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When marketers think of using data to come up with test hypotheses, they typically think of digital analytics. Quantifiable data. But qualitative research can actually offer more insight than anything else for coming up with winning test hypotheses. When quantitative stuff tells you what, where and how much, then qualitative tells you ‘why’. The goal of qualitative research is to gather an in-depth understanding of user behavior, and the reasons for that behavior.

Definition:

You have a 4-step sales funnel on your website. Most people have no problems taking the first step, but almost all of them drop out at step #2. Why? This is where analytics data can fall short, and won’t be enough to figure it out. You need to know what your actual users are thinking when they see that page, and leave. And the only way to get that information is through asking your users.

Qualitative research enables us to peek inside the mind of the people we’re trying to sell to. Without knowing what they’re thinking, we’re in the dark. We can speculate all we want, but it’s not going to get us anywhere.

How you conduct qualitative research matters

Qualitative research involves people. What you ask them, when you ask them and how you ask them will all influence their response. They might lie to please you, they might be influenced by how you frame a question (“Don’t you think this looks more secure?”).

Michael Summers, Global User Experience Research team at PayPal:

There are two very precious cognitive resources in the mind that influence how we study optimization:

1. attention,
2. and external motivation.

We all have a sincere desire to understand how our UI is supporting conversion — or what obstacles or barriers exist. However if you imagine a young child with a large magnifying glass — who leans over fragile flower to study it more closely, only to accidentally concentrate the suns rays and cause the flower to burn — sometimes when we try and “study” something — the actions we take to understand it get in the way.

When we try and watch people encounter our UI or our conversion funnel, perhaps arriving at a landing page, evaluating options, considering our “pitch,” or value proposition, and then perhaps sign up — if we artificially distort attention and motivation, we will walk away with unrealistic values for things like comprehension, retention, decision to act, time on task, success rate, and error rate.

For this reason, the way we study people matters. A lot.

How do top experts use qualitative research to get insights?

I reached out to fellow conversion optimization people, and asked them how they are going about qualitative research. Which research methods have been most useful to them, and how what specifically have they asked the users, or have them do to get insights?

User testing

User testing and usability testing are the favorites for many optimizers.

Dr. Karl Blanks from Conversion Rate Experts praises user testing:

User tests allow us to see how visitors interact with a site, but they also have other benefits. Each user test gives us a deeper intuitive understanding of how people use websites. And they allow us to collaborate with the user, so we can work out solutions to difficult problems. No other technique delivers so many “insights-per-minute” on a prolonged basis.

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Craig Sullivan, optimization guru:

By far the most useful technique is user testing, with as early stage of a product or new feature as you can get. This is where the best blinding insights, product pivots, winning tests or great ideas came from in my work.

Start on paper or using some of the great prototyping tools out there – and get feedback, early and often as you iterate and build something out. I must also wave the flag for Voice of Customer or Feedback tools, particularly where you are measuring customer satisfaction (e.g. NPS) and service ratings for multiple elements of the product. Working out where to invest for increasing delight works perfectly with an optimisation programme.

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Moderated user research

User testing has to be handled with care – and often moderation is needed to make sure we’re not just having the testers go through the motions.

Paul Rouke from PRWD:

Over the last 15 years of conducting user research, I’ve witnessed a range of different approaches and moderation styles, but unless you’re careful you can invalidate the research. It’s crucial when using this research technique to do the right preparation, the right recruitment and use the right style of moderation. Follow this and you can’t fail to gain powerful and highly actionable user behaviour insights, which to date, have led us to developing some of our most impactful A/B test hypotheses.

Moderated research comes under criticisms such as “people will tell you what you want to hear” or “this isn’t an environment where people usually browse”. These can be negated with the right facilities and welcome questions prior to conducting any research scenarios, allowing participants to provide their thoughts in a neutral setting. Plus get the right level of observation, probing and non-leading questioning and people have a phenomenal ability to unlock and share the hidden motivators in their brain.

A quick tip that we often use to gain more considered feedback and insights from people – provide at least two different digital experiences to compare to each other. This allows people to progress their thinking to what really does matter for them, and helps to identify strengths and weaknesses across the different experiences.

One final often overlooked opportunity using moderated research, is how it can be used to gain insight or validate the fundamentals of your businesses. Conducting research on your proposition to see if it resonates and persuades your target audience can provide you with strategic insights and the opportunity to gain advantage over your competition.

Michael Summers, Global User Experience Research team at PayPal chimes in again:

The best way to learn about your UI, is to mix it in with competitors, or even non-related tasks, and ask people to conduct a very general goal (“you are considering finding a new insurance company, please click on these bookmarks and determine if any of these offers are a good fit for you”).

By doing rapid on-line tasks in sequence, and not even revealing to participants what you are studying, you are less likely to artificially slow them down, and also less likely to impose external motivation such that they understand more than they would under natural conditions.

Also, before you even do your blind set of tasks — ask users to spend some time on-line without you directing them at all. Allowing them to read the news, check Facebook, etc., will help them acclimatize to an unfamiliar environment and begin to move at a more realistic tempo to what they would do at home on their couch.

Live chat transcripts

Do you use live chat on your website? It’s a proven tactic for increasing conversions. You can also use it to get insights.

Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist:

Live Chat transcripts tell us what people are looking for who don’t want to search. It also tells us what is missing from a site or what is hard to find.

Sometimes you can feed the transcript into Wordle.net to tease out words that are used frequently, giving you clues to larger issues.

Interviewing customers, sales and support people

Michael Aagaard, copywriter and optimizer, Content Verve:

Interviewing customers and stakeholders is without comparison the most insightful qualitative research method in my CRO toolkit. In my experience nothing beats actually talking to your target audience. The insight you get is priceless, and no amount of quantitative data will let you reach the same level of understanding.

When it comes to copywriting and messaging, I find customer interviews to be especially insightful. In many cases there’s a huge difference between what marketers think the target audience needs to hear – and what the target audience actually needs to hear in order to make a positive buying decision.

I’ve been involved in several optimization projects where customer interviews revealed that the core value proposition was fundamentally flawed. Moreover, the answers I got from these interviews got me much closer to the winning optimization hypothesis.

I also find it extremely useful to conduct interviews with employees from Customer Service, Support and Sales. These guys and gals spend all day talking to customers and have in-depth knowledge of the problems and issues that they are dealing with – both in relation to the website and the product itself. Moreover, they are familiar with the decision-making process of the target audience and can help us build better optimization hypotheses.

When I interview employees from Sales and Customer Service, one of the most useful questions is very, very simple: “What are the five most common questions you get from (potential) customers?”

Followed up by this question: “What do you answer when you get these questions?”

Try it out next time you are conducting qualitative research for a CRO project. I bet you’ll be amazed at how much insight you get.

Customer surveys

One of my own personal favorites is customer surveys. Surveys are mostly about learning who the customers really are, what they want, what’s causing doubts and hesitations, and the language they use. This is critical for copywriting, understanding friction , learning what matters to them about the products you sell, and so on.

You want to survey only recent first-time buyers. People who don’t have a history with you, no prior relationship. And no more than 30 days since their purchase (better if it’s right after completing the purchase) – or they will forget what they were thinking when they shopped on your site (and then bullshit their answers). The best online surveys have open-ended questions. No (or very limited) multiple choice questions.

What to ask? It depends on the business / website. Broadly speaking, you want to understand 4 key things:

• who they are – pay attention to how they self-identify, useful for putting together personas;
• user intent – what’s the specific problem they were solving;
• shopping process – what mattered to them when choosing the product, what kind of comparisons did they do, how many / which other sites they looked at, and so on;
• friction – fears, doubts and hesitations they experienced before making the purchase.

Dr. Karl Blanks from Conversion Rate Experts:

We survey people who have just signed up or purchased something. The golden questions for them are these:

• What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us?
• What was your biggest fear or concern about using us?

Web traffic surveys

Most people on your site will not buy anything. How can we get more people to buy? One thing that helps us figure that out is website surveys.

There are 2 ways to survey your web traffic:

• Exit surveys: hit them with a popup when they’re about to leave your site.
• On-page surveys: ask them to fill out a survey as they’re on a specific page

Both are useful. What to ask? Since our goal is to get more people to take action, start with learning about friction. What are the FUDs (fears, doubts, hestitations) they are experiencing – while on a specific page?

Step 1: Determine the most wanted action for the page.
Step 2: Come up with a question that asks about friction.

So for instance if this is an ecommerce product page, the goal would be cart adds. So the question to ask could be something like “What’s holding you back from adding this product to the cart right now?” or “What’s keeping you from buying this product right now?”.

See if you spot any trends in the responses. See if your customer survey responses about friction are similar to web traffic survey results. You’re mining for insights! See if you can validate or invalidate some of your observations from the heuristic analysis.

A bunch of people will tell you that pricing is an issue (“too expensive!”) – that’s to be expected. If that’s a dominant response, you’re either driving too much unqualified traffic to the site, or you’re not doing a good enough job communicating the value of your product(s).

Conclusion

Qualitative research helps you look inside the mind of your customers. You will learn what they really think, what they want and how they want it. If you can’t figure out WHY people are dropping off here or there, or how to increase motivation to take action, qualitative research can help.

As smart phones and tablets proliferate, the number of personal devices allowed to be connected to the corporate network is growing due to perceived cost savings and productivity gains. Five years ago, when the emerging trend of employees bringing their own devices to work was first captured by Intel, many employees in the workforce continued to use employer-issued devices, such as BlackBerrys, because of privacy and security concerns. Nowadays, as mobile devices adoption grows, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) marketplace has become a battlefield where Apple, Samsung, HTC, LG Electronics, and Nokia are vying for the enterprise user pie.

The fierce competition amongst mobile device providers to include business-ready features offers a great variety of choices for enterprise buyers. Here’s a list of smartphones that we have found to have powerful specs such as clear screens, long battery life, and reduced weight. With this summary, we hope to help you identify the devices that best suit your workers’ needs.

iPhone 6 Plus

The shortage of iPhone 6 Plus stock around the world suggests a robust demand, in part by enterprise power users. The expanded utility can be attributed to a combination of upgraded hardware and software, and the clear retina display makes working with corporate documents much easier on the go. The large screen wins over many enterprise power users, as they find iPhone 6 Plus to be the perfect substitute for their tablets, which used to have a big advantage for document-based projects. In addition, enterprise-grade security features are even more powerful in iOS 8: for example, data protection is expanded to more apps and finer control is enabled over connection encryption.

The Specs:

• 5.5-inch 1920×1080 display
• Touch ID
• Weighs 6.07 ounces (172 grams)
• Battery life: Up to 16 days (384 hours) stand-by time
• Price: $749 lowest

Pros:

• Advanced camera with increased image accuracy
• Excellent call quality for quick conversations with coworkers
• Tough, scratch and scrape resistant, good for frequent use on business trips

Cons:

• The flip side of the solid battery life is that charging takes a long time
• Its big size may cause difficulty in carrying for some mobile workers

Blackberry Passport

Inspired by actual passports as a symbol for universal mobility, the Passport is BlackBerry’s latest flagship product built for the enterprises and productivity. BlackBerry, the dominant enterprise mobility provider traditionally known for its “all work, no play” philosophy , still remains on most CIOs’ radars. In addition to the security features in the OS for managing, auditing, and securing data, apps, and hardware such as cameras, the Passport has several layers of hardware security in its components. This also explains why President Obama won’t switch his BlackBerry to an iPhone.

The Specs:

• 4.5-inch 1440×1440 display
• 3450 mAh battery, up to 30 hours of mixed use
• Touch-enabled QWERTY keyboard
• Weighs 6.88 ounces (195 grams)
• Price: $599 lowest

The Pros:

• Convenient QWERTY keyboard that makes composition of messages easier
• Built-in BlackBerry Assistant helps execute tasks quickly such as responding to important emails, scheduling a meeting or getting directions

The Cons:

• The wide design make one-handed control difficult
• Poor third-party app support: some standard requirements were reportedly either unavailable or prone to crashing on the Passport
• Sluggish camera compared to benchmark smartphones

Google Nexus 6

As the first official Nexus 6 reviews appear along with carrier pre-orders for the gadget, the latest Nexus phone has already impressed many with its new design look, fast speed, and the gorgeous Lollipop OS that it runs on. Encryption is turned on automatically for Nexus 6, which is extremely appealing to enterprise administrators worried about information security, and other notable features include easy backup and synchronization between devices.

The Specs:

• 5.96-inch 2560×1440 Display
• 2.7 Ghz Snapdragon 805 Processor, 3GB RAM
• Runs Android 5.0 (Lollipop)
• Weighs 6.49 ounces (184 grams)
• Price: $649

Pros:

• Water-resistant, perfectly prepared for any weather and travel conditions
• Runs on Android 5.0 (Lollipop) with guaranteed updates to later versions
• Long battery life with talk time of up to 24 hours

Cons:

• No option for expandable storage, imposing limits on the number of files and applications
• Some users might find it too big to be used on the go

Samsung Galaxy Note 4

No other phone on our list comes with a stylus, and that’s where the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 stands out. The design of the Note 4 continues Samsung’s newly adopted metallic look, combined with a high-resolution screen. The power of a stylus for mobile workers cannot be overlooked: it makes working on documents and apps in general much easier. Samsung has made great strides over the past couple of years in making their offerings enterprise-ready: Samsung KNOX, for instance, highlights the IT giant’s effort to create a security platform suitable for highly-regulated industries.

The Specs:

• 5.7-inch 2650 x 1440 display
• Weighs 6.2 ounces (176g)
• Up to 20 hour talk time
• Fingerprint sensor (PayPal certified)
• Price: $840

Pros:

• S Pen Stylus makes working on documents much easier
• Quick charge (up to 50% capacity within 30 minutes)
• Superior image quality from cameras accurately captures details

Cons:

• Not completely water proof, which could be a problem in inclement weather/workplace mishaps
• Delicate, requires extra effort to handle with care
• Expensive, compared with other phablets offering similar features and UI

HTC One M8

The HTC One M8 has been much feted for its advanced design, quality and speed. The M8 is available on Android or on Windows, and is now available on AT&T and T-Mobile, after months as a Verizon exclusive. Widely considered a benchmark for mobile device design and hardware quality, the M8 is a great choice for enterprise users looking for large-screen phablets with a premium UI design.

The Specs

• Weighs 5.64 oz (160g)
• 5-inch 1080 x 1920 pixels display
• 32 GB built-in storage, storage expansion up to 128 GB
• 20.7 days stand-by time, up to 20-hour talk time
• Price: $639

Pros:

• Powerful processor that ensures fast and smooth workflow
• Excellent sound quality for various outdoor settings

Cons:

• Not completely waterproof, not prepared for inclement weather/workplace mishaps
• Mediocre camera, not the best option if image accuracy is a priority

While we’ve listed out the pros and cons of the above smartphones for enterprises, it is important to poll your employees and get a sense of which features they value more in their work routines, ensuring optimal alignment of the smartphone choice and their workflow. Another approach would be to allow employees to select their own devices: we’ve written before on the various device policies currently in vogue.

The most important consideration is what you’re actually going to put on the phones: as our CEO Michael once wrote in Forbes, there is a key difference between business-ready apps like Lua, and more consumer-facing software. Keep an eye out for whether your enterprise considerations are being met: information security, scalability across a large network, and ease of Admin control.

Are you using any of the phones listed above? What types of phones do you equip your mobile workforce with and how do they like them? Let us know by commenting below or tweeting at @getLua!

In today’s buying economy, the connected B2B buyer uses a multitude of resources to make their final buying decisions. In addition to sales conversations, they’re using social media, online content, recommendations and references as part of their decisions.  DemandGen’s 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey showed:

• 64% of respondents said vendor’s content had a significant impact on final purchasing decision
• 66% of buyers are using more sources to research and evaluate purchase decisions
• 46% create a short list of vendors before their first communication with a salesperson

Your buyers are consuming more information than they ever have before. Their expectations have changed. They are looking for value in their vendor relationships. As a result, your sales organization needs a process behind continuously creating and capturing value for your customers. It is more important than ever to understand how “sales” is a function of every role in your organization and should be integrated in key business functions. For today’s Sales Snapshot, we pulled together three articles that cover opportunities for sales synergy.

1. Sales And Strategy

This article published on Harvard Business Review’s blog points out the dangers in setting goals without input from sales, as well as the dangers of training salespeople without consideration of overall business goals.

In many organizations, it has become a common practice for executive planners to sit locked away in an “ivory tower” of sorts, setting business growth goals without truly understanding the day-to-day variables affecting their sales team’s ability to deliver on those goals.

While it’s important to stay out of the weeds during strategic deliberations, if there is no way to receive feedback from frontline sellers, you miss a valuable opportunity to close the gap between goals and successful execution.

2. Sales And Technology

In this report about technology’s effect on selling, Aberdeen Group poses the question, “Would you buy from a 20th century sales rep?”

Today’s buyers expect a seamless experience between their day-to-day lives and their interactions with an organization. This makes the connected buyer far less likely to purchase from a company that is “behind the times.”

As new technology is introduced at an ever-increasing pace, it is becoming more and more necessary for sales organizations to remain up-to-date with current technology in order to maintain market relevance, do their job more effectively, and gain insights into valuable data that has traditionally been only available to marketers.

3. Sales And Customer Service

Best-in-class sales organizations understand that, for the connected buyer, a strong customer experience is one of the most important factors in their decision-making process.

The amount of value you place on delivering an excellent customer experience will ultimately determine whether your organization stands out from the competition, or is just another company paying lip service to “great customer service.”

This post from salesforce.com offers fifty inspirational quotes that remind us how every interaction with a customer or prospect is an opportunity to move them closer to the sale.

Social media has been a game changer for the holiday shopping season. Once upon a time, gift inspiration came from catalogs, and customer inquiries were handled in-store or on the phone. Now, more and more customers are turning to social media to get both gift ideas and real-time customer service.

When it comes to gift ideas, Crowdtap statistics show 64.8% of shoppers scroll through their social feeds to find ideas for the perfect present. Most small businesses  and non-profits have caught on to this trend and share gift guides, mention upcoming sales or specials services, and/or provide year-end donation suggestions. While your holiday marketing efforts on social media may be up to par, is your customer service on social top-notch, too?

Current or potential customers are extremely vocal on social and reaching out to a business publicly on Facebook or Twitter garners the attention of many. With increased sales and inquiries during the holiday season, follow these tips to ensure you offer the kind of social customer service that will wow shoppers this holiday season:

1. Respond quickly
Every comment, question, complaint and kudos should get a timely response. This is true whether it’s the holiday season or not, but it’s even more important when the masses are keeping a close eye on your social sites.

“The immediacy of social media communications creates an expectation from customers of immediate response by brands,” says David Erickson, vice president of Online Marketing at public relations firm Karwoski & Courage. “If customers don’t get an immediate response, it is by definition a negative experience.”

In other words, don’t let feedback sit unanswered on your social sites.

2. Offer a positive experience
Research shows that customers who have a positive exchange with a business on social media are 71% more likely to recommend that business to others.

During the holiday season, referrals are crucial. Every interaction that a social media visitor has with your business should be positive. So, how do you deal with unflattering reviews? You do so with tact. Apologize for any inconvenience, be sympathetic to the customer’s needs, and offer to speak about the problem in private. That’s exactly what an Arizona car dealership did in its response to a customer’s negative experience with its service department.

3. Spread some holiday cheer with images
Keep your social sites updated with current holiday images to show customers that your business is in the holiday spirit. Find a dozen or so photos that you can use throughout the season for your cover art on Facebook, create a holiday-themed Pinterest board and tweet images from classic holiday movies.

4. Give support
During the holidays, customers may have questions about how your product works or need troubleshooting tips. Social media is a great outlet for this. Xbox, for example, answers gaming questions via Twitter. Consider offering this kind of special customer service around the holidays; this could boost your reputation and relationship with buyers.

5. Offer holiday-themed promotions or tools
Your social customer care shouldn’t just be reactive; it should be proactive, too. You want to do more than just respond quickly and politely to feedback; you want to engage with customers.

Research shows customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 to 40 percent more money with that company. That’s all the more reason to get shoppers socially engaged. Here are few holiday-themed ideas:

• Try a holiday giveaway: Who doesn’t want free stuff, especially during the holidays? Host a gift giveaway on one of your social sites (Note: Always follow the contest terms and conditions for each social site). Joby, a camera accessories business, for example, created a “12 Days of Giveaways” on its blog and promoted it on Twitter.

• Offer useful content: Share content that helps make the season bright. For example, Taste of Home offered holiday recipes on its Facebook page.

• The Mall of America uses Twitter to help holiday shoppers find available parking spots with #MOAParking, a tool that Erickson and his firm suggested to the mega mall.

• Team up with a local charity: Encourage customers to bring in a canned good for a food drive or run a “Buy one, Give one” promotion. Every time a customer buys a certain item, your business donates one to a family in need.

How do you use social media to provide customer service? Add to our list of tips in the comments section below.

Corporate growth, good and bad, can be traced to sales lead follow-upⁱ. 

Marketers keep thinking it is common sense for sales representatives to follow up all inquiries given to them. After all, what is the alternative? Cold calling? But alas, as Voltaire said, “Common sense is not so common.”

So we are left with motivating them to do the obvious and not give up. Yes, follow-up is difficult today. Prospects are always available when they want something, but disappear when they have what they need. Follow-up is variously reported from 10%-25% in most companies. When you think about it, some marketers feel that giving some salespeople sales leads is like throwing money in the trash. Here are some thoughts on motivating salespeople to do the obvious:

1. Greed: They will make more money by following up sales inquiries. Talk to more people and they will sell more product. It is a simple law of averages. You must show them the stats proving that those who relentlessly follow up will close more deals.

2. Fear: They must make quota, and prospect follow-up is easier than cold calling. Sometimes sales reps need to be reminded that a sales quota is a contract between the salesperson and the company. In order to make quota, they must sell product at a predictable level, which can only be done if they speak to more people than the number of customers who must be converted every year. A constant flow of new prospects helps them do this.

3. More fear: It’s a condition of employment. The only certain way a salesperson will understand and comply with your 100% follow-up rule is if the rule is a condition of employment. It should be stated in the job description that each salesperson reads and signs upon joining the sales department. While all of the reasons cited here are important, this is the reason they most often respond to.

4. Guilt: Inquiries are expensive. Salespeople must be told that each inquiry costs $50 to $1,000, which the company spends on their behalf.

5. More guilt: They will disappoint potential customers. The suspect who has contacted the company expects a response. The first test of a company’s responsiveness to a potential customer is when someone asks for information and they get it in a timely manner. If the salesperson doesn’t follow up 100%, the inquirer will be disappointed in the company and the company’s brand name and, ultimately, the individual sales rep will suffer. Remember the last time you got bad service at a restaurant? Afterward, did you say the waitress was to blame or did you blame the restaurant? Probably both, but the restaurant’s name is remembered more than the waiter’s name.

 

6. Exclusivity: Only the salesperson can close out the inquiry. No one in the company except the sales representative can accurately report on inquiry resolution. With all of the effort and money being spent to find the prospect, the success or failure of marketing hinges on the inquiry resolution from each salesperson. Only the salespeople’s accumulated opinions for inquiries, when added together and judged by source, will tell management if the money they spent on marketing was successful. That is a lot of responsibility. Unless of course you screen inquiries through a service and pass only sales-ready leads along to the salespeople, but the end result is the same.

7. Demonstrate conversion rates from successful salespeople: If they see that salespeople they know are more successful because of diligent lead follow-up, they will be inclined to copy what successful salespeople do.

8. Reports: Publish reports of sales lead conversion on a regular schedule. Show them the results of follow-up.

Once you achieve critical mass on follow-up, over 90%, it is within your power to more accurately control your future by spending more on marketing and growing the sales force.

Email marketing may have the highest ROI of any form of marketing. However, that doesn’t mean it’s an automatic win for your organization.

All too often, I see organizations fail at email. Their open rates are low, and their conversion rates are abysmal. They may even earn more unsubscribes than new leads from each attempt at email marketing! I think there’s one key thing many marketers miss. They’re not treating their emails like blog content.

I’ve compiled four big ways your emails should be more like blog content than you realize. Here they are:

Image
s and Visuals

Every email you send needs at least one image. These should ideally be custom-created or highly relevant visual content. It’s even better to use a video. You’d never publish a blog without an image, so apply the same principle to your email marketing.

Be extremely cautious about the images you use. Images are processed 60,000 times faster than text in the human brain. The wrong picture can disgust your readers before they even begin to read your content. Avoid anything tacky, obviously from a stock photo website, awkward, or otherwise irrelevant to your brand.

Content

Did you know that four out of five emails sent today are spam messages? It’s safe to say that your customers are sick and tired of receiving spam in their inboxes.

However, what’s perceived as spam isn’t just emails from “Nigerian Princes” trying to draw consumers into a wire fraud scheme. To most people, spam is an irrelevant email that doesn’t provide value. If you send something low-value, you run the chance of being labeled a spammer by your contacts.

To combat this, I recommend providing super valuable content in each email you send. Don’t engage in hard-sell tactics or provide a link to low-value content on your website. Create something that’s unique, useful, and tailored to the needs of your contacts.

You’d never publish thin sales-driven content on your blog. Never use your email list as a platform for pushing out anything substandard.

Traffic Quality

When you publish a blog, does every single person who reads your content become a customer? Unlikely. Research indicates that average lead conversion rates on blog content range between 4-8%. Even if your organization excels at lead nurturing and sales, it’s unlikely that more than 1% of your blog readers will ever become customers.

The same concept applies when it comes to email marketing. Many click-throughs from your emails won’t result in sales. Your contacts may click out of sheer curiosity, and fail to convert into leads.

What can you do? Well, for starters, understand that your email marketing will probably never have a 100% conversion rate. However, optimizing your emails with high-quality CTA’s that lead to exceptional content offers can be a huge benefit. Every click counts, so it’s crucial that you make the most of it.

Growth

As your blog audience grows, you’ll probably find yourself working a little harder at content marketing. You may spend more time engaging your audience, or testing new forms of content like custom videos and infographics. You’ll employ marketing experiments and different tactics to keep your new audience engaged, and you’ll continue growing.

As your blog traffic increases, there’s a strong chance you’ll gain email subscribers along the way. It’s up to you to keep this audience engaged. Test new forms of content, new topics, and new calls-to-action. Treat your email like landing pages on your website. Most importantly, don’t hesitate to invest in an email platform like MailChimp that can handle A/B testing.

What are some of the most common email marketing mistakes you see brands make? Share your experience in the comments!

You’ve heard of eating your own dog food? Apply that as a marketing concept and you’ve got yourself the framework for a good lead generation strategy. The challenging part though is the reality that organizations are not ‘perfect.’ Decision makers aren’t perfect.

How do you deal with these imperfections and make sure your value proposition isn’t sullied by bad examples?

Ultimately, dedicated vigilance is the key. You can encourage prospects to follow your example but most of your efforts should really be less on marketing what you do and more on just plain doing it! For example, if you’re trying to educate prospects on SalesForce management then don’t just blog about it.

• Focus on the practice – Dedicate your focus on the core of your value proposition. Keep exercising the good practices that you preach during webinars and tradeshows. Don’t waste too much time micro-managing what your telemarketers will say or what colors your landing pages are.

• When you fail, fail with grace – Don’t make excuses. If you should have a plan to save face, don’t make it about saving it at all. Own up to not living up to the expectations you’ve set for yourself and don’t blame leaving customers or critics for doing what they naturally do.

• Don’t plan to fail – That said, don’t spend too much time creating a plan in case of failure. Back up plans are good but they’re not your prime investment. Your core value proposition is your investment followed by generating sales leads to keep yourself sustainable.

• Listen to feedback – The very purpose of feedback is to make sure you’re really setting an example and not just telling yourself that. Positive feedback starts at the core but you won’t hear it either if you don’t allow negative feedback to shape up perspective.

• Look at the examples of competitors – Sometimes when you look at a competitor’s example, you immediately criticize. Avoid this temptation. You could be overlooking something in their example that’s lacking in your own.

Good marketing can impress and can spark attention but it is not the fuel that will keep a prospect’s interests burning. “Words are wind,” as it goes in the fantasy world of Game of Thrones. It goes the exact same way in lead generation campaigns.

Last week we joined Digital Megaphone’s Social Media Masters Summit to learn some cutting edge strategies from top brand marketers. We especially loved Andy Crestodina’s “Content Marketing 201” presentation – so we thought we’d share some key insights from the session with our fellow content marketers.

Crestodina discussed a number of advanced tactics to help content marketers understand how they can optimize their content to drive traffic and conversions online. After all, according to Crestodina, “Traffic x Conversions = Success” in content marketing. But what we found especially interesting was that as he presented, three themes emerged that content marketers would do well to keep in mind as we create and promote our material.

Content marketing revolves around:

• Help
• Empathy
• Credibility

“Advertising Is the Hype, And Content Marketing Is The Help.”

We’ve seen this number before, but it’s significant and we want to reinforce it again: 60% of buying decisions are made by customers before they even contact a sales rep. While this figure could haunt our dreams, it actually gives content marketers a unique opportunity to impact the customer’s decision-making process. While advertising gives your brand hype, content marketing is what helps nurture the relationship and build trust with your customers.

“I’m beginning to think people don’t care as much about brands anymore,” Crestodina boldly claimed. “Whoever can help them solve their problems the best will win.” People are looking for solutions that work, regardless of where they have to go to get it, and it’s up to content marketers to fill the role of a partner and educator. Competition is high and content marketers play a pivotal role in shaping our customers’ opinions.

“You Need To Earn Your Market.”

Above we mentioned that content marketing is the “help,” but that doesn’t mean our content will automatically be considered valuable. “Empathy is the greatest web marketing skill,” Crestodina argued. “Whoever does the best job of putting themselves in the mind, the heart, and the shoes of their audience is the one that is going to win.”

In order to do this, content marketers need to think as the market versus of the market. And until we take a step back to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes we will only ever push our content onto our customers. Taking a look at Crestodina’s “periodic table of content” is a helpful guide to segment our content and understand where each piece fits in a broader content marketing strategy.

 

“Google Is like The Mean Girl In High School. You Can Get Her To like You, But Not Directly.”

Crestodina continued, “Once you get everybody else to like you first, only then will the mean girl like you.” Credibility is built in two distinct ways: first, in that your online presence must encompass link credibility and be optimized for keywords, phrases, and even your subscribers; second, in a more intangible way, in the credibility we hold with our audiences.

In order to build credibility online and with our audiences, content marketers must consider the following:

• Topics: There is a plethora of tools available to help us understand what our customers need. Use Google AdWords, Yahoo! Answers, Quora, and simply listen to our sales and customer service teams.
• Links: The right balance of both outgoing and incoming links to our website and content is necessary to drive traffic. Even linking our old blog posts to new blog posts can help boost link credibility.
• Keyword phrases: Determine what content has ranking potential for you on your website. Make sure you are not only including keyword phrases in your content (your H1 tag, body copy, SEO title, meta description, etc.) but also to check that they are phrases that you can “win” for in search.
• Testimonials: Crestodina contends that we should scrap our testimonials page, instead “putting the proof next to the claim.” Incorporate your testimonials throughout your website, directly next to the products and services they are certifying.

“Your Website Is The Mousetrap, And Your Content Is The Cheese.”

We’ll leave you with the above quote. At the end of the day, it is the content on our website that people are attracted to. It’s up to us to use empathy to first create content that will help them, and then merge the conversion champions with traffic champions to effectively promote it. After all: Traffic x Conversions = Success.

If you’re interested in learning about the ways you can generate more leads from your content and improve your content marketing ROI, check out our white paper, “Marketer’s Guide to Proving (and Improving) Content Marketing ROI.”

In a big year for deal making, the health care industry is a standout.

Large drugmakers are buying and selling businesses to control costs and deploy surplus cash. A rising stock market, tax strategies and low interest rates are also fueling the mergers and acquisitions.

It’s all combining to make 2014 the most active year for health care deals in at least two decades. The industry has announced about $438 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions worldwide so far, about 14 per cent of the $3.2 trillion total for all industries, according to data provider Dealogic. Overall, M&A is on track for its best year since 2007, the year before the financial crisis intensified.

“Health care has been a sleepy niche of M&A until recently, but the giant has been awakened,” says Ken Menges, a senior partner handling M&A at law firm Akin Gump in New York.

To a large extent, the deals are being driven by “cost pressure on the entire health care system,” as insurers and government health plans increasingly hold down or even reduce reimbursements to drug, device and service providers, says Ashtyn Evans, pharmaceutical and biotech analyst with investment firm Edward Jones in St. Louis, Missouri.

Companies also are looking to expand market share, and boost their portfolios in hot areas such as drugs for cancer and hepatitis C, she says.

Drugmaker Merck & Co., for example, agreed in June to pay nearly $4 billion for Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. to combine that company’s hepatitis C medicines with its own.

Taxes are another reason behind the rush to the negotiating table.

Some big, U.S. pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies have been trying to acquire overseas rivals, allowing them to move their headquarters to a country with a lower tax rate. The deals also give the buyer access to billions in overseas profits to invest in research and development, without having to bring those profits back to the U.S. and pay taxes on them.

Medical device maker Medtronic’s $43 billion acquisition in June of Covidien, a Dublin, Ireland-based rival, is an example.

For customers, this year’s deal making has both benefits and drawbacks.

Patients could see a slight increase in new medicines and devices over time. That’s because bigger companies typically have more money to spend on developing treatments, and have more experience navigating the difficult process of getting products approved by regulators. But patients could also have fewer doctor and hospital options as companies combine to lower costs.

For employees, the mergers could mean some job losses in areas such as administration and sales, but not in research at drugmakers. Losses at health care providers would be minimal, if any.

The frenzy of health care M&A has been good for stocks.

Mergers tend to boost share prices in general. That’s because the acquiring company typically pays a premium over the market value of the target stock to ensure that the deal wins approval from shareholders.

The health care sector has surged 23 per cent this year, making it the best-performing industry group in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and putting it on track to outperform the broader market for the fourth straight year.

Private equity firms are investing in small biotech and pharmaceutical companies needing billions for research and development. In return, private equity hopes to profit through initial public offerings of the companies they invest in, or by selling them to bigger rivals.

Big hospitals also have been doing their own deals, snapping up related businesses. That includes a surge in hospitals buying “mom-and-pop” doctors’ practices and outpatient clinics to feed new patients into their system, says David Hillman, a partner at law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP.

All health care companies — from nursing homes to drugmakers — are under pressure to keep costs down in today’s market, says Bob Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, an adviser to health companies.

“That in turn leads to … combinations to make organizations more expense efficient, combinations for more economies of scale, people buying up smaller organizations that have developed an ability to deliver niche products.”

___

Johnson reported from Trenton, New Jersey, and Rothwell reported from New York.

Follow Linda A. Johnson at ttp://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma.

The post As drugmakers and hospitals cut costs and sharpen focus, health care deals lead global surge appeared first on Canadian Business.

Businesses need solid online presence to keep up with increasingly competitive market. LinkedIn is a very powerful platform to help you jump-start that presence.

Here are some benefits of using LinkedIn for business:

1. Lead Generation – LinkedIn opens the doors for networking and a flood of potential clients. Keep your company page up to date with relevant information and be a resource to your connections and followers. Branding yourself as the subject expert on your services will help them think of you when they need you.
2. Increased Exposure – Having a LinkedIn Company Page is a great way to gain attention for your business. The page has the potential to show up when people search for you in Google, as well as showing up for searches within LinkedIn.
3. Higher Level Of Credibility – LinkedIn is a great place to showcase your business products & services and gain trust amongst customers/prospects. One feature that helps is the “Recommendations” feature. The more recommendations you have from past customers and clients, the more of an opportunity you have to generate more leads and sales.
4. Show Off Your Accomplishments – Another way to build up trust with potential customers and clients is to display your achievements. This will help give everyone an overview of exactly what you have to offer.
5. Filtered Search Results – Generating sales effectively means reaching your customers effectively. LinkedIn makes this easy by offering a thorough group of search options that you can use to hone in on your target demographics.
6. Quality Business Connections – The most important benefit of LinkedIn is the fact that it is populated almost entirely by forward-thinking professionals such as yourself who are also looking for ways to grow their businesses. This creates a unique culture of individuals who, in representing their respective companies, make business easier for everybody.

The connections that you make on LinkedIn are noticeably more effective than those on other social media networks. Here’s to your success!

In the introduction of this guide divided into five sections, I’ve talked about how blogging supports your business goals and why it should be a key component in driving revenue.

Before jumping into the first step of the process, let’s take an overview at what we have to do.

The process of generating leads with blogging starts with knowing the target audience. “I hear this everyday… could you skip it”

I could skip mentioning it in this post, but I like to learn from mistakes and telling other people how to avoid them. Honestly, I have written enough untargeted content in the early stages of my work at Marketizator and I must admit that it’s costly and frustrating.

Not cool.

You should also be sure that you attract good traffic to your website.

People who have an interest into solving a problem or exploring an opportunity with your product is good traffic. Bad traffic will affect your limited resources of time and energy – if it hasn’t already done it. Bad traffic means attracting the non-consumers of a product, the ones who have no interest in buying or using it ever.

3 simple tasks to blogging success

To see things more clear, here are the three tasks that you need to accomplish to start generating leads with business blogging.

1. Attract traffic to the website

2. Convince people to subscribe to an email list

3. Convince subscribers to convert into leads

And that’s all.

Only these three activities should concern you. Any other distraction has to dissappear from your way to be sure that you don’t consume energy and time on things that don’t matter.

Your efforts has to be targeted to moving the users from a stage to another.

The four stages presented above in the image correspond to your marketing efforts. As you see, people who come to your blog from various sources – social media, guest posting, search – are nothing else than strangers. They know nothing about the company, but somehow your content has attracted them to read more.

Once arrived on the company’s blog, strangers become visitors. You should know that Google Analytics is tracking visits, not visitors. A new visit is recorded each time the user is away from the website for at least 30 minutes or returns to the website using a different source than the previous one. For example, if someone arrives on your blog, read the content, leave and return after 30 minutes, you have two visits, but a single user who has made two visits.

The content marketers goal

The content marketer’s goal is to transform the visitor into a subscriber. The aim is getting the email address, being 100% sure that the user wants to give it in return for something valuable to him.

Finally, through various marketing tactics such as funnel optimization, email marketing and landing page optimization, the subscriber will become a qualified lead. That’s the final status that the content marketer has to “offer” to the user who once was just a stranger. Depending on the business model, a lead might mean something different for you: the user who is signing up for a free trial, a demo of the product, a series of paid courses, etc.

I would say that the first step into the process of generating leads for a business with blogging would be data analysis. But this guess is based on the fact that the marketer has already defined his goals and target audience. Otherwise, looking into data without knowing where you want to get is obsolete. Therefore, let’s be sure that you clearly defined goals for your blogging efforts.

1. Creating goals and conversion funnels in Google Analytics

When we’re talking about goals, we often refer to desirable things that we want to achieve. When our goals are not defined clearly, we cannot target our efforts efficiently because we don t know exactly where we want to get. The reason almost all of the career coaches encourage people to draw or write down their goals. Visualization helps us achieve goals.

In our case, we have to divide goals into three types:

1. Business goals: I will increase sales by 30%
2. Marketing goals: I will increase the number of paid accounts to 1,000
3. Website goals: I will generate 5,000 leads using inbound marketing tactics

This is just the first step into defining goals. In this article, I ll focus on the website’s goals, more exactly on creating goals for the blog. This is an easy task at the first sight, but you may have some trouble when Google Analytics is asking you to add a URL for each goal to be tracked or marked as “completed”. Let me show you.

Log in the Google Analytics account and then go to Admin, View, Goals, and Create New Goal.

I have chosen the “Sign Up Goal” only for the sake of the example. With this type of goal you can track the number of subscribers to the Blog’s Newsletter or any email list that has a free offer in the backside.

The last step is adding the URL of the destination. That would be the Thank You Page for subscribing to the Newsletter. You just have to copy the URL from your email service provider (Mailchimp, Aweber, etc.) and paste it in this section:

This is the procedure of creating goals for your blog. If you have multiple lead generation campaigns, you just have to create goals for each of them using the exact simple procedure.

Since you’re reading this blog post, I suppose that your ideal customers need to take a certain number of steps to give you money. Funnels help with seeing the process more clearly and knowing exactly what steps could cause confusion or anxiety to the customers on their path. Therefore, we could use Google Analytics to visualize our goals and track them to achieve positive results more easily. When you know where the problem is, you know where to act.

You can start creating a conversion funnel by enabling the “Funnel” option in the Goal description section when you create Goals.

2. Analyzing the current situation

Once you figured where what you wanted to achieve with your blog and visualized the goals, you can proceed to analyze the current situation. The outcome of analyzing data in Google Analytics has to show you where you have to improve, optimize, change something to achieve your goals. Data analysis starts with identifying the conversion rate of your blogging efforts.

More exactly, you need to figure:

• How many blog visitors converted to subscribers

• How many subscribers converted to leads

In this case, there are two possible situations.

1. You have already set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics. In this case, you’ll have to go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Here, you have to look at Conversions > All Goals and analyze how many people completed the goal. Analyze the top pages that count for 80% of the traffic. These pages are the ones that include the keywords and phrases that generate the largest amount of traffic to the website.

2. You haven’t set up yet goals and funnel. If you’re doing it right after reading this post, you will have to wait until Google Analytics tracks visits and conversions.

Until now we have talked about the basic procedures that you need to follow in the early stages of generating leads with blogging. It is very common that marketers dive into more advanced tactics to get leads for their business without being sure that they have covered basic aspects such as goal tracking.

Once you have a clear idea about your goals and the way you’re going to achieve them, you have to be sure that you haven’t skipped something important on the way. The missed steps into the process of generating leads with blogging is making the keyword research and, then, the editorial calendar. Here are a few tips about these two planning activities:

Keyword research

• Find a balance between the general words and the more specific ones. General keywords are costly, because your competitors cover them too. You have to place yourself in the ideal customer’s mind and think about what would you search for if you have to solve a problem or explore an opportunity.

• Test your guesses using the Google’s search bar. Type the identified keywords and look at the first results, both organic and paid.

• Test the performance of the chosen words with a Google AdWords Campaign

The role of the keyword research is to help with targeting your content better. Therefore, once you finished doing the research, you have to come up with the so called “long tail words” which are extensions of the target keywords. Let me give you an example from Marketizator. The primary target keyword is conversion rate optimization. Obviously, we couldn’t rely on this keyword because is overly competitive (costly). Therefore, we came up with a list of long tail keywords. One of them is the customer acquisition cost, which is included in the area of conversion rate optimization.

Editorial Calendar

The keyword research has to be followed by creating the editorial calendar. Having a list of long tail words (I recommend using Excel sheets) you can start creating headlines for future blog posts. In our example, “customer acquisition cost” has become “How to lower the customer acquisition cost in # easy steps”. You can proceed with this tactic until you reach the end of the list.

Once you have a list of 20 headlines (they don’t have to be exact in this stage), use a WordPress plugin or other tool to schedule them for the next weeks.

You won’t have to worry anymore about what to write and not even confront the blank screen block that any blogger has faced at least once in their lifetime. :)

PRO Tip: Plugins may decrease the speed at which your website is loading. If you want to avoid it, use Google Calendar(it’s free) to schedule your posts.

In summary:

• Set up goals in Analytics

• Create conversion funnels

• Analyze how you do against the goals

• Make a keywords research

• Create an editorial calendar and stick to it

In the next post we’ll get in more advanced tactics that will help with generating leads for your business. I’ll cover one of my favorite topics in online marketing, studying the consumer’s behavior.

You’ll learn how to use surveys to get information that you couldn’t find out with other methods and how to use the insights to create targeted content and distribute it more efficiently.

I’d wager that, if you’re reading this at work, you’ve probably checked Facebook at least once or twice today. Even if you haven’t, Mark Zuckerberg wants to change that.

According to various news sources, the folks at Menlo Park are planning to make a power play against LinkedIn by launching a new service designed for office drones – but can it succeed?

‘Facebook For Work’

PC Mag reports that Facebook employees already use a modified version of the Facebook platform internally, and that the company wants to expand access to “Facebook for Work” to a wider audience – namely, you.

The as-yet unnamed product, which was first leaked by The Financial Times (paid subscription required), aims to usurp existing services such as LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft’s Yammer by allowing people to collaborate on shared documents, chat with their coworkers, and “connect with professional contacts.” Sounds like the lovechild of Google Drive, LinkedIn, and an instant messaging client.

At the time of this writing, no further details have emerged, including a potential release date, a working name for the product, or pretty much anything else. Regardless, the news has already got people talking, particularly when it comes to the likelihood of Facebook dominating the professional social networking space.

LinkedIn In The Streets, Facebook In The Sheets

One of the project’s biggest challenges is overcoming the stigma associated with professional social networking services. Let’s face it – as popular and effective as LinkedIn can be, it’s not exactly the sexiest service on the internet.

Another problem Facebook has to deal with is convincing large organizations that their documents – many of which contain sensitive, proprietary information – are safe from prying eyes. This is arguably Facebook’s biggest challenge, given Zuckerberg’s cavalier attitude toward user privacy in the past and Facebook’s previously labyrinthine approach to privacy policies.

The privacy and security of “Facebook at Work” aren’t just conceptual challenges. If businesses are going to entrust internal communications to Facebook, the platform has to offer a suitably robust technical solution for doing so. Sure, users already have the option of using the HTTPS protocol, but the potential vulnerabilities of Facebook Messenger will have to be dealt with before many companies will be willing to experiment with the new platform.

Facebook remains tight-lipped about how it plans to deal with these not-inconsequential problems, but with LinkedIn alone valued at an estimated $1.3 billion, there’s plenty of incentive to try.

‘Facebook For Work’ – A Separation Of Church And State?

The other aspect of “Facebook for Work” that is intriguing is Facebook’s apparent desire to separate the personal and professional lives of its users.

Given how much emphasis has been placed on professional accomplishments in Facebook (particularly after the launch of Timeline in 2011) and how prominently educational and work-related information is displayed in users’ profiles, it could be seen as counterintuitive for Facebook to segment its user base in this fashion – unless you’re an advertiser, of course.

LinkedIn’s evolution from a simple social network into a publishing medium and advertising platform have proven highly effective (and lucrative) for the service, a market that Facebook seems intent on targeting. It’s not unreasonable to think that, by offering a service aimed solely at professionals, Facebook could further increase its advertising revenues and apply different rules to how and when content is displayed to users.

It also opens up new potential revenue channels for Facebook. Third-party apps for businesses? Sponsored features? New advertising formats? If Facebook can successfully split the service into the personal and professional, the rules of the game could change radically – especially if Facebook leverages the considerable power of its Atlas advertising platform with Facebook for Work.

Pretender To The Crown?

It’s far too soon to say whether Facebook for Work has a chance of even competing with LinkedIn, Google, and the rest of the established players in the professional space. If the reports are true, however, it’s a powerful indicator of Facebook’s long-term plans to move beyond the personal and gain a foothold in the office.

Much has been made of search engine optimization, but as social media becomes increasingly important, you need to consider optimizing this channel as well. Fortunately, Twitter cards are an excellent way to generate qualified leads from social media.

One of the main difficulties in social media optimization is telling the platforms more about the content on your website, according to Razor Social. Twitter cards work by adding a few lines of coding to your website to inform the network of particularly strong content, such as great photos, videos or slideshows.

Then, when social media followers share this content on Twitter, the image, video or other media will appear directly in the interface, creating a more visual brand experience. In fact, Twitter cards are more likely to gain increased exposure through retweets.

There are a few different kinds of Twitter cards, including summaries, large-image summaries, photo, gallery, app, product and specific lead-generation cards. Since social media marketing is all about engagement, this is an essential way to command more attention.

Real-world Ways to Use Twitter Cards

As Twitter cards continue to gain popularity, many brands are using them to great effect. One of the reasons Twitter cards can spark higher levels of engagement is because of the visual nature of this feature.

It’s really easy to skim through your Twitter feed on a mobile device without anything catching your eye. But an in-line image is harder to miss. This can make Twitter cards a great promotional tool without being too intrusive. Similar to custom landing pages on Facebook and LinkedIn,

Twitter cards allow your followers to interact with your content without leaving the platform.

Say Daily offered the following examples of brands that have successfully used Twitter cards:

• ModCloth: Have a limited-time offer you want to promote? Twitter cards may be the way to make it stand out. Online clothing store ModCloth used an image in a Twitter card to get the word out about a special discount rather than listing the percentage in the body of the tweet.
• Skittles: Halloween is a great time to promote candy, so Skittles took to Twitter with a holiday-themed video. This tactic is more effective than including a link to the video on your website because users may be wary of leaving the platform to interact with content.
• Monster: The job board not only made it easier to apply for new positions, but it’s also using Twitter cards to promote this new availability with how-to videos.

There is a multitude of possibilities for Twitter cards. For example, a business-to-business firm could use this feature to include a subscription link to its blog. This can provide a clearer call to action with visual cues that readers are sure to notice compared to a link in a tweet.

Lead generation cards are especially effective for this purpose because Twitter auto-fills users’ email addresses to streamline the process of filling out the form. Because forms are an important tool for collecting contact information, you want to ensure the process is as easy as possible for users to prevent form abandonment.

Like most marketing objectives, you need to determine the purpose of the tweet to select the right card option.

For instance, the gallery card allows you to display four photos instead of just one. There’s even a version of the Twitter card designed to promote mobile app downloads, speaking to the versatility of this tool.

While some companies may be reluctant to boost engagement on social media, options like the Twitter card create an opportunity for on-platform interaction with your content.

 Over the last few months enterprise giants Oracle and Salesforce have put on shows featuring the likes of Hillary Clinton and Bruno Mars reminding all of us in the enterprise world that marketing matters. While most enterprise startups will never reach these levels of budget and glamour, this time of the year does serve as a reminder that enterprise marketing matters. Read More

As an employer, you don’t want to receive the same CV four hundred times for a single opening – “I’m great at working in teams, have excellent attention to detail; I’m like a Japanese train when it comes to time keeping (ha, ha)”, etc. etc. So, why should candidates expect the same thing when they’re looking for jobs?

The first thing that a jobseeker does when applying for a job is research the company they’re applying for. If you’re simply listing the same benefits as every other company in your industry, why should you expect a potential employee to sit up and take notice?

Companies with a strong talent brand attract on average 50% more quality applicant

In a booming recruitment market, employees don’t apply for job openings – they search out the companies they want to work for. If you want to attract the best talent, you better stand out from the crowd.

In fact, a 2014 study by LinkedIn found that companies with a strong talent brand attract on average 50% more quality applicants than those without. But the report doesn’t stop there:

• Companies with stronger talent brands have 28% lower turnover rates compared to companies with weaker brands.

• With a better-managed and stronger talent brand, companies typically spend 50% less per hire than those with weaker brands.

• 56% of professionals consider a company’s reputation as great place to work above all other factors when considering a new job opportunity.

• Studies show that highly engaged employees are 480% more committed to helping their companies succeed.

• 93% of CEOs say that they are actively changing their talent strategy, or recognise that they need to.

The evidence for developing a talent brand is clear, as is the intent of the competition, so the question a company that wants to attract top talent needs to ask themselves is, where do I begin?

The answer? Developing your Employee Value Proposition – your EVP.

It’s one of the most effective ways of conveying the less tangible aspects of your company

What exactly is an EVP?

In short, an EVP is a tool that allows you to communicate consistently and convincingly, what your company can offer jobseekers.

Whether this highlights the integrated nature of your teams and workforce, the international scope of work, or the potential for development (or all of the above), your EVP is a toolkit that maps out your company’s key benefits and how you address them. It’s one of the most effective ways of conveying the less tangible aspects of your company: not just the salary and pension entitlements, but your values and culture.

But this means that your EVP is not simply a rehashing of your advertising . After all, what you’re offering jobseekers is likely very different to what you’re offering your customers. Your EVP should be a distinctive language developed specifically for translating a unique proposition for the candidates that you want to attract. It should be geared towards telling the story of your culture, your values, and what working for you can add to a potential employee.

How do I create my EVP?

Think about the things that make you stand out to potential employees – is it the fact that you have teams all over the world? Is it that you have the best training programmes in the industry? Is it that you offer monthly ultimate Frisbee tournaments? Speak to your current employees about what it is that they enjoy about the company.

Once you’ve specified what these are, you can set about defining how you want to speak about them. You can do this by focusing on the language that you want to use and how you want to use it. Do you want to push the fact that your company is ‘inspirational’ or ‘aspirational’? When you talk a candidates career path, do you want to focus on ‘development’, ‘progress’ or ‘reaching your full potential’? These are the specific details that can make an EVP successful.

Using a partnership agency to help define and create your EVP will not only help you specify what your best and most marketable traits are (an external pair of eyes is always wise), but they will also be well placed to help find the best way to package it.

Now what do I do?

Defining and creating an EVP is just one step towards creating a consistent and attractive public face for your company in order to to draw in excellent talent. You can use it to inform your recruitment content marketing strategy – what’s one of those? Stay tuned for my upcoming blog – hit subscribe and you won’t miss it.

Usually the best way to retain customers is to drive your value proposition so deep, it aligns with their core interests. But if a customer is just not as vested as you are, is there any hope left for your lead generator?

This speaks to a reality that not all customers can really bring themselves to care about an issue as much as you’d like them too. For example, you can’t expect them to recognize the value of advertising if they’re not that eager to experience results (good or bad). A company that’s comfortable with less than spotless bathroom mirrors isn’t going to be all that impressed by your janitorial expertise.

What you need to do is to find ways to compensate for their lack of interest. It’s not always good to make them care about something that’s not at the top of their company agenda. You could get the enthusiasm of your first contact but everyone else who buys in would still rather have you get it over and done with. (And no, just because they don’t say it to your face doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t there.)

• Start as an example – First, make sure your brand lives up to its marketing image. If you’re going to care about something more than your prospect, you’ve got to be at a level that holds you as accountable as you are authoritative.

• Ask about what they do care about – The problem addressed by your value proposition may not be the same problem that’s at the top of their priority. However, knowing what is at the top helps lay out what middle ground you can establish. How can you tie it in with your offer?

• Always remember your job – Remember, product or service, you are essentially offering them your job. Said job is meant to fill a need and if you forget that and fail to manage expectations, they’re going to their job of not doing business with you again.

• About managing expectations – Expectations need to be controlled if you really don’t want to be held up to achieve unrealistic objectives. Remember, the more promises you make, the more you’ll have to keep so don’t ever oversell.

Think of it like buying a toothbrush. You don’t want the cashier at the grocery store lecturing you about dental hygiene. You just want something to brush your teeth with. The problem, to you, isn’t as big as your other problems. So instead of trying to get you to care, a good cashier would find something else to keep you coming back. It’s not that entirely different in a B2B sales process.

There have always been marketers who rely on subjective data and unsubstantiated hypotheses. They have a point of view, are comfortable with their perspective and only accept information that confirms their opinions. They also tend to surround themselves with others who agree with them and reinforce this perspective. Unfortunately, social media, and the ability it provides to locate like-minded individuals, has made this even more prevalent.

Marketers can be overly swayed by hype and the latest “shiny new object.” Some marketers, who like to think of themselves as fact based, support their views by pointing to the latest LinkedIn poll, their Twitter feed, articles their Facebook friends post or some list of “top tens” that has gone viral. That these polls may be completely biased, that their Twitter feeds and Facebook conversations reflect their associates, not the world at large, and that “top ten” lists may be made up by some copy editor, does not dissuade them from using these sources as proof points.

In addition to an over reliance on biased but readily available information, many marketers suffer from an “internal out” view of the world. Like true believers, they accept their company’s optimistic perspective and fail to appreciate true market realities. For these folks, failure often comes as a complete shock. We see this phenomena often in the political arena. These individuals get lost in a bubble and simply fail realize that they are in one.

Whatever the root cause, the consequences of making decisions without true market based facts can be quite dramatic, leading to unrealized sales, campaigns that fall flat and products that fail to excite those they are intended for. The following are some ways to avoid falling into a bubble:

1. Do not get lulled into believing you are an expert - It is easy to get followers, have one’s musings retweeted and find communities of like-minded people. Do not start believing your own press clippings.
2. Seek out experts – You may not be an expert, but there are those who are. Find them, pick their brains and read their writings. Learn from those you have gone before you.
3. Associate with those who disagree with you and challenge your assumptions - Get out of your comfort zone. Don’t stop being innovative, but do not assume every new idea is a breakthrough. Sometimes the nay sayers are right. And always remember, context matters.
4. Figure out what clients want and need and create value - Even game changing offerings, such as Facebook, had to fulfill needs. While early adopters may not have articulated a specific desire for Facebook, the ability to engage with friends and share experiences was something that was very desirable. Facebook caught on because of this. Remember that very few things succeed without creating value and those that do are often simply the “flavor of the month”.
5. Invest in a broad program of market research – There are many good social listening tools available and they provide a great perspective. But these do not always provide a deep enough understanding of the subject being investigated. Definitely use social tools, but also consider controlled experiments, well designed surveys, focus groups or depth interviews. These may not be new approaches, but they still yield insights. Remember that humans are more adept at detecting hidden meanings than computers. Don’t completely eliminate the human element.
6. Study the competitive landscape – Very few things exist in a vacuum. Understand what choices are available for clients and prospects. Study competitors and find out what makes their customers loyal or if there is something specific that is locking customers in. Remember that to get customers to try something new or switch from an existing vendor, you may need to provide an incentive. Another approach is to be cheaper, better or faster than competitors. You will not be able to achieve this is you do not know what they are offering, at what price and how their distribution channels work.
7. Communicate using the right vehicles – You may want to use all the channels available to you to raise awareness and consideration of your product, but understand how your customers get their information and who their key influencers. Prioritize the channels that they use, and remember to target messages to reflect the way customers view the world, not the way you see it.

I learned a long ago that the best marketing vehicles are not always the ones that are the most creative or win industry awards. They are usually the ones whose messages resonate and make sense to those they are trying to influence. And, they most often reflect a deep understanding of their target audiences. Knowledge is power, knowledge also makes one a better marketer.

Advertising has changed drastically since the days of Don Draper and in-office cocktails during creative meetings. Now, print and TV are old-school mediums, and forward-looking brands are turning to mobile to reach a new kind of audience.

By 2015, there will be an estimated 2 billion smartphone users. So, whether your brand uses mobile ads to drive traffic to your website, promote a new product or service, or to acquire new app users, your prospective audience is vast and active.

Mobile ads open up a world of technical, targeting and tactical options previously impossible in traditional ads. This form of app advertising is now one of the most popular among marketers, which has lead to increased creativity in the way ads work to engage your audience.

In this post, we take a look at five of the best mobile ad campaigns which actually work in capturing attention, capitalizing on creativity, and driving awareness.

1. PBS KIDS – The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That!

When PBS wanted to run a campaign promoting Dr. Seuss’ 108th birthday, they employed game-like mobile apps as part of an integrated marketing strategy to drive website traffic and to encourage viewers to tune-in to an upcoming TV special.

Instead of running an ad showcasing the date and time of the special, PBS took a mobile-specific approach by creating a quick, easy-to-complete & kid-friendly game within their interactive ad. In the game, the user was able to “pop” balloons using their touch screen, and after had the option to play again or click to access a sneak preview of the TV special on their website. The results screen also contained a real-time countdown to the airing to create a sense of urgency with the audience.

PBS targeted Moms – those who would be interested in showing their kids the special, or those whose children might use their phone or tablet to play the short game.

Ad success equation: By pairing intelligent targeting (to Moms) with native functionality (the touch screen), a whimsical touch (the interactive game) and a sense of timeliness (the running countdown) PBS created a campaign that increased mobile engagement and contributed to tune-ins.

 

2. John Lewis – Monty’s Christmas Penguin

Monty the penguin has us feeling all the feels this holiday season. The story of Monty’s quest to find love is not only a brilliant and emotional Christmas tale meant to exemplify the spirit of the season, but also a genius move from UK retailer John Lewis (who always seems to hit a home run with customers). From a movie-quality commercial to a dedicated mobile app (and the power of social media), Monty’s mark has already been felt far and wide.

But John Lewis and Monty aren’t stopping at virality and calling it a day. The brand has put into place mobile ads for the Monty’s Christmas mobile app in effort to gain new users and to strategically beat out the competition.

John Lewis and its competitors Marks & Spencer and Debenhams are famous for carefully choosing the songs used in their holiday adverts, typically employing famous musicians or bands to cover past hits in new ways. Because of this, many mobile users will open up Shazam on their phone to identify a particular song or version they enjoyed.

John Lewis (who has since stated this was simply a coincidence and not an implicit strategy) targeted Shazam users who were looking up tracks from its competitors’ adverts and had a mobile ad for the Monty’s Christmas app appear on the screen. Regardless of the intention, it is a successful mobile tactic that has helped with the Monty app marketing.

Ad success equation: Starting with heart (Monty the penguin) as the foundation for any great viral campaign, John Lewis paired strategic targeting (seekers of its competitors’ music) and a mobile-first strategy (app usage to find this music) to keep users falling in love and interacting with Monty’s story in a dedicated app.

 

3. Bradesco – Fake Ad

This next example is from 2012, but it still rings true as one of the best mobile ads we’ve seen. Bradesco, a car insurance provider in Brazil, created an iPad app to demonstrate the value of their services – without looking like your run-of-the-mill insurance ad.

The ad was run only in iPad magazines, and was designed to appear as an ordinary car ad. However, once the user swiped to access the next page of the magazine, the car in the ad went with it, crashing against the side of the screen. After, a screen appeared with the tagline: “Unexpected events happen without warning. Make a Bradesco car insurance plan.” Simple. Straight-forward. Impactful.

The ad won a Cannes Mobile Lion award as one of the best mobile advertisements in the world. It’s also a fantastic example of creating a hyper-specific ad in order to make a big statement. On a phone or outside of a tablet magazine, the ad might not have had such force. But because it was designed to fit in the publication as a basic car ad, the end result is that much more provoking. That gravitas, paired with the honest nature of the tagline, is what makes this ad great.

Ad success equation: Bradesco started with a simple, but elegant, idea (the ease with which crashes happen) in the hands of the user (literally) and ensured that by placing it perfectly in the right format (a regular car ad) and context (in a tablet app magazine) it made a mark.

 

4. Taco Bell – Happier Hour

Taco Bell has been making mobile waves long before its online and social media blackout #OnlyInTheApp campaign (although we have to give them credit for that risky and spectacular idea). While their recent app promotion strategy has been out-of-the-box, Taco Bell has previously seen mobile success by employing one excellent strategy: give users special offers, and make it easy for them to redeem.

Sound slightly uninspired? It shouldn’t. Because while creativity makes for awesome ads, so does giving your customers an easy way to get what they want.

Last year, the fast food giant ran a mobile ad campaign promoting their new “Happier Hour” nation-wide. The visual advertised a $1 drink specialty that was available from 2-5pm. It also included a variety of ways to keep a user on track with actually participating in the offer. In the ad, you could choose to have Taco Bell remind you at the start of Happier Hour (by adding it to your calendar app), to remind you when you were physically nearby a Taco Bell, or share the information with a friend by sending them a funny gif.

This ad may seem simple on the surface, but it elevates a number of new ways for a user to activate it or stay on top of the offer. It’s accessible, and that makes it great.

Ad success equation: Knowing that the fast-food audience will respond to deals (Happier Hour drinks) and creating functionality around ease-of-redemption (activating reminders around time or location) plus cool bonuses like inviting a friend via a gif, Taco Bell launched an unassuming but effective ad campaign.

 

5. Showtime – Homeland

Confession: I have never seen Homeland. I have heard the rave reviews and cries from friends when I admit this fact. But while I’ve long been convinced that it’s worth a watch, I’ve never actually taken the time to watch it. Until I came across one of the mobile ads Showtime has launched to promote the show.

The banner ad is ordinary enough; it displays the show title, time and network, and prompts you to “zoom.” This call-to-action (CTA) is what caught my eye – zoom on what? It’s a banner ad? Shouldn’t the CTA be asking me to click to watch a preview or take me to the website?

In fact when you do zoom, the ad opens to display across the table screen and showcases a mosaic of images that makes up a portrait of the lead characters. Zooming in further opens those images and reveals that they are actually short videos you can play that highlight different aspects of the show’s plot.

Not only is it visually striking, the ad also betrays expectations by featuring a mosaic constructed of surprise videos. The idea of a banner ad that opens to reveal a video isn’t groundbreaking, but the actual experience of accessing the videos is pretty thrilling, and thus it turns the standard on its head. It’s also timely – appearing on the publication the day it airs, and targeting The New York Times readers (who are more likely to be interested in a foreign relations drama).

Ad success equation: Transforming a banner ad with an intriguing CTA (“tap to zoom”) which defies expectations by delivering an intricate collage of images (to feature a main character) that then are all revealed to be bite-sized videos (catching you up on the plot of the show and luring you in to watch more) is a smart way to create a new twist on mobile ads without incorporating too many bells and whistles.

What Makes a Great Mobile Ad Campaign?

The answer to this changes depending on what kind of marketer you’re talking to. But when it comes to mobile, it’s clear that creativity and technical ingenuity are key. And just like with mobile apps, you need to make your ad engaging and useful to the end user.

What campaigns have you seen that really knocked it out of the park? Let us know!

Staying focused on customer care becomes more challenging as companies increasingly rely on automation to service clients rather than human-to-human customer service. Both approaches can have their pitfalls, so the real challenge to customer care depends on how many touchpoints a customer has with an organization before their issue is solved. The answer is the fewer the better. Understanding that, below are five tips that businesses can use to create a better customer experience even when relying on automation.

1. Develop a corporate culture surrounding your company’s approach to automation. Your philosophy should be to make sure that the customers’ needs are easily meet and that you have an advisory board that goes through your company’s approach to automation and service. Put a policy in place to regularly check in with customers to see that requests are being fulfilled when they use a machine. This fact-checking procedure fosters a culture that acts on caring.
2. Social listening is a key component to customer care. Most humans become frustrated with automated service when it doesn’t work and with social media they have an avenue to immediately complain to everyone engaged with your company. Social criticism or praise provides a significant platform that most companies overlook because they don’t realize the enormous impact social reviews have on peoples’ influence to work or connect with a company’s brand. Watch and react quickly to social comments. It is easy to take the customer offline and deal with their concerns directly and then use these comments to provide future direction.
3. Adopt a 5 to 3 rule. This means that the transaction between your customer and your automated service is short and to the point. That means don’t offer more than five options to a customer to finish their transaction and don’t take more than three minutes to go through those five things. Providing fewer options to solve their issues shows your customer you value their time rather than your company’s bottom line.
4. Delighting the customer should always be the top priority when adopting an automated service experience. This goes back to making sure your culture is cemented in putting the customer first. If you can’t provide your customers with cutting-edge automation that also simplifies things for them, perhaps you should question providing this automation at all. If you already have automation in place that is substandard, work to get rid of it. You will likely save your customer’s loyalty to the company and pick up a new one—or several—by doing so.
5. Strike a happy medium between technology and human contact. The key to keeping your clientele happy is to know when, where and how to use technology to make things more efficient for both you and the customer. There are times when dealing with a human is expected and appreciated by your customers. Finally, if you want to keep everyone happy, provide customers with a human alternative to help resolve their customer service needs in the event that they are disinclined to engage with an automated service.

We all know what a bad blog looks like. As soon as the page loads, your eyes start to crisscross trying to find the content. Meanwhile, banner ads, pop up forms, and multiple columns all compete for our attention. At most, you might spend 5 seconds before moving on to another site.

The secret to having a blog that people actually want to read and return to isn’t actually much of a secret at all. In fact, after stumbling onto enough of those sensory-overload sites, it reveals itself pretty quickly.

Ready?

Usability. (Groundbreaking, we know). Blogs are a great way to establish yourself as an industry leader, provoke conversation, and build a following around your brand. In fact, according to these stats, B2Bs that use blogs generate 67% more leads. Meanwhile, 61% of U.S. consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post.

So if you want to successfully use your blog as part of your marketing plan, the ease with which you can read and navigate it is critical.

Here are some questions to ask yourself about your blog.

Does it look good?

As in life, first impressions go a long way. Within seconds, people will decide if they’re going to stick around and read your content. So first thing’s first. Make your layout clean and simple to guide users’ eyes in the right direction. A single column for your posts always works best with additional, organized content in the margins.

Next, don’t just rely on text for your posts. Obviously, if you’re a talented, thoughtful writer, use the power of the pen (or keyboard), but it’s important to mix up your content. After all, people respond to images (because who doesn’t love pictures and pretty colors?). Using a combination of photos, infographics and even video, you can make your content compelling and unpredictable. For text posts, bulleted lists (like the one below) can help readers quickly consume info as well.

Do the design elements help or hinder?

By now it’s safe to say that most users prefer a clean and crisp web page design, especially when it comes to trying to find information. Make sure your blog is void of anything that’ll distract the reader. This isn’t just limited to annoying GIFs or clashing colors; careless typography can also be a hindrance. In particular, these design elements can greatly affect the user experience:

• Font
• Margins
• Priority points

Font. You know that test that optometrists use? The one where they ask you to read very tiny letters to see how bad your eye site is? No one enjoys that test. So don’t make your users squint at your 1,000 word blog posts. If they even get through the first paragraph, they’ll forever associate their ensuing headache with your brand.

Margins. In school, we’re taught that wide margins are bad in essays; they’re just a sneaky means to writing a shorter paper. Luckily, the internet prefers that you write less! In an age where content on blogs is mostly scanned rather than raked over, you should increase your page margins. People are more likely to continue on the site if they don’t have to read a long line of text across the page. Allow them to scroll often.

Priority points. Always highlight your big takeaway points. The use of bold and italicized words and phrases can go a long way in communication, but why stop there? In addition to increasing the font size for important themes, some blogs set the really important text against a different-colored backdrop. Without even reading the content, the reader intuitively understands what you’ve done.

What is my conversion goal?

While blogs are perhaps best used to update your website with relevant, interesting content, they’re also great for conversions. Most likely, this will include getting the user to click on something, thereby turning him or her into a lead.

However, many businesses clutter the page with too many options. Leasing your blog to advertisers might be a good way to earn a little money on the side, but it will distract people from clicking on your own product or service. Even social media buttons can split users’ attention, especially if you belong to every possible social network.

The solution? Unclutter the page. Define your conversion (get people to sign up for a newsletter? Submit email for follow up correspondence? Etc.), and make that a prominent feature on the blog. Whether it’s a big button that you want them to click, or a pop up window offering a free white paper, emphasize your conversion. If you have to include social media buttons, consider placing them at the bottom of the page, away from your goal.

Is it easy to navigate?

While typography will make the text easier to read, you also need to allow people to find even more content. Skipping from one post to another should be simple, sure, but theoretically your blog is a warehouse of content. You might have other relevant posts that aren’t located on the first blog page, but if they’re buried and non-accessible in the archives, then the user may never find them.

Including items like a menu, search box, archives, and contact page will guarantee a smoother, more in-depth reader experience, and ensure that he or she returns to your site.

However, good navigation doesn’t just stop at your blog. If users visit your site, like what they see, and want to learn more, they’ll likely jump over to your homepage. Think about it. Your homepage is the gateway to your business. Make sure it’s similarly clean and simple. In fact, it presents another opportunity for a conversion. Users have already shown interest, so present them with a clear call to action and ask them to sign up for a newsletter, free service, etc. once they click through to your main page.

Is it optimized for SEO?

Blogs are a great way to generate SEO mojo. They allow you to frequently update your site, which signals to search engines that your website is active; they provide opportunities for internal linking; and they give you content to share in social media, which in an ideal world will be shared by other people, thereby creating a backlink to your site. Of course, all of these personal benefits also help users find and use your blog.

So why don’t more people optimize their blogs?

If you’re not sure where to start, consider pagination. By organizing only a few – or perhaps just one – post per page, you create a more user-friendly experience. Otherwise, people have to scroll down one epically long blog page, diving into your archives, searching for relevant info. Additionally, dozens or hundreds of posts would most likely negatively affect your page load times.

Meanwhile, search engines will appreciate the digestible scaling of content for similar reasons. They recognize the ease of access, and will value your blog more favorably as a result.

Another way to hit the twin goals of usability and SEO is by adding a Related Posts button at the end of every individual post. Not only will this guide readers towards similar content, but it provides an internal link to related material, which in turn helps search engines properly evaluate your site, and improve those pages’ rank. (WordPress users can find a variety of easy-to-use Related Posts plugins).

Yes, you read that headline correctly. Thrill your CEO. In order to meet that expectation, you will first have to understand what kinds of things get your C-Suite excited. Those are called executive strategic drivers. Some examples of those drivers are Growth Strategy, Competitive Pressures, Regulatory Changes, Risk Management, Shareholder Value, Profitability and Technological Market Disruptions.

Let’s look at what was notin that list of strategic drivers. Unaided Brand Awareness, Total Impressions, Number of Leads, Funnel Metrics… that tactical list of things you are probably reporting on right now. I am not at all saying your current reports are not important. In fact, they are critical to building and maintaining a revenue pipeline. They just don’t address strategic challenges from an executive perspective. And you can change that!

Putting Some Perspective on Reporting

If we simply change perspective from Demand Gen Success to Organizational Success, it is very straightforward to realign your reporting. We’ve already established that tying your Demand Gen metrics to revenue is critical to determining success. That never goes away. You are in a business and that business has a key objective (if not the key objective) of generating revenue, which provides livelihoods for employees and products and services for customers. Your executives are charged with not only keeping, but building that revenue stream and the profits it generates. Your owners (or shareholders) want to see a positive return on their investment and your company is but one of a myriad of investment options. How does Demand Gen contribute to success from that perspective? Let’s just look at Demand Gen performance from the perspective of three of the executive drivers:

• Growth Strategy
• Profitability
• Risk Management

Growth Strategy

First, let’s look at the strategy options for growth, which fall into three broad categories: organic growth, partnerships and acquisition. Demand Gen falls into the organic growth category, which means growing the organization by driving increased revenue. This is pretty straightforward, as demand gen is the primary driver of revenue growth. We don’t need to spend a lot of time expounding on the advantages of revenue growth, but we’ll come back to this issue.

Your reporting should reflect both retrospective performance and predictive future performance (for internal consumption only, of course). Your executives want to know how well you performed, but also what to expect in the future. The entire purpose of building a demand gen machine (we’ve often called it a “Marketing Factory”) is to drive efficient, predictable and scalable revenue generation. That includes growth. And growth thrills your CEO.

Profitability

Part of the equation for effective demand generation is how efficiently you can do it. Looking at this graph, we want the best possible combination of demand and the cost required to obtain those results, creating an Effective and Efficient demand gen machine.

As the graph indicates, you can spend more to generate more leads, or you can spend less and generate fewer leads, but neither is an ideal state. You are seeking the best combination of generating demand and reducing the cost of acquiring leads, thereby reducing overall customer acquisition costs.

Creating reports that show your trend over time – and the resultant reduction in cost for acquiring more leads for less cost per lead indicates increased profits. Profit thrills your CEO.

Risk Management

Since we’ve pared down our set of executive drivers, let’s now look at the associated risks. At the highest level, your CEO must balance the risks associated with growth: grow too fast and it is difficult to maintain the organizational infrastructure required to manage the additional business. How will manufacturing produce enough product to satisfy demand? How will the additional burden on staff affect customer satisfaction? Can our supply chain keep up with demand? Can we deliver the additional product through our distribution channels?

On the other hand, if growth is too slow the organization may be too big to maintain its margins and keep up with competition. Will we need to downsize the organization to keep costs in line with revenue? How will the market react to slow growth and potential layoffs? What will we need to do to correct the revenue outlook?

From the profitability standpoint, many of these same questions apply, with some additional flavor. Where can we cut costs with the least impact on product quality and delivery? Where can we consolidate functions or increase efficiencies? Where can we benefit from economies of scale?

To manage risk in each of these categories, your CEO really needs to see the roadmap because changing course before something bad happens is always preferable to changing course afterwards. Fortunately, you are on a course to build a predictable and scalable Demand Gen machine that will help your CEO chart the correct course. By providing your executives with a predictable course, you are helping them avoid risks associated with proceeding blindly on a course into the future. Your predictability reduces risk. Reduced risk thrills your CEO.

Change the conversation.

Your reporting needs to combine retrospective performance with a predictable performance forecast. Looking backwards and projecting forward provides your executives with the information needed to make smart course corrections. Your CEO wants to ramp production, supply chain and distribution that same 15% you have predicted an increase in demand. With that understanding, your reporting becomes a critical information source for business decisions with weighty consequences. Reporting with that perspective makes your Demand Gen team an extremely important part of your organizational success. And you CEO will be thrilled!

Notes:

Align your reports with executive strategic drivers.

Don’t just look backwards, look forward.

Be Predictable.

Thank You!

I want to thank the thousands of demand gen professionals who have spent the past 40 weeks on this journey with me. I am often surprised at what Google tells me about the number of readers of this humble blog post. We’ve traveled together down a long road to learn about building, organizing and managing our Demand Gen teams and I hope you’ve learned something that will make you a better marketer.

What’s next?

I’m going to take some time off from posting through the holiday season and the remainder of the year to regroup and refuel. I will be taking the fundamental ideas from this post and organize and compile them into an e-book that I will publish early next year. I hope you will be as excited to read it as I am to publish it. I’ll also be looking for new and exciting topics to cover in next year’s blog posts. In the meantime, I wish you much success and ever-increasing demand!

Asking questions. Selling value. Handling objections. Crafting sales strategy. Closing. Analyzing the competition. Check out any sales training program and you’re likely find some of these sales skills being taught. They are the fundamentals and they are critical to sales success. And just because they are fundamental does not mean they are simple to learn. To perform them skillfully requires a lot of practice and feedback.

But to borrow a phrase, these skills are “necessary, but not sufficient.” A study by Millennial Branding and American Express, for example, reported that 61 percent of managers surveyed felt that soft skills were more important in new hires than hard skills, or even technical skills. In fact, the same study showed that the top three characteristics managers looked for when promoting Millennials were the ability to prioritize work (87 percent), a positive attitude (86 percent) and teamwork skills (86 percent).

The study goes on to report six soft skills most often cited as critical to success. Although the report was focusing on professionals in general, we thought the work held merit for those concerned about developing sales success.

6 soft sales skills critical to sales success

• Communication – Communication moves beyond sending emails, texts, and Instagrams. Everyone inside companies must be able to effectively engage people face-to-face. Nowhere is this more critical than for salespeople who must engage a wide variety of customers across a varied set of situations.
• Teamwork – B2B sales increasingly are moving away from salespeople as the lone wolf to sales teams – whether multiple salespeople, technical specialists, etc. This means salespeople must develop the skills required to both lead and to participate in sales teams.
• Flexibility – Flexibility provides some unique challenges for salespeople. Beyond simply being flexible about schedules and responsibilities, salespeople increasingly are being called on to marshal internal resources and to be part of – or manage – sales teams. In today’s environment salespeople are required to play different roles at different times during the sales process.
• Positivity – This one is no surprise – people like to be around positive people. And, this is certainly true for salespeople. Salespeople need to learn how to leverage praise from people for what they do and avoid overreacting to criticism and bad news. But, salespeople have a special challenge – not only do they have to work with colleagues, they also have to work with prospects and customers where it’s easy to say “yes” – but yes is not always the right answer. Salespeople must learn how to effectively say “no” or disagree or present a different view to prospects and customers and have the customer view that interaction positively.
• Time management – Whether new to sales or a veteran, time management is an obstacle all salespeople must tackle. Learning how to prioritize and manage time is important for all salespeople. A good idea for any salesperson is to periodically assess the percentage of their time they are actually selling vs. doing something else. If one can increase that number by 10%, which in most cases is very likely, a whole lot of good things happen.
• Confidence – Confidence is an underpinning of every salesperson’s success. Salespeople must learn to display confidence – it’s at the heart of building their credibility and credibility is a key for success. When someone is new to a company or new to sales, building confidence and credibility can be tough to do. One answer is leveraging your company’s capabilities and success stories until you develop your own tales of success.

If one believes the soft skill story, then a real challenge emerges for sales managers. It’s likely that most salespeople would not on their own, over time, develop these soft skills. As a matter of fact in some situations, time may actually degrade the skill. For example, a salesperson could very easily lose confidence due to failures vs. learning from the failures as to what to do next time.

Once again this is why sales management coaching and modeling are so important for developing and sustaining a successful sales team. Yet, how often do the soft skills make the short list for sales coaching?

Getting customers to go paperless is a focus for many companies. It’s easy to ask customers to switch off their paper documents and receive electronic versions instead, but where is the best place to start?

Companies today spend a lot of time and money developing eDocument solutions to reach their end customers. However, for all of the effort that is put into developing the solution, a somewhat unequal amount of time is spent collecting customer email addresses.

Your paperless solution can be great, but if you do not have a clean, current database of customer email addresses, your project will fail. Maintaining a clean, updated email database is a critical strategy in continuously increasing your paperless adoption rate.

The two most important strategies to consider when dealing with email collection are:

1. Develop a solid email collection plan
2. Leverage every customer touch point

Develop a solid email collection plan:

A little bit of planning and effort to develop a cohesive email collection strategy goes a long way. Companies that have successful email collection strategies have a couple of things in common: they always put their plan into writing and get internal ‘buy-in’ at all levels within their organization.

A solid email collection plan should include the following steps:

• Appoint a project champion. Someone (or team) within your organization must drive this initiative.
• Develop targets, milestones and responsibilities.You constantly gain new customers, so collecting email addresses is a continuous project.
• Segment your customer/member base. Divide them into workable groups and approach each one differently.
• Understand how and where email addresses will be saved. Create a platform for storing email addresses and preference management.
• Educate all levels of staff about the value of collecting emails.
• Incentivize email collection within the organization, wherever possible.

Leverage every customer touch point:

At one point or another, every one of your customers has interacted with you – either when they first become a customer, update their information, or seek out answers regarding their service.

There are both proactive and reactive ways to reach out to your customers, but the most important thing to remember is not to lose an opportunity to acquire their email addresses.

Here are some of the best touch-points for email collection:

Call centers

Using the call center is probably your most productive method of gathering email addresses (outside of new customers). Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) are often the most frequent customer touch points. Train CSRs as soon as possible on the benefits of email collection and make it part of their routine.

Website / portal

If a customer proactively visits your website for any reason, you have already won half the battle. Even if you do not need the customer to create a profile on your website, having a page with eBilling information and a simple location where they can enter an email address and an account number will help grow your email database.

In-store (where applicable)

If you have a store, office, walk-in payment center, etc. make sure to collect email addresses at all face-to-face points.

Online payments

When customers pay online, you can ask them to provide an email address for payment confirmation.

Social media

Use social media to gather email address. Post links on social media to the pages on your website where they can provide an email address.

New customers

If possible, default new customers to paperless communications. At the minimum, make the email address field mandatory.

Print communication

Bill stuffers/envelope messages are an effective way to gather email addresses, as it is a proactive strategy that can reach every customer.

Text for email campaigns

Texting the customer and asking for an email address is a highly effective strategy but does require a mobile number to be captured in the database. There are partnerships available where texts can be sent and received from the customers at no cost to them.

Remember that email collection is a process that should always be top of mind if you have an electronic communication plan with your customers. This is never a “once and done” strategy.

Constant improvements and tweaks to your strategy will be required to meet the needs of a growing customer base that interacts with you in different ways.

We can help you develop effective email collection strategies that could mean the difference between mediocre and successful paperless adoption rates.

One of the keys to a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy is having fully developed buyer personas – or as I described to a client recently – knowing your audience. Who is your ideal client? How will we define what constitutes a good lead? Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C realm, all marketers can agree that we market to people. When we lose sight of that concept, marketing isn’t as effective and we don’t typically see the kinds of results we’re looking for.

When marketing is poorly targeted, people don’t just unsubscribe from your emails, they emotionally unsubscribe from your brand. Marketing doesn’t have to be boring. It can be clever and witty as long as it serves a purpose for your audience. What do I mean by “serves a purpose”? I’m talking about creating marketing that solves peoples’ problems or answers their questions.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal client. I’m not talking about a simple description like “small business owners in the Washington, DC area.” I’m talking about detailed profiles of specific decision makers – for example, the owner of a small business with between $5 and 10 million in annual revenues within 20 miles of Washington, DC. And good personas don’t stop there. They include description of your buyer persona’s pain points, goals, likes/dislikes, trusted resources, decision making power, etc. You can see a detailed list of all the things a good persona should cover by downloading our buyer persona worksheet.

Why Buyer Personas Matter

Let’s say you have two types of buyers and one goal – to sell them your product or service. Even though you’re trying to sell the same thing, different people have different pain points. This means that they will buy your product or service for different reasons. Given these differences, how can you create marketing that caters to each of them?

Buyers are people, but if you’re doing B2B marketing and you’re designing a strategy to target a wide variety of influencers within one company, know that each of these personas have different buying considerations. Think about the questions your personas are asking:

• “What is the cost?”
• “Will this beat my competition?”
• “Will this make me look good?”

If the companies to which you are marketing make decisions by committee, each member of that committee is potentially a different persona and will have different information needs. It’s important to never underestimate a committee member!

How To Be Successful At Persona Based Marketing

Exploit the universal motivators

Draw a venn diagram of your personas and their pain points. Find the sweet spot where the pain points of your buyers overlap so that you can make your marketing relevant – exploit those universal motivators of your personas by hitting them on a personal level and giving a voice to your audience.

Don’t fall in love with your own marketing

Some campaigns are really creative but are they serving a purpose? Are they accomplishing your goal? Is the messaging effective? Often times, even the best laid plans just don’t connect with our audience but we’re too in love with our own creative ideas to see that they’re not working. In addition to not being too in love with your own marketing, make sure you’re not getting sick of your marketing efforts either. If you’re tired of them, your personas probably are too.

Revisit your personas regularly

Personas change and so do their needs and pain points. Revisit your personas regularly to make sure they’re still in line with your marketing and to be sure your marketing is effective.

Remember, our job as marketers is to help sales people sell. Don’t let vanity guide you, don’t assume you know everything and don’t make your marketing efforts more complicated than they need to be. By defining your personas and understanding them, you can optimize your engagement, increase the effectiveness of your marketing and increase leads for your sales team.

Win-win for everyone!

As a company you reached the point where you are king of the hill in a region or vertical industry, so the next step is start preparing for an expansion in a new market where the product or service can deliver value.

As you start researching market expansion tactics, a few points immediately come across as we have already seen in our previous article: Market analysis, checking entry barriers, reviewing local competition, and identifying potential partners are just a few.

There are a few options to do this: contract external consultants to do market research, hire a new go to market team, or involve your management team and a few key employees in the process. Many companies choose involving their management team, which is a good way to ensure you maintain a strategy consistency, however you will soon understand that the effort involved may keep them away from delivering and executing on the current business road map.

Valuable information is available all around the web on how to open a new market, but we found it too generic. We have been working with a few clients on developing and researching new markets through online tactics, so it was natural to look for a simpler way that can deliver the same results with a smaller team of people and through our core expertise: inbound marketing. Our clients are usually looking for a cost effective way to collect strong data points from multiple potential target markets as well as customer insights, which are highly valued.

We decided to use our marketing experience to analyze new markets.

Inbound Marketing For Market Evaluation & Research

Inbound is usually used to reach an audience, educate them on your solution, convert them into leads and clients, and maintain them as happy and loyal. Today, it is a growing practice for reaching customers online. But we believe it is worth looking at this methodology for market evaluation as well.

When using this approach for opening a new market, the focus should be more on attract and convert. In this stage your goal is not to sell, nor is it to maintain loyal customer base. The purpose is to see which of your target markets are looking to solve the problem you developed a solution for, and what are they interested in.

Implementing an inbound strategy can help shape the buyer profile and narrow down the market by analyzing the interest and engagement of the visitors. Conversion should also be seen different from a regular sales cycle. In this stage, conversion can be considered when potential customers engage with your content and show interest. The more information you can get from these prospects, the better you understand the new market. As an example, converting visits into feedback could be more important than converting into sales, as it will offer insights on better and more effective marketing messages and strategies.

Second, you can use this same approach to evaluate the interest and feedback from potential re-sellers, distributors, or partners.
Using inbound marketing to diving into a new market might not be the most obvious choice, but it can deliver even greater results in building up a partner and distribution channel for example, when compared to the traditional fairs or trade missions approach.

Preparing The Research And Evaluation

1. Buyer Personas

Look at current clients and create a buyer persona if you do not already have one. Once that is in place, research the new market for potential differences and update the persona accordingly. Check if the user profile has the same characteristics in your new market, e.g. do they belong to the same age group? Is their income level higher or lower?

2. Local vs. global online distribution platforms

It is important in inbound marketing to have a good distribution channel for your message. Review the preferences of the local buyers on social & professional networking platforms. Ask yourself: Are the new buyers using the same channels as the ones I am currently selling to? Is there a specific / localized platform that works best? For example, LinkedIn is good for business users, but Xing may be a better alternative for some industries in the German markets. Or did you know that architects have 5 different options of social networks for architects?

3. Define measurements and segmentation from the start

Segmenting the users and their behavior from day one is a sensitive thing to do, as it will provide insights into their behavior. You might be used that buyers go to your homepage, then check your features or services, then pricing, and last hit the contact button. You might find it strange then that no one contacts you when you launch a local version. But that does not necessarily mean they are not interested, but could be in fact that contact forms do not work well for the culture, and a phone number, or a personal email from the company is much more trustworthy in the new culture.

4. Setup goals on traffic, leads, etc.

Make a plan and set a goal for your new market. Identify the size of your market, look for data on how many potential users are online, check if you find how many use internet for purchasing. Then decide how long will you run the campaign, and how many users are enough to validate your assumptions. Provide relevant content, (white papers, case studies, blog posts) and analyze if your initial assessment is correct.

5. Gather the right data

Translating an old case study might help, but remember that not everyone is interested in the global market or what happens across the globe. Make sure the references, statistical information, and key data is being localized as well, to provide comparison that users relate to. When it comes to blog posts, make sure that show case local data and information. Research what is the local information that they might be interested in, and start testing ideas, titles, value propositions to see which message conveys more.

Applying Inbound for evaluating the market

Using marketing techniques to evaluate a new market, and prepare your market expansion, should start as a simple action list, that develops into a complex strategy over time.

Today’s increasingly complex and diverse marketspace calls for sales organizations to look for new and creative approaches to improve sales execution strategies and advancing revenue growth. One particular step towards is a surprisingly simple way to impact sales performance: improving the output of your middle sales performers.

But will improving the middle’s performance make a real and quantifiable difference? Let’s investigate…

Here’s a point of context: A new crop of savvy and well informed buyers lead most sales processes. They’re armed with a plethora of knowledge and data, and are already half way through their buying journey before ever speaking to a sales person. However, most sales organizations today are still internally focused and have failed to keep pace with these buyers. Simply put, while buyers are two steps ahead, sales reps are two steps behind – presenting the buyer with a grand total of zero new and insightful information.

And here’s another tidbit: 60 percent of deals end in no decision – mainly because sales did not effectively communicate value. It’s common with most sales organizations to have a definitive set of performing groups – with the average represented by the 20/60/20 rule. The top 20 percent will be top performers that often meet or exceed quota, the middle represents the 60 percent that are often on or just shy of meeting quota, and the bottom 20 percent are usually far below quota attainment. And regardless of such other variables as company size, the middle 60 percent will always represent the majority of any company’s sales revenues, and offer the greatest potential for increasing sales. However, many organizations focus on the top 20 percent and reward top performers for the obvious reasons. Well, what if you could improve the selling performance of your middle by just a small amount? What would that do for your organization’s total sales performance?

Moving the needle when it comes to increasing quota attainment across your sales organization remains a daunting challenge. In reality, only 57% of quota-carrying salespeople make or exceed their quota. That means 43% are not delivering revenue performance as planned. When seeking to increase sales and overall quota attainment across your entire sales organization, it’s less effective to focus on your top performers than it is to engage your middle performers.

Consider this example – a simple five percent gain in the middle 60 percent of your sales performers can deliver over 91 percent greater sales than a five percent shift in your top 20 percent. In this instance, let’s say we have a sales force of just 60 sales professionals, each with a $2 million quota – the numbers add up substantially. A performance improvement of the middle performers by just 5 percent can be close to double in return, compared to the same impact on top performers. This example illustrates a compelling business impact – even with 30 sales people, let alone 3,000. Equally important, a 20 percent improvement in low performers does not even come close to the business impact of improving the middle.

Now for the big ask: How can you make your middle perform better?

First thing first: Understand your middle. Don’t believe that middle performers are not motivated. The typical misconception is that the middle lack the drive to be top performers. The fact is, this group is competent and capable; many are former top performers, but perhaps have stepped back for a variety of life-related reasons. For some who are newer in their roles, they simply may not yet have developed the instincts, skills, and necessary experience required to focus their efforts on high value activities.

This larger and diverse group has enormous potential, and sales leaders need to be clear on which type of middle performers they have to accurately set the stage for behavioral change. The age range of this group can vary, but often split between more experienced who welcome feedback and coaching, and those that might be less experienced but are hungry to learn and advance their careers. Recognizing these demographics and the dynamic nature of each group will help to prioritize initiatives to better support them.

Second, it’s not just motivation. It’s not just incentives, and recognition. It is about how to capture what works in your industry, with your offering, and your buyers, and replicating best practices for this group. Ask yourself: What are the situational selling scenarios that can be captured, documented, and served up directly in the selling process? What are the resources that work best in each selling situation? Overall, this group plays an integral role in supporting a company’s culture and they can bring substantial business value when properly developed, managed and influenced. And while it’s likely that a few middle performers simply do not have any more to give, most of them have an unrecognized potential.

Getting more out of the middle requires a fundamental shift in mindset, with a focus on agility and alignment, in order to help middle performers take the necessary steps to become better performers. What the middle needs is not just incentives, but targeted and daily guidance. But there’s also plenty more…

The way the companies buy has substantially changed. Internal decision-making and funding approvals have become far more complex, bringing new challenges to sales organizations looking to grow their key accounts. Why is this happening and how do you adapt?

The Reality of Buyer Decision Making Today

In the past, salespeople would look for buyers with budget, authority, need, and timeline for purchasing – The traditional BANT model. In the 90’s, relationships grew more complex. Spending authority was taken away from certain buyers as it moved up the organization, meaning salespeople typically had to work with sponsors to gain access to a buyer who could actually approve a purchase.

The biggest change we see today is that more buyers are involved in the decision making process. Today’s companies are comprised of many different departments and groups, each with their own budgets. Decisions about complex problems are made with agreement networks that involve numerous people, and more effort is required to close a deal. This is partly because buying decisions involve processes and workflows that tend to cross department boundaries.

We also see that high-level executives (C-level) are more frequently involved in almost all expenditure decisions. CEO’s and CFO’s are reviewing even the smallest expenditures and declining deals of all sizes at the eleventh hour. These extra levels of approval and oversight going up the chain are slowing down deals and elevating the risk for both salespeople and buyers.

The complexity of buyer decision-making may have always been a challenge, but the involvement of more and more people in the decision making process is becoming the new norm and less of the exception. Salespeople must now be prepared to navigate complex agreement networks in order to execute on strategies and grow key accounts, which no longer involves a simple interaction with procurement buyers.

Adapting to the New Reality

To help your reps adapt to the growing complexity of your customers’ decision-making processes, they need help embracing this new reality. It’s starts by understanding the altitude of the buyers involved in decisions and the strategy you are pursuing. The higher your reps can engage in an account, the better they can accurately decide if an account is worth pursuing.

Your salespeople also need to examine the common roles of the buyers involved in purchasing your specific type of product or service, not only their altitudes but also their functions (Marketing, IT, Security, etc.). How does your solution specifically help or impact their roles? Salespeople must be able to tune their communications to the specific roles within the agreement network. It helps to have your reps look at their current customers to identify the motivations, decision drivers, and well as the altitude levels and roles of the people who ultimately approved previous purchases.

When account planning, your sales team needs to consider all of the buyers that should be contacted and engaged, then determine how these relationships need to evolve in order to grow key accounts. The key is to make it a team effort. By collaborating with their peers to leverage additional networks, your reps can gain the right level of access needed to effectively navigate complex agreement networks. This type of collaboration can bring mutual gain and consistency of execution, while building credibility in the eyes of your buyers.

Growing key accounts involves a great deal of insight, information, effort, and planning. Equip your reps to navigate and engage the multiple buyers who contribute not only to the buying decisions but also to the funding of purchases. Ultimately, reps need better information and support as well as planning tools/processes that bring discipline, objectivity and accuracy to growing key accounts. Visual maps of buyer relationships, influencers, stakeholders, etc. can help the make sense of all this complexity while fostering collaboration. The good news: All of this is available and possible. It’s up to you to make it happen.

The answer is YES. If you are looking to grow your key accounts, it helps to focus your efforts on senior-level executive buyers. Unfortunately, most salespeople are losing potential opportunities in their very first meetings at this altitude. In fact, Forrester Research tells us that only 10% of reps in the U.S. are successful at getting a follow-up meeting with executive buyers. In other words, 90% of these first meetings FAIL.

Why is this happening? Salespeople who are calling on high-level executive buyers are less aligned with the decision-making process than ever before. Forrester Research also tells us that executive buyers are looking for a particular type of value when it comes to the conversations that they have with vendors; but it simply isn’t happening. For them, value is defined by three key attributes. If you want to strike a cord with your senior-level buyers (and get that second meeting…and grow your key accounts), get to know these attributes well:

Prescriptive Communication

Executive-level buyers value clear, prescriptive communication. They want to meet with salespeople who exhibit a clear understanding of their business issues and can articulate how to solve them. Many reps are not prepared to have conversations focused on the challenges of their buyers because their primary agenda is to pitch a product. Well, guess what: Executive buyers could care less about a product or service…unless it’s part of a solution for solving a problem.

Problem Solving

The natural urge of both reps and buyers is to jump towards a solution without really understanding the root cause of the challenge it should solve. Executive buyers value repeatable, proven approaches to solving their business issues. They want information and knowledge from reps that show them how to systematically address the root of their business challenges across functions and processes, instead of simply treating symptoms in silos. Of course, just because a rep can accurately pinpoint a problem and offer a solution doesn’t mean that buyer hasn’t heard it before…

Fresh Insights

Executive buyers are looking for insightful ideas that will change their thinking. Information about your products and services can easily be found on the internet, so they likely know as much about your product as you do. Trust me, they’ve done their research well before your first meeting. Where they struggle is at identifying the barriers that stand in the way of executing their initiatives. So they schedule that first meeting in hopes of finding fresh and unique insights that help them to think through their problems in new ways. Only when a salesperson can share thoughtful ideas that haven’t already been considered will an executive buyer agree to a second meeting.

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Helping your customers “buy” is all about having empathy for their challenges. Salespeople need to better align their conversations with their buyers’ expectations in order to drive key account growth. They need to be equipped with the right buyer-centric skills, knowledge, behaviors, technology, and messaging/content in order to meet executive-level expectations of value..to even have a shot at accessing larger amounts of funding in their key accounts.

Sales organizations should also be training their reps as much on the types of business challenges faced by their customers as they do on product knowledge. How else can they be expected to have these conversations? These days, it seems like 80% of training and coaching is focused on the latter, and senior-level buyers see no value in that. Long story, short – If your account strategy is to expand into an account by addressing the business challenges of its executive buyers; good for you! Just don’t expect successful execution without first closing the gap in buyer empathy and executive selling skills.

To avoid another missed quarter, your strategy as CSO/ VP Sales has always been to ramp up field sales activity. Aggressive pipeline reviews, increased focus on deals that may close this quarter, temporary SWAT teams to help win big deals, yada, yada, yada.

These tactics used to work 5 or 10 years ago, but not so much lately.   Something has changed.

The Common Denominator

Whatever has changed, it’s common across a lot of companies because the average CSO/VP Sales tenure has dropped to just 18 months. You definitely don’t want to fall into the same trap as your industry colleagues!

You know that the marketplace has changed over the past 5 to 10 years due to internet, mobile, and social.  But has it fundamentally changed your target B2B buyers? Yes, it has, in a big way. The buyer’s team members have unprecedented access to business and product information online, literally at their fingertips. In fact, the buying team can go through 50% to 70% of their purchasing process before needing to contact your sales reps.

If your salesforce can’t influence the buyer team early in the buyer purchasing process, like they used to 10 years ago, you will be at a significant disadvantage. If your competitor is already influencing these buyers, and you’re not, then you’re in big trouble.

What Does It Look Like If Buyer Alignment Is The Root Cause?

If your sales process IS NOT ALIGNED with the buyer’s purchasing process, than the company’s overall revenue strategy is probably not aligned either.  If you consider the sales barriers that are preventing your team from reaching this year’s goal,  and compare it to the barriers that your team experienced five or more years ago, what is different?

• Insufficient new business growth
• Decreasing pipeline quality
• Unreliable quarterly sales forecasts
• Increased reliance on new business leads from Marketing
• Poor quality leads from Marketing
• Insufficient volume of quality leads from Marketing
• Difficulty for Sales and Marketing to agree on the definition of a sales-ready lead
• Increased product portfolio complexity
• Insignificant sales bump from the new product launches

If you are experiencing most the above symptoms, then your sales process is not sufficiently aligned with your buyers purchasing process.

What Does It Look Like If You Have No Serious Alignment Issues?

If both your sales process and the company’s revenue strategy IS ALIGNED with the evolving buyer purchasing process, then high 5’s all around; you are the hero in a high growth company! So what are some of the clues that suggest you have what it takes to be a high growth company?

• Your organization has a well-defined and understood sales process that mirrors the current buyer purchasing process, so you are experiencing 18% more sales growth than others according to a recent study by Hubspot and the Sales Management Association.
• Your Sales reps effectively leverage social selling in their sales process, so they are 79% more likely to attain their quota then ones who don’t, according to Aberdeen Group.
• Over 62% of your new business leads are generated digitally according to a recent study by Hinge Research Institute, Society for Marketing Professional Services and Association for Accounting Marketing.
• About 47% of your forecasted pipeline is generated from Marketing-generated leads according to a study by Aberdeen Group.
• The last major product launch is contributing about 50% of the company’s sales and profits according to studies by the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA).
• You have a strong collaborative relationship between Sales and Marketing at all levels as demonstrated by the following results, according to multiple research studies by Aberdeen Group:
  • Your sales reps are achieving 75% of their quota (versus industry average of 50%),
  • Your organization is achieving 100% of its sales goal (versus industry average of 61%), and
  • Your corporate revenue is growing at least 13% annually (versus an industry average of 4.3%).

At the end of the day, if the root cause is a sales execution issue, it is totally within your responsibility as CSO/ VP Sales. The CEO and Board are expecting you to get the sales force on track, quickly.

However, if the root cause is poor alignment with your target buyer, you’re going to need a lot of help from others to fix it, particularly help from your CEO, CMO, and an experienced revenue acceleration consultant.  A detailed discussion and outline of a CSO Action Plan can be found here.

 

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When you work in the B2B eCommerce industry, sometimes it seems like B2C merchants get all the breaks. After all, their streamlined and simple payment tools put each customer in complete control of the sales process: he makes his own purchasing decisions, and he controls his own credit card or PayPal-like payment method.

Unfortunately, this process is a fraction of the activity that goes into a B2B eCommerce sale. In the B2B world, we have to fight a purchasing process that involves multiple stakeholders, and when your payment finally gets approved, you’re losing time to old-fashioned payment methods and terms. All of this leads to an increasingly dangerous and costly consequence you may not have considered yet: what if your traditional payment processing is preventing B2B business growth in the long run?

Faster Payment Processing Brings Your Business Into the Digital Age

“Business as usual” is a killer in the world of eCommerce payment processing. Because we’re used to how we process payments, we rarely consider how we could update that process to save time, money, and sanity. Here’s a look at how each of these common payment requirements and types can prevent B2B business growth over time:

1. Multiple stakeholders delay the purchase.

In our experience, the average B2B payment requires the approval of two or more stakeholders: the VP, the accountant, and often the manager directly responsible for the account. Even assuming none of those people are on vacation, home sick, or slammed with work, what do you think the odds are that all of that requisition and approval paperwork for your B2B customer’s purchase will make it through that list within a week?

When a customer’s purchasing process involves too many people, your marketing efforts are fighting with time and effort that your customer would rather spend on other, more important work. And the longer he delays a purchase or a payment, the less likely it is that he will make that purchase at all.

2. Old-fashioned payment terms mean busywork.

Every business struggles with time management at one point or another. And nothing increases the pressure on your time like arrangements that use old-fashioned payment terms like Net 30. Not only are you waiting on the actual check to be cut and sent, but you also must wait on the back and forth paperwork of purchase orders, credit checks, invoices, and collections.

Any back and forth in your business is an opportunity to streamline your time. And choosing not to eliminate that time commitment translates directly into wasted hours and wasted resources.

3. Paper checks can take forever (if ever).

Did you know that six billion B2B checks were written in 2012, and each check cost the company $4-20 to create? That’s an incredible amount of paper, postage, and trust in the mail system in your locality. (And that’s not even taking into account the mail-hoarding mailmen out there).

As a merchant, you may never be able to stop a business from paying this way. But the same argument exists as for old-fashioned payment terms. The more time you invest in tracking, monitoring, and exchanging payment information regarding paper checks, the less time you have to devote to important business processes that grow your company.

4. Credit cards aren’t B2B reality.

Most B2B eCommerce businesses picture “traditional” payment processing as running a credit card. But this is a flawed and mistakenly B2C view because businesses have purchased in ways other than a credit card for decades. B2B shoppers often need to buy things for work online, but they don’t have a corporate card and don’t want to use a personal card.

Merchants who treat business shoppers like they can just pull out a credit card to pay aren’t thinking straight; When your shoppers find out that they can’t complete the purchase the way they need to, you’re stuck with cart abandonment and lost sales.

In an age where more than $1 trillion of business is done in B2B eCommerce each year, your business shouldn’t have to operate like it’s 1980. Implement a processing system that allows your customers to pay by whichever method is most convenient— whether that’s a credit card, eCheck, PO, or paper check— and see how much easier it is to run your business!