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At Strong Towns, we've created a lot of content about parking. If you've read some of our articles on the subject, you've likely caught on to the most prominent recurring message: parking minimums—local laws requiring private property owners to provide and maintain a certain number of off-street parking spaces—do not belong in a strong city or town.

These minimums result in more parking than we actually need. They rob our cities of financial productivity. They hinder those who contribute value to our cities, from small business owners to developers to renters to homeowners. And they result in dead zones of empty, underutilized space.

The message has encouraged many of you to rethink how parking minimums affect your city. Even better, you've documented the effects of too much parking through our annual #BlackFridayParking event, where readers share pictures of parking lots with ample unused space on the busiest shopping day of the year.

Go here to learn more about how to participate in #BlackFridayParking—all you need is a camera and a social media account!

But then it happens: the guy on Facebook complains about reduced parking; the small business owner rejects the proposed bike lane that would remove parking spots; and the city council considers another parking lot downtown.

Articles and pictures of mostly-empty parking lots are great; but to meet people—whether it's your neighbor or your councilperson—where they are and help them understand why parking minimums hinder the financial productivity cities, you need to dig deeper. 

A series of posts this week, in anticipation of #BlackFridayParking, will lay out some of the most important things to understand and examine about how parking affects your city's financial strength and resilience. And we'll help you learn to apply and present that knowledge in a compelling, persuasive way.

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Parking is expensive. We can break these costs down into two categories. One is the explicit fiscal costs of parking, to the provider and to the public. The other is the implict opportunity cost of parking, which occupies land that could have been put to another beneficial use, and/or is often built at the expense of another beneficial activity.

The Fiscal Cost of Parking 

• Parking is expensive to build: a typical surface parking stall costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to construct (including the value of the land it occupies).  A parking space in a garage can cost $25,000 to $50,000.

• Studies have measured the cumulative explicit cost of the parking we provide. A 2018 study by the Mortgage Bankers Association examined the total parking supply in five cities and produced some eye-popping estimates of its cost:

• Parking in Des Moines has a total replacement cost (i.e. what it would cost to rebuild all of it from scratch today) of $77,165 per household, or 60 percent of the cost of the median-priced home in Des Moines.

• Seattle has a population density of 13 people per acre, and a parking density of 29 parking stalls per acre. That's more than 2 parking spaces per resident (including even young children) citywide.

• Jackson, WY has over 100,000 parking spaces, whose eventual replacement cost is a staggering $192,000 per household.

• Excess parking has implications for housing availability in cities facing affordability and supply crunches. Developers who build parking pass the cost on to the tenant—whether that parking was required by a local parking-minimum ordinance, or would have been included anyway. Seth Goodman at Reinventing Parking did an analysis in 2015 of how much a parking space adds to apartment rent, finding (with much variablility) an estimated average of $225 per month.

Parking minimums can also discourage a developer from building housing at all—more on that in a bit.

Dunkin can afford the parking lot. Can a mom-and-pop shop? (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

• Parking is also an onerous cost for small businesses. Imagine you open a small, locally-owned business—say, a donut shop. What percentage of your overhead goes to building and maintaining the required parking spaces? Compare that to the situation for a large chain retailer or restaurant. Parking minimums put national corporations at a large competitive advantage over local businesses, because those large companies are more able to swallow the expense of providing mandated parking.

•Privately-owned parking induces public sector costs as well. A common claim in defense of parking minimums is that parking lots may not produce much economic value, but they also come at little to no ongoing service cost because they require few services. This argument misses a key point about infrastructure costs.

Infrastructure—roads, sidewalks, water pipes, sewer pipes, gas and electric and internet lines—exists to service productive land uses: that is, places where people are. Devoting a large amount of land to parking spreads those productive uses farther apart from each other. The commensurate infrastructure cost is real and quantifiable. And it's paid by the public at large, through local government and utilities.

• Parking imposes indirect, but real, costs by reinforcing car dependence. The "spreading out" effect of devoting much of our land to parking lots means that walking, bicycling, and even public transit become less viable modes of transportation. Parking, especially mandated, ample, free parking, is a powerful inducer of more automobile use. And this means some fraction of the host of real, financial costs associated with driving, from tailpipe emissions to health impacts and 40,000 deaths per year, can be laid at the foot of parking requirements.

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The Opportunity Cost of Parking

An opportunity cost is the loss of a potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen—and your daily life is filled with them. 

You choose a salad instead of pizza. You choose to walk to work instead of bike. You choose to move into a two-bedroom apartment instead of a one-bedroom apartment.

The opportunity costs; the cost of not choosing the alternative: a better tasting meal, a faster commute, and a more affordable apartment. 

The decisions we make, whether for ourselves or for our cities, have an opportunity cost—including decisions related to parking.

In much of North America, free parking is so much a part of the landscape that we take it for granted and rarely think about what else might have been. Of course that store has a parking lot; of course there's parallel parking on the street. But these things are choices, whether on the part of the property owner, or the local government that sets parking requirements. They consume land that might have gone to another use. What is the opportunity cost of choosing parking?

In some cases, it's that a developer can't build much-needed housing; a prospective small business owner can't build a much-needed amenity, such as a grocery store in a food desert; and a local government can't collect much-needed taxes from potential taxable properties. 

Present these opportunity costs to your peers or colleagues and you'll likely get this response: But we need parking, right?

They're right. You likely live in a city where many people need a car to accomplish the day's needs. You're not pitching that your city abolish parking; instead, you're pitching that—because of the opportunity costs—a parking space might not always be the best use of a given piece of land in a given location. It has to be weighed against the best, most valuable of the alternatives that are being foregone: this is the opportunity cost.

Here are a few thought experiments that will help you understand and quantify the opportunity cost of parking, and communicate it to skeptics in your community.

Opportunity Cost for Businesses and Developers

• Parking minimums take large chunks of land out of productive use. Check out your city's parking requirements. They're most likely in the zoning and/or development code. As an example, here you can find Minneapolis's long list of commercial and residential parking minimums.

Let's examine what that means in practice. The below diagrams show two ways to squeeze a common amount of required parking for commercial businesses in many cities—one space per 500 square feet of gross floor area—onto a typical commercial lot (in both cases fitting the parking spaces into the absolute most cramped alignment possible):

   

This illustrates a key insight about the destructive power of parking minimums in cities:

• Parking minimums often make the traditional development pattern impossible. Even where the zoning code allows a mix of uses (like an apartment above a store), allows buildings to come right up to the sidewalk, and allows a fine-grained mix of smaller structures, parking minimums make an old-fashioned Main Street all but impossible. The parking simply takes up too much land.

• Structured parking isn't an easy answer. The term structured parking refers to enclosed parking in a garage, either underground or above-ground. Structured parking saves land relative to a surface lot, but it is up to ten times more expensive to build, so it may not be an option except where a development opportunity is valuable enough to justify the expense.

And even in that case, other restrictions on development likely mean that the structured parking comes not just at a monetary cost, but an opportunity cost as well. This analysis from the Sightline Institute examines in detail how parking requirements can cause a developer to provide fewer and more expensive housing units than they would otherwise.

• Parking requirements can price otherwise viable development projects out of existence. It's not just that rent in a new building must be higher to cover the cost of building parking. Often, that cost drives the necessary rent above what the market will bear.

Imagine you want to build an apartment complex in a neighborhood where you believe you can get $1400 per month in rent for a new two-bedroom apartment. Without parking, maybe a rent of $1350 is sufficient to cover operating expenses and pay back your construction loan. Add a three-story parking garage, and perhaps, in our hypothetical example, the necessary rent to break even on the project jumps to $1600. If you can't find tenants willing to pay $1600, you won't move forward with the project. Most likely, a bank won't even give you a loan.

This is the opportunity cost of parking minimums: productive uses that would have added vitality to neighborhoods and dollars to a city's tax base may never come to pass.

• The above applies doubly to subsidized affordable housing, where part of the goal is to keep costs, and therefore rents, as low as possible. These projects invariably have very slim margins between viability and non-viability, and a parking minimum can easily push one over the edge into not-going-to-happen land.

Opportunity Cost for Cities and Citizens: Place vs. Non-Place

• Parking lots are non-places. A powerful way to understand just how much we're giving up when we mandate excess parking is the idea of places vs. non-places.

Places are destinations: anywhere a person would go out of their way to purposefully visit or spend time. They include building interiors (residences, workplaces, schools, shopping, entertainment, and so forth), sidewalks, parks, plazas, and other public destinations.

Non-places for transportation, vital infrastructure, and to fill the space between places. They include roads, parking lots, and landscaping "green space" where people are not expected to linger if they set foot at all. Non-places do not directly add value to cities: at best, they facilitate valuable land uses.

Here are some sample place vs. non-place maps by Strong Towns contributor Andrew Price:

 
Downtown Phoenix, AZ

48% Place

San Francisco, CA

81% Place

Suburban Little Rock, AR

8.5% Place

 

• Non-places are self-reinforcing, in a vicious cycle. Nathan Lewis at New World Economics explains this dynamic as follows:

One of the basic problems with Non-Place is that it’s contagious. When you start introducing Non-Places into a city design, you tend to add more and more Non-Places to try to fix the problems caused by the original Non-Places. If you have two Places next to each other, like an apartment building and a store, then you can easily walk from the apartment building to the store. If you put a big roadway in between, now you can no longer walk. You need a car. Now the apartment building needs a parking lot. Now the store needs a parking lot. Now the roadway needs to get bigger because of all the people driving from the apartment to the store. Now you need to surround the apartment building with grass (or better yet, a row of trees) to add a little buffer between the apartment building and the noisy roadway, because who wants to live next to a roaring highway? Then, you need to surround all the parking spaces with more grass and shrubbery, so that you aren’t left with acres of burning asphalt.

Click to view larger.

• Parking lots can dramatically impede the walkability of an area. Look at this aerial photo. The shopping center at the left includes a Target, Petco, and other popular, well-trafficked retailers. The mall at the right includes dozens of shops and restaurants. The distance between them is less than a quarter mile, or about a five minute walk. But the no-man's land of parking in between makes it so virtually nobody will walk from one to the other.

The lack of ability to walk conveniently and safely between destinations is an opportunity cost of parking. And this is true even in less suburban environments. A common situation in American cities is a downtown with a traditional development pattern, but in which many of the historic buildings have been razed and replaced with parking lots.

Marietta, GA. Source: Google Maps with modifications by Antonio Graña.

Strong Towns contributor Antonio Graña made us this place vs. non-place map of downtown Marietta, Georgia, where areas colored orange represent parking:

Let’s say 40% of potentially developable land within a 15 minute radius is taken up by parking, that is 40% fewer destinations that can be reached within a 10 or 15 minute walk. That is a real cost to the person on foot.

• Parking lots take a large part of a finite supply of land out of productive use. In the Strong Towns Mission, we state, "Land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained." Most cities are unable to expand their boundaries and thus have a finite supply of land. Every bit of it not put to productive use carries an opportunity cost.

How much land does parking take away from other uses in our cities writ large? Here's one famous attempt to visualize it, courtesy of Shane Phillips at Curbed Los Angeles:

 

If you took every parking space in Los Angeles and combined them into one huge circle, this is how large it would be.

 

• Even public on-street parking has an opportunity cost: other uses of that space. Public parking occupies street space that might have gone to another use. This might be recreational space such as a parklet. It might be an expanded sidewalk, which could house cafe seating. It might be a bike lane to enhance safety. The value of these things should be weighed against the potential benefits of devoting the space to parking.

Up Next: Taking These Insights to the Streets

Tomorrow we'll look at how to actually go out and collect some hard data to refute the notion that your city needs parking minimums, or doesn't have enough parking.

(Cover photo: Tony Webster via Flickr)

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For businesses of every size, time is money and fast solutions are always in high demand. This is even truer when you are a freelancer or small business owner. Most businesses still look to RFPs for their vendor search, but this can be cost prohibitive for freelancers and small businesses. RFPs are the embodiment of waste and bloat in the system, and they often provide no actual value to the process. The truth is, the RFP just doesn’t fit in with modern business operations.

According to a case study by New Boston Creative, just one RFP takes dozens of hours of draft response time, weeks or even months of finalist research, and on average vendors spend $5,000 before even winning the bid. For the 17% of businesses who deal with up 21 RFPs for months, the time, money, and creative efforts that go wasted in the process are astronomical. For freelancers and small business owners, going through this process is just not possible.

So what’s the alternative? Working with freelancers on small projects and getting word of mouth recommendations from others who have worked with them before is just as safe of an option for most projects. The next generation of RFP responds to the growing need for fast and reliable solutions. Proof of Value, or POV, shows itself as a streamlined and updated version for RFPs and ensures that projects are done right before they even begin. Based on the information measurement theory, the predictability of success (and of course errors) are weighed, effectively replacing RFPs with an information and performance-based standard.

Ready to dump the RFP in your business for an upgrade? Here’s how. This infographic details the modern state of RFPs, how they inhibit meaningful business growth, and what alternatives there are to reaching new vendors.

Upwork is a freelancing website where businesses of all sizes can find talented independent professionals across multiple disciplines and categories. If you’re a business and are looking to get projects done, consider signing up!

The person asked the question I have been asked dozens of times before. The question he asked was, “When do you give up on a prospect? When do you cut your losses and move on?”

Whenever someone asks me this question, I am reminded of two stories. The first story is from the great Harvey MacKay from Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, where an experienced veteran responds to that same question with, “They die, or you die.” That statement takes persistence to another level, doesn’t it?

The second story is my own. I called on a client for seven years. To be fair, it wasn’t any client, it was my dream client, and they spent $2,000,000 a year in my category. More still, I was absolutely positive I could help them get better results. But, as luck would have it, the decision-maker had a deep relationship with a competitor, and she wouldn’t give me the time of day.

I called her over and over, without ever getting further than “No,” “We’re all set,” or “Thanks so much,” before she hung up on me. One day I called, expecting to hear another “no” to yet another request for a meeting, only to find out she had left to take a new role at another company. Within two weeks I had a contract with my dream client.

Here is how I thought about what I was doing. I was prospecting anyway, so why wouldn’t I call on the biggest, best prospects in my territory? What would I spend my time pursuing smaller prospects with small problems and small needs when I could help big clients with big problems and make a bigger difference? It couldn’t hurt me to pursue my dream clients while I was prospecting, but it could hurt me to give up and go away, only to later find out that something changed that might have allowed me to create an opportunity.

If you decide to frame a “no” as rejection, well then you have never really been personally rejected (you would know that a “no” from a client is rather neutral, not personal). But if you believe instead that it is simply feedback that your timing is off, you aren’t trading enough value, or that the client has other, more pressing priorities, you will persist, trying again and again, knowing that your time will come.

Eventually.

The post When Do You Give Up on a Prospect appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When it comes to content distribution, one of the most effective and popular strategies is applying ego baits. It’s by no means a novel strategy but one that’s been increasingly getting attention and recognition in the past few years, especially with the social media boom. As such, it deems a closer look for its potential and effectiveness.

Ego bait does exactly what it says:

plays to the self-importance of the other side.

The concept has a somewhat misfortunate name as it actually sounds worse than it is. While you’re in fact stroking someone’s ego by saying nice things about them, ego baits are more about networking than anything else. In essence, it’s the type of content that features industry experts and influencers. Sometimes, you’re simply taking advantage of knowing influential or smart friends whose words have merit. However, more often than not, you’ll just be reaching out to experts to get their take on the subject.

The focus is on crafting content with the aim of appealing to your target’s ego. In return, that recognition earns you back a link, social share, or any other form of usable content. Thus, ego baits in their pure form have a certain level of reciprocity – you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Say nice things about someone and they’ll likely do the same. Just remember there are limits as to how far you can go without being sycophantic – that’s the wrong ego you’re catering to (I’ll brush up on that later on).

Ego baits also work without aiming at an individual to satisfy the element of reciprocity. This category of ego baits is called link baits and pertains to use of content that targets an entire audience. What you do is typically find a trending topic and then generate kickass content that’s genuinely valuable and/or different from what everyone else is doing. Don’t worry, I’ll get to those as well.

“What do I get out of ego baits?”

I’m glad you asked (sort of). While stroking someone’s ego may seem a one-way street at first, there’s a lot in it for you as well:

• You attract traffic to your site naturally as people start sharing your content on different platforms, connecting to it on personal or professional levels.
• The above also adds to the SEO aspect of your website and helps increase your positions in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), as it’s a direct signal to Google that your content is of value.
• With more traffic to your site and more link sharing, your company or brand gets more recognition and mentions, building awareness and even forming a tighter community.

Ego baits are super close to that beloved “win-win” scenario where both sides profit: one side gets exposure (not necessarily to the same audience they’re used to, which is always a plus) while the other gets great, lasting content, as well as the possibility of reaching out to a different audience.

Image credit: Semrush

“How do I use ego baits for content distribution?”

Another great question, if I may add. Content that compels people to link out to it comes in various shapes and sizes – that’s what makes ego baits so effective. I’ll mention a number of types that showcase the power of ego baits: getting lots of traffic, backlinks, social shares, and increased brand visibility – all the things necessary to deliver more relevant traffic to your content.

1. Expert roundups

One of my personal favorites, expert roundups feature expert opinions on specific topics. By default, people take experts’ words with more credibility and trustworthiness due to their status as authoritative figures in their respective industries. Focus on a certain issue, challenge, or a trend and get their views on it. Not only are you building valuable links and shares, but also associating yourself with credible and influential people while they are creating great content for you. Talk about being efficient, right? Just make sure to point out there’s a guaranteed link to the expert’s site and/or social media when you insert their feedback in your roundup. Here’s an example where yours truly shared a bit of wisdom:

After I provided the quote and the post was published I was approached again and asked to share the post to my social media networks, which I did (and now I linked it here as well for all of you to see. See what I did here? I’m sneaky that way).

2. Guest posts

As a form of ego baits, guest post is perhaps the longest standing. That’s because this type of content has been delivering results throughout history. Experts and influencers usually provide great content because they have a large following and say what their audience wants to hear. In that regard, you can hand them the reins to offer actionable insights and expertise that your target audience seeks, whether it’s a fresh take on something or an entirely new approach. The added benefit is the opportunity to attract the expert/influencer’s audience as it will come to your site, especially those that almost religiously follow them.

3. Interviews

A smaller form of the expert roundup (if you will), doing an interview with an expert or an influencer means focusing on a broader set of questions. Therefore, there’s a bit more work put into figuring out what your audience will find relevant. Otherwise, the whole point of the interview is the same as that of the expert roundup – produce a trustworthy and useful content rich with insights. One advantage of interviewing an expert/influencer is it works in different forms like a podcast or video (if applicable), adding a more of a multimedia experience. In any case, a written form is a must due to its SEO value.

4. Top/resource lists

The first of the link baiting section, lists are always a great idea because they tend to both groups and individuals. What you’re doing is recommending people, content, products, or services. In doing so, you incentivize the recommended entities to share them because let’s face it – who doesn’t want to boast about being great at something? The same principle goes for data-based lists that have a slightly different take as they use statistical information, studies, reports and so on as their foundation. Whichever way you look at it, you’re creating an authentic piece of content that addresses and solves a problem for your audience while promoting someone or something.

A snippet from our yearly State of the Marketing Automation 2018 report

5. Infographics

The main strength of infographics is their visual appeal. As humans, we are wired to be naturally drawn to images and colorful elements – anything visual that stimulates the brain. That’s primarily the reason why infographics are one of the most naturally shared and seamlessly integrated ego baits because we simply like seeing statistics presented in a visually appealing form.

Time to promote your ego baits

I’ve read something a long time ago that resonated with me to this day:

no matter how great the content is, it will never go viral if it isn’t seen.

Besides sharing the hell out of your content on social media, it’s critical to get in touch with your experts and influencers and let them now the content is published. Make a gentle suggestion to give it a small push by promoting it with their audience. An email or a tweet will do, just don’t be too pushy because you might ruin the chance for any future cooperation.

At the very center, ego baits are about creating powerful, expert content that mostly features someone else’s work. The types mentioned in this post are by no means the only ones you can leverage but are more than good enough to get you into this world.

• A remote school complex in Brazil has just been awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) International Prize for the world's best new building.
• The building was designed by Brazilian architecture studios Aleph Zero and Rosenbaum.
• The boarding facility provides accommodation for 540 children aged 13 to 18 attending the Canuanã School.
• The project was funded by the Bradesco Foundation, which runs a further 39 schools in rural communities of the country.
• The 25,000-square-metre complex is made from local resources such as eucalyptus timber and earth blocks.

Is it a skyscraper? Is it a museum? No, it's a remote school complex on the fringes of the Brazilian rainforest.

This year's Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) International Prize for the world's best new building has been awarded to Children Village in the northern state of Tocantins.

The building was designed by Brazilian architecture studios Aleph Zero and Rosenbaum, headed up by a duo in their early 30s.

The boarding facility provides accommodation for 540 children aged 13 to 18 who often come remote areas of the country, sometimes by boat, to attend the Canuanã School.

The project was funded by the Bradesco Foundation, the charitable arm of one of Brazil's largest banks, who run a further 39 schools in rural communities of the country.

"We chose the architects precisely because they are not the kind who think they know everything," Denise Aguiar, director of the Bradesco Foundation, said according to The Guardian.

"We didn't know what we needed, but the designers seemed like they would actually listen to what the students wanted rather than imposing their own ideas."

The 25,000-square-metre complex is made from local resources such as eucalyptus timber and earth blocks, making it cost effective and environmentally sustainable.

The building is also well-equipped to deal with the stifling heat in the region, which can top 110 degrees Fahrenheit, thanks to its canopy roofs and perforated brickwork.

It's unclear how the building protects against the elements, but it apparently doesn't even need air conditioning — the students are more likely to complain about being cold rather than too warm.

"Children Village provides an exceptional environment designed to improve the lives and wellbeing of the school's children, and illustrates the immeasurable value of good educational design," said RIBA president Ben Derbyshire.

The architects worked closely with students at the school to determine how they wanted to live and interact with each other.

In the end, the facility was designed in two identical, gender-segregated complexes, each arranged around three shaded courtyards with dormitories for six on the ground floor and plenty of communal space and play areas on the upper level.

"The girls are getting much more friendly with each other," Aguiar said. "They told me they can now share their secrets, because they're living in cosy groups of six, not 40. They enjoy spending time in their rooms, whereas the boys spend all their time playing games on their upper decks."

Gustavo Utrabo and Pedro Duschenes, directors of Aleph Zero, said: "It has been a joy to see the children making the building their own and adapting the space to fit their needs.

"We wanted to be prescriptive without being overbearing, to be supportive without being patronising, and to encourage growth and development without cosseting it."

Marcelo Rosenbaum and Adriana Benguela, directors of Rosenbaum, said: "This award strengthens our understanding of architecture as a tool for social transformation, a tool that transcends construction and creates a deep connection between young people and their ancestors and knowledge.

"The space facilitates the interaction between public and private, and socialising between the collective, nature and the individual, reconnecting children and young people to their origins and with their surrounding ecosystem."

The RIBA International Prize is awarded just once every two years and is billed as one of the world’s most rigorously judged architecture awards.

Each longlisted building is visited in person by a group of international experts before being handed to a grand jury, who visit the final shortlisted four buildings.

SEE ALSO: English homes are nearly a third of the size of American homes

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The author of 'Boy Erased' reveals what gay conversion therapy is really like — and how he survived it

By now, it’s treated as an established fact: large companies can’t innovate, small companies can.

But that’s not exactly true. The innovation divide isn’t based on company size – it’s based on whether a company is new or established. Small companies aren’t particularly innovative – new companies are. A company that is just starting out, and still searching for the right business model, will be driven to innovate. New companies are hungry, willing to do radical things to create a new product or service. And they need to be innovative to compete with established players.

But once they have an established business model – and that business model is working – small companies face the same challenges as larger ones. Employees have expertise in the established business model, but not in any new ones. Investments in the established business model have a clear ROI, but investments in new ventures don’t. And if you have a clear growth runway in your existing business, why would you invest time and money trying to create something new?

We have faced these challenges in our own company, Peak Support, and with one of our clients, West Wing Writers, a communications consulting firm. I also spent four years as an innovation consultant with Innosight, the consulting firm founded by innovation guru Clay Christensen. Based on these experiences, we’ve identified four strategies for established companies – of any size, and any age – to improve their innovation success rate.

Got an idea? Hire someone to run with it.

You run a growing business. You don’t have time to launch a new one, and neither does anyone on your team. You didn’t build your existing business working part-time, and the new one can’t be built that way, either. If you try, it will fail the second you have to put out a fire in the core business. So hire someone – a full-time hire, a contractor, or a firm, depending on the idea and your level of confidence in it.

When West Wing Writers had the initial idea for a new software product, Amplify, they thought they’d be able to manage it internally. Amplify is a subscription service that enables entrepreneurs and executives to find speaking opportunities at events. Peak Support built the product to a beta stage, planning to turn it over to the West Wing team. But the West Wing partners were too busy with their core business to devote time and energy to a completely new product. As a result, they are now seeking a full-time hire.

Make small bets – but not too small

We all know about lean startup principles – experiment, learn and pivot. It’s a great way to validate an idea before investing tons of money in it. But at a certain point, you’ll have to invest a decent chunk of money, and that point may come sooner than you think.

West Wing faced this challenge with Amplify. The West Wing partners invested a modest amount to build a database of more than 3,000 events around the world, and tested demand by selling custom event lists to its existing clients. This significantly increased their confidence in the value of the idea. Eventually, however, they saw that they would have to spend or raise a more significant amount of money to build and market a working software product.

We’ve faced this challenge as well. Peak Support is a customer service outsourcing company, and we needed grammar training for our team members. We didn’t find what we needed in the market, so we spent months developing a comprehensive 12-module series covering the most important topics in English grammar. We think there’s broader demand for this product, and spent a couple hundred dollars testing online marketing. We learned nothing. We’ve realized we may need to invest $10,000 or more to truly understand if this is something we can sell.

Set a budget for new ventures

How can you avoid the trap of spending too little money on a new venture? If you have new opportunities you want to explore, make innovation a line item in your 2019 budget. Otherwise, you’ll constantly be negotiating to pull a few dollars from other departments. Setting a budget also forces you to think about how much it will really cost to build a new venture.

Overweight the value of diversification

New opportunities often look unattractive compared with your existing business. Subscriptions to Amplify cost much less than West Wing’s core consulting services. We might sell our grammar trainings for $5, $10 or $25 per module. We’d have to sell thousands to make the opportunity worthwhile – while our current business model would be successful even if we had just a few clients.

So when you’re calculating ROI, overweight the value of diversification. The grammar training opportunity might seem tiny, but it could start to protect us from the forces disrupting the customer service outsourcing industry.

The post Four Ways To Improve Your Innovation Success Rate appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Many of the world’s most successful companies pride themselves on being customer centric. Thought leaders such as Peter Fader are helping companies to focus in on their most important customers by understanding the Customer Lifetime Value. See his books Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and the new Customer Centricity Playbook. He teaches how to calculate Customer Lifetime Value (LTV or CLV) and also how to focus on the customers with the highest LTV.

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Investors in subscription businesses also obsess over Customer Lifetime Value and the ratio of the Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Costs, LTV/CAC. Generally, this ratio needs to be greater than 3 in order to have a viable business. Ideally, this ratio should be closer to 6.

LTV/CAC = 3 to 6

Much of Ibbaka’s pricing strategy work involves designing pricing strategies to optimize this ratio which can be done in several different ways. A common way of calculating LTV is from David Skok’s “for Entrepreneurs” blog. The best article is SaaS Metrics 2.0 - Detailed Definitions.

LTV = (ARPA x Gross Margin)/Revenue Churn Rate

LTV is Customer Lifetime Value

ARPA is Average Revenue per Account

It is important to use the same time unit for each of these metrics, whether this be month, quarter or year.

Price and pricing model can impact all of these variables. Higher prices give a higher ARPA and a higher gross margin but, in certain cases, this can also increase the revenue churn rate. In designing your pricing, you want to find the sweet spot that is optimizing for maximum LTV over your customer base (sometimes referred to as customer equity). This will normally require the use of a Monte Carlo model to explore different assumptions and how they interact (Ibbaka can help you to build these models).

The simplest way to increase customer equity is often to increase prices. So why do we hesitate before doing so? There are three common risks:

1. Higher prices may lead to higher churn

2. Higher prices may increase customer acquisition costs

3. Higher prices may reduce the addressable market and lead to a smaller number of customers

The main reason companies fear these is that they have not spent enough time thinking about the customer’s perspective. Your customer is not interested in seeing their LTV increase. They care about how much value you are providing to them. We call this Value to Customer or V2C.

Just as you calculate the LTV of each customer, you should be calculating and communicating the V2C you offer to your customers. The V2C must be larger than the LTV. In most markets, it must be a multiple of LTV and the earlier the market and the more risk, the higher this number has to be. As a rule of thumb …

V2C/LTV > 3 in established markets

V2C/LTV > 10 in new markets

How does one calculate V2C?

The simplest approach is to calculate the Return on Investment. Note that it is important to calculate the ROI over the full lifetime of the customer, which is calculated as follows.

Customer Lifetime = 1/Customer Churn Rate

This is different from the usual ROI calculation, which is normally measured over a fixed number of years independent of the churn rate.

The Investment, the I in ROI, is the LTV plus internal costs.

This leaves the most difficult part of the work calculating the Return. The grunt work in value-based pricing is understanding what drives the return on investment for the customer and comparing this with the alternatives. This is unique to each offer and will be discussed in many future posts on this blog. ROI is generally expressed as a percentage but in this case, we are interested in the actual dollar returns so that we can compare them to the LTV and get a ratio.

Companies that focus on maximizing customer equity and LTV while forgetting about V2C are building on a shaky foundation. If V2C is lower than LTV, or if the ratio even approaches 1 to 1, then there is no sustainable business. The only way to grow customer equity long-term is to grow the value you are creating for your customer. This is why Ibbaka works to help our customers move around the value cycle and ensure that both LTV and V2C are growing in balance.

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What is lead generation?

Lead generation is a method of identifying, attracting, and converting people unfamiliar with your business’s products or services to potential customers. It is accomplished by providing valuable information that gives these prospects as an incentive to provide you with their personal contact information.

Lead Generation: A Complete Guide

1. What are the different types of lead generation?
2. Why lead generation is important for B2C businesses
3. How to get started with lead generation
4. Lead generation requires great content
5. Techniques to increase the number of qualified leads
6. Why you should align offline and online lead generation campaigns
7. Measure the results of your lead generation campaigns so you can improve them
8. The Bottom Line: Online Lead Generation Captures the Best Leads for your Business!

There are so many business leaders who believe because they don’t provide their information to get an eBook that no one else would give their contact information as well. The following online B2C lead generation example demonstrates that properly developed content will indeed convert visitors into leads. I have clients who believed this and whose minds have been changed as they see leads converting on their website once they give it a try.

This graphic shows the views and conversion rates for several offers. The reason why the views to submission (conversion) rates are so high is because these offers reside on website pages that are similar in topic so when viewers visit this page, they see a valuable offer that relates to their interest. So yes, 30 to 40% conversion rates are possible, however, it depends on the content and context it is share within.

There are two primary categories of lead generation, offline and online.

1) Offline lead generation involves all of the actions that are in the physical world, newspaper advertisement, a trade show or other event where you meet people physically, or you present a tangible asset to them through the mail or another method.

2) Online lead generation involves all of the things you do digitally through the internet to reach the visitor on their computer, phone or tablet devices.

Research has shown that prospects perform nearly 60% or their investigation into a product or service online before buying (see the research below). Even during day to day events, they will google a company or product to learn about it. While in a brick and mortar store, customers will often search on the product in front of them in Amazon.com to determine if they are getting a fair price. For this reason, online lead generation has become essential for all businesses, even brick and mortar stores.

This article will focus on online lead generation, its influence on buyer behavior, and the methods and tools that enable your business to attract and convert the very best leads.

Why is online lead generation important for B2C companies?

You want to get your product and service in front of as many potential customers as possible—and fast. Moreover, the truth is, online lead generation can’t be completed as quickly and as simply as placing an ad for your business in your local newspaper; a successful strategy takes a thoughtful investment of both time and resources.

However, there’s a difference between marketing activities that generate action and marketing activities that create results. If you want to deliver the best possible ROI for your marketing investment (and of course you do!), online lead generation is the way to go.

Still not convinced? Here are some key advantages to implementing an inbound lead generation strategy for your business:

1. It allows a prospective customer to connect with you on their terms.

Gone are the days when you could merely blast messages about your business far and wide to anyone and everyone; the Internet and social media have made customers far more discerning about whom they’ll give their attention to—and that means you have to earn it. There’s a truly astounding amount of information available to your customers. Giving them something of value, for free, cuts through that noise. Moreover, when those same customers want more, they’ll know whom to turn to. It’s the business that helped them the first time around.

2. It has longevity.

Are you investing in newspaper ads or online paid advertising? Today’s news becomes old news pretty quickly, which means your ad will very quickly be at the bottom of the recycling bin, never to be seen again. The same is true of online paid advertising. Once you stop paying, the leads stop as well. In both of these scenarios, the only way to get your ads in front of more eyeballs is to pay up. Again and again. (And there’s no way to ensure the right eyeballs are seeing your ads!)

Online lead generation using the inbound marketing methodology, now that’s a different story. Once you have completed the upfront work of creating the content that attracts your prospects and entices them to give you their contact information, called a lead magnet, they are available to live online forever, accessible to your potential customers 24/7. So even better: They’re available to customers in channels you control, such as your website and found through online search and social media.

While you may find a need to update your lead magnets periodically, they generally can be considered “evergreen content”—so called, because the information contained within them is accurate and current month after month and even year after year. See how the graphic below uses analytics to demonstrate the long-term value of evergreen content.

3. It brings the most qualified leads straight to your door (or inbox!).

Ask yourself this: How much time do you spend with the average potential new customer? Be honest. How much time do you spend educating them about your company and products, comparing their options and costs, and answering their questions?

So then, answer this: How often does all of that work result in a sale?

I’d venture a guess that it’s not as often as you would like. It takes a lot of time and effort to convert customers who at best are only passingly familiar with your business; it’s even harder to convince those who, at worst, have never heard of you at all. That’s where online lead generation using inbound marketing comes in.

With an inbound marketing strategy, your valuable content allows customers to essentially perform all of this legwork on their own—on their own time, at their own pace, and in the formats they most prefer.

At the end of this process, some visitors will say, “That’s not the best choice for me.” That’s ok. Because there will be others, who will say, “I want to learn more.”

By the time a visitor gives you their personal contact information in exchange for one of your lead magnets, you can be confident that you have earned that customer’s trust—and they’re primed to purchase your product or service. That means less time educating and more time selling for you.

That brings us to …

4. It’s cost-effective.

Online lead generation using inbound marketing is one of the best ways to maximize your marketing budget. An initial, upfront investment of time and money creates assets that can be leveraged over and over, through various marketing and sales channels. At the same time, it frees up both your own and your employees’ time to focus on the tasks most likely to directly lead to sales. With the extended shelf-life of online content (aka, forever), the ROI on inbound lead generation only compounds over time.

How to Get Started with Online Lead Generation using Inbound Marketing

Every time a prospect searches online for solutions to problems your business solves, you have an opportunity to capture their attention and acquire a valuable lead. It’s an exciting prospect, but it’s critically important that you lay the groundwork you’ll need to be successful.

To get started, you’ll want to explore and answer these crucial questions thoughtfully:

1. WHOM do you want to attract?

The goal of lead generation is to generate the right traffic to your website, not just more traffic to your website. The

2. WHAT will attract the right prospects for your business?

Right traffic consists of those individuals who fit your company’s buyer persona. To define this target group, you should carefully profile the demographic and behavioral characteristics of your current customers. Prospects who share common traits with this buyer persona are more likely to convert to qualified leads.

Relevant, valuable content is the driving force in drawing in the best, most qualified prospects to your website. For the best results, make sure your content is relevant to your ideal customer, as identified in your buyer persona.

Blogs, social media, and SEO all serve as magnetic fields that pull potential buyers toward your website’s content. Inbound links from other credible sources also drive prospects to your website.

3. WHERE are your prospects?

To effectively attract the best prospects, you must identify the different paths that will lead them to your website. As you develop your lead generation strategy, some questions you might ask yourself to determine this include:

• Which keywords do my potential customers use when searching for solutions to the problems addressed by my business? Is my content optimized for those keyword searches? (This process is known as search engine optimization or SEO).
• Which social media platforms do my prospective customers frequent? For example, is your customer likely to ask for recommendations from members of a local Facebook group?
• What businesses offering similar products or services do my ideal customers follow? Please do some research to explore your competitors’ lead generation methods and strategies, and the types of content they are offering their customers.

4. WHEN does an anonymous website visitor become a lead?

Provide numerous opportunities for your website’s visitors to convert to leads, as well as easily accessible options for direct communication via email, online chat, social media, and telephone.

If you’re new to lead generation efforts like these, you may worry it feels too overbearing or aggressive to have these multiple opportunities to collect an unknown prospect’s contact information. To that, I say, quite simply: Don’t be. By the time an unknown visitor converts into a qualified lead, you have earned their trust and established your expertise and value—and this means you’re well-positioned to ask for this information.

5. WHY is inbound marketing the most effective approach to lead generation?

The inbound marketing methodology is centered on the inherent nature of organic search, which connects buyers to websites that offer content that is highly relevant to their online inquiries. Inbound strategies create the magnetic force necessary to point these motivated buyers in your direction. Your website content draws them in, and your lead nurturing engine keeps them engaged by providing a steady flow of content until they are ready to buy. The analytics produced by inbound marketing automation tools provide actionable data for fine-tuning your lead generation campaign in real time, resulting in higher numbers of sales-qualified leads.

Online Lead Generation Requires High-Quality Content

The types of content that best achieve this goal vary from business to business and industry to industry but can include options as diverse as ebooks to video product demonstrations to case studies to exclusive discount offers. These often are called lead magnets.

With its focus on conversions (from visitors to leads), lead generation is the second stage of an inbound marketing strategy (Check out the graphic below for a look at all four phases of the customer’s journey in the inbound marketing methodology).

The key to great leads starts with great content. In fact, according to HubSpot, B2C companies that blog five to ten times per month get 100% more leads than companies that blog only two times per month.

Today’s B2C buyers have figured out how to dodge and deflect interruptive marketing techniques that were successful in the not-too-distant past. In response, B2C companies are turning to innovative inbound lead generation tactics to draw the interest of buyers seeking answers to problems.

Once you have earned a visitor’s trust by establishing your educational value, your website becomes a trusted source of information―making you well-positioned to ask for their contact information in exchange for desirable new content. The anonymous visitor grants you permission for future communication by sharing their contact information, enabling you to begin the lead nurturing process using email, social media or other methods.

To capture your customers’ contact information, businesses can provide numerous avenues for visitor-to-lead conversions through your website. Use multiple calls-to-action, as well as easily accessible options for direct communication via email, online chat, social media, and telephone.

You can see by these metrics that content forms the core of all of the online lead generation tactics. Inbound Marketing defines the best practice methodology to follow to ensure success.

4 Methods to Increase the Number of Qualified Leads Generated

Traditionally, generating qualified leads has not been the most straightforward task. Even seasoned marketers can have trouble attracting qualified leads and converting them into sales. To compound this problem, the marketing game has evolved. The rise of big data and social media has changed the way marketers must approach the job.

It’s up to you to find ways to make prospective customers want to engage with your business.

If you have read the classic business book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, you know he analyzes the behavior of human interaction and teaches how to gain trust and build relationships. You can understand the methods that Dale explains people do what they want to do. His teachings educate you how to influence them to do what you need them to do. Getting visitors to engage with your business is part of the strategy of winning influence with them.

Here are the four methods to amplify your lead flow:

1. Email nurturing

Perhaps one of the most natural things your business can do to create qualified leads is to take the time to personalize your marketing content for each prospect. Traditional email campaigns are carried out in a “burst” fashion without a focus on the individual. With an email burst, generic advertisements are sent out in emails to many contacts at one time. This approach is referred to as “interruption marketing” because these emails are seen as annoying to the recipient.

Instead of sending generic, impersonal emails to leads, customize them with personal information to target each recipient. This engaging approach can be accomplished by something as simple as adding the first name of the person who will receive these emails. While a seemingly small gesture, personalizing your communications in this way resonates with your customers. Direct email nurturing puts a human face on your campaigns and connects with your clients at a much deeper level than typically possible. The more information you have in your database about each contact, the more you can personalize the message. Segmenting your contact lists give you even more power to deliver targeted messages.

2. Social media

Social media is one of the most powerful marketing and lead generation tools available—just one look at the chart below showing how often users spend on some of the most popular social media platforms demonstrates their enormous potential for amplifying your lead generation efforts.

Use a social media presence to share information about your business, products, or services. Link to blog articles or special offers and let your followers do the advertising for you by sharing this content with their friends. Create exciting and fresh content and watch the reach expand geometrically as your followers share it with their friends, drive traffic to your profile and business website.

Social engagement also provides another opportunity to communicate with your clients on a personal level. Engage in a conversation about your business and take advantage of the level of direct access to your contacts that was never before possible.

3. Clean and simple website design with opportunities for lead conversion

While a social media presence for your business is vital, it is not a replacement for a website. Your company’s site serves as a hub for all your online activities, enabling lead conversions from your various social media activities, email marketing campaigns, and blog engagement. However, if your site is poorly organized and difficult to navigate, you may lose potential leads, rather than create them. Simplify your site design by eliminating redundant content and focus on the navigation of the prospect toward the offers you want them to select. Be sure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices, especially for content you would like them to read, like blog articles.

4. Ask for referrals from existing and past customers

One of the most overlooked ways to generate qualified leads is to ask satisfied customers for a referral. Similar to the way in which social media followers share posts and links with one another and advertise for you, merely asking a current customer for a referral can help generate leads that may not have been reached otherwise. See the chart below for the difference standardized referral programs can make in your conversion rates.

Don’t Forget to Align Offline Lead Generation with Online Lead Generation

Many B2C businesses, such as brick-and-mortar retail stores, will have the opportunity to interact with their customers in person, in addition to their social media and online presence. These interactions provide powerful lead generation opportunities, so don’t pass up the chance to take advantage of them!

For example, an easy way to get started is to offer an email signup form at your checkout. If a customer is actively purchasing something from you, you know that they are interested in what you have to offer. Capturing their contact information is a great way to continue this relationship. Just remember that even if a customer sees an email signup sheet at your register, they may need a simple prompt from you to complete it. The way to do this is simple: ask.

Here are some other ideas for integrating offline and online lead generation:

1. Create a custom hashtag for your business. Encourage customers to post photos of themselves in your store or using your products accompanied by the hashtag. This approach not only helps you identify some of the customers most enthusiastic about your products but is an excellent way for customers to create a community amongst themselves—and one that has your business at its heart.
2. Add email signup forms to your social media platforms. Regularly create posts encouraging your fans to sign up. If you offer any unique benefits for members of your email list, be sure to note them.
3. Host special in-person events. Invite customers already on your email list to events at your location or in your store. If a prospective new customer would like to attend, ask that they share their email to register and secure their spot.
4. Offer discounts exclusive to members of your email list. These types of “insider” rewards not only encourage customers to make return visits to your business but also thank them and show your appreciation for their loyalty.
5. Create a QR Code for your printed collateral or paint it on your delivery trucks. QR codes link to a landing page on your website. QR codes are images. When a person receives your collateral , they can scan the code with their cell phone and it opens one of your website pages. For example, this QR code links users to the Bristol Strategy home page.

Measure the Results of Lead Generation Campaigns

To create qualified leads, marketers need to know their audience and target those individuals specifically. Personalization of content is an important start, but B2C companies also need to take the next step and analyze website visitor behavior. Doing this work leads to significant results—and the graph below shows just how big that difference can be.

With the data provided by analytic tools, you can find even more opportunities to personalize your website and optimize lead conversion opportunities. B2C companies must continually apply the lessons learned from analytics to stay a step ahead of the competition.

Free options like Google Analytics and native analytics tools available within social media platforms are popular options for gathering this valuable data. Integrated tools like Hubspot, a marketing automation platform, provide even further insights into your analytics and are an excellent option for measuring the effectiveness of and optimizing your marketing efforts.

Once you dig into the data, you’ll find that some campaigns are performing better than others. Take some time to explore why. Some questions you might ask yourself could include:

1. Do your lead magnets offer enough value to be attractive to your customer?
2. Are you targeting the right prospective customer?
3. Do you need to make adjustments to your buyer persona?
4. Are you connecting with customers in the places where they are most likely to be found?
5. Is your website easy to navigate, with your lead generation forms easily accessible?
6. Are customers continuing to stay engaged with your business and content once they have accessed their lead magnet?

Use this information and insights you gain to plan future marketing campaigns and adjust ongoing ones. Moreover, don’t be afraid to experiment.

The Bottom Line: Inbound Lead Generation Brings You the Most Qualified Customers

Customers do not want to be annoyed by pesky marketers and pushy salespeople. They prefer businesses that earn their trust by providing valuable content and digital experience that engages them while providing useful insights. Implementing an inbound lead generation strategy allows you to cost-effectively connect with prospective customers in the ways they like best with the information they most need while delivering to you the customers who most want to buy from you.

Now, that’s what I call a win-win!

Gain additional insight by downloading the eBook – 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas – and get onto the road to success.

Marketing is by far one of the biggest hurdles that startups and businesses must face. You’ll be generating leads, connecting with the right audience, and determining which channels to use for marketing.

You can use calendar software and become a better marketer.

Remember all of this can feel a bit overwhelming. That’s not even taking into account the time and money it’s going to take to spread the word about your business.

The good news is that is doesn’t have to cost you an arm and leg to market your business.

Email, blogging, and social media are all effective ways to market your business without spending a fortune. The problem, however, is organizing all of these marketing efforts.

That’s where a calendar comes into play.

Whether you’re using an online calendar like Google Calendar or a specific marketing calendar tool like Co-schedule — using a calendar will make you a much better marketer.

What is a marketing calendar?

A marketing calendar is simply a plan that outlines all of your marketing activities for a specific amount of time.

Like the calendar you currently use to plan out your day, a marketing calendar will not only keep you organized, it will also ensure in helping you get more. Calendars establish routines — prioritize tasks — and block out time for efficiency. You can also your calendar to set reminders for important deadlines and events.

If you want your marketing efforts to be more effective, then you need to start using a calendar.Here are five ways that marketers can properly use a calendar.

Establish and Organize Your Entire Marketing Process

Let’s say that you just went to IKEA and purchased a new desk. When it’s time for you to put the desk together — you don’t just throw all the parts on the ground. You would look at the directions and follow them step-by-step. This way the desk will be properly put together.

Step by step you will learn how to apply strategy to your marketing efforts.

Before you start filling your calendar with content ideas, take the time to develop your marketing calendar.

Thinking about marketing will help you reach the goals you’ve set for your business. What specific goals do you want your marketing efforts to achieve. In other words, be clear on what business objectives your marketing will help you accomplish.

Now it’s time to outline your strategy. This should include:

• How frequently you want to promote your business.
• Determining buyer cycles and peak demands.
• Knowing which type of media to target. Besides email and social media, consider blog posts, eBooks, podcasts, videos, and even attending conferences.
• Knowing exactly who were audience is you know which type of content to create.
• Being aware of the resources you already possess.

Outlining your marketing strategy gives you a better understanding of how, when, and where to market your business.

For example, if you sell backpacks. You would want to start by targeting parents and kids before the new school year starts. This means in your calendar — months like July and August — would be extra busy.

On your calendar, you would put where all your blog posts and social media campaigns will be.

You calendar what the content will be. You will calendar the strategy that you will be reminding parents to purchase new backpacks for their children.

Now it’s time to create your marketing calendar.

It doesn’t have to be too complicated. It should just be a calendar that includes the following information:

• The name of the project.
• The date when the project goes live.
• Who is responsible for managing the project.
• Any other individuals, such as other department team members or freelancers, needed to complete the project. For example, for blog posts the author and the social media manager should be listed. The author writes the content, while the social media manager promotes it.
• A place to record the results of the campaign.

With all of this information addressed — you can fill in your calendar. Start with recurring events, such as blog posts and emails.

Next — focus on target promotions. These include the holiday seasons.

You will be considering all kinds of holidays — not just the ones you personally go in for. This not only ensures that you know when and where your marketing efforts will take place, it also allows you to set deadlines.

Additionally, when you view your marketing calendar — you can see if there any gaps where there isn’t any marketing activity. Your calendar can let you know if you’re doing too much marketing during slower times of the year.

Helps Execute Marketing Tactics

Now it’s time to execute. However, this can vary depending on your business.

Larger businesses with entire marketing teams usually map out a large annual calendar. Then they permit each team member to manage their own responsibilities.

Consider other marketing teams.

Other marketing teams may have one large shared calendar where everyone updates and works against it. This calendar is usually managed by the sales and marketing manager.

The calendar software is assisting you and your team with project management, communication, and workflow.

Keep in mind that as you’re mapping out your marketing plan — you’ll be prioritizing the channels and content that will help you reach your goals. These goals are based on buyer intent.

Next, you’ll map out your content against deadlines and make sure that all key members of your team know which elements they’re responsible for.

Your calendar software is the perfect tool for this — since it can be shared with others via email or with an embedded link.

Calendars keep you organized as you coordinate and update everything from blog posts to newsletters. You can even keep up-to-date with the in-person events and the traditional paid advertising.

You and your team have one master calendar and everyone involved with marketing your business. All members of your team will be ready and accountable to execute your marketing campaign.

Your calendar also keeps everyone on the same page while working toward a cohesive goal.

Eliminate Tedious Processes

Have you previously used a spreadsheet to manage your marketing efforts? It can be difficult to make changes — such as the due dates.

Thankfully, your calendar is much easier to update.

There are some calendars that allow you to move an entire project from one day to another with just a click of a mouse. Because you’re using the same calendar — your entire team will be aware of changes. You don’t have to contact your team separately.

Your team are all checking in with the main calendar for updates. And you — as the sales and marketing manager can check the check-in. You’ll know that everyone is on the same page.

Some calendars also let you create templates. With a template you can use them over and over again instead of constantly creating new documents.

You’ll just put in your new dates on similar and recurring campaigns.

For example, you can create a project list for recurring projects like blog posts, landing pages, and social media campaigns. Simply update the due date and team member assigned to each task during the start of new marketing campaign.

As an added perk– each team member will receive a notification when their assignment is due.

You can also use a project management system with your calendar so that you can track the progress of assigned tasks. Project management systems can also eliminate those time-consuming status update meetings. You can see where each team member is at any point along the way — throughout the marketing campaign.

Your calendar may also be able to automate several processes.

You will have a suggestion about when, where, and what type of meetings to schedule. This means Calendar can automatically schedule future brainstorming sessions for your next marketing campaign.

This takes out the guesswork of what you need to be doing. This is especially valuable with a startup business.

Also, some tools like Coschedule come with features like Social Queue. This will help you create social messages and schedule social messages in advance so that you can focus on more important tasks.

Facilitate Collaboration.

You can also use a calendar to facilitate collaboration from content ideas to execution. Take Google Calendar. You can use “Keep” to jot down ideas on your phone and then add it to your calendar. You can then assign a team member to convert those ideas into actionable items.

You can also set reminders so that team members know exactly when the assigned task is due.

You can add notes to your calendar eliminating those lengthy email threads. All of your notes, ideas, and progression are one convenient location.

Learn From Your Results.

Was there a particular promotion that was super-successful? If so, you may want to repeat those results by putting it on next year’s calendar. The same is true of a particularly bad campaign. If a campaign didn’t have the results you were hoping for — then you know that you need to try something different.

Maybe the lousy campaign was launched during a slower time of the year. Next year — you may want to launch the campaign during a higher buyer cycle.

By using a calendar — you can have a solid record of your marketing plan that will assist you in refining your marketing strategy year-after-year.

As a startup, it’s often tempting to look at the established giants in your niche and believe you have no chance of beating them. However, an informed and savvy underdog can defeat a perceived champion.

How? By achieving organic growth.

Deloitte calls organic growth the “lifeblood of organizations.” It’s vital for your success. This post explores the intricacies of organic growth. In this post, you’ll learn the benefits of an organic growth strategy and five strategies for achieving organic growth.

What is organic growth?

Organic Growth vs. Inorganic Growth

Advantages and Disadvantages of an Organic Growth Strategy

5 Strategies for Organic Growth

Organic growth generally achieves a higher rate of return for companies but takes longer to achieve. That’s because organic growth requires collaboration. The process involves upfront marketing, sales, and customer service investments.

Organic Growth vs. Inorganic Growth

Organic growth is achieved by the company’s internal resources. For example, your marketing team may write an ebook of case studies from past customers. They then host the ebook behind a lead generation form. The prospects and conversations from this ebook helped your company grow organically.

Inorganic growth, on the other hand, is achieved through using external resources. That includes mergers, acquisitions, and rounds of funding. Meta’s acquisition of Instagram ($1 billion) and WhatsApp ($22 billion) is an example of acquisitions that drove inorganic growth. On a marketing level, inorganic growth could mean spending money on paid media, like search ads.

Here’s a quick video to explain the difference between organic and inorganic growth.

Advantages and Disadvantages of an Organic Growth Strategy

Successful businesses rely on a combination of inorganic and organic growth. See the advantages and disadvantages of organic growth strategies below. This will help your team determine how organic growth plays can help achieve your goals.

Advantages of Organic Growth

1. Easier to sustain since you’re relying on internal resources and personnel
2. Less risky than mergers and acquisitions
3. Relies on self-sufficiency and avoids taking on debt, and is relatively inexpensive compared to mergers and acquisitions
4. Increased revenue from organic growth can help fund more strategic growth methods later.
5. Frequently generates more value than inorganic growth
6. More adaptable since you are working with internal parties and can pivot when needed
7. According to Deloitte, “a company focused on organic growth sends powerful signals to investors and talent alike about its health, its ability to innovate, and its potential future performance.”

Disadvantages of Organic Growth

1. The most obvious (and unavoidable) downside to organic growth is that it’s slow-going. Relying on internal resources and personnel limits how much you can do, and it can be slow to see results. (Let’s not forget that slow and steady often wins the race. When Citi CEO Jane Fraser announced the company’s organic growth strategy to investors, she was transparent and realistic that it would take a few years but would be worth it in the long run.)
2. Competitors can use inorganic strategies to merge or acquire companies that were once competitors.
3. Deloitte points out that companies “often have hidden blind spots around where and how to look for [organic] growth opportunities and select the best ones...leaving value on the table.”

Although this isn’t an exhaustive list, the benefits outnumber the drawbacks. It’s important to consider both when building a strategy for organic business growth.

5 Strategies for Organic Growth

Achieving organic growth isn’t an exact science. There are multiple organic growth strategies to try, and what works for one company may not work for another.

1. Invest in a long-term content creation strategy.

There are no shortcuts to achieving organic growth, and you need to remember that going in. Successful businesses of any size play the long game, understanding that organic growth and profit take time.

In 2022, inbound and content marketing are fantastic strategies that get results. That said, only 40% of marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. This is an opportunity for you to have a better, more focused content strategy than the next person.

Image Source

Consider:

• Cost-per-lead drops by as much as 80% within just five months of implementing a content marketing strategy.
• Businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those that don't.
• Business websites with an active blog have 434% more indexed pages, 97% more inbound links, and 55% more visitors than those without one.
• Fourty-three percent of B2B marketers say their company's 2021 content marketing budget increased over the 2020 budget, and 66% expected their 2022 budget to increase even more.
• The top 3 goals B2B marketers say content marketing helps them achieve: creating brand awareness (80%), building credibility and trust (75%), and educating audiences (70%).

While these stats help show the power of content marketing, you can't compete with the giants with just one or two blog posts. To optimize for growth, build your strategy around pillar and cluster content for better SEO, user navigation, backlinks, and more.

Pillar Content

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page that links to more blog posts that explain the topic in depth. “Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth,” writes former HubSpot marketer Sophia Bernazzani.

A pillar page or piece/a> offers a comprehensive guide, post, or ebook on a broad topic. It's a subject that could be broken down into many smaller pieces, like content marketing, Facebook Ads, or how to build brand loyalty.

Both search engines and visitors love pillar pages and cluster content because it's easier to understand a subject and find additional resources. That's a major win for you.

Better, more convenient, and detailed content means more shares, links, and organic growth. Include a variety of topics and formats to keep your audience from getting bored. That can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, animated presentations, ebooks, images, charts, webinars, infographics, and more.

Build your content strategy around pillars and clusters from day one, and you're primed to drive massive organic growth. None of this is fast or easy, but you get what you put in. Successful startups aren't afraid of hard work.

Pro tip: Use detailed buyer personas to build your pillar pages. This can help you deliver the content your customers and prospects want to the places they spend their time online.

2. Experiment with emerging trends and strategies to beat established competitors.

Don't be intimidated by your larger competitors. They may have an existing audience and catalog, but their success can sometimes work against them. Maybe they've grown complacent or no longer put a premium on growth. Maybe retention is not their strong suit.

This creates an opportunity for your team.

As a startup, you can't outspend them, but you can out-hustle them. You can innovate, experiment, and think outside the box in a way that may either be impossible or ridiculously slow to implement for them.

Create better content. Visit the blogs of the biggest businesses in your niche, and you'll likely see the same subjects, topics, categories, and even headlines. This copycat content is safe but boring. Find ways to be different.

An online search query or a tool like BuzzSumo can instantly show you what works. Once you’ve identified that, improve upon it and expand.

Diversify your production beyond just written content (blogs, ebooks, articles). In 2022, B2B marketers expect their organizations to invest in videos (69%), events (61%), owned-media assets (57%), and paid media (55%) in 2022.

Cultivate your reputation as the expert for Topic X. Leads, customers, and fans will eventually come to you as your reputation grows.

Pro tip: Be delightful, engaging, and fresh. You don’t need to start from scratch every time. Take existing content and see how you can repurpose it using new and emerging trends.

3. Build relationships to amplify your content.

Build mutually beneficial relationships with editors and other content creators in your industry and niche. Using the Voila Norbert email-finding tool is a must for building these relationships effectively. Leverage those connections to get your content seen by a far-reaching audience.

This strategy is not a quick fix. But it's perhaps the most powerful way to increase awareness of you and your brand.

Make a list of the movers and shakers in your niche, including individuals, websites, and publications. Those are the big fish. Set that aside for now.

Make another list with the lesser-known creators. Conduct a search query for the keyword or topic of your latest piece, and jot down the names and sites on the SERPs you don't recognize.

Do the same with a service like Social Animal or BuzzStream.

Those are the other small fish hungry to grow their audience, just like you, and they'll be eager to use your content to do so.

Follow and engage with them on social media, comment on their latest blog post, compliment them on a recent achievement, share their best stuff with your audience, or find a broken link on their site and let them know. Establish a connection, and give without asking for anything in return.

Cold email is the best way to automate this outreach, and most providers allow you to personalize at scale. Don't forget to follow up if you don't get a response. And then follow up again. Just make sure to space out your emails.

Once the relationship is underway, link to the person or company in your content, and notify them. They'll likely be happy to share. From there, ask them for a quote, a quick Q&A, a longer interview, or pitch a guest post idea.

Once you've established a network of small and medium-sized fish, you can start reaching out to the big ones from earlier.

Pro tip: Spark Toro Co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin suggests asking yourself “who will amplify your piece of content and why?” Start with the “why,” and that will lead you to the “who.” Create a list of influential people or publications that you can refer to and ultimately ensure your content doesn’t fall flat.

4. Foster a community to fuel organic growth.

There are many benefits of assembling a passionate community behind your brand, but better organic growth is the big one. And as more organizations realize the value of community, the number of companies with dedicated community departments grows, increasing from 15% last year to 22% in 2022. Additionally, 35% of teams have at least one person focused full-time on community operations.

As companies focus more of their resources on community-building, they're also shifting their business objectives. Up from 13% last year, 19% of companies say their top goal for their community is acquisition. The most popular objectives continue to be customer support and success.

Source: CMX

Notion, the all-in-one collaboration and note-taking tool, is one example of a community-building success story. In 2020, Notion reached 20 million users, with 80% of its site traffic coming through direct search. Notion's impressive organic growth is due in part to the company fostering a knowledge-sharing community and enabling brand ambassadors.

In the video below, Notion Chief Revenue Officer Olivia Nottebohm shares her learnings on organic growth at scale-ups and the community's role in it. The entire conversation is worth a watch, but the key takeaways include:

1. Prioritize your community at a strategic level and hire accordingly.
2. Start small and listen. Notion started its ambassador community by bringing 10 "very excited people on Twitter" together on Slack and trying to understand what each person was trying to accomplish and what they were excited about with Notion.
3. Give your community members exclusive access to things standard customers don't have to show your appreciation for them.
4. Share as many of your community members' stories as possible to drive organic growth.
5. Gift your product to startups if you're able to. As they grow, there's a good chance they'll become enterprise customers.

What we like: Learn how more brands like Google, Twitch, and Sephora built brand communities – and how you can, too.

5. Use technology to work smarter, not harder.

Find the tips, tools, and services to simplify your organic growth. Yes, to use a buzzword, we’re talking about growth hacking.

As Meredith Hart explains in the Growth Hacking Playbook, growth hacking is “the term used to describe experiments and processes aimed at building and scaling a company’s customer base and revenue through creative, innovative, and low-cost strategies.”

To learn more, read our list of more growth hacking strategies to try.

Make A/B testing and conversion rate optimization part of everything you do: email, content, landing pages, and more. What's not working can usually be fixed. What's already working can be better.

According to Semrush’s 2022 State of Content Marketing report, "quality of content is the primary success factor in organic ranking and in content marketing in general. This is followed by increasing the content output, investing in keyword research, and creating unique and research-driven content."

Image Source: Semrush

Avoid competing for the highest-volume keywords, and instead focus on the lower-volume — but higher-converting — ones. These long-tail keywords are easier to target and better reveal searcher intent.

What we like: Check out 6 Startup Growth Strategies from a Forbes Top VC below for more organic growth strategies.

Pursuing organic growth can help get your brand in front of the right eyes while establishing your business as an authority in its space. As tough as putting one together might be, a well-constructed organic growth strategy is a massive asset that's turning from a "nice-to-have" to a "need to have" for several companies.

To have a successful product launch, you need to craft a thoughtful, actionable, effective go-to-market (GTM) strategy framework.

Without proper planning, it’s impossible to know if you’re chasing the wrong audience, are too early or too late to a given market, or targeting a market that's too saturated with similar solutions.

To make the process easier to navigate, I’ll going to walk you through everything you need to know to build a killer go-to-market strategy in this article. This guide can be used for startups, B2B businesses, and virtually any new venture you plan on launching.

• What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?
• Go-to-Market Strategy Purpose

• Who needs a go-to-market strategy?

• Go-to-Market Strategy Benefits
• Go-to-Market Strategy Framework
• How to Build a Go-to-Market Strategy
• Go-to-Market Strategy Tips
• Go-to-Market Plan Template
• Go-to-Market Strategy Examples

I have to note that go-to-market strategies aren’t exclusive to physical products, as you can create a GTM plan for a new service, branch of your company, or even an entirely new business. 

Go-to-Market Strategy Purpose

The purpose of any GTM strategy is to have a set plan for how your company will bring your offer to market with as little risk as possible. 

It aligns all involved stakeholders on overall processes (whether directly involved or not), helps you get in front of the right people (your target audience), and helps you effectively convey value to drive conversions. 

Your go-to-market strategy is essentially a handy roadmap to success that measures the viability of your solution’s success and predicts its performance based on market research, prior examples, and competitive data. 

Ultimately, you want to create a plan that helps you competitively position your offer, set the product or service apart from the competition, and generate leads and customer retention. 

Who needs a go-to-market strategy?

Since, as I mentioned above, GTM strategies aren’t exclusive to physical products, any business that is introducing something new to market and wants to effectively reach its audience and drive (sustainable) business growth needs (or would benefit from) a go-to-market strategy. For example:

• Established businesses launching new products or breaking into new markets with new customer segments need a go-to-market strategy to aid a successful entry. 
• A small business looking to expand beyond its market or introduce new products would benefit from a GTM strategy to guide its expansion efforts. 
• Businesses undergoing strategic changes, like mergers, acquisitions, or new business model changes, would benefit from updating an existing or creating a new GTM strategy that aligns with any new visions or directions. 
• Companies facing increased competition can use a GTM strategy to draw out key differentiators that help attract customers.

Go-to-Market Strategy Benefits

As you develop a new product or service, it’s vital to start drawing a go-to-market strategy that’s customized to fit your budget and your buyer persona. Although it takes a great amount of effort, time, money and resources, a well-planned go-to-market strategy can significantly benefit your project.

Create Alignment

Alignment is essential when preparing to launch a new product or service.

Whether you’re a product designer or a social media coordinator, everyone needs to be on the same page because you’re all contributing to and executing on elements of the strategy. 

Go-to-market strategies help maintain alignment throughout the product lifecycle with roadmaps and planning documents that inform everyone on who handles what. Without this alignment, your process can get unorganized quickly, which can lead to miscommunications, missed deadlines, and errors that can cause your project to flop. 

Establish Product-Market Fit

I find that creating a go-to-market plan can prevent many of the mistakes and oversights that can tank new product launches. Poor product-market fit can dampen a launch — even if the product is well-designed and innovative.

When you’ve identified your target audience segments and their specific needs, a GTM strategy helps you tailor things like messaging and pricing to resonate with your intended audience. 

Take Apple, for example. In the 1980s, decades before Steve Jobs launched the game-changing iPhone, he led one of Apple’s biggest flops: the Apple Lisa computer.

Although Lisa had some of the best graphic technology of its time, only 10,000 units were sold. Critics attribute the failure to Lisa’s misleading ads and high price, despite its low processing power.

While Apple and Steve Jobs recovered, smaller companies could have a lot more to lose when bringing a product to market with a poor plan.

Work Out Kinks

While a go-to-market strategy isn't guaranteed to prevent failure, it can help you manage expectations and work out any kinks before you invest in bringing a product to market.

The process of creating a go-to-market strategy allows you to discover gaps in the market, which can help you hone down your product’s niche and better alleviate your buyer persona’s pain points.

Competitive Advantage

Competitor research is a vital part of creating a go-to-market strategy, which makes it one of the biggest benefits of having a GTM strategy: you know exactly how you compare to your competitors and what makes your offer stand out. 

You can differentiate your product from competitors and create a unique value proposition that generates interest and sells your product. 

Cost-saving

With a GTM strategy, you’re much less likely to waste your budget on unnecessary processes that don’t help you meet your goals. 

You’ll be more strategic and focused with your spending in ways that will help you meet your goals, and you’ll make decisions that are better aligned with your budget. 

Accelerated growth 

A high-quality GTM strategy saves you from any wasted time. Sure, you won’t have immediate success, but careful planning tells you exactly which markets to enter and why, which helps you create effective value propositions for your marketing materials and helps you get in front of interested customers at a much faster rate.

To aid you in this process, we have free go-to-market strategy templates that can help you build a strategy that positions your product in front of your target audience.

Go-To-Market Plan Methodologies

I've seen two major methods for developing a go-to-market strategy: the funnel and the flywheel. While the traditional, one-off funnel method focuses on attracting leads and nurturing them into sales, the flywheel approach uses inbound marketing and other strategies to build long-lasting customer relationships.

While the funnel is centered around the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the customer’s journey, the circular flywheel focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting prospects, leads, and customers.

When a lead becomes a customer, the flywheel continues as the company is tasked with attracting, engaging, and delighting them all over again with solid customer experiences, new content, and potentially new offerings.

Go-to-Market Strategy Framework

Before I share my go-to-market strategy framework, I thought I’d go over four key points of a GTM plan.

All of these points are integrated into the step-by-step guide I share below, so you don’t need to answer these questions now. Still, they’re useful for keeping in mind — especially if you’re creating a never-before-seen product.

Here are the critical parts of a go-to-market strategy:

• Product-Market Fit: What problem(s) does your product solve?
• Target Audience: Who is experiencing the problem that your product solves? How much are they willing to pay for a solution? What are the pain points and frustrations that you can alleviate?
• Competition and Demand: Who already offers what you’re launching? Is there a demand for the product, or is the market oversaturated?
• Distribution: Through what mediums will you sell the product or service? A website, an app, or a third-party distributor?

Alternatively, you could also try to use go-to-market platforms like Dealfront to help establish and initiate your strategy framework. 

Platforms like Dealfront allow you to pull from four layers of data, enabling you to target your ideal customer, track visitor behavior, reach out to leads, and promote your company with the help of B2B display advertising. 

Now, let’s get started. Below is my step-by-step guide to building your own GTM strategy using the tactics I’ve implemented to build multiple companies throughout the years.

I’ve also outlined how you can iterate and optimize as your company evolves, and you’ll find helpful examples of how we’ve broken these steps down at my most recent company, Automation Hero (formerly SalesHero).

1. Use go-to-market strategy templates

Launching a new product or service can get overwhelming very quickly, especially when there are many moving parts and stakeholders. That’s why the first thing you should do when taking a new product to market is to find go-to-market strategy templates that keep you and your team stay aligned and on schedule.

HubSpot offers a free go-to-market kit with multiple templates that help you organize each aspect of your strategy and keep key stakeholders informed on who is responsible for which task.

Download the kit today to get started on your go-to-market strategy.

 

Each template has its own unique purpose, but they are best utilized in tandem:

• Product Launch Planning Template: Create tasks that need to be completed for the product launch, provide progress updates, and plan social media and PR messaging
• Product Update Email Templates: Internally communicate product updates and changes to your team
• Product Roadmap Template: Create a schedule of all the tasks that will be addressed and who will be handling them
• Product Lifecycle Mapping Template: Keep track of your product’s lifecycle stages
• Product Classification Template: Classify your product and align all teams on product vision, marketing plan, and sales strategy
• SWOT Analysis Template: Determine your product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and weaknesses, as well as conduct market research on competition
• Sales Plan Template: Outline and communicate sales strategy to stakeholders

2. Identify the buying center and personas.

When preparing your product for market, you must always consider your customer.

According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision-makers. These people make up what is called the "buying center."

Each of those buyers typically fills one of the following roles (though it’s important to note some job titles might occupy more than one role):

• Initiator: Starts the buying process or shows initial interest
• User: Uses your product regularly
• Influencer: Convinces others the product is needed
• Decision maker: Gives final approval for the purchase
• Buyer: Owns the budget
• Approver: Final approver who pushes the initiative on a larger scale (typically someone in the C-suite)
• Gatekeeper: Blocker in getting a product implemented or approved

These roles vary based on the product, industry, and vertical you’re selling to. I recommend getting your team together to brainstorm the job titles that could be impacted by your solution.

I recommend researching each role to get a general sense of what they do, their goals, and their pain points. Learning who these people are, what motivates them, and what their problems are is critical as they will be the ones to put your product on the map.

Using Automation Hero as an example, the buying center breaks down like this:

3. Craft a value matrix to help identify messaging.

After mapping your buying center personas, it’s time to map out your value matrix.

A value matrix is a breakdown of each buying center persona, their business problems, and how your product is valuable in solving those problems.

The value matrix will also include a relevant marketing message tying the problem and solution together.

Create a chart with each persona in one column. Below each persona, list the pain points they face daily. If your product can solve or ease any of these problems, include them in a row below.

Lastly, the message needs to capture the pain point and value in a meaningful way. The best way to achieve this is to agitate the pain point. People will take a painkiller to cure a headache but are much less likely to take a daily vitamin to prevent the pain in the first place. The value your product brings should solve the pain, not act as a vitamin.

Here's a fill-in-the-blank chart you can use to create a value matrix:

Persona Name	Pain Points	Product Value	Message
Example Eddy	A process he uses costs too much time and money	The service costs less time and money.	This service does ____, which saves companies time and money.

 

 

 

Here’s an example of a complete value matrix:

4. Test your messaging.

Once your value matrix is in place, it’s time to test your messaging. Start advertising on marketing platforms using the messages you’ve just created for various audience members.

You’ll have three variables to test: the channel you advertise on, your target audience, and the message you share.

When deciding where to test, I would first consider where your audience already spends their time and go there. Some possible paid digital ad channels might be LinkedIn, Google Ads, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Once you run your tests, aim to continue advertising on the channels that show high conversions. 

 

5. Optimize your ads based on the results of your tests before implementing them on a wide scale.

Next, optimize your audience. Some ad platforms have highly targeted audience settings for advertisers. For example, LinkedIn offers options for job title, job function, company size, and geographic location. Test different options to see who is more likely to click or convert.

For example, I noticed high clicks in certain industries, so we began targeting and using our ad budget to focus on that handful of industries on LinkedIn. The key here is spending money where you’ll get the biggest return on investment.

And, since you’ll be testing your message to see which versions resonate most with your audience, engagement and conversion rates of your ads will indicate which value proposition and pain points work best.

Using a dedicated marketing analytics tool here is also highly recommended, as it gives you insights into how the target audience behaves across different channels. 

For instance, you can gather data on how users landing on your website from PPC ads interact with your pages, as well as compare PPC performance to other traffic sources.    

Once you’ve collected this data, you can base your larger campaigns on these insights.

6. Understand your buyer’s journey.

With your personas and value matrix built, dive deeper to understand the journey a potential customer will take, both from the buyer’s perspective and your company's perspective.

From your customer’s perspective, the buying process is linear. More or less, it will go like this:

1. The buyer realizes they have a business problem and researches the topic.
2. The buyer shortlists potential solutions.
3. That list is narrowed down by talking to sales teams from the solution provider and by testing product use cases until a decision is made.

The buyer’s journey — from a business perspective — used to be a funnel. In the traditional sales funnel, there is a lot of general interest at the top. It gradually narrows down as opportunities fall out of the pipeline.

This journey was divided into three sections:

But the sales funnel is no longer the best way to look at your buyer’s journey. Instead, I propose using the flywheel methodology, which takes a more holistic approach that puts your customer at the center and turns your leads from prospects to customers to active promoters.

In the flywheel model, customers go through three stages: attract, engage, and delight.

First up is the attract phase. Content at this stage grabs a potential customer’s attention. This can be in the form of a blog, whitepaper, or video. A lead gets here by clicking on an ad, social media post, or a search engine result. However, these behaviors do not indicate that this lead is ready to make a purchase yet.

After that comes the engage phase. In this stage, a prospect has demonstrated they have a problem your product can solve. They show this through digital behavior like downloading an ebook or joining a webinar, allowing you to engage them with educational content.

While each company divides the lead generation and qualification process differently, marketing is typically in charge of the attract and engage phases. Your marketing team will need to generate interest and awareness and educate the relevant audience on a product’s value through messaging and content (more on that later).

Halfway through the engagement phase, the prospect should ask for a quote or a trial period. They’re nearing a decision on whether or not to purchase.

Once the prospect reaches this point, the sales team takes over. I find process typically looks as follows:

• Contact: Communication between the lead and sales rep begins.
• Qualification: The sales rep learns more about the company, their customers’ pain points, and asks questions to see if they meet the basic requirements to purchase the product (BANT is a popular sales qualification method but several other sales methodologies are used to qualify).
• Business case: The prospect tests the product through a free trial or POC to see if it can solve their needs.
• Evaluation: The decision-makers in the organization weigh the cost of the product to the results they achieved during the business case.
• Negotiation: Both sales reps and decision-makers discuss pricing details and feature needs.
• Close: A deal is agreed upon and your prospect turns into a customer.
• Renewal (Optional): Your customer renews their contract or subscription.

Right after your sales representative closes the sale, the lead leaves the engage phase and enters the delight phase. When customers reach this stage, they should be delighted by a painless onboarding process and friendly customer service options.

After that, your customer should ideally turn into a promoter. They bring you more customers, keeping the flywheel going and enabling you to grow better.

7. Choose one (or more) of the four most common sales strategies.

You’ve done all the required foundational work; now it’s time to pick a strategy that will push your product into the market. No one method will work for every product or market, so it’s important to consider the complexity, scalability, and cost of yours.

There are generally four go-to-market sales strategies — each one catering to a different product and business model.

The Self-Service model

The self-service model is when a customer purchases on their own. We typically see this model with B2C purchases in which a customer can find and buy a product via a website, like Amazon.

This works best for simple products with a low-cost point and high sales volume. It can be difficult to build, but when successful, it sees a short sales cycle, zero cost to hire salespeople, and is highly profitable.

While you won’t need a sales team, you will need a marketing team to drive traffic and conversions to your site. The core marketing team would likely include growth marketing, performance marketing, and content marketing experts, though there will likely be other team members as well.

The Inside Sales Business Model

The inside sales business model is when a prospect needs to be nurtured by a sales rep to convert into a deal. This type of model works best with a product of medium complexity and price.

The sales cycle ranges between a few weeks and a few months. Here, you’ll invest in a sales team — but inside sales reps are less expensive than field reps.

With a high volume of sales, this model can be profitable and is fairly easy to build and scale as you hire more team members. The sales team in this model is typically composed of a sales manager who supervises a handful of reps.

The Field Sales Business Model

The field sales business model is when you have a full sales organization that closes large enterprise deals. These are typically complex products with high price points, which also means there’s typically a low volume of deals with a long sales cycle.

The sales team in this model is often very costly as the field reps are experienced, high-salary employees. This model is easy to build but harder to scale because hiring and training a full sales organization takes time and money.

Members include a sales manager, field reps, sales engineers, a sales development representative (SDR) team, and sales operations.

The Channel Model

Lastly, in the channel model, an outside agency or partner sells your product for you. This is hard to build, as the people can be difficult to recruit and educate on the benefits of your product. They are also often less motivated to sell than your own sales team would be.

However, this is a cheaper model because you don’t need always to pay a sales team of your own. I find that it works best with a product that matches the partner’s interest. For example, if you sell phone cases, you might want to find partners selling related products, like Best Buy or Apple.

You can mix and match these strategies based on industry or customer size (i.e., number of licenses or seats). For startups, it’s healthy to scale over time rather than invest in an expensive sales team too early.

8. Build brand awareness and demand generation with inbound and/or outbound methods.

Now, you need to fill your pipeline by snagging the attention of your target audience. This occurs through demand generation, which can happen with both inbound and outbound strategies.

With inbound, prospects discover your brand through marketing efforts and reach out to you or show signs of interest organically. Some examples of organic inbound traffic channels could be social media, content, or paid ads leading to a landing page.

Outbound demand generation is when a salesperson contacts a lead through cold outreach tactics. They might do this by reaching out to a contact list, sending warm emails, phoning leads, or gathering leads at industry conferences.

Once interest has been generated through these methods, sales conversations begin, and the leads are led to more educational content and then into the sales funnel.

9. Create content to get inbound leads.

Inbound leads are generally easier to convert and cheaper to acquire than outbound leads. This is because inbound leads are already partially educated on the business problem you solve, aware of your product, and usually more interested in buying your product.

Content marketing is the key to generating that inbound interest, as content will drive traffic to your site.

Your content marketing team will drive this inbound traffic by finding and targeting keywords that your potential customers would search for and then creating and posting related content on your website.

At the core of content marketing is search engine optimization (SEO), which is the way a search engine ranks the content on the internet once a query is entered into the search bar. This will be a large source of your organic web traffic.

What goes into content marketing? It’s a cycle of keyword research, creation, and measurement.

1. Keyword research: Identify keywords related to your product, analyze the volume (how often that keyword is searched), the difficulty of ranking for that keyword (i.e., how competitive that keyword is), and see who is already ranking for those keywords.
2. Content research: Brainstorm content topics that include that keyword. See what articles already exist around these topics and begin to plan your content calendar.
3. Content creation: Put those ideas into motion and have a writer create articles on those topics.
4. Design: Add relevant images, infographics, videos, and other multimedia to your content so it’s more visual and engaging.
5. Promote: Spread your content and drive traffic to your website by sharing the links via social media or emails to your customer database.
6. Build links: Reach out to other publishers and ask them to link to your content to gain even more traffic with link-building tactics. This gives you site authority, which helps improve your SEO rankings.
7. Conversion rate: Track and measure the engagement and conversion rates of your content. Keep doing what works and drop what doesn’t. From there, begin the content creation cycle again.

Your content team should develop content that aligns with the various stages of the buyer’s journey (top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel).

Top-of-funnel content is lighter educational content, middle-of-funnel content is deeper, more applied learning, and bottom-of-funnel content is for those who are ready to buy and implement. To use SalesHero as an example, the content at each level of the funnel would look like this:

• Top-of-funnel content: "What is sales AI?"
• Middle-of-funnel content: "How sales AI can increase productivity"
• Bottom-of-funnel content: "Using sales AI to extract dark data"

To make this process easier (and more organized), I recommend creating a messaging strategy or content marketing plan based on your customer's journey and the knowledge they do (and don’t) have at each stage. 

Below, I’ll share an example of how you can organize your content, and you can easily fill in my chart when creating your own. 

Top-of-Funnel Content

Funnel Stage: Awareness

Flywheel Goal: Attract Prospects

What type of content will you create to catch the eye of potential customers in similar industries? Make a table like the one below.

Type of Content	Topic	Promo Strategy	Lead Generation
Blog post	What is sales AI?	Content will be shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and in weekly newsletter.	A CTA in the post will ask readers to sign up for our next webinar.

Middle-of-Funnel Content

Funnel Stage: Consideration

Flywheel Goals: Attract and Engage Leads

In this phase, your audience might know of your service or be researching products related to yours. What types of content do you create to move your service to the front of their minds?

Type of Content	Topic	Promo Strategy	Lead Generation
Webinar	How Sales AI Can Increase Productivity	Social and email promotion will link to the signup page.	A thank you email will include a link to request a demo.

Bottom-of-Funnel Content

Funnel Stage:strong> Decision

Flywheel Goals:strong> Engage and Nurture Leads / Gain and Delight Customers

Your audience is really interested in your service. How will you use content to sell them?

Type of Content	Topic	Promo Strategy	Lead Generation
Demo or tutorial	Use Our Sales AI Tool to Extract Dark Data	Demo signup links will be shared in webinar follow-up emails, newsletters, and on the website.	Those entering demos will make contact with a direct sales/support person.

1. Find ways to optimize your pipeline and increase conversion rates.

Growth requires more than simply picking a sales strategy and building a demand generation process. You must optimize.

Sales is a numbers game, and you can only be successful if you measure progress. The key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing a sales team are volume, conversion rate, and time.

You’ll also want to track how many opportunities come into the flywheel: your pipeline volume.

Then track how many leads turned into customers. Comparing the volume of the pipeline opportunities to the number of won deals will get you your overall conversion rate.

It’s found that it's even more important to optimize the conversion rate between stages. As opportunities move through the funnel, they’ll go through various qualification processes (i.e., basic qualifications, current solutions in use, technical evaluation, and closing), and you’ll want to track at which stage the opportunities fall out and why.

I recommend measuring this for your overall flywheel and per sales rep. This information tells you where each rep needs to improve and potentially receive more training. Work to personalize your sales coaching efforts to shorten the sales cycle of each rep. Compare time and conversion rate to see who's better and faster in particular stages.

Track how many opportunities each rep converts and at what stage in the process they drop out. The sooner an unqualified opportunity falls out of the flywheel, the better, because less time, energy, and resources are spent on that particular lead.

2. Analyze and shorten the sales cycle.

Finally, track how long your sales cycle is. This is the amount of time it takes for an opportunity to enter the sales funnel and change to a closed/won deal. The goal is to shorten the conversion between every stage. This can be done by identifying common objections (and iterating ways to remove them before they happen), doing ongoing lead nurturing, and brainstorming ways to find the best-fit customers.

3. Reduce customer acquisition costs.

As a business owner, you’ll also need to optimize your customer acquisition cost. This will be very expensive at first, but as time goes on, you’ll need to reduce this cost by optimizing your processes, or you’ll be losing more money than you make.

Customer acquisition is how much it costs to gain a new customer or deal per $1. The lower the customer acquisition cost, the lower the impact your marketing efforts have on your PNL, and the higher the profit you get per customer.

4. Strategize ways to tap into your existing customer base.

A common adage in the industry is that it costs seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to do business with an existing customer. If you're providing a great buying experience, existing customers already know, like, and trust you — all of which are reasons to stick around. 

The best opportunity for companies to earn more and gain revenue is through renewals, cross-selling, and upselling. The average cost for a company to renew a product is $0.13, while upsells cost a company $0.28.

Many people think of sales as a black box. But with analytics and new sales AI technologies cropping up, business leaders can optimize their processes to accelerate business.

5. Adjust and iterate as you go.

Building a successful company is not reserved for those entrepreneurs who’ve been blessed with special skills.

Chances are, you’ve already built your product, and building a company is a very similar process. You must be strategic and continue to improve throughout the process.

Take time and continue to iterate, and you too can build a company. Return to areas of your plan that aren’t working and tweak them. Make note of the things that are working, and brainstorm ways to expand upon them.

6. Retain and delight your customers.

In this phase, you will focus on maintaining your customer relationships and spreading good word-of-mouth. This is where a flywheel strategy can be much more helpful than the funnel, which ends at sales. For a detailed rundown of the delight phase and beyond, check out this ultimate guide.

Although different products might require different launch strategies, the below template and steps should help you create a solid starter plan which can be customized along the way.

Go-To-Market Plan Template

Download Now

Creating a go-to-market strategy from scratch can be daunting — especially if it’s your first time launching a brand-new product or service. That’s why HubSpot created a complete go-to-market kit to help you get started. You’ll find templates that help keep your team on schedule and promote alignment between all product stakeholders.

The kit includes:

• Product Launch Planning Template
• Product Update Email Templates
• Product Roadmap Template
• Product Lifecycle Mapping Template
• Product Classification Template
• SWOT Analysis Template
• Sales Plan Template

Still stumped? Below, I’ve included a few more examples of go-to-market strategies that can help you inspire your own.

1. Via

Via is a ridesharing platform that was founded in 2012 when Uber was still relatively unknown.

While Uber has bypassed Via in popularity and product usage, Via has effectively carved a niche in the transportation technology space.

Why I Think Via’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

The company’s GTM strategy emphasized ride-sharing — that is, riders literally share rides with other riders traveling in the same direction. The driver takes a predetermined route and drops riders off at convenient locations rather than picking up riders at private locations.

Via set out to solve a common pain point for commuters: overcrowded or unavailable public transit with inflexible routes.

Another pain point of the target audience was that Uber and Lyft rides were overpriced and couldn’t be used for daily commutes. Via looked at this problem and created a true ridesharing service that could fill the space Uber and Lyft didn’t fill.

Now, the company partners with private transit operators, schools, and public transit agencies to expand existing operations or provide more riding options for passengers. The result of Via’s go-to-market strategy is that it no longer sees Uber as a direct competitor.

2. Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Windows has long been the preeminent OS, and for good reason: most computer manufacturers offer Windows laptops and desktops.

So why would Microsoft launch its line of computers and tablets if its software is ubiquitous?

Why I Think Microsoft Surface’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

In its go-to-market strategy for its Surface products, Microsoft set out to solve a common problem for tablet users. Tablets were primarily mobile devices; while they were convenient to carry, they didn’t offer the full functionality of a laptop. And for many people, owning both a tablet and a laptop was not financially feasible.

When it released the third generation of the Surface tablet, Microsoft made its position clear. The device was a fully functioning computer in tablet form. You could have a light device without sacrificing function. Compared to the Apple iPad, its principal competitor, the Surface tablet offered more functionality at the same price.

Now, the Microsoft Surface line has expanded to include laptops and desktops. Microsoft realized that laptop buyers may not purchase a Windows laptop because there are so many manufacturers to choose from. Specifications and hardware components vary from machine to machine.

With its Surface laptops, Microsoft makes the choice easier for target demographics such as college students and everyday users. These devices compete with Apple’s macOS offerings and are designed to seamlessly integrate with all of the features of Windows OS.

3. Owala

At first glance, the Owala brand of water bottles doesn’t seem much different from competitors.

But in its go-to-market strategy, the brand used its motto, "Do more of what you love," to hint at its products’ ease of use. You can "do more of what you love" since you won’t even waste time opening the bottle. The lid itself is where you sip.

Why I Think Owala’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

With its product launch, Owala addressed common problems for water-drinkers: openings that are too wide, spills, and two-handed drinking.

Owala specifically targets those who are active. In its first series of Instagram posts, the brand posted a mosaic of a man on a motorcycle, and in most of its social posts, it includes people in workout clothes.

The company arguably entered an overcrowded space. Brands such as HydroFlask and Contigo dominate the industry. By addressing a specific target buyer and solving their problems, however, Owala successfully launched into that competitive market. The brand distributes its offerings through its website, BestBuy, and Amazon for optimum reach.

4. Bread Beauty Supply

Bread Beauty Supply, a Black- and woman-owned hair care line, set out to solve a common problem for its curly-haired audience: overcomplicated routines that waste time, energy, and products.

Why I Think Bread Beauty Supply’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

The brand launched in 2020 and partnered with Sephora as its principal distribution channel. In its go-to-market strategy, the brand identified a segment of buyers who would rather keep their routine simple and leave their curls in their natural state.

Compare this strategy with that of competitor brands such as Pattern Beauty and Ouidad, both of which offer a multitude of hair care products that can dizzy, confuse, and overwhelm buyers. When creating its go-to-market plan, Bread Beauty Supply recognized that some people with curly hair would rather spend less, not more, time on their hair.

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While the curly hair care industry verges on overcrowded, Bread Beauty Supply successfully launched by taking a unique stance in the industry.

5. The Sip

The Sip, a Black- and woman-owned champagne subscription service, makes drinking luxury wine more affordable.

Champagne clubs have always been around, offering monthly deliveries of delectable wines at a premium cost.

To the target audience, however, this model poses a few problems. The wine of choice for that month could fail to meet expectations, and that could result in a wasted bottle. And that is at full cost, too. One of The Sip’s competitors, Club Bubbly, charges $100 per month to deliver two bottles of champagne.

Why I Think The Sip’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

In its go-to-market strategy, The Sip emphasized its mini-bottle program: subscribers can try three mini-bottles of champagne at a fraction of the cost. If you happen to like one, you can buy the full bottle.

By solving common problems faced by subscribers of wine boxes, The Sip not only attracted the subscribers of its competition, but opened up this type of subscription to buyers who could not previously afford it.

6. Vuclip

Vuclip, a mobile video-on-demand service, tapped into emerging markets with limited access to high-quality video streaming services. Consumers in these areas — including India, Thailand, and Egypt — dealt with slow video buffering speeds due to a lack of advanced mobile networks.

Image Source

Why I Think Vuclip’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

The company's go-to-market strategy rested on appealing to those "must-have" markets, where it could come in with a competitive advantage by presenting an accessible platform that addressed those regional consumers' issues with buffering.

The result? Vuclip built a subscriber base of more than 41 million consumers across over 3,000 cities, with plans to establish a presence in even more underserved markets around the world.

7. Upscope

Upscope, an interactive screen sharing platform, came on the scene as a resource to suit a more technically inclined crowd than its competitors — namely onboarding, support, and IT specialists.

Why I Think Upscope’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

The primary pain point the company looked to address was the trouble consumers ran into when trying to share their screens — particularly when it came to walking prospects, customers, or employees through technical subject matter.

The company addressed that issue by creating a solution that lends itself to instant and interactive screen sharing — sparing users the trouble of fumbling through the screen share process and letting all parties engage with the content they're seeing.

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Upscope supported its go-to-market efforts with a solid content marketing strategy — maintaining an active web presence and blog. It also incorporated integrations with other tools into its solution, giving itself more visibility and clout.

8. Baggu

Baggu is a reusable bag brand. While it seems rather simple on the surface, its go-to-market strategy has made a buzz in the world of sustainability.

Why I Think Baggu’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

This brand was created to eliminate unnecessary waste through responsibly managing deadstock products and fabric. This appeals to eco-conscious consumers who are trying to minimize their use of plastic bags.

Accompanying its relatable mission, Baggu has held many collaborations that take its products from functional, to stylish statement pieces.

Baggu recently partnered with Joonbug, a Jamaican artist known for impressive skate designs, and made colorful patterns that showcase his cultural roots and style.

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The products are visually interesting, eye-catching, and were marketed through Instagram — a social media platform designed for visual ads and promotion, and a perfect vehicle for a mutually beneficial collaboration for JoonBug, who is also a prominent influencer in the art sphere.

9. Thinx

Thinx is a feminine hygiene company that makes underwear for people with periods. This re-imagined approach to menstrual products has been gaining more traction in the industry, and its go-to-market strategy has definitely aided in its success.

Why I Think Thinx’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

A common pain point for people with periods is spending a lot of money on one-time hygienic products, and it’s not good for the environment, either. So offering washable underwear with a 2 year guarantee is a much better investment than the alternative.

Thinx is also known for partnering with organizations using cause marketing, like with Black Mamas Matter Alliance. BMMA focuses on the issue of maternal health (specifically for black women who are three times more likely to die from childbirth than other races) that Thinx’s audience would also care about or be aware of.

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This strategy appeals to consumers who can feel good knowing they're buying something that gives back a portion of profit to something beyond themselves, especially if it raises awareness of inequalities in maternal health.

10. Metaverse

One of the most outlandish ideas of recent go-to-market strategies is none other than the launch of the Metaverse. It’s an immersive, digital economy made by Facebook, and a look into the future for the platform.

Why I Think the Metaverse’s Go-to-Market Strategy Works:

This brand understands that people are leading digital lives more than ever, which includes more online shopping — but without the experience of shopping in person. So while it is more convenient to add items to your cart through clicks, customers give up the feel of shopping in store.

Metaverse solves for this, by incorporating the brick and mortar experience in a VR-centric, digital world.

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In addition to solving the online shopping dilemma, the PR campaign and influencer marketing was such a huge rollout on one of the most major social media platforms, it caused quite a buzz through the internet and news outlets.

Create a Strong GTM Strategy for Your New Venture

Building a go-to-market strategy is critical before bringing your new product to market. With the steps I shared in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to launching a product or service that solves for your future customers and becomes profitable in the marketplace.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Most sales teams hire extroverted talkers. But once they onboarded, reps live and die by their writing, and many find themselves unprepared to compete in the inbox.

The average rep spends 20.4% of their time emailing compared to 15.7% talking on the phone or in-person, an InsideSales.com study found. The importance of email is also front-loaded: If an email is bad, reps never get to a phone call. If the email is really bad, prospects name and shame them on LinkedIn.

Want to convert more accounts? Want to win more deals? Want prospects to stop posting about how your team still sends pictures of hippos? Teach your reps to write.

Here are seven ways to improve your sales reps’ outreach:

1. Make Your Own Templates

Using templates to guide reps is wise. Borrowing them is not. Any template that’s broad enough to apply to all the readers of a widely-read sales blog hasn’t been tested with your audience and isn’t tailored to your buyer and industry. It’s also the same exact format every other salesperson uses. Make your own from scratch based on what actually works.

“Not every sales rep needs to be a skilled writer to succeed. But for the sake of your team’s performance and your brand, someone needs to make sure the standardized portions of your outbound sales communications are authentic, accurate, and match the challenges of your target or market persona,” said Alex Boyd, founder of the demand generation agency RevenueZen.

Once you have templates, never settle. Use a sales automation tool to A/B test messages across teams, share knowledge, and revise.

Takeaway: Appoint or hire a template writer and let them test.

2. Stop Saying “I”

Chatbots are proof that even the simplest scripted conversations go off the rails quickly, and templates only get you so far. It’s up to your reps to make clever choices when personalizing their messages and responses. For example, not writing things that make them seem narcissistic.

Sales emails often overuse the pronoun “I” and begin by telling prospects what “I would love” to do. But prospects couldn’t possibly care less.

“Excitement about your own product doesn’t compensate for being selfish,” said Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, about a noxious email he received. Instead, “the first line of a prospecting email should always be about the prospect, never about the salesperson.”

Teach your reps to review their emails to replace every “I” with “you” and then rewrite until it makes sense. Some I’s are unavoidable, but the exercise teaches reps to write about their prospect.

Takeaway: Have reps replace every “I” with “you” and rewrite the message until it makes sense.

3. Search Before You Send

If reps ever have difficulty coming up with something to say, their email is too cold. They don’t know enough to even begin relating to their prospect.

Steve Bookbinder, CEO of DM Training, recommends always researching prospects before writing, especially on social media. “Their feeds will give you major tips about what’s going on in their life, the way they communicate with others, and maybe even give you an understanding of their career triumphs and pressure points.” It also prepares you to mirror their tone.

If the prospect has a scathing wit and likes memes from the darkly-humored TV series Rick and Morty, some sarcasm may be okay in the exchange. If they seem buttoned-up and address colleagues by their full name, it’s probably best to use formal language. Read them, mimic them, and write to them.

Takeaway: Encourage reps to study prospects’ social media to mimic their tone and style.

4. Be Honest in Your Subject Line

If reps promise something in their subject line, their message must deliver. If they don’t, they’ve only set prospects up to feel abused, indignant, and eager to do the opposite of whatever is asked. If you can write a clever subject that relates, great. But it’s better to just be straightforward and literal than misleading and burn a bridge.

Plenty has been written elsewhere on how to write outbound subject lines, but here are a few tips that have always worked for me:

• Say unusual things: Don’t send what everyone else is sending. Instead, interrupt the pattern and write as you would to a friend.
• Front-load keywords: Put the most important words first.
• Don’t capitalize the first word: Executives often do this, and it can make you seem like someone the prospect should listen to.
• Omit needless words: Never use three words where one will do, and always use a shorter word if it doesn’t alter the meaning.
• Use evocative verbs: Replace ‘surprise’ with ‘shock,’ ‘increase’ with ‘boost,’ and so on.

Takeaway: Don’t send subject lines that are sensational and misleading.

5. Write Less

You have just a few seconds to catch prospects with your subject line. If they open, you have another few seconds. That’s it. Don’t waste a single word—like most reps do.

Most reps take a shotgun approach and cram as much information into their email as possible. They believe that at least one of their many bullet points will stick. But this makes for a terrible user experience. Prospects will open what looks like an instruction manual, read nothing, and delete. Far better to write less and be read.

“Keep things short and sweet … by keeping your email focused on one core idea or benefit,” wrote Heather R Morgan, founder of SalesFolk, in an article about starting conversations. Shortening messages also makes them more relevant: If reps can only say one thing, they’re going to invest more effort into selecting the most critical point.

Takeaway: Have reps shorten their messages with a limit, say, 150 words. Stick to it.

6. Replace Clichés and Buzzwords with Precise Language

Clichés are phrases that are so overused they’ve lost all meaning, like telling a prospect you’ll drive their business forward. Unless you’re Uber, that’s just confusing. Buzzwords are similar: they’re so fashionable that everyone uses them everywhere—as happened with “AI”—and they’ve stopped meaning what they used to. Together, clichés and buzzwords make emails indecipherable.

For example:

I’d love to tell you about our next-generation AI data processing solution that helps business owners such as yourself push the envelope, increase engagement, and disrupt the market.

Teach your reps to do the hard thing: Learn how the prospect’s business actually works and actually explain how they’ll change it. For example, replace:

• ‘Solution’ with software, app, or service
• ‘Bandwidth’ with capacity or time
• ‘Core competency’ with advantage
• ‘Business results’ with 14 percent more inbound leads, like X customer
• ‘Streamline’ with cut your support agents’ workflow in half
• ‘Move the needle’ with lift your average revenue per user
• ‘Business value’ with literally anything else

And so on. Here’s a list of replacements.

And then, there’s jargon: Phrases that aren’t easily understood by people outside a particular industry such as ‘intelligent chat’ or ‘PaaS.’ Prospects probably won’t understand your jargon, especially if your marketing team invented the word and it has a symbol. When in doubt, skip the jargon and explain the product in plain English.

Precision and brevity don’t always go hand-in-hand. Sometimes being specific makes your email longer, but it’s better to be precise and understood than vague and ignored.

Takeaway: Keep an ongoing list of clichés, buzzwords, and jargon on your wall. Remind reps to be specific and write phrases prospects actually understand.

7. Edit Before Sending 

Works of persuasive art are only produced through thousands of hours of sweat. Encourage your reps to read, copy, and borrow everything good they see in print. Have them subscribe to other companies’ newsletters, screenshot good ads, and preview each other’s emails.

Once your reps have written something, make them sit on the email for a day, and then edit. It’s only through conscious practice that they’ll improve at writing and cease to bore their readers with monotonous offers to solutionize their business, and instead, awe them with a single sentence that earns the reply, “Wow, good timing. Let’s talk.”

The post Want More Deals? Teach Your Sales Reps to Write appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

As most of you (hopefully know), my latest book, The Convenience Revolution, is all about making the customer experience as frictionless as possible. In the book, there are six Convenience Principles with plenty of examples, and many of our followers have read my articles and watched my videos on these powerful concepts. The other day I was interviewed and asked, “How does one get started?”

My flippant answer could have been, “Read the book and find out,” but instead I gave an answer that was simple and applicable to any type and any size business. Now, this is a very basic explanation of the process. It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s where you want to start.

1. Identify touchpoints: First, start with mapping out every touchpoint your customer has with any aspect of your company. It can be an interaction on your website, a form they fill out, the checkout process, how they are greeted when they walk in your store or building, how the phone is answered, how the invoice is received, and much, much more. Every touchpoint must be identified.
2. Details count: Be as detailed as possible with every touchpoint. For example, if you sell from your website, how many steps does it take for a customer to check out? How many lines of information do they fill out? Get as detailed as possible.
3. Analyze each touchpoint: This is the fun part of the process. At each touchpoint, look for a way to reduce friction. Where can you eliminate a step? Where can you eliminate or reduce a customer’s effort? Is there any redundancy that can be eliminated? Can you deliver rather than make the customer come to you?
4. Execute: Now that you’ve identified (in great detail) and analyzed the touchpoints, you’re not finished until you take action.

Even the smallest reduction of friction counts. And, sometimes it makes you money. For example, the Wall Street Journal reduced friction by shortening their online checkout form. Some customers were not completing the checkout process. The WSJ experimented by shortening the process. Every unnecessary field removed from the checkout flow raised the conversion rate by as much as 1-3%.

Amazon all but eliminated the typical checkout process with their “Buy Now with 1-Click®” option. And, then they did one better with the Amazon Dash buttons. You push a button that looks like a doorbell and your product just shows up. I could imagine a group of smart Amazon employees sitting around the table answering the question, “I wonder if there is a way for our customers to order products without having to turn on their computer or open an app on their smartphone?” The result was Dash buttons.

The goal of reducing friction is to make the experience convenient and save the customer time. So, have a great product, offer great customer service and be more convenient. That’s a combination that is hard to beat.

The competencies that were once necessary to succeed in sales have not been eliminated or replaced. That isn’t how evolution tends to work, it tends to transcend and include what came before, making modifications and adaptations, not whole scale changes.

Prospecting has not been replaced by inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has been added to the traditional forms of creating new opportunities. Like all methods and mediums, different strategies produce different results based on dozens of variables.

The idea of closing, asking the client for their business and securing a contract, is still very much necessary, despite any protestations to the contrary. If anything, the evolution of commercial relationships likely includes more commitments than would have been necessary in the past.

If anything has truly changed, it’s the very idea of discovery. Now, in addition to the new outcomes of helping your dream client discover something about themselves (the reason they should change, the implications of not changing, how they should change, the trade-offs they may need to make), you also have to discover who is necessary to a deal and how to build consensus. Do you still need to know what keeps your dream client up at night? I doubt it could hurt you.

Differentiation is more pronounced than ever. You, in fact, are a large part of the differentiation because you are a large part of the value proposition. Your company, your product, and your solution might also be different, but the added value that creates a preference is mostly on your shoulders. Would it help to have differentiation across the four levels of value? Stacking it up isn’t going to harm you, as long as you get things in the right order.

Most salespeople aren’t taught to negotiate, and when they are, you’d think they’re being taught to execute Shuttle Diplomacy ala Henry Kissinger. Even though the largest part of a negotiation in which a salesperson is responsible is about the value each party captures, competition and commoditization has massively raised the stakes.

You can add to these fundamentals things like business acumen, a relatively new modification to the skill necessary in B2B sales. The idea that one knows their business, their client’s business, and the intersection of the two well enough to consult isn’t new, but it is certainly more pronounced—and it is recognized as missing when that is true.

Change management, building consensus, and leading a group of people through the process of change, starting with the decision to do so, is another higher level skill that builds on what came before.

It is likely true that you need to be generally smarter to sell than in times past as it pertains to the complex, B2B sales. Would the client suffer from having a salesperson who was exceptionally good with people and capable of helping them persuade their teammates to change? Would fast rapport and relationships make selling more difficult for either the buyer or the seller? Or might it provide the benefit of being able to work together on difficult problems.

As you read and think about how sales has changed over time, wherever you see an “or,” change it to an “and.” Not much is being taken away, but much is being added.

The post The Evolution of B2B Sales Transcends and Includes appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Few sales techniques are as universal and effective as the upsell. Long a staple of the salesperson’s toolkit, upselling is the process of increasing the value of a conversion through the sale of related products and premium options. Upsells exist because customers will often opt for the cheapest version of whatever they’re buying unless they see a direct benefit to paying more. It is a salesperson’s job to make the customer aware of options beyond what they may have initially intended to purchase, as this increases the value of the sale. Often, all that is required for a successful upsell is to present customers with the option. Since e-commerce sites use an interface rather than a salesperson, upselling is generally done in the form of product recommendations. In today’s blog, we’ll be discussing how to optimize product recommendations to better ensure an effective upsell.

Relevance

Perhaps the most important factor when offering a product recommendation is relevance to the product being purchased or considered. Some sites recommend products by simply promoting their most popular items. Some do the opposite, and promote low-selling items in an effort to clear their stock of unwanted products. While both of these tactics theoretically make sense, they’re often largely ineffective.

For instance, consider a superstore that sells a huge variety of products; many physical stores upsell by grouping items together in aisles. If this store were to follow the “popular items” example, one of their aisles could very easily be “breakfast cereal and auto parts” because both happen to be popular items. Grouping these would almost certainly seem off-putting in a brick and mortar store; it’s off-putting online as well. It would make far more sense to group together breakfast cereal and milk, as those products are generally consumed together.

When considering what items to group together in product recommendations, make a point to group items together that have direct or semi-direct ties to one another. If the item is electronic, it makes sense to recommend backup chargers, accessories, or batteries. If it’s furniture, consider recommending accent pieces that are frequently purchased as a complement. For more expensive items, a common and effective upsell is to offer an extended warranty. Many of these products can be bought elsewhere. However, by offering them while a user is already making a purchase, you can quickly increase your order value while saving the customer time.

Understanding the Customer

Whether a customer has bought from you in the past or not, the data you collect from them can very likely shed some light on their purchasing habits. For instance, if the customer has been consistently looking at up-to-date tech equipment, like a newly released phone or computer, they’re likely looking for quality over value. Thus, it would likely make more sense to recommend other newer or higher end products rather than low-cost alternatives.

The opposite can often be true as well. If a customer is looking at mostly lower end or older models, trying to upsell them on a brand new phone may be far less fruitful than upselling them on a warranty or accessories for the older model.

You can also use this data to display more enticing results to “bargain hunters” who spend the majority of their time in the sale section. For instance, if customer X has been browsing shoes marked at a 50% discount, showing them other discounted items will likely be more effective than trying to upsell them on a full price pair.

Consider a Recommendation Engine

Product recommendation engines are a fairly recent development in ecommerce, but have been catching on quickly. In essence, they utilize an algorithm which examines the user’s purchases, browsing, and click history. It then uses the findings to predict which products would be of the most interest to the customer, often leading to successful upsells.

Many programs also allow stores to set individualized parameters, such as prioritizing transitioning season merchandise, restricting recommendations to only full-price products, and even preventing low-stock items from being shown. Research has shown that sites using such technology consistently have higher order values and greater conversion rates. While this technology does require an initial investment, it often pays for itself quickly.

Upsold

Upselling via product recommendations is a fantastic way to increase your average order value. However, like any tool, it must be used intelligently. By leveraging a combination of common sense, clever pairings, and technology, customer satisfaction can rise along with your AOV.

The evolution of marketing automation has had a profound influence on marketers and buyers alike. From the days of spray-and-pray email marketing and complicated database marketing, the technology and expertise of marketers have truly elevated marketing automation as a practice. Today, we use technology to analyze buyers’ digital body language to personalize, engage, and incite action on dozens of channels.

But we still have a long way to go. Today’s MarTech platforms advance at an uncatchable rate. It is incumbent upon marketers to strive to make the customer experience better by being present, relevant, and helpful. This imperative to improve will be the underlying theme in how marketing automation evolves. The industry will need to shift to anticipating what buyers need and how to serve them.

In this blog, we’ll explore the top five trends that will define the future of marketing automation.

The Need for Experimentation and Testing

In traditional marketing, the costs for trial-and-error experiments were significant. Today, the capabilities of specialized testing tools allow marketers to make micro-investments in new channels and tactics that enable rapid optimization and course-correction.

The concept of experimentation will have a profound influence on the marketing automation industry. Marketers crave the ability to test and learn to get ahead of the competition and to connect with busy and distracted buyers. Those looking to achieve sustainable results will need to develop a fearless culture of innovation, with an iterative approach to strategy and tactics.

In a 2018 interview with VentureBeat, Steve Lucas put forward: “[The future] belongs to those who embrace change, act boldly on their convictions, and understand that the willingness to take risks is what drives innovation.” When it comes to marketing automation, these questions must be considered:

• Are we using marketing automation to deliver better experiences for our customers and prospects?
• Have we invested enough in experimentation, to try new things and new approaches?
• Are we using technology to automate processes that can free up time for our marketers to be able to think more strategically and holistically?

The Shift Toward True Omni-Channel

Many marketers today excel in mainstay digital channels like email and social media. However, the marketers that will be successful in the future will look at all channels holistically to build relationships with customers. What used to be known as integrated marketing, will be omni-channel marketing for the years to come. Technology will advance to incorporate and invigorate how marketers leverage these channels.

“Marketing automation is vital to omni-channel marketing,” says Helen Abramova, Marketing Automation Leader at Verizon Business. “Generally speaking, marketing automation is all about connecting the dots, creating a complete picture, and planning and executing upon your strategy. Of course, there are some gaps, as not all channels are easily tracked digitally, but that makes it even more important to collect and process all possible touchpoints.”

The marketers and MarTech platforms of tomorrow will embrace and integrate all channels, while still allowing for personalization and relevance every step of the way.

The Resurgence of “Permission Marketing”

Though almost 20 years since its publication, Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing rings as true today as ever. With new data privacy laws and regulations, consumers and governments are requiring companies to take consumers’ personal information seriously and to treat it with respect.

New anti-spam and data acquisition laws necessitate earning the trust of your audience. To do that, marketers must provide value, and demonstrate authenticity and transparency.

“Being ‘anticipated, personal and relevant’ is not optional—it is a must.” Helen continues, “It’s easier to load a list and send them an email—but it’s so much more important to find the right people, create the right message, and deliver it at the right time.”

Business buyers today are informed, curious, and aspirational. The marketing automation of the future will evolve to support that: to let buyers know what is interesting and helpful, and what can be done to achieve greater heights for their business.

The Never-Ending Evolution of Social Media

The ever-changing landscape of social media further defines the future of marketing automation. Social media is rapidly becoming a staple in the lives of digital consumers. It falls onto marketing leaders to orchestrate the right mix of channels to best engage them. This includes listening to what customers are saying, guiding them to the resources and answers they need, and crafting the right conversations based on the given platform.

An online study from IDC showed 55% of senior decision makers tap into their social networks before making a purchase, a number that will continually rise in the future. Marketing automation can be a part of that framework by automating processes and workflows caused by specific social behaviors or cumulative activity.

The marketing leaders of the future will need to define the right marketing mix of digital, social, and other methods to move their business forward.

The Need for New Ways to Deliver Content

As the go-to channels become more saturated, it becomes more critical for marketers to communicate to buyers through new channels. This includes changing and matching the communication style, such as shorter content when consumers are busy, and more in-depth content when you have their undivided attention.

The growing trend because of advanced technology, a more reliable internet connection, and better devices is the proliferation of video. As buyers want faster and more visual explanations to become informed, marketers need to cater to this need by communicating in this new medium.

“Video content isn’t new, but the way in which marketers use video to connect to their audience is shifting,” says a marketing leader from an enterprise video platform. “Information that is typically consumed via written guides (tutorials, articles, updates) now can be delivered in a quick, digestible video that users can consume on their mobile devices.”

Along with an evolution of video marketing, the ideas of experimentation and new marketing mindsets will continually drive growth. Marketing automation teams can expect this to impact their future positively. These improvements will undoubtedly create a better overall experience for both buyers and businesses alike.

The post 5 Trends that Will Define the Future of Marketing Automation appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

For many years, we have espoused the idea of knowing Who should be your customer, and, sometimes more importantly, Who should NOT be your customer. Some recent research suggests that this is powerfully true in terms of customer satisfaction as well.

The July-August 2018 issue of the Harvard Business Review reports on a study done of thousands of banking customers and hundreds of banks that showed a remarkable correlation between reported customer satisfaction and who the bank “typically” serves. The study found that the variation in reported satisfaction had little to do with any other variable. In other words, the more the bank served those customers it was designed to serve, the better the level of satisfaction. The more it strayed into other bank services the less satisfied were its customers.

This again reminds me of the importance of focus. The narrower your focus the better your results.

The research demonstrates that to improve customer satisfaction, it’s not just about training, it’s about focus on attracting the right customers who value what you are designed to offer. If there aren’t enough of those customers, that may be a strategy issue for you.

While this research is about banks, there is no reason to believe it is unique to banks. Decide Who you want to serve and develop offerings and processes to support those offerings for those customers.  Be transparent about who you are “for.” Know who you are going out for business to serve, and focus on them.

Mitch

One of the biggest mistakes sales managers and sales people make is spending too much time focusing on the health of the pipeline.

Managers are constantly holding pipeline reviews. They are constantly asking, “What’s changed since we reviewed the pipeline yesterday?” (You can see how tedious these constant reviews are, particularly if you have a long sales cycle (anything over 3 months).) Inevitably, there are problems with the pipeline. There’s the universal managerial answer to these issues, “You need to get more in the pipeline!”

“Well yeah, but…….”

Turns out the advice to get more into the pipeline isn’t really helpful. Why more? How much? What else could I do?

The pipeline is a terrific analytic tool and can help the manager and sales person identify potential problems. For example, not enough in the pipeline—we need to focus on adding more opportunities by prospecting. Alternatively, we have enough in the pipeline, but deals are stalled or we aren’t winning enough. Or maybe the quality of the opportunities isn’t great.

The pipeline is a terrific tool for the sales person and manager to identify problem areas. But you don’t fix those problems in the pipeline. We fix those problems by focusing on other areas.

Not enough in the pipeline? We need to do more prospecting! Our territory and account planning processes are basically structured approaches to prospecting. They help us identify where we find new opportunities. Coaching in prospecting helps us understand how to to this most effectively.

Deals stalled, win rates too low? We need to build stronger deal/opportunity strategies! Leveraging our sales process and any sales methodology helps us look at each deal maximizing our ability to win these in the shortest time possible, at the greatest value possible.

Quality of the deals in the pipeline bad? We need to focus on our ICP and more effective qualifying. If the deals are falling out after they’ve been qualified, we need to build stronger deal strategies.

We solve problems in the pipeline by building/executing stronger deal strategies, leveraging our sales process more effectively, doing better qualifying, and executing higher impact sales calls. We fill the pipeline by building and executing strong territory and account plans.

Ironically, too many managers are obsessed with the pipeline, spending virtually no time coaching deals, account, territory, prospecting, or call plans. They think they can fix the pipeline by obsessing on it, not realizing the pipeline only tells you where the problems are likely to be.

If managers spent less time on the pipeline and more time coaching sales people in the problem areas identified by the pipeline, they would have to spend less time on the pipeline. (Hmmm, that circular logic actually makes sense.)

In Hollywood’s most famous movie about sales, Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, hammers home the “ABCs” to his salespeople. In the middle of his tirade, he tells a burned out, tired-looking group of men, “Always Be Closing!”

The speech Blake gives is the epitome of the empathy-lacking, money-hungry stereotype of a salesperson. He doesn’t care about prospects or their needs. Closing the deal is all Blake is focused on. He’ll say whatever it takes to makes a sale.

Blake didn’t understand what we do today about the sales process. It’s not about what we want. As sales professionals, our purpose is to give people what they want. The thing that benefits them.

Always Be Helping vs. Always Be Closing

In this season of gratitude, we propose focusing on a different mantra – Always Be Helping (ABH).

What’s the difference between ABH and ABC?

ABC means that you’re trying to close the deal from day one. Every interaction is a transaction. Regardless of whether your solution matches the customer’s needs, you were just trying to get the deal done. ABC may have worked in 1985, but it isn’t sustainable in today’s environment.

ABH is about building trust first. It’s the opposite mindset of ABC. In this scenario, you become a trusted resource. This gives you a chance to learn about a prospect’s challenges and goals. If your solution genuinely fits their needs, you can offer it to them in the framework of their priorities. This is far more effective than the old approach of simply trying to close based on your sales pitch.

Of course, your job is still to sell. However, if you don’t understand the customer’s business, how can you provide them with value? That’s the secret sauce!

Getting Started with ABH

If you have some downtime this week, think about what your prospects and customers might be thankful for this year. Are they thankful for their relationship with you? What could you do in the future to make them more thankful for you?

A prospect’s needs are as diverse as the individual person. Deliver a better selling experience by really listening when they’re describing a challenge. Invest the time to understand it and provide a solution that fixes it. Be patient and polite, not overbearing.

Or like we like to say, be sincere and authentic in your interactions.

11 Ways to ABH

This is a great time of year to be a little extra (in a good way). Use some of that secret sales success sauce to make your prospects and customers smile.

To inspire you, we created a list of 11 ways to Always Be Helping:

1. Invest time in learning.

First of all, care enough to read posts like this, to work on your craft, and commit yourself doing everything you can to help your customers.

2. Take good notes.

Take note of your prospects’ interests. Use that information as an excuse to share a related story, connect around current events, or just to show somewhere down the road that you were paying attention. Using technology like Meeting Intelligence makes it easier to reflect back on conversations.

3. Send a handwritten note.

When was the last time you sent a handwritten note? Received one? It may seem “old school,” but how much it would mean to you to receive a handwritten letter in the mail? Thoughtful gestures like these make people feel good and leave lasting impressions.

4. Follow-up on questions quickly.

If a prospect or customer asks a question, always follow up with an answer. If it’s going to take more time, let them know so they don’t think you forgot about them.

5. Use your manners.

Please remember to say please and thank you. Hold the door for others. Be nice to your server. How you treat others is important. People notice. Hopefully, your parents drilled this into you early on.

6. Surprise and delight when you have the opportunity.

Periodically choose a few contacts to surprise or delight. It might be as simple as calling to let them know you remembered their birthday. Maybe you gather your team to record and send a video congratulating a customer on a promotion. As we mentioned above, remembering something unique about the person makes a good impression.

7. Be on time.

Arrive early to meetings, – whether it’s via phone, webcam, or in-person. It shows respect for the person and their time.  If you absolutely must reschedule, alert them in advance and make the new time/location convenient for them.

8. Underpromise and overdeliver.

We’re not saying to sandbag. However, it’s easy to be too enthusiastic (especially near a close) and start promising too much, too quickly. It’s better to be realistic and work to exceed the goal than to fall short and feel like you’re breaking a promise.

9. Go the extra mile.

If you can help a customer with something that isn’t revenue generating for you, do it. Maybe it’s as simple as giving advice or providing an intro. Whatever it is, that extra mile shows customers you genuinely want to help them win.

10. Special delivery.

It doesn’t matter if you’re 12 or 35, being the beneficiary of swag elicits a smile. Thank a prospect for a call with branded socks. Show a sales team you appreciate their feedback by having pizzas delivered. It doesn’t have to be something big; just enough to show you appreciate them.

Pro tip: Sendoso makes it simple to do this as a step from within the SalesLoft platform. Click here to see how Uberflip did it.

11. Just say ‘thanks.’

The most ironic suggestion on this list – take the time to tell the people you work with how thankful you are for them. Not to be confused with using your manners (above), saying thanks is about gratitude. Giving thanks has a funny way of delivering 10x returns.

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In closing, here’s an example. A wise sales executive recently shared a story about how he used to print out (yeah, like on paper) a list of all his contacts. Line-by-line, he would make notes of actions he could take to add value to each relationship. Ways he could always be helping.

No matter how junior or senior, regardless of their likeliness to buy what he was selling, he did this daily throughout his career. He connected people he thought would hit it off (one pair ultimately married!). He helped several people become close friends by connecting them around a common interest. But most of the time, it was small things like, “Hey, I saw this article and remembered you were reading up on the topic” or, “I had to share this book I just read, there’s a whole section on that thing we were talking about.”

It’s easier than ever to do share connections or information today. Yet how many of us are diligent in thinking about how we can add value to the people on our list? Isn’t that the essence of authentic selling?

Ultimately, the Always Be Helping approach requires establishing a relationship of trust and confidence. The “always be closing” pressure-sale is dead. For that, we can all be thankful.

Who are you thankful for this year? Better yet, what is something you can do to always be helping in this season?

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Another way to show you care is to take time to personalize communications. Download our new eBook for ideas to get started.

The post Always Be Helping: The Sales Success Secret Sauce appeared first on SalesLoft.

I love email marketing. It’s a great way to connect with my audience on a deeper level and it’s also one of the best ways to increase sales. When you think about it, people join your email list because they want to hear more from you and engage with your business.

This provides the perfect opportunity to build more rapport, provide additional value, and start marketing and promoting your products and services.

The only thing worse than being a business owner without an email list is being one who doesn’t have a winning email marketing strategy.

If you’re not gaining as much traction with your emails, here are 3 things your email marketing strategy could be missing. ‘

Personalized Content

Are you sending the same thing to everyone on your list? The days of batching mass email announcements are over. It’s important to start segmenting your email list.

If you have different opt-in forms for each of your offers, you should be tagging subscribers to make sure you know what they’re interested in. Then, cater to those interests with your content.

If subscribers are constantly sent emails covering topics that don’t interest them, they will get bored and either unsubscribe or stop opening your emails.

Testing

Have you ever tested your current email strategy? If not, how do you know if it’s working well or not? You should be testing everything from headline subject lines to emojis, specific phrases, headers, and images within your emails.

You should do this to find out the type of content your audience best resonates with so you can increase your open rates. It doesn’t take much to test out different strategies for your email content. Just make small changes and tweaks each time you send an email.

Then, at the end of the month, check your stats to see which strategy worked best. You should also try resending emails to subscribers who haven’t opened them if your email service offers this.

A fellow friend of mine and business owner encouraged me to do this and it was a major game changer.

Clear Call to Action

Each email you send should have a clear call to action. People want to be told what they should do and will surprisingly do nothing if you don’t clearly spell things out for them.

Don’t get so excited about your content that you don’t include links or direct subscribers to take a particular action. Use a clear call to action and try to use scarcity as well which can help motivate people to act on a limited time offer.

Summary

Well-maintained email lists can be a huge asset for small business owners. When you think about it, each email subscriber is worth a certain amount of revenue for your business. The people who sign up for your list are voluntarily opting in to receive more information and showing interest in being a customer. You don’t want to mess up the opportunity to better serve and market them. Make sure these 3 crucial elements are included in your email strategy.

Editor’s Note: This article was first posted on LinkedIn here. 

Bellies full of beignets, my parents and I were exiting San Francisco’s Just for You Cafe when when a middle-aged man called my name.

“Andy, it’s Christoph!” he shouted. “Do you have time for a quick question about messaging?”

(Later, my mom asked, “People stalk you for messaging advice?”)

It was fun having my parents think I was some kind of messaging celebrity, but I recognized Christoph as the CEO of an early-stage tech company who had recently attended one of my workshops. He was waiting for a table, but didn’t wait to tell me what was going on.

“Listen,” he said, “I restructured our sales pitch using your Greatest Sales Deck framework and the results have been awesome. I’ve used it with a few prospects, and they engage at a deeper level, they get what we’re about faster, and they’re all moving to next steps.”

“That’s great,” I said. “What’s the question?”

“Well, it’s my VP of Sales. He won’t even look at the new deck. Says he already has a deck, and that buyers don’t have time for a story, they just want to know how we solve their problem.” Christoph was digging his heels into the pavement, one after the other, as a metaphor for his VP’s resistance. “How do I bring him on board?”

With so many B2B teams gearing up for next year’s sales kickoff events, I’m guessing Christoph isn’t the only one worried about his sales team embracing a new version of the pitch. So I’ll share an expanded version of my response to him here:

(These 5 points are particularly relevant to the Greatest Sales Deck framework, but should apply to any deck you’re “selling” to sales).

#1. Make sure your new deck facilitates discovery

Christoph’s VP’s complaint echoes the most common pushback I hear from salespeople about flashy new sales decks in general — they encourage salespeople to blabber on instead of listening to prospects. In other words, they inhibit what salespeople call discovery.

One of my biggest “aha” moments was when several sales teams I worked with began using their “change in the world” slides to get prospects talking and opening up. For example, Switzerland-based SpotMe, which delivers custom apps for events and training, begins pitches by sharing a change that we heard about from SpotMe’s customers — namely that they now see events not as self-contained shindigs, but as episodes in some greater journey:

When unveiling the new deck, SpotMe CEO Pierre Metrailler trained his sales team not just to present these slides, but to stop and ask, “How is this shift playing out for you and your team?” According to Pierre, the information his team gets from these exchanges is gold. As he told me:

Buyers open up and share what’s really going on, so much more than when we used to just ask direct questions about their challenges. Once, with a group of IT buyers, we decided not to show these “change” slides, thinking they would be irrelevant for a technical person, but the buyers were practically silent. Then we went back and showed those slides, and it was like magic — the IT buyers let down their guard and began sharing all kinds of valuable information.

#2. Nurture advocates for the new deck inside your sales team—before rolling it out

If your marketing team, or even your CEO, builds the new pitch without your sales team’s close cooperation, don’t be surprised when your salespeople shun it like a body rejecting foreign tissue. Besides, with salespeople being so close to buyers, why wouldn’t you involve them?

At Boston-based Zaius, which has raised over $50 million for its B2C marketing platform, CEO Mark Gally invited one of his sales leaders, Michael Angoff, to be part of the group that would build the new deck. When Mark asked Michael to rate the group’s first draft on a scale of 1 to 5, Michael gave it a 2. “That’s pretty good for him,” Mark said, but I knew we’d have to do better if we wanted Michael to evangelize the deck to the rest of his team.

One of Michael’s biggest objections was — surprise — he didn’t see how the new deck would facilitate discovery. So just like at SpotMe, we saw how the “change in the world” slide could be used for that. In Zaius’s case, it looked like this:

We also asked Michael and one of his colleagues to try out the deck on live calls for a couple of weeks, and we made modifications as they reported back on what worked and what didn’t. By the time Zaius rolled out the new deck to its entire sales team, Michael’s rating was up to 4.5, and he was actively evangelizing it. As Michael told me recently, it’s been especially valuable for getting new reps up to speed:

The last two reps that came on board used the deck…both ramped quicker and crushed their goals in their first quota-carrying month.

#3. Have customers speak at the unveiling

A critical part of strategic messaging, and certainly any sales deck, is what I call the “Promised Land message” — a simple articulation of the future you commit to making real for buyers. At SkySlope, a SaaS platform for real estate brokers and agents headquartered in Sacramento, when CEO Tyler Smith first shared the Promised Land message below, some folks on his leadership team felt it wasn’t emotional enough:

Of course, Tyler didn’t come up with that message out of nowhere; he had heard it — over and over — from the brokers and agents who were SkySlope’s customers.

Before unveiling the deck to the rest of his team, Tyler invited a respected broker (who’s also a SkySlope board member) to speak about how being a broker today means your relationships with home buyers and sellers are under constant attack by new players like Zillow, Rocket Homes, and Opendoor. After that, everyone understood why the Promised Land above was an emotional vision for SkySlope’s customers.

#4. Tell the new deck’s story everywhere

I’m on the record saying this:

What make Zuora’s sales deck truly great is not simply that it’s structured around a compelling “change in the world”…

…but the fact that everyone from CEO Tien Tzuo on down tells the same story of that change. Most recently, Tzuo told it in a book:

When you unveil a new deck, make sure you’re supporting it with other new assets that tell the same story — new website, new content, whatever — so that sales teams know you’re committed to providing the air cover they’ll need to sell on the ground. Like Zuora, treat the sales deck (in particular, the change in the world you’ve highlighted) not as something separate from other communications, but as a strategic blueprint for all of them.

#5. Ask what your sales team wants

I recently posted this question on Modern Sales Pros, a popular online forum for salespeople:

What’s the #1 thing that leadership (sales leadership, marketing, CEO, etc.) can do to more successfully gain sales team buy-in on a new deck?

Many of the responses reflected a deep cynicism of sales decks, born of years of having them thrown over the fence from marketing. As Damian Wisniewski, Head of Sales at Got It, told me:

In my experience, the default scenario is (1) marketing unveils a 50-slide deck with great fanfare; (2) the worst reps struggle through it, while the best ones take the six useful slides; (3) everyone moves on with their lives.

Still, don’t let that healthy skepticism stop you from asking what your team wants out of a deck unveiling. From Damian and other Modern Sales Pro members, I heard the following:

• • • Train us on how to use the new deck, including video of an ideal call (I would add: Even if reps loathe decks and never show one to buyers, train them on how memorizing the deck’s story flow can help them with discovery, guide conversations to their advantage, etc.)
    • Make sure the story your deck tells is based on what’s really happening in the customer’s world, not just pulled out of marketing’s ass. As one Modern Sales Pro commented, make sure it’s “real.” (Having customers speak to it, as I mentioned above, can help.)
    • Keep the deck as short as possible

If you try any of these, let me know how it goes — either in a comment below, or the next time we run into each other in a restaurant.

About Andy Raskin:

I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

The post Selling Your New Sales Deck to Sales appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Building inbound marketing on your otherwise static website isn’t hard to do. You start off with creating a content offer that lives behind a form and go from there, adding blogging and email marketing to the mix, and maybe even working in a bit of social media.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be posting a process to follow to handle that first step. This post is about creating your first content offer. Then, we’ll get into creating forms, calls-to-action, and how to promote, including examples of what to do and what NOT to do.

The benefit of having a content offer is two-fold: your visitors get a question answered, or learn more about your industry, and you get their email address for use in future marketing. You can target the content towards where your visitor is in the buying stage, like writing a case study for decision-stage leads or create a simple how-to for the awareness stage. Either way, an email address is the currency of the marketing world.

The types of offers you can create, like the two I just mentioned, are endless. A content offer doesn’t just need to be text on a page; it can be in audio or video form. You can host a live webinar or unlock a longer version of a popular post of yours. So long as it’s content that you want to gate, then it’s perfect for this process. For this post, I’ll be focusing on the most basic form: a downloadable PDF.

Creating your first downloadable offer

As with anything, the first step is brainstorming. In this case, it’s brainstorming a list of ideas for the content offer. It can be a frequently asked question, more information about a new product line, a broad view of your services, or a how-to that your visitors will love. For future content offers, you’ll want to conduct keyword research and look at your analytics to see what would make a hit topic, but for newbies to inbound your instinct is probably right.

Once you have a list of ideas, do some research and narrow it down to one topic. Talk to customers if you can about the topic, as well as sales people and especially support at your own company. If you’re a solo business or just a few folks, talk to others in your industry— y’know, that dreaded thing called networking. Your goal should be to become the expert on the topic and know everything there is to know about it.

In the world we live in now, learning anything about everything is just a few clicks away. All it takes is the curiosity to learn. If your topic is “How to Hire a Repairman,” for example, you should not only know the right things to look for when finding a repairman, you should also know what to look out for.

Writing and researching can happen simultaneously and the direction of what you’re writing can change as well. The biggest hurdle is really writing the first draft. I would aim for several blog posts worth of content, so 1500 – 2000 words.

The best way to tackle this is to plan an outline for what you want to say. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers. Think about what they need to know and in what order they should learn it. You can’t tell someone to go search online for a repairman if they don’t know what kind of repairman they need. The first draft is going to be a jumping off point— you’ll probably end up changing it quite a bit the first time you create an offer.

With a very rough draft in hand, ask someone else to take a look at it. If you have a favorite customer you talk to regularly, ask them if they’d like to help out. The goal is to have someone else, whether they’re inside your company or not, take a look at what you wrote and help knock out the kinks. It’ll probably take a few rounds of this to call it done, but when it is done, you’re going to have an extremely valuable resource for your website that will also serve as a great lead-generating tool.

If you have a graphic designer on call, they can take care of getting the offer into a nice presentation, but honestly formatting it nicely in Word with a first page as a cover works as well. What you want to end up with is a PDF version uploaded to your website somewhere so you can link to it in future steps.

Credit: Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

You are trying to get the attention of a lead. You keep trying the same method of contact over, and over. Assuming persistence will pay off. However, it the end it’s more like persistence will piss off the lead.

The ability to utilize multiple touchpoints in both your sales and marketing will make all the difference in response rates. It will make you top of mind in the right way, not an annoying one. By hitting different channels, attention will be spread out.

Here are the 5 Ways to Contact Your Leads

Email

Email has the use of a general campaign or a personalized message. You must choose based on your product/service, and target customer. For general brand awareness, and a lower price point product/service campaigns are a good fit. If the product, or service, is more complicated with a higher price point, then be personal.

Make sure that the subject line of emails stands out with emojis and non-typical messages. Everyone gets emails so separate from the pack!

Phone

Many thought leaders are acting as the phone call is dying. I say the complete opposite. The fact less are making calls means you should be making more. Also, the depth of connections you make during a call goes far beyond a message via social, or email. You can feel the emotion of the party and nurture that relationship.

There are also modernized tactics that a far more scalable using the phone to connect with your market.

First is ringless voicemails. Have you ever received a call from an unknown number? What do you usually do when it happens? Most likely you let it ring and go to voicemail. Then at some point, you play it back to see who was trying to contact you. This is where the ringless voicemail changes the game! Send out a well-crafted voicemail message to your market all at once. This would be ideal for the beginning of build rapport; After that, I would suggest making calls one on one when they contact you back.

Second is text messaging. The data is insane on this channel. More than 98% percent of texts sent are opened! This crushes the average of email open rates. The trick is to do it in a nonintrusive way, it’s a more personal channel so tread lightly. Send text to those you have connected with on other channels first. Let them aware that you will do so. You want to be a helper, not a spammer.

Social Media

By social, I’m not only talking about making posts. There is much more to the successful social media equation.

Liking others content, leaving thoughtful comments, and sharing is significant. People appreciate those that go above, and beyond to engage with their content as well as get them more attention.

Direct messaging. The biggest mistake I see all the time in this channel is jumping straight to a pitch when contacting someone. This is an egocentric move that won’t get you a response. The only exception is if it’s a business opportunity that the professional is showing openness.

Instead, PROVIDE VALUE. Think about it in real life. How awesome is it when you receive a gift from a stranger? It leaves a great impression and increases the odds of a relationship developing.

Online Ads

The most apparent touchpoint is paid ad campaigns. Whether they are social media ads, messenger ads, Google AdWords, or banner ads. They are all relevant.

Many see that there can is not a high enough ROI because engagement might be low. However, you must consider the number of people see the ad throughout web browsing. If they see you everywhere, it’s increasing familiarity which can lead to engagement in the future.

Direct Mail

Direct mail is the curveball tactic. It’s going against the evolution of technology. With so many businesses focusing on digital, traditional advertising is gaining an edge again. Think about how many more emails you receive than direct mail.

Crazy huh?

Implement a direct mail campaign that will catch your market off guard and make you become the more sincere business.

Conclusion

Never be a one trick pony when implementing a sales and marketing strategy. Embrace multiple channels to gain attention. Your brand will be touched more than a writers keyboard!

If you found this blog helpful please share it with your peers!

Originally published here.

Coaching your sales team takes up your time and money – but, investing in a sales coaching program can work wonders for your business and especially help you improve your sales. And sure, it can also seem like a very complicated task – creating a sales coaching program and implementing it successfully – but its results will more than make up for it.

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to start a sales coaching program for your business.

What does a sales coaching program actually mean and why do you need it?

Sales coaching is not about telling your sales team what they need to do; rather, it’s a way to help them reach their full potential and enable them to make better-informed decisions.

It involves:

• Analysing the results of your team to understand what works and what doesn’t, as well as what weaknesses and strengths you have as a team
• Looking at each individual sales rep in your team and uncovering their strengths and weaknesses
• Helping nurture sales reps’ strengths and try to find solutions to overcome their weaknesses
• Consistently providing your sales team with the right information, knowledge and support they need in order to perform their jobs
• Consistently analysing the performance of your team at an individual level to keep finding solutions and optimising your sales strategy

The big reason why (good) sales coaching is so important is that it actually helps you improve your sales while bad coaching or no coaching can have very negative effects on your results; for example, here are some interesting stats about sales coaching:

• Companies that develop dynamic sales coaching programs (incorporating video coaching technology) achieve up to 28% higher win rates
• Companies that provide quality coaching can reach 7% greater annual revenue growth
• On the other hand, if your salespeople feel like their manager is a poor coach, they’re more likely to leave their job (as much as 60% of sales reps!)
• Sales reps who receive 30 minutes or less coaching per week have a win rate of 43%, while those who receive at least 2 hours’ worth of coaching every week have a win rate of 56%

So while it’s true that sales coaching can be a considerable investment for your business, it’s also well worth the results in the long run. And the best way to go is with a clear strategy/program – this way, you can ensure you are always consistent and always growing and boosting your sales.

Start with data to discover strengths and weaknesses

Data should be a huge part of your sales coaching program because this is how you find the strengths and weaknesses of your sales program, as well as of individual sales reps. This knowledge will then help you build the perfect coaching strategy, as you’ll know what you need to focus on.

To gather and analyse this data, use your CRM tool’s analytics or a tool like Tiles that pulls data from your Salesforce CRM:

Here are some of the things you should look for when analysing your sales data:

• Keep track of your conversion metrics
• Look at historical data to see how your results have changed over time
• Compare each sales reps’ performance to their overall performance over time, as well as with the average sales team performance to see whether
• Set (realistic) sales performance goals and compare the performance of your sales team versus your goals

Use data – historical and new – to understand why your sales performance isn’t where you want it to be, both overall and at an individual level; this will then help you understand what areas need improving so that you can coach each sales rep as needed.

Use different sales coaching styles

As a sales coach, you need to be versatile and cover different areas in order to truly help your team reach their full potential.

For example:

• Focus on specific skills: uncover each team members’ best skills and help them further grow these skills. Plus, check each of their skills (emailing and messaging, sales calls, etc.) to help them develop each skill in turn
• Focus on the sales tactics: are your sales reps using the right tactics for outreach, cold calling, qualifying leads, etc.? Help them grow by explaining how each tactic works best
• Motivate and encourage your team: even the best sales reps sometimes need motivation and encouragement in order to boost their performance – and some sales reps will need it even more often. Sometimes, it’s not about tactics and strategies, but rather about emotion and motivation – make sure your sales team is motivated and wants to achieve their goals; for example, you can use gamification to motivate your team as they win points (and even prizes eventually) for their wins

Create content to help you coach your team

As I mentioned earlier when I shared some statistics about sales coaching, a dynamic sales coaching program with video coaching technology can work wonders on your results: up to 28% higher conversion rates.

One way to do this is with micro-learning; for example, create short videos for coaching purposes, create simulated sales scenarios or video role plays, create polls to find out what issues your team is facing, and so on.

That said, you’ll also need a platform where you can easily post all of this content when needed and where your salespeople can easily access the content, wherever they may be. The more convenient it is for everyone involved, the better – both the coach/manager and the sales reps will save time, while the sales reps are also improving their knowledge and skills.

You can use a tool like MindTickle to publish and manage your content, while also keeping track of your sales reps and gathering important data:

Plus, you can also use it to create onboarding programs for new sales reps, as well as to analyse the performance and skills of your sales team in order to further improve their performance overall and at an individual level.

Conclusion

As you can see from the statistics shared in this article, sales coaching can make a huge difference to your results and revenue. But even more so when you develop an actual sales coaching program – one that is ongoing so that you can constantly find new ways to help improve each of your sales team members’ performance.

That means monitoring and analysing your sales data consistently and then using that knowledge to help each sales rep develop their skill set, find the motivation they need to perform well, and generally helping them in any way they need to be the best possible sales reps they can be.

I’ve been using the sales funnel for 28 years, my whole career. This year, I retired the funnel — threw it a party, gave it a gold watch, and congratulated it on its move to a condo in Florida.

It was the right thing to do.

For one thing, in an era when trust in traditional sources has eroded — in government, media, and in companies and the marketing they employ — word-of-mouth from trusted peers wields greater clout than ever.

For another, the funnel fails to capture momentum. A boss of mine used to say, “The sun rises and sets on the quarter.” By the end of a quarter, she had wrung every ounce of energy out of marketing, and we started the next quarter from a standstill with no momentum and no leverage.

That’s no longer true. After years of inbound marketing, your company has assets: evergreen content; backlinks to your site; social media followings; and, of course, customers who advocate for your brand. For many of us, our marketing departments could take a vacation for a month, and new visitors and leads would continue to come in, and existing customers would continue to refer new business. That’s momentum.

The Flywheel

These days, instead of talking about the funnel, we talk about the flywheel. For us, flywheel is a powerful metaphor. The flywheel was used by James Watt over 200 years ago in his steam engine, the invention that powered the Industrial Revolution. It is highly efficient at capturing, storing, and releasing energy.

Using a flywheel to describe our business allows me to focus on how we capture, store and release our own energy, as measured in  traffic and leads, free sign-ups, new customers, and the enthusiasm of existing customers. It’s got a sense of leverage and momentum. The metaphor also accounts for loss of energy, where lost users and customers work against our momentum and slow our growth.

I’ve become obsessed with two dynamics that make our flywheel spin fast: force and friction.

Force

The more force you apply to a flywheel, the more places on it where you add force, the faster it spins.

When I started my career, the most profitable application of force was in sales. Back in the 1990s, sales reps had a lot of information, while customers had relatively little. Sales reps leveraged that information gap to create a lot of trust. It made a ton of sense to hire a lot of reps back then.

Around 2005, marketing became a bigger force driving growth. In many industries, the sales rep and the customer now had more or less the same information at the same time. Competitive advantage went to those marketers who created useful content to pull prospects in.

Today, it’s shifting again. Now, delighted customers are the biggest new driver of growth.

I’m a sales and marketing guy, so it makes sense that HubSpot’s early priorities reflected my instincts, with all our energy and force applied to sales and marketing, trying to close as many customers as possible. These days, we’ve shifted our center of gravity away from that and applied more force towards delighting our existing customers, knowing that’s the best way to find new customers.

I made a couple mistakes along the way. First, I just said, “hey, we’re going to be a ‘delight’ company!” The intention was right, but there was no operational impact.

Second, I assigned this to our customer service department. I said, ‘you’ve to fix this problem, we’ve got to delight our customers.” Neither of those things worked.

What worked was getting the whole organization behind it — especially Sales and Marketing.

Take our commission plan, for example. In 2015, a sales rep earned commission on everything they closed. Now, we’ve made two important tweaks to it: a carrot and a stick. The stick was very unpopular. If a sales rep closed an account, and that account cancelled within eight months, the company would “claw back” that commission. Painful, but effective.

The carrot was easier, and also effective. The sales reps who do the best job at setting expectations, who have high retention rates and the happiest customers, receive a kicker, they got paid at a higher rate.

That carrot and stick have changed how we think about the “force” part of our flywheel. Our sales reps are focused not only on closing customers, but on delighting customers.

We’ve done something similar with the quality of our leads. Prospects that are more likely to be successful customers get a higher lead score, rather than leads that are simply likely to close. We measure the success of our marketing based upon the volume of those most-likely-to-succeed leads.

Friction

The second thing James Watt would recommend is to eliminate friction in your flywheel.

I’m a true believer in low friction. I woke up this morning on my Purple mattress. I put on my Warby-Parker eyeglasses, picked up my phone and played Spotify. I made my way to my bathroom and shaved with my Dollar Shave Club razor. I reached into my closet and put on my new outfit from Trunk Club, and then I got in a Lyft and came to work.

These six companies have woven their way into my daily life. They are all fewer than 10 years old; they all sell relatively undifferentiated commodities; and they are all growing like a weed?  How do they do it?  What’s the secret handshake?

It’s friction — they’ve taken all the friction out of their flywheel. When I bought that Purple mattress, there was almost zero friction in the process. I did it in a few minutes online; they shipped it to my home; and if I decided to return it, the process promised to be simple and hassle-free.

Two years ago, I bought my previous mattress from a traditional seller — a so-called full service store. But, full service means handoffs between humans, it means haggling. Buyers have become much less patient, and less forgiving of friction.

All of these examples are B2C. If your business is B2C, the train is about to leave the station. You’ve got to get 90% of the friction out of your model.  If you’re B2B, the train is parked in the station, but it’s leaving soon.

One of my favorite business school professors used to say, “If you want to build a great company, your product has got to be ten times better than the competition.” Today, that advice feels out of date. If you want to build a great company in 2018, your customer experience has to be ten times lighter than the competition. It used to be what you sell that really matters, now it’s how you sell that really matters.

To eradicate friction, we have to turn some assumptions on their heads:

Customer interaction. In a “better product” market, 80% of the touches with your customers are handled by humans, your employees. Human touches entail friction. In a “lighter experience” market, 80% of your customer touches need to be self-service, and only 20% full service with humans.

IT investment. In a “better product” model, 80% of your IT resources is invested in making your front line employees more efficient. In a “lighter experience” model, 80% of your IT resources will be invested in making your customers more efficient.

Employee skills. In the “better product” era, when you grew, you added humans, and you placed them in specialized roles. In addition to a sales rep, you created a business development role for pre-sales, you hired a variety of hunters and farmers, you assigned an account rep to manage ongoing business. You hired and trained “I-shaped” employees who could dive deep into a specific domain. Specialists are great at handling specific customer issues. But, when you have multiple specialist roles, it means your customer is getting handed off from one specialist to another. And, if your customer is getting handed off, they are experiencing friction.

In the “better experience” era, you minimize handoffs. You hire and train “T-shaped” employees who can dive very deep in one discipline, but also have other expertise, and able to handle more complex customer interactions.

Unlike some changes in business philosophy, the flywheel is not an all-or-nothing proposition, Any tactical change to reduce friction, or organizational alignment of forces that optimize for customer delight, will have a measurable impact on customer experience. Early successes will breed increasing support for a full flywheel approach.

I’m glad we’ve ditched the funnel. The time has come for the flywheel.

What are you doing to attract customers? How are you building credibility and trust in your brand and business? The content you create, whether through your blogs, social media, newsletters, and more, is how you attract customers. It is the key to maximizing your inbound strategy and turning strangers into customers. But to do this, you must produce amazing content. Let’s discuss several ways to turn boring and bland content into copy that produces results.

Establish Your Goal of the Content

Why are you writing the content in the first place? What do you hope results from the blog post, social media post, email newsletter, or whatever else it may be? If you want to produce incredible content that is going to attract and convert, you need to determine your “why” before you even begin the creation process. Then, turn that “why” into your call-to-action. This doesn’t have to be a call for more sales. It could be something as simple as following you on Facebook, sharing your blog post, or entering a giveaway. However, as you write your call-to-action, make sure it is clear. Let them know that you want them to click and subscribe to your newsletter or download your free eBook. Don’t leave your readers guessing what they should do or what you want them to do. The more straightforward that you are, the more results you will receive.

Focus on Value

Inbound marketing is essentially grabbing the attention of potential customers at the beginning of the decision-making process. To do this, you need to provide value to them. You need to answer all of their questions and their greatest concerns and appear as an authority on the subject matter. Our society wants instant gratification. According to one survey, only 26% of American adults say they would wait more than 30 minutes for takeout food and 41% of the respondents claim they are less patient than they were five years ago. This means your content must be focused and cannot be full of fluff. It needs to be informative, valuable, and interesting. This means doing things like touching on trending topics, reporting on current events in your industry, answering questions that they’re searching for, giving them something to laugh about, or even being a little controversial – anything that will make them actually want to read your content and share it with others.

Be Diverse

When trying to maximize your inbound strategy, you can’t simply focus on one type of content like blogging. You need various content types to work together. Think video, infographics, newsletters, podcasts, and social media. For example, you need website content and blogging to help boost your SEO — which helps you become found on the search engines. However, you also need strong social channels to build a following and promote your blogging and other copywriting efforts. Providing relevant and high-quality content in all of your channels is where you will see the most results, not just when focusing on one or the other.

Publish Consistently

When was the last time you published on your company blog? Did you know that websites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages? This not only boosts your search engine results but it provides more information for your readers to access and makes you appear as the expert and the go-to source on the topic. Don’t focus on quantity when it comes to your blogging. Instead, focus on producing high-quality, relevant content for every single blog post. This is the type of content that is going to make a difference — not the content that was rushed so you could produce multiple posts in a single day. And, if you struggle to produce consistent content, outsource the work. Find a way to make it possible.

Creating amazing content is what will help you stand out from the competition, especially when you do it strategically. It will help you generate leads, attract potential customers, and convert. Nobody is going to spend time reading — or even searching — for content that is useless and dull. Create amazing content and watch your inbound strategy succeed.

Cesium atoms and laser traps offer a more robust type of quantum computer

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

It’s hard to believe it’s been about three years ago already that we started Sales Pipeline Radio.  It’s live every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific. It’s just 30 minutes long, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales & marketing professionals. We feature the brightest and best minds in B2B.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities heading into and throughout the year. You can listen to full recordings of past shows at SalesPipelineRadio.com and subscribe on iTunes.

I am beyond excited and humbled to share this episode called “Learning from the King: Sales Lessons & Musings from Jeffrey Gitomer. He is the King of Sales. If you’re in sales, he is a household name. He literally wrote The Little Red Book of Selling and has published a number of different books. He is the author of the recently published … in fact, published last week … came out, Truthful Living: The First Writings of Napoleon Hill.

Listen in or read the full transcript below:

I recognized that you cannot be a great sales person until you become a great person. Those are the benchmarks. You can’t become a great dad, until you become a great person … or a great mom, until you become a great person … or a great secretary, until you become a great person. Whatever it is that you’re looking to do, you have to be a person before you become an it. And attitude and beliefs are some of the fundamentals in that process. Very few sales courses teach you about self-confidence. They’re trying to teach you some technique that pisses other people off. Find the pain. What’s your pain? The answer is, “None of your business.” So, stop tryin’ to extract things outta me. Why don’t you try and find the pleasure?

Thank you to our sponsor, MailTag.io.

MailTag.io is a Chrome browser extension for your Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails.

It’s a super helpful tool if you’re in sales because you can receive real-time alerts, right on your desktop, as soon as your prospects open your emails or click links within your emails.

For more info, be sure to check out MailTag.io!

Matt:  Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Thanks so much for joining us, again. If you’re joining us live on the Funnel Media Radio Network, thanks so much for everyone joining us during the workday. We are here every week, Thursday, at 11:30 Pacific, 2:30 Eastern. If you’re joining us on the podcast, thanks so much for joining us. I think we’re up over 40,000 subscribers now on the podcast. Very excited to have all of you joining us and very humbled by all of you that are joining us on a regular basis. Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio past, present, and future is always available at salespipelineradio.com.

Each week we are featuring some of the best and brightest minds in sales and marketing. Today is absolutely no different. I am beyond excited and humbled to have joining us today Jeffrey Gitomer. He is the King of Sales. If you’re in sales, he is a household name. He literally wrote The Little Red Book of Selling and has published a number of different books. He is the author of the recently published, in fact, published last week came out, Truthful Living: The First Writings of Napoleon Hill. Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining us today.

Jeffrey:  It’s a doggone pleasure. If you want some humor, you could say, “We’ve got the best minds in sales ever. We couldn’t find any of ’em today, so we have Jeffrey Gitomer on the show.”

Matt:  Self-deprecating, as always.

Jeffrey:  Yeah. I love self-deprecating. I must also say, now that I know you’re from Seattle, should we ever get together, we would go to Anthony’s Pier 66 down in the harbor and we could fight over the check and you could win.

Matt:  I’d be happy to the next time you’re here, we’ll definitely check that out. What’s amazing is, you go down by the water front and there are a ton of seafood restaurants. Most of them are tourist seafood restaurants that any local would never bother to go into because it’s fish for twice the price and it was caught like six weeks ago. But Anthony’s is one of those real treats where it really is very good food. Very fresh. Very good. Not right on the waterfront. It’s definitely a gem.

Jeffrey:  Yeah. I’m downstairs and I order the biggest Dungeness crab.

Matt:  How big is that, usually?

Jeffrey:  Couple pounds.

Matt:  Okay. That’s a pretty good size.

Jeffrey:  Yeah. It is a good size. Every once and while they have a huge one.

Matt:  My other tip for you and for anyone coming to Seattle, you want to go when you want to watch them throw the fish. You go to Pike’s Market and that little spot where they throw the fish. It actually is very fun and that’s all fresh fish. That stuff was all alive the day before kind of thing.

Jeffrey:  However, as you’re looking at the fish group, go to the right, down the market, and the first fish place you come to on the left has better, cheaper fish.

Matt:  I was just going to say, you turn 45 degrees to your right and there are two or three fish places there that aren’t nearly as busy, but that’s where the locals go. It’s the same fish. Half the price. You’ve just got to know where you’re going.

Speaking of where we’re going…

Jeffrey:  I want to begin with the best upsell lesson I ever got and it was at that Pike’s Market. I’m walking’ through the market and it was the summertime and I said, “I’m going to get some Rainier cherries and eat while we’re walking’ around.” So, I go to this lady’s … all she had is fruit. I said, “Give me like a half a pound of Rainier cherries.” She puts them into a bag and weighs them, but the bag was kind of oversized. She shows them to me and says, “Are you sure that’s enough?” And I said, “All right. Give me a pound.” And she does the same damn thing. She looks at it and then she looks at me and shows me the bag and she goes, “Are you sure that’s enough?” I said, “All right. Give me two pounds.” She gets me from a half a pound to two pounds. I’m walking’ down the aisle and I thought, “I wonder if she does that to everybody?” So, I run back to the booth and I go, “Tell me about the deal here that you just did on me. Do you do that to everybody?” She goes, “Oh, yeah.” Everybody who comes to that place gets, “Are you sure that’s enough?” How simple could that upsell be? Are you sure that’s enough? Five words. And with that, she got a $4 sale to a $16 sale.

Matt:  I hope they understand the difference between doing that and then, if you go to a bar and they say, “Can I make it a double for $1 more?” I think there’s a psychological difference between the two.

Jeffrey:  Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. Because this woman is actively involved. She’s showing you what you bought. It is a side show to the way she did it. I was so impressed, I wrote about it. I use that as a lesson in upselling that most sales people don’t upsell enough. They have no concept of asking for more. My father taught me the philosophy in 1974 of upselling. He said, “Son, when their wallets open, empty it.” I thought, “Oh, cool, Pop. Okay. I’ll do that.”

Matt:  There’s a psychological difference between saying, “Would you like more?” and “Are you sure that’s enough?”

Jeffrey:  Oh, without a doubt.

Matt:  They’re very different.

Jeffrey:  She’s challenging me to think of the answer myself. When you go to a 7-11, the guy says, “Is there anything else?” Like, “No, there’s nothing else.” I want a house and a car. But, if he said, “Did you get a popsicle? Did you get a candy bar? Did you get a bottle of water?” At least a suggestion would make me think about is there something else.

Matt:  Is part of that based on the fact that when you’re ordering the cherries, you don’t actually know how much is enough? You don’t actually know how hungry am I. How much is a half a pound.

Jeffrey:  I’m just walking’ around the market. A half a pound should do it. But she put it in an oversized bag. That’s the key. It looked there was nothing frickin’ in there. So, the challenge that you have is, as a sales person, is your language conducive to buying? Not to selling. Is your language conducive to buying? When she said, “Are you sure that’s enough?” That made me get the answer because she could’ve said, “This doesn’t look like enough. You need more.” No, that’s enough. I got what I need.

Matt:  You know, it’s funny. I actually wrote about that this morning on LinkedIn. We get a lot of companies as we’re recording this. It’s the beginning of November and companies are, believe it or not, starting’ to think about New Year and sales kick off-

Jeffrey:  Oh, yeah.

Matt:  One of my pet peeves of sales kick offs is the content usually focuses on the product you want to sell and the sales process you want to follow. Very little time is devoted to the customer. Like, how they buy. How they think. What their psychology is. I mean, don’t ask them what keeps them up at night. Tell them what should be keeping them up at night and see where that goes.

Jeffrey:  Or at least show them what the opportunity is, just in case they are. And what keeps me up at night is none of your business.

Matt:  Right.

Jeffrey:  I don’t like fish questions. I don’t like Miss America questions. I was looking at your website yesterday and there’s a couple things I don’t quite understand. I was wondering if you could help me. Sure I can help you. I’m an expert at my website. That’s where I need to go other than what keeps you up at night. It’s a dumb question.

Matt:  We are blessed today to have with us the King of Sales, Jeffrey Gitomer. Who, if you’ve been in sales, hell, if you’ve been in marketing, you know this guy. You’ve read his books. It’s sitting on your shelf somewhere. Jeffrey, I do want to make sure we spend time talking about the new book as well, Truthful Living: The First Writings of Napoleon Hill, just published.

We were talking before we started recording about Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich, which I read a long time ago. I should probably go back and read it again. There are certain fundamental books that aren’t really about sales and about marketing, but just help you be a better person. Help you have a better outlook on life. For me, Think and Grow Rich was one of those. Talk a little bit about, it sounds like that book was impactful for you in your life and career, as well.

Jeffrey:  It was. In 1972, when I read Think and Grow Rich, I was with a bunch of other sales guys and we did a four hour morning training every morning for a year. In that morning training, each person did a book report on one of the chapters from Think and Grow Rich. There’s only 15 chapters in the book, so we were going’ through the book every three weeks. That year allowed me to do it 10 times how many times I actually read the book. That gave me my positive attitude.

Well, fast forward several decades and I became friendly with the guy that runs the Napoleon Hill Institute and I said, “Hey, let me give something back to you guys. I’ll do your weekly email newsletter on one condition.” The guy goes, “What’s that?” I said, “That you never pay me a nickel.” And he goes, “Okay!” How do you say no to that?

So, I’ve been doing that for 15 years. A couple years ago, they found the original writings of Napoleon Hill, 20 years before Think and Grow Rich. It was hidden in a course called Truthful Advertising, where Napoleon Hill was teaching kids how to sell ads. After each one of the sales lessons, he wrote an After the Hill lesson with Mr. Hill and he wrote it on positive attitude and personal development. That was the foundation for writing Think and Grow Rich.

So, I edited out all the sales stuff and I kept in all the personal development stuff and that’s what created Truthful Living. And, it’s amazing. It’s totally amazing. Chapter one, just as an example, he starts out and says, “Success is up to you.” Oh, yeah, you’re right. And chapter two is Finish What You Start. And chapter three is How to Think. And chapter four is Imagination. I mean, these are fundamental pieces, but there’s a secret inside of them. I’m going to share with you what the secret is.

He takes four or five different words and puts them together. The secret is, making certain that you use them all in conjunction with one another, not just themselves. For example, he says, “Imagination, desire, enthusiasm, self-confidence, and concentration are the five most important words in the English language.” Now, think about that. He’s not saying, “Imagination, by itself, because if you have imagination and you have no desire, or you have no self-confidence, you’re going to keep it to yourself. Then, the glue in the five words, is concentration. Focus. This was written in 1917. There were no paved roads. There was no anything. A phone was like a rare commodity and you had to go through an operator to make a phone call. There was no television. There was hardly a radio. There was no distraction. Yet, Hill understood that concentration was the most important element in keeping your single purpose together.

Today, your phone dings more than it rings. You get notifications that your old high school boyfriend got fat. Or, you get notifications that you got a text or an email. It disrupts you. It takes you off your course. This is about how to find your focus. How to have your chief goal. How to maintain self-confidence, desire, enthusiasm, and imagination. There are 23 other lessons in this book that will do exactly the same thing. It’s an unbelievable book.

Matt:  We do a lot of work with inside sales teams, helping them improve efficiency and effectiveness. The underpinning of a lot of it is process and discipline. So, be able to stay focused. Someone asked me the other day, “How do you build a process that’s going to really sort of drive predictability and ensure that’s happening across the sales team?” And my answer was, “I can’t. Unless I actually have robots doing this work, the people doing the work have to dedicate themselves to that purposeful work. They have to dedicate themselves to the concentration and focus to get this work done.” I would imagine there’s a lot more people that believe in this, that listen to this, and would nod and say, “Yeah. That all makes sense.” But, will go back to the dings and the pings of their phone and ping pong across fire drills all day.

Jeffrey:  Exactly. If your attitude sucks, you can’t do a job right. And, you’re not going to even learn anything because you’re going to close your mind to it. Hill is just saying, “Hey, dude. Open up your mind. Recognize that it’s up to you. Recognize that stuff’s going to happen to you that’s not good, but those are blessings in disguise. And, if you just finish what you start, you’re going to win.” Most people don’t finish what they start. Most people quit way before it’s time to quit because they either needed the money or they got fired from their job or quit their job or whatever it was that they did, they stopped doing what was leading them to success, before they got there. Unbelievable to me.

Matt:  It seems to be, before you published this book, I mean, I looked at some of the stuff you published in the past, including your Little Gold Book of Yes Attitude. Clearly, this approach has been with you for a long time.

Jeffrey:  Oh, yeah. I recognized that you cannot be a great sales person until you become a great person. Those are the benchmarks. You can’t become a great dad, until you become a great person, or a great mom, until you become a great person, or a great secretary, until you become a great person. Whatever it is that you’re looking to do, you have to be a person before you become an it. And attitude and beliefs are some of the fundamentals in that process. Very few sales courses teach you about self-confidence. They’re trying to teach you some technique that pisses other people off. Find the pain. What’s your pain? The answer is, “None of your business.” So, stop trying’ to extract things out of me. Why don’t you try and find the pleasure? Because if we both like Dungeness crabs, or we’ve both eaten at Anthony’s Pier 66, immediately we know a lot about one another and we’re willing to talk about it even more.

Matt:  We’re going to have to take a quick break here and pay some bills. We’ll be right back. More with Jeffrey Gitomer, the author of the new book Truthful Living: The First Writings of Napoleon Hill. We’ll talk more about the book, talk about his podcast, talk a little bit more about where to eat when you’re coming’ to Seattle. We’ll be right back. Sales Pipeline Radio.

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Matt:  Welcome back to Sales Pipeline Radio. Wanna thank, again, our sponsor for this episode, mailtag.io. If you are using G-mail and you want to have a very simple, but effective tool to track when your prospects are clicking and accessing your email and you want to be able to access that into your CRM and do that without a lot of bells and whistles, but do it very quickly, easily with a quick Chrome extension in G-mail. I want to thank the folks at mailtag.io. If you go to mailtag.io and you use the coupon code Heinz, H-E-I-N-Z, you will get half off their product for life. So, thanks to the team there for-

Jeffrey:  And it comes with a bottle of ketchup!

Matt:  And you get a bottle of ketchup. It’s such a good deal! I will throw it in.

Did you know, Jeffrey, speaking to Jeffrey Gitomer today. He’s the King of Sales, author of numerous books, including the new book Truthful Living. This probably won’t surprise you now. When I was in fifth grade, I ran for student body treasurer of my elementary school. My campaign slogan was “57 Varieties of Honesty.”

Jeffrey:  Oh, that’s cool. That’s totally cool.

Matt:  I have absolutely no connection that I know of to the actual Heinz condiment company, but I’ve milked it for as much as I can, throughout my career.

Jeffrey:  Hell yeah. I’ll tell you something, they were one of the World’s Fair sponsors in 1939. You should look up the brochure. You can buy them for five or six bucks a pop. They’re beautiful.

Matt:  Really?

Jeffrey:  Oh, yeah. Just take a look. It might be something in there that you can use.

Matt:  That’s funny. My wife is a teacher and her maiden name is McDonald. I remember one of her students, when she told people she was getting’ married and what her name would be next year, they said, “Well, that makes sense. You got ketchup and hamburgers joining together.”

Jeffrey:  I don’t know what your business card is, but if it doesn’t look like the label on a ketchup bottle, something’s drastically wrong with you.

Matt:  Well, it’s funny you bring that up because inadvertently, and I promise, this was inadvertent, in the very beginning, our primary color on our website and our logo has been red.

Jeffrey:  Cool.

Matt:  And we redesigned our logo a few years ago. The intention was to make it sort of be kind of a fancy looking funnel, but I’m wearing it right now, I have a sweatshirt with our logo on it and when I wear it on a plane, it looks like a squiggle of ketchup. It just looks like ketchup. So, people assume that it’s from the ketchup people. Maybe that was all subliminal. I don’t know.

Jeffrey:  That label is so recognizable.

Matt:  I appreciate you joining the show again today. We’ve been talking’ about the new book, Truthful Living: The First Writings of Napoleon Hill. You can find it on Amazon or where all fine books are sold. Hardcover, Kindle, audio book.

Jeffrey:  Yep.

Matt:  I love it. What I love about what you’ve done here is you’ve taken some of this universal sort of lessons that have been passed down from Napoleon. Some of the early work that he’s done. Well before books like Think and Grow Rich and others were published. You talk a little bit about where this has come from. Talk a little bit about some of the other stuff you’re working on these days. I know you’ve got other books in the process. You’re constantly around the world speaking. I’ve been checking out your new podcast. Maybe it’s not new now.

Jeffrey:  It’s about a year old and we’re at about, I think this month we passed 100,000 downloads.

Matt:  Wow.

Jeffrey:  Which is pretty amazing.

Matt:  That’s pretty good.

Jeffrey:  People love the podcast. We call our listeners diehards. We, of course, have the wristband that says, “Sell or die.” It defines sales. You sell or you’re dead. There’s no second place in sales.

Matt:  This is true.

Jeffrey:  You didn’t almost win a deal. You got to nothing. Those are the elements.

Matt:  What have been your approach to content diversity? You’ve got a blog. You’ve got the podcast. You’ve got the book. I assume it’s been fairly intentional to diversify the channels to get your message out.

Jeffrey:  Yes. There’s no one channel that brings me my business. Although, I will tell you, a lot of now comes from my social channels. Most people will brag about the fact that they got 1,800 connections on LinkedIn. I have 28,000 connections on LinkedIn and a hundred and some thousand followers on Twitter and five million views on my YouTube channel. The phone rings and someone will say either, “I read The Little Red Book of Selling.” Or “I read The Sales Bible.” Or “I read the Gold Book of Yes Attitude.” Or “I follow you on Twitter. I follow you on LinkedIn. I listen to your podcast.” You can’t just have one thing. You have to have enough diversity so that when someone Googles, hey, I need somebody who’s an expert in sales, your name pops up.

Matt:  Right.

Jeffrey:  If it doesn’t, it’s because you haven’t posted enough about your expertise. I don’t want to say this as a brag. I just want to say this as a fact. I’ve delivered about 2,500 corporate seminars over the last 23 years. I’ve never made a phone call. Everybody calls and wants to buy. People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. I own that trademark phrase. That’s the challenge that you’re facing in the marketplace. Who knows you? In sales, it’s not who you know. In sales, it’s who knows you. That’s the way it works in this, you knew who I was before we ever talked on the phone.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Jeffrey:  You probably have one of my books or two and you probably violate my copyright law when you go out and do training. It’s fine.

Matt:  I want to ask you a question about that. I think about some of the stuff that you’ve written. The Little Red Book of Selling. I don’t know very many sales leaders that don’t have that in their library.

Jeffrey:  Correct.

Matt:  Once you’ve read something and you believe in it, it becomes part of who you are. You start using that language. How do you think about that, from the idea of sort of maintaining control of your IP and your language, with allowing it to become part of the nomenclature of sales, which really ends up driving more business back to you, I assume?

Jeffrey:  I trademark things. I copyright things. And still, people take liberties. I can’t control that. But, if you look at any one of my books, you’ll see that if there’s a full page quote, you’ll also see my name at the bottom of it. So, I don’t let people simply copy my stuff without seeing my name. It’s very important. If you look up The Little Red Book of Selling, if you just open up the book, if they copy a page, it doesn’t just say the title. It says the title and my name. Every single page. It’s designed specifically that way because I know people are going to take liberties. I know somebody’s going to say, “Here’s how you network. Here’s how you ask questions. Here’s how you close deals. Here’s how you get leads.” I’m okay with that, as long as they say my name. I’ve become known synonymously, literally, I’m the King of Sales because I named myself. Nobody else took the title, so to hell with it. I took it. If someone thinks they’re good enough, challenge me. I’ll step down. But these are the rules of challenge. Ready?

Matt:  Yep.

Jeffrey:  We both do a seminar in front of 1,000 people. Same day. We each put $50,000 in cash at the end of the stage. At the end of the hour, the audience votes. Winner take all. Somebody else could become the King of Sales. All they’ve got to do is beat me.

Matt:  Right.

Jeffrey:  Simple, right?

Matt:  Pretty simple.

Jeffrey:  So, have your listeners phone in. If they want to take my challenge, I’m happy to do it. I would love to do it.

Matt:  It’s a good lesson that words you put on a page are one thing, but it’s your ability to execute that’s really the differentiator. We got just a couple more minutes here with Jeffrey Gitomer, the King of Sales.

Jeffrey:  Let me give the secret.

Matt:  Do it.

Jeffrey:  The reason I’m as good as I am is I’m a student of what I do every day and I love what I do every day. If you don’t love what you do, you can never rise to the greatness that you’re hoping for. You have to have the passion.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Jeffrey:  That’s how ball players, they go to the Hall of Fame, or they go to the All-Star Game. They want to be the best and they’re the most passionate about it.

Matt:  Jeffrey, I want to ask you a personal question as we run out of time here.

Jeffrey:  Sure.

Matt:  I’m going to ask it to you only because it’s in your bio, so I’m hoping that it’s going to be all right. You say in your bio, “My name is Jeffrey Gitomer. I’m a salesman. I’m a dad. I’m a college dropout.” I want to ask you about the middle one because you talk about in your bio your daughters, you say they taught you patience. I would love to hear how your approach to selling and whether patience has become a part of your sales approach, from what your daughters have taught you, as well.

Jeffrey:  I have four daughters and four granddaughters now, and a fiancé, and two female dogs. I have all girls. All the time. You can’t yell at girls because they’re girls. My patience was tried as an early father. When the kids would do something wrong, I had two choices. I could yell at them, or I could question them. I chose questioning and it was very simple. I go, “Wow. How did that happen?” And they go, “Well, we did … ” You think that was the best thing you could’ve done? And they go, “Well, no …” I said, “What do you think you could’ve done that would’ve made the outcome a little different?” And they go, “Well, we could’ve done this, this …” I said, “Well, do you think you could do that next time?” And they go, “Well, yeah.” I said, “Well, let’s do that.” And done.

The problem is that we, as parents, have zero patience. You have an iPhone, or some reasonable facsimile that doesn’t work as well, and coast to coast, you call me from Seattle to Charlotte and the call takes three seconds to go through and you’re tapping the phone like, “Why is it taking so long?” No. How does it know? How does it know what to do? It’s like a miracle.

Okay. We, as a society, have no patience. Domino’s pizza … we deliver it in 30 minutes, or it’s free. Everybody wants it now. Everybody wants it for nothing’. Growing up in that society, you have to have the patience and the structure to be able to perform in that environment.

Matt:  Right.

Jeffrey:  I have learned it by being a dad.

Matt:  Hey, we are unfortunately out of time. They only give us a half hour here, Jeffrey.

I could keep going. We didn’t really get back to good food in Seattle. But, we’ll have to do this again sometime.

For those of you listening, if you want to learn more about Jeffrey, you can check him out. Well, you can check all of his books out, quite frankly, at Amazon. His new book, Truthful Living: The First Writings of Napoleon Hill. To learn more about you, you’ve got tons of content on your podcast. Where should people check you out directly?

Jeffrey:  In the show notes, which I’m sure you’re going to put in there, just put the Amazon link to Truthful Living or the link to gitomer.com or gitomerlearningacademy.com and that will make me the happiest man on the planet.

Matt:  Last question for you, 2019 predictions for the Phillies?

Jeffrey:  The Phillies will be able to hit the ball out of the infield on the fly for the first half of the year like they normally do and then they will die. This year, we made it all the way to September before we died.

Matt:  Sounds good! Yeah.

Jeffrey:  Wait a minute. But the Eagles will kick the Seahawks ass into the dirt where they belong because I hate the Seahawks and their coach. Just for some reason I just don’t like the guy. It was the only time I ever wanted New England to win a game and they lost on the dumbest call of a play in the history of sports. Marshawn Lynch. And he passed the ball.

Matt:  It’s still too soon to talk about that. That’s still painful.

Jeffrey:  Yeah. I apologize. But, it was the dumbest play in the history of sports. Any argument with that?

Matt:  Well, yes, in hindsight.

Although, if it would’ve worked, we would’ve called him a genius.

Jeffrey:  C’mon. Marshawn Lynch quit the team after that.

Matt:  He did. I don’t know if you know it or not, now we’re way over time, the Raiders did it to him earlier this season again. As you notice, he’s not playing again.

Hey, thanks very much for joining us on Sales Pipeline Radio. We will be back here next week at 11:30 Pacific, 2:30 Eastern for more great guests. On behalf of Jeffrey and my great producer, Paul, thanks for joining us. This is Matt Heinz on Sales Pipeline Radio.

The post Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 140: Q&A with Jeffrey Gitomer @gitomer appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Yes, account-based marketing can be an effective way to convert your B2B audience, but make sure you have a strong foundation before your start. Here's what to look for. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Posting to social media is a great but even better is creating conversation.

For years companies all over the world have been leveraging the power of social media to grow their business. But many fall short when it comes to the true intentions of content marketing.

When you post something that is intended to appeal to your ideal users, don’t walk away. Those notifications letting you know how the post is performing are the important part.

Engagement refers to any time you and users following your business’s profiles interact. That interaction can not only lead to high quality leads, it will lead to more followers who are genuinely interested in what you provide.

How can you optimize your content for user engagement?

Optimizing your content marketing to improve user engagement isn’t easy. Many people limit their activities to a blog post and then hope for the best.

Many small business content marketing strategies consist of Googling a topic and rewriting one or more other pieces in a new voice. Video content is guilty of this with many videos borrowing, or outright copying a previously successful video.

In either case, a user has already seen that content so why would they act on yours when it’s the same thing?

Here are some more effective ways to create content specific for user engagement:

Step 1 – Create Something New

Your first step for your content is to accept that you will have to take some risks.

That risk pertains to the way you present your content, what you have to say, and how your brand brings something new to the subject.
This graph shows how this task is seen as the most difficult for businesses when trying to improve their online presence. While it’s focused on B2B, anyone working in B2C should pay attention.

This initial step is crucial because it forces you to do more than dismiss your marketing as a task to set aside.

A lot of businesses leave their content marketing strategy entirely in the hands of an agency, which will not be effective. An agency or consultant is an expert on how to distribute the content, but not an expert on your business, so you will have to work with them.

This means holding meetings where they can get input from you on what you do and why any user would want to buy from you or be your client.

A solid content marketing strategy for small businesses involves a consistently collaborative process.

Working together is your best route to creating great content.

Great content means the combination of your skill set with that of the person or people you’re working with to make sure it gets seen by the most eyes and is structured to benefit your overall online presence.

Step Two – Engage, Adapt and Refine

The second step is to watch the reaction.

Look for peaks in Likes, Shares, or new Follows and notice the subject matter users have expressed more interest in. This can show you a lot about what value your users see you providing.

If you post regular blog posts or videos and see 5 -10 likes and no comments, and then you post something that receives double that or gets users commenting, you know to explore that subject in future content pieces.

If/when you do see comments, then you should absolutely respond.

The worst thing a brand can do is leave engagement hanging empty. Not only will the user who took the time to comment be put off, but you’ll also be showing every other person who sees that comment without a response that your company isn’t really paying attention.

Moreover, many users see social media as a great way to get a company’s attention when they have a problem. So when they see that they can’t even reach you on Twitter or Facebook they will naturally question your support in general and likely look for another vendor who does engage their users.

Look at the phenomenal traction Facebook groups have for people who are interested in a particular subject.

Your niche may not be large but if you capture an audience within it, your engagement will benefit your business by showing users your expertise, your willingness to interact with them (and potential clients), and your commitment those that buy from you or become clients.

To make it easier, it’s best to have an internal set of canned responses ready for whoever monitors the accounts to reference. Chatbots are a new product that automate this process through Facebook messenger and they exist for a reason. Many business owners aren’t able to juggle their responsibilities and learn and monitor their accounts.

For social media your best bet is to hire a professional and work with them. You can draft a set of responses to frequently asked questions and when in doubt they will email you so you can respond on your own time. This again speaks to the cooperative nature of having a professional help you with your social media.

Originally published here.