Rnordman

One of the most popular photos of the Hong Kong protests so far is that of a lone man walking through clouds of tear gas holding an open umbrella. Known as the “umbrella man,” it is drawing parallels to the “tank man,” who held up a column of Chinese tanks at Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. While it might be seen as a simple household item, the umbrella has become a curious but fitting symbol of the pro-democracy protests. Media outlets have dubbed the movement the Umbrella Revolution and the hashtag of the same name is blowing up on Twitter. Protesters are painting their umbrellas with political messages of freedom and hope.

There are a few simple reasons why: umbrellas offer shelter from rain and sun and can act as makeshift barricades. They have also been used as shields against pepper spray fired by the police. While umbrellas might generally seem like shoddy defences, they have a long history of being used as weapons: In 1838, Baron Charles Random de Berenger instructed readers of his book How to Protect Life and Property on how to use an umbrella to discreetly pull a pistol out of your pocket or whack a robber over the head. In 1978, Bulgarian secret agents used a poison-tipped umbrella to kill a dissident in London.

Umbrellas also have deep roots in Chinese society. There is evidence that parasols were invented by the ancient Egyptians, but it was the Chinese who made them waterproof with leather in the 11th century BCE. Today, they’ve become one more example of China’s unwavering economic clout, with more than 70 per cent of the world’s umbrellas produced there; and over 1,000 umbrella factories operating in the city of Shangyu alone, according to National Geographic. Observers have noted the irony of protesters adopting a symbol with such strong links to mainland China.  The China Umbrella Museum, the only museum of its kind in the world, opened in Hangzhou in 2009 to display the “identity of the umbrella in the minds of Chinese people,” according to one travel website.

“Every protest needs a name, like Occupy Wall Street or the Red Shirt Army in Thailand. The umbrellas are unique because they are ubiquitous in China and have never been used like this before,” says Yongjing Zhang, professor in public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. He says it’s fitting also because this is the first time the Hong Kong police have used such extreme tactics against protesters. The Associated Press reports that umbrellas are being donated to the movement by outside supporters to replace those being destroyed by police. With the number of protesters growing dramatically and no signs of Beijing backing down, it seems like demonstrators are going to need every umbrella they can get their hands on.

The post Why the umbrella is a symbol of hope in Hong Kong appeared first on Macleans.ca.

 

BY JENNI DUGGAN

The world has been captivated by images of tens of thousands of umbrella-wielding protesters on the streets of Hong Kong demanding democracy. But these images aren’t finding their way to the rest of China, where the authorities are controlling any information about what has become known internationally as the Umbrella Revolution.

In Shanghai this week, newspaper headlines suggest the protests were orchestrated by a few “political extremists” who are disrupting the daily lives of ordinary people in Hong Kong. “There has essentially been no coverage at all of the Hong Kong protests by mainland media,” says David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the journalism and media studies centre at the University of Hong Kong. “No reporters, not even for state media, have been allowed to report the story from the scene.”

Any mentions of the protests within the Chinese media have been tightly controlled and highly critical. “What we’ve seen are a handful of official news releases from Xinhua [the Chinese state news agency] that reiterate the government stance that they are illegal, which is not true, and that they are harmful to the peace and prosperity of Hong Kong,” adds Bandurski. Social media outlets have also been heavily censored with a high number of posts on the popular micro-blogging site Weibo being deleted or edited. International social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook are already blocked in China, and the photo-sharing application Instagram appears to have fallen to the same fate due to the high number of photos of the protests being shared.

Censorship and controlling the narrative around sensitive stories is not uncommon in China. The current administration, lead by President Xi Jinping, has implemented tight controls on an already very restricted Internet. The media has not escaped either. “In recent years, one of the central themes of Chinese press policy has been the need to get on top of stories, both domestic and international, attempting to dominate the agenda or tell China’s side of the story,” says Bandurski.

Related reading: What you need to know about the protest in Hong Kong 

The protests in Hong Kong represent the biggest test to date of China’s ability to control information. The last time there were such large-scale democracy demonstrations on Chinese soil was in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which ended in a bloody crackdown against protesters. The Chinese government successfully controlled the narrative of those events to the extent that even today many in China are not aware of what took place. In the era of the Internet, it is impossible for the Chinese authorities to restrict information relating to the protests in Hong Kong to the same degree. While experts do not think it is likely that the protests will spread to mainland China, there are fears about the impact that calls for
full democracy could have on the mainland.

Hong Kong has operated under a “One country, two systems” framework since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. This means that the international financial hub has limited self-governance, an independent judiciary, greater freedom of speech and an unrestricted press. These are freedoms that already make Hong Kong a sensitive issue for China, where such freedoms are not enjoyed. When it was returned to China, Beijing promised that by 2017 Hong Kong could elect its chief executive (its top leader) by universal suffrage. Last month China ruled that the candidates in an election would have to be approved by a pro-Chinese committee, eventually culminating in the current protests.

“There are so many sensitive facets to this Hong Kong story that I think Chinese leaders are really at a loss as to how to handle it,” says Bandurski. “This is about calls for political reform—a highly sensitive issue—made through civic activism—another highly sensitive issue—in a society with a tradition of speech freedoms, which continue to rankle Beijing.”

But for all of Beijing’s controls, some information is getting through China’s Great Firewall (as the Internet restrictions are often jokingly referred to). As new terms are used in relation to the protests—terms like Umbrella Revolution—it takes time for the censors to get on top of them online. Even if a post is deleted, there is the potential for a large number of people to read it and forward it before it is taken down. People in China are also aware that Hong Kong does have greater freedoms.

Related reading: Why the umbrella is a symbol of hope in Hong Kong 

Whether the Chinese public are (or become) aware of what is really happening in Hong Kong, it is unlikely the protests will spread to the mainland, says Willy Wo-Lap Lam, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Hong Kong. “The long-term impact of Hong Kong will be significant, but in the near term, it is difficult to see Hong Kong playing a spearheading role regarding the development of democracy in China,” he says. Along with Xi’s success at cracking down on dissent, the motives of the Hong Kong protesters may not be fully understood or sympathized with elsewhere. Economic growth is considered of utmost importance in China. And Chinese mainlanders see Hong Kong as benefiting economically from its ties to China: Why, the thinking goes, would they would want to damage that relationship?

If there is not much likelihood of the protests spreading to the mainland, they still pose a threat. Lam believes that the reason the government wants to control the narrative of the protests is to ensure that heroic images of peaceful protesters facing off baton-wielding police officers don’t circulate on the mainland. Such images show not only defiance against the authorities but also that it’s possible for people to organize in a short space of time, he says. “These are things that Beijing is afraid might spread to different parts of China: that the people are not so easily intimidated by tear gas.”

The post Behind the great firewall of China appeared first on Macleans.ca.

One of the most challenging and important aspects of business success is setting your prices.

---

Who doesn’t love shiny new gadgets? I know I do. But what good are gizmos if they don’t actually, you know, do something? The wearable tech industry is booming right now, but whether or not it’s accomplishing something productive — other than giving us something that looks cool — isn’t so clear.

So we’ve put together a list of some of the latest (and most prominent) wearables currently on the market or in development to try and sort out why they’re so appealing. We also determine if there are any nuggets of true, world-changing innovation here. Here they are in order from the useful to just the plain whack-a-doodle:

meMINI

The meMINI is a wearable camera that lets you “handpick your favorite moments, after they happen,” according to its Kickstarter page, which makes it sound like any old recording device on the surface. In actuality, the meMINI records video continuously so that when a moment happens that you want to capture forever, you just have to press the “Recall” button to save the few seconds or few minutes that have just transpired. It’s like a video record button that lets you go back in time. It includes a “magnacatch” that lets you wear it anywhere on your clothing, too. You can get it now for $199.

Narrative Clip

Lifeloggers rejoice! The Narrative Clip is a wearable camera the size of a stamp that automatically takes photos of your life. Since you don’t have to consciously take the pictures, the argument here is that you’ll capture moments that you might’ve otherwise missed. It can store up to 4,000 images that you can easily upload to your computer later or share with friends online. It weighs just 0.7 oz so it promises not to hang off your shirt. Starting price is $229.

Mi.mu

Now, this is a wearable I can get behind. The Mi.mu is a pair of gloves that uses gesture detection to help wearers control music using the movement of their hands. Though it didn’t meet its Kickstarter goal, the gloves are still in development and have received considerable endorsement by musician Imogen Heap. No release date has been set as of yet.

Lumo Lift

If you’re like me and sit slumped over a keyboard all day, this wearable might actually be useful. The Lumo Lift is a magnet that clips onto your clothes near your collarbone that can sense when you’re slouching. When it does, the device vibrates until you stand or sit up straight again. It can also measure how good your posture is throughout the day. And it works (of course) with the Lumo Lift app. Expect to pay $100 for this one.

Muse

Because who doesn’t need their brain “sensed”? At least, that appears to be the thinking behind the Muse, a brain fitness tool that promises to help you better manage stress and improve focus. To use it, just sync the headband’s Bluetooth with the dedicated app and go through Muse-guided exercises. For instance, you’ll be presented with a beach environment on the app, and if your mind wanders, the weather will change. This helps your improve focus and learn calming techniques. Muse costs $299.

Sensoria Smart Sock Fitness Tracker

We’ve got smart wristbands. Sensoria smart Sock Fitness Tracker will be giving us smart socks. This device, which met its funding goal on Indiegogo, consists of “smart” socks that are made of running-friendly fabric that’s been infused with textile sensors. Once you’ve put on the socks, just snap on an electronic anklet to one of them and you’ll be able to sync details about your step count, speed, calories burned, and how your feet hit the ground, to a dedicated app. What will super smart socks set you back? $149.

SmartWig

The SmartWig from Sony is only at the patent stage right now, but it’s so unusual, I had to include it here. The SmartWig is designed to cover all of or a portion of the head and is loaded with sensors that are capable of communicating with a whole host of external devices. It has a GPS, lasers for conducting remote PowerPoint presentations, and ultrasound transducers that vibrate when you’re getting close to an object. And if you want to complete a task, just touch the wig. Here’s my favorite description from the patent: “During a presentation the user may, for example, move forward or backward through presentation slides by simply pushing the sideburns.”

Now, be honest: Do you see yourself actually using any of these?

When your company spends the money, time, and effort to display a booth at a trade show, it is vital to make the best of it.

Careful planning and research can go a long way towards ensuring a successful showing at your next trade show.

This article will highlight ways to attract visitors to your booth, detail ways to plan out a successful trade show exhibition, and explore some of the best ideas for trade show giveaways.

---

Attracting Prospects to Your Booth

A trade show is a place where buyers and sellers meet. The benefit is that buyers come to a trade show looking to buy and wanting to learn about the latest and greatest that you have to offer.

The problem is the amount of competition you have in the direct vicinity. The way to overcome the problem is to take steps to ensure that buyers won’t miss your booth.

Here are 10 ways to make sure visitors stop by your trade show booth:

1/ Booth Location

Of course, the old business adage “location, location, location” stands here just like anywhere else. Most trade shows will offer prime location booths for an extra charge.

If you are willing to pay extra, look into this early. Most trade show’s prime locations sell out fast; some prime locations are even grandfathered in, so you may need to think even further in advance, like next year.

It also is something to consider when negotiating your contract. If you plan on attending a trade show long term, year after year, prime location is something you can try to leverage at that time.

2/ Get the Look

Buyers are attracted to good looking booths. Use bright colors and put effort into the design of your booth. It will make all the difference between visitors stopping or walking by.

Make your messaging clear and able to be seen from every direction as well as near and far. Use clear signs and optimum lighting.

3/ Make Your Booth Approachable

In addition to having that ‘right look’ and appealing design, your booth should be approachable. Smiling faces of professional booth attendants are important.

Have a variety of different display options to appeal to different people. Some people like flyers, pamphlets, and reading materials.

Other attendees are visual and would like to see a video demo on an HD screen or tablet.

Many will want to engage with the booth staff and ask questions. Make sure that plenty of booth staff is available at all times.

4/ Booth Hosts

Consider having a booth host who is trained to answer some simple questions and direct buyers to the appropriate staff member in the booth.

You could try using entertainers such as a model, a magician, singer, or other type of entertainer that goes along with your company persona or theme of the booth or trade show.

5/ Offer Show Specials

Make sure to highlight your show specials so that buyers know that they need to buy at the show in order to receive the discount or special offer. Make sure your show special is posted and very clear.

6/ Contests and Promotions

Everyone likes to win something and contests, special promotions, or prize drawings will attract people to your booth.

Be sure that you require something of attendees in order to enter the drawing or qualify to win a prize such as a business card, or filling out a contact form or questionnaire.

7/ Snacks and Drinks

Trade show attendees are usually not used to all the walking around.

Offering snacks and drinks will be much appreciated. Your drinks or snack offer should be in line with your company culture or theme. Water bottles and any packaging should come with your branding or business card attached to help remind them where they received it from.

8/ Show Your Expertise

Offer something of value to trade show attendees. This can be something like a white paper on the state of the industry, top 10 lists of products, newest trends. If most people who attend a particular trade show are from out of the area, you can offer information about the local area, such as top places for dinner.

9/ Reach Out on Social Media

You should already have a social media marketing plan in place for your trade show. One way to use social media is to engage with people who have checked in at the venue or mentioned the trade show on social media. Invite them to your booth and offer a special incentive through social channels.

10/ Promotional Products

Promotional products and branded gift giveaways are a staple at trade shows.

However, choosing the right promotional products to giveaway will ensure that your investment is worthwhile.

Make sure that the promotional product giveaway that you choose is something that is relevant to your brand and useful to the consumer. That is the best combination to ensure that they are kept for long periods of time.

Some of the most popular promotional products for trade shows include:

• Pens: A good old standby. They may be a bit mundane, but everyone still needs a pen to have handy. Pens are kept for a long period of time and even have a transfer value since recipients might give them to others.
• Bags: Everyone always needs something to carry all that stuff they pick up at a trade show. Reusable bags are kept much more often now than in the past for their environmental benefits.
• Electronic Gadgets: USB or thumb drives always rank among the type of promotional item that people would like to receive. Mobile device cases are also always well received.
• Cups & Mugs: Cups and mugs are kept for long periods of time and get a lot of use. For the trade show attending crowd, though travel mugs are probably a better choice for usability.
• Badge Holders: Even though some might only be used during the trade show, handy ones with extra pockets will often be kept and reused at other events.
• Folders, Binders, Notepads: These come in handy both during the trade show and after, they will often make it back to the office for use by the receiver and other staff members.

---

To Sum Up

Carrying off a successful trade show involves a great deal of planning. Since trade shows are often a risk because of the cost involved and the short term, one shot deal nature of them, it is imperative to do enough to ensure their success.

Many of the 10 points we illustrated to attract buyers require research and planning ahead of time. If you regularly attend trade shows, you will form a routine; but even if you have a routine, be sure to constantly continue to innovate and improve it.

 ^{Image Copyright: violin / 123RF Stock Photo}

I was discussing the OMG Partnership opportunity with a gentlemen from Hong Kong, who objected to our reasonable licensing fees, refusing to pay any fees to a US company.  This is when the conversation began to resemble a sales call.  He did what a lot of buyers do to salespeople and began to boast about how well-positioned his company is to market OMG in Hong Kong and what a huge opportunity this would be for OMG.  He expected me to waive the fees in exchange for the great opportunity he described.

Most salespeople - 74% to be exact - not wishing to jeopardize a great opportunity, start negotiating or worse, agreeing, to the unrealistic requests.  There are ripple effects to this, for example:

Enterprises typically have very long buying cycles. Six months or longer from initial contact to closing a deal are the norm. But there are ways to fast-forward this process and close even large enterprise deals in less time.

Enterprises are typically big buyers, but they're also very slow moving organisations. Deals are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it takes so much time and so many steps to actually get a contract signed. Here are two things you can do to accelerate the sales process.

1. Understand the buying cycle of the enterprise you're selling into

Have a clear vision of their buying journey. What are all the steps that it's going to take to close the deal? Who are all the stakeholders that are going to be involved? Make a list of everything that needs to be accomplished all the way from initial interest to signing the contract and wiring the money.

How do you do that?

You ask the prospect: "What is it going to take for you guys to buy? What are all the steps that we're going to take together to make you become a customer of our product?"

The prospect will then answer something along these lines: "Well, we'll have to get approval from this department, and that, and get buy-in from this stakeholder."

The most common mistake startups make at this point is answering: "Sure! Sounds good!"

Why is that a mistake?

It's a mistake because more often than not, they haven't told you their whole buying cycle yet.

That's why you ask another question: "So once we've done these things that you described, are we in business, or do we still have things to do?"

And then you let them guide you through the virtual close. They will essentially describe a virtual roadmap of all the steps that are required to get the deal closed and their money wired into your account.

Once you have mapped out their buying cycle, you move on to the next step.

2. Parallelize processes

Find out which of these steps you can go through in parallel. So rather than doing step 1, then 2, then 3, 4, 5 etc., you try to find opportunities for steps you can already take, while other steps aren't completed yet. Maybe you can already get started on step 5, while you're still working with them on getting step 2 accomplished.

Most companies go through the sales cycle sequentially. That's fine. But if you want speed, you split the cycle up into several threads that run in parallel.

Here's an example

This is what a typical enterprise sales cycle looks like (extremely simplified, just to illustrate the principle):

1. You work on getting green-lighted by the various stakeholders.
2. Once that is achieved, you then have to talk with their procurement department, which specializes in purchasing from outside vendors.
3. And then you often still have to go through legal, and deal with all the contracting issues, and it's a long back-and-forth between your legal department and their legal department before the contracts get approved by their legal department.

Rather than doing this one step after the other, get started on these three threads simultaneously.

Here's what you say

When you're talking to the prospect and it seems like this is a highly probable opportunity, you tell them:

"After our initial call, it seems that this would be a great fit.

Now we know that we're going to have to take all these different steps and talk to all these different departments and stakeholders to make sure that the entire organization is on board and you guys are ready to rock'n'roll.

We've had really good experiences once we've established that somebody is a great fit. Most of the time, we're going to be able to make the deal happen. We're going to work with you and make it happen.

In order to make it happen even smoother and faster, what we would appreciate is if you could put us in touch with your procurement and your legal department now, so we can start that process in parallel, so by the time we have approval from all the different stakeholders, we're ready to rock'n'roll. We're not going to be slowed down by things that need to be done by procurement and legal.

Does that sound fair?"

Nine out of ten times people will say, "Yeah, that actually sounds like a really good idea." And they're going to put you in touch with procurement and legal, and you can start the process even ahead of the final agreements. 

This can cut weeks and even months off their buying cycle.

And every day you save time this way is making your life, and the customer's life better, and it helps you become a more profitable, faster-growing company.

Want more of my best advice on selling to the enterprise? Claim a free copy of my book Enterprise Sales For Startups!

Download the book

In the first blog post of this series, The Subscription Economy: What It Is and How It’s Changing The Way People Buy, we asked Zuora’s VP of Worldwide Sales Strategy and Execution, Dave Frechette, to introduce the concept of The Subscription Economy – the move from traditional pay-per-product/service models to subscription-based Software as a Service (SaaS) models.

In the second post, How the Subscription Economy is Driving a New Kind of Business Model, we pulled notes from our conversation with Dave to highlight four essential areas of business operations that are changing in response to the Subscription Economy.

In this third and final post of the series, we’ll discuss one of the most important changes brought about by the shift toward subscription-based businesses – How subscription-based sales models are driving changes to the sales process.

If Customers Buy Differently, We Need To Sell Differently

A customer who has moved to a subscription-based model of consumption has completely different expectations about how companies are going interact with them.

How you market to them, how you sell to them, how you bill them, how you nurture the relationship – it’s all affected by the Subscription Economy. The customer’s idea of value has changed. And, if the customer’s idea of value has changed, your value proposition should be aligned accordingly.

A shift in your sales process to support new customer value requirements includes making sure your company’s “currency of value” can be shared and demonstrated at every level in your organization. The Value Messaging Framework you create for your sales organization drives more than just a sales conversation, it now provides the basis for company-focused business development, delivery and customer nurturing conversations.

The subscription-based sales process relies less on the closing of a sale and more on the nurturing of a long-term relationship to create lifetime customer value.

The new sales process requires high-value interactions and messaging at every customer touch point – whether customer acquisition, increasing value to existing customers or reducing customer churn.

1. Acquiring New Customers

One of the critical components of selling in the subscription economy is aligning your organization’s sales process with your customer’s buying process.

One of your most important goals will be to achieve “one voice” to the customer, harmonizing and aligning every touch point throughout the customer journey.

Success at this level requires a unified front to the customer through alignment of both sales and marketing materials. If done correctly, this unification ultimately creates an uplift in customer loyalty, as being aligned internally helps support being aligned around your customer.

For true alignment, your messaging should focus on three broad categories:

• Value Comprehension – Your company’s ability to identify and respond to trends in the market.
• Value Offering – Your company’s ability to translate an understanding of market and customer trends into world-class product and service offerings.
• Value Engagement – Your company’s ability to articulate value and differentiation at key “moments of truth” and deliver on your promises throughout the customer lifecycle.

2. Increasing Customer Value

In order to increase the value of an existing customer, you first need to know the baseline value of each customer.

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are an incredibly important metric in the Subscription Economy. You start by knowing how much it costs your company to acquire each new customer. From there, you determine how long that customer needs to remain a customer in order to regain your initial costs.

Once you’ve reached your “break even” point, your job is to continue to find ways to provide value to that customer. Increasing the amount of time a customer stays with you, or the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), greatly impacts your company’s overall profitability.

With subscription-based services, you often have the ability to interface with your customers both horizontally (across many devices) and vertically (across many interactions/logins). These key “moments of truth” should be your focal points for providing and leveraging value through:

• Increased usage of your product
• Increased reliance on your product
• Increased loyalty to your product

3. Decreasing Customer Churn

Stickiness – a successful company’s favorite word. In the Subscription Economy, stickiness is as important, if not more so, than in a traditional sales model. If you can get your customers consistently using your solution and can reiterate the value of your solution, then they’re less likely to churn.

In The Economist’s Intelligence Unit Report, commissioned by Zuora, the results showed that once people move to a subscription-based model, they’re far less likely to revert back to their old relationship model. Today’s B2B buyers are beginning to adopt the “I have to have it” mentality seen in today’s B2C marketplace.

What’s in it for the Customer?

Cool Stuff. Business Value. Easy Accessibility. Low Risk.

Today, many powerful business platforms are easily accessible. In many cases, business users can get a 30-day free trial by simply sharing their email address. That’s a pretty low-risk requirement for a business buyer to check out a platform that could save them time and money on the job, help them collaborate better with teammates or create some impressive charts or graphs to add value to their next business initiative.

If a product provides value for today’s B2B market, a “tryer” will become a “buyer” by utilizing the platform on a trial basis with a current work project or initiative. If your product successfully adds value to a current initiative, that value will become associated with your company and your products.

Many subscription economy companies base their sales strategy on ways they can acquire the masses. By design, their strategy is to continuously provide more “free access” to increase usage, embed information, establish value and build loyalty. If done well, at some point, users of your “freemium model” are going to want to collaborate on projects with others, share more information and have more security controls.

That’s when it happens. Your tryers officially become buyers. They raise their hands and cross the threshold into the world of a paying customer.

What’s In it for B2B?

Monthly Recurring Revenue. Lifetime Customer Value.

Bottom line – paying customers mean Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) for your company – MRR is a driving factor behind a company’s decision to join the Subscription Economy. It helps companies maintain profitability and make informed decisions about future operational initiatives.

In the Subscription Economy, sales process decisions are more likely to be focused on “buyer first,” versus the “product first” approach of traditional models. Internal conversations focus more on customer success metrics determined by changes in your Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC), changes in your Lifetime Value of a Customer (LCV) and your success rate in upselling a % of your accounts to a premium product or service model.

The Subscription Economy requires a very different way of looking at your sales process and your overall business model. The luxury of having more predictability in your business model comes with some caveats: (1) the responsibility of successfully navigating scores of customer interactions and (2) the inherent risk that each interaction will either strengthen or weaken your customer experience.

Transitioning to or enabling integration of a subscription-based sales model will fundamentally change the way you operate your business. It will also affect many key functional areas of the organization.

• The Sales Organization: This effect happens because you’re changing the way you sell your products and services.
• The Finance Organization: This effect happens because you’re changing how you recognize revenue and how you predict profitability.
• The Information Technology Organization: This effect happens due to a radical shift from an SAP or Oracle life to an entirely different information ecosystem.

Despite the highly technical changes that need to be in place to make this sales model effective, the biggest barrier for most companies continues to be company-wide change management. An operational shift of this magnitude will require long-term change throughout your entire sales organization. True sales transformation and a plan to drive consistent adoption will be critical to your success. For more information on driving successful adoption and achieving true sales transformation, read Force Management’s eBook, Leading Sales Transformation – 5 Strategies to Successful Sales Adoption.

To learn more about the Subscription Economy, check out Zuora’s list of studies and eBooks here.

We’d like to thank Dave Frechette and Zuora for partnering with us to make these great posts possible.

It’s a statistic that’s been widely quoted and even more widely misunderstood – the idea that the typical modern B2B buying decision process is “57% complete” before the customer even talks to the supplier.

Or you may have seen it quoted as “65%” or “two thirds”. It doesn’t matter, because all the figures are precisely wrong.

I think the original statistic came from a CEB* study but it has been naively interpreted and driven many thoughtless conclusions. You see, like many statistics, it’s simply a headline-grabbing average that hides a wide variation in actual behaviour.

Subsequent studies by other organisations – including one by IDC – have revealed subtleties that any B2B sales and marketing organisation need to take into consideration before they decide to make far-reaching changes to their go-to-market strategy…

An unhelpful average

In fact, the worse possible thing that any smart B2B organisation could do is take the 57% statistic too literally, or to assume that late-stage engagement has somehow become the inevitable norm. We need to put the statistic into a broader context.

First, let’s acknowledge that the stage at which the customer will feel the need to engage in a sales conversation will vary dramatically according to the complexity of their need.

You can’t ignore complexity

If they have a clear sense of what they want to buy – for example if it is a simple or relatively inexpensive transactional purchase or the re-ordering of the same or similar solutions, then it’s hardly surprising that the prospect may conduct most of the buying process online.

But if the problem is poorly defined, and the solution less than obvious, or if it involves a high-value complex buying decision process with multiple stakeholders, then the prospect is much more likely to be open to early engagement with potential vendors.

Of course, at this earlier stage of consideration, they are expecting to be educated, rather than subjected to the hard sell – and will react very badly if exposed to the blunt instrument of a dinosaur sales person who has been schooled in the “always be closing” style of selling.

When “selling value” only adds to cost

Simple, generic or inexpensive products where the primary differentiation is price and delivery are increasingly becoming the preserve of on-line purchasing. In this environment, attempts to “sell value” are likely to simply increase the costs of losing the sale.

For these sort of low-friction transactional purchases, most buyers simply want the experience to be as simple as possible, and if the sales person cannot make a real contribution to their thinking process, they had better step out of the way.

For considered purchases, you need to engage early

But for the sort of high-value, considered purchases that most of the clients I work for are familiar with, early sales involvement is absolutely critical to improving the chances of sales success. As one of my customers is fond of saying, you need to engage while the cement is still wet.

In these complex deals, the concept of value has multiple dimensions. In many cases – where the prospect’s need may have to be created or at the very least redefined at an early stage of the buying journey, the sales person will probably have to “sell” the need for change – and the need to change now, rather than later – before they can sell their solution.

You can’t wait for BANT before engaging

The idea that this sort of influence can be most effectively exerted when a decision process is more than half-way complete is risible. In complex sales environments, this sort of sales conversation needs to start early. And it certainly needs to start way before the opportunity can be called “BANT qualified”.

In this sort of situation, if sales people (or their managers) insist on opportunities being BANT qualified before they are prepared to engage, they are simply sleepwalking towards a revenue precipice.

Learning from top performers

Top sales performers have always understood the value of engaging in the sales conversation at the earliest possible stage in the prospect’s decision-making cycle – and they have balanced this with an uncanny ability to sniff out opportunities, and to qualify bad deals out early.

But what about the rest? What about the vast majority of the sales population? What can we do to enable them to engage the prospect more effectively, early in the process?

Marketing must take the lead

The answer must start with marketing. Marketing needs to communicate with the market in a provocative and differentiated way, stimulating the prospect to think differently and carefully structuring their “thought leadership” pieces so as to make the prospect want to learn more – and be prepared to engage in conversation – sooner, rather than later.

Weak, wishy-washy campaigns and collateral that simply serve to reinforce what the prospect already knows or believes simply won’t work – they do nothing to persuade the reader to engage.

But even creating provocative, edgy, tell-me-more content will ultimately fail unless at the same time you prepare and coach your sales people to have interesting, provocative and stimulating conversations that make their prospect want to continue the dialogue.

You need to prepare your sales people

This absolutely requires that every marketing campaign is accompanied by a sales briefing process that includes talking pieces, intelligent insights, though-provoking questions and relevant customer anecdotes.

I’ve become increasingly hard-line about this, to the point where I believe that if you’re not prepared to invest in doing this right, then you might as well not waste the effort in creating the campaign in the first place.

But do this well, and you can shatter the 57% myth. Your sales people can engage early, qualify effectively, and help shape the agenda. Or would they prefer to keep arriving late to the party, and be forever breathing someone else’s exhaust?

"How concerned are you about the commoditization of your services?" I posed that question to a room full of consulting engineers at a conference session I conducted last week. Almost everyone present indicated that it was a significant problem. "Enough to make significant changes in how you do business?" I asked. The group was much less sure of their answer to the second question.

Thus we have the conundrum of the commoditization trend in the A/E business. It's a problem we all like to complain about, but few are willing to try to do anything about it. And that's perfectly fine, because the consequences of commoditization are probably less painful for most firms than changing in response to it. As I see it, there are three basic responses you can make:

1. Stay the course, continuing to do things much as you have been
2. Become more efficient, enabling lower-cost delivery of your services
3. Differentiate, adding value to your services that clients are willing to pay for

Most firms, by far, stick with option #1, even as they talk about the need to differentiate. Some firms have embraced option #3, finding ways to distinguish themselves from the competition (I addressed possible differentiation strategies in a previous post). A much smaller number of firms settle for option #2, because most don't want to admit they've become a commodity.

But that reality is inescapable for several firms I've worked with over the years. While they admit that clients treat them like a commodity, they resist the characterization and continue to operate as if they offered differentiated services—putting themselves at a competitive and financial disadvantage.

Of course, my focus is on helping A/E firms differentiate. But if they can't or won't, isn't option #2 worth considering? There's nothing wrong with embracing a commodity market (such as most private land development) and redesigning your firm to succeed at it. It requires some hard choices, but the benefits go straight to your bottom line. Some possible strategies to consider:

Streamline project delivery processes. In most firms, there's much room for improvement here. For example, rework in our industry seems to consume between 15 to 20 percent of project budgets. That's unacceptable. Design-related change orders contribute about 4% of construction costs. Half of those change orders are attributed to coordination errors. See a trend? The first place to start in lowering the cost of your service delivery is improving how you manage projects.

Control overhead growth. The good news is that overhead is declining across our industry, reaching the lowest level in 2013 since the recession began. But many firms are still running lower utilization due to inadequate work load and a reluctance to further pare back overhead positions. The hope is that growth will soon return, but high overhead makes that more difficult in a commodity market. Alas, these firms may face some tough decisions to remain competitive.

Outsource select services to boost profitability. This is not a popular choice, but it may be a strategy worth considering. Start by evaluating the performance of the different departments and disciplines in your firm. Do some routinely lose money or otherwise hamper your firm's competitiveness? Some firms have realized they can be more profitable by outsourcing price-sensitive complementary services such as surveying or laboratory analysis. Certain overhead functions might also lend themselves to outsourcing.

Hire more paraprofessional staff. As budgets contract, it becomes increasingly important to fit the right people (hence the right billing rates) to the assigned tasks. Many of the tasks we perform can be adequately handled under appropriate supervision by less experienced professionals, non-degreed personnel, and even administrative staff. Other professional service firms—such as law and accounting firms—have cultivated the role of paraprofessionals. These are individuals who have related associate or vocational degrees, or simply relevant experience with no degree. Couldn't this approach work for our industry?

Employ some hoteling to reduce office space needs. Besides indirect labor, the biggest overhead expense in most firms is office space. Yet in many firms on any given day, a large proportion of offices and cubicles are unoccupied, particularly for firms that perform field services. The practice of hoteling is a growing trend among all types of businesses, including many professional service firms. This involves setting up shared work stations that employees use periodically when they are in the office. The growth of telecommuting has made this a practical alternative for many companies, saving millions in office costs. No doubt this suggestion will be greeted with skepticism in our industry, but might be worth considering as a commodity provider.

Offer more standardized design products. Why do cash-strapped clients like small towns and rural counties need to pay for custom designs for buildings like fire stations or community centers? Could they not shop for the design of their choice from a catalog of standard models, similar to how home buyers use house plan books? Obviously, this is not a popular concept with architects and engineers, but I've heard owners express interest in such low-cost options. Customizing every design or solution is difficult to do profitably when clients are seeking the lowest cost.

On second thought, maybe differentiation deserves more attention! Any of the efficiency measures above have merit, but are likely very difficult or distasteful to the vast majority of A/E firm leaders. That leaves two choices—stay the course or differentiate. If you're tired of more of the same, this blog is full of ideas on how to stand out in the crowd. 

As a marketer, you put a lot of effort into understanding your target market. You may hire top marketing firms to help you achieve clarity.  You probably use market segmentation to understand where to focus, and you may even gain significant insights into that target market. These insights help you understand how to build the right products, develop a product positioning strategy, and fulfill the needs of that target market. But market segmentation and customer insights are only part of what you need to enter the competitive market.

Are you ready to take your efforts to the next level?

Understanding What Motivates a Buyer

A lot has been written about buyers from the perspective of a salesperson, but very little has been written from the marketing person’s point of view. While the salesperson understands how to categorize specific individuals within accounts based on their role in the buying process, identifying buyers is a more complex process for marketers. They need marketing analytics on how people buy so a company can begin the marketing process before those buyers even know they have an itch to scratch.

The Buying Center

Marketers need to start marketing to customers well before a potential buyer is ready to talk to a salesperson. The most effective way for the marketer to accomplish this is to utilize the concept of the “buying center.” The buying center is an acknowledgment that, in the complex sale, there are many people involved in the process of buying over a long period of time. The buying center also highlights the fact that different people have different roles, requirements, and desires as they relate to the solution being offered.

Let’s use a telecommunications company that needs to purchase software as an example. We can assume that the buying center would be made up of four different groups:

• Senior management
• Finance
• Marketing
• Network operations

Each group has very different requirements, and marketing broadly to all four groups would be a mistake. Instead, understanding what each group wants will help you craft your message for each:

• Management: wants to protect quarterly earnings
• Finance: aims to reduce costs with the solution, as well as find an affordable vendor
• Marketing: strives to roll out new services and increase average revenue per customer
• Network operations: wants to keep the network up and running at all times

The beauty of the buying center concept is that, once you begin to understand what drives the different groups within a buying center, you can create the right value propositions and messaging to address the needs of different groups within the buying center.

Developing Personas

Once you’ve identified the departments that make up the buying center, it’s time to develop different buyer personas. The persona is a representation of a buyer/user in the guise of a single individual. It enables anyone in the company to understand exactly who they’re dealing with, and it ensures that everyone in the company has a consistent view of buyers.

Start by researching these individuals, not only to understand what is important to them, but also to understand how they view other players in the competitive market, how they see you, and how they gather information to help them make decisions.

Let’s go back to that telecommunications company. For network operations, you might create a persona called Technical Ted. He’s the guy with lots of technical questions about the software. He cares less about price than Finance does, and is more focused on understanding whether your software will be easy to implement, as well as how much work will be required of him.

In Management, maybe you have Skittish Sal. She’s anything but tech-savvy, and she needs a lot of hand-holding, because she’d rather ask your salesperson questions than conduct research online. She wants to make sure she chooses the software solution that will help the company grow.

The Finance department might include Miserly Mike, who shops solely on price, and is impervious to all the great reasons your product is worth paying more for. He wants to know about your solution’s total cost of ownership (TCO). And for Marketing, the buyer persona might be Benefits Betty, who wants to know that your product will make her company look good and stand out.

Once the personas are developed and mapped onto the buying process, then you can start communicating effectively with each group within the buying center.

Tailoring the Message

Once you have identified members of the buying center and developed the buyer personas, you can emphasize different value propositions and deliver them through different vehicles to each persona.

• Find the Right Marketing Channels. Each buyer persona will have preferences for where he receives messages. That might be blogs, social media, news sites, magazines, et cetera. Make sure you’re using the appropriate marketing channels for the personas you’re trying to reach.
• Focus on the Benefits to That Person. Every member of the buying center wants to know what’s in it for him. Speak to that in your messaging, and know it will be different for each persona.
• Reinforce the Message. Make sure you’re delivering consistent messaging across all channels, and that you’re not confusing anyone who visits your site, social profile, or blog by trying to be all things to all personas. Pick one for each post, update, or page, and speak to that persona only.

Applying these steps to the buyer personas we created above, here’s what the messaging might look like for each:

• Technical Ted: build a client forum where he can learn how to maximize uptime and ensure his network is always up and running.
• Skittish Sal: send her videos that address frequently asked questions, as well as an email drip campaign that provides simple and useful content on how your solution will help the company move forward. Have a dedicated salesperson eager to help her.
• Miserly Mike: direct him to in-depth blog posts that talk about cost benefits of your software, as well as ROI. Provide him with sophisticated economic analysis tools.
• Benefits Betty: hold events where she can learn hands-on how to help her company differentiate itself in the competitive landscape using your products.

By wrapping your arms around the concept of the buying center, you can communicate value at the right time to the right decision makers, using unique value propositions that address their specific needs.

What does your buying center look like?

This article was originally published on MarketingProfs.

One of the negative stereotypes about sales professionals is that we’re all self-centered. Buyers fear getting taking advantage of by self-serving sellers who will resort to any and all means of trickery to line their own pockets. I’ve worked with thousands of sellers, and I’m convinced that most sellers don’t think that way. The vast […]

What you say when you first meet someone is so important — especially at work — because those opening words cast a first and lasting impression.

"You may remember the playground adage, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.' Unfortunately, this saying does not apply in the workplace, especially when you're meeting someone for the first time," says Darlene Price, president of Well Said, Inc., and author of "Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results." "Words, poorly and unconsciously chosen, can indeed hurt not only first impressions, but also your credibility, relationships, and opportunities for career advancement." 

Unfortunately, though, we've all experienced the foot-in-mouth syndrome — when you wish you could click the "undo" key on speech, Price says. And there are at least three reasons this happens.

First, she says, nerves and anxiety often cause a "litany of 'no-nos.'" "When we're nervous, we speak without thinking, we speak much faster, and we say more than is necessary."

Second, unawareness of proper social and business etiquette leads us to bring up "traditional taboo topics such as politics, religion, and sex."

And third is egocentrism ­— a preoccupation with one's own internal world. "This prompts some people to talk excessively and even brag about the subject that interests them most: themselves."

Here are nine things you should never say or talk about when you first meet someone in a professional setting:

1. Anything negative: "My job stinks." "I hate this company." "My boss is a jerk." 

Nothing tanks a first impression faster than negativity, Price says. "Even if these statements are true, they're best left unsaid in a social or business setting, especially when you're putting your best foot forward in a first-time meeting." If you have a genuine complaint about someone or something, communicate the issue with the person who can do something about it, such as human resources.

2. Anything about money: "What's your salary?" "How much do you make?" "What do you get paid?"

The amount of money a person earns is a very personal matter. "It's considered rude to ask, and unconscionable on a first encounter," she explains. "If you're really that curious, or it's important that you know, instead of committing this faux pas, do some research on sites like Payscale.com, Salary.com, or Glassdoor.com.

3. Anything political: "I'm a Republican/Democrat/Other." "Who did you vote for?" "What's your stance on abortion/immigration/capital punishment?"

As a general rule of etiquette, don't bring up politics — particularly around election time. "While you may feel strongly about your political party, candidate, or key issues, avoid campaigning at work," Price says. "If, however, the person or group with whom you're conversing launches into the topic, stick to the facts. Stay away from anything emotionally charged, controversial, too personal, opinionated, or judgmental." Instead, discuss the candidate's stance, what was said in the debate, and the latest headlines.

4. Anything about religion: "Do you believe in God?" "Are you religious?" "I'm a devout ____."

It may seem obvious to avoid this topic, but it happens. "Regardless of whether you're a person of faith or not, the first time you meet someone professionally is not the time to ask about their religious persuasion, unless perhaps you're a member of clergy," Price explains.

5. Anything about your sexual orientation: "I'm gay." "I'm straight." "I'm asexual."

"It doesn't matter, and it's no one's business other than yours and your partner's," Price says. "It's also likely to make other people uncomfortable, and may even border on sexual harassment." 

6. Anything about pregnancy: "When is your baby due?" "Congratulations! I see you're expecting." "Are you pregnant?"

If you imply a woman is pregnant when she isn't, there is no recovery. It's a colossal insult. "Besides, this observation (whether true or false) is too personal to mention for a first time meeting," Price says. "Unless the woman brings it up, stick with professional topics that relate to your industry or business function." 

7. Anything about their physical appearance: "I love your dress." "Who does your hair?" "Have you lost weight?" "You look so different in real life than you do in your LinkedIn photo."

"Avoid commenting on a person's personal appearance or belongings — even if it's positive — when you first meet them," she suggests. "It's too personal and out of place. Even after you get to know them, be careful what you say and why." 

Because of varying power relationships and pecking order in the workplace, it's often the safest bet to avoid physical comments altogether unless you're certain how they will be perceived. "Instead, give sincere work-related praise such as, 'I really enjoyed your presentation.' Or, 'Congratulations on exceeding your sales quota.' Or, 'Your project management skills are a huge asset to this team.'"

8. Anything about your health or hardships: "I'm getting a divorce." "I have chronic fatigue syndrome." "I had to file for bankruptcy."

If you're going through something difficult, it may be tempting to share with your new colleague or client — but it's entirely inappropriate.

"Avoid mentioning personal adversity when you first meet someone, or in general business discussions," Price suggests. "If you do, you may give your coworkers and boss reason to doubt your ability." Of course, serious health issues must be discussed with your employer. But your clients and colleagues don't need specific details about your health or hardships.

9. Anything about your expectations: "You're shorter/taller, thinner/larger, older/younger than I was expecting." "You look different than you sound over the phone." "I would never have guessed you were _______."

Don't begin a conversation by implying you're surprised, disappointed, or puzzled by that fact that the person did not meet up to your predisposed expectations.

10. Anything that will make you seem self-centered: "I…I…I..."

Self-absorption should be avoided in any first conversation. "Dorothy Sarnoff reminds us that, 'I is the smallest letter in the alphabet, so don't make it the largest word in your vocabulary.' No one is impressed when a person dominates a conversation or talks too much about him or herself, especially the first time you meet someone," Price says. To avoid an I-centric conversation, show sincere interest in others by asking appropriate questions and actively listening. "How did you get into accounting?" "What brought you to Atlanta?" "What do you believe are the key challenges in our industry?" 

"We all stand to improve our ability to craft a positive first impression, particularly in the words we say," Price explains. "If Emily Post is right, the most effective remedy is to focus on the best interests of the other person because, 'nearly all the faults of conversation are caused by a lack of consideration.'" 

SEE ALSO: 18 Things You Should Never Say During An Exit Interview

Join the conversation about this story »

The “customer experience” starts the minute your prospect engages with your company. With nearly 70% of the buying process being done digitally, this experience could very well begin with your organization’s digital presence, way before the point-of-sale.

Effective B2B sales organizations need to account for the increasingly connected buyer in the sales process. If not, they risk alienating a buyer before he/she even contacts a vendor for a possible solution.

This edition of the Sales Snapshot shares three studies that demonstrate how a customer’s experience can drive sales revenue and is an integral part of the sales process.

1. A Good Customer Experience Increases Retention and Future Sales

Having a customer service department and creating a great customer experience isn’t necessarily the same thing. More and more B2B buyers admit that the customer experience shapes their interactions with a brand. This means organizations need to understand the importance of customer experience and how it relates to every function within a company.

In transactional businesses, a great customer experience leads to increased frequency and spend per visit. In subscription based businesses, a good customer experience creates higher retention and offers more opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.

According to a study by Medallia published in the Harvard Business Review blog, customers of transactional based businesses spent 140% more per purchase after having a good experience with the company. In subscription businesses, customers who had the best experiences were 75% more likely to still be subscribed a year later.

Whether you’re a transactional business, or a subscription based business, building a good customer experience into your sales process is an important factor in increasing retention and future sales.

2. Social Engagement Drives More Leads and Closes More Deals

This study from CSO Insights shows that companies which adopted social engagement as a part of their sales and marketing strategies nearly doubled the amount of leads generated and deals closed, compared to companies that had no social engagement plan in place. When the customer experience starts digitally, it’s important your organization has a way to meet the buyer during the “digital” buying process.

Social engagement proved to be one of the most important uses of social media for B2B organizations, as it increases brand exposure, increases leads, builds sales relationships and increases close rates.

3. Blurring The Line Between Sales and Service Increases Revenues

Whether consciously or unconsciously, departmental silos exist within most organizations. Few silos are more common than the separation between sales and services.

But as outcome-based conversations become increasingly more important than feature-based conversations, it’s no surprise that service has begun to play a larger role in the connected buyer’s decision-making process.

A study from Aberdeen shows that customers and prospects who experience some interaction with service technicians during their decision making process are more likely to:

• make an immediate purchase
• make future purchases

Also important to note, is that organizations who had trained service technicians to cross-sell and upsell while servicing customer needs saw a dramatic increase in sales revenue. It also increased technician productivity as they could pass a customer on to a “paid technician” if the customer required extensive assistance.

For connected buyers, the gap between sales and service is quickly closing. It’s vital to the ongoing success of your sales organization that your sellers be able to offer value, and your service technicians are able to offer sellable solutions.

In a time where buyers are looking for true business value, you can’t afford not to provide that value from the very first point of interaction.

The demand generation manager’s balancing act: you want to collect as much information from your buyers as possible, but you don’t want to turn your buyers off when they see the number of fields on your form.

Not to mention the added complication that B2B buyers (myself included!) are liars.

I’m not kidding. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been confronted with a “phone number” field on a form and thought to myself, “Man, all I want to do is download a white paper (cue frustrated sigh)…Alright, Jenna, what numbers shall we use this time?” (I really should extend a public apology to whoever owns the numbers 555-5555 and 123-4567. Here are a few list-cleaning services that we recommend at Pardot to take care of form fiends like myself).

But I’m not the only one! According to data collected by MarketingSherpa a few years ago, B2B buyers are extremely hesitant to provide their personal information to companies. The following data was collected in 2008, but let’s be honest — how much more willing do you think people are to provide their personal information knowing full well the capabilities of today’s marketing and sales technologies? Probably less willing, if anything.

According to MarketingSherpa’s data, buyers are most likely to submit their name, email address, and industry when filling out forms. But asking for a phone number or any other custom question? Forget it. Only 29% of buyers will always answer custom questions honestly. The rest are trying to dream up clever ways to bypass your system.

So what’s the solution?

Here’s what we propose. Since shorter forms have higher conversion rates, and since buyers are reluctant to provide too much of their personal information (especially at one time), use a tool with progressive profiling capabilities to decrease form length and collect buyer data over time. Progressive profiling allows you to select which form fields appear based on the information you already have about a particular lead. For example, if a lead has already filled out a form on your website and submitted their industry and company name, use progressive profiling to ask for their job title instead. This makes it easier for you to collect new information about your buyers without putting them on their guard — plus, it also means shorter and less repetitive forms for your leads. It’s an easy win-win!

This is what progressive profiling might look like:

Form 1

First Name: Harry

Last Name: Potter

Email Address: harrypotter@gryffindoralumni.net

Industry: Magic

Form 2

Email Address: harrypotter@gryffindoralumni.net (You want to be sure to always ask for an email address so that whatever they are requesting can be delivered to their inbox)

Company Name: Ministry of Magic

Job Title: Auror

As you can see in the example above, you’ve collected a lot of information about Harry with just two form completes — and he was only confronted with four form field max at any time during the conversion process.

But what about the lying?

Good point. Your buyers aren’t necessarily going to start answering every question truthfully just because your forms are shorter. Here’s the best advice we can offer:

• Always be aware of the data reflected in the chart above. If you need to ask for a phone number, it’s highly likely that you’re going to get a fake string of numbers.
• Use data-supplementing services like Data.com to fill in the gaps for prospects who are already in your database. Here’s a blog post on how this works in conjunction with marketing automation.
• Regularly “spring clean” your database so that you’re getting rid of old and incorrect data. We recommend using these services.

What other techniques have you found to increase form conversions? Are there ways that you get around falsified data in forms? Let us know in the comments!

There’s no questioning the importance of thought leadership in content marketing. But if you’re still wondering if the amount you invest in blogs and research has been really attracting sales leads, the complete answer might not be in your CRM data.

Instead, try approaching thought leadership like a teacher would approach a classroom.

Look at the term carefully: ‘thought leadership.’ Isn’t it just a fancy way of saying teacher? Expert? The people who know their stuff and can tell you more about it?

So whenever you put out a piece of content or share your experience for marketing purposes, the results should be like that of a good teacher:

• You’ve challenged others to learn more – You could say you’re even nicer than a teacher. You don’t hand out quizzes or long assignments to get your readers learning. Instead, they simply wish to learn more about your industry. They want to know how to use your products properly. Your expertise impresses them and motivates to consult you.

• You used the carrot on the stick – Forget reward and punishment. Putting the carrot on the stick has been proven the way to go when you’re motivating people to learn. In the case of thought leadership, the stuff you teach must always be useful. Don’t expect results if you can’t even answer this question honestly.

• You understand the level you’re teaching in – This is often overlooked. You don’t necessarily need a two PhDs or five degrees just to to be a thought leader. You just need to know something that your prospects won’t easily figure out for themselves. That requires targeting. For example, a small and relatively young business is more likely to ask more questions than an experienced buyer. Guess which one is the lead in need of more nurturing?

• They figure things out on their own – Finally, a good prospect isn’t someone who’s going to just ask questions. You enable them to figure out the best way to use your products on their own. That leaves you with more time for new appointments from new leads.

If you don’t meet any of the following conditions, any negatives in your sales results would no longer come as a surprise. So before you start checking the numbers, first honestly evaluate if you’re really being a good teacher to the classroom that is your target market.

In the past decade, buyer behavior (especially in the B2B market) has shifted dramatically as more and more companies have started their search for your product or service online rather than through advertisements, tradeshows or in-person sales calls.

This shift in purchasing behavior doesn’t mean that offline channels (such as telemarketing) don’t matter, but it does mean that buyer expectations have changed, and your business needs to adapt its lead generation efforts and sales process accordingly – or be left in the dust of twenty-first century marketing and sales.

Here are four ways that your company needs to adjust its sales and lead generation efforts to fit new B2B buying behavior:

1. Set Proper Expectations

Today’s buyers wanted it yesterday, where “it” is your product or service. And while price and quick service are both important, B2B purchasers are ultimately looking for a long-term partnership over a merely transactional relationship.

What does this mean for your business? Early in the lead generation process, position your sales team as partnership-builders and not just commission-hungry sellers. Then, once you have a contracted engagement, set expectations of what the partnership entails and what it looks like moving forward. Once your engagement is underway, don’t forget to make necessary adjustments to keep your customers pleased and your relationship healthy.

2. Have Collateral On-Hand

With the Internet, today’s buyers are more empowered than ever to make a buying decision before they even pick up the phone (including when you call them). So, in order to attract these research-driven buyers, your website needs to have plenty of content and collateral to answer their questions and position your company as the partner of choice.

Buyers may lead themselves 80% down the buyer’s journey before they even contact you, so make sure your content is compelling and gets to the core of their needs. Prospects should be able to find out all the information they want about your business without the commitment of talking to a salesperson. Then, if your collateral has been effective at selling your product or service, you’ll be the first business they call.

3. Build Your Presence On Multiple Channels

While outbound lead generation is an important part of your marketing and sales mix, your company shouldn’t attempt to survive on just a single sales channel. We say attempt to survive, because without some sort of presence across multiple online and offline channels, your business won’t survive with today’s buyers.

Your prospects expect to interact with your company in a variety of ways, and when they’re ready to purchase from you, they might close the deal on any of your given channels. Thus, your business needs to diversify its lead generation and sales efforts into other channels like marketing automation software and social media – you need to give your buyers more options on how to research your offerings and business. Without multiple options, you will not be where your buyers are looking, and they will be hesitant about your legitimacy and ultimately search for other solution providers.

4. Position Yourself As The Expert

B2C buyers can be easily swayed on factors like price and brand competition. After all, their relationship with a business is more transactional. However, B2B buyers are much more picky, and one of their main stipulations is that your company demonstrates its expertise and leadership. An incompetent partner (or an inexperienced one) doesn’t get the final sign-off, only the expert does.

While generating content and website collateral (number two, above) go a long way in conveying thought leadership and expertise, it’s also important to harness the power of social proof. This means your company needs to actively seek, curate and nurture user-generated content and reviews that validate your product or solution as the industry’s best. Without solid, positive reviews, your lead generation efforts lack the muscle to close the deal.

Today’s buyers expect more from your business than ever before. But, if you put in the work to mirror your lead generation and sales process to their new buying behavior, your business won’t be hurting – it’ll be thriving.

Need more quick tips on how to improve your lead generation or sales process? Click below to download a tip sheet from Invenio Solutions™ and discover how the Science of Sales™ helps you generate warmer leads and optimize your sales process for maximum profitability.

It can be a compelling proposition to have external companies working for your success without the heavy investments necessary to build, equip, and train an internal sales organization – particularly if you need to reach a broad geographic area. However, there are some tough lessons I have learned over many channel relationships, some painful, some amusing, and some highly productive.

Lesson 1 –Channel partners are in it for themselves. Regardless of how many times you hear adages from your partners such as, “Consider us an extension of your sales force” or “We’re all in this together,” – when the going gets tough, the partner will make decisions in its own best interest. The channel will often prove harder to manage than your employees will because you do not have the power of the regular paycheck to control their behavior. In fact, your partners have their own sets of problems and their own payrolls to meet, and they will support you and your ideas only to the extent that you contribute to their monetary success.

Lesson 2 –Win-win scenarios are crucial. Since the primary motivation of your partners is the success of their companies, why would they cooperate in a program that was not in their best interests? I have seen companies create greed-driven scenarios – such as offering low margins, or charging high registration fees – in order to generate short-term revenue or higher profit margins for themselves. Quality partners have many options, so why would they accept anything other than reasonable entry fees and revenue splits? Do yourself a favor and design a program that will attract, instead of repel, desirable channel partners.

Lesson 3 – Quality is better than quantity. Too often, the primary focus is on partner acquisition. Regional reps (and their managers) get excited when they sign up new partners, figuring that every new partner is a steady source of future revenue. But the fact is, a small minority of channel partners will usually account for the vast majority of your deal flow so it is better to focus on fewer numbers of quality partners. I would rather have ten active and engaged partners instead of thirty who have signed the agreement but are not committed to the partnership.

Lesson 4 – The best partners are the ones who bring in business, with minimal effort on your part. You are probably saying “duh” as you read this lesson, but let me explain. There are those partners who require lots of time and attention from you and can’t seem to close business on their own. They want you to bring them prospects and then require you to help them close the deal. A better strategy is to find channel partners who have access to their own leads and prospects and who can bring you that magical substance known as incremental revenue.

Lesson 5 – Selling is easier than sustaining. There are many steps necessary to get new partners productive, and if you don’t follow these steps, many new and promising partnerships will wither on the vine. Some organizations have solved this problem by supplementing their partner sales reps with partner enablement specialists, whose job is to work closely with each new partner to do whatever it takes to bring in the first few deals. Once this happens, the partnership is more likely to bear fruit far into the future.

Lesson 6 – Training is crucial. With few exceptions, the companies that provide their channel partners with the greatest quantity and quality of training have the most successful partner programs. This is true for two primary reasons. First, the better they know the specifics of your offering and how to sell it, the more effective they will be at generating initial deals. Reason two is that a partner that commits its team to a training program is putting serious skin in the game. A sales rep who sits through training is not generating revenue, and this is a real investment on the part of the partner, who will want to see that investment rewarded with future revenue.

Lesson 7 – Say YES to your partners. Organizations spend enormous amounts of time and money putting together complex partner plans or partner handbooks, detailing every possible aspect of the relationship. Unfortunately, they then use these documents to say NO to partner requests, and justify this by claiming that the same rules apply to every partner, and no exceptions can be made. Of course you need to practice judgment – you don’t want to invest major resources in potential deals that have only a minor upside, but there are many ways you can help partners in a cost-effective way. This will gain you the reputation as a good company to do business with, and this reputation will attract great new partners to you.

I’m writing this post while attending the ExactTarget Connections 2014 event. I’ve learned a lot from listening to the sessions and speakers here.

As I listened to attendees and speakers, I frequently heard the same keywords, such as:

• Personalization
• Segmentation
• Customer focus
• Data
• Connection
• Authenticity

But something I wanted to hear more about was relevance.

People aren’t trying to open and click your emails. They’re looking for reasons to delete them.

A recent MarketingSherpa survey of email recipients found that 58% of those who stop reading, disengage or unsubscribe later cite “lack of relevance” as a key factor. This is hugely important because most marketers rely on email as their No. 1 lead-nurturing tactic.

For example, I receive emails often from companies that claim to “know” me — in some cases I’m their customer — but their emails certainly don’t show it. Their creative and graphics-laden emails don’t speak to my concerns or motivations at all, and each non-relevant message I receive is basically programming me to ignore or delete future messages from them. I’m sure that’s not their intent, but these companies are missing the key idea of relevance.

So, how do we better align align our email and nurturing messages with what is relevant to our audience?

 

Idea #1: Build relevant messages based on problems that matter to your customer

It is critical to know what customers want in order to serve them better. Do you know what motivates and matters to your customers? If not, ask them. We can spend more time guessing wrong, or we can just ask our future customers what matters to them. You can do this in person, via phone, events and more.

Read more on how to put your customers first in lead generation.

 

Idea #2: Understand where your prospect is in the buying cycle

Be sure to provide different kinds of information to your prospect based on what point they are in the buying process.

If you have a complex sale, the best way I know how to do this is by combining a human touch with your sales pitch to build relationships with your lead-nurturing message. Also, you can tell a lot based on the content people are engaging. If they are at an early stage lead and they are just starting to get familiar with the business issues you solve, don’t send them the same copy that you would send someone who is on the verge of making a decision.

Read more on Email Marketing: 3 lead nurture paths you should automate.

 

Idea #3: Create message based on industry vertical or company size (Hint: Segmentation)

Industry information will most likely tell what pains your prospects are experiencing. At the same time, company size will give you a hint as to the resources they have available to tackle these challenges. Be sure to add this information to your marketing data often so that you can easily define your target segments based on these indicators.

 

Idea #4: Map content and message based on role or job function personas

Effective lead nurturing starts with listening to customers to truly understand them, and then it requires identifying the personas of your audience.

What’s their job function? What part to they play in the buying process (influencer, decision maker, information gather)?

For example, based on my experience, a decision maker is heavily involved at the very start and the very end of the B2B buying process but leaves the middle of the process up to the influencers.

You’ll need to investigate who gets involved at which point in the buying process so that you can segment your messaging. What content do they need? What are the problems their facing?

Read more about effective content marketing here: Content Marketing: 4 stages to mapping your content strategy.

 

Idea #5: Leverage trigger events to your advantage

Do you know why favorable trigger events matter? Trigger events are a great way to change the physics of the buying process and yet another way that we marketers can go beyond the lead.

Trigger events matter for two key reasons. First, they may indicate that the status quo in an organization is changing, and secondly, they can contribute to the development of timely and relevant sales and marketing messaging.

Read more on The Physics of Trigger Events for Lead Generation to get a look at a trigger event mind map. It will show you some of the possible trigger events you can track.

 

Idea #6: Test your messaging

This is the hardest part to get right.

Each audience responds differently to different styles. That’s why you should test, test, test.

Try different subject lines (this is my favorite relevancy booster — I find that the less marketing hype used, the better). Try different message copy and calls to action.

The response to your A/B tests will help you understand which style is most relevant and effective with your audience. Try different mediums (don’t only rely on email nurturing).

Developing lead-nurturing tracks is extremely useful because you can leverage what you’ve learned to reuse that content again and again.

Read how to create more effective content marketing that your audience will actually be interested in reading here: Content Marketing: Consulting firm nets 388% more leads with 4-step strategy.

 

Photo Attribution: Exact Target Blog

 

You might also like

Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content [More from the blogs]

Digital Marketing: Be relevant, data-driven and precise [More from the blogs]

New Chart: Top tactics organizations use to improve email relevancy [MarketingSherpa chart]

Email Relevance: 8 tactics for leveraging timing, segmentation and content [MarketingSherpa how-to article]

Tom Clancy died last month ,and like any other fan of techno political military thriller novels I was heartbroken.

The man practically invented the sub-genre.

But that’s not why I am invoking Clancy.

My reasons are a little less literary.

Clancy: the consummate connector of dots

Anyone who has read Clancy will be struck by how detailed his descriptions were especially when it came to weapon systems.

When the “The Hunt for Red October” was published in 1984 authorities were spooked when they found out that Clancy was bang on when he wrote that Soviet submarines spent only 15 percent of their time out at sea. Other classified information that was scarily accurate included the number of SS-N-20 Seahawk missiles a Soviet sub carried.

Clancy found out about this when the then Navy Secretary cornered him at a White House reception and demanded the name of the officer who cleared his access to that info. Clancy denied that he had an inside source and replied that everything in the book was based on publicly available journals and manuals intended for military officers and engineers.

All he did was read them extensively, connect the dots and write a novel could have gotten him arrested for leaking national secrets.

Google Hummingbird, (Not Provided) and content marketing

If Clancy had written a book on his research methodology digital marketers would be thumbing and flipping through it right about now.

On Sept 26, 2013 during an event to mark the company’s 15th birthday Google announced that it was running a new search algorithm in the background codenamed Hummingbird. There were some other major announcements too which will change the way SEO works.

In case you are still not clear on what Hummingbird is all about Danny Sullivan has written a comprehensive FAQ about it. Go read it, I will wait.

One of the major announcements is that Google will completely stop providing organic keyword data by the end of the year. Right now, according to (Not Provided) Count, 81% of keywords are hidden.

For digital marketers and search professionals long used to organic keywords as a jumping off point for site optimization this is like trying to land a crippled jet on the rain lashed deck of a heaving aircraft carrier.

Another change introduced in Hummingbird is that the algorithm pays more attention to the meaning of the page rather than the presence of specific words while determining the rank. This is driven by the rise of voice search like Siri and Google Now where queries are in the form of natural language.

So how should content marketers deal with these changes? Here are a few ideas

1. Use tools and good old fashioned detective work to get traffic intelligence

Even though Google has stopped passing referrer data to analytics tools you can still use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, internal search for your website, Google Adwords (in case you are running PPC campaigns), Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest for keyword discovery and keyword intelligence.

You can use the free Not Provided Toolkit for Google Analytics to see

• Current percentage of not provided traffic
• Breakdown of not provided traffic by browser, device etc. with shiny graphs and charts
• Landing page information for not provided traffic
• Any Google Analytics reports for only not provided traffic
• Any Google Analytics reports for only organic keyword traffic
• Organic search data from non Google search engines

Also, because branded search traffic is more valuable than people who land up on your site because of a random query here is a hack to track branded search traffic which is otherwise obfuscated by (not provided).

See what I meant about B2B marketers channeling Clancy?

2. Create authoritative content, aka “In-depth articles”

I know, I know, authoritative content is starting to sound like “synergy”, “innovation” or “thought leadership”. But I am not flinging buzzwords here.

According to Google 10% of people want detailed information about a topic when they key in a search term on a broad topic. This is why Google has now introduced a new section called In-depth articles on some search terms. In the SERPs it looks like this

Because this feature is in the early days it’s not available across all locations even for the same keyword. But even then, creating cornerstone content is always a winning strategy.

Check out these guidelines from Google on how to best rank for this genre of content.

3. Focus on answering questions

Good content marketing has always been about providing information and insights that can help your prospects. With Hummingbird you don’t have an option anymore.

If you have already not done get busy finding out what questions your prospects and customers are asking about your solutions. Pull in data from sources like support tickets, customer surveys, sales queries, LinkedIn, Twitter, blog comments, mails, telephone queries and customer complaints.

Reorganize them, create FAQs, write blog posts, put up demo videos, compile these questions into buying guides and reuse that content in various formats like case studies or whitepapers to give yourself maximum online exposure.

4. Cozy up with Google Knowledge Graph

Google Knowledge Graph lies at the heart of Google providing a more relevant and complete answer to what you are looking. This video explains what it’s all about.

The updated Google Knowledge Graph

Here is one aspect of the Google Knowledge Graph in action. This feature is called Rich Snippets

So how can B2B content marketers play nice with Google Knowledge Graph to get more visibility in searches?

Have a blog with high quality content, for one. As this screen grab show, blog posts are highlighted disproportionately over other pages in search results. A visitor’s entry page might be your latest post so for the love of baby Jesus don’t phone your posts in.

You should also have a Google+ page for your brand and implement both rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” to connect websites and content creators with the respective Google+ pages and profiles.

5. Think conversions, not rankings

For a long time ranking has been one of the biggest badges of honor in digital marketing. You had keywords and your job was to rank for the first page of Google search, if not for position #1 or #2.

That has to change now. Ranking will still be a metric but the focus will have to move to getting high quality traffic to specific pages in the short term and performance based metrics like leads and sales in the long term .

Optimize your website and landing pages, keep your buyer personas updated, plug leakages in your sales funnel and audit and map your content to different stages in the buying process.

All this should actually make your job as a content marketer simpler. You won’t have to obsess and track daily or weekly movements of your keywords. You won’t have to look over your shoulder constantly and wonder what esoteric SEO plays your competition is up to. You won’t have to pull off shady shenanigans that could get your site banned from search results.

Best of all, the impact of your work will be reflected beyond the obvious like improvements in website user experience or email click through rates into business oriented metrics like sales and profits.

6. Implement semantic markup

Hummingbird has not changed the fundamentals of SEO i.e., making it easier for people and for search engines to retrieve information from your site. It has merely placed more emphasis on new elements like schema.org’s article markup.

That link is highly technical but in layperson’s terms, article markup basically tells Google what a number, word or phrase means. It helps Google and other search engines pull out information about ratings, event dates, sports stats, testimonials, recipes, videos and content creators and display them in the SERPs itself. This is why search results on Google look like this

Search results with rich data like this will drive more click throughs than the plain vanilla search results. Check out this detailed resource from Google on how to create these rich snippets.

7. Focus on mobile

I don’t care what you are selling but if you don’t pay attention to mobile you have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting traffic from Google especially in highly competitive markets.

In fact, if I were playing a shrink looking for subconscious cues about Google’s love of mobile I would link you to the blog post announcing the changes in Google search: they used the mobile view to show how the new features like the Rich Snippets.

So make your website mobile friendly and customize your emails for mobile users .Develop a content strategy that works both for desktop and mobile.

Bringing it all together

This all seems to be overwhelming and a lot will change as Google keeps on adding new features and axing older ones. Without keywords your workflow will also change and some aspects of content creation and marketing will be more challenging.

But as I have mentioned earlier, the basics around B2B content marketing and SEO won’t change. People will always want to know how to do their job better and avoid obstacles and landmines at work.

If you are selling a solution that has been demonstrated to help your prospects and customers do either or both create non salesy content about it in a way that’s relevant to them.

And above all, don’t forget stories. Clancy became famous spinning believable yarns around submarines and sonars- there is no reason why you can’t tell tales about CRM, CAD or cranes.

We see it all the time. A great sales candidate meets with a prospective employer who rejects the candidate and elects to hire someone else. Oftentimes the reasons are legitimate – such as poor cultural fit – but many times, there are no logical reasons for the decision not to consider the candidate who would in all likelihood otherwise be a strong producer.

When reliable sales talent is in such high demand because it is so important to the success of any business, excluding great sales candidates from the hiring process for the wrong reasons is a real issue. There are several reasons why this happens:

Top Performing Sales People Are Different – If you spend any time with sales people who consistently perform at or above targets, you will quickly see they are different than the average sales person. The over-achievers possess higher drive and ambition, are more competitive, and exude confidence. While these are the traits that lead to sales success, they can be misinterpreted as liabilities, as Joseph Skursky noted in his post, Sales Thoroughbreds: The Key to Winning New Business, “the very nature and intensity of a hunter’s personality frequently turns off some recruiters and people in HR.”

Top Sales Talent Is Rare – As Colleen Francis points out in her book, Nonstop Sales Boom, only 20% of reps consistently hit well above their targets. Since the vast majority of applicants and the majority of sales people employed are average or below average sales people (see John Kearny’s post, Is Your Talent Hurting Your Sales Initiatives?), hiring managers are often not conditioned to spot them and instead are looking for more of what they are used to – average sales people.

High Producing Sales People Are Employed – Great sales candidates are not sitting at home waiting for a call from a new employer. Sales people who consistently at or above target are busy producing sales for another employer. And being paid well to do so. Any employer trying to recruit one of these may find that they may not be as enthusiastic as another unemployed candidate who desperate for a job; any job. Often enthusiasm is mistaken for ability and a hiring manager focuses on the sales person they can easily hire rather than the sales person that will produce the desired sales results.

Broken Hiring Processes – In many companies, the hiring process is disjointed. Multiple people are involved in the hiring decision without clear and shared hiring criteria. This leads to confusion about the traits the employer is seeking and some great candidates can get nixed because someone misunderstands the hiring needs. Furthermore, it is often the case that people involved in the interview and hiring process have no formal training on how to interview or select candidates (in case you need it, here are some tips on how to interview sales candidates). As sales expert Dave Stein points out, “a key to successful hiring is objectivity.  Hiring salespeople on gut feel, the old-fashioned way, doesn’t work.”

It takes a lot of hard work and effort to attract and hire great sales people. High producing sales organizations know that the odds of attracting sales talent is greatly increased when top performing sales people are immediately recognized and given the attention they deserve.

To your success!

References:

Sales Thoroughbreds: The Key to Winning New Business – Joseph Skursky

Is Your Talent Hurting Your Sales Initiatives? – John Kearny

Nonstop Sales Boom – Colleen Francis

Hiring The Right Sales People: Try This – Dave Stein

The post Why Great Sales Candidates Get Rejected appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting | Sales Recruiter.

It seems like ever since last December, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said his company was working on drone prototypes that could one day deliver packages to doorsteps, the public has been imagining a world where we coexist with drones buzzing overhead.

Google has similar plans for drones, and now DHL has announced it will begin delivering medical supplies using drones in Germany.

There's a chance these types of deliveries will remain highly specialized, of course, and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been cracking down on the still largely unregulated technology. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of marketers and innovators out there thinking of new ways to use drones.

Over the past year, small businesses and major corporations alike have been using the machines to advertise products. 

In January, Minneapolis-based Lakemaid Beer released an ad showing off a real-life service it created to ship beer to ice fishers on Minnesota's Lake Waconia.

Lakemaid's drone delivery service allowed customers to call in their orders to a grocery store without having to leave the trailers that they had set up for fishing.

The stunt shows both the appeal and the risk of using drones for advertising in the US, where FAA regulations prohibit their use for commercial purposes. Officials saw Lakemaid's video online and promptly told the brand to cease making drone deliveries.

Four months later, Coca-Cola put its own twist on this strategy in an ad outside the domain of the FAA.

The soda behemoth teamed up with Singapore Kindness Movement, a nonprofit backed by the country's prime minister, to deliver care packages to several of the nation's notoriously mistreated migrant construction workers.

The care packages included photos of Singapore citizens holding signs thanking the laborers for building their city and, of course, cans of Coca-Cola. The ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Singapore documented the deliveries for an ad distributed online.

Of course delivery stunts aren't the only way brands have been using drones.

In a particularly creative move in 2013, Paramount Pictures promoted its "Star Trek Into Darkness" film by flying a group of drones over the River Thames in London.

Lighted against the night sky, the glowing drones formed the shape of the Star Trek logo.

And in Russia, the noodle shop chain Wokker used drones to carry small fliers past the windows of Moscow office buildings, promoting the shop's lunch specials just as workers were getting ready to eat. Hungry Boys, the advertising agency that created the campaign, says it increased sales by 40%.

One 19-year-old entrepreneur is dedicated to making drone ads commonplace. GauravJit "Raj" Singh, who is based in Philadelphia, started his drone advertising company DroneCast in April. Singh tells us an angel investor recently put $1 million into the company, on top of $55,000 he invested earlier this year.

DroneCast provides clients with drones that can fly banners to promote an event or product. They can either be manually operated by trained employees or programmed for a flight path. The company is open to customized services as well, such as when it used drones at the BeachGlow concert in New Jersey this past summer to film the crowd and drop glow sticks and T-shirts.

Singh tells us that his company has averaged 10 customers per month, and that he expects to bring in $1.5 million in revenue by the end of this year.

He's convinced that after the FAA begins to fully regulate drones, companies will be more willing to advertise using them, and that in about two years drone advertising will peak.

Neal Burns, an advertising professor at the University of Texas, Austin, thinks drone advertising could become more popular but not beyond a niche market, since it's so high risk. All it takes is for one accident — where a drone failure leads to an injury — to kill the entire industry, he says.

While drone advertising is still in its early stages, Burns sees potential in it becoming effective for businesses targeting specific local markets. It also provides a chance to experiment with new campaigns without spending a large amount of money.

Singh tells us that he and his team have been measuring metrics comparing the effectiveness of drone promotions versus traditional street team outreach for their clients, and the numbers have been reassuring. For example, he says the Inbox app's $27,000 drone promotion had a $7 cost-per-download compared to a previous ad campaign of theirs that resulted in a $15 cost-per-download.

Is drone advertising the way of the future?

"I really do believe that in a couple years you'll see them commonly flying around the street," Singh says.

SEE ALSO: Everyone Needs To Stop Worrying About 'Peeping Drones' — Here's Why

Join the conversation about this story »

Have you ever had one of those awful emails out of the blue, usually from a company offering SEO or website services, where they just pitch at you and don’t seem to have paid the slightest attention to your website or business?

That’s bad cold emailing at work. No better than spamming.

On the other hand have you had a very targeted, charming email from someone you don’t know where the writer has done their homework and opens up a useful conversation with you that leads to something mutually beneficial?

That’s good cold emailing.

I’ve had much more of the former than the latter. But when cold emailing is done well it can greatly benefit both sender and receiver.

In fact, when you’re trying to get work with larger organisations where executives don’t go out to events and you don’t have any connections to get referrals from, a highly-targeted, well-researched short email can be your best way of making an initial connection.

In this interview I speak to the UK’s leading expert on cold emailing done right, Peter O’Donoghue and find out from him how to make cold emailing work.

It’s my biggest interview to date – 100 minutes in total so you might want to listen in a few chunks – and Peter doesn’t hold back. He reveals how to find the right people to email, the different types of email to send in different circumstances, and how to write your emails to maximise your chance of getting a response.

He also reveals why a lot of the tips on cold emailing you’ll see on the web only work in very specific circumstances – and how to find the right approach for your situation.

Peter’s also laid out the details of his cold email system in a detailed report along with a set of email templates you can use. You can grab them here:

>> Peter O’Donoghue’s Cold Email System and Templates

The post Cold Emailing to Generate Leads and Win Clients appeared first on Get More Clients: Proven Strategies to Attract and Win Clients.

Last week during a client’s sales meeting we got into a discussion regarding pipeline values, needless to say the number of prospects and dollar values were insufficient to achieve the overall corporate revenue objectives. Several of the salespeople blamed marketing for not generating enough quality leads (ever hear that before?) and as the discussion of “territory development” evolved several of the salespeople simply didn’t feel it was their responsibility to prospect because of the futility of cold calling/phone calling and event marketing.

In many organizations marketing is expected to develop leads via a well messaged nurturing campaign with a quality data base with an objective to set-up the salesperson with a highly qualified opportunity. In this format there maybe a series of marketing campaigns, tele-sales people and a well-designed CRM reporting system. In other organizations there is limited marketing of this nature with an expectation that sales will build relationships that lead to additional business opportunities. The question is, as a sales manager how should you structure your sales team’s expectations around prospecting?

First, it depends. What is your sales process? Are you selling large accounts with a complex sales cycle or are you more transactional with short sales cycles selling to small business? Are you territory based or open territories? Your business type will alter what works.

Second, it is my belief that salespeople need to prospect continually, the real question is how.

I have listed below a few ideas with a brief description simply because of space, if you have questions on the specifics just ask!

• Networking: every salesperson should attend one event a month, this is not negotiable
• Circles of Influence: develop a list of individuals who can influence your sales opportunities or they can refer business to you. Depending upon your business these could CPA’s, Commercial Real Estate brokers, contractors, architects, etc. Each of these individuals need to be contacted at least once a quarter
• 20/20 plan: each salesperson sends two (2) distinct direct mail pieces referring to your products/services to 20 suspects; 20 pieces one week, 20 the next week. The third week the salesperson calls the 20 suspects. This process is repeated each week.
• Thought Leadership events: schedule one breakfast event a month with a topic based upon thought leadership marketing. This event is driven by marketing, but the salesperson is responsible to call/invite individuals to the meeting. This gives the salesperson a reason and message to communicate to their prospects/suspects.
• Referral: the salesperson should ask their customers for referrals twice a year
• Bus-ecosystem: each salesperson should develop relationships with 3-5 other salespeople who sell non-competitive, but related products/services into common marketplace.
• Who you know list: each salesperson should create a list of everyone they know, friends, business associates, professionals. This is a good sales meeting idea to come up with “titles” of individuals your sales team might know. Then make sure they know what you do and what problems you solve using a personal letter.
• Review calendars: Good thing for this time of year to; review your calendars for the past 12 months, you might find someone you had forgotten to follow up on.

That’s a good starter list, what prospecting ideas are you using-that are working? Care to share? Let’s build up a comprehensive list so that everyone can finish the year strong and be positions to make 2015 your best year ever.

There are many theories out there as to why marketing and sales don’t always get along. If we’re being honest, we know there is generally a natural divide between the two groups in an organization. Since being honest is still the best policy, we should likely say this right out loud and get on with developing some strategies to minimize this corrosive divide.

In my role as President of NuGrowth Digital, it’s my job to make sure our clients have scalable sales and marketing organizations that drive high-quality results. And one of the things I’ve often found to be true is that too many businesses spend too much time trying to deal with the symptoms of this divide, instead of the underlying causes. Leaders spend hours or days or months managing squabbles or fighting over numbers. Marketers end up caving in to salespeople’s assertions that “these leads aren’t any good.” And everyone ends up halfheartedly agreeing with marketing that sales doesn’t give these leads the attention they deserve.

I’ve also found that the things we do to manage these symptoms often kill productivity. They divide a team. They appease people, but don’t really move the needle. So … let’s get on with moving the needle.

Here are six strategies we’ve found that can help unify sales and marketing teams and drive results.

1. Collaborate early and often

It’s up to the leadership team to create an organization that encourages and promotes collaboration between the sales and marketing organizations very early in the process.

This is even more important in today’s era of content marketing, as the pieces marketing produces must be relevant and have impact on the industry to really be effective. So, hitting the mark on your ideation is critical. Funny thing is, ideation in a vacuum often produces very sterile results. You need to get together, pull out the details from all levels of the prospect funnel, and get good ideas on the board.

Both sales and marketing have views of this. Bringing these teams together to work on the content strategy is imperative to hitting the mark with your content.

2. Systematize feedback loops

Once a campaign is in the market, it is important to know the impact. This comes from both quantitative and qualitative research into the results. So, you need to set up systems to capture both.

Your CRM should be standardized to capture feedback on campaigns. Standardized drop-down fields are nice to haves on this. They make it easy for a sales rep to point, click, and offer up that feedback. It’s also nice to be able to run general reports that show how campaigns are delivering. This is really the quantitative data.

You should also gather qualitative feedback. Sales and marketing should engage in qualitative campaign reviews. Specific examples should be uncovered. Stories should be told. Successes should be highlighted. Failures should be discussed.

3. It’s a science … treat it like one

It’s often been said that sales and marketing are part art and part science. Today, the science part has taken a much bigger role, especially when we consider the onslaught of mountains of data we’re now able to gather. So we have to steal a few fundamentals from the science playbook to really make sense of this data.

The bullet points are simple, but the practice is a bit harder:

• Develop solid hypotheses around the content that will make a difference
• Define lead stages and anything else you intend to measure. Clarify those definitions – don’t just use a short-hand term like sales- Qualified lead (SQL) – write down a definition and make sure sales and marketing agree on it.
• Agree which conversions you want to measure
• Outline a process and expected results
• Engage in a study of those results
• Look at both qualitative and quantitative results
• Conclude, adjust hypotheses, and run the next experiment!

4. Train, train, and train some more

The days of operating in a silo are gone. Google has made us all experts, knowledgeable with a simple search. (And amateur cooks become chefs by watching a 24 hour “Chopped” marathon on the Food Network). It’s time to embrace and accept it. Knowledge is power, and much more powerful when shared.

So get the team together and train continuously. Train on vocabulary. Train on process. Train on messaging. Train on metrics.

Marketing should understand what an introductory sales call looks and sounds like. Sales should know how social media campaigns work. Marketing should understand what it takes to close a deal, including the actual personalities, disasters, saves, and stories involved. Sales should know how marketing profiles contacts, applies scores, and lays out a nurturing program

I’m not saying have they need to give up their day jobs, but cross training is effective and very conducive to a smoother and more efficient process.

5. Know the numbers … and agree on their value

There are all sorts of numbers out there that can be used to measure progress. So many, in fact, that Insight Venture Partners has put out a periodic table of B2B digital marketing metrics.

It’s a great resource that should definitely be used. However, it is critical to remember, as Mark Twain once put it, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”

The key part about the numbers is to make sure they represent the facts. Take time to agree upon the key statistics that you will be tracking as a business. Focus on why they are important to your progress. Then measure the heck out of them and improve!

(By the way, this guy, who happens to be my uncle, is the best Mark Twain I’ve ever seen. The resemblance is uncanny.)

6. Define and celebrate successes collectively

A critical element of any team is how you define and celebrate success. Don’t divide here … unite ! Marketing is not responsible for closing sales, but they sure are responsible for teeing them up at a good rate. Sales is not responsible for driving leads, but they sure are responsible for closing them.

You should definitely define small wins and leading indicators for the teams and measure these. Marketing qualified lead (MQL) numbers, new opportunities found, new meetings set, ratio of MQLs to SRLs, and more.

However, for the big picture, take a risk. Define success as a revenue number. Then you can lead the way, and help the teams operate as one.

Get sales and marketing on the same team. Download this toolkit to find out how to evaluate your current sales and marketing processes, establish common metrics, create buyer profiles, and make sure your sales and marketing teams are driving toward the same goals across channels.

*This post first ran in the ANNUITAS blog on March 27, 2014. As we go into event season-it’s good to remember that building a Demand Generation Strategy isn’t easy. Attend workshops, sessions and learn from industry experts and peers and keep in mind this is a complex process that won’t be solved immediately. It is a process to be learned, implemented and continuously optimized.

In reading many of the blogs and listening to some of the webinars and speeches that have been given about Demand Generation one would think that the path to Demand Generation is just a few simple steps away.  I once heard at a conference one of the speakers tell a room full of marketers “all you need is the desire to want to make it better, and you will.” Really?

Is success in today’s ever changing B2B buying environment really just a matter of want to?  Is success on impacting pipeline and generating demand really just a few simple steps away?  Listening to some of the noise that is out there, it seems Demand Generation success can be bought via an infomercial where if you buy now, you will get an extra Shamwow® with your order.

Despite the information that is being peddled by some, all indications would say that what marketers are facing today is a pretty tough climb.  Take a look at the following:

According to the Duke Fuqua School of Business:

• Only 35.7% of CMOs feel that they can prove the short-term impact of marketing spend quantitatively
• Even fewer 28.6% – can prove the long-term impact on a quantitative basis

According to IBM:

• 52% of CMOs state they are unprepared for the expected level of complexity over the next five years

According to Sirius Decisions:

• 75% of marketing automation adopters claim they’re not receiving full value from it
• Less than 10% of organizations are deploying marketing automation tools to address programs later in the buying cycle
• 62% of marketing automation owners state that the use of technology did not equate to an increase in sales

It is time to come to grips with reality and understand that given the ever-increasing complexity of B2B buyers and the pressures on B2B marketing and sales people, that success will not be achieved in a 7-Step Get Well Plan or a series of half-day workshops.  Success in today’s environment needs a purposeful and balanced approach to organizational transformation.

This kind of needed transformation starts with a “bottoms up approach” that drives effectual change – See Figure 1.  The change begins with an entry point or a pilot program focus on a line of business or specific audience segment.  Defining that audience – understanding the various roles involved in the buying process, the market conditions, their path through the buying process and content consumption patterns – this is just the beginning.  Once you have documented and have these buyer insights, the real work begins:

–          Developing the Content Marketing Architecture that aligns to each step in the buyer’s journey.  This includes developing content that can both educate and qualify

–          Implementing a Lead Management Framework to ensure leads are qualified and routed appropriately

–          Organizing marketing and sales in a way that aligns to the buyers purchase path rather than the siloed approach that exists today in many environments

–          Establishing technology and data governance that will enable the strategy – versus expecting the technology to be the tip of the spear in driving change

–          Establishing KPIs for program measurement and using that analysis to optimize the program

Figure 1:  ANNUITAS Demand Process Architecture

This is the beginning of change, as the results of this program will greatly inform of the other organizational and strategic changes that need to occur.  However, this will supply a methodology and process, which can then be replicated across the business to help drive further change and approaches to Demand Generation.

The world of B2B marketing is hard enough, let’s not make it any harder by sugar-coating it and stating that Demand Generation success can be found by following a step-by-step plan.  This kind of transformation is a process that will have success along the way, but does take time, a new approach and a new way of thinking.

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidlago is CEO and Principal, ANNUITAS

 

According to HubSpot’s inbound methodology, the best way to turn strangers into customers and customers into promoters of your business is by creating quality content. When considering your content marketing strategy, nothing is more important than delivering the right content to your target audience at the right time. A good starting point is to identify the different stages of your customer’s buying process – whether it is long or short – and then use their process to directly influence yours, and how you communicate with prospects and leads.

What is the customer buying process?

In simplest terms, the customer buying process describes the process your customer goes through before they buy your product. Inbound marketing plays a major role in attracting your target customers and then moving them along in the decision-making process. As marketers, it is our goal to simplify and streamline the decision making process as much as possible.

The buying process consists of four marketing actions: attract, convert, close, and delight. To accomplish each action, there are many content marketing tools you can use to simplify your customer’s buying process:

Attract

The initial step to attracting the right customers is allowing them to find your company and product on the internet in the first place.

1. Keywords – Determine what keywords your target customer is actually searching for and tailor your keyword strategy accordingly so you can show up in relevant search results on Google and social media. The use of accurate keywords begins the process of attracting strangers as website visitors.

2. Blogging – Create educational blog posts around the keyword(s) you’re trying to target. At this stage, website visitors are looking for informational content about your company and product – so give it to them willingly and answer their questions in your posts. Write about goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information shared among all of your buyer personas.

Convert

Once you get visitors on your site, the next step is to gather their contact information so you can convert them into leads and market to them.

3. Calls-to-Action (CTA) – Encourage visitors to keep moving throughout your site so they aren’t stagnant after reading a blog post and decide to leave. Place CTA buttons not only on your blog posts, but also on landing pages and front and center on your homepage. Advertise relevant premium content like e-books and whitepapers or offer a free consultation. Whichever content option is the best fit for your target customer during their lifecycle stage, be sure to use actionable language(!)

4. Landing Pages – Once you attract your target customer to a landing page after clicking on your enticing CTA button, there are a few tactics to ease your target customer’s decision about giving you their information:

• Optimize form fields – only ask for relevant/appropriate information & keep it short
• Explain the value offer – use bullet points
• Place content above the fold – keep it front & center
• Remove menu navigation & links – don’t distract target customer
• Include an image – make sure it’s relevant
• Redirect to thank you page – potential opportunity to provide an additional offer… “Request a Consultation” perhaps?

Close

Finally, it’s time to convert your leads into customers. Your leads may not be ready to buy your product after downloading a single e-book or subscribing to your blog, and rightfully so. Try the following content marketing tool to take your marketing to the next level and effectively accomplish a conversion:

5. Lead Nurturing Emails – Send a series of emails on useful, relevant content relating to the content offer your lead downloaded or inquired about. Some examples include: recommending an e-book to download, explaining benefits of your product vs. competitor(s), or offering a free trial. The goal is to build trust and help a lead become more ready to buy.

Delight

Once your leads become customers, don’t forget about them. After all, existing customers can give referrals of your business and actually promote your product if they dig it. Keep existing customers engaged by incorporating the following tools into your strategy:

6. Smart Call-To-Action (CTA) – These CTA’s change depending on the website visitor’s lifecycle stage. For instance, if an existing customer comes to your website and has already downloaded the case study promoted on your homepage, it will feature a different offer they haven’t seen before. This will keep them engaged and feeling like you always have something new to offer their needs.

7. Social Media – Say it with me… Customer service! Here are some great ideas to please existing customers:

• Create a hashtag that customers can identify your brand with
• Answer customer service related questions
• Make a Pinterest board showcasing all of the ways your customers can use your product
• Advertise a Facebook contest encouraging customers to share their experience/photos/ideas in exchange for a prize

As you can see, old outbound marketing methods are making an exit and smarter marketing methods, like content marketing, are helping simplify the customer’s decision-making process. Writing content for your customer’s buying process requires an investment of your time to strategize, test, and report on, but this investment will pay dividends.

What part of the customer’s buying process can you improve for your marketing strategy – attract, convert, close, delight? 

Answering any question about what’s next in B2B marketing must involve the increasing attention on buyers as people vs. simply “business to business”. The human element of business marketing has attracted a lot of play in the B2B marketing conversation and rightly so.

While there are many changes and trends to consider to stay ahead in the B2B marketing game (paid, earned, owned and shared media for example) the thing that unites departments, tactics and technologies is common ground and common goals. By viewing B2B marketing from the buyer’s perspective, whether it’s an individual or committee, business marketers can start to break free of the mechanical and start creating more meaningful marketing experiences for buyers.

To drill down further on this topic, I’ve connected with 3 top B2B Marketers from ExactTarget, Xerox and The Conversion Scientist to capture their insights on a more customer focused view of B2B marketing.

CMO: Chief Officer of the User Journey

Joel Book @joelbook
Director of eMarketing Education at Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud

One of the biggest trends in B2B Marketing is the rapidly expanding technology budget for the CMO. Gartner predicts that, by 2017, the CMO will have a larger IT budget than the CIO.

“NextGen CRM” is all about personalizing and optimizing the B2B buyer’s product research, buying and usage journeys.

As Marketing, Sales and Customer Service functions converge, CMOs are being asked to shoulder responsibility for not only creating brand awareness and generating leads, but nurturing those leads by providing information that aids purchase, and delivering relevant and timely customer service communications.

In short, “NextGen CRM” is all about personalizing and optimizing the B2B buyer’s product research, buying and usage journeys. And the CMO is rapidly becoming the company’s Chief Journey Officer!

B2B & B2C Will Be Replaced by B2i

Jeannine Rossignol @j9rossignol
Vice President of Marketing at Xerox Global Services

“In the future there’s no distinction between B2B & B2C. Everything is marketed to individuals”

In the future there is no distinction between types of marketing, B2B or B2C is irrelevant because everything is marketed to the individual, and everything is controlled by your smart devices.

When the alarm on your phone wakes you up, you hear a message about the latest traffic report and a reminder to leave early because your car is almost out of gas.  As you listen to the news, through iHeartRadio on your phone, all the commercials are customized to you.

You might hear a promo for a new coffee flavor that works in the Keurig you just bought, or you might hear a promo on a new product/service based on the Google search you did last night.

Shocking! BP2BP Replaces B2B

Brian Massey @bmassey
The Conversion Scientist

In the coming year an in-depth study of corporations worldwide will reveal that businesses do not buy anything, but that human beings are actually the force behind decisions being made.

The B2B industry will be re-crowned BP2BP, or business person-to-business person.

This revelation will send shockwaves through the communities that sell to businesses. The B2B industry will be re-crowned BP2BP, or business person-to-business person. Thinly-veiled disciplines will be adopted from consumer marketing such as strategytelling, corpywriting, and bLearning.

Copywriters will be liberated in their writing. Stock photo sites will see a sales plummet. It will be hard for some businesses to accept that business people come with the same hopes, fears and dreams that drive consumer decisions. At least one high-level marketing executive will be overheard saying, “People. Who’d have thought?”

Well said Joel, Jeannine and Brian.  I hope you’ve already registered for the sold out MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston Oct 8-10 to see these 3 B2B marketing smarties in person. If not, you can sign up for on-demand access.

To get even more insights on the dynamics of B2B Marketing now and in the future, be sure to check out the full complement of B2B Marketing predictions in the Future of B2B Marketing eBook below. You’ll find a mix of predictions that range from the practical to those that are so far out there, they’re literally science fiction.

How are you incorporating a more “human” approach to your B2B marketing?

Photo: Shutterstock

---

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

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | The B’s in B2B Are People Too – A More Human Approach to Business Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

Running a nurture campaign is a lot like being a personal shopper – it’s true! Both require thought, patience, and persistence in order to get the desired result. For the shopper, that’s finding clothes for your clients that make them feel confident and beautiful. For the digital marketer, that’s engaging with your prospects and developing those relationships into leads.

What is a Nurture Campaign?

If you’re not familiar with nurture campaigns, they are a type of email marketing tool that allows you to engage with your audience over a longer period of time than an asset download or purchase. The idea is to create a stockpile of content written for your readers and then send that content out over a period of time. You don’t, however, bombard your email subscribers with all the content you’ve ever written. Instead, you look at how they interact with your brand and send content based on that information.

If, for example, you see that the last three emails you sent to prospect A went unopened, that’s a good sign that this person isn’t interested in receiving more info from you. Rather than improving the relationship, sending more emails could actually damage your chances of salvaging the prospect. Nurture campaigns are all about context clues.

What are Some Different Types of Nurture Campaigns?

The most general nurture campaign is one whose purpose is simply to stay in touch with your prospects. This includes emails like, “I noticed you downloaded asset A and thought you might like this as well,” or “Saw you watched part one of our video series – part two is available now.” The one caveat here is to remind people that they’ve interacted with your brand before – consumers are wary of spam and might banish you to the junk folder if they don’t immediately recognize your company. These types of campaigns can also help reengage prospects who have fallen out of contact.

There are also more specific nurture campaigns, like a promotion for a big sale or event. These are quite popular among B2C brands – in fact, you probably have at least one nurture email in your inbox right now! These types of campaigns typically offer a discount in each email, along with reminders to get shop the sale or register for the event.

How Do I Execute a Nurture Campaign?

Now that you know what a nurture campaign is, it’s time to learn how to build one. The easiest way is to go through your marketing automation platform. In fact, this is almost impossible to do with a MAP because of all the moving pieces. Here are the six steps.

1. Establish Your Goals

Knowing what you expect to get out of the campaign will help you determine what type of nurture emails you need to send, the ideal timeline for the campaign, and what content to offer, which leads me to my second point…

2. Give Your Contacts a Reason to Click

Advertising your latest ebook is not a reason to send a nurture email. Offering an ebook that expands on the last asset a contact downloaded, however, is. Remember, this isn’t the time to blast out every piece of content you’ve ever made. Keep it streamlined.

3. Create an Editorial Calendar of Sorts

This can be wildly helpful for keeping all of your content straight. Make sure to include the title of each asset, a brief description, and how it fits into your overall campaign. You can even go more in-depth and add information about the email that will include the asset, like its subject line, intro message, and CTA message.

4. Establish a Timeline

This should be fairly easy once you’ve established your goals. If this is a promotional campaign, you should layout all of the content you plan to include and schedule them the appropriate time length apart. For a general campaign, you can spread your emails out over a longer period of time.

5. Send Your Emails

This is the best part of a marketing automation platform – you can schedule your emails, either for a specific date and time or on a trigger-based system, and then not have to think about them.

6. Study the Results

Finally, you need to analyze the campaign reports to see what worked and what didn’t. This will give you insight into future email nurture campaigns, help you see what content is the most effective and, of course, send your leads further into the sales funnel and, ideally, produce new clients.