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We are now in an age where buyers expect more and more. And because the buyer is always right, we have to play by their rules. It’s no longer acceptable to just hand off the same old plain, generic content that might’ve worked 10-15 years ago. SiriusDecisions reports that 82% of decision makers believe sellers are unprepared. These days Sales needs to be equipped with dynamic sales materials to ensure they have the best possible chance of closing a deal. Without a dedicated process for creating, delivering, and measuring the success of dynamic sales materials Sales will not be positioned for success.

What Are Dynamic Sales Materials?

Dynamic sales materials are pieces of content that speak directly to a buyer’s needs and can be quickly updated to reflect shifting priorities. Dynamic sales materials are not static pieces of content that are used generically throughout the buyer’s journey; those can be thrown right in the trash as far as I’m concerned!

When a buyer reads a dynamically created piece of content, they should feel like it was created especially for them. Like one of the mixtapes you planned to give to your crush that you agonized over. After reading the materials the buyer should feel like your organization is the only one in the world that truly understands them and can solve their problems. Similarly, your sellers should feel empowered to create dynamic sales materials and send them to potential buyers.

How do you Create Dynamic Sales Materials?

Now here comes the rub, if dynamic sales materials were easy to create, everyone would be doing it all the time. Generic content that speaks broadly to an organization’s value points is more popular because it’s easier and more efficient to create. Without the proper platform, both Marketing and Sales are not going to be able to effectively create dynamic sales materials.

Utilizing a smart platform that enables both sellers and marketers to create these materials is the only way an organization can truly undertake a dynamic sales material strategy. Both Marketing and Sales have needs that are almost at odds with one another when it comes to this topic.

Marketing wants to retain tight control on materials that are created to ensure brand consistency and compliance. Sales wants the content created yesterday and wants to deliver it as fast as possible. You can see how those might be competing interests.

The solution is to leverage a platform that allows Marketing to create ‘living templates’—content that can be locked down from a brand and compliance standpoint, but free to edit for filling in a buyer’s unique situation. By giving Sales a self-service platform where they simply have to plug and play with data from any source they want, or information they’ve gathered through conversations, dynamic sales materials can come together in no time.

Measuring the Success of Dynamic Sales Materials

Creating dynamic sales materials is well and fine, but without measuring the success of their efforts an organization won’t truly know if their efforts are worth the while. Putting the time and money into investing in a platform that enables dynamic sales materials requires that the returns be measurable.

The results can’t simply look at low-level statistics like open and click-throughs either. Marketers and sellers need to have a good idea of how engaged a buyer is, and what engages them the most.

That’s why when thinking about leveraging a platform that can create dynamic sales materials you should also take a close look at the reporting and analytics the system offers. You want your sellers and marketers to be able to get as granular as seeing how long a buyer spent on each page, what section they spent the most time on, and even the ROI of a particular piece of content.

The ability to effortlessly create dynamic sales materials is one of the most powerful arrows a seller can have in their quiver. With that process available to them they can quickly create engaging content that directly speaks to a buyer’s needs and measure the success of the content itself—ultimately resulting in more won deals.

Lead generation involves the process of attracting strangers and converting them into someone who has an interest in your product or service. If you pay close attention to your marketing and lead generation efforts, then you will gain precious into these prospects as well as information about them – this plays a vital role in the converting stage.

Inbound lead generation takes this tactic, yet prevents your business from coming across as ‘spammy cold callers’. We’ve all been the victim of cold-callers ruining our relaxing evenings, trying to sell us a product which we have never expressed an interest in. As you know, this is incredibly off-putting and very rarely works. This means it is more important than ever to get the inbound marketing right. The internet demands new ways to generate leads, and with consumers paying most of their attention to the online world (up 7% year on year!), businesses must keep up to succeed in lead generation.

Warming up potential customers is only the beginning of your inbound lead generation practice. You need to know how to qualify a lead in order to understand if they are going to have value to your business. This can be done through online vouchers, free guides, online chats, trials, etc. Whatever strategy you take, ensure that it has a goal of collecting information about your leads.

If you’re on the fence about starting, then it’s worth understanding why inbound lead generation is so effective. Inbound lead generation thrives from organic search, meaning that you’ll be focusing purely on ethical methods – nothing that’ll get you blacklisted! With organic search having the largest close rate of 51%, it’s going to be your best bet with a lead generation strategy.

At the end of the day, all of your sales techniques are going to point to one goal – positive ROI. If you don’t have positive figures at the end of your sales journey, then you’re going to feel a bit defeated. So, it’s extremely important to work out your lead acquisition costs and understand your financial situation at all times. The result will differ depending on your industry, but you can determine expenses through this equation: divide what you spend on a campaign by the number of leads that came in from it.

If you’re looking for quality, then a higher cost per lead might mean a higher quality lead and a lower overall customer acquisition cost. Hubspot conducted a survey which found that 58% of companies generated 500 or fewer leads per month, with 71% generating 1,000 or fewer leads. Recall that the companies with higher annual revenues are also the ones that produce the most leads.

There’s plenty of things to consider when it comes to nailing your inbound marketing campaign, and it’s crucial that you have a plan – the last thing you’ll want to do is go on a tangent and waste valuable time! My company, Bulldog Digital Media, has created this thorough guide for generating business the inbound way, which is worth checking out if you’re serious about getting some leads!

Seth Godin’s latest book “This is Marketing” is filled with industry truths that you simply can’t afford to miss hearing. On this episode of In The Arena, Anthony and Seth dig into the book’s brand-new insights and talk about the differences between being market-driven and being driven by marketing. You’ll hear how you can make a bigger difference in the world while changing the lives of those around you, and why truly ethical marketing encompasses layers of empathy and compassion. It’s a stellar episode not to be missed – listen now!

Marketing shouldn’t be about one to MANY, but it can be about one to many

Years ago, marketers could succeed if they simply got their message in front of as many people as possible. However, that’s not the case in today’s world. Seth explains that “Marketing shouldn’t be about one to MANY, but it can be about one to many.” By pursuing your smallest viable audience and adding value to their lives, you can avoid hiding behind the masses and actually make a difference in your organization and the world.

Marketing should be done WITH people, not TO them. Seth exclaims, “Modern marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become,” and that cannot happen if you’re simply sharing a message with millions of people.

“This is Marketing” teaches you to approach marketing as a teacher seeking enrollment

In “This is Marketing,” Seth uses the analogy of teachers and students to explain how modern marketers should operate. It’s 100x easier to teach a person if they come to the teacher already interested in the subject. Ethical marketing should be about pursuing new enrollment audiences for your company, not just securing new sales leads. By approaching an interested person as a teaching opportunity and not just a sales statistic, you’ll be able to add value to their life while preserving their dignity.

There’s a difference between being market-driven and being marketing-driven

Seth tells Anthony about one of the greatest pieces of advice he had ever received. As a young professional, Seth exclaimed to a mentor that he was “marketing driven.” His mentor thoughtfully explained that unless Seth was driven by departmental deadlines and to-do lists, Seth was actually “market-driven.” When a marketer is market-driven, their main focus becomes answering the question, “How can I serve my audience better?”

Seth believes, “Our contributions are the only things we leave behind. And if you focus on leaving a better contribution, you earn trust and attention, which gives you the platform to make more change happen.” His insights are best heard straight from the source, so be sure to give this episode your full attention.

Truly great marketing cannot be about differentiation – it must be about positioning

Far too many marketers become caught up in the differentiation game – eliminating competition simply because they’re afraid of losing business. However, Seth and Anthony discuss why truly great marketing is actually focused on honest positioning. If a marketer can outline the key differences between their company and the competition, as well as make the decision easier for the buyer by eliminating confusion, they’ve positioned their company well. Then, they can seek out “enrollment” students that are interested in the company’s culture and products.

Seth’s book “This is Marketing,” is a must-read for all marketers. Not only will you get the full story behind this interview, you’ll also read about how you can actually change your company’s culture and why compassion and marketing go hand-in-hand. You can find it on Amazon and wherever you buy books.

Outline of this great episode

• The key difference between sales and knowledge that Seth explains in “This is Marketing.”
• Marketing shouldn’t be about one to MANY, but it can be about one to many
• Here’s why Seth’s latest book is different from all of his other works
• The concept of enrollment in marketing, and why you shouldn’t operate without it
• Organizational culture is simply defined as: People like us do things like this
• Empathy and compassion go hand in hand in ethical marketing
• The difference between market-driven and marketing-driven
• Two teachers don’t compete, they’re just on the same board
• Information on Seth’s upcoming marketing seminar
• The story behind the name of “This is Marketing”

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• Seth’s website
• Follow Seth on Facebook
• Follow Seth on Twitter
• Connect with Seth on LinkedIn
• Seth’s January 2019 marketing seminar
• Seth’s altMBA program
• Seth’s newest BOOK: “This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See”
• BOOK: “What to Do When it’s Your Turn (and it’s Always Your Turn)”
• BOOK: “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us”
• BOOK: “Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship”
• BOOK: “Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition”
• Get 15% off your first month of podcast audio and show notes service with Podcast Fast Track by mentioning In The Arena
• RESOURCE: 800-CEO-READ
• SPONSOR: MailTag.IO

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

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The post Seth Godin on Being Market-Driven & His Latest Book “This is Marketing” – Episode #120 appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Events are powerful communication tools that allow businesses to achieve all sorts of aims, from networking to educating employees, brand building to lead generation and product promotion. Whilst many trade fairs will allow vendors to exhibit for a fee, running your own event does have its benefits. Running a successful event isn’t easy though and it’s all too easy to become bogged down with logistical planning as costs spiral.

Good planning is essential to event management so here is a complete guide to running a corporate event.

Pre-Event Planning

Clearly define your event goal and logistics

Every successful event starts with a clear and even measurable goal in mind. Once you have established this, it will be far easier for you to start making concrete informed decisions around things like the best venue, the proper sponsors (and what’s in it for them) and perhaps most importantly, the budget your willing to set for your event.

As long as it’s specific the goal of your event could be anything you want to accomplish, from lead generation to education or training. You should also try to establish how you will measure success and any metrics you will use to do this (feedback, lead gen, uplift in sales, social media buzz, event hashtag mentions, brand exposure, etc)

Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

• How many people will attend the event?
• Will you also offer transportation?
• Does your budget fit your event goals?
• Does the location have enough parking spots?
• Will you have your own catering firm?

Once you know your objectives properly mapped out, you can begin thinking about audience, venue selection and event logistics.

Determine who your audience (and why should they attend)

Clearly defining who is your perfect attendee for the event, will help you select the most effective marketing channels to promote your event and build buzz, craft persuasive on-message marketing and also how to create a memorable experience during the event.

The simplest way to start is to ask yourself three key questions about every attendee that will turn up to your event:

• Why are they attending your event?
• How will their life/business be different after your event?
• What makes your event stand out to similar events?

For example, a trade show or exhibit provides the chance for attendees to discover new products, showcase their own products or make new business connections. The difference between your trade show and another one might be that at your event attendees can network with some of the biggest names in the industry. Alternatively, it might be that you’re showcasing some of the most exciting new technology around.

Event Marketing

Generate pre-event buzz

One of the most powerful marketing strategies is word of mouth. And social media makes it so incredibly easy to build a community and generate pre-event buzz across pre-existing networks or people. One effective way to pre-market an event is to create a unique hashtag and use it in every social media post, as well as any printed materials like brochures or posters.

You could also leverage social media by holding mini-events in the weeks leading up to the big one. Make sure you take a lot of photos, tag people in (of course, always ask for permission) and even ask your booked speaker’s social media to mention your event whenever possible. This will help you leverage other pre-existing networks, spread the word faster and also gain credibility among those networks.

Leverage the power of social media

Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there when it comes to event marketing. That’s not only because it’s where so many people’s attention is often found today, but also because it offers you a lot of laser-targeting possibilities and also plenty of options to keep in touch with your potential customers.

For instance, if you’re interested in having at your event only decision makers from a certain industry, you can choose to show a promotional video only to people who have listed VP, Chairman, CTO, Manager etc. on their Facebook profile. And the possibilities don’t end here. Facebook and most social media platforms offer you the possibility to re-engage with people who have already shown interest in your content. If we continue our example from above, you can further connect with people who viewed your previous video.

Use email marketing to promote your event

Email marketing can play an important role in a successful event planning because it is cheap and will reach people who are already aware of your company, so are more likely than most to be interested in your event.

To make the most out of this strategy, make sure you avoid sales jargon, keep it informal, explain to people what’s in it for them and make all your emails mobile friendly. Also, make sure you have the correct systems in place to track email opens and click-throughs. In this way, you can follow up with those people who have shown an interest in your event but didn’t go all the way through to reserve their seat.

Leverage speakers and influencers to spread the word faster and gain credibility

Having your speakers promote your event can explode your ticket sales because they will likely already have established followers and audiences, as well as credibility and kudos in their sector. To encourages speakers to promote your event, you could create useful content that will promotes them and your event and encourage them to share.

For example, you could interview your speakers on a certain topic that would be interesting for their audience and put it up as a podcast on your website and across your social media channels. Alternatively, you could also get your speakers to guest post on your blog and link to their content or share the article on their social media account.

Also, if you want to encourage your speakers to promote your event directly, make it as easy as possible for them to do so by providing regular updates and information on your event. Put at their disposal images and documentation that they could use to spread the word out about your event on their own channels. You could go even further and create a special page for each of them, with a full author bio and links to their content.

Crafting a Great Event Experience

Use modern registration software to make the check-in experience seamless

A study on hotel front office practices and their impact on guest satisfaction shows the extent to which an outstanding check-in experience can increase the overall customer satisfaction. And since queues are inevitable because usually lots of people turn up at once to check in or register for the event, you have to be prepared to make the experience as smooth as possible.

Event registration is a hugely important element of event planning. Fortunately, modern event registration software allows you to easily take payment, register attendees and track attendance, as well as generate useful lead generation data post event. Some event agencies will offer print on demand badging solutions and even run your front desk, allowing you to print delegate badges in seconds instead of having to search through boxes of pre-printed badges that clutter up your check-in desk. It might not seem like much, but eliminating queues to get into your event can create that all important good first impression.

You could even create a check-in experience that allows your attendees to register themselves with a print-on-demand service that gives them their own printed badge in a matter of seconds. Having a separate area for inquiries and VIPs also helps you make sure the queue doesn’t slow down.

Identify your VIPs

A successful event is one where every attendee felt that it was worth the invested time and money. In order to do this, you have to adapt your activities and the experience to both their personalities and their status.

For examples, VIPs will probably invest significantly more to participate at your event and they will probably expect special treatment and extra benefits. On the other hand, whilst it’s important to ensure VIPs get a VIP treatment, it’s important not to compromise anyone else’s experience. You can prepare introducing icebreaker activities for people who aren’t so outgoing and try to avoid small talk and networking. Or you can encourage open discussion and debate by facilitating small groups or set up round tables within a larger group. In this way you ensure that no one is left out and everybody is engaged.

Incorporate feedback both during the event and after it

Feedback is crucial to improve your ongoing event planning and establish your event as ‘the one everyone wants to attend’ in your field or industry. Feedback is crucial for making sure each event you run is better than the previous one, even if it’s a different type of event.

Small improvements can have a huge impact and can often be implemented with little or no cost. By simply asking your attendees how are they feeling and if they need anything you can make sure they are having a memorable experience they will share with their friends. You can do this on the day, but it might make sense to do it after the event, by following up with emails or even a phone call. Don’t hound people and maybe make it interesting by running a prize draw for everyone who leaves feedback. This will also help you create post-event buzz on social media.

If you sell through indirect sales channels, channel partner relationship management is an essential part of the success of your organization. Without implementing the right tools, taking care of these partner relationships can be a challenge and can negatively impact your partner’s sales cycle. Partner portal solutions for Partner Relationship Management (PRM) are filling the gap in PRM resulting in an improved channel partner sales cycle.

PRM software gives channel partners access to the information and tools they need to help sell your products to the end user. Using a partner portal is a key aspect in providing companies with the ability to improve their partners’ sales cycles by better managing, tracking and forecasting opportunities, leads and deals.

What is a Partner Portal?

A partner portal is a web-based application that gives channel partners access to a number of different exclusive resources such as:

• Sales and marketing information
• Product information
• Training and certification
• Lead management tools
• Performance management tools

The portal should provide partners with access to relevant information that will help them effectively close more deals and achieve greater profits. Companies who use partner portal solutions also create powerful channel partner relationships.

Which Type of Channel Partners will the Partner Portal benefit?

Depending on the type of channel partners your business utilizes, you may be wondering if a partner portal is right for your channel partner program. And it is! Whether you are working with a reseller, implementer or a system integrator (ISV) partner, a partner portal solution will create a strategic alliance that will help improve their sales cycle. Below are a few ways that these type of partners can benefit from a partner portal solution.

Reseller Partner: A reseller partner works on generating sales for your goods or services, but they will not be involved after this point. They will be working independently to sell your products, but they need you to provide them with the necessary resources to attract leads and close deals. Without the use of a partner portal, channel partners will have to wait for your email responses to provide them with the collateral they need to close their deal. Through the implementation of a partner portal, these channel partners will have 24/7 access to sales enablement assets for every scenario in the sales cycle, improving your partners’ sales cycle.

Implementer Partner: If your company decides to work with an implementer partner, not only will they be selling your products, they will be managing the whole relationship with the customers they are selling to. Similar to the reseller partner, the partner portal offers the same benefits in improving the sales cycle. A partner portal also benefits this type of partner because they will have access to co-branded material and the marketplace. These tools create a strong sense of loyalty between you and your partner. Your partners will be encouraged to sell for you as opposed to other vendors, thus improving the sales cycle.

System Integrator (ISV): A system integrator is someone who will be referring your business to their other partners. You may be thinking, how would a partner portal benefit this type of partnership? Well, a partner portal will help keep this partner up to date with your product or services. Since this type of partner won’t be consistently selling your product, they may not know any updates or changes that occurred, which can impede the partner sales cycle. With the use of a partner portal, channel partners will have access to training and certification, which will keep your channel partners up to date with the content they need to sell. Just like the 2 partners above, they’ll also have access to help close deals faster.

Why is a Partner Portal Solution right for you?

A partner portal makes it easier to interact with your channel partners. With communication occurring on one platform, and the ability to access it from anywhere, you’ll be able to streamline your business process to improve the partner sales cycles. This connection will add value to your partner relationship. You’ll gain insights on sales activities and data to understand performance trends, so you can fully support your channel partners throughout the sales process.

With the use of a partner portal solution, you’ll be able to better manage your channel partners. Partner collaboration and engagement will then increase, resulting in a new and improved partner sales cycles.

What Components of a Partner Portal will Help your Business?

Are you still trying to decide if a partner portal is right for your business? Here are a few components a partner portal solution can provide you to improve your partners’ sales cycle.

Partner Certification and Online Training

Is your businesses’ time being wasted trying to discover if your channel partners are ready to sell your products? With the use of a partner portal solution, your partners will have access to customized training and quizzes. A successful training program will focus on addressing the different aspects of the sales cycle. This includes marketing, sales and technical knowledge. By providing your partners with a certification for their training, they will be encouraged to put more effort into understanding your company’s solutions.

Playbooks

Do you find that your channel partners are waiting for you to give them the resources they need at different stages of the sales cycle? With the use of a partner portal solution, you can offer your channel partners a playbook. A playbook is a collection of marketing and sales resources that are available on demand for channel partners. At any point in the sales cycle, your partners will be able to access the playbooks they need.

Market Development Funds (MDFs)

Do you have channel partners who want to attend conferences in separate regions than you to raise brand awareness for you? Chances are you do. Through the implementation of a partner portal, channel partners can easily request MDFs to perform marketing related initiatives that will help increase your brand awareness. Using this portal to provide MDFs to your channel partners provides efficiency and clarity, improving your channel partner sales cycle.

Document Management

How do your channel partners access the material they need? If you’re expecting them to get these assets from a shared drive or download assets from email updates, you’re sadly mistaken. A partner portal will give your partners access to document management. You will be able to upload all your files in one secure, mobile-friendly, organized location. With easy access to materials, channel partners won’t have to risk lost time looking for the resources they need, thus, improving the sales cycle.

Deal Management

Have your channel partners ever competed for the same business? Odds are they have. With the use of a partner portal, you can avoid these channel conflicts by controlling the flow of leads to your channel partners. By overseeing and approving the leads your channel partners are going after, you can avoid the same channel partners going after the same lead. This will improve the partner sales cycle, as one partner will not waste time pursuing a lead when another partner is already close to closing it.

Are you convinced as to why a partner portal will improve your partner sales cycle? For further knowledge of a partner portal’s assets click here.

What are the Advantages of Using a Partner Portal?

If a partner portal is properly implemented it can provide you and your channel partners with a number of benefits that will result in an improved sales cycle.

Easy to Access: A partner portal that is easy to access and is mobile responsive will give channel partners access to the resources they need at any time. By having these resources available on demand there will be no delay in the channel partners sales cycles.

Partner-Focused: A partner portal gives you the ability to offer personalization to your channel partners. This personalization includes content that is tailored to their usage, engagement and activity level. Your channel partner relationship will, therefore, be improved and channel partners will be more willing to sell for you.

Improved Collaboration: Without the use of a partner portal, collaboration and communication is difficult. A partner portal provides a central system to communicate on accounts, such as leads. By being able to communicate on these accounts, you can avoid wasted time that occurs during email, improving the partner sales cycle.

Easy to Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): By using a partner portal you’ll be able to better understand areas where you are succeeding and that need improvement. This may include performance, partner engagement, sales, etc. Tracking these metrics will improve the partner program and help you determine areas that need further investment to improve the partner sales cycle.

How Does a Partner Portal Improve Relationships with Channel Partners?

As seen above a partner portal can be an amazing tool that solves a number of different channel problems. If used effectively, one of the greatest things that a portal can do is improve your relationship with your channel partners.

Channel partners are an important part of your business’s success. If you do not have a strong relationship with them, they will not be motivated to sell for you. You may be thinking, but how can a partner portal build such a strong relationship? The answer is, provide channel partners with the support they need. This support shows your channel partners how much you care about them on a personal level; which then motivates your channel partner to sell for you.

Here are three ways a partner portal offers your channel partners support and motivates them to sell for you.

Builds Loyalty: Through the use of a partner portal, your channel partners will have access to everything they need 24/7. You are eliminating the burden of making your channel partners contact you and having to wait for a response whenever they need something. By making your channel partners life easier, it increases their loyalty to you and improves the partner relationship. With this loyalty at the forefront, channel partners will be more motivated to sell for you as opposed to their other vendors.

Creates an Engaging Partner Relationship: With the use of a partner portal, your channel partners will be provided with proper training and education to sell your products. You may be wondering, how does this onboarding process motivate your channel partners to sell for you? Well, this first impression shows that you care about the success of your channel partners. By maintaining the relationship by constantly keeping in contact with your partners, they will feel like they are getting the support they need from you, and will be motivated to sell.

Provides Incentives and Rewards: To show your channel partners that their relationship is important to you, you can provide them with incentives and rewards. The partner portal keeps track of how your channel partners are doing, so they can see if they will be receiving a reward. This incentive is a friendly reminder that you care about them and want to reward them for their hard work.

Are you Ready to Upgrade your Channel Partner Sales Cycle?

For channel partner programs, a partner portal solution is a tool that is going to help you optimize your partner’s sales cycle. With the use of a portal, channel partners will have a better understanding of your business’s solution. By empowering your channel partners with this asset, you’ll have a more effective and efficient sales process that will create a competitive advantage. So, what are you waiting for? Try a partner portal today!

As a blogger or vlogger you might find certain niche ideas are already covered before you think of them. Grr! Popular niches get saturated – it’s a natural cause & effect of the popularity of blogging. But what if other countries who speak your language still need that niche topic or idea!? By simply tailoring […]

The post How To Create International Blog Content & Help New Audiences appeared first on Blogging Tips.

There is a type of displacement outside of removing your competitor that is equally—and in some cases—even more difficult to execute. It’s trickier, and sometimes even more political. The displacement I am referring to here is the displacement of one priority for another, or one project for another.

One of the reasons that companies refuse to change partners despite having a strong justification for doing so is because they have limited bandwidth, limited time, resources, and money. It’s likely that your dream client is working on more than on initiative now, and the thought of diverting their attention to another priority isn’t always attractive. It could divert attention from their priorities or disrupt their business at a time when they can’t afford to deal with additional challenges.

Make It Strategic

That said, it’s your job to help your dream clients produce better results, and the primary frameworks in Eat Their Lunch can help you displace other projects and priorities. It starts with Chapter One and Level 4 Value Creation, or the focus on generating the strategic outcomes your dream client is pursuing or should be. Your chances of displacing higher priorities with lower levels of value are not dissimilar to your odds of winning the lottery. There isn’t enough “there” there.

The starting point of moving up as a priority for your dream client is proportional to the strategic value of the outcomes you produce. You have to tie your initiative to something strategic enough to command time, attention, and money.

Mindshare > Something Else

The second way you build the case for moving you up to the top two or three initiatives (the few that get time and attention) requires you capture mindshare, Chapter 2 in ETL. You have to shape the way your dream client thinks about their strategic outcomes, especially as it pertains to the solution you sell and its contribution to their goals. How do their other initiatives suffer because your initiative isn’t in front of the others?

You have to be able to make the case that you should go first. If you aren’t able to make that case, you cannot expect the contacts you are working with to do any better. You have to tie your opportunity to the success of their other strategic initiatives.

More of Us Than Them

Finally, you need consensus. You need to create a map of stakeholders whose support will allow you to move up the ranking of your dream client’s priorities, Chapters 7 and 8 in ETL. The way to think about this now is Horizontal and Vertical, which means getting support at the top of the organization chart and the bottom, as well as across different functions (think deep and wide here).

The more people that believe and support you because they believe what you are proposing is valuable enough to tackle now, the more likely you are to find your opportunity at the top of your dream client’s priority.

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As we increasingly understand the “Chaotic Buying Journey,” as illustrated by the great work done by my friends at Gartner; marketing and sales people are struggling with, “How do we respond?”

Too often, the thinking is, “We have to meet the customer where they are at!”  Some marketing and sales enablement people are reveling in the new content challenge, thinking, they have to provide content and related support for every one of these points in the buyer journey.  The thinking is, “We must mirror the buyer journey.”

The underlying principle of aligning with the buyer’s journey and intercepting them where they are at, as they wander through the chaotic buying process, seems to make sense–at least on the surface.

On reflection, though, one might think, “Just because the buying journey is chaotic, doesn’t mean it should be or that the customers want it to be that way!”

In fact, one quickly comes to the conclusion, that anything we can do to help the customer simplify and reduce the chaos they experience, creates great value for the customer.  As a result, one then realizes, that mirroring and aligning with the chaotic buying journey is the wrong thing to do.

Sales (and marketing) create the greatest value when we can help the customer reduce the complexity, confusion, and duplicative work.  When we help add clarity to what the customer is trying to achieve and the simplest way to align priorities and interests in helping them through their buying process, we help them achieve their goals more quickly and with greater certainty.

While we will never make it a straight path (as much as we may long for the days of the linear buying/selling processes, we can provide leadership in improving the process, making it much less chaotic and more predictable

Businesses have spent almost a decade creating customer experiences (CX) that are more valuable than the features and pricing of the products they produce. From customer service to product quality, brands across all segments are catering to customer sentiment with tremendous insight into how customers feel about them and their competitors.

According to a 2017 Gartner survey, more than two-thirds of companies are already focused on growing their business mostly on the basis of CX – and that percentage is projected to rise to 81% by next year. Yet, despite the rising expectations for CX initiatives, marketers are now facing an untenable fight for essential budget as they prove how CX investments improve customer relationships, business performance, and financial results.

Why is it so difficult to make a case for something that has tremendous opportunity to disrupt competitors and gain market share?

4 technologies that give field services an edge in the customer experience

Ultimately, the value of the customer experience boils down to demonstrating how newly acquired digital and human capabilities have a direct, immediate impact on the end-to-end customer journey – including post-purchase services in the field. More than traditional marketing tactics such as demand generation, marketing research, advertising, communication messaging, the customer experience is shaped by everything a brand – and the field services organization is no exception to this rule.

By applying technology with a purpose to keep down internal cost, increase process efficiency, and boost information accuracy, field services can give their brands’ customer service a competitive edge. Potential scenarios that work well in this arena include mobile access, smart analytics, self-services, and crowdsourcing.

1. Connected mobile access, online and offline

Bring an end to low productivity among field service technicians by giving them full access to the tools, information, and insight they need on any mobile device. Managers can acquire the visibility they need into their teams to address staffing levels and training needs proactively. Meanwhile, technicians gain the flexibility necessary to respond to service needs on the customer’s site without losing the context, knowledge, or tools to increase first-time-fix rates, speed, consistency, and efficiency of service execution.

2. Smart analytics and the Internet of Things

Field services can move from reactive maintenance to predictive service by empowering technicians and managers with real-time insights into asset performance and conditions as well as department, team, and employee performance. The organization can predict maintenance needs, plan ahead, and prevent breakdowns and extra repair costs – all of which can lower downtime, increase uptime, and build customer trust and satisfaction.

3. Customer self-services

Make common complaints from your customers – such as long wait times and lack of visibility into service requests – a thing of the past. By using the cloud to manage field services interactions, customers can access the information they want with ease, turn to remote assistance, or schedule a field service visit.

For example, customers can scan a QR code, a serial number, or any other unique identifier on a device and choose between a series of self-service options. From the moment a service request is submitted, customers can review on their mobile devices everything from troubleshooting tips, remote service options, technician scheduling, service tracking, and progress of service parts delivery.

4. Crowdsourcing of talent

Make the most of limited in-house resources to meet field service needs. Field service organizations can crowdsource a pool of skilled service technicians, including employees, subsidiaries, partners, and freelancers, to quickly find the right expert for the job.

With the addition of artificial intelligence tools, managers can automatically plan service requests in real time and send job notifications to a technician’s mobile device. This digital approach not only creates an on-demand service network that boosts service performance and meets customer expectations. More importantly, it capitalizes on skilled talent to grow the business by enabling the opportunity to accept more jobs, assist other service companies, and reach clients in more remote regions.

Field services: Different perspective, new opportunity for CX

Even in organizations that appear to be streamlined and advanced, field service can be a letdown when they run on broken, manual processes that deliver consistently wrong information and increases costs – leading to poor staffing coordination, long response times, delayed problem resolution, and low levels of customer satisfaction. Additionally, once a customer shares the experience online and goes viral, the brand can be severely damaged in ways the business will never fully understand and recover.

To deliver interactions that are more satisfying on the customer end, field services require a sharp focus – not innovative sales programs, bundled offerings, channel, and promotions. Schedules still need to be made, contracts still need to be drawn up, and field technicians still need to be trained and dispatched according to skill level.

But most of all, front-office engagement and back-office processes need to be synchronized reliably and in real time to give every customer what they deserve: a service experience that makes their lives easier and more delightful.

Earlier this week in a new experimental newsletter I’ve been helping Danny Crichton on, we briefly discussed transit pundit Jarrett Walker’s article in The Atlantic arguing against the view that ridesharing and microtransit will be the future of mass transit. Instead, his thesis is that a properly operated and well-resourced bus system is much more efficient from a coverage, cost, space, and equality perspective.

Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on.  I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

From an output perspective, Walker argues that by operating along variable routes based on at-your-door pick ups, microtransit actually takes more time to pick up fewer people on average. Walker also gives buses the edge from a cost and input perspective, since labor makes up 70% of transit operating costs in a pre-autonomous world and buses allow you to service more customers for the price of one driver.

“The driver’s time is far more expensive than maintenance, fuel, and all the other costs involved.  In almost every public meeting I attend, citizens complain about seeing buses with empty seats, lecturing me about how smaller vehicles would be less wasteful. But that’s not the case. Because the cost is in the driver, a wise transit agency runs the largest bus it will ever need during the course of a shift. In an outer suburb, that empty big bus makes perfect sense if it will be mobbed by schoolchildren or commuters twice a day.”

But transit is not solely an issue of volume and unit economics, but one of managing public space. Walker explains that to ensure citizens don’t use more than their fair share of space, cities can either provide vehicles that are only marginally bigger than a human body, i.e. bikes and scooters, or have many people share large-scale vehicles, i.e. mass transit. Doing the latter through a mass fleet of on-demand microtransit solutions, Walker argues, increases congestion and makes it harder to manage scheduling and allocate infrastructure.

While the article offers an effective comparison of unit economics and acts as a useful primer on the various considerations for city transit agencies, some of the conclusions are a bit binary.  The discussion is a bit singular in its focus of microtransit as a replacement of public transit rather than an additive service and doesn’t give much credit to the trip planning and space management capabilities of many microtransit services, nor changes in consumer expectations towards transportation.

But despite some of the gaps in the piece, Walker highlights two ideas that spill over to some broad areas that have caught my interest lately: Tolls and Parking.

Tolls

Photo by Michael H via Getty Images

“To succeed, microtransit would have to help people get around cities better, not just make them feel good about hailing a ride on a phone. Full automation of vehicles, if indeed it ever arrives, might solve the labor problem—although it would put thousands of drivers out of work. But the congestion problem will remain.”

Like many, Walker argues that ridesharing aggravates city traffic rather than alleviates it.  Even though ridesharing’s long-term impact on traffic is widely contested, nearly everyone agrees that a solution to urban congestion is desperately needed.

What’s interesting is that regardless of the discourse that surrounds them, trends in US tolling mechanisms seem to suggest American cities may be moving closer to congestion pricing methods.

As an example, solutions to congestion are top of mind behind the New York state election that saw Democrats taking control of both state legislative houses. Though it seems like the argument resurfaces every few years, the elections have brought renewed debate over the possible implementation of congestion pricing in New York City.  In essence, congestion pricing is a system where drivers would pay higher prices for using high-traffic streets or entering high-traffic zones, allowing cities to better dictate the flow of drivers and reduce congestion.   

Outside of the obvious political tension created by effectively implementing a new tax, some lawmakers have pushed back on the effectiveness of a congestion pricing policy, with some arguing that it can aggravate income inequality or that a policy addressing construction and pedestrians, rather than vehicles, would have a bigger impact on traffic.

However, over the past year or so, an increasing number of states have been rolling out highway tolls that are priced dynamically, instead of using traditional fixed-price tolls. The exact drivers behind the toll prices vary, with some cities charging prices based on traffic conditions and others charging varying prices for the use of express and HOV lanes.

Several new technologies and companies have also made it easier for local governments to implement more sophisticated, adjustable toll pricing or congestion fees at a much lower cost. In the past, congestion pricing systems around the world have required physical detection systems that can be extremely costly to implement.

Now, companies like ClearRoad are helping governments use a wide range of connected vehicle technologies to establish and collect road usage pricing from any location without the need for physical infrastructure. Oregon is one geography working with ClearRoad to manage its new opt-in road usage program where the state is able to calculate drivers’ usage of certain roads and their gas consumption, and then reimburse them for gas taxes they’re paying.

So even though people are still screaming at each other in state capitols, it seems like we may be closer to seeing congestion pricing in major cities than we think. And while executing these programs can be difficult and painfully slow (often needing to satisfy city regulations and tax laws forty layers deep), if these smaller-scale programs we’re seeing in the US are actually effective, congestion pricing may be a solution to plug chunky budget gaps, better finance infrastructure projects and replace lost gas tax revenue in an electric vehicle future.

Parking

In his piece, Walker goes back to some basic principles of urban design, highlighting that at their core, functioning cities come down to how millions of people share a comparatively tiny amount of space.  

Walker explains that city dwellers that travel with cars and solo rideshare trips rather than with large-scale shared transit are effectively taking up more than their fair share of public space.  While the argument is made in the context of ridesharing and congestion, the same idea applies to the less-discussed impact mass-transit ridesharing can have on city parking.

At least in the near-term, certain cities have seen ridesharing actually increase vehicle usage rather than reduce it (a claim rideshare companies dispute), resulting in an even wider gap between the supply and demand for available parking spots.  And if people are using ridesharing but still choosing to own cars regardless, in an indirect fashion, they are similarly reducing the stock of available parking space by more than their fair share.

And while it makes sense that rideshare vehicles should receive a larger portion of the parking stock, given that it serves more passengers, the use of available parking by these vehicles can and has caused tension with local residents that have to store their cars further away.

There are companies like the mobility-focused data platform, Coord, that are working on tools geared towards helping cities and citizens more effectively allocate and plan parking strategies for the future multi-modal transportation network. And theoretically, ridesharing should reduce the number of vehicles in search of parking in the long-term. But at least for now, the impact on parking congestion is just another unintended consequence that weakens the argument for ridesharing as mass transit.

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

• A Smart City Is an Accessible City – The Atlantic, Aimi Hamraie
• The DEA and ICE Are Hiding Surveillance Cameras in Streetlights – Quartz, Justin Rohrlich & David Gershgron
• When Amazon Happens to Good Cities – Planetizen, James Brasuell
• In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing? – The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman
• The Social Responsibility of Wakanda’s Golden City – CityLab, Nicole Flatow

One of the most dangerous mistakes we can make as sales people is believing that our customer – and particularly the sponsor we have been working with – knows how to buy.

This might be a reasonable assumption if our prospective customer is buying a familiar solution in a familiar way – for example a repeat purchase from a well-known source.

But if our prospective customer is looking for an unfamiliar solution: something they have not had to buy before – from an unfamiliar source: a vendor they have no previous relationship with, the assumption of buyer expertise is very dangerous.

Buyer unfamiliarity can represent either an opportunity or a threat – depending on how we choose to respond to it...

There are two key dimensions to this buyer unfamiliarity effect, and either or both may be at play: the prospective customer may be unfamiliar with what they need achieve their goals, and/or they may be unfamiliar with how to navigate their own organisation’s buying decision process.

Breaking new ground

There is a third, less-common class of unfamiliarity: no-one in the buying organisation may have any experience of buying this class of solution before. This used to be common when - for example - organisations had only ever bought on-premise software and were now considering a SaaS based solution for the first time.

Although this is now an increasingly rare scenario, the contractual differences between acquiring on-premise and SaaS based solutions are profound, and many legal and procurement teams used to struggle to get their heads around the radically different commercial and contractual mindsets.

If we find ourselves in a similar situation, we need to identify the challenge early in the sales cycle rather than be hit with an unpleasant surprise at the end, and we need to need to engage and educate the customer’s legal and procurement teams sooner rather than later.

Unfamiliar solutions

When an individual, a decision group or an organisation is buying an unfamiliar type of solution for the first time, they are likely to be on a steep learning curve. They may assume that the buying behaviours that have stood them in good stead in the past are going to be applicable in this new scenario.

But it is just as likely that they may feel like they are “running in the fog”. They may not have a clear idea of what they really need. Despite their attempts to conduct research over the internet or by asking their peers and colleagues, they may not be clear about their requirements or how to prioritise them.

This may prevent them from achieving stakeholder consensus about what they need to do or to agree on what their shortlisted options should include and thus increase the likelihood that they will ultimately decide to stick with the status quo.

This is where we can and should step in and help. This buying decision may be unfamiliar to them, but we can share how we have helped dozens, hundreds or thousands of similar people in similar organisations to master the complexities and arrive at the right decision.

Without having to resort to “hard-selling” our solution, we can help our prospective customer to shape their decision criteria based on the experiences of others like them. We can educate and inform them and earn ourselves a position as a trusted advisor.

Unfamiliar processes

It’s sometimes harder to identify the fact that our potential champion is unfamiliar with their organisation’s own decision-making and approval processes – and if this is unfamiliar territory for them, they may make some unjustifiable assumptions about how easy it is going to be.

Our champion may innocently assume that they are familiar with their organisation’s buying decision processes. But unless they have regularly and recently bought similar solutions, it is very likely that even if they believe they understand the general principles, they may not understand the finer details that can derail the decision process.

This is not just a matter of identifying all the gates in the process or all the people who will be involved. It’s also about ensuring that our champion understands what’s expected from them in the form of a business case or other requirements.

And – in particular if our champion is an inexperienced buyer – we need to help them to recognise that their pet project is likely to be competing for attention and funding with a range of other potential investment opportunities, and that they need to ensure that their project is positioned with the appropriate degree of urgency and relative priority.

Once again, this is where our experience can help. We may not understand the full detail of their organisation’s decision and approval processes, but we have probably got a pretty clear idea where projects like these can potentially go astray and by asking the relevant questions and sharing the relevant insights, we can equip our champion for the journey they are about to undergo.

Unfamiliar source

And, as is likely, if this is the first time that their organisation has bought from our organisation, we need to recognise that questions are going to be asked not just about the suitability of our proposed solution, but also of our credibility as a potential supplier.

Even if we have convinced our champion of our bona fides, we need to recognise that others in the decision loop will want to satisfy themselves of this. And we need to factor in the time taken for us to be verified as an approved supplier into our projected close dates.

If we don’t know, we mustn’t assume

If we don’t know how these factors are likely to play out, it is very dangerous to assume that things will evolve smoothly. I expect you can think back to opportunities that you thought were a sure thing to close, only to find that an unanticipated factor or factors emerged at a late stage in the process.

In this, as in so many other aspects of selling, ignorance is not our friend. If we don’t know, we mustn’t assume. We need to make sure that we have the clearest possible picture of how and why our prospect makes buying decisions. And if, as is highly likely, they are not expert buyers, we must make sure that we share our experience and help them.

Isn’t that what being a “trusted advisor” really means?

I THINK YOU'LL ALSO APPRECIATE

Our Step-by-Step Guide to Value Selling

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, an award-winning blogger, a confident and entertaining event speaker and workshop leader, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B value-selling experts.

Following a varied and successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates Bob now works as an adviser to some of today’s most ambitious B2B-focused sales organisations, equipping and enabling them to accelerate revenue growth and transform sales effectiveness by implementing the proven principles of value-based selling.

I’m always running around saying how much I enjoy B2B marketing, because it’s complex, high ticket, and the results can be really satisfying. That’s all true. But sometimes I find it annoying, too. There are things about B2B that just tick me off. Forgive the rant, but I have to get this off my chest.

Businesses play their cards close to the vest. Have you ever tried to get a client to give you a testimonial? Well, then, you know what I mean. I’ve had customers say, “No way, you’re my secret weapon. I don’t want my competitors to know how good this is.”

What’s particularly annoying is that testimonials are one of the most powerful tools in B2B marketing. They reduce buyer risk. They offer social proof. And in theory business people want to help each other, so you’d think testimonials should be easy to get. But they’re not. Because buyers want to keep their good things to themselves.

Businesses think email is their best prospecting tool. When it isn’t. I just got off the phone with a data scientist in Bangalore who was complaining how he digs up high value prospective accounts, and his clients blast them with email, get no results and then blame him. Poor guy.

I’ve said before that I think email makes us stupid. It’s too cheap. So we get lazy. In a complex environment like B2B, you have to recognize how buyers buy. They research online. They talk to their peers. They attend conferences. They develop short lists. We need to reach them where they are, which is not talking to strangers from their inboxes.

B2B marketers still duck their data responsibilities. This irks the hell out of me. I am not the geekiest marketer around, but I find the power of data in B2B an endless source of fascination, and results. Where else are there so many buyers and influencers who need to be part of the decision-making process? Where else are people’s titles and job roles changing constantly?

So when marketers shy away from taking ownership of their company’s data strategy, and feeling personally connected to the need for data hygiene, I get mad. I’ve ranted about this quite recently, so I should probably shut up. But I can’t help myself. It bears repeating.

Okay, that’s the end of today’s rant. Maybe it’s time for me to go back to consumer marketing? Naw. I’m still B2B’s biggest fan.

Well, it’s actually account-based marketing (ABM), so are we counting that as two words? Who cares; it’s the concept that matters.

A Brief Intro to Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing (ABM in the rest of the text) is a B2B strategy that focuses not on the attempt to reach a wide audience, but to cultivate high-value relationships with specific businesses. It means you’re targeting your prospects with your content and offers only if they are highly relevant to their needs. You’ll have an account for each prospect, and you’ll treat it as an individual market, crafting a specific marketing message to target it.

So instead of developing a generic marketing campaign that would speak to a large audience, you target specific businesses that would make good clients. When you prioritize these prospects, you develop a customized approach to each of them.

SiriusDecisions conducts a yearly survey to evaluate the state of ABM. In 2017, they found that 81% of the respondents have already adopted ABM strategies. When compared to 49% in 2016, that’s a huge percentage that indicates a growing trend.

B2B marketers identified “revenue generation” as the top priority for conducting such a campaign. The other important goals include pipeline acceleration, lead generation, and sales and marketing alignment.

What does this mean for salespeople focused on B2B marketing? Does the fact that most other marketers rely on ABM mean that you should adopt such a strategy as well? Not necessarily. That’s just a hint of all the reasons why you should get interested in ABM.

You want more reasons? No problem! We’ll list 5 reasons you cannot neglect since they are focused on the main aspect of your job: generating sales.

5 Important Reasons to Use ABM to Boost Sales

1 Focus Is Everything!

With ABM, you focus your efforts on a small number of accounts that have high potential of becoming your clients. You identify how many clients your company would be able to serve at this point, and you obtain the exact number of customers that ideal situation imposes.

You’ll communicate with your prospects on an individual basis. You won’t be sending email messages as part of a general marketing campaign. The so-called “spray and pray” approach is not part of ABM. The communication will be highly specific for the particular account.

With greater focus, you’re able to achieve better results. It’s pure logic.

The sales and marketing teams collaborate to target those individual accounts in the most meaningful manner possible. They focus their resources on a handful of businesses, so they make sure to get the right messages to the right prospect.

2 ABM Creates Cohesion between Sales and Marketing

Theoretically, the Sales and Marketing departments of an organization should always work together. But is that always the case? If you observe situations from your own experience, you might realize that these two teams are focused on a common goal, but work separately towards it.

According to research from Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn, 81% of marketers in highly aligned companies were more likely to closely collaborate with their sales team on the way they use content when compared to just 25% of marketers in low aligned companies.

The most interesting fact that came out of this report is that ABM was considered to be a definite sign of alignment. 57% of highly aligned companies had implemented this strategy into their marketing efforts. Account-based marketing has a direct relation to using high-quality content, since it has to direct it to specific accounts.

The most common obstacles that prevented consistent collaboration between the marketing and sales teams involve different internal incentives, varying approach to measuring results, teams in different locations, use of different technologies, and lack of meetings.

So how does ABM help the teams to overcome these obstacles?

It provides a shared goal: personalization. The marketers are focused on researching the audience and knowing its needs, inside and out. They are looking for ways to reach them. For the sales team, the focus is on understanding the leads and delivering personalized content that triggers buying decisions. ABM is where these two teams meet.

The personalized approach is driven by content marketing, and it conveys itself through personalized sales pitches.

When a company implements ABM techniques, the marketing and sales teams simply have to collaborate and meet as frequently as possible.

3 ABM Drives ROI

The return of investment is one of the strongest arguments in favor of ABM.

Do you remember the stats we mentioned at the beginning of the article? The biggest reason why B2B marketers were implementing ABM was generating revenue. They invest in this promotional approach with the intention to return the investment and generate high revenue.

How is this goal being achieved?

• Through ABM, the marketing and sales teams share a common goal, so they focus their efforts on a consistent campaign. That saves them from making unnecessary costs, so they spend less on marketing while still getting results.
• This strategy encourages sales. It’s as simple as that. When a business gets a personalized offer that fits their specific needs, there’s no reason why the offer shouldn’t be accepted. This is a customer-centered strategy and that’s where its greatest value is.
• As the team measures the ABM performance, they identify and reinforce the most effective strategies. It’s easy to measure insights when you have a highly focused and narrow campaign. You see what content approach gains traction, and what attempts fail to succeed.
• ABM marketing does not require much time to deliver tangible results. The team won’t take much time to research the market and identify companies that could become clients. It’s a much faster strategy when you compare it to the process of online branding that caters to a large audience. When the businesses are identified, an account-based approach will offer exactly what a business needs. If the marketers put in the work, the offer will be accepted in no time.

4 A Personalized Approach

What makes ABM so appealing to clients? Personalization.

Imagine you’re a business owner. Let’s say you own a private language learning school. You get a personalized offer by a cleaning company, which offers to provide cleaning services every day once you finish classes. They tell you exactly how you’ll benefit from this approach, and they offer flexibility to arrange the details. Plus, they explain that they solely use organic cleaning products that couldn’t possibly affect a child’s health. They offer to adjust their practices if any of the kids has allergies to the any of the ingredients used in the products.

On top of everything, this company gives you an affordable price. You realize that you’re getting a lot of value from this investment, since you’ll be making your school more attractive for the new users.

Now that’s an offer that sounds too good to refuse, right?

ABM has a way to turning attention to detail. The nature of this marketing approach is highly personalized, so it immediately gets a client’s interest.

Of course, the marketing and sales teams have to be capable for in-depth research of potential leads. When you get that matter covered, they will target clients based on their likelihood of converting, and they will develop personalized offer with high chances of good results.

5 ABM Helps You Understand Your Clients Better

A successful ABM strategy requires extensive, but focused research. You’re not reaching out to a generalized target audience, but to specific business entities that could become your clients. When you have such a narrow focus, you have a chance to understand what would really gain someone’s interest.

Now, let’s use the same example with the school, but we’ll put you on the other side of the equation – you represent the business that offers cleaning services.

If you identify the foreign language school as a potential client for your cleaning service, you’ll try to research as much as possible about this prospect. You’ll find out how many learners and how many classes it hosts on a daily basis, and you’ll dig into their values. If they stand for a clean environment, you’ll offer cleaning services that fit within those values.

You get a chance to communicate with the specific prospect, so you can craft an even better offer for them. If you get their interest when you reach out to them, the business owner or the employee who deals with such expenses will probably have questions. They may ask you to adjust something in your offer, and you can easily do that.

If, for example, they inform you that one of the kids is asthmatic and has reactions to the scent of mint, you’ll make sure not to use cleaning products based on that ingredient. You can afford to change the strategy for a single requirement since you’re developing personalized offers that work for the client.

So Is ABM Good for Your Business?

If you own a B2B brand, then ABM is the best kind of marketing you could invest in. It allows you to target realistic potential clients and personalize the communication to a high level. Due to the high focus and personalization, you’ll reach high ROI much faster than the one you’d achieve with a general marketing campaign.

rawpixel / Pixabay

You’ve got a list of target accounts. You mapped out a plan that covers every stage of the sales process. Your marketing and sales teams are working together to engage your buyers and close deals. But why does it feel so complicated?

If your account-based programs are so complex and manual that they’re difficult to scale across larger audiences, this blog post is for you. You shouldn’t need a rocket scientist to figure out how to roll out ABM across your organization.

6 Challenges with Scaling Account-Based Programs

By launching an account-based strategy, you’re one of the pioneers boldly exploring the next frontier of B2B. And as a pioneer, you’ve had to navigate uncharted territory with no roadmap and limited tools.

Unfortunately, this has led to over-engineered processes requiring time-consuming manual steps to fill the gaps left by outdated technology. Let’s look at six of the challenges you may be facing with your ABM strategy — and how you can demystify what sometimes feels like rocket science.

1. Too Many Tools with Siloed Data

As the ABM buzz grew, so did the technology vendors wanting to jump on the bandwagon. As marketing teams try to piece together a target account program, it makes sense to turn to technology to automate as much as possible. So, marketers end up with a lot of point solutions.

Many of these tools are great and have helped B2B marketing take giant steps forward, but they’ve also added to the complexity of scaling personalized ABM campaigns. Managing steps across different tools is often a manual process that doesn’t scale well. This also complicates reporting and makes it difficult to aggregate account insights from disparate tools that don’t integrate the way you need them to.

2. Target Account Lists Take Too Long to Create and Update

When you’re doing it manually, target account lists take a long time to build. Because the important data is spread across many tools, you have to spend a lot of time downloading and consolidating spreadsheets and then uploading the spreadsheets back into a tool like Salesforce.

CRM and marketing automation tools weren’t designed to be account-centric, so they’re challenging to use for target account list building. It’s also difficult to manage and reprioritize account lists, which poses a challenge to agile marketing and sales teams who want to pivot their strategy as new information becomes available.

3. Reaching Decision-Makers Takes Personalization

These days, decision-makers are increasingly hard to reach. Tried-and-true channels aren’t performing the way they used to due to competition or audience fatigue. The silver bullet to this problem has been personalization, but personalization creates its own set of problems.

You may have seen amazing results with highly personalized campaigns, but they’re complex and time-consuming. The question is, how can you scale without sacrificing that personalized experience?

4. Sales Has Too Much Data

Sales transitioned from having little insight into their accounts to being overwhelmed by prospect data. With today’s tech, reps can now see if their account is showing in-market intent, engaging with key content, reading third-party reviews, attending an event — the list goes on.

To cut through the noise, you have to deliver actionable insights to your sales team — not all insights at all costs. This means you have to be thoughtful about the data sales is receiving and how that data is being visualized. You also have to be mindful of the triggers and actions the data supports. What will your sales team actually do with the information you give them?

5. Can’t Measure Success

One of the biggest challenges with account-based marketing is measuring success. Legacy marketing attribution technology ties pipeline and revenue to leads, not accounts. And lead metrics don’t tell the whole story of an account’s path to purchase.

Using traditional marketing tech to measuring the success of account-based programs is challenging, even more so when you want to scale your program. And without metrics to prove the value of strategic, account-based campaigns, it’s difficult to get the support to scale in the first place.

Make Account-Based Marketing Easier

ABM doesn’t have to be rocket science. The landscape is maturing, and you no longer have to be a lone pioneer without a map or adequate tools. Empower your marketing and sales teams to scale account-based strategies with the TEAM framework: Target. Engage. Activate. Measure.

• Target your best-fit accounts.
• Engage the entire buying committee with multi-touch marketing programs.
• Activate sales with actionable insights.
• Measure success with account-based metrics.

By simplifying your processes and consolidating your tools, your team can scale your account-based programs. No NASA scientists necessary.

Want to learn more about how to execute the TEAM framework and simplify your ABM strategy? Watch Put ABM Into Action With TEAM, an on-demand webinar that breaks down how to succeed with a target account strategy.

Imagine walking into a toy store and seeing a shiny red button on a table.

Go ahead, push it.

A metal ball above your head rolls down a track and your eyes follow it around the store to see where it ends up.

Instead of a single message your customers may forget, triggering a series of emails around your holiday marketing becomes more effective in sustaining your audience’s attention. An email automation series reinforces your message over and over, while simultaneously building excitement about what’s coming next.

Learn to help your marketing stand out from the noise of the holiday season with an automation series.

Meanwhile, the ball is still rolling…

Provide real value every step of the way

The ball falls off the track and trips a lever. This lifts a cage off a wind-up monster truck, which zooms forward, aimed at a ramp…

To keep your audience reading, each email in the series should provide consistent value and work towards solving your customer’s problem. By spreading the overall solution across multiple emails, you can better hold their attention and explain how your products offer the right solution.

If the toy store needed more in-store customers, the email series should set up a problem of holiday shopping, then offer a different solution in each succeeding email. For example, how shipping delays could interrupt the joy of the holidays. The email series could detail an alternative solution, such as shopping in-store and getting the toy the same day. Paired with an in-store coupon, this provides value and builds excitement about the business at the same time.

Meanwhile, the monster truck hits the ramp and launches into the air…

Build deeper excitement about your business and products

The truck flies across the store high above your head and lands in a net, which ignites a nearby torch…

A movie scratches the surface of a topic, while a mini series has the time to go much deeper. This depth leads to higher levels of excitement and understanding; just think of how much you love “Stranger Things.” Expanding your email into a series lets you cover a wider range of solutions to a single problem, providing a deeper satisfaction than a simple answer.

The toy store needs to convey three different benefits of shopping in person. Instead of quickly highlighting the benefits with simple bullet points, each could be broken out into a separate email. The first could cover the in-store discount, the next could outline the benefits of testing a toy before buying, and the final email could introduce the store’s helpful employees. With separate emails for each point, there are more opportunities to convince the customer.

Meanwhile, the torch heats the air inside a miniature hot air balloon. A teddy bear looks out across the store from inside the basket…

Tease what’s coming next to maintain engagement

The teddy bear pilots the balloon to the center of the store, towards a clown figurine holding a large pin…

Just like the mini-series that keeps you guessing at every turn, building excitement in each email requires a mixture of solving a problem and detailing your product’s benefits, paired with a tease of what to expect in the next email. As long as each email provides value, the customer’s curiosity can hold their attention through the series.

Unboxing videos have exploded into a trend of their own online. Instead of listing the three hottest toys of the year, a toy store could use three separate videos and sprinkle the content across a series. At the end of each email, a tease of the next toy to be unveiled will act as an enticing cliffhanger.

Meanwhile, the clown punctures the balloon and it crumbles. The teddy bear separates from the basket and starts falling…

Slow down the free fall of your customers

Why bother with an email series? Like the teddy bear, your customers are in trouble. Not only do they have a problem that needs solving, but they’re also so busy that they don’t have time to look for a solution. Instead of making them search for you, your email series can present multiple solutions until they recognize the answer to their specific problem.

Knowing your customers well helps to solve the right problem with the right product. Prior to the boom of the holiday season, or as soon as you can, conduct a survey that uncovers the essential needs of your customers. The toy store may discover the main problem is last minute gifts, not shipping costs. This helps refocus the email series to what’s truly important to your customers.

Which brings us back to the teddy bear currently plummeting towards the ground…

“Save the teddy bear already!”

The teddy bear falls into a large funnel, which soon turns into a slide that loops and turns down towards the floor. The teddy bar slips off the slide and lands on a fluffy pillow beside the cash register. You walked into the store needing a gift anyways, why not get the teddy bear with a backstory of adventure?

Spreading your message over a series of emails keeps your audience more engaged with your business and helps you stand out from the holiday marketing noise. Start an email automation series that builds excitement about your business and informs your customers about your products to boost your sales this holiday season.

Some say the best film scores are the ones you don’t notice.

That’s not to say that scores don’t impact moviegoers—quite the opposite, actually. The best film scores make huge impacts on their audiences.

The key is that they do it subtly. As the visuals unfold on screen, the music enhances the emotions of the scenes—without most viewers being consciously aware of it.

Spoiler alert: I’m making an analogy.

The score is to the movie as your inbound marketing strategy is to your brand.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy by which you drive prospects to your website rather than outwardly advertising your products or services.

The idea is that bringing potential customers to your website will familiarize them with your brand and offerings. Ideally, you’ll make a good impression—thus making it more likely that your prospects will go with your product or service when they’re ready to buy.

Outbound marketing, on the other hand, refers to the marketing strategy behind traditional paid media: TV ads, billboards, those insane Vitamin Water posters that make your morning commute worthwhile. The commonality across these ad types is the direct advertisement of a product or service.

Outbound marketing brings your offering to your prospects. Inbound marketing brings your prospects to you.

Why should I use inbound marketing?

Short answer: because it allows you to build trust with high-quality leads who demonstrate an active interest in your product or service.

This is particularly important if your business has a relatively long sales cycle. If your prospects generally take their time to research different offerings and weigh the pros and cons of each, building brand awareness and trust is big.

Let’s say you’re a B2B marketer selling social media management software. Your customers use your platform to create and schedule tweets, Instagram posts, Facebook posts, and the like.

Social media management platform Sprout Social.

Your software is an investment—nobody buys it on a whim. Although your pricing is fair and competitive, potential customers make sure to check out your competitors and educate themselves as much as possible before making a purchase.

Simply pushing your product isn’t gonna cut it. You need to demonstrate value.

You need to cultivate a brand that your prospects not only recognize, but a brand that your prospects know they can turn to when they need answers.

After months of research and deliberating, who do you think your prospects will go with: the product they briefly encountered in their news feeds or the brand from which they’ve gotten tons of valuable insights and best practices?

Exactly.

What are some examples of inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is an umbrella term—it encompasses a lot of unique tactics.

After all, there’s more than one way to get a potential customer on your website.

Let’s talk about ‘em.

Example #1: A blog

According to HubSpot—the SaaS company that popularized the term “inbound marketing” circa 2006—marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to get a positive ROI.

And it pays to be consistent: those who publish blog content at least 16 times a month generate 3.5x more website traffic and 4.5x more leads compared to companies that only update their blogs a few times a month.

A blog is a terrific way to answer your prospects’ pressing questions (e.g., How should I structure my Google Ads account?) in accessible long-form content.

Via Neil Patel.

The more educational your blog is—and the more frequently you update it with fresh content—the more likely you are to become the trusted brand that prospects remember as they move towards the bottom of the marketing funnel.

Example #2: An infographic

As awesome as written content can be, people don’t always have the time (or the desire) to sit down and consume 2,000 words about long-tail keywords, for example.

Sometimes, your prospect just wants a quick snapshot of insightful data, ideally presented in an aesthetically pleasing format.

Plus, if the information you’re sharing is especially valuable—say, benchmark data for mobile ads across 18 industries—there’s a good chance it will generate considerable buzz around the interwebs.

Buzz isn’t fleeting, either; it makes a lasting impact on prospects. If you can get people talking about your brand, you’ll see conversions in no time.

Example #3: A whitepaper

The definition and purpose of a whitepaper depends on who you ask. The industry you’re in and the goals you pursue certainly influence the final product.

For our purposes, we’ll define a whitepaper as an in-depth, well-researched piece of educational content that adopts a somewhat more formal tone than your average blog post.

Whereas a blog post is your weekly homework assignment, a whitepaper is your term paper.

As a rule, assume that the prospects who download your whitepaper are expecting higher degrees of rigor, depth, originality, and value.

It should look good, too. Presentation is half the battle.

Via Koozai.

The key advantage of a whitepaper over a blog post or an infographic is that—in addition to providing value to the people who qualify for your product or service—you can require contact information in exchange.

That way, after readers have downloaded your content, you can use email marketing to nurture them closer to conversion.

Example #4: An ebook

I won’t front—the benefits of an ebook are pretty similar to those of a whitepaper.

It’s another opportunity to develop your brand as an authoritative resource of actionable, insightful information. Typically, it’s free of charge and exchanged for contact information.

If you decide to incorporate ebooks into your inbound strategy—and I do recommend it—don’t take the task lightly. Remember: You’re writing a book.

That implies a pretty serious level of sophistication. You should reserve this content format for your truly hard-hitting material.

Via Unbounce.

Example #5: A case study (or customer spotlight)

Imagine that you’re a business owner in the market for a social media management software like the one I mentioned before.

While you’re browsing the blog of one of the companies you’re considering, you come across a case study. It tells the story of a company—eerily similar to yours—that bought the software a year ago and has seen positive returns ever since.

This software has made a huge difference for the featured customer.

Naturally, you think to yourself: “Well, that means it can work for me, too, right?”

That’s the power of a case study. It demonstrates to the people on the fence that your product or service has done wonders for people just like them. Talk about a nudge, huh?

Example #6: A webinar

It’s not always easy to inject personality into your written content.

True, the relative informality of the blog post allows you to crack jokes; however, when it comes to the highly polished world of whitepapers and ebooks, you may find yourself wishing you could add something a little more … human.

That’s where the webinar comes in.

A webinar is an internet seminar—lecture-style content presented to an exclusive web audience. With this format, a member (or a few members) of your content team has the opportunity to provide that valuable information we’ve been talking about and do it in a highly engaging and personable way.

Via IgniteVisibility.

The presence of a real, sentient person—even if it’s just his or her voice—creates the feeling that your brand is in direct conversation with your prospects. Whereas it’s easy for your prospects to abstract away the talented people who create your blog posts, whitepapers, and ebooks, that’s not the case with a webinar.

And, once again, the ability to request information from your prospects as an entrance fee makes the webinar a particularly good lead generation tactic.

Example #7: A podcast

Make all the jokes you want about pretentious millennials. Nowadays, podcasting is sexy.

(I may regret that sentence in a few years. That’s the price I pay for being a content cowboy.)

Much like the webinar, the podcast format allows you to attach some personality to your brand. That way, when your prospects are making their final decisions, they’ll remember you as both a valuable and relatable resource.

Podcasting doesn’t need to be labor-intensive, either. If you’ve got a laptop, a couple mics, and at least one coworker who sounds nothing like Steve Buscemi, you’re in business.

The co-hosts of Marketing Over Coffee.

One 30-minute episode a week is all it takes to become the engaging brand potential customers turn to during their Monday morning commutes.

Example #8: A video series

I’ll spare you the video marketing statistics you’ve been hearing all year and leave it at this:

Video content is huge. It’s growing and engaging, and most importantly, it’s effective. It’s what people want to see when they’re scrolling through Facebook and Instagram.

You already know why it works, too: It brings your brand to life.

A screenshot of a WordStream Weekly episode.

Whereas it pays to make your written content long-form, video is best when it’s bite-size. There are exceptions to every rule, but social media users are generally uninterested in videos that go longer than a minute or two.

Plus, video is a great opportunity to repurpose content in a more digestible format. A prospect may not have had the time to attend your webinar, but he can probably spare two minutes while scrolling through LinkedIn to get the basic ideas.

Yeah, you’d prefer he attend the webinar and fill out a form, but building a reputation as a great video company ain’t bad, either.

Example #9: Search engine optimization

What better way to finish this guide than with the inbound marketing strategy that makes the previous eight all the more effective?

SEO is an umbrella term in and of itself, referring to the suite of practices you can (and should) use to make your content more visible in the search engine results pages.

It doesn’t matter how sleek your ebook looks or how crisp your podcast sounds unless your prospects can actually find you in the organic search results. That means getting your content on page one—ideally in the middle or at the top.

Via Smart Insights.

Otherwise, you’re not driving anybody to your website.

On-page SEO encompasses all the stuff you can do directly on your website to make your content more visible on the SERP. At a macro level, that means making high-quality, human-oriented content that truly answers searchers’ questions and solves their problems. At a micro level, that means optimizing content for particular keywords to ensure that it’s considered relevant when people search certain queries you want to address.

Off-page SEO encompasses all the stuff that takes place away from your site. Essentially, the goal is to acquire links to your content from reputable websites. Each link indicates to search engines that your content is good and, therefore, worthy of moving up the organic ranks.

I’m grossly oversimplifying, but you get the gist: SEO is a massive part of inbound marketing because people don’t visit the websites they don’t know exist.

And if you don’t know, now you know.

There you have it, folks—nine different ways to get the people most qualified for your product or service on your website and familiar with your awesome brand.

Of course, not all of these tactics are going to be right for you. In fact, you may find that only one or two are good fits for your broader marketing strategy.

And that’s cool! By no means do you need to become the Wizard of Inbound (band name) to see success. As with everything else in marketing, it will be a process of tests, trials, and errors.

Once you find the balance that works best for you, the leads will be lining up at your door.

JuralMin / Pixabay

I’m on a mission to help companies understand the need to embrace a culture of video in 2019 and beyond. Why is this a passion point for me?

As I’ve been helping companies embrace video, I’m starting to see the same old business problem rearing its ugly head again.

What problem?

Silos!

You see, most companies are doing video as a marketing initiative or having us come out and simply help their sales team be better on camera.

Most service teams we have encountered have not even thought about the importance of using video in their process yet.

This is just not going to work in the future!

Everyone from the top c-level folks to the janitor who sweeps the floors and empties the trash should understand and use video in their process moving forward.

This means marketing, sales, service, HR, and any other division you can think of should be leveraging the communication powerhouse that is online video!

I have an entire talk that I give on stages around the world about the “5 Real Reasons Your Business Should Be Creating More Videos!”

Spoiler alert, it is not because it is a tactic or a strategy for a single individual or department.

It is because it is an amazing communication tool that allows any company to do things like:

• Humanize Their Brand
• Simplify The Complex
• Disarm Potential Leads
• Educate Their Customers
• Evoke Emotional Responses

But, the question we have been running into as of late is this:

How do we create videos across all of our divisions and through the entire buyer’s journey when engaging with our company?

Great question!

The Video Funnel Foundation 2019 Style

To understand what types of videos we should be creating and using in certain sections of the journey, we need to understand what the potential customer is trying to accomplish.

Video Funnel: Absorb Stage

At the very top of the funnel, we know that they are trying to absorb as much content as they can around the problem they are facing or the desire they want to achieve.

This type of top of the funnel content is all about understanding the root, the issue, the core foundational pieces of the problem or desire.

The types of videos that work best here are brand awareness videos, emotional shorts, how-to videos, and documentary-style videos.

Notice most of these are very story-based. A story simplifies the way in which we can share information around a certain topic.

As you think about the video types and what department might have a hand in their creation, it becomes obvious that every department could probably do all of them.

However, I think you can drill down and give certain types to certain divisions.

Why?

Because, if you simplify what they need to or can do, it will get done. If you give them all the choices, most times it is paralyzing to their creative efforts.

So how do we divide up the top of the video funnel?

Brand Awareness Videos: Brand Team

Brand awareness videos are very story-based.

You want to make sure to tie into an emotion that the audience may be or should be feeling.

A great example of a brand awareness video is this one from Shopify called Unite: Mobilizing Entrepreneurship!

Notice in this video, that Shopify did several things amazingly.

1. It communicates brand values.

Create & Achieve the impossible. Unite a world together.

2. It draws viewers in immediately and keeps them watching.

You instantly understand that these people have a problem but, how are they tied together?

What are their individual stories?

3. It tells a story the target audience relates to.

We all have been there. We have a feeling or a great idea but, we just aren’t sure how to achieve it by ourselves.

4. It creates emotion and connection.

Shopify uses the emotion of empathy, the thought of freedom and a great life to pull you through the entire video.

5. It leaves viewers wanting to know more.

How can we succeed in our own stories? How does Shopify fit in?

Emotional Short Videos: Sales Team

For emotional short videos, we can go in several directions.

One very strong way is explaining why the sales rep does what they do.

I don’t mean making money either. What are three levels deep to the real WHY they do or love their job?

Where are they trying to get themselves or their potential customers to?

Uncover that information and the video will be a hit for sure.

The second emotional short video could be just that.

A story about where the customer was and how they got to where they wanted to go.

What about the rest?

One of my favorite types of videos to create in the absorb stage of the video funnel are:

How-to Videos: Service Team

Over the past four years with several different companies, I have created close to 1,000 how-to videos around HubSpot and Inbound Marketing.

Heck, just in the past 6 months, we have created 200 videos for the Sprocket Talk podcast an audio and video daily tips, update, or interview series.

Here is a great example of how to create a fun and educational how-to video.

Documentary Videos: Marketing Team

Don’t forget about the documentary-style videos.

They are a power-packed punch of goodness just waiting for your company to create them!

Once the visitor is ready to move from the absorb stage and move into the assess stage, we have to change our focus as a company, as well as the types of videos we are creating and sharing.

Video Funnel: Assess Stage

In the Assess Stage of the video funnel, we can start to leverage product and service videos, case studies, testimonial videos, and about us videos.

An easy place to get started is:

• Case Studies Videos: Sales Teams

• Testimonial Videos: Service Teams

Both of these videos can be scripted and highly-produced or in my personal opinion…NOT!

We humans are funny! We desire authenticity and reality.

Having an interview-style case study and or testimonial video could come off as even more powerful than video you spent a ton of time and money to produce.

Even a live event that gathers all of your current customers and gives them the opportunity to gush on how amazing you are as a company could be then repurposed into several case study and testimonial clips to be used on your website and in social media posts.

Product & Service Videos: Service & Marketing

I love product videos.

They have the potential to be so creative.

Again they can come in super in-sourced style or highly-produced styles.

I even like animated videos for some products or service videos.

A great example of this is the Fairlife product by CocaCola.

What did they do great with this video?

• They kept it simple.
• They connected with several different audiences.
• They educated the consumer about a niche-style product.

What should you be thinking about when creating product or service videos?

Here are a couple things:

1. Hook the audience immediately.
2. Show the product or service.
3. Tell a story specific to the consumer.
4. Show how it solves a problem.
5. Inject some human elements.
6. Keep it simple.
7. Add a CTA to the product or service.

Keep those product or service video tips in mind and you will have an award-winning video that converts sales!

About Us Videos: Marketing

Don’t forget the about us videos. These can be individual employee videos, department videos, or entire company culture style about us videos.

The people who will use your products or services want to see the building, the process, the team, the why of what you do as a company.

So, use video to achieve that for them.

Once those same people have graduated from the Assess Stage, they will quickly move into the Aquire Stage. Their sole purpose is to acquire or purchase the solution to the problem they have been facing, researching, trying to fix. Or, to fulfill a desire they have had.

Video Funnel: Aquire Stage

Some videos you can focus on creating during this stage are:

Personalized Video: Sales Teams

Personalized videos are an amazing tool for sales teams. We as humans love to hear and see our names. We love to be recognized out of the masses.

With personalized video, you are also fully aware that this video is not mass communication. It has been created with love just for you.

A great example of a super cool personalized video is this one from the YMCA.

What did the do right in this video?

They called out Chris. I wanted to be Chris by the time the video was over.

They used upbeat inspirational music for the video.

Smiles were plenty in this video!

They made it feel authentic with real people.

Instructional Videos: Marketing Teams

These videos are a close kin to the how-to videos from the assess stage.

They are a deeper level of education and are customized for actual customer using the product and service versus high-level info about using said product or service.

FAQ Videos: Service Teams

Every company should have an FAQ video gallery page in my opinion. It can be created by leveraging all the questions that your service departments get from real life customers.

Sales, however, can also leverage those videos that service has created in their sales efforts.

It is a super easy way to streamline communication and learning!

Now, most companies think that is where the journey ends for video. To be honest, that is where most companies think everything ends.

We made a sale, let’s call it a day and go home.

But, if you want to keep making sales and build a brand that the world loves and talks about, then you have to head into one last stage, the advocate stage.

Video Funnel: Advocate Stage

This stage is the holy grail of stages. It allows you to create deeper long-lasting relationships with customers.

I have had many customers turn into friends, that then freely talk about HubSpot and video training like they are the best thing on the planet.

Well, they sort of are.

But, I digress.

There are many ways to create advocate style videos but, my favorite is the spotlight approach.

This is when you pick a super user of your product or an entire company that uses your product and shines a light on them.

You share your real appreciation of them, what you have been able to achieve because they are a customer and the growth that you have seen from them during the time of the relationship.

You are leveraging the human emotions of love and gratitude as well as a little vulnerability.

That crazy cocktail of emotions can take a video to the next level and make a customer feel like a superhero!

When you navigate in this way, your advocates love and trust you with their business if not even more and then tell the entire world how awesome you are.

Pro tip: Do this as a tactic vs a heartfelt truth and it will flop every time.

So, are you using video through your entire company and through the entire funnel?

If the answer is no, you now have a road map to get started.

Focus on creating a culture of video through the Absorb, Assess, Aquire, and Advocate Stages by helping your sales, marketing and service teams to create the right video content.

The working environment at Wishpond is focused on rapid growth.

This allows us to throw marketing tactics against the wall to see what sticks.

More often than not, the things we throw end up breaking. But sometimes they stick, and we boost sales by 40% or find a new avenue for growth.

This article is a carefully collated list of hacks and tactics which, I hope, you will not have seen before. These are the tactics we’ve found to be the most reliable for growing a business.

Which element of business growth are you most interested in? Click below to head straight to each section:

• Increasing Brand Awareness
• Getting More Customers
• Becoming More Efficient

Most of the marketing tactics in this article are simple to implement, but some will require a developer or a bit more advanced understanding of digital marketing. If you have any questions, reach out in the comment section and we’d be happy to help!

Increasing brand awareness

The marketing tactics in this section revolve around getting a business seen and heard.

Less-focused on driving sales, here are 11 early-stage marketing tactics which drive brand awareness.

#1. Join active communities of other marketers

There have never been more awesome marketing communities than right now. Check out Facebook and Slack, in particular.

These communities don’t just offer advice. If approached correctly, they can also share your content and connect you with a network of people excited to increase your brand awareness.

#2. Send micro-influencers an Instagram DM

If you’re looking to connect with a larger audience on Instagram, identify micro-influencers (people with 2000-10000 followers) and DM them. Compliment them on their photos and ask for feedback, in return for a discount code.

Then, follow up with interested influencers and offer a free product in exchange for a promotional post.

#3. Stand for something

Standing out from your competitors may mean choosing a side.

A good example of this is Harry’s, an ecommerce company selling men’s shaving tools. To stand out from their (frankly, numerous) competitors, they built a brand around exploring what it means to be a man.

In particular, they jumped into support of the LGBTQ community, devoting a month of their blog’s content to exploring their stories:

In honor of Pride, we sought out inspiring individuals in the LGBTQ+ community and asked them: How do you actually identify? No labels. No expectations. Here, see how fun—and moving—true individuality can really be. – Harry’s Five O’Clock blog

#4. Create videos for LinkedIn & YouTube

A powerful way to increase the reach of your posts is to create a video – just a minute or two, describing your content or your newest feature.

These videos don’t need to be incredibly professional. So long as you have good audio and good energy, people will respond positively.

To see an example, check out this LinkedIn post and video from Shopify Plus editor Aaron Orendorff.

#5. Find and Repost User-Generated Content

76% find UGC more trustworthy than branded advertising. A tool like Later can help you search for user-generated content using hashtags, save it to your library, repost it and credit the people who took the photos.

This is an awesome way to reach new audiences on Instagram.

#6. Mention people when you post content on social media

Whenever you write an article and share it on social media (especially LinkedIn and Twitter), create a list of thought-leaders within your network who may be interested, then @mention or tag them in your Post.

Another cool idea is to mention brands within your content, and let them know when you’ve done so.

#7. Run a referral or bonus-entry campaign

Referral or bonus entry contests are the best ways to use your existing contacts to spread awareness about your brand.

These contests give people additional chances to win a grand prize if they share your contest with their network.

#8. Reward sharing

Your existing customers are the most valuable resource you have to increase awareness. They already love you, after all.

Check out a tool like Referralcandy, which enables you to reward your customers (in a number of ways) when they share your brand with their network.

#9. Communicate easily with followers

A tool like Commun.it automatically tracks all your new Fans every day, identifies the most engaged Fans and allows you to reach out to them directly from the app.

This is an awesome way to ensure you’re engaging with your social media community (and ensure that community is engaged with your brand).

#10. Run a co-promotion with a business similar to yours

Identify business who don’t compete with you, but do have a similar target market (and are a similar size). Combine forces to offer an awesome prize package, then promote to your existing lists.

You’ll double the effectiveness of a normal contest, and drive huge awareness from your target market.

#11. Brand your app, and offer a free version

If you have the capability, a great way to increase brand awareness is to offer a heavily-branded free version of your software (or a part of it).

Getting more customers

Ultimately, driving sales has got to be the focus point of a marketing team.

Website optimization, advertising, and testing are important, but you already know that.

This section focuses on giving you tactics to grow your customer base which you may not have necessarily thought of.

#12. Retarget pricing page visitors

Rather than spending huge money to retarget/remarket all your website traffic, focus only on those most-interested visitors.

Retarget people who viewed your pricing page, but didn’t check out. YouTube video ads are particularly effective.

#13. Don’t send people to your homepage

Homepages still have a place, of course. You need somewhere for people to go if they just want to learn more about you (though there’s an argument to be made that even your “About Us” page should be optimized to drive demos).

But if you’re running ads, using social media, blogging, or (really) driving people to your website from any traffic source except Google organic search, you should create a page specifically optimized for that traffic source.

#14. Send a text instead of an email

Using marketing automation, you can trigger text messages instead of emails. With a 98% open rate, texts may just be a better way to confirm a demo booking or fight shopping cart abandonment.

Apps like Twilio make it easy:

#15. Make your 404 page a landing page

Changing your 404 page to a lead-gen landing page means you’re taking advantage of every page of your website.

Consider offering an ebook, demo or email-gated promotion to everyone who accidentally finds your 404s.

#16. Auto-select form fields

Auto-selecting form fields enables your site visitors to simply start typing rather than having to move their mouse to your form.

Never underestimate the importance of usability in your sales funnel.

#17. Add PayPal & Amazon pay to checkout

PayPal and Amazon pay options are super easy additions to your ecommerce site, and every time you give people more options, you cut out the excuses to not complete a purchase.

ComScore ran a study which reported that ecommerce checkout with PayPal as an option converted 82% higher than checkout processes without PayPal.

#18. Add social logins to signup pages

We get about 40% of our total signups through Facebook and Google logins. Clicking a button is so much easier than entering your email address.

Without social logins, our signup rates would be significantly lower. You’ll need a dev for this, but it will pay off almost immediately.

#19. Delay sending emails until office hours

Email open and click-through rates are significantly better on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays than they are on Sunday. And they’re significantly better at 8am than they are at 8pm.

Use a tool like Wishpond’s email-delay to make sure your automated emails are only sending when people are around to open them:

#20. Instead of a landing page, use a click popup

We saw a 40% increase in conversion rates when we kept blog readers in an article (allowing them to download a guide in a popup) than when we sent them to a different tab to do so.

Over the course of the year, the test resulted in thousands of more leads than we otherwise would have had.

#21. Use conditional formatting to personalize the website experience

Conditional formatting enables you to include demographic information, product names, even first names within in your landing page, product pages, and popup headlines.

This type of personalization drastically increases conversion rate.

For instance, let’s say you own an ecommerce company. Wouldn’t it be awesome if your page headlines changed based on product that the visitor clicked on?

Here’s an example from eMusic, in which headlines change automatically based on a visitor’s previous visit:

Becoming more efficient

Does it feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day?

Marketing a business online requires coffee, late hours and more creativity than you’d think possible.

But there are ways to make it that little bit easier (and isn’t a little bit all you need, some days?)

This section covers marketing tactics and tools which help you become a more efficient marketer – saving you time, energy, and resources.

#22. Use templates

The easiest thing you can do as a marketer to make your life easier is to use templates everywhere you can:

• Blog header images: Have a designer create a PSD file which looks great and learn how to edit it (you don’t have to learn Photoshop to edit a Photoshop file)
• Landing pages: Edit an existing template within your favorite landing page builder with your brand colors, brand font, etc. Then duplicate and edit that template for each of your future marketing campaigns.
• Facebook Ads: Have a designer create three or four Facebook Ad designs, then run campaigns with all of them. Ask them to create an editable template of whichever design performed best and use it as a starting place for your next campaign.

For instance, take advantage of designer-created landing page templates:

#23. Make Facebook Ad testing easy

We’ve been using AdEspresso for a few years now, and there’s one main reason:

The platform makes it super easy to create multiple tests.

Let’s be honest, Facebook’s ad manager doesn’t make it easy to create tests, but testing is crucial to getting the most bang for your ad budget.

Import a single ad image and write three different headlines, and AdEspresso automatically creates 16 different variations. import 3 images and 3 headlines, and you’ll get 45 distinct tests.

It’s quick, easy, and the time-saving (and conversions) more than pay off the cost of the platform.

#24. Use a project management platform well

I say “well” there, because I honestly believe that’s what makes this marketing tactic different from the ones you’ve heard before that recommend project management apps.

Tools like Trello can be used one of two ways: 1) haphazardly and inconstantly or 2) to save you time, stress, and make your team work 50% more efficiently.

It’s up to you.

A great example of a well-used project management tool is Buffer’s public content calendar

Here’s a snapshot:

#25. Zap it

Need to send data between two platforms? Use Zapier to connect them.

Fighting for a developer’s time can be one of the most frustrating and time-consuming parts of a marketer’s job. Zapier makes it possible for marketers of all skill-levels to send data from the tools they love to the tools they love.

#26. Use marketing automation

You’ve may have heard this marketing tactic before, but there are a few use cases you may not be familiar with:

• Use marketing automation to send a series of emails to leads (this is the one you’ve probably heard before).
• Use marketing automation to send a message to a salesperson (prompting them to get in touch manually) when a lead visits your pricing page twice in two days.
• Use marketing automation to send an abandoned cart email when someone abandons checkout, prompting them to return.
• Use marketing automation to move leads to a “hot lead” segment based on pages they’ve visited, frequency, demographics or any other variable you can think of.

#27. Create automated webinars

Tools like Demio enable you to create a webinar once, then replay it (automatically) forever as if it’s live.

The technology is a bit cheeky, but you can create a level of urgency you wouldn’t otherwise have with on-demand webinars. This increases registration rates.

#28. Use Google Drawing instead of learning the Adobe suite

This is one of my favorite marketing strategies – the ability to create almost everything that my designers can create with a totally free tool.

Google Drawing (and Presentation) make visual content-creation super simple. And they save you from having to go back to school…

#29. Take a pause

I first heard about the “Take a pause” method when a friend forwarded me this Forbes article.

In it, marketing influencer Bruce Kasanoff recommends that, after you complete a task, just sit there for a couple minutes, resisting your desire to push on to another task immediately.

That desire, Bruce says, “[leads] to a long and winding road of inefficiency. You end up being reactive instead of proactive.”

Instead, sit for a few minutes until your impulse to check your email, check your phone or jump into another task fades.

“Just wait, until you calm down.

When at last you are content doing nothing, allow yourself to consider your next move. Whatever you do next will be the product of calm and focused thought.”

#30. Ask for help

This is perhaps the most important marketing tactic I’ve learned in 6 years at a startup. That’s why I’ve included it twice, kind of.

I said above that communities are an amazing way to increase brand awareness, and they are. But they’re also incredible resources.

A simple question, “Which webinar software should we use?” is far more effectively answered by an active Facebook group than it would be by a day of Google searching:

That question got replies from 14 marketers, looking to help someone out of nothing more than their own altruism.

Growing a business takes a village. Never forget that you’re not alone in this.

Final Thoughts

I hope you find a few tactics in this post which you can use to grow your business, as we have.

I don’t have any real favorites, as I believe every single one of these has serious value at different business stages and for different industries.

As I said in the introduction, though, some of these require a bit more thought than others.

If you have questions about implementation or any of the tools I’ve recommended, feel free to reach out in the comment section.

Happy growing!

I want to let you know that your story matters. And how you tell it can be a subtle difference between marketing and a strategy.

Marketing is easy; strategy, not so much. The reason I bring up this topic is I had a conversation with a client, actually maybe a past client. It’s hard to say. When we started the project, the goal was to increase sales. During the process, we learned a lot. But the end result is that the client felt unsatisfied. “We got nothing, we got nothing,” I kept hearing. In reality, there was a lot. But all he wanted to see was sales. What he missed was some incredible information that we got which could help him get what he wants if he would listen and learn to implement it.

The Answer Is In The Questions

The key thing is that you have to ask questions. The way that you ask questions is people that have already purchased your product. That’s going to give you real solid clues as to how you can convince other people to make purchases. Ask them these questions after they’ve purchased. Get on the phone with them, record it. When you record it, you can have it transcribed, because when you’re listening you tend to have a certain emotion. It could be defensive, it could be gleeful, it could be anything. But record it and have it transcribed, and reread it with different eyes after you’ve had the conversation.

Ask them: why did they buy? What motivated them? What convinced them to finally pull out their credit card and make that purchase, or hand you cash, or whatever it is? Then: can you use that information to help you figure out a way to convince other people who are like them to buy? I think that’s one of the most underutilized tools in marketing, is doing post-customer surveys. Most people oversimplify it and they ask: How’d you hear about us? Most people will respond: the Internet. Then they just leave it there. But there’s so much more detail available if you just ask.

When this project started out, it was a marketing project. But what it really turned into was a strategy product that can be used to help improve marketing. Let’s talk about the difference between marketing and strategy.

Marketing Defined

Marketing in its simplest form is pretty easy. I look at it as being comprised of three major components. Now, you can get a lot more complex, but if you break it down, the first component is composing branding messages, the messages that you want to send. The second thing is you have to deliver those messages to your audience where they’re listening. It could be TV, could be radio, could be social media, whatever it is. Then thirdly, measure the results of what’s happening with that marketing. Are people buying? Are people clicking? Are they getting to your website? If not, why not?

Strategy Refined

Now let’s look at strategy. A strategy is built upon what you’re doing with your marketing. When you look at a real strategy, the ultimate thing is what people are doing when they consume the marketing messages that you put out there. What you do with that information is incredibly important.

First and foremost, you want them to take action. You want them to click the buy now button to give you a credit card, to sign up with whatever program you have, buy a house from you. That’s what you want them to do. But if they’re not ready, then what you want to try to do is get them to ask for more information.

Secondly, you want to have the opportunity to stay in front of them so that you can convince them, so when they’re ready to buy, you’re the choice.

The third thing is to stay in the loop. That’s the way I use email marketing, is they may not be ready to buy today, but I can at least keep my content in front of them.

I own my email marketing list, so I have the ability to do that with platform independence. You do, too. Get them to take action. If they’re not going to take action, bribe them to get on your list and then communicate with them via email or some kind of way. Could be a phone call, could be text, whatever you need to do.

Sometimes you have to reverse that order. Get people on the list and then convince them to buy your stuff, and then eventually they will. A lot of the time that’s what it takes, but that’s the strategy. You have to look at it forward and backward, backward and forward, and figure out what’s working for you, your audience, and your product.

Three Strategy Options

Sales Campaign

Let’s talk about three different types of strategies or sales campaigns. what I want to talk about is something like Amazon. Amazon’s main goal is to get you to their website and buy something. That’s how they make their money. They want you to put something in the cart, click the cart button, and pay. But, sometimes you look at something and say, “Hey, that’s cool, but I wonder if I could find an alternative? Can I find something cheaper?” They’re constantly putting in front of you alternative options. What’s the most popular, what’s the cheapest? You can go and look at all that. You can research what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

The next thing is can you get people to stay in the loop, just like I said before. You want them to add their products to a wish list, so when they come back, they remember what it is they were researching so then they can put it in the cart and purchase. Think of what I said about a strategy in that way.

Brand Awareness Campaign

Next, let’s talk about a brand awareness campaign. For this one I want to use McDonald’s. Most people think of McDonald’s as the fun family place, but they’ve actually b een taking out all of those playgrounds. Yeah, they still have a Happy Meal but you don’t hear about Ronald McDonald or the Hamburglar anymore. What they’re marketing to is value. Think of the dollar menu and what they offer. That’s trying to get their brand out there that they’re a cheap alternative.

The second thing they’re trying to do is get you to remember their brand when you’re in your car. Because it’s not only cheap, but it’s convenient. Then finally, in order for them to stay in the loop, they do some unique things. Now I don’t know about you, but I love me a McRib. They bring that out just once or twice a year, so it becomes one of those things that people talk about. Do you like McRibs, do you hate McRibs? But they create brand awareness. They keep it top of mind by doing things like that.

Public Relations Campaign

The last thing I want to talk about is a public relations type campaign. It exists to create a brand awareness in a different sense. One of the things that younger people care about is social consciousness. Think of Amazon Smiles. You can actually donate to charities when you buy things and it doesn’t cost you any more. Think of the Ronald McDonald House where kids with cancer parents can stay. Those are social consciousness brands.

The next one is the feel-good neighbor. Have you seen those McDonald ads where the kid walks in with his acceptance letter to college and how McDonald’s was his first job and primed him to get to where he needs to be? That’s the message they’re trying to get across.

The final thing that PR can do is overcome bad news. Think about Amazon. It was in the news because it’s taking advantage of the postal system, when in reality it’s actually making it a lot of money. PR can overcome a lot of those issues.

Final Thoughts

When thinking about strategy, there are three things you need to consider. Number one, it’s a long-term process. Number two, it’s a process. Stay committed. Number three, ready, fire, aim.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

3dman_eu / Pixabay

When I first started my business, I wasn’t sure how much to charge. Even when I figured out my pricing structure, when it came to putting it on paper, I was always nervous it was going to be too much. I didn’t know my value – and worse – my clients didn’t know either.

It was a few years into a certain client’s event that I decided that the value I brought to the table was not being rewarded. It was my own fault, but I was charging way too little because I just wanted to “get the business” and I was afraid of claiming what I really thought I deserved. It was a tough time in my company – trying to take LKE from a side business to a serious FT business – and part of that transition was learning to charge what I believed I was worth (and building a business that reflected that value). I ended up raising my prices 4X that year and it has been a more successful business ever since.

I don’t get every client, but I do get the ones that are perfect for me. This is important – and the process to get here was long, but worth every second. Here are a few tips I have if you’re looking to change the perception of your business, uplevel and see exponential growth!

1. TAKE YOURSELF SERIOUSLY AS A BUSINESS
The first step in getting other people to respect you as a legit planner who is worth paying for – is to take yourself seriously. This isn’t a side business. It’s not a hobby. If you want to make a full-time income, you’ve got to make this your biggest priority. I’ve found that focusing on your planning as a serious business does a few things.

(1) It helps you believe that you bring something very special and unique to the table. You know how hard you work and you want to be paid accordingly.
(2) Your activity is evident to all those around you – they take you more seriously, expect to spend more money and determine that they want to work with you for a specific value you bring to the table.

If you’re working with a full-time effort and want to command higher revenue, you’ve got to make it look legitimate. This would include spending your time on:

• Branding yourself as a high-class planner. This mandates that you focus on your BRILLIANCE and brand yourself accordingly. Yes – choosing a niche is important!
• A strong marketing plan. If you’re spending hours and hours working on your business, some of that time should be on strong social media posts, an updated website, updated LinkedIn profile and a strong marketing plan.
• A defined, well-branded proposal process. What do your prospective clients receive from you the second they’re interested? What is your proposal process and how does it speak to your ideal target clients? If it’s giving away too much up front or not communicating your value, you’re going to lose more potential clients than you could ever find.

In short, when everything you do looks like a successful business that provides a unique value to a specific target audience, you’re on the right path!

2. CHARGE ETHICALLY AND APPROPRIATELY

It’s not fair to our clients, or to ourselves, to make pricing a guessing game. The price of the day shouldn’t be based on how you feel or how rich your client is. At the end of the day, you’re selling a service that has an associated price. You’re an event planner and that means you’re involved in various aspects of throwing an event. Maybe you’re more on the management side or full production, but you should know your service listings.

In determining how to charge, I’ve found a few pricing models that exist in our industry. Some do one way, others make a hybrid version, and still others make it up as they go along. Here are 3 popular pricing models I’ve seen and my opinions on each.

• A PERCENTAGE OF THE BUDGET
  This model is simple – planners who charge this way take a % of their total budget. So let’s say your client has a $100,000 budget and you take 20%, you get paid $20,000 (Look ma, I just did math!).This is very straightforward, but not my favorite way to charge because it has no reflection on the work you will need to do. Let’s say the client’s budget is $100,000, but they want you to manage 100 speakers. They may not be paying these speakers so it’s doesn’t factor into their budget, but managing 100 speakers is a HUGE, time-consuming task. You’ve really got to make sure your % is fair if you’re using this model.
• A FLAT FEE
  I’ll be honest – I’m not 100% sure how people figure this model out (which is why I don’t do it), but the general concept is that there is a flat fee. For example – on-site wedding management is $2,500 and full wedding management is $5,000. I’m guessing this is based on average workload, but I also have a feeling this changes frequently based on the whim of the day – and the projected “budget” of the client.
• A PROJECT FEE BASED ON PROJECTED # OF HOURS
  This is the model I love the most, and it’s what I use for all of our clients. I lay out a very specific scope of work. Like -VERY specific – and then use that to determine how many hours I think I will have to spend. Of course, I also include staff time as well. This estimation of hours is then multiplied by my hourly rate and then given as a flat fee. So – if I end up spending more time than I thought, that’s my fault. My clients don’t pay more. If I spend less time (which RARELY happens), I still get paid the same flat fee. But – I do reduce for the client the next time around to make sure it’s in line with reality so they aren’t overpaying.The reason I love this model so much is that it’s a direct reflection of the work. If I give a proposal for $40,000 and my client can only afford $10,000, I can still take the contract by reducing the scope and lessening my fee. I know how much work I’ll need to do, and reducing my fee and scope allows me to take on other clients. It’s also much more transparent to the client as they know they’re being charged only for work I’m doing. It helps me when the client’s budget is lower than my proposal – I don’t just have to do all the same work for the same price.

Now just because the third model is my favorite, doesn’t mean it’s the only right answer. You have to find a solution that you feel comfortable with. The main goal here is to decide on a pricing model – make it clear to your clients – and stick with it. If you know HOW you charge, you can then determine HOW MUCH!

3. STICK TO YOUR GUNS

If we want our clients to take us seriously, we have to take ourselves seriously. And the biggest way we do that is sticking to our pricing strategy. Once you’ve done the two things above, you’re really sure that you deliver great value to your clients. You’re also clear on HOW you price your services and HOW MUCH makes sense for each project. Once you’ve established this – you come to the hardest part of all – sticking to your guns.

Remember that story I told in the beginning about raising my prices by 4X? Well the first time I did that, I lost the client. They couldn’t understand why I had to raise my prices so much and they didn’t value the work that I brought to the table. It was a hard loss and I really had to push through a lot of doubt and uncertainty about this new pricing strategy. But you know what? After 2 years, that same client came back and paid the 4X amount. They had hired other companies and didn’t get the same quality – and when they came back – they knew why I was worth every penny.

I know this is easier to say than to do, but when you truly believe in the value you bring to the table, you take yourself seriously, and you have a smart pricing strategy – you will find that the right clients are the ones who will pay you. You’ll have to let the ones who don’t see your value fall away. You’ll lose some business. You might even lose some of your best current customers.

But you’re also opening the doors to a whole new ballgame.

When you brand yourself and price accordingly, you open up all new doors.

• Clients who love you and will pay top dollar to work with you.
• New revenue opportunities from thought leadership.
• No more justifying your value every step of the way and arguing with clients who don’t have clear expectations.
• Getting paid WELL for work you LOVE to do.

It may not be easy, which is why many people don’t do it, but those who take the time to walk this path will be some of the most powerful event hustlers in the business!

—————————————

This may be one of the largest articles I’ve ever written, but raising your prices is not a simple task. It’s a lot of work and there are a lot of nuances. I found out (the hard way) that much of this takes support from people who have been there before.

Artificial Intelligence (or AI) remains a much misunderstood technology, and many business leaders (perhaps you among them?) are either wary of it, or simply don’t yet see how it applies to their business.

That’s partly because there are so many myths and half-truths being circulated about AI that it’s hard to separate the real from the fanciful, and the positives from the negatives. But make no mistake, AI isn’t all about robots and driverless vehicles. Its potential for business transformation is huge, and to keep ahead of the competition you need to be thinking now about how your digital transformation strategy incorporates AI for future growth.

What do we really mean when we talk about AI?

AI isn’t a new term; it was first used by Alan Turing around 1950. It refers to using machines to simulate or do ‘intelligent’ things – things that would normally be done be by people, using their cognitive faculties. The use of AI has accelerated in recent years (and continues to do so) because of the exponential growth in the availability of both computing power and data – today we all have supercomputers at our fingertips with our smartphones, (and are already using AI every time we use the spellcheck as we’re typing). Many e-commerce sites are also using AI as well as statistical methods when it comes to suggesting other things you may be interested in buying, or reading. So developments are going deeper and deeper into the capabilities of AI technologies.

As this McKinsey podcast transcript outlines, AI broadly encompasses five areas:

• Physical AI – robotics and autonomous vehicles;
• Computer vision – image and video processing;
• Natural language processing – particularly spoken language, but also involving some written language;
• Virtual agents or conversational interfaces – enabling systems to converse with you by voice or chatbots;
• Machine learning – perhaps the area with most growth potential right now – a good example of machine learning would be Siri or Alexa, every time you use it, it gets better at finding what you need.

Obviously, not all of these will be relevant to every business. So what you need to do is identify which areas are, or could be applicable to yours.

What does strategy AI-driven transformation look like in business?

Where companies are willing to invest, and use it to gain competitive advantage, AI can deliver real value. Marketing is an area where companies typically first recognise the potential, but AI can be used across all operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

This chart from techemergence shows the results of a survey of 50 executives at the forefront of using AI for marketing, designed to find out which AI and machine learning applications are driving

Source

According to Andrew Ng, a premier AI researcher, the businesses taking AI seriously are “engaged in multidimensional chess games to collect the data they need to compete,” and having both mindset and capability to do this is essential for success.

AI, and in particular Machine Learning, could provide the most powerful tools to take your business to the next level. But don’t see it just as a bolt-on. If you look at where you already have a competitive advantage, that’s where you have the greatest strength, and where AI could give you the quickest ROI. What’s the next step? Where do you have the best data – machine learning requires a huge amount of it – and can start building competencies?

As Madhusudan Shekar. Principal Evangelist, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd, says in his techemergence podcast, “if you have an advantage over your competitors in the same area, applying machine learning could potentially give you a generational advantage. To do that requires a lot of clean data.”

Telecoms and financial services can use AI across functions, in customer services and in their core areas; the automotive industry can use it to improve operations, but also in vehicle development, including self-driving technologies.

You can listen to or read the full podcast here.

Whatever the areas of strategic investment in your business, also remember that AI can only build on the processes you already have. If your processes aren’t solid, and working well under human management, AI won’t fix them. In fact, it could augment problems.

This webinar from MITSloan covers five strategies for getting the most from AI in more detail.

What does AI mean for people and employment?

One of the big perennial myths surrounding AI is that it will replace the need for people, or leave only the low-skilled, menial jobs left for them to do. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Like any other technology, AI takes over the simple tasks and does them more efficiently. That leaves the humans free to concentrate on the more complex, or creative aspects of the business, and creates a need for different skills. AI can’t compensate for the need for human interaction, relationship building or critical thinking. But it can take over simple tasks and make them more efficient.

There’s an in-depth article at Forbes.com that illustrates this idea really well.

So what we mustn’t forget is, that for every penny we invest in AI, as business leaders, we need to invest the same in people – whether that’s in training them to use data-driven new technologies, or in changing their mindset to help them embrace change. You need to lead from the top down – and drive that culture change. You might not be the data scientist yourself, but you may need to be able to have meaningful conversations with them about the applications your business is going to use, so you’ll need to get a bit clued-up yourself.

Where will AI add the most business value?

If your business is new to the AI arena, you can learn a great deal from those early adopters who have already invested in it and are now starting to reap the benefits. Retailers, particularly online retailers, rely on AI robots to control stock, and utility companies use AI to forecast demand.

It’s all about data quantity and quality, so the moment, it seems likely that online businesses will benefit most from AI technology. ‘Bricks and mortar’ businesses have bigger challenges when it comes to streamlining their data collection and management. And businesses which already collect large quantities of data will have a better platform to build on.

McKinsey’s survey of over 3,000 companies globally who are already using AI showed that they tend to be operating in the digital arena, use AI to increase revenue as well as reduce costs, in the core part of the value chain, and, that, crucially, AI initiatives are fully supported by the executive leadership. At the moment, these companies also tend to be larger firms within their sector, mainly because of the level of investment involved.

The techemergence survey further identifies the sectors most likely to be engaging with AI, and particularly Machine Learning:

Source

But whatever your business type, the first things to assess, before beginning to invest in AI, are where you already have an advantage and what you want to do with it. You need to ask yourself how you are collecting data and what kind of data it is, as well as assessing how reliable your data sets are.

Consider whether your best data sets are in your customer data or in operations.

Madhusudan Shekar points out that you may be able to use ready-made solutions like Amazon Polly or the Amazon Lex chatbot (he’s an Amazon Evangelist, you’ll find other options out there), which are available off-the-shelf so you can deploy them quickly and efficiently. But even with these solutions, the business value you get from them is only as good as your data. Around 80% of the work in machine learning is making sure your data can be trusted and is clean and organized. Because that’s all your AI technology has to go on. Unlike a person, it’s not going to intuit – at least, not just yet. In five years’ time, who knows?

What is certain is that AI is here to stay. Your digital transformation strategy needs to recognize this and to identify where your business strengths can be further bolstered by the accumulation of high quality data, and the adoption of the right AI technologies for your business.

Originally published here.

In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

Stop Trying To Get Every Customer To Love You
You really don’t have to get every customer to love you. Focus on the ones that matter. Thanks for the advice, Ryan Hart.

In Praise Of Boring Sales Organizations
Sometimes, in business, boring can be a good thing. Thanks for your thoughts, David Brock.

5 Skills Marketers Will Need to Succeed
Some skills you might need to survive the coming changes in marketing in 2019. Great article, David Gutelius.

The Marketer’s Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Native Video
Have you considered adding LinkedIn Native Videos to your 2018 and 2019 marketing plans? If not, why not? Some helpful advice from Nathan Isaacs.

Breaking the Addiction to the Social Apps
Sometimes you just have to delete your social apps to avoid some of the negativity they can bring. Thanks for the tip, Anthony Iannarino.

13 Reasons Why You Should Consider Text-Based Marketing
When SMS marketing is done strategically, respectfully, and in a contextually relevant way, the benefits can easily outweigh the pitfalls. Thanks for your thoughts, Bethany Johnson.

Shaky Business: How Handshakes Win Negotiations
A handshake before a negotiation can have a surprisingly strong effect on the outcome. Great article,  Michael Blanding.

3 Time Management Strategies to Get More Done with Less Effort
Those who achieve more and whose work seems to come effortlessly have mastered the 3 time management strategies. Thanks for the tips, Mike Schultz.

3 Ways to Achieve ABM Success Based on Research
What are companies that succeed at ABM doing that sets them apart? Great article, Sabrina Ferraioli.

The Most Important Thing about B2B Personas-Common Ground
Is the value returned from the investment of personas really worth it? Thanks for your thoughts, Hank Barnes.

The post B2B Reads: Social Media Addiction, Text-based Marketing, and Handshakes appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

The pattern that occurs in sales conversations is one which tends to start with a discussion of challenges or better future outcomes, the exploration of potential ways those future outcomes might be obtained, the collaboration with concerned parties and attempts to gain consensus, the presentation and reviewing of plans and investments, the resolving of concerns and adjustments to proposals, a negotiation around value creation and capture, followed by a decision.

A pattern that looks like this is seen in B2B and B2C sales, even if there are differences from one to the other. It’s also true that even though the process is now more non-linear than ever in B2B sales, the parts still tend to exist, even if the pattern goes forward and backwards.

Where salespeople tend to get into trouble is to believe that variances to this pattern and its component parts means they can succeed while skipping steps and stages and conversations and commitments.

In a dozen deals where the salesperson sends and email with pricing and a proposal after a single conversation, skipping any and all conversations that may have allowed them to create value and a preference to buy from them, they win one of the deals. To this salesperson, they have proof that emailing pricing and a proposal is a process that works for them. The other eleven deals that were lost are somehow not evidence of a poor overall strategy.

A second dozen deals might start with an interested party who wants to explore some better results who finds their way to a salesperson in a role designed to qualify them. The salesperson asks the interested party questions about the seriousness of their interest, their willingness to spend money, whether they are really compelled to do something now, and if they can decide. Of the dozen deals, three of the interested parties being qualified show up for a demo with another salesperson, and one agrees to buy what the company sells.

The sales organizations that play the numbers game built on winning the one of out twelve deals believes it is a numbers game, that the leads are bad, that most prospects are sketchy and miss demos for reasons other than the fact that the process being employed to engage them creates too little value. They believe the one deal is what they should expect, even though they have eleven times as many reasons to believe it isn’t as effective is it might be.

The fact that something works once in a while isn’t evidence that it is the best way to have sales conversation.

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The post The Pattern of Sales Conversations and Variances Mistaken as Proof appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Change can be challenging. New diets, new schedules, new habits – they can seem harder than climbing a mountain. But there are certain lead dominoes that, once knocked over, will trigger everything else to fall into place.

When I asked John Steinert, CMO of TechTarget, “how do you go from lead-based marketing to Account Based Marketing?” he reveals the lead domino that will make ABM easier.

Enjoy!

(watch the video on YouTube)

TRANSCRIPT:

Brandon:
So, how do you go from lead-based marketing to account-based marketing? Hey everyone, Brandon Redlinger here, Director of growth at Engagio. And to help us answer that question, I have John Steinert, the CMO at TechTarget. Hey John.

John:
Hey Brandon.

Brandon:
How do you cross this chasm, right? And also, I think you have some very interesting things to say about KPI’s, too, right? How do you change these KPI’s?

John:
Yeah, so, I think that the chasm is caused by KPI’s, and let me talk a little bit about that. If I start going overboard just tell me “stop ranting.” My spouse does that a lot, says “you’re starting to rant about B2B marketing, and I don’t really care about it.”

But that’s kind of one of the points I wanted to get on, because one of the great things I think is going on right now in our industry is that it’s gotten sexy enough that it’s attracting a lot of young talent. And what I want to do is I want that talent to be applied to the latest, best way of doing things. And the best way of doing things, which you and I both know, is working on an account-based model. But here’s the problem.

Even if you think you’ve adopted, and you’ve implemented, you’ve adopted the philosophy of being account-based as a marketer, you’ve crossed the chasm with your sales folks who already think this way, and you say, hey, I’m gonna go do some Account Based Marketing, we’re going to do plays together, and everything’s looking good.

If you’re coming from a lead-based world, you know that those leads are going to go to some intermediary before they go to field sales. The leads have to be worked, and they’re going to go to SDRs. And so my point about the industry being sexy is that what I’ve seen, we’re not having any problem hiring young people. And so these people come out of college, and they’re ready to go, and they’re smart as hell, and they go right into SDR land, and they’re in SDR land, and they really don’t know much about marketing no matter how much we train them, right, they don’t know that much about our products so they can’t really interact effectively without a lot of enablement.

But the worst thing is that their KPIs make them behave in a certain way.

Brandon:
Very good point.

John:
Right, so they’ve got these KPIs that are based on things like call volume, call more people. You know, I don’t give a damn if these people are showing any signs of interest, your job is to get that meeting. Well, here’s the problem. In account-based strategy, we’re tasked with making sure that we focus on certain accounts. And when we have certain indicators, signals, we want the behavior of anybody who’s interacting with that account to change. We want them to use those indicators to change the play that they execute. But that requires that the KPIs themselves get changed to incorporate that.

So, you could be on board with account-based strategy, sales, field sales is naturally on board with account-based strategy, but you’ve gotta get the leadership, whoever’s forcing the SDRs to a narrow KPI path to expand their KPI model, because they have to be allowed to execute in a sensitive way, a way that is informed by what is going on in the account, a way that they use that information, so with our purchase intent stuff, they can see what the account is doing, even if there’s not a lead there. And they can see the people who are active, who you should be talking to.

So you’ve got to allow them to call people who are not MQLs, and you’ve got to teach them what to say if you see people behaving this way, consuming that kind of content, so you have to enable them more, and until we do that, A, we can’t execute account-based strategy effectively, because it will be broken by SDR behavior, and B, and this is the most important part, you’ve got young, smart kids who are doing what is really a volume-based, sort of almost mindless task and you’re wasting that talent. They could be innovating right now, with ways of breaking through those accounts, and you’re not letting them do it.

Brandon:
Exactly.

John:
So, that’s the rant, and because SDRs are great, they’re full of energy, they’ve got, you know, they’ve got the emotional strength to do this very difficult job and take, you know, hang-ups all day, so let’s leverage that into something a little bit more effective by giving them the information and the enablement and adjusting their KPIs so that they can show what they can do.

Brandon:
Great, love it. Let’s leverage the talent, let’s change the KPIs, let’s give them some great intent data.

John:
That’s right.

Brandon:
Great, thanks, John.

John:
Thank you, Brandon.

This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin, Portfolio, 288 pages, Hardcover, November 2018, ISBN 9780525540830

“Who’s it for?” It really doesn’t matter where you work—in business, in government, in a non-profit, or in the home—you are going to need some marketing skills at some point. And whether it’s getting customers to purchase a product or service, getting constituents out to vote, getting contributions toward a cause, or getting your kids to brush their teeth, it is important to ask, “Who’s it for?” The answer should almost never, if ever, be for you.  

Seth Godin’s first big book, Permission Marketing, got him kicked out of the Direct Marketing Association. It was heresy to suggest that, rather than disrupting people to convey a marketing message they most likely didn’t want to receive, you should instead seek their permission—their willing, even eager, participation in receiving messages from you. He had not invented this idea so much as he “narrated the beginning of a revolution” in marketing.  

Permission Marketing was a revolution that mirrored the evolution of digital technology, and many other classic books from Seth followed. His latest, boldly titled, This Is Marketing, is in some ways—and sometimes literally in the later chapters—a summation of his previous books and all he’s come to understand over his many years of observation, research, and writing. One of the key observations is that the positioning philosophy of marketing’s past—of pioneers like Ogilvy, and Trout and Ries—“doesn’t hold up over time.” The way to gain a consistent and sustainable edge now, if there is one to be gained, is through honesty and generosity. The way to gain a following is to ignore what’s popular, ignore the spaces in which most people are already operating, and carve out a niche, “build your own quadrant,” speak to the underserved and underrepresented. Leave the most fought-over territories to others, to those with big advertising budgets and less scruples about using them to rent people’s attention for 30 seconds, less scruples about filling our inboxes with spam and our mailboxes with junk mail. The efforts to reach a mass market through those means is an understandable impulse; you think you’ll find more customers there, but you are unlikely to gain more traction there.  

The kind of marketing that Seth practices and promotes “seeks volunteers, not victims.” It is “about the human condition, and about our culture.” It is about bringing about change.

Regardless of what the specifics are, if you’re a marketer you’re in the business of making change happen. Denying this is a form of hiding; it’s more productive to own it instead.

Anand Giridharadas wrote powerfully and, we here at 800-CEO-READ believe correctly, in Winners Take All about how the philanthropic endeavors of powerful, private industry interests to “change the world” perpetuate the very social ills they are attempting to alleviate. But there’s no denying that if you’re in business, you are going to have an effect, that you are often going to make a literal and material change in people’s lives. It’s also true that if you’re in any other field outside of business, you are going to have to find a way to reach people. But how do you do that, and what kind of a change are you going to make?

Seth’s vernacular is that of the market. Seth’s values are undeniably heretical to the traditional understanding of marketing. But it’s also why he has so much appeal to those looking for a better way to make change. He gained the popularity he has not by appealing to the mass market, but by serving a specific audience. The following, written by Seth to you, could apply directly to him.

You, on the other hand, have gone out on a limb, one that belongs to you, and maybe, just maybe, there are underserved customers out there who can’t wait to find you, connect with you, and spread the word.

If you’re a politician, substitute the word “customer” with “constituent.” If you’re a teacher, think in terms of classrooms and students. If a nonprofit, think of communities and individuals. The important thing is to consider the needs of your "market" before your marketing.

When you’re marketing-driven, you’re focused on the latest Facebook data hacks, the design of your new logo, and your Canadian pricing model. When you’re market-driven, you think a lot about the hopes and dreams of your customers and their friends. You listen to their frustrations and invest in changing the culture.

The market, in this sense, is simply those you wish to serve. And marketing, in Seth’s view, is “a chance to serve.” It’s a chance to tell stories and to make change in a culture. He does, in traditional business book fashion, break marketing down into five steps, but those five steps are rather broad, and the final step (to my mind, the most important one) is to “show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years—to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make.”

There are actually many more lists in This Is Marketing. While I’ve heard some readers decry the list-ification of business books, those lists are often very effective, and Seth’s lists in particular contain more human considerations than "business" motives—things like advising readers to “Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not ‘How can I start a business?’ but ‘What would matter here?’”

Ellen Ruppel Shell warned us wisely in The Job, against seeking out a “calling” while seeking out a job. But what if the calling weren’t in the job title, but in the description of it, “a chance to make things better for those we seek to serve,” or “to serve people in a way that they need (or want).” That is what Seth is suggesting when he uses such language in marketing. Honesty is necessary, absolute authenticity is a myth, because “what people want is to be understood and to be served, not merely to witness whatever you feel like doing at any given moment.”

Not everyone is going to like your work, and that is okay. In fact, it is only right:

The critic who doesn’t like your work is correct. He doesn’t like your work. This cannot be argued with.

The critic that says no one else will like your work is wrong.

What you do is not going to be for everyone. That is a feature, not a bug. Find the people that like your work. Better yet, find people that need something you can offer and find a way to be of service to them. If you’re in marketing specifically, Seth suggests this:

Now, instead of asking, “How do I get more people to listen to me, how can I get the word out, how can I find more followers, how can I convert more leads to sales, how can I find more clients, how can I pay my staff … ?” you can ask “What change do I seek to make?”

Once you know what you stand for, the rest gets a lot easier.

It is a bold statement, to say “this is marketing.” Because marketing has a pretty bad reputation. It’s as bold as Dan Pink saying that “to sell is human” in his book of that name. But both are also undeniably true, and both espouse these professions as honest, generous, and perhaps most importantly, engaged in service to others over the long term. Marketing is, as Seth says, “the landscape of our modern lives.” He begins the final chapter asking "Is marketing evil?" He has answered the question throughout the book, but he does so more directly here, stating that he thinks "it's evil to persuade kids to start smoking, to cynically manipulate the electoral or political process," which is undoubtedly marketing. But "Marketing is magic when it elects someone who changes the community for the better," and of course, to echo the title of the book, "this is marketing" also.  We should work to make it better by promoting that which makes the world better. I believe the knowledge and perspective Seth offers can help us do that.

The best business books humanize business rather than commodify humanity. Seth’s work has always attempted to do that. And in This Is Marketing, I think he has succeeded. Who's it for? Maybe not for everyone, but if you've been following us here, I imagine you'd find it's for you.  

Politics has always been a slippery slope when it comes to sales, and the last few years the road has become very icy and a lot of oncoming traffic.   When it comes to politics and sales, the number one thing is to respect the other person, regardless of what they may or may not say.

I have customers who represent every imaginable political position.  I’ve learned this through various conversations with them and I’m fine with it.  My objective is to first respect everyone and second to keep focused on the big picture.

Here are my guidelines I use when talking with others:

Respect everyone.  Just as I have an opinion, so too does everyone else.

Be the optimist in everything. The world has enough negative people. There is no need to add fuel to the fire.  We become like who we associate with the most.  There’s a reason why negative people have negative friends, and it’s the same reason why optimists have optimistic friends.  I always seek to find the positive…the good in everything and everybody.

Don’t over analyze. Don’t read more into what people are saying than necessary.  It’s amazing how easy it can be to take one comment a person makes and suddenly turn it into a conspiracy theory.

Relax. Be slow to form an opinion. The sun will still come up in the morning. No need to panic with what someone says or doesn’t say. It’s not going to change the course of mankind.  Don’t rush in forming an opinion, as the only thing it will do is rush you to make a bad decision.

Don’t fall for the baited comments or questions.   This one is dangerous and it is happening not only in conversations, but also in social media.  Be cautious in how you respond, because it’s amazing how quickly things can become misinterpreted.   With this one there is no perfect answer. It truly is an icy road ahead!

Don’t burn the bridge or Rome.   Just because you don’t agree with somebody on an issue, this isn’t a reason to cut them off.  No two people are alike in everything. If I cut off everyone who doesn’t line up 100% with what I think, then I will be living on a deserted island.

Calm rules the day.  It’s amazing how fired up people become with the language they use. I see and hear this a lot.  There’s no place at all for foul or crass language on social media or in a conversation. Only thing it does is mess with your brain and get you viewing everything negatively.

Engage in conversations, not lectures.   Last thing I want is a lecture, either to hear one or to give one.  Let’s not kid ourselves — a lecture is a waste, unless you want to burn a bridge.

Last week I was in three states — one heavy red, one heavy blue and the other split. As a result, I was with people from every perspective.  For me it wasn’t an issue. Every topic imaginable came up and yet in the end I came back to a belief I’ve had for years — “With each conversation I have, I want to earn the right, privilege, honor and respect to be able to meet with that person again.”  Make that your focus and you’ll be playing the long game, becoming a person of influence and impact.

And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Proving the effectiveness of content marketing can seem daunting. But if you can’t prove your worth to the c-suite, why would they keep investing in you and content marketing?

To prove your value to the c-suite, you need an easy, repeatable method for measuring how well your content marketing campaigns are performing, how they tie back to business objectives, and what you need to do next.

To prove your value to the c-suite, you need an easy, repeatable method for measuring how well your #contentmarketing campaigns are performing.
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It’s time for a content dashboard.

Dashboards have been around a long time. The goal of a dashboard is simple: to convey the most relevant information about something in one easy-to-understand place.

A content dashboard is no different. But how do you create a dashboard that proves the ROI of your content marketing efforts without getting lost in a sea of data? And how do you go the next step to create a content dashboard for you, so you know what you should create next?

Let’s start with a content dashboard for your c-suite (I’ll show you the free template there), and then we will dive into creating an actionable content dashboard for your content marketing team.

Create a content dashboard for your c-suite.

What are your business objectives?

The very first thing you need to do when creating a content marketing dashboard for your c-suite is to understand what your business objectives are for your content marketing program. These objectives should tie directly to your content marketing goals.

If your business objective is to increase leads by 10% YoY, and content marketing needs to drive half of that, then your content marketing goal is to increase leads 5% YoY.

If your business objective is to decrease calls to your customer support by 25%, and it’s 100% dependent on being achieved through a new online FAQ your content team is creating, then your content marketing goal is to decrease customer support calls by 25%.

Which content metrics matter?

You manifest what you measure.

Which metrics will show the success or failure of your content marketing goals? In the first example above, success or failure will be judged by total leads over time. In the second example, it will be necessary to get reports of total calls to the customer support team over time.

Identify the metrics that matter most. You don’t want to throw in metrics just to have them. Yes, it’s great that site traffic went up, but that doesn’t mean anything if it’s not part of your overall goal for content marketing. It creates clutter and takes away from the point of the content dashboard.

Some metrics may be easier than others to get. Leads, inbound traffic, e-commerce revenue, etc. may come from Google Analytics. Other metrics, such as call volume, may need to come from another source. Make sure you know how you’re getting your metrics and how often you need them (are you reporting monthly, quarterly, or yearly?) Remember, you’re only getting the metrics that matter the most.

How do those metrics translate to money?

When measuring ROI, you’re comparing money in to money out. So you need to understand how much money each of your goals is either making or saving the company.

In the example above, you can calculate the value of the average lead you get (total revenue from previous leads / total previous leads = revenue / lead). If you can go a step further and get the lifetime value of the clients brought in through leads, that’s even better!

For the call center, you should be able to calculate the cost savings per month of reducing call volumes by 25%. Someone must have that data, or else why would it be a business objective?

You also have to document how much money went out to achieve that goal. Here’s where you can pull in how much you spent on resources such as promotion, salaries, etc. Even a rough estimate will give you actionable data.

Assemble your data.

Now you put everything together. Pick a business objective/content marketing goal and the metric that measures it. That’s your first data point in the dashboard.

If you can get down to dollars and cents for each metric, add that as well (this will give you a true ROI figure).

Go through each of your main goals in your content marketing strategy, and have each accounted for in the content dashboard. Then, show the difference in how that metric has performed vs. the previous time period, and how it performed vs. your overall goal.

This is your c-suite dashboard. It shows them, in very real numbers, how their investment in content marketing is working.

Download the c-suite content dashboard template here

That’s great for them, what about you?

Create a content dashboard for your own team.

Proving that your content marketing efforts are working through a content dashboard is incredibly important, but the magic doesn’t have to stop there.

Producing great results that create a positive ROI is most of the battle. Content marketers need all the help they can get to create great content that resonates with their audiences and moves the needle in the right direction.

Proactive content dashboards can help content marketers understand what’s working, what’s not working, and where new opportunities may be hiding in plain sight. But the data that feeds these dashboards is different than the data that feeds c-suite dashboards.

The c-suite just wants to see what happened. As a content marketer, you also want to see what should happen next.

The c-suite wants to see what happened. As a content marketer, you also want to see what should happen next.
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The 5 key elements of a proactive content dashboard

A proactive content marketing dashboard will be more complex than the c-suite dashboard because it needs to not only show where you’ve been, but where you should go next. That’s going to involve new ways of looking at data and being able to drill into data to get more details.

A proactive #content marketing dashboard needs to not only show where you’ve been but where you should go next.
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1. The first key component to determining what to do next is to analyze what’s driving existing success. If leads are a key metric, you need to know what content and channels are driving those leads, so you don’t take your foot off the gas of the things that work.

2. You need to see where things might be changing. What content is rising quickly in both inbound sessions and conversions which are contributing to your success? This content could be ripe for more promotion, adding fuel to the fire.

3. Look at what content is dropping. Understand why it’s decreasing, and if it’s worth trying to save it, or if you should just let it drop and move on. If a top converting page is suddenly losing traffic, you definitely want to fix it. If a piece of content you promoted via email last week suddenly has fewer email visitors, it’s obviously not something to worry about.

4. Check out what pieces of content cover a topic that’s underutilized. Sometimes we stumble upon a topic people love, but for some reason or another, we don’t write about it again. Look for high performing content that is different than what you normally write about. You may uncover some great topics you never knew were so valuable to your audience (and you.)

5. Finally, look at your competitive space. This can be a bit tougher to do and goes outside of typical metrics you get from Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms. SEO tools like Moz allow you to set up campaigns and keep an eye on how well your competitors perform for a set of keywords that you’re also targeting. If a competitor suddenly shoots up in rankings for a keyword, you want to know. And you want to see what they did to make that happen (so you can do it even better).

To recap, the keys to a content dashboard that show you what to do next should include:

• The content that’s currently driving your goals
• What pieces of content are gaining the most traffic? Why?
• What pieces of content are losing the most traffic? Why?
• Look for underutilized topics that could be content opportunities.
• What’s working for my competition? How can I make their success my success?

There are content marketing dashboards out there that help you get to this data already. Ceralytics provides a content dashboard and content intelligence to help you dig into what’s working, why it’s working, and what you should do next. It also breaks down websites into topics, making it easier to see which topics are driving the most traffic and conversions on your site.

Klipfolio has a great start on a content dashboard as well, which can be customized with more of the data discussed previously. This data comes almost exclusively from Google Analytics, but provides more flexibility than Google Analytic’s Dashboard.

Google Analytics gives you the ability to create custom dashboards of data, so you can pick and choose the data that makes the most sense for your content campaigns. Here’s a Google Analytics template you can use to get started. Update your goals and clone the goals section for as many goals as you want to track.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t have all of the answers, but this is at least a start — and it’s free!

There’s no one size fits all dashboard.

Your perfect dashboard will need to be customized to your individual business objectives, and it may never actually be perfect. But with the tools above, it will be something very useful for proving your value to your c-suite and driving better results for your content team.

The post How to Build a Content Dashboard that Proves Your ROI (Free Template Provided) appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.