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Boris Wertz, the former COO of Abebooks.com, sold the used-bookseller to Amazon in 2008. He has since founded Vancouver’s Version One, a venture capital fund, and incubator GrowLab — since merged with fellow incubator Extreme Startups to create Highline.

“After eight years as an entrepreneur, I felt like I wanted a new career, but I also wanted to give back by sharing entrepreneurial skills. I’d been investing since 2007 as an angel, so I’ve been investing full-time for seven years, only now it’s in a different way. Version One is two and a half years old, and I think we’ve done a good job of helping companies scale up and helping entrepreneurs.

MORE: Three Canadian provinces now attract more venture capital than all but 6 states »

“The biggest challenge for any startup in a smaller ecosystem—and Vancouver is a smaller ecosystem than Silicon Valley or even compared to Seattle—is that even if you’re successful at home, you still eventually have to compete with the big boys for top-notch venture capital out of the Valley. You might be king of the town, but that’s still the real prize.

MORE: Silicon Valley North: Vancouver tech surges as U.S. immigration reform idles »

“The entrepreneurs who succeed always have a unique perspective as to what is world-class—they don’t limit their perspective to what is best in Canada. It’s a super-important benchmark to always have in mind. Today you have a worldwide market. There are no national barriers any more.”

The post Why Version One founder Boris Wertz tells Canadian entrepreneurs to look abroad appeared first on Canadian Business.

Content for sales apps is like blood for any living creature. As a marketer, I have seen the shift from outbound lead generation to inbound and the need for that relationship between marketing and sales to strengthen.

Both build one incredible thing that will make or break any sell: trust. There are two key tactics successful marketers today are connecting with their company’s customers: content marketing and apps on mobile devices. For both of these tactics to exist successfully, one needs the other in order to drive new customers for sales to close and bring in more revenue for your company.

Don’t believe me?

Approximately 83% of individuals are now going online to do research before buying a vehicle, according to MaxTradeIn Director of Marketing Rachel Boyle. That’s four out of five consumers walking into a dealership already know which car they want to buy because of the content they read online. That’s streamlining the sales process thanks to the power of content marketing.

And do I really need to sell you on mobility and importance of apps? If I did, you wouldn’t be here reading this.

So it makes perfect sense to take your company’s content marketing strategy and use that valuable collateral in your sales apps. But what is the best way to do this? Here are six ways marketing can create powerful content for sales apps.

1. Take inventory of your content

Your company’s sales team isn’t going to know every single piece of content you worked your butt off creating. Make sure you categorize all of the content for sales. You can do this by customer pain points, sales cycle stage, or even the buyer segment. This list needs to one so that sales can easily find whatever piece of content they need no matter the opportunity they are working.

2. Use multimedia tools at your disposal

Apps live on devices that can play videos and audio clips, perform animation, do ROI calculations, and just about anything else you have on your company website. Why wouldn’t you take that multimedia and incorporate all of that content for sales apps too? You want to give your sales reps in the field all the tools possible at their disposal. You can give them more than a spec sheet and some photos.

3. Testimonials still ignite sales

Testimonials continue to be a useful sales tool for marketers. But not the black and white quote in a white paper or blog post. Video testimonials are rising in demand from companies, and using them in their content marketing strategy. These same video testimonials can be the voice of reason for a sales rep in the field with your sales app when getting an “on the fence” prospect on to the greener side.

4. Supply interaction nuggets from your content

Sales reps have enough going on in their world that you can cut them a break when they tell you they didn’t listen to your latest podcast. But what you can do to help make their lives easier, while still giving them your content marketing at their disposal, is simply supplying them cliff notes. Give sales reps a couple talking points out of your new content, then they will remember it the next situation they encounter with a prospect with your sales app.

5. Make sharing your content simple

Again, sales reps have enough on their plate. Just like any product or pricing information you have on your app that is sharable with customers, make your content sharable too. If a sales rep has a customer already buying one product but is considering another one too, give the rep the ability to share some of that juicy content you created with you sales app.

6. Gather feedback from the frontline

Periodically ask your sales reps in the field questions about what content is working and isn’t working on the sales app. If videos are providing a lot of interaction with prospects but audio clips aren’t working, adjust! In the end, the only way your content will be successful for your company if you know what is getting customers to buy.

I’d love to keep the conversation going. How have you implemented your content marketing strategy into your sales apps? Comment below and let me know!

You know the feeling. You’re sitting there, staring at your hands, at the keyboard, at the screen, at the ceiling. You’re supposed to post something on Twitter, but you have no idea what to post.

I’ve been there before. I think we’ve all been there. Everything that comes to mind seems lame. Slogans, links, articles, quotes, pictures—you have no clue.

So you sit there wasting your time.

We’re all too busy to afford this wasted time. Social media shouldn’t be a time waster. It should be a money maker.

I wrote this article so you can save at least six hours each week on social media.

We spend lots of time on social media—3 hours a day or more

Social media is a huge time vortex. According to Business Insider, “Americans spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including email.”

In one survey, American adults spend an average of 3.2 hours a day using social networks!

This data is shocking enough, but it gets even more interesting:

• Business owners spend 50% more time on social media than non-business owners.
• Senior executives and business decision-makers spend 40% more time on social media than those not in such positions.

Of all business professionals, those who spend the most time on social media are marketing professionals. A survey by Social Media Examiner discovered how much time marketers spend weekly on social media.

Smaller companies, including many entrepreneurs and startups, spend a disproportionately larger amount of time on social media due to smaller staffs and lower budgets. This chart shows how much time is spent on social media according to the size of a company.

We waste lots of time on social media

Sure, we spend a lot of time on social media. But how much of this is truly time invested vs. time wasted?

A full third of CEOs, businesses owners, and proprietors want to spend less time on social media.

But how?

There are tons of things to do on social media — finding content, posting it, figuring out how to post it, measuring ROI, etc. This infographic from Vertical Response reveals that merely finding stuff to post takes the most amount of time.

For Vertical Response, the data from their survey was so intriguing that they came up with the following big takeaways.

• Small businesses spend more time on social media, but many struggle with the added workload.
• Small businesses realize the value of content – but, again, time is an issue.

We waste time on social media, because of the following factors:

• We don’t know exactly what social media actions to do or what has the highest ROI. Estimated time wasted each week: 1.5 hours.
• We have trouble finding content to post. Estimated time wasted each week: 1.3 hours.
• We spend time trying to learn the social media platform, rather than expertly using it. Estimated time wasted each week: .5 hours.
• We take time trying to figure out what our competitors are doing. Estimated time wasted each week: 1.25 hours.
• We respond to inquiries and questions rather than using social media for true marketing. Estimated time wasted each week: .75 hours.
• We spend time monitoring followups/likes/retweets, even though this has little ROI. Estimated time wasted each week: .5 hours.
• We get distracted and start trolling through meaningless discussions or visiting clickbait junk. Estimated time wasted each week: 1 hour.

Total time wasted: 6 hours, 48 minutes

Most of us waste hours on social media each week. The time is wasted not because we’re on social media, but because we’re using social media the wrong way.

4 techniques for saving time on social media

If we have the right system in place, we can save time. There are four big ways to save time on social media—up to several hours each week.

1. Use a social media management system for posting.

The first and most important technique is to automate your social media posting.

Think about it. There are so many different social media platforms. You can and should post the same content on each platform, but it takes a long time! Plus, the content needs to be customized for each platform.

You have to go to each site, one-by-one and post the stuff. Besides this waste of time, you have to unplug from what you may be currently doing — another huge time-wasting distraction — to go post on social media to begin with. Double time wasted!

You can save a lot of time if you automate this entire process. Automated systems will keep you on a regular social media schedule, while also helping streamline your social media efforts across all channels.

Here are a three suggestions for systems that can do this for you:

• Buffer – The main feature of Buffer is scheduling and automatically posting content. Buffer also provides a very helpful engagement reporting tool.
• Socialoomph – Socialoomph provides some helpful scheduling tools, and a decent monitoring platform. You can also track keywords.
• Hootsuite – Probably the largest and most well-known of the social media tools, Hootsuite has a wide array of social services. Though some find the interface clunky, it’s a powerful tool that will save you time.

Don’t waste even more time looking for the perfect tool. Don’t bother with getting more than one. You don’t need more than one. Each one of these will work fine, and will save you time. The most important thing is to get your time-saving tool, and start using it.

Estimated time saved weekly: 3 hours

2. Budget a half hour each day for social media scoping.

Even though social media tools do the posting for you, they don’t find the content to post. This is your job.

There’s a big danger in searching for content to post. Link leads to link, and article to article, and hashtag to hashtag. This is where we lurch into a wasted hour, ending up with nothing productive to show.

The best way to stop the insidious power of time creep is to set limits. If you budget 30 minutes daily to find content to post, here’s what will happen:

• You will save time.
• You will work faster.
• You will find great content.

Simply forcing yourself to do something, then setting a time limit makes you more productive.

What you’ll do in this half hour is look for stuff to post later on. Look for articles, quotes, infographics, news stories, press releases, great tweets, helpful images — anything that is social media worthy.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open up your social media management tool or an empty document (Google Drive, Evernote, whatever you like).
2. Spend five minutes on Twitter, opening up articles or copying information that corresponds to your niche. Copy links and/or quotes into your document.
3. Spend five minutes on Facebook, opening up articles or copying information that corresponds to your niche. Copy links and/or quotes into your document.
4. Spend five minutes on LinkedIn, opening up articles or copying information that corresponds to your niche. Copy links and/or quotes into your document.
5. Spend five minutes Googling for news (click the “News” tab) in your niche. Copy links and/or quotes into your document.
6. Spend 10 minutes exploring top niche blogs and websites, copying links and quotes into your document. You should have a go-to list of ten or fifteen websites that consistently have good information. The website you’re reading now and others like it should provide you with fodder for links and information.

By the end of a half hour, you should have a document full of material to post for several days, maybe longer.

Estimated time saved weekly: 2 hours

3. Assign a customer service team member to respond to questions and inquiries.

If your business has a help desk department or customer service team, assign them to respond to inquiries that come through social media.

For many businesses, social media sites are the de facto customer service lines. If a customer has a question, problem, or issue, they will find the social media site to ask their question.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but it can take away from the time you spend on other social media tasks, not to mention your typical workload.

Assign this role to someone whose primary responsibility is responding to customer questions. If this is your responsibility, then budget time to do it each day so it doesn’t end up swallowing up chunks of time here and there.

Estimated time saved weekly: 1 hour

4. Use a social media reporting system for analyzing metrics and measuring ROI.

You will absolutely waste time if you “measure social media ROI” by seeing how many people liked or retweeted a post. That’s not measuring ROI. That’s wasting your time.

Social media reporting platforms provide a far more effective way to gauge the success of your social media efforts.

If you use a social media management platform, these reporting features are probably built in. If not, you can purchase a reporting service elsewhere.

Reporting in and of itself can take time, even if you’re not individually analyzing every single retweet and +1. Limit yourself to weekly or every other day reporting analysis. Reports are intended to advise you on future action. The bigger the picture, the better the action points.

Use reports to really find out what’s giving you the best ROI. This alone could be the most time saving technique of all. Once you find out what’s getting you the most money and what’s netting you the least, you know exactly how to configure your social media strategy to best achieve your goals.

Estimated time saved weekly: half hour

Conclusion

It’s not necessarily about saving time. It’s about maximizing ROI.

You want to know how to best spend your time to grow your business. Social media is obviously part of where you must be spending your time as a digital marketer.

Time wasted gives you a negative ROI. But if you spend more time on social media, and get a bigger ROI, then that’s a great thing. Keep it up.

Keep aware of your time, your money, and your ROI, and you’ll be better able to maximize the revenue of your business.

What other techniques do you have for saving time on social media?

Images via Social Media Examiner, Vertical Response, Death to the Stock Photo

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35,000. That’s the maximum potential number of Fire Phones Amazon has sold so far, according to an estimate by The Guardian’s Charles Arthur.

Using data from Chitika’s ad network and Comscore’s smartphone user data, Arthur came up with a figure that, while not definitive, gives us a sense of how many Fire Phones are actually being used in the wild. And if it’s even vaguely accurate, it’s a terrible result for Amazon.

It wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall for the Fire Phone (read our review here). With its high-end price ($200 on contract, just like every other top smartphone), exclusivity to AT&T, and lack of any defining features (Amazon’s “3D-like” interface was pretty much a gimmick), the Fire Phone was a tough sell from the beginning.

The ultimate problem? With the Fire Phone, Amazon ended up serving itself more than it actually served consumers.

The phone’s “Firefly” option, one of its few interesting features, which lets you quickly identify an item with the phone’s camera and order it on Amazon, is a barefaced attempt to drive more sales. Its high price mainly serves to make Amazon seem like it’s competing on the same level of Apple and Samsung rather than offering consumers a better value than those established competitors. In the end, Amazon didn’t give anyone a reason to buy the Fire Phone over the iPhone or the plethora of increasingly polished Android devices.

Now, two months after the Fire Phone was announced and a month after it went on sale in the U.S., it doesn’t seem like there’s any path to success. Even if Amazon drops the price significantly, other companies like Motorola are already focused on low-cost, fully capable smartphones, which notably aren’t locked out of the Google Play app ecosystem and Google’s core services like the Fire Phone.

Rather than a product that can stand on its own, the Fire Phone seems more like a statement of intent from Amazon. It wants to be a presence in the smartphone world, but it’s relying more on gimmicks and hype rather than earning its seat at the table by offering something truly innovative and valuable for consumers.

There’s probably not much Amazon can do at this point to revive the Fire Phone, but hopefully the company can learn a few lessons from this failure as it readies its followups. And, yes, you can bet those are coming.

The smartphone market is too important for Amazon to give up entirely. But until it figures out why, precisely, consumers should buy its phones, Amazon will struggle to compete.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if it decides to just snap up a smartphone manufacturer out of pure desperation. Yesterday’s $970 million Twitch acquisition, while surprising, shows that Amazon isn’t afraid to go big to invest in new markets.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where cu... read more »

Before you start the process of selling your business, consider these tips to boost its value

The infographic from CEDR HR in Tucson, Arizona depicts statistics about the millennial population in the workforce today. With facts about the diversity of the population, what they value and how to attract them to companies. The info graphic gives managers a better idea on how to appeal to the millennial demographic using their goals are and what is important to them. The colorful graphic includes detailed graphs and visual elements to help fully represent the information.

About a year ago, I started to rethink my views regarding the role and value of third-party content in the marketing efforts of B2B companies. I had always believed that most of the marketing content used by a company should be developed internally or with the help of outside professional content developers. In either case, the “authorship” of the content is attributed to the company or to a company executive or internal subject matter expert. With third-party content, an external person or firm creates the content and is identified as the author.

My preference for “vendor-branded” content was based on the idea that a primary objective of content marketing is to communicate your company’s expertise to potential buyers and thus cause those buyers to view your company as a trusted resource for valuable insights and as a capable business partner. Logically, branded content seemed to be the most direct way to accomplish this objective.

Because of three recent research studies, I now have a different view on this issue.

The 2013 Research

Last year, the CMO Council published a white paper – Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field – that was based on a survey of more than 400 B2B content consumers. As the table below shows, survey respondents said they trust and value several kinds of third-party content more than vendor-created content.

The 2013 B2B Content Preferences Survey by DemandGen Report showed similar results. In this survey, B2B buyers were asked which of four types of content they give more credence to. The table below shows that vendor-branded content doesn’t fare as well as third-party content.

The 2014 Research

The results of a third study published in March of this year provides even more compelling evidence regarding the effectiveness of “expert content.” This research was commissioned by inPowered and conducted by The Nielsen Company. The Nielsen study involved 900 participants and consisted of a proctored, in-laboratory experiment combined with both a pre-experiment and a post-experiment survey.

During the in-laboratory portion of the study, participants were exposed to three types of marketing content pertaining to several types of products having a wide range of price points. Expert content included reviews and articles from third-party websites and blogs. User reviews were selected from the websites of major retailers or other online forums. Branded content consisted of content that was taken from the vendor’s website.

The Nielsen study measured the impact of each type of content on three stages of the purchase decision-making process:

• Familiarity with a new product
• Affinity toward a brand or product
• Purchase consideration of a brand or product

There’s no question that using marketing videos during a sales call can be a perfect addition to close the deal.  The visual appeal of sharing videos on the iPad with a prospect, especially for complex machines or industrial applications, is undeniable.

As many enterprise mobility marketers are scrambling to produce videos for social media and websites to attract and inform prospects, their eyes turn to mobile sales enablement tools used by their sales teams.

The question is−What is the right length of a marketing video for a sales app?

In other words, do you need chop videos into short digestible segments or is a full 10 minute demo video acceptable?

Although the ultimate answer depends on your sales process, we’ve seen some trends with our enterprise sales app customers that are important for you to consider.

Here are three factors you must consider:

YouTube is not acceptable for sales apps

Have you ever tried to share a video on YouTube with a friend at the bar and it just won’t load? Or have you watched how frustrated a kid gets when a video won’t play on his device?

Annoying, right?

Most of the time your sales team will not have sufficient Wi-Fi connection to stream a marketing video from YouTube or any number of sharing sites on their iPad.

Additionally, sales reps have little time to even find the right marketing videos on their iPad, much less search for a marketing video and wait for it to stream to their device.

The best scenario for playing marketing videos is to sync them to your iPad or sales app to play without an Internet connection; meaning your sales teams’ iPads are offline.

If your iPad sales app streams video, then you must make the marketing videos :30 – :45 seconds maximum. There’s no guarantee the Wi-Fi connection used to show a video is strong enough to play straight through without pausing to buffer.

Our advice is don’t count it.

Snippets of videos work great for details in sales call

Sales reps are often asked to demonstrate very specific parts or functions of your products. For example, how a robot arm moves, or how a medical device is fitted.

It is incredibly painful to force prospects to sit through a three-minute intro video on how awesome your company is to get to the detail or motion they need to see to make a decision.

It’s even more painful to watch a rep try to scrub back and forth in long marketing videos to find the :30 seconds they need.

Many of our B2B customers are cutting their marketing videos into :30 second to 1:00 minute snippets that can quickly demonstrate the motion or footprint of a given product. This gives the rep the ability to quickly share the exact feature.

Additionally, several customers are including larger marketing videos along with the snippets in case the sales person finds a willing audience. In at least one occasion, the longer video did save the day!

The added value of video snippets is they are much smaller and therefore easier to install into your app to shown offline.

Longer videos are great for technical service or maintenance calls

With the launch of our first technical service apps for the iPad last spring, we saw lots of customers creating and arming tech teams with videos. One of them actually has an app with over 90 videos that all run offline where their teams work.

Although, some kept the videos short to address specific technical issues or maintenance issues. Other found that technical videos needed to be longer and more detailed.

Given the typical size of the iPad (minimum 16GB), you will need to carefully weigh the size of your video files. For example, five videos at 500 MB will eat up a ton of space on a 16GB iPad, but not that much on 60GB iPad.

Additionally, the time needed to install longer videos is not taken into consideration by marketers before launching them into their iPad app. Take a 500MB video being downloaded over Wi-FI at a speed of 100 KB/sec. That is 1 MB every 10 seconds or 8.3 minutes to download a single video.

Many users will give up a lot faster than that.

Conclusions

Based on what we have seen, B2B companies will be using more and more marketing videos in the future to aid sales teams and load them into mobile sales tools.

The question of how long the marketing videos should be will largely depend on the process or job of the end user. Snippet seem to work great for details, and longer marketing videos for technical details.

Finally, don’t turn your sales reps into frustrated kids trying to stream YouTube videos!

Photo Credit: Marcel Oosterwijk

In a refreshingly candid article on banktech.com, Jamie Armistead of Bank of the West tells banks to take a look at Google as an example of great customer experience building, both in terms of uptime, performance and continuous refinement of mobile & desktop applications.

Here’s a quote from the article that really resonated with me:

“… it seems like they continually architect their solutions to support data sharing and integration. While you may not know precisely how you’re going to evolve your customer experience over time, having solutions architected in a way that supports data sharing and integration makes evolving the customer experience that much easier.”

There are some important drivers at work here.

First, organizations are increasingly anxious to be smarter about data. They understand the inherent value of it, even though they might not know yet how to get at the value. We continuously meet customers who are stockpiling heaps of data in Hadoop – yet still wondering what application and what use case will be supported by it. There’s a distinct need to go beyond the analytical number crunching, beyond the infrastructure and tooling bits, and beyond a very large unserved audience for (big-)data-driven business applications that bring (if possible: immediate) value: CRM, marketing support, customer service.

Next, big online players are showing us how important execution is: it should be perfected, gradually and incrementally, and relentlessly tested and improved as the customer (and Google) has set a very high bar. People need both the feature as well as the experience. You might think your coupon redemption app is great because it offers all sorts of sophisticated options, but your user might just skip it because the authentication method is awkwardly complicated.

Lastly, bringing me back to the point of Jamie, is the need for data integration. Behind the scene of great customer experience should be a platform preparing and managing data in a customer-centric way. It makes no sense to just pour operational, transactional and customer data into a data lake without processing and organizing it around your single most important entity: the customer.

Your customer is your key index into your data – one single customer doesn’t care about you being capable of doing sophisticated population statistics, his main interest is how much you know, how much you care about him, and how you use that data to provide the best possible experience. Great personalized service, proactive offers – specific to that one single customer.

Organizations must have up-to-date, well-organized data points of every individual customer – there are thousands of relevant metrics to be tracked, leading to a unique sort of DNA for each customer. This allows customers to choose their own moments of interaction, through any available channel for an experience personalized based on previous interactions.

It is my firm belief that customer experience goes hand in hand with real-time customer-centric data organization. You cannot address the needs of every single individual customer if your data doesn’t follow that same pattern. And your actionable customer profiles cannot be pulled from disparate application silos overnight – they should fed, improved and nurtured in real-time.

GUEST POST

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Since Salesforce.com did us all a terrific service by touting the initial benefits of software as a service (SaaS) through its “No Software” branding, many SaaS companies have sprouted up, grown and had healthy exits. The explanation for this growth is simple — SaaS has become the best choice for replacing on-premises software, largely because the tangible benefits are staggering. SaaS requires no hardware costs, rolls out easily, boasts lower licensing costs, and often has significantly faster user adoption.

SaaS secretly offers significantly bigger benefits for customers than those afforded by simply replacing on-premises applications. This benefit lies in the massive, untapped potential of heavily mining the business data collected by SaaS applications to drive huge business process improvement by means of predicative process and behavior analytics. Unfortunately, most SaaS companies have not yet realized this potential land swell.

Many SaaS companies are multitenant, and as such, they have the ability to aggregate and analyze data from all of their customers. Done well, these companies could offer priceless industry benchmarks to help their community of customers perform better in their industry. Some great examples of this method in practice include Zendesk (customer service), which has an entire “Best Practices” section of their website that includes benchmarks derived from their data, and Coupa (indirect procurement), which updates its “Industry Benchmark of Key Performance Indicators” yearly. My company, Noosh, a SaaS for project-based sourcing and procurement currently targeted at marketing and print services, also recently released its benchmark report illustrating how collaboration drives productivity, business opportunity and lowers costs.

A competition of continuous improvement

As the customers of these SaaS companies use benchmarks to compare themselves with their peers and improve performance, the benchmarks themselves become more stringent, fostering year-over-year continuous improvement — on behalf of both the brands producing the benchmarks, and the customers that apply them. Next year’s benchmark includes the performance improvement gains from the previous year. Not only does the SaaS application help its customers perform critical business functions, it helps year-over-year by providing a virtual community against which companies compare themselves and strive for improvement.

For example, at Noosh, we’ve analyzed the time from the point at which a buyer asks for a price to the point which the first price is received across our entire customer base. More than 31 percent of the time, the buyer receives the first estimate in less than an hour. That’s a strong benchmark and key metric for anyone in our industry. This is simply not discoverable with on-premises software deployments.

For this to work, of course, SaaS companies must first have and then meaningfully interpret a lot of business-process data. Web companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all data companies. These companies collect consumer data by delivering software services and leveraging that data to sell targeted advertising. If the “big data benefit” of business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies does come to fruition, the same sentence can be re-written for the future of B2B SaaS, simply by replacing “consumer” and “targeted advertising” with “business process” and “offer real-time predictive business-process insight.”

Clearly stated: These visionary B2B SaaS companies collect business-process data through delivery of a software service and leverages the data to offer real-time predictive business-process insight.

The beauty of interoperability

Beyond analyzing historical data and publishing benchmarks, future waves of SaaS companies will leverage data their systems have collected to build predictive business-process improvements directly into their applications.

A good example comes from Saba, which provides SaaS solutions for talent management. Saba has implemented machine-learning algorithms based on data from its customers as “The Intelligent Mentor,” or TIM. TIM makes personalized and relevant recommendations about content, classes, and mentors that can help employees be more productive on the job and develop in their careers. Other potential examples could come from sourcing apps to predict the impact of user actions in realizing cost reductions. Consider the business implications of an application that can predict the value of receiving another price quote regarding savings potential (in its simplest case) or which can predict whether the next quote would be low — or high — based on the previous behavior of the actual suppliers yet to respond or seasonality variations.

Add to this the increasing interoperability of SaaS solutions, and new applications will be mashed up in ways we can’t conceive of, which will result in a new set of applications. This “second cloud front,” as suggested by recent Future of Cloud research, will be an order of magnitude bigger than the first. Imagine the possibility of collecting data from multiple business-process applications to predict outcomes and optimize entire, cooperative business processes.

One could argue that supply-chain software companies have been leveraging big data and algorithms for inventory replenishment for years. While true, these hard-coded algorithms and data are isolated instances — islands generated by one company, for the benefit of that sole company. B2B SaaS is different; it affords companies the ability to leverage and apply big data benefits, such as dynamic predictive insights, to business processes by using data collected from the industry at large. These wide, industry-shifting benefits are only possible with the data stored by SaaS platforms in the cloud.

Ofer Ben-Shachar is the founder and chief executive of Noosh, a leading software-as-a-service platform for integrated project and procurement management.

Ofer Ben-Shachar is the original founder and CEO of the company which, at its founding in 1998, had the same name as its award-winning technology, “Noosh.” He has continuously served on our Board of Directors since that time. Of... read more »

Capturing and maintaining your customers’ loyalty is harder than ever. Prove your trustworthiness by capturing pictures in the field to illustrate your points and propel your customers to act.

With more competition and greater demands than ever before, service companies today often find themselves at a loss when it comes to gaining customer loyalty, selling future service, and renewing preventive maintenance contracts. Even if you have a steady stream of new customers, it’s still difficult to maintain those customers, sign them up for recurring service contracts, and propel them to act as advocates for your organization.

In today’s market, the only true way to keep your customers coming back for more is to provide exceptional service. There’s no way around it. But how you attempt to provide exceptional service is often dependent on the type of mobile field service strategy you’ve put in place.

Turns out, if your field workforce is using a mobile field service app and devices, one of the easiest ways to impress your customers can also be one of the most effective. Picture taking in the field can save your team tons of time explaining a problem and provide trustworthy evidence to get your customers to renew service and build loyalty with your company.

Here are the top six ways field service mobile picture taking will build trust with your customers and establish a loyal and lasting relationship:

1. When you tell your customers something is broken, they’ll believe you.

You know your technicians would never exaggerate to make a sale, but your customers are wary and they don’t always trust when a technician tells them they need to replace a part or their air condition might not work next month. If the tech can take a picture of the broken part, illustrate what will happen when it stops working, and give the customer options for future service, the customer is much more likely to believe there is a problem and hire your company to fix it.

2. It’s faster than trying to explain every detail.

Explaining technical problems in non-technical terms so your customers can understand can be frustrating and time-consuming. Pictures really do speak 1000 words, so use them to speed the process when you’re explaining tough problems to customers.

3. Improve awareness of new sales opportunities.

Technicians are often in the best position to sell customers on upgrades, new products or extended warranties because of the face-to-face interaction they have with customers. More than anyone else in the company, customers look to technicians to give them trustworthy advice. Mobile picture taking capabilities make it easier for techs to document necessary services or repairs and then show customers exactly what needs to be fixed.

4. Renew preventive maintenance contracts by demonstrating the benefits of regular service.

Proof is key to demonstrating the value of your service. Customers want to know they’re not throwing their money away with regularly scheduled preventive maintenance contracts. Use pictures taken in the field to visually demonstrate how their equipment is working when it receives regular service and what could happen if they don’t stay on top of it with preventive maintenance.

5. Show off your field techs’ great work (before/after shots).

One way to build credibility with your customers is to show what an asset looked like before and after the service took place. The before/after shots can serve as testaments to your technicians’ quality work. And it demonstrates your ability to provide consistent, quality service.

6. Encourage internal knowledge sharing

In addition to pictures taken in real time while in the field, technicians can also save pictures for future use. When they save them to the field service management system through their mobile app, other people in the company have access to the images and can make strategic plans based on what the techs provide them in the field.

Important Features for an Integrated Mobile Field Service Picture Taking Strategy

In order to take advantage of the above benefits, companies can equip technicians with the following, to achieve picture-taking success in the field:

• A mobile device with quality picture-taking capabilities.
• An integrated mobile field service app that shares information across the organization.
• A native mobile app that allows technicians to capture and upload photos when they don’t have cell service.
• A cross-platform field service app so the companies don’t have a limited device or provider selection.

Empowering Your Team to Take Action

Field service is a process spanning from marketing to sales to service. As service organizations try to become more profit-centric, it is important to focus on the revenue building, or sales, side of the process.

With this profit-centric model in mind, integrating a picture-taking solution to back up service claims and renew service contracts will help technicians build trust with customers, which can translate into concrete revenue once techs start making new sales and renewals in the field.

In the market for a cross-platform or cloud-based mobile app for your field service organization? Learn important tips, guiding questions, and to-dos in our free, educational whitepaper: “A Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Field Service Software.”

*Originally published at MSI Data.

 

Are you at the cusp of something new? Perhaps you've taken a new sales position. Maybe you're selling into new markets or to new buyers. You could be launching a new product or service. You might be responsible for onboarding a new rep.

Or just maybe you've finally realized that you're doomed unless you figure out how to deal with today's savvy, frazzled, sales-averse decision makers.

What's common between all those scenarios? You – or your new reps – are thrown into learning mode again.

You're overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of the task. You're not sure you'll ever figure it out. But here's the deal: to make that happen, you need to take control of your learning. It can't be done in bits and pieces, with no rhyme or reason on what you're learning first.

In AGILE SELLING, I lay out a complete 90-Day Sales Plan that starts with a deep dive into the information and/or skill you need to focus on.

Why ninety days? Because the time frame is short enough to feel manageable, yet long enough to get results.

Here's what should be included in the first 10 days of a sales plan:

 

1. Complete company-specific training (for example, products, sales, and industry).
2. Map out and prioritize “need to know now” info necessary for situational credibility.
3. Immerse yourself in relevant product and marketplace knowledge.
4. Fill out the Buyer’s Matrix on primary buyers.
5. Create a dictionary, cheat sheets, and checklists to aid recall.
6. Map out and get clear on the buyer's decision process.
7. Clarify reasons buyers choose to maintain status quo.
8. Identify business cases that will encourage buyers to make a change.
9. Get up to speed on technology needed to do the job.
10. Start collecting customer stories; learn the difference you make.

 

Notice how focused it is on understanding your customer – even more so than your company or offerings. There's a reason for it. That's what matters the most. You need to establish situational credibility as soon as humanly possible. 

The full 90-Day Plan is filled with learning activities to deepen your knowledge, sharpen your skills, increase your prospecting effectiveness and engage with customers.

 

When you map it out ahead of time, you get lots more done – and you're productive much sooner. 

 

 

grit (noun): firmness of character; indomitable spirit; unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger

True Grit

Your sales team has process, skills, and plenty of product knowledge. So what’s keeping them from landing that next deal?

By Jennifer Bohanan

International sales strategist Andy Miller of Big Swift Kick says that whether you’re managing deals on a small, medium, large, or even massive scale, no matter how thoroughly trained your sales team is, you (and your training company) are overlooking a vitally important element of your sales strategy: grit.

The concept of grit has become so important in the industry that the term Sales GRIT™ has been trademarked, defined as a salesperson, sales manager, or sales VP’s ability to get things done, no matter the circumstances. It is their capacity to dig deep and do whatever it takes—even suffer, struggle, sacrifice—to make sales happen.

“In deal management, without grit, the tough questions don’t get asked because the salesperson didn’t have the guts, didn’t feel it was appropriate, or thought it might be off-putting to ask,” Andy says. He also cautions that, without grit, sales reps and account managers simply won’t stick to the sales process. He sees reps deviate from sales process for a variety of reasons. “Sometimes they aren’t comfortable with it, or they’re too trusting. Maybe they’ve gotten complacent or the prospect pressures them to do things differently,” he says. “The bottom line is a ton of time, energy, and resources go into a deal they won’t win because they lacked the necessary grit.”

It’s important, he notes, to understand that buyers have a process, too. Andy points out that according to CEB, B2B customers have completed approximately 67 percent of their buying process before they engage with a supplier. They’ve already done their research and have a short list of suppliers to engage. Even if the prospect calls you, the deal must still be sold, and that’s where grit can make the difference.

Whether a seller makes a cold call or the buyer makes contact, the seller should work toward differentiating the value of their offerings from that of their competitors. “Buyers are looking for a way to determine the best choice for their needs,” he says. “Sellers should be educating and helping the customer make better decisions based upon research/evidence from trusted third party sources.” Brochures and product/service pitches are of little help, he adds, because they don’t aid the customer in understanding what to look for and what to avoid. A competitor with better marketing may be shaping the prospect’s thinking against you. Only a sales rep with grit has the guts to politely and confidently challenge the prospect when they hear biased thinking, wrong questions, or flawed selection criteria.

Andy says a perfect example of grit is the children’s story The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper, and CEOs agree. A survey by Paul Stoltz, Ph.D. the world’s leading authority on grit and Founder of PEAK Learning, asked 25,000 CEOs across all industries who they would rather have work for them: Someone with perfect skills, experience, and qualifications who lacks grit, or someone who lacks some skills, experience, or qualifications but has grit? Ninety-seven percent picked the latter.

Fortunately, Andy and other experts believe that grit is a “teachable and learnable skill.” Out of the 50 competencies tracked in Brad Smart’s Topgrading: The Most Proven Hiring and Promoting Method to Turbocharge Company Performance, resourcefulness (a subset of grit) is identified as number one. University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Angela Duckworth says that, in children, grit is the primary predictor of success. The U.S. Military teaches grit at War College as a top leadership skill needed in a world of increasing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity). “Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are teaching it in their MBA and entrepreneurship programs,” says Andy. Many private equity firms say the number one reason for executive turnover is lack of ability to execute and bring about change (“lack of grit”). Venture capitalists often have higher success rates when investing in first generation immigrants because life experience has helped them develop more grit.

Most sales performance improvement experts consider sales process, sales skills, and knowledge and expertise as essential program components, but Andy believes grit also plays a critical role, especially in a world of VUCA. “Grit is the foundation that supports or sabotages your effort to find and land a deal.” says Andy. “It either props up or undermines everything you do.” If your grit is not right, nothing else works properly.”

About Andy Miller

Andy Miller is co-founder of Big Swift Kick, a sales strategy and performance firm that specializes in helping small and middle market companies double the speed at which they double their organic growth. He has 23 years of middle market experience and is responsible for helping clients generate $5.7 billion in new business through their direct sales organizations.

About Jennifer Bohanan

Jennifer Bohanan is a freelance writer and editor who has been composing, adapting, and fine-tuning communications for business clients since 1997. Most recently serving as editor and copywriter for ES Research Group, Jennifer has produced clear, captivating, and cohesive content to meet a range of objectives across a variety of industries. Taking special interest in the issues that impact sales professionals in today’s complex post-recession business environment, Jennifer is currently working on a business book project with ESR Founder and competitive sales strategist, Dave Stein, and Steve Andersen of Performance Methods, Inc. For additional details, visit Jennifer at www.wordsmatter.com.

How to Make Selling Harder Than It Has To Be is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

You are making selling harder than it has to be.

When you leave a sales interaction with your dream client without a firm commitment that moves the opportunity forward, you are reducing your chances of gaining that commitment, and you are extending the time it will take you to gain that appointment.

Commitments that don’t move opportunities forward:

• Your commitment to send pricing.
• Your commitment to call your dream client.
• Your commitment to provide information.
• Your commitment to do anything else not listed here.

 

Your commitments are important. You need to keep them. But they aren’t the commitments that move your opportunity forward. For the opportunity to move forward, your dream client has to make a commitment.

These commitments generally move an opportunity forward:

• Your dream client’s commitment to meet with you again (sooner is better than later).
• A scheduled meeting with other stakeholder’s within your dream client’s account.
• A commitment to meet to review the information you promise to provide.
• A commitment to visit one of your existing clients with you.

 

Notice something about these commitments? It is your dream client who is making the commitment. Even when you commit to provide information, your dream client is agreeing to allow you to present it. When you don’t gain these commitments, you are hurting both you and your dream client.

How you are hurting you and your client by failing to get these commitments.

• You are allowing your dream client to go longer without the results they need.
• You are allowing your dream client to control the process without replacing it with a process that ensures they achieve their outcomes.
• You are allowing time for other forces to change or challenge the opportunity.
• You are showing a lack of professionalism by not having a concrete plan for helping your dream client with their buying journey.
• You aren’t helping your client generate revenue and profit, the keys to growth and creating new and greater value.

 

Look at your stalled deals. In every case, you are missing the next commitment you need to move that opportunity forward. Had you gained that commitment while you were sitting in front of your dream client, your deal would be moving forward. Now you are struggling to get a response to your emails and voicemail messages, and you worry that your deal is at risk. Don’t make selling more difficult than it has to be. Ask for the commitments you need.

Understand Why Before ROI with Content Marketing

The rush towards the content marketing bandwagon can seem as chaotic and nonsensical as most of the adventures of Alice in Wonderland. There are Cheshire Cats offering ambiguous advice and Red Queen business managers demanding results now or, “off with their heads!”

There is no satisfaction from investing in creating more content if the purpose (or porpoise) is not clear. This is why “the why” of content marketing is so important.  Joe Pulizzi makes this quite clear with his recommendations in the Content Marketing ROI eBook:

To see if you’re on the right path, use the Why? Exercise:

Put “Why?” at the top of a piece of paper.
List all the different channels you are creating content for (e.g. your blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) down the left side of the page.
List “Why” you’re creating content for that channel. (The Why? needs to be either sales, savings or customer retention/loyalty.)

We’ve performed this exercise with dozens of billion-dollar brands. Not once has one of these brands had the Why? for every one of the channels for which they create content.

This is a problem, and one you can fix.

Indeed you can. Below we have an infographic created by Christie Anderson from TopRank, citing the 10 content marketing ROI experts featured in the Showing Real ROI for Your Content Marketing eBook. They include Nicole Smith, Joe Pulizzi, Jay Acunzo, JoAnn Sciarrino, Michael Brenner, Andrew Davis, Julie Fleischer, Robert Rose, Pawan Deshpande and Ardath Albee – a true “A-List” of content marketing smarties.

A combination of useful and entertaining, “infotaining” as I like to call it, this infographic and eBook draw upon a select group of speakers that will be presenting at this year’s Content Marketing World conference. Here are some of their “tweetable tips”:

Joe Pulizzi, CEO at Content Marketing Institute
“Skip analytics reports for your CMO. Instead, focus measurement reporting on performance: sales, cost savings, and customer retention.” @joepulizzi Tweet this

Julie Fleischer, Director, Data + Content + Media at Kraft Foods 
“Without attributable sales results, you must get creative measuring content ROI through cost savings, marketing efficiency, and specialized insights.” @jfly Tweet this

Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy at NewsCred 
“Content marketing is the thing that will save marketing itself, because it works. Track costs, measure results & trace those metrics back to business value.” @BrennerMichael Tweet this

Nicole Smith, Managing Editor, Tech Page One at Dell 
“‘Get real’ with content by surveying your audience, through usability testing, listening socially & folding that data into your content strategy.” @NicoleSatDell Tweet this

Andrew Davis, Author at Brandscaping and Keynote Speaker
“The more you focus on measuring market size vs. market share, the more revenue you’ll generate. Create content to grow your entire market.” @TPLDrew Tweet this

Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions 
“Determining ROI in the B2B space takes creativity. Measure content relevance to boost performance & manage content quality to increase sales follow through.” @ardath421 Tweet this

Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer at Content Marketing Institute 
“Traditional ROI measures are flawed. Focus on measuring content, vs. teams, both quality and quantity, and see ROI as progress, not a destination.” @Robert_Rose Tweet this

Pawan Deshpande, CEO at Curata 
“To gain insight for more effective content marketing strategy, focus on 3 metrics: performance, operations & ROI.” @tweetsfrompawan Tweet this

JoAnn Sciarrino, Knight Chair, Digital Advertising & Marketing at UNC Chapel Hill 
“Your brand lives in the consumer’s mind. Measure the emotional or brand attachment between people and brands.” @JoSciarrino Tweet this

Jay Acunzo, Director of Platform & Community at NextView Ventures 
“Determine the biggest problem facing your buyers and create a resource that solves that problem.” @jay_zo Tweet this

Click on the image below for the full sized content marketing ROI infographic PDF.

To Get ROI, You Must Invest – In Yourself!

The Content Marketing World conference is coming up fast, Sept 8-11 and you won’t want to miss it!

Learn how to co-create content with industry influencers. I will be presenting at Content Marketing World on Sept 9th at 3:30pm on how companies can attract, engage and recruit industry influencers to partner on content projects, just like this one.

If you work for a technology or software company, we have the ultimate content marketing workshop for you: Susan Misukanis and I from TopRank Marketing will be hosting a content marketing workshop for Tech/Software companies (Sept 11 from 9:00am to 3:30pm) with co-speakers from LinkedIn (Koka Sexton and Deanna Lazzaroni), Dell (Connie Bensen), and a Pam Didner, a former Intel Global Content Marketing Manager and author of the new book: Global Content Marketing.

To help you get Content Marketing World on your calendar, here’s a $100 discount code: TopRank

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Infographic: Achieve Real Content Marketing ROI – 10 Tips from CMI, Dell, Kraft Foods, Curata, NewsCred | http://www.toprankblog.com

Early this week I posted on how Sales is Broken. There are many examples of traditional sales tactics that don’t work when buyers have access to a tremendous amount of information.

The old rules of selling...

Just because you have my email address, it doesn’t mean you should email me your sales message. Just because you have my phone number, it doesn’t mean you should call me with your sales pitch. Just because we’re connected on LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean you can add me to your distribution list. Just because I follow you on Twitter, it doesn’t mean you can try to sell me something via Direct Message.

But you know the old rules already.

When buyers have more information than sellers

I’ve worked up a SlideShare to discuss The New Rules of Selling. I provide details on how to succeed in a world where buyers have more information about the products and services they’re interested in than sellers and why buyers are now in charge of the buying cycle.

Many of the ideas in the SlideShare came from interactions on my blog and social networks with people like you who are making it happen, defining the new rules that work in our ongoing communications revolution. Thank you.

The New Rules of Selling!
1) Authentic storytelling sets the tone
2) Content is the link between companies and customers
3) Big data enables a more scientific approach to sales
4) Agile selling brings new business to your company
5) Real-time engagement keeps customers happy

If you enjoy the SlideShare and haven’t already done so, please consider buying the book that the ideas in the SlideShare are based on: The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business.

The book is available in e-book formats now. It will release the first week of September as an audiobook and the print editions will ship September 2 in the USA (a few weeks later in other countries).

Thank you for your support.

When two equally functioning laptops — one visually attractive, the other less so — were priced at $600, research participants were pretty much evenly split over which to choose; but when the computers were priced at $599, 85% chose the attractive one, says a team led by Jungsil Choi of Cleveland State University in Ohio. The apparent reason is that a price ending in “99” conveys a discount image, which assuages buyers’ anticipated monetary guilt over making a purchase that would feel good as well as be useful.

Sales: Do This, Not That!

 Today’s post is written by Emma Snider from HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing and sales platform. 

I have an astonishing appetite for candy, and it probably would have done me in long ago if not for the “Eat This, Not That!” series. Thanks to the book, I can still eat a sizable amount of candy without having as disastrous an impact on my waistline. ETNT prompted me to make the switch from Butterfingers to fun-sized York Peppermint Patties.

After the first few days of no longer indulging in my favorite treat, the initial shock was gone, and with Yorks in hand, my mood stabilized (I am now a confirmed junkie). My sweet tooth was still getting fed, just with not quite as many calories.

While none of today’s sales practices are “junk food” per se, there are some areas that can be similarly tweaked for better results. And like my experience, the hardest part can be making the jump; once the changes are normalized, the result is often a healthier sales organization.

With my candy experiment in mind, I present to you, “Do This, Not That: Sales edition.”

Do This: Research prospects before your first encounter

Not That: Go into a cold call completely cold

As Linda Richardson wrote in her latest book Changing the Sales Conversation, “Today, clients will respond to straight discovery questions and product talk with impatience.” Salespeople should aim to learn as much as they can about prospects before they pick up the phone, send an e-mail, or swing by the office. With so much competing for potential buyers’ attention, salespeople who diligently do their research will stand a much better chance of being met with interest rather than brushed off with annoyance.

Do This: Seek referrals

Not That: Wait for them to trickle in

Customer referrals are a remarkably effective channel to grow sales pipelines and revenue. Yet, salespeople are often hesitant to ask for referrals because they feel awkward or because they’re loath to spend time cultivating customer relationships when a new month’s quota is on the line.

But, according to sales coach Rick Roberge, salespeople should proactively seek referrals (albeit gently). And it’s not as awkward if you work in the expectation from the start — Rick advises salespeople to bring up the topic of referrals even before a contract is signed.

Do This: Optimize social accounts for social selling

Not That: Use them as online resumes

Social selling isn’t just learning how to spot a lead on Twitter or LinkedIn and following up in record time — it’s also about using these channels as a way to gain and demonstrate knowledge of your prospects’ industries and pressing issues. Therefore, social profiles and activities should be optimized for buyers, not for sales recruiters.

Social selling expert Jill Rowley recommends that salespeople engage with buyers, thought leaders, and other industry influencers by commenting on, liking, and sharing their social posts, in addition to writing vivid profile headlines and summaries that are more than just mini-resumes.

Do This: Read every day

Not That: Stop learning when training ends

Since buyers are much more informed about products and services today thanks to the abundance of online information, salespeople need to add value in other ways. Linda Richardson espouses the importance of insights — information that disrupts a prospect’s status quo by revealing a problem they might not be aware exists. Delivering insights sets the stage for trust and, potentially, a sale.

Google can’t serve up insights — only a human can do that. Salespeople should keep up with their buyers’ industries by reading trade publications and following relevant influencers. Strive to set aside some time for reading every day.

Do This: Conform your sales process to your prospect’s buying process

Not That: Force buyers to fit your sales process

Just like researching individual prospects and companies before you reach out, you should also learn as much as you can about your target audience’s buying process. This enables you to provide relevant information or assistance at just the right time and increases your chances of being treated as signal rather than noise.

Do This: Recognize that sales hinge on you

Not that: Rely on your product or service to make the sale

In today’s sales environment, differentiation is no longer the realm of a product or service — it comes from the salespeople themselves. As Jill Konrath wrote in her book Agile Selling, “You know what buyers pick as the differentiator in their decisions? The sales experience — what it’s like working with you.”

So, how can you become a differentiator? With your knowledge. Buyers are looking for more than a canned sales pitch and a demo; they want people to work collaboratively with their team to solve business problems. If you develop the know-how to recognize and fix problems specific to an industry or type of company (here’s where reading comes in), buyers will take what you have to say — and sell — seriously.

——————————————————–

COMPLIMENTARY RICHARDSON SALES TRAINING TECHNOLOGY BRIEF

Click here to download our new brief, Selling in the Cloud – 8 Keys to Successful “Land and Expand” Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers.

The post Sales: Do This, Not That! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

GUEST POST

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Marketing software is becoming increasingly intelligent, with vendors building predictive algorithms to improve every aspect of demand generation and sales.

But it’s only as good as the data fueling those algorithms.

Predictive marketing tools: An overview

Lattice, Infer.com, and Fliptop provide tools for predictive scoring of leads on the top of the funnel. InsideSales.com empowers inside sales teams with predictions as to who and when to call to increase lead qualifications and sales. C9, DxContinuum, and Aviso analyze later stages of a sales pipeline and help businesses to forecast revenue.

Customer success tools such as Gainsight, Preact, and Bluenose Analytics even help after the deal has been successfully closed and the lead has become a customer: They predict which of the customers is likely to churn (drop away), and they help identify upsell opportunities for happy customers.

Some of the players, for example, SalesPredict and 6Sense, provide intelligent support for the full customer lifecycle, from scoring inbound leads to predicting customer churn.

Begemoths Salesforce.com and Marketo have recently acquired predictive marketing software companies (RelateIQ and Insightera), indicating that they are serious about data intelligence, too.

All those tools address different stages of customer life cycle but are based on a common set of principles: Assemble customer data from multiple sources, consolidate it by customer, store it in an analytical database, and run predictive models against it.

The quality of the data is crucial, and any predictive analytics engine without the right data is like a Ferrari without fuel.

What kind of data do you need?

Generally there are two kinds of data circulating inside modern marketing software systems: internal behavioral information about leads and customers, and external information about leads and the companies they represent.

Internal behavioral signals are gathered from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, email marketing systems, customer service platforms, or billing and invoicing systems. They include data points like these: Whether a lead opens marketing emails, visits the company website, downloads company whitepapers, submits questions to the support system, etc.

External information includes such factors as the lead’s job title and additional information about the lead’s company, like its employee count, job openings, web presence, social media presence, technologies installed, patents, trademarks, and more. Static external signals like firmographics (industry, location, or company size) are more important for qualification of early stage leads, while dynamic external signals, such as news about new investment round, new office opening or executive change, are more useful for monitoring late stage opportunities and managing customer success.

Where can you get more?

To collect external signals, predictive analytics vendors have built in-house data crawlers as well as licensing the data from third-party data providers. Here’s an overview of the options.

The veterans of business information — D&B and InfoUSA — mostly collect the information manually, with the help of call centers. They focus on collecting general companies’ firmographics, like location, number of employees, industry category, and contact information for key employees. But they rarely have company websites, multiple email domains, social network accounts, or other information found on the Web.

Younger companies like my startup, Orb Intelligence, crawl information on the Web and from government filings and provide it via API to marketing software vendors. Datanyze and BuiltWith crawl the web to collect data about what technologies are installed on companies’ websites. Enigma.io integrates and indexes United States government filings. HG Data collects information about software products used by companies and provides competitive intelligence data for the technology industry. ZoomInfo and data.com focus on collecting employees’ contact information.

As the marketing software ecosystem matures and defines its requirements for business information, we are likely to see business information providers grow into data platforms for marketing applications. This in turn would free marketing software vendors from the burden of data collection and maintenance, letting them dive deeper into predictive analytics and specialize their products.

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Maria Grineva is a co-founder/scientist of Orb Intelligence, a company that provides business information for marketing software vendors and B2B marketing agencies.

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Knowing who uses your competitors’ products can be a huge competitive advantage. Knowing when potential customers start a trial of your competitor’s product could be a lifesaver.

That’s the appeal of Datanyze, the “Google of sales and marketing.”

The company, which trawls the web for scraps and pieces of code that reveal what software-as-a-service products companies are using on their website, announced today that it has raised a $2 million seed round from investers such as IDG Ventures, Google Ventures, and Mark Cuban. And that it’s been growing at the astonishing rate of 25 percent per month all this year.

“Datanyze enables salespeople to uncover not only who is using a competitor’s software, but also determines when they started or stopped using it,” the company said. “If a competitor requires annual contracts, Datanyze can pinpoint the day a client deployed this competitive technology and send notifications a few months before the contract is up for renewal.”

Clearly, that’s gold to salespeople and marketers.

In January of this year, Datanyze was already well on the way to $1 million in annual revenue — without having taken a penny of investment. With barn-burner growth ever since, it’s unlikely that the company needed the seed round, although it will help accelerate progress. But a good seed round does provide a good ramp to a bigger round of capital down the road, and a basis for a valuation, both of which are important for a potential future IPO or acquisition.

And founder Ilya Semin doesn’t have small plans:

“Our goal is to become the de facto lead generation solution for every technology provider,” he said in a statement.

Datanyze is not just pursuing its own technology and product. It’s also working with frenemies and coopetors, such as HG Data, a company representative told me recently. HG Data, based in Santa Barbara, does something similar to Datanyze, but instead of spidering websites, it searches the hidden web: PDFs, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets, the digital trash of modern companies, which also reveal important clues to what technology you are using.

The difference is that HG Data’s information is better at revealing technology purchases that don’t hit the website and might not be SaaS-based: servers, CRM that’s not integrated with the web, switches, and back-office functionality such as corporate databases. In addition, HG Data searches out a much larger universe of technologies.

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“We have 1,700 technologies, they have about 4,000,” the representative told me. “HG Data will sell Datanyze’s data, and Datanyze will sell HG Data’s data.”

All told, that puts the number of technologies that Datanyze can supply data about at over 5,000 (there’s some level of overlap). And because Datanyze has invested in a slick user-friendly interface — which HG Data has not — partners have the option of pretty charts and graphs as well as just exports of and API access to raw data.

Early adopters including KISSmetrics, Fastly, and Dyn, and the capabilities have excited the ultimate celebrity investor, Mark Cuban:

“Like investments, sales is all about context and timing,” the NBA Mavericks owner said in a statement. “When I saw what Datanyze was doing with technology data, I knew I was in.”

Datanyze updates its data with daily web crawls to ensure freshness.

Investors in this round include AngelList, Gil Penchina, Neeraj Agrawal, Jeff Epstein, and Kyle York, as well as the already-mentioned Mark Cuban and Google Ventures, and the lead investor, IDG Ventures.

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Is it necessary to pre-qualify inbound leads? That’s the overarching question I recently presented to a panel of industry experts. Over the course of this three part series, you’ll hear from 15 leading voices in the world of sales, marketing and lead generation, as they share their insight in response to the following questions:

• Are companies wise to invest money and time to pre-qualify inbound leads from marketing automation systems that have been assigned a “perfect” lead score?
• Should CMOs feel confident that these leads from marketing automation are ready for sales to close
• Without additional qualification measures (such as tele-qualifying), will these leads inevitably clog and choke the sales pipeline?

We started the first series hearing from author and consultant Ardath Albee; entrepreneur Kyle Porter; author and consultant Joanne Black; and consultant and speaker Dave Brock.

In the second part of the series, we heard from The Funnelholic’s Craig Rosenberg; Annuitas Group’s Carlos Hidalgo; Sales Lead Management Association’s Jim Obermayer; Direct Marketing News’ Ginger Conlon; consultant and trainer Dave Stein; and agency founder Matt Heinz.

We are now at the third and final part of this series, where we will hear from Connect & Sell’s Chad Burmeister; consultant and professor Ruth Stevens; sales guru Chris Tratar; Care.com’s Chris Snell; and finally, cleaning up is 60-Second Marketer’s founder and CEO, Jamie Turner.

Sales leaders are feeling the pressure to build successful teams that will increase deal flow and drive revenue. But that’s no easy feat in today’s competitive market. Resources are rife, and tools are many, but how does one know what advice to heed?

We’ve cut through the clutter and found the 10 questions we hear time and time again.

In a two-part series, we’ll share the best practices for building a sales development team of superstars:

1. What Qualities Should I Look For In Hiring A New SDR?

Your hiring strategy must be focused on recruiting reps who are highly motivated, hungry for success, consistently punch above their weight class, and are in the top 1% for the following traits: positive, supportive, and self-starting.

These are common traits that should shine through during the hiring process, many of which were outlined in a recent webinar with Craig Rosenberg. Incorporate these into your sales development hiring strategy to hire the best in class.

2. How Can I Onboard My SDRs Quickly And Effectively?

The key to developing a successful SDR is to dedicate an onboarding strategy and training process that focuses heavily on your buyer and your process.

The key onboarding strategies that we implement at SalesLoft include:

1. Define Expectations- Make sure that new hires understand their role, what is required of them, who they report to, and how they know if they’re doing it well. Outline a measurement for success at the onset.
2. Implement Best Practices- Leverage the best practices that have been successful for the company to date, and translate those into an onboarding document that walk reps through all the steps needed in order for them to become great.
   
   The categories of onboarding that are essential to an SDR’s success are: team culture, technology tools, process implementation, significant time spent with role-playing, and getting comfortable with the offering.
3. Develop a Fluid Playbook- Your playbook can and will change, however it is a necessity to have a clearly defined and thought-out document of your sales development process. Make sure the playbook is available to anyone on your team, especially new hires.
   As you build the playbook, outline several items such as:
   • What kind of email templates will you use?
   • What’s your cadence for phone vs. email?
   • Will you use social media?
   • Where do you get your lists for outbound prospectors?
   • How will you find a decision-maker for inbound leads?
   • What email tool will you use to increase efficiency?

   The more specific you can answer each, the less questions you’ll need to answer as your team grows. As you work through the process, test slight changes and update the playbook when you find ways to improve.

4. Establish Measures of Success- An SDR is successful when they are consistently hitting their numbers, asking good questions, and providing solid answers to objections from prospects.

   A well-defined onboarding process will position an SDR to have confidence, focus, and provide value to prospects. Sales is a game of confidence, where two people come together and the person with the most confidence has the most influence.

   3. What Are The Best Coaching Strategies For Developing My Reps?

   Whether SDRs are experienced or new to the game, they need consistent coaching to grow and develop their sales skill set.

   Rivalry’s Jon Birdsong says that the best coaching strategies to develop your reps are simple: communicate, communicate, communicate. You can never over-communicate with your reps.

   Here are the top three tips to integrate into your coaching strategy:

   1. Understand how they feel and uncover where they are struggling.
   2. Leverage data in the CRM to validate these concerns.
   3. Pinpoint areas of improvement and create a simple game plan to improve.

   
   4. What Is The Most Popular SDR Compensation Plan?

   The sales development compensation plan should be simple:

   • Monthly quota for SQA “sales qualified appointments” (e.g. 40 new SQA / month)
   • Monthly performance incentives (e.g. 0-25 SQA: Expected /26-50 SQA: $70 each / 51+ SQA: $90 each)
   • Promotion when they meet pre-established quota ( e.g. 400 SQAs or 1 year)

   Compensation drives behavior and SDRs should be compensated on what they can control (like demos completed), not whether a deal closes or not.

   5. How Should I Create A Career Path For My Reps?

   A new hire could start out as an Inbound SDR and get promoted to an Outbound SDR upon meeting pre-established goals. When your Outbound reps crush their quota, promote them to an Account Executive role. Map the career trajectory during the hiring process and develop the path so that their skills and goals align with the overall goals of the company.

   Here’s an example of how the SDR could advance within your business.

   –
   Provide these tools, training and support to your SDRs so that they have the resources to be successful.

   In the next post, we’ll dive into an overview of the best tools for your team, establishing the best ratio of SDRs to AEs, and measuring success.

The qualities that make a good sales manager are something I’ve thought about a lot. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen them a lot.

In my opinion, it all comes down to coaching, which is something most sales managers aren’t particularly adept at — especially if they were promoted to their position from a rep role. Reps-turned-managers likely got into management because of their ability to sell, not necessarily their ability to coach, and this negatively impacts the way they work with struggling reps.

Consider this scenario. A rep is having a tough time closing a deal, and turns to their manager for help. The rep-turned-manager then has two options: give the rep some guidance, and then let them try to fix the problem themselves (and possibly flounder), or take control of the situation because they already know precisely what to do and how to do it. In my experience, the manager usually opts for the second choice.

And that’s a problem. Not only did the rep not learn anything, but if this is the default way their manager handles issues, the rep will eventually become reliant on the assistance.

This tactic might close more deals in the short term, but what about the long term? Coaching, by definition, is helping to empower people and improve their performance over time. There’s no “easy” button to push for effective

That said, I’ve noticed four behaviors that the best sales managers demonstrate. Not surprisingly, each is firmly rooted in a coaching mindset.

1) Let reps do it themselves.

Hand holding is one thing, carrying is another. For reasons I outlined above, you should avoid solving reps’ problems for them as much as possible. It might be a short-term fix, but you’re stunting your reps’ potential in the long run.

And just like giving a kid a push on their bicycle and watching as they wobble down the street, be prepared for uneasy feelings for both parties at first. Recently, I was working with a rep on a problem he was having with a deal, and I could hear the voice in my head: “this would be a lot easier if I just did it myself.” But instead of wrestling control, I instructed the rep to work on the issue overnight, provided him with the tools he’d need to get started, and promised that we’d reconvene in the morning. He was definitely a little freaked out — I’d describe the look in his eyes as “Please don’t go!” But I did, and we were both better for it in the end.

2) Establish consistent processes linked to goals.

Reps crave direction, but they also have a million things competing for their attention. If you expect them to do something consistently, like update the CRM or produce a document in a specific template, you need to set the cadence and stick with it. If you say you’re going to pull the deal review in three weeks and you don’t do it, your CRM will be a ghost town in no time.

But keep in mind that not all habits are productive. The caveat with this tip is to always link processes with goals. Before defining a process, think: What’s the outcome I’m trying to drive? A pointless process is just as bad as none at all.

3) Don’t flog your reps.

Sales is a number-driven profession, and it’s easy to react strongly when the month isn’t going your way. A rep tells you that a decision-maker at a certain company doesn’t like them — well, why not? A member of your team has a few gaps in their opportunity plan — and how did that happen? These knee-jerk, unpleasant responses are all too common from first line managers.

Nobody likes to get yelled at. So how do reps escape their flogging? By shuffling some data around or keeping an issue to themselves, so they can cover their tracks and dodge the flog — temporarily. But all problems come to light eventually, and they’re often much more serious later on than if they had been dealt up front. Plus, in the meantime you (and your SVP) are working from inaccurate data.

Don’t let yourself be unconsciously incompetent. Encourage reps to come to you with problems and help them work through it as a coach, not a tyrant. If some are reluctant to wear their issues on their sleeve, ask open-ended questions until you get to the source of the trouble.

4) Motivate through games.

Salespeople naturally love goals, and being measured on them. But to give them the extra push to achieve, consider making it a game. For instance, whoever sells the most licenses or has the most leads by the end of the week wins a prize or a trip. “Gamifying” goals can drive behavior like few other motivational tactics can.

Coaching Benefits Both Manager and Rep

When sales managers act more like coaches, they’re also taking on increased responsibility for their reps’ performance. Today, reps bear almost the entire brunt of making or not making quota, and I don’t think that’s right. Good coaches should share in the wins and the losses, and when the fate of reps and managers are more closely tied, coaching becomes mutually beneficial.

What qualities do you think are essential for successful sales managers?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that businesses that invest time, resources and, in some cases, money in social media want to see a measurable ROI. In theory, social selling seems like an easy concept to master. After all, you just need to promote your products or services on a social network and then sit back as the sales flow in, right? Wrong.

While it’s essential for today’s businesses to engage in digital sales activities, it’s useless without first understanding how to use social media channels to generate leads. The very first step in this process is crafting an effective social media strategy.

(Image Courtesy of Shutterstock)

36% of people trust brands more when they have a social presence, according to statistics collected by cloud-based marketing and public relations software company Vocus. If you want to turn these social media-oriented people into customers, you’ll need to create a social strategy that leads them through your sales funnel. And the strategy doesn’t end when you make a sale.

In today’s digital world, you need to delight current customers just as much as you do potential customers, not only to keep them coming back, but also to turn them into brand advocates. After all, 81% of customers seek out the advice of friends and family members on social media sites before they make a purchase. A solid social strategy can help you become a recommended business.

Here are a few tips for developing a social strategy that’s right for your brand, your target audience, and eventually, your sales.

Be Proactive

A purely reactive strategy will leave you at the whims of your customers and their social media habits. Your customers will choose where conversations about your brand take place, and you’ll be left to monitor keywords and perform sentiment analysis. Instead, switch it up and add proactive elements to your social strategy.

Use your own content to start and lead conversations, and influence what your customers are saying about your brand. By controlling conversations you’ll be better positioned to impact consumers and persuade them to purchase your products. It will certainly take more effort than a more passive social media strategy, but it will be worth it when you’re improving the impressions social media users get from your business.

Be Sales-Minded (But Don’t Overdo It!)

You should be selling when and where appropriate. In the majority of cases, your social strategy should follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of what you post on social media should be about something other than your business (and interesting to your audience), whereas 20% of what you post should be purely about your brand.

What portion of that 20% is devoted to sales activities is up to you – try different styles of posts, different content, different products or services. To determine the best strategy for you (in terms of your brand and your social media followers), take a look at past analytics and see what has successfully led to sales in the past. You can even use A/B testing to try out new tactics and review the results.

(Image Courtesy of Shutterstock)

Monitor

Social media monitoring is useful in sales activities, just as it is in marketing or promotional activities. You’ll want to keep an eye on all things related to your brand (including competitors), so that you can jump in where needed, react to comments or questions, and get a feel for how customers are feeling. Monitor your streams and timelines to keep tabs on your important contacts, and track (and participate in) conversations relevant to your brand. This will help keep you in contact with leads and potential customers, and keep your products at the top of their minds.

Choose the Right Channels

Think about what social media networks your business is currently active on. Now ask yourself, do these channels really make sense for the brand? If your target customers aren’t likely to be on the platform you’re using, that’s time and energy wasted. Compare Instagram and Facebook – the first is great for visuals, and for a younger crowd, while the second is great for reaching a huge range of ages, and for sharing a variety of content. What fits your needs and your audience?

The sales campaigns you run on social media should be tailored to each network and the audience that frequents it. The networks you engage and sell on should line up with your company’s goals, industry, and audience. The ROI on your campaigns will be much greater if you have properly targeted your strategy to the best channels. For instance, 68% of Twitter followers are likely to make a purchase while 51% of Facebook fans are likely to buy. Decide what networks give your brand the best chance for success.

In order to succeed with social selling, you’ll need a stellar social media strategy; they go hand-in-hand. Using social media platforms without a cohesive strategy simply isn’t going to pay off with the conversions and sales you’re looking for. Social media can’t replace the more traditional sales process, but it can be a great accessory that helps drive additional revenue for your business, with a well thought-out strategy behind it.

Now that you know what it takes to put together a social strategy for your business, it’s prime time to take the next step through the process! This Social Media Fast Track makes it easy for digital marketers to understand the foundations of social media marketing and the implications of each of its discipline and platform. Following and completing this track will give you the quickest and most direct route to understanding the benefits each area in social media marketing can provide and what will drive business results. While you can take the classes in any order you wish, we recommend you watch them in sequence to get the most from your learning experience.

You are already convinced of the power and effectiveness of content marketing. You understand how it can be used to nurture leads and drive sales. And you understand that companies have to make sales if they are going to survive.

But here’s something you many not have thought about: the importance of going beyond making the first sale to a customer. Many in the world of marketing and sales fall victim to such short-term (and short-sighted) thinking, so don’t feel bad. But please consider the advice of legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:

I’ve long believed that, rather than getting customers to make sales, it is smarter to make sales to get customers. The first provides only income. The second provides income and equity. The majority of businesspeople think only about income every day. The exceptionally smart few who get rich from business think about both, every day.

It costs you a lot less to make a repeat sale to a happy customer than it does to make the first sale. It’s also a lot easier.

As is the case when you are nurturing a lead toward their first sale; persuasive, problem-solving content can help you lay the groundwork for future sales to happy, long-term customers.

Selling: It’s Not A Dirty Word

This is a topic that would take many books to cover thoroughly. Here’s my take: don’t be afraid to sell, at the right time and in the right manner. And don’t do so apologetically.

Think of it like this: If your product will add value to your prospect’s life by solving a nagging, frustrating problem and making his life better, don’t you owe it to him to sell it to him?

Avoid the old stereotype of the sleazy, high-pressure used car salesman. Start thinking of sales as helping, listening, serving and solving problems.

Welcome Guest Or Annoying Pest?

To paraphrase Dan Kennedy, you want to be a welcome guest, not an annoying pest. The greatest, most ethical sales people don’t shove unwanted products down a potential customer’s throat. They seek to be perceived by their prospects and customers as trusted advisers, not pushy peddlers.

Apply this attitude to your content marketing efforts and, when the time is right, use content to persuade your customers to take the action of buying from you.

Add-on Sales: Are You Leaving Money On The Table?

Here’s an example from the retail world you can apply to your post-sale content marketing, especially if you run a B2C e-commerce website.

Let’s say you run a retail store that sells men’s suits and accessories. A young customer who just graduated from law school with a new job at a prestigious firm walks into your store looking to buy suits. He’s excited and in the mood to spend money.

You take him at his word and offer him suits. He buys three. But for some reason, he never mentions shoes, belts, ties or shirts, even though he needs them all. And you, because you are afraid to be pushy, don’t offer him these accessories.

He gets in his car and spends time fighting traffic driving across town to one of your competitors. There, he buys all of these accessories that he would have bought from you, if you had only offered them to him. You thought you were being polite by not selling him things he didn’t ask for, but you actually did him a disservice.

What’s the post-sale content marketing lesson here? Immediately after your customer makes a purchase, send him an email linking to your webpage that offer products complimentary to the one he just bought from you. He’s already shown that’s he’s in “buying mode”, and based on this example, you could very well be doing him a great service.

The Power Of “Thank You”

Deciding to focus on building long-term customer relationships will lead to more sales down the road that will be easier and less expensive for your company to make. This relationship building process begins before the first sale takes place, but it needs to go into high gear after the first sale is made. A very powerful (but, sadly, often overlooked) tool for jump starting this process is a well-crafted thank you page.

Like this first-rate article from conversion rate optimization expert Theresa Baiocco implies, a great thank you page can help you combat buyer’s remorse. It can help you build strong relationships with happy, long-term customers who buy from you again and again in the future.

And it can give you opportunities to make additional sales. Think about it: Who says you can’t have a call to action in a thank you email that links to a relevant product page on your website?

Here’s another idea for leveraging the power of great thank you pages to combat buyer’s remorse: Use the content of the page to reinforce the wise decision your new customer just made and what they stand to gain from their purchase. Paint vivid “word pictures” of the benefits they’ll enjoy.

Pave The Way For Future Sales

On the topic of buyer’s remorse, fight it further by sending your new (or not so new) customers fulfillment content that provides value by showing them how to get more productive use from your product.

Emails with links to “how-to” videos or articles are ideal for this purpose. This will help your customers get more value from their purchase, but also strengthen your relationship with them, making them more loyal to you and creating TOMA – Top Of Mind Awareness – of your brand.

This is important. When they’re ready to buy again, you want them to think about you first. And of course, you want them to do so fondly. Fulfillment content that helps your customers get more value from your product will help achieve this goal.

Build goodwill by occasionally sending emails that detail how much you appreciate their business. Make them feel important and involved with your brand. Request their feedback on their user experience with your product and emphasize how you want to use the feedback to refine your product and service to give them even more value.

Again, selling is not a dirty word. As you are distributing your post-sale content marketing through email, don’t be afraid to sell on occasion. Do you have a new product or service you think your customers would like? Send them an email telling them about your new offerings and include a call to action to a targeted product page on your website.

Content marketing is powerful. It can give your company’s bottom line a very nice boost. And it’s not limited to lead nurturing and helping to make the first sale. It can also help you gain customers for life.

It’s conventional wisdom to believe that data, analytics, and quantifying buyer behavior is a winning formula for sales leads. And by many accounts, it makes a lot of sense. You’ve already hypothesized what gets B2B prospects buying and now have the numbers to prove them.

But take a step back and retrace that thinking, what came first? Was it the numbers or the behavior? What led you to have this assumption about prospects were looking for? Was it because you already had the big, data-crunching systems in place to tell you or was it something more intuitive?

Are sales leads simply part data and part people?

Despite all the innovations, human empathy is still an important element in B2B marketing and sales. It’s the first step to putting the customer first. Sure you can use the data to understand them better or send more targeted email offerings.

But is it the computer really doing all that guesswork or you? Ultimately, all that data you’re using is just the equivalent to one big calculator. It doesn’t generate its own numbers.

It’s up to you.

• You were the first to discover the need – Did you have the graphs and the buyer profiles when you started your first B2B marketing campaign? No. For you, the closest thing to that would be stumbling on a statistic that concerned you. (E.g. X% of organizations suffer from lack of Y). And even then, those statistics would’ve been born from either a similar source or better, yet: Human experience.

• You are the one driving yourself to serve – A database only takes in and visualizes the data when you’ve already put it in. It’s not driven by anything else. You on the other hand, are driven by something and your business is just the front. It’s like how online anonymity brings out both the worst and best in human authenticity. Your analytics and your own statistics only enable something that you already have: the capacity to find those in need of something.

• You’re the one giving the perspective – A computer will only tell you that the glass is 50%. The same computer will tell you that you only have 50% of your lead quota. It’s ultimately up to you to think if you’re falling behind or making progress. Interpreting data or even just the number of leads isn’t about how well it’s all calculated. There are subjective elements too (from the color impressions of your website to the seeing your pitch from a prospect’s perspective).

Your sales leads aren’t part data, part people. They’re just people that generate the data (much like you). And often times, the only way to make them realize that is to start it from your end. Be a person that goes around simply helping people with their problems, not just because the data told you there was.

Last week we shared tips on creating the most effective web form possible. Today, we’re going to tell you to stop using them.

Just kidding! Sort of. While website forms are the standard method of collecting mircoconversions from your website, we’re finding that following the same publishing method for every new piece of content actually hurts your conversion rate, not helps.

Should you abandon forms altogether? Not exactly, but here’s what you should be analyzing in order to improve them:

The type of content

The arguments are out that the B2B white paper is dead. Most of this is because too many white papers are heavy on sales language and not so much on thought leadership. While we’ll leave it to you to improve on business writing, white papers are a weaker incentive for users to exchange their contact info.

Instead consider the type of content you’re putting behind a form and ask the following:

• Is the content I’m sharing proprietary or something that needs to be protected from my competition?
• Is it something I’d be willing to give my contact information for?

The second question may be a bit hard to answer 100% honestly. But most of the time, white papers, tip sheets and guides would serve you better if they included calls to action within the document itself. This way, prospective clients can make the decision to contact you later—instead of abandoning contact at the first sight of a form.

Audience intention and expectation

There are some types of content that will always be accompanied with a form—it’s what your audience has come to expect. These standard items include free product trails, discounts, webinars and daily newsletters. These content marketing offers come with bigger rewards in exchange for prospect information.

On the flip side, other content marketing offers such as blog posts, articles, short guides and infographics may not convert as effectively because the audience provocation isn’t as strong. It’s ok if some of your content goes without a form—if anything it’ll create a stronger desire for users to sign up for content that has one.

Current sales process

Finally, in order to really understand what you should be “protecting” behind a form over what you shouldn’t is what your ideal prospect’s journey is.

For example, as an agency we still receive the bulk of our leads either through our “Contact Us” form or from a direct phone call. More than half of them have either visited our website previously or downloaded piece of content (white paper, guide, etc.) before reaching out. Additionally, we know that prospects we email immediately after downloading a content from our website rarely respond back.

What does this tell us? Our prospective clients are educating themselves in order to reach out later. This is in line with what many sales and marketing departments are seeing—the self-educated consumer.

With this information in mind, start creating conversion paths that speed them down that process. For example, if you know the bulk of web leads that attend a webinar will want to talk to sales afterwards, make sure there are follow ups in place to get them talking sooner.

So what should use instead of a form?

Forgoing forms on a content offer doesn’t mean you’re suddenly losing your lead capture method. Instead we recommend the following:

• Unlock forms from content offers that are low in lead generation and are not proprietary to your business
• Feature content directly on the landing page (without the form), paired with a stronger call to action that matches your ideal prospect’s buying journey (e.g. call us, sign up for our newsletter, email our sales team)

Have you been experiencing any “form frustration” from your web leads?

Back when direct mail was a staple of B2B marketing, everyone involved knew your list could make or break your marketing. Yes, your offer, creative and message mattered too, but the list was the biggie.

Today, the right B2B Target Account List is even more important if you are adopting account-based marketing, but it doesn’t spark the same passion that discussions of postal and email list sources did a decade ago. After all, you know what companies to target, right? Sadly, the answer is usually no.

If you are a B2B marketer and you are adopting an account-based approach in any portion of your marketing, it is time to find that passion for “the list” again. Fortunately, the tools and resources are available today to create more effective target account lists than ever before. Here are three categories of accounts you should include, and how to find each one.

1. The elephants you know

You already know these accounts by name and the list can be cobbled together between sales and marketing with the help of Excel and Salesforce. These are the big potential opportunities that you are already focused on and are the first (and often the only) companies that are included in a target company list and an account-based marketing program.

But if you sell to manufacturers and you identified 300 target manufacturers, you’ve only just begun. These may be the most important long-term targets, but the list is limited to the people you know and often doesn’t even consider if they have a current need for a solution like yours. Stopping here is the mistake many marketers are making today.

2. The prospects that know you

You don’t hang up on someone who calls you just because they aren’t from one of your 300 target companies. So don’t ignore people that otherwise show they are interested in you!

Here are two ways to identify companies actively showing an interest in you. While they may not be as big as the elephants, you will find many of your best near-term opportunities in this group.

• Identify your best site visitors: Using a solution like Demandbase, you can identify companies viewing key pages or content on your site and that fit your target profile. The best potential fits can be added to your full target account list and marketing program. (Disclosure: Demandbase is a client).
• Find engaged companies in your database: With predictive analytics solutions like Lattice Engines, you can not only score leads but improve your lead scoring with additional data sources and analytics, identifying potential accounts to focus on from within your existing marketing database.

3. Buyers oblivious to you

If you are looking for a new marketing automation solution, do you start by visiting every potential vendor site? No. Chances are you start with Google or by asking someone your know. Ultimately, your journey takes you to a wide range of sites but only a few vendor sites. Many vendors, particularly smaller or lesser-known providers, can’t count on you knowing them.

However, that journey across the web leaves a trail that some of today’s predictive analytics offerings can follow. When analytics firms combine these trails with additional information about the people and companies making them, they are able to identify the companies most likely to be in market for your solution.

While some of the larger B2B trade publishers have developed these offerings using data from their own properties and databases, some of the most interesting offerings are coming from newer firms like 6Sense that focus exclusively on predictive analytics and draw on a much broader data set.

If you haven’t adopted an account-based approach to your B2B marketing yet, I’ll leave you with links to two brief examples that show why it is a fast growing area of focus for many B2B marketers:

Nuance: Engaged 46% of their targets and delivered a 19-1 ROI.
CenturyLink: 26% of targets won and an 8-1 ROI. (I was fortunate to have had a hand in this program)

What has been your experience creating account lists and account-based marketing programs?

Disclosure: I’ve purchased and/or evaluated the offerings listed here but have no personal or financial interest in any business mentioned in the post.

Image Credits:
First: David Davies via Flickr cc
Second: TheLizardQueen via Flickr cc
Third: karlrobin via Flickr cc
Fourth: Fishyone1 via Flickr cc