From Beacon 23 to Station Eleven, we've put together a preview of the next batch of science fiction TV series being adapted from books.

The endgame of any type of sales efforts is to get that final conversion, whether it’s a true sale or something that could lead to a sale down the line, like redeeming an offer or signing up for an email list. A lot of sales professionals get creative here, from trying to add a sense of urgency via timed sales or trying to add fun elements to the purchase experience. For sales copy, because you’re limited to the written word, you may think that your options are limited, but this isn’t the case. Your sales copy is a potentially powerful tool when used correctly. Here are three ways to use your sales copy to drive conversions:

1.Benefits over features

Some people fall into the mistake of thinking that there’s not a lot of difference between a product description and sales copy. However, it’s easy to point out the flaw in this thinking right away. When a person looks at a product description, it’s because they already have some sort of degree of interest in it, whether they found it through a search engine or were recommended it by a friend. The goal here is to try and explain the features in a clear and concise way. That’s not how sales copy works. You are still missing that key step of convincing someone why these features are important. A subtle shift in your sales copy can make that possible.

Part of this is because the nature of sales is changing. People no longer need to be sold “a solution” because most already know the solutions they want. What you need to focus on in your sales copy is communicating benefits. The simple change here is making it less about how great your product is and more about how your product can help the reader improve their quality of life. In order to do this effectively, though, you need to know what your reader’s concerns are. That’s part of the reason why big ad firms pay so much for market research—to know what their customers value so they can write with that in mind.

2. Intelligent Structure

As said before, sales copy isn’t a product description. However, it’s not a blog either. Think of it this way. Very few people watch a commercial intently. Instead, something may catch their eye, they see the brand association, then they go on their way. Something similar applies to sales copy, in that most people are likely to skim it rather than read it intensely. You need to keep that in mind when creating your sales copy.

To make the most out of a customer who is skimming your content, make sure that you focus on creating enticing headlines and sub-headlines. These should communicate key benefits of your product or service so, even if a person only skims, they will understand those. Ideally, the headline will be so interesting that they want to read the whole way through, but this way, you’re covered in both cases.

3. A successful call to action

Remember, if someone decides to read your sales copy, they’re likely aware that its sales copy, and that you want something from them. It’s essential to make what exactly you want as clear as possible with a strong call to action. Don’t be ambiguous about things, so if you want them to click a link or fill out a form, simply say it. In addition, you also want to make things as easy as possible for your reader to actually get to the sales copy. It may be worth it to try and experiment with things like different font, verbiage, and even placement in your sales materials. Just make sure that you don’t go off-brand in doing so. Remember, the rest of your sales copy is about convincing a person to buy your product or whatever conversion you are looking for. The goal of your call to action should just be making it easy for them to do so.

The good news is that if you are struggling, there are a lot of strong examples to draw from of other businesses. Just make sure to adapt some of these examples and the principles we mentioned earlier to your niche and your customer base to see the most success.

If there are two things that probably mean the most to your sales copy efforts in terms of conversions, they are effort and empathy. Low-effort sales copy is easy to notice—a verbatim reading of benefits of a product that is more about talking at a customer rather than to them. Going hand-in-hand with this is empathy. This is taking the time to understand customer problems, so you can address them ahead of time in your sales copy. Remember, with sales copy, you don’t have someone behind the desk to answer questions like in a store, so you need to think ahead.

For Dutch architect Do Janne Vermeulen, the “space race” to build the world’s tallest timber-based building is no longer a matter of pride, but more of a sustainable imperative.

“I don’t think it matters who gets the highest first,” Vermeulen said following her presentation to a sustainable-building conference in Vancouver.

“What’s interesting to see is that it helps to get attention for tall wood buildings,” which is the important part “because if you get one, you might get two, if you get 10 you might get 20 and with 20, you might get 100.”

Vermeulen’s Amsterdam-based firm, Team V Architecture, is in that race with its design for Haut, a 73-metre (240-feet-tall) hybrid mass-timber residential building in a new, sustainability focused residential district of that city.

And multiplying the numbers of buildings defined as sustainable, sequestering carbon in renewable wood construction materials, is becoming more important at a time when warnings about climate change are becoming more stark.

Vermeulen spoke Tuesday in a keynote address to Wood Works B.C.’s annual Wood Solutions conference, which is doing double-duty this year as a week-long gathering of international policy makers in collaboration with Passivehouse Canada and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s Committee on Forests and the Forest Industry.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in an October report, warned of irreversible changes if people don’t take immediate and substantial reductions in their greenhouse-gas emissions beyond what they are taking now.

If people don’t, they are courting climate temperature increases in as little as 12 years that would speed up the melting of sea ice, cause droughts, famine and flood that are worse than previously anticipated.

Responding, in British Columbia, means implementing initiatives such as the province’s Energy Step Code, an optional set of energy-efficiency standards, or the Canadian Build Smart standards, according to conference organizers.

With wood recognized as a low-carbon option, “it is imperative to offer technical knowledge through learning opportunities in wood products and building systems,” said Lynn Embury-Williams, executive director of Wood Works B.C.

In past years, the Wood Solutions conference has highlighted local vanguard projects such as the all-timber Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Prince George, which is now home to University of Northern B.C. and Emily Carr University of Art and Design programs aimed at fostering the use of wood in construction.

The 18-storey timber-hybrid Brock House residence at the University of B.C. has also taken centre stage at Wood Solutions.

This year, however, the climate aspects are more firmly at centre stage of the week’s events than in previous years when the focus was as much on promoting B.C.’s value-added manufacturing of forest products.

“That (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report is just another statement in a long series of statements that emphasizes the need for this kind of collaboration,” said Rob Bernhardt, CEO of Passivehouse Canada, about this week’s events.

Canada has a “very good policy framework,” with its Build Smart initiative, Bernhardt said, but governments need more encouragement in implementation.

“Doing is far more difficult than planning,” Bernhardt said.

And Vermeulen said she is hopeful that her firm’s Haut project, along with other projects that have been built or are under development stand as examples for a different kind of tall skyline than those dominated by towers built out of hard materials such as glass, concrete and steel.

“We imagine that a great big, high city can be soft, comfortable, and to a large part, made out of wood,” Vermeulen said.

And Haut stands as an example for how well the project is being accepted, Vermeulen said.

“We managed to do it and we managed to sell the apartments and we didn’t encounter any insurance or mortgage or any kind of process problems,” Vermeulen said.

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In 1997, Billy Beane became the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. The A’s had the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball and in the four full seasons before Beane became GM, the A’s averaged less than 70 wins a season. Beane knew if he was going to build a contending team, he would not be able to do it the traditional way.

Beane’s strategy -- as depicted in the 2011 film, “Moneyball” -- has traversed beyond the world of baseball to nearly all sectors of business and has become synonymous with making data-driven decisions.

The tenet Beane and the A’s followed enabling them to average more than 93 wins per year for the following eight years had two components:

• Discard highly valued “vanity” metrics that did not have a significant impact on winning baseball games.
• Identify different metrics -- preferably those no one else was paying attention to but which had a significant impact on winning baseball games.

If Billy Beane were to take over a sales organization today, he would feel like he’d traveled back by about 20 years.

Sales organizations today are dominated by metrics, but they’re rarely data-driven and even take actions counterproductive to the outcomes they desire. This results in higher costs, burnt out reps, high turnover, and frustrated customers.

When noted economist Steven Levitt published the book “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” he shared the disproportionate impact structural incentives have on the behavior of individuals and their output.

Structural incentives are those created by the structure of what’s being done. They are often referred to as the law of unexpected consequences and are generally more powerful than explicitly stated incentives.

Structural incentives are also one of the primary causes of difficulty in change management. In sales, the most common structural incentives are the metrics used to assess performance -- whether tied to compensation or not.

The following five metrics are among the most common and destructive to building a high-performance sales organization.

1. Call activity

The activity metric has been a bad metric from the beginning. Born from the belief “sales is a numbers game,” the idea behind tracking this metric is that “more activity is better.”

The only statistical relevance call activity has on sales success is there’s an activity level that’s too low and one that’s too high. The difference between too little and too much is often quite wide -- so, this isn’t a particularly actionable metric.

There’s only one valuable use for call activity. Over time, reps demonstrate a pattern of activity levels that tend to correlate to their success. So, it can be a useful, personal coaching data point to note if a rep’s results diminish.

2. Appointments booked

For years, I said call activity was the worst metric used in sales. It’s been overtaken by appointments booked. This metric was initially designed to address the problem of measuring just activity -- then, structural incentives kicked in.

Made worse by the massive growth of the sales development function, the world became dominated by "Can I have 15 minutes of your time?"

Here's the problem with appointments: they are really expensive. There's the direct cost, the opportunity cost, the downstream cost, and the bottleneck.

Today, sales reps sell appointments creating tremendous waste for sellers and buyers alike.

3. Revenue potential in pipeline to quota ratio

Most sales organizations operate on a 3x out 4x model, meaning the total potential value of all of the opportunities in the sales pipeline should be three to four times quota.

This creates two problems:

• It endorses inaccurate pipeline estimations
• It encourages reps to keep deals in the pipeline that should be eliminated

It also creates the structural incentives that favor reps sticking with low-quality opportunities, instead of weeding them out in order to free capacity for higher-value opportunities.

4. Closing rate/win rate

Closing and win rates are useful for organizational planning and resource allocation. They are not particularly effective for assessing salespeople.

When closing/win rates are used as key performance metrics, they incentivize two destructive behaviors:

• Reps often filter out reject leads that aren’t ready to buy -- even if they have greater potential.
• Once a deal is added to the pipeline, the metric creates an incentive to keep working the deal because that means they don't have to record it as closed/lost.

5. Sales cycle time

This metric is cited often as a key metric for the effectiveness of the overall sales process. Sales blogs and research announcements regularly proclaim sales organizations are becoming less effective because sales cycle times are getting longer.

Unfortunately, the pressure to reduce sales cycle times is a major cause of the biggest challenge they face: the increased independence of the buyer’s journey.

The easiest way to shorten the sales cycle is to start it as closely as possible to a purchase. For several decades, observers have discussed the need for sellers to stop pushing so hard for the sale and align with the buyer.

Little progress has been made here and the focus on sales cycle time is a major reason why. What’s sad is that despite this focus, sales cycles are still getting longer.

How to Determine Effective Key Metrics for Growth

So, what would “Moneyball” look like if we were to apply it to the sales process? What are the right metrics to track?

Unfortunately, there’s no one answer to that question. There’s a paradox surrounding key metrics that boils down to this: the easier it is to identify and/or track a metric, the less valuable that metric typically is.

This means you must be purposeful in determining the metrics you track and designing the dashboards you use to monitor them.

To do so effectively, follow these three rules:

1. Conduct an analysis of what causes sales

There’s a famous saying in business circles that goes, “What you measure gets done.” For the most part, this statement is true. What’s missing is an additional clause warning, “So, be careful what you measure.”

I’ll spare you the lesson on statistics, but the key to creating metrics that lead to predictable results is to make sure what you track is a cause of the outcome you desire and that it doesn’t merely correlate or coincide with it.

While this lesson is certainly not new, very few organizations actually stop to figure out or even think about what causes sales for them.

If you’re new to this type of analysis, start with a simple one-step process. Answer the question, “What is the number one item that increases the probability a sale occurs?”

For example, I ran this analysis several years ago and we discovered a company fitting our ideal client profile that involved us in an assessment of their growth strategy was our primary causal driver.

As you become more advanced, you’ll be able to build up what I call a “causal chain” that’s typically three to five steps. Here are ours:

• A meaningful conversation with a primary or secondary persona
• A high probability indicator (HPI) aligning with our value proposition
• Sponsorship from an authoritative primary persona
• Completion of our assessment process
• The cost of the problem is a multiple of the investment (varies by offering)

2. Don’t confuse measurement with management

I’ve studied thousands of sales and marketing organizations, and I’m convinced the reason many bad metrics exist is because managers regularly try to use metrics to replace the role of process and management.

It would be easy for us to give our reps a target/quota for each part of the chain, reward them for hitting targets, and manage by the numbers. It would be easy -- but not very effective.

This strategy might work for a short period of time, but reps would likely forget the “why” behind the metrics.

To build an effective, data-driven approach to sales, build your key metrics on those components the rep has the ability to strongly influence and manage the ones that don’t.

To finish this example, our reps have quotas on the number of meaningful conversations, sponsorship, and assessments they conduct.

Reps don’t control what problems exist or the costs of those problems. But they can execute a process allowing answers to those questions to be uncovered.

3. Realize key metrics change over time

A business is a living organism. As the business changes, so does the market it’s focused on. This means what you measured yesterday might not be what matters today.

If you’re in high-growth mode, update this analysis every three to six months. If you’re in a more mature growth phase, update it at least annually.

There’s been a great deal of comment – often from people and organisations who frankly should know better – about how today’s B2B customer doesn’t want to engage with a sales person until late in their consideration.

That comment is based on studies and statistics that appear to show that the average potential customer is variously 57%, 60% or more than 70% through their decision-making journey before they see value in a sales conversation.

But no customer is “average”. And those simplified statistics and headlines – supported by naïve and often self-serving interpretations from people and organisations attempting to peddle a particular point of view – hide a much more nuanced reality.

When you dig into the facts behind the facts, a much more complex reality emerges…

I’m no great fan of averages. They often act as a comfortable crotch to support stupidly simple assertions that deny the complexity of the real world. H. L. Mencken observed that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”.

And that is certainly true in this case. Never mind the fact that in complex B2B sales our success depends on engaging multiple stakeholders who each may have different perspectives and be at different points in their personal decision journeys – there are other patterns at play here.

Let’s briefly deal with the obvious one: if a sales person is already engaged with the prospect prior to the start of their current decision journey – either though a previous sale or a previous buying cycle that never came to closure – they have a better chance of early involvement this time around.

A spectrum of complexity

But let’s also recognise that there is a spectrum of complexity in the types of buying cycle the prospect may be engaged in. McKinsey published a compelling analysis last year (“When B2B buyers want to go digital – and when they don’t”) that highlighted the impact that decision type has on buying behaviour, and on the desire to have a 1:1 interaction with a sales person.

Yes, the results are themselves averages, but they indicate the potential for very different levels of engagement (and very different sales strategies):

• On average, only 15% of B2B buyers that were involved in a repeat purchase of the same product or service as they had bought before saw value in being able to speak with a sales person.
• When the purchase of an otherwise similar product or service involved a change in specification, the average number of B2B buyers that saw value in having a sales conversation rose to 52%.
• And when the B2B buyers were looking for a completely new product or service – something they had never bought before – the average figure rose to 76%.

The only thing that surprises me about the latter is that the figure is so low. In complex, high-value, never-bought-it-before, high-risk decisions, you’ve got to wonder about the quality of the decisions that the remaining 24% are making.

Invest in digital and people

There’s an obvious conclusion here: sales organisations need to invest heavily in digital assets that directly support and simplify what their customers regard as simple B2B purchases. If those customers do not see the need to interact with a sales person, they shouldn’t have to.

But there’s an opposite conclusion when it comes to complex B2B sales – organisations need to invest heavily in recruiting, training and enabling sales people to support complex B2B buying decisions, most particularly when the purchase is breaking new ground for the customer.

Carving a path through the clutter

Given all the digital clutter that these prospective customers will often have to wade through when they do their research through internet search, I believe that there’s an argument that complex conversational skills, supported by genuine business acumen, have never been more important in high-end new business and new project sales.

And it’s never been more important to start having these conversations at an early stage in the prospective customer’s decision journey. If the first time we engage is after the customer has issued an RFP or tender document, we’ve either probably already lost, or have a very low chance of winning.

The argument for early engagement

Our influence is at its most powerful when we engage while the customer currently appears satisfied with the status quo, when they are starting to explore their options, or while they are defining what their future solution ought to look like and how to choose between their options.

Once they are locked into the selecting phase (often signaled by the presence of that RFP or tender) our room for influence or manoeuvre is dramatically limited. No amount of negotiation training or cute closing techniques is going to help us. Someone else’s fingerprints are already on the prize…

But it’s not as simple as focusing our sales people on engaging early (or ensuring that our marketers see it as their prime responsibility to get the customer to want to have a sales conversation sooner rather than later).

Making good use of their time

We need to ensure – in that all-important first conversation – that our customer sees value in continuing the dialogue. We won’t achieve that by delivering a tedious company or product pitch. We won’t achieve that by talking about us.

The only way we can reliably ensure that the first interaction leads to an ongoing conversation is to share something that proves to be of value to them. Something that makes them think “that conversation was a really worthwhile use of my time”.

That’s why business acumen, curiosity, active listening, context and the ability to share relevant experiences are such important foundations for compelling sales conversations. These are the things that make customers pleased that they decided to talk to a sales person.

It’s good to talk!

And if you want a justification for engaging early, let me throw another average at you: Forrester found that nearly three-quarters of B2B buying decisions went in favour of the vendor that had done the most to influence the customer’s vision of a solution.

Don’t be misled or waylaid by the siren voices proclaiming that customers don’t want to talk to you early on. Under the right circumstances, they do, and they see value in your involvement.

But please don’t destroy their trust by delivering a crude company or product pitch. You’ll screw it up for yourselves, and probably for every sales person that attempts to follow you.

When you are slated with the task of finding ways to increase revenue for you and your team — think “schedule.” How do you schedule your team for revenue increases?

To build great revenue increases — the whole team has to rise together.

What you are building is a team that can consistently regenerate itself and build upon what it has already done in the past. What each of this team have learned in the past and what they are bringing to the table.

To do this scheduling for revenue increases — you’ll look at killing the mediocre in yourselves and your team.

You’ll start scheduling these goals into your bonuses structure — team cooperation and not merely the individual income. You calendar this by adding in a different definition of failure and success.

Each member of each team is responsible for the revenue increases to your company. Usually, as soon as a team meets their revenue goals — it’s “great,” here’s your new goal. You don’t even stop for a refresher — or “good job.”

All you have been saying is — “sell sell sell.”

What if the company or team revenue goal isn’t met? Catastrophe! Bad bad bad — and the whole team feels like shit. Watch your rate of illness the week or couple of weeks after the sales or marketing goal isn’t met.

In one company, the boss showed up at the home of the team members after the “failed” sales quota. (This is a true story — but it’s another story for later). No one had called in sick — they were just sick. Schedule that (stop over) and you’ll soon get the idea what is really happening with your teams.

You think your team is out following-up on the new leads. That’s what you think.

No – they got up and got ready — maybe even started into work — but turned around. They are home sick whether you know or believe it or not.

What you have scheduled here is a decrease in revenue — not an increase.

If you don’t hit your sales target — understand that there has not been a failure in your team. Admit that there has not been a failure — unless one of two things has occurred. Your team members have participated in either a:

1. Failure to teach someone.
2. Failure to ask for help.

As you schedule your team for revenue increases — you will schedule how and where these two actions can take place.

Changing how you schedule in your calendar for revenue increases.

Focus on your team — and how they can be the making of a strong team. In order for this “team revenue” to occur — you have to have your team grow together and keep each other up to date.

1. You won’t have as many star-studded lone cowboys.

   They will have to teach others on your team their ways and secrets. Your team members will have to be strong enough to teach someone else the ins and outs of your business process or products.

2. You will begin to schedule less meetings about product — and give more training to each other.

   This scheduling is about how to build relationships with your customers and clients. Most especially each team member needs to know how they fit in with the company progress. They need to know what they themselves do to bring their company revenue increases.

3. Some call this “the company social selling program.”This is actually scheduling in ways that will make the difference in the bottom line for you — revenue increase.

What you are doing is scheduling (in your calendar) how you will increase revenue.

Nothing is ever simple — but we don’t need to move into a new house today — with our scheduling — just because the dishwasher is leaking under the sink.

Keep in mind that sometimes small adjustments present considerable consequences and outcomes when you are scheduling your team for revenue increases.

Start with team building exercises, training and events.

Yes, I know your pushback on this seemingly easy tagline. Cost, cost and cost and yes — you did mention time, time and also time.

Team building exercises:

1. Do some major training on emotional intelligence. Have your team study and come up with the part of emotional intelligence that they are going to work and report on. Also have them define which EI for which they are going to help someone else on the team. Schedule this event in your calendar. The size of the team will determine whether this event will be several hours or a day.
2. Everyone may get sick of Silicon Valley stories. On any day — at any time in Silicon Valley — you can look online. There are ideas that you would likely ever need to build your teams through events. One place lists 100 events that you can schedule every single day. Rent a bus and go. They will fit in your large group, as well.

Train — Evaluate — Plan

If you build it they will come.

1. Your sales, dev and marketing teams need to be looking for qualified leads and get them into meetings. How have each of your team accomplished this in other teams. Use collective knowledge for a fast uptake in what you’ll want to do to schedule your revenue forecasts.
2. Consider hiring more sales development reps (SDR’s). Some companies call these inside sales. The SDR’s have a way of looking for leads less expensively. Again — how have your teams seen this done in other companies to great effect? Schedule what your plan is — what you expect from this plan and how you will measure this.
3. Remembering the qualified opps are the foundational component for revenue growth. Every member of your team needs to understand and be able to regurgitate (to you and to each other) the structure, process and the tool box your company used for each team. They need to be able to map-out how this system works in their department and what their specific part is. Each team member should be able to shoe you their schedule — what their plan is — and what revenue they can expect from their actions.
4. Have a clear method of how you hire, train, evaluate and mentor your new hires from the very first day. For the first few weeks — it can be “all hands on deck” for the new hire. Depending on your hiring schedule — after training — you can use the new hire as a clear need for a team building exercise dates. Don’t leave your new hire scrambling for information or feeling like they don’t fit in with their team.
5. Assign your teams to prepare predictable schedules for revenue increases as they see them — and as they have seen and used before. This will impart a vast amount of knowledge to your team in a short period of time. This will occur each time you hire a new team member.

Look at Salesforce — Mapping, Execution and Analysis.

Follow how they use the concept of scheduling your team for revenue increases.

Mapping: operations and process, scripts, and what solutions you will be using.

Execution: The things I need to do, and the things I need my team to do.

Analysis: What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Add — expected revenue and gain to this part of the equation.

What you will gain by scheduling your team for revenue increases is a way to distinguish yourself and your team.

You’ll have a better team. Think you can have better targets and campaigns – yes you can. Continually be up-to-date with your team and relevant data.

Each team member will know what their schedule is. They will know what revenue increases they are going after. Your individual team members will know the direction they should be going. They will clearly know what direction and path they are on — it’s scheduled on their individual calendars. Most of all your team will be free to fly because they are supported from within their company. Your team knows that their success is also that of the team and knows where all the revenue increases are going to come from. If a team member sees a company that can benefit another team or team member and that they’ll receive a revenue source from that information when it’s passed along — the motivation is higher.

If you as a startup founder feel that these slow sales days will be wasted time — don’t. Your sales, marketing and devs can still improve themselves and your company on their days off. They will be building themselves and their (your) team. Even on the team building days — your teams will be training, evaluating and planning.

Understand that this recharging of yourself and your team will be the reason you and your team will get better and better. Watch as your scheduling brings you and your teams increased revenue. You’ll see increases — not just in money — but in better individuals.

You will be known — not just by what you are offering — but by who you are. Your team will also know that they are embarking on a great journey of self-discovery.

Are you scrambling to find influencers for your brand?

You see competitors using top bloggers and driving massive social media shares and traffic to their site.

You want to imitate and get similar results.

You think “hey if it works for them—it’ll work for me too. Right?”

Not exactly.

The purpose of influencer marketing is to grow brand awareness, build new leads, and convert prospects into customers.

Irfan Ahmed, a guest writer for Social Media Today, says “94% of marketers who use influencer marketing find it an effective practice, and influencer marketing can generate up to 11x the ROI of traditional advertising.”

Without the correct Influencer, you’ll never see 11x the ROI. If done incorrectly you’ll waste money, leads won’t convert, and your brand will be forgotten.

In this blog post, learn 10 reasons your influencer turns off customers and how to spot the right spokesperson to drive sales and crush competition.

1. Influencer doesn’t fit campaign strategy

Your influencer strategy should align with your customers’ needs and build out your marketing funnel.

Choosing an influencer solely on their follower count is no longer enough, start thinking, how does this influencer fit into our customer’s journey?

Your customer’s journey comprises 5 stages:

• awareness
• interest
• research
• decision
• advocacy

Boagworld offers an excellent guide on researching your customer journey map.

No two maps are the same, and will vary depending on your organization. Figure out your biggest challenges. Are you having troubles getting found online or need a credible voice to back your product’s performance?

Every influencer may bring awareness, but all influencers cannot produce effective content to trigger sales.

Decide which areas your campaign needs to target. To educate customers on your product, pick an influencer who is articulate, thorough and respected for reviews to deliver the campaign. If you want customers to become brand advocates, an influencer with a weak fanbase will not yield a strong community. You want their die-hard fans to transfer over to you.

Believing your influencer is a one-stop-shop to hit all stages is guaranteed to cripple your marketing. Start organizing influencers into groups that promote, entertain, educate, and empower their audience best.

With mapping, you can scale your campaign easier, and your goals will be attainable.

2. Influencer is too popular

Numbers are a vanity metric, and a large social media following can be a problem. Mega-influencers are influxed with followers, for their personality—but for other reasons as well.

Here are a few:

• Fear of missing out: Followers have no interest in the influencer, but wants to stay connected to what’s popular with peers. Oftentimes they have no engagement with the account.

• Spammers: Have you seen the comment section of huge accounts?Spammers offer no value to discussions.They self-promote and bombard accounts with annoying comments.

Here’s a photo of celebrity influencer Kylie Jenner. Kylie’s Instagram account is notoriously filled with the comments LB, FB, and CB, which stands for like, follow, and comment back.

You need engaged followers to build relationships ,and your sales funnel. Think about, how can one person have a strong connection to millions of people? The larger you are, the less of a connection you have. Realistically, you only convert a small fraction of followers.

Your eyes may widen when you see your product on a page with 2 million followers, but engagement and sales conversion are what matters most.

It’s difficult, but deterring your strategy towards a small, lesser-known influencer with higher engagement is a better alternative. Here’s where micro-influencers come in place.

Micro-influencers are influencers who have anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of followers. Adweek shares those with an audience of 1,000 produce an engagement rate of 15%.

A study by HelloSociety states micro-influencers are 6.7X more efficient at engaging audiences than popular influencers. The study also confirms their followers tend to be more loyal with engagement rates 60% higher.

Instead of testing your luck with huge accounts who may have the numbers, but not the connection; try reaching out to niche influencers. There’s less competition, less expensive, and they’ll hold your customer’s attention better.

3. Poor audience segmentation

Does your influencer understand their audience? Before you launch your campaign, you need to gather insights on what’s appropriate to promote, what time, which platform and to whom.

The Health Compass, provides an excellent example of different customer segmentation groups.

When developing your campaign, consider these questions for each group.

1. Socio-demographic: What is the most common customer persona? Ex: Asian female, who’s 25-40 years of age with an income under $70,000.
2. Geographic: Where is our target audience located? What are the best times to post on social media in that region and time zone?
3. Behavioral: Which groups respond best to written content? How many prefer short videos before they take action?
4. Psychographic: What are the shared values and beliefs? Is the audience snarky and loud or conservative?

A well-researched segmentation strategy will provide insights on how to market the influencer and to their audience.

1. Messaging is the same across platforms

When you log into Twitter and see an advertisement and then see the same ad on Facebook, do you feel compelled to buy?

I don’t. I automatically keep scrolling.

With personalized ads, marketers follow you around the web on different websites in hopes you’ll finally make a purchase.

Your influencer should tailor your product’s message to each platform and audience. A one-size-fits-all advertisement is not adaptable across social media. A long video product placement may perform well on Youtube but may do poorly on Instagram where short videos perform best.

When fleshing out your content plan with your team, create variations of the same ad to hit target customers on every platform. Play with images, messaging style and tone to see which ad gets the best response. Track and measure engagement, click rates and sales to see which creates better conversions.

4. Influencer is controversial

You scour social media for your best spokesperson, you develop a campaign strategy, invest money, prepare to launch and then bam —you’re hit with a dilemma.

Your influencer put their foot in their mouths and now has an outraged audience. You still have a contract to fulfill, but their followers no longer care what they promote, either they apologize and return to grace or forever be blacklisted.

All your time, money and resources wasted. This happens all too often on social media.

Kuwaiti beauty guru Sondos Al Qattan, who has 2.4 million Instagram followers recently faced backlash for complaining about a new regulation allowing her maid at least one day off from work a week.

Her rant triggered global outrage, and several brands who sponsored her such as Mac Factor, Phyto USA, and Chelsea Boutique swiftly had to cut ties from her brand.

If you find yourself in a media controversy, you’ll have to address heavy issues you didn’t plan for. For businesses without a PR department timing is everything during a crisis and you don’t want to get burned.

Pressure to back away from an investment you spent months on will happen, and to retain customers, you’ll have to. Research past scandals online to get a feel of any shortcomings your influencer has. Are they impulsive and lash out often? See how they handle themselves when they make public mistakes.

Choosing an influencer with tact and good sense will save you from offending customers.

5. Awkward collaboration

Do you cringe when you see fashion gurus promoting jalapeno mayonnaise? Or Olympic athletes sponsored by Mcdonalds?

Brand collaborations should make sense. If your followers sign up to see content about digital marketing than you reviewing software that helps schedule social media posts is beneficial.

Chriselle Lim a luxury lifestyle blogger, on Instagram, received backlash after bringing awareness of Volvo’s eco-friendly car campaign.

Her followers immediately hated the pairing and Chriselle was called a hypocrite because of her extravagant lifestyle, fast fashion wardrobe, and cars.

Chriselle was forced to address the harsh criticisms, which overshadowed the environmental message Volvo was attempting to spread.

Customers love authenticity, in the brand and ambassador. Don’t risk losing buyers with awkward spokespersons.

6. Influencer does not disclose sponsorship

There was a time when sponsorship was a dirty word—and to some it still is. Companies used to coach influencers into concealing their advertisements, whether that be hiding their collaboration announcement where followers couldn’t see or omitting information altogether.

Customers want genuine reviews and demonstrations of a product. When influencers take money from brands, advertising a product that is low-quality or over-hyped; they are deceiving customers.

The Federal Trade Commision now enforces influencers to disclose their relationship with brands when endorsing products.

Addressing your partnership head on will not hurt your influencers credibility, transparency is key to retaining followers converting to customers.

7. Influencer doesn’t have strong community

Influencers are the new celebrities and many of their fan bases rival top Hollywood stars. A strong community will support and purchase recommendations at a higher rate than weak ones.

Some examples of popular online communities are:

• World traveling on a budget
• Bullet journaling and stationery
• Family bloggers with toddlers

Harvard Business Review says a brand community exists to serve the people. By helping followers meet their needs, and not trying to make money from them, customers will have a stronger emotional bond.

Search for influencers who create content on their own that educates, inspires and provides resources for their followers. When it’s time to introduce your brand and sell, customers will be more receptive to your product because it aligns with their community.

8. Influencer has no freedom

A research study by Linqia reveals “76% of marketers cite measuring the ROI of influencer marketing as their top challenge for 2018”.

That same study states “when measuring the success of influencer marketing programs, marketers cite engagement (90%), clicks (59%), and conversions (54%) as top performance indicators”.

Are you a little too eager to make a sale that your influencer is on tight strings?

Your influencer knows their audience best. They’ve built their platform from the ground up and interact with followers daily. If you’re a social media manager or marketer who wants to control every aspect of the campaign, you’re losing valuable insights from your influencer.

A robotic, corporate-sounding script that’s outside their usual vocabulary will signal red flags to followers and lower conversion rates.

Your influencer should always have first say in the visual and written content shared to their audience, with your input.

9. Influencer has too much freedom

Clear boundaries should be outlined in any influencer-brand contract. However, as a business owner, you have the right to protect your image and product on social media.

Your spokesperson should:

• Provide great visual content
• Not mention or show another brand in your ad
• Be polished and professional

For growing companies, Influencers may not see you as an authority when speaking about your product. This will be obvious to their audience, and your image may come off uninspiring and forgettable.

If you’ve had troubles with influencers posting late reviews or lazily thrown together tutorials, it’s time to enforce respect with stronger agreements.

The way you’re introduced to a new audience sets the tone for your future relationships. Giving too much freedom to an influencer may result in potential customers abandoning research and choosing a competitor, so create strict rules you’re not willing to compromise on.

Conclusion

As influencer marketing grows, brands and influencers must hold themselves accountable for how they build relationships with customers.

We all want the best outcome for our marketing campaigns. We need our efforts to be validated with increased followers, more traffic, and higher conversions. This is absolutely possible by setting realistic goals, targeted campaigns and not overburdening our influencers.

By avoiding these 10 missteps, you’ll build a stronger community, drive more sales, and showcase your business’s integrity to customers.

When it comes to sales, should salespeople do it all, or should individual functions be divided among multiple people, each having specialized responsibilities? I’ve had several conversations lately about the virtues of each approach.

Do it All vs. Split it Up

Is the do-it-all method, where one salesperson hunts, closes and then manages the accounts after the sale better than, say, where an inside salesperson handles the inbound or outbound calls (or a sales development rep, as they are commonly called, gets appointments scheduled) and other salespeople conduct those meetings and close the sale? The truth is: each way may be right or wrong.

The correct structure is likely dictated by both the abilities of current personnel and the company’s desired selling scenario. What I mean is that you must pay attention to whom is available now to execute your goals. AND, you must pay attention to what is the best way to make sales, whether the personnel now are optimal or not. If they’re not, you’ll need to upgrade your team over time.

Too often I see companies hamstrung by the existing team talent and an unwillingness by leaders to set new expectations, along with a reluctance to make changes if people on the team aren’t the right ones to take the company where it needs to go.

Looking at Skills

To effectively transform a team to execute in an optimal way, you must first analyze what skills are needed. We use the OMG sales force analysis tools to identify qualities needed for different sales competencies. Click here to see why. So, as an example, let’s look at how Hunter traits compare to those for Account Manager:

The Hunter Competency	The Account Manager Competency
Will Prospect Prospects Consistently Prospects Via Phone and/or Walk-Ins Has No Need for Approval Schedules Meetings Recovers from Rejection Maintains Full Pipeline Not a Perfectionist or it Does Not Prevent Prospecting Reaches Target Prospects Gets Referrals from Customers/Network Uses Social Selling Tools Attends Networking Events	Has Strong Relationships Will Handle Organizational Politics Will Make Friends Everywhere Will Follow Up Often Will Meet/Talk with Decision Makers Will Know the Real Budgets Won’t Feel Urgency to Close Business Won’t Alienate People Will Focus on Current Accounts Rather Than Looking for New Accounts Will Manage Time Effectively

There really isn’t any overlap. It takes different talents to be good at each competency. However, time and again we see companies structured so that those very talented Hunters must also become Account Managers. Yes, there are individuals who are proficient at both, but people are more frequently wired one way or the other.

Inward Reflection

So, if sales aren’t what they should be, it might make sense to look at the different behaviors being asked of your salespeople to determine who is a better fit for what role now. Then, examine what the organization should look like in the future to get optimal results, and plan to get the right people into those roles.

Oh, if you are separating roles of individuals, then there cannot be a one-size-fits-all compensation plan either. Hunting is harder than account management. Individuals should be compensated based on the value they bring to the company and the degree of skill required to do the job.

How Individual Selling Functions Vary

When it comes to having individuals in separate roles, we need to slice the data with a little bit more granularity and question the specific traits necessary to be effective at each position.

Sales Development – The differences between sales development – getting the appointment – and the sales closer – the salesperson who will close the business – is an interesting one. The appointment setter is slightly different than the excellent closer. They must develop rapport quickly; and at least identify the prospect has a problem your company can solve and that they are talking the right person within the target. They do not have to fully qualify or cause the prospect to spend any money. They merely must get them to agree that it is worth their time to have a deeper conversation with someone else. In addition, sales development people must be able to recover from rejection quickly. They are probably externally motivated and somehow excited to pound out the calls or emails to get to a certain number of appointments. Sales Development roles can be characterized in a couple ways.

Inbound Salespeople – They need to be able to connect in a service fashion first to gain the trust of the individual calling in. Clearly, there is something going on that is compelling enough to cause the person to call. The inbound salesperson should be adept at uncovering what that is efficiently and do an expert job of qualifying for an appointment. This individual needs to be able to easily shift from one conversation to the next and be in the moment to make the most of the benefit of the caller being interested in your services.

Outbound Salespeople – Their skills are marginally different than inbound-only salespeople. The outbound caller must be able to not only eloquently interrupt whatever the target prospect is doing at the time of the call; they must also help them understand why it would be beneficial to talk on the phone about a problem the prospect may not even know they have. The outbound-only position requires better relationship building, consultative and questioning skills than the inbound-only position. In other words, to be effective, outbound-callers require a greater collection of sales skills.

Sales Closer – The salesperson who is expected to close must also be a good relationship builder, a great qualifier (remember that it is just an appointment, the prospect isn’t completely qualified), must be consultative and follow a predictive structured sales process. And, oh yeah, they must be able to close if closing is possible. You can see why it’s easy to make a case to have appointment setters who spend their time hammering the phones (and email) to get appointments, and closers who spend their time qualifying and, well, closing.

No Uni-size Solution

Be assured of one thing: There is absolutely no one-size-fits-all approach to a sales organization. We know there are certain qualities and traits that lend themselves to individuals conducting certain aspects of the sales role, but don’t get caught up in doing it just like everyone else. Analyze the talent you currently have and utilize them in the most functional way based on the abilities they have. But always strive for the exceptional and help your team evolve to it.

Text messages are a powerful player in the digital marketing landscape. As cell phones became mainstream, so did SMS (short messaging service) marketing; serving as a convenient communication tool between businesses and their contacts.

Not only are text messages quick and easy, but data also reports shockingly high open and engagement rates. Almost 100 percent of people open a text message, with the vast majority of messages being opened within two to three minutes of receiving them. These statistics prove that SMS marketing is a necessary addition to the marketing scope, and it’s important that businesses grasp the basics of writing a text before hitting send.

Regardless of its place within marketing, SMS proves to be an ever-reliable form of digital communication. For a successful SMS marketing campaign, it’s important to write texts that people want to open and respond to. Here are 5 tips for making your SMS marketing campaign a success.

1. Remember your target audience

Also known as personas, your target audience is a crucial component to all digital marketing campaigns, and SMS marketing is no exception. It’s essential to write to your audience. For example, Chipotle, a fast-casual Mexican restaurant chain, does a great job of SMS marketing by remembering who they’re talking to. Their primary audience is millennials. This generational group has well-known affinities for purpose, people, and consistent communication.

By channeling the millennials’ pain points, Chipotle starts by sending consistent, relevant texts that are clean and fresh like its product. They’re short and to-the-point, like their “No GMO” campaign that focused on cutting out food additives.

To take it a step further, the restaurant chain offers annual buy-one-get-one offers for teachers and nurses. This is a smart move as millennials make up almost 40 percent of the workforce today. With their affinity for helping people and finding purpose, these are two of the most millennial-driven careers.

By aligning what a millennial wants to hear and how often they want to hear it, Chipotle found a winning recipe for SMS marketing. Remember: Your audience is key.

2. Make it personal

Like a phone call, a text message from an unknown five- or six-digit number is a little off-putting. Unfortunately, that’s how most services work, and it can make your consumer feel like they’re just another number.

A simple way to make the experience feel less like “mass texting” is to personalize the text. If your forms include information like company name, product interest, or company location, leverage those to make the interaction customized. This 1:1 marketing at scale is the holy grail for many marketers.

These personal touches in automated SMS marketing help a consumer feel valued and strengthens the business-consumer relationship. The more a consumer feels valued, the more likely they are to return.

3. Keep it short

The average SMS marketing service gives you about 160 characters to work with. That’s about half a tweet.

Because of the strict character limit, it’s important to deliver information quickly and clearly. Texts are meant to be short, so use the following tips to help you write an SMS campaign:

• Include simple language.
• Avoid industry or salesy jargon.
• Get to the point.
• Leave general business information out.
• Offer value. Don’t spam your consumers with unnecessary texts.

Within seconds, consumers should be able to understand why you sent them a text, how it benefits them, what the next step should be, and when or if the offer will expire.

4. Include a strong call-to-action

When we talk about next steps, we’re talking about calls-to-action (CTA). For SMS marketing, a call-to-action is different from a button at the bottom of blogs, landing pages, or websites. It’s a shortened link to a website or coupon that’s downloaded to the recipient’s smartphone or a phone number to confirm an appointment.

To get your consumers to click on these CTAs, it’s important to include strong and precise words and avoid misleading language. “Download your free coupon” or “Call to confirm your reservation” are both good examples of communicating next steps.

5. Don’t use “text speak”

This seems like a simple tip, but it’s important. If you send your consumers an SMS that says “u” instead of “you” or “l8r” instead of “later,” it devalues your brand and looks spammy. Expect the open and click rates to drop if you choose to speak unprofessionally, even in a text message.

Social Selling: Using Social Media to interact directly with sales prospects by providing value through thoughtful content and question answering, until the prospect is ready to buy. (Hubspot)

Social Selling removes intrusive direct sales from the equation, no more cold calls or sales pressure, especially when the prospect doesn’t want to be sold to or interrupted. It uses Social Media to interact and engage with prospects on their terms.

Social Media is often misunderstood by business owners and sales people, thinking the hard sell is what will convert people fast. Using Facebook or Pinterest to push your products or services with only sales updates is a surefire way to turn people off your accounts and stop following, ensuring no one will receive your message, sales announcement or not.

Here are the 3 keys to using Social Media as your “sales” platform and get results:

1. Skip the Hard Sell

If you focus only on posting direct sales information may get you a new client or two, but it will most likely turn people off. The Feeds on all Social Platforms are valuable real estate spaces. There is a lot of content from many different sources that are competing to get into followers’ News Feeds. In fact, on Facebook the algorithm takes personal relationships into account when deciding what content to put in their users News Feeds.

2. Provide Value

If you want to reach people and you want a fighting chance for your business updates to reach your followers’ News Feeds you must provide valuable information.

Focus on content that will interest your followers. Content that will inspire them or educate them, i.e. home efficiency tips to save money on heating bills if you are an HVAC company, or a decorating tip if you sell home goods, or a stain removal guide if you are a laundromat.

Give them content they want to see; not content you want them to see. Getting them interested in what you have to say and valuing what you are sharing will get them to be more likely to purchase from you.

3. Engage & Interact

You are using Social Media to reach people and find new prospects, be SOCIAL! Watch for people to like, comment, or share your updates and respond to them. Have a conversation with them, be human and not just as sales billboard.

Have fun and get involved with your followers. Share a joke, share useful information and explain how it works in your personal life, etc.

Be human and be social.

Don’t Skip Social

If you think using Social Media takes up too much time or doesn’t provide a worthwhile ROI or fast enough results you are missing out on a huge opportunity to tap into potential sales.

75% of buyers use Social Media when making a purchasing decision. Whether your message is a sales message or not, your activity on Social Media matters to people.

An active Social presence conveys that you are a legitimate company that cares about its customers.

Take the time to use your Social Media platforms daily or hire someone who will do it for you, provide value, be human, engage and interact and the return on this investment will pay off.

Ibbaka recently did a large project with a non-profit that wanted to understand how pricing and value perception were shaping the decisions of their target audience (or rather of the three groups that constitute their audience). This organization’s mandate it to ensure safety and although it needs to self fund it is primarily concerned with shaping behaviours to ensure safety. Working with this group reinforced the importance of trust in pricing. If you have not earned trust, it is very difficult to execute on value-based pricing.

Please take our survey on pricing innovation. We are exploring how people create and then price their innovations.

Why is this? Value-based pricing relies on two things, a deep understanding of the customer’s business and how it is changed by your offer and the ability to connect price and value. At the end of the day, both of these depend on trust. If your customer does not trust you, they will not share the data you need to go deep into value with them and they will not believe your value-messages.

Trust also impacts the beliefs and actions of your sales team. They also need to believe in the value analysis and value messages that have been provided. The best sales compensation plan for a company taking a value-based pricing approach is one based on gross margin (see inset below). This will only work if the sales people trust the information about gross margin provided by management and if management trusts the sales team with this information. In too many organizations this basic trust between sales and management is missing. If people inside the company won’t trust each other then it is hard to ask their customers to believe the value claims and to get them to share critical information.

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Creating a sales incentive to drive profit

Recommendation from The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing Sixth Edition

See page 278-279

When sales is compensated on top-line revenue, this is what they will focus on. In many cases, the easiest way to do this is to offer discounts rather than by doing the hard work of communicating value. Sales people tend to do what they are paid to do. They are coin operated as one of our favourite sales advisors Reg Nordman says. Tom Nagle suggests the following compensation model for sales.

Sales Credit = [Target Price - k [Target Price - Actual Price] x Units Sold

k is the profitability factor, or ‘kicker.’ It gives a way to incentivize sales based on the contribution margin. The higher the contribution margin the higher k should be to align the sales person’s interests with the company’s.

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Trust is becoming even more important as we move into a world where most products generate and share data, and some of the best business opportunities are based on data monetization. In their recent book on this theme, Monetizing Data: A Practical Roadmap for Framing, Pricing & Selling Your B2B Digital Offers by Stephan Liozu and Wolfgang Ulaga, they devote a whole chapter to the theme of trust. This may be a first for a pricing book. In Chapter 8, “Build Confidence and Trust in the Data and Its Value” they argue that in order to effectively monetize data one has to build customer trust around data quality, data rights, confidentiality, capabilities and relationships. In fact, this extends beyond data-centric offers. All companies that want to execute on value-based pricing need to invest on building trust.

Our research has found that trust is based on three things: fairness, transparency and consistency. Let’s look at each of these.

Fairness

Is the price fair? This is as emotional question, a price is only fair if both sides perceive it to be so, but there is an economic underpinning. Buyers want to believe that they are getting fair value for their investment. They do not want to overpay, and smart buyers, who trust their vendors and want a long-term relationship will not want to underpay either. This of the standard Economic Value Estimation model developed by Tom Nagle. If the vendor tries to claim too much of the differentiation value the buyer will not regard this as fair. On the other hand, if the buyer refuses to pay any premium for the differentiation value then either they do not believe the value story or they are not willing to play fair themselves. If a buyer is not willing to pay a fair price walk away.

Transparency

Transparency is as important as fairness. Without transparency, there can be no assurance of fairness. For value-based pricing, we are not talking about cost transparency. Costs are only relevant if you are basing your price on costs. What matters is how you came up with your estimate of value. There are three keys here:

1. Have you really chosen the next best competitive alternative for the buyer or have you set up a straw man?

2. Have you recognized your negative value drivers (your shortcomings relative to the next best competitive alternatives and your unique costs). We often see EVE models with no negative value drivers. In reality, this is seldom the case. You can win trust by acknowledging your shortcomings and having a way to address them.

3. Do your value driver equations demonstrate an understanding of your customer’s business (do you have the structure right) and are the placeholders for the variables believable? If you get the structure right and use believable estimates, your customer is often willing to share their own numbers with you as you have demonstrated that you care enough about their industry to understand it and that you are not trying to trick them.

Another aspect of pricing transparency is how you set the price. This has to be clear and easy to understand. You don’t need to disclose this on your website (whether or not to publish pricing is a subject for another day) but you should be willing and able to disclose this in the sales process.

Consistency

Pricing needs to be consistent. Buyers want to believe they are paying roughly the same amount as others who are similar to themselves. They need to believe that companies have a good reason when they change prices. People in procurement do not want to hear that a competitor has negotiated a better deal on a key input or piece of equipment, and in serious cases, they can lose their job for this.

This will be a challenge for dynamic pricing and load management systems. We can already see this with the airlines, where adoption of revenue management software has contributed to commoditization. If the hotel industry is not careful, it will follow the airlines down this hole.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to set prices is going to make it more difficult to develop trust. Companies that use AIs to set prices (which is going to be almost everyone) are going to need to develop policies to ensure that their customers continue to trust them (and to counter the AIs that procurement will be deploying in price negotiations). Be prepared to answer the following questions:

• What data is used to set prices?

• What is the machine learning being trained to do?

• How does the pricing algorithm work? (This will be impossible to answer if your pricing was developed by a deep learning system but that will not stop people from asking it.)

• What does your AI do to help your customer get more value from your solutions?

Trust is going to become more important, not less, in a world filled with bots and AIs, a world where data is critical to almost all products and services. Programs and policies to promote trust are going to be a central part of any value-based pricing or data monetization strategy.

Dr. Alistair Cockburn is one of the original thought leaders and authors of Agile Manifesto. He travels the world consulting and speaking on the Agile methodology and has developed a community alongside his partners, Soledad Pinter and Djordje Babic, called the Heart of Agile, which centers around the four actions: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, and Improve. When they decided to redesign the old Heart of Agile website, Alistair knew he wanted to work closely with a local team of creatives and developers.

Lucky us — we were walking distance from his St. Petersburg apartment and described ourselves as agile on our website. He walked over, introduced himself, and soon after we got to work.

It’s been an amazing journey.

We’ve uncovered a lot of gems along the way — about how we approach work, collaboration, feedback, delivery, pretty much everything — we’ve outlined five of the shiniest. The Heart of Agile partners believe that Agile can work regardless of industry. We believe that regardless of your industry there is something of value to be found in our experience.

Shiny Gem #1: Come with a beginner’s mind

When Heart of Agile came to us, we believed the intent was to give the design and the UX of the existing site a facelift, develop more structure around the resources, and pay more attention to conferences and events. Alistair gave us specific instruction to pull the website up together and as a group document our initial reactions. Dutifully we gathered … and our collective feedback cup runneth over. Upon first glance, we had some very fundamental questions about the site.

• What am I supposed to do on this homepage?
• What is the point of the site?
• What’s the story?
• What are your services?
• Who is Dr. Alistair Cockburn and what does he have to do with the site?

Alistair’s style is not business as usual. Our typical Discovery meeting has an agenda and specific exercises, but for this engagement, we pushed agendas to the side and came with truly open minds. Our cross-functional team sat with Alistair and held an open-ended Discovery Discussion. We bounced around from site features to the audience these tools would serve, and back again.

One of my personal favorite quotes from Alistair during the discovery meeting was: “Everything about this website is a mistake.” While comedic, this sentiment illustrates just how large and amorphous this project really was. Coming to the relationship with open minds allowed us to come to a consensus with our new client on what was really needed to deliver a new Heart of Agile experience.

Shiny Gem #2: Make tasks tangible

Everyone on a project, clients and agency collaborators alike, needs to agree on what is needed in order to realistically track toward a deadline. This is not a groundbreaking statement, but how to align everyone is less obvious.

Alistair shared a technique with us that does just that. We wrote down all of the individual tasks associated with our website features on notecards, as well as time estimates for the tasks. We spread them out on the conference table, paying attention to when one task was dependent on another. We also marked off sections of the table for our sprints (which are weekly for our agency), and a delineation for the initial launch. Taking what is usually a digital Trello card and physically moving it in relation to other notecards and sprint lines WITH the client was revolutionary.

Laying out everything in front of us allowed us to see and agree on what was realistic for the timeline, and which features were truly needed for the initial launch.

We sat back, a little stunned by the results. Entire sections that were previous “must haves” were now marked by order of importance in a post-launch schedule. It felt like our lives just got a little easier, and our project had a greater chance of success.

Shiny Gem #3 – You ain’t gonna need it

YANGNI, or “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” is a principle of Extreme Programming that is not only fun to say (yag-nee), but can also save immeasurable amounts of time. We quickly learned that in order to keep our project on track and on budget, it was crucial to hold each possible solution up to the scrutiny of its true usefulness.

Early on in the project, we estimated 13 hours to develop a certain capability and Alistair’s response was, “No single task on this site should take 13 hours.” This helped us understand more fully the YAGNI principle and pushed us to be more creative in how we implemented solutions. Question the true purpose of every feature, establish the core necessity of it, and then look for simple, elegant solutions that get the job done.

This stark approach is not only liberating but it also empowers the team to make decisions based on a shared understanding of the project needs.

Shiny Gem #4 – Embrace what works

If you had told me that I would genuinely welcome a client sitting beside me to choose logo colors and design page layouts … I honestly would not have believed you. Work sessions with clients aren’t unheard of, but it’s certainly not the norm and definitely rare for designers.

However, in the spirit of beginner’s mind, we approached this project openly. And it worked. We quickly established a language of trust and collaborated efficiently and effectively. The content strategist and writer for the project had a similar experience, scheduling “mind meld” sessions with Alistair to concept, write and edit entire pages of the new site.

The amount of time we saved by working side by side made it completely worth it. Just as important though was the effect it had on our bond as a unified team working towards a goal.

Pushing this tenet even further, I found that communicating with Alistair and Sole on Facebook Messenger was incredibly effective. Yes, you read that correctly. By the time I started using Messenger to share ideas and get quick answers, the team as a whole trusted one another and the process to the point where if something worked we just went with it.

This experience and project reminded us of something we already try to practice: Don’t get so fiercely attached to a specific way of doing things that you become resistant to change. Every project and person is different, and situations change from day to day, so more important than any process is the commitment to a goal and an understanding that we can all be flexible on how to achieve it.

Shiny Gem #5 – Polish less, share more

Early on in the project, when discussing a design deliverable, Alistair said, “Don’t spend too much time on it because it’s going to be wrong anyway.” While we’re accustomed to client feedback and design revisions, the blunt force of this statement allowed me to step away much sooner and share a rough idea before it concretized into a polished design.

The word “wrong” struck me and gave rise to a fleeting moment of defensiveness, but our commitment to open-mindedness gave me the opportunity to reflect on the statement. He was totally right; the solutions that we developed together were inherently more informed than any that I could create in a vacuum. On top of that, this practice eliminated the need to get approval since the buy-in was made in real time.

The practice of collaboration isn’t new to how we work internally or even with other clients, but our work with the Heart of Agile team took this practice deeper and perfectly illustrated its effectiveness.

We launched a site, but this is only the beginning

When a new websites launch we typically celebrate by sending nautically-themed cookies to the client and internally letting out a collective “Whoo hoo!” But as you may have been able to tell, this was not a typical client.

We invited Alistair to our well-timed Fun Friday game day. He brought along Sole and Djordje via video chat, a bottle of champagne and a bottle of Cockburn Port, and a cake that featured the Heart of Agile logo. Alistair knows how to celebrate.

He also handed out framed diplomas to each member of the team recognizing our official Heart of Agile certification. This experience was so much more than launching a site, it was a shared effort full of spirit, mind and (ahem) heart that we are incredibly proud of and grateful for. Hopefully, these gems will leave you inspired to push and surprise yourself on your next endeavor.

As a Sales Manager, an essential part of your job is providing your sales team with the tools they need to be successful. This includes high-quality sales training that actually produces results.

How can you make sure your sales training really works?

Here are six proven ways to make sure your sales training is worth everyone’s time and investment.

 

1. Clearly define the problem the sales training will solve.

It is surprisingly easy to jump into a new sales training initiative while still unclear on what issue the training will actually solve.

Start by deciding what problem sales training can realistically solve. Of course, high-quality sales training improves selling skills, but there are several issues even the best sales training cannot solve. For instance, it cannot repair structural issues within your organization or do away with ineffective hiring practices.

As a Manager, what problem would you like the sales training to solve?

Get perfectly clear about why the training is occurring. Just as importantly, get clear on how you will be able to tell whether it has been successful.

You or your training team should consult with the very people who are experiencing the issues.

What kind of sales training will help them? How can you align the sales training with the outcomes they really need? How can you measure it?

Then go from there.

 

2. Make sure sales leadership is involved.

Which leaders will be most impacted by the outcomes of the sales training? (These are known as the stakeholders in the process.)

How will they be involved throughout the sales training process?

Far too often, sales training happens because someone with access to a budget identified a need. The training ends up taking place, but there is no clear connection to those who are affected by the training.

The training should never be the end goal, but a tool to solve a problem the key stakeholders have clearly identified.

For training to be successful, the stakeholders need to be part of the initiative before, during and after the training. They should have a platform to communicate enthusiasm and/or expectations throughout the process. Opportunities for everyone to show their enthusiasm might include kick-off meetings, video and email communication initiatives and participation in the actual training.

 

3. Define and measure the desired outcomes.

As mentioned before, zeroing in on the problem is only the first step. It is also crucial to lay out the ideal outcomes as a result of the training. Start by asking these questions:

• What are you looking to change with this training?
• How will you know whether the program has been successful?
• How will you measure results?

Make the most of tools like surveys to measure the desired outcomes after the training. You might ask participants questions such as:

• Did you enjoy the training?
• Did you understand the material?
• Will you apply what you have learned?
• Do you think this training will produce results?

 

4. Skip the one-size-fits-all training techniques.

It is never a good idea to apply a generic training template to the complexities of your own organization.

Of course, there are fundamental, timeless selling skills and techniques that work in every industry. But unless the training program you implement is perfectly aligned with your business, it will not hold value for your organization. Instead, it will leave even your best salespeople wondering how to apply the concepts to their specific environments.

Collaborate with both fellow managers and sales team members. Identify specific exercises and role playing scenarios that make sense for your business.

You likely will not need to build these sales exercises from scratch. However, you will need to make sure things like case studies, role plays and terminology resonates with your organization.

Which training format might work best for your organization? Consider:

● Courses. The classic course format, either in-person or online, is a powerful way to pass your sales knowledge on to teammates and colleagues. Depending on how you set it up, it can allow your salespeople to complete their training on a schedule that works for them. Meanwhile, you can keep track of their progress.

● In-person workshops. Brief in-person workshops shake up the typical workday. They can be a great way to build anticipation around your sales training.

● Training led by outside consultants. An expert consultant brings tons of value. You can expect everything from customized sales tools, years of experience and priceless market information.

● Conferences. Your team can network, learn from industry leaders and keep an ear to the ground within your market.

● Internal team testing. Conduct an audit of both successful and unsuccessful sales cycles. Your team will learn the real-world applications of what you are teaching them.

When trying to decide how you will present your training, ask yourself:

What are some common challenges everyone attending the training faces?

Participants should feel like they are getting real work done and improving their skills. When they get back into the field, they should feel confident in applying their training.

 

5. Make the program easy to implement.

Even fascinating, engaging training becomes meaningless if the participants forget the concepts once they return to the field.

Regardless of industry, your salespeople need tools and concepts that help them close more business. Training should make life significantly easier, never more complex.

Make the program simple to implement by using quick reference guides, tools and key takeaways to help your salespeople apply the new concepts.

 

6. Provide ongoing refreshers and reinforcement.

Finally, decide who in your organization will provide ongoing reinforcement of new training principles. Build this element of reinforcement into your training plan. Make sure anyone providing this kind of support has the skills and tools to guide the participants.

 

In Closing

The truth is, your journey to create better sales training will never be complete. You will always find new techniques to try out and fresh objections to overcome in a changing market, all while bringing new sales talent aboard.

The best salespeople have the Drive it takes to be the very best. It is worth investing in the high-quality sales training it takes to help them get there.

Discover more about what Drive really is, who has it and how you can find them every time you need to hire.

Take the Drive test today.

The post 6 Ways to Break Through Sales Training Issues and Come Out Ahead appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

The Value Of Storyboarding For Product Design

The Value Of Storyboarding For Product Design

Joshua Bumcrot

2018-11-06T14:15:20+01:00 2018-11-29T11:00:02+00:00

When you think of the word “storyboarding,” you probably think about film, media, and video creation. Historically, this is what storyboards have been used for, but who says we can’t use them for product development as well?

Storyboards are an effective communication and product development tool for digital marketers, content creators, user experience specialists, and product managers. In this article, I’ll teach you why storyboarding is valuable to the product development process, as well as why it can reduce interdepartmental miscommunications as well as overhead costs.

Below is a comic of a clear and common situation experienced by most companies. Words can only go so far as to effective explanations and miscommunications are are a common occurrence in the product development world. As you read the article, keep this image in mind and notice examples where storyboarding or visual communication may be able to prevent misunderstandings.

I’m going to set a scene that almost all tech companies experience on a regular basis:

Marketer Mary has an idea for a new product. Mary thinks this product will be a huge winner and goes to tech to have them build it.

Developer Diane hears Mary’s idea and tells her she will start working on it. As Diane continues to build out functionality, she realizes that the product will actually be much more efficient if she combines some of the parts and cuts out others. Diane finishes building the product and sends it over to Creative Chris.

Chris meets with Mary to discuss the product’s UI, where Mary explains her ideas. Chris gets to work. He starts to incorporate Mary’s ideas but quickly realizes that he has a much better and more interesting UI concept in mind, and eventually completes the product that way.

Once the project is complete, Mary is upset. The product has neither the functionality she asked for, nor does the UI allow the user to navigate the product properly.

All three departments go back to the drawing board to redo the product, and a significant amount of time and money has been wasted.

This common situation is not one person’s fault. Mary should have explained to Diane and Chris her clear end goal of the product and let them create it with the goal in mind. Diane should have understood that Mary was asking for specific functionalities for a reason and even though her product may have been more efficient, it’s useless if it doesn’t accomplish the desired end goal. Chris should have understood that even though Mary’s UI concept may not have been the most aesthetically pleasing, she had that UI for a reason. They should have worked together to create a concept that works for everyone.

There are a few ideas out there on how to attack common product development miscommunication problems, however, many have found the most successful solution is to create storyboards throughout the product development process.

A storyboard is a collection of cells, either in a linear progression or mapped out from a central idea that tells a story. Each cell can contain an image, a title, and a description that provides specific information to the reader about certain aspects of the story. Storyboards are meant to be simple representations of a larger concept, and force both its creators and readers to break down large complex topics into simple step by step subsections.

The Journey Of Entrepreneur Erin

The fictional, but based on real events journey of an entrepreneur using storyboards to help her and her team design, build, and iterate a her product.

Erin left her job at the big company she worked for and decided to pursue her dreams and start her own company. She already had an idea — SoLoMoFoo. SoLoMoFoo is an application to alert employees when free food is available in common areas — like conference rooms, shared office kitchens, or private offices. At her old job, she had noticed far too often that free food goes to waste due to lack of awareness and employees become disgruntled after hearing about free food that they had just missed. She decided that this problem needed a solution and that she was going to build it! First, she needed to figure out who exactly her target users would be.

A useful way to discover potential target users is to create personas. Erin decided she was going to map out a few of her target users and buyers and record some of their unique characteristics.

Creating Personas

Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for.

— Rikke Dam, Co-Founder of Interaction Design Foundation

Erin knows that SoLoMoFoo will solve a problem that exists (the lack of awareness about free available food) — but who does this problem exist for? Who will be using her product? Before Erin starts to create storyboards she first has to build her personas. Generally, companies will have to focus on two different types of personas — user personas and buyer personas.

1. User Personas

These are fictional depictions of quintessential users fitting a certain criteria. Most products will try to limit the number of two or a maximum of three key user personas, and then focus the majority of marketing efforts on attracting these users. In SoLoMoFoo’s case, there are two key user personas that Erin has identified:

• Baking Ben
  Ben is often bringing free food into the workplace to share with coworkers. He feels a little weird about emailing the entire office every time he brings in cupcakes so he would love an app that alerts his coworkers for him.
• Hangry Hank
  Hank is constantly missing free food and is upset because of it. He feels less productive when he’s hungry and would be very interested in an app that alerts him anytime food is available.

2. Buyer Personas

Often times the intended user of your product is not the same as the intended buyer. In SoLoMoFoo’s business model, an entire company will purchase the SoLoMoFoo app and have their employees download it. This way everyone in the office will both be able to send alerts when they have free food, and receive alerts when they’re looking for food. Erin has decided that the most likely purchaser of SoLoMoFoo will be the HR department.

• HR Hailey
  Hailey is the HR manager and has purchasing power. She is constantly looking for ways to improve employees’ morale and engagement. She is incentivized by her superiors to inspire energy and teamwork amongst the employees and has a budget to spend on applications or tools that will help her do this.

Creating these personas will help you step inside the shoes of both your users, and your buyers (if they are different). It helps you take a step back from your product and see it through the eyes of the people you are designing for.

To start creating the personas you need, there are several online resources you can use. For example, you can use a persona worksheet template like one of these:

Or use a persona creation tool like this one from HubSpot.

After personas have been created, the next step is to discover how these personas would come in contact with the problem you're solving for, your product as a solution, and how the product would ultimately benefit their lives. A great way to step into your personas’ shoes is to create journey maps.

Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping helps you to visualize your customer’s experience from the customer’s point of view, across all the different touchpoints they have with your brand as they seek to achieve a specific goal or goals.

— Tandem Seven Experts

Now that Erin has identified SoLoMoFoo’s key user and buyer personas it’s time for her to discover how these personas may come across her product, how they would use it, and what potential obstacles they may face throughout the process. A great way to do this is to create journey maps in the form of storyboards. Creating these journey mapping storyboards forces the product designer to walk in the user or buyers shoes and experience their product in a step-by-step manner.

A journey map storyboard can generally be broken down in six key components:

1. Problem Experienced
   You have decided to create your product for a reason. You believe that your target users are experiencing a problem that they want solved. What is the problem that your product solves for?
2. Solution Search
   After your persona has experienced the problem, you believe they will go searching for a solution. What methods will they use to search? These can be potential marketing channels to consider for your go-to-market strategy.
3. Product Discovery
   During their search, your personas will come across your product and decide to start using it. How will they know this is the product for them? How will they get started? What barriers to entry might they face?
4. Product Experienced
   The persona will now use the product and experience the intended objective. How do they use it? Can they use it immediately or are there other steps they need to take?
5. Problem Alleviated
   After the intended product objective is attained the users problem is alleviated. Is this the same problem you were attempting to solve for at the beginning of your storyboard? What other potential problems might stem from your solution?
6. Beneficial Outcome
   Now that persona’s problem is alleviate, why is their life better? What benefit did solving their problem bring to them and how will this improve their situation?

Need an example? Take a look at the illustration below:

In the case of Entrepreneur Erin, she has to consider how the lack of access to free food would affect HR Hailey, how she would research possible solutions, how she would come across SoLoMoFoo, how the SoLoMoFoo platform would be implemented at her place of work, and the potential benefits and timeline for those benefits that the SoLoMoFoo program would bring.

Creating journey maps in the form of storyboards is a useful way to humanize your buyers. It’s essential to remember that your users are not just numbers, but real people. Having a human character and their personal journey map story associated with each persona serves as a constant reminder that your users are people, and their needs are constantly changing.

These journey maps are not only a great external product development tool, but also a great way to minimize internal miscommunications.

By developing user personas and a customer journey map storyboard, everyone is able to visualize the steps a persona would take when engaging with your product. Creating journey maps and presenting them to coworkers allows team members to view your vision in a realistic and tangible way. Once every department understands your journey maps, you can all reach consensus on what the final product will be, and the development process can continue with everyone on the same page.

Storyboarding For UX Design

Storyboarding in UX is a tool which can help you visually predict and explore a user’s experience with a product.

— Nick Babich, Editor-in-chief of UX Planet

Entrepreneur Erin has successfully identified who she believes her target users and buyers are and how they will come in contact and use her product. Now it’s time for her to design the SoLoMoFoo user experience.

A useful way to step back and view your product from a user’s point of view is to create UX concepts through storyboarding. Creating storyboards, cell-by-cell, forces you to walk through every step of your UX process as a user. You can easily create multiple storyboards and try out different UX approaches to find the most efficient concept.

Erin wants to design SoLoMoFoo as a simple app so she reviews the personas and journey maps with her development and marketing team so they are clear on the product vision and together they start designing a user experience.

Creating these visual, tangible storyboards points out potential flaws in your UX — maybe you are forcing your users to take a long leap in one step and is not intuitive. Or, perhaps you have a few steps in your UX that could be combined into one thus eliminating superfluous actions.

According to UX Specialist, Luca Morovian:

“The UX storyboard can help visually predict and explore the user experience with a product. It visualizes how people would interact with a service or app. A UX storyboard can also help understand users current motivations and experiences connected to a certain problem.”

The power and value of storyboarding for UX comes in the creation process, letting you experience your product as a user, which allows you to best optimize for effective design and an improved conversion rate.

Finally, Erin has identified her target users and buyers, journey mapped their process, and built a streamlined UX — but the product development process is never over.

Storyboarding For Product Iterations And Improvements

Your people know your products better than anyone else so as long as you ask the right questions and use appealing storyboards, you can solicit reactions from them and start a discussion on whatever it is you need to find out.

— Andre Bourque, Entrepreneur

Erin has now identified who she thinks will use and buy her SoLoMoFoo, how they will come across the product and engage with it, and how the platform user flow will be designed.

As product developers are aware, a product is never fully complete. As technology changes, users adapt and so must your product. It’s important to constantly be referring back to your customer journey maps and user personas to make sure they are still accurate to your product. As you learn more about your users and user-case scenarios, your product should adapt accordingly.

When looking into product iterations, most product development teams have a tough time isolating the scope and deciding on which aspect of the current product they want to change. Storyboards can help product designers break their product into individual segments, which then allows them to specifically work on one aspect of a product without involving others.

Here are a few questions you may want to use as a guide:

• Do you have a homepage conversion rate issue and want to modernize UI?
• Are users not responding to your call-to-actions? Maybe your UX is too complicated? Or maybe people just aren’t purchasing your product, so are you really solving your perceived problem?

Having a storyboard of your product allows you to clearly see which parts of your product are responsible for which users’ actions. As a result, you can focus your iteration process on one aspect of your product instead of the product as a whole allowing for faster improvements and a cleaner process.

How To Begin

Now that you have the knowledge on how to start using storyboards in your product development process, it’s time to get started.

Here are some quick steps to help you make the first step:

1. Identify the problem your product is solving for;
2. Identify 1-3 user personas and 1-3 buyer personas (if different);
3. Create journey maps for your personas;
4. Design UX flows around your target audiences’ needs;
5. Iterate, repeat, and improve!

In conclusion, you now have tools to start incorporating storyboarding into your product development process. From the beginning in identifying your target users all the way to the end in building a UX and iterating your product for improvements.

Using storyboarding through the product design process will help prevent simple miscommunications and allow both you and your team to have a clear concept of what your product will accomplish and look like. Start storyboarding out your new product idea today!

Things don’t always go according to plan. Markets change. Things break. People leave. You get the point.

So, what do you do when ABM isn’t working the way you hoped?

I asked this question to some of the top ABM practitioners and leaders out there and compiled their answers for this 2-part blog series. Here’s what they had to say.

What do you do when ABM isn’t working?

Kathy Macchi,
VP Consulting Services at Inverta

“If you didn’t form an ABM Leadership team, consider doing that. The leadership team ensures that the ABM program remains aligned with the business and focused on long-term goals.

It’s common for programs to get off track because sales is not aligned on the target account list. When that happens, speak to Sales Leadership and find out why they shifted their account focus. Were the wrong accounts chosen? Did marketing not communicate what they were doing to engage those accounts? Are programs not working?

Business is fast-paced and priorities can shift. If regular meetings between sales and marketing aren’t happening – focus can be derailed or misaligned.

Whatever the issue with the ABM program, the right path forward is to roll up your sleeves, find the root cause, and work with sales leadership to address.”

Jon MiIller,
CEO & Cofounder of Engagio

“Strategically, the first thing somebody should do if ABM isn’t working is determine if they truly doing ABM. You may be doing ads and calling it ABM. Or you may be doing targeted demand generation and calling it ABM. The way you know that is by asking, “Are you treating all the accounts the same?” ABM is about focusing more energy on your best accounts. That disproportionate amount of energy gets you disproportionate results. Too often when we see ABM disillusionment it’s because they’re not.

From there, there are two ABM quick wins I recommend every company should consider. First, implement an ABM standup. This is the process where Marketing (or the ABM marketer), the Sales Executive, and the SDR get together and review the target accounts in their territory. Weekly, take 5-10 minutes to answer, “What did we get done since the last stand-up?”, “What will we do before the next stand-up?” and “What impediments stand in our way?”

My second recommendation is for people who need to get something going fast and get that quick win. TOPO recommends that the simplest way to get started is with basic SDR prospecting paired with marketing air cover. Start with putting that simple process in place – drop a direct mail package at the account, and then have the SDR follow up.”

Peter Herbert,
CMO of FullStory

“First, there should always be a constant rhythm between all the go-to-market players to make sure the revenue team is optimizing. Ideally, this means things won’t get too far off track. I always say during a transformation “something will go wrong, so we all have to commit to giving feedback and working the problems quickly and iteratively”.

Second, get help from the outside. Not everyone putting an ABM sign out has deep experience in all aspects of ABM, so you must be selective and get some references to figure out if they’re right for your business. I have my shortlist of people I highly respect. Learning is something I deeply value for myself and the people I work with, so exposure to true go-to-market experts, their content, and their events is invaluable. When I first launched ABM, I invited everyone I could to speak or present in person or on con-calls, and it had a huge impact on the success of our ABM program.”

Just Gray,
CEO of LeadMD

“If your ABM motion (or really any go to market strategy for that matter) isn’t landing, the best remedy involves getting back to basics. This always starts with the buyer. Do you really understand your target account list, the profiles of accounts you’ll be engaging and the buying committees and personas within them, or did you initially just select large accounts that seemed like no-brainer targets? We see this all the time, and a rushed target account selection process is the primary cause for ABM failure.

To succeed with ABM, focus on bringing real intelligence to your target account research process. The insights you develop while collecting and analyzing your ICP will become the foundation for all other dependencies in an ABM centric process – messaging, content, playbooks, air cover, you name it – it all starts with the buyer. On average we see a 35 – 40% success rate, based on first meeting acceptance in year one, when target account research is conducted properly. If you do not see numbers in this neighborhood, it’s time to revisit the fundamentals.”

Joe Andrews,
VP of Marketing at InsideView

“As B2B companies have high expectations for ABM, marketers are sometimes impatient to be successful right away. Like any good marketing execution, it takes practice and iteration to get it right.

Here’s what we’ve learned at InsideView from our own ABM efforts and from our customers:

1. Determine what’s really broken (i.e. is it a failed campaign tactic? or the whole strategy?). At InsideView, one of our early ABM tactics was to send nicely packaged wine bottles to accounts we identified in a new market segment we were trying to break into. The response was poor. We could have given up on ABM, but we decided that our strategy was still right. We just needed to adjust the cadence of outreach to warm up these accounts and engage with the right individuals. Which leads to the next point.
2. Assess your target accounts and people (and reassess often). We know from many B2B companies we speak with that they often skimp on the account selection process, one of the most important parts of ABM planning. It’s ok to start with a named account list from sales based on where they’ve had some history of success. But it’s important to identify accounts that match your ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s also important to fine-tune your targeting based on performance – e.g. demote some tier 1 accounts when you learn they aren’t a good fit. And this leads to the last point.
3. Get sales and marketing aligned through both the planning and execution. ABM helps to break the old paradigm of marketers chasing lead volume but Sales needs to be engaged early and often throughout the process. And give marketers a pipeline $ target. When both teams have the same goal, there’s more collaboration and accountability for achieving results.”

– – –

Stay tuned for part 2 when we get advice from Jessica Fewless, Craig Rosenberg, Trish Bertuzzi and Matt Heinz.

Questions are some of the most valuable tools in a salesperson’s arsenal. With a well-crafted inquiry, reps can open their prospect’s mind to a new possibility, compel them to action, discover relevant information, or secure buy-in for the next step.

But if reps ask questions aggressively, they won’t get far.

Instead, they’ll alienate prospects or even anger them -- and, unsurprisingly, angry prospects aren’t eager to talk.

The silver lining? There’s a simple test for differentiating between aggressive and assertive questions.

How to Tell an Aggressive Sales Question From an Assertive One

When attempting to determine whether a question is aggressive or assertive, length is your first clue. In general, longer questions feel more aggressive than assertive ones.

When the salesperson leads with intent or context, prospects can feel pressured to respond a certain way. Getting right to the point, on the other hand, makes prospects feel like they can answer however they’d like.

That brings me to the second indicator -- the format. Aggressive questions start with the rep’s reasoning and then segue into the actual request, like so:

“It’ll probably take less time if I speak to your HR department myself. Who should I contact?”

Compare that to a question that cuts to the chase:

“Is anyone in HR assigned to this area?”

The first variation comes across as far more pushy. The decision to speak to HR sounds like a foregone conclusion, because the rep has introduced their reasoning first. The salesperson is also taking for granted their choice is the right one for the buyer -- and that’s a dangerous assumption to make.

The second variation leaves room for the buyer to introduce an alternative (like talking to HR herself, or suggesting a different contact), enabling buyer and rep to come to a mutually agreed-upon next step.

The Formula For Assertive Sales Questions

Reps can turn an aggressive question into an assertive one by asking it in one sentence. This rule forces them to cut out all preface, leaving only the core ask.

Here’s an example:

Before:“The events team will definitely want to come to the demo so they can evaluate our offering. When would be a good time for all of us to meet?”

After:“Is there a good time for you, me, and the events team to meet for a demo?”

Of course, the salesperson should provide an explanation if their prospect requests it. Imagine that in the above scenario, the buyer says, “Wait, why should the events team attend this meeting?”

The rep might reply, “If the events team manages their mobile bookings through the tool, it would free up operations to focus more attention on assisting your team.”

With that context, the buyer can either approve the events team’s attendance, or say it’s not necessary.

There’s an added benefit to asking one-sentence questions; When reps keep their queries short, they never fall into the trap of nervous rambling. It’s easy to accidentally ask a two, three, or even four-part question -- but doing so can easily confuse or even overwhelm a prospect.

Seasoned salespeople usually find that brief, focused questions keep the conversation on track and decrease potential hesitation. While it can feel awkward or rude at first to immediately get to the heart of the question, the more reps practice this technique, the more comfortable they become.

Tips for Asking Assertive Sales Questions

1. Leave yourself out of it

Remove the singular pronouns, including “me” and “I” around things you want. The assertive salesperson asks for what they want and waits for the answer.

For example, “You know, it would be great to get another point of view on the next call. Can you invite your boss?” You’re stating the answer you want and then convincing your prospect why they should say yes.

The aggressive person says something passive like, “I’d really love to have your boss on the demo.” This is a statement dressed as a question -- and it’s the sign of a passive aggressive salesperson who’s not brave enough to ask for what they want.

2. Don’t indicate your dislike of prospect answers

Every once in a while, a prospect will respond to your question with an answer you don’t like. Avoid the temptation to indicate your dislike. If a customer says they’ll review contracts at the end of the month -- then have to push that date back due to a legal issue, don’t say, “Really. Why’s that?”

This type of follow-up question expresses your displeasure at the delay and serves no purpose other than to challenge your prospect’s honesty and erode trust.

If your prospect says, “We have a two-week delay because of legal,” respond by saying, “Thanks for explaining that to me. What can you do by the date we agreed to?”

You’re accepting their answer and asking if there’s anything you can collectively accomplish by the original date. If their answer is, “I’m afraid we won’t be able to meet any of our deadlines quite yet,” it’s time to move on.

3. Be conscious of your verb choice

Telling your prospect, “I’d really like to meet your boss,” is a statement, not a question -- and it’s aggressive. If you want to meet their manager, say “I’d love the chance to explain the benefits of our product to your boss. Would it be possible for us to meet?”

You don’t close for access to your prospect’s manager, you close for power. The more specific your close, the more assertive you are. The more a prospect has to ask what you mean, the more aggressive you are.

If you’re following up after a competitor’s pitch, avoid saying, “I’m calling to check in.” Instead, explain “I’m calling to see how [Competitor’s] pitch was.” Keeping your request specific makes it impossible for your prospect to misunderstand or avoid answering the question.

Walking the line between assertive and aggressive takes effort -- and the way salespeople ask questions is just one aspect.

However, if you want to project confidence, involve your prospect in the decision-making process, and keep them focused, it’s always best to stick to single-sentence questions and skip the upfront explanation.

Want more from Jeff? Check out his "Your Sales MBA Blog" today. 

When it comes to business outsourcing, I have been on both sides of the table. I have, since 2009, hired 20+ outsourced resources from all over the world for tasks such as data research, web design, translations, voiceover talent and more. I have learned quite a bit about it.

I also run a Consulting company, AltiSales, which has a Business Process Outsourcing component, think Accenture, but purely for SDRs. That means that some of our clients, are outsourcing to us. Therefore, I can analyze this topic from both perspectives and share some learnings.

To clarify, the dictionary defines outsourcing as “obtaining (goods or services) from an outside or foreign supplier, especially in place of an internal source.” So let me start by setting the stage.

Outsourcing in your personal life

All of us, consciously or subconsciously are constantly “outsourcing” in our private lives.

For example, most of us plan to forever Outsource certain things. Ask yourself:

• Do you fix your clogged sink or do you outsource to a plumber?
• Do you change your car oil, or do you outsource to a car shop?
• Do you diagnose your illnesses or do you outsource to a doctor?

Here are things that we outsource sometimes:

• Do you cut your own grass, or do you hire a gardener?
• Do you drive, or do you take a Taxi / Lyft / Uber?
• Do you clean your house, or hire a home cleaning service?
• Do you cook, or do you eat out?

How Is Business Outsourcing Different?

Before we dive into the topic, I have an important question for you.

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the dining experience was just terrible, and you promised yourself never to be back?

We all have. Now, imagine that instead of saying “I’m never coming to this restaurant again” you were to say “I’m never dining out again”… woooow. Extreme, right?

Yet that’s what most people do after they try an outsourcing solution in the business world and fail. Why? Let me add more color with a dining experience example.

What NY Strips can teach us about outsourcing

Imagine you are feeling like eating steak today, and you know that 3 restaurants down the road have NY Strips for $32, $37 and $42… you also know that the supermarket sells frozen NY Strips for $12.

Suddenly, someone approaches you tells you they can serve you a NY Strip for $4.50, and another person offers it for $4.35. They claim it’s as good as any of the premium steakhouses. What would your reaction be? Deal or no deal?

I hope you’re not taking that deal. The NY Strip cut costs $12 at the supermarket… how will they buy it, cook it, serve you and clean after you, all for $4.50 and stay in business?

If you were naive enough to take the deal, you’ll soon realize that they’re actually serving you dog meat, the portion is 1/5th of the other steaks, it comes in a paper plate, and there’s no silverware to eat it with.

You’re also getting food poisoning. No wonder you never want to eat out again…

The Sales Development outsourcing industry is broken for that exact reason. Most companies are competing on price, and when you hear about the $4.50 and $4.35 steaks, most people discard the idea of going for the $32 option.

So, how do we fix this, and more importantly, if so many companies are serving dog meat and calling it NY Strips, how do I know I’m not paying $32 for the dog meat?

How to think about Lead Generation / SDR Outsourcing

In an industry of extreme cost-cutting, constant over-promising and under-delivering, the only way to find good providers is to question the business operations in depth and demand extreme transparency. You need to make sure that the way they are running their business is the way you would run it as well. In other words, figure out where they source their meat, how they prepare it, and demand to see it all, do not fall victim of the “happy ears” syndrome.

You also need to understand that this company needs to make a profit, and beyond the cost of the service, they have a cost of selling the service to you. You have introduced a middle man.

So why wouldn’t you just do it in house?

There’s three reasons: Cost to start, time to start, and expertise.

Similar to going to a restaurant, where you can get a incredible well prepared peppercorn NY Strip with a Ceasar salad and mashed potatoes in a matter of 20 minutes, building your own SDR team, including tools, workflows, messaging, metrics, and management can take 6-18 months and cost you ~$15,000 per month for just 1 SDR and data. And you’re no SDR chef, are you?

Your cost of trying to build Sales Development in house is therefore $90,000 at a minimum. Most likely with 2 SDRs, a manager, and some consulting, you’re investing $200,000 for an experiment.

As you can imagine, delaying your dinner by a few hours to cook your own steak is no problem, but delaying the building of your SDR team by 6 months can kill your company. A lot more is at stake here (pun intended).

RELATED: B2B Sales Outsourcing Is Dicey. Here’s How to Do It Right

How to evaluate your Lead Generation Provider

Here are some of the key aspects you need to look into. This is the equivalent of kitchen cleanliness and ingredient sourcing. None of these aspects will guarantee you that the dining experience will be amazing, but the lack of good answers to the below questions put your success at high risk. Rats in the kitchen doesn’t always mean the food is bad, but I wouldn’t risk it.

Dedicated SDRs: First of all, never use a firm that has an SDR work on multiple products/companies at the same time. It’s almost impossible to become good at selling something if you sell multiple products to multiple markets and talk to multiple personas that have different priorities. SDRs will either be constantly confused and overwhelmed, or they will require strict scripts, which means that they will sound scripted. This is dog meat.

To verify, ask: “Is my SDR dedicated to only my account? If so, can I call my SDR anytime during the day and speak directly with them?”

High Quality SDRs: Make sure that whoever is assigned to your account is actually capable of doing the work, and doing it well. You should ask in advance about the expertise of the SDR, and their compensation structure. Most companies will tell you that their SDRs have many years of experience, but experience doesn’t matter as much as expertise. A great SDR, most likely isn’t working for $10/hr. This is also somewhat reflected on how much you’re paying for this firm? $4.50 NY Strips… be skeptical.

To verify, ask: “Before we get started, will I be able to have a quick video-chat with the SDR assigned to my account? I want to know who’s joining my company”

Be Careful with Bait & Switch “Trials”: Too many companies will offer a trial and give you their best SDR for 2-3 months. As soon as you sign a long-term contract, they switch you to an entry level SDR.

To verify demand: “I want the agreement to specify that whichever SDR we use during the trial, will continue to work with us if we sign a long term contract”

Ensure Quality Conversations: Results matter, and activity matters, but you also want to make sure your company is properly represented in conversations and that you can ask the company to adapt how pushy they are with messaging.

To verify ask: “I need to have control over the quality of conversations. Can we make sure all calls are recorded where legally allowed, and have access to those recordings anytime?”

Ensure Quality Training: When you spot any mistakes in messaging, objection handling, or how to react to competitors, there should be someone training the SDR, and the training should be good.

To verify, ask: “Can we either get recordings, or at a minimum, email summaries of all the trainings that my dedicated SDRs participate in?”

Avoid Spammy Practices: Make sure that the company you use, is not sending a ton of templated emails or using auto-dialers to spam the market. Not only will they annoy your prospects and make you look bad, but they might also risk your URL reputation if they’re using your email. I recommend keeping SDR emails at a maximum of 3000 per month or 150 per day, and make sure that autodialers are only used for SMB campaign. You don’t want to annoy a C-Level executive at a 100+ person company with an autodialer where the change in ambience noise, and the frequent dropped calls make you look bad.

To verify, demand: “I need to have access to the system that sends emails and the phone dialer, so that I can check the daily volume of work being done. Will you provide that?”

Manager Ratios: Make sure that your SDR has a healthy management ratio. Without a good manager running 1:1’s and helping him, their turnover will be high. You wouldn’t run a team of 20 SDRs with just one or no managers right?

To verify ask: “I’d like to meet the manager that will be in charge of helping my SDR perform. How often can I speak with them if I need help with my campaign? Can I have a direct dial to them?”

Performance Metrics and Analytics: You also need to make sure that you know how much progress is being made week by week, how many emails are positively responded to? How many are “unsubscribes” or “remove from your list”? How about calls? How many people actually listened to your calls, what were their objections?

To verify ask: “Beyond the meetings set and activities, what other metrics will you share with us on a weekly basis?”

Strategy Lead vs. Follow: Another important aspect is the amount of time it takes to manage this team, and the effort required to adapt messaging when needed. Make sure that the team is self sufficient and brings the expertise in messaging.

To verify ask: “Will you come up with your own messaging, or do we need to give you a script and email sequence? If you are building your own, what does that process look like?”

Data & Bounce Rate: You also want to ensure that the data being used is high quality and you minimize your bounce rate to protect your email reputation.

To verify ask: “Do you source your own data, or do we need to provide you with that? If you source your own, what vendors do you work with?”

Cost Distribution: The final test for any company to pass is to have a reasonable explanation of their fees and how those are distributed. Similar to the steak, if it costs $4.50, whats your cost of the meat, and labor to prepare it?… follow the same logic. Don’t fool yourself, if the costs look way below market… something is fishy and you’ll be served dog meat. Trust but verify!

To verify ask: “Your monthly fee is $X. Can you approximately share what the SDR Salary, manager salary, cost of tools, cost of overhead, and profit margins look like?”

RELATED: Don’t Hire the Wrong Outsourced Sales Professionals: 6 Handy Tips

Bonus Questions

You can also ask further questions about their ability to execute tasks on Linkedin. How the SDR social profiles will look like, the number of leads they will burn through per week, the process for deciding what’s the minimum acceptable title they will book for a meeting with, their ability to follow up with tradeshow scans or other leads, and so on. The above questions are just the tip of the iceberg to make sure you don’t get yourself dog meat, but when it comes to creating the perfect strategy for your company or product, feel free to add more questions as well.

Summary

There you have it. Hopefully this article will help you err on the side of caution, instead of the side of over-trusting. By asking all the questions above you will guarantee yourself a high quality team.

Also, remember, if you can’t afford to go out and eat steak, and you don’t have the time to learn how to cook, see what you are willing to compromise.

A “NY Strip” for $4.50 is just not going to cut it.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing Sales Development and Lead Generation appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Do you know where your last lead came from? While the basics of lead generation remain the same, new technology and methodology is changing the way agencies gather leads for their clients and forcing them to assess their own lead gen strategies. With the market being as saturated as it is, marketers are doubling their efforts at measuring the success of their lead generation campaigns to create processes that they know work for them and their audience.

Whether your leads are coming from content marketing, organic traffic, paid traffic or referrals it’s important to track them at the source to help shape your future campaigns.

Agencies have the added pressure of finding their own leads on top of building fresh and unique strategies for their clients.

Here’s how 18 top digital agencies craft their lead generation strategies for themselves and their clients, and more importantly, how they measure the success of their efforts.

Dauntless Agency
At Dauntless Agency, they don’t need to run lead generation campaigns because 100% of their leads are referral based, but that doesn’t mean they still don’t need to measure internal KPI’s to track growth.

“We measure the total impact versus our growth curve. Our clients are large, and we’re not a traditional agency,” explains Josh Chesney, CEO of Dauntless Agency. Our campaigns for our clients are more of a digital transform at the enterprise level. We create internal and external platforms to help optimize and restructure their marketing campaigns so that the business can market itself and become more profitable.”

WebDigital
For the past 2-3 years, WebDigital has generated nearly all of their leads from referrals from current and past clients, but, as a digital agency, they continue to run lead generation campaigns for their clients.

“To help them generate leads we use a combination of Google AdWords and Facebook Ad Campaigns,” explains Mihai Alexandru Andrei of WebDigital. “To generate leads for ourselves is a little more complex than for our clients because we have multiple tactics that we apply including Google Adwords and Facebook ads for ourselves, and articles in different publications in Romania for our clients.”

They’ve found the direct marketing approach to be the most successful for them, but different moments in agency life require different marketing tactics to work well, making it essential to recognize that what works now might not necessarily work long-term or in the future.

The Participation Agency
The Participation Agency doesn’t use a lot of technology when it comes to generating their leads. Instead, they look for brands that align with them and use old-school techniques like phone calls and meetings to build those relationships.

“We are very into targeted networking,” says Ruthie Schulder, Co-Founder, and President of The Participation Agency. “Mostly what we do is roll out platforms that become a calling card for the agency.”

Concerning projects, they track metrics via impressions, product feedback, their product in the hands of consumers and what products are more successful and revenue-driven to determine success.

Community Agency
Danielle Perras, Communications Specialist at Community Agency recognizes that there’s no one way to generate leads that performs definitively above all the rest. At least not at their agency.

“We’re midsize, so we don’t do traditional SEO. We create organic traffic by updating our website and posting on Instagram to showcase our creative process and the final product,” says Danielle. “But we don’t overly brand ourselves We may run paid ads once in a while, but we grow our company through word of mouth, winning awards, publishing articles and building on referrals.”

Community Agency emphasizes the idea that all of their efforts work together to help show off the different types of thinking they’re able to bring to the table. They pride themselves in approaching things in a holistic creative manner and not a cookie-cutter strategy that they expect to work every time.

Street Toolz
As with most campaigns, Street Toolz creates lead generation strategies specifically tailored for their clients and are dependent on the type of campaign they are running. For their own services, its the same ball game.

“When you work with a diversity of clients, it’s difficult to pin down the most successful techniques,” says Elcee McEdwards CCO at Street Toolz. “It’s usually a combination of different strategies, ranging from A/B testing to remarketing, to using ads to target competitors customers.”

With any campaign, it’s important to remember that trial and error must exist to find out what works and what doesn’t. Every client and every agency will have their own challenges reaching their audience and taking a fresh and holistic look at each campaign is key to finding success for themselves and their clients.

Nuanced Media
You can try to identify the approach for lead generation before beginning research, but in a world as competitive as digital marketing, the research component is key to finding top opportunities, according to Ryan Flannagan, CEO at Nuanced Media.

“For growth and profitability, you have to look at whole sales funnel; from attraction to lead generation to repeat customers,” says Ryan. “If you do that well, and create valuable content that addresses your audiences pains points and nurtures them over time, they’ll start to see you as a thought leader that they want to do business with.”

Ryan agrees that measuring success in lead generation campaigns all depends on the type of client and the type of campaign.

“In B2B campaigns we can easily find an existing prospect list and start targeting them top of the funnel on social media, then we start reaching out with value ad pieces,” adds Ryan. “From that point then we continue to give them value and nurture the lead until we close and can call it a win.”

Index
Like most agency, Index practices lead generation for their clients as well as for themselves. Regarding their own lead generation, the way they approach is by first segmenting the target into personas, defined as either influencers or decision makers.

“Each person will have his own campaign, which is based on a multi-channel approach, meaning we will try to reach each persona on a multitude of sources,” says Jeremy Easterbrook, President of Research and Development at Index. “Those sources being defined as the channel(s) or the platform(s) where the persona will be reached in the first place, then we will bring this persona/prospect down our conversion funnel toward the ultimate conversion, in our case a form of a call or a form sent to us, which is then picked up by the sales department.”

They separate their multi-channel approach into two kinds of campaigns: notoriety and acquisition. Facebook, for instance, will be used more as notoriety channels; Google AdWords and website optimization will be used to generate organic traffic.

To determine the success of their methods, they look metrics of each channel, often finding that people coming from organic (the results of their SEO efforts) tend to have a more prolonged engagement on the site and will end up converting at a higher rate.

While it’s the most successful strategy regarding channels, they also can’t rely only on one source and need to use a mix-marketing approach. Even though a client can come organically, they make it a point to stay aware that most visitors will convert only after 5 or 6 visits.

“Indeed, sometimes the original visit will come from organic but we will retarget visitors on Facebook for instance, and it will only be after few times of touching points with them, that they will finally convert. It has to be a mix-marketing approach to get a good conversion rate overall,” adds Jeremy.

Yesmail
Yesmail has a lead generation strategy that is almost entirely rooted in content that’s informed by their experience in the marketing space and their history of helping their clients.

“We believe in providing something of value to our prospects and clients in exchange for their information – strategic guides, data reports, design lookbooks, industry case studies and much more,” shares Ivy Shtereva, Vice President of Marketing at Yesmail.

They’ve found content marketing to be the most useful source of lead generation success for them. Since they have established themselves as industry thought leaders, clients don’t feel taken advantage of when they follow up. Most other strategies involve more of an inorganic stream of communication and content marketing bridges that disconnect very effectively.

Rhythm Agency
When working on strategic campaigns for Acura, Rhythm Agency put their efforts into what they refer to as ‘interception’ campaigns – creating and delivering valuable organic and paid content to get into the consideration set, engage audiences and generate quality leads. They take a holistic view of the customer journey and design funnels implementing YouTube ad campaigns, PPC, SEO optimized video content on YouTube, etc. – making sure their branded-keyword strategy was optimized to deliver the right content to consumers along their purchase path.

“When we sit down with a client, it starts with business goals and what pieces are going to help meet goals,” explains Kristin Bush, Director of Marketing at Rhythm Agency. “Then we make sure they have the infrastructure, which is a crucial component for us to ensure success.”

It’s also important to note that, while they’ve found success using videos to generate leads, dedicated landing pages tied to targeted email campaigns is one of the most successful strategies for many clients.

“Email not going away,” says Kristin. “It’s still the most cost-effective, delivers best results, and allows brands to send the messages their audience wants to hear.”

Email is also a tried and true way to get prospective customers into the funnel and nurture them for future sales.

BFG
With a lead gen strategy primarily driven by existing relationships and category and discipline expertise, creative agency BFG focuses on areas that they know they excel in.

“We differentiate ourselves and position creativity as our secret weapon,” says Scott Seymour, Chief Creative Officer, and VP at BFG. “We can show potential clients how to create a fresh approach to their business and inspire them around what’s possible by activating specific opportunities and focusing on key areas.”

When working with clients who want to build an audience, speaking the same language as the leads you’re targeting is also important.

Advantage
There are a lot of ways to engage people online. At Advantage, they believe that consumer passions (ie., sports, entertainment, lifestyle interests, causes) are what fuels the entire process of connecting with an audience.

“As an agency, we are in the sponsorship and brand experience arena,” explains Tom Haidinger, President of Advantage, a sponsorship and brand experience agency. “That means we help our clients achieve their goals (usually lead generation) using the currency of consumer passions.”

Their breakthrough in what they do for their clients is to resonate with consumers, whether it’s the general public or a B2B setting, by holding conferences, thought leadership seminars or other onsite events that create engagement and promote passion as their priority.

“For lead generation – when you get past the semantics and engagement, we find an integrated approach serves the purpose, surrounding the consumer with multiple touch points,” says Tom.

TPG – The Pedowitz Group
When approaching a new lead generation campaign, The Pedowitz Group tends to work backward from business goals.

“We first look at what is the total revenue at any given moment and work back coming from there versus starting from scratch to find new ways to acquire leads,” explains Kevin Joyce, CMO at The Pedowitz Group. “Working our way from the bottom of the funnel lets us more easily align ourselves with the overall strategy of the client. company with whom we’re working with.”

They’ve found that while working backward is useful, there’s no one way to find success in these types of campaigns.

For existing customers of clients, focusing on creating upsells to nurture the leads, along with content to promote thought leadership, like webinars, catches prospects in their buying journey and allows them to monitor customer behavior to use as research for future campaigns.

AND Agency
At AND Agency, their team uses a software package that can help manage the process in terms of cold leads, but the remainder of their new business comes almost exclusively from referrals and word-of-mouth.

“Since we work on large projects with large organizations, credibility has significant meaning. We rely on our word-of-mouth leads since our existing customers can vouch for our credibility and reliability,” says Adam Kamieniak, President & CEO at AND Agency.

To measure the success of their campaigns, AND uses Salesforce, which they believe to be an industry standard in real-time reporting and to see what’s coming down the pipeline.

What3Words
What3Words is a startup making it easy to talk about location by dividing the world into 3m X 3m squares to identify an exact location. Since they are a startup, they concentrate their efforts on B2B2C which is key to measuring the marketing innovation, by testing and learning and proceccess. They are focused on scaling by working with partners like delivery companies, post offices, food delivery, and aid and humanitarian efforts (which the company has committed to provide at no charge).

The adoption rates of partners and customers of partners are the primary way they measure the success of their campaigns, according to Giles Jones, Chief Marketing Officer at What3Words.

“W3W prides itself on using 20% of their marketing budget on marketing innovation,” says Giles. “The team is willing to try any experiment, see what works, take risks. It keeps their marketing fun and always innovating to try new methods.”

Pixel Union
At Pixel Union, they’re putting a lot of effort into cross-promotion—more than they’ve ever done in the past.

“As theme developers, we’ve always had a lot of products to sell, but the cross-selling opportunities are limited since you can’t use two themes at once,” says Hal Williams, Marketing Manager at Pixel Union. “That’s even more true in e-commerce, where there’s so much at stake when it comes to overhauling the look and feel of your online store.”

Since they started making apps in addition to themes, they suddenly have a range of products that merchants can use in concert to increase customer engagement and sales, making it a bit easier to measure the impact of their products.

Whereas before they focused on individual product marketing, the results of their cross-promotion efforts are what will take them to the next level. As a platform partner, they’ve found a lot of success partnering with great companies like Shopify—and in addition to that, they now have large communities of their users that they can leverage as brand ambassadors who will act as a marketing team.

They use customer lifetime value (CLV) to measure the success of their efforts. By increasing the number of Pixel Union products a merchant uses, they effectively increase LTV. With apps, this measure becomes more of a product metric, since it’s incumbent upon the product and merchant success teams to provide a great experience and keep that customer.

“Our goal is to help merchants sell more and become integral to their success. If we can do this by creating and promoting an ecosystem of tools and resources—not only our products but our partners’ products, too—I think we’ve positioned ourselves for big things,” says Hal.

Plutora
This year, Plutora doubled down on their account based marketing strategies and integrated a set of campaigns designed to bring inbound and outbound marketing techniques together.

“Our accounts and persona strategy started to incorporate old-school techniques that were used 5 to 10 years ago,” explained Bob Davis, Chief Marketing Officer at Plutora. “We would see direct mail, an old-fashioned technique, starting to become en vogue again and working nicely.

The Plutora team also started to engage a lot of partners so doing some marketing in concert with our channels and business partners because we’re a small company and we are doing momentum market, so the amplification of our voice is significant.

Plutora measures the success of their campaigns by tracking KPI’s but ultimately consider the prime measure of success to be the return on investment of their marketing efforts. Rather than sales, they think in terms of partnerships. They monitor each campaign on ROI and optimize and refine as they go to drive that number up.

“In our market, we have a tremendous maturing going on, so people are looking for solutions we offer. The awareness level of what we do and the share of mind that we get from competitors,” adds Bob. “It just reasons that if we accomplish these goals, we will get invited to the party, so we win a lot more than we lose right now. It’s about shared pocketbook.”

Livity
Felix Morgan, former head of strategy at youth-led creative network Livity and Emily Goldhill, strategist at Livity believe that the internet has changed everything when it comes to how they build and form identities.

“Previously, society was made up of sub-cultures where people united over shared consumptions – mods, punks, hippies, etc. Being part of a subculture defined how people experienced culture, what products they brought, what services they engaged with. It was hardwired into their identities, making it incredibly hard to change their behaviors without hard interventions at the point of action. But with the internet, people are no longer subscribing to tribes in the same way as they are able to now consume multiple streams of culture simultaneously.”

They explain that this means people’s identities are fragmented, especially young people, as they explore the many different sides of their personalities across many different channels, platforms and streams of culture. Their identity is fluid as they continually try to balance multiple and often inconsistent views at any one time. This has had a direct impact on our habits. As research has shown identity and habit formation are deeply intertwined so now our habits are also incredibly fluid.

It is this thinking that has led Livity to create a new pioneering model for habit change, built around adopting a more holistic approach to the audience – viewing them as a person, not just a consumer. Previously models of change were focused on choice architecture and nudges but Livity argues that the focus should now be about driving cultural change by creating memetic ideas, and finding the most authentic voices and spaces to deliver them.

The end goal is the same, the methodology has just changed which means traditional behavior change metrics and models like TTM will still be used to measure the success.

FrieslandCampina Kievit
Although FrieslandCampina Kievit is not a digital agency, they demonstrate to be a leader in lead generation campaigns. FrieslandCampina Kievit has a long history of working closely with customers to create food and beverage solutions to enrich everyday life. They believe customer intimacy is key to building successful business relationships. However, customer intimacy involves personal contact, and this cannot be achieved by merely talking on the phone or sending emails.

“We consider client meetings to be extremely valuable to our business. That is exactly why a large part of our marketing efforts is directed at getting the most out of these meetings,” says Sarah Darweesh of FrieslandCampina Kievit.

When prospecting new clients, they make sure to come prepared to add as much value as possible, offering market insight and trends (often extracted from their own market studies), as well as inspiring. This way they show customers and prospects that FrieslandCampina Kievit is not only a reliable supplier of high-quality food and beverage ingredients, but can be a valuable partner in developing new, innovative products, that can help them stay ahead of the competition.

“To measure success, we look at how our marketing efforts are contributing to business results regarding volume and margin, but other key performance indicators are also taken into account, like the share of wallet and market share,” adds Sarah. “Our online marketing is continuously monitored, and each month a cross-channel report is used to evaluate and optimize our online marketing.”

“Lead nurturing is a process, not an event.” That statement in a Marketing Experiments article caught my attention.

All too often, as marketers, we focus too much attention on the final conversion point in our customer’s decision process. The contact us or request a quote form submission is often held up as an example of how strong marketing campaigns are performing. The unfortunate result of this type of focus is that it’s not taking into account all of the micro-conversions that have to happen along the customer’s path to a decision to use or not to use your company.

Focusing too intently on the final conversion is much like our Romeo in the picture, it’s not going to end well.

Do you want more leads or more qualified leads?

Did you know that only 19% of buyers want to talk with a salesperson while they are in the awareness stage of their buying process? This is according to research done by Hubspot.

Your customers are controlling how they are going to do business with you, and you can’t rush them. But, you can nurture them. You can educate them about your company and why you’re different from your competitors. You can educate them about your products and why they’re different from your competitors. By taking this nurturing approach to selling, you’re building a business relationship with your future customers that will help you to be more responsive to their needs and as a result, you’ll be able to close sales with less effort.

Nurturing your leads will also increase the efficiency of your sales team. Think about how often your salespeople are chasing leads that aren’t “sales ready”. Here’s a typical scenario. Someone lands on your website and downloads a piece of gated content. It might be a case study, a white paper, or any other type of content that they have to fill out a form to get.

As soon as that person’s information hit’s your CRM your salesperson in on the phone or typing out an email to “schedule a time to talk”. The problem is that the customer isn’t ready to talk, yet. It’s too soon. So, not only did your salesperson waste their time running after a lead that’s not ready but they have, now, also left a negative brand impression with someone that was thinking about becoming one of your customers! In fact, according to Marketing Experiments, only 36% of companies nurture leads.64% send leads straight to the sales department!

Why you should think about nurturing your leads

• 50% of leads may be qualified but they are not ready to make a buying decision. > Gleanster
• Lead nurturing can result in a 50% increase in sales-ready leads. > Forrester Research
• Nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle. > Market2Lead
• 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, the common cause being lack of lead nurturing. > Marketing Sherpa
• Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. > DemandGen Report

Is it just me or is sales getting more complicated?

No, it’s not you. Sales is getting way more complicated. The more the buyer’s process for purchasing changes, the more complicated the lives of both salespeople and marketers gets. Just think about the time, energy and systems that it will take to start tracking all of your leads, trying to determine when they want to talk with a salesperson, when they don’t, what information they need next, or what they’re really interested in. It’s overwhelming, to say the least.

Marketing Automation is the answer. Marketing automation will give you the ability to nurture your leads until they are ready to make the buying move, by giving them the most relevant information that they want and when they want it.

Marketing automation will give you the ability to nurture your leads until they are ready to make the buying move

Increased personalization is one of the most important features of using Marketing Automation For Lead Nurturing. Let’s say that someone lands on your website and downloads a case study about how your red widget product improved the life of one of your customers. You can have a workflow setup so that that person will receive an email about your red widgets a day or so after they’ve downloaded that case study. Highly relevant information for them to make a decision on.

Or, you could set up your Marketing Automation to alert a salesperson when someone revisits your website and looks at the same product or service more than once. The repetitive visits will demonstrate interest so your salespeople will know what to talk about when the time is right.

By re-evaluating your sales process and adding lead nurturing to your marketing process you’ll start to see increased conversions, happier marketing, and salespeople and improvement in the ROI for all of your marketing functions.

It’s important to follow through on leads. Upon receiving a new lead, it should be categorized, accessible, and tracked for the most relevant ongoing marketing campaigns. We know that lead management is defined as the process by which marketing acquires, evaluates, nurtures, and hands off leads to the sales team. Seems like a simple definition, right?

Unfortunately, many organizations forget about this basic definition and don’t have any standards in place for properly tracking those leads; in fact, 25% of leads in a given sales pipeline are legitimate prospects, according to Gleanster Research.

How can your marketing teams bring lead tracking back into focus?

Let’s examine a few challenges faced and the top five best practices for tracking leads.

Challenges Faced

Marketing operations is often tasked with the responsibility of tracking leads, but it’s not without obstacles. Marketing operations must deal with challenges including time management, expectation management, system limitations, training, and enablement. For example, expectation management often falls on the operations practitioner who must balance feedback and understanding, while communicating across the organizations.

Marketing operations also deals with not being seen as a strategic partner when they are in fact a vital and strategic player. The practitioner may find half-baked strategies and execution, which brings its own set of challenges when tracking lead conversion and pipeline.

 Let’s examine the top five best practices for lead tracking: 

1) Determine What’s a Good Lead

Sales and marketing need to work together to define what a good lead is. While it seems obvious, lead qualification sometimes gets overlooked.

Best practices include:

• Track basic lead information such as first name, email address, title, company name, company size, etc.
• Aim for higher lead data accuracy
• Implement faster response time to leads, which can lead to faster conversions
• Consider a lead scoring model to prioritize which leads get sent to sales and when

2) Define Fields in Your CRM Systems

The best place to start is with a data directory. What data points are you interested in for running your campaigns and sending leads to sales? It will differ from company to company, but you generally want to have synced fields that define demographics, engagement, revenue cycle position, firmographic (if possible), and marketing touches.

Other best practices include:

• Make sure the lead generating campaign is synced to your CRM
• Set folders of the reports, standardizing & automating reporting
• Remembering to set your cookies
• Implement automated programs and UTM parameters
• Keep the number of fields to a minimum
• Think broadly when designing

3) Organize

While in a rush to get these campaigns out and start tracking, it’s essential you organize your lead tracking. This helps keep your leads accessible, categorized, and orderly.

Organization best practices include:

• Set your expectations and KPIs previous to tracking leads so that you can effectively track the right numbers and the right data points
• Develop a revenue cycle that a lead fits into will help map to your buyer’s journey
• Keep your database clean
• Keep it simple enough that the person who comes after you can take the reigns without a struggle

4) Promote Efficiency

It’s important to be clear on lead scoring vs. lead tracking. Lead scoring is a major pillar of tracking activities and sales readiness. Lead tracking is a generalized 30,000-foot view of where your database is engaged and in the buying process. Lead scoring is sometimes used as a determiner for who to target and measures sales readiness. Furthermore, targeting leads for a campaign should also involve lifecycle and current consumption habits.

Efficiency best practices:

• Automate lead scoring via the CRM and engagement where possible
• Ensure that only operations can make changes to the model
• Bring on a data scientist to help you determine cutoff scores for MQL and SQL
• Create documentation that other members of the marketing team need to study
• Ensure that all the definitions and goals are clearly defined, so everyone is on the same page

5) Customize Sales Pitches

It’s imperative to know your audience and have all the relevant information ready for sales to tap into when needed.

Best practices include:

• Create strong ties to sales enablement for campaign managers to communicate to
• Meet with the sales team to understand what works for them and what doesn’t in terms of leads
• Provide an automated way to communicate sales pitches and marketing initiatives
• Create customizable email templates

Communication and Collaboration Is Key

It’s time to break down the silos.

When marketing and sales work in accord with each other and truly communicate, the whole organization can benefit from this collaboration whether in training or enablement. As covered, the main issue is expectation management, so there has to be a balance of feedback and understanding; for example, when a change is requested by sales, it can’t be made immediately and must be communicated and logically worked out before launching. Bridging the gap in communication will ensure that you become a trusted member of the team who is transparent and willing to step in/up when needed. 

How Marketing Automation Helps with Lead Tracking

Marketing automation can allow organizations to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. Consider marketing automation delivering strategic and tactical approaches to elevate the lead tracking best practices covered.

As an example, marketing automation can help score customer and prospect activity via automation to determine sales readiness. Then, once a score passes a predetermined threshold, they are deemed ready for a conversation with sales.

Other marketing automation benefits include developing customer advocacy, cookies and tracking based on IP, capturing anonymous behavior and links to a known lead upon conversion, and establishing a set of rules and criteria, so the handoff to sales is smooth and at the appropriate time. New marketing attribution tools are emerging to help you understand where your money is going and how it is being put to work. Consider scoring your content not just by channel, but also look for opportunities to reuse content across different channels.

Overall, marketing automation, combined with smart organization, communication, and collaboration, can bring all your lead tracking efforts in alignment.

Are there any lead tracking best practices that I missed? Tell me about them in the comments.

The post Lead Tracking: 5 Best Practices for Marketing Operations appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

In today’s mobile-first world, consumers have access to a variety of information channels that can lead to a winding customer journey. They take advantage of the ability to access information across various devices based on what is convenient at the time. This includes visiting multiple channels before making a purchase. What starts as researching a product on a tablet before bed can turn into a smartphone search of a particular brand over morning coffee.

This behavior offers a complex web of touchpoints that marketers can use to personalize each interaction with their brand, both online and offline.

After all, channel-hopping consumers expect to not only be able to interact with brands across multiple platforms, they expect their experiences to be customized to deliver the exact information they are seeking.

To consistently influence quality leads and conversions, marketers need to own and personalize the entire omnichannel customer journey.

Digital Advertising Drives Calls

Smartphones and the explosion in mobile advertising have changed the way consumers interact with businesses. Marketers have not failed to notice this trend. In fact, mobile ad spending is expected to surpass all traditional media combined by 2020.

But customer journeys that begin on mobile devices often move offline. Many smartphone users that engage with digital ads or website content convert by calling. From 2014 to 2019, calls to US businesses from mobile ads have increased by more than 110%. The call channel is expected to influence $1 trillion in US consumer spending this year.

Source: BIA/Kelsey

Callers Are Valuable Conversions to Businesses

Inbound calls are an important part of the customer journey within many industries. According to Forrester, “customers who initiate inbound calls convert faster, spend more and have a higher retention rate.”

Someone who calls a business usually has a higher purchasing intent and is further along in the customer journey than someone who fills out a web form.

For industries with complex, expensive, infrequent, or urgent purchases, calls are often the most valuable leads. These industries include but are not limited to, healthcare (where 88% of patients book appointments over the phone), insurance, home services, financial services, travel, automotive, and education. Consumers making a purchase or booking an appointment in these industries want to call and speak to a real person, regardless of the device they use to research a product or service.

Sources: Google, xAd, TravelClick, Kelley Blue Book, Sequence, DialogTech, McKinsey & Company

The Caller Experience Matters

Personalization is the idea that a brand can use signals from customers to deliver tailored, relevant ads, emails, website content, and experiences no matter how and where they interact, and consumers expect it.

62% of consumers said it was extremely important that they be able to call the business during the purchase phase of their decision-making process. 86% say a personalized experience plays a role in their purchasing decision.

Along with generating the call itself, marketers must now own the responsibility of ensuring a caller’s experience is equally positive, on-brand, and individually customized as interactions within other channels. In order to provide a custom experience, brands should know who their callers are, where they are located geographically, if they are a new or repeat caller, and the interaction with digital marketing efforts that generated the call.

Having access to this information in real time is essential to personalization and is the key to crafting a relevant, seamless call experience for consumers. The right call analytics solution can provide it for marketers. Once you have access to this caller information, you can offer your consumers a rewarding experience in many different ways.

Automatically Route Calls to the Most Compatible Representative

By incorporating caller-specific data, marketers can set up rules and logic to automatically route inbound callers to the best location or agent. For example, Monroe Engineering, a leading distributor of industrial components, have sales engineers taking calls in offices throughout the United States. Based on predetermined rules, their call analytics solution automatically routes callers based on time of day and location. This ensures a Monroe engineer is always there to answer calls from digital advertising.

Another example would be an insurance company that routes callers based on the marketing source that drove their call. A consumer who calls after searching for “car insurance in Illinois” can get automatically routed to the best agent in the call center or local branch to assist them. Someone who called from their webpage on life insurance will be sent to the agents responsible for those products.

Outside of influencing the caller’s path once they make a call, there are other tactics marketers can use to create a high-quality caller experience. Consumers hate to wait on hold and forcing callers with high-purchasing intent to wait, increases the chances you lose the customer. Call routing technology lets callers referred from a keyword or campaign with a proven track record of generating high-converting calls to “jump the line.” They are placed in a priority queue reserved for high-value callers where an agent can assist them immediately.

Send Callers Through an IVR

Taking advantage of tools like interactive voice response (IVR) can help direct callers to the right department or salesperson within your business. An IVR allows callers to interact on the call via voice or phone keypad. They have cost- and time-saving benefits for businesses and value-adding benefits for callers as they help ensure the call is sent to the most helpful representative, saving the caller time and resulting in a more positive experience overall.

For example, mattress retailer, Sleep Train (purchased by Mattress Firm), uses IVR to qualify and route the more than 50 thousand calls its marketing programs and website generate each month. The Sleep Train marketing team uses IVR to determine if callers should be routed to one of their 300 stores or to their call center to make a purchase over the phone or get help with financing. By prompting callers to select whether they’d like to be sent to the nearest store, order directly over the phone, or learn more about financing, the brand saves time for its team and their callers.

Save Callers’ Time

Connecting the caller with the right agent is one thing—knowing what to say is another. By passing caller information about what drove the call to agents, a more seamless experience is created.

Real estate brand Sotheby’s has agents taking calls on the go. When they answer, agents hear a message before the call is connected relaying the marketing source and property the lead is calling about. For example, an agent might hear, “call from Zillow for 24 Winding Lane.” By knowing which property the call is about, the agent can better understand the value and quality of that lead.

Understanding the Context of the Call

Crafting a rewarding and ROI-driving caller experience is not just about what happens at the beginning of a call—it’s also about what is said throughout the call duration. Conversation analytics provides a wealth of information on callers, their intent, and the value of calls from each marketing source. For example, marketers can learn:

• Which ads, keywords, and programs drive the best sales calls
• If ad messaging and promotions are resonating
• What questions callers needed answered before finalizing a purchase
• If calls converted and why (or why not)

Analyzing how calls are handled helps marketers and sales leaders detect and correct issues that negatively impact ROI, measure which percentages of calls are not answered at each business location, and how individual agents perform at converting callers to customers.

The most efficient and scalable method of implementing conversation analytics is the deployment of AI technology to analyze and report on each phone call coming into a business. AI algorithms analyze calls for you, scoring conversations and delivering insights in easy-to-understand reports.

Comfort Keepers, one of the nation’s leading providers of in-home care for seniors has more than 450 franchise locations. Phone calls make up 70% of their marketing conversions, so they use AI to automatically analyze calls they drive from each franchisee to determine lead quality, providing insights on how many new customers marketing efforts bring in.

Marketers can also use this information to inform the brand’s content marketing approach. The leading wholesale distributor of foodservice equipment, Central Restaurant Products, mines conversations to improve SEO and website conversions. Inbound calls make up 56% of orders and 81% of total revenue. Its marketing team analyzes calls from a specific product’s webpage to see what questions callers are asking, then use that intelligence to update the details of the specific webpage.

Drive Action by Knowing Your Customer and Using Learnings as Fuel for ROI Growth

The way to further success in marketing is analyzing what has been successful in the past and applying those learnings to current and future marketing efforts. By understanding the types of customers who have converted via phone calls and which channels, ads, keywords, and website interactions drove their call, marketers can predict the actions of future callers.

The first step to knowing your customer is understanding whether or not they’re a quality sales lead. Was the caller referred from a marketing channel or activity that has historically generated revenue-driving calls? An analysis and application of which marketing initiatives are driving the most revenue can send ROI soaring.

Agency Roger West works with Roy’s, a chain of upscale restaurants with more than 20 locations, on paid search and display marketing. By analyzing the which paid search and display ads drove calls that resulted in a reservation, Roger West is able to optimize for the channels, ads, search keywords, days/times, and devices that convert the most customers. By knowing what drives reservations, Roger West and Roy’s were able to increase reservations by 434% and decrease cost per reservation by 38% within the first seven months of their call analytics program.

Another critical insight is knowing whether or not the caller converted and how this affects future interactions between them and the brand. For callers that do not convert, marketers can provide a personalized online experience as a result of the call by serving the caller a custom retargeting ad offering a special promotion. For those that did convert, they can be added to the most relevant upsell or cross-sell ad or email campaign. Their caller data can also be used to build lookalike campaigns to extend your reach and find new leads resembling the lead you know converted.

Have a 360-Degree Customer Journey View

For a holistic view of customers, marketers can integrate call data into existing marketing platforms to measure and optimize against the full customer journey and develop a more complete picture of customers.

By adding attribution and analytics data on calls to marketing and sales tools, brands get a complete view of customers—both online and over the phone—that allows an understanding of what’s truly working within their marketing program.

This allows better targeting, the ability to create a more personalized consumer experience, and in turn more efficient and impactful marketing.

Call analytics can have a profound impact on how customers view brands and how effective your brand is at acquiring and keeping customers. It also provides an essential basis for marketers to connect their online and voice marketing initiatives in order to drive ROI and revenue and create more satisfied customers.

To learn more about how marketers can create a rewarding, revenue-driving customer journey, download our free ebook—The Digital Marketer’s Playbook for Voice Analytics.

I’m a sucker for anything that takes text data and turns it into something visual. This week I came across Location History Visualizer, a tool that creates a heat map using your Google Location History.

Read more...

It used to be customary that the salesperson to try to connect and develop rapport with a prospective client before tackling the business agenda they suggested when they scheduled the meeting. The salesperson would sit down in the prospective client’s office and look for something they had in common. They’d ask about the pictures on the client’s desk, especially pictures of their children. Or they would look for signs about what their prospective clients interests were, including things like where they went to college, what their hobbies are, or what kind of car they drive.

Now, because everyone has more work to do in less time, and because so many companies are operating lean, most prospective clients aren’t willing to suffer through the rapport-building exercise first. Instead, they’re more interested in a business conversation and agenda.

Value Creation First

If you cannot create commercial, economic, or strategic value during a sales call, you are unlikely to get the opportunity to develop a relationship with the prospective client. They are not going to waste time allowing you to build rapport and invest in a relationship with someone who cannot help them produce better results.

By putting the business agenda first, and you prove yourself as a professional. When you ask your prospective client for a meeting, you suggested that you could help them produce better business results, not find a personal ground that would allow you to attempt to build rapport and develop a relationship. The relationship your prospective client is interested in developing is a commercial relationship. A commercial relationship does not preclude a friendship, but it does require create value for the prospective client as it pertains to their business.

Rapport Second

The greater the value you create in a commercial sense, the more likely you are to have the opportunity to develop the rapport and relationship that allows you to create a deeper preference to work with you. This is the normal course today, with the commercial and economic value creation happening first, and the reporting relationship building happening later, only because no one wants to invest in a relationship with someone with whom they are not intending to do business with.

This is a generalization. All generalizations are lies, including this one. There are some people in some places where moving to the business agenda without the rapport-building and relationship building formalities is a mistake. Most of the time in sales you are not working in situations where there is black or white approaches. You have to be comfortable working in the gray.

The post Value Creation First. Rapport Building Second. appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Khadeeja Safdar / Wall Street Journal:
How companies use customer lifetime value scores to differentiate prices, services offered; unlike FICO scores, CLVs aren't regulated or accessible to consumers  —  Retailers, wireless carriers and others crunch data to determine what shoppers are worth for the long term—and how well to treat them

Life at a successful startup can be full of company happy hours and free lunches will be abundant. The morale nearly never suffers in these situations as people can see how their work is impacting the trajectory of the company. People even are willing to take below the industry standard of pay as they consider the company to be family. This cohesion and all of the other positive things that happen when a startup is a success plummet into a nightmare when things start to go wrong. Much like in sports a winning team’s problems never seem to surface but the real issues start when they start to lose. The following are some of those negative situations that happen when a company is failing as well as reasons the company could be failing as a whole.

Lack Of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is imperative for startups to have success in today’s business landscape. This can take an entire department in itself so at times it could be better to outsource these jobs. Digital marketing companies already have connections with certain publications and can allow content created by your company to be featured simply by sending a few emails. Social media also needs to be on point and this should not be a platform simply to promote your own content or advertise sales. Spark conversation by sharing industry articles with a certain take on the situation at hand. Engaging with followers is imperative as it is quite easy to unfollow a social media account that acts more like a commercial for the company than actually adding any content of value. Avoid generic content as this can be a waste of money as quality content is what really converts. The last thing a struggling company needs is to waste money on another clickbait article that does not drive any traffic to their website.

People Start Talking Negatively About Management’s Decisions

In this post about struggling startups it says “There’s nothing more morale-sapping than having the WiFi cut out half a dozen times daily or having the photocopier continually breaking down. Provide marketing tools for them to be productive with”. Many issues that arise when people start talking negatively about management and their decisions is not being given what they need to thrive. Setting the staff up for failure by accepting a project that they have no chance of hitting the deadline on can frustrate everyone involved. What needs to happen is the staff is giving everything they need to succeed then thwart any negative talk.

There are going to be those second-guessing decisions so reprimand these people in private the first time. If they are caught doing this again it is time to do this in public as you need to set the tone that negative talk about the company will not stand. Management has more knowledge about what is happening in different areas of the company than a regular staff member. Negativity can spread throughout a small startup so cut out the negative employees if this continues to be an issue. The last thing a struggling company needs is an employee undermining every decision made by upper management. This does not mean to value employee feedback as it can be important but there is a much bigger difference between complaining just to complain or addressing a problem then offering an actionable solution.

Employees Start Leaving In Hoards

Once a startup begins to struggle there could be hoards of people leaving for other opportunities. This is normal as employees want to make sure that the company they are working for will be able to employ them well into the future. The employees that stick around until the company turns its luck around are those that need to be rewarded. Loyal employees that do great work need to be paid accordingly as well as given certain perks. Perks that can entice valuable employees to stay with the company are things like free lunches but the most attractive one is the ability to work from home.

Mistakes Pricing Your Products

Finding the right price points can be difficult as a startup without name recognition charging too much can have them laughed right out of a pitch meeting. Offering a low price regardless of margins can make the product seem low quality so it is imperative to know pricing standards in the industry. This can be done through research and reaching out to different companies in your niche covertly to see how your prices measure up. The right price point will rid the startup of those trying to get the highest quality of work for pennies on the dollar. The price point will also entice those looking for quality as well as a bit of a deal. The right clients can make startup life much easier and the right price point can improve your quality of clients.

Changing Company Goals or Products Offered Too Frequently

One mistake that many people running a startup can make is that of trying to modify what the company is doing constantly. This could include rebranding multiple times or offering a wide array of products instead of specializing on just a few that they do well. People in the industry will see this as grasping at straws so this can even hurt brand image. This does not mean to modify certain areas of the business where it makes sense but doing it month after month does not allow the changes to make a difference. Gather as much data as possible before making a change so you can see how this change has negatively or positively impacted the startup.

Startups are not always going to be close-knit groups that thrive and make it big. There can be struggles and even downright failures but addressing the above issues can help start the upward trajectory of a startup that is tanking.

Your email subscribers are the best people to promote your holiday sales to; they’re loyal followers of your brand and you can send messages straight to their inboxes to invite them to shop at your website or store. But you can’t send the same blanket holiday email to each of them.

Each of your subscribers have different needs: a mom overseas needs to buy different products, and needs to buy them earlier, than a teenager on a budget. So, you need to craft different holiday marketing campaigns for each of them. You can’t spend countless hours sending out emails one by one though, and that’s where segmenting your email list comes in. By using an email marketing service like Constant Contact, you can use segmentation tools to identify and group like contacts so that you can send more effective emails.

Get ready to have the most festive and fruitful holiday season yet, here’s how to segment your email list to boost sales this holiday season.

Welcome new subscribers

Your newest email subscribers are not as familiar with your business as your long-time subscribers, so you need to get your new subscribers up-to-speed before the holidays arrive. If you want new users to be ready to buy this season, set up automated, trigger-based welcome campaigns for subscribers that sign up during the holiday season. This will ensure that they get the right messages at exactly the right time.

Alter your welcome email series to include all of the key holiday messages new subscribers might have missed as well as any important information they need to know about your company. This could include:

• Holiday promotions
• Important holiday-themed content
• Shipping information and deadlines
• Important next steps like setting their preferences or completing their account

So, instead of throwing new subscribers into a holiday whirlwind of overwhelming emails, provide them with all the basics they need to know first. A welcoming email series will put them at ease and give them the confidence they need to make a purchase.

Focus on location for shipping deadlines

Even the most organized holiday buyers can be thrown for a loop by holiday shipping deadlines, so make sure your customers get their gifts before December 25th by segmenting your email list for shipping deadlines. This will help your business stand out from the competition and help your customers’ present-shopping go smoothly; that means no second-guessing when it comes to clicking the “Checkout” button on your website.

Segment your email by geographic location and determine the shipping deadlines for each country or location your company ships to. You can then send each member of your email list, in each area, an email to let them know the shipping deadlines that are relevant to them. You can even increase urgency by adding a visual countdown timer to the shipping deadline cutoff and send them reminders as the date gets closer, if they haven’t purchased yet.

Look at purchase history

Another great way to boost your sales this festive season is to analyze the purchase history of customers and segment emails based on that history. There a number of purchase history email segmenting strategies you can take advantage of in order to drive more sales.

For instance, take a look at the customers who tend to spend the most money and buy items at full price, you can send those subscribers targeted emails featuring your priciest products – they’ll likely be interested and willing to spend big bucks. Then look at customers who spend less money and only purchase items on sale, send those subscribers emails promoting your biggest deals to convince them to buy.

You can also look at what type of items customers bought previously and promote similar products to them. And if customers shopped with you last holiday season, remind them – when they remember how great you were during the holidays last year, they’ll be excited to buy from you again. Segmenting your email list based on purchase history will make sure your customers are getting exactly what they want this holiday season.

Reward loyal buyers

Take purchase history email segmentation a step further by rewarding your most loyal buyers. Customers who continue to purchase from you will greatly appreciate a little special attention from you during the holidays and thank you for it by purchasing again.

So, consider sending your biggest fans customized holiday email campaigns that reward them for their loyalty by offering bigger, better deals or free gifts with their purchase. You could even reward them by giving them early access to holiday promotions like Sephora does with their VIB Rouge members.

Whether you decide to reward shoppers who’ve purchased a certain number of times each month, or customers who’ve referred five friends to you, they’ll look forward to the next reward they receive. And they’ll keep purchasing and referring to get the next reward after that one too.

Re-send messages to non-openers

Don’t miss out on sales you could have made just because your email got lost in recipients’ inboxes. Segment your email list based on users who haven’t opened your holiday email campaign and re-send them the key messages that have gotten lost in the crowd of holiday offerings.

Since it can be difficult to grab the attention of consumers during this busy time, re-sending your emails to non-openers is essential to boosting your sales. Remember, when re-sending the emails, change the subject line; if it didn’t catch their attention the first time, try switching it up. You can also introduce a feeling of urgency to your subject lines by announcing there are only 8 hours left to save on your holiday sales. Just because they missed your email the first time, doesn’t mean they’re not interested. Try sending your message again 12-24 hours after the first missed email and you’re sure to make more sales.

Start segmenting now

The holiday season can be a stressful time for many people, but it doesn’t have to be stressful for your business. With these tips, holiday shopping will be a delight for your customers too. Be sure to start segmenting your email list now, so you’ll have ample time to get your subscribers excited about your business for the holidays. Now that you’ve learned how you can segment your email list to boost sales, you’ll be able to relax this season and watch the sales roll in.

If you are in the tech industry and you are selling enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, you know how challenging it is not only to market your products but also to get quality B2B leads. That’s because potential customers are not aware that there are ERP solutions available for various specific needs they have. ERP solutions can help streamline and expedite their processes without compromising the quality.

However, since not a lot of people and businesses are aware of ERP software, firms in this field are hard-pressed to find high-quality ERP software leads. The competition to get a bigger bite of the market is very stiff. More so, they cannot be lax about their lead generation strategy, or they will end up in the dumps.

How to Generate Leads Effectively

Generating ERP software leads require precision. You need to focus your time, money, and effort on marketing your product to the right people. To find the right people, you need to understand a few things before you start your ERP software lead gen strategy.

1. Identify the Type of Customers Who Will Benefit from Your Product

If you know who you are going to talk to, you will go straight to them, and that saves you a lot of time and effort. It also allows you to create a personalized strategy on how to position and present your product’s features.

When you create your buyer persona, you should also ask what they need your ERP software for. The answer will, of course, vary since no two businesses are alike. For example, a financial establishment has a different need than a healthcare institution. Therefore, they will require different features for their ERP software. You have to find out the industry or segment that will significantly benefit and find value from your ERP software.

2. Focus on SEO

If you have a website, you can use it as a lead generation tool by using the right SEO practices. To ensure that you fully utilize your site as an effective lead gen tool, you have to use the right keywords and meta tags that well describe your ERP software business.

You can begin by understanding what your target wants (which you already did on the first point), and their online behavior. What keywords do they often use when they search for an ERP software? Which sector or industry do they belong to?

Aside from ‘listening’ to what your prospects are looking for, you need to conduct keyword research. You can use tools, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, and more to find out what keywords rank high and which ones fo your competitors use.

Another SEO tactic you can use for lead generation is link building and backlinking. These methods allow you to post your link on socially essential sites. You can also ask fellow bloggers if you can backlink to their sites.

Having a lot of links and backlinks from high authority sites increases your ‘link juice.’ Consequently, the more juice you have, the stronger your site becomes. Your ranking will improve when search engines start recognizing that. And as your ranking improves, more people can find you.

3. Run Paid Campaigns

Using SEO to optimize your website can increase your organic traffic. Couple that with paid campaigns on search engine networks and social media to attract more leads.

• LinkedIn – Even though LinkedIn removed its SlideShare feature, you can still utilize their Lead Gen forms along with your sponsored content to generate more leads.
• Facebook – Use Facebook’s Lead Ads to run your lead generation campaign on their platform and Instagram.
• Display ads on Google – Using Google AdWords enables you to display targeted ads on Google and partner websites.

4. Partner with a Lead Gen Firm

As mentioned earlier, the competition in the EPR software market is cutthroat, and relying solely on your inbound marketing team for your lead generation will not suffice. Make your lead generation effort more robust and effective by partnering with a lead gen firm.

Allowing a third party to handle your lead generation is not just cost-effective, but your in-house team can focus more on other important tasks to grow your business. More so, a lead generation firm has professionals with years of lead generation experience under their sleeves.

Conclusion

Even though generating leads for your ERP software is quite daunting, you can still attract the right people to your sales pipeline. Know what customers you want and find out their wants and desires so you can create an effective lead gen strategy. Also, don’t forget SEO and couple that with both organic and paid ads campaign. If you think the job is too overwhelming, partner with a lead gen firm to help you with your efforts. Use all the tools and resources you have and soon your efforts will pay off.

This article originally posted at The Savvy Marketer.

Product led companies flip the script on every aspect of their business. They break the mold when it comes to marketing, pricing, sales and customer success. There are lots of people talking about how to adapt these functional areas to keep up in a product led world. But what about product management? After all, product is at the epicenter of everything a product led growth (PLG) company does. So how do the product organization and its PMs need to adapt to fuel growth at these businesses?

Over the past few months we’ve chatted with product management leaders from top product led growth companies including Atlassian, Intercom, Dropbox and many more. Throughout these conversations we’ve identified five major lessons on what sets product management at these all-star companies apart:

1. Design A Product To Be Bought, Not Sold
2. ‘Product Led’ Does Not Mean ‘Product Manager Led’
3. Always Be Communicating
4. Prioritize, Evaluate, Prioritize Again
5. Above All Else, You’re Here For The Customer

Design A Product To Be Bought, Not Sold

In a product led world, it is critical that your product is solving real user pain. You want to be solving a pain point so poignant that your users are actively searching for a solution. When they do a search and stumble across your company, your product needs to be so simple that the solution jumps off the page at them. This means stripping out anything noncritical and delivering value within the few first interactions.

More than ever users want to experiment with new solutions themselves. They’ve done their own research and want to experience the value firsthand. The best companies today recognize this shift in the way people want to buy and are creating an intuitive product that can be purchased via self-service. This is no easy feat. Simplicity is hard. It takes a lot of work to optimize your UX so users can be self-guided. Gone are the days when you could simply rely on your sales reps to explain to your leads the value of your product and its ROI via an hour-long demo. Some product led businesses take the extreme approach and ONLY offer their products via self-service.

“At Atlassian, we build products that sell themselves. We don’t have a traditional sales team, so our products are designed to be our best sales people. A significant amount our budget goes into R&D, which is a good thing, because we can spend time really going deep into multiple ways of collecting customer feedback.” Pratima Arora Head of Confluence at Atlassian

Arora hits on one of the advantages of designing a product to be bought. Less sales reps (or none at all) means more resources can be invested into R&D. Atlassian uses this extra budget to gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs in order to continuously evolve their products. In fact, Atlassian spent 50% of its revenue in 2017 on R&D. The results have clearly paid off. Atlassian now serves 125,000+ customers worldwide and has over a 19 billion dollar market cap.

Atlassian is an outlier, but the trend is clear. We consistently see public product led growth SaaS companies spending more on R&D compared to the broader SaaS index (28.2% versus 19.4%, respectively). Check out our full Product Led Growth Index for more details. 

It’s important to note that product led companies consider Design and UX as a core part of their R&D. Scott Williamson, VP of Product at SendGrid, recalls that the product team only had 3 PM’s and 1 Designer on staff when he joined the company in 2013. Williamson’s first priority upon starting was to aggressively scale his team, including both Product and Design. In fact, he recommends a ratio of 1 Designer to 1 PM to 1 Scrum team for self-service, UX-heavy product areas. This over-investment facilitates incredible user experiences and products that users actually want to buy.

“Having healthy ratios enables the Product Team to plan further out in front, solicit more customer feedback, and spend more time on the finer details of design.” Scott Williamson VP of Product, SendGrid

This advice of designing a product to be ‘bought’ was echoed by the Head of Product at Typeform, which is known for designing beautiful and simple products:

“It was a necessity for us to build a product that’s easy to use, that has very effective onboarding and where people can basically start using it without any hands-on help.” – Milos Lalic, Former Head of Product at Typeform

Typeform creates a highly intuitive experience not just for leads to sign up, but for their customers to be successful and truly adopt the product. This also results in saved resources. With the product serving as the main educator for onboarding, Typeform can effectively service its customers in a one to many customer success environment.

‘Product Led’ Does Not Mean ‘Product Manager Led’

As products become the centerpiece for businesses, some product managers fall into the trap of thinking they are leading and everyone else is following. This attitude quickly becomes detrimental as product managers isolate themselves from other departments. A key component of product management is collaborating with other departments, incorporating broad perspectives and filtering feedback through a customer-first lens.

This is arguably even more important at a product led company where the product is the primary driver of growth at every step of the customer journey. Intercom is a stellar example of a company that takes a collaborative approach to product management:

“Product can all too easily forget how much the rest of the company is dependent on your work. It’s easy to get into your own bubble & think you have the best view of the customer. You talk about features (not problems), marketing becomes an afterthought & so on. This is a huge pitfall. At Intercom, we recognize sales and support are talking to our customers every single day. We leverage their perspective to form our roadmap. We also get marketing and product managers to have a tight relationship. Sales, support & marketing are all consulted as we build the stories and scope of our projects.” Brian Donohue Director of Product Management, Intercom

In addition to collaborating with other departments, product managers are also working with sub-teams within the greater product organization. These sub-teams can be a product manager’s greatest resource. At Dropbox, the teamwork between PMs and the research teams plays a vital role in developing the product:

“We have a fantastic research team here that does quite a bit of qualitative research, all sorts of different forms. The best and most impactful stuff that I’ve seen us pull off is when we do joint venture between research and product analytics.” Jesse Miller Group Product Manager, Dropbox

Combining research and product has led to a data-centric decision process at Dropbox. The relationship between PMs and Research is best when it is a two way street. Product managers can come to Research with predetermined hypotheses to validate and Research can proactively provide product teams with insights into unique user groups.

Whether it is incorporating insights from other departments or within the product organization, product managers should be the glue that brings together all customer insights to drive product innovation. Many businesses will actually organize cross-functional teams based on the phase of the customer journey (i.e. conversion, activation, retention, expansion). These teams will include resources from product, design, analytics and sales/CS all dedicated to influencing a key metric in the customer lifecycle.

Always Be Communicating

Effective communication is required in every product management task, from working in tandem with other departments, crafting compelling hypotheses, designing the narrative for the roadmap and more. Communication is the key discipline great product managers need to master in order to excel in their role. At Typeform, communication is an utmost priority:

“Communication for us is on top. Being able to clearly and effectively communicate the vision, the goals, defining them as well and aligning them with the company or product messages is super important.” Milos Lalic Former Head of Product, Typeform

At Typeform, communication skills are prioritized for ensuring the product manager can connect overarching company goals with their product positioning. There is a necessity for translating the company vision into messaging that can be used on a daily basis. Product leaders at top PLG companies are testing for strong communication in addition to technical skills in the interview process. Intercom has even incorporated a written exercise into the PM interview process to account for this:

“We have a written exercise early in the interview process. It exposes folks who veer towards the fluffy compared to clear, concise, sharp thinkers. Sometimes even after a onsite presentation interview, we’ve referred back to the initial written exercise to validate their communication skills. When your company is small, PMs can sometimes get away with weaker written skills. But that weakness is ruthlessly exposed as your company grows.” – Brian Donohue, Director of Product Management at Intercom

The role of a product manager requires a wide range of skills for the variety of hats they will wear. It’s clear, be sure to put communication skills at the top of what you are looking for in your next PM candidates.

Prioritize, Evaluate, Prioritize Again

You can’t have a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality when it comes to your product roadmap. A product manager’s job is to prioritize what will have the highest impact given the work required. Many product managers will spend a good amount of time determining the prioritization of a project or feature when they first review the request. However, prioritization needs to be a continual process that is strewn throughout your entire project timeline, providing feedback at every step of the journey. SendGrid uses a comprehensive system of prioritization that encompasses the entire project lifecycle, from beginning to end:

“Have a consistent prioritization system, so you can compare the value of very different projects, force priority decisions out into the light, and pressure test assumptions.” – Scott Williamson, Vice President of Product Management at SendGrid

The first important point here is to compare very different projects side by side. As most product managers can relate to, there will be product requests coming in from every direction. Each project should be weighed against the other, no matter how different they may seem.

In terms of how to prioritize effectively, your team should always be thinking in terms of the company vision. Without doing so, teams can begin to prioritize based on their local perspectives and lose the collaborative aspect and big picture view. Donohue describes the issue here:

“People can easily be on different routes, all the teams need to be moving broadly in alignment and in tandem. Teams’ natural tendency is to steer into a direction that locally makes sense but veers away from the bigger strategic picture.” – Brian Donohue, Director of Product Management at Intercom

As Donohue points out, there is a natural tendency to follow what makes most sense from a departmental perspective. For example, you may hear from your sales team that they have prospects who could be seven figure deals, but they require custom functionality. What sales may not know is that custom work would derail your product roadmap and wouldn’t help the vast majority of your users. You have to represent the broader goals of your company in your decision making process. It doesn’t mean you have to say no to enterprise deals, but you have to draw clear lines internally on what you will and won’t do to close and retain them. The relevance of the previous insights also comes into play here. Through collaboration with other departments and constant communication, product managers can ensure the product improvements they drive are in sync with the company’s broader vision.

Above All Else, You’re Here For The Customer

All of the product leaders stressed one thing above all else: the role of a product manager is a customer-first role. The more you understand your customer, the better product manager you will be. Greg Keller, Chief Product Officer at JumpCloud, describes how the customer-first approach is at the core of all his product managers:

“The number one characteristic of their DNA is a bleeding desire to help the customer. … If you’re not doing this for the customer’s sake, then you’re likely ego first and you’re never going to be successful. I can’t stress that enough. You’re not in the right business or the right role if you’re not first and foremost trying to viscerally get to the bottom of what a customer needs.” Greg Keller Chief Product Officer at JumpCloud

Keller articulates the importance of holding the customers’ needs at the center of your decision making process. JumpCloud, a highly technical product, has found success over legacy solutions such as Microsoft by developing a deep understanding of the customers’ specific pain points and desires. Keller implicitly describes a layer of humility required in product managers, as it is not their goal to create a product they want, but to create a product that perfectly fits the users’ ideal vision. At Typeform, they share JumpCloud’s respect for the customers’ needs:

“We don’t want product managers to be solution-focused. We rather want them to be problem-focused, understanding deeply what the problem of the customer or the business is. Only then can they begin to develop a solution or multiple solutions to test and validate.” – Milos Lalic, Former Head of Product at Typeform

If there is one thing to learn from these companies’ customer-first approaches, it is that this strategy extends beyond what projects you prioritize. It requires creating a company-wide respect and understanding of the customer. This is something that Slack has always valued. Merci Grace, an early Product and Growth leader at Slack, stresses the importance of becoming obsessed with real customers, rather than a mythical persona that doesn’t exist in real life. This means real 1:1 user interviews, onsite with sales, shadowing CS calls, using your own product, etc.

“Personas are a great idea, like Communism, but they don’t work in real life. You’re putting thoughts in the heads of people who don’t actually use your product…When creating a product, close your eyes and pretend you’re a human being.”  Merci Grace Former Director of Product, Growth at Slack

These product leaders have had success employing these 5 key principles to their own companies which serve diverse markets. Product led growth can be adopted across varying software categories from developer tools to collaboration tools to enterprise-grade solutions. No matter where you are in your product led growth maturity, applying these principles will help you accelerate your growth.

Thanks to Kyle Poyar and Tristan Eid for helping with the research.

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