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*Editors Note: Live updates from the Sales Hacker Series – Lead Gen & List Building in Dublin are brought to you by Betts Recruiting. Betts Recruiting helps companies teams staff and attract talent for all revenue generating roles. Follow us @BettsRecruiting. Slides from the session are embedded below the text.

This session is titled Sales Prospecting Through Customer Development Tactics by the CEO at InvestorSheet, Russell Banks.

Two types of sales: Hunters or Farmers.

• Different skill sets that people gravitate towards. However, in startups you have to do both.
• Fear vs Fun – either you need to buy this or you’re in trouble vs get on board, this is the place to be!
• Friends make all the difference in sales – if they like you just a bit more than the other guy, that could be the difference.
• Cold Calling – can be a nightmare, you KNOW you are interrupting them. It’s a hostile start!

There is a better way….CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT!

• A process of identifying whether or not they have a problem that you can solve. (The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development is the handbook to this) People will try and tell you what you want to hear but don’t RUSH. Think of it as pre-sales. You can’t just jump right into the sale.
• Think of how your product is being perceived. See where you fall on their pain points. f you think there is a real need, they’ll be happy to hear from you again.
• As a person, email is just easier on you and the lead. Not quite as painful.
• Run the customer dev meeting well by asking the proper questions so that they can’t just tell you what you want to hear. You don’t want them to lie to you to make you happy.
• Create PERSONAS
• Develop hypothesises and plan the strategy towards the overall view of the lead.
• Ask the 5 why’s. Understand what personas the leads are and how you can approach that down the road.

Emails

• Send all cold emails from a personal account – begin the relationship, not the sale.
• Start with an emotional intro, personalized and researched.
• Give them a brief description of your activity, don’t sell them or give them too much info.
• Spark their interest and gauge their pain point.
• Validate with a case by case example if needed.
• Try to set up your Skype (especially good for the 24 hour workday available here in Ireland) or phone call for further development.
• Yesware or ToutApp to track your email blasts.

Customer Development Meetings

• Don’t tell them what you’re doing until the END.
• You need to discover what their needs are, evaluate the lead while building the relationship.
• Let THEM do the talking (90% of it)
• YOU ARE NOT SELLING! – Note the emotion of the conversation, but do not drop the sales pitch. It may be tempting, but the perception of the relationship can change dramatically if switched on to the sale too soon.
• Have a questionnaire, offer up the fact that you are taking notes so that you can learn more about them.
• Don’t ask questions set in the future that are a set up for failure. “Would you” and “could you” questions setup a hypothetical that people will find a way out of.
• “Why”s are a good question, let them talk and don’t lead them. No Leading Questions!
• Builds for a positive first impression/experience with each other. You’ve quickly done all the research on them in a conversation or two.

 

Sales Hacker Series Dublin was Sponsored by Betts Recruiting, Bank of Ireland, and CaFiCo International.

Your customers expect what you tell them to expect, and what you don’t tell them to. Outbound marketing is largely about setting customer expectations, which we do through branding, messaging, feeds-and-speeds lists, pricing and so much more. After encountering a product, customers have gut-level sets of expectations. Drive past a posh French restaurant and a dirty taco truck, and you have two completely different expectations concerning your culinary experience. Where bad and good buzz begins is when you set one expectation and deliver another. Set expectations low and deliver high, then people sing your praises everywhere. Invert the expectations and results and you likewise invert a customer’s public reaction. Marketing is responsible for defining those expectations, and presenting most of them (every employee who interacts with customers is also responsible, and great CEOs make sure they all set the right expectations). Marketing defines the brand – a primary expectation-setting tool … Continue reading →

Marketing organizations today are struggling to adapt to and thrive in a world where the customer is king and competition for share of mind- and share of wallet- is fiercer than ever. Research has shown that customers are completing as much as 60% of their purchase decisions before connecting with vendors (source: Corporate Executive Board), a trend that has challenged marketers to think beyond their standard tactics and enlist modern marketing strategies including digital, content marketing, and social media. Traditional campaign-based programs are no longer sufficient as they tend to be inside-out, focused only on the agenda driven by the supplier and won’t be considered relevant or meaningful to customers. Not unlike the winning teams in the recent World Cup tournament, marketing teams need to be agile, creative, and collaborative to rise above the noise and score with customers.

In the past, the marketing organization was fairly straightforward and primarily consisted of branding, communications, and demand generation with a linear process and straightforward goal of filling the pipeline full of qualified prospects. There was a clean hand-off to sales and that was the end of the story. Today, those one-off sales are largely insignificant to both customers and suppliers and the customer experience is cyclical, not linear. Brands strive to engage customers in long-term relationships and it is critical that marketing is aligned with sales and customer service functions to deliver a stellar customer experience in a complex omni-channel marketplace. Having the right team in place is key in order to win customers’ share of mind- and share of wallet.

Today, marketers are expected to engage customers and deliver on metrics far beyond registrations and clicks. The modern marketer targets metrics indicative of commitment to the brand- such as subscribers, followers, comments, community members, and social shares to name a few. Reach and influence are crucial to organizations today and the entire marketing team needs to be primed and ready to take on the challenge.

So, what does it take for a modern marketing team to be a winner today?

Relevance and insights: Perhaps the ultimate challenge to marketers today is to deliver the combination of insight and relevance- inserting a brand ‘voice’ into an existing event or trending conversation of the targeted audience and disrupting the status quo with a new perspective. When done successfully, as we saw recently with Oreo’s Tweet during the Superbowl black-out or Nike + Google at the World Cup, real-time marketing is powerful in both reach and influence. When combined with commercial insights that lead to the supplier, this tactic yields measurable results as demonstrated by SAP’s stats zone and broader sponsorship of the Superbowl in 2014.

Creative and analytical: Creativity continues to be highly valued within marketing teams as the advent of new media formats such as slideshares, mobile apps, soundclouds, videos, interactive content bring new possibilities to a previously vanilla toolbox of tactics. The marketing teams that stand out from the crowd will combine creativity with analytics to offer their audience meaningful insights, inciting a change in their mental model and perhaps their behavior as well. Insights can be derived from customer interaction with your brand, products, services and even their peers via social media. The opportunities are infinite and savvy marketers will monitor analytics and deliver a more personalized experience. The creative talent is crucial in thinking outside the box and delivering the “wow factor” to customers. A recent article in the NY Times, In Modern Marketing, a Big Dose of Data in the Creative Juices, offers several examples of personalized, data-driven customer experiences.

Digital acumen and content strategy: Far too often, we see digital strategy siloed from content strategy and that is likely due to few individual marketers having deep expertise in both areas. However, the modern marketing team will ensure that these critical strategies are aligned and that, at minimum, collaborating to ensure that the customer experience accounts for both. The ability to understand the possibilities of digital and marketing technology will enable the content strategist to deliver an innovative and engaging program and ensure that the customer is able to personalize their experience- be it by device, channel, or stage of the buying journey. One success story in this area is Airbnb,who recently redesigned their entire digital footprint- including content and imagery- to reflect a renewed focus on people, not places.

Agility and execution: Today, every marketer needs to demonstrate these two traits. They need to be capable of being both the visionaries and the executors of their ideas- and they need to move fast or risk a competitor beating them to market. Ongoing reliance on extensive planning cycles and third party vendors to execute marketing programs results in delayed time to market and often weakens the meaningful and personal connection to the the content. Modern marketing teams will initiate rapid, iterative planning cycles in order to be responsive and relevant to customers’ needs.

Product expertise and storytelling: In an era where brands are rapidly becoming publishers, marketers are adopting skills traditionally associated with journalists such as the ability to convey a point of view and tell a compelling story. However, the storytellers who also have product expertise will rise to the top as this combination will differentiate true content marketing from worthless link bait. Savvy content marketers are looking at the existing gap between thought leadership content and solution content and capitalizing on the opportunity to support buyers with diagnostic tools and content.

This article was originally posted on a new webzine for leaders in commerce, sales, and marketing: The Customer Edge.

Out-bounding is dead. Long-live Personal Content!

When it comes to developing strong relationships in your professional network, “Personal Content” is king. This has has never been more true than in today’s quickly evolving business world, where there is an ever increasing torrent of mediocre content. In short, as out-bounding is dying, Personal Content is taking the throne.

You don’t forget personal messages.

Personal Content is something that you write or make that’s worth sharing with others, and that in the business world we hope will drive our bottom line. There is a sliding scale that qualifies something as personal content. On one hand, there’s the level of personalization: the more personalized you make your content, the better. A customer is much more likely to remember (and open) a handwritten note than an email. On the other hand, there’s the quality of the content itself: how impactful is the content you’re sharing? Is it something trite that the customer has likely seen before? Or is it unique, helpful, and memorable?

For what it’s worth, nothing short of one-on-one conversation can trump sharing personalized content. The personalization helps form a relationship with potential customers by making them feel valued (which they then project back onto you) and by sharing a bit of your outlook (which helps them learn a bit about you). The quality content will stick with them, and they’ll be thankful for you having shared it with them.

The long, successful history of sharing things that really matter

“I invented the essay. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

Personal Content being king is nothing new, but its salience is changing in the 21^st century. As long as people have been writing, sharing good stuff has been helpful in developing strong relationships. More than 400 years ago, Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, wrote of a friendship that started with content-sharing:

“I am particularly indebted to [his writing], because it first brought us together: it was shown to me long before I met him and first made me acquainted with his name.”

Back then, writing was uncommon, and sharing anything would go a long way. Contrast that with today’s ever-growing amount of content shared. According to “Zuckerberg’s Law,” that number is doubling each year. How does any individual react to this level of information? They filter out the invaluable, and hone in on what matters. This is demonstrated by some key facts:

1. We are less likely to open impersonal content (18.6% email open rate in 2012, and estimates hover around 17% for 2014)
2. We are more likely to open personal content (99% open rate for handwritten mail)
3. We are more likely to remember personal content and associate it with the person who created it (Perceived Partner Responsiveness)

Get started with Personal Content right now

So if out-bounding is on its last leg, and those who rely on it solely are spinning their wheels, how can you make use of Personal Content to drive business more effectively?

• Send a handwritten note every now and then to a valued customer — if they’re actually a valued customer, it should make sense to have them feel that way!
• If you’re going to send out an impersonal email blast, take the time to ensure that the content is meaningful, impactful, and desirable—and make that subject line irresistible
• Use social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as a way to connect and network with your customers — not as a billboard
• Make sure that your one-on-one emails have personalized themes in them. Don’t just throw out your sales pitch; weave in comments referring to the relationship you have with this individual such as talking about when you last spoke or asking about their family.

Personal Content is more difficult than out-bounding, but the ROI is much higher. You will be spending more time on each customer; admittedly, writing a handwritten note for a few customers is the equivalent of sending out dozens of emails, and crafting more personalized emails will cut back on the number of people you’ll be reaching overall. But the end result is that these customers will actually open and read what you’ve shared, because your content will be much more likely to make it through their content-overload-filter. These folks will then become better, more loyal customers. They’ll be repeat users of your product or service, generate you more referrals, and give you word-of-mouth advertising. Those three factors will trump the out-bounding equivalents of one-time buyers, cold leads, and Yellow Pages ads any day.

The landscape of lead generation is in a constant state of evolution, and the speed in which it changes continues to pick up the pace. Several ‘new and popular’ strategies that were once believed to be the most effective are getting pushed to the backburner: many of them having come about within the last five years.

For instance, it was once thought that having a heavy social media presence was the golden goose of lead generation, but, research is now showing astoundingly bleak results for this particular method in 2014.

At the same time, there are certain strategies that are enduring far longer than most had projected. Email marketing, telemarketing, tradeshows and conferences and search marketing have been holding steady as boasting the top ROIs.

The best strategies are ones that aren’t primed for short-term gains but instead are fixed on long-term results. Here are four tips for crafting your own lead generation strategy that will outlast the ‘new and popular’ ones, keeping your company ahead of the times for the long haul.

#1: Engage, Engage, Engage

The most effective strength of any lead generation strategy is your company’s level of engagement with its potential leads.

This is one area in which many new startups often fail, because their strategy is one of pure automation and not of direct engagement. For instance, many companies have adopted the practice of trusting in automated social media posting and have neglected the most basic and surefire practices in sales: engagement.

Engagement is providing available sales representatives via chat, help centers and forums. There’s just no way to ‘automate’ this essential lead generation method, because it requires a real person on the other end to interact with the potential lead.

Perhaps the only real way to auto-generate leads through engagement is by developing an FAQ section of the company site (see image above).

The FAQ section can be developed based on the statistically most common questions asked by potential leads. Not only will this method engage prospective customers, but adding a statistically-developed FAQ section will save your company time, labor and the marketing budget.

There is no substitute for remaining active in engaging your potential leads.

#2: Maintain Your Outbound Edge

According to an insightful infographic from MarketingProfs, their research on the most effective lead generation methods in 2014 showed that lead generation was the biggest, most costly challenge for 78% of marketers. However, it also showed that email marketing, telemarketing, tradeshows and conferences, executive events and inside sales were the most effective methods at generating leads.

What do all these methods have in common? Answer: yet again, engagement.

The least effective methods were apps, online video, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. The common link among those methods is that companies are free to basically remain disengaged from potential leads, while utilizing them.

However, one important aspect of this comparison is to understand that the least effective methods are considered ‘inbound marketing,’ while the most effective methods are considered ‘outbound marketing.’ Focusing more on outbound marketing will pay off; the stats have proven it still works best.

#3: Embrace New Technology

One method that was supposed to have been rendered obsolete long ago was email marketing. However, in 2014, it retains its position as one of the strongest. In fact, ConvinceandConvert.com published stats from 2014 that stated four out five Americans do their online shopping on a mobile device.

This is one reason why email lead generation has held its position in front of the pack. Smartphones receive emails, and this invasive form of advertising will go with the potential lead just about everywhere.

So, here’s what your company should do:

• Stay up to date on new devices, and find out how to reach them.
• Identify new technologies and in what areas will it be compatible with older methods (i.e.: the email-smartphone effect).
• Invest in developing ‘smarter’ types of media and page design. Responsive web design allows pages to automatically change with the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. Not only is this convenient for the visitor, but it ensures that your website doesn’t have to create and entirely new site to accommodate a new type of web device.

#4: What’s Trendy Isn’t Always Trending

One lead generation method that wasn’t quite at the top of the list on the MarketingProfs infographic was SEO. However, this method still beat blogs and radio in terms of overall effectiveness.

The need for search engine optimization has been tremendous, even as far back as 2007, and it still remains a requirement for effective marketing seven years later.

SEO largely depends on several factors, including maintaining a presence on social media. In fact, QuickSprout.com even noted that social media plays an integral part in SEO, and this is one area that cannot be ignored.

Although your lead generation strategy cannot live by social media alone, it is still important for you to keep your social media presence active in order to nurture a much larger player …the search engines.

Social media might soon become highly effective for lead generation again, especially if the technology evolves to make this happen. However, we’ve always understood that search engine marketing is highly targeted, cost effective,and highly beneficial over the long-term.

Doing what’s trendy might make a few dollars overnight, but it will leave your company penniless within five years. Doing what is trending can sustain your lead generation machine beyond seven years. Usually, the methods that work best are the ones that have stuck around the longest. Strategize accordingly.

LinkedIn is best known as a tool for job seekers and recruiters, but it's also a burgeoning platform for "social selling," a business it hopes to boost with a new entity called Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator, which is designed for salespeople, leverages LinkedIn's network of 316 million-plus members to expose sales leads. If you work in a company with 500 employees, for instance, LinkedIn will let you know if one of those employees is connected with someone at one of your target companies. This reduces cold calling and leads to more sales, according to LinkedIn; a February survey from the company found that "social sellers" — those that used social media to interact with their prospects — were 51% more likely to beat their quota than traditional sellers. Read more...

More about Linkedin and Business

How an unpolished LinkedIn profile can hurt your bottom line.

You may be thinking, how is my LinkedIn profile losing me money? If you’re not proactively using the biggest online business network in the world on a daily basis, then you’re leaving money on the table. Consider these following stats from power+formula 2012 LinkedIn User Survey:

• 87% of members trust LinkedIn as a source of information affecting decision making.
• 44.5% said increased face-to-face networking effectiveness.
• 37.6% built new relationships with potential customers.

I was speaking with a group of sales executives who questioned the importance of having a well-developed and thoughtful LinkedIn profile. They challenged me by saying that their name and title was enough on LinkedIn? My response:

When you fail to create a polished LinkedIn profile, you’re telling your customers, your prospects, your partners, your boss and your peers one or more of the following:

• You aren’t tech-savvy enough to know how to use social media or…
• You don’t have any truly notable accomplishments or…
• You don’t care. Being an amateur and part of all the static on LinkedIn is ok with you.

Don’t Be an Amateur Online

You would never go to a business meeting dressed in tatty faded blue jeans and an old pair of sneakers. Of course not. You want people to see you as a professional and a person they’d want to do business with.

Failing to build a professional LinkedIn profile has the same effect online as going to a business event dressed in the wrong clothes. You risk looking like an amateur. Even worse, you’ll look like someone people should avoid. Having a professional profile is especially important if you’re responsible for building new business or retaining customers.

To help you complete your LinkedIn profile wisely, here are five classic mistakes that scream “I’m an amateur!”

Mistake #1: No Photo (Or, a Bad One)

Studies show that people are seven times more likely to click on your LinkedIn profile if you’ve got a picture.

While not having a photo isn’t good, having a bad photo is worse. You need to make sure your picture sends the right message. A professionally taken headshot is key. Put your best foot forward by investing a couple of hundred dollars in your primary digital asset, your photo.

You can also use your new professional headshot in your email signature and all of your collateral. Your professional headshot says to your customers and prospects that you’re a professional and that you take your business and yourself seriously.

Mistake #2: A Useless Headline

Your headline is the most important piece of real estate on your profile because it’s tied directly to the search feature in LinkedIn. People find you based on keyword searches. If you have 2-3 keywords they are searching for in your headline, you’ll rise to the top of the results.

Your headline should also contain a strong value proposition. Too many professionals have their business title as their headline. Wrong! Your title should tell people why they should do business with you; or at least connect with you on LinkedIn. Tip: ABC – Always Be Connecting!

Mistake #3: A Long-Winded Summary in the Third Person

Did you copy and paste your Summary from your resume? Or worse, is it a long-winded piece written in the third person that drones on and on?

Like all content on the Web, your Summary should be formatted and written to scan, not read. That’s why using bullets and ascii graphics is important. Done correctly,

1. You’ll draw people in to learn more about you.
2. They’ll easily read what you do.
3. How well you do it.

Use your Summary to roll-up your benefits into two to three quantifiable value propositions. Don’t put the reader to sleep with an epic novel. Instead, tease them with a short, impactful summary and the person will want to learn more about you.

Mistake #4: Not Making Your Value Interactive

One of the best features you can use to your advantage in your Summary is the Add Content feature. It allows you to add videos, case studies, white papers, ebooks and more. People can learn about the products and services you provide in an engaging way. A two minute video is much more valuable to you than a thousand product word description.

What’s even better is that people can watch videos and read ebooks directly on your profile. They don’t need to go to another site. You can even add lots of calls-to-actions like “Call me at (555) 555-5555 to learn more” within the content.

Mistake #5: No Call-to-Actions, No Leads 

Speaking of call-to-actions, this is the biggest mistake of all. Professional marketers will tell you that publishing or producing any kind of Web content without a call-to-action is the biggest blunder you can make. Examples of call-to-actions include “Call me”, “Click here” or Download now”. How many of these are on your profile?

Beyond Amateur Mistakes

While those five are the biggest mistakes, there are other things to consider when building the best possible presence on LinkedIn. Keyword optimization, showcasing the right skills and including the best examples of additional experience you’ve had are all advanced attributes of LinkedIn profile optimization that can help you look good online and make you stand out.

The Bottom Line

Start doing what I’ve described above and you’ll be way ahead of the competition. Consider investing in a LinkedIn profile makeover by a professional who’s worked with hundreds of sales people.

Content marketing is rapidly becoming synonymous with marketing itself, with many businesses jumping on board and using content to connect with prospective customers over traditional marketing tactics. But content marketing is still relatively new, and there’s a lot we’re continuing to learn about how to best use content to grow your business.

While creating and curating great content is a no-brainer when it comes to effective content marketing, it’s not enough to generate those leads you’re ultimately really after. Optimizing your content for lead generation is more than producing interesting content and trying to get as many eyes on it as possible — it’s creating an entire, immersive content experience that your audience will love and respond to.

Ok, so what does that mean? Here are 4 things to consider when building out your content experience:

Discoverability
Is your content living in individual silos or can people discover different pieces that interest them without having to look for them? You’re working hard to create content that your audience will enjoy and share, but if it’s not easy to find then you’re entering “if a tree falls in the woods” territory. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if the people who you want to read it aren’t doing so, it might as well not even exist.

Through navigation, suggested content, and targeted call-to-actions, you want to take your visitors on a journey that helps them discover more content that is relevant to them. For example, in Uberflip’s content Hub we’ve created custom streams by topic and filled them with applicable resources. So someone interested in learning about lead generation will find blog posts, eBooks, webinar recordings, and more on that topic all in one place.

Responsive Design
If you’re surfing the web on your phone and open up an article to find it’s not mobile-optimized, do you stick around?

Even though we all know people are constantly on their phones and tablets, many websites aren’t designed for cross-platform accessibility. Creating a great content experience for your audience means making it work wherever they are, and much of the time that’s on the go (or if they’re like me, scrolling through their phone on the couch because they’re too lazy to open up their laptop). If you’re banking on visitors awkwardly zooming and scrolling through content that isn’t responsive, you’re sacrificing a big chunk of your audience — and a lot of potential leads.

Targeted content
Proper targeting is essential for keeping your audience engaged and pulling them into the sales funnel. Once you’ve figured out your buyer personas, each piece of content should apply to at least one of them. Aiming for mass appeal may bring in traffic, but that traffic will likely be less qualified than if you’ve written a blog post targeted toward a prospective customer.

At Uberflip, we align each piece of content with a buyer persona to make sure we’re hitting all of our marks, and use our Hub metrics to track what’s resonating with our audience (and what’s not). We’ve also created custom streams for different segments of our audience, like HubSpot users, which is where targeting also ties into discoverability — the more content you have designed for a specific group, the better you can lay out a content path for them.

Contextual call-to-actions
Call-to-actions (or CTAs) are the real moneymakers, and seamlessly incorporating them into your content experience is key for conversion. Whether the action you’re trying to get people to take is to subscribe to your blog or download an eBook, that CTA should be contextual. Put yourself in the position of the person you want to respond — is the CTA relevant? How will they find it? At what point are they most likely to click?

If someone is reading a blog post about email marketing, a CTA for an email marketing eBook is more compelling than just asking them to sign up for your product. Many CTAs in our Hub are specific to their surroundings, such as a call to download SlideShare templates in our SlideShare stream. Since our CTAs are synced with marketing automation, anyone who fills out a form is added to a list for lead nurturing. We’ve also placed delayed overlay CTAs to subscribe to our Hub over each blog post so visitors can read some of the post before being asked if they want to subscribe.

What are your tips for generating leads through content marketing?

Value-Based Selling demands an understanding of the stages of a basic buying process.

1. Articulating Requirements
2. Evaluating Options
3. Committing to a Course of Action

The role of the sales rep, then, is to progress the buyer through these stages in a way that leads a buyer towards your solution and away from the competition, and to do so in a way that creates a compelling business case. Your sales process should naturally progress your buyer from his/her pains and objectives to your solution offerings.

Today the Command Center is getting back to basics. Whether you’re a veteran salesperson or someone who is getting his/her feet wet in the sales game, it is important to remember the fundamentals. When you encounter your next sales prospect, make sure you are executing these five steps of a value-based sales conversation.

1. Pain Points and Business Objectives

The first step is to get the prospect to admit pain points and to describe the business outcomes he/she is looking to achieve. Once you have an idea of the business pain and the future state the customer is trying to get to, you will be able to create a compelling business case.

2. Define Requirements

After you uncover the pain, the seller and the customer must jointly develop a specific and finite list of requirements that the solution must satisfy in order to address the pain points and achieve the business objectives. Reconfirm the requirements throughout your sales process, especially when you’re dealing with multiple decision-makers.

3. Solution Mapping and Business Justification

Once you define the required capabilities of the business solution, you need to map the features and functions of your solution back to the requirements that are most pressing from the buyer. These required capabilities need to be tied back to the business objectives that are fueling the purchase.

4. Differentiate

The fourth step is for the seller to clearly differentiate the solution from competitive offerings. Again, this needs to map back to the requirements that are top-of-mind for the buyer. Differentiation is only effective if you map it back to the decision criteria that you’ve established with the required capabilities.

5. Provide the Proof

Provide proof of the value you promise with proof points and customer testimonials that give future customers tangible evidence your solution does what you say it can do. Providing these references from outside sources can help your customers understand the positive business outcomes they can also expect from your solution. These proof points should include testimonials that describe how your company’s solution satisfies the requirements in a way that addresses the pain points and achieves the business objectives.

When it comes to your entire sales team executing these types of customer conversations, a Value Messaging Framework can help drive consistency in your sales organization and achieve the measurable results that improve the bottom-line.

This week's blog comes from guest blogger, Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer, Inbound Sales for HubSpot.

What does a top performing sales person look like? Seriously. Picture him or her in your mind. How do they dress? Are they attractive? Are they eloquent speakers? What do they do in their free time?

Well, in my experience, the profile of the top performing salespeople is changing. And fast! As I built the HubSpot sales team over the last 6 years, I probably hired close to 200 salespeople. It amazes me, even in that short period, how the profile of the industry’s top performers has shifted. Here are four habits that today’s top performers exhibit that yesterday’s top performers did not.

#1: They are Data Jocks

Historically sales managers have taken extraordinary strides to measure the performance of their salespeople… and salespeople have avoided these tactics like the plague. “What I do cannot be measured. It is an art form.”Today’s top sales performers love the data. To them, data represents the blue print to excellence. They want to know:

• Which sales email templates are performing best?
• What day of the week or time of day do prospect’s most often open email or pick up the phone?
• How many calls per day do I need to make to hit my commission check goals? Am I on track?
• How does my call activity, connect rate, opportunity conversion, forecast accuracy, and close rate compare to my peers? Where can I improve? Who is the best so I can learn from them?

Now these top performing salespeople love the data for their own use. But do they want their manager to see the data too?

It depends.

If the manager uses the data to micro-manage them, forget it.

“Nobody leaves this office until they make 100 dials today!”

Ha. You’ll end up with a bunch of fake outbound calls and disgruntled salespeople.

Today’s top performers do not mind their managers having the numbers as long as the manager uses the metrics to make them better, to coach them.

#2: They are Technology Geeks

How did legacy salespeople get an edge? They owned front row season tickets for the hot pro sports team. They were members at the exclusive country club. They had access to vintage wine.

But, sorry. Customers just do not buy this way anymore. They probably wonder how much of this lavish lifestyle is baked into the ultimate sales price being pitched to them.

Today’s top sales performers look for an edge from technology, not exclusivity. They use technology to create a better buying experience for their customers and to streamline their own sales process.

Top performing salespeople no longer buy lists of cold prospects who are supposedly a good fit for them. They use technology to monitor the millions of buying signals happening online every day and engage with those companies that are actually entering into a buying process.

Top performing salespeople do not prospect into their territory of companies listed in alphabetical order. They use technology to understand which prospects are actually engaging with their sales efforts, opening their emails,visiting their website, and are prioritizing their sales efforts accordingly.

Today’s top performing salespeople don’t lead with the generic elevator pitch. They use technology to understand what information the prospect has already consumed and lead with the next piece of information appropriate for prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey. Today’s top performing salespeople do not tolerate the burdensome tasks of updating their CRM. They use technology to automatically update their CRM records as they interact with prospects on email, on the phone, and on webinars.

#3: They think “Always Be Helping”, not “Always Be Closing”

Remember Alec Baldwin in GlennGarry Glenn Ross.

“A-B-C”

“Always Be Closing”

Legacy salespeople are closers. The pitch starts the minute they open their mouth.

However, today’s top sales performers put the customer’s needs before their own. Here are the three steps today’s top performers follow:

1. Develop trust with the prospect
2. Leverage the trust to understand the prospect’s top priorities/goals/problems.
3. If the sales person’s solution are aligned with the prospect’s priorities, the sales person presents the solution within the buyer’s context, using their terminology. If the solution is not aligned, the sales person thanks the prospect for their time and refers the prospect to someone who may be able to help. In a social-media-driven world, jamming the wrong solution down a prospect’s throat is the kiss of death for a sales person.

The one caveat to the process above is in the second step, if the sales person believes the prospect has the wrong goals, they challenge the prospect. They show the prospect industry trends on why they feel the priorities are off. They educate the prospect on more effective best practices. If the sales person truly has the prospect’s trust, they will help the prospect avoid a potential pothole.

#4: They are Digital Thought Leaders in their Industry

In a post Internet age, the power in the sales process has shifted significantly to the buyer. Buyers can be at home on a Saturday night and research the top vendors in a space online. They can find out how each solution is different, how much each solution costs. Sometimes they can try the product for free and often times they can buy it, right there on the website.

So why do we need salespeople?

In this new buyer-driven context, salespeople need to step up their game. They need to be perceived as trusted advisors by their prospects.

Top performing salespeople make the investment to attain this status. Instead of 80 hours a month of cold calling, top salespeople carve out a few hours a week to build up their online authority. They read the blogs their target prospects read and they add smart comments. They follow the Twitter users their prospects follow and they retweet the best messages. They join the same LinkedIn groups their prospects are members in and they post smart answers. They take the time to guest post on their own company blog around the top questions they receive from prospects early in the buying journey. They become digital thought leaders. Ultimately, they are sought out by their prospects for help.

True story. Last year, the VP of Sales at a Fortune 500 company called me up.

“Mark. I need to have lunch with you and my VP of Marketing. We need your help on our sales and marketing funnel.”

“Great!”, I said. “I’ll be at your office tomorrow at noon.” “

That’s OK Mark. We’ll come to you.”

They showed up with the best pitch deck I have ever seen for HubSpot. They had outlined their entire funnel with all of the conversion rates. They had theories on where they were under-performing and how to fix it. We spent 90 minutes over lunch working on the document. I shared the industry benchmarks. I coached them on the strategies they should use to address deficiencies. When the check came, I reached for it but they pushed my hand away.

“Our pleasure Mark. This was a great lunch.”

Shortly thereafter, I had the order form.

That is selling today. It no longer feels like a sales person / prospect relationship. It feels more like a doctor / patient relationship.

When the doctor asks, do you smoke? Do you have heart disease in your family? You do not lie. You see the diploma on the wall. You trust the doctor. You answer her questions.

When she gives you the diagnosis and prescribes the proper medication, you do not say “let me think about it” or ask for 20% off. You take the medication.

Today’s salespeople invest their time to reach this level of authority with their prospects.

Picture this new top performing sales person. How do they compare to the image of yesterday’s top performer? Who would you rather work with?

Today’s top performing salespeople are making the profession more honorable. They yearn for excellence. They love efficiency. Most importantly their industry knowledge and desire to help make for an enjoyable experience for all of us buyers.

Problem: Many distributers are frustrated because they have to participate in a competitive bidding process to obtain business. Winning is often based on having the lowest bid. More than in any other type of sale, the buyer is in total control of the process. All information is disseminated to the bidders at a common bid conference and individual meetings are rare. The seller has no advantage over his competitors and frequently is reduced to guessing what his company will need to win the bid. If there are six qualified distributers bidding, your chances are less than 20% of winning the bid. And if you’re the “lucky” one that is awarded the bid, chances are your margins won’t be as healthy as you’d like.

Analysis: Typically, prospects use the bidding process to avoid having to deal with salespeople. But for the salesperson, failure to have access to the buyer is a recipe for disaster. You must find a way to take control from the buyer if you are to improve both your chances of being awarded the bid and arrange to generate higher profit margins on the contract. In other words, submit the bid on your terms, not the buyer’s. To do this, we suggest the following “re-direct” strategy.

Solution: Get the buyer aside and say the following, “We’ve looked at the bid specs and see some problems. It looks like you might have made some mistakes in planning. If we bid the contract the way it’s set up, you’re going to have problems. By the way, have you ever awarded a contract only to discover that there are cost overruns, lots of change orders, and the work not done on time? That’s probably because the specs were flawed from the beginning.” (Most contracts have cost overruns, changes orders, etc. because the specs are often flawed, so the buyer can always relate to that.)

Continue with this tactic to take control of the bid process. “If you want us to bid, here’s what we suggest…let us come in and review the bid specs. We’ll have to charge for this service, but you’ll get it back if we are awarded the bid. I’ve got to tell you one thing, we’re higher but you’ll make up for that during the course of the contract since there’ll be less cost overruns, etc.”

Sell the analysis.  If you find gaps or flaws in their specs and you have a solution that can correct those then re-write the specs to favor your company and enjoy a much higher close rate and higher margins.

Good Selling!!

The size and importance of messaging apps becomes clear once we compare them side-by-side with traditional social networks. It's important for marketers, digital publishers, and anyone involved in mobile media to understand that messaging is the audience platform of the future. 

In our second quarter report on the mobile messaging industry, BI Intelligence charted the growth in users of four major messaging apps (WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE, and Facebook Messenger), and four global social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn). 

The report takes a deep, granular dive into the messaging market and includes an exploration of possible monetization paths for mobile apps. 

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are some of our other findings in the report:

• Between March 2013 and March 2014, the messaging app market exploded. The top seven messaging apps expanded by 148%, adding 900 million users. 
• WhatsApp blew past all the messaging app competition in mid-2013 and never looked back. By February of this year, WhatsApp already had 100 million more monthly active users than its nearest competitor, China-based WeChat. 
• Facebook Messenger is still a laggard. It is several times smaller than the top three messaging apps. Despite its global footprint and deep integration with Facebook, it's smaller than Japan-based LINE, which is most popular in East and Southeast Asia and a handful of other countries. 
• Snapchat is huge. The photo- and video-centric app, which only recently incorporated video calls, is running neck-and-neck with messaging and voice calling app, Tango. 

The report is full of charts and data that can be easily downloaded and put to use. 

In full, the report: 

• Publishes full MAU numbers on WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and Tango
• Includes a case study on LINE, and how it has built multiple revenue streams — it's not just dependent on stickers
• Discusses why payments might be a huge opportunity for Facebook's WhatsApp
• Explains why no other category has grown as quickly in the last few years
• Compares engagement numbers, in terms of app sessions and minutes-spent, for each of the leading messaging services

For full access to the report on Social Messaging  and all BI Intelligence's charts and data on the mobile and social industries, sign up for a free trial subscription today.

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Are you making these 7 Lazy Pinterest Activities? 7 Lazy Pinterest Activities to Avoid

• Are you using Pinterest for business?
• Are you doing it “right”?
• How do you know you are doing it right…exactly?

Truth is, most people are not “doing it right” on Pinterest and know because I’ve studied over 1000 business Pinterest pages.

Okay, so you’re probably thinking I’ve just posted a bunch of pretty pictures so why the heck am I not getting more repins and why aren’t I getting any followers!

Like I tell my clients over and over effectively managing Pinterest, like any other social media platform is science. There are tricks of the trade, a few short cuts and no such thing as a one size fits all.

You need to know:

1. who your target market is
2. what problems they need to solve
3. how you’re going to use Pinterest to achieve your business goals

Unfortunately, I am seeing businesses making the same mistakes over and over and over on Pinterest while attempting to cash in on Pinterest’s success and sadly because of these mistakes they are setting themselves up to fail from the get-go.

7 important keys to Pinterest success:

Don’t be lazy with these seven Pinterest activities. Roll up your sleeves and do them right.

1.  You’re not pinning enough

Not pinning enough is the most common deadly sin I see. I see Pinterest pages that haven’t been updated in months. Remember these are business pages.  Originally they thought….we can do this ourselves and then realize….it’s a bigger job that requires much more dedication, expertise and time than they thought.

In the early stages I recommend pinning at least 10 times per day when you’re target audience is on Pinterest. I don’t expect you to sit in front of your computer all day so batch your work by scheduling some of your posts ahead of time.  For small businesses Go Pixel’s scheduling tool can help you schedule your pins. It’s the most affordable scheduling tool I’ve used to date. Go here for more information.

2.  You’re not pinning helpful content

Your Pinterest page is not there for the continuous promotion of your products and services. Hello.  Read that again and let it sink in because sooo many people miss this. Pinterest is not designed to be a digital catalogue for your products and services.

It’s about finding creative and indirect ways to show them off. I see so many Pinterest business accounts pin images solely about their company and take the approach that “it’s all about me”.

It’s social media. Get it. So be social. Be caring about the other person.  What are their needs, goals and problems and effort to help them with those?

Think of it this way – would you want to have a friend who only talks about themself? About what they’re doing and about how great they are?  A friend who never ever takes the time to offer you anything of value?

How many of those people do you want in your live by design?  Not many right?  Well if your Pinterest page is just another form of online catalogue and company focused promotion that is exactly what you are doing while you try to make new social friends in the digital world.

If your approach is too direct, meaning all about you, you will very likely under perform on Pinterest and forever be frustrated.  The more indirect you are the better it goes and the more impact Pinterest can have on your traffic and sales.

The key to winning the hearts of your potential customers is to offer value.  Ask yourself:

1. Who are my customers?
2. What do they struggle with the most?
3. What do they need and want?
4. What solutions can I offer to help them solve their concerns or problems?

Your posts should be 20% marketing messages (your product/service related) and 80% education, helpful tips, and fun. (Nothing to do with your product or services)

3.  You’re profile picture makes pinners say “Oh My!”

There’s a saying that goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”…well, unfortunately too many people do not follow that advise and therefore their crummy profile pictures come back haunt them on Pinterest.

Your Pinterest profile picture is your chance to make a statement about who you are. What I see so often, even with big brand names is that their profile picture is blurry, lopsided, or worse it just shows the Pinterest generic red pin image.

Put it this way – would you go to into a retail store if the window dressing was dirty, the products being showcased were in disarray, poorly merchandised or worse… it was empty?

C’mon people! First impressions mean a lot in business and in life. You have one chance to make that lasting impression. As a matter of fact you want to be positively memorable so take advantage of this 160×165 pixels profile picture box. Before you pin, work on that profile picture. Look good, look trust worthy, look successful like somebody I want to learn more about or follow.

Pinterest Actionable Tip: If you’re a small business or a solopreneur I highly recommend you use a profile photo with your logo. People like to see who’s behind the business. It humanizes you and Pinterest users will remember you more than your logo and as a result you will get more followers.

4.  You’re a “snob”

Remember that Pinterest is called “social” media. If someone has commented, repinned, or shared your pin you must in some way acknowledge them within 24 hours or you will be looked upon as a social media snob.

That’s right – within 24hrs. And if you do not have the time then you need to hire someone to manage your social media for you or drop other jobs to make time for this.

We’re all busy and I get that but by reaching out to those who acted positively to your pins is rewarding. If a customer called your business would you call them back in a few days, a week, or do you call them back the same day?

A comment or a repin is like someone leaving you a message?  Your response says a lot about you and whether or not they want anything else to do with you. Again if you are too busy to do this right then hire more staff or outsource the management of your account.

Doing it poorly damages your brand image. Is that really going to help you increase sales?

You want to build relationships with those who engage with you so over time they can become brand ambassadors. Don’t hide behind Pinterest; you need take the initiative by reaching out to others.

5.  You don’t describe your boards

Pinterest allows you up to 500 characters for your board descriptions. This is your chance to show other pinners your personality through your writing style. In addition, take advantage of keywords to increase your SEO and increase your chances of being found.

Here’s an example of a poor board description “crafts”…one word is just not going to cut it.

6.  No company website or blog

If you don’t have a website that’s one thing but if you do then… well maybe you just forgot. That’s why I’m here… to help you succeed on Pinterest!

Make it easy for Pinterest users to find you by making sure you add your website URL under the “ABOUT” section of your Pinterest page.  Have a blog rich with key words that will help drive traffic to you.

In addition, make sure you verify your website so you can take advantage of the Pinterest Analytics that Pinterest provides businesses. Verifying your website also guarantees pinners that your account is the legitimate account for your business and not just a copycat.

7.  You’re boards are empty

One thing that drives me a little crazy is when I see several boards that only have one image on them. Having one image on a board is just plain unattractive and bad, bad, bad.

It’s kind of like seeing one shirt on a rack in a clothing store. If you were shopping would one shirt on a rack make you excited? Most likely not. You wouldn’t want to open your business if you had no inventory to sell.

One image on a board is like opening for business with one item in the store. I am not saying they should be all product or company focused images, on the contrary per my 80 – 20 rule most pins ought to be helpful in nature in general for your target audience and have nothing whatsoever to do with your products. The boards just need to be full so it looks like you are “open” for business.

If you’re a business owner you’re on Pinterest for a reason – to build followers to get more people going to your website to increase sales.

So make sure you have a minimum of five images on your boards so they look appealing to the Pinterest user. Pinterest success does include having amazing images (of course it’s not just about that but it’s the starting point). Your goal is to attract as many followers as you can through the images you pin. So if there’s nothing there then don’t expect them to check you out.

Pinterest Actionable Tip: Have at least 50 images per board if you seriously want to get more followers.

I know you know about the secret boards. A board under construction is one of the reasons why secret boards were created. If you don’t think you’ll be able to complete pinning five images on one board then use your secret boards. Please. Avoid undermining your brand image. More and more people are on Pinterest every day, this is not the forum where you want to wing it and look bad.

So there you have it!  Avoid these 7 Pinterest marketing mistakes on your page. If you’ve made some of these deadly mistakes don’t worry, you can still redeem yourself by fixing them doing it right going forward.

Over to you…

What other mistakes do you see other people doing?  Let me know in the comments below.

If this is overwhelming for you and you feel like you are going around and around with Pinterest and not getting anywhere contact me contact me about my Pinterest management services or to learn more about my Pinterest Marketing Course for Business. You can always take chapter 1 for free.

Eurozone consumer prices climbed by just 0.4% year-over-year in July. This was down from 0.5% in June, and it was worse than the 0.5% expected by economists.

This was also the tiniest increase in prices since October 2009.

"Looking at the main components of euro area inflation, services is expected to have the highest annual rate in July (1.3%, stable compared with June), followed by non-energy industrial goods (0.0%, compared with -0.1% in June), food, alcohol & tobacco (-0.3%, compared with -0.2% in June) and energy (-1.0%, compared with 0.1% in June)," said Eurostat.

The big risk here is that prices go negative, and Europe spirals into deflation, a phenomenon that perpetuates itself as consumer and businesses delay spending in anticipation of even lower prices.

Combined with the stubbornly high unemployment rate, this puts increasing amount of pressure on the European Central Bank to leverage monetary policy in an effort to stimulate economic activity and stoke inflation.

"Lowflation in the euro area suggests the European Central Bank will maintain its easing bias," said Bloomberg economists David Powell and Niraj Shah. "The ECB may take some comfort from the stabilization of inflation for services. .. That rate has largely stabilized since hitting a low of 1% in December. Inflation in the service sector is a better indicator of domestically-generated pressure on prices than that in the manufacturing sector."

SEE ALSO: Adidas Shares Crash After Stunning Warning About Russia

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A new report has revealed some fascinating insight into retailers' online price changes.

According to the data, Costco makes most of its price changes on Saturday and Sunday, while Target's alterations spike on Tuesday and Friday.

Amazon, which averages 2.5 million price changes daily, tends to alter its prices evenly across the week. The research was conducted by the price intelligence firm 360pi. 

The chart below reveals the times of the week when six major retailers make most of their price changes. 

In one case, Amazon changed the price of a single item eight times in one day, the report found. 

The report also reveals how closely some retailers, such as Lowe's, are tracking their competitor's pricing for specific products, as shown in the first chart below. 

SEE ALSO: Fascinating Facts About 10 Of The World's Best-Selling Products

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If you're a CEO or founder and want to get a quick introduction to essential sales skills for your startup, this webinar is a good place to start. 34 minutes (or 17 minutes if you watch at double speed) and you'll know the most important fundamentals of sales that truly matter.

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Transcript:

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Essential Sales Skills for CEOs. I'm super excited about this group today, amazing founders and CEOs in the session. We're going to go through the webinar and talk about all the ways that you need to think about sales and the basic sales skills that you have to have if you're a CEO and a founder and somebody who's running a business. And then also how you need to think about all the people in your day-to-day job that you're selling to, and what you're selling them in the first place. So we're going to really go deep in sales focused on the CEO level.

First, let me share a little bit of background. So I've been a founder and CEO my entire life since I dropped out of high school when I was 17, 18. So I'm completely, you know, unqualified for any kind of job. I'm totally unemployable, but I've had at least the title of CEO for a very long time. And I've been selling to CEOs for a very long time.

ELASTIC SALES

The latest business that's probably most relevant to you guys is a company that we started called “Elastic Sales”. With Elastic Sales we helped over 200 venture backed startups in Silicon Valley scale their sales efforts. So we coach CEOs and founders in sales. We help them develop a sales process. We help to go out and sell to other businesses mainly in the B2B space. And the majority of those sales were actually to core decision makers, so CXO levels, many, many times to the CEO level. And we, as Elastic Sales, we always sold to the CEO, the final decision maker in basically utilizing Elastic Sales sales force to outsource sales and to get sales consulting and to scale their sales efforts.

Close.io SALES SOFTWARE

We've worked with many, many companies in developing their sales process and scaling that. And in the process, we built a tool. At first we called it our internal “secret sauce” called “Close.io” that our sales people and our sales teams used in order to scale all these sales campaigns and outcompete their competitors. And you know, after a year of holding that piece of software close to our chest and calling it our “secret sauce” and our “secret unfair competitive advantage,” finally we gave in to all the demands from the outside market. We released Close.io, and it's been a tremendous success. Thousands and thousands of companies and sales people, people around the world, are closing more deals and making more sales using our piece of software.

So sales is really near and dear to our heart. It's in our DNA. It's the core thing that drives us and drives our business. And we're talking to CEOs and founders every single week, helping them with their sales strategies, helping them scale their sales forces and overcome their sales challenges.

PITCHOLOGY 101

All right, let's get right to it. So let's start off with Pitchology 101, right, the basics of pitching, the basics of sales. First of all, you need to understand that sales is nothing else than results-driven communication.

It's all about communicating with other people. It doesn't matter if it's in the context of a corporation or an individual buyer. You're always communicating with other human beings. And the goal of the communication is to help them make a decision, to drive a transaction, to drive a result, you know, yes or no. But you are in the results driven communication business.

And when you're managing teams as well as when you're selling yourself, you need to understand and separate communication for communication's sake versus communication for result's sake, right? So when you're in sales mode, and as CEO, you should always be in sales mode. It doesn't matter if you talk to your team to build something, if you talk to the press, if you talk to, you know, co-founders, employees, investors, you're always in sales mode, and talking is not selling. You know, you really need to focus on speaking in a way and communicating in a way that's actually going to drive a result and that has a result at the end of it as the end goal and the core driver of it versus just communicating for the sake of hearing yourself speak. Right?

And that's where sales is the closest to sports, in a way, and why a lot of people that are great at sales are actually people that are very competitive and might have had a background and history in sports because in sales you have a scoreboard. It's not just like, “Oh, I communicated great today, and I think I made some really amazing points.” Nobody gives a shit. Like, “I played really well today, but I didn't score anything.” Nobody gives a shit, right? The only thing that matters is how much, how many results did you drive, how many, you know, scores did you make if you were on the court, if you played basketball, whatever the competitive sport is; and in sales how many deals did you close? Nothing else matters.

And the other thing about that is it doesn't matter what the results were that you drove yesterday. You could be the best of the best, the best of all time. You could have been like Michael Jordan at his prime. When he went on the court for a new game, the score as zero, zero. Nobody said, “Well, this is Michael Jordan. He starts off with, you know, 30 points ahead because he's already worked his ass off for the last couple of years and he's the best of all time.” Nobody gives a shit.

The score he starts is zero. It doesn't matter what your results were last week. You have to perform again. You have to constantly drive results. And that's what it's all about. And as a CEO, you should only communicate to actually drive a result. No other communication should be part of your day-to-day life and the day-to-day where you do things and communicate things.

HANDLING REJECTION AND FAILURE

Because sales is a result driven activity, you know, you're never going to always just get wins. Not every throw is actually going to score. So you're more likely going to get more noes than yeses. You're going to have more failures than successes. If you opted to actually drive a result and get to a yes or no transaction one way or another, you're going to have to live with pain and rejection and failure. So you got to get used to that. And in sales, it's all about figuring out and training your own tolerance for pain and training your own tolerance for rejection. Right?

Most people design their lives around rejection. They design their lives around creating safe spaces where they're going to have to face as little rejection as humanly possible. When you're a CEO and you're selling, you need to get over yourself, which a lot of CEOs – a lot of CEOs have this problem that because they have this “title” for whatever the fuck that's worth, because they have that title, that title is seen as something that's prestigious, they only want to go out and sell when they know they're going to succeed. They don't want to fail in front of their team and staff. They don't want to look stupid. So they always kind of pick and choose what deals and what interaction they should get involved with only when they feel really, really, really confident that they can step in as the CEO and fucking drive the win and make this a big success and close the deal or whatever it is.

You have to get over yourself. You know, if you're only winning as CEO when you're interacting in sales conversations, you're not selling enough. If you're only winning, you're not taking enough risk. You need to fail. You need to show your entire team, organization, the public that it's okay to fail. It's okay to lose when you're playing to win. It's fine. As long as the scoreboard all in all has you ahead, you're fine. It doesn't matter how many times you took a swing, or throw and didn't hit the basket. So it's all about actually figuring out a way to tolerate and manage your emotional household and be okay with rejection. If you're not getting noes, if you're not getting rejected as CEO, you're not selling enough, you're not taking enough risk in sales. You need to be out there and figure out a way to manage your own emotional household and manage the way that rejection will be part of your daily life, hopefully.

SELLING = ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Right now a lot of people and a lot of especially inexperienced CEOs – there are two camps: inexperienced CEOs when it comes to sales, people that maybe are very technical or don't have like a long background in sales; and also the other camp, people that love themselves talking, like super outgoing, super gregarious kind of personalities that think talking equates to selling – these two groups of CEOs think that selling is all about hearing yourself speak, selling is all about talking, selling is all about stealing the show and walking to a room and like babbling on forever and, you know, whoever has the most percentage of talk time in a conversation won. Nothing could be further from the truth, right?

In sales, the person who asks leads the conversation. Not in sales, in life, the person who asks the questions is leading the conversation, is focusing and directing and shepherding the conversation IN the direction you want to. You can only sell if you have understanding. You can only have understanding if you ask questions and you actively listen. Sales is all about first qualifying the prospect, qualifying the opportunity before you actually go out there to sell.

BRUTE FORCE SELLING SUCKS

Don't throw darts in the dark. Too many people do that. You come into a conversation, you think, “Oh, this could be a potential buyer for a product so let me go on and tell that person everything there is to know about our business, and I'm going to throw as many darts in the dark,” darts representing value propositions, features, functionalities, fun facts. “I'm going to keep on saying, 'Well, our product is this and it does that and we have this and we have that.' I'm going to just throw as many things as possible, and something will surely hit.” Right? That's kind of the most unelegant, brute force, stupid way of selling. And what's going to happen as a results is the person will stop listening to you because you're like this overbearing person that is so self-involved and only in it for yourself. And it's impossible to listen to somebody and actually remember the 25th value proposition of that product. nobody is capable of doing that. And we've all been in these kind of very counterproductive conversations.

You can't just come into a conversation and sell. You come into a conversation to first get to learn and get to understand who it is that you're conversing with, who it is you're communicating with.

• What are their needs?
• What are they use cases?
• What are their goals and challenges and obstacles?
• Who is this person that I'm selling to and what do they need?

And once you actually get to understanding, not just surface level understanding but deep, real understanding of somebody's situation, then and only then do you have the permission to sell. And then and only then do you have the ammunition to sell because you have real targets.

You know, oh, this person really, really cares about X, Y, Z and I know why they care about it and I know the context, the environment in which they care about this. I really have a deep understanding so when I now start speaking to pitch them on our product, both do I have the authenticity that I believe our product really solves their problem; but I also a have clarity of what I should focus on. Instead of telling them everything our product can do, I'm going to tell them what our product can do that's going to help them and that I know is a priority for them.

So you always want to qualify first before you actually start selling anything. You always want to ask questions before you start assuming you know who they are, what they need and start pitching them on those.

And when you ask questions, make sure that you don't just ask them so it gives you a permission to pitch. Ask them to really understand them. Ask them with the real curiosity and an open mind and actively listen to what they say, the content of their words as well as the context, how they say it. Are they congruent? what's the environment like in which they are interacting and saying these things? Pay attention to not just what they say but how they say it and really drive understanding and qualify them. Yes, they are actually a really good fit for what we do and I understand what they need and why they need it, and I'm going to go and pitch them really effectively, throw in one dart into the target and hitting on the first attempt.

BUILDING TRUST

So the other thing that you need to know is that trust comes before any transaction, trust before transaction. Nobody buys anything if they don't believe everything you say, right?

So here's an example. If your phone rings after this webinar, and you pick it up and it's an unknown number, and the other person on the other line goes, “Hey, John. This is Steve. I'm calling from company X, Y and Z. I want to tell you you've won $1 million. Isn't this exciting?”

Are you going to get excited? Are you going to jump up and down from your desk, high-fiving your employees thinking you've just won $1 million? No! Chances are you're going to think about hanging up. You're going to say, “No, no. Not interested,” and you're going to hang up. Why?

Isn't the content of the call amazing? Isn't hearing and learning that you just won $1 million incredible value? Well, the problem is that you have zero trust. The problem is that you believe nothing that was just said. And the more amazing it is, the less you trust it.

It's not only about what you say, it's how you say it and who says it. Credibility and trust before any kind of transaction. You need to establish some level of trust before people can actually buy from you.

You need to understand that trust is being developed on three core levels:

1. on the company level,
2. the product level,
3. and the personal level.

And if you can only establish trust at one level, do it on the personal level because that's the most vivid, active relationship, is you and the person you're selling versus – your product doesn't have a relationship with the person you're selling. Your company, which is this conceptual construct of multiple people and things. A company won't have a relationship. It always comes down to people.

So first, people have to trust you. Then you need to build some trust in your product, whether you're actually going to deliver what you promised.

And you also want to create some trust around your company, right? So why is this company going to be around? Why is this company known for keeping their promises, or fixing their issues. or keeping their words? Why should I believe this company is going to be around for a while? So interacting and getting into a relationship with them is not a waste of time that's going to be worthless in a few months because they're going to be out of business. So you need to build trust and tell people why they should trust your company.

You need to build trust around your product. Why will your product deliver? Why should people trust your product?

And most importantly you need to create trust around you as a person. Why should I want to be business with you? Why should I believe anything you say?

EXPLICIT VS IMPLICIT

And you can do that explicitly and implicitly. And implicit is always better. Like you can always tell them about things that will make them think, “Oh, this person is trustworthy,” versus saying outright the words, “You should trust me.” Right? I'm always distrustful. The first thing I think when somebody is like, “You should really trust me,” is, “Oh, my God. I will never trust this person.” That's the most obvious thing to think.

So you want to be able to say things like, “Hey, here are the five amazing companies that have bought our product and here's the value they're getting and here's what they're saying about us. Hey, here's my background, here's my personal story, here's the companies that I've built, that I've led as a CEO and the results these companies drove and the legacy I've led them to become. Here's my background and story. Here's where I'm coming from. Here's where I am today. Here's where I'm going next.”

And you want to speak in a way that is authentic so people feel the congruency of your words so every word actually hits and people start believing you and trusting you. And a big benefit that you have as a CEO of a company is that the title alone comes with a lot of trust, right? The title CEO alone comes with a massive bag of goodies, and one of them is trust. People immediately assume you're important. People immediately assume they can trust you a lot more than your sales people or anybody else in your organization. So if you come into that relationship with all these like, you're already coming into this relationship with a lot more trust than normally people would have. And you want to make sure you're taking advantage of that.

SELL BENEFITS (NOT FEATURES)

Here's a big one about sales. You always – no matter what you do, product, service, I don't care what it is that you're selling – you always sell value. Nobody cares about your features. Nobody cares about how you've built what you've built, the functionality, the features, the buttons, the things. Nobody cares about the things that you're involved with all day long.

All people care about is what is in it for me. What have you done for me lately? What is this going to do for me, for my life?  How is this solving my problems? How is this making my life better? How is this making me more money or saving me money? Like why should I care?

And you have to focus on talking about value versus features. You have to talk about benefits versus functionality. And we all, we all forget this. It doesn't matter how amazing you are as a CEO. It doesn't matter how professional you are as a salesperson. Sooner or later you'll get so self-involved with your product, you're so focused on the features and functionalities and the bolts and bits and little pieces of how everything works that you're going to start talking about these things a lot more than you should be translating these things into value.

It doesn't matter that you're product has X, Y, and Z functionalities. The question is what kind of value does that drive to the other person and why should they care? Is this going to make them more money or save them time? Is this going to make them look good in front of their boss? Or, is this going to save them embarrassment? What is the core value that you could deliver with your product? Only talk about that.

Talk about the value you create. And then later one, as a follow up, you can talk about the vehicle that delivers that value, which in technical products, might be the features and functionalities of your product and the technical background. But the features and functionalities are always the deliverers of value. What people really care first and foremost about is what's in it for me? What is going to be the value of what you're trying to sell me for my life, right? Always sell value. Always do value-based sales. Never do features, functionality-based sales.

MANAGING OBJECTIONS

The next basic thing you need to know, understand, and master if you're a CEO in sales is the art of managing objections. There is no such thing as no objection sales. If you can pitch somebody, and they just say, “Yes,” and they buy – the most scary prospects for me are the ones that buy without objections. The most scary people that I try to hire for my company are the ones that want to start immediately without having any critical questions. The most scary potential investors are the ones that are immediately talk about investing without having any challenging objections.

Objections mean somebody is real. Objections mean somebody is trying to qualify ifhis is a good fit. Objections mean somebody operates in the real world with real constraints. I like these people. These people actually are the reason I exist. If people just bought left and right and had no objections, challenges and critical questions to ask, there would be no need to do sales anyway. Everybody would just buy. You wouldn't have to sell anything ever.

So objections are a good thing. You shouldn't hide or run from them or be annoyed or inconvenienced by them. You need to learn to manage them, anticipate and then manage. Hard preparation, easy fight.

BE PREPARED

So here's what you need to do. You should never compute an answer to an objection on the fly and in real time. What that means is if you're selling it doesn't to employees, to investors, to the press, to customers, you're going to get similar questions more often than not. 80% of the time, people want to have very similar objections and questions. There's going to be the, “We don't have any time. This is too expensive, what about security risks?”

Like there's going to be a set of questions, five, ten, 15, 20 questions that you hear again and again and again and again and again. And what surprises me is that people are surprised of hearing these things again and again and again. You know what? The more they hear them, the more annoyed they are that they have to deal with them. How stupid is that?

How about preparing for them and being excited when somebody has that objection because you're prepared to answer it effectively,and you know how to actually answer it in a way that drives your agenda forward and helps them, and helps you move the deal forward.

So what you need to do is once you know what the top five, ten, 15 objections are that you get all the time, sit down, you write these in a piece of paper or a document and you think about an answer that's effective, that only needs one or two sentences, no paragraph, no pages. You want to answer any objection as concise and precise as possible, one or two sentences.

You know what the secret is? It's not even that much about like how amazing is the answer. It's even more about – it's not so much how you answer it, or what you say when answer,but how you're answering it. Whenever you're able to

• answer an objection in one or two sentences, and
• keep eye contact, and
• keep your level of energy and focus and clarity,

what it does is it doesn't just communicate the content of what you're saying, it also – the underlying message to the other party is, “Wow, this guy seems to not be rattled at all by this objection. This person seems to know exactly how to deal with it. This person seems to have a very high a level of clarity on how to manage that objection.”

The underlying message?

You're an expert. You know what you're doing, you've done it before.

That makes people comfortable, and comfort is - more than anything else - what people are looking for when they're bringing up objections. They don't just want to hear you answer and believe it. They want to feel like you are a pro, you've dealt with this before, they're in good hands.

So hard preparation, easy fight, you learn how to embrace objections, manage them, and use them as a tool to sell more effectively.

ASK FOR THE CLOSE

All right. Now the last of the sales basics for CEOs is the most surprising one. Duh, you have to ask for the close. Every conversation, every communication with somebody, needs to end with an ask for a close. Wow, Steli, you know, this is amazing. I'm so glad I enjoyed this webinar. I've never heard of this before. This is such a groundbreaking concept. Right? This sounds like the most stupid, obvious thing to say, but how is it that every single day I hear sales calls, I participate in sales conversations, where the end is the weakest part of the conversation and the CEO is not going for it? Again, looping that back to the fear of rejection, because they're afraid of hearing a no instead of embracing it.

Ask for the close:

• Hey, are we in business yet?
• Hey, what will it take for you and us to get into business?
• Hey, what would it take for you, now that we've figured out that this is a good fit for you, now that it seems like we're really aligned and I was able to answer all your critical questions to your satisfaction hopefully, I'm curious, what stands in the way of us getting into business?
• What needs to happen for you to become a customer of our solution?
• What needs to happen for you to decide to join our team?

Like whatever it is, go for the close. And you know what? More often than not, you're going to get a no, or not yet. That's awesome. Embrace it. Anticipate it. It's a good thing.

What's the most powerful thing you can do when somebody tells you no?

Don't be rattled by it. Keep your smile. Keep your energy and composure. Show the other person that that doesn't affect you, that you anticipated that, and that it's fine for them to not quite be there yet now, but you're going to help them get there. Right?

That's when you come into the conversation, the sales conversation, from a point of friendly strength. Right? You're very friendly to them, but you're also, there's an underlying strength, like a parent interacting with a child that's really upset about something, or throws a tantrum, is coming from a place of knowing, showing the other party, “You know what? I've dealt with this situation before. I know you're not quite there yet. And that's okay. I'm going to help you and guide you through the process until you feel comfortable to make a buying decision.”

Nothing is more powerful than being okay with somebody saying no, and still keeping the conversation moving forward and focusing on servicing them into giving them everything they need to buy your product.

But you have to ask for the close to get the no. You have to ask for the close to get a close. You have to ask for the close to get to a result, a yes or no. You have to make a throw to make a point. You have to take a chance.

Too many times at the end of a conversation, a CEO or a salesperson will not actually really go for it. They will go, “Well, this was a great conversation. I'm really happy about it. Well, let's stay in touch and see how this is going to develop. And then let us know if you have any more questions, and we would love for you guys to buy our product. All right, bye.” Boom. What kind of a shitty close is this?

How about, “Hey, how was this call? Are you happy with all the answers? Are you ready to get in business with us?” Right? “Are you ready to go? Are you ready to rock and roll?”

Ask people for the close to get to a result. Yes or no doesn't matter. A no could be a not yet.

Even if it's a definite no, and there's a real good reason for why they'll never buy your product, you better want to know about it right now than wait for it for weeks. “Oh, are they going to buy or not? I don't know. We're still looking into the account every day and hoping they're going to upgrade or purchase themselves.” That's weak sauce, right? You have to go for it and ask for the close every single time.

The close might be, “Buy our product.” The close might be, “Let's schedule that next meeting.” The close might be, “Introduce me to somebody important.” But you have to ask for it. You can't get what you want if you don't ask for it. Right?

FOLLOWING UP

All right. So let's go to the next one. Fortune is in the follow up, and that's really the last step of the Pitchology 101, the Hustling 101, Sales 101 for CEOs, is you know, you know you have to deal with rejection. You have to go out there and pitch people and communicate in a result driven way. You have to qualify them and ask lots of questions to have a real understanding. You have to actually sell in a value focused way. You have to manage objections, and then you have to go for the close. And you know, more often than not, the transaction will not end until you have to do a little bit of follow up. And follow up is really where the fortune is. Follow up is where winning actually happens because nine out of ten times, everybody else will not follow up when a deal falls through.

So here's what happens. You have a sales conversation, you have a meeting, you have a recruiting call, you have an investor meeting or whatever it is, and it goes really well. And then they say, “Hey, let's schedule another call to talk some more,” and then send them an email to schedule the call and crickets, silence. You don't hear from them back.

So you send another email. You don't hear from them back. You wait a little longer, you send another email. You don't hear back. You call, you leave a voice mail. You don't hear back.

At that point, you start assuming, “I've been rejected. They hate me. They probably think I'm horrible and stupid. Oh, my God, I'm going to feel really shitty about this. I don't want to be meeting and keep getting rejected by their silence. So I'm just going to stop and call this a 'loss.'” It's the stupidest idea and the stupidest strategy you could ever apply.

When you have been in a positive interaction with somebody and they fall off the track and they don't communicate with you, you know how many times you should follow up?

Indefinitely! Forever.

You should never stop following up until you get to a result. Again, looping back, result driven communication. Silence is not a result. A no is a result. A yes is a result. But silence isn't.

So here's my simple philosophy. I always follow up indefinitely. I keep following up forever until I hear back. When somebody tells me, “Hey, fuck off dude. I really don't want to hear anything about this anymore,” I'll stop. I totally will stop. But until I hear back, I will never ever stop following up.

You know how many deals we closed, how many investors we got, how many things we've moved forward just by being the only ones that kept following up? A lot more times than you could ever imagine.

I'll give you a quick example, a story that I tell oftentimes. An investor, somebody that's so famous, all of you have used his product, the product that he developed and made billions with I can say with certitude, we got a warm introduction to that investor. Once we were fund raising, that guy replies and says, “Yes, I'm interested. I want to meet up with you guys.” We get all excited, high-five each other. We send an email with some times and dates to meet. Silence. We send another email, silence. We send another email, silence.

You know how many follow ups it took to hear back from him? 48 fucking follow ups, 48 follow ups, where he was totally silent. You know what, when we follow up, we weren't needy about it. I was referring back to the original emails. “Hey, you said 'yes'. What's up? I've followed up with you 12 times. That's not cool. Really, it would be – I really appreciate it if you” – like no!

Every single email, I was clear and to the point, short, precise and concise:

“Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. Here's a little tidbit of good news about our company. How about a quick call on Tuesday or Thursday at this or this time?”

I send another follow up:

“Hey, how about we should try to meet on Wednesday or Saturday.” Nothing.

Another follow up: “Hey, you know, here's another cool news. We just hit this milestone. Would it be possible to meet this week, either this time or that time?”

I just kept following up, professional, clear cut, one or two sentences, precise. After 48 follow ups, the guy replies and says, “Oh, my God. I'm so glad you kept following up. I'm so sorry. I suck. We had this big crisis. I had to fly around the world. I had to do this and that. Yes, can you come tomorrow to my office at 11 a.m.” We went there. We closed the deal. We got the investment.

That's how you win. Follow up when nobody else is following up, because everybody feels rejected and needy and doesn't want to be inconveniencing somebody. This is business. When you're in a relationship with somebody and you interacted with them and they give you positive feedback and said, “Yes, let's move forward,” they've given you permission to follow up. And it's not just rude to follow up. It's rude to be silent. Don't assume people are rejecting you. Assume people are busy. People have other things to do than to answer you. Something came up so keep follow up until you hear from them.

If you only do one follow thing as a CEO is instilling a culture of follow up in your organization, and you have to go first. Lead by example. Show your employees, your team, your investors that you always follow up and follow through to get shit done. Right?

PLAY THE CEO-CARD

All right. A last little tidbit on the sales side, pulling the CEO card. Like being – just by having the title of CEO, deals will happen faster and better because people assume a lot of stuff with, “Oh, the CEO has stepped in to talk to us.” Right? You could give a junior salesperson the CEO title, and that person will probably close more deals next week just because they come into a conversation with like, “Oh, this is the CEO of our company.”

People assume importance, people assume authority, people assume intelligence, all kinds of amazing shit with the title CEO. So just by having that title, just by giving yourself the title of CEO of your two-person company, right, I'm the chairman and CEO, just by that, people will take you more seriously, people will listen to you more carefully, and people will resonate and respond to your message a lot more powerfully.

So you have to help your team. If you have a sales team already or team that sells, that goes out there, you have to get down and dirty. You have to step in and help your team close deals especially the important ones. Help step into your HR recruiting team to hire people. Step into, you know, the industry and fund raising side. You have to be in the front lines using your title, and using the authority and the magic and the unicorn sprinkling, all the cool goodies that come with that title to get shit done and make transactions happen. So support your team and utilize that title to make stuff happen.

And then one quick other tip is that one of the more core important things about the CEO title is that people assume that you are busy, that you are important. Being busy and important assumes that you don't have time to waste. So when you go into sales conversations, one easy hack to make the other person really feel implicitly that you're important is to have time constraints. If you go into sales calls as a CEO and you take two hours for like a $100 a month deal, you know what the other person will think? Even if they appreciate that you take all the time in the world for them, they will assume you're not important. They will assume you have nothing better to do than to take two hours to close a $19.99 monthly subscription deal with them, all right?

So here's a simple hack. As a CEO, everything you do should have a short and precise time line. You do 15-minute sales calls. You don't do one-hour sales calls. You come into the conversations with having real time constraints. “Hey, my name is Steli. I'm the CEO of Close.io. I'm super excited to talk to you today. I'm going to highlight to be respectful of your time that I'm going to have another call in about 15 minutes. My day-to-day is a little crazy. I apologize for that, but I think that if we both focus, we're going to be able to accomplish our objectives and get really a lot of things done. Why don't you start and tell me the three things that you want to focus on? And then we'll go ahead, and we'll try to make it happen.” Right?

Just by saying, “Hey, I have a real time constraint. I have another call in 15 minutes or 30 minutes, but I think that amount of time, if we focus, will help us get everything done,” just by that and having that kind of energy of like, “I need to get you done. I don't have time to babble on for or talk about the weather and everything. I'm here. I'm focused. I'm going to give you all my attention. Then I have to move on to something else,” just by doing that, you're going to have real impact, and you're going to implicitly communicate to the other party that you're important and busy.

And people love to buy from people that are busy and that are important. Right? It makes them feel comfortable. It makes them feel like this is somebody that's important for a reason. Probably they're very intelligent and successful. So doing business with them is probably going to be a good idea. Right? Use that. 

So the pitch went great.

You took your stakeholders through a glittering presentation on the power of content marketing.

You unleashed your ultra-compelling content marketing statistics.

You explained. You showcased. You killed it.

And now, exhausted but floating on a cloud of inspiration and light, you turn it over to your audience and ask, “So, do you have any questions?” And then everything goes horribly wrong.

Has this happened to you?

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how compelling your stats are or how many microsites Pepsi created or what tools you can use to aggregate tweets. Sometimes you bump right into a hardcore philosophical objection…a big one. In this two-part post, we’re going to look at some of the most common objections to content marketing and how to navigate through them with some solid responses.

See if you’ve heard any of these before.

“People don’t want to read content about our boring industry.”

Let’s say you’re a gravel company or a consulting firm who provides research on paint drying speeds. In all seriousness, your execs turn to you and say, “Hey, look, we’re boring. No one wants more content about this kind of stuff!”

What do you say to that? Start with this:

• Explain that it’s not about them, it’s about addressing the pain points of the audience base. Together you’ll have to find out what those needs are.
• Walk them through the need to shift their focus from only talking about solutions to painting a picture of the solutions-space.

Action item: Map out an audience segmentation chart or needs analysis to show just what kind of value they can provide in terms of content.

“It’s too early in the content marketing game to establish value or ROI.”

Here’s an objection you’ll probably get from the CFO or other decision-makers who love financial acronyms. They’re saying, “This is too new, how are we going to measure this?”

Thankfully, this one is a relief to explain and really quite simple.

• First, reinforce the fact that the ingredients of content marketing aren’t new and that ROI and analytics have long been established for what you’re recommending.
• Second, explain that this is more like a slow dance and that obtaining top-of-mind awareness is a nurturing process.
• Third, put the burden back on them to clearly define their goals. Who cares about the details if the goals are being met?

Action item: Show off some Google Analytics reports or examples of how other companies report, and explain how you measure success in numeric and non-numeric forms.

“We don’t have the staff for this.”

Sometimes there will be questions on how current staff will be able to take on a newer venture like content marketing. And while 75% of your future content marketing team might be in the building already, odds are the team as it stands now is not currently prepared to roll out such sweeping changes right away.

Answer these objections with:

Overcoming Objections to Content Marketing

• “We’ll start small, with a pilot program to prove its effectiveness. As we evaluate the results, we can determine where to spend our energy for maximum results.”
• “Part of the investment we’d like to make involves working with some external partners who have expertise in implementing these types of plans in organizations.”
• “At the beginning, we’ll rely a bit more heavily on qualified freelance help and curated content as well.”

Action item: Internal experts are some of the best sources for content and content ideas. Show how you can work across teams to start creating content that resonates with buyers.

In my next post, we’ll look at a few other great objections including some popular ones about outsourcing content, social media presence, and the big one… cost.

In complex B2B sales, research shows that more and more decision makers are needed to make the sale. The recent CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization report showed that 76% of B2B deals involved three or more decision makers. Thirteen percent had six or more.

This can be seen as a challenge or an opportunity for a salesperson. Sales conversations with multiple buyers can work for you or against you. Here are a couple of scenarios to consider:

Your Thinking is Too Small

Multiple buyers work against you if you’re aligning your solution with too small of a problem. If you haven’t uncovered the largest business problem in your discovery process, then you will have an uphill battle trying to get buy-in from executives from different departments.

Your Buyer is Thinking Too Small

As a salesperson, multiple buyers can work in your favor if your buyer is limiting him or herself to a small solution that won’t fix the larger business problem. Bringing in others from the company can help draw the critical links needed to steer the conversation towards solving that issue with the largest business impact.

Some sellers rejoice when there are multiple buyers in the room because it avoids them being put in the vendor box. (Oh, you sell software? Speak to the IT department). Others realize that multiple decision makers may slow the sales cycle and demand more work on the sales person.
No matter how many decision makers are in your sales conversation, you need to create a common language that drives consistency in front of the customer. Think of this common language as a currency of value.

Let’s say I’m selling a solution that addresses three major problems along the customer pain chain. There’s a user-level concern, a manager-level concern and an executive-level concern. The good news is my solution is very customer-centric and offers value at each one of these levels. However, the challenge is that I have to make sure I acknowledge these different concerns throughout my sales process. I need to adjust my conversation buyer to buyer to buyer, in a way that speaks to the positive business outcomes each one is trying to achieve.

In order to close opportunities with multiple decision makers, you need a common currency of value that ensures everyone is “heard” throughout the sales process. With each buyer, you need to ensure you alleviate the Seller Deficit Disorder by demonstrating you are listening to and understanding their business pains. You can’t assume the first person you talked to did the selling for you. You have to leverage your value currency throughout your sales conversations.

What’s the Currency?

Your currency is the positive business outcomes (PBOs), the required capabilities and the metrics that you use to align your solution with your buyer needs. These areas are great currency in the eyes of the customer. They focus the buyer and you as the seller, on the problem you’re trying to solve.

PBOs are business oriented. Required capabilities are technical in nature. Metrics tend to have a higher-level focus. They all morph and become even more pervasive the higher you go up in the organization. In my sales conversations, they help me execute the language of the customer.

When you move through multiple decision makers in your buying organization, you need to determine the PBOS, the required capabilities, and the metrics that are important to each buyer. Approach each decision maker as a new discovery opportunity. Are the PBOs, required capabilities, and metrics others indicated as important just as important to this particular decision maker? If not, you need to determine and understand the discrepancy.

Use these three key components of the sales conversation as the common value currency that helps you maneuver through multiple decision makers. They’ll keep you focused on buyer needs and on aligning your solution with high business value.

I know the research continually shows that multiple decision makers are factoring into the B2B sales process more and more. However, I believe they’ve always been there, whether you as the salesperson had to deal with them or not.

Bottom line: I’d be worried if there was only one decision maker in my deal. If there is, you’re likely minimizing the value capability inside the account opportunity.

When selling and marketing your services and your business, it might feel like you're walking a narrow line between being perceived as a trusted advisor and a pushy, even desperate, salesperson. One misstep—even if that misstep was an accident—can push you over the line. And before you know it, there goes the sale.

What can you do? You're excited about your services, and you want to help people. But if you push too hard, buyers will walk. That medium ground involves doing things that assure prospects you can be trusted and "that you have their best interests at heart," says Colleen Stanley in her article Are You a Trusted Advisor or a Typical Salesperson?

Two things on the top of her list are seeking the truth and telling the truth. Seeking the truth involves finding the root of the buyer's problem. You must ask questions and really listen to what the buyer says. Don't wait for cues to jump in and give your spiel. Uncover their true needs, then offer a solution.

If it turns out you don't have the expertise or resources to help solve their problem, tell them so.

ANNUITAS recently launched a survey that focused on the Demand Generation function within large B2B enterprise organizations.  While the research is still ongoing there have been some key findings in the area of content marketing that are quite revealing.

When respondents were asked, “Do you have a content strategy?” 72.7% responded with yes.  While it would seem like good news to see that almost three in four of B2B Enterprises have a content strategy, some of the responses to other content focused questions leaves one wondering on how marketers define strategy.  According to the results of the study:

-          Only 41% of respondents align their content to the buyers pain points and challenges

-          Only 29.1% create specific content for each stage of the buyers journey

-          While 78.2% use nurturing as part of their Demand Generation Strategy only 38% of these respondents create nurture specific content

-          Only 14.6% of respondents track the performance of their content offers

There seems to be quite the disconnect between what marketers are saying  “we have a content strategy” and what they are actually doing. So where is the disconnect?

I believe there are several forces at play as to why marketers are saying one thing, but in reality, practicing another.

Marketers Have Traditionally And Still Do Focus on Tactics-

Each and every week there are reports, webinars and articles written on how to execute an effective “fill in the blank” campaign.  Marketers are looking for insights on email campaigns, social campaigns, telemarketing campaigns, etc.  These are all tactics i.e. vehicles to deliver content.  The reason they fail is they do not take into account the purchase cycle of the buyer, which moves the thought process to a programmatic approach, and not a series of disconnected tactics.   When designing your next demand generation program, don’t think about the tactics, think about the content touch points that can be developed to establish a dialogue with the buyer, then determine the vehicles that will be used to deliver the content.

Demand Generation Marketers Don’t Really Know Their Buyers- 

According to the survey’s early returns, only 36.4% of respondents stated that their Demand Generation teams are responsible for the development of buyer personas.  In order to create effective demand that Engages, Nurtures and Converts the buyer through the buying process, it is necessary for buyer insights to be the starting point of the strategy.  This includes knowing their path to purchase, their challenges and pain points among other things.  Product marketing and corporate marketing do not get to this level of detail, so the Demand Generation team must.  Not having this kind of insight makes it impossible for Demand Generation teams to have the deep knowledge of their buyer – which is necessary for the development of content. Marketers Believe Activity = Value

Both the CMI Content Study launched earlier this year and the ANNUITAS study show an overwhelming number of companies will continue to spend money and put more of their organizational energy behind the creation of content.  However, this increased funding and work to create content is not having the intended impact. Note only 9% of marketers in the CMI Content Survey say they are “Very Effective” with their content. Why?  Because working harder and simply doing more does not equate to improved results.  This is evidenced by the multiple studies that show that up to 70% of all marketing generated content goes unused.

As B2B Demand Generation and content marketing continues to evolve, it is vital that marketers understand what it means to take a strategic approach.  Right now, the responses don’t add up and simply saying there is a strategy does not mean there is one.

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidalgo CEO and Principal, ANNUITAS

Free resources to make your job easier

You know that creating brilliant content is key to driving traffic to your website. Without valuable content that engages your audience, writing blogs and posting to social media becomes a lot like throwing paint against the wall and hoping it sticks. You put something out in cyberspace multiple times a week and hope that your audience is reading it and becoming inspired enough to fill out a form or inquire about your product.

Deep down, though, you realize this “strategy” is not effective. You know you need to publish content in the form of blog posts, infographics, videos or checklists that your audience craves. Providing content your consumers want to absorb is the best way to drive traffic to your site, generate leads and, ultimately, increase sales.

For many companies, though, taking the time to develop a well-planned content calendar that addresses the right keyword phrases and resonates with specific buyer personas is a nice dream instead of a daily reality. Too many companies are too short-staffed or lack expert the content creators necessary to develop a comprehensive content marketing plan to maximize SEO and increase website conversion rates.

Fortunately for these companies, several free tools exist that make content creation easy and effective for your organization. Whether you are looking to create engaging blog posts, informative infographics or organized and shareable presentations, these resources can help you maximize your in-house resources to produce the engaging content you desire for your website or social media platforms.

Check out this list of free tools designed to help make it easier for you to design and post effective and valuable online content.

Tools For Curating Content

A major challenge in developing strong online content is knowing what to talk about. Utilizing content curation tools helps you pay attention to what your customers are reading about and sharing online so that you can provide the same type of information that will get them reading about and sharing your content (which helps increase SEO and, hopefully, conversion rates).

• Feedly Sites like Feedly aggregate blog content in an RSS feed so that you can stay up-to-date on the topics that matter to you (and to your customers) to know which hot topics you should be posting about. This site is organized graphically, making is easy to find the topics you find most relevant.
• The Tweeted Times This Twitter app compiles news in your Twitter stream and ranks it by popularity among your friends. The app lets you create customized newspapers on any topic you find interesting, so you can monitor updates specific to your business or industry. Because it updates in real time, you always know what is the most up-to-date information being shared online.
• List.ly This online tool helps organizations curate, crowdsource, and engage readers through a live list embedded directly into blog posts. Among other features, this tool allows you to poll those already reading your blog to learn just what it is they like most about your blog and want to see more of.

You can even use social media sites like HootSuite and Pinterest to pay attention to what your users are talking about online. Set up streams with designated keywords within HootSuite to monitor conversations on certain topics or search boards in Pinterest to see what types of visual content your customers find most engaging. This will help direct you in the types of content your marketing team should be creating for your company.

Tools for Creating Content

Now that you know what your audience wants to know about, it is important to generate content that speaks to them. Whether you want to use text or graphics to best communicate your message, these tools can assist you in presenting your information in a way that makes sense to your readers.

• Canva Does your audience crave infographics? Do you find them time consuming and difficult to produce? Websites like Canva allow you to produce your own graphics using a supply of templates and images sourced for free. With a step-by-step tutorial and an intuitive platform, just about anyone on your team can create visual images that convey the desired message to your audience.
• SlideShare Anyone who has ever sat in on a lecture, seminar or other presentation knows how effective slide-based presentations can be at conveying a message. If you have a lot of information to share on a certain topic that would best be communicated with graphics and text, consider using SlideShare. This site makes it easy to crete and share presentations on across the web and on social media platforms.
• ThingLink The fun site enables you to upload and image and add icons from ThingLink’s library to create your own custom interactive image, video or message. Your readers can interact with these icons that you are able to embed into your blog post or website. You can also share the image organically or through social channels like Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr.

Tools for Distributing Content

All this content is great, but it is meaningless if you don’t share it with your users. These tools help you distribute your message to the people who care most about what you are talking about.

• HootSuite We mentioned it briefly before as a way to monitor conversations, but HootSuite also helps you participate in the conversation as well. This site allows you to manage all of your social media accounts, track mentions, respond to fan interaction, and schedule posts all within the app. Because you can schedule one post to multiple platforms, it requires less time to distribute your content across multiple channels. And we all love efficient solutions, right?
• MailChimp If you want to reach your customers directly through their inbox, email services like MailChimp provide easy-to-use platforms to create and send an email to a designated contact list. A variety of templates and designs makes it easy to plug in your information, schedule your mailing and track results from your customer database.
• Click to Tweet You’ve written great content, published it on your blog and posted it to your social media profiles. But how do you get others to talk about your content? using services like Click to Tweet make it easy to provide bite-sized bits of content from your larger posts that readers can immediately post on their own Twitter account with just one click. Because you can customize the tweet, you can include a link back to your site or your Twitter handle to gain additional followers and shares.

Content is key for successful web-based marketing. But you don’t have to be an expert or have a huge marketing team to have a successful online marketing plan. With these free and fun resources, your team can create engaging visual and text-based content that appeals to your audience and is easily shareable for increased SEO and SERP results.

Tell us, what are some of your favorite online tools for content curation, creation and distribution?

LinkedIn is the social network for businesses and business professionals. It is the best way to connect with others, source leads, find jobs, and network online.

Most businesses can greatly benefit from having a presence on LinkedIn. In fact, all 500 of the Fortune500 businesses have established a presence on LinkedIn.

As of February 2014, there are over 3 million company pages on LinkedIn.

As with any social channel, just setting up a page for your business is not enough. Engagement is a key factor; you get back what you put into it.

One surefire way to get the most out of LinkedIn for your business is to optimize your business page. Here are 4 crucial features every business should have on their LinkedIn page:

1/ Post Informative and Engaging Content Often

Just setting up a page won’t get the attention of other LinkedIn users. However, what you post is very important.

Just as with all social media channels, your LinkedIn posts should not all be related to sales.

Even though LinkedIn is for professionals, it is still social in nature and the types of updates that will get the most attention are informative and engaging.

One of LinkedIn’s newest features gives you the ability to target posts to a specific audience. Post with the intent of establishing yourself as an authority in your industry or area of expertise. Post often and also engage with other pages and groups.

There are over 2 million LinkedIn Groups. Find groups that are in your niche or your community.

If there isn’t one, then create it.

An excellent example of a company offering thought leadership in their LinkedIn engagement is ADP. LinkedIn highlights ADP in a case study which shows how the company displays its expertise in human resources, employee benefits, talent management, business processing outsourcing, time management and payroll.

The results of their efforts lead to doubling their followers to 85,000 and LinkedIn is the number-one social reference for their website.

2/ Optimize Your Page with Keywords

Using keyword rich content on your LinkedIn page is advised for a few different reasons. Descriptive content lets readers know what you do.

However, those keywords also tell LinkedIn’s search feature what your page is about so that it will return your company page in the results for relevant searches made by users. Consequently, it also helps get your LinkedIn company page ranked in the search engines for those keywords.

Just as with any search engine optimization effort today, it does not mean saturating your page with a list of keywords, but rather using those relevant keywords to describe what your company does, your products, and services.

LinkedIn features a case study on Service Brands that illustrates how they increased brand awareness with their company LinkedIn page.

Adding relevant keywords to their page and their status updates not only increased their LinkedIn followers by 83%, but also attracted new target customers and leads while improving the search engine rankings for their brand.

3/ Enlist Employee Interaction

Employees are 70% more likely to engage with your company updates on LinkedIn. All you really have to do is ask them and send out frequent reminders.

Make it easy for them to copy and share. Interaction from company employees on LinkedIn can amplify the messaging exponentially.

Employees sharing company updates with their own LinkedIn connections not only increases exposure, but can also act as an endorsement.

Word of mouth marketing is one of the best uses of social media for companies.

In addition to enlisting employee interaction, it is important to share LinkedIn’s best practices for maintaining their own professional profiles on LinkedIn.

SalesForce was featured in a LinkedIn case study that exhibited how they met the challenge of engaging followers, increasing event attendance and reaching regional audiences. One of the tactics that helped them achieve their goals was through empowering localized teams to create their own content and then targeting the message to specific regional audiences.

4/ Ask for Reviews and Recommendations

Reviews and recommendations drive social interactions and conversions online more than company advertisements or messaging.

Oddly enough, it is a rather simple concept because most of the time when a company asks for reviews or recommendations from its customers or clients, they respond, and it is usually in a positive way.

Hewlett-Packard is the subject of a LinkedIn case study that shows how activating the recommendations and asking for company reviews helping increase the exposure and create over 2,000 brand advocates in just two weeks.

The Takeaway

If you put forth the effort, LinkedIn can be a valuable asset to your company.

The exposure and connections that your company can gain on LinkedIn can be one of the best assets you have because of the social nature of the channel. When you establish your company as a leader and authority in your area of expertise, region, or industry, people are more likely to do business with you.

According to Entrepreneur.com, “LinkedIn research suggests that members are nearly 50% more likely to purchase from a company they’ve interacted with on LinkedIn, and 80% say they want to connect with companies on the platform.”

Full disclaimer, I’m an extreme extrovert. If you want to create one from scratch, to me, it’s easy — put them on stage at age two or three, tapping or singing or whatever it is to get them out there before a child learns to be seen and not heard. But, as much as I’m an extrovert, I’ve had to learn over the years how to train hundreds of all sorts of personality types, from age 12 to 65, from the States to Spain, to speak in public and to sell themselves, their products, services and their brands. The inspiration for this piece comes from them and it comes from the people I’ve met from various startups over the years.

Recently, at one of those startup bootcamp conferences, a woman said some wise words: “As a founder you have to be a salesperson in the first second.” Which, since the majority of startups are coming from the shyer, tech world, discomfort with sales can seem like just another hurdle in the track of long-distance entrepreneurship.

As she continued, “I don’t think anyone wants to be a sales person, but there are some people who are natural salespeople.” And we assume introverts aren’t them. I disagree. I know many introverts who cringe at the idea of sales, but who, when given the chance, become some of the best sales folks you’ll meet. So today I embark to tell the introverts of the world why they too can be sales rockstars and offer a few tricks to help along the way.

1. You don’t scream sales.

…and that’s a good thing! Remember Matilda’s used-car selling dad? People are more likely to be open and direct with you, than an intense salesy person cold calling them all the time. And imagine if your customers are introverts. They sure will appreciate your more mellow manner. The more timid tend not to be pushy or obnoxious. People don’t feel like they are being given the hard sell, they feel like they are part of a budding relationship.

2. You’re a great listener.

People don’t want to hear what you have to say, they want to hear what they want you to say. You are a natural at asking insightful questions that get right down to your clients’ needs and then offering a response to those client needs. When you do speak, it’s to parrot back what they said, with something like: “What I’m hearing is that your concern is…” Socratic sales for the win!

3. You hesitate.

Since you are less comfortable cold calling, you’re more likely to qualify your leads and work to build up to the relationship with online contacts, instead of jumping into a day of cold calls. You will really work your sales pipeline until you have exactly the right moment to pick up that phone.

Secrets to Introverted Sales Success

I talked to a shyer friend who, at his last company, was ranked 12 out of 5,000 recruiters. Here’s what he had to say about which personality type makes a true sale star:

Introverts upsell better

“In recruitment, for example extroverts, are much better and generally do better in getting the business in the door, but it’s the introvert and their less flashy personality that keeps the business and grows the account. They usually are seen as more operational and less on trying to sell you their own mother whenever possible.”

Introverts evaluate leads better

“Extroverts try to say what you want to hear and do everything possible to win the business. An introvert approach would be to evaluate whether the business really has a need for his or her services and whether they themselves can really add benefit. When they spot that and genuinely agrees that they can add value the passion comes out, and clients see that.”

5 Tricks, Tools and Tips for How to Sell Better (without changing who you are)

Diversity is crucial to the success of any workplace. And it’s not just demographically, a team made up of different personality types is essential. While you want to excel at sales, you don’t want to change who you are or try to become someone you’re not in the process. Here are some tricks and tools for how to make that sale more easily.

1. Start by talking to strangers

Just don’t take candy from them! Ask people how they are doing when they ring you up at the grocer, look your server in the eye. And even though you’re a homebody, go out and force yourself to have a little fun sometimes. Take baby steps, but take low-pressure social actions like these where you make eye contact and smile to each person.

Focus on developing the contacts you make, less on making new ones. An extrovert can work a room at a networking event, meeting 40 people, but what would she do with that? If you take it slow and meet three people, you are much more likely to have a memorable first meeting and to follow up properly toward a mutually desired action. (Plus, it’s much less exhausting for you this way.)

And work to develop every teeny contact you make, no matter how far they are related to your sales targets. It’s not about how many people, it’s about how many people you know who know other people. Sometimes there’s more power in you following up with that one extrovert who worked that whole room, who can then introduce you to that one other person in the room who could be your perfect contact.

2. Play well with others

Partner with other sales reps. Working as a team means that you will probably service your clients better and you won’t feel alone. Here are some fab collaboration software to help you do just that. Each app comes equipped with Gantt charts, file sharing, and look to improve your team’s productivity and profitability. Either of these three collaboration apps could help you better communicate with your team in order to offer the best service possible, which, in itself, is the best sales.

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Wrike: OutCollaborate

Wrike is well-suited, customizable and scalable for companies from corporations down to freelancers. Wrike’s gold stars go to its real-time activity updates, highly customizable and dynamic Gantt charts,

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Mavenlink: Now take command.

Mavenlink is best built for service-based businesses. It includes all the project management bells and whistles, along with a strong focus on your financial planning and getting paid for these projects.

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Clarizen: The Future of Work.

Clarizen works for teams, ranging from IT departments to even marketing teams. Clarizen includes pre-defined template workflows, integrations with Microsoft Excel and Projects, a social platform that turns “unstructured communication into structured work,” and resource and task tracking and management.

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3. Use the Internet to its full advantage

When you’re reticent to pick up the phone, you want to use all the tools available to you to manage and organize your customer relationship. Specifically a customer relationship manager or CRM is a great way to integrate your various forms of communication — email, social media, notes — not only for yourself but across teams.

Here are some great CRMs to build better client relationships, including what they are best for:

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RelateIQ: Relationship Intelligence

Well, the name says it all for RelateIQ — it’s all about nurturing customer relationships. It measures the amount and quality of interaction across multiple platforms, even suggesting and prioritizing those who you last spoke with and those who you need to touch base with most. And since it’s not who you know but who you know that knows that someone, RelateIQ pulls those Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon across your email, team address books, social networks and more. Because it’s not cold calling if an introduction’s been made.

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Infusionsoft: Small Business Sales and Marketing Software

As its tagline suggests, Infusionsoft allows you to integrate sales seamlessly (or softly), marketing and even e-commerce activities, making it easier for you to make those various points of contact across different relationship-building activities. Infusionsoft actually uses automation of these processes to build better client relationships, by creating a well-honed, automatically triggered system of marketing and sales, allowing you to get in touch with clients always at the right moment.

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Insightly: #1 Small Business CRM

Insightly is the customer relationship manager specifically designed for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses,) between one and 200 staff members. Insightly actually combines a CRM and a project management system, and has the flexibility with which to connect any item — person, business, opportunity, tasks — to another, so everyone on your team can get an overview of sales processes all within sales pipelines.

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4. Do your homework

Sometimes you are going to have to jump in the deep end, but you can still wear your water wings. Before going to an event or making a sales call, do your research. Know who you want to talk to and have an idea of what they want. Surveying and feedback management tools are logical ways to do that.

5. Work with the customers you already have

It doesn’t take as much effort to contact the folks you already know and they can help you find new clients. They can also become the sellers of your product, as brand ambassadors through affiliate programs. We are always encouraging YOU to write reviews — real opinions are often the most powerful. We love this tool to help turn your fans into advocates.

Ambassador: Referral Automation, Made Simple

As its name suggests, Ambassador looks to turn your customers into brand ambassadors, allowing you to create and track referral programs like Refer-A-Friend and customer incentive programs. One of Ambassador’s ambassadors even called it a “major time saver and revenue producer.”

6. Bonus Disney Lesson

In the end, take advice from Dory, and just keep swimming. The busier you are, the harder you work, the more you achieve, the less you’ll notice your nervousness and worry! Just remember, nobody’s perfect, so don’t try to be!

And when all else fails, if you are passionate about your cause, you will find it much more natural to sell.

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Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud (try saying that three times fast) has launched a new visual “Journey Builder” that promises to enable marketers to understand, define, and create coherent, unified customer experiences across Web, social, email, apps, advertising, sales, and service.

That’s a big promise. And it’s available today.

The new software simplifies your view of how people interact with your brand, according to CEO Scott McCorkle.

“The future of marketing is the ‘customer journey,'” McCorkle, who leads the ExactTarget component of Salesforce, said in a statement. “Marketers need to understand the complete journey people have with their brand and how to measure and optimize its impact on their business.”

In addition, Salesforce says that the new software will enable companies to optimize “every point of interaction” on that journey while also measuring the impact of “all customer communications.”

Salesforce plans to deliver on this promise by providing essentially a drag-and-drop graphical user interface for customer interactions, across all your media and channels. Salesforce calls it a “canvas,” which marketers can use to map customer journeys across apps and social and email, building flows and stages through which they hope to bring prospects and existing customers.

The result, McCorkle says, is a complete view of the customer in a visual format.

Journey Builder is available today, but the new features won’t be available until, as Salesforce put it, “Q3 FY2015.” Before you gasp, that translates not to calendar year 2015 but to about November/October of this year.

Pricing will start at $5,000/month for a subscription, with the dollars rising as you send more messages to customers via the system.

At each step of the process, marketers can add triggers for ad campaigns, email messages, or offers in response to events like abandoned shopping carts, completed purchases, or interactions with the brand on mobile or Web. Those triggers aren’t just preset; Salesforce has added predictive analytics to intelligently trigger responses automatically.

It’s not just all pretty pictures, however.

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We’re studying compensation for digital marketing execs.
Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.

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According to Salesforce, the new Journey Builder product includes real-time analytics that help you measure the impact of each interaction, identify best-performing channels, and test variations in customer flow to optimize conversions, downloads, sales, or “loyalty achievements.”

“Everything begins with uncovering the journey of connected customers and how it differs from the funnel you’ve organized around today’s already familiar customers,” Altimeter analyst Brian Solis said in an accompanying statement.

Solutions that manage the marketers’ mountains of data and help them understand their customer better in all the places they touch are getting more and more popular, and more and more necessary as the internet has added hundreds if not millions of channels for customer acquisition and marketing. Beckon recently launched to tie all marketers’ data together, as did Origami. And CertainSource just released a tool for evaluating all your hundreds if not thousands of lead sources.

None of these solutions, however, have built in the capability to influence the data you’re seeing and change your marketing behaviors in response the way Salesforce has.

With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at t... read more »

We have written about social sales relationship building and social sales research. Let’s stop and think for a minute about the most simple form of integrating social into your selling with listening.

It sounds so simple, yet good social listening is an art and science.

Social listening is an art because of nuances you are looking for, and patterns to see.

Social listening is a science because you must have a cohesive plan in place and be methodical for the greatest success. If you approach listening in a haphazard way you will get poor results.

Create some social listening goals. It could be to better learn about the CFOs or Directors of IT whom you sell to. It often is based on specific companies you are following who fit your profile for best target companies as prospects.

Next, put a plan into place.

Do you want to learn about your prospective customer’s world?

First see what social platform they use predominantly. Follow them there.

Example: I just became interested in a company after they visited our website. I found that they are very active on Twitter, so they are now in a list we have of companies of interest. We will be watching what they say and how often they are on. We will look for the successes they will share and any challenges or frustrations they reveal. Eventually we will reach out and engage – but for now, we will simply watch and listen.

At the same time we will see what they post on LinkedIn and elsewhere online.

Do you use alerts to keep tabs on your prospective buyers and existing customers?

Google alerts was the first to send emailed updates on what is happening with key words you’ve selected to monitor.

Now there are bigger and better ways – from tools like GageIn to data tools like Avention we can track new contacts at our prospective customer companies – a key way to grow opportunities.

One of the best posts written about tracking trigger events is from the guy who literally wrote the book about trigger events – read Craig Elias’ post here. I love this simple way of tracking where the existing contacts at your company go when they move on, who replaced them, and who took that person’s place at their previous company. Strategies like these are important and effective.

Ultimately you will want to do more than listening, but even if you just listened to look for new opportunities, your sales team’s revenues would grow.

Take this test – for the next month, put a simple plan in place to listen more socially. Put time blocks in your calendar and work at least 3 times a week, if not five, to intently listen in on what those in the industries you work in are saying and posting.

Make a list of 30 companies to follow – separate out existing clients and prospective clients.

At the end of 30 days – assess. What did you learn? Is it worth more effort?

When thinking of this as a project rather than a lifelong change, it can be easier to learn and people seem more willing to try.

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | View My LinkedIn Profile | twitter |Visit us on google+

The post How To Be Social In Sales – Listening appeared first on Score More Sales.

Ready for another amazing #AWeberHour Twitter chat?

As I mentioned in my last post, we’ve got a fantastic lineup of speakers at our upcoming ASCEND Digital Marketing Summit in October.

To introduce you to these incredible speakers, we’ve organized three special edition #AWeberHour Twitter chats. We’ve already knocked out one amazing chat.

Next up, on Wednesday, August 6, from 2-3 p.m. ET, you’ll hear from five conversion optimization experts who will be sharing ways you can capture more leads using email and landing pages.

You’ll walk away with ideas on how to optimize your lead generation efforts and maximize the opportunity of capturing new leads.

The top chat contributor will receive some AWeber goodies, so be sure to participate!

Our Guest Panelists

Hunter Boyle, @HunterBoyle

Hunter is senior business development manager at AWeber. He develops partnership, affiliate and strategic growth initiatives. As a multichannel marketer, editor and optimization strategist, Hunter draws from 15 years of client-side and agency experience. Prior to joining AWeber, Hunter frequently spoke and led training in many aspects of digital marketing as the content director for Marketing Experiments and the editor/blogger of Internet Marketing Report and What’s Working In Sales Management.

Oli Gardner, @OliGardner

Oli is co-founder of Unbounce. He’s seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet and coined the term “conversion centered design,” authoring the marketing theory behind its seven principles. At Unbounce, he lives in front of a 20-foot whiteboard, mashing up usability, interaction design and landing page optimization to create better conversion experiences. His disdain for marketers that send campaign traffic to their homepage is legendary.

Justine Jordan, @Meladorri

Justine is director of marketing at Litmus. She’s a recovering designer masquerading as a marketer. Once responsible for designing, building, and managing email campaigns for ExactTarget customers, she now leads content marketing, customer education and research initiatives for Litmus. She’s strangely passionate about this email marketing thing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when it’s time to hit the send button.

Brian Massey, @BMassey

Brian is founder of Conversion Sciences. He calls himself a conversion scientist and he has the lab coat to prove it. He is author of the book Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist. Website optimization is the science of finding more online revenue without paying to get more visitors. He authors The Conversion Scientist blog, and has written for ClickZ.com, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and the Content Marketing Institute.

Justin Rondeau, @WhichTestWon

Justin is chief testing evangelist and editor of WhichTestWon. He leads the editorial and training workshops for WhichTestWon, the top weekly publication in conversion optimization. More than 75,000 marketers each month visit WhichTestWon to research its extensive case study library, which features samples and results data for nearly 300 A/B and MVT tests. A trainer with hands-on testing and conversion optimization, Rondeau’s goal is to inspire and educate more marketers to optimize their email campaigns and web sites via testing.

How To Participate

1. Create an account at Twitter.com.
2. Follow @AWeber and our guest experts.
3. Follow the hashtag #AWeberHour using our tchat.io link or in your favorite Twitter application (e.g., Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc.) and be sure to include it in your tweet.

What We’ll Cover

Here’s a preview of the questions we’ll be discussing:

• What’s the biggest optimization challenge facing marketers today?
• Where do the best test ideas come from?
• What are some common landing page mistakes marketers should fix?
• Why do so many struggle with creating a killer value proposition? What tips can help marketers with this?
• What are your top 3 tips for optimizing email opt-in forms?
• In general, what’s the first area of a site you recommend to start optimization testing?
• What’s your favorite test that you’ve run or seen recently, and why?
• What tactics do you recommend for generating traffic and conversions using social media, email marketing and search optimization?

Sign Up for an Email Reminder

Mark your calendar and be sure to get in on the action on August 6 at 2 p.m. EDT. Tweet you there!

Sign up to receive a reminder below.

Commonly, when building a B2B campaign, companies identify the executives involved (or whom they would like to be involved) in the decision making process and build messaging from there, focusing on the challenges facing the vertical and versioning that to the responsibilities of each executive, e.g., the CFO gets the financial spin on how our product or service is best.

Understanding Your B2B Prospects

Uncommonly, a company takes the time to understand their B2B prospects as people, and that can make all the difference in the world. It’s really people who make the decisions, and people can have intertwining, contradictory, personal, and professional needs and preferences. That same financial executive may evaluate your product or service on how it meets the overall challenge, by what she’s heard from friends, and on how this decision is made may affect her evaluation and career, and more.

Let me tell you a story where wading into this B2B prospect mess really paid off.

In 1987 David was a programmer working on mission critical development. One day the computer burped and all the data was lost. The company was instantly out of business, and David was instantly out of a job. But not out of ideas. He immediately began developing the best backup program around and creating a business backing up everyone else’s data.

The company David started, Asigra, is one of the most dynamic companies you’ve never heard of, quietly developing data backup and recovery software whose value has been recently recognized by elite industry analysts. Asigra’s ambition is earned—they want to expand from SMB to the enterprise. A caveat: the enterprise marketplace is home to the well entrenched 500 pound gorillas of the industry.

The B2B Prospects Case Study

To better understand these enterprise decision makers, Asigra engaged them in purposeful conversation or an evolved form of prospect persona research designed to bring clarity to the B2B Prospects. The goals:

• Identify high and low potential prospects.
• Understand their information behavior—how they learn or don’t learn..
• Assemble the information into human form to drive messaging and focus sales and marketing.

Here’s what the decision makers said:

• Data backup is not strategic to the corporation. It is viewed as a cost center and a royal pain in the butt—a low level, time intensive process. However, data recovery is strategic. “I am responsible to the corporation for how quickly, efficiently, and completely I can recover the critical data.”
• About a third of these executives said, “I have an illogical distrust, almost a religious aversion to the word ‘cloud.’ It means I can’t touch my data and I shut down as soon as you say the word.” It’s emotional.
• Asigra must become a known entity—we are not about to trust our critical data to a company we’ve never heard of.

So here’s what Asigra did:

“Recovery Is Everything” became the new tagline, replacing “The Cloud Backup Experts.” The cloud, which blocks out the sun for many executives, was relegated to a feature. And,

• Advanced prospect personas, or personas 2.0, were developed for both prospects and non-prospects, allowing sales and marketing a unified vision and a plan for quickly understanding an inquiries’ purchase potential.
• A year-round prospecting plan was developed including redesigned logo and materials; new and repurposed content and messaging refined to closely align with how executives explained their desire for a data recovery partner whose strategic goals matched their own.

It has bought them a foot in the door with some big players and a funnel of qualified leads.

David summed it up best, “Three words capture all that I have been working on for 27 years.”

MENG is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.

The term sales and marketing alignment is at the top of today’s Business Buzz Words list, as evidenced by the sheer magnitude written on the topic. (A quick search returns over 22 million results. Modify the term slightly and the results become seemingly infinite.)

It’s good news. Most companies are keenly aware that the notorious acrimony between sales and marketing is inhibiting business success. Furthermore, an increasing number of executives are embracing the benefits of bridging this gap – namely, more and better-quality leads, more operational efficiency, and more revenue.

According to a recent MathMarketing study, businesses that enjoy strong sales and marketing alignment are:

• Outgrowing their competitors by 5.4%
• 38% better at closing sales
• Losing 36% fewer customers each year

Rates like that can add up to real competitive advantage and real money … thus the rally cry to “Align!”

But align to what?

It’s a common question posed in business posts and comments. At Act-On, it regularly comes up during webinars and customer calls.

Here’s the answer:

Sales and marketing must align to a single plan that they create together.

It’s a simple, proven concept: Real results come only from real cooperation. The beauty of a single plan is that it forces both sides to put equal skin in the game and take equal responsibility for performance.

Quid pro quo.

If you go back to those 22 million search results, you’ll surely be able to curate multitudes of best practices, step-by-step instructions, and tangential deep dives that can help your teams create a strategic plan. (And I will shamelessly plug our resources at the end of this post.)

Which is precisely why this post is not about the pieces of the plan or the how-to tactics of creating it.

It’s about the pre-work … the “what you need to understand” stuff that comes before the how-to tactical stuff.

So before you jump into the guts of “the plan” (e.g., defining personas, (re)calibrating sales phases, mapping and creating content, assessing tools and technologies, etc.), there are 3 major things you need to be willing to do in order to lay the groundwork for success …

First, Lock Everyone in a Room

Ok, you don’t need to actually lock the door, but this idea is more literal than metaphorical. Get your sales and marketing people in a room. Physically if possible. At the same time. On the same day.

The reason: Neither sales nor marketing can build a plan alone, then sail it across the harbor to eager masses who will cheer and applaud when they behold the pretty new boat. (Remember that acrimony thing? This won’t help.)

So you’ve got to bring everyone together, even if it’s just an assemblage of two; e.g., you (the marketer) and Bob (the salesperson).

It’s exceptionally easy to strategize in a silo and justify the behavior by saying everyone is “too busy” or “wears many hats.” Resist. Shared ideas require shared time, and the risks and rewards of NOT collaborating are too high. As a recent CMO Council report says, closing the sales and marketing gap means teams must partner or perish.

Second, Walk a Mile in the Other Team’s Shoes

The need to be understood is a common denominator we all share. When we feel someone “gets us”, it’s a game changer. It validates our experience in the eyes of the other person. Mutual understanding of what the other side does is fundamental in creating a single sales and marketing plan.

Here are some things each side can do to gain insight into the other’s experience:

• Understand the numbers. Marketing and sales need to understand what the other cares about and is beholden to. For example, how much time does the average sales cycle take, in general and per stage? How many marketing touches does it take for a prospect to become a lead? How many marketing-nurtured leads become sales-qualified? How many qualified leads convert to sales? How many leads does sales need to make their quotas? What percentage of revenue is marketing responsible for?
• Embrace the role of messaging and timing. When it comes to email communications, marketing and sales have very different approaches to effective messaging: marketing-initiated emails tend to be branded and targeted to defined segments, while sales-oriented emails tend to be to-the-point and targeted to individuals. Both serve critical roles depending on where prospects are in the buying journey. It’s imperative to understand – and respect – both types of messages, and use them together optimally, in a mutually agreed-on process.
• Get the inside scoop of what everyone talks about. Learn as much as you can about the types of conversations and talk tracks salespeople and marketers have amongst themselves as well as with prospects/leads/customers. Opportunities include regularly attending each other’s meetings, listening in on live sales calls, and sharing internal communications such as weekly “field notes” and “campaign alerts.” By doing so, each team will better understand how the other side defines customer wins and losses, and ultimately expand their perspective which, by extension, benefits collaboration efforts.

Third, Define the Same Things the Same Way

There’s a saying that goes something like this: If you ask four people the same question, you’ll get five different answers. In order to communicate effectively internally and externally, everyone needs to agree to a common set of business-critical terms and respective definitions.

Here are some to consider:

• Lead. How are “prospects” different from “leads”? What actions and behaviors do leads exhibit? How are they put into the CRM? Who is responsible for this?
• Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL). What actions and behaviors indicate that a lead is ready to be passed to sales? Is there an engagement time frame? A scoring threshold that’s met (if you practice lead scoring)?
• Sales-Accepted Lead (SAL). What’s the review process? If the lead is accepted, who is responsible for passing it to sales? What happens if an MQL is not accepted?
• Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL). What actions need to be taken when an SQL is identified? How does sales manage different types of SQLs? Is there a time frame on the sales-nurturing process? What happens if the sale doesn’t close?
• Contact. When is a contact created? Who creates it?
• Opportunity. How is an opportunity different from an SQL? What are the stages of an opportunity? Where is the information kept about the record, and who is responsible for keeping it/maintaining it?

Go Forth and Align

Sale and marketing alignment takes commitment, dedication, and patience. But the benefits are worth the effort, as articulated by a recent CMO Council study:

“Synchronized go-to-market campaigns is the most-cited advantage, closely followed by consistent, unified messaging; a more strategically focused and empowered sales team; improved acquisition and retention; higher-quality, better-qualified prospects; and better allocation and use of marketing dollars. In addition … shorter, more successful selling cycles; bigger, more valuable and profitable deals; and greater sell-in/sell-through effectiveness.”

I think that about sums it up.

“Stone Zen” by Pixabay public domain pictures.

“Parisian Love Lock” by Allen Skyy, used under a Creative Commons license.

“Mismatched Shoes” by Anne Jacko, used under a Creative Commons license.

“Spade” by iGarou, used under a Creative Commons license.

SALES QUESTION:

"My decision makers let everything go to voicemail. I posted my dilemma on a LinkedIn sales group asking for advice and one person said I should simply call, give my number, leave my first name and say "I have a question for you" and then hang up. What are your thoughts on this type of strategy?"

SalesBuzz Answer:

This is called the Vague Voicemail Strategy and it's very damaging to your reputation and wallet.

Leaving a vague voicemail message isn't going to help you win new business.

When a prospect gets a vague voicemail message, they think it's one of three things:

A client needing help;

A potential new customer;

It's a sales call.

So if they take a chance and make a call back only to find out it's a sales call after all, what do you think happens to your prospects mood? How would YOU feel? Probably pissed, right?

First impressions are everything. Is that how you want your first impression to go down with your new prospect? Me neither.

When I'm making sales calls and get voicemail, it's important to realize that I don't want every prospect to call me back. I only want the prospects that desire a change to call me back. Those are the leads I want to invest my time in.

If you want prospects that desire a change to call YOU back, you'll have to hit their hot buttons.

You should know the top hot buttons your targeted audience has before you call them.

This is knowing how to pick your zebra out of the herd. Know the WHY your best clients are your best clients (the problems they had that your solution solved) and make sure you hit that message when calling a fresh prospect and leaving them a voicemail.

Example:

Hi (Prospects Name), Michael Pedone with SalesBuzz.com. Reason for my call is we help inside sales reps increase voicemail callbacks by an average of 20% by providing them with word-for-word scripts customized to their audience. I'd like to see if what we do would work for you as well. You can reach me at 888-264-0562 Ext. 400 until 3 pm today. Again, its Michael Pedone, SalesBuzz.com at 888-264-0562 Ext. 400. 

And now send an email saying the same thing.

Someone looking for your services pulls out the phone book and starts searching … Oh, no, wait – that was 15 years ago. Today, the buyer who picks up the phone to call is already more than half way to his or her buying decision. And where did they find the information to make such a decision before even hearing your voice? Very often the answer is – online!

But what does that process really look like, and how can you reach people at every stage of the buyer’s journey to move them along to the next?

How the “Unaware” Prospect Researches

The person in the “unaware” stage of the buyer’s journey may have a need for your product or service, but not know that they have an issue or they could be aware of an issue, but not know that there is a solution.

For example, a purchasing manager for a large manufacturer might wish he could reduce cost on parts, but not be aware that there are other options for reducing costs than just getting $.02 off each washer. Your system which optimizes warehouse processes and streamlines ordering might give him more savings than he ever imagined, but he’s not looking for your help because he never dreamed it existed.

This person is not actively looking for your help, so you’ll have to bait him by speaking to what he THINKS he needs. In our purchasing manager example, you might address his inside-the-box question with a blog post such as, “How to negotiate lower fastener prices” or address issues of quality control. Once you get them to the site, you’ll use your blog posts and calls to action to make them aware of their real issue and the fact that solutions are available.

The “Aware” Prospect

The person who begins to sense symptoms of a problem, but has not quite pinpointed the issue is in the aware stage. To reach your aware audience, provide plenty informative content to help them identify their problems and needs – that’s what they’re looking for at this point. You can do this using:

• blog posts
• whitepapers
• check lists
• ebooks

At this stage, keep the body of your information vendor-neutral and strictly educational. “Aware” buyers aren’t ready for a sales message yet. You can increase your chances of attracting the attention of people at this stage by using social media and paid online advertising.

What Someone in the “Consideration” Stage Looks For

Now that your potential buyers has put a name to his problem, he is ready to research solutions. Be there to meet his needs by presenting unbiased suggestions, whether you offer all those solutions or not.

Don’t be afraid of offering some do-it-yourself options, either. Someone who is determined to do it on his own will find the information he needs somewhere. If not on your site, then on someone else’s. If he tries it and realize it’s beyond his ability or he can’t keep it up, who do you think he’ll call for help?

To meet the needs of researches in the consideration stage, supply:

• comparison charts
• webinars
• podcasts

All of which should present help in selecting the tools, solutions and methods to solve the buyer’s problems or fill the need.

Here, too, you should be taking advantage of social media and paid online advertising. At this point, you may have collected the visitor’s email address as he moved from awareness to consideration, so make sure you are nurturing that interest with educational email messages.

What a Buyer Needs In the “Intent” Stage

At this stage, your potential buyer has decided which tools and solutions will best address his needs. Now he just needs to determine which provider to hire or recommend. To this end, he’ll be looking for a way to differentiate suppliers – and not just by price!

Do him (and yourself) a favor and provide a comparison of available vendors and the features (and even pricing) each one offers. Of course, it’s your content, so you can add a little “why you should choose us” section, too! Some businesses have found it helpful to even include a “who should NOT choose us” section. Not only does this weed out companies that might not be a good fit for you, that kind of transparency also builds trust.

People in the intent stage will also use the following to complete their research:

• free trials or samples,
• demos,
• case studies
• vendor or product comparisons.

At this point, a potential buyer may search for reviews of your company. Keep a close eye on your online reputation to make sure that what they find is accurate and positive. Your professional response to reviews (good and bad) can go a long way towards reassuring a prosepct that you are trustworthy.

At this stage, depending on the habits of your buyer, he may be asking around for specific suggestions via social media. Make it a habit to monitor social for mentions, not just of your brand, but of the services or products you offer. When you spot a question, take that as an invitation to reach out directly. For example, a person might tweet out, “I’m looking for a new laptop supplier for our school. Anyone have a recommendation?” If you sell laptops to schools, you just found your next “intent” prospect!

It truly pays to have complete, optimized and active profile wherever your prospects are on social media. A social profile that was carelessly set up and abandoned gives the impression that the company just doesn’t care about the impression they make. When your intent prospects are checking you out, make sure they’ll like what they see.

The “Monitor” Stage?

I propose we add another buyer journey stage here. This person is a customer, but as we know, many customers are, either by nature, or because of pressures from above, always looking for the “latest and greatest” solution for their problems or needs.

To that end, they may be looking for trends in your industry. New tools, advancements, better pricing, etc. How sad it would be if they canceled their contract with you, and when you asked why you learned that it was because they wanted a feature that they didn’t know you offered! By then it might be too late to win them back.

Clearly, they are looking online for this kind of news, so make sure they find YOU. Keep on top of industry news and trends and report on them on your blog, using social media, and in newsletters you send to your existing clients. Of course, you’ll have in-person or telephone meetings as well, in most cases, but it’s still important that they can find what they need exactly when they are looking for it.

We’ve come a long way from cold calls and the Yellow Pages. Make sure your prospects can find you when they look – even if they don’t know what they’re looking for! That’s the power of inbound marketing – and we can help.