Rnordman

As a business owner you’re always on the lookout for ways to improve the value of your business. Have you thought about inbound marketing?  It adds value to areas that most likely already exist inside your company. It’s that extra boost that you’ve been looking for.

Lets take a look at the definition of business value.

Business Value: The intangible value of a business, over and above the value of the land, improvements, fixtures, receivables, and cash. Intangibles may consist of goodwill, franchise value, and proprietary systems and procedures.

Now I’d like to identify some intangibles that inbound marketing can add some “oomph” to.

1. Sales Processes
2. Marketing Processes
3. Removing yourself from the day-to-day
4. Website standing

Time to dive into each!

Make for a more effective sales process

Inbound Marketing allows you to take a hard look into activity that prospects take on your website. Well let me rephrase that, Inbound marketing software allows you to take a hard look into activity that prospects have with your marketing efforts.

Why would you want to start the sales process with a lead that isn’t remotely ready to buy? This is an inefficient use of your time and can cost you the sale. With inbound marketing you can set up lead scoring.  This allows you to measure the amount of engagement a lead has had with your website and marketing. You can add points for things you find value on- downloaded content, opened emails, visits to the pricing pages. And you can subtract points for leads that aren’t a good fit, say they identify themselves as a student and well… you don’t do business with students- no phone call for them.

Now your sales process is connected to your marketing. This makes your sales more targeted.

Marketing Processes with an ROI

The beauty of inbound marketing is that you are able to actually measure your marketing campaigns (again, with the right software or tools).

Gone are the days of sending out mailers blindly with no ROI. Gone are the days of sending out emails blasts and not knowing who clicked what and came back to your website.

Allow yourself to see real ROI with inbound marketing. There are metrics and reports for about every action a lead can take with your online marketing efforts. You can really see what works with your audience and what doesn’t. It’s that simple.

You’re the boss, time to focus on the bigger picture

Inbound marketing is kind of like hitting the autopilot button. Yes you need staff to manage it but once sales and marketing are linked with inbound marketing, you can step out of the equation.

The process is set up and it’s automated.  Your marketing team… markets. Your inbound marketing software notifies your sales team when a lead is qualified for a sales call (lead scoring). Your sales team…sells.

Time to figure out the next steps for your business because growth is just around the corner at this point.

Your Website Can Make Personal Connections

Your website is the first thing people go to when they are looking for solutions or hear about your company. It’s usually the first impression you make on your prospects.

If your website is optimized for inbound marketing it will reflect the buyer’s journey. Your website can then take prospects down a personal path that reflects the reasons why they came to your website in the first place.

Your website should not just be a slab of info. It needs to engage with visitors.

My Bottom line…

Adding value in the right places with inbound marketing can make a real difference for your business. We recommend using HubSpot to implement your inbound marketing efforts. It is a software that allows you to implement, measure and analyze your marketing.

GUEST POST

Image Credit: Clifford Joseph Kozak

Will the entrepreneur who has completely lost focus over something a VC once said please stand up? Good. Now that you’re all standing, let me tell you a secret: You don’t have to go mobile first.

In fact, for some startups, going mobile first will kill you, while going mobile second will let you live long and prosper.

They say: Choose one platform to reach product/market fit

You say: What’s good for Yo wouldn’t work for SalesForce

“I run my business entirely on my phone,” said CEO of SalesForce Marc Benioff earlier this year. “I believe this is the future.” He was making the point that with more and more data being stored in the cloud, desktops will be less of a must.

And while this is true, unlike Yo, SalesForce itself could never have been built mobile-first. You know what would happen if it did: No one would use it.

Why? Because SalesForce — as most SaaS — is for entire companies. And companies are comprised of people, who own different smartphones on different platforms and versions. So companies can’t use tools that are limited to only one platform.

If you want to be a company-tool that’s mobile first, you need to develop for all platforms and all versions, and that’s not an MVP or something for a startup budget.

They say: Keep it simple

You say: Overbuild. Test. Remove. Repeat.

Keep it simple, they say. And they are right. But the thing about “Simple” is that Simple is perfection. Simple is not your starting point, it’s the end result of a long perfection process. You reach perfection by building, measuring, improving or removing.

If you want to reach perfection faster, don’t just build — overbuild! Then measure. Run tests. Measure again. Talk to your customers. Discover which features bring them the most value and which don’t. Then remove the ones that don’t and perfect the ones that do.

If you go mobile first, you’ll never be able to do this fast enough or cost-effectively enough. If you go mobile first, it will take you 10 times longer to reach Simple.

They say: Design, design, design.

You say: Value, value, value.

They’ll tell you that mobile is all about design. They’ll tell you that mobile users won’t give you the time of day. If your design won’t convince them to stay within minutes, seconds even, they’ll leave for good. And they are right.

So the question you must ask yourself is: Can my value proposition be grasped within minutes? If the answer is No, you shouldn’t set yourself up for failure by going mobile first.

Some products require a mindset of delving into details. When a CEO is looking for the perfect solution for an important aspect of their business, like a CRM or a development tasks management tool, they are willing to take some time to explore solutions. They are likely to read comparisons, testimonials and blog posts. Then, once they reach your site, they will want to watch a video, read about features, review the pricing, read case studies. Hell, they might even request a demo.

So while your design better not be ugly, what you really need, more than anything, is to communicate value. This decision making process is completely different from the one that results in installing the Secret app. It’s about richness, not leanness.

They say: Follow the trend

You say: Know Thyself

You need to know who you are and what you want to achieve. Stand in front of the mirror, look yourself in the eyes and answer this question: Is going mobile second a deal breaker for my target users, or just an annoyance? Will it prevent them from using my tool, or will they use it and love it, while they constantly nag me about mobile?

If it’s a deal breaker, find the way to go mobile first.

If it’s a “nice to have,” resist the temptation and focus on building something perfect that brings value. Then, when you have enough users / customers who are devoted to you and you can spare the resources, go mobile to support your service.

Then you’ll really have something that can live long and prosper.

Daria Shualy is Don Draper at daPulse, a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool that turns founders into managers. She’s also former founder and CEO of two e-commerce startups. Reach her @darshu.

GUEST POST

Image Credit: Dreamstuff

While web design is traditionally thought of as an artistic way to show off a brand’s image, its benefits are really much more far-reaching than that. A well-designed website can lend a helping hand to SEO efforts, increase conversion rates, and improve interaction and engagement with site visitors. Thanks to recent improvements and growth in the web design industry, it’s become easier than ever for small businesses and entrepreneurs to design aesthetically-pleasing sites with a high ROI.

While a beautiful website doesn’t necessarily mean a huge uptick in conversions, it can certainly help. Some of the most valuable benefits of having a well-designed website include:

1.) Longer Average Time on Page.

While clicks are good, you’re really looking for visitors who will stay on your site and read your content. This is generally indicative of more engaged readers, who lead to higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates. Well-designed websites encourage people to stay by helping them move from page to page, like an experienced tour guide.

One study showed that design can be more beneficial in some cases if it encourages users to scroll down a page rather than click somewhere else on site, because it is easier for visitors to do so.

2.) Branding.

If you, as a company, are able to attract enthusiastic buyers, you’ve done your job. One way to do this is through high-quality web design which highlights and effectively communicates and strengthens your brand image. Software like Axure and Invision are making it easier than ever to attract these enthusiastic buyers by simplifying web design collaboration.

3.) Consistency.

While your customer wants a quality product or service, deep down they are craving something else. They want consistency. Think about why people buy food at their favorite fast-food joint. They often go because they can count on getting the same flavor and choices every single time. A McDonald’s in Hong Kong will give you the same burger as the McDonald’s in New York City. High quality web design does the same thing; it helps your company establish brand consistency, which is something many customers desire.

Some of the most successful companies in the world as well as top site designers claim they have long seen greater engagement because of consistency in site features such as company logos, “breadcrumbs” and content location on page.

4.) Scalability.

While your site may be effective today, will it still be attractive three years down the road? High quality web design means scalability. If your business grows or styles change, your site should be able to scale and adapt accordingly. Sites designed without great care or attention to detail usually necessitate starting over when major changes occur, due to a lack of scalability and adaptability.

5.) Added Exposure.

If you have truly fantastic web design, you may even find additional exposure through CSS galleries. These are professional design galleries that websites showcase. They can bring additional traffic you would never have had otherwise. One software that’s made web design collaboration easier and simpler is Flatsies. With improved collaboration comes higher quality web design and added exposure.

6.) Cross Browser Compatibility.

Everyone has their own preference for browsing. Some like Firefox. Others like Safari or Google Chrome. Some people still swear by Internet Explorer. A well-designed website ensures that your site will be clearly visible and functioning on all browsers. This maintains a professional image and makes the most out of all visits.

7.) Reduced Maintenance.

In the business world, downtime is lost time. When your site goes down, you are missing out on exposure, conversions, and sales. A high quality website will limit outages, as well as the amount of time you need to clean things up and eliminate bugs. This gives you more time to focus on the things that matter.

8.) Shareability.

If your website is well-designed, it will be easily shareable. This provides opportunities for visitors to share content, suggest products to friends or interact with your brand. Furthermore, it builds social signals, which increase your brand’s reach and awareness. Many experts speculate that social signals are also used in Google’s ranking algorithm.

9.) Better Search Engine Visibility.

While your primary goal should be to accommodate your human visitors, high quality web design also influences your site’s rankings in search engines. Google actually employs manual search quality raters who visit websites and score them based on usability, quality of content, and other metrics related to design. High-quality web design accomplishes this, and thus influences search engine rankings.

Conclusion

Clearly, high-quality web design has numerous business benefits. If you’re looking to upgrade your site’s design or want to launch a new site, you will want to consider multiple factors including the consistency of your branding on site, its shareability and browser compatibility, among many others.

You may also be interested in considering new technologies that make communication between web design firms and businesses like yours easier and more effective.

Your website design matters more than you might think: Don’t let a poor-quality site hold you back from getting the conversions your business needs to thrive.

John Boitnott is a longtime digital media consultant living in San Francisco. His writing has appeared in NBC, The Village Voice, FastCompany, and USAToday.

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We are living in the midst of an epidemic of selfies. Mostly it’s just innocent fun – no big deal to snap a photo of yourself and post it to social media. Of course, some people seem to be addicted to selfies.

But this isn’t about them. It’s about B2B content marketing, and the disturbing similarity to sefies.

“Most B2B Content is as narcissistic as a selfie,” Sirius VP Marisa Kopec said at the Sirius Decisions Summit back in May.

Ouch. But true.

Typically, B2B firms have an extremely hard time breaking out of the old school marketing approach of telling their prospects and customers how awesome they are. It’s understandable – we’ve all been trained that way: Promote, promote, promote. It’s all about you… kind of like those narcissistic selfies. Those are fine in small doses but they don’t move the needle. They don’t make a statement. They don’t have any substance to them.

And, especially for B2B firms, the audience must perceive value in your marketing. The audience has changed the way it consumes information; the buyer’s journey is very different now. It’s social, self-directed, trust-based and transparent. Sixty-seven percent of this journey occurs online, typically before sales ever hears from the prospect. The buyer is in charge now, and if an organization’s marketing does not provide value, the buyer will shut it down.

They want you to save them from the deluge of bad content that exists. They want awesome stories that engage them, show them how to do their jobs and get ahead of the competition. They want thought leadership. Hint: Thought leadership isn’t about how-to articles and listicles. It’s about provoking thought… starting a conversation. Make them think and get them talking – this fuels engagement and community. That’s the opportunity.

Organizations that focus on the traditional product-centric marketing approach, always talking about themselves and their products, are focused on just that last 33 percent of the buyer’s journey. This is what they’ve historically done.

Obviously, this is incredibly shortsighted in this day and age. You can’t leave two-thirds of your sales process to chance. You can’t ignore it. That’s a horrible way to run a business. Sure, it’s a difficult transition, changing the muscle memory of decades of marketing. It isn’t easy to help the C-suite understand that your marketing is going to substantively and completely change.

“Selfie” may have been the word of the year in 2013.  From a purely transactional perspective, selfies might be something for social media managers to take advantage of. But a business must move beyond the content selfie if it’s going to stay relevant, move the needle and make an impact in the marketplace.

Marketing strategy must move beyond this narcissism and become more audience focused in order to win.

You do want to do that, right?

Google’s Doodle is back to normal. Twitter’s put down the hashflags. It looks like it’s going to be business as usual on the internet now that the World Cup’s over.

And if your lead generation campaign has been riding these waves, it might be high time to change course. But where to next? If you’re struggling with this question, you might be like the many who neglected to have a fallback.

Bye-bye hashflags. See you again in four years!

You see it plenty of times in the history of professional sports. Once it’s retirement time, players pursue other related (and also not-so-related) endeavors: coaching, investments, brand management etc. So how can B2B marketers shrink and apply this same tactic to the size of their own lead generation strategy? Here are several suggestions:

• Find a new trend – Trend hopping is sometimes frowned upon but if you’re good at it, it could save your business by keeping it relevant. You could argue that relevance is best achieved in B2B markets if you stick to addressing prospect problems, not just trends. Then again, why hold back? Do both when you have the resources!

• Promote new products – Sometimes it’s good to time the release of a new product right alongside the latest buzz. On the other hand, sometimes a new product can generate enough buzz on its own. One downside could be that you can’t always be releasing new products that often. Still, it can be handy when you need to fill the gaps left in post-trend periods.

• Call up current customers or old leads – You don’t need to wait for a really dry sales period to start calling following up on customers or former prospects. Long-term sustainability requires long-term business relationships. This works better if you’re simply keeping in touch with repeat buyers and checking up on the needs of those who are still deciding.

The World Cup is over but there’s still plenty of things you can do to keep your campaign floating and sailing. Find a new wave, market new products, or simply catch up on old contacts. Professional sports isn’t the only industry where a fallback can be pretty handy.

(And Call Volume is Not One of Them)

I recently wrote in my blog post, “5 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing Inside Sales,” that gone are the days of closely tracking the number of activities when managing your inside sales team. While I still think measuring activities is important to a degree, I don’t think it should hold as much weight as it does for many inside sales teams out there.

The problem with placing such a large emphasis on the number of activities is that doing so confuses the purpose of teleprospecting. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. With this metric as a forefront in Inside sales reps’ minds, they tend to get caught up in making a high number of dials instead of focusing on making smart dials. Smart dials lead to quality conversations which in turn result in qualified opportunities for themselves or for the outside sales team to follow up on.

The times have changed, and with exciting new auto-dialer technologies, inside sales reps can really focus on having fruitful conversations instead of stressing about hitting their activity number for the day. All calling efforts are done for them, which allows them to reach upwards of 150 dials per day. Auto-dialers along with marketing automation really eliminate the time spent on manual activities, leading to more and more time for inside sales reps to focus on what they do best – talking to prospects live.

So what metrics should you track to ensure your inside sales reps are focusing on quality, not quantity? If activity number isn’t as important anymore, what is?

1. Number of Conversations.

As I said above, and it bears repeating, the key ingredient to a successful inside sales rep is their focus and motivation to talk to prospects, uncover quality information, and hopefully convert them to opportunities. As long as the rep is averaging 12+ quality conversations per day, they will uncover 8-12 opportunities per month.

2. Lead Rate.

The lead rate is the amount of leads your inside sales rep uncovers in comparison to the amount of conversations they have. While conversations are well and good, uncovered opportunities is the number one metric to track.

3. Positive Lead Feedback Percentage.

After a lead has been qualified, it’s crucial to track its quality. To calculate the positive feedback percentage, simply take the total amount of leads passed and divide by the number of leads that moved on to a next step Some examples of a next step are: scheduled follow-up or check-in call, scheduled demo or onsite meeting, etc.) This metric is just as important as their lead rate. Even if your inside sales reps are passing a ton of leads, it really doesn’t mean anything unless they have a high lead feedback percentage. This metric allows you to track quality, and that’s obviously what will ultimately yield high forecast, pipeline, and closed business numbers.

When I was on the phones, I remember my daily goal: 120 calls. Eight years later, we’ve seen a shift in focus, and now inside sales managers want quality conversations and quality leads. It’s less about how long you’ve been hammering away at dialing as many prospects as possible, and more about how those prospects are reacting and whether you’re able to move them on to the next step. Again, it’s not that number of dials isn’t important (it definitely is), but emphasis should be placed on what is resulting from them.

What metrics do you utilize to manage your inside team?

68% of B2Bs use landing pages to garner new email leads. Are you?

Once you have a substantial email list, you can start creating targeted emails to nurture your leads – and ultimately convert them into customers.

In this article, I’ll go over 5 ways you can use landing pages to build your email list (I’ll also provide a few tips along the way!).

1. Generate Leads with Free Trials

Vidyard makes good use of contrasting Calls-to-Action (CTAs) as well as a compelling headline on their product landing page. They even incorporate the use of their own product on their landing page. Clever!

Free trials are a win-win for your business and consumers. Why?

For your consumer, free trials are a risk-free type of value proposition. There is no commitment involved with trying out your product or service.

For your business, free trials can give leads the right kind of nudge to make the purchase decision once they’ve tested out your product or service. So not only can you amplify your lead generation with free trials, they can often lead also lead to conversions! Awesome.

To effectively gather email leads with a free trial, create a landing page with either just a CTA to an entry form (like the above example), or with an entry form directly on the page (like the example below).

Here are 6 key landing page tactics to consider for your free trial landing page:

• Use whitespace to accentuate the important aspects of your landing page, such as the entry form or CTA
• Encapsulate your CTAs and/or your entry form
• Create a succinct and captivating headline and sub headline
• Make sure to use the word “free” on either your headline or CTA
• Include a list detailing the benefits of your free trial
• Use directional cues to point landing page visitors towards your page’s focal point

2. Lead Generation: Email-Gate Live Webinars

Wishpond makes use of whitespace and contrasting colors on this webinar’s landing page. Both of these landing page design tactics help put emphasis on the graphic and the encapsulated Call-to-Action (CTA).

Webinars show your clients that your business is a knowledgeable industry leader. Webinar attendees are people interested in your industry – they may even be loyal readers of your blog that finally become leads. Make sure to email-gate your webinar to get leads.

Why should it be a live webinar?

So that you can show the humane side of your business and build more meaningful relationships with your customers.

Another bonus is that you can use your webinars for different types of online content. Upload a clean, edited version to Youtube later for everyone to view. You could even publish the webinar on your company’s blog once it’s up on YouTube.

Here are 6 quick tips for hosting a webinar:

• Make it free (look at all that value and no risk your webinar has!)
• Make sure to pick topics that you feel confident speaking about
• Introduce the hosts before you start the presentation
• Take time to practice your webinar beforehand
• Build hype around your upcoming live webinar. Promote it on your social channels, website homepage, with online ads, etc.
• Provide ample time at the end of your webinar for attendee’s questions

3. Newsletter Signups Effectively Generate Leads

I’m going to take an educated guess and assume (/hope) you have a newsletter of some sort. Newsletters are what make your email leads profitable.

Newsletter signups can effectively generate leads and grow your email list. They can be used to educate customers on your industry and products or services.

A bonus: once you’ve collected the email leads, you can create targeted emails to specific leads to convert them into customers. If tailored appropriately to the right email subscribers, they will feel a level of exclusivity with your business, which essentially butters up your lead!

Here are 6 tips for optimizing your newsletter’s landing page:

• Created a branded landing page (include a logo, relevant, visually appealing image, etc.)
• Make it super easy to sign up – include a maximum of 3 form fields on your entry form
• In a snippy sentence, detail the types of content they will be subscribing to
• Mention how many other subscribers you have, “join 10,000 other members!” (if you have a substantial amount)
• Use a lot of whitespace and position the CTA above the fold
• Test telling your future subscriber what you will and won’t do with their information

4. Lead Generation: “Coming Soon” Landing Pages

Birdboxx created a pre-launch landing page for an upcoming feature of theirs (an accommodation directory).

When you think of “coming soon” landing pages, do you think of a dead-end landing page? You shouldn’t.

Coming soon landing pages can be very effective in generate leads (and hype) for your upcoming product/service.

If your B2B comes out with a new product, service or feature, try creating a landing page for it. Using a landing page builder that’s customizable (and doesn’t require you to use any code) can get the job done in minutes.

Here are 6 tips for optimizing your “coming soon” landing page:

• Use more colours to make the promotion look exciting (like the Birdboxx example above)
• Create landing pages tailored to each of your target markets
• Test using more casual copy on your CTA (e.g. keep me in the loop!)
• Create a headline that really communicates the exclusivity of being amongst the first people in the know
• Leave the landing page visitor with a little bit of curiosity (and something to look forward to) – don’t give away all of the exciting details of your upcoming product or service
• Most importantly – make sure to include a clear CTA button and/or minimal form fields for your visitors to fill out

5. Offer a Free Demo of Your Product or Services to Generate Leads

This landing page has been created by Wishpond’s landing page builder. Carla gets personal and asks for the necessary information needed in order to prepare for a one-on-one demo for a business.

Not all businesses have the resources available to extend a one-on-one demo to everyone that wants one, but if you think you can manage, it’s definitely worth a try. Demos can really contribute to lead generation for your B2B.

They increase the trust factor of your business, and it’s a step in the right direction to relationship-building. This form of customer support is a big part of customer relationship management (CRM).

Create a landing page where you invite leads to sign up for a free demo of your product or service. In exchange, you can gather valuable information about your consumers (such as their email, any questions they may have about your industry or business, etc.). It doesn’t hurt that you get an opportunity to show them how they could benefit from your business, either. This will warm your leads up for conversions!

Here are 6 tips for creating your free demo landing page:

• Have an entry form on the landing page (with max. 5 form fields)
• Make sure to have a clear benefit list highlighting what they will learn from the demo
• Include what differentiates your product or service from the rest
• Try testing a (max. 30 second video preview) of a successful past demo on your landing page
• Make your landing page personal by including a picture of someone on your sales team
• Put a calendar directly on your landing page to make it easy for people to book an appointment right away

Conclusion

All of the listed methods have proven to generate tons of email leads for B2Bs just like yours. You won’t be sorry trying out one (or all) of these landing page ideas!

Have you had success growing your email list with any of the above landing page suggestions? Or did your visitors want nothing to do with your offers?

Let me know in the comments section below.

By Cara Tarbaj

Sometimes the new guy isn’t just some intern working in the back office. Sometimes it’s a new member of your sales team. But like any new hire, there’s a typical chance that they need a lot of help working with your business’ older appointment setting process.

You might think that this could be due to your marketing strategy, the tasks you may (or may not) have outsourced, target industry etc. That’s partially correct. The other part though is that they could still freeze up when it’s their turn to finally meet a prospect (regardless of how good your marketing is).

Imagine this, it’s their first day on the job and they got their first appointment. For your veteran sales reps, that seems no biggie. You have a source of sales leads, a system for scoring them, and a calendar for the actual appointments. Even the new guy is bound to have one right?

You might be overlooking something though: They’re still the new guy. Not only are they unfamiliar with your marketing process, that unfamiliarity leads them to be really unfamiliar with prospects. Here are a few suggestions:

• Their fears could start with the workplace – If they already have some fears in your workplace, then logically that might carry out in their conduct with your B2B customers. They might fear them just as they might fear the boss. So before sending them out, see what you and your marketers can do to help them get over those fears.

• Check previous experience – They may have gone to the right school or scored big sales in a previous employment. That doesn’t mean they stop learning. They may have never engaged in a real webinar or conducted a sale purely over the phone. To help them familiarize, you use their previous experience as a reference.

• Information gets too much – Whether it’s the CRM interface or just the style of delivery, sometimes the information can be a little bit more than the new guy is used to. Seeing as B2B marketers are already called to go visual, why limit that courtesy to just prospects? Help your new sales rep understand the information delivered to them so they’ll know how to use it.

• Always appreciate feedback – New or old, sales reps have every authority to critique a marketing strategy. Maybe their past experience could actually give you ideas to improve your appointment setting process. You won’t know until you hear them out.

Preparation is a basic step when bringing in any new hire. Marketing and sales are not exceptions to this rule. The responsibility is shared between both departments to ensure the new guy gets up to speed.

Empowering your field sales reps with access to their data is one of the most crucial steps you can take towards selling more and saving time. I mentioned in a previous article how important it is for your rep to have access to performance metrics, customer activity data and support data in his or her mobile report. Below, you’ll find ten of the most important metrics you should be including in your rep’s analytics dashboard.

1.) Lead Response Time

How long does it take your rep to follow up with a lead once it comes through? Studies show that the sooner you engage with a lead the greater likelihood that lead will close down the road.

2.) Calls Made

How many calls is your rep making over any given time? It can also be helpful to track this number in comparison to how many leads your reps receive or prospect.

3.) Lead Conversation Time

It’s not enough to just make calls, your reps need to make contact and have meaningful conversations with their prospects. The longer a conversation is, the more likely that a lead is interested in and qualified to buy your product.

4.) Prep Time vs Time With Customers

If your rep is spending too much time preparing for calls and not enough in face to face interactions, it might signal a limited understanding of the value proposition or a lack of support from marketing.

5.) Open Opportunities

Knowing how many opportunities they have open at any given time will help your reps calculate their forecasts accurately and with confidence.

6.) Win/loss Rate

It’s important for your reps to know their own win rate so they understand the likelihood of them closing every single deal. It will also help them know, statistically speaking, how many leads and calls they need to make to hit quota. In addition, understanding their own win rate will help them realize which skills they need to target to improve.

7.) Sales Cycle Length

Your reps need to have insight into how long their deals are taking to move through the funnel vs what your benchmark is. Understanding this can help them qualify or eliminate prospective deals or know when to ask for help gaining momentum.

8.) Customer Activity

The specific metric behind this will vary depending on your product and industry. If your rep sells software, she might want to know how often a customer has logged in over a specific time period. If she works in pharma, she’ll want to track how often her doctors are prescribing her product so she knows when to call. It’s important for any sales rep to know what their customers are up to so they can easily guide them to make more purchasing decisions.

9.) Support Activity

Your reps should also be aware of how often their accounts experience issues and how quickly those issues get resolved. Having these details allows them to build a positive relationship that will help them grease the wheels when it comes time to reup a contract or expand.

10.) Social Media Reach

In today’s era of social selling, your reps will be using social media outlets to both attract and search for prospects, so it’s important for reps to know how much traction they’re gaining in the social media landscape.

You’ve started driving traffic to your site, but how do you turn these visitors into solid leads? What can you do to get your visitors to provide their contact information and enter your sales funnel?

One of the best ways to collect leads for your sales team is to provide premium content.

Are you making the most of this strategy? Have you created a compelling offer and excellent landing page to entice people to sign up? The following strategies will show you how to generate leads from your website.

1. Make sure your premium content is behind an opt-in form

If you’ve been creating content for awhile, you probably already have some great pieces on your website. If you have a popular whitepaper or a heavily viewed series of blog posts that you can turn into an eBook, you have the makings of great premium content.

With the advent of the Internet, social media, and the dispersal of knowledge in every direction, corporations are in the unique position to distribute the information they’ve gathered in exchange for audiences, readership, and brand loyalty.- Harvard Biz Review

The next step, if you have not already done it, is to put this content on a landing page behind a form, so that visitors to your site have to provide you with their contact information to get to your offer. An effective opt-in form is short, simple for you customers to fill out, and helps you increase your contacts database. Once you build a sufficiently large database, you may strategically decide to give away no-strings-attached premium content, but when you are first starting out, you want to capture all of the names you can.

2. Make your landing page concise and captivating

Your potential customers get bombarded with new information and requests for their details on a regular basis, so unless you make your offer compelling, your site will probably be lost in the noise. In order to get noticed you need a landing page that explains the benefits of your premium offer on a well-designed page with short, captivating copy, lots of white space, and a visual or two.

3. Be explicit about your offer

Clearly state your offer in the headline of your landing page and create an attention-getting image for your offer. Include a short, compelling call to action above your information request form. Occasionally revise your landing pages and test out different combinations of headlines, CTAs and images to see what brings the highest conversion rate. With the right offer, you might entice someone who was formerly just a browser to join your list.

4. Keep your opt-in form short

If your form looks daunting, people will not take the time to complete it. Even if your content is great, potential leads will be discouraged. Make sure customers can see at a glance that it will not take too much of their time.

If your target audience is people who are unfamiliar with your business, it may be enough just to get their name and email. This simple approach will get you the highest response rate, so it is effective when you are trying to grow your database rapidly.

At some point, you may consider adding more-targeted questions. A few additional questions about company size, marketing budget, and location can help you rate the quality of new leads and assign them among your sales reps. Just keep your form as short as possible.

5. Test your site frequently

Any time you create a new landing page or tweak an existing page or form, test your site to make sure all the data is collected correctly, and the landing page directs to your ‘thank you’ confirmation page. Technical glitches should not be an excuse for losing potential leads.

6. Customize your submit button

Aim all of the text on your landing page at promoting your offer and getting your customers to commit. One way to emphasize this is by changing the ‘submit’ button at the bottom of your form to something specific to your offer such as:

• Download Now
• Speak to an Expert
• Get Your Free Trial

These buttons provide actionable copy instead of generic text.

7. Add CTAs in multiple locations

Don’t just wait for readers to stumble across your landing page. Advertise your premium offer in multiple places on your site. Here are some of the most popular locations:

• Your site’s Homepage
• You company’s About page
• Your product description and pricing pages
• The bottom of relevant blog posts, and in your blog’s sidebar

Follow these 7 tips to help you turn the attention of your readers into viable sales leads.

Have additional tips for increasing lead generation rates? Please share your experiences.

Are you looking for ways to increase your YouTube engagement? What if I told you, you can increase your YouTube traffic by a whopping 374%? But before I dwell any further on that, a small recap on the earlier infographic where I discussed the importance of incorporating videos in your social strategy. By making YouTube a part of that social strategy could, really accelerate your growth.

YouTube is the third most popular site in the world and the second most popular search engine after Google. If you are still not convinced to incorporate this platform in your social media strategy, then take a look at the 2014 stats, figures and numbers which Harsh shared earlier. The Infographic below explains how you can maximize your traffic and engagement. It even draws light on how you can generate more traffic and sales, by highlighting the best practices.

Breakdown of How to Increase Your Engagement By 374%

• Videos that have a thumbnail get 154% more clicks by women.
• Emails that embed a YouTube Video get 96% higher call-to-action, and it even leads to conversion by 51%.
• Longer videos tend gain more engagement by 40%, so you don’t need to worry about snipping out the creative’s while editing.
• Real people create a stronger impact on your audiences compared to celebrities by 12%, and it even leads to them visiting your Facebook page. Same is the case for humorous content; it drives more traffic by 2% to your Facebook page.
• The click-through rate is higher on Mobile Phones v/s Desktop by 8%, it is extremely important to make sure your content is viewable on all devices.
• The most popular day for engaging with video on YouTube is Tuesday. The most active engagement takes place at 11a.m. EST v/s 1a.m EST, thus lunchtime is streaming time!
• 4% click-through rate is more for videos 15 seconds or less, v/s 31-60 seconds. Looks like snackable information is the need of the hour.
• In terms of preference of advertisements, audiences prefer Opt-in videos, followed by pre-rolled video ads and lastly pre-roll interactive video ads; to receive higher call-to-action.

Here are some YouTube Best Practices that you should keep in mind too:

• Make sure to add metadata to your uploads, like – headlines, tags etc. to be found by search engines.
• As thumbnails garner maximum clicks of 154%, it is important to select attractive ones which grip your audiences.
• Add annotations on your videos, it really gets your viewers attention.
• Being consistent is the key to be successful on any social network, thus religiously share content on your YouTube channel.
• Strategically share content – before a holiday, cause day or some big event to increase engagement.
• Have appropriate length of videos as per your topic; if it’s a FAQ or instructional video make sure its 4-5 minutes than cramming in all information in 30 seconds.
• This the golden rule for each and every social network, talking to your viewers. That is the only sole way to increase engagement, answer their comments, and involve them in your discussion and so on.

Hopefully this infographic by Quicksprout has drawn some light on the subject of leveraging Videos, and mainly YouTube marketing efficiently.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

You know sales is a lot like politics, some are isolationists, others realize we live in a big world with plenty of room for all to thrive, and not always at the expense of others, I guess these would be the inclusionary camp.

The way it plays out in sales is you have those zealots who will proclaim things dead, “never cold call again”, telling their unsuspecting followers that there is only one way to Nirvana, their’s, and no other, “all other roads will lead you to hell and financial ruin”. Sort of like the “Referral Über Alles” approach. For me, combining many approaches in a way that leads to maximum results is way better than betting the farm on one, and then hoping. I say take the inclusionary approach, that is, include as many viable methods, rather than the risk singular approach; if for no other reason than the fact that buyers come in many shapes and sizes and from many corners, some of which may not be known to us at the outset, and missed if you go down one street only.

I like to leverage cold calls to get referrals. Despite the scary things some will tell you about the responses to cold calls, most people you call are human and will behave that way even when they turn down your offer. They may not be interested in what you have to say or sell, (now), but most respect the fact that you are doing your job. Experience has shown that few hang up, and few swear at you, most tell you in a civil way why they are not interested at that moment in time. Managing those initial objections is part of the job.

Grab your Proactive Prospecting Call-Flow Chart

But once you see that you cannot take away their objections, you still have the opportunity to say:

“Based on what we spoke about, is there anyone you know I should call who may see merit in the conversation?” A vast majority will say no, and the call ends. But a number will say, “You know you may want to call….” At that point I thank them, and follow up with, “May I say you suggested the call, or am I cold calling them?” Some say “Sure, tell’em I sent you.” Others will say cold call. Either way is good by me, and I have direction.

Not only that, but in all instances, you have demonstrated yourself to be a professional who completed the “Prospecting Exercise”, and will be remembered for being that pro. (Believe me you’ll call them again).

Using both cold calling and the referral approach is all upside, an inclusive approach both in terms of methodologies, and people. Using this technique I get to speak to more qualified prospects while setting up future wins, than those relying strictly on one methodology.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

Want to design a landing page to stop potential leads in their tracks and boost your conversion rate sky-high?

If so, this is the article for you.

When it comes to building a landing page, design is everything. Ultimately, your design is what will make it easy for leads to understand your landing page and convert.

When users arrive on your landing page, it should be clear to them what you’re selling in 5 seconds or less. This idea comes from a 2006 study at Carleton University, which showed that you have under 5 seconds to engage and impress first time viewers before they leave your landing page.

Most people mistakenly believe that aesthetics are the easy part of creating a landing page. In reality, a poorly designed page has been proven to kill businesses’ conversion rates.

In this article I’ll walk you through 8 pivotal landing page design practices guaranteed to increase your conversion rate.

Lets get started!

Landing Page Design Best Practice #1: Use Context-of-Use Videos & Images to Explain Your Offer

Context-of-use is a great way to explain your product or service to potential leads. Including an image or video demonstration of your product in use is eye-catching and shows potential leads the exact features your offering has. It lets potential leads place themselves in the actual situation with your product or service.

A good-quality image or video can also visually show the benefits of your offering. Images or videos should serve a direct purpose rather than just filling space on your page. An example of using an image with direct purpose can be seen in the Atlantis Resort landing page below. Hotels and resorts use images of their white sand beaches with the crystal-clear ocean to cause viewers to imagine being at this relaxing destination. In this example an image is more powerful and impactful than any written message.

The landing page below is a great example of using a short video demonstration. It shows the Magic Bullet and its ability to chop and blend just about anything “in 10 seconds or less.” The video clearly enforces how life in the kitchen is made easier with this convenient device.

Landing Page Design Best Practice #2: Display Images of Happy People to Make Your Page Welcoming to Visitors

Images of people can make your page more personal and warm. These images are the most appealing and welcoming, and will make your potential leads feel more comfortable on your page. Actually, one study showed that having a picture of a smiling person on a specific landing page increased conversions by 102.5%! People act off of their feelings and we can use emotions to make potential leads feel a certain way. Displaying a smiling face puts them in a positive mood, leading to a positive impact on conversions.

You can also use images of people as a directional cue, guiding page viewers to what you’re offering. It’s human nature to follow other people’s eye-line to their point of focus. Have the person in your image look towards your offering, and viewers’ eyes will be drawn to the person’s focus-point. The landing page below is a great example as the woman’s eyes direct you straight to the information and call-to-action.

The same applies to the person’s body language which you can use to steer viewers’ eyes to a specific part of your page. Using a person’s body as a directional cue is a great way to get viewers to look somewhere specific without them even noticing. Be subtle in how you do this, however, as obvious pointing or gesturing by the person can come across as annoying or distasteful to viewers. The image below from Geico is a great example of this technique, as the gecko’s eyes and body language subtly draw your eyes to the information.

Landing Page Design Best Practice #3: Highlight the Most Important Areas of Your Page With Contrasting Colours and Whitespace

Contrasting colours are sharp variations or changes in colour, such as a bright orange icon on a dark blue background. As humans, we are naturally attracted to this type of severe difference. You can use this in your design to highlight the sections of your page that you want to be seen. The heading, lead-capture form, and the call-to-action (CTA) button should be the most prominent elements. With contrasting colours it’s easier for potential leads to digest the information on your page and convert.

One big mistake many marketers make is packing too many elements onto one landing page. Whitespace is the best way to fix this. Whitespace is blank space used strategically on your page to make certain areas standout. Place whitespace around features like your heading, lead-capture form, and CTA button to give them room to breathe. This will make your page very clean, and force potential leads to focus on what’s important.

The landing page below is a great example of using contrasting colours and whitespace. Here are 5 reasons why:

• Call-to-action button “Send Me More Details” is highlighted against a contrasting orange background
• Use of an arrow as a directional cue
• Lead-capture form displays white form fields on an orange background
• Consistent theme of orange, white and turquoise is used throughout, but contrast makes certain areas stand out
• There is enough info on the page to entice customers to want to learn more, but it doesn’t appear overcrowded

Landing Page Design Best Practice #4: Design an Obvious Call-to-Action (CTA) Button

Your CTA button is ultimately the most important feature on your landing page. Your entire goal is getting viewers to see this button and want to take the action to convert on it. The effectiveness of your CTA button can be changed instantly through an eye-catching design and obvious placement on your page.

1. Demand Attention Through Your CTA Design – As I mentioned above, it’s crucial that you use contrasting colours to make your CTA stand out against the background.

Here are 4 more attention-grabbing design elements to make your CTA demand attention:

• Bold your CTA text: This makes the words jump out, driving viewers to read your CTA button, making them more likely to convert.
• Make your CTA button large enough to be seen: The button should be a main feature that potential leads see when they land on your page.
• Use directional cues to guide viewers to your CTA (arrows, lines, line of sight): These types of indicators are a great way to steer viewers to the CTA button so that it is obvious where they click to convert.
• Make your CTA appear clickable through a 3D design or download arrow: This gives your button a special design element to make it unique from any other component on the page.

The CTA button from Skype below is perfect. Here are four things that make it great:

• The green button contrasts the blue background
• The button is a large feature on the page
• The white button text stands out against the green button
• The button text is bold and easy to read

2. Place your CTA Where It Can Be Seen - Where you place your CTA button on your landing page is also a crucial design aspect to consider. It needs to be in a visible location where it will be seen by everyone. It should be one of the first things your customer sees on the page and shouldn’t require a lot of effort for viewers to find.

Generally you want to place your CTA “above the fold,” on the right hand side of the page. “Above the fold” means positioning your CTA so that it’s visible to potential leads without scrolling down. This makes the CTA button a key feature as soon as viewers arrive. Seeing your CTA immediately tells potential leads the whole focus and theme of your landing page.

3. Time the Appearance of Your CTA – One advanced call-to-action technique is to use an embedded video landing page with a delayed CTA. This means having a video as the main component of your landing page to hook in viewers and grab their full attention. After about 20-30 seconds set your landing page so that your CTA and lead-capture form appear. This gives your potential lead the opportunity to watch part of your video without any other distractions on the page. Once they have an understanding of your offering, the late appearance of the CTA button will make them more inclined to convert.

The landing page below is a good example of timing the various elements of your page. After watching 20 seconds of this video, the lead-capture form and CTA arrive on the right-hand side of the page. This allows viewers to get a preview of the type of information they will receive in the Landing Page Conversion Guide, before being asked for any information. The delayed arrival of the CTA and lead-capture form make them more obvious, and potential leads more likely to convert.

4. Define the Action to Take Through Your CTA Button Text – When designing your CTA button, it’s crucial that your button text actually describes what the viewer is doing by clicking and converting. You should never have a button that reads “submit” as it doesn’t convey what the viewer will get from clicking the button. One Hubspot study that looked at over 40,000 landing pages with “submit” as CTA copy found that these pages actually had lower conversion rates than pages with different copy.

A few good examples of CTA button text include:

• Start My Free Trial Now
• Get My Ebook
• Download My Copy Now

The more specific and clear you are with your button copy, the higher your conversion rate will be.

5. Avoid Common CTA Design Mistakes – There are a number of common mistakes to avoid when designing your CTA button. A few examples include using similar colours for the background and CTA button, making the button a small feature on the page, and having vague button text like “submit.”

The landing page below is an example of a bad CTA button. This landing page has enticing images of the Perivolos Resort, but even after looking at the page for a few seconds it’s hard to find the CTA button in the bottom right hand corner. Instead, the company should have a large “Book Now” button higher up on the page, with bold lettering and a contrasting button colour.

Landing Page Design Best Practice #5: Make Your Benefits Clear or Risk Potential Leads Looking Elsewhere

Potential leads need to know how your product offering meets their needs. What exactly are they going to get from this relationship? Present benefits in a clear, simple way that makes them curious for more information.

It’s best to present these benefits in a list or small blurb. This allows potential leads to easily skim through and see if this is the right product offering for their needs. The landing page below is a great example of 4 encapsulated benefits which clearly stand out from each other.

Be careful not to overwhelm the customer with language or terms that they won’t understand. The tricky task is giving them enough information to feel educated about what you’re offering, but short and sweet enough that it’s easy to comprehend.

Some benefit item examples include:

• Save money instantly! Get our new _______ and save ___/month starting today
• Increase productivity by reducing time spent ___________
• With the most advanced technology, _________ helps you optimize your business’ efficiency and security

Landing Page Design Best Practice #6: Provide Potential Leads With One Single Action to Take

When creating your landing page, the goal is to provide potential leads with an easy path to conversion. We need to provide viewers with only one action they can take to convert. This means removing any navigation bars, footers, or outside links apart from our CTA. Having multiple things for potential leads to click on is a large distraction and will reduce the number of people actually clicking the CTA and converting.

Below is an example of a poorly designed landing page that has not removed any links, making it very hard to tell what the actual goal of the page is. Is the call-to-action to sign up for the mailing list, book online, or order a gift card? Always ensure you are giving potential leads just one thing to click on if you want to see your conversion rate excel.

Landing Page Design Best Practice #7: Use Bold Headings to Make It Easy For Potential Leads to Skim

A heading and subheading are crucial to your landing page design as they hook in potential leads. However, marketers should also remember to use bold section headings throughout the page to explain additional benefits or selling points. Break information down into small, digestible segments with one consistent topic discussed in each. With small sections and logical headings, your page will be more appealing and easier to skim.

Near the bottom of your landing page you should also include a bold statement that reaffirms your value proposition. This final declaration should include a call-to-action. This is your last chance to convince potential leads they need your offering. An example of this can be seen in the Wishpond landing page below. Potential leads are given one last statement along with one final opportunity to convert.

Having an organized, easy-to-read display of information is key to capturing leads. Your page design must be easy to skim and understand in order for your conversion rate to soar.

Landing Page Design Best Practice #8: Create a Short Lead-Capture Form to Prevent a High Bounce Rate

As a visitor, there’s nothing more frustrating or daunting than an overcomplicated lead-capture form. When designing your landing page, it is crucial that filling in your lead-capture form is an easy task for potential leads. If not, they will be sure to drop out before completing the conversion.

In fact, a recent study by HubSpot that analyzed over 40,000 landing pages found that conversion rates improved by nearly half when text entry fields were reduced from 4 to 3. The study also found a strong negative correlation between the number of drop-down menu fields and conversion rates.

The picture below shows a good example of a lead-capture form. Shopify asks for just 3 fields which are vital to create an online store, and nothing further.

When creating your signup form, keep your main objectives in mind. Only ask potential leads for information necessary to achieve your objectives. The more fields you ask potential leads to fill out, the more drop off you’ll experience.

Conclusion

The design of your landing page is as important, if not more important than the actual content on the page itself. Potential leads need to be able to easily read the page and understand the message you are trying to convey.

Following these 8 design best practices will provide your viewers with a brief, informative and visually appealing glimpse of your brand, leading to higher conversions.

Every landing page does, however, have room for improvement. A/B Testing is the best way to ensure that you have the proper design in place to drive potential customers further along the sales funnel.

In your business, how many times have you picked up the phone, called a new prospect, and been met with genuine interest (and maybe even excitement) on the other end of the line?

Not very often, right? And that’s normal.

Typically, when salespeople or businesses owners reach out to prospects initially, they’re greeted with skepticism, resistance, or objection — and that’s assuming they get a human on the other end of the line at all. Over time (and with persistence), great salespeople often quell prospects’ skepticism and overcome their objections. But that process can be exhausting and many salespeople give up before they ever reach the critical tipping point.

Now, what if I told you there was a way to eliminate much of that inefficient early phone tag and improve the likelihood that contacts not only took your first call, but also set up a first appointment? Sounds like some sort of impossible sales panacea, doesn’t it?

It’s not. In fact, warming up a target market before salespeople reach out to prospects for the first time is actually as simple as changing the way you think about email lead generation and nurturing campaigns, and investing a little bit more time into executing those campaigns.

A Better Way to Approach Email Lead Generation Campaigns

Almost all email campaigns share a very specific purpose: To drive leads.

The problem, however, is that many salespeople and marketers mistakenly assume that in order for an email campaign to be considered a success, it must deliver high open, click through, or response rates. And while those metrics are important, the reality is that they don’t tell the whole story.

After all, unless you write emails specifically asking for a response, chances are that your best possible outcome is a click through. And while a click through is a definite sign of interest, it’s not a sign that a contact is ready to move into the sales cycle.

To take that step, you need to see a pattern of click throughs, which indicates that a contact is paying attention to your content and that the topics you’re discussing are important to his or her business. Only then can you truly begin to understand what your contacts are interested in and grasp how ready they are to take the next step in their journey.

One Tip that Can Drastically Improve Prospect Interest

So, here’s my advice for business owners and salespeople: Don’t call prospects after you’ve seen just one or two click throughs. Instead, warm up your contacts with extended, consistent email nurturing. Once you see that a prospect is clicking through consistently, you’ll know it’s time to involve a salesperson.

Extending an email campaign until that point can deliver a handful of very significant benefits. Namely, your prospects will be more prepared and receptive, and your salespeople’s gain access rate will skyrocket.

Yes, I know, you’re probably thinking that you need leads right now, not weeks or months from now. But if you’re willing to invest some time into extending your email campaigns, you’ll not only generate a higher volume of leads, you’ll also produce higher quality leads who know your business and actually want to speak with you. And before you know it, you will be able to generate leads right now.

Here are three super quick Twitter tips to get you better traction when using Twitter for your business so you will start seeing great results!

1. USING THE PERIOD BEFORE @ SIGN

If I start my tweet with an @ sign, only people who follow BOTH me and AND the person I am tweeting to will see this tweet.

It won’t be seen by ALL of my followers. It won’t appear in their feed, unless they follow Mari Smith too:

Why? Twitter views your tweet as conversational and only shows up on your stream, the stream of whoever you tweeted at, and those followers you both have in common. Its so you don’t flood other people’s streams when you are tweeting back and forth with someone.

So…if you start your tweet with the @ sign to tweet directly to someone and you want it to appear on ALL of your followers’ feeds, use a period before the @ sign, like this:

Remember when you use the @ in the middle of the tweet, ALL your followers see this tweet, like this:

2. USE IMAGES IN YOUR TWEETS

Tweets that include images generate approximately 50% more likes and retweets than those that do not! Make use of the new photo options on Twitter like Multiple Image Upload and Tag Your Friends.

IMPORTANT NOTE! When tweeting using an image, use Twitter, NOT Hootsuite, TweetDeck or any other social media management software. Why? Because the image shows as a link only. Way less effective and compelling! If posted from Twitter, the actual image shows in your timeline on your homepage.

This is an image posted from Hootsuite with link only showing in timeline:

This is an image posted from Twitter with image showing in timeline:

3. MAXIMIZE YOUR TWITTER BIO

Make sure your Twitter bio (i.e. your mini resume!) is crafted carefully and smartly. This tiny 160-character blurb can make the difference between one click to Follow and one click to move on and ignore you. It also reminds your current followers who you are. You can update your bio to include special info as often as you need to.

Keep these 3 super quick tips in mind when using Twitter and you will gain more traction for your business!

The bell rings. The door closes. The elevator starts to rise. It’s just you and a client you have wanted to land for months. In your mind, you hear your professor telling you that now is the time to bust out the elevator speech. You take a deep breath and let loose.

Now, what your professor and reruns of Mad Men would have you believe is that by the time you reach the top floor you will have landed a new client. Your lightning fast, laser-focused pitch would hit all the high points and leave your customer dizzy with excitement. They wouldn’t be able to give you their money fast enough.

In reality what most likely happened is that you lost any chance of landing the client. Your pitch perfect delivery only served to let them know that you were delivering a rehearsed pitch. Your slick delivery and careful attention to only the positives left them feeling like you were selling them a used car.

If you want people to buy what you are selling, then you are going to have to make them trust you. You can’t pitch trust. Trust is earned. Bombarding people with sales jargon may have worked in the sixties. Today marketing messages come at us every few seconds. Today’s customers are jaded, educated, and can spot a huckster a mile away. If you want to build a lasting customer base, you need to build relationships.

Relationships are built around open and honest communication. Elevator pitches are the business world’s cheap pick-up line. There’s nothing wrong with being clever or witty. Just save it until after you have proven your honesty and trustworthiness.

Of course the best way to gain customer confidence is to provide good service and value. While customers don’t want to be pitched to, they still want to feel like they got a good deal. Giving the customer exactly what they want – and maybe a little more – is worth hours of elevator talk. I know mechanics, accountants, and lawyers that are terrible sales people but still have a pack of repeat customers. This is because they give quality service and honest pricing. They do everything your marketing professor said NOT to do, but still make good money every week from return business.

So what should you do when that door closes and you have two minutes or less to get into the client’s head? Smile. Ask them what they do. Explain in a few short sentences how what you do connects to what they do and mention that you would like to help. Get their card. Be helpful. Then turn the conversation back to them. Don’t push them for a commitment. Don’t call them without asking if it is okay for you to call. Don’t be pushy.

You don’t have to become your client’s best friend. You just have to earn their trust and the keyword there is “earn”. Don’t be surprise if it takes longer than 30-seconds. You earn trust by being consistently honest – something you can’t squeeze into a well polished elevator pitch.

It’s easy to let headlines take the back seat in your writing process. Headlines can wind up as a quick afterthought, but really should be treated with much more consideration. In fact, your headline is arguably more important than the article itself. After all, who cares how great your blog post is if no one even reads it?

Headline writing rules have changed quite a bit since the great online migration

Out of all the folks who read your headline, only 20% will read the article copy. Whether it’s for email subject lines, blog posts, ebooks, or webinars, you need a powerful, sexy headline to make readers swoon.

Modern online article headlines are tricky – they need to be SEO keyword friendly, but also should be unique and creative. The end result needs to be super clickable, irresistible headlines.

If you’re like me, your eyeballs encounter nearly a hundred headlines before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee. What makes you read one story over another? It’s all about the headline – that magical string of words that allures and excites.

What makes a killer captivating headline? We’re dishing out 19 headline writing tips to help.

1. Numbers, digits, & lists

We’ve talked before about how much readers are mesmerized by lists. Starting your headline with a number helps the headline stand out. Just as the human eye is drawn to contrasting colors, we’re also naturally drawn to the juxtaposition of digits resting beside text. A list also gives readers a clearer idea of what to expect in your post, as well as promising a quick, scan-friendly read.

Some great list words to get you started:

• Reasons
• Ways
• Tips
• Tricks
• Secrets
• Ideas
• Techniques
• Strategies
• Facts
• Methods
• Statistics

2. Define What the Article is About

While there’s much to be said for mystery and intrigue, you can’t leave readers hanging without a clue of what to expect from your blog post. Your blog post headline needs to clearly articulate what you’ll be covering in the article. No one is going to click a vague headline.

• Bad Headline: Write a Song
• Good Headline: How to Compose Your Own Song: Songwriting 101

3. Demonstrate Your Value

In our post about social media landing pages, we talk a lot about pushing your value proposition – explaining to visitors why your offer is valuable. In a way, your article headline needs to do the same, although more subtly. You want to explain to readers, in so many words, why your article is worth reading.

Ex. Create an Eye-Catching Infographic in Minutes

The headline above promises a fast (and therefore, probably also easy) way to crate high-quality infographics. Sounds like it’s worth reading more about! Promising a desired result (eye-catching infographics) within a set time period (minutes) is a classic winning headline writing strategy.

They key is to prove that you are useful and that you are providing essential info!

4. Breed Distrust

Us humans can be a cynical bunch, and we’ll often jump at the chance to read about how we are being manipulated, deceived, or given the run around.

Headline writing examples:

• 6 Lies Your Car Dealer Will Try to Tell You
• Is Your Doctor Telling the Truth About Prescribing Your Kids Ritalin?
• Sun Damage is Bad, But is Sunscreen Even Worse?

5. Educate the Masses

People often search online to educate themselves or learn more about a particular concept. They want to learn how to build a fire pit, where to see an off-Broadway musical, how to eat an apple core (hey, I don’t know, people are wacky!)

Image from Team Treehouse Blog

Many successful headlines use the “how to” concept with some extra embellishment. Starting all your articles with “how to…” gets really boring really quickly, so think of creative ways to present a “how to” educational article, for example….

• 3 Best Methods for Peeling a Mango
• 6 Strategies for Deterring Burglars
• Build Your Own Firepit: A Beginner’s Guide
• Teaching Your Dog to Fetch: Canine Training 101

Hot headline writing keywords like “101” and “Complete/Beginners Guide” are great to include in educational posts. Using words like these reassures readers that your article will be in layman terms that they can understand, marketed towards beginners.

6. Readers Should be EXCITED to Read Your Article

It’s your job to get reader psyched about reading your post. They should feel like a couple of kids at the entrance of Disney World.

OMG, the momentous fantasy magic. [photo by Chris Harrison]

People aren’t going to read your boring, dry drivel. You are not on their summer reading list. If a 7^th grader gets to choose between reading Great Expectations or Harry Potter, you can be sure as hell they won’t need to sleep on the decision. You’re going head to head with other snappy headlines, so you best bring your A game.

Where would you spend your summer? The waterpark or the shovel museum?

7. Don’t be Afraid to Embellish

The best blog post headlines aren’t afraid to sell themselves. Embellish. Exaggerate. Entice.

Is substituting carrot sticks for potato chips a “secret” to losing weight? Not really, but you can act like it is in an article entitled “The Ultimate Diet Secrets for Shedding Serious Pounds.” Don’t be afraid to take a few liberties in headline writing.

A sense of urgency doesn’t hurt either:

• Make the Most of Holiday Shoppers – Don’t Miss Out!
• Don’t Buy a Home Without Reading Asking Your Real-Estate Agent These 8 Questions

8. Create an Eye-Catching, Unique Title

Captivating headlines are the ones that stand apart from the rest. Great headlines aren’t afraid to be a little weird. While it’s difficult to achieve, the best headline writing straddles the line between clarity and uniqueness.

9. Think About Your Audience and What Matters to Them

You know your audience. You understand their dreams and pain points. Make use of that knowledge in your web headline writing so that your posts truly speak to readers.

Knowing your audience lets you develop some smart, strategic headlines that capitalize on your audience’s wishes or fears.

Ex. 5 Practices That Make You Look Like a Blogging Newb

This headline would certainly have bloggers interested.

10. Remember the 5Ws

In grammar school you probably remember learning the 5Ws:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why

These engaging, interrogative words are used to gather information. By using them in your headlines, you articulate to readers the kind of information you intend to provide.

11. Address Readers in 2^nd Person

While writing prose in 2^nd person is infamously awkward, it’s the perfect form for headline writing, grabbing the attention of readers by calling them out.

• You Think You Know Game of Thrones? Take Our Quiz and Find Out!
• 3 Ice Cream Recipes You’ll Drool Over This Summer
• 5 Emergency Tools You Should Never Leave Home Without

12. Break Conventions

Headlines that elicit controversy draw in curious readers.

Headline examples:

• Why the iPhone 5 is a Piece of Crap
• Why Your CTR Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think

13. Brainstorm Lots of Different Headlines

Some experts suggest that writers should devote 80% of their time writing headlines – put your effort into the most important element. Set aside time to brainstorm a healthy smorgasbord of headlines. For a headline writing exercise, try writing at least 10 headlines, each with a different structure or with verb and adjective variations. See which feels the most appealing and ask coworkers for their opinions.

You really need to sit down and brainstorm to get those snappy headline juices flowing. You might not hit that headline writing sweet spot until you’re a few headlines in – chances are the first headline you come up with will never be your best.

14. Use Strong Adjectives and Verbs

As Startup Moon notes, there’s a morbid fascination that seems to hang over us. Readers are often drawn to dark and violent wording. Some dark headline power words include:

• Kill
• Fear
• Dark
• Bleeding
• War

But it’s not just ominous words that allure readers – other viral headline words that appear in popular headlines include:

• Smart
• Surprising
• History
• Hacks
• Big/Huge
• Shocking

15. Ask Questions

Asking the reader a question helps draw them in, and punctuation helps catch the eye, similar to the way numbers and digits do.

• Think You Know SEO? Quiz Yourself and Find Out!
• Do You Want to Build a Snowman? Read This Guide First.

16. Use Keywords

Be sure to use topic keywords in your headline – it will help your blog post rank better on Google, as well as make clear to readers what you’ll be discussing in your post.

17. Keep Headlines Under 70 Characters

If you want your headlines to look good in Google and prevent them from being cut off, make sure your headlines stay under 70 characters.

We don’t get a full understanding of what this article is about due to the chopped headline.

18. Don’t Forget to A/B Test

Buffer did a great study showing folks how to easily A/B test headlines. How? It’s pretty simple:

• Take two headlines that could potentially perform well.
• Schedule two tweets to be sent out with the two different headlines.
• Send the tweets one hour apart (keeping both tweets well within in the AM/PM period – 9am and 10am for example).
• Whichever tweet performs better earns a place as the permanent blog post headline.

19. Use Images to Compliment Headlines

Headlines are a big deal, and in many cases on the web, they are the one and only way to introduce your article to the world. However, many social sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pintetrest, and, more recently, Twitter, make it easy to add images alongside your link headlines. This is awesome news because images are insanely powerful and can do a lot to boost the success of your headline.

As Buffer notes, you can’t just use any old image to compliment your headline. The image you should provide a strong visual clue to the topic of the article.

Some image headline examples:

The image accompanying this post by Mashable is an excellent choice – it visually illustrates that the article is about Facebook and political partisanship.

This Wildfire image is simple but effective – it singles out one powerful statistic from the article in a visual asset, sparking our attention and encouraging us to read more.

This image by Intel is an excellent example of how a picture can serve as a perfect visual headline. Without reading any text, we get the message.

Overlaying a relevant image with the main headline or message of your post is an excellent strategy to make the most of a social media photo post. (Full disclosure, this is an article I wrote about buying Twitter followers.)

Be sure to set aside time to focus on good headline writing. Don’t rush through it – choose a few favorites and consider which will work best. A headline can make or break your article, so give it the time and attention it deserves!

I was recently onsite with a prospect and was told that if this company could simply add $10,000 to every customer renewal each year they would add $400,000,000 in incremental revenue to the bottom line. This was a significant statement that would have major impact for the organization. However, there were significant barriers that existed that prevented this revenue from being realized.

In my work with many large enterprise B2B organizations, I find this is the case more often than not. Sadly, most organizations do a poor job selling back into their customer base and as a result are missing a huge opportunity to generate revenue.

Everyone has seen the studies that state it costs twice as much to acquire a new customer as it does sell into a current one. If this is true, then why are so many organizations so bad at doing this? How can an organization have metrics that show $400 million in revenue is within their reach, but not be able to capitalize on it?

There are several consistencies across organizations that I see and if addressed, could help organizations add significant dollars to the bottom line.

1. Lack of Data Governance

The plain truth is that most organizations have no clear picture of their customer. Data sits in different parts of the organization, CRM systems are full of duplicates, finance has their own database that consists of procurement contacts and there is no one database that provides a holistic view of the customer. In one recent meeting I had, one of the operations folks said, “Let’s just hope a customer does not ask one of our reps what products they own, because we could not tell them.”

These issues stem from a fundamental lack of data governance across the organization. With the multitude of systems and information that exists in an enterprise, things can and often do get messy quickly and organizations need to define data standards to govern:

- Who has access to the data and what levels of control do they have?

- What systems need to be integrated to show a complete view of the customer?

- What is the data hygiene process?

These are just a few of the things that an organization needs to think about in terms of data in order to make the most from it. Without the proper governance in place, little value will come from your data.

2. Lack of Demand Generation Focus

Typically when I speak about Demand Generation, marketers automatically assume that I am referring to generating new business. While new business should be a focus for Demand Generation, it should not be the sole focus. Fundamentally, the same principles of Demand Generation apply in any sales instance –you need to Engage, Nurture and Convert your buyer. In the case of selling to your current customers, you are simply looking to expand the relationship with them. This is easier than starting from scratch as there is already a level of engagement there and a relationship.

With all of the potential revenue that is to be had from current customers, organizations need to develop specific programs aimed at creating demand among their customers. In doing so, they will not only see an improvement in their retention rates, but a vast improvement in their customer lifetime value.

3. Lack of Analytics

As mentioned above, many organizations have data scattered all over their organizations which makes it virtually impossible to market well to your customer base. However, even organizations that do have control over their data often lack the analytics necessary to determine the best approach to sell effectively to their customers. This can be remedied however, given the numerous tools that are available to help with analytics for marketers today.

The analysis of data to inform decisions and provide insights into marketing and sales is still a huge gap in many organizations. In terms of generating more from your customer base…this is costing organizations millions.

For marketing leaders that want to make a profound impact to their companies’ revenue, data analysis should be made a top priority.

Mining the install base may not be as sexy for marketing and sales as chasing the next big new deal or beating out a competitor for a new logo. However, it is often times a more profitable venture and will have a significant impact business.

Much has been written about the research that suggests that a buyer is 57% through their buying process before they engage with a vendor. I have written about this how I think the ‘57%’ is sometimes misinterpreted. Sometimes buyers engage with you early, and sometimes the call you after they have done their own research. Strong patterns exist that correlate the level of awareness that a buyer has of a need to act as he rushes headlong to that 57% Point, directly with his propensity to buy something. That is really no surprise. The parallel pattern however is that his level of awareness is inversely proportional to your opportunity to create value. This is a vital opportunity to which every sales strategist should be paying attention and that’s because most effective selling happens before the buyer calls someone for a solution.

ACCOUNT PLANNING IS THE NEW MARKETING

Selling early means working in the areas traditionally assigned to marketing: raising awareness, generating interest, and being top of mind as the buyer develops a preference. Our way of expressing this mindset is “Account Planning is the new Marketing.”

Think about what good you can do for your customer early rather than waiting for them to call. This gives you an opportunity to apply account planning principles early and helps you deliver superior value.

Focus on creating, developing, pursuing, and winning business that delivers mutual value to you and your customer. If you can work on a project that’s good for the customer and good for you, it’s more likely to be non-competitive and less price sensitive. By delivering more value to your customer, you’ll improve your opportunity to succeed.

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

You need to have a deep understanding of your customer’s business problems and you need to know their people. Our surveys tell us that only 61% of salespeople think they’re good at uncovering their customer’s business problems, and only 54% of sales people believe that they know how to discover this key information. That’s a challenge that you must address and overcome to assure success. If you don’t understand the business problems and don’t know and understand the people, you’re unlikely to create value or make a sale.

SUMMARY

Every buying decision is subject to these four phases: (1) Awareness of need, (2) Interest in solving the problem, (3) Developing a preference for a solution, and (4) Deciding to make a purchase. You need to determine

if you acting before the buyer develops a preference or not? Whenever you can, act early to have a greater opportunity to create value. If you determine that you’re acting after the 57 percent point, you can still prevail if you qualify carefully and work from deep insight about the prospect’s business needs. Then, flank toward your strengths with unique business, target the people who can assist you – and win.

Please feel free to download our latest publication:

Battling the 57%: Deconstructing the Buyer Seller Dance.

WRONG WAY (Photo credit: CarbonNYC)

This July marks the 13^th year since the first drafting of the concept and methodology for buyer persona development. Notably, in the last three years, we have seen an increase in awareness of buyer personas. Coinciding with the rise in content marketing, marketers seek to use buyer personas to help guide content strategies and tactics. With this rise in awareness also come pitfalls in having buyer personas steer marketing efforts in the wrong direction.

I raise this point due to the proliferation of content on buyer personas over the past few years. Some helpful but the majority, in my opinion, are steering companies the wrong way. For marketers, it creates confusion mixed with redundancy as they attempt to filter the stream of content coming at them regarding buyer personas.

Is It Easy Or Hard To Do?

Before looking at five reasons, it is important to note the old adage of: if it looks or sounds too good to be true, it usually is. There is much content out there on buyer personas I would put in this category. Making it seem like it is an easy 1, 2, 3 and voila! You have buyer personas. Gaining insights on buyers and using buyer personas to tell their story is hard work. It takes sound use of resources, talent, and the right level of qualitative research know-how to produce value in buyer personas.

Heading In The Wrong Direction

Sometimes, as in many things in business and life in general, knowing what not to do is helpful in making sure you do something right. With this in mind, I would like to share a few reasons why buyer personas, if not done right, could steer your marketing efforts in the wrong direction:

1. Input Comes Solely From Sales and Account Management Teams

This can be like a knee-jerk reaction. Quickly jumping to the conclusion inside sales, field sales, and account management teams are filled with rich descriptions of customers. I am sure this can be true – for the wrong reason. Usually we can be regaled by elaborate war stories from the field about customers. With much talk about battles won and lost. You see – this is the focus of sales. To win business – not in-depth qualitative research to understand behaviors and attitudinal influences.

Do not get me wrong here on this point. Sales can provide extremely valuable input. They should be part of the buyer persona development process. The point here is not to rely solely on input from sales and do no qualitative research.

2. Making Buyer Personas A Win/Loss Exercise – Even If You Don’t Call It Such

One action, which could get you heading in the wrong direction, is talking only to recent buyers and those who said no. Buyer persona development is about understanding the goals and behaviors of people. Thus, limiting your understanding to just this area and turning your efforts into win/loss sales research efforts could have you missing out on very valuable insights. I have also echoed on this point many times over in the past dozen years – recent buyers are elated so you have skewed positive input. Losses, while they can provide valuable input, are often skewed towards protection and not divulging too much. A very consistent pattern over the past dozen years in conducting hundreds of buyer interviews is this: when I have tapped into previous win/loss interviews where lost accounts claimed the company was a close second, this was not true the majority of time.

3. Focusing On Sales Intelligence

One area where sales can be helpful is in sharing sales intelligence they have gathered over the years. In B2B sales, high performing teams are adept at getting down the basics related to sales intelligence. These include intelligence on typical as well as emerging strategic initiatives, the typical 4 or 5 buying criteria factors used in an industry, product or service performance requirements, risk factors, and what constitutes a typical buying process. Where things can take a wrong turn is if marketing performs research, which proves to be redundant – or – if sales intelligence research becomes a substitution for qualitative buyer research. This factor combined with the above creates a vortex of inertia turning buyer persona development into a sales intelligence research project.

4. Treating Buyer Personas as Market Segmentation

Often times, marketing and sales departments involved in a buyer persona development initiative can unknowingly turn their efforts into a segmentation exercise. Where much of the effort is focused on the description. Sweating bullets on items such as age, gender, demographics, psychographics, firmographics, and all things related to segmentation. When this happens, companies never reach the deeper layers of insights into buyer behaviors, goals, values, attitudes, contextual situations, and mental models, which have powerful influences in shaping the how and why of buying.

5. No Focus On Context

Buyer personas are designed to help us understand archetypal behaviors, activities, mental models, and contextual situations in which buyers are attempting to accomplish specific goals. Foundational to buyer persona development has been and still is scenario analysis and creation. Without this focus, buyer personas become buyer profiles with pretty pictures on them. Yes, the picture will come with the before mentioned degree of sales intelligence but devoid of the crucial context needed to truly achieve a deeper understanding of customers and buyers.

What can happen is several of the reasons noted above are in play at the same time. Resulting in buyer personas, which are more glorified profiles than personas. In helping several organizations recently with conversations on their disappointments, the above reasons were traced back to why there was only nominal perceived value in the resulting buyer personas.

Sales-Centric and Product-Centric

What the reasons noted above can do is steer a company into the direction of creating magnified sales-centric and product-centric lenses, which they use to view customers and buyers. Causing them to miss out on crucial opportunities in developing innovative marketing frameworks enabling deep connection with buyers. More importantly, missing out on major shifts about to happen in buying behaviors. With these shifts usually come new emerging buyer goals about to become powerful influences.

By the time they are discovered, it may be too late and an organizations spends years attempting to catch up.

I’ve heard it all from clients.  “I want a PDF for this,” “I want to do a webinar on this,” “Can we do an infographic?”  It’s wonderful that our clientele is excited about content and wants hop on the content band wagon. And while these pieces may be good ideas, you have to ask the right questions. Will this content serve my bottom line? Does it fit into my marketing goals? What I’m trying to get at is that content isn’t something you throw at the wall and see if it sticks. Content is something that requires real thought and you can kick off your content with a meeting.

The Good Content Meeting

When a few co-workers and I attend HubSpot’s partner day I went to a workshop on content. It was there that I learned what makes a good content meeting. HubSpot’s very own @albiedrzycki took the workshop through the content development process I am about to describe to you. It is awesome and it works.

Start With Your Audience

Take a hard look at your target audience before you even fathom content creation.  You need to put yourself in their shoes and understand their buyers journey.

• Why do they have a need for your products or services?
• Why would make them search for a solution?
• What types of searches would they enter into search engines to find solutions?
• What are their pain points?
• What are their drawbacks to not entering business with you?
• What questions may they have about our products or services?

These questions are the kind that really get you thinking like your audience. Once you are in this mindset you can answer these questions as if you were the buyer.  Bring your answers to the content meeting and also bring any other questions you think your audience may ask.  Once this material is in place, you are ready to kick off your meeting on the right foot.

Brainstorm

Present your answers and additional questions in your meeting and begin to brainstorm.  List out items that are relevant to the questions and answers of your buyer persona. For example if they have a heavy interest in Website Redesigns your list may look something like this.

• Building your website around the buyers journey
• Homepage messaging
• Inbound Friendly
• CTAs
• Landing Pages
• Smart Content
• HubSpot COS
• “I want more traffic”
• “I want more leads”
• “I want the website to look pretty”

Once you have fashioned a pretty hefty list you are ready to move onto the next portion of your content meeting.  Everyone in your meeting should engage in this brainstorming exercise, even if you have repeats in eachothers lists it’s important to have multiple perspectives on the topic at hand.

Aligning the Content

The next portion is where you get to see the meat of your content come to life. Take your lists and organize them by topics they may fall under. Taking from the list I used in the last Example you may want to form a topic called “Website Strategy” and you would organize items in your list that relate to this under this topic.

Website Strategy

• Building your website around the buyers journey
• Homepage messaging
• Inbound Friendly

The goal of this exercise is to have the items in your list dictate the topics the content will cover.  The topics you come up with can act as chapters in your content and the items in your lists that fall under those topics will be what is discussed in each chapter. Pretty cool right?

Settling on the title and offer type

Now that the lists are organized  by topic take a look at the topics you have to brainstorm a title. The title should stem from this but it should also still be relevant to your audience (don’t fall outside the scope here!).

Maybe the topics you settled on were all focused on pains of doing a website redesign.  For this you title may be “Mistakes Overlooked During Website Redesigns”.  Perhaps you have 10 topics too, then your title can be “10 Mistakes Overlooked During Website Redesigns.”

Now you have to decide how you want to deliver the content to your audience. Would this make a good ebook? Perhaps a checklist? Maybe an infographic?

Whatever you choose make sure that it is a medium that your audience will engage with!

My Bottom line…

Content deserves time and attention on the front end, not just the production portion. As you can see from above these meetings involve a lot of questions. It’s important to ask these questions so you can really be in the mindset of your audience.

We have taken this process and applied it to our own content creation process.  It works very well and it makes for a very fun meeting!  It can be draining though so I suggest a happy hour after!

Aberdeen’s Content Marketing & Management survey (238 responses through December 2013) indicated that 75% of B2B companies had an active content marketing initiative in place. I’ve seen other surveys putting this figure even higher — as high as 93% of firms. The exact percentage probably isn’t all that meaningful at this point beyond saying, categorically, that most of your competitors are doing content marketing. And what that fact means perhaps more than anything else is that the amount of content being produced is large and getting larger by the day. And while I don’t subscribe to a zero sum philosophy when it comes to content marketing, it’s an obvious point to make that the quantity of available content is surpassing the availability of attention to consume it.

The competition for content is leading smart companies to focus on the quality of content they’re publishing, as much as the quantity. In fact, when asked to rank the value of a variety of content marketing activities, producing high-quality content ranked highest, beating out quantity. Moreover, Best-in-Class companies are 34% more likely than All Others to be effective in producing high-quality content (78% of Best-in-Class ranked their executional effectiveness as a 4 or 5 on a 1-5 scale, compared with 58% of All Others). So yes, quality is job one when it comes to content marketing, but what does quality actually mean and how do you measure it? There are three factors to consider when it comes to content quality, what I call the 3 Fs:

• Findable: Findability isn’t strictly a measure of quality, but quality content tends to become more findable through search and social shares. Measuring inbound traffic generated from content is among the top three content marketing metrics tracked by respondents (along with search rank and content consumption/views);
• Fine: This is no time for schlocky looking content. The aesthetic quality of the content you publish is critical, but it might also be the easiest to control by finding a good designer or hiring a capable agency or freelancer; and
• Fit: Best-in-Class companies are consistently more likely to align content to the informational needs of buyers, whether that be from the perspective of their job role/persona, industry, or stage of the buyer’s journey.

How do you measure content quality based on the 3 Fs? One solution is emerging from LinkedIn, which is fast becoming a publishing platform of choice for business professionals. In March, LinkedIn rolled out a Content Score. LinkedIn’s Content Score provides a benchmark for measuring not only how content published on the LinkedIn network is performing, but additional insight about the profile of who it’s performing well with. This is a great step towards understanding what content is resonating, particularly as you get beyond the confines of your owned web properties. One way to think about this is like an early warning system to alert you to topics, messaging and headlines that work, and those that flop need more work. LinkedIn has smartly combined their content publishing and social platform with its rich profiles of business professionals to serve up killer social content metrics. However, it doesn’t tell the full story.

This is where fit comes in. A content analytics strategy should consider the role of content in content performance management. The value of LinkedIn’s Content Score is limited to content consumption on the LinkedIn network (naturally), which means it’s limited to primarily top-of-funnel, buyer engagement content. Best-in-Class companies are more than twice as likely as All Others to track the performance of content across various channels, including owned channels. This is critical to understanding how specific content is performing deeper into the funnel (or further in the buyer’s journey), and thus its fit to the information needs of your buyers.

To learn more about aligning content marketing to the buyer’s journey, check out Aberdeen’s May 2014 report Content Marketing and The Road to Revenue: Answering the Questions.

Contrary to popular belief, content isn’t just the responsibility of the marketing team. Smart salespeople utilize content to generate leads, deepen relationships and close deals. Below are three ways sales reps can incorporate content marketing tactics into the sales cycle.

1. Be Relevant – Each piece of content should be created with a specific buyer persona in mind. This ensures that the context of that content is speaking to someone in particular who is interested in your offer. Content that tries to speak to everyone often ends up speaking to no one.

After leaving a sales call, there’s a lot of information to digest. It’s important to keep the prospects main points top of mind. Your follow up contact with that prospect should ideally include a piece of content relevant to the conversation that took place in the meeting.

For instance, if your prospect is concerned about price, email them content that breaks down the ROI of your product/service. This may be content that the marketing department has already created or something you’ll need to quickly pull together. Keep in mind that if one prospect has this concern, there are likely others that will have the same concern. This piece of content should be repurposed, making this exercise more than worth your time.

2. Tie it to CRM – Typically, CRM is used to track actions with potential customers, such as meetings, calls and follow-ups. Today, savvy sales teams are also using CRM to track content. This provides a more complete picture of your prospects’ needs and wants.

Additionally, it’s important to define what content should be delivered at what stage of the sales cycle. For example, if a prospect reads a few of your blog posts, maybe they are showing entry-level interest in your company. While downloading a white paper may normally take place in the middle stages of the sales process.

The key is to examine what kinds of content and what topics they’re reading to determine their interests and leverage that knowledge in your communications with prospects.

3. Add Variety – People digest content in different ways, therefore, it’s important to provide your contacts with content in a variety of formats, including presentations, videos, infographics, blog posts, podcasts, white papers and case studies. This greatly increases the chance that a piece of your content will appeal to your specific prospect, increasing the likelihood that you close the sale.

There is a whole new slew of great business books that are coming your way in the next little while. Here are ten of the ones that look the most interesting (ranked by date of publication):

1. The Power of No: Because One Little Word Can Bring Health, Abundance, and Happiness by James Altucher and Claudia Azula Altucher. Without a doubt, James Altucher is one my most favorite writers out there today. Well, he just released his latest book and I'm about to get started on it! From the book: "How many times have you heard yourself saying yes to the wrong things -- overwhelming requests, bad relationships, time-consuming obligations? How often have you wished you could summon the power to turn them down? This lively, practical guide helps you take back that power -- and shows that a well-placed 'No' can not only save you time and trouble, it can save your life. Drawing on their own stories as well as feedback from their readers and students, James Altucher and Claudia Azula Altucher clearly show that you have the right to say no: To anything that is hurting you. To standards that no longer serve you. To people who drain you of your creativity and expression. To beliefs that are not true to the real you. When you do, you'll be freed to say a truly powerful 'Yes' in your life -- one that opens the door to opportunities, abundance, and love." The book was published on July 15th, 2014.
2. The Marketing Performance Blueprint: Strategies and Technologies to Build and Measure Business Success by Paul Roetzer. Paul wrote a super-interesting book titled, The Marketing Agency Blueprint, back in 2011. Now, he's back with this one. From the book: "The Marketing Performance Blueprint is an actionable and innovative guide to unlocking your potential as a marketer and accelerating success for your business. With an eye toward the marketing industry's rapid evolution, this book focuses on the processes, technologies, and strategies that are redefining the marketing environment. Step by step, you will learn how to build performance-driven organizations that exceed ROI expectations and outpace the competition. Companies are demanding a more technical, scientific approach to marketing, and this guide provides the key information that helps marketing professionals choose the right tools and recruit the right talent to more effectively build brand, generate leads, convert sales, and increase customer loyalty." The book will be published on August 11th, 2014.
3. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin. He's a scientist, musician, record producer and bestselling author. He wrote the incredible book, This Is Your Brain On Music. From the book: "The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we're expected to make more -- and faster -- decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up. But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel -- and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time." The book will be published on August 19th, 2014.
4. The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business by David Meerman Scott. One of the most prolific writers and speakers on marketing and technology (and all around awesome individual) is back with a new book. From the book: "Sales and service are being radically redefined like never before. With buyers now in possession of unlimited information, online content is quickly becoming the dominant driver for commerce. Today anyone working in sales or customer service needs to possess entirely new skills. Unfortunately most organizations are still using traditional selling and service models developed for a different time. In this new book by the author of the #1 bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott demystifies the new digital commercial landscape and offers inspiring and valuable guidance for anyone not wanting to be left behind." The book will be published on September 2nd, 2014.
5. The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson. He's back! Virgin founder and seminal entrepreneur, Richard Branson is back with a new book (not sure if these are written by or done by a ghost writer, but his books are always quite good). "While building the Virgin Group over forty years, Richard Branson has never shied away from seemingly outlandish challenges that others (including his own colleagues on several occasions) considered sheer lunacy. He has taken on giants like British Airways and won, and monsters like Coca-Cola and lost. Now Branson gives an inside look at his strikingly different swashbuckling style of leadership. Learn how fun, family, passion, and the dying art of listening are key components to what his extended family of employees around the world have always dubbed (with a wink) the 'Virgin Way.'" The book will be published on September 9th, 2014.
6. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley. OK, I lied in my intro to this post. I not only read this book, but was honored to be asked to write a blurb for it. I love all things Ann Handley, and she's back with a much-needed read for these times. This book is filled with writing goodness. From the book: "Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer. If you have a website, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers. Yeah, but who cares about writing anymore? In a time-challenged world dominated by short and snappy, by click-bait headlines and Twitter streams and Instagram feeds and gifs and video and Snapchat and YOLO and LOL and #tbt... does the idea of focusing on writing seem pedantic and ordinary? Actually, writing matters more now, not less. Our online words are our currency; they tell our customers who we are." This book will be published on August September 15th, 2014.
7. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters. Peter Thiel wants people to drop out of college, not go into debt and start their own businesses. He's so passionate about it, that he's putting his money where his mouth is. Literally. The co-founder of PayPal also created the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old, in order to spur them to quit college and create their own ventures. From the book: "Zero To One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything Peter Thiel has learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.
   The single most powerful pattern Thiel has noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. Ask not, what would Mark do? Ask: What valuable company is nobody building?" The book will be published on September 16th, 2014.
8. The Digital Economy Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence by Don Tapscott. One of the brightest minds in the digital economy is Don Tapscott. This is one of his most fascinating books. It came out long before anybody was really doing and of the stuff that we're doing today, making this anniversary edition that much more curious. From the book: "Twenty years ago, The Digital Economy changed the way the world thought about the Internet. While everyone else was in awe of 'web sites' and 'dot coms,' Don Tapscott argued correctly that the Internet would have a much deeper impact on the nature of corporations, government, and every institution in society. In this new edition, the New York Times bestselling author updates his book with a sweeping new analysis of how the Internet has changed business and society in the last 20 years. Tapscott leaves the original text untouched for historical purposes and scrutiny, writing a dozen new sections placed in the context of two decades of transformation." This book will be published on September 26th, 2014.
9. UnSelling: The New Customer Experience by Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer. The UnMarketing guy is back with a new book. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but rest assured he and Alison will be welcomed guests on podcast as soon as this book hits the streets. From the book: "UnSelling is about everything but the sell. We put all of our focus on the individual purchase transaction, while putting the rest of our business actions second. We've become blind to customer service, support, branding, experiences and even product quality. 60% of a purchasing decision is made before a customer even contacts you. We have funnel vision, and it needs to stop. Unselling is about the big picture: creating repeat customers, not one-time buyers. Create loyal clients that refer others, not faceless numbers. Becoming the go-to company for something, before they even need you." This book will be published on September 29th, 2014.
10. The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson is a famous author. In our circle, he's most noted for him amazing Steve Jobs biography. Now, he's back with a book about innovation and Silicon Valley. From the book: "The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?" The book will be published on October 7th, 2014.

Did I miss any? What new books are coming out that you can't wait to read? Do share...

Tags: alison kramer ann handley blake masters british airways business book claudia azula altucher coca cola daniel j levitin david meerman scott don tapscott everybody writes facebook instagram james altucher palantir paul roetzer paypal peter thiel richard branson scott stratten snapchat spacex steve jobs steve jobs biography the digital economy the innovators the marketing agency blueprint the marketing performance blueprint the new rules of marketing and pr the new rules of sales and service the organized mind the power of no the virgin way thiel fellowship this is your brain on music twitter unselling virgin walter isaacson zero to one

As a small company, it’s important to gain a competitive edge that can catapult you to the next level. You’re not just fighting for market share; you’re fighting for relevance.

That’s why most small businesses benefit from securing a partnership with a large, well-established brand. Not only will these partnerships make it easier for your company or product to become a household name through exposure to new channels, but they will also help nurture current relationships. When you publicly connect with a large brand, your company’s perceived value increases, which leads to countless new opportunities.

Securing a big-brand partnership isn’t easy, but the potential rewards are more than worth the effort. Here are four tips for securing that partnership you’ve had your eye on:

1. Entice Partners With a Unique Value Proposition

Big brands are successful because they do specific things better than others. But achieving (and maintaining) prosperity doesn’t always allow time for innovation. This is where your company can shine.

If you have a product or service that’s potentially scalable for use within larger companies, demonstrate its value during a contract bid. Uniqueness alone won’t win you a partnership, but highlighting how your company can help a brand appeal to its different audiences and markets will go a long way when securing a partnership.

Keep in mind that adapting and scaling doesn’t mean straying from your company’s primary focus. If you find yourself trying to win a contract bid by mimicking your larger, more powerful competitors, you’re setting yourself up for a failed partnership.

A strong example of this comes from the rapidly growing fitness movement CrossFit, which recently partnered with Reebok. CrossFit used Reebok’s wide reach to increase visibility, profitability, and credibility within the industry, all without veering from its core offering.

Instead of modifying its approach, CrossFit became ingrained within Reebok’s messaging and brand strategy — regularly providing input on product development and opening a CrossFit gym at Reebok’s corporate headquarters.

2. Allow the Partnership to Develop Organically

While it’s important to firmly establish your company’s value, partnering with a big brand can be a lengthy process. When first developing a relationship with a company, it’s important to stay true to your own brand but allow the creative process to breathe.

Take your time, and don’t be so quick to say no. Taking things off the table while establishing a partnership sets a negative tone and may put a damper on the relationship. A lot can change throughout the process, and if you allow ideas to flow freely, then you’ll ultimately be able to dictate the partnership terms.

It’s also important to allow conversations to occur without too much sales talk. You shouldn’t “always be closing.” Big companies like to own ideas. They hate to be sold. If they arrive at your idea on their own, you’re much more likely to create a beneficial partnership.

3. Make Your Company Indispensable

Big brands like maintaining control, so let them. Then, structure your deals to make them dependent on what your company offers. Always work to create value on all sides of the transaction, and know what’s most important to the brand.

For example, my company recently entered into a partnership with Allstate. As the talks progressed, Allstate began to open up about some of the challenges it faced with its lead acquisition strategy. These insights allowed us to adapt our offering to Allstate’s evolving needs, which cemented our importance in Allstate’s long-term lead generation and nurturing plans.

Having an innovative product is great, but it’s important to know how your company fits into a partner’s long-term vision. If you understand what’s important to them, then your pitch will resonate, and you’ll have a better chance of securing a long-term partnership.

4. Know When It Isn’t Working

In business, you need to know when to let something go. If a partnership is being delayed by brainstorming and endless changes, it might not be a good fit.

You should always have a contingency plan and be prepared to shift your attention to another big fish. Ask yourself who else could use your product, and consider making a deal with the brand’s competitors. With a strategic exit plan, you can apply pressure on a nonresponsive partner by simply walking away.

In the end, securing a big-brand partnership is a lengthy, unstructured process, filled with many variables and lots of back-and-forth discussion. However, if your company’s offering meshes with the brand’s long-term plans, a mutually beneficial partnership can pay significant dividends and help your company become a household name.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

There are literally hundreds of ways to post to and monitor social media sites out there today, and they have a pretty wide variance of capabilities. How are you supposed to know which one is right for your business? The good news is, you don’t have to try every one out or do a year-long study to narrow the field down and decide on one that will best serve your company. All you need to know is which questions to ask and what to look for, and I’m about to tell you what those are. Lucky you.

What’s the Learning Curve?

For most businesses, learning the social media ropes is plenty of learning curve to handle. When you are choosing a social media dashboard to help you with your marketing, you certainly don’t want or need it to make things more difficult. Sophistication doesn’t have to equal difficulty.

Sendible is extremely simple to use, despite the incredible power it packs. There is a downloadable user manual as well, but you aren’t left hanging with pages to wade through. If you need help you can contact us by telephone, email, and through multiple social media channels. There are also instructional videos on the site to help you navigate features, as well as the Sendible Insights blog that keeps you up to date with changes, new features, news, and how-to’s.

How Broad and Integrated Is It?

Unbelievably, many social media tools are still stuck only posting to Facebook and Twitter, with little else in the way of social integration. This shows the obvious lack of insight and forward thinking that many companies have when it comes to the medium they purport to help you with. For example, Pinterest surpassed Twitter in number of users earlier this year, yet it still isn’t integrated with most dashboards.

Another misconception by many is that social media marketing is a separate entity that doesn’t fall into the same category as older mediums like email and blogs. Why would you want to have to manage these things separately and use more than one tool if you don’t have to?

In terms of integration, posting a status or a tweet barely scratches the surface. Can you post to LInkedIn groups (if it includes LinkedIn at all)? Facebook pages? A quality SMMS will integrate deeply with networks, allowing posting and manipulation in different subsets of the site as well as tapping into social media analysis.

Sendible supports email marketing campaigns, blog posting and monitoring, review site monitoring, sms responses, RSS integration, link sharing and bookmarking services like Instapaper, Delicious, Read it Later, and Diigo, and more on top of integrating with deeply with every major social network. Post pictures to Flickr, Instagram, and Pinterest, videos to Youtube, slides to Slideshare, and a lot more.

Does It Work Both Ways?

Posting without monitoring is like sending letters to sea in a bottle. How will you ever know if anyone reads them or is paying any attention to you at all? Likes and shares only tell part of the story. You also need to know if someone is talking about you, especially if they aren’t happy.

Monitoring the social web is absolutely essential for brand reputation in an age where reputations can be damaged very quickly. Sendible lets you monitor the entire web for brand names and whatever keywords you like, to let you know right away if damage control is needed or if there is a potential customer that you can contact.

How Sophisticated is the Reporting?

Or, quite frankly, does it even have reporting? Is it customizable? Sendible has Google Analytics baked into it’s reporting, so you don’t need a separate tool to get the information you need. It gives you detailed reports on social activity, allows for exporting the raw data in CSV form for further analysis, and will track clicks if you use a url shortener such as bit.ly.

Is it Growing?

You need to know that the product you are using is supported by a company that cares about social media marketing and isn’t simply creating a basic product for a quick buck. The perfect example is PInterest, as I mentioned earlier. As the second largest social network in the U.S. with the highest sales conversion rate of any network, does your dashboard of choice support it? If not, why not?

Sendible is constantly growing and adding features for our customers, and we are determined to be on the cutting edge of social media marketing wherever that road leads. Twitter, for instance, just added the ability to post animated GIFs to their site. Sendible was ahead of them, having the capability long before Twitter made their decision. It’s this kind of forward thinking as opposed to reactionary measures that sets us apart from the field.

Does it Have Good Support?

Can you get in touch with the company if you have a question or problem? Some companies only have a Twitter address for support, and that isn’t acceptable. Sendible has phone numbers for the U.S., U.K., and Australia listed right on our home page, along with email, support forums, and accounts for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram. If you need us, you can get us.

Is it Scalable?

Your business may be small right now, but I’ll bet you don’t want it to stay that way. You need the ability to scale your dashboard to the needs and size of your business. Sendible offers everything from a basic plan for managing up to eight services up to a comprehensive plan to cover unlimited services for even the largest of companies.

Whether you only need posting, monitoring, and reporting services or you want customizable branding, social CRM, collaboration tools, workflow features, or even a dedicated support channel, Sendible has what you need to make the most of your social media marketing campaigns.

I live and work in Indiana, a state rich with both high-tech and agribusiness, so believe me, I understand the value of silos . . . for farming, that is. Corporate silos are another matter entirely.

Corporate silos are outdated. They’re impractical, and (I can’t be any more direct than this) they have no place in the modern enterprise. Silos, whether within marketing itself or between marketing and other departments, impede virtually everything that’s vital to success in today’s fast-paced and multifaceted business environment.

Even so, dismantling traditional corporate structure isn’t easy. How do you begin?

I tackle this topic in great detail in my book, Big Data Marketing; but in a nutshell, it all comes down to one thing: using your customer data as a wrecking ball.

Follow these five steps:

Set a customer-focused vision and strategy: Communicate and drive a shared understanding of expectations, goals and anticipated returns. The key: Identify where customer data lies across the business and integrate it to create a single view of all the interactions customers have with your company. Our research shows that only 18 percent of marketers have this kind of insight. Resolve that today, a single view of your customer data becomes your first priority.

Collaborate so everyone’s a part of marketing: Since every customer-facing function needs to deliver your message, you need robust communication channels for two-way exchanges of information. Some companies use circulated reports with scheduled cross-functional team meetings. Others make this a standing topic in quarterly or operational meetings. Alternatively, you could create an internal collaboration platform like Jive or Chatter to provide real-time updates to the appropriate team(s).

Remain transparent: You need buy-in beyond marketing. To get it, equip yourself with the right tools. Today’s technologies allow you to track your way toward revenue goals, get instant visibility into spending and campaign ROI, and know where you stand on customer satisfaction, market share growth and virtually any other metric. Transparency between sales and marketing is especially essential. It enables sales to provide you with the feedback needed to optimize marketing initiatives.

Share what you did: Communicate results with the entire company so others learn where opportunities exist and what’s been improved. Use data to demonstrate marketing’s contribution to the company’s objectives, and give them what they want – not how many Facebook “likes,” but Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) or the number of marketing-qualified leads.

Most of us don’t have a lot of leeway when we’re selling online.

The pressure is on with shortening attention spans, numerous competitors, and consumer skepticism. Being too pushy or asking a question at an inopportune time can put off the leads you’ve worked so hard to get.

Being aggressive might work for an ecommerce store that sells $5 t-shirts, but it probably won’t work for you. If you’re selling something complicated or expensive enough to warrant a sales funnel, a different approach will win you more customers.

The psychology shifts with expensive, complicated products or services. Prospects view the transaction as less of a commodity and more of the beginning of a relationship with the salesperson. How well you sell yourself becomes critical.

A Data-Driven Approach to Close More Sales

Why do so many businesses get this wrong? And what can we do to get it right?

Those are the mysteries psychologist Neil Rackham set out to solve.

Image Credit: Ok I Trade

Neil Rackham is a psychologist and founder of Huthwaite, a research and consulting firm. He and his team spent 12 years observing over 35,000 sales calls and gathering data. They dissected the interactions to determine the most important components of a successful sale and how to put them together to increase the likelihood of success.

Their results were unexpected. Rackham transformed them into a system – SPIN Selling – you can implement to close more sales. The first step of embracing the SPIN Selling system begins with questioning a few major assumptions of conventional sales thinking.

Questioning Conventional Sales Wisdom

The SPIN Selling research was shocking because so many of the findings went against the grain of conventional sales wisdom. There were (and still are) countless sales books and training courses out there repeating a set of fixed beliefs about what makes a salesperson effective.

Rackham’s research calls some of those beliefs into question, revealing that successful salespeople might not have such a great understanding of why they’re so successful and their colleagues aren’t. Here are three major beliefs the SPIN Selling research revealed were misconceptions when it came to major sales:

“Always be Closing”

Perhaps the most pervasive misconception from sales teams is the idea that aggressively closing the sale is the single most important factor in determining a successful sales outcome.

The SPIN Selling research found that the emphasis on obtaining the prospect’s commitment is misplaced. The average number of closing attempts a salesperson used during a sales call did not have a noticeable positive impact on the closing rate. With high-cost transactions, aggressive closing was actually more likely to scare prospects away and ruin the sales opportunity.

Here’s what Rackham had to say about pushy closing techniques:

Closing techniques may increase the chances of making a sale with low-priced products. With expensive products or services, they reduce the chances of making a sale. – SPIN Selling, pg. 33

An Emphasis on Overcoming Objections

Conventional sales wisdom also stresses being prepared to handle numerous buying objections and overcoming them. It wasn’t uncommon for the salespeople Rackham observed to prepare for sales calls by listing potential objections and rehearsing their responses to them.

The research revealed this wasn’t as important as a lot of people thought. In the majority of the successful sales calls Rackham and his team observed, customer objections weren’t really a big factor.

Skilled people receive fewer objections because they have learned objection prevention, not objection handling. – SPIN Selling, pg. 118

Because Rackham believed sellers were usually responsible for the objections (as opposed to the prospects), he thought the focus on handling objections was misguided:

“The professional salesperson,” the instructor began, “welcomes objections because they are a sign of customer interest. In fact, the more objections you get, the easier it will be for you to sell.” The class, duly impressed, wrote this down. Meanwhile I groaned behind my mandatory visitor’s smile. – SPIN Selling, pg. 117

It isn’t a given that the prospect will have objections. They can be prevented if the salesperson creates a high enough perceived value. And they do that by asking the right questions.

The Importance of Asking Open-Ended Questions

“Ask a lot of open-ended questions.”

Rookie sales professionals and veterans alike probably hear that advice daily. The idea is to get the prospect talking; that way the sales person can draw out insights and act on them in a way that advances the sale.

The SPIN Selling research found that the preoccupation with open-ended questions has been blown way out of proportion. Rackham noted that the average number of open-ended questions created no noticeable difference between closing rates.

In other words, none of our studies showed that the classic distinction between open and closed questions has any meaning in high-value sales calls. – SPIN Selling, pg. 16

The type of the question – closed versus open-ended – mattered much less than the question’s purpose. Some of the most successful salespeople used many closed questions, but they used them to obtain critical information and advance the sale.

A Systematic Approach to Streamline Your Sales Process

Conventional sales tactics – overcoming objections, asking a lot of open-ended questions, and pushing for the close – persist because they work well for low-ticket items that don’t require any follow up. While they might work well for the $5 t-shirt shop, they won’t be as effective for 99% rest of us.

Rackham used the insights from his research to create a system to close more “major sales” (when the process usually requires multiple interactions between the buyer and prospect before a sale is made). This approach works for B2B sales, B2C sales with at least a moderate price, and for service providers.

The key is creating massive perceived value in the eyes of your prospects:

In a small sale the customer is less conscious of value. As the size of the sale increases, successful salespeople must build up the perceived value of their products or services. The building of perceived value is probably the single most important selling skill in larger sales. – SPIN Selling, pg. 8

How can you do this? Let’s break down the SPIN Selling process and how you can apply it in your own business:

A Breakdown of The Spin Selling Approach

Rackham breaks down the sales process into 4 steps.

1. Preliminaries: warming up the prospect. This is the part where you introduce yourself and ask a few innocuous questions to make the prospect feel comfortable.
2. Investigation: this step, according to Rackham, is the most important part of the entire sales process. You’ll ask prospects a series of questions to find out more about their business, problem areas, and the needs you can fulfill. It’s an information exchange that can make or break your chances of success.
3. Demonstrating capability: showing your prospect that you’re able to provide the solution to the needs identified in the investigation stage. This is where testimonials, social proof, and other trust signals can push prospects on the edge about doing business with you to commit.
4. Obtaining commitment (“closing”): here’s where you wrap up the process by asking the prospect to commit to the sale, or a lesser degree of action – like scheduling a demo or joining your email list – that advances the sale.

A lot of salespeople obsess about getting to the “closing” stage as quickly as possible. But in most transactions, it’s how you handle the investigation stage that will determine whether your sale is a failure or a success. Doing this well starts and ends with asking the right questions.

Acing the Investigation Stage with SPIN Questions

Image Credit: San Diego State University

Rackham recommends asking 4 different types of questions to ace the investigation stage and turn more prospects into customers. Salespeople got the best results from asking these questions in order, though it’s possible to jump around depending on the prospect. The “SPIN” in SPIN Selling is an acronym of the 4 types of sales questions (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff) to ask for the best results.

Here’s how to handle each one:

Situation Questions

Kick off the investigation stage with a few situation questions. These are the questions you ask to find out the background information you need to make sense of the prospect’s situation and how you can help them.

Answering these kind of questions can bore prospects after awhile, so it’s important not to take it overboard. Doing some research beforehand will help you focus your questions on information that isn’t publicly available.

Here are some examples of good situation questions:

• “What type of software do you run here?”
• “How many customers do you have?”
• “How do you get most of your customers?”
• “What is your current churn rate?”

Problem Questions

After prospects fill you in on the situation, their problems might seem obvious to you. You might be tempted to launch into the benefits of what you’re selling. But resist the urge! Asking questions that get prospects to acknowledge the problem on their own – instead of bringing it up directly – will lead to far more sales.

Like a lawyer in the courtroom, you can lead prospects to the realization you want them to have by asking the right questions. Problem questions probe for information to discover what about the prospect’s current situation is creating frustration or pain. This sets you up perfectly for the next step, and it might even draw out some interesting concerns you would’ve overlooked.

Here are some examples of good problem questions:

• “What’s the biggest problem you’ve faced when managing your sales pipeline?”
• “Is it difficult for your sales team to keep up with peak demand?”
• “Are you satisfied with your current software?”
• “When someone from your sales team goes on vacation, what happens with the leads they were supposed to follow up with?”

Implication Questions

Implication questions are probably the most critical part of the process. You’ve found out more about the prospect’s situation and got them to identify their problem areas. Now’s the time to make the prospect feel the pain of those problems in a way that motivates them to act.

The pain your prospect is feeling right now might be irritating, but it’s comfortable. Non-action is the status quo. Without the proper motivation, it’s easier to stay in that comfort zone instead of shelling out the cash to fix it.

Implication questions get prospects to understand the full extent of not fixing their problem. The goal here is to make the prospect identify the effects, consequences, and long-term impact of letting the problem continue unchecked.

Just like with the problem questions, resist the temptation to do this for the prospect. It’s essential they identify, understand, and appreciate the negative consequences; it will make them more motivated to take you up on your solution.

Here are some examples of implication questions:

• “What’s the average cost of getting a new customer when a lead doesn’t make it to the end of your sales pipeline?”
• “How much time do you spend dealing with complaints from unhappy customers?”
• “What’s the financial impact on your business when your sales team can’t keep up with peak demand?”
• “What are the time and financial effects on your operation when your software crashes?”

Need-Payoff Questions

You just motivated prospects to act by having them identify the consequences of not fixing their problems. Need-payoff questions push them over the edge by getting them to see the benefits of your solution.

Once again, the idea is to use questions to get the prospect to describe these benefits instead of doing it yourself. It’s much more persuasive that way. Need-payoff questions get prospects’ imaginations racing about how different their lives could be if their problem were solved. The more benefits you can draw out, the higher the perceived value of your solution (and the better the chance of closing the sale).

Here are some examples of need-payoff questions:

• “Do you see the value if your sales team could keep up with peak demand?”
• “Why is it important to tighten up your sales pipeline?”
• “How would it help you and your business if you could spend less time dealing with dissatisfied customers?”
• “If you could reduce your churn rate by half, what impact would that have?”

Make the Most of Every Opportunity

Using a smart CRO strategy to turn your website into an lead generation platform is crucial to your long-term success. But getting leads is just the first step. You still have to motivate those leads to become buyers in order to capitalize on your opportunities.

That’s where SPIN Selling can help. You use data to drive conversion optimization decisions, and now you can use the data from over 35,000 sales calls to streamline your sales process. Give the SPIN Selling system a shot. You can leverage the insights of Rackham’s research, stop second-guessing your approach, and make the most of every opportunity.

What do you struggle the most with about selling? Do you think giving the SPIN Selling approach a try would help? Leave a comment below and let me know.

You’re probably getting tired of hearing this but software leads aren’t sales. You or your other marketers have probably been nagged to death about how the volume of your production doesn’t mean squat unless it wins any actual buying decisions.

On the other hand, you don’t always have to take offense. Sometimes it really helps to be reminded of what software leads are and why your sales reps want them in the first place.

Part of this lies in the fact that the B2B sales process really is complex and if not complex, it’s still quite lengthy. For example, the fine line between cold calling and warm calling may not be so fine. Gone are the days when calls are completely unsolicited with sales and marketers still barely having a clue about the prospect’s business. However, just because a call went well doesn’t mean you should throw a party. A little victory dance maybe but again, it’s just a step. What is the essence of a step?

• It’s a mark of progress – Starting with the obvious, a step means you’re closer to hitting a goal. In this case, the goal is sales. (And hence, the many complaints that B2B marketers replace that goal with just their lead quota.) That has never been the case. You are only marking a significant part of the buyer’s journey but it’s not the end of it.
• It’s a mean to an end – Steps also provide a means to an end. For your sales reps, software leads provide them with the information necessary to win a sale. But at this point, it can get tricky because you need to provide divide the responsibility of nurturing the lead without necessarily reducing the rep’s role into a cash register.
• It’s a requirement – Finally, a step is a requirement. It not only tells you how close you are and it only helps you get there. Put those two together and it shows that they (like your software leads) are necessary. You don’t magically warp from point A to B in a B2B sales process. Furthermore, this is the asset that can keep your reps from complaining too much. If they can’t accept this, it’s either they’re already generating leads on their own or they’re carelessly cold calling.

On that last point, they’re still acknowledging that your software leads are necessary for winning sales. The success of your marketers becomes the crucial step to the success of your sales reps. That makes your leads important but not the only thing important in your business.