Rnordman

I’m not anti-meeting but as a freelancer, my bread and butter lies in my ability to be able to complete projects. In order to complete projects and get paid, I need to have time to work on them. That said, I also need to make sure I’m understanding my role and have great communication with clients.

One of the most popular ways to communicate with clients and team members is to have virtual or in-person meetings. Some team meetings can be pretty important and extremely helpful. Others on the other hand, can seem like a waste of time if someone goes off on a tangent or if the topic could have been consolidated so everyone could get to the important points.

When running meetings in your business, it’s important to make sure the time spent conversing is well planned out, efficient, and effective. One thing you can do to cut down on the time and energy spent running meetings is to consolidate important meetings so you and your team can get more accomplished. Here are a few ways to cut your meeting time down while still discussing important information.

Organize an Agenda Beforehand

It’s best to have a clear agenda for your meeting organized beforehand. You want to determine the main topics you’ll cover, specific recent updates you need to make the team aware of, and ensure you’re on track to meet any upcoming deadlines.

Also, make sure everyone knows what the meeting agenda is before attending. That way, they can be better prepared on their end and come with questions.

Being unprepared or unsure of what you’re going to cover can slow the meeting down and do more harm than good. If you’re going to consolidate important meetings, like your monthly team meeting, for example, to cover a variety of topics, make sure you have an agenda and everyone knows what to expect.

Set a Time Limit For the Meeting

Once you have your agenda in place, you’ll have a better understanding of how long the meeting should be. It’s up to you to determine whether you want to do multiple small meetings throughout the week or month, or a longer, overview meeting.

Sometimes, the slightly longer and more in-depth meetings can be better for your time management and your team’s productivity. You may even find that if you stay on schedule, your meeting won’t take up as much time as you thought.

I wouldn’t host a meeting over an hour as you may start to lose people’s attention unless it’s covering a super sensitive/important topic.

Try to shoot for meetings ranging anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes and keep the timeline firm. Depending on the flow of things, you can cover a lot of ground in 45 minutes so you may want to either schedule a few meetings back-to-back or cover more ground during your longer meeting.

Swap Mini Meetings Out With an Informational Email

Some meetings don’t even need to take place in my opinion. If you’re providing or receiving a simple update or someone has a few questions, you may be able to discuss them during a quick email or an online company chat.

Tools like Slack and Voxer and great to send internal messages to others on the team or even recording a short video or audio messages to send one another.

A good rule of thumb is to cancel out the idea of having a meeting if you can discuss the topic in detail with only 1 to 3 email exchanges. If you start to go back and forth about a topic, it may be best to just jump on the phone or add a meeting to your calendar.

Some time back I worked with a client who wanted to hold weekly or bi-weekly meetings with all the staff writers to share company updates and accept pitches. To me, after the company update, the meeting was pretty counterproductive to the writers because we all had to sit on the call for over an hour and listen to everyone else’s pitches.

I wasn’t really too interested in what the other writers were covering because I wanted to focus on my own unique content ideas and not be influenced by what anyone else was doing. My personal pitch only took up about 3 minutes of time on the call so it seemed like a waste of time for everyone but the client.

Luckily, the client soon realized that it would be much easier for everyone to post their pitches in a forum within a certain time frame, and it saved the team a lot of time.

Remember, if you’re going to take time schedule a meeting and block out time on your calendar, it should be worthwhile. A brief 5-minute check-in meeting can probably best be handled via email exchange.

Schedule Multiple Meetings in One

If you manage several areas of your business and need to meet with various different people, consider having a company overview meeting, then breaking out into small meetings afterward.

I have a client who does this well. If we all need to have a team meeting, we schedule a time to hop on a call. Then, when the general meeting is over, he allows some people to drop off the call while he talks to others about more specific topics.

This is more productive for my client because he gets to knock out everything in one big meeting. It also saves team members time because they only need to be involved with the meeting information that pertains to their role within the business.

Tag Team Interviews and Discovery Calls With Other Team Members

Meeting with multiple different people for interviews and discovery calls almost makes no sense. Instead, you can consolidate important meetings like these by adding more people to the call.

For example, say you’re interviewing someone or looking to work with a new client or partner and would like a second opinion on the candidate from a current team member. Add that person to the meeting so they can ask their questions and give feedback right along with you.

Do this instead of hosting the meeting solo, then scheduling a separate meeting with your team member to go over the details. It just makes more sense and will be less confusing for everyone.

Ultimately, team meetings can be helpful or they can strip crucial time and attention away from you as you strive to improve your business. Don’t schedule a meeting without a clear agenda. Also, consider consolidating your meetings using the tips mentioned above to save time so you can accomplish more in other areas.

How do you manage meetings? Do you use any of these strategies to consolidate important meetings?

As Warren Berger showed in A More Beautiful Question, the humble question can be a powerful tool. By asking questions, we can analyze, learn, and move forward in the face of uncertainty. When confronted with almost any demanding situation, the act of questioning can help guide us to smart decisions. But the questions must be the right ones; the ones that cut to the heart of complexity, or that enable us to see an old problem in a fresh way.

The Book of Beautiful Questions contains over 200 such questions addressing everyday dilemmas of all types: getting out of a career rut, generating fresh ideas, overcoming a fear of failure, checking your own biases, and many more. The book is about asking the right questions, at the right time, in order to make the best choices when it truly counts. Each beautiful question is thoughtful, provocative, and actionable, meaning it can be applied immediately to bring about change. Along with each question, Berger offers insights gleaned from his own research, as well as guidance from leading thinkers and experts, including Adam Grant, Elizabeth Gilbert, Atul Gawande, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. The Book of Beautiful Questions provides essential questions to guide readers to their own answers where it matters most.

The book is available now, and here’s an excerpt to give you a taste of what you can expect!

 

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How might a leader encourage others, throughout an organization (or a community or even a family) to inquire more?

As is often the case, it’s better to start by first considering “Why?” before “How?” Why would a leader want to encourage more questioning? Why open the lid and release a potential torrent of employee questions?

The most obvious answer is that many companies today need new ideas from as many sources as possible, in order to innovate. Questions asked by all sorts of people—a manager reviewing procedures and processes, a worker on the frontlines who detects inefficiencies—can lead to important changes and improvements. Socrates once said, “All of us are smarter than any of us.” Companies become smarter and more productive by tapping into the collective intelligence of the group.

A second, related reason to encourage widespread questioning is that companies are having to deal with rapid and constant change, and inquiry is a key, accessible tool for navigating change. People within those changing companies can better adapt and survive if they’re able to ask questions and learn on the job.

Moreover, good leaders want their followers to feel content and fulfilled. (If nothing else, it lowers the employee-turnover rate.) One of the ways people feel fulfilled in their work is by learning. In fact, research suggests many people are apt to leave their jobs if and when they stop learning. If you want people within an organization to keep learning, you must give them the freedom to explore, wonder, and inquire.

So that’s the “why”—and it’s compelling, particularly for organizations that place a premium on innovation, want to encourage learning, and have a tolerance for independent thinking and internal debate.

That tolerance is important. Having a curious, engaged, and inquisitive workforce presents challenges. One question I sometimes ask leaders when discussing this is: If people start asking more questions at your company, what will you do with those questions? (Because questions shouldn’t be ignored; that just upsets the questioner.) Another point that comes up is, What if you don’t like the questions your employees are asking?

If leaders are flummoxed by those two points, it indicates they haven’t thought through the ramifications of encouraging a questioning culture. Here’s another, more common warning sign: Often, top executives say to their employees, “Don’t bring me questions; bring me answers.” (A similar version of that statement is, “Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions.”) If you’re a leader and this sounds like something you have said or would say, consider what that statement means.

You’re saying, in effect, you’d like someone to bring you solutions and innovations—but you’re not interested in the messy process that produces those results. That’s not the way innovation works. To encourage innovation, you must embrace questions and experiments as potential opportunities to improve or innovate. As for the person who identifies a problem and raises a question about it—that person has, at that point, already contributed something valuable. In a positive questioning culture, an employee is not responsible for answering the question or solving the problem. If that individual happens to know the answer, that’s great—but depending on the scope of the problem, it may require a team effort to solve it.

To boil this down to a question, leaders weighing whether they truly desire a culture of inquiry may want to ask themselves: Am I ready to announce “Bring us the problems you’ve noticed?” Because in a questioning culture, people will do just that.

In terms of how to foster a culture of inquiry, there are different ways to approach the challenge but one thing seems clear: It must start at the top. Research on curiosity shows that it tends to flourish in an environment where questioning and problem solving is modeled and encouraged—whether by a teacher in a classroom, a parent in a home, or a top executive at a company.

“Leaders must be role models for good thinking,” says Ed Hess of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. They can do that, Hess says, by being very open about what they’re curious about, how they’re learning and solving problems. “They should be thinking out loud, in front of everyone.”

The good news is that many leaders are curious people by nature, as the journalist Adam Bryant observed, based on his hundreds of “Corner Office” profiles appearing over a decade in the New York Times. In looking for common characteristics among the many chief executives he interviewed, Bryant found “they share a habit of mind best described as ‘applied curiosity.’ They tend to question everything. They want to know how things work, and wonder how they can be made to work better. They’re curious about people and their back stories.”

To begin building a culture of inquiry, a curious, questioning leader should exhibit those tendencies at every opportunity. For example, start meetings “by asking open-ended questions,” says Berkeley business professor Morten Hansen. He points out that too many leaders start meetings by stating opinions—which then causes “the rest of the room to fall in behind you.”

Rather than expecting people to fall in line, a questioning leader encourages disagreement. Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of the Edison International utility holding company, even goes so far as to ask other senior leaders at his company to disagree with him in open settings “so people see that somebody whom I value can debate with me.”

Modeling the behavior of questioning is an important start, but it’s only a first step. Doug Conant advises that with any effort to bring about change in an organization’s culture, there are three stages: You start by figuring out the culture you want, then you declare it, and then you create practices to support it. The “declaring” part is easy—too many leaders do that without backing up the declaration.

To adjust Conant’s formula slightly, leaders might want to start by asking themselves a two-part question: What is the culture I want, and what actions and conditions are likely to produce such a culture?

 

Excerpted from The Book of Beautiful Questions: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead.
Copyright © Warren Berger, 2018.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
All rights reserved.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Warren Berger has studied hundreds of the world’s foremost innovators, entrepreneurs, and creative thinkers to learn how they ask questions, generate original ideas, and solve problems. His writing and research appears regularly in Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. 

There is deafening silence where there was a cacophony of shrill voices shouting down cold calling and singing the praises of what they called “social selling.”

Notice that no one serious about helping people improve their sales results is willing to remove the phone as a medium anymore. Even those who were very late to the party have given up the ghost. At the very worst, they hedge, suggesting that the phone works, but that you should also consider using the social tools—even though the main tools once praised are no longer mentioned (like Twitter, Facebook, and the odd idea that Snapchat would somehow be a significant B2B play). Social selling is down to LinkedIn, and that is turning out to be a mess (and exactly the opposite of what “social selling” suggested).

Have you recognized how little and how uncommon it is to now see the words “social selling” on social posts, where it was once part of every second or third post? The two words, “social” and “selling” are almost never seen together anymore, apparently having lost their mojo over the last couple of years. Like all fashions, over time, they are displaced by a newer fashion, while the core fundamentals go from season to season, never going out of style.

Content Marketing, however, is still having a very good run of things.

The reason this deserves your attention now is because the best way to make decision about the future is to look to the past. Things that stand the test of time only do so because they continue to be valuable.

Honesty and integrity are never going to go out of fashion. If you are going to build a reputation and a career, your character is the foundation on which you erect that structure.

The advice that makes one a trusted advisor is so fundamental and so critical to creating a preference to work with you that it’s as old as any story humans tell, even before stories of the Oracles the Greeks relied upon when making life and death decisions.

Relationships and caring are always going to over-index when it comes to producing results through and with other human beings. If you read history, you are going to find a record of relationships, as will you were you to pick up any biography (which are only written about those who lived lives worth such an accounting).

If you want success, pay attention to what lasts and not what’s now. A lot of what you see that looks like something substantial lacks the foundation to stand the test of time.

The post Pay Attention to What Lasts appeared first on The Sales Blog.

A coach would never send a rookie player to the field without practicing team drills and scrimmages.

Similarly, you wouldn’t wait until after sales onboarding, when your reps are already on the playing field, to assess their ability to handle key components of customer conversations.

At that point, you’re one step forward and two steps back.

Sales certification should play a critical role in the onboarding process, and modern learning tools empower sales enablement and training professionals to personalize reps’ path to getting certified.

Three essential skill areas pave the way for new employees to build sales certifications around:

1. Demonstrating a solution

When a new hire delivers company messaging, can they clearly articulate the mission statement? How well do they grasp the buyer’s experience? How well do they understand the buyer’s industry and demonstrate the value of the company’s solution?

Requiring that reps submit sales certifications during onboarding provides you with answers to these and other key questions before new reps get in front of customers. Before certification, lead them through examples and show them what “good” looks like by giving them access to libraries of short video clips featuring top sales performers in your organization demonstrating how they do it.

2. Storytelling

An endorsement from a satisfied customer goes a long way. In fact, sales reps should be able to confidently articulate customer success stories to new potential buyers and demonstrate the value they derived from a specific solution. Mentioning that a customer has stayed committed to your product for many years can also help drive a new sale.

Ask new sales reps to submit a video of themselves explaining two or three customers’ business problems, the impact your solution had, and the ROI the customers realized. From there, evaluate and post comments on key moments throughout the videos to drive new hire engagement through early 1:1 manager-rep interactions during sales onboarding.

3. Navigating sales objections

Once your new hires submit their videos demonstrating their ability to present your solution, surprise them with a video scenario of an objection to which they need to respond.

How do they react? Are they prepared? Do they remain calm? Do they back up their answers with customer anecdotes or examples?

Share the best of these submission videos with the wider team to promote peer-to-peer learning and friendly competition. From there, curate and publish them to a best-practices channel for all reps to review throughout their onboarding and beyond.

Sales learning and coaching platforms expand the number of ways sales trainees learn, practice and submit sales certifications at their own pace over the course of onboarding and ultimately help shape new employees into well-seasoned reps.

A version of this post was originally published on the Allego Blog. You can read the original post here.

Most companies acknowledge the merits of value-based pricing as an ideal.  Why then, do so many companies struggle to execute it in practice?   There are three reasons we frequently encounter:   Confusing Product Value with Customer Value   Back in the early

The old sales funnel is losing ground. Prospects are getting pounded with sales communication and attention is limited. Sales communications that are highly personalized are winning. Here is a look at account-based marketing (ABM) and the steps needed to begin.

What Is Account-based Marketing?

Well, you probably know full-funnel marketing starts by dividing the funnel into two parts: the upper funnel, where you reach your target audience, and the lower funnel, where you nurture your prospects. Traditional marketers focus on email to nurture, but new technologies help change the way this is done. Part of the reason this is necessary is that prospects spend 23 hours per week on email, social media, and texting.

Prospects are influenced by personal recommendations, social content, display and search advertisements and online reviews. Capitalizing upon this change is imperative but so is the need to flesh out a plan to achieve growth marketing.

Some primary elements of growth marketing include market definition, audience analysis, market, lead and demand generation, and sales enablement. To cover these elements strategically, a modern marketer should rely on key tools like public relations, website strategy, social media, advertising — both traditional and digital — inbound marketing, marketing automation, and sales collateral development.

A Deeper Look at the ABM Sales Model

Consider this: online display advertising is not only a top funnel strategy. It has been proven effective when used at every stage of the funnel. Display ads can increase search conversion. Both display and search ads can improve return on investment (ROI) with time.

On a similar note, content marketing is something you should use at every stage of the funnel. In the upper part of the funnel, LinkedIn-sponsored updates combined with leadership blog posts can establish a company brand as helpful, reputable and knowledgeable. For the lower part of the funnel, videos can work well with whitepapers to educate and engage potential prospects. Businesses can drive leads and sales with webinars or product-focused content.

How to Get Started with ABM

Half of executives admit their data-driven marketing efforts are lagging, and another 22 percent say they are non-existent. So, how do you get started with ABM?

Find your target accounts. Identify the key players involved (decision makers and influencers). Personalize your communication. Engage targets throughout the sales cycle, and then measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and make adjustments as you move forward.

Map marketing programs and content to your firm’s KPIs. If you map out your marketing program and your content compared to KPIs, you can confirm your success at each stage of the funnel.

For example, you can confirm your success metric for the awareness and investigation stage (otherwise known as the top of the funnel) with marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). You can confirm your success metric for the comparison stage (middle of the funnel) with sales-accepted leads. You can confirm your success metric for the consideration/purchase stages (or, the bottom of the funnel) with closed-won deals.

Engagement metrics are things like clicks, shares or likes. They give you insight into the content topics and formats that your marketing channel uses. To relate this to revenue, you need a scoring model.

Check the Pipeline

The simplest way to figure out the score of any campaign or asset is to evaluate the movement of your buyer through the pipeline. For example, the first touch might be a whitepaper, the second an email, the third a blog post, the fourth another blog post, the fifth a video and the sixth and final touch might be a webinar. So, to convert from a lead to MQL, it took six assets. That means that each asset earns 1/6 of a score.

Remember AMB sales metrics and analytics are vital for the success of your firm for several reasons. They allow you to track how your company is doing. You can measure your ROI, the growth of your firm, who you are reaching and what your following is. In the world of marketing, it’s not enough to say something is — or is not — working. You need to back up these beliefs with factual evidence. Marketing metrics and analytics allow you to do this. Not only do they allow you to track your success, but they also allow you to prove it.

“ If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” — Peter Drucker.

Thanks to online marketing and technology, we have more data than ever to use in measuring and managing marketing campaigns. There are so many potential reports and dashboards that it’s easy to be overwhelmed.
So in this article, I will boil down an ocean of possible marketing data into the essential drops of wisdom. These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will give you the big picture. Plus, they allow you to drill deeper as necessary to manage your pipeline, refine your campaigns and maximize return on investment (ROI).

1. Cost-Per-Lead

• What it is:

Your campaign costs divided by the number of leads you generate.

• Why you need it:

It is critical to have an automatic way to track your cost-per-lead on all campaigns because it tells you which are the most cost-efficient and deliver the highest ROI. And given all the campaigns you probably have going on at once, you don’t have time to track the cost and performance of each campaign manually.

You need to be able to compare at-a-glance the cost-per-lead from each marketing channel — paid search, events, display ads, retargeting, organic search, content syndication, direct mail and more. This comparison enables you to answer the question, “Which channels work best?”

Also, to improve campaigns, you need the ability to evaluate, for example, an A/B test on a landing page. Which landing page generates the lowest cost per lead? Make that your control and perform your next test so you can continually optimize your marketing machine.

2. Cost-Per-Acquisition

• What it is:

Your campaign costs divided by the number of sales you generate.

• Why you need it:

If you can push your measurements beyond lead generation to customer acquisition, you’ll have a measure that’s even more valuable in helping to allocate your marketing spending. That’s because not all leads are created equal. Those that are higher quality convert better.

Perhaps you have a low cost-per-lead on your pay-per-click campaigns and a much higher one from events. By tracking cost-per-acquisition, however, you may discover that event leads convert better and are more cost effective.

Thus, you can optimize the use of your marketing budget by allocating more dollars to channels and campaigns with the lowest cost-per-acquisition metrics.
You can also compare the cost-per-acquisition between multiple events to help decide which events to participate in during the following year.

3. Pipeline Contribution

• What it is:

The dollar amount of the sales pipeline generated through marketing or sales activities.

• Why you need it:

Both sales and marketing are responsible for revenue generation, and you want to know how much each team contributes. Also, since marketing initiatives often have a longer lead time than sales efforts, you should review a pipeline contribution dashboard to determine whether their contribution over time is growing.

This dashboard does not get into the nitty-gritty of programs, such as direct mail campaigns versus pay-per-click. Because it focuses on the big picture, however, it’s ideal for sharing with members of top management who want to know whether their marketing and sales teams are pulling their weight.

4. Pipeline Velocity and Acceleration

• What it is

Bear with me on this one. It’s a little more complicated, but it’s worth understanding.

Frequently, when we think about speed, we’re looking at automobile dashboards that measure miles per hour. Pipeline velocity measures are similar in that they too are averages. However, they instead look at the average sales dollars your pipeline produces each day.

To calculate it, you need to know:

• • How many qualified opportunities are in your pipeline
  • Your average sales win rate (the average percentage of opportunities that become closed deals)
  • Sales dollars per deal
  • Average sales cycle

Here’s the equation:

(Pipeline opportunities x Average sales win-rate x Average sales dollars per deal)/ Average Sales Cycle in Days = Pipeline Velocity.

For example, here’s the equation for a company:
(100 opportunities x 40% average sales win-rate x $7,500 average sale)/ 30-day sales cycle = $10,000 a day.

• Why you need it:

Just like when you’re driving, pipeline acceleration is putting your foot on the pedal to bump up the $10,000 a day pipeline velocity. There are two ways to accelerate pipeline velocity. You can increase the numerator or reduce the denominator of the pipeline velocity equation.

To increase the numerator, you could turn up any of three knobs on the dashboard — opportunities, sales win-rates or deal size. To amplify win rates, you’ll want to be able to drill deeper to see conversion rates at each stage in the pipeline. For instance, your dashboard might delineate the number of opportunities that convert to demos, the number of demos that result in proposals, and the number of proposals that result in deals. This detailed data enables you to look for the pipeline areas of where you have the most significant leverage to rev up conversions.

You can also try to reduce the length of the sales cycle. It’s helpful if you can see the sales cycle length by each salesperson or other segments. Perhaps you’ll find one rep has a shorter sales cycle than others. If so, find out what they’re doing differently. Alternatively, you can examine the overall sales process to find areas for increased efficiency, tweak your process and find out if it reduces the sales cycle.

5. Web Traffic Sources

• What it is

A measure of where the traffic on your website comes from — direct (typing your URL into their browser), organic (from search engines such as Google), referral (clicking on links on other sites), and campaigns. It should also show the number of sessions and the bounce rate by source.

• Why you need it:

It enables you to make judgments about the quality of visitors from different sources by comparing bounce rates. Also, you’ll be able to see the success of various campaigns, your search engine optimization program (the driver of organic traffic) and your initiatives, such as guest blogging, to develop links on other quality sites. This information helps you direct future marketing efforts to those that are most successful.

Dashboards can provide a wealth of information that helps you know where to focus your energies and how to improve your marketing programs. While there are many dashboards and KPIs to consider, the above are staples for marketing departments seeking to optimize the use of their resources.

The race is on. We’re only weeks away from the end of the year, and this means more than ever time is of the utmost importance.  Your customers don’t want to waste time they don’t have, and you don’t want to waste time on people who aren’t going to buy.

Qualify fast all the time. Qualify even faster this time of year. This means you must be ruthless in removing from your schedule prospects who are merely suspects. Don’t hold back on a question you want to ask, and that includes two questions I like to ask once you’ve established the customer has a need with which you can help them:

• What is the outcome you’re looking to achieve?
• How important is time to you in making a decision?

With both questions, you’re looking for the customer to give you an indication they have urgency in their need to make a decision. These two questions are what I call 4^th quarter questions, because they help you learn quickly if time is on your side. Sure, they work every other quarter too; it’s just that I feel in the 4^th is when they will help you the most.

Here is a 40-second video worth watching:

 

A second approach I like in the 4^thquarter is to remove options to minimize the number of decisions the customer needs to make.  This means you take control and make the decision for the customer.

To do this it begins at the prospecting phase by being careful to not mention anything that implies you have a “wide variety of options” or anything else that implies a lot of choices.  The last thing you want the customer to be thinking is they need more time due to the number of options they are considering.

When you use this approach, don’t think you’re doing a disservice to your customers.  No, you’re actually providing them with more value, because you’re helping them to make a decision faster.

The faster they make a decision, the sooner they begin to benefit from what you have to offer.   This applies even more in December because a decision to wait can turn into a lengthy delay due to the holidays.

Sales never stop! We don’t shut down the sales process due the calendar, but rather we flex our process to fit the calendar.

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

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

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars

All hell broke loose at an academic conference in Vancouver when legitimate scholars realized they were being exploited by deceptive organizers.

Angry academics demanded their money back, forcing the organizer of the pseudo-technology conference to flee the event. The confrontation occurred when some scholars realized they had paid large sums of money to attend a suspicious symposium organized by the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET).

The highly respected British publication, Times Higher Education (THE), recently posted a chilling account of a British academic paying more than $4,000 Cdn to travel to and attend the conference in Vancouver, one of countless events that have been put together by WASET, which is increasingly being seen as a so-called “predatory” academic organization.

The story in Times Higher Education (which is registration based) describes how Jane Essex, a lecturer in education at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, came to Vancouver to give a paper at a conference organized by WASET, which turned out to be squeezed with other unrelated conferences into one room of a Holiday Inn.

Essex’s experience directly relates to the research findings of suspended Thompson Rivers University economist Derek Pyne, who received international media attention for exposing the way members of his own economics and business department in Kamloops have been advancing their careers while publishing in deceptive publications, including those created by WASET.

Pyne was suspended without pay in July, but had his remuneration reinstated in August, the same month that The Vancouver Sun researched and published a report on his conflict with TRU’s administration. Pyne is still not being allowed to teach on campus and his situation with the university and his faculty association remains far from resolved.

UPDATE: The Canadian Association of University Teachers today (Oct. 31) launched an investigation into whether Pyne’s academic freedom has been violated by TRU administrators.

Related

• Douglas Todd: B.C. economist locked in grim battle against deceptive scholarship
• B.C. government urged to investigate Kamloops professor's punishment
• Editorial: Prof pays price for exposing questionable research

Here’s a brief excerpt from Times Higher Education about the Vancouver conference that riled the academics who paid to take part in it:

When (Prof. Essex) arrived at the {Vancouver) venue – a single room inside the Holiday Inn – she realised the questionable nature of the event and used her laptop to look further into Waset’s credentials.

Instead of presenting her paper, Dr Essex used her talk to tell delegates that the Waset event was a “predatory conference”, in which multiple “conferences” on unrelated disciplines are loaded into the same symposium.

This sparked a confrontation between attendees and the event’s organiser, who was also challenged by hotel staff, according to Dr Essex, who said that police officers were eventually called to deal with the commotion….

Dr Essex told THE that she wanted to go public because the “predatory conference” industry relied on victims being shamed into silence, rather than warning others about the problem.

Times Higher Education has been among the leaders of expanded efforts to expose the rapid growth of predatory academic journals and conferences, which often charge scholars large amounts of money to publish and give lectures about their research, regardless of whether it has any merit. The debate over such publications often revolves around which academics are genuinely duped by the deceptive journals and conferences, and which academics take advantage of them to advance their careers.

THE reported that WASET holds about 50,000 “conferences” a year, although they were loaded into about 170 events held in major cities across the world, particularly Vancouver. About 180,000 papers have been produced by the five biggest predatory conference organizers, which also run a vast stable of pay-to-publish journals.

Why Partnerships Are Your Secret Weapon to Building Referrals written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Generating referrals is the key to securing your business’s long-term success, and it can feel like a pretty massive undertaking. One way to lighten the load and help you to create a more sustainable stream of referrals is to build partnerships.

Why go it alone when you could instead join forces with other business owners and make the referral process easier for both of you?

Types of Partnerships

When you’re thinking about establishing partnerships for your business, there are a few different types of relationships to consider.

• Strategic partners. These are businesses or individuals who provide a good or service that is directly tied to your business’s product offering. If you’re a graphic designer, you want to have a trustworthy copywriter who you can suggest to your clients.
• Content partners. A network of publishers, bloggers, and those in need of content for their own sites can help you to spread your business’s name, mission, and unique point of view to a whole new audience of people.
• Co-marketing partners. These are business owners whose business models have some sort of synergy with your own company. If you’re a plumber, this person might be an electrician or contractor. If you own a wine shop, this might be the owner of the cheese store down the street. As a fellow business owner who’s not in direct competition with you, but does business with a subset of the population who might also have an interest in and need for your business’s offerings, these relationships offer easy cross-promotion opportunities.

Bonus points if you can create partnerships that are unexpected like the ones I outline here; unique partnerships can generate even more marketing buzz!

There are a variety of reasons to consider each type of partnership, and there’s a different value-add that comes from each one. That’s why it’s important to focus on building up a comprehensive network of partners, with different partners from each type of group.

Become a Trustworthy Guide for Your Customers

No matter what business you’re in, there are a lot of other businesses out there that do what you do. While a key part of standing out from the crowd is making sure you have a clearly defined value proposition, another thing that will keep customers coming back again and again is that they see you as more than just a provider of a good or service—they see you as a trustworthy partner and advisor.

One way to become a trusted partner is to tap into your network of fellow business owners who you yourself know and trust. When you’re able to suggest other service providers to your customers, it makes you seem like someone who’s in the know and who truly has your customers’ best interests at heart.

Let’s say, for example, that you own a rare used bookstore. A customer comes in and buys a first edition of a work by their favorite author, but then they want to be sure they’re going to be able to care for their new, beloved purchase. You should be able to provide them with a list of trusted partners—a bookbinder who can help restore the original leather cover, a vendor of special boxes for book storage, or an appraiser who can help set the sale price for another rare book in their collection.

These partners need to be people that you know and trust; you’ll do more harm than good if you suggest another business who does not do right by your customer. But if you do have a strong network of other worthy businesses who can provide a service that’s of real value to your existing customers, then you establish yourself as a trusted source of knowledge in your industry, and the next time your customer is looking for advice or to do business, they’ll be coming back to you.

Move Up the Hourglass

There is a lot of work that goes into winning over new business, particularly if you’re starting from scratch. For someone to decide to go with your company, there are four steps in the marketing hourglass before a new customer even makes their first purchase. And there is a tremendous amount of effort and money that can go into those first four steps.

For someone to come to know and like your business, there are marketing and advertising dollars to be spent. To establish trust, you need testimonials. For the trial phase, you need to create products or services that you’re willing to give away for free in hopes that it converts your prospect into an actual customer.

Establishing partnerships, however, allows you to leap over the heavy lifting associated with these steps. You don’t need to spend excessive amounts of money on advertising and marketing to prospects when you have a solid partnership network who will refer their customers to your business.

A prospect who has been referred to you by a business owner they already know, like, and trust, will have an inherent level of trust in your business. This allows you to jump ahead and move right to the try and buy portion of the hourglass.

Double Your Network Overnight

As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one, and that’s particularly true when building up referrals. You’ve worked hard to create repeat customers, and new customer acquisition is a costly endeavor. You know that other small business owners have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into creating their own roster of return clients. Why not come together with a fellow entrepreneur to double your network overnight?

When you establish a strategic or co-marketing partnership, suddenly you have access to another business owner’s entire rolodex. There’s no competitiveness there, because you offer products that are related but different, and so you’re willing and able to share your existing network with this other business owner.

Additionally, you can consider creating new marketing campaigns that are a joint effort. While you double your reach, you can also halve your costs by splitting advertising fees with your new partner. Running joint promotions for your business can allow you to catch the eye of your established customer base, their established customer base, plus those who are new prospects for both of you.

Referrals are the lifeblood of any business. Why go it alone on this important road to generating referrals when you could join forces with another like-minded business owner? Together, you can help each other to create a sustainable referral engine that will continue to benefit you both in the long term.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.

The martech world is changing so quickly that we often overlook one of the key tenets of effective management: aligning organizational structure to strategy.

I have been fascinated with the various organizational charts for the marketing ops (MO) function and have written a few articles on the topic.

In this article, I’d like to highlight how one particular MO org structure changed over time in response to market and company demands. In future articles, I will highlight different types of MO organizations.

A simple marketing operations maturity model

To effectively review and assess an org structure of an MO function, we should start by defining a simple maturity benchmark.

• Stage 1 is when marketing is unaware of the need for a dedicated MO organization. Clearly, we are moving past this!
• Stage 2 is Efficiency, in which the MO team focuses on doing things well. Examples include optimizing the use of the marketing automation system and ensuring systems are implemented and integrated correctly. This is largely a reactive organization taking assignments as they occur.
• Stage 3 represents the Effective MO organization and is characterized by doing the right things. This MO group is more proactive and is often found to be responsible for re-engineering core processes such as lead management and for bringing forward new ideas and innovations to better meet goals.
• Stage 4 is the Customer-centric MO organization, the key to helping the company pivot from a product-centric to a customer-centric organization. Team members work as collaborators across functions to ensure the exchange of customer data aids the customer journey across all touchpoints.
• Stage 5 is what I call Next Generation and is characterized by a radical new organizational structure in which all customer-oriented operations functions report into one organization. This group becomes the “owner” of the all the threads that create an optimal customer experience.

Case study: Technology company moving from Efficient to Customer-centric

The MO group in this billion-dollar company is part of an 80-person global marketing team and has been in existence for eight years. The same VP of Marketing Ops has led and built this team from day one. This VP is responsible for developing and orchestrating the processes and systems required to enable efficient and effective marketing.

More specifically, MO staff members are responsible for developing and managing the processes to ensure smooth operations of strategic planning, lead management, marketing performance management, marketing infrastructure and overall marketing excellence.

It is their focus on process (including lead management) and their proactive leadership role in marketing that places this company in the Effective stage of MO maturity. Recently, however, the company pivoted from a product-centric to a customer-centric strategy, which moves this MO group into the Customer-centric level of maturity.

Over the last year, the MO function has played an instrumental role in developing and executing the customer-focus market strategy, and as a result, the senior management team now has a more strategic set of expectations for this function.

The biggest changes in this MO organization over the last year have occurred in two areas. First, this team has been an integral part of the pivot to customer focus as described above. The MO team’s technical knowledge, project management skills and ability to coordinate and communicate up and down the company helped ensure success for the pivot.

The second change is the ongoing maturity of the team. This team has been together for quite a while, and they continue to enhance their skill set and value to the firm as the firm asks them to step up in key areas.

Other key and unique responsibilities for the VP of Marketing Operations in this company include establishing and managing the budget, as well as integrating the frequent company acquisitions and managing the partner program. This is a busy team.

Reporting to the VP of MO are key functions led by a Director of MO, a Marketing Automation Manager, a VP of Analytics and a Senior Analyst Marketing Collaboration.

The Director Marketing Operations manages a team responsible for the marketing technology infrastructure, MAP governance, CRM integration, oversight on the global lead management process, enabling customer segment marketing, generating and analyzing performance metrics and reports and maintaining budget management tools.

The Marketing Automation Manager is responsible for all marketing automation systems and processes as supporting regional teams for campaigns, including direct support of campaign design and execution. This team is also responsible for all reporting and analytics related to marketing automation.

The VP of Analytics is a senior role responsible for overall marketing reporting and analytics processes and execution. The VP develops a vision for reporting improvements that match marketing strategies and intelligence requirements. For strategic reporting on leads, pipeline, product performance, marketing ROI and special initiatives, the VP develops reports and publishes key data. The VP leverages BI and visualization tools to create executive summaries and dashboards to help with effective critical intelligence visibility. The VP looks for innovative ways to leverage intelligence to drive better performance and better outcomes as he works with marketing, sales and the executive team.

The Senior Analyst Marketing Collaboration is a unique position that I have not seen in other organizations. This person is responsible for defining the vision, strategies and objectives for marketing collaboration within the marketing function, between marketing and other internal functions and between marketing and entities outside the company. This person defines requirements for ideal collaboration related to all facets of marketing and defines a roadmap and a set of technologies to move toward the ideal state.

All MO groups are a function of the unique needs of their company. We see many configurations, and there is no right or wrong. What is important is to be intentional in the structure and to ensure the structure meets marketing’s strategic demands to achieve the company’s measurable growth objectives.

• Starting a business presents myriad challenges.
• Author and entrepreneur Nicole Rollender details the decisions she made that helped get her first business off the ground.
• From hiring business coaches to finding the right accountant, here are the five best things Rollender did when she started her company.

 

I used to tell anybody who’d listen that I’d never work for myself. I loved the comfort of having a boss and working for a company. For almost 15 years, since I graduated with my master’s degree in creative writing, I’d always worked for publishing companies.

All that changed a year ago, when my position of 11 years was eliminated. Everyone told me I’d find a new job right away, since I had so much experience as a magazine editor-in-chief and head of multiple departments. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. I applied for hundreds of jobs and didn’t receive one job offer.

When I was employed and someone would ask what I’d do if I was no longer at my current job, I would say tongue-in-cheek that I’d launch my own company. But in January, after yet another 9-to-5 job interview, I decided I was ready to take a leap of faith, and I launched my own writing services business.

Here are five smart things I did when I started my company.

SEE ALSO: I've been a manager for 10 years — here are the 5 best ways to impress your boss

1. I hired business coaches.

I had tons of experience as an executive in a company and knew my way around running a department. However, I knew that I didn’t know how to run a creative services business.  

My coaches first helped me grow the right boss mindset. For example, many freelance writers like myself underestimate the money they can make with their skill sets, so they undercharge. They often work 50 hours a week, barely making ends meet.

Mindset work helps you know exactly what you offer and its value, so you can clearly communicate that on sales calls. Getting really clear on my market value helped me find the right clients and type of work to match my expertise. I work way less than 40 hours a week.

It’s always good to work with coaches who are several steps ahead of you. My coaches had run several six-figure writing services businesses, so I got lots of spot-on tips to scale fast.

2. I’m always marketing.

This was a hard lesson for me, but it’s a fact: As a business owner, you can never stop marketing.

At a certain point, I had a lot of writing work, so I said, “I don’t have time to take on new clients, so I can stop marketing.” Then, the bottom dropped out.

In the same week, two contracts canceled, both for reasons within the client companies that were beyond my control.

It took me almost two months to find four new clients — and that was with pitching several hours every day. (Cold pitching via email and LinkedIn works best for my business.)

One coach wisely said I should always be prospecting, because relationships can take months to convert to paying clients. One of my biggest clients, in fact, took six months to sign on the dotted line.

While you may not have to prospect every day, market your firm at least several hours a week.

3. I partnered with the right accountant.

When I first set up my LLC, I hired a budget-friendly virtual accountant I found online. Unfortunately, that firm recommended and set up the incorrect business structure for my personal situation, which caused me to overpay on taxes on multiple fronts.

Luckily, a fellow business owner who’d been in a similar situation told me to shop around for the right accountant. (Whether or not the firm is local to you, it should understand small businesses and your state’s particular forms and regulations.)

I visited several local accountants and found one I felt was the right match for me. That accountant set up my new business structure, helped me get all the paperwork in order for my state, and even refiled my 2017 taxes so that I’d get back some of the money I overpaid.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Today's buyer is more informed than ever before, thanks to the vast amount of information available at their fingertips. Because of this, the balance of power has shifted from the sales rep to the buyer in most sales conversations. This is why pushy sales tactics are no longer effective the way they used to be.

Instead, to be successful in sales in today's day and age, sales reps must adapt their mindset from selling to helping. And the best way to start this process is becoming intimately familiar with who the buyer is and the journey they take on their path to purchase: The buyer's journey.

By understanding the buyer's journey, the pains and problems they experience along that journey, and the influencing factors that shape their thinking, sales reps can better empathize with the buyer and position their product or service along that path. So let's dig in a little further.

Here's how to conceptualize each stage:

1. Awareness Stage: The buyer becomes aware that they have a problem.
2. Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and considers options to solve it.
3. Decision Stage: The buyer evaluates and decides on the right provider to administer the solution.

Now that the overall journey has been defined, let's take a look at each stage in greater detail, from the buyer's perspective:

What is the buyer doing during the awareness stage?

The buyer is experiencing a problem or symptoms of a pain, and their goal is to alleviate it. They may be looking for informational resources to more clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem.

• Example: "Why do my feet hurt all the time?"

What is the buyer doing the consideration stage?

The buyer will have clearly defined and given a name to their problem, and they are committed to researching and understanding all of the available approaches and/or methods to solving the defined problem or opportunity.

• Example: "How do you treat arch pain?"

What is the buyer doing during the decision stage?

The buyer has decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. Their goal now is to compile a list of available vendors, make a short list, and ultimately make a final purchase decision.

• Example: "Where can I get custom orthotics? How much will they cost?"

If you don't have an intimate understanding of your buyers, it may be difficult to map out the buyer's journey in a way that will be helpful from a sales perspective. In this case, be sure to conduct a few interviews with customers, prospects, and other salespeople at your company to get a sense of the buying journey.

Tailoring Your Sales Process to the Buyer's Journey

With all of this in mind, buyers don't want to be prospected, or demoed, or closed when they're not ready. These steps add zero value, from their perspective, when offered at the wrong time.

However, where a sales rep can shine is in the instances when buyers are looking for additional information about your product that can't be found online.

Awareness Stage

Buyers are identifying the challenge or opportunity they want to pursue. They are also deciding whether or not the goal or challenge should be a priority.

What We Should Be Asking	Actions We Should Be Taking
How do buyers describe their goals or challenges in the context of our business? How are our buyers educating themselves on these goals or challenges? What are the consequences of inaction by the buyer? Are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing the goal or challenge? How do buyers decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized?	Creating informational, not salesy, sales collateral that educates them along their path to purchase. Providing them with resources to help them define the problem. Helping, helping, helping.

Consideration Stage

Buyers have clearly defined the goal or challenge and have committed to addressing it. They are now evaluating different approaches or methods available to pursue the goal or solve their challenge.

What We Should Be Asking	Actions We Should Be Taking
What categories of solutions do buyers investigate? How do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?  How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category? How do buyers decide which category is right for them?	Understanding exactly how our product or service solves their problem compared to both our direct and indirect competitors.  Considering how our direct and indirect competitors are showing up in the marketplace and how they influence perception.  Providing the buyer with resources to help them determine the solution that's right for them.

Decision Stage

Buyers have already decided on a solution category and are now evaluating providers. For example, they may have written a pro/con list of specific offerings to decide on the one that best meets their needs.

What We Should Be Asking

Actions We Should Be Taking

What criteria do buyers use to evaluate the available offerings? When buyers investigate our company's offering, what do they like about it compared to alternatives? What concerns do they have with it? Who needs to be involved in the decision? For each person involved, how does their perspective on the decision differ? Do buyers have expectations around trying the offering before they purchase it? Outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparations, such as implementation plans or training strategies?

Understanding what objections they might have prior to the sales process so that you can adequately handle them.  Ensuring that you have a unique selling proposition that provides value to the buyer and sets you apart from competitors.

Some of these considerations may fall more under the marketing umbrella than the sales umbrella, but ultimately the answers to these questions will provide a robust foundation for your buyer's journey.

The process of getting to know how your buyers buy is invaluable as you create or refine your sales process. You'll be better able to empathize with prospects, handle objections, and provide the right information at the right time, helping you close more deals and win more business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In mid-October, Social Media Examiner, which had been producing a number of long video shows for Facebook, declared that “no one was watching their videos” and announced that they were stopping production of two shows and moving a third exclusively to YouTube.

While this wasn’t the first, and certainly will not be the last time there’s a media assault on long form content, due to the nature and reputation of Social Media Examiner, this announcement created ripples throughout the social media community.

Is long form content dead? Does that include written content, or just video? Is it only dead on Facebook?

This is where I see the conversation lacking perspective. YouTube as a video platform is now approaching their 14th birthday. And even though it started in 2005 and had some early successes, it wasn’t until 2009 – 4 years later – that YouTube usage really hit its stride.

What am I saying?

That it’s WAY too early in Facebook Video’s timeline of existence to make judgement calls. This isn’t a startup social network like Blab, but rather a robust ecosystem and mature platform. Just as they did with Google+, Facebook can afford to take their time and make sure that what is implemented will be used long-term and effectively eliminate the competition.

As more people become adept at creating video specifically for the Facebook platform, and Facebook continues to make it easier to find such content (i.e. Facebook Watch), more and more people will make Facebook videos an intentional destination. They will want to watch long videos on Facebook just as they do today on YouTube or Netflix.

And if you’re creating videos for Facebook and aren’t getting tremendously high retention rates, that just might be OK. Stephanie Liu of Lights, Camera, Live put it this way:

It’s OKAY because I know that my viewers are busy folks and can’t always tune in when I’m live.

It’s OKAY because fans know that they can always watch the replay on-demand on their own schedule.

It’s OKAY because fans will go to my website and read the blog transcript.

It’s OKAY because live streaming is still giving me referrals and building my bottom line.

It’s OKAY because I can build a custom audience from views.

And it’s OKAY because the magic always happens in the inbox…

At the end of the day, know what works for your audience and if it isn’t working, it’s OKAY to shift your strategy.

So it’s clear that long Facebook videos may work for some and not others. Not everyone has the same experience or perspective, which means that, if nothing else, it’s hard to say something as definitive as, “Long form video on Facebook is dead.” On the other hand, is short form content like tweets dead as well? Are people’s attention spans shorter, or is content just bad? Which form of content “is the future?”

One of our 360 Marketing Squad group members was understandly confused by the claims and hype that he’s seeing daily.

The idea that a particular form of content “is the future” suggests that it will dominate so much as to make the other form extinct.

The death of blogging has been predicted many times, and the same has been said for podcasts, and now video…

Guess what, we’re still reading text as a society. And that is not going to change any time soon.

What’s lacking when someone makes claims like that is context. Where is the content being shared? With whom? Is it any good?

No one has time for BAD content whether it’s long or short or a single emoji.

And some people do not have time for some forms of content which they happen to find at a particular time and place. This is where an understanding of, say, “mobile use of a platform” or “targeted demographic” comes into play, and exactly what Stephanie was referring to above.

If you’re targeting busy professionals who are overwhelmed at work and have a frustrating 45 minute commute every morning, a podcast might be the best way to reach them – assuming they have time for your solution.

You see, reaching a target demographic is just the beginning. You also have to convert and serve that target. If some of the people do not have time to read your blog posts, and you’re selling an ebook, they’re not going to have time to read that either! Which might be just fine – they may have self-selected themselves out of your target audience.

But the idea that everyone no longer consumes long-form content – whether it’s written or video – is a false narrative. Some people do not have time for some content some of the time. My logic professor would have a fit of apoplexy reading some of the marketing hype today.

“Blogging is dead.” – found on a blog post.
“Facebook video is dead.” – found in a Facebook video.

“Short form content is dead.” – found right here, in my long-form post. ;)

There is a sliver of truth in these rumors and bold claims, just like anything else that’s hyped. And that truth is that people’s patience with content is lower than ever.

You used to be able to create long squeeze pages and people would actually keep reading and reading and continue to get excited about whatever widget you were selling, believing the hype and “reviews” and they’d click on those Buy buttons again and again.

You used to be able to hire foreign copywriters for $0.01/word to churn out 500 word articles to help your site rank in search engines.

Those techniques are so ’90’s.

Today, both consumers and technology are better able to spot the crap when they see it.

Yes, people are busy. Yes, they’re bombarded by content in multiple shapes and forms. But will they refuse to read a long article or watch a long video if it’s awesome?

Hardly.

HubSpot surveyed 1000 companies to determine how often they were blogging, what the length of those articles was, and the success that they achieved. Among the wealth of information gleaned, they determined that articles longer than 2500 words received more traffic, more leads, and more bottom-line-driving sales as a result.

And BuzzSumo in a similar study found that articles longer than 2500 words garnered more social shares than others.

Taken together, it’s clear that long-form articles perform better for content marketing. So why do we keep hearing that short whatever is better?

Because it’s easier.

It’s easier to create a 50 word social post than a 2500 word blog post. It’s easier to shoot a 2 minute video than a 20 minute tutorial.

But there’s no meat to those shorter posts. No long-term value.

But the value that’s found (traffic, leads & sales) is something that only the originating business can determine and share. No one here knows how much traffic and business results my most successful blog content gets unless I tell you.

What the public can see is initial social engagement. How many likes, comments and shares. But that’s such a terrible metric. If that was an indicator of success we’d all just film ourselves in our cars wearing funny masks.

So my advice is to push back on such claims. Question the relevancy to you and your audience. Are they just repeating the claims and hype that they’ve been hearing themselves?

Consider what it is that you are doing and how your audience is receiving that. Perhaps you’re creating great long form content (as Social Media Examiner most assuradly was) and yet it’s not working for you. “It’s OKAY to shift your strategy.” Just do so with a calculating eye.

“Hype is dead.”

As the year draws to an end, the burning question is: how did you do on you goals? For most of us, the results are probably a mixed bag. Yet, sometimes, the question can lead us to a deeper question: did you set good goals in the first place?

In this post, we’ll explore setting goals in marketing and sales to see how we can better gauge growth and industry expectations so we can nail next year with finesse.

Mechanics of a Goal

To have a goal means setting an expectation for the future – to see a desired state, and to move toward it with all your energy and spirit. There is nothing more exhilarating than achieving a goal.

There are many many sites and resources to draw from as you consider setting goals, the methods behind the process, and even how to maintain your momentum. I’m not going to cover all of that in this post, but what I will discuss is the general aspects of how goals work for your team and your departments.

When you set a goal for a department or a team, you are aligning the priorities of the team for the time period. As a manager, this is an effective way to cast vision and direction for the team. Yet the goal itself is not enough. You must then follow up on the progress to help the team avoid and remove obstacles, and nurture the goal in its current status every week. Then, as the goal is completed, you analyze, reflect, and see what it took to get there. Doing so will help you to set the next one. The collective brain and heart of the organization flourishes as you set, work on, and achieve your goals.

So, to recap, goals create alignment and cast a future. Managers coach those in the arena, fighting for the goals to see them through. This also means creating accountability to the goals – both when things go well and when things go bad. Then, once a goal is missed or made, the team reflects on how to achieve the goal more effectively the next time, and notes what went into the successes and failures this time around.

Setting Goals in Marketing

Making goals in marketing (or in any aspect of the business) requires that you have a method for setting goals. The reality is that you’ve got to have some basis for setting your goals. There are three common ones I’ve seen and used:

1. Previous success. This means looking at the past, seeing what success you had, and planning to replicate that success.
2. Targeted goals. This is looking at a desired future (what you’d like revenue to be next year, for example), and working backward to figure out what your goals need to be to make that future happen.
3. Blended. This involves working on the middle ground. You’re looking at previous or industry benchmarks and factoring in the consideration of where you would ideally like to be. It’s a blending of those two methods to find something that makes sense. This is my favorite way of setting goals.

The last way is a great way of setting a realistic “stretch goal.” These goals are a bit outside of normal expectations, yet they don’t push so far beyond reality so as to make them discouraging – which can be a real result if your goals are too big. Set unrealistic goals and teams never reach them. That gets discouraging quarter after quarter.

So, as you choose your method for setting goals, you need to discuss them as a team. Having buy-in from the team and management makes goals really stick. Getting input from the people who will be responsible for achieving the goals keeps the goals from being too far-fetched. Incorporating the desires of those overseeing the company prevents the goals from being too little. The process can create great balance.

Coaching Goals in Marketing

Once the goals are set, coaching the team through the goals would be your next step as a manger. What reinforcement do you provide? What accountability? Here are some aspects that can help your goal accountability and coaching.

1. Provide a frequently-updated dashboard against your goals. You need to be reporting frequently against the goals. Some companies use monitors in the lobby to show the live status of goals. Some use weekly meetings to share updates. The point is, goals are not real unless they are discussed frequently and tracked.
2. Meet with each team member to coach performance on the goals. Breaking out individually will allow for candor and accountability in the group. Review the numbers together and see how each team member is supporting or hindering the goal.
3. Provide group training. Find activities and aspects of the goal that could be supported with training for the team. Start the quarter off with a day-long training to help them hit the goals, or read a book as a team that reinforces the the rationale behind the goal.
4. Celebrate progress. If it’s a quarter goal, do something when you are on track at the end of the month. Let the team taste victory and keep momentum moving in the right direction.
5. Track the factors leading to the goal. Discuss the micro metrics associated with each goal so that you’ll have as clear a picture as possible of potential success.

Goal Autopsy

Once a goal is hit or missed, it’s time to do the autopsy. What happened to make or break that goal? There are lots of ways to look at it, and a few fundamentals to hold onto.

First, the cause of most failures on goals are people. Not circumstances, not the market, but people. Don’t let the the conversation move toward this account, or this client, or these poor market conditions. Make sure that the conversation does not drift too far into “no one’s fault” land.

Second, have data. The last thing you want to do is analyze based on opinions. Having data to support the outcomes is ideal. How many calls were made? How many emails were sent? What was the source of all the web traffic? These are all good questions that generate real insight from data. Don’t let feelings enter the conversation. Look at the sales, leads, and hits as objectively as possible to tell the story in terms of data, not opinions.

Additionally, if you did not hit the goal, sometimes it’s hard to know what data was lacking. There are ways around this, but for now, trust that you can get better once you understand the data and make decisions.

Lastly, let everyone discuss their personal experience with the goal as a way to gather collective information for the management team. This is where feelings will exist, and where they should be shared. Let it add a dimension to the story, not tell the whole story.

Many marketers I work with are tasked with creating both personalization and account-based marketing (ABM) programs for their organizations. A common mistake when starting out on this journey is to separate the efforts for personalization and ABM. I’ve found that personalization and ABM can and should work together to help accomplish a company’s objectives throughout the sales process — from increasing the number of leads from target accounts to closing more opportunities, expanding deeper into existing customer accounts, and winning back lost opportunities. In this blog post, I’ll explain how to do that.

Increase Number of Leads from ABM Accounts

The best part of an ABM strategy for a marketer is that you know exactly who you’re targeting. You don’t need to try to appeal to everyone and hope that your message at least resonates with someone. You already have a list of accounts to communicate with. Furthermore, you know all the specific attributes about each company on your list including revenue, industry, technologies used, and more.

Using firmographic data, you can recognize your target accounts (or target industries or personas if you use different ABM tiers) before they explicitly tell you who they are. This allows you to use personalization to help build interest with these accounts while they are on your website. That could mean changing the message on your homepage to speak to specific use cases you know apply to these accounts, recommending relevant resources on your top-level pages, and even informing each account who their account rep is by pulling data from your CRM.

Ask yourself the question: If I were speaking to this account in person, what would I say to convince them that my company is the right fit for their specific needs? With personalization, you can share that same message on your website.

Close More Opportunities

When an opportunity is open, your CRM system (such as Salesforce) can tell you what products an account is interested in, who the main players are within the account, and what the current stage of the opportunity is — based on information that has been added by the salesperson working with the account.

You can use this information to continue the conversation a prospect has had with the salesperson each time he is on your site. When you know what product an account is interested in, for example, you can make sure they see the latest news and resources about that particular product every time they come to your website. Or, if you know it’s a competitive deal, you can make sure the account is shown content regarding how you compare to the competition.

You can also use the information you’ve learned about an account from its behaviors on your website to help your sales team close the deal. Are you noticing that an account seems to be more interested in a different product or use case than it originally mentioned in the discovery process? Does your sales team know when an account comes to the website, in other words, when it is expressing interest in your company? Giving your sales team access to these insights can help them speak to the right contacts based on their actual actions and interests instead of shooting in the dark.

Account Expansion Opportunities

After your team has closed a deal, you’ll usually want to expand the account over time (“land and expand” in sales terms). It’s always important to go about expanding a current customer account in the right way. You don’t want to bother them or come across like you’re just trying to get more money.

Without personalization, you may ask your sales team to reach out to a customer account when you notice new contacts coming back to your marketing website. But you can use your personalization platform to do that first before even engaging the sales team.

You can identify from a customer’s behaviors if they are researching other products. You can also use surveying to explicitly ask visitors if they’re part of the department or team you’re currently working with. With this type of behavioral and explicit data, you can identify when a customer presents an expansion opportunity, before asking your sales to try to find out this information on their own. Plus, this information can sync directly with Salesforce, which both saves your sales team time looking for information and allows them to have contextual conversations based on all the information you already know about an account. This can fast-track expansion opportunities for your company as well as build inherent trust with these accounts.

Win Back Lost Opportunities

No one has a 100% win rate, no matter how great the product is. In cases where an account is closed lost, you can leverage Salesforce data and firmographic data to recognize when users from lost opportunities are back on the site.

Why would people from these accounts come back to your site? Maybe the vendor they ultimately chose isn’t working out, or they have budget now when they didn’t in the past. You can run campaigns on your site to remind these visitors of the value of your products or to get these accounts to re-engage with your sales team to realize lost revenue. Since your sales team already has a lot of information on these accounts, and they’re already demonstrating interest by being back on your site, you don’t want to waste the opportunity to get these potential deals back on track.

Getting Started

Most of my clients ask me the best way to get started on this journey. My main piece of advice is to see where there is the greatest need in the sales process and start with a personalization campaign or two that helps address that need. These days, that need often intersects with a company’s ABM strategy. Work with your sales team to understand what they need to know about an account to create a sales opportunity. Then, make sure you are synchronizing the correct information between your CRM and your personalization platform. Once the data is there, it’s pretty easy to build campaigns that help generate leads, close opportunities, uncover expansion opportunities or win back lost opportunities.

One of the most commonly debated questions in ABM is “who should the SDR team report to?”

The dales development (at Engagio, we call it Account Development, and thus we have ADRs) team can report to Sales, to Marketing or operate independently as its own department.

TOPO found that 64% of sales development teams report into sales. But the top-performing SDR teams in their sample perform more or less the same when reporting to marketing vs. reporting to sales.

However, Todd Berkowitz fearlessly predicted that the majority of Sales Development teams will soon report to Marketing. He followed that up with a post that explained his rationale. He articulated, “I don’t have specific survey data to support this, but my conversations with both clients and other tech vendors seem to clearly highlight two things. More tech companies are using in-house SDRs for outbound prospecting and more of those teams are reporting into marketing.”

That is generally the consensus. CloudKettle argues, “With over a decade of experience working with SaaS companies and having built a few lead generation teams ourselves, we advocate three main reasons SDRs report to Marketing and not Sales. 1) SDRs need to be coached and mentored – a lot. 2) SDRs tend to look up to Sales team members. 3) Passing qualified leads to Sales is Marketing’s job.”

RingDNA offers their perspective and explains that there’s a paradigm shift: “The Old Paradigm– Marketers generate leads, closing is Sales’ problem.’ The New Paradigm– Marketers are closely monitoring lead quality, helping reps qualify leads, and doing everything in their power to maximize the ROI of their efforts.”

The Bridge Group found that inbound-focused groups are 2.1X more likely to report to Marketing.

The truth is, any of these scenarios can work well, as long as it’s run by a dedicated leader who understands the discipline and its role in the Account Based Marketing ecosystem.

Let’s look at the data.

That said, we’ve seen some development teams move into Marketing, which is arguably the home for ABM:

• Marketing and SD are both focused on creating pipeline, while Sales is focused on closing it
• Marketing and SD both need a longer-term mindset, in which opportunities are nurtured
• The concept of Account Based Everything requires orchestrating ABM and ABSD activities into coordinate Plays

“The Marketing and Sales Development motions are really similar – and the messages must be highly synchronized, so the natural home for Sales Development may be Marketing.”
– Matt Amundson Vice President of Marketing, EverString

It’s still most common for SDR teams to report into Sales.

This is likely because sales development often serve as a “farm team” for Sales, and so it makes sense that Sales does the hiring and management. Also, the more the SDR team focuses on outbound prospecting, the more likely it is to report to Sales – since the prospecting skills are closer to the core sales skillset.

Gabe Larson from InsideSales.com weighs the pros and cons of each in this LinkedIn post, and advises to answer certain questions when deciding where your account development team belongs.

• What portion of my prospecting is inbound vs. outbound?
• What do I want the career path of my qualifier role to be?
• Do I have a leader who really “gets” data-driven sales and who wants this function?
• Do I have systems, people, and processes to manage “hand-offs”?
• How much self-sourcing does the inside sales or sales closer team do?

Our advice is that the development team can live in either Sales or Marketing, but what matters is:

(a) Sales is responsible for hiring and training

(b) Marketing is responsible for coordinating activities and Plays

Do you need specialized teams within your SDR department?

Some SDR departments chose to split up into even more specialized teams for example:

• By industry
• By region
• By account size

We’ve seen SD leaders who swear by this – after all, specialization into Sales and SDR made sense, as did further specialization into inbound and outbound Sales Development, so why go further?

The more you speak to the same audience, the better, the argument goes.

“I like specialization. Every time I break out a team to focus on a market size or a vertical, I see big uplift. It lets us optimize what works.
– Chad Burmeister

But we’ve also seen those who warn against it.

They feel that over-specialization decreases management flexibility: if you lose a mid-market healthcare SDR you’re left with a very specific gap to fill.

Similarly, a specialized DR may find it harder to move up into a sales role in a different niche Of course, the bigger your team is, the less likely these concerns are to happen.

The rule of thumb might be to dedicate a portion of your team to a specific market only if that market represents a significant segment that’s large and important to your business.

When TOPO works with clients to determine which organization the SDR team should live under, they evaluate two primary factors: strategic execution of the sales development function and professional development of SDRs. When it comes to strategic execution, they consider things like, go-to-market strategy, qualification strategy, process and SLAs, lead management and change management. When it comes to the professional development of SDRs, they consider things like dedicated management, coaching and mentoring, peer mentoring, growth path, and resources for learning.

Or, are we overcomplicating it? I’ll close with this advice from Trish Bertuzzi: “Here is the advice we share with our clients. Have the group report to the person/function that has the bandwidth, expertise and passion to lead them. That more than anything else will determine success or failure.”

Here in Raleigh, the N.C. State Fair wrapped up this past weekend. New junk food included jalapeño cheetos bacon, pumpkin spice latte candy apples, and Deep Fried Meatballs.

Those all might seem like a good idea, but you’re likely to regret it later… kind of like hiring a commission-only salesperson for your agency.

Commission-only sounds appealing—after all, you get sales help with zero overhead. But be careful—making it work is a lot harder than it looks.

Commission-only sales = Junk food?

One of my agency consulting clients recently asked:

“We’re considering working with an experienced salesperson to do work for us on a commission-only basis. We’ve known her for several years. She’s suggesting her commission be 30% of the first twelve month’s contract, paid up front. How does this rate fit with what you see elsewhere?”

The right salespeople can be a huge boost to your agency, but commission-only rarely goes as smoothly as you expect.

Let’s look at the risks of hiring a commission-only salesperson at your agency, how you might mitigate those risks, and whether those example numbers make sense.

Be careful about commission-only sales

First, weigh why you’re considering a commission-only salesperson. This approach may not be aligned with your long-term goals.

Agencies often hire their first salesperson (usually on salary plus commission) when they hit ~20+ employees (or sometimes sooner, if the owner hates selling). If you’re smaller than 20+ employees, it may be too early.

If you’re larger than 20+ employees, I wonder why you’re not hiring a more traditional salaried salesperson. Commission-only might be “penny wise, pound foolish.”

Second, run the numbers on what success—and failure—would look like. Here are three questions to answer before you hire a salesperson. They look at the impact on profits and capacity, as well as how the prospective salesperson might perceive the comp plan.

Third, never pay anyone their full commission in advance. This is important for any sales role—if the client fires you, you’ve lost the revenue and the commission. In theory, you can have a “clawback” clause, but good luck collecting, especially if the salesperson has since quit.

Why to be skeptical of commission-only

I’m skeptical of salespeople who pitch “commission-only” to agencies. Good salespeople have options, including demanding a base salary.

If you still want to explore commission-only, there’s more to consider. To start:

• Is the salesperson an employee or a contractor?
• Is s/he exclusive to your agency, or are they selling for others? If non-exclusive, how does s/he decide which leads go to you versus a competing agency?
• Is there a sales quota? What if s/he doesn’t meet the quota?
• What’s his/her role on check-ins as the new client starts (as a double-check on the day-to-day account manager)?
• What’s his/her role handling (if any) shepherding renewals, as a full-time salesperson would normally do?
• Is s/he doing 100% of the prospecting? What if s/he closes a lead you hand him/her?
• What’s their scope overall? Are they doing full-stack prospecting, qualification, proposals, and closing?
• What’s your signoff on pricing they offer? Are they marking-up your rates to cover their fees?
• What’s your recourse if they do something that hurts your agency’s reputation?

When my clients have tried commission-only before, they tend to be dissatisfied with the results—typically because the salesperson hits roadblocks and gives up because s/he isn’t getting any money.

A few months after that point, you finally realize the salesperson has quit selling on your behalf, and your pipeline is now dry. In contrast, you would have been having weekly “sales management” chats with a salary+ salesperson, reviewing progress.

Commission-only sales vs. Fees to referral partners

A commission-only arrangement is similar to how you might structure paying a 5-10% referral fee to other agencies. But it’s different in a key way—you’re expecting a commission-only salesperson to be actively selling on your behalf.

In contrast, you don’t rely on each referral partner to send you a constant flow of business, as a salesperson is supposed to do.

Tip: On a related note, build a “stable” of referral partners, so you don’t become overly reliant on any one partner.

Creating the sales comp plan

As I mentioned, experienced salespeople tend to have options, including demanding a healthy base salary plus commission—so I was curious why my client’s prospective salesperson was proposing 30% commission-only.

A more typical agency sales comp plan would be a base salary of, say, $75K plus a ~10% commission on the first year, and perhaps 5% in future years, with commissions paid on a monthly basis while they’re an employee of the agency, and with a certain sales quota. (The base typically depends on your location, the services your agency sells, and the current market for sales candidates.)

In my client’s example, a 30% commission is technically reasonable for commission-only sales, especially when capped at a year of revenue. But as I mentioned, never pay 100% in advance—it’s a major mismatch on incentive alignment, particularly if the client cancels mid-year on a retainer.

You’d want to run the numbers to make sure that 30% truly works for you, too. Even without a base salary, that’s a huge chunk of your profit margins—and probably not a chunk you’ve budgeted for at your current pricing. For instance, would s/he be selling $100K a year or $1 million a year?

Be careful. The right salespeople can be a huge boost to your agency, but hiring a commission-only salesperson rarely goes as smoothly as you expect.

What would a 10 percent increase in annual sales mean to your organization? According to Gartner, companies will miss at least that amount in “lost opportunity” revenue. This is dollars left on the table due to ineffective processes for “defining, assigning, and managing territories, quotas, and incentives and compensation plans.”

Compensation plans need to evolve with organizational objectives and sales strategy. An effective comp program helps drive specific behaviors of the sales organization. Whether or not change is required depends on whether the current plans are driving desired performance.

Have you made any adjustments to your 2019 comp plan for sales development reps? To help you get started, we’ve created a guide: 6 Steps to Designing a Sales Development Compensation Plan.

This brief set of sales compensation guiding principles underlie our 6 step guide. Compensation plans should:

• Be consistent with overall corporate strategies and financial objectives.
• Pay for directly-controllable performance, inclusive of effort and skill.
• Be as simple as possible. For example, strive to pay on no more than 3 metrics.
• Attract and retain the best talent.
• Allow 70% of associates to meet or exceed quota.

Step 1: Determine On-Target Earnings (OTE)

OTE is total cash compensation, inclusive of base salary plus variable commission, paid at 100% quota attainment.

Start by understanding the local market benchmark since national averages can be highly misleading. If you do not have access to premium salary benchmark data, utilize GlassDoor to look up salary information. Table 1 shows average salaries for the job title “Sales Development Representative” on GlassDoor in several major US metropolitan areas:

(source: GlassDoor; October 21, 2018)

Next, adjust up or down from the average based on these five factors:

1. Prior experience: Candidates with strong academic pedigrees or longer prior work experience will expect higher OTE.
2. Job complexity: The more complex the job function, the higher the OTE. For instance, SDRs who conduct discovery calls will expect higher OTE compared to those who primarily book meetings. Similarly, outbound SDRs tend to earn more than inbound SDRs since it requires more skill to engage less-receptive prospects.
3. Product complexity & price: This is a special subset of job complexity for SDRs. Generally speaking, engaging customers to discuss expensive, complex products requires a greater level of skill and commands higher OTE.
4. Intrinsic benefits: If you have strong intrinsic benefits – a great brand, a strong culture, an outstanding training program, clear career progression – then you may be able to get away with paying lower OTE.
5. Target attrition: Even with the best product and the most inspiring culture, companies that want lower attrition will need to pay above average OTE. Place higher importance on low attrition when hiring costs and training costs are high.

Step 2: Choose the target pay mix

The target pax mix is the percentage split of OTE between base and variable compensation. The benchmark average (see Table 1) appears to be 73/27. We frequently see all of the following: 60/40, 65/35, 70/30, and 75/25; mixes of 50/50 and 80/20 are rare; base percentages below 50% or above 80% are extremely rare.

Pay mixes skewed toward a higher variable percentage tend to attract more aggressive, risk-loving candidates. You may think of this sales personality as a “Hunter.” Roles offering higher base compensation that is more certain are more quickly filled, as most humans value low risk – high reward opportunities.

If you are just building out your sales development function, select a higher base percentage since you do not yet have good data and can easily end up underpaying or overpaying.

Step 3: Select variable performance measures

Consider the simplified sales funnel shown in Figure 1. An SDR engages in a cadence of activities such as phone calls, emails, social touches, etc. These activities, when effective, lead to a booked discovery (or demo) meeting. If the meeting is held and the prospect is deemed qualified, then an opportunity is created. Assuming the stars align, an AE wins the business.

Compensation Tied to Funnel Stages

Let’s explore the implications of tying compensation metrics to each of the stages in the funnel.

Activities: We do not recommend paying on activities. While activity volume is almost completely within an SDR’s control, few companies use activity as a pay metric because (a) paying on activity volume prioritizes quantity over quality and (b) activities are too far removed from business results. If an SDR’s job required almost no skill, then it would be suitable to pay on activities. It might also make sense to pay on activity volume while an SDR is ramping, but even that practice is very rare.

Meetings Booked: We also do not recommend paying on meetings booked. If one pays on meetings booked, then SDRs lose the incentive to do what is necessary to ensure prospects attend meetings. Without best practices in place, 20% to 30% of prospects will no-show. With the right reminders, including rescheduling, the percentage of prospects who go completely dark will be closer to 8%-12%.

Meetings Held: Meetings held is the first reasonable metric to consider. If SDRs are given accounts and contacts, pay them up to 100% of variable compensation on meetings held. This keeps them engaged when they lack control over what happened upstream or what will happen downstream. If they are given accounts but are responsible for sourcing their own contacts, then it is a judgment call as to whether or not to pay on meetings held. If they are given neither accounts nor contacts, then do not pay on meetings held since it creates too much incentive to inject garbage into the pipeline.

Opportunities Created: Opportunities created, also known as sales qualified leads (SQLs) or sales qualified opportunities (SQOs), is by far the most common SDR variable compensation metric. It represents a healthy balance between the company’s performance and what is controllable by the SDR.

Note: If you link SDR pay to opportunities, we only recommend linking to opportunity creation following the first meeting. Tying some or part of compensation to opportunity advancement beyond this stage is a non-starter. This practice demoralizes SDRs since they don’t have control over opportunity progression. Moreover, small numbers of opportunities generated by a given SDR advance during any given month. Therefore, you’d have a set a low quota which would expose the company to uncomfortably wide swings in compensation.

Closed-Won Business: Many companies pay SDRs on closed-won business – often in the neighborhood of 1.0% to 1.5% of annual recurring revenue (ARR). Paying on ARR aligns SDR pay with company performance and creates strong incentives for SDRs to focus on “good” prospects. However, paying a percentage of ARR is fraught with the following problems:

• SDRs have very little control over opportunities after AEs take over.
• With typical 3 to 6 month (or longer) B2B sales cycles, there is an extended gap between activity and reward. This gap not only lowers incentive-driven motivation but also complicates compensation management.
• Two SDRs might get paid very differently for the same work because one SDR had the “luck of the draw.” Meaning, they were given a better account or handed an opportunity to a better AE.

A Novel Approach

At SalesLoft, we have applied a novel approach to this. Each month we pool a fixed percentage of ARR and distribute ‘shares” based on each SDR’s portion of total opportunities created. We acknowledge and accept the fact that new SDRs benefit from the earlier work of more tenured SDRs (and even from SDRs promoted into new roles). This is a small price to pay. Plus, tenured SDRs got to benefit from this when they were new, so all’s fair. This approach fosters teamwork and dramatically simplifies compensation management.

What is the net-net? For most organizations, we recommend paying 100% of variable compensation on one metric: qualified opportunities created. However, Figure 2 below provides a more complete decision-making guide. Paying on closed-won business is noticeably absent from the decision guide since it is a ‘nice to have’ not a ‘need to have.’ Should you decide to pay on closed-won business, strongly consider the pooled approach described above.

Step 4: Set quotas

Set targets such that ~70% of SDRs meet or exceed quota in any given month. This ensures two things:

1. The company will perform as if every SDR hit 100% since the SDRs who overachieve should more than make up for those who underachieve.
2. SDRs stay motivated by a goal that is challenging yet attainable.

A nearly universal rule of thumb is that outbound SDRs should be able to schedule 20 meetings per month or 1 per business day. Even after rescheduling no-shows, assume 10% of prospects will go dark, leaving 18 meetings held per month.

Concerning qualified opportunities created, things get tricky because every company has different qualified criteria. According to The Bridge Group’s “Sales Development 2018” report, the average number of opportunities generated is 10. That is a pretty darn good starting quota.

By way of example, let’s say you had a $70K OTE and a 70/30 pay mix, or $50K base and $20K variable. Moreover, assume the only compensation metric is sales qualified opportunities. Throughout the year, each SDR would need to help generate 120 qualified opps. Hence, each opportunity pays $20K/120 = $166.66.

Here’s another way to come up with the 120 qualified opportunities per year target. In fairness to SDRs and for ease of administration, set quotas to account for paid time off. Many companies offer ten vacation days, ten holidays, and five sick days. There are also about 104 weekend days. That leaves roughly 236 working days. If an SDR can average one meeting booked per working day and the ratio of opportunities generated to meetings booked is 50%, then they can produce 118 opportunities per year.

Calculated either way, setting quota at ten qualified opportunities per month means you do not need to adjust for seasonality, vacation, common illness, etc. (unless otherwise legally required).

An advanced consideration is what to do during SDR ramp. According to TOPO, SDR ramp time to full quota is three months. There are three common approaches to accounting for ramp time.

1. Some companies make no adjustments, which means SDRs earn less during ramp. Instead of lowering quota, they have minimum performance expectations such as 0 opps in month one, and 5 opportunities in month two.
2. Other companies adjust the payout. For instance, they might pay 100% of monthly variable compensation in month one then scale up the per meeting commission until quota achievement. Above the reduced quota, they usually go back to the standard rate.
3. A third option, which we have not observed ‘in the wild,’ is to spread the reduced productivity during ramp across the year. For example, a fully-ramped SDR might be expected to produce 120 qualified opportunities over 12 months. A new SDR might expect to have 0 opportunities in month one and 5 in month two. Therefore, they produce 15 less over 2 months, or 105 annually. That would translate into a goal of 9 (rounded up from 8.75) instead of 10.

Step 5: Set thresholds and accelerators

Most companies want to limit compensation for underperformers and ramp it for overperformers. Thresholds and accelerators, respectively, accomplish those goals.

A threshold is a minimum performance level, below which no commissions are paid. A standard threshold is 40% to 50% of quota. So, continuing our example, if quota is ten qualified opportunities per month, then a threshold of 4 or 5 would be appropriate. If you have good data, set the threshold at the bottom 10th or 20th performance percentile depending on how aggressively you want to weed people out.

Accelerators are wise since they drive performance and reward for over-performance. The math behind choosing accelerators is all about knowing your desired SDR compensation cost of sale (CCOS).

Let’s say that each SDR, on average, is ultimately responsible for creating opportunities that lead to $700K in closed-won ARR. With a $70K OTE, their CCOS is 10%. Building on the example above, the $700K in ARR came from 120 opportunities. The implied value per opportunity is $700K/120 = $5,833.33. Hence, you could maintain the 10% CCOS by paying $583 per opportunity over target.

However, most organizations (and their investors) want their CCOS to decrease as revenues increase. The $583 is a ceiling. The floor is the $166 SDRs earned up until quota. Anything in between is fair. We typically see a 25% to 50% accelerator per qualified opportunity over target. In our example, that would mean paying $200 to $250 per qualified opportunity over target.

Side note: SDRs often find it motivating to know how much revenue each call generates for the company. Assume an SDR makes 300 dials per week or 14,400 per year. If that generates $700K of ARR, then each call is worth almost $50 to the business!

Step 6: Set the performance period and payout frequency

The performance period is the term over which you measure performance to quota. For SDRs, that is almost always monthly. Such short performance periods are appropriate for SDRs since their results (meetings and opportunities) follow shortly after their activities.

It isn’t necessary that payout frequency match the performance period, but it usually does. If you have a monthly performance period, it makes sense to adopt a monthly payout frequency.

A Final Thought

There is an ever-present tension between what SDRs want to be paid for (activities) and what the business wants to pay for (money in the bank). When designing compensation plans, repeatedly ask yourself two questions: (1) What is simple? (2) What is fair?

If you have any questions, the folks at SalesLoft are happy to help!

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Looking for more on what top performing sales professionals are doing to succeed? Don’t miss this new TOPO research!

The post 6 Steps to Designing a Sales Development Compensation Plan appeared first on SalesLoft.

Augmented reality (AR) can enable some truly amazing user experiences, and it has the potential to completely transform customer service. But it’s currently overshadowed by chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), and all the talk about how those technologies will dramatically change the contact center — including by replacing human agents with machines.

AR technology, which merges what we see in the physical world with the 3D features of the virtual world, should be getting a lot more attention, however. It does something chatbots and AI can’t: It preserves, and even elevates, the human connection in service and sales experiences. And while AI agents could handle AR-supported customer service experiences, they could not deliver highly personalized, human-to-human interactions.

Why is the human factor so important to maintain in customer service when chatbots and AI can handle many tasks more quickly and efficiently than human agents? Because consumers still overwhelmingly believe that human-to-human interaction provides a better emotional quotient (EQ). That’s the ability to recognize and respond to a person’s emotional state. And 80 percent of consumers believe that human hearts, not robot minds, offer the best EQ, according to our new report, Emotions Win: What Customers Expect in the Age of AI. The research suggests a new frontier for customer experience is emerging, and that businesses, by combining AI with human interactions, can seize “a massive marketing opportunity right now and for years to come.”

You can be sure AR is going to play a big role in this new frontier, and here’s why:

AR Reduces Miscommunication and Accelerates Problem Solving

Great customer support is essential to maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty in the digital age. One negative experience not only could ruin a company’s chance to earn a customer’s repeat business, but it also could result in that person saying negative things about it in social media and elsewhere. Our research shows that most consumers (85 percent) will at least share the story of their unsatisfactory experience with people who are close to them: friends, family, and colleagues.

AR can help reduce the risk of poor customer service experience by providing more context to both customers and agents so that issues can be understood and resolved faster — the first time around. It enables a more human way for customers and contact center agents to interact by letting them interact and solve problems virtually, side-by-side. For example, agents can use AR to guide customers through a process, like assembling a product or troubleshooting a device connectivity issue, in real time using visual guidance. And with technology like Microsoft’s HoloLens system, remote experts can be “in the room” with users through an app that enables video chat and screen sharing.

AR can also put more problem-solving power in the hands of consumers. Instead of reaching out to the contact center, a consumer could, for example, point their smartphone at a product to access AR overlays that offer visual instructions for installing a product at home or resolving problems. This should become commonplace fairly soon, as more smartphones are equipped with AR capabilities, making it much easier for customers to experience it.

For agents, AR providing basic how-to information to customers in need means that they are free to focus their attention on helping other customers with more complicated and urgent matters. They can take the time to provide highly personalized experiences that will, in turn, increase customer satisfaction.

AR Enables More Meaningful Brand Interactions

Customer service can be a powerful tool for engaging customers and elevating a company’s reputation and brand image because agents are connecting with people at a critical moment: when they are feeling frustrated and want (or desperately need) help to resolve a problem.

In fact, according to our research, 90 percent of consumers view problem-solving as an important or very important characteristic of their interaction with a brand. And 89 percent of respondents said that support plays an important role in helping them figure out the right solution for their needs.

Today’s consumers also expect to experience a consistent brand experience across any channel, physical or virtual, that they use to interact with a company or brand. They have very high expectations about omnichannel experiences. That includes customer service, which many businesses now view as a form of marketing in our increasingly service-oriented economy.

Also, given the AR-driven brand interactions that more consumers are having in-store these days, it stands to reason that many will soon start to expect, or even prefer, to interact with customer service agents who are equipped with AR tools.

Consider a study by consumer experience marketing firm Daymon Interactions, which found that 61 percent of shoppers prefer to shop at stores that offer AR over ones that don’t. And many leading retailers, from Timberland to IKEA to Zara have been responding to that demand, delivering AR experiences in-store or using AR to bring the in-store experience to consumers shopping at home. Some brands, like Adidas, are even incorporating AR into their products.

The rise of AR-infused shopping and brand experiences helps to further underscore why this technology and customer service are a great match. For example, while most consumers (61 percent) see AI’s potential to make shopping faster, an equal percentage sees AI making that same activity less personal.

So, as businesses take a more automated approach to the customer experience, they should also be careful to preserve the human element wherever possible, and especially in customer-agent interactions. Today, brands have an opportunity to build rapport with stressed-out customers in need of assistance by delivering a blend of helpful information and empathy.

In time, AI will likely gain some level of EQ — nearly half of consumers surveyed by Invoca believe that will happen. But until then, and likely even beyond, AR technology can ensure people still experience the human-to-human interaction they want and need from customer service — only better.

At some point, your business might consider a way to outsource your work, delegating some of your functions or responsibilities to a party outside the business. If you’re used to handling everything in-house, it’s a nerve-wracking thought, but it’s also one that could save you lots of time, or ensure that your work is in more capable hands.

If you’re weighing your options, there are a few key questions to consider before you start to outsource your work.

1. What is your core motivation?
   

   Why are you really looking to outsource? There are many acceptable motivations here: you could be trying to save time, you could be hoping to operate more efficiently, or you could be looking for more quality than you could provide in-house. Your exact motivations don’t matter as much as your acknowledgment of those motivations; only when you identify and document your end goals will you be able to optimize which partners you choose and how you establish those partnerships.
   In short-term situations, your motivation is usually clear. For example, you might have a design project due for a client in a week, but you don’t have the manpower to handle it; in that case, you need to get the job done faster, and since you won’t be able to hire anyone new that quickly, outsourcing is your best option.
   Things get more complicated when your business matures, and you start thinking about adding outsourcing as a constant feature of your business. In these scenarios, there are usually multiple motivations in play. For example, you might consider hiring an offsite personal assistant to save you time and make you less stressed, and possibly give you an option for when your workload becomes overwhelming—without the need to hire someone full-time.

2. Which functions need outsourced?
   

   Next, you’ll need to consider which of your business functions you’re going to outsource, turning to the goals you outlined in point one to guide your decision. For example, if you’re outsourcing because you need more expertise on a given subject, you might be tempted to outsource demanding technical areas of the business. If you’re short-staffed in a specific department, you might outsource to compensate for your lack of manpower.

These are some of the most commonly outsourced areas of business:

• Accounting and bookkeeping.
  

  Accounting and bookkeeping is an essential function for any business, but finding someone with the right skillset at the right price level can be tough. Small businesses may need help, but may not be able to afford a full-time hire, while bigger businesses may have long-term needs that can’t be fulfilled by an in-house team.

• Legal work.
  

  Lawyers are expensive, and most businesses won’t need them on a regular basis. Instead, they’ll turn to firms or individual lawyers to handle things like drafting contracts, overseeing mergers, and handling cases if and when they come up.

• Marketing and advertising.
  

  You probably have a good idea of what your brand is like, but when it comes to illustrating that brand and reaching out to new demographics, marketing and advertising are frequently best left to experts. Marketing agencies have more experience, access to more specialists, and they’ll take responsibility if you don’t see results.

• Customer service.
  

  Customer service has high turnover and is hard to manage without creating a separate wing of your business; that’s why so many you might decide to outsource your work. The fact that it doesn’t demand much in the way of technical expertise is a big plus.

• Software development.
  

  Software developers can be expensive, and tend to specialize in one or two key areas. It simply doesn’t make sense to bring those developers in-house on a long-term basis, especially when there are so many freelancers and development firms to choose from.
  Finding the people you do want to hire in-house can be a challenge, and there’s no guarantee of recruitment or retention rates with an in-house recruiter. That’s why so many businesses move to outsource recruiting.

3. How are you going to outsource?
   

   No matter which functions you’re going to outsource, you’ll probably have your choice of a few different outsourcing options. One of the main decisions you’ll face is whether to work with an agency or hire a freelancer/contractor. Agencies tend to be a bit more expensive, but for good reason. They have access to an entire staff of specialists, sometimes in very different areas, so they don’t have to rely on a single person’s general expertise to solve problems. They tend to be in business longer, and have more experience working with business clients. You may be able to have your own account representative within the agency, and in most cases, you’ll have some guarantee of success—like ROI or close rate—and a party to hold accountable if things go wrong.
   Freelancers are also a good option, however. They tend to be much less expensive than agencies or firms, and may be willing to work on more flexible terms; for example, agencies frequently want you to sign an ongoing contract, while freelancers may be happy with a-la-carte work. Freelancers also give you more total options, since there are usually thousands to choose from in a given field. You may have to deal with some flakiness, but once you find a reliable candidate, you can feel more confident assigning work to them in the future.
   Neither choice is inherently better than the other, but you’ll need to consider these strengths and weaknesses as you move forward.

4. What’s the value of your time?
   

   Next up, you’ll need to think about cost and value—of both the outsourcing option you’re choosing and the in-house function you’re replacing. It starts with recognizing the value of your own time (and the time of your employees). How much is your time worth, per hour, and how much time would it take to recruit, hire, and train someone for the position you’re thinking of outsourcing? Compare that to the rate of your prospective freelancers and agencies, and see if the move is worth it.
   Many people make the mistake of underestimating the value of their own time. They see that a freelancer would cost $40 an hour, or an agency would cost $50, so they forgo those options in favor of adding to their already-heavy workload. But consider your salary at your last position, or calculate how much revenue you could bring in if you were solely dedicated to the most valuable tasks in your business. Are you worth $60 an hour? $80 an hour? More? If so, you can consider hiring an external agent to be a way to maximize your profitability—especially if your hours are already at their limit.

5. Is this short-term or long-term?
   

   Finally, consider whether you want this to be a short-term arrangement, or whether you want to convert it to a long-term partnership. Most agencies and firms strongly prefer long-term partnerships, and may not even offer short-term engagements as an option; instead, they’ll push you toward six-month packages or monthly subscriptions.
   This is usually more of a consideration with freelancers and contractors. After hiring them for one specific job, or for a limited time, you’ll have the option of keeping them on, or reconnecting with them the next time you’re in this situation. Being friendly and fair throughout the process and communicating clearly and proactively can help you ensure you remain on good terms. Of course, you’ll also want to spend time evaluating their work to see if they’re worth keeping on in the first place; not all contractors will provide you the same level of service.

Core Weaknesses (and How to Compensate for Them)

There are some inherent weaknesses to outsourcing your work, no matter how you look at it, but there are some easy ways to compensate for them:

• Outsourcing can be expensive if you aren’t careful, but shopping around for the right partner can help you mitigate those costs. Look not only at the bottom-line cost of each option, but also which products or services you’re getting in return, and try to cultivate a better professional relationship so you can score a discount in the future. Many freelancers and agencies will cut you a deal based on volume or your history with them.
• Necessarily, you’ll sacrifice some control when you outsource, but you can compensate for this by setting clear expectations from the beginning of the partnership, choosing a partner who’s willing to be transparent, and staying actively involved in communication. You can’t specifically control what your new partner does, but you can set up safeguards to protect yourself from the fallout of a bad decision or low-quality work.
• Jumping back and forth between vendors can be chaotic and cause your business to suffer. Your best bet here is to use consistent standards when finding new vendors, and try to maintain your partnerships as long as possible.

Outsourcing can ultimately be a valuable decision for your company, especially if you think the decision through and attempt to make the most of the time and money it will cost you. Every business will need something different, so consider your unique situation, and adjust your pursuit accordingly.

Indirect partners love a good company-sponsored sales incentive program. It shows appreciation for their loyalty to the brand and creates an interactive experience to participate in. But participants and administers alike often know the different between a base-level and sophisticated system, and the difference could be impacting your bottom line results.

While mounds of needless complexity could add headaches and dysfunction to a reward system, strategically used logic-based components of the program—like personalization, system rules, custom conditions, and payout levels—can propel the user experience and results of the program from good to great.

Fortunately, there are some key questions to ask yourself that could help assess whether your partner program is truly smart, or, better said, getting the most sales bang for your reward buck.

Does your program enable advanced segmentation?

If there’s one fact that marketers know for sure, it’s that personalizing your message to the target audience creates a more relevant and effective experience. The same is true for sales promotions. Different categories of your program audience often require unique and personalized treatments. And that relevancy often translates to results.

In a recent study, Insight Data Solutions found that “applying the wrong incentive structure for a particular individual can reduce productivity and satisfaction.” Further, they discovered that when the shoe does fit, or more specifically, when the right structure and incentive is provided based on the profile of the particular user, their success rate nearly doubles. Yet, according to WorkStride’s recent study with Wakefield Research, 42% of programs are still targeting their whole audience with the same promotions and content without segmentation.

If you’re easily able to filter your audience into defined groups based on attributes and behaviors, and then leverage the factors of those groups to do things like build and run relevant audience-targeted contests, content and communications, and reward levels, then you can bank on a more meaningful experience and better outcome.

It is important to remember that even though you want each user selling as much of that product as you can, each user is not the same. Leveraging advanced segmentation not only allows you to cater your messaging to each user set, but most importantly your contest metrics and goals will yield you true return on program investment. The user will be able to be paid for attainable goals assuring engagement and loyalty, while your budget will be more closely tied to sales goals than arbitrary payouts.

Can you leverage system logic?

Logic-based conditional elements built into your program help make achieving complex goals and processes simpler.

For instance, running simple X for Y rewards could be an effective strategy, but how far can you go to match your specific requirements. Or before you’ll need to go beyond the basics and leverage opportunities to improve.

• Can you reward for sales of particular SKUs and not others?
• Does “X” even have to be a SKU? Could it be a volume of SKUs? A dollar amount? A team aggregate? A bundled add-on?
• Can “X” be conditional in order to get “Y” (i.e. must be $500+ on a Tuesday)?
• Could you set a minimum of sales made to even qualify to participate?
• Can you reward sales lift by offering extra “Y” reward for the sales of “X” that are above the forecasted amount expected to be sold within the period?

Your program should enable you to simply define and change rules on the fly, enable eligibility prerequisites, set incentive levels and success metrics, and other crucial requirements.

SHRM recommends including payout ranges in your incentive plan design that rewards the 90th percentile performer 200 to 300% above the standard incentive amount.

User engagement is a crucial piece of your program, running metric driven incentives is paramount to yield a positive ROI. Users should feel engaged and driven to hit and exceed any combination of equations of goals you put in front of them.

Are you automated?

Systems that allow data collection, creating audiences, spinning up of promotions, and calculations for payouts seems smart. But it’s only truly smart if these processes are automated by the system and not manual work behind the scenes.

The dead giveaway to tell the difference? Can these elements be self-managed, or are they submitted to the vendor to handle. If it’s the former, you likely have an automated system. You work quickly and efficiently with no added costs. If the latter, there’s likely manual work being done behind the scenes to satisfy these tasks – which means wait times for you and your users, room for error, and often added costs.

All companies purchase software for the purpose of making life easier. If your entire program is not automated, then it doesn’t fit the software forte.

Without automation, among many other repercussions, there are two common effects on users that you’d want to avoid:

• Users become apathetic. If a user is not able to track their success, nor be paid as quickly for earned rewards, the program’s engagement may tapper off.
• Users become frustrated. If your program has different goals and campaigns running for different populations, a non-automated system could result in huge time gaps, and most likely deter you from advancing the sophistication of your program overall.

Are you gamifying?

Incentive Federation, Inc. estimates that $75.6 billion was spent in the US on awarding redeemable sales incentives through programs in 2015. That means there’s a lot of competition all vying for the loyalty of your sellers. To stand out, you must engage your audience.

Traditional offline promotions based on a flyer usually miss the mark on the value of engaging the user with tracking and a rich experience. Even many online systems are built to simply utilitarian to merely capture, validate, and reward out the sale.

A smarter-built system goes beyond the standard collection, validation, payout and blends in the additional component of user engagement with tracking widgets and gamification?

Your program is only valuable if it continues to yield results and improvements. As such, it’s critical to keep the program interesting for the participants. Contests, games, visual success tracking, leaderboards, and other widgets help get users to participant and keep them coming back.

Gamification should also expand past widgets and be incorporated in your training programs. Learn and earn modules should be a simple function of your system.

How well can you track performance?

How does something or someone become smart? They learn! There’s a myriad of valuable data ruminating in your network right now. Are you able to see it? Filter it? Visually report it? Learn from it?

While basic sales and payout reporting can show how many dollars are flowing through the program, this is raw information that could just as easily be seen using Excel—it’s also way cheaper. With smart programs, you can delve deeper into reporting and analytics and bridge comparisons between sales, partners, and customers which you (and Excel) typically couldn’t do otherwise.

Your reporting should be eliminating gguessworkwhen it comes to the promotions that you’re running. Those decisions should be driven by the information that the program is showing you it needs to improve.

If you can’t drill down in your results to display clear reports within specific regions, partners or partner types, divisions, SKUs, promotions, and timelines, then you may be missing a ton of highly-actionable insights that may not get acted on.

Along with seeing siloed intelligence, the software should afford you the knowledge of learning why certain partners, promotions, and products interact with one another. If you can see the direct correlation between a partner and a specific campaign, you can assess the success and any adjustments that need to be made. Further, having such visibility real-time allows you to react to it quickly.

Are dollars being spent wisely?

You’re spending money on earning loyalty and performance from your partners. But are you spending that money smartly? Even the largest of OEMs can become smarter with how they’re spending reward dollars to attain the highest possible ROI.

Through the blend of actionable system data, smart self-managed features, and strategic support from your vendor, you should be able to seamlessly learn the opportunity and improvement areas of your indirect business and quickly execute effective solutions.

Can your program flex?

“Smart” is within the eye of the beholder, and there’s array of different solutions out there that could fit your needs. From big to small. In-house to external. Simple to complex. Boxed to custom. But it’s important to consider what is right for you in both the short and long terms in order to reduce your exposure to risk.

A self-administered, out-of-the-box program might fit the cost requirement, but might be limited in flexibility. On the other hand, a highly-custom built program is tailor-fit to requirements, but the expensive build might be a gamble if you’re wrong about the needs. It then may be too expensive to change.

A smart program can support your immediate needs and also grow with you overtime as business grows and things get more complex. If your platform is willing to support a simple grass-roots campaign like a basic collection/payout promotion, but also support in complex and highly-configured program environment and everything in-between without costly rebuilds, you’re likely running a smart program that you could be with for the long term.

What if I told you that there was a method to attract customers ready to purchase your services or products, and at a lower cost than your traditional marketing techniques? Sounds too good to be true, right?

The good news: It’s not. And the way to do that is through inbound marketing. We answer these questions in this article:

• What is inbound marketing?
• Inbound versus Outbound Marketing: What’s The Difference?
• How to Get Started with Inbound Marketing?
• Marketing Automation – A Critical Element of Inbound Marketing
• Why Ignoring Inbound Marketing will Cost Your Business Sales
• The Bottom Line – Inbound Marketing Fuels Growth

What is inbound marketing?

It’s a methodology that brings prospective customers directly to you, rather than you just promoting your business to them, as you may have done in the past through traditional advertising. It accomplishes this through the creation of targeted, custom content designed to meet potential customers’ needs during each step of their buying journey, delivered to the customer using engaging nurturing automation.

Inbound marketing can be considered a subset of digital marketing, a term that represents all of the marketing activities you do online—such as email, social media, and your website—to attract, engage, and delight users to your business.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: What’s The Difference?

In the past, B2C companies used traditional marketing methods, such as newspaper ads, direct mail, and publications like the Yellow Pages to generate awareness of their services and products among customers. These outbound marketing techniques take an interruption-based approach, creating a relationship in which the company, and not the customer, is trying to take control of the message.

These methods also leave little to no opportunity to precisely target the customers who are most interested in you and what you have to offer them. Instead, you may be left with the feeling that all you can do is just “cross your fingers and hope it works,” without the opportunity to fully explore the real ROI on your marketing investment. However that has all changed. Seller control of the conversation went away as soon as the customer gained access to information.

The customer now has control of the conversation

Potential customers use the Internet and social media to become educated about their options before ever contacting a company for their services or making a purchase. Because your prospects are looking on the Internet for general information about services or products similar to what your company offers, you want to provide high-quality content that attracts these potential customers to your website by providing valuable information to them.

When you do this, your visitors become confident that you are an important resource. When they are ready to buy, they will approach your company as a trusted partner, rather than being dissuaded by an aggressive seller. To do this, your website needs to be more than just a flashy brochure. B2C inbound marketing with inbound marketing transforms a website into a selling machine.

And a word of caution: If you’re not already doing this, your competitors may be—don’t yield this advantage to them.

How to Get Started with Inbound Marketing

The key to inbound marketing is to understand your customers. They no longer expect you to find them. They want to find you. And this concept should be the driving force behind your inbound marketing strategy.

1) Develop an ideal profile of your customer

One of the first steps for turning your website into a sales engine is to develop a profile the ideal customer you would like to attract with your B2C inbound marketing. This profile is called a buyer persona. You need to identify the type of people who will be most interested in your product or services. We use the Buyer Persona Institute’s 5 Rings of Buyer Insight approach to create buyer personas for our clients as described in this diagram.

As a simple example, a home landscaping services company would want to attract homeowners―but not just any homeowners, that is. Homeowners with a priority to make their landscape pretty and enjoyable during each season of the year may be one vital characteristic of this company’s target customer, and so they might choose to focus their inbound marketing efforts on customers in suburban areas with higher incomes and a preference for the outdoors.

2) Understand the stages your ideal customer takes to learn

Understand the stages in your ideal customer’s journey (as shown in the next image). Many people who visit your website will just be in the awareness stage. They have identified that they have a problem, and are doing research about the root cause of the problem.

Using our landscaping company as an example, here’s a real-life problem that could be facing one of their potential customers: The customer’s lawn is being overtaken by weeds, and they want to get rid of them. Questions asked at this stage for this problem might include: “What type of weeds are overtaking my lawn?” or “In what conditions do weeds thrive?”

The second stage is the consideration stage. Customers in this stage have become aware of the cause of the cause of the problem and are researching solutions.

By this stage, our landscaping customer has identified the type of weed and what causes it to grow. Armed with this information, the customer may now be wondering things like, “What types of products can treat this weed?” or “Can I treat this problem myself, or do I need to hire a professional?”

Finally, customers have reached the decision stage when they have researched the solutions to their problem, and are evaluating products and services that can solve that problem. You want to create content that appeals to your customer’s persona in each stage of their educational journey.

At this point in their journey, our landscaping customer has identified that the best option to treat their problem is to hire a professional skilled in weed treatment. In this stage, the customer might want to know, “What process does this company use to treat weeds?” or “How much does professional weed treatment cost?” or “Do they use harsh chemicals or organic practices where possible?”

3) Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

So far, we’ve explored what inbound marketing is all about. So, are you wondering what the heck is content marketing, and what does it have to do with inbound marketing? The short answer: A lot.

Content, quite simply, is the fuel that makes your inbound marketing engine run. Content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, educational, and relevant content to your prospective customers. It’s a long-term approach that requires consistency. And it works. The following graphic describes the percentage of B2C marketers who have a content marketing strategy (Source: Content Marketing Institute 2018). It is amazing to us that so many businesses do not consider a content strategy as an essential part of their marketing investment.

The B2C Content Strategy Should:

1. be thorough and based on your buyer persona,
2. address the trigger events that cause them to prioritize taking action now,
3. should include content at each stage of the buyer’s journey,
4. and lastly, include nurturing through email, social media, and other methods

This graphic shows the relationship between the different types of content at each stage of the buyer’s journey for information. It, in essence, creates a digital funnel for the prospect to travers.

Content for the early awareness stage might include white papers, eBooks, and webinars. These help visitors connect the problems they are experiencing with causes. Customers in the middle consideration stage might benefit from product videos, slideshows, data sheets, and online brochures. These help present solutions to the root cause of the problem. Finally, buyers in the decision stage will want to see case studies, product demo videos, and request a conversation in the form of a consultation or options to purchase the product for online sales.

When you’ve made a connection with a potential customer via your content, don’t waste the opportunity to continue that relationship. You need to capture the contact information so you can continue the relationship via email nurturing, social media and other methods. This is important because the prospect may be a qualified prospect but just not ready to buy. Nurturing keeps your company top-of-mind until their need aligns with their readiness to engage.

Yes, this does mean sending emails. However, when the customer has given you permission to contact them by offering you their information, it’s an entirely different ballgame compared to sending a mass email blast to everyone and anyone. These are personal touch points which answer the common questions a prospect may have when they are doing their initial research.

Make sure that your emails are content-rich, which means taking an information-sharing approach. Additionally, spend as much time writing the email subject line as you do writing the content itself, because recipients often use the subject to determine if they open the email or just deleting it. It would be a shame to write a great email that no one opens!

To capture their information, the most effective approach is to offer an incentive. The best type of motivation differs from business to business. For example, our landscaping company might find a downloadable checklist of tasks homeowners can do to prepare their yard for spring. Or, an educational video guides about how to prune a yew or other plants.

Remember, though, the foundation of inbound marketing is offering excellent quality content―and the truth is, not just anyone has the expertise to produce it. If you do not have professional writers and designers on your team, consider hiring these experts on a freelance basis, or a marketing agency who can oversee this for you. This next image shows the growth of the world internet population. That is a lot of eyeballs.

A look at the amount of information produced available only underscores this point. Today, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, at a pace that is only accelerating each year. With so much information available at their fingertips, consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and will value only the best—if you give a poor first impression, you may never earn their trust. If you’re taking the time and resources to invest in content in the first place, do not skimp in the quality of the material.

Once you publish the content and you learn how prospects engage with it, then you will find generating leads will not only be easier and more cost-effective, but your bottom line will improve because, as the prospects this methodology produces will be those most interested in your services or products.

Marketing Automation Tools for B2C Companies

This marketing approach uses automation software to make the methodology work. We used the engine analogy describing inbound marketing as a lead generation engine where the content is the fuel that the engine runs on, the marketing automation tools serve both as the gears and mechanisms that automate all of the elements and also measure engine performance with meters and dashboard lights. It’s true, the lead generation engine will not run without automation, so let’s dig in and learn more about how automation helps.

Automation provides your prospects and customers access to content when they are ready to consume it. It also personalizes the communication and can select which element of content is best for your prospect. To begin, it is vitally important that your website not only appeals to customers but also responds to them quickly. Automation tools allow you to do this efficiently.

For example, say a prospective customer decides to download an educational guide from our landscaping company, which is to be delivered via email. With a marketing automation tool, one action (signing up for the guide) triggers the next (sending the guide to the customer’s email address). It’s both seamless and instant and requires no additional work on your part once the desired sequence of events is set up in your marketing automation tool. It’s a natural, efficient process for both you and the prospect.

Here’s what the same scenario would look like without a marketing automation tool: The prospect signs up for the guide, but no one at the landscaping company sees the new request right away, because they are busy with other projects. It’s not until many hours, at the end of the day, that the employee is able to send the guide to the prospect.

This next image shows all of the pieces of your engine in one place.

The buyer’s journey is on the left, the inbound marketing tactics are on the right, and the automation is described in the middle in terms of the relationship between the content and automation to deliver value at the right time to the prospect.

The prospect becomes disappointed because they had hoped to read and even use the information in the guide right away. It also is time-consuming and inefficient for the employee, who must monitor and respond to each request individually; this takes their attention away from other valuable tasks. And if your content is popular, this process can quickly become unmanageable.

Another example enables a business to provide dynamic content to the visitor. Let’s say a specific person downloads guide #1 and then comes back to the website page that had that guide. Automation knows who the visitor is and also knows that they already downloaded guide #1 so it automatically offers him/her guide #2 in order to provide even more valuable information. Without automation, the businesses website cannot become dynamic, personalized and engaging.

Automation tools also allow you to monitor the behavior of your prospects, so that you can watch them navigate through their journey toward purchasing your products or services. You will only directly contact leads who progress to the decision stage of their journey. This means that your sales team will mostly be contacting highly qualified leads who have already identified their problem, been educated about the potential solutions, and are ready to make a decision to purchase from your business.

Why Ignoring Inbound Marketing Will Cost You Sales

Still not convinced that inbound marketing is right for you? Here are some reasons why if you choose not to invest time and resources into it, you risk business growth.

1. You are passing up on productive lead nurturing opportunities.

One of the most potent benefits of B2C inbound marketing is the continuous connection it creates with the consumer. When you are given permission to communicate with someone, you become their authority on that particular topic. If you stay connected with potential customers by providing information that can help them solve their problems, then you will be the first one they turn to when they are ready to implement a solution.

2. You are ceding the opportunity to be seen as an authority.

One of the most significant benefits of B2C inbound marketing is that you gain the opportunity to position yourself as an industry leader. Inbound marketing allows you to speak in a way that proves you know your stuff; if you get this right, your content positively reflects on your business’s image and differentiation. All types of customers are more attracted to companies that look like they know what they are doing.

3. Your website won’t rank as highly in search engine results.

One of the first things customers do when trying to a find a solution to their needs is a search on the Internet. The businesses at the top of the search engine results will land these types of customers. If your business is low on the first page of search results―or worse, isn’t even there at all―you are passing up on countless sales opportunities. The best way for your website to get these top spots is with inbound marketing strategies explicitly designed to get you there.

4. You aren’t building the most influential business relationships possible.

Once a job is finished, or a product is delivered, you should not allow your customers to wander off. If a customer does not have a reason to think about you after they purchase, then they may forget about you—even if you did a fantastic job. This provides an opening for your competitors to snatch up your customers the next time they’re ready to buy. Staying connected with your customers not only increases their loyalty but also increases the likelihood they will continue to find a need for your offerings (sometimes people do not even know they need something until they receive a friendly reminder!)

This next graphic describes inbound marketing from the perspective of the CFO and the CMO because it increases profits and revenues through greater efficiencies because inbound marketing is measurable, predictable, and attributable.

How Small- and Medium-Sized Business Can Compete with Inbound Marketing

Today, marketing is becoming increasingly “more human,” creating an expectation in customers—whether the customers themselves realize it or not—that companies will deliver content and information that is made “just for them.” Even large marketing agencies are shifting their approach, investing both time and significant dollars to create deeper connections with customers.

Inbound marketing offers small- and medium-sized B2C companies a cost-effective way to create similar connections with their customers while doing so in the formats their customers prefer most. Customers want to do business that understands them and their problems—and with inbound marketing, you can not only compete but even beat, your larger competitors.

The Bottom Line – Inbound Marketing Fuels Growth

Inbound marketing is the most effective method to attract highly qualified customers. To be sure, it takes an investment of time and resources, but when you consider how the customer’s buying process has changed (hint: dramatically), it’s the only way to go. Don’t miss this opportunity to increase sales, lower customer acquisition costs, and become an authority in your industry—and all while offering your customers incredible value.

Bristol Strategy is a “full funnel” inbound marketing agency and inbound sales agency offering comprehensive Inbound Marketing services that enable our clients to surpass their business objectives by transforming the way they engage with their buyers on-line. Reach out to us to learn more about how our proven processes can help your business grow.

Every time I meet sales enablement and sales executives, I ask, “What are the critical skills you are focusing on training and developing your people on?

The answers are varied, but generally fall into very specific, and classic selling skills:  Qualifying, questioning, listening, prospecting, objection handling, closing, call planning, deal planning, account planning, time/territory management, establishing rapport, communications styles, and so on.

These skills are important, in fact they are table stakes for all professional sales people.

But they are yesterday’s skills and insufficient in working with tomorrow’s buyers.

Going back to those conversations with sales executives, I usually follow that initial question with, “What are you doing to train your people in curiosity, what about critical thinking and problem solving?  Have you considered project management, consensus building, facilitation, change management, systems thinking?  And then there is the perennial, business acumen.  It’s been on my list for decades, but I don’t see many organizations addressing this, despite tremendous resources being available.

By now, about 70% of the people are looking at me cross-eyed, inevitably thinking, “Those aren’t selling skills, what’s this guy talking about?

Hmmm, it’s interesting, those aren’t selling skills, but there are more than selling skills that are critical to being a high performing sales person.  Why are so many limiting their thinking to selling skills and not looking at the skills critical to sales success?

About 25% respond, “We’re struggling with things like value creation, communication, delivery.  Or they may site specific programs like Insight or Challenger Selling.”

These are important and can be game changing.  The problem is, without a foundation curiosity, critical thinking, consensus building, problem solving, and so forth, it’s really difficult to apply these approaches effectively.

Then there’s the 5%.  These are the organizations with consistent high performance.  These are the people looking at where the buyers are going–or where they need to be going.   These are the organizations that recognize customers struggle to buy, so they can create great value in helping the customers navigate their own problem solving/buying processes.

It’s no wonder that we see a widening gap in sales performance.  Year after year, the percent of people making plan declines.  Year after year, the chasm between buyers and sellers increases.

A large part of this is we are focusing on yesterday’s skills, but not developing the capabilities to create great value for tomorrow’s buyers.

If you are a sales enablement professional, or a sales executive, perhaps you need to rethink your priorities.  If you are a sales professional, committed to your own professional development, recognize that all the skills you need to be successful in selling are not selling skills. Look beyond these and start learning the skills critical to your success.

 

If you don’t know who your dream clients are, if you haven’t identified the best prospects in your territory, you have a form of friction that prevents you from prospecting.

When you don’t know how to gain an appointment by trading enough value for the time you are asking for, the resistance you get when you ask for a meeting is unnecessary friction. The “no” you hear is friction.

Your dream client has concerns about meeting with you, and those concerns are real to them. When you decide to overcome their objections you create resistance than would have been more easily removed had you decided to resolve their concerns. Unresolved concerns are friction.

When you show up and begin a conversation by talking about your company, your products and services, your global footprint, and the big name logos you presently serve, you create the friction that comes with believing that you win sales by providing proof that your prospect should buy from you because your company and products are great instead of using that time to serve them. Self-orientation, in all its forms, creates resistance.

Sometimes things that create friction feel like progress. Your dream client asks you tells you how impressed they are and asks you for a proposal and pricing. But because you haven’t collaborated around the solution and haven’t done the work to really understand their challenges or their constraints, you have created friction by providing them with something to which they can easily refuse. Lack of an effective theory about how to control the process is friction.

In larger, complex, B2B sales, there are often more stakeholders than smaller, simpler sales. When you try to bypass including the people who are going to be effected by any decision to change, you create the friction that is their resistance to being excluded from the conversation. You also have likely created the additional friction that comes from losing the high ground that comes with dealing with friction.

The intention to speed up sales does not create friction when the tactics employed mean slowing down. When the tactics you use speed things up, you create the kind of friction that can bring the entire process to a crawl.

The remedy for friction is lubrication, making the surface smooth and even and easy for things to move from one side to the other. If there is a potential to create friction, then there is also the potential to create antifriction. If you want to make selling easier, then do the hard work of creating antifriction.

The post Reducing Friction and Creating Antifriction in Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

A hot buzzword during the past couple of years has been digital transformation. It has branched off a few more in the world of marketing and sales:

Martech Transformation

Sales Transformation

CX Transformation

Customer Engagement Transformation

I am sure there are more. At the risk of being a buzz killer, there is something amiss about all of this that may not be that great. Much of these have to do with internal processes within marketing and sales. The emphasis is on becoming more digitally efficient with one’s marketing and sales efforts as a means of connecting with customers.

2020 Looms Ahead

The focus on transforming marketing, sales, customer experience, and etc. is the right thing to do. A question which businesses undergoing such efforts should answer, however, is: Will our transformation help us to align with customers and buyers? Many will answer yes. And, they will be right to a certain degree. Changes that allow organizations to be more efficient at communicating with customers is inherent in such transformation efforts.

Transformation is being driven by rapid changes in buying behaviors. Online research and experiences have become the most prominent forms of behaviors that transformation initiatives are responding to. With efforts designed to enable engaging with customers online and digitally.

Addressing buyer behavioral changes through the aforementioned transformation initiatives is a must for all organizations as we head towards 2020.

As 2020 looms ahead, there may be a transformation effort that is far more important to understand.

The Buyer Transformation

With 2020 on the horizon, buyers are involved in their own transformations. Transformation on many fronts that will raise the bar for many B2B organizations to meet when pursuing customers and buyers. What are areas of transformation occurring on the buyer side that B2B organizations need to be aware of as we head towards 2020? Here are just a few observations gathered from conducting buyer interviews while engaged in buyer insights research and buyer persona development for organizations over the past two years:

Supply Chain: After a slow start, supply chain technology is rapidly transforming. High expectations are forming for seamless integration into digitally transformed supply chain management.

Procurement: In a survey by Procurement Leaders, over 80% of procurement departments are undergoing some form of transformation. Introducing new technologies to make the procuring of goods and supplies more efficient, less costly, and truly “just-in-time.”

Data: Buyers are increasingly reliant on and building predictive data operations to help with their decision-making. Data operations are expanding and helping with all forms of decision-making. Whether they be market-based, production-based, or operations-based decisions. Look for an increasing number of Data Scientist building user-friendly decision-models for buyers to use.

Decision Networks: In a previous article, I mention how buyers are on a quest to fulfill a need. One way this is happening is the “buying team” is giving way to “decision networks.” Decision networks are linked digitally and can respond to making decisions in a rapid manner. This is rapid decision making among a network of stakeholders who are invested in getting a resolution or in acquiring services or solutions. Think of this as a “network quest” to get an answer. The “decision network” finds the buying team process unnecessary, geographically impractical, and cumbersome.

Accounting/Finance: The field of accounting and finance are experiencing tremendous transformation as the digital commerce world evolves. More and more companies are moving accounting and finance operations to the digital cloud. Once an area met with high resistance, this transformation is now seen as a competitive must-have in order to cut cost and create efficiencies.

Workforce: How people work and communicate are changing drastically. Propelled by digital technology and flattening hierarchies, the workforce is changing in substance and skillsets. Millennials will increasingly make up a higher percentage of the workforce and have new expectations.

Innovations: Buyers now have dedicated teams whose purpose is to scout the marketplace for innovative outsourcing, market trends, product trends, service trends, and workforce trends. The aim is on how to creatively innovate and improve the entity for the future and how to transform certain areas of business operations.

These are several areas of transformations taking place in the world of buyers. While addressing changes in buying behavior related to online research and content is a necessity, it is not the only addressing that needs to happen. The forces of Buyer Transformation listed above mean new expectations for B2B organizations to meet.

Addressing Buyer Transformation

B2B organizations today will need to thoroughly understand, gain insights on, and adapt to Buyer Transformation. While transformation in Martech or sales will improve organizational capabilities, not addressing the forces of Buyer Transformation can put an organization in a non-competitive position come 2020 and beyond.

This is especially true for organizations that are burdened with extensive unyielding legacy systems. Severely limiting an organization’s ability to adapt to a digital world of commerce. As more millennials in buyer capacities move up the career ladder, the tolerance level to accept the limitations of legacy systems will wane.

To be prepared for 2020 and beyond, sincere efforts in reaching a deeper understanding of Buyer Transformation will need to become a priority. Not addressing Buyer Transformation in 2019 will create a gap between organizations and buyers that will be hard to fill come 2020.

Sales productivity can be a pretty nebulous term. It’s an expression that’s taken on various different roles, definitions and interpretations over the years as new tools, methodologies, and techniques come to redefine modern selling with increasing regularity.

At its core though, sales productivity is all about increasing your number of sales for the amount of time you spend actively selling. And that exciting measure of sales productivity—learning how to get more sales without hiring more reps for your team or working more hours each week—is exactly what we’re diving into here today.

Want all of our best sales productivity tools, content, advice and templates? Get access to The Sales Library now.

But first, when talking about sales productivity, we can’t very well begin this conversation without fully defining what exactly sales productivity is...

What is sales productivity? (How to calculate sales productivity for your organization and individual reps)

At the organizational sales team level, sales productivity is defined as your organization’s amount of revenue generated for a specific period of time (output), per total number of sales rep on your team (input). This answers the question of how productive your average sales rep is, in terms of their direct revenue impact on your business.

Therefore, organizational sales productivity is a measure of how much revenue you can expect to generate from each individual rep, on average over time.

You can calculate your organizational sales productivity with this equation:

Total Team Revenue ($) for a Period ÷ Number of Reps on Your Team in that Period

For example, if your sales team generated $100,000 in revenue during the last quarter, and you had 3 reps on your team during that period of time, your team’s sales productivity calculation would work out to $33,333.33/rep.

That’s organizational sales productivity.

Now here’s individual sales rep productivity.

While it’s obviously crucial to understand how well your sales organization is performing as a whole, it’s arguably even more important to have a clear measure of how well each of your individual sales reps are performing in terms of revenue generated for each hour of work.

Some reps will generate more or less revenue than others (be more or less productive), which means you can learn from and train for improving productivity across your team.

Whether your goal is to simply keep a watchful eye on performance, to catch the warning signs early and make sure quotas aren’t missed, or to identify how and why some of your reps perform particularly well compared to others, tracking sales productivity is a must.

At the individual level, sales productivity is defined as a rep’s amount of revenue generated (output) per each hour of work (input). Rather than our previous calculation that spits out an average sales productivity figure spread across your entire team, this measure is designed to drill all the way down to exactly how much revenue each rep generates per hour of work—and that’s extremely useful.

You can calculate an individual rep’s sales productivity with this equation:

Individual Rep Revenue ($) for a Period ÷ Number of Hours Worked in that Period

For example, let’s say your rep Alison brought in $50,000 in revenue during Q2. She’s a salaried employee that works an average of 40 hours per week, and there were 13 weeks in Q2 this year, which translates into a total of 520 hours worked. If you divide her revenue by the total number of hours, that gives her a revenue figure of $96.15/hr.

It’s natural to see daily, weekly and monthly fluctuations in your individual rep sales productivity figures, but across greater spans of time, you’ll be able to safely rely on these calculations—and most importantly, begin taking action.

That’s enough math for now. It’s time for action.

Let’s talk about how to increase your sales productivity from an individual rep perspective, where those positive gains will then trickle up into making a direct impact on your team’s bottom line (this is the one of the most important objectives Close.io is designed to help you accomplish).

10 sales productivity tactics you can use to close more deals

Like it or not, the world of B2B sales is becoming increasingly focused on exceeding sales quotas. As a result, salespeople are under more pressure than ever to hit higher revenue goals.

At the same time though, most sales orgs aren’t very excited about the prospect of revamping their sales process, hiring a ton of new reps, experimenting with new sales strategies, changing established behavior or adopting new tools like predictive dialers.

It’s right here that sales productivity truly comes into play.

Sales productivity is all about increasing your individual rep output (revenue) while holding the key input (hours spent working) constant—or even reducing that time spent.

Digging deeper into exactly how to achieve sales productivity gains on your team, here are 10 of our best sales productivity tactics, strategies, tools and processes you can implement and start closing more deals today.

1. Evaluate your tech stack (leverage the right sales productivity tools).

When it comes to boosting sales productivity on your team, the biggest gains stand to come from re-evaluating the tools your sales team uses on a daily basis—and gauge whether or not there’s a need to add, substitute or remove from your arsenal.

The most obvious place to start this evaluation is with the highest impact tools in your sales tech stack, of which your CRM is probably the most important. To figure out exactly where you can affect the greatest positive change with your team’s sales productivity, begin at the highest level and ask yourself questions like:

• Are we using a CRM? If not, why? If so, is it the right one for our business?
• How effective is our CRM at enabling our team to deliver more emails and make as many high-quality calls as possible throughout the day?
• How many clicks does it take to update a lead record, set a follow up reminder and move on to the next prospect?
• Does our CRM have built-in calling or are our reps routinely switching between apps all day in order to hit their activity goals?
• How many different tools do your team members use on a daily basis?

Chances are, there’s probably room for reducing the mundane tasks here—because those actions like clicking, switching apps, manually logging details—can add up to precious hours of your team’s time spent not selling to prospects or bringing in more revenue.

Using a CRM like we’ve built (designed by and for salespeople) here at Close.io with the goal of increasing individual rep output, arms your team with several of these similar leaps in sales productivity.

Here are just a few of our core CRM features that are built to maximize sales productivity:

• Smart Views and and Dynamic Lead Lists: Having the ability to group and dynamically sort your prospects based on key filtering criteria such as geographic location, lead status, source, recent interactions and a nearly infinite number of other data points, means your team can get extremely specific in the leads they’re targeting or prioritizing on a daily basis. Plus with Close.io, the default time-wide transparency guarantees everyone can keep a pulse on your hottest leads.

• Bulk Email, Automated Sequences and Shared Templates: Long gone are the days of having to individually email every single lead on your list. By leveraging intelligent bulk email sending to custom lead lists based on dynamic filtering, you can personalize your email (at scale), sort just the leads who will be most receptive to your offer, and exclude everyone else to create high-impact campaigns sending to thousands of targeted prospects with one click. Plus, with our recent launch of Email Sequences, you can create an drip sequence of customizable emails that are automatically sent to prospects and leads over the course of days or weeks.
• Follow-Ups: By using our one-click follow up reminders, tasks, and email snoozing features, you’ll never forget to check in on the prospects in your pipeline, even after they’ve left your automated sales sequences. We’ll remind your team when to follow up, so you can focus on the more important tasks.

• Built-In Calling: Our CRM is the only one on the market with built-in calling that keeps your reps inside just one application to do all of their core tasks, saving even more time. And with the addition of our predictive dialing call automation software, you’ll drastically cut down on the amount of time spent listening to dial tones. Your sales team can now dial multiple numbers at once, and the technology behind the predictive dialer detects when a real human answers the phone, then immediately routes an available sales rep to that call.

Beyond just the CRM and other sales communications-related tools in your sales tech stack, look for optimizations with lead generation tools, scheduling, contract and proposal management, process documentation, forecasting and otherwise.

All in all, sales productivity is a field that’s experiencing explosive growth, and so much of that growth can be unlocked with the CRM you choose to use (and grow with for years to come).

So if you’re not regularly evaluating your sales tech stack for opportunities to make your team more productive and increase their output, then you’re leaving deals on the table.

2. Invest in onboarding and regularly training your reps.

Once your sales team grows beyond just one or two reps you can personally coach through the challenges that arise with their accounts, implementing a proper sales training workflow into your new hiring process (and ongoing rep development) becomes essential.

As a sales manager, director, or founder, it’s your job to give your sales team the tools they need to be successful—and to personally teach them how to maximize their sales productivity by spending time only on the highest-impact activities throughout their day.

Without an effective training process or techniques in place, you’re playing a dangerous game of telephone with your core strategies. What you taught to your first hires might get passed on correctly, or it might not. Before you know it, your sales process and the finer nuances that’ve made it so successful, have been completely thrown out the window and your reps have devolved into an anything goes mentality.

Whether your sales training comes in the form of in-person workshops, online courses, conferences, from outside consultants, internal databases, mentorship, or ideally a combination of all these formats—it’s crucial to train your reps on these qualities.

• How to become an effective listener and proactive problem-solver
• Internalizing key scripts and answers that meet all of your sales objections
• The basics of cold emailing and cold calling (to be built upon in-action)
• Gauging both purchase intent and the red flags of a potential bad-fit customer
• Articulating value to prospects and knowing how to consistently follow up
• Understanding how and when to ask for the close

Remember though, the learning never really stops in sales. There are always new techniques, better scripts, new objections to overcome, new features coming out, other competitors entering the market and you’ll have to continue learning how to thrive.

The best salespeople have a drive to learn, achieve, and avoid wasting time on mundane tasks that don’t ladder up to closing more deals. The right sales training will help your team become more productive.

Want all of our best sales onboarding and training tips, tools and templates? Get access to The Sales Library now.

ACCESS THE COMPLETE SALES LIBRARY NOW

3. Automate, batch and outsource routine tasks (including examples).

Want to see something scary?

Here’s a breakdown of how the average salesperson spends the majority of their working hours during a given week:

Source: How Reps Spend Their Time - Pace Productivity

The average salesperson spends just 22% of their time actually selling. Something about that just doesn’t seem right (and we built Close.io for the exact reason that these kinds of statistics didn’t sit well with us).

Let that sink in for a moment…

Why would a person whose job is to sell—to bring more revenue in the front door—be spending only ⅕ of their time doing the task they’re hired for in 2018?

Because most companies don’t know how to approach sales.

The last decade has seen an explosion of tools, products, services and support industries pop up in order to help solve this challenge of empowering salespeople to spend more of their time selling. So, what gives? Why aren’t salespeople at maximum productivity yet?

Well, the harsh truth is that most sales teams don’t know:

• How to effectively automate non-essential tasks
• When to outsource duties that can be done by lower-paid assistants or contractors
• How to teach their reps to batch less time-sensitive activities into blocks of dead time at the end of their days

Accomplishing either of these important feats begins with flearning how to identify which activities can be automated, outsourced or batched in the first place.

Automating non-essential sales rep tasks.

When it comes to determining which tasks your reps should automate in the name of sales productivity, begin by categorizing the activity from one of the classifications in the image above—does it fall under planning, administration, or order processing? Those are low-hanging fruit to search for automation solutions.

Much of your automation ability will be determined by the CRM you choose to use—and it pays dividends to invest in one (like Close.io) that already has intelligent automations like call logging, call automation, and automated email follow up sequences built directly into the product.

Still, an increasing number of sales tools now integrate with apps like Zapier that’ll allow you to connect the various products in your tech stack, in order to let them seamlessly pass data between each other and automate different types of workflows.

For example, if you’re following up with prospects from an event you attended, asking them to hop on the phone to chat about their needs by booking a call with you—this process could be automated by using a scheduling tool like Calendly that has full visibility into your calendar. You could then use a Zap to automatically create a Zoom video conference meeting for the conversation, and another Zap could pass that data back to your CRM to update the contact record and reflect their change in status.

Outsourcing low-leverage activities.

If the amount of time your sales reps spend doing non-selling related activities is reaching an unsustainable level even with the right automations in place, hiring either an in-house administration assistant or virtual assistant to help with the more routine tasks like booking demo meetings, preparing pitch decks, and generating invoices will be a worthy investment.

If your sales team is remote or distributed across multiple locations, start by hiring a contract-based virtual assistant in a compatible time zone and see if that structure can meet your needs. However, if your team is based out of a single location, you’ll likely experience a massive leap in productivity gains by having your sales assistant sitting in the same office as your team members (and proactively pitching in when there’s a need).

Batching less time-sensitive duties.

Batch processing is the grouping of similar tasks—that require (often repetitive) similar resources—in order to streamline their completion.

For example, if you’re responsible for generating a weekly sales report for your manager to review, it’d be the most efficient use of your time to batch all of your sales tallying into just one block of time at the end of the week, rather than manually update your report after every single new deal closes throughout your week.

Batching can even be applied to countless mission critical sales-related tasks too. Consider grouping together the sending of your day’s manual follow up emails into one chunk of time at the beginning or your morning, or grouping the day’s sales calls into just one or two major blocks of time so that you allow for getting into a state of flow and you’ll often experience a leap in sales productivity as a result.

4. Improve your lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects with the goal of advancing higher-value (and more likely to close) leads faster through your sales process—and to avoid your reps wasting time speaking with those that aren’t ready to become buyers.

While every company has a different model for assigning points to score their leads, one of the most effective ways to create a lead scoring system is by using data from past leads to assign value.

• Which traits, qualities, characteristics, demographics, geographic locations of your existing customers contributed most to them purchasing from you?
• Which of these characterizations do your customers share in common?
• What do your leads that rarely convert share in common with each other?

Once you've evaluated the historical data from both of these cohorts, you can decide which attributes should be weighted heavily (and assigned value) based on how likely those characteristics are to suggest they’d be a good fit for becoming a customer.

For example here at Close.io, we automatically place a higher lead score on new trials that sign up from one of our top five countries where we’ve historically acquired the highest number of ideal customers. Other factors like team size, annual revenue and referral source also play into how a lead is scored—and thus how quickly our sales team reaches out.

Seems pretty simple, so how do you improve your lead scoring from here?

Well, you can make your lead scoring model more accurate by incorporating both explicit information (data points like company size, industry segment, job title or geographic location) and also implicit information.

Implicit scores are generated from tracking and monitoring your prospect’s behavior beyond just what they’ve told you about themselves. Examples include activities like:

• Viewing the pricing page on your website
• Downloading a particular eBook from your blog
• Opening or clicking on your sales emails (and the number of opens or clicks)

What’s more, you can now use website personalization tools like RightMessage to customize your prospect’s experience on your website based on their lead score and other relevant data you collect—thereby surfacing the most applicable offers, tweaking headlines and testimonials to resonate more with their specific industry, and more.

Ultimately, your ability to improve your lead scoring efforts will greatly improve the quality of leads your sales team gets to work with. Now that’s a direct impact on sales productivity.

5. Forge a close alignment between sales and marketing.

At the heart of sales and marketing alignment is getting your lead generation efforts right.

If marketing isn’t actively driving in the right leads for your sales team to work with, conversion rates can hover abysmally low.

On the flip side, if sales can’t accurately articulate what exactly they need more of in terms of leads, then your marketing team won’t be able to devise a campaign that’ll generate those results.

Setting the stage for cross-team alignment.

Visibility is everything. Properly enabling your marketing team to support sales (and vice versa) requires getting both teams together and creating the space for regular involvement with each other.

That means marketing should attend a weekly sales meeting, and have more hands-on monthly meetings with sales managers to talk about lead quality and examine your conversion rate by channel. From there, marketing can devise experiments to try and create shifts in lead source (and quality).

During cross-team meetings, marketing can share upcoming campaigns, content coming through the blog pipeline, offers that’ll be promoted during the week ahead, and gather feedback from sales at each stage.

This is also the best time to collect content ideas and recommendations from the sales team—often in the format of in-depth answers to the most common questions sales reps get from prospects—to inform on future offers, campaigns and blog post topics.

You can take the content brainstorming to the next level by creating a shared Google Doc for your sales team to quickly pop in and add ideas or case study resources anytime they hop off a call with a new insight for marketing to run with.

When your sales team can collaborate with marketing to ensure a consistent flow of higher quality leads, they’ll be spending their time working on prospects that have a much stronger likelihood of converting. Sales productivity will go through the roof.

6. Create an easily accessible resource library for your sales team to pull from.

Remember all those blog posts, eBooks, videos, templates, checklists and other marketing-driven resources your counterparts on the marketing team are producing on a daily basis?

Well, those are assets that can come in handy when managing common sales objections.

Sales productivity is all about eliminating time spent on low-return activities like firing off an email to marketing asking if there are any shareable resources you can send to a prospect to help alleviate one of their concerns about upgrading, and then waiting an hour for someone to reply with a link.

Each of the core marketing assets your company has should be categorized and easily discoverable in a single internal location—like a shared company-wide Google Spreadsheet with resource names and their corresponding links—for your sales team (and others) to have quick access to.

7. Develop an internal mentorship program.

Mentorship picks up right where management leaves off.

Sales managers have their plates full doing everything from setting sales goals, to managing quotas, refining your sales plan, monitoring progress throughout the quarter, forecasting, helping to close key accounts and hiring new reps to grow your team.

And while they’re certainly responsible for a level of regular sales training to make sure everyone continues performing well and stays fresh, sometimes that’s not quite enough.

Enter: Sales mentorship.

When it comes to sales, studies show that mentorship programs lead to not only increased skills and selling abilities, but also increased salaries, faster time to promotions, and higher internal retention rates. Is that enough to convince you?

How about this—we’ve all met that one rockstar rep that consistently beats quota month over month, right?

Well, think about what you stand to gain by pairing your A-players with reps on your team that are lagging a little behind the rest of the pack.

By regularly shadowing your highest-earning reps, doing sales calls together, and getting routine feedback from those that have already mastered the art of selling your product, everyone stands to improve.

More junior reps get first-hand experience working with and getting coaching from those who’ve already been through it all, and your senior reps get to grow in their career and take a big step toward soon becoming a sales manager.

Here’s how to set up a win-win sales mentorship program on your team:

• Have a kickoff meeting between manager, mentor and mentee: Start by setting the ground rules, expectations, and goals of working together with the objective of also landing on the ideal frequency of meeting with one another.

• Define roles and responsibilities: Pairing reps arbitrarily doesn’t often produce the best results—there needs to be something both the mentee and mentor stand to gain from this new relationship. For example, matching a junior rep that’s having trouble closing leads over the phone with a more senior rep that wants to become a sales manager, is a win-win.

• Collaborate on guide to success: How will this relationship be defined in terms of success for both parties? Begin with a clear metric your mentee needs to hit in order to signify a meaningful level of advancement within their six month program, and walk backwards to develop a game plan of how you’re going to get there together.

• Plan for what comes next: At some point, your more junior reps need to graduate from their mentorship program and stop leaning so heavily on your senior reps. Depending upon your sales cycle and the amount of coaching they need, this can vary a bit, so track key metrics carefully and use your quarterly review with a manager to gauge progress.

The goal of a sales mentorship program is to help both parties involved—the mentor gets to further develop, grow and progress in their career, while the mentee gets a field training experience in how to increase their sales productivity from someone already excelling at it.

Want all of our best sales productivity tools, content, advice and templates? Get access to The Sales Library now.

ACCESS THE COMPLETE SALES LIBRARY NOW

But first, when talking about sales productivity, we can’t very well 

8. Incentivize your reps to maintain momentum (and avoid distraction).

It’s easy to lose momentum throughout your day when you’re constantly getting up to grab a celebratory cup of coffee after closing a deal, or taking a walk outside to shrug off a particularly harsh rejection.

Even worse, your reps will suffer from cognitive switching costs if they have to jump between five different tools and applications just to call or email a lead, then update that record before moving onto the next one.

It’s not only mentally exhausting, but breaks your rhythm and slows progress.

Momentum both on the micro level during an individual workday, and on the macro level throughout the quarter or year, can contribute a great deal to how well your reps perform and stay productive—so it’s important to celebrate wins and let go of losses the right way.

Research has shown that the more you focus on continually performing a single task at work, rather than multitasking throughout the day, the more you’ll get accomplished.

You need to make it your mission to avoid this:

Now, this same principle applies to hitting your activity goals in sales. Holding all things equal, the more calls you make and follow up emails you send in a given day, the higher the likelihood of closing more sales.

Therefore, a rep that makes 100 calls can expect to close measurably more deals than a rep that only makes 50 calls of the same quality. So how do you encourage more reps to up their activity goals and stay focused?

Financial incentives always help.

But rather than only offering bonus compensation when your reps close a new deal, experiment with creatively rewarding reps for hitting call, email or other milestones using a platform like Bonusly that makes employee recommendation more fun.

Some creative rewards include ideas like faster accrual of vacation days, company-paid travel, books, courses, conference passes, comped meals, museum memberships, concert tickets, personal training vouchers and more.

Avoiding distractions.

The average employee that works a desk job loses a whopping 2.1 hours each day to distractions and interruptions. Compounded over the span of a full week, that’s more than a full day of wasted work.

Distractions and task-switching are the death spirals of sales productivity.

Rather than interrupting the entire office by ringing a bell when you close a big new deal, set up a Slack integration within your CRM to silently celebrate and get kudos from the rest of your team on their own schedules without throwing a wrench into the phone conversation they’re currently having with a lead.

The more often you’re jumping between making calls, manually updating lead records in your CRM, and firing off connection request on LinkedIn, the quicker your cognitive energy is depleted (we built Close.io for that exact reason).

Using intelligent sales productivity tools that discourage distraction and taking frequent breaks without good reason will curb much of this behavior. Adding the right incentives into the mix will create a powerful combination with a direct impact on sales productivity.

9. Reduce meeting time.

Alright, everybody raise your hand if you love meetings!

This one’s pretty simple, really… the less time your reps spend in non-mission critical meetings, the more focused hours they’ll have to work on closing leads. This is the definition of simple sales productivity gains.

This applies to both one-on-one meetings between managers and reps, as well as small group and team-wide sales meetings.

To be more efficient with the one-on-one meetings you do have, come to the table with a very specific agenda, keep your time focused and avoid tangential discussions whenever possible. If you can get through everything on the agenda early and there’s nothing left to tackle, end the meeting early and let your rep get back to selling.

In group meetings, it’s even more important to prepare an agenda and make sure that the topic of conversation is relevant to everyone in the room.

For example, running a pipeline review can be extremely helpful for the rep who’s leads are being worked through and evaluated. However, it’s largely a waste of time for the rest of your sales team to sit in on—gathering little to no value as passive observers without a stake in the conversation.

Stick to the rule of minimum possible attendance when sending out invitations for every meeting, and think twice about whether or not a meeting can be avoided with just an email.

Your sales team will thank you for it.

10. Measure and repeat.

You can’t expect to (regularly) improve at that which you don’t actively measure.

If you take nothing else away from this guide, it’s our mission as a sales productivity-first CRM tool, to drive home the importance of always measuring your key metrics, tracking sales productivity over time, and using that to get better at forecasting future growth.

And accurate measurement starts with using the right tools…

We built Close.io for the sole purpose of measuring (and improving) both individual and organizational sales productivity—to empower sales teams around the world to close more deals without needing to hire additional reps or work over-time every day.

Our reporting tools eliminate the distractions that lie in ultra-complex reporting, and scales it back to just the insights that’ll help you take action to grow your revenue.

From viewing your entire team’s pipeline overview, to zooming in and identifying gaps where prospects tend to fall out of your sales funnel, to measuring individual performance and more, the right CRM will be designed to help your team increase sales productivity at every turn.

Try a free 14-day trial of Close.io (no credit card required) today and see the difference for yourself, first-hand.

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