Google, one of the biggest stashers of our personal data, just updated Google Search—Aka Google-dot-com—to make it easier for you to review and edit what search data the company stores. The Google Search page now features a link below the search bar that will take you directly to a new data privacy hub that let’s you…
When it comes to winning over modern buyers, we could all use a little help from sales enablement solutions.
Companies are seeking solutions to equip their sellers to deliver a better buyer experience as today’s buyers demand more from their engagement with sellers. By 2021, 15% of all sales technology spending will be applied to sales enablement technology, up from the 2017 level of 7.2%, according to Gartner’s 2018 Digital Content Management for Sales Market Guide. That represents a growth rate of over 208%!
In the Market Guide, Gartner evaluated 19 Representative Vendors within the Digital Content Management for Sales space. Highspot met all vendor capabilities and use cases identified.
“Across the almost 40 vendors that Gartner tracks in this market, finding functional differences between them is increasingly difficult,” Gartner says. “To find differentiation, Gartner recommends that software buyers focus on vendors’ platform capabilities.”
If you’re a sales, marketing, or enablement leader looking for a sales enablement solution and are wondering exactly what capabilities you should be examining, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are six capabilities that Gartner says your sales enablement platform should have, and what Highspot delivers:
For sales and marketing teams looking to effectively guide buyers through their journey, content is king. But problems arise when content is scattered across multiple files, folders, or drives. Sellers often can’t locate content, and marketers waste time and resources developing content that goes unused. To solve this challenge, the Highspot team developed a unique, award-winning approach to content organization where content is managed in “Spots” instead of rigid folder architecture. Because sales success starts with the right content and relevant context in one place, Highspot goes beyond basic content organization to deliver content alongside communication and guidance.
Equally important as managing content is the way reps discover content. To ensure that your sellers have the materials they need for any given situation, your sales enablement platform should be designed to surface relevant content. Highspot’s AI-powered search algorithms mean that sellers get accurate results on time, every time. Reps have the option to find the most effective content with artificial intelligence or hand-curate their own. Then, when content gets updated, automatic notifications let reps know what’s new, what’s changed, and what’s relevant to their selling success.
As a real world example, Dun & Bradstreet adopted Highspot to solve the problem of too many content sources and not enough organization. Prior to implementation, the company had more than 6,000 pieces of content stored across 12 different locations. Highspot enabled more than 500 sales reps to spend their valuable time selling — not searching.
Different scenarios require different approaches to content customization, which explains why sellers require the flexibility to adapt content to every unique case. To create the perfect pitch for every customer interaction while staying on-message, reps need a way to quickly assemble presentations and customize content on the fly. Highspot is the only solution that empowers sellers to quickly edit documents or presentations using Office Online or Google Docs from within the platform.
Sometimes, the perfect pitch needs to be pieced together from content in multiple formats. With Highspot’s unique Remix capability, sellers can quickly rearrange decks and documents, mixing and matching different formats.
Another time-saver is Highspot’s AutoDocs, which allow sellers to easily build complex, data-driven, and personalized content at scale with data from your organization’s CRM systems.
Modern buyers demand that sellers provide unique perspectives and added value at every stage of their journey.
With Highspot, sales reps can meet buyers where they are with advanced pitching capabilities. Engage from LinkedIn, Twitter, Outlook, Gmail, and more. Or, present live to customers online through Slide Cast or other fully integrated third-party web conferencing platforms.
One of Highspot’s newest solutions is Pitch Experiences, which allow reps to organize a prospect’s content into a single, customizable, and dynamic portal that showcases all content related to an account. As a result, sellers see higher response rates and more engaged prospects.
One of the most common challenges for companies is lack of content insights. Take Red Hat, for example. Fielding a worldwide sales force of more than 2,700 sales reps, the company had no way to get insight into content usage or effectiveness and struggled with prioritizing and creating the content that sales needed. After choosing Highspot as their sales enablement platform, Red Hat unified 3,000 content items in a central location, making it possible to analyze performance data, prioritize, and optimize.
With Highspot, reps receive real-time alerts that notify them when a prospect engages with their content. Insight into what slides the prospect spent the most time on, who the prospect forwarded the pitch to, and more help reps make the most informed and strategic next step.
For marketers, Highspot analytics show indicators such as content downloads, views, and pitches, allowing them to prioritize creating content that the sales team will use. One of the best features: patented Content Genomics technology that tracks modifications down to the individual slide level, so sales and marketing teams can see how content evolves over time and use this knowledge to harvest best practices. With insights into what’s resonating and what’s not for customers, sellers can adjust their approach and marketers can focus on developing content that sales uses.
When you’re a seller engaging dozens of prospects and customers every day (or sometimes every hour!), efficiency is crucial. From recording new contact information to tracking activity, staying on top of data entry takes away from valuable selling time.
CRM systems are only as powerful as the data that’s in them. The good news: Highspot’s deep integrations allows reps to manage customer engagements in a single dashboard. For example, for organizations that live in Salesforce, the entire Highspot platform is available within the platform, including features that improve the sales process like intelligent content recommendations and smart search. In addition, Highspot automatically records activity in Salesforce, from email pitches to customer interactions.
Most sellers today are constantly bouncing from tool to tool for various parts of their workflow. Your sales enablement solution should streamline your workflow, not complicate it.
Knowing that the last thing companies need is another separate platform, we made sure that Highspot works where you work, seamlessly integrating with your existing tools. Highspot has more than 50 certified integrations — the most of any sales enablement solution on the market — with CRM, CMS, LMS, productivity suites, web conferencing platforms, and communication tools like Outlook, Gmail, Outreach, SalesLoft, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more.
Deciding what to order from a restaurant menu can be a difficult dilemma, let alone choosing a sales enablement platform for your organization. As you evaluate various sales enablement solutions to find the best fit, keep these six capabilities as a compass to help guide your decision.
Download your complimentary copy of Gartner’s 2018 Digital Content Management for Sales Market Guide to learn more about different platforms and what they can bring to your team.
The following post is an excerpt taken from the B2B Marketing for Executives: A Deep Dive on the Big Rocks First white paper that dives into the key foundational pieces (i.e. the ‘Big Rocks’) of B2B Marketing including marketing strategy, messaging, lead generation and more!
B2B businesses cannot thrive and grow without a reliable, well-oiled lead and demand generation engine in place. Two key ingredients of this effort are content marketing and marketing automation. But first, understand that it’s important to evaluate your lead generation efforts at a strategic level in the context of the B2B buyer’s journey.
So, how can you create a B2B lead generation engine that will position your marketing team to generate high quality leads and drive revenue? Let’s get into it!
A critical step in B2B lead generation is to identify the steps in your buyer’s journey and strategically create targeted lead gen campaigns at each stage of the journey.
Here’s a visual of how our friends at HubSpot frame it.
Identify: The ‘Identify’ stage is the point where you begin to pique your audience’s interest to convert them from complete strangers to potential leads. Your web visitors may be learning about your business through blog posts, gated thought leadership content (via web forms) and more.
Connect: During the ‘Connect’ stage, your audience knows what your business does and is considering your product/service. You’ll want to continue offering various types of web-form gated content such as eBooks, white papers, how-to guides, templates or webinars that are relevant to your product/services. This is also the ideal point to begin nurturing your leads with email and content marketing.
As your leads continue to engage and download with your content, you’ll further push them along the buyer’s journey and converting them in to higher qualified leads.
Explore: At the ‘Explore’ stage, you’ve hooked your audience in as qualified leads but now need to further deepen their interest in your product/service to convert them into an opportunity. Focus on nurturing your leads based on the content they’ve downloaded and buyer journey stage. Deliver personalized, relevant content via email marketing campaigns with the goal of building trust and staying top of mind.
Advise: At the ‘Advise’ stage, you’ve reached the point in the journey where your opportunities are ready to become customers. Nice! You’re finished right? Not quite. Now is the time to ensure you deliver an excellent customer experience by continuing to provide relevant resources and content through a newsletter or nurture campaign geared towards your customers. Make sure you check in periodically on your customers’ experience with your product or service too. You can do this via check-in calls or through client satisfaction surveys. This will help further establish your organization as thought leaders, show your customers you truly care about their needs and help turn customers into evangelists.
By strategically considering your B2B buyer’s journey, you can better identify what areas you need to address in your lead generation efforts. For example, you might see that there is an opportunity to turn your loyal customer base into brand champions and promoters of your product/services, giving you another channel to generate high-quality inbound leads.
Now that you’ve determined what your buyer’s journey will look like, consider the following strategic questions when evaluating the power of your lead generation efforts:
Agreeing on answers to these strategic questions is foundational to building an effective lead generation engine. With this in place, you can then decide how you’re going to go about generating the leads you need to grow your business and what tools you’ll need to do so efficiently.
77% of executive decision makers found at least one new supplier at the last trade show they attended (Spingo).
Did they find you?
Many of you have sales plans for 2019 that includes attending and exhibiting at trade shows to generate leads. In fact, trade shows top the list for lead generation methods for most companies with a business to business sale, “88% participate in trade shows to raise awareness of the company and its brand” (Spingo).
It got me thinking when one of my clients told me he spent more than $200k annually on one trade show and got disappointing results. The show was huge, and thousands of people walked through the exhibit area. His salespeople swiped a lot of badges but unfortunately, the booth visitors were not the decision makers they were hoping to meet. They did some follow-up but got very little response. He felt sick about it. He wasted all that time and money.
While trade shows could be a good source of leads, they are expensive and typically yield disappointing results. I hear things like, “We got one good deal from that show that was six figures, so it paid for itself.” WHAT!!! Tons of leads but only one deal. I’ve heard this many times. Why not 10 deals?
The problem is multifaceted.
Stop! Don’t leave money on the trade show floor.
You never have to be disappointed again. Here’s my proven 3 step process to increase the results of any trade show, whether you are exhibiting or just walking the floor.
A successful trade show plan has three phases:
I’ve developed a process for each phase.
The key to ensuring success at a trade show is to plan ahead. Planning starts when you pay your fees to secure your booth. At least 8-weeks before the show you will meet with your team and plan all of your marketing and sales efforts.
Here are some of the most important actions to take before the show:
By taking care of these items well in advance, you’ll set the stage to DOMINATE at the show.
It’s surprising to me to see what’s happening at most booths. The booth staff is talking to each other or looking at their phones, the booth is messy, the staff is standing behind a table making themselves unapproachable. Worse, they are dragging people in from the aisle, practically strangling them to scan their badge and then pitching to them. These are the things we all fear most when walking anywhere near a booth.
While you’re at the trade show, focus on these activities to DOMINATE and maximize your results.
The work you do in the CREATE phase before the show should make it easy to DOMINATE at the trade show. Proper preparation will assure you meet the prospects and customers you planned to meet, attract ideal prospects to your booth, ask good questions and have time to walk the show, attend sessions and interact on social media.
I would say that more than half the contacts that are made at a trade show are wasted because the salespeople don’t follow up and marketing doesn’t have a plan to stay in front of them.
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The work you do after the trade show is vital to success and following up correctly and promptly is crucial. Follow-up with something great so you stand out from all the post-show noise. The hard work you put into the CREATE and DOMINATE phases will pay off if you do the follow-up right.
Everything you have done up till this point will not turn those LEADS into DEALS. It’s what you do when you get back to your office after the show that gets you results.
. To launch this new venture we are holding a FREE 3-Day Virtual Summit, Tuesday, November 13th – Thursday, November 15th.
The post Dominate at Trade Shows to Generate More Deals appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.
The basic tabletop microscope hasn’t changed much in fundamental design in nearly 100 years. At least its design hadn’t changed until a Stanford engineer started playing with innovative microscopy ideas in 2011.
Thanks to Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, in California, there are now more than a half-million “Foldscopes” out in the world. The Foldscope uses origami to make a stable cardboard microscope body and precision-manufactured glass beads for a lens. Drawing inspiration from DNA-folding studies, space telescope design, and much more, Prakash says he’s able to achieve optical alignments in this folded-cardboard device of as little as 20 micrometers. With such clever design hacks, the cost of the parts needed to make one Foldscope is now less than one U.S. dollar. And instead of an eyepiece, you can use your smartphone’s camera, which can be magnetically docked to the Foldscope thanks to adhesive magnets.
Prakash is also the designer of a 20-cent whirligig biomedical centrifuge, made only of paper and string, that separates pure plasma from whole blood in under 1.5 minutes and separates malaria parasites in under 15 minutes. This “Paperfuge” has applications in both field work and developing countries.
Prakash first conceived of Foldscope in 2011 while traveling in Thailand. Foldscope is now backed by a startup company, Foldscope Instruments of Palo Alto, Calif. Prakash and his former graduate student Jim Cybulski are the cofounders, and they’ve set a goal of distributing a million Foldscopes by the end of 2018. As of October, the company had shipped 510,000, according to Prakash. He says he designed the Foldscope “to make the world a more curious place.”
Foldscope’s online community, Microcosmos, is a meeting place for Foldscope novices and Foldscope veterans around the world to share tips, tricks, and hacks for the device, which is available at the Foldscope website for $39.99. Prakash says the company uses the proceeds from the high markup of individual Foldscopes to underwrite its classroom kits. A classroom kit of 20 costs $70, while a large classroom kit of 100 costs $350.
Prakash is particularly pushing Foldscope in developing countries, which might not have any scientific instruments for their students otherwise. Prakash says there are Foldscopes in more than 140 countries today.
And it’s not just useful for science education. Marine biologist Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, says he uses the Foldscope anytime he goes out on the water.
“I take it with me everywhere I travel. I use it as a first approximation to look at samples in the field,” he says. “I took this thing to the Galàpagos last January, and I was able to capture images of a large number of planktonic species that I myself have never photographed before. It’s extremely useful. It’s lightweight and compact, and the quality of the image is really fantastic.”
Still, for all its utility for research, Alvarado recognizes the potential of a simple, $1 microscope, with a smartphone interface—backed by a global, online community—that could find its way into the hands of millions of kids around the world. “If you are in school and want to use the microscope, you have to ask permission,” he says. “But if you own a [Foldscope], you don’t have to ask permission of anybody to use it. It is yours. That can be a transformative way to teach science.”
This article appears in the November 2018 print issue as “Foldscope.”
2. You need to then get that value on the radar screens of your ideal buyers. That means you have to publish, speak, network, and ask for referrals.
Don’t let anyone else know this because, apparently, not too many consultants know about it and you can use it to your competitive advantage.
The post The Secret appeared first on Alan's Blog.
Recently, I was asked this great question by a reader –
“I want to improve my biz, but am afraid that asking for things; especially money, will make me look greedy. How can I avoid that?”
I love this question because it gets right down to the foundation of being a confident negotiator – our mindset.
It’s entirely natural to have feelings of doubt creep up. Or to worry about how others will perceive us if we step up and ask for more than we’re being offered. These feelings are especially intense when we’re finding our feet, and cultivating our voice in business but rest assured, with time and practice it subsides.
Today you’ll learn 2 of my key tricks to diffusing those doubts and worries ASAP – so that you can get down to the business of securing the rates you deserve.
Why are you asking for this rate increase? What’s the driving force behind it?
Maybe you’ve completed a certification and your higher rate reflects this new level of expertise…
Or maybe your cost of doing business, or cost of materials has gone up and you need to pass that on to your customers…
Perhaps you’re in high demand – but can’t possibly squeeze another client into your schedule…
If you can identify a reason along the lines of one of the above for why you’re asking for a higher rate, you can relax – no one is going to be calling you a greedy guts (so you don’t have to feel that way about yourself).
If; however, your reason for increasing rates is somewhere in the neighbourhood of ‘because I can’, you might be veering into opportunism – and yes, perhaps greed.
Think of it this way:
When a storeowner increases the price of a bottle of water because their costs have gone up – that’s fine.
When a storeowner increases the price of a bottle of water because there’s a broken main in the neighbourhood and no one has access to running water – that’s shady.
Be honest with yourself in figuring out your why. If you can back it up – you won’t be looking greedy.
When we’re focused solely on what’s in it for us, it’s more likely that we’ll come across as greedy or self-serving when we’re negotiating. Me me me me me me me. Ugh.
Shift your mindset to collaboration – “What’s in it for us?” – and that changes.
In the example of asking a client for a rate increase, your benefit may be financial – but there’s something in it for your client as well. Perhaps it’s a higher quality end-result thanks to your new skills.
If you’re earning a rate that compensates you for your contributions, covers your overhead expenses, and turns a profit…just think of how present you can be when working with that client. No worrying about the bills, no feeling resentful for being underpaid, and confident that you’re able to re-invest in improving your business.
That, my friends – is a win for everyone involved, and miles away from being greedy.
Turn the tables. Go back through your list of ‘whys’ and the value you’re delivering to the other person and put yourself in their shoes.
If someone asked you for a rate increase, and had these reasons and motivations…would you think they were being greedy? Or, would you recognize and respect them as a business person who’s setting themselves up to do their best possible work for you?
The next time you’re quoting for work (bonus points if it’s with an existing client!) challenge yourself to bump up your rate. It doesn’t have to be huge…even a few percentage points is a good place to start. Write out your whys, and the value your client is getting…feeling good? Would another % point feel better? Add it – then quote.
What’s your most motivating why in asking for what you need in business? Have you been on the receiving end of a rate increase? How did it feel? What did you learn?
Today’s ideal leadership candidates are not necessarily employees with the most experience or expertise. One of the key differentiators among top leaders is leadership agility, or the ability to balance multiple challenges. Agile leaders help companies foster connections, help people achieve peak performance, and encourage both innovation and change.
Impactful leaders tend to possess three critical capabilities that allow them to excel and provide significant value to their teams. By learning to connect, adapt, and deliver, they develop the flexibility that true agile leadership demands.
Agile leaders must first understand how to establish meaningful connections in the workplace before they can make an impact. Their ability to inspire, influence, and foster a collaborative environment is what helps to set them apart from their peers. They exhibit leadership behaviors that set the tone for organizational alignment, which contributes to employee and stakeholder buy-in. Leading by example is one of the best ways for agile leaders to establish the credibility that allows them to use influencing strategies more effectively.
Part of what allows agile leaders to connect so effectively is their ability to maintain self awareness. They understand their own emotions and motives, which makes it easier for them to learn to keep their own personal biases in check and empathize with team members. Although many agile leaders naturally possess high emotional intelligence, they can greatly benefit from development programs that incorporate strategies to improve adaptability and agile leadership principles.
Demonstrating personal integrity is also critically important for agile leaders. By acting with consistency, honoring commitments, and taking responsibility for actions and decisions, they take gradual steps toward building trust and support among their team members. When leaders are perceived to lack integrity, they will find it much more difficult to influence others and establish productive connections.
An effective agile leader has the ability to recognize changing dynamics and adjust rapidly to overcome challenges, reimagine strategic direction, and propel transformation and innovation. Situational awareness is a key competency in this area because it helps leaders to understand how external and internal events can impact a company’s effectiveness as well as affect the people involved at various levels of the organization. Agile leaders know that applying the same strategies repeatedly without making adjustments based on the situation can severely undermine performance.
Systems thinking also helps agile leaders to recognize how different elements of an organization interact with one another, which allows them to anticipate how changes in one area may impact others. This is especially important in large organizations, where any action might produce various consequences in other departments, many of them unintended.
Understanding both contextual situations and organizational structures helps agile leaders make decisions that minimize trade-offs and account for both short and long-term goals. They learn to strike a balance between efficiency and innovation, often without complete or perfect information.
While it’s important for leaders to be able to connect with others and adapt to changing circumstances, they must ultimately be able to deliver positive results for their organizations. Effective agile leaders find ways to drive performance and generate consistent and reliable results by investing in the right accelerators, and cultivating high-performance teams committed to customer and shareholder value creation. In many ways, the ability to deliver is dependent on the other agile leadership competencies. The ability to connect and adapt puts them in a position to deliver, but unless they can follow through, their teams will have difficulty accomplishing their goals.
Agile leaders tend to excel at prioritizing. They identify big-picture goals and understand how to take gradual steps toward achieving them. While they are effective at dealing with day to day challenges, they never lose sight of the organization’s overarching mission. Through careful planning, time management, and patience, agile leaders continuously adjust their efforts to keep their teams productive, efficient, and engaged.
From change situations to everyday conflict management, agile leaders continuously work to overcome challenges and deliver results. But far from following an established blueprint, they understand that every situation is different. In some instances, they may have to reallocate resources or delegate tasks to people they trust. In addition, without their ability to connect and adapt, they would not be able to build the trust and credibility to guide their teams through difficulties.
In today’s fast-moving business environment, agile leaders are more valuable than ever. Whether shaping work cultures, building consensus, or inspiring team members to keep them engaged, these leaders deliver positive results for their organizations. It’s crucial, then, for companies to invest in assessment and development programs that help build leadership agility.
Given the amount of competition out there, the challenges of landing a new client and the struggles with keeping the clients you do have – I totally get the hunger to have the right answers. But, it’s not about the answers we provide, it’s about the questions we ask.
We want to think that after all, what our clients are paying us for is our expertise, our years of experience and our guidance. I want to suggest that while all of that is true – our expertise, experience, and guidance should show up in a different way. The more we can put aside our cookie-cutter solutions and assumptions the better our questions will be.
And ultimately, that leads to better answers. As Voltaire was credited with saying, “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
When we are meeting with a prospective new client, the sentence I love to hear more than any other is “I’ve never been asked that before.” That means I am adding value. I am taking them in a direction they haven’t been before or coming at their issue from a different perspective. And odds are, the closer I am to getting to the best answers.
In terms of marketing, we have evolved from a black and white world to a world of iterations. I don’t care how right your solution is for today, given the rapid rate of change in our world, it’s not going to be spot on forever. Some solutions, like a company’s brand and product promises, need to stand the test of time. But today, most of our marketing tactics have a shelf life. Customer behavior, needs, and expectations are a moving target and we have to keep up with them.
If you don’t feel like the quality of your questions is where you want it to be – how do you up your game?
It helps if you’re naturally curious. Is your brain wired to wonder? The very trait that I am sure drove my parents crazy when I was a kid is one of my God-given superpowers as a professional. If you’re not naturally curious, then practice the art of curiosity. Like anything, you can create a habit around curiosity. Beyond that, try some of these techniques:
Keep it open-ended: Try to keep the conversation going by asking questions that require a longer response than a yes or no. Certain words trigger definitive answers and actually add a bias into the question. Avoid using the words “should” or “would” when you formulate a question. Don’t start off with “do you think” because you’re giving them license not to actually think about their answer.
Follow the rule of three: This is a digging deeper technique. Ask at least three follow-up questions to your original question before you move onto the next topic. This will require you to listen carefully and not be ready to jump in with the next question. Especially in a business setting, the first layer of questioning has been asked and answered a million times. You want to go where most haven’t thought to dig.
Beware of assumptions: One of my favorite questions is “if we had to prove that was true, how would we go about it?” So often, we make assumptions along the way and start speaking them as if they’re the absolute truth. But we have no basis for that other than our opinion or it may be a long-held belief that no one questions anymore. Remember that even if it was true in the past, it does not necessarily mean it’s still accurate.
Better questions make our work more collaborative and more accurate in terms of actually finding the best solutions for our clients. So, fire up your curiosity and ratchet up your Q&A sessions.
The post Do you ask better questions? appeared first on McLellan Marketing Group.
Maybe you’ve done events in the past – whether these are book shows specifically, or book signings in bookstores, libraries, or even craft fairs. If you came up short on book sales, you’re probably not alone. So often we decide to do these events, without any kind of real insight into what it takes to make them successful. And that’s not your fault per se, because doing successful events takes time. People who do a lot of trade shows know this – it can be a lot of work, but also a lot of payoff if it’s done correctly.
As authors, we spend a lot of time online, or locked behind our computers. And while this has merit, there is nothing quite like an in-person event. And while getting a book event booked seems like half the battle (and it is) now it’s time to figure out how to start selling more books at events, regardless of the event you’re doing.
Some years back, I was promoting a fiction book I wrote, The Cliffhanger. The book was set in Oregon and I traveled up there to do some events. But you know, factoring in the travel and the time it takes to do these, I really needed this to pay off in terms of book sales. As luck would have it, a major storm hit the area on the day of the signing. Though I had gotten some press for the event, the heavy storm kept the majority of people away.
I had also sent the bookstore a ton of swag to use, including a sign for the window, which they had never unboxed. So other than the article in a local paper, no real promotion had happened.
With the store all but empty, I started to panic and then I remembered my own guidance to authors: marketing is about message and movement. So instead of just sitting in a chair, I got up and walked around. People, seeing refuge from the storm were browsing the shelves and I politely introduced myself.
Several of them said: “Oh I read you were going to be here.” And I sold a book to each of them! I stayed way past my signing time and wound up selling out of the books I brought with me, which admittedly wasn’t a lot. I think I brought 20 in a box. But it was better than I’d initially expected to sell, which was zero. This signing taught me a lot about connecting with consumers in stores and selling more books at events.
If you have an event coming up, consider the below ideas while you prep, and if you haven’t contacted me yet and you’re serious about taking your book to the next level, let’s chat so you know what your options are.
First and foremost is the marketing of your event. But I’m not talking about the marketing you do the media (though that is great too). I’m speaking of in-store marketing. This is what most folks seem to overlook. Because if you’re going to sell more books at events, it’s got to start with your marketing – which often starts well-ahead of the event. So supply things to the bookstore or venue (if possible) to help them promote your event. Make it easy for them to drive attention to your book signing. Here are a few thoughts:
Do bag stuffers. If you want to start with something simple, do fliers. Ask first if the store minds if you offer this, though most stores or events will be on board with this. If the event is a local craft fair, be sure to target any local businesses that are promoting the craft fair.
Bookmarks: While many in the industry see these as passé, readers still love them. You can do bookmarks as bag stuffers or fliers with bookmarks. I’d suggest that you have a series of bookmarks printed up with the event date and time, if you can. This helps become a handy reminder to anyone who gets handed one. If you have the store give them out with a flier, the flier will probably get discarded and they’ll keep the bookmark, so make sure it’s customized somehow. If you don’t have it in the budget to print up more of these – and you already have some handy, you could always print up a small sticker that you adhere to it. Regardless, bookmarks can be a fun way to bring more people to your event, and sell more books.
And, keep in mind, you can keep track of not just freebies, but everything you need to focus on for your book events using my free monthly book marketing planner.
Regardless of where you do the event, plan to do a talk instead of a signing. Sometimes, like with book fairs, this may not be possible. People are drawn into a discussion and are often turned off by an author just sitting at a table. A table often comes across as a boundary between you and the reader. Again, marketing is about message and movement so stand up and speak. And if speaking isn’t something that the venue allows, plan on standing a majority of the time. Sitting in a chair and checking your phone won’t help you start selling more books at events – engaging people will. If speaking in public is intimidating to you, Patricia Fry, author of 72 books, suggests going to Toastmasters or some other local networking/speaking group and see what you can learn: “Toastmasters, in particular, is especially helpful in giving an impromptu speech (or communication), such as is required at a book festival or signing.”
If you want to get more attention for your event (and sell more books!), consider doing events in unique places. We’ve done them in Hallmark stores, electronics stores, gyms, and even restaurants (on slow nights). Doing outside-the-bookstore events is a great way to gain more interest for your talk. Why? Because you aren’t competing with everyone else at the bookstore. When you do an event at a local venue that doesn’t normally do events, you’ll gather more people just because it’s considered “unique.”
OK so let’s say you’re in the store and there are a ton of people in there shopping (a book event dream, yes?). I suggest that you take your extra bag stuffers or custom bookmarks and just hand them to the people in the store. Let me know you are doing an event at such and such time and you’d love it if they can sit in. You’ll be surprised how many new people you might pull in this way and, because of this – sell more books.
Regardless of what your talk is about, poll the audience first to see a) what brought them there, or b) what they hope to learn if your talk is educational. I suggest this because the more you can customize your discussion, the more likely you are to sell more books at your event. If you can solve problems (and this is often done during the Q&A) all the better. You’ll look like the answer machine you are and readers love that. If you have the answers they’ll want to buy from you. I promise. Here’s another clue: listen closely to questions you get during your Q&A, these questions can offer some great insight into future books you may want to write or maybe spike some ideas around blog posts or future talks you could do!
Get to know the bookstore or venue people, but not just on the day of the event. Go in prior and make a connection – if at all possible, tell them who you are and maybe even hand them your flier or bookmark (or a stack if you can). Often stores (and libraries) have Information Centers, so see if you can leave some fliers there instead of just at the register. Getting to know the people who are selling your book is a great way to help gather more people into your event. If your event isn’t in a bookstore but attached to a shopping area or mall, go around to the stores (and perhaps you did this when you passed out the bookmarks) and let them know you have an event and ask what can you do to help them promote it. If you can rally the troops to help you market your talk, you could triple the numbers of people at your event – and sell more books at this event. No kidding.
Sometimes events aren’t always about selling more books. Sometimes they are about relationships. Get newsletter sign ups, make connections, talk to folks who came by your table or booth, etc. Building these connections can be as important as an immediate book sale.
While you may not always sell more books at events – or hit your book sales goal for each event, you may sell a lot of them post-event. That is, if you have a way to get in touch with people once the book event is over. This is why I always, always recommend that you get names and (email) addresses from the folks who attended. Signing them up for your mailing list is a great way to stay in touch with them and stay on your reader’s radar screen. If you have a giveaway or drawing, great! This will help you to collect names.
What’s your book about? I mean, really about? What’s your elevator pitch? If you’re at a trade show, or big book fair or even a local craft fair and someone asks you what your book is about, what will you say? Kathleen Kaiser who heads up SPAWN a fabulous group dedicated to authors and publishers and based in Southern California says that elevator pitches can often be key to selling more books at events. Pitches should be short and sweet, 2-3 sentences and really motivate a potential reader to buy your book. Take some time to practice this before event day!
Make sure your book is easy to buy. If you are doing this outside of a bookstore, this is easy to do and will help your sales. I find that a rounded number like $10 or $20 makes for a quick and easy sale. If you can round up or down without adding or losing too much to the price, by all means do it.
One way you might be able to sell more books at events is to pair your book with a freebie. When I paired Red Hot Internet Publicity with a second, but smaller, marketing book I took the awkward pricing of $18.95, bumped it up to $20 (so 2 books for $20) and quadrupled my book sales during the event. I called it an event special – so new readers felt like they were getting a deal! Now the pairing doesn’t have to be a book, it can be a special report or even an eBook that you send to them after the event.
As you’re doing your talk (especially if it’s in a non-bookstore venue), make sure that you have a copy of the book propped up in front of you so attendees can see it the entire time you are speaking. Hold up the book when appropriate and use it as an example when you can. This will help to direct the consumers eye to the book – and making eye contact with the product is a good way to make sure it stays on their radar screen throughout your talk. If you’re doing a book fair or trade show, Kathleen Kaiser of SPAWN recommends putting a cover of the book on an 11 x 17 foam core board: “Add reviews to the board, maybe your logline (elevator pitch) and whatever else will entice a new reader to buy.”
While pricing is a great way to incentivize people and sell more books at events, so is the ease of purchase. Nowadays you’ve got a lot of options with Square, PayPal, and other remote devices that can allow you to take credit cards. But also make sure that you’re ready with some change in case folks want to pay with cash, because that happens at a lot of book events I do! Whatever you do, make it easy to buy your book!
If your book is about a time period, or a particular character – like a pirate. Why not dress up? A fun and really engaging way to bring in more readers and sell more books at events is to become the character. Sandy Murphy, author of From Hay to Eternity offered the following advice: “One author wrote a kid’s book that had pirates. She wore an eye patch, had a toy parrot on her shoulder, and a gold painted treasure chest for kids to dig through and choose a small toy.” This is the kind of thing that can really help engage readers and push more book sales.
So the event is over, what now? Well, if you got attendees to sign up for your newsletter (you did do that, right?), now it’s time to send a thank you note for attending. Be sure to offer them the opportunity (if they missed the chance at the event to buy a copy of your book at the “special event price”) to still get the same deal post-event. You could find that you’re still making book sales, and selling more books – though now more post-event.
Also, don’t forget to thank whoever hosted the event, too. A well-placed thank you goes a long way towards securing future events, not just at that venue, but also others. Saying it in person is fantastic, but don’t forget the power of a handwritten note and sharing the love on social media. People talk and you want them to remember you favorably.
Speaking and book events are great ways to build your platform, sell more books, and build your connections. For many of us, our book is our business card and thus, if we can sell our “business card,” we can keep consumers in our funnel. If your book isn’t your business card you still want readers, right? So the marketing both post and during an event is crucial to building your readership. While it’s easy to say that all events sell books, they often don’t. You have to work them to make this happen. But one thing I’ve learned both from personal experience and from authors we’ve worked with is that the more you do, the better you get, and you start selling more books at events and beyond. Seek the opportunities when they are made available to you and then maximize them. You’ll be glad you did!
Do you have a book event success story you’d love to share? Whether it’s about tips you learned for selling more books at events or another type of event success, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you! Please share in the comments!
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Entrepreneurs generally take one of two paths when determining who they want their business to cater to: the mass market or a niche market. Whichever option you — our valued reader and savvy, aspiring business pioneer — choose will depend on factors like your offering's appeal, its utility, your experience, and personal bandwidth constraints.
If you try to appeal to the mass market, you're probably going to try to create multiple products or serve various industries — and becoming a leader in your space will be a particularly tall order.
Selling into a niche market gives you more flexibility to narrow your scope, structure your business around your passion, and sell to an audience you know well. In this post, you’ll learn about the benefits of niche markets, how to find your niche, and what to do after you identify an unmet need.
Table of Contents
When your company offers specific products and services instead of a wide variety of offerings, you benefit by saving money and becoming more productive. You’ll also build a comparative advantage over your generalist competitors.
For example, in the pet industry, creating a business that sells dog collars is selling into a niche market. The same applies to cat sweaters and pet GPS trackers.
When companies decide to sell to a niche market, they attract more customers to their product or service. Let’s look at some benefits of operating in a niche market.
Whether you’re starting or scaling a business, niche marketing is an effective way to establish your brand positioning. Here are some other benefits that niche market entrepreneurs enjoy.
By focusing on a small audience, you can use your resources to find customers who align with your product. These people need your product the most and are most likely to convert.
Niche marketing also helps you save on your marketing and advertising budget. That’s because a highly targeted audience means you’ll have fewer buyer personas. You can spend efficiently, targeting specific types of prospects.
Aligning your products or services with a small group of customers is an excellent way to encourage word-of-mouth marketing and positive reviews. This form of social proof is powerful. Recommendations can carry your business into a larger, potentially more profitable market.
Mass markets often evolve from niche markets. So while you’re starting small today, consider the big picture, and start building the foundation that’ll help you succeed on a grand scale.
Operating in a niche market means you’ll deal with less or no competition. Many companies or individuals like to serve many customers. By going narrow, you’ll offer a specific product that’ll eliminate many companies from your customers’ radar.
That said, there may also be fewer customers looking for your product or service. So you’ll need to enter a niche market that has an adequate audience.
Niche marketing allows individuals and businesses to improve brand loyalty. Engaging with fewer people means you’ll find it easier to nurture prospects and build quality relationships. Your audience will know that you understand their vibe. They’ll see you as a true partner, rather than a vendor who’s only interested in their money.
Being able to constructively approach and capitalize on a niche starts with an intimate knowledge of the space. At its core, every niche is based on a specific community, and you can‘t really appeal to a specific community if you’re not a part of it.
The most effective niche-occupying entrepreneurs start with passion and a vested interest in whatever concept, product, or process their offering suits — so as corny and “self-help-book-y” as this sounds, you need to start with you if you want to pin down the niche you're best-equipped to appeal to.
Where do your interests and skills lie? Is there a hobby you're particularly passionate about, an activity you're particularly good at, or a group of people you understand particularly well?
Consider these questions as you identify your niche:
Writing your answers to these questions will help you identify your core strengths. This allows you to build on a niche market idea you already love.
Let‘s say you nail the first step. You’re thinking, “Holy cow! I know exactly what niche I'm going to go for!” First of all, congratulations! Second of all, now that you know the “what,” you need to start considering the “who.”
In a lot of ways, a “niche” isn‘t an abstract concept — it’s the people who are interested in that concept. In other words, your target audience is your niche, so if you want to carve your place in a specific space, you need to understand who you're going to be selling to.
Construct thoughtful buyer personas. Understand factors like your community‘s typical demographics, the various categories of buyers that invest in offerings like yours, and how much they’re willing to spend.
Try to find your “space within the space.” If there are other players in your niche, take a more granular approach and find a more specific class of customer you can appeal to.
Once you have your personas in mind, take time to conduct market research to get a pulse on their buying behaviors and typical challenges. Consider reaching out to prospects in the space to get a more human sense of what they go through.
One way or another, get a sense of their needs, interests, and motives. That will set you up to deliver on the other points listed here.
Unless you beat everyone to the punch, there are probably going to be other players angling for position in your niche. You need to understand who they are, who they appeal to, their brand identities, and why they interest their customers.
Again, you‘re trying to carve out a "space within a space" — you don’t get there by shooting in the dark. Luckily, there are a lot of tools and resources you can leverage to better understand who you‘re up against. Let’s explore some of them.
Exploding Topics is an excellent tool that allows entrepreneurs to find emerging trends before they take off. Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you’re interested in the beauty niche. To find emerging trends, you’ll visit explodingtopics.com and use the “All categories” filter. Once you click “Beauty,” you’ll get a result like this.
From there, you can see your competitors in that market and find your own way to shine.
Let’s say “Bakuchiol” from the beauty trends interests you. A competitive research tool like Google Trends helps you know how frequently people search for this term.
As you can see below, the interest in the term has been growing steadily since 2019 in the U.S.
With this data, you can get an idea of market size and demand.
To find a market around your search term, use a tool like Answer The Public to find a niche for different product categories.
For instance, if we enter “Bakuchiol for” in Answer The Public, we’ll see 331 results like bakuchiol for acne, body, blackheads, breastfeeding, skincare, and face.
Each result provides a niche opportunity for you to explore.
But before going all-in on any keyword, use a free keyword research tool like Ubersuggest to get a detailed overview of each term.
For instance, when we plug in “bakuchiol for acne,” we see it has a high-paid difficulty and moderate cost per click.
Other tools to use for competitor research are:
Use these tools to explore the best-selling products consumers are researching and see if your new business can meet their needs.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret only the most elite entrepreneurs know. Ready? Businesses are generally established to make money. Boom. You‘re welcome. That’s the kind of insight you can only find on The HubSpot Sales Blog.
Even if you‘re passionate about your niche, your offering, and the community you’re going to serve, your endgame is still going to be generating profit — so before you try to carve out your place in your niche, consider the following factors:
Your idea could be profitable if you research the market and discover similar products, but few companies sell them.
Look at the price points of competitor products so you can price yours competitively.
Resources like Amazon (for products), G2 (for software), agency directories (for services), and PRICEFY.IO (for price monitoring) help you evaluate competitor pricing and determine prices for your products and services.
Create a simple website or landing page for your business so customers can find you. Offer a trial period of the product or give out free samples to your target customers. This initial test period should not cost a large amount of money. However, you can certainly use paid ads to drive traffic to your website.
See if people want to put money towards your product with crowdfunding sites. Not only can you gain funding, but you’ll also get your product in front of potential customers.
If the test is not as successful as you hoped, don’t scrap your idea entirely. Go back to the drawing board and find key areas where you can improve your product or marketing.
If you’re wondering what a niche business looks like, below are seven examples of businesses that cater to niche markets.
This one might qualify as something you do after you find your niche, but it still bears mentioning. If you're going to identify and capitalize on a niche, you still need to stand out within it.
It‘s the culmination of every other step detailed here. If you want to craft a compelling value proposition, you need to thoroughly understand your audience, and you’ll get there by applying your customer and competitive research — along with reflecting on your personal experiences.
Ultimately, you have to approach your niche with something distinct and legitimately valuable. Pin down what you, as someone who's passionate about your space, can get out of your offering.
From there, you can factor in the other insight you‘ve gathered through the process described in this section and present a value prop that gets at the core of what you can offer and why it’s worth your audience's attention.
Georgetown Cupcake‘s niche is specified in its name. Opened in 2008, the franchise sells one item and one item alone: cupcakes (although, to the bakery’s credit, it has rolled out over 100 flavors in the past 16 years).
The Container Store is a specialty retail chain that focuses on storage and organization solutions. The company offers a range of products, including custom closets, shelving, bins, baskets, and other organizational tools — tailored specifically for consumers looking to de-clutter their spaces.
Drybar is a salon chain that specializes in blowouts, offering professional hair styling services that focus exclusively on washing, drying, and styling hair. Unlike traditional salons that provide a range of hair care services, Drybar's concept revolves around providing a luxurious, pampering experience centered around the blowout, ensuring clients leave with perfectly styled hair.
SoulCycle is a fitness company structured exclusively around indoor cycling classes. It takes a community-oriented approach to spin — appealing to a variety of consumers interested in indoor cycling.
Ties.com is an online retailer that primarily specializes in men's neckwear and accessories, offering a wide selection of ties, bow ties, pocket squares, tie bars, and other related items. The company aims to provide high-quality, stylish products at affordable prices, catering to a range of fashion preferences from classic to contemporary.
Dorm Mom is a specialized laundry service that caters primarily to college students, offering convenient and reliable laundry and dry cleaning services. The company provides a range of services, including regular laundry pick-up and delivery, dry cleaning, and even linen and bedding cleaning.
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Kirrin Finch is a fashion brand that specializes in creating gender-inclusive clothing with a focus on menswear-inspired apparel for women and non-binary individuals. The brand offers a variety of clothing items, including dress shirts, blazers, pants, and accessories, designed to provide a tailored, androgynous look that challenges traditional gender norms.
Frostbeard Studio is a unique company that specializes in creating literary-themed candles and home fragrances inspired by books and beloved fictional worlds. Founded by book lovers, the studio crafts a variety of scented candles, wax melts, and other aromatic products that evoke the ambiance of favorite novels, characters, and bookish settings.
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Jacamo is a men's clothing brand that offers a wide range of stylish and comfortable apparel, catering especially to men of all sizes, particularly plus sizes. The brand provides a diverse selection of clothing, from casual wear and activewear to formal attire and accessories, ensuring that every man can find fashionable and well-fitting options for any occasion.
"My niche found me. I love weightlifting and have been at it for over a decade. I would still have continued weightlifting if I had not ventured into entrepreneurship. New entrepreneurs, how do you like to spend your days? What would you be comfortable doing for hours or days? Does it make you feel fulfilled? What do your friends or others come to consult you about?
“The key is to find whatever works for you. For example, if you love building websites, sell your services and build websites for people. Eventually, you can start a company of your own. Do not get caught up in the unending cycle of constant brainstorming and endless research about what you would like to do. You will end up getting paralyzed with fear and anxiety and never start. Look inward into what you are good at and love doing, and let your niche find you.”
"Finding my niche stemmed from my passion. Since 2012, I've been obsessed with prop making, which led me to explore various creation methods like woodworking and CNC machining. In 2016, when I got my first 3D printer, a whole new world opened up.
"I wasn't just printing — I was building, repairing, and customizing these machines. This personal fascination with 3D printing technology is what made me realize the niche opportunity. There are creators out there, like myself, who crave high-quality, custom 3D printing solutions but may not have the expertise to build or maintain their own printers.
“So, for new entrepreneurs, my advice is to look inward! What are you passionate about? What problems do you encounter in your own field that others might face too? Those personal interests can be the seeds for a thriving niche business.”
"In pursuing my passion for high-end fashion design, I found my niche almost organically. Having a strong interest in and knowledge of formal attire, I decided to channel my creativity into handcrafted gowns for proms, weddings, and other formal occasions. Nothing quite like it existed in the market, and thus, Amarra was born.
"For newer entrepreneurs, finding the right niche is about understanding where your expertise, passion, and a gap in the market intersect. Tap into your knowledge and interests, assess the existing market, and identify the unique value you can provide.
“Once you've identified the niche, learn to speak the language of your target audience. In my case, I had to understand the aesthetic preferences, purchasing habits, and emotional needs of those looking for exclusive, luxurious gowns. Success in a niche market is a blend of unique value propositions, a thorough understanding of your audience, and keen market insights.”
"When we started our digital marketing agency 19 years ago, we were working for various industries. However, with our law firm clients, we were able to deliver measurable results in their local markets faster than some national brands, which sometimes had lower marketing budgets.
"As we shifted our focus to the legal industry, our entire infrastructure grew around what worked for law firms. The question to ask yourself when finding your niche is, “Who has the most to gain from my offering?”
“We built our law firm marketing company around the client base that was most successful using our service. If you focus on building your business around serving the community that you and your team can serve the best, you can't go wrong.”
"When finding your niche, I highly recommend finding your ‘why.’ Our ‘why’ is what inspired us to create our whole business—the illness of a family member that meant we wanted to find the right solutions.
"That ‘why’ is your power, because the first thing many people think when they see a business with a specific niche is ‘Why?’ And they are far more likely to engage further because of your human story, rather than just the products.
"If your business has meaning, it is what gives your business its niche, so never be afraid to share how you came to it, because somebody else may have been looking for that exact same solution, and that is what leads you to build your customer base.
“Of course, we want to reach as many people as possible, but especially as you get started, that 'why' behind your niche can also help you build trust with a new audience.”
"As the co-founder of Frostbeard Studio, specializing in candle scents for book lovers, I found our niche through a blend of passion and market research. Our journey started with a small pottery business, but we quickly realized the potential in combining our love for literature with our craft. Noticing a gap in the market for unique, book-themed candles, we pivoted and created a product that resonated with a specific community of book enthusiasts.
"One essential tip for new entrepreneurs is to cultivate a deep understanding of your interests and hobbies, as they can often lead to discovering a niche. In our case, our combined backgrounds in Studio Art and English Literature provided a natural segue into creating candles with literary themes. We tapped into a community that shares a love for books, which allowed us to connect deeply with our audience and tailor our products to their preferences.
"Another crucial strategy is to leverage platforms where your niche audience is active. For example, we started selling on Etsy, where our bookish candles quickly became best-sellers, thanks to the platform's focus on handmade and unique items. This success enabled us to launch our own website and expand our production, selling in bookstores and gift shops nationwide.
"Consistently seeking feedback and engaging with your community can significantly refine your niche offerings. We've created over 100 unique candle scents, many receiving 5-star ratings, by listening to our customers and incorporating their preferences into our new products. Our DIY ethic has remained unchanged, ensuring authenticity, which resonates well with our target market. This hands-on approach has been vital in maintaining quality and fostering a loyal customer base.
“Always look for ways to enhance and personalize the customer experience. We host exclusive events, like candle-making sessions, to deepen customer engagement. This interaction not only builds a stronger community but also provides invaluable insights into customer desires and trends, helping us stay ahead in our niche market.”
By specializing your products and services in a narrow market, you’ll better use your resources, produce products faster, and develop a loyal customer base. Selling to a niche market can be a short- or long-term strategy — the key is finding your audience and tailoring everything you do just for them.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Does prospecting with integrity even matter? I contend it does, and I believe prospecting with integrity is not something that is even an option, but it is mandatory considering the chaos going on around us.
Prospecting with integrity is not something you talk about. It’s something you do, and it’s something others see in you. They see it not just because of what you do, but also because of what you do not do.
Check this 34-second video out where I talk passionately about this issue:
A salesperson who prospects and sells with integrity is one who does not make claims that are unsustainable. They don’t talk about others in anything but a positive light, and most of all, they hold themselves to a higher standard.
When you present yourself with complete integrity in everything you do and say, it is amazing how you will attract prospects who have integrity. Would you prefer to build a business around customers you can’t trust or would you prefer to build it around customers who have integrity? The answer to that question is simple.
The reason you will attract customers who have integrity starts with your approach to analyzing prospects. Keeping your integrity high means you won’t compromise your standards and, in particular, your ethics, and as a result you’ll spot ethically-challenged prospects and steer away from them.
Customers who are used to compromising on business standards or lack a moral compass will become exposed quickly. Light exposes darkness. In much the same way, integrity exposes moral weakness.
You can’t afford to be spend any amount of time with people who don’t approach relationships with integrity. Regardless of how much you feel you might need a particular deal to close, if the customer doesn’t exhibit integrity, you must run.
Compromising is not something you can do once and never again. Compromise once and you’ll do it again and again. Integrity is not something you turn on or off. Doing so will only achieve one thing — ensuring you do not have any.
If you’re a sales leader and this is a message your team needs to hear, call me. We need to talk. I’ll be happy to share with you how I can incorporate the concept of selling with integrity into your 2019 sales kick-off meeting. There are still a few dates open on my calendar, but we need to talk now to make it happen. Call me at 402-445-2110 or email me at mark@thesaleshunter.com.
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
When I was the sales leader at ion interactive, even our smartest customers sometimes asked me questions that, at the time, seemed pretty clueless. For example, I’d often get calls from prospects asking “So wait, how are you different from Google Analytics?”
In my head (though thankfully never out loud) I’d be screaming: “I just told you! We’re nothing like them. We’re a software that makes a calculator or a logic-driven assessment without code. You can’t do anything like that with Google Analytics!”
I would get off calls like that and immediately go to our homepage. Yes, right there on the homepage it was clear. What our product did, the challenges it solved, who it solved them for, the benefits of it. Clearly spelled out. How could a buyer be confused?
Then, our martech SaaS company was acquired, and I accidentally became a SaaS consultant. Suddenly I was evaluating technology in a way I hadn’t before, and I realized, it’s hard out there for a SaaS customer trying to find specific solutions tailored to their needs. As the SaaS market booms, customers have more options than ever before. Here’s why that’s not necessarily a great thing.
There are 6,500+ marketing technology companies alone. There are about 800 in the sales tech landscape. What must there be in finance and operations? And eLearning, and productivity, and BI, and ERP and BPM and on and on?
And what about the SaaS companies we don’t even have on our radar yet? My former business partner, Scott Brinker (ChiefMartec), is the mastermind behind the 6,500+ company martech landscape, and hardly a day goes by when some company founder doesn’t mention to me that his or her marketing tech company isn’t listed on the landscape.
With all this choice, you’d think customers would be able to easily find perfect SaaS solutions. But instead, customers are increasingly overwhelmed by a cluttered market where most of the choices seem the same.
Why? Because everyone in the SaaS world, no matter what product they’re selling, is saying the same thing. Let me repeat that: Everyone. Is. Saying. The. Same. Thing.
And when thousands of products are delivering the same message – let’s say, “data-driven, personalized solutions for building relationships” – it puts the customer into panic mode. One product looks so similar to the next, which can be paralyzing for customers who don’t want to waste time and money on a solution that won’t actually meet their needs.
Studies show that having too many choices often whittles away at our decision-making abilities. For example, one study that followed shoppers around a crowded mall for a day found that those who made more purchase decisions were less inclined to make good choices after a busy day of shopping.
And if a day at the mall can zap consumers’ power to make the best choice, imagine the decision fatigue that comes from weeks of pouring through SaaS marketing materials, trying to decode nearly identical messages to intuit what a company actually does. And now imagine your job, or next promotion, is on the line if you don’t pick the right product.
The SaaS landscape probably isn’t going to get smaller any time soon, and we probably wouldn’t want it to. But we can empathize with our buyers and anticipate their needs beyond a string of buzzwords.
SaaS vendors should focus on massive differentiation – in their product, in their messaging, in their marketing and their brand. And also, in their sales team. Because people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to their problems. And so the products with the best sales teams will win for now, along with those who create value, clearly differentiate, forge respectful relationships and best map their product’s benefits to their buyer’s problems, obstacles and goals. The company that can become a clear voice above the noise will be the company that gets the customer.
The post How the Growth of SaaS Makes Life More Difficult for Customers and What to Do About It appeared first on OpenView Labs.
Did you know that buyers complete 50% to 80% of the purchasing decision before engaging a sales rep?
Armed with research and resources at their fingertips, modern buyers demand more of sellers, expecting them to provide added value and unique insights.
This is where marketing teams have an opportunity to shine.
When sellers have marketing content that maps to each stage of the journey, their odds of securing buyer progression increase substantially. But how can marketers know what content is most effective when it comes to winning over buyers? How can they ensure the sales team knows where to find the right content when they need it? And finally, how can they measure how their efforts are impacting business success?
You guessed it — sales enablement is the key to unlocking the answers to these questions. This is just one reason why Highspot was named a Top Marketing Tool of 2018 by Smart Selling Tools.
Let’s take a look at what life looks like for marketers empowered by sales enablement:
If you’ve ever spent hours toiling over perfecting a piece of content only to see it collect dust, you’re not alone. SiriusDecisions reports that 60% to 70% of the content that marketing develops goes unused by sales. This is usually due to two reasons, both of which sales enablement solves.
First, sellers may not be able to find your content when it’s buried in multiple drives and folders. It’s impossible to use something when they don’t know it exists. Highspot’s award-winning approach to content management provides a singular source for reps to easily search, browse, and receive intelligent recommendations on content to use based on what has performed well in similar scenarios.
Second, sellers may not be using your content because it’s not relevant to their unique selling situation. Just because an infographic looks nice doesn’t mean it will effectively close a deal. With Highspot’s end-to-end analytics, marketers gain insights into the content sales is using, how sellers are customizing that content over time, and how effective each piece is in the field. With this data, teams can focus energy and budget on creating content that not only gets used, but that drives results.
Remember the days when sales and marketing were siloed, miscommunication happened on the regular, and time and resources were wasted? With a sales enablement platform, those times are becoming a distant memory.
Highspot customer InsideView’s CMO Tracy Eiler shared that research by analysts shows that alignment helps companies increase win rates by 38%, customer retention by 36%, profit growth by 27%, and business growth by 36%. Sales enablement bridges the gap between sales and marketing by providing access to shared insights, a single place to collaborate, and a streamlined way to communicate. And it doesn’t stop there — Highspot offers the ability to provide guidance alongside every asset, allowing marketers to indicate best practices for each piece of content.
For InsideView, Highspot enabled their teams to manage a wide assortment of content, resulting in unified sales and marketing efforts, a 98% platform adoption rate within its first quarter of use, and a 78% breadth usage rate (30 day usage/90 day usage). In the words of Product Marketing Manager Jyothsna Durgadoss, “Highspot has helped us solve our content mess, showcase the right content to our reps, and provide analytics on usage. It also helped create a behavioral change in our reps, as now they engage more with prospects and customers through sharing content. This is reflected by the high adoption and engagement metrics we see on Highspot.”
It’s a tale as old as time — without metrics to demonstrate the value of content and activities, the marketing team often goes undervalued and under-funded. This story can be rewritten, however, with the power of sales enablement.
Highspot’s advanced analytics, powered by artificial intelligence, show the impact content has on buyer engagement and sales. Marketers can see content usage in every sales stage and identify which has the biggest impact on buyers — and, most importantly, revenue. With this knowledge, marketing can spend their time creating valuable content that maps to each stage of the buyer’s journey and quantify their contribution to the bottom line.
Once your organization invests in a sales enablement platform, you won’t ever look back. Between seeing an average 300% improvement in marketing content used by sales, proving ROI with hard data, and making optimizations based on insights, marketers at companies of all sizes spanning different industries will agree on one thing — sales enablement matters.
Ready to see how Highspot makes a difference? Request a demo today.
Are millennials really as destructive as the internet tells us?
I went into Google and started typing in a search term — “millennials are” — and the auto-populated queries suggested that this (my!) cohort is killing capitalism, killing mayonnaise, killing napkins. (The horror!)
Hyperbolic articles lamenting this generation’s calamitous cultural impact are all too common, and they often involve major leaps in logic based on singular data points. But it’s easy to see why there is such widespread focus on the millennial cohort: they’re expected to account for a majority of the global workforce by 2020.
As such, it’s not surprising millennials are also gaining sway on B2B buying committees. A study by Merit found that some 73% of this population segment — loosely defined by being born between 1980 and 1995 — are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies. And that percentage only figures to rise.
So clearly, it’s important for B2B sales teams to understand millennials as well as we can. And luckily, there is a fair amount of new (legitimate) research that can help advance this understanding. Let’s take a look at how to tailor your B2B sales strategy for the first generation of digital natives.
We all know that modern selling is evolving as buyers become more self-driven in their purchase research. This trend is largely driven by millennials, for whom tracking down information online is second-nature.
But don’t worry, millennials aren’t killing the B2B sales profession. We just need to adapt to their methods and preferences. Here are some suggestions:
Team up with marketing
An article in Harvard Business Review earlier this year on How Digital Natives Are Changing B2B Purchasing notes: “This cohort identifies online search, vendors’ websites, peers and colleagues as the most important sources of information — all more important than salespeople.”
That doesn’t mean sales pros won’t play a role in this journey, but it’s becoming more likely that buyers will find their way to the rep than the other way around. The marketing department can help facilitate this path by ensuring that your company and its sales team are easily discoverable by your target audience via search and social.
Engage on social with digestible information
HBR’s piece also points out that “the youngest [millennials] have a particularly strong preference for social media as a source of information,” and adds that — per a 2017 Forrester report — “digital natives prefer short bursts of information, often in visual formats, and they think phone calls are tedious and disruptive.”
With this in mind, it makes sense to maintain an active presence on LinkedIn, with plenty of concise posts and images/videos offering value to your niche audience. That’s not to say you shouldn’t also be hitting on other social channels, but given the context and mindset of its 500M+ professional users, LinkedIn should be a priority.
Establish trustful connections
Citing research by Santa Clara University, HBR asserts that millenials “respond favorably to salespeople who evoke feelings of trust, compatibility, and connectedness, in contrast to buyers 50 and older who focus more on business benefits and deliverables.”
In other words, we need to build relationships before taking that next step to pitching. Our new guide offers plenty of tips on getting closer to to your B2B prospects.
Consider incorporating CSR into your approach
One of the most distinct trends around millennials is the value they place on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Studies continually reinforce the notion that younger buyers are more likely to choose companies that align with their core principles, and actively advocate for issues or causes they care about.
A study by Cone Communications found that by and large, millenials are “prepared to make personal sacrifices to make an impact on issues they care about, whether that’s paying more for a product, sharing products rather than buying, or taking a pay cut to work for a responsible company.”
Which issues matter to your audience? Is your company taking a prominent stance on them? And how can you, as a seller, show that you care and want to make a difference? We wrote last year about integrating CSR into B2B sales.
Make yourself available on-demand
From Uber to Netflix and beyond, the shift toward an on-demand economy is altering consumer expectations, and this shift is carrying over to the business world as well. Salespeople can take steps to meet these expectations by adopting an on-demand sales strategy, which involves making yourself accessible at the moment a prospect is in need, personalizing your approach, and minimizing friction.
Shrug off all those doomsday proclamations. Millennials aren’t here to destroy B2B sales or make our jobs irrelevant. (I can’t speak for napkins or mayo, though. They might be on the hot seat.)
While every individual is unique, the preference trends mentioned above are reliably true for younger buyers, and the coinciding recommendations can safely be viewed as best practices for modern selling.
For more advice on connecting with the modern buyer, subscribe to the LinkedIn sales blog to track the latest trends and research.
Testing alternatives has become a standard practice in marketing. About ten years ago I was at a seminar led by Google on A/B testing ads. Small, apparently meaningless, changes to wording can give large, 7x or more, differences in click through rates. It was a compelling demonstration and I have been an advocate for A/B testing ever since.
Over the past decade, A/B testing has moved from cutting edge to common practice and it is now well supported by platforms like Optimizely and Unbounce. Of course, comparing text or images on one page is just part of the story. It can be even more important, especially in the context of pricing research, to compare different paths. Fortunately, there are now some platforms that let you do this as well, like Split, and testing is becoming central to user experience research.
Pricing is the critical P in the four Ps of marketing (Price, Product, Promotion, and Place). With A/B testing so important to other aspects of marketing, how is it being applied to pricing?
This can be a tricky question for B2B marketers and pricing leaders. The Internet remembers what you have done (remember the Wayback machine) and past prices frame current prices. Some B2B contracts even include clauses that require you to provide your best price retroactively, so a pricing experiment can have a cascade of effects. Then there are the legal and ethical issues of offering different prices to two different users at the same time. Pricing experiments are tricky.
So how can you leverage the power of A/B testing and other experiments in pricing?
The first thing to do is to build out the set of hypotheses that you want to test and see how they interact with each other. You need to know what order to test things in before you figure out how to test them. There are two ways to do this: goal-based and action-based.
Goal-based testing is all about uncovering the assumptions behind your goals and then systematically testing to see if the assumptions are true (or can be made to be true). Pricing goals generally address four things:
These days there is often a fifth set of goals around unit economics: Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV), the ratio of LTV/CAC and the number of months to recover CAC.
The other approach to generating hypotheses is to think through the actions you could take and what has to be true for you to want to take that action. There can be different reasons to increase price, particularly because they are governed by your overall business strategy.
How do you test to see if you can raise prices in a tiered pricing architecture? To do this effectively you need to know the role of each tier in your pricing strategy. Are tiers meant to capture demand at different levels of willingness to pay or are they a conveyor belt with each tier being a step on an upgrade path?
In the case of the former, what do you think the volume demand is at different levels? You probably don’t know this in absolute terms, but you can write down your assumptions, work out the implications, and then check to see if the implications show up in your data. You can then start adjusting prices to bring them in line with your assumptions. When the market opportunity is at the low end of the market (in revenue or volume depending on your goals), you will likely end up with a convex pricing curve across tiers as Hubspot has.
In this case, the price of the highest tier is often to frame the target tier. In Hubspot’s case this is the Professional tier, which looks like a good deal when compared to Enterprise.
To test these framing effects, it’s best to increase the price of the tier immediately above your target tier and see if this increases that tier’s overall share. If it does (which is often the case) you can then increase the price in your target tier. This kind of two-step pricing where you reframe the highest tier, check for changes in tier share, and then increase the target tier, and check again for changes in tier share, is one of the fundamentals of price testing.
Of course, there are other ways to guide users into the target tier. You can experiment with different packaging. It is often easier to change packaging than it is to change subscription pricing. To test packaging, it needs to be easy to switch different functions on and off and to know which functions are of value to which kind of user.
As was the case above, you are trying to lead customers into the tier that is best for them, while optimizing the offer for your target tier. Hubspot has done a good job with this as well. On their pricing page, you can see the differences in packages, from Free to Starter to Enterprise. Look at all of the packaging options they have to test. Over time, you will want to be able to easily test different packages and overall impact on demand and distribution across tiers. As with A/B testing of language in search ads, small changes can have surprisingly large results.
These days more and more companies are adding a transactional component to their pricing. A well-chosen transactional metric connects closely to value. In Hubspot’s case, the transactional metric is the number of contacts. It is generally much easier to price test transactional metrics than it is subscriptions. You can test different metrics, different bundles and different price levels without annoying or confusing the market, who are generally paying closer attention to subscription prices. Optimizing transactional pricing is easier than optimizing subscription pricing and can have a big payback.
Finally, it is important to constantly test your value messages. The simplest thing is to A/B test different messages for each tier and see how different sets of messages work together to optimize demand across tiers.
This is not enough though. The order in which messages appear can be as important as the messages themselves, and this can be different for different buyers. We were once pricing a solution that was bought by the head of nursing at some hospitals and by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at others. It was important to present the emotional value drivers around healthcare worker safety before presenting any economic value drivers. For the CFO the reverse was true, they cared about worker safety, but they needed to understand the economics first. Testing paths is as important as testing the specific messages.
Testing plays an important role in pricing, but it requires a lot of structure and preparation to be successful. A quick review:
At Ibbaka we are conducting a survey on pricing and innovation. It would be great to have your insights into this. Without good pricing strategies, the best innovations can fail!
The post How to Effectively Test Your Pricing appeared first on OpenView Labs.
Traditional database maintenance usually involves some combination of list vendors, professional database cleansing services, email scraping, and good old-fashioned personal outreach. There’s no perfect process. And with B2B data decaying at such a rapid rate—about 70% annually—for many businesses, even employing every strategy doesn’t quite cut it. It’s a daunting task that never goes away.
But just because it never goes away doesn’t mean it can be swept under the rug. Bad data is a BIG problem that companies can’t afford to ignore. Literally. ZoomInfo research has found that as many as 40% of business objectives fail due to bad data, costing US businesses more than $611 billion annually. To combat data decay, businesses spend as much as 50% of IT budgets on data rehabilitation.
That’s a lot of time, money, and resources spent on database health.
I have a far better solution. A continuous database cleansing strategy that uses the absolute freshest data source possible: your own leads. Best of all, if automated it’s also incredibly simple—and you can start using it today.
Interested? The solution is sitting right in your inbox!
Every time you send an email campaign, replies are inevitable. Out-of-office, left-the-company, manual unsubscribe requests, and human replies. Many companies do a quick scan for the human replies and mass-delete the rest—either because they don’t have the resources to review each reply, or they aren’t aware of how valuable they are.
Let’s take a look at a very standard and unassuming out-of-office reply:
Now if we’re JUST talking database health here:
As an added bonus, you also gained two net new contacts: Stephanie and Bruce. And Mark is giving you permission to contact them in his absence—take advantage of it! Reach out with your original message but add a few personalized lines to the top. Let them know how you got their contact info, introduce yourself, ask them to opt-in, and map them to your account. Are they buyers, decision makers, or influencers? With today’s B2B buying decisions now taking an average of seven people according to Gartner, every new contact you add gets you closer to sealing the deal.
Go a step further and boost your connect rates—yes, increase connect rates with out-of-office replies. You can do this by noting the date Mark is back in the office and scheduling a personal outreach.
Just looking at the potential of one OOO reply is exciting. Imagine scaling this process to impact your entire database. I’ve found that the average reply rate of a typical email campaign is 2-3% (holidays are higher), and of those replies, about 87% are out-of-office auto-responses. Consider the size of your own database and do some quick math to see how many out-of-office replies you could start mining after your next campaign.
And that’s after EVERY campaign. Every time you send an email campaign, you are sitting on data that can be used to update your database. All day, every day. It’s not a one-time or scheduled database maintenance “project;” the data is a natural product of something you’re already doing: sending emails.
Mining reply emails allows you to:
Changes to titles, email addresses, and phone numbers are commonplace among B2B employees. An out-of-office, left-the-company, or even an auto-response alerting senders to an employee’s change in role, all contain valuable nuggets of information that can be used to update existing contact records and eliminate contacts that have moved on.
As we saw in the earlier example, replies often contain cell phone numbers, titles, and other information that can be used to enrich existing contacts. The more you know about leads, the more effectively you can engage them with direct contact and personalized, relevant content.
A big part of database health is continually growing your database to reach more prospects and ultimately increase pipeline and sales velocity. More than half of out-of-office emails contain other contacts as we saw in the earlier example. These new contacts could be just what you need put a deal over the finish line! Likewise, most left-the-company auto-responses contain a replacement contact. Get in front of these new contacts as quickly as possible to gain a favorable position over competitors, or to secure renewals if the account is already a customer.
Failing to remove people from your email lists upon request can result in hefty fines for noncompliance with email spam laws like CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR. While you undoubtedly already have an automated solution for unsubscribing, the truth is some people simply can’t be bothered and will manually reply and ask to be removed instead. By mining replies you can catch these unsubscribes in a timely manner. This allows you to remove them from your list and stay on the right side of the law.
The beauty of mining emails to improve the health of your database is that you’re leveraging data from something you’re already doing. And it requires absolutely no changes to your existing email campaigns and schedule. Now if only there were a way to automate it…
The post My Simple Secret for Maintaining a Healthy Database appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
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Account based marketing has been around for a while now, but doing it in a highly personalized way is not something you hear addressed often. But if you can personalize your marketing you can greatly strengthen customer relationships and grow your footprint in the account. On this episode, Bernie speaks with Paul Johns, CMO at SAI Global, a leader in the delivery of integrated risk management solutions for enterprise customers across the globe, about how they help their customer win through highly personalized account based marketing.
Paul is a senior marketing executive with a track record of driving marketing strategy that has a measurable impact on ACV – average contract value. On this episode, they discuss how a highly personalized account based marketing strategy using microsites can help customers win more while driving more business with those customers – who Paul refers to as the “perpetual prospect.”
There are many insightful takeaways shared, so don’t miss this podcast conversation.
Every marketer or sales professional is eager to hit their numbers, but many don’t know what it takes to actually do it. Paul Johns points out that three things need to be considered when determining an effective strategy for hitting sales numbers. And he makes the point that it needs to be done collaboratively between sales and marketing.
First – understand your product’s capabilities today and over the next year.
Next – salespeople need to know where they should go hunting for the best prospects.
Finally, marketing must validate that those targets really ARE the best places to go in order to generate the best returns.
Listen to this episode to learn more of the specifics.
Are you familiar with the term “microsite?” It’s a term Paul uses to describe online “rooms” that contain content designed for specific clients that educate them toward an informed buying decision. His company creates these sites co-branded with the customer directly addressing the customer’s goals. Finally, their team connects these microsites with the technology that enables them to track customer interest and movements.
All of this helps both new and existing customers learn to trust them but also opens the door to ongoing cross-sell opportunities. It enables them to land customers then expand the services they offer that customer, indefinitely. Paul calls it the “perpetual prospect” concept. It’s a bit of a challenging concept to understand without hearing Paul explain it, so be sure you listen to this episode.
Your customers are looking for solutions to their problems and you may have the exact solution they need. But there are often so many layers of management or leadership between you and the decision maker that you can’t make any headway. That’s why you need to build the kind of relationship with contacts within those businesses that empower them to be your sales advocate within their own company.
Work together with them to publish content in a co-branded microsite that addresses their company’s needs and help them get it distributed within their company. This will demonstrate your solution across departments, allowing various managers and decision-makers to see how your solution could benefit them as well. Listen to hear more of how Paul’s team does it.
Somehow we marketers and sales professionals forget the tremendous impact emotion plays in buying decisions. We step into the office and suddenly approach everything through data, scale, and analytics. Those are not bad things, but alone they are not enough.
Whether the prospects you’re pursuing are CIOs, CEOs, or middle managers, there is a human element involved in the buying decisions they make on behalf of their companies – and it includes emotion. What can you do to tap into and address the emotional aspects of how your customers make their buying decisions?
Paul suggests that you need to learn to be provocative, bold, and gutsy in the way you market – then once you’ve tapped into the emotional motivations behind the buying decisions, be able to communicate that you are looking to help your customers win. It’s easier said than done, but Paul has a wealth of insight about how you can shift your marketing messages toward the kind of storytelling that resonates with buyers. Be sure to listen.
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I read a quote the other day that immediately resonated with me:
“Memorizing a playbook is like memorizing a script. When they change the script at the last minute, it’s like changing a play in the game.”
Never has this been more true than in the art of selling. No two deals are the same, though they likely share common DNA. In fact, with so many variables involved in a deal—from unique buyer objectives, to your timing in a deal relative to your competitors—building playbooks for your sales teams is more like writing a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel.
In sports, a playbook charts out potential in-game scenarios, containing your team’s strategies and guiding your path from where you are in the “game” to where you want to to end up. In sales, it’s not much different.
A good sales playbook breaks down your sales process—think buyer personas, call scripts, discovery, scoping and negotiation questions, and deal intelligence.
A great playbook tells you when to call an audible in a deal cycle because something fundamental changed or was introduced, helping you to continually adapt to your buyer’s signals.
RELATED: Sales Tools that Actually Matter: Building your Playbook
You were brought on board to make your teams good… here’s how we get them to great:
As a sales enablement leader, your first job with new sales members is to successfully ramp them—giving them a map and ensuring they know how to read it. Those critical 3-6 months of ramp are, by far, the greatest expense to your sales org (simple math—a non-producing sales person is very costly). Not giving your team a playbook to follow with their onboarding is like dropping them into the woods blindfolded and hoping they memorized the map well enough to navigate out.
While dress rehearsals, role play and call recordings go a long way to coach and modify behaviour over time, playbooks offer steady reinforcement of your learning process and a killer cheat sheet in the moment.
According to Salesforce via The TAS Group, “Almost half of all sales team don’t have a playbook. For the 60% that do have a well-defined sales process in place, the benefits are clear. Companies that follow a well-defined sales process are 33% MORE likely to be High Performers. The win rate exceeds 50% for two-thirds of companies that have a defined process in place.”
Left to their own devices, sales teams will develop their own content which isn’t entirely bad… as long as it’s good! No guarantees there. You want your teams to be creative, so whatever you do build in your playbooks, ensure that it gives your teams latitude to insert their own personality and flair.
Equally, if team members see continued success with specific messaging or outreach methods from their adaptations of the playbook, use their learning to adjust accordingly. They’re front line in the sales process—ideally they can help you fine tune things based on what’s working and what’s not.
Documenting planned ways to get to your desired outcome as efficiently and effectively as possible will allow you to remove any missteps in your process.
RELATED: Demystifying Sales Enablement: What Is It, Why It Matters, And How To Do It Right
Pretty easy stuff here—figure out who to involve in the process.
Start with the usual suspects—whether this be your VP Sales, Product Marketing or Sales Enablement—you want them in the room with you. Reach out to thought leaders in the space for their insights and subject matter expertise. Most importantly, involve your sales team. Again, your top performing front-line sellers offer a wealth of knowledge and experience… don’t exclude them.
Decide who amongst you owns the playbook building timeline, ensuring that deliverables are, well… delivered.
Be sure to examine and evaluate any existing collateral as your customer-facing teams have likely gone through the trouble of customizing talk tracks, meeting agendas and presentation outlines—don’t let that go to waste. You’ll want to stress test it for effectiveness, but you’ll also improve adoption if you get their buy-in early.
From there, figure out what to measure:
Good: Build a work-back strategy with your team that ties your playbooks back to sales outcomes you need, pain points across the business (pro tip: handover is a huge problem… build a playbook specific to this) and, most importantly, tie your playbooks back to metrics the business cares about.
Great: Derive a sales net promoter scoring (SNPS) system to get feedback from your customer facing teams on the performance of your content contained inside the playbooks. Ensure you validate the subjective feedback from your team against objective, quantifiable measures such as deal velocity, ramp time (cohort metrics) and, of course, good ol’ revenue.
In a previous post, I talk about the idea of “Outside-In Selling.” Think of your role in sales enablement as very similar—you don’t start with handling objections and competitive battle cards, you start with telling your sales team why you do what you do, how you do it, what it means to your customer, and who cares. If the team doesn’t understand these fundamentals around your business strategy, the tactical elements of your playbooks end up toothless.
As the “go-to” resource for your team—you want each section of the playbook to serve a purpose.
Start off by diving into the company’s overall strategy and the reason for its existence: what problem is your organization trying to solve (start with why it’s being solved, first)—and how your sales strategy fits into the bigger picture. Review who leads which teams and what each of them is responsible for, ensuring expectation alignment, and who to go to with their questions. A simple chart outlining who’s who will do the trick!
This is also the spot to go over the organization’s mission and vision so the sales team keeps each top-of-mind. The goal of the overview is to ramp up new hires on the company’s objectives and what it stands for.
Capture each sales team member’s personal responsibilities and have a transparent view on their day-to-day. Laying out the ground rules for activity levels and explaining their quota targets in detail will help your teams prepare a game plan on how they want to hit these goals. According to research conducted by the Aberdeen Group, “Playbook users report 15% more sales reps achieving annual quota, compared to non-adopters.”
If you want your teams to focus on the most qualified leads, you’re going to want to drill down on your buyer persona to encapsulate as much detail as possible—from job titles, organizational structure, though to pain points.
Every ICP has similar trace elements, so while it’s good to be thorough, ensure that you also have a top 5 list of criteria. Be sure to note when it makes sense to bring certain people into the buying process—often there isn’t just an ideal customer profile, but an ideal sequencing of those profiles (e.g. “talk to product marketing prior to talking to the VP Marketing because…”).
Remember—you hired your team for a reason—you believe they possess what it takes to get the job done. Give them the freedom to experiment with their cadence schedule. Just like no two deals are the same, no two sales team members are either.
Some will perform better on the phone, some on email, some face-to-face… so ensure you have alternative paths for each seller type. Test, refine, test, refine. If you have proven guidelines that work to pursue opportunities, lay out best practices but also signals on when to let them go.
New sales team members require assistance to get up and running. Go into step-by-step detail on each stage of the sales process, including everything from email templates, discovery call scripts, meeting agendas, qualification questions, objection handling—you name it.
To strengthen their comprehension and further accelerate ramp, add call and screen share recordings of live demos. Your team will be able to incorporate key learnings into their own process.
If your sales team doesn’t know your product inside out—how are they supposed to guide prospects in understanding the value it brings to their respective needs and pain points? This section should cover the essentials like pricing, key value propositions, and use cases. If your company has several product offerings, consider building out a selling guide for each one where the buying process drastically differs.
Ah, it’s everyone’s favourite part of the job—keeping Salesforce (or equivalent) up-to-date—if only that were true! Use this section to define each stage, which fields are required, how to customize dashboards, etc. Your team should be clear on your expectations of their CRM reporting and when you’ll be reviewing their opportunities.
Put yourself in your team’s shoes—you never want to be kept in the dark of how your pay structure works. Lay it out in clear terms so there’s no confusion surrounding whether their plan is salary only, commission only, or a mix of both. Make it super simple to digest by showing your team what they can expect if they hit 50%, 100%, or more of their targets.
Make close allies with marketing and customer success. These folks are your go-to’s for collecting relevant customer stories, case studies, white papers and testimonials. You want to make sure that this section of your playbook in particular is kept fresh.
It’s important to have content geared towards your ideal customer profiles—after all, they’ll be the ones deciding whether or not to implement your software. Watch your sales teams close rates improve when they have on-demand materials to support their conversations.
Good: Your content library is well curated and tagged for easy discoverability, searchability and, most importantly, learnability.
Great: Your deal-specific playbook components dynamically adapt to buying signals allowing your sales team the ability to anticipate and prepare for buyer questions and concerns, rather than react to them. Your buyers want to know that your sales team understands them, even when your buyer throws an unexpected curve ball.
Good: Everyone knows metrics are important, but which ones matter most to your sales teams? Which ones make or break whether or not they’ll succeed? Revenue is your obvious North Star metric, but think about other objectives around product mix, time to first opportunity, time to first close, etc. If your team has a clear understanding of how their performance will be measured, you can bet that they’ll do everything they can to hit those goals.
Great: Your sales team also understands how YOU are measured, enabling them to give you feedback to guide improvement to the overall sales process. Ideally, you give them a feedback vehicle to do so.
Building out a sales playbook is a big undertaking—but you’ll thank yourself for putting in the work—especially as your team grows.
Keep in mind, your sales playbook forever evolves. Every time your process changes or your customer profile shifts, reflect those shifts inside your sales playbook. Treat it as a living document that standardizes your sales process for scalability and predictability.
By the time the music starts and your sales team has stepped on the dance floor with your buyer, you’ll know pretty quick if your buyers came to tango. You best ensure they’re ready to respond in kind… don’t let them mess it up by doing the Floss. To truly give your sales team the best chance of success, your playbook needs to not only continue being adapted… it needs to be smart enough to adapt in-the-moment. We’d be happy to show you what that looks like—check us out.
The post How Smart Is Your Sales Playbook? appeared first on Sales Hacker.
Talk to any B2B marketer about attribution and they’ll either roll their eyes or rant about how it’s important but hard to get right—long lead cycles, multiple contacts from a single organization, etc.
Some might stare blankly and ask what you mean.
As a group, we’ve gotten a firmer grasp on top-of-the-funnel metrics. We can prove that social media and SEO drive traffic and top-line conversions, but we still struggle to show the bottom-line impact of marketing.
To get marketing a seat at the table and prove that it can drive revenue and pipeline, we’ve become borderline obsessed with numbers. The accuracy of those numbers, however, depends largely on the quality of our attribution model.
Attribution takes marketing analytics a level—or a couple levels—deeper. If we look at the hierarchy of marketing data, it goes something like this:
As marketing moved online, we got decent at tracking link clicks and website behavior, but we still struggle to connect the dots between someone visiting a website, taking an action, and becoming a customer.
To reframe marketing as an investment rather than a cost center, we must connect all the dots to revenue—but it’s hard to do without the right tools and models to get started.
No marketing attribution model is perfect. The prospect-to-customer journey is not a linear series of events; it’s hard to predict and measure every engagement. However, some visibility is better than none at all.
Why do I say that? Too often, in my in-house and now consulting days, I talk to clients and executives who want to know how much each dollar spent brings back in revenue and which channels and activities generate the largest return.
That’s the dream—but it’s nearly impossible to do with 100% accuracy.
Marketers like to work with frameworks. The traditional marketing/sales funnel (soon to be replaced by Hubspot’s Flywheel Model) is a fantastic framework to put things into perspective.
But it wrongly assumes that people go through the funnel in a straight line. In fact, they take all kinds of detours. Since the journey isn’t linear, it’s impossible to determine exactly which touchpoint generates revenue for each client account.
Here’s what I mean:
Which touchpoint generated the highest return? Was it the Facebook Ad, which got her interest in the first place? The Twitter post? Or a whole bunch of other things she might have seen in the meantime? How do you justify the Facebook Ad spend or social media manager if you can’t tie their work to closed deals?
This challenge is why you need some form of attribution modeling. Otherwise, you’re just looking at top-of-funnel traffic and conversions—not how those channels intersect to generate pipeline and revenue.
One of the companies I consult with spent a lot of money sponsoring conferences. One in particular was highly regarded in the industry—it had the right titles and personas in attendance, so this client spent $50,000 on an annual sponsorship. It was a significant chunk of the marketing budget and came at the expense of other channels.
They measured success by the number of attendees, which they counted as net new prospects. One of the first exercises I did with them was to create an attribution model to measure trade show success. Using Salesforce (which I dive into below), we created a report on how the event drove net new pipeline and whether it moved existing opportunities toward closed sales.
After looking at the data across 3–6 months (the average sales cycle), it became clear that—even though the campaign was a “success” based on the number attendees—it drove a relatively low percentage of pipeline revenue.
Attribution took a top-of-funnel metric (net new prospects) and dove deeper to determine how much revenue we actually drove, which proved to be less than the investment.
As a result, the team changed how it approached the event. It was still important for the brand and getting face time with customers and prospects, but they reduced their sponsorship amount.
The same argument can be made for any marketing activity:
Without attribution, you would wrongly assign all the credit to Twitter or the trade show.
There are different ways to look at attribution based on how you slice and model the data. The critical touchpoints in B2B are the transition stages in the customer journey:
(Note: I borrowed some terminology above from Bizible)
You can track other stages, but the point is not to track every stage; otherwise, you’ll have too much noise. Focus on the stages you care about most and what drives the stage change.
Your entire customer journey is worth 100%. Different models assign different percentages to each touchpoint.
For example, if you have five touchpoints, a Linear Model will assign credit equally across all touchpoints—each engagement is credited with 20%. You can also break this down by revenue: If a deal is worth $1,000, then each touchpoint or engagement is worth $200.
Here’s an overview of the different models:
(CXL has a fantastic article explaining the different attribution models in detail.)
No model is the “right” one. It depends on the context of your business and how you prefer to measure. And remember: While not perfect, each model is better than not having any framework in place.
For B2B businesses, managing individual contacts within an account is crucial for attribution.
By far, Salesforce is the most widely used CRM for B2B businesses. But one of its limitations is relying solely on the lead source for attribution.
Here are the issues that can arise:
Field mapping between Objects in Salesforce.
Thankfully, Salesforce Campaigns solve these issues brilliantly, allowing for:
For accurate reporting, you need to capture every touchpoint and assign it to a Salesforce Campaign. But you also want to avoid setting up and managing hundreds of campaigns.
To make the process simpler, you consolidate touchpoints. For example, paid media (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.), events and tradeshows, and webinars are all important to track independently. But maybe you can bundle newsletter and marketing emails (outside of nurtures) into a single campaign.
It’s also important to use relevant campaign statuses. So if it’s a webinar, set up custom statuses to track how many registered, attended, or were no-shows (versus relying on the binary, out-of-the-box “sent/responded’ statuses). To make this process more efficient, I set up campaign templates to easily replicate statuses in the future.
You can set up attribution for marketing automation tools, too, and connect them with Salesforce to trigger campaign assignments.
Hubspot lets you create attribution models in a couple of ways: Original Source and HubSpot Campaigns.
Original Source. Original Source tracking tells you which channel a prospect came from before becoming a known contact. It relies on a cookie that’s added to a prospect’s browser when they first come to a web property with a HubSpot tracking code.
When they fill out a form, HubSpot ties the cookie to a known contact in its system to give you a complete picture of how the user first came to your site, how long it took them to convert, and where they converted.
You can take this a step further and attach UTM parameters to all links for all channels. Those parameters show up on form submissions, effectively offering First Touch and Lead Creation attribution to show, for example, that a contact came from Organic Search but then converted from Google Ads.
How does this look in practice? Suppose I came to your website through Twitter, and a week later I converted through a Google Ads campaign. Reporting from those two fields gives you two touchpoints—what first caught my attention and what led me to convert. Without tracking both, we’d mistakenly give 100% of the credit to Twitter or Google Ads.
To track which source drove a contact to become an Opportunity or a Closed-Won, we can create an automation workflow that stores the UTM value in a field called “Lead Creation Touch.” When a stage changes from, for example, Lead to Opportunity, we can write the value of the UTM parameter into “Opportunity Creation Touch” and determine the three touchpoints—Original Source, Lead Creation, and Opportunity Creation.
Reporting all of these will give you a more complete picture of the journey from anonymous visitor to customer.
Hubspot Campaigns. Hubspot has recently expanded reporting to break down First Touch, Influenced, and Customers sources by the campaign, enabling reporting on overall campaign performance:
Similarly, in Pardot, you can assign Pardot Campaigns based on Source Tracking or Custom Redirects. You can use either to track contact touchpoints from First Touch to Lead Creation and, ultimately, Closed-Won.
At present, Pardot doesn’t offer an Original Source tie as Hubspot does for anonymous visitors. But there’s a workaround: Create Custom Redirects for high-value campaigns and write in the Pardot Campaign and Source values for anyone who clicks on that link. The Pardot cookie can tie that Custom Redirect Source back to the contact after they become a known lead.
For a client who uses Pardot, I connected Google Analytics and Google Ads to Pardot to add UTM and GLICD parameters. After capturing UTM values, we set up automation rules to write the source values on the contact based on the UTM value combinations and assigned them to specific Salesforce campaigns based on that data.
I write the values into a source field rather than reporting directly from UTMs because:
With Pardot, you can also track keyword-level performance through their Google Ads Connector.
Marketo offers two methods. One is Programs, which are similar to tracking statuses in Salesforce Campaigns. You can use tracking parameters to set Program memberships and statuses to determine how your programs perform over time.
However, Marketo Programs don’t offer a multi-touch report like Salesforce Campaigns. You can use a bit of JavaScript to write source values into the Marketo cookie (Munchkin tracking) for the specific browser and tie it back to the contact when it’s created.
The power of using Marketing Automation and Salesforce campaigns becomes apparent when you use your marketing automation tool to capture and assign Salesforce campaigns based on source/referral/medium values.
Google Analytics (GA) is perhaps the most widely used yet underutilized tool for web analytics.
Ninety percent of the time I audit client GA setups during onboarding, they’re missing Goals. Goals tell GA what’s important to your business and let you track things like form submissions or trial starts, allowing you to see, for example, how many people from Twitter actually convert.
The other reason Google Analytics is so powerful is that once you set up Goals, you can create Multi-Channel Funnels to view which interactions (based on channel, parameter, etc.) lead to conversions.
Here’s what a Multi-Channel Funnel report looks like:
You can see that Direct traffic assisted a lot of conversions (expected), but if we look a level deeper, it shows that Organic Search, Paid Search, and other channels also assisted conversions.
As I mentioned, a customer’s path to purchase is not a straight line. What this tells us is that—of all the conversions during this time—prospects engaged across these channels most often.
So, a prospect might have:
This gives is a clearer picture of all the paths a prospect took before converting. You can slice this data by segments, parameters, device, location, landing page etc.
This is a great opportunity to understand what Direct traffic means and if there’s a spillover effect from other campaigns. Most marketers curse Direct traffic since it doesn’t show you where it came from or what caused it. However, if you combine Direct traffic data with GA Multi-Channel Funnel reporting, you can see some insights.
For example, a recurring trend I’ve seen is an uptick in Direct traffic when Facebook Ads are running. A hypothesis (which was validated by a correlation analysis) confirmed that Facebook Ads indeed spiked Direct traffic.
This could be because prospects who see ads on Facebook are more likely to go to a site directly or via an untagged URL, or that there were higher-than-reported conversions from Facebook Ads due to session expiration.
This is what makes GA conversion paths so powerful. With marketing automation tools or Salesforce, you cannot layer in additional data because it’s simply not available. But in GA, you can add more data to segment your channel report and really understand the user journey toward conversion.
The Top Conversion Paths report shows you the sequence of channel interactions prior to conversion. Additionally, the Path Length report gives you an idea of, on average, how many engagements a prospect has before converting. (The answer may surprise you.).
A third powerful tool in GA (though one that’s not directly related to attribution) is the Time Lag report. If you run a lot of retargeting ads (which you should be running), the Time Lag report shows you how long it takes for someone to convert.
In one of my consulting engagements, a client ran tons of retargeting ads on prospects who had visited the site in the past two days. However, looking at the Time Lag report, we saw that 30% of people converted 5 days after coming to the site. Changing the strategy from a 2-day to a 3–7 day window increased our remarketing ads’ performance by 25%.
Note: By default, the “look-back window” or “attribution window” in GA is 30 days, so GA will look at a 30-day window to create the first-visit-to-conversion path.
A report showing weighted attribution in Google Attribution 360’s Model Explorer.
At $150k per year, Google Analytics 360 doesn’t make sense for most businesses. For those it does, however, it offers vastly improved attribution modeling.
Google Attribution 360, the attribution system within Google Analytics 360, uses machine learning to create a custom attribution model based on data from all connected accounts: Google Ads, Google Display Network, Campaign Manager, etc.
Attribution 360 also folds in offline data, like the impact of television advertisements; allows you to upload spend data from non-Google accounts; and extends the look-back window beyond 90 days, more than three times past the standard in Google Analytics.
The Model Comparison Tool compares three potential models to see how each affects the valuation of marketing channels. You can also create custom rules for attribution models, then reallocate marketing spend to test the validity of the proposed model.
A comparison between a Linear attribution model and one in which Paid Advertising receives additional credit.
Google Attribution is a free, lightweight, but not-yet-released version of Google Attribution 360. According to plans, it will connect data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Campaign Manager accounts—without additional tagging.
Google intends to roll out the free version, in part, to help advertisers better understand the impact of their ads (and, presumably, encourage them to spend more by showing the role of events like ad impressions in driving conversions).
If you want to take attribution a step further and have the budget to do so (about $25–40K annually), you can add Full Circle Insights or Bizible to your existing suite of tools.
Bizible adds a layer of extra reporting and custom objects into your Salesforce data. But note that Bizible is built on top of Salesforce campaigns, so if you don’t have Salesforce or are not using Salesforce Campaigns, then Bizible isn’t for you.
Bizible creates touchpoints for each Salesforce campaign and maps them along the attribution journey (First Touch, Opportunity Creation, etc.). You can create different models or even your own model (with higher-tiered plans).
Bizible shines with its native Google Ads integration, which pulls in cost and revenue data from Salesforce to give you a true return-on-spend visualization:
You can also set up matching rules to add UTM parameters to custom touchpoints (like campaigns that turn leads into marketing-qualified leads). Since all this is native to Salesforce, you can create dashboards and reports based on campaign/channels to gauge performance accurately.
However, Bizible is an enterprise tool—not every business needs it to create a functional attribution model. As with any system, make sure that the data inputs are clean, or you’ll end up with a “garbage in, garbage out” scenario.
Also, Bizible lacks native Facebook Ads integration. Facebook has been a strong channel in a lot of B2B consulting work I’ve done, so, for now, you’ll have to add the costs and rules manually.
I mentioned attribution windows briefly. What are they? Attribution windows are the timeframes in which, if a conversion occurs, the credit will be given to the channel(s) involved.
For Google Analytics, it’s the timeframe (30 days) in which Google Analytics traces back to the First Touch from the date of conversion.
To understand attribution windows, let’s look at a Facebook Campaign. If a prospect:
Facebook will record it as a conversion in the Facebook Dashboard and optimize around the event.
Let’s break it down a little more: If a prospect clicks on an ad and then converts anytime in the next 30 days, Facebook will record it as a conversion. Why? Because Facebook influenced the conversion (and because Facebook, as a platform, has an interest in taking credit for that event).
You can customize attribution windows for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Adroll, and other paid media channels, but this is why Facebook often shows one number for conversions but your data shows another—the attribution windows between your two platforms don’t align.
Another reason is the difference between view-through conversions (VTC) and click-through conversions (CTC). Most ad platforms count people who saw (VTC) or clicked (CTC) an ad within a certain timeframe as converters. Adroll breaks it down, but some don’t—keep that in mind when you’re attributing paid media spend back to pipeline revenue.
Start somewhere. Anywhere. If you aren’t properly tagging and capturing UTM or other parameters, start there:
Establish a single source of truth for your data. Most of my clients ask why a number in one tool doesn’t match another. There are a lot of reasons; different systems measure things differently.
One example is Facebook conversions versus prospects created. Another is how Hubspot measures website traffic versus GA’s approach. (GA doesn’t filter for internal Hubspot pages and previews.)
If you’re going to report new leads from social ads via your CRM, ignore the Facebook reports (but be aware that some Direct traffic might be Facebook-influenced).
Accept the limits so that you don’t spend your time trying to find the right data but instead spend it gathering insights and making decisions.
It’s easy to get lost in the details—but it’s never worth it.
Most importantly, remember that a prospect’s journey from visitor to paying customer isn’t linear. Plenty of “assist” and “influence” channels don’t get captured by tracking codes.
Branded search is a classic example. If a rise in branded search correlates with a marketing campaign, there’s a high probability that you’re generating a lot of word of mouth and, as a result, branded search. If you look at campaign results in isolation, you may think it underperformed.
Increasingly, as marketers, we’ve become “data-obsessed,” but sometimes we lose sight of the big picture. Data and tracking are meaningless without context, and not every action can be measured—no attribution model is perfect.
If you’re not currently connecting marketing spend with results, start somewhere. You don’t need enterprise-level tools. Google Analytics is a great place to start and make a case to your organization for how marketing drives bottom-line results.
Alternatively, you may already be doing it but know you have blind spots—every company does. Find out what you don’t know. Just don’t forget to improve the value of what you do know.
“It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again”
Another quarter sales target just barely made. It was a close call. As you go over the numbers with your team you realize that trying to close a sale with XYZ Industries cost you a ton of time, almost made you missed your quota and almost cost you your job (maybe – you never know, but you suspect it).
It’s not that you haven’t been down this path before. As Yogi Berra would say “It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again.” It’s not the first time there was a close call because somebody wasted your time. And there were other bad deals in the past.
What if there was a way to know bad deals before they happen? What if you didn’t feel like you don’t know when to walk away from a bad deal? What if you could keep your emotions in check and avoid getting too deep into a process and wasting your time or striking a bad deal? What would that mean to your bottom line?
I came into the world of sales an unusual way. First I was a CPA, then a law school graduate and eventually I was an attorney for some of the largest law firms in the United States. After that started my own law firm and later a business strategy firm. As time progressed I did more and more sales and more and more sales teams called me for advice and training.
But this role and unusual path have allowed me to look at negotiations in a completely different way. I often get to be a neutral advisor to many negotiations which allows you to see so much more.
And one of the most powerful things to know is knowing when to walk away from a bad deal. Let’s set some ground rules so you can easily walk away from that next bad deal – before it almost costs you your job!
We are going to replace your instinct of “if I don’t keep going, I won’t make quota” to something better for you. The reality is chasing after a lead that’s never going to close is one of the quickest ways to miss quota. Instead, it’s better to get ruthless about walking away the second you can see it’s not going to pan out.
RELATED: 5 Psychology Tips From An FBI Hostage Negotiator That Will Make You Sell Better
If you keep this six tips close to you you’ll know better when to walk away from bad deals.
It’s important that you think in terms of when you will “walk away” from a deal at the start of the negotiations. “Walk away” simply means the time and place when it no longer makes sense to negotiate and move on to other options.
As you go into future negotiations you should always be thinking about what your walk away is before you start. This is a discipline that you can build that should become natural to you. Every time you open a file for a prospective client set your walk away terms as described in this section.
Every time you into a new sales call, start thinking about a purchase or otherwise prepare to negotiate stop and think about what terms you will accept and what you would be too much give. Write this down now. You want to record what you think is fair – and what is not – before the heat of the moment takes over. If you do that you’ll know when things are going too far and when these are getting unfair.
When I’m negotiating on behalf of my clients, I often started the preparation for the negotiation by getting them to agree to what they will accept and what they wouldn’t accept as an outcome. Knowing how much give is too much before you start will allow you to shape your behaviors.
In sales, we’ve all heard of BANT, but there is another helpful acronym here known as BANTA. At the Harvard negotiation school, they often talk about your “BATNA” or your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. This is a helpfull concept. Think about the power to know what alternative you have if your deal doesn’t work out. Where will you go? What will you do if this negotiation doesn’t work? You’ll feel less trapped. In the simplest terms know how good and likely your “Plan B” is.
I have a simple saying the drives the point home: “The person that can’t walk away loses.” If you aren’t ready to leave the negotiation you are going to lose.
As you get in the negotiation always look back to that walk away that was set before the negotiation was started. Are we still in the bounds of a possible agreement or is it time to consider leaving the negotiation? How far have we gotten to our goals versus getting closer to the walk away? Have the terms gotten into the range of your walk away? Because we know what a good deal is for us (and what a bad deal is for us) we can start to walk away as soon as a deal starts to turn bad.
Imagine you’re trying to sell a software package to a customer. Before you went into the negotiation you knew that $99 per user per month would be your floor on pricing. You’ve now invested substantial time into the negotiation and you found that your customer will only pay $89 per user per month.
The old you may have felt compelled to keep going to win this. But because you have a clear walk away and you set that standard before you start it you now know that this customer will not be a win for you. You can now easily walk away and move on to find customers that will be able to justify that $99 per user per month minimum.
Sales is an emotional process. We are all told about how to connect to our customer and how to understand their emotions and feelings.
We sales professionals are no different. We also have emotions. The problem is that our emotions often come in and cause us to push for bad deals. We have to get that win. We want to look good for our bosses and impress our colleagues and friends.
This means we will often get emotionally invested in closing the deal. We aren’t thinking about our overall numbers, our job or the quota – we are thinking about winning this deal.
When emotion takes over we often strike bad deals. So let’s, instead, focus on winning deals not serving our emotions.
Having backup options will make it easier to walk away. That way you know that you don’t have to stay in the current offering or current deal if the terms turn bad.
Let’s say you’re in a sales discussion and your buyer is starting to signal that it may not be the right deal for them. Your price point is too high or they just aren’t sure they want to make a commitment at this time.
Having seen the situation play out many times I know that those without backup options, ie other strong leads in the pipeline, often feel like they have to force the sale to make their quota or goals. That’s why it’s so critical to have backup options. If you know you have a pipeline that is converting to sales you won’t feel stuck in any one deal.
If you are in the middle of a deal and it just doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. So keep an eye out and think about how you are feeling and why. Ask yourself, “Am I uncertain about closing the sale because I lack confidence or do I actually see some red flags?”
Many studies have shown that humans are actually very perceptive. Ignoring warning signs and these feelings will not help you in the long term. Believe in your intuition. If you’re seeing the wrong things and the sales process is not moving forward, then back out and start over again with a new prospect. It’s okay to walk away.
Another item that makes it easy to walk away from a bad deal is to remember your personal values. What are your goals and why are you on this journey? Who are you trying to take care of? Is it your family? Close friends? Or some broader societal mission?
If you stay focused on your life’s mission and your big goals, every single deal really plays a small role. As such, when you can remember your big picture it’s easier for you to walk away from a bad deal because you know that you can still serve the big mission.
RELATED: How To Walk Away From A Business Deal Without Burning Bridges
The rules above will let you know when to walk away. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts for walking away from bad deals.
Do: Set a Walk Away
Always go into a deal with a walk-away. Know exactly when you’ll leave and what terms are unacceptable. For selling situations this usually means a bottom line on price or terms that you will not accept. If you set the walk away before you go in it will be easier for you to recognize when the deal becomes bad.
Do: Limit The Emotions
We’re humans and we’re emotional creatures. More and more research shows that human emotion is very important in business and success. And you’ve certainly seen the sales materials that have told you about emotions and how emotions can be learned to increase sales.
In considering walk-away scenarios limiting your emotions with respect to winning the deal can be critical to successful outcomes. So don’t tie emotion to whether you get the deal or not. Keep your eyes on the bigger picture.
Do: Focus on Winning The War, Not The Battles
Life, and selling have many battles. Don’t focus on winning each battle. Think about your big goals and what you’re trying to accomplish. That’s what you should be focusing on,not winning each individual deal.
Don’t: Feel the Need to “Win”
Many people get stuck in a bad deal because they feel the need to win. They have to get that trophy of getting the best possible deal. Perhaps bragging rights. That need to win has caused many people to put too much time or too much effort into bad deals.
Give up the need to win everything. It will be liberating in that it will make it much easier for you to walk away.
Don’t: Get Emotional About Walking Away
Many people associate walking away from a deal or losing a transaction as being a loss. Categorizing walking away as a loss, or a bad event, triggers those normal emotions of loss in us as humans. Make walking away a logical decision, not an emotional event.
It’s just business after all. So if you walk away from a bad deal know that you’re doing the right things for your business not losing some part of yourself.
Don’t: Box Yourself In
Don’t box yourself into any one transaction. Know that it’s a big world, a complicated business environment and there are many options out there. There are many paths you can take to meet your goals and accomplish success in life and business. You don’t have to follow any one path. If you can keep your paths open and keep many options going you won’t feel boxed in and it will make it very easy to walk away from a bad deal.
Don’t Lose the Big Picture
Is closing a deal with a bad prospect really a “win”? Many salespeople are paid on an account management model now, meaning they have to pay back the commission within a certain time period if the customer bails. Even if that isn’t the case, the customer success rep who gets stuck with your bad apple isn’t going to appreciate your “close at all costs” efforts.
Add on top of that that that terrible prospect may call you again for additional business (restarting the cycle) or refer you their friends that are similar to them!
You may think that you will lose face with your peers if you don’t close every day. In reality you might lose face pushing for the wrong closes and drive yourself crazy in the process.
The post Part 1: How to Walk Away from a Bad Deal appeared first on Sales Hacker.
Five Tips That Make Asking for Referrals Less Intimidating written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
Asking for referrals can be tough. It can feel like you’re being pushy or imposing on someone’s time. But in reality, the majority of happy customers are more than willing to give a referral when asked.
While the first hurdle in asking for referrals is getting over your own insecurities or mental blocks associated with the process, here are five additional tips that make asking for referrals less intimidating.
This one might seem obvious, but the first step to feeling good about asking for a referral is providing the best service possible. Of course you’re going to feel sheepish approaching a customer who had a less-than-stellar experience with your company. But if you are honest, responsive, and helpful from start to finish, then why shouldn’t your customer be excited to pass your name along to others?
We’re all human and mistakes do happen. There will be times when a customer has a sub-par interaction with your business. That doesn’t mean that you should run away and consider that customer a lost cause. If you are proactive about reaching out, apologizing, and asking for a second chance to wow them (and then delivering on your promise the next time), you might just create an even more loyal customer. People appreciate honesty and businesses who are willing to go the extra mile, so when you make that effort—even if it’s after an initial mess-up—you should feel confident asking for a referral after you’ve proven your mettle the second time.
Sometimes it can feel difficult to ask for a referral because it feels like you’re selfishly asking for a favor out of the blue. One way to mitigate this feeling is to establish a meaningful conversation with someone before you ask them for a referral. Send them a congratulatory note when you see on LinkedIn that they reached a milestone in their career. Forward them an article that you think would be of interest to them. Donate to a Kickstarter related to their business’s newest product launch. There are lots of simple ways that you can show support for someone that will make asking them for a referral further down the line feel like more of a part of a conversation rather than a demand coming out of nowhere.
Of course, there is an art to doing this. You don’t want to make a grand gesture of kindness and then turn right around and ask for a referral. No one wants to feel like they’re being bribed into saying something nice about you and your business. But if you show a genuine interest in what someone is doing in their business life, they’ll feel even more open to saying something genuinely kind about you when you ask.
It’s always best to ask someone for a referral directly; people are far more likely to refer when they’re asked than they are to go out of their way to do it on their own (even if they had a positive experience with your company). However, you want to be sure you’re making it easy for customers to refer you, whether you’re asking them directly or not.
Include a link to sites where customers can provide a review (whether that’s Yelp, Facebook, or a tool like Grade.us) in your email signature. Customers who see this reminder each time they communicate with you might be more likely to review you when they have a spare minute if they’re presented with the opportunity to do so on more than one occasion. You can also create a “refer a friend” button or page on your website. This makes it easy for you to collect referrals from customers by sending them a link to the page, while it also allows customers you haven’t reached out to directly to still submit a referral if they feel so inclined.
One of the best ways to generate referrals is by creating partnerships with other business owners. They’re facing the same struggles as you when it comes to generating referrals, so it’s easier to ask them for referrals. They understand how intimidating it can be to ask customers to pass your name along, and so they’ll be all the more willing to do so for you and your business (and you will be willing to do the same for them).
Work to find businesses that are providing a good or service that makes sense with the work your company does. If you own a shoe store, talk to the cobbler down the street. If you’re a DJ for weddings and events, speak with the local party equipment rental company.
Asking a fellow business owner for referrals is not only a bit less intimidating than asking a customer, it also establishes a steady flow of referrals. Business owners will continue to come across prospects who are in need of your services, whereas past customers might only meet someone every once in a while who’s looking for the good or service you provide.
Some people are hesitant to ask for referrals when it seems like a broad ask: “If you know anyone who needs what I do, let me know!” One way to counter this is to do a little research.
Let’s say you’re a website designer who already has a list of local businesses you’d like to target. You’ve looked at their sites and have some specific thoughts on how to strengthen each of their designs to help them grow their business.
Go onto LinkedIn and see if any of your current clients have connections at these businesses. If so, you then have a specific referral ask that you can make. Reach out to your current client and say, “I see that you know the marketing manager at Company X. I’ve been wanting to get in touch with someone over there about their website design; I’ve got some concrete ideas about how to organize their site that could help grow their sales. Would you be willing to put me in touch with your connection?”
This serves a few purposes. It shows to your current client that you’re serious about your business, know your stuff, and do your research. This makes them feel more at ease in referring you to their connection. It also makes you feel more empowered in your ask. You know exactly what you want, and you’re confident enough in the services you provide to be unafraid to ask for that referral.
Asking for referrals can be scary. But if you provide excellent service to your customers, there’s no need for you to feel shy. People are excited to spread the word about a great business, and if you’re able to drum up the courage to ask for referrals, you’ll be sure to get great new leads for your efforts.
If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.
Dirty data means bad business. Yet sales operations are still largely based on incomplete, manually entered activity logging done by sales reps. Anyone who’s worked in a sales role can attest to the wasted hours of task logging that managers require as part of their oversight. But what if a company could automatically track the steps employees took to land a deal, freeing up reps’ schedules to do their actual jobs? People.ai has raised $30 million to try to achieve just that.
People.ai, a startup that tracks every communication touchpoint between sales teams and customers, wants to solve this problem. Now, the company (and the youngest Y Combinator graduate to make the accelerator’s list of its most successful startups) has attracted the attention of Andreessen Horowitz, scoring a fresh $30 million to move forward on this mission. Also participating in the round were Series A investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and Y Combinator. In addition to the investment, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Peter Levine is joining People.ai’s board.
The startup, founded by Oleg Rogynskyy, previously raised $7 million. It started out as a software meant to give sales managers a predictive playbook for the best way to close a deal, but investors have a master plan for the long term.
While this kind of live data mapping tech resembles an acquisition target for Microsoft or Salesforce, it’s no secret that Andreessen likes to build massive software franchises like Skype, Airbnb and GitHub. As we enter Q4 of 2018, early stage SaaS investment is stabilizing and public cloud stocks are soaring. Salesforce continues to pump more money into the AI sales concept, paving the way for startups like People.ai to thrive. But when it comes to exit strategy, selling to a large enterprise player is not the goal.
An example People.ai dashboard
While Rogynskyy tells me he’d eventually like to take the company public, People.ai first needs to solidify itself as an AI solution for enterprises. To do so, the founder says they will use about half of the Series B investment to fund commercial expansion and customer acquisition (something the Andreessen network will undoubtedly catalyze) and the other half to fuel data science and engineering advancements within the business. The San Francisco-based company has also opened up offices in Boston and Los Angeles, and is considering building out an engineering-focused team in Canada.
People.ai works with companies like Lyft, Palo Alto Networks and New Relic to help sales and customer support teams improve performance. But how exactly does it operate? The company built a machine learning technology meant to perfectly populate CRM records of salespeople’s processes as they work to close deals. The tech scans email, phone calls and calendar meetings to reveal how much time top performers are spending at each phase of a deal, and where struggling reps may be deviating from typically successful methods. Are salespeople too zoned in on one phase of a deal? Not spending enough time talking to product managers, executives or other decision makers? Are they focusing on the right leads to begin with? Those are the questions People.ai’s algorithms seek to answer.
“We’ve expanded so that we don’t solely work with salespeople. We now work with everyone who touches the customer interactions, including marketing, inside sales engineers, customer success and sales support services. People.ai not only captures the activity of salespeople, but now gives teams a 360 degree view of everything that is happening with a customer across an entire team,” explains Rogynskyy.
As data cleans up, a bigger question for managers unfolds. While companies shouldn’t fly blind with years of incomplete CRM records, automative software like this removes the human element from business. If managers have the insights to reward individuals purely based on data rather than immeasurable qualitative soft skills or personal style, a product like this could internally redefine an organizations’ best practices.
Investors view People.ai as a foundational company in the next generation of SaaS that could provide greater efficiency within existing workforces. There are ways for best practices to be culled from these communications and distributed across an organization, and Andreessen thinks People.ai has the head start. “Every organization in an enterprise is collecting data through email and manual entry right now, that we believe can unlock tremendous efficiency and optimization not only in sales but across HR, services, marketing and finance using the exact same algorithms that People.ai is applying to sales,” says Levine.
Editor’s Note: This guest post was contributed by Julie Thomas, CEO, ValueSelling Associates.
More than half of sales professionals give up too easily on cold calling, if they make the calls at all. A prime reason: fear.
A newly released survey of 160 U.S. sales professionals in a wide variety of sales roles and industries found fear to be among the biggest prospecting challenges for B2B outbound sales. 53% of salespeople surveyed admit they are quick to quit cold calling and almost as many (48%) confess they are afraid to pick up the phone.
The survey, which my company conducted with media company Selling Power, also found outbound prospecting is hindered by sales reps’ lack of organization and consistency (60%), difficulty accessing decision makers (42%), and weak social media skills (38%).
Given how fundamental outbound prospecting is to the sales process — and successful sales careers — it’s surprising how many sales reps lack confidence in it. This is despite the fact that, next to client referrals, cold calls ranked second in prospecting effectiveness.
In order to become top performers, sales reps and managers must constantly be filling their pipelines with qualified prospects. That aspect of sales is rarely a cinch, but these days it is even more challenging.
Other findings from our research may help explain why certain aspects of outbound prospecting continue to give people pause.
The most common difficulties cited by respondents include:
63% of respondents believe conducting research to locate target prospects capable of making purchases was key. That skill was followed closely with knowing how to garner introductions via a reference and in-person networking to get to the next stage in the buying cycle.
So, the drive to reach decision-makers is there, but the lack of early successes is impacting future efforts. As a result, frustrated sales reps give up too quickly.
More than half of sales professionals (54%) say it takes more than five touch points, such as phone calls, email, social media outreach, to book an initial meeting. In 10% of the cases, it took 11 or more touches. This demonstrates why tenacity and determination are necessary skills in sales.
Of the 76% companies that provide outside training, close to half (46%) provide training only once a year. And, 28% of these organizations provide this training only one time total, as part of initial onboarding.
This last point deserves special attention because repeated, incremental sales training for everyone on a sales team is one way to overcome the challenges cited in the survey, or at least reduce the apprehension surrounding them. The right sales training provides a framework for each sales team member to follow and a means to jump-start sluggish outbound prospecting activities. It also can elevate someone’s communications skills and help erase their unease with using the phone, email, social media or face-to-face networking for initial outreach.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy a long, prosperous sales career if you don’t devote an appropriate amount of time and energy to properly prospecting. The ValueSelling-Selling Power study indicates that kind of prospecting isn’t happening; respondents said only 18% of their sales reps spend nine hours or more on weekly prospecting — the amount of time weekly that our clients have found ideal for proactively finding leads.
If you find it difficult to muster the courage to pick up the phone to make cold calls, consider where that fear is coming from. Chances are it is tied to a lack of competence and, in turn, confidence. If you can boost your sales and communications skills, you not only establish a friendlier relationship with the phone—but also a lot more opportunities and orders in your future.
For more insight into the sales process, subscribe to the LinkedIn Sales Blog today.
Being in a room with 150 of the industry’s top marketers at the B2B Game Changers conference last week was nothing short of amazing. Hearing the stories of wild victories and real failures from our marketing role models give us a taste of our industry’s reality. If you want to make a difference in your organization, you need to embrace change, think fast and stay humble.
Every year, Integrate recognizes a handful of noteworthy role-based marketers as B2B Game Changers. This year we directed our focus towards revenue marketers. As the landscape evolves and marketing teams are becoming increasingly responsible for a sales-like quota, the shift is inevitable. Revenue marketing is not just demand generation or ABM, nor just marketing operations or field marketing. Rather, it’s marrying these disciplines together to create measurable value for the organization. We see and know firsthand how challenging this can be. So, we pulled together a group of bad-ass Game Changers to share their stories with their peers. The results? Marketing magic. Here’s what we learned:
The Rise of Revenue Marketing Isn’t A Trend; It’s Here to Stay
Our fearless CMO, Scott Vaughan said it best during the session, “Change Strategies for Global Enterprise Marketing” with Leslie Alore of Iron Mountain and Anika Kaulius of Microsoft. “We’ve blew up the demand waterfall, killed funnels and murdered MQLs – it’s been a productive day.”
If you’re marketing goals include scaling revenue, we must leave the old KPIs behind of funnel stages and MQL creation. Revenue marketing is about penetrating target accounts with sales, and thus creating opportunities which quickly convert. The only way to find success here is by taking an integrated approach to all marketing activities. Beki Scarbrough of ForgeRock gave a great example of her team’s revenue-based KPIs during the session, “Creating Categories, Integrating Programs and Going Digital to Change the Game.” The old KPIs include open rates, form fills, MQLs and lead conversion. These are now pivoting to conversations, percent of account engagement, open opportunities, meetings booked and more tangible events.
We’ve only just begun to dip our toes into the world of revenue marketing and we will quickly observe which organizations sink or swim. In a world that demands to be delighted with simplicity and ease of purchase, marketing teams must be focused on surrounding accounts, locking arms with their sales teams and adding value; not throwing a finite amount of MQLs over the fence to bitter sales reps and hoping they stick.
During one of the first presentations of the day, David Lewis, CEO of DemandGen opened his session with the day-in-the-life of the modern consumer – they wake up in a custom mattress that was delivered to their doorstep, discuss the weather with Amazon’s Alexa over their favorite coffee, and get in an Uber that provides them with a pleasant and efficient means of commuting. All part of a seamless experience from companies focused on delighting the customer and providing an agile solution to the daily routine.
B2B marketers need to become more like B2C marketers. Customers, regardless of their B2B role, are still consumers at heart. We expect the same seamless and delightful buying experience in our careers that we have grown so accustomed to in our everyday lives. After a morning like the one David portrayed, why would we want to get to work and fill out multiple contact-us forms, call 1-800 numbers and send broad spectrum helpdesk emails just to get information on a product or service? It is the marketing team’s job to provide an experience that leaves the customer feeling satisfied and in control of their purchase.
David explains that this is the only reliable scale to measure a customer’s experience. If the value is greater than or equal to the customer’s expectations, marketing has done their job.
All we’ve heard for the past few years is the promise of “sales and marketing alignment.” If your organization has truly achieved that, props to you because it is very much still a pipe dream for the rest of us. At the end of the day, sales or marketing, we’re all here to make money and add value to the business. The only way for everyone to win is to abolish the mindset that marketing’s only job is providing leads that they then pass to sales to turn into revenue. When we work this way, it becomes a marketing vs. sales environment which isn’t healthy for either party. In the session “How to Seduce Sales into Falling in Love With You,” Heidi Bullock, CMO of Engagio explained how she used to struggle with proving the marketing team was right with data and how much friction that caused with sales. By then shifting the mindset from us vs. them to “we” the revenue increase spoke for itself. Beki Scarbrough even mentioned that your marketing team must carry a quota alongside sales. Talk about game-changing moves.
Revenue teams start with revenue marketers. Nothing changes in a day but implementing processes that focus on collaboration first will pave the way to a frictionless team. Plus, you have to know when to play offense and when to play defense, advises Leslie Alore, Regional Marketing Director at Iron Mountain.
As a part of the marketing team at Integrate, it was truly amazing to see this conference come to life and crazy that in just a day, it was over. The amount of time and effort our team, speakers, partners and loyal supporters invested in making our dream a reality is simply humbling. We are so grateful for our B2B community and friends that have offered their unconditional support.
A special thank-you to our partners: DemandGen, Mintigo, Bombora, Engagio, and Inverta. Game-changing marketing truly does require game-changing partners.
We can’t wait to see you next fall and tackle what it takes to be a game-changing marketer in 2020.
If you’re interested in hearing more game-changing insights from the pros, tune into the Demand Generation Virtual Summit on October 31. Integrate, Terminus and Salesforce are hosting the roundtable session, “The Future of Demand Generation.”
Nothing comes easy in sales -- it’s always earned. But I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon: even the most seasoned and confident account executives can flinch when it comes to securing budget from their head of sales.
Reps won’t break a sweat asking for thousands of dollars from a future customer but second guess themselves when asking for a few hundred dollars from their boss for new software or a professional development seminar.
The hesitation to ask your boss for help on a project or pitch an idea to your executive can be detrimental to your quota and productivity. Part of the reason why 72% of sales teams (with fewer than 50 opportunities in their pipeline) don’t hit their revenue goals and 62% of a rep’s time is spent on the non-selling admin tasks is a lack of direct feedback from the front lines to Sales leadership.
So, I sought out expertise from Mixmax Head of Revenue Don Erwin, on the best ways to pitch a solution to your boss that will increase the likelihood the budget will get approved. Having led teams at Automil, HackerRank, and LinkedIn, Don has just about heard it all; and reveals his top tips below.
It’s easy to get excited about new technology and want to share it with others. There’s a certain satisfaction in being an early adopter who’s “in the know.” However, with 850+ sales tools and 5000+ marketing technologies, it’s easy to get distracted by the new and shiny.
Ensure you’ve done your due diligence before pitching new technology. Have you test driven the solution? Scheduled a demo to better understand the capabilities and limitations?
Sending your boss a Slack message with a link to new technology you’ve just heard of and haven’t tried isn’t going to cut it. Whether you realize it or not, you’re placing the onus on them to research and evaluate the solution for you.
Instead, take the trial, speak to a rep, read reviews, and watch videos to better understand the strengths and drawbacks of the solution. Taking a trial or a demo will give you an idea of how easy or difficult it will be for your team to adopt the software.
Following Wu-Tang’s C.R.E.A.M. (cash rules everything around me) mantra, sales leaders naturally prioritize revenue initiatives with current and potential customers over internal items.
It’s likely your email or Slack message about internal process enhancements, while important, will get drowned out in the day-to-day volume -- especially if introduced near quarter’s end.
Instead, create a dedicated time to meet and send an itemized agenda to keep the conversation focused, succinct, and quick to action steps. Face-to-face time ensures your voice is heard and the head of sales has dedicated time to evaluate your ideas.
As a rep or SDR, you’ll likely be the end user of a product, like a dialer, prospecting tool, email automation software, or CRM. So, your evaluation of a tool is often based on the feature set. However, your head of sales is rarely -- if ever -- going to use the product they are evaluating for the team.
Describe how the solution helps with department goals, bottlenecks, or time management. For example, you might love the ability to insert your calendar availabilities for a meeting in an email because it saves three or four additional emails scheduling a demo with a prospect. However, your head of sales is unlikely to buy a tool just because it saves your inbox an email or two.
Relate the calendar scheduling feature to business impact or improvements in efficiency. This might sound like: “In our last sales quarterly, I noticed our demo booking rate going down significantly, I found this solution helped the team at Gong boost their meeting RSVP rates up to 41%, and believe it could be a good solution for us.”
Not every tool or solution will present a clear ROI. In that case, track time saved. More time to sell leads to more realized revenue by the end of the quarter. You might say, “I tracked my time and found I spend four hours a week logging post-call activity and notes in our CRM. I found a great solution that does this automatically and can free up our team with an estimated ~20 more selling hours a week.”
With solution selling, if you haven’t established a champion or decision maker and defined clear steps towards success, there isn’t a real opportunity. The entire purchasing process is left up to the buyer’s whim.
The same goes for selling internally. If you haven’t established clear milestones for success, it’s likely your pitch will land on deaf ears when competing against other priorities.
Ensure you come up with mutually agreed upon milestones, such as:
Recap your discussions as you move between stages to ensure the upfront contract is understood. For example, “ After I showed you a demo and covered your concerns, we agreed to a decision on budget this month, are you still O.K. with that timeline?”
An upfront contract will move the conversation towards a decision and eliminate unforeseen reservations or delays.
While Sales leadership genuinely cares about employee satisfaction, they’re less biased towards action based on emotions alone. Sales is inherently performance based and inherently stressful.
The better you can articulate how a solution might impact performance -- especially revenue -- the stronger your positioning will be received. Before you can win your internal pitch, you need to ensure each of the following can be answered -- with accompanying data:
As Don put it, “If you can’t answer these questions, it’s a hope; a maybe, at best.”
Rattling off dry features/benefits isn’t going to gain the attention of your head of sales; they get these pitches all the time. Instead, make it personal and help your boss better understand what it’s like at the front lines.
Package team goals, challenges, and day-to-day workflows into an entertaining story that shows a need for a solution -- and how it can improve performance.
Finally, don’t forget to cover the ease of implementation. Your head of sales cares about the ramp period of any new tool and is constantly thinking, “Do we have time to implement this and still make our number?”
Take these insights to heart. The difference between being a valued confidant versus a squeaky wheel is the ability to bring solutions to the table, not just reveal and complain about bottlenecks. Happy selling!
Let’s start with the basics: A conversion can be many things, but in this article, we’re defining a conversion as an action taken online that’s valuable to your business. If your business isn’t converting, it won’t be a business for long.
Common conversion points are sometimes obvious, like a purchase. Some are not so obvious, like downloading a piece of content from your website, submitting a form that grows your leads database, or registering for an event you’re hosting, can also be critical to your business’s success. Understanding what your online conversions are, the hierarchy of them, and having your sales and marketing teams aligned on what’s important and what’s not, can be the difference between end of year bonuses and end of your business.
A conversion rate measures the effectiveness of your conversion. To calculate your conversion rate, take the total amount of people who were exposed to your conversion point (e.g., total visits to a landing page) and divide it by how many people completed the action (total conversions). For instance, if 100 people click an ad to visit the sneaker page on fakeshoestore.com and only two people buy the shoes on the page, the shoe store has a 2% conversion rate.
Put simply: Conversion rate = (Number of visits / number of conversions)
A conversion rate directly measures an action you want your audience to take, so there’s a lot riding on making your conversion funnel as uncomplicated as possible. As we mentioned above, your sales and marketing teams need to work in lock step in deciding what constitutes a conversion and how your business will measure it.
In the digital age, your business’s website is one of the most common places to capture conversions. You can sell things on your website, grow leads, or have your audience directly contact you via phone, chat, or contact form. You should measure all of those things, if applicable. Google Analytics makes it easy to track how your website is performing and what your audience is doing when they’re on your site. Adding on supplemental tools like behavioural heat-mapping and SEO monitoring will give you more data on your website.
One of the easiest ways to improve your conversion rate is to deliver good user experience (UX) on your site. Good website UX is no longer a nice to have, it’s a mandatory. When you visit your website on a smartphone and it looks like a mutation, you’re in trouble. As a first step towards improving conversions, audit your entire website and find the weak spots, the purposeless pages, the empty content that offers nothing and leads to nowhere. Amplify the calls to action. Don’t ask the user to do too much. Get your landing page strategy on paper.
A website with good UX bears the following characteristics:
Businesses often use landing pages on their websites to capture key conversions. For instance, if you’re running social ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter selling your latest product or service, you’ll want to send the user to a place where they can interact more with your brand and complete a conversion.
Enter the landing page. The best landing pages are purposeful and easy to use. Common components include strong headlines, clear benefit copy, and a quick form that doesn’t ask too much of the user. Check out these examples of strong landing pages with smart UX. Does your business’s website do these things? Does it have a purpose? It better if you want to increase conversions.
A good conversion rate is dependent on your industry, what you’re offering, your price point and more. There’s not some magic conversion rate you need to achieve to make your business the best business ever. If you’re selling $20,000 helicopter tours, a conversion rate of 1% might be considered great, whereas if you’re selling $1 toothpicks, you’ll need a lot of corn eaters converting to get a good return on investment.
Things like free content downloads or free trials should convert at higher levels since there’s no monetary commitment. Additionally, email signups, especially when you offer some sort of incentive, can see conversion rates as high as 10%.
As you decide what a good conversion rate is for your business, again, you’ll want sales and marketing to be involved in the conversation and speaking the same language. Goal alignment is important. If your sales team is sending prospects one place and your marketing is targeting the same prospects but sending them somewhere else, confusion is inevitable.
At the minimum, hold monthly meetings where sales and marketing can look holistically at the business, what’s working, what’s not, and make adjustments in approach and conversion strategy.
The sales team carries a lot of pressure when it comes to conversions. The sales team lives or dies by conversions. Sales can play a major role in improving overall conversion rate, independent of marketing, by doing the following:
Consumers expect your business to be active and ready to respond to any inquiry, at any time of night. You have to be ready for any crisis. Prepare for the worst. What are the worst possible outcomes for using your product/service? What if your website gets hacked and you lose customer information? If you’re running paid media (search, social, display, et al), what if your ad gets placed with unsavory content?
Have your sales team brainstorm ways that they would respond to these issues and work to assure customers and prospects that your business has control of the issue. Hopefully your worst day won’t be realized, but if is, at least you’ll be ready.
Your sales team is often the first impression. First impressions are everything. Trust is a foundational element to conversions. If your business can’t deliver an experience that builds trust, it will fail. Trust happens when your sales team, your product, and your marketing are all working together to deliver similar messages about your product or service. If one of the trio fails, you’ll all fail. Trust happens at every stage, from first impression to conversion to product/service usage to post-transaction thank you.
Creating a frictionless customer experience involves more than just good website UX. The whole sales process needs to be as seamless as possible. People make hundreds of little decisions every day without thinking. What to wear. What to eat. How to drive home from work. Your product or service should try to mimic these easy, intuitive decisions. Make it a no-brainer.
A good sales team is organized and efficient, delivering a personalized experience for your business’s customers. Every interaction should end positively. It helps when your website is equipped with a strong customer relationship manager (CRM). LinkedIn offers tools like the Sales Navigator that can also assist your sales team in creating a streamlined approach that puts consumers first.
When it comes to improving your conversion rates, your marketing team admittedly has a leg up on the sales team. High-powered inbound marketing platforms like Hubspot and Pardot allow you to quickly capture conversions through easy-to-build landing pages. But with great power comes great accountability. Here’s how your marketing team can earn their keep while supporting both team’s conversion rate objectives:
A/B testing is a way for your content marketing team to test out everything from special offers to landing page design and the optimal length for online forms. Via website coding, developers are able to tell your site when to serve up one version of yourbusiness.com to a certain type of user and a different version of yourbusiness.com to another.
The same goes for offers -- with A/B testing, you can showcase different types of products and sales language to predetermined user personas, adjust your CTA (call-to-action) buttons, and more. This is a great way to squeeze every last conversion from your marketing and worth the time it takes. Don’t believe us? Just ask President Obama.
Long gone are the days when sales people could get away with hiding behind vague product descriptions and technical jargon. The same no-nonsense rules apply to your marketing team, as well as your SEO and SEM strategy. In the nascent days of the Internet, a lot of clever people realized that by stuffing their sites with SEO buzzwords, they could game search engine algorithms, thereby ending up on page 1 of search results.
Thankfully for us all, Google et. al have wised up. Because of changes made to search engine algorithms, websites that are concise and transparent are rewarded in search results, and those that aren’t are penalized. If you haven’t updated your site since the days when keyword stuffing your business URL was en vogue, it’s time for a reboot of your SEO and content strategy. Your sales team will thank you, your marketing team will be able to put their skills to good use, and your conversion rate should see a nice spike, too.
Lagging conversion rates can be caused by any number of things -- many of which we’ve already mentioned in this piece. Whether it’s your content, your UX, or your underlying SEO and site infrastructure, high conversion rates should be seen as a reward for a holistic site strategy rather than something you can game by spending big bucks on paid media or pay-per-click.
If you’ve worked hard to reboot your website strategy but the conversions still aren’t coming, it’s time to consider how your marketing team is approaching your site’s content and microcopy. Are they taking advantage of opportunities to engage and entice through special offers or incentives? Whatever offer you decide on, your site should make it easy and enjoyable for users to take the plunge.
Of course, all of this is moot if your sales team is positioning your brand one way, and your marketing is messaging in the opposite direction. Finding ways to bring both sides together will make your team -- and your business -- stronger in the long run.
Once you get both teams in the same room, get them talking about the value propositions they want to make both online and off. Once your teams reach an agreement on how they’re going to prioritize and evangelize your company’s key value props, make sure that they’re using consistent language across all mediums and platforms -- whether that’s on in a print ad, on LinkedIn, or on your homepage.
There are probably as many ideas out there about how customers find you as there are people on your payroll. While not all conversions take place online, many businesses find it helpful to consult their site analytics to assess users’ conversion funnel. Data may be the only way you'll begin to achieve common ground when it comes to your buyers’ journey. So use it.
Case studies are business’s way of stepping back after a job and seeing what worked and why. Case studies are also a great way for both teams to have a say in shaping the outcome of work. Imagine being a part of a huge company success, but then having no say in how that success is portrayed to the outside world. That stings a bit, right?
When doing case studies, make sure that you treat your sales and marketing teams as equal stakeholders in the process. Be sure to also involve the client that’s being featured as they’ll need to sign off on the final version if you use their real name (and you should always use real names, if possible).
For businesses who advertise on LinkedIn, setting up conversion tracking is an absolute must. But after the set-up, being able to read the data that comes in will be crucial to making LinkedIn ads work towards improving your overall conversion rate within the LinkedIn ads platform.
Before you start blindly changing your ads, take a look at your LinkedIn Analytics. Pull relevant reporting from within the platform, or ask a more qualified counterpart to do it for you. Without knowing how your ads are performing, you won’t be able to correctly identify weak links or add emphasis to the ads that are working.
Once you’ve confirmed that your conversion tracking has been set up appropriately, there are lots of ways to optimize your conversions from within the LinkedIn ads platform. Specifically, our bid auto-optimization feature bases future Sponsored Content bids on past ad performance without you lifting a finger.
With the help of behavioral learning, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is able to understand the profile of your most-likely-to-convert audience, and then automatically adjust your bids to more efficiently reach similar LinkedIn members, while dropping bids for members who have been less engaged with your ad campaigns. Over time, you should experience a lower overall CPA (cost-per-acquisition) and a higher conversion rate.
Additionally, advertisers in our platform have the ability to adjust their attribution model, compare conversion rates of all campaigns, and A/B test top performing ads in order to produce the best possible return on their paid advertising.
While conversion rates can improve overnight, in most cases, it takes time and dedication to yield results. Don’t fall victim to short-term-ism by abandoning important conversion points because you’re not getting the results you want. A good, long-term conversion rate strategy is constantly evolving. Look for opportunities to improve each month. Have your sales and marketing teams continuously talking and reporting on what works and what doesn’t. If you stay the course and your sales and marketing teams are aligned on overarching business goals, your conversion rate will improve.
For the ultimate resource on how to align your sales and marketing efforts for a seamless customer experience, download The Art of Winning eBook.
When it comes to generating revenue for an organization, marketers and salespeople alike understand how difficult it can be to find the right leads that convert. In fact, B2B organizations consistently list quality leads as their top challenge. Even still, lead generation efforts are the foundation for generating revenue and growing an organization.
However, according to one study, a staggering 80 percent of B2B marketers report their lead generation efforts as only, “slightly or somewhat effective.” This begs the question, why is it so difficult to drive the right leads down the funnel? The answer lies in how complex the modern B2B sales cycle can be.
From start to finish, marketers now need to do more to capture prospect attention, nurture them down the funnel, and arm sales with the prospect insights needed to effectively drive home sales.
(Source.)
Given the complex nature of B2B lead generation, it goes without saying that there are plenty of stumbling blocks that can hinder lead gen efforts. With this in mind, we’re diving into the common pain points marketers experience when filling the funnel while offering solutions that lead to better marketing results.
Take a look:
Marketing and sales both rely on lead generation to consistently drive revenue. However, many organizations still view the process as an abstract, loosely-defined marketing concept. As a result, marketing and sales teams often conduct their efforts without a consistent, data-driven strategy guiding their efforts. What’s more, many marketers still believe common lead gen myths that can negatively impact business results.
To address this common pitfall, marketing and sales teams both need to align their efforts toward identifying a cohesive strategy they can use to ensure quality leads enter the funnel, are effectively nurtured, and have a high propensity for conversion by the time the sales team picks up the phone.
With that said, successful B2B lead generation starts with a clear and well-defined strategy. Before any efforts can be effectively implemented across marketing channels, marketers need to know their target audience, the content relevant to their needs, and qualification factors.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: marketers who focus their efforts on generating as many leads as possible simply won’t drive the results they’re after. Instead, it’s crucial that the quality of leads be emphasized more than the number of leads in the funnel. It may sound counterintuitive… smaller amounts of leads result in smaller amounts of sales right?
Wrong. Here’s why:
If marketers and sales teams spend their time reaching, engaging, nurturing, and qualifying leads that have no intention of actually converting, all that time, effort, and money has been misplaced. In fact, 79 percent of all leads generated never result in a conversion. While this statistic may surprise you, the root cause shouldn’t. Just because a lead is in the pipeline doesn’t necessarily mean it belongs in there.
Poor leads result in poor conversion rates, plain and simple. The higher the quality of the leads in the funnel, the higher the likelihood that those leads will be effectively nurtured in the middle of the funnel and converted at the bottom of the funnel. Knowing this, it’s crucial that marketers focus on defining what constitutes quality leads within their organization. This can be done in a number of ways, but at a high-level, consider the following best practices to help focus on quality vs. quantity:
Once marketers focus on bringing quality leads in first, they’ll be in a better position to drive the kind of revenue their organization is looking for. Additionally, the more streamlined the process of determining lead quality, the faster quality leads will be in added to the pipeline—leading to more sales.
Today’s B2B prospects are research-driven and digitally savvy. Considering the fact that 90 percent of all B2B businesses use some form of content marketing, prospects no longer have to wait until a conversation with sales to get their questions answered. Instead, prospects rely on the content organizations put out there to help them navigate the sales cycle and reach an informed buying decision.
In fact, according to a Havas Group study, 84 percent of people expect a brand to publish content that entertains, tells stories, provides solutions, and creates experiences and events.
(Source.)
It’s clear the role of content marketing in the B2B space has never been more important. Yet, many marketers are still relying on traditional content ideation and implementation—leaving content gaps across the buyer’s journey. These content gaps are areas along the sales cycle that don’t provide the kinds of content a prospect is looking for, and as a result, prospects will turn elsewhere for the answers to their questions.
To address these content gaps, marketers need to understand the unique questions their prospects are asking and tailor their content marketing to answer those questions at each level of the sales funnel. To help, consider using the following strategies to help identify where your content gaps lie, and how you can create the content to fill them:
For marketers looking to understand where their content marketing efforts can be improved, interactive content can be an effective tool. By placing responsive interactions in existing and new content, marketers can understand the topics, trends, and pain points their target audiences are most interested in. Additionally, interactive content makes it easy to add qualifying questions that help accelerate qualification.
In addition to identifying content gaps, marketers need to ensure that the content they leverage in their marketing efforts aligns to the buyer’s journey marketers are providing for their prospects. Why? Because if prospects can’t find the content that relates to their unique needs and questions, they’re going to find a competitor whose content can.
To prevent losing leads at the various stages of the sales cycle while increasing the effectiveness of content engagement, marketers need to ensure they match content with sales funnel stages.
For example, there may be a need to develop two different content assets that aim to answer the same question, “Why Choose Brand 1?” Leads at the top of the funnel aren’t ready for an in-depth look at all the specifics that Brand 1 brings to the table. Conversely, a prospect toward the bottom of the funnel already understands the high-level offerings, capabilities, benefits, etc. and wants content that dives into the specifics of how Brand 1 can help solve that prospect’s needs and pain points for the organization.
The last lead generation stumbling block we’ll mention is arguably one of the most common: infrequent and inconsistent marketing optimization. Simply put, the B2B marketing landscape is constantly changing. Consumer demands shift, new technologies and capabilities emerge…the list goes on. For B2B businesses looking to get the most from their efforts, they have to stay ahead of these changes.
In order to keep lead generation efforts consistent and effective, marketers need to optimize their efforts based on data to address the constant changes impacting the success of their marketing. Think about it this way: would your organization generate more or less revenue if you still used the same strategies that were popular 10 years ago? In all likelihood, you’d be generating much less. As the B2B landscape continues to evolve, lead generation efforts need to as well.
Across the B2B space, lead generation remains a critical component for driving revenue. The marketers that understand the common obstacles in their way – and how to avoid them – will bring the right leads to conversion, faster. For those that can’t…time, money, and effort will continue to be misplaced on the wrong prospects that lead to lackluster results.
To learn more about various ways to tackle lead generation stumbling blocks and get the most out of your marketing, check out our Use Cases pages. We highlight some creative and effective strategies that lead to better marketing across the sales cycle.
It’s human nature to use past experiences to drive future decisions. This is how we grow and thrive in our lives. The same tactic can be used to develop a strong email marketing strategy.
A good email strategy is the perfect blend of effective subject lines, engaging content and images, no over-selling or spamming customers, and making sure you build around what works for you.
There are a multitude of email metrics you should track; these will help you optimize your emails effectively – not to mention measure whether your emails are helping you achieve your goals. Use the results of past emails to drive your email marketing strategy moving forward.
Before sending your next email, pause for a few minutes and ask yourself: What is the goal of my email marketing strategy? Is it to grow my subscriber database? Generate more leads? To convert more existing leads into customers?
Whatever you decide your goal is (and you can have more than one), the next thing you need to do is figure out which metrics to track in order to determine how you’re progressing toward that goal, and what you can do differently to get to your goal faster
Let’s take a look at the metrics you should pay attention to, and how you can tie those metrics to building out your email marketing strategy.
Email open rate is the number of people who have opened your email, which is counted after someone views your email and waits for the images to load before closing it. Open rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent, excluding the number of bounces.
How to use open rate to guide your email strategy:
There is a very quick window of opportunity when it comes to readers opening your emails. They see it in their inbox, and depending on the “from name” or subject line, they decide whether to open or ignore. Having a good open rate can mean you’re doing well with brand awareness because readers are recognizing you in their inbox.
A subject line should be a summary of what your email contains, thus the more relevant it is to the reader the more likely it is to help in boosting your email open rates. Other ways you can make subject lines more effective are to add personalization, offer the customer a discount, invite them to make a purchase, or you could offer free downloadable content.
See which subject lines and “from name” have performed well in the past, and use those to guide new, fresh ideas when creating emails.
A customer has opened your email, read your content and scrolled to the bottom to your “call-to-action,” or CTA, – did they click?
Your click-through rate (CTR) tracks which links were clicked, but also who clicked on the link and when. This is the percentage of clicks based on the number of contacts who actually opened the email. The average across industries for click-through rate is around 7%.
A high click-through rate means the content in your email resonates with your audience. A low click-through rate doesn’t necessarily mean your campaign isn’t working, but minor adjustments are needed.
How to use click-through rate to guide your email strategy:
Your click-through rate will give you a good idea about how many people are actually taking time to go through your content and clicking on links in the email. If your CTR is low, you may need to adjust your messaging. Use A/B testing to find out what messaging makes your readers want to click the links in your email.
After a reader has clicked through your email, ideally the next goal is to get them to convert – in other words, to follow through on the action your email has asked them to do. For example, if your email is giving your readers to download a free eBook, anyone who downloads that eBook is considered to be a ‘conversion’.
Because your definition of a conversion is directly tied to the call-to-action in your email, and your call-to-action should be directly tied to the overall goal of your email marketing, conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for determining the extent to which you’re achieving your goals.
How to use conversion rate to guide your email strategy:
Conversion rates vary wildly depending on your industry, price point, and existing customer engagement. If your goal is to make more sales or bring in more revenue, this is the metric for you. You can also use it to track the number of recipients who complete other actions – like joining your Facebook group or signing up for a free webinar.
To maximize your conversion rate, deliver the best possible email. Make it inviting. Personalize it. Include something valuable. Show recipients why being part of your community (and buying your product) is a great idea that’s going to make their life easier.
There are many factors which can affect your unsubscribe rate. Unsubscribe rates can be high when you don’t have a strong welcome series, if your “from” name isn’t recognizable, if you use misleading subject lines, if you don’t email frequently enough, or if you email irrelevant content too frequently.
Don’t take it personally when a customer unsubscribes from your mailing list. All you can do is think about what went wrong and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
How to use unsubscribe rate to guide your email strategy:
If your contacts are unsubscribing, then they are no longer a part of your email marketing strategy, so your main goal here is to keep that number as low as possible.
Your unsubscribe rate will give you great insight into how people are actually interested in reading your content and engaging with you, over those who find your content irrelevant.
Chances are you’ve been on both sides of the unsubscribe before. Don’t sweat it. If someone is bent on unsubscribing, they will. Just make sure to provide consistent value to readers and let them know the kind of content they will be receiving from you before they sign up. This makes it easy for people to know what they’re likely to receive, before giving up their information.
After you’ve sent your email, the reporting for your email might show that some of your email addresses bounced. Bounces are contacts that didn’t receive your email for a variety of reasons.
How to use bounce rate to guide your email strategy:
In order to keep your lists clean and full of quality contacts, it’s important to know why an email address bounced, how to manage the bounces, and when to remove a contact from your list.
You can check to see if the email addresses are correct and even get in touch with the contact to see if they have a new email address.
Use the Did Not Open and Bounce reports to find email addresses that consistently do not engage with your campaigns. Clearing up your email list gives you space to add more leads to your database.
You need to know which metrics will help you create a perfect email marketing strategy. These aren’t the only indicators of optimal email performance, but they’re a good start. Remember to constantly A/B test different emails with different segments to see what works and what doesn’t.
Learning from these metrics can further help you define your goals and answer some really important questions – “Are customers opening my emails, are they clicking, and do they care at all?” Knowing what works and what doesn’t help you save time, effort, and money, so get excited about email metrics to guide your way to successful email marketing.
I love bullet points:
Have you ever gone through a pamphlet or a sales page and felt an insistent need to buy everything the moment you get to the bullet points?
Today I’m going to share 5 formulas designed to help you craft bullet points that compelling and that enticing. And I promise they’ll all be way better than:
“You’ll learn the number one way to XYZ”
I mean, that’s so boring it makes me want to kill myself with a thousand paper cuts. Your bullet points should make people want to buy on the damn spot – before you even reveal your offer.
Before we get going, make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row. You need to:
So that’s your pre-work. Go do that now. Next, it’s time for those psychology-backed bulletproof formulas:
For example: “The one thing you can do in 5 minutes to improve your chance of being the winning candidate by 50%.”
You can also play with the structure of this one: “The one thing that will double your chances of being chosen as a winning candidate, best part, it takes less than 10 minutes to implement.”
Same formula, different order.
For example:
“When to follow up with the HR manager to ensure you leave a lasting impression, and how not following this advice can make you seem needy and desperate.”
Or:
“The exact timeline to follow when sending your CV, to make sure you get shortlisted for your green time, and how not doing this can destroy your chances of ever finding a job.”
For example:
“Why most top grade CV’s get ignored by HR managers and why knowing this will drastically improve your chances of being selected.”
Again, you can take the principle and tweak the structure:
“How do HR managers shortlist winning CV’s? Why not knowing this could mean yours being ignored, no matter how great your credentials are.”
The way you put these bullets together gets people to sit up, pay attention, open up their wallets and beg you to take their money. The dream, right?
For example:
“The three trick phrases most interviewers use to weed out unsuitable candidates and how you can trick them into choosing you.”
Or:
“The signs to look for in the first five minutes of an interview that will tell you how to win over any interviewer.”
People love insider knowledge. People love to know that they’re reading the other person. People love to feel like they have some strange telepathic power. When you tell them that there are certain signs that they can use, oh my God, you have them.
For example:
“The one thing that’s keeping you stuck in your miserable job while millions use this exact tactic to land dream jobs every single day.”
Or:
“The one sentence in your CV that’s making people ignore it, while others with less experience and credentials get selected over and over again.”
To recap, by using these formulas you can write unbelievable bullet points on your sales page and beyond. The kind of bullet points that make your buyers stop scrolling and start drooling, whether they want to or not.
If you want to learn more about how you can use the power of persuasion psychology to fascinate your leads and turn them into paying clients and raving fan, go download your free copy of “30 Days of Persuasion: Hook Hearts With Words Alone, Fascinate More People and Sell a Zillion More”. Get it here: 30 Days of Persuasion free download
