Rnordman

Every so often you stumble across a report that contains so much insight that it’s futile to try to digest it all in one sitting. The latest annual Internet Trends Report from Mary Meeker, venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, is one of those, and it’s a must-read for those of us in digital marketing.

Mary Meeker

I spent a chunk of time digesting some of it this weekend, and I know I’ll be spending more time over the coming days. It’s a triumph of substance over style.

Key early themes for me (from the first third of the deck):

Decline of desktop: The number of desktop PCs shipped continues to decline, while mobile is accelerating. Tablets, meanwhile, have significant growth ahead and are showing exponential growth – currently shipping more units than PCs ever did. Meanwhile on the paid side, mobile shows significant room for continued growth while print ads remain “significantly over-indexed”.

Digital communications continues to shift: Change remains the constant. “Over the top” messaging systems (WhatsApp, WeChat, Shapchat, etc.) have acquired more than one billion users in under five years. Visual social networks are accelerating. “Invisible apps” such as Foursquare Swarm and Runkeeper Breeze – which only open when you know they “explicitly have something to say to you” are growing. The trend is away from platforms like Facebook, which have become mass communication vehicles, and towards smaller 1:1 interactions.

Industry disruption continues: Local industries (accommodation, food delivery, transport) are being disrupted by startups (Airbnb, Amazon Fresh, GrubHub, Uber). Bitcoin is disrupting the very meaning of a local currency. How can technology disrupt your sector?

Hat tip to Mitch Joel for drawing my eye to this.

HR Directors love our sales candidate assessments because when they finally learn to select the right salespeople, their job becomes easier and they become heroes!

Promises of great success would lead you to believe that this is not a difficult sale, but it doesn't always go that smoothly.  

Today, there are two classes of HR Directors working at companies.  The first class is made up of great ones who have a seat at the executive table, understand the business issues that need to be solved, and strategize with the leadership team to integrate appropriate and effective solutions to help the company grow.  HR Directors in the second class are administrators of recruiting, compensation and benefits and they justify their existence by getting in the way, defending their turf, taking tactical rather than strategic approaches and staying with what they are familiar.   

Once in a while, an HR Director from the second class knows so much more than me about assessments that they take it upon themselves to make sure I know how smart they are.  They make sure that I'm aware of the letters that appear after their names, their experience with assessments, they dig their heels in with anti-assessment or anti-OMG (Objective Management Group) biases, and then they ask all of the wrong questions.  When HR Directors are more interested in how the assessment works and how it could be so accurate than problem solving and learning whether or not it will help them select great salespeople for their company, it's a pretty good clue that we are heading up the creek instead of getting down to their challenges.  Sometimes, these HR Directors need to take OMG's Sales Candidate Assessment themselves in an attempt to somehow disprove its accuracy and predictive ability.

Recently, I had one of those extremely productive, uplifting conversations.  This particular class 2 HR Director wanted to take our assessment as well as the one her company was currently using.  The other assessment was a personality test disguised as a sales assessment.  Even more ironic, it was the assessment that wasn't working, as only 11% of the salespeople who were selected with it were hitting their numbers and 40% had failed and turned over.

I had to laugh when I was told that our assessment was "correct in not recommending" her for the sales position at her company, but "the other assessment was a more accurate description" of her.

Of course it more accurately described her - it's a personality assessment, not a sales assessment, so it described what she is like and she was able to relate to the description of herself.

OMG's Sales Candidate Assessment does not describe a personality or a person or a type.  It answers business questions that are far more important, like:

Will this candidate succeed in this particular sales position, selling these particular products or services, into this particular market, calling on this particular decision-maker, in this size company, against this kind of competition, at these price points, in a sales cycle of this length, with this level of difficulty and resistance, these challenges, and your expectations?

Which information is more useful when determining which candidates to interview - the kind of personality they have, or whether they will succeed in the role?

When HR Directors don't understand business and the challenges of selling, they can much more easily relate to a known (albeit useless) personality assessment for the purpose of pre-employment testing.  This is why it is so important for CEO's and sales VP's to work with HR and help them understand why the sales role is so completely different than every other role in the company.  Help them understand that while the information from personality assessments is nice to have, the accurate, predictive findings of a reliable sales-specific assessment like OMG's is a must have to get sales selection right.

I'll be hosting a free webinar this Thursday, June 5, 2014, at 11 AM Eastern time.  I will discuss the Magic of the OMG Sales Candidate Assessment.  Register here. 

You’ve already been given expert advice for getting started on social media.

Now it’s time to track the social media strategy you’ve implemented.

With these four reasons listed below, the question of “Why should I bother tracking social media?” will be answered.

1. To see what works and what doesn’t

There’s no point of sharing content across social networks if you don’t know what type of engagement you’re getting back.

By tracking key social media metrics — including likes, comments, retweets, shares, repins and +1s — you can see what’s working with your audience, what’s not, and how you can tweak your strategy to improve your results.

You can also gain valuable insights including:

• The best time to post
• The right frequency to post
• The type of content that works best (photos, links, videos, etc.)

In addition to keeping your eye on the number of interactions your content is receiving from fans and followers, you can also take advantage of the native reporting tools like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics.

Tip: With MarketMeSuite’s ‘Shorty’ feature, you can shorten links before sending or scheduling out a post and see how many people have clicked the link once it has been posted.

2. To know what networks you should focus on

Having a social media plan across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest increases your reach and makes your business that much more accessible through social. But sometimes it’s in your best interest to only focus on two or three social networks.

Maybe your target audience isn’t on Google+ or LinkedIn — that’s okay.

Tracking your results on social media makes it easier to identify your high value networks and helps you prioritize your time and resources on social media.

Tip: Facebook recently launched Audience Insights, a new tool that extends beyond their Page Insights allowing you access to details of your target audience such as: Purchase Behavior, Geography, Demographics, or Facebook Activity.

3. To see where leads/customers come from

Interacting with people across social is important for building relationships and improving communication, but part of the reason you’re on social in the first place is to attract and convert fans and followers into customers.

Going off my last reason, if you notice that one network is bringing in most of your leads and customers, you can do two things:

• Put more of your marketing efforts to that one network and convert, convert, convert.

• Take what has been working on that one network and use that same strategy toward other networks to see if you can get the same results.

Once you start coming across a number of leads on networks such as Facebook or Twitter, you’re going to need a place to keep track of them.

Tip: With MarketMeSuite’s Lead Inbox, you can mark a social post as a lead, as well as mark how high quality that lead is. Once you’ve marked a lead and its importance, it will then be categorized by network.

4. To set, meet, and exceed your goals

Getting results is the name of the game with any form of marketing effort. But if you’re not taking the time to track your results, it’s impossible to set realistic goals for your social media marketing.

When you start to track your results on social media, you’ll be able to set goals to work toward. Your goal could be related to the number of interactions you hope to generate, or the number of fans you hope to attract.

For example,

• Number of Likes on Facebook
• Followers on Twitter
• Comments on Instagram Photos

But you can also begin to set business goals like,

• Number of new customers from Twitter
• Total sales from Pinterest
• Number of referrals from Facebook

Set the bar high with your social media plan. The only way you’re going to see how your strategy benefits, is by setting goals and keeping track of how those goals are being met.

Stop lacking in tracking

There is countless ways to track your results on social media.

Whether you go through individual network insights or use analytic reports that MarketMeSuite can provide to you through each unique social profile, tracking your results is a must.

Have you started tracking your social media efforts? What’s one important element of social that you keep track of the most for your business? Let me know in the comments below!

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday will roll out a plan to cut earth-warming pollution from power plants by 30 per cent by 2030, setting in motion one of the most significant actions to address global warming in U.S. history.

The rule, which is expected to be final next year, will set the first national limits on carbon dioxide, the chief gas linked to global warming from the nation’s power plants. They are the largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., accounting for about a third of the annual emissions that make the U.S. the second largest contributor to global warming on the planet.

The regulation is a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s plans to reduce the pollution linked to global warming, a step that the administration hopes will get other countries to act when negotiations on a new international treaty resume next year.

Despite concluding in 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger human and welfare, a finding that triggered their regulation under the 1970 Clean Air Act, it has taken years for the administration to take on the nation’s fleet of power plants. In December 2010, the Obama administration announced a “modest pace” for setting greenhouse gas standards for power plants, setting a May 2012 deadline.

Obama put them on the fast track last summer when he announced his climate action plan and a renewed commitment to climate change after the issue went dormant during his re-election campaign.

“The purpose of this rule is to really close the loophole on carbon pollution, reduce emissions as we’ve done with lead, arsenic and mercury and improve the health of the American people and unleash a new economic opportunity,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defence Council, which has drafted a plan that informed the EPA proposal.

Yet the rule carries significant political and legal risks, by further diminishing coal’s role in producing U.S. electricity and offering options for pollution reductions far afield from the power plant, such as increased efficiency. Once the dominant source of energy in the U.S., coal now supplies just under 40 per cent of the nation’s electricity, as it has been replaced by booming supplies of natural gas and renewable sources such as wind and solar.

“Today’s proposal from the EPA could singlehandedly eliminate this competitive advantage by removing reliable and abundant sources of energy from our nation’s energy mix,” Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said in a statement issued Sunday.

The White House said Obama called a group of Democrats from both the House and Senate on Sunday to thank them for their support in advance of the rule’s official release, which is expected to be rigorously attacked by Republicans and make Democrats up for re-election in energy-producing states nervous.

Environmental Protection Agency data shows that the nation’s power plants have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 13 per cent since 2005, or about halfway to the goal the administration will set Monday. But with coal-fired power plants already beleaguered by cheap natural gas prices and other environmental regulations, experts on Sunday said getting there won’t be easy. The EPA is expected to offer a range of options to states to meet targets that will based on where they get their electricity and how much carbon dioxide they emit in the process.

The options include making power plants more efficient, reducing the frequency at which coal-fired power plants supply power to the grid, and investing in more renewable, low-carbon sources of energy. In addition, states could enhance programs aimed at reducing demand by making households and businesses more energy-efficient.

Obama has already tackled the emissions from the nation’s cars and trucks, announcing rules to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by doubling fuel economy. That standard will reduce carbon dioxide by more than 2 billion tons over the life of vehicles made in model years 2012-25. The power plant proposal will prevent about 430 million tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere, based on the 30 per cent figure and what power plants have already reduced since 2005.

The EPA refused to confirm the details of the proposal Sunday. People familiar with the proposal shared the details on condition of anonymity, since they have not been officially released.

Beinecke spoke Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” before details of the proposal became public.

The proposal was first reported Sunday by The Wall Street Journal.

The post What is known so far about Obama’s climate plan appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Despite the recent hype that was kicked off by Tech Crunch, Google+ is still alive and kicking.

It’s not going anywhere and I’m glad.

Why?

It’s a great platform and it’s turning out to be much easier to generate an engaged following than on other networks.

And from a user perspective, it’s a refreshing environment in comparison to the likes of Facebook.

But, what does it mean for brands?

A study by Forrester Research found that users interacted with brands posts, almost as much as on Facebook.

That begs the question, what tools can help you get more out of Google+? Let’s take a look…

Write more engaging posts with the Post Editor for Google+

One of the things that I love about Google+ is the post formatting options.

This has always been a bit tricky, but, that isn’t the case with Post Editor.

It adds the ability to format your posts and use bold, italics and strikethrough’s right from within Google+. There is also an option to add symbols.

The only downside is that this is a Google Chrome extension.

Try using bold headings and sub headings in italic text and see what that does to your posts – you might find you get more engagement.

Price: free

Find the right time to publish your posts with Timing+

Social media statistics are published all the time and most are great.

The one’s that get me though, are the ones that tell people when to publish content.

They’re always using someone else’s data, but, what’s the point when it’s not your data?

There isn’t really, that’s why you need to utilize your own data.

That leads me on to my next tool, Timing+.

It’s incredibly easy to use – just sign in to G+ and it will analyse your last 100 posts to give you an idea of the best time to publish.

There will definitely be other factors at work (for example, if you are tagging other influential users), but it can work well as a bench line.

Price: free

Find relevant people to follow with CircleCount

CircleCount is a free tool that helps you make sense of Google+.

You can use the tool to track your followers, which will give you some indication to how well you’re doing, although that doesn’t tell you how engaged your followers are.

Where this comes in handy is finding relevant users to engage with.

You can break users down into topical areas (amongst other filtering options) and get additional information on them.

You’ll also find links to other social profiles, e.g. Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Price: free

Get valuable insights and detailed reporting with Steady Demand Pro

Steady Demand have been offering Google+ services for a while now, but this tool is something that will definitely be a game changer for marketers using G+.

Steady Demand Pro gives you access to incredible insights that just aren’t found in other tools, yet.

Not only that but you can track your competitors and even get guidance on what you should do next to improve your results.

Price: $12/month+

Discover helpful user statistics with All my +

If you’re looking for detailed data on a Google+ user, All my + is a great option.

The depth of the information that this pulls in is crazy, you can see things like someone’s posting behaviour per weekday or per hour.

You can even find out which people are actively re-sharing content from particular people.

You also have the option to download the raw data.

Price: free

Test to make sure Google Authorship is setup correctly

If you’re publishing content, you can also benefit from setting up authorship on your website.

This means that on some occasions your photo (with links to your G+ account) will be included in search engine results.

In some industries this has been known to increase click through rates and when your authority increases, people will begin to recognise you.

Google Webmaster Tools has a testing tool which you can use to check whether your content has authorship setup.

This post also has some more details on how to get Google Authorship setup.

Schedule your G+ posts with Do Share

One of the issues with Google+ is that you cannot manage a personal profile from any of the regular social media management platforms (e.g. Hootsuite or Buffer).

You can manage brand pages though.

Do Share is one of the only tools (currently), which allows you to schedule Google+ posts on personal profiles.

The only downside is that, because Do Share is a Google Chrome extension, you need to have your browser open for this to work.

Price: free

Manage your circles better with Circloscope

Google+ allows you to manage your circles and there is a lot you can do.

That being said, if you want to be able to filter your circles and manage them easier, Circloscope works great.

The magic happens with the action section.

You can add users to a circle, move to a circle, remove from a circle or remove from all circles at the click of a button.

You also get the option to export your data.

Price: free (premium account available)

Identify key influencers with NOD3x

NOD3x is a tool that has so much potential.

If you want to get into a deeper level of analysis on Google+ and start data mining – you will love this.

Some of the insights you can get include:

• Influencers
• Sentiment analysis
• Relationship graph
• And so much more

NOD3x isn’t limited to Google+; you can also pull in data from YouTube and Facebook too.

Klout, Peerindex and Kred scores are also pulled in.

The level of depth in this tool is incredible; this #TNTBootcamp video from Ronnie Bincer and Christine DeGraff has a great explanation of how you can use this tool with Lee Smallwood from NOD3x:

Price: free

Over to you

Which tools are you using right now that are giving you great results on Google+?

I’d love to hear more in the comments below.

Your business was just featured in the media – awesome! Great PR can help spread the word about your company, boost credibility and ultimately bring more business through your doors.

But you’re not done. A favorable media placement can be extended in a variety of ways, both online and offline. But, you need to act quickly before it becomes old news. Here are five ways to get max value out of your press coverage:

1. Get social. Share the media placement with your social media networks. Timeliness is key, so do this as soon as possible. With any luck, you’ll get a few virtual pats on the back from your followers.

2. Update your website. Highlight your proudest PR hits on your site’s home page. It can be something as simple as just the media outlet’s logo linked to the story (for example, “As Featured In XYZ Magazine”). Even if you already have a separate press section on your site, not everyone will necessarily visit that page. You want your latest achievement to be front and center.

3. Send an email. Launch a special email with a link to the media placement to customers, vendors and any other groups you think might be interested in the good news. Use this as an opportunity to thank them for their support, too. If it’s an online placement that has social media sharing tools and/or comments enabled, encourage them to share with their social networks and chime in on the conversation.

4. Promote on the floor. If your media placement is an article or blog post, get a picture frame for it and show it off on the wall of your store or lobby. Or, if you’ve got several clips under your belt, consider putting printouts in a nice portfolio book and leave it out in your waiting or reception room table. Wouldn’t you rather customers flip through that versus an outdated copy of US Weekly?

5. Arm your sales staff. If you have a sales team, have them bring color copies of the media placement as part of their leave-behind packets in meetings with prospects, at trade shows, etc. (make sure you have reprint permission first). They’ll appreciate having their sales pitch endorsed and validated by a credible media source.

You work hard to get favorable coverage in the media; get the most out of it with these five ideas!

The greeter at the door greets you. The barista hands you your drink. The host shows you to your table. The cashier takes your money. The usher takes your ticket and tells you where to go.

Each of these interactions holds the promise of a moment of human connection, a glimpse of community and mutual support. But too frequently, unfortunately, that promise goes unfulfilled.

When it comes to satisfying your service needs, sometimes all you want is the impersonal simplicity of the ATM machine or the airline kiosk. But there are times when you really want something more.

An Eye for an “I”

Think of how it feels when someone is looking at you to gauge your reaction, checking to see what you need, and smiling or not, as the circumstances warrant. Think of what they’re communicating: I see you. I’m glad you’re here. I value your presence. I’m eager to help. Thank you so much. You’re very welcome.

Now think of what this highly engaged service person might actually be feeling: I’m not just “labor” or a pair of hands. I take care of you. I provide a useful service. I matter in your day. You appreciate me!

And then think of how it feels — to both parties — when that connection is missed.

The Eyes Have It

Eye contact is so remarkably evocative that, as described in Psst. Look Over Here. in the May, 16 2014 New York Times, Cornell University researchers found that people are more likely to buy the brand of cereal whose box features a character looking straight out at them.

The proverbial idea that the eyes are the windows to the soul rings true. Neuroscience has shown that eye movement during eye contact lets us process another person’s intentions and feelings more accurately.

The literature of both child development and marriage counseling also makes clear the importance of eye contact, as it connotes hearing as well as seeing. Making eye contact is often the first step in acknowledgement and acceptance of another person.

Seeing Eye to “I”

Without eye contact, a welcome is less warm and the goodwill of an interaction is less good. How many people just walk away, thinking the counterperson doesn’t care? Or feel diminished and shut out when the desk agent fiddles with papers or the keyboard and never seems to notice the live customer standing just two feet away?

So don’t miss out on such a crucial part of the service relationship — or any face-to-face relationship. Pay attention. Look. See. Make “I” contact.

While this post was written for the marketing agency pro, most of its recommendations are good for any time-strapped marketer.

As an agency-side marketer, chances are that you spend far more time whipping up assets and planning campaigns for your clients than you do creating anything for your own company.

But you, of all people, know how important it is to get (and keep) good prospects in the pipeline. We’ve collected a few ways you can leverage a channel or a technology to boost your own marketing efforts without taking too much time away from your clients.

Socialize strategically

Social can be a black hole, so you need to be very selective. Pick out the two or three social channels that will give you circulation and presence with your current and potential clients. Don’t get distracted by the shiniest new thing – unless your clients and potential clients are there in strength. You’re far better off doing a thorough job in two channels than having a thin presence in five.

LinkedIn. VentureBeat recently identified LinkedIn as the best place for lead intelligence. It’s a good place for agencies; there are plenty of groups and forums with very targeted interests, which are frequented by both professionals and ordinary buyers looking for solutions. You can probably find at least one group that’s aligned with your agency’s strengths, which means your proven expertise could make you a respected contributor. Commenting on others’ posts on LinkedIn can offer good exposure with a long shelf life, and is less work than starting your own threads. Respond substantively and thoughtfully to the topic or issue; don’t sell yourself or your agency, and don’t offer links. You’re looking to demonstrate credibility, which will organically drive respect and interest over time. If you’re there, people can (and will) find you when they decide it’s time to turn to you for help solving a problem.

Celebrate your clients’ wins, even if their victories aren’t connected to one of your campaigns. If and when it’s appropriate, take out your phone, snap a picture, and post in social media with a shout-out to your client. It’s quick, it’s easy, and if your client is active in social media, they will appreciate it.

Use content marketing

Create it. You’re going to require fresh content from time to time; you need it for your own marketing, and you need it to set an example for your clients as well as keeping your own growth going. Look for tools that make it easy, such as Infogr.am or Piktochart to create infographics that are easy to share.

Look for assets that scale: that you can create once and use in multiple formats, or that scale as inbound marketing assets that work for you 24/7. Try making a fun quiz and post it on your website; these have a long lifespan and are quite shareable. There are companies that make it very easy, quick, and affordable with templates.

Consider recording a short webinar that offers your specialized expertise on topics your clients care about. Offer this webinar on-demand on your website, and socialize the offer to gain a little traffic. Bite-size webinars don’t take a lot of time to create, and prospects find them digestible. Turn the slides into an infographic, and/or a blog post.

Don’t write or research anything unless you can use your efforts in at least three ways (e.g. in a paper, a blog post, and a proposal).

Curate it. Collect snippets of excellent pieces of information (stats, graphics, quotes, tips, best practices, survey results) from credible and vendor-agnostic sources, then add your own insightful commentary. Don’t publish an entire article (that would be duplicate content, an SEO worst practice) but use a representative bit of the information, acknowledge the original source, and link to it. (By the way, if you find a curate-able bit of content on an aggregation site, look for the link to the original source material and then link to the original; don’t link to the aggregator.)

You can make your curated piece a blog post or infographic, and also put it into a PowerPoint which you can turn into a PowerPoint movie file. Post it on your website, send it out in an email campaign, and post it on SlideShare. This will connect your agency to relevant content and position you as a source for credible, useful information. SlideShare, by the way, is among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world and is a popular site for searchers, so your efforts here (creation or curation) can pay off handsomely.

Save time through automation; even small campaigns can yield big results

The beauty of marketing automation is that it can let you get more done, with less effort, while also increasing your consistency and reducing errors. You can create a few basic automated campaigns for your agency that will manage ongoing interactions with your potential prospects…while you are spending your actual time paying attention to your clients.

An automated process requires time at the beginning to set up, but a simple program may take only an hour or two (especially if it’s not your first). The payoff can be huge. An automated process becomes a little “machine” that helps you build your own business while you’re focused on helping your clients build theirs.

• Trigger campaigns. These deliver an automated response when someone performs an action on your website. Suppose someone downloads a PDF of your agency capabilities; the trigger campaign can send a thank-you and offer a free initial consultation. You’ve just made a personal connection with no effort other than the initial set-up.
• Build one landing page with a form. Offer something of value – a white paper, a free consultation, a video – that people must fill out a form to get. Each new contact you get this way will have some degree of potential as a new client, as they are self-selecting as interested in what you offer. Make sure you have a trigger response.
• Build one simple nurture campaign. Take a hard look at the interactions and (especially) the content that have brought you clients in the past. Create an automated nurture program that replicates those steps in an email campaign. Make it as simple as possible.

For example, suppose your expertise is helping clients with new product launches. You could design a program: “Five Steps to the Perfect Product Launch.” You could set this up so that you have five emails, each with one piece of content: Step One, followed by Step Two (two weeks later), and so on through Step Five, followed by a sixth email offering a free consultation. Every time you get a brand-new contact, you could enter them into the nurture program. Over the course of three months, they would get a nurturing email from you every two weeks, hopefully building their confidence in your market wisdom and capabilities. While you are tending to your current clients, your nurturing program is tending your future ones.

Case study: CoreElement, a marketing agency dedicated to helping manufacturers grow with targeted marketing, used marketing automation to develop and deploy a survey for their industry. By gathering demographic information like company size and industry, while also asking about marketing strategy and activities, CoreElement gained detailed insight into the needs of its prospective clients.

Pay attention to who visits your website

Website visitor tracking is another marketing automaton feature that can help you identify your potential next customer.

• Track your visitors. Everyone’s online, on the hunt for solutions to problems. When they begin to look at what you offer, you’ll want to know who they are; you can usually find out using forms and data directories. You can also see which pages they look at, so you get a head’s up on what they’re interested in and how you might begin a conversation with them. You may also discover patterns that tell you how close they are to making a decision.
• Track companies that visit. Most buying decisions are made by a team. You’ll want to know if multiple people from the same company are examining your website; website visitor tracking can show you this data.
• Real-time alerts. Got a particular prospect you’ve been trying to land for a while? Get an alert when they visit a specific page on your website, so you can respond quickly and appropriately.

Case study: circle S Studio’s experience is proof that this works. After receiving an alert that a targeted prospect downloaded an eBook from the circle S Studio web site, the agency was able to respond quickly, with content specific to the prospect’s interest.

The bottom line

At the end of the day, we all want to grow our businesses. The small agency has the same tasks and responsibilities as the enterprise – but without the same resources. This makes it doubly important for the small agency to make sure every action counts, and every asset is scaled. Leverage what’s available to you, and turn it into more.

Agencies are often so buried with client work that they neglect their own marketing. But with a carefully planned strategy, you can – without a great cost in time – get you in front of your own target audience. You can then become your own best case study as you work to grow your client list.

What’s the most effective marketing tactic you’ve ever tried for your agency?

Does Your B2B Marketing Include Social Proof?

There are five pillars of B2B marketing and sales success.

The second pillar deals with the Buying Process and factors affecting this process. There are four main factors affecting the buying process. These factors are;
1. The Five Buying Stages
2. Social Proof
3. Why B2B Companies Buy
4. The Five Influencers

The last article I wrote was on The Five Buying Stages in the Buying Process of B2B Buyers. You can read about these stages in the previous article.

The next factor is Social Proof.

Social proof, especially in B2B marketing, is important to show new prospects that others believe in your products and services.

Why is this important?

In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, or when a situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to, and accept, the actions of others as correct.

What does this mean?

It means that people will believe what others do, if they are not quite sure what to do themselves. It means that if you haven’t completely convinced another company about your products and services, the people in this other company want to know what other people are saying, and have done, with your products and services.

They want SOCIAL PROOF before they will proceed.

So what is social proof? From Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion he states that the principle of social proof is; “The greater the number of people who find an idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”

And there is another important condition for social proof. The principle of social proof works best when we are observing the behaviour of people we believe are similar to us.

So, why is social proof so important to your business, and how do you provide social proof for your business?

Because you are trying to convince people who don’t know you, or your business, IE: your prospects; they need a way to feel assured that if they buy your products and/or services, they will be getting what you said they will get.

They want proof. They want to mitigate as much of the risk as possible.

You can provide social proof to your business in several ways.

One of the most common ways is through Authority, to associate your business with a business that everyone knows and trusts. A good example of this is when a technology company has Microsoft or IBM as a partner.

If these two trusted companies believe in your company to let your company become a partner, then your company must be trustworthy and reliable.

Another common method of social proof is with Case Studies & Testimonials. These show that other companies trust you because they have done business with you, and have given you an endorsement through the case study and testimonial.

However, there is a danger here. Many companies collect case studies and testimonials, but they are like their websites. They are too similar to everyone else’s case studies and testimonials. They are weak and commonplace.

Very few companies do case studies and testimonials that sell. If done correctly, case studies and testimonials differentiate your company from you competitors, and make your company stand out from the rest.

They also help define your Unique Value Proposition.

How to Put Social Proof to Work

Most people are imitators. So, if you want someone to do something, show others doing it.

Here are a few specific applications of this idea:

• List testimonials of satisfied customers and clients.
• Feature testimonials by those who have been “converted” from another product or service.
• Show pictures of people using your product or service.
• Relay case histories of some of your best customers or clients. Show people similar to your prospect using your product or service.
• Show the general excitement of others who have discovered your product or service.
• Mention how long your company has been around. (A subtle indication of popularity.)
• Tout the number of products sold.
• Display the names of customers or clients you serve.
• Say how long your product or service has been a best-seller.
• Cite information on your market leadership.
• Show important or well-known people using your product or service.
• Display a seal of approval by a rating organization.
• Cite favorable reviews.
• Cite mentions in the media.

If you want to stand out from your competition, stand out from the crowd, get the social proof you need to convince your prospects to buy from you.

If you want some help getting it right, then please contact me through my email below.

Part 1 – How Closing the Loop Means Closing More Sales

I was watching television the other day when an ad came on for a new type of television.

Have you seen it? 

The newest television technology has taken the TV with a flat screen and curved it, totally transforming the viewing experience.

This new technology, put out by Samsung, was highlighted in a commercial from Agency 72 in Los Angeles and has gotten a lot of hype.

Taking the television screen from a flat line to a curve is the next big thing.

Inbound marketing is going through a similar experience.

The typical inbound model expresses the buyer’s journey through the marketing funnel in a straight line. There is a beginning and an end.

New versions of the online marketing experience for buyers are changing and include a curvature of this linear concept.

In fact, the curve has turned into a circle.

Now, instead of pushing a buyer into one end of a funnel and spitting them out the other end, marketers are figuring out that for most industries, the buyer that comes out the end of the funnel is just as important as the visitors coming in.

Closed loop marketing addresses this new approach to the inbound process, and adds the sales team to the mix, as well as a whole lot of customer delight.

WHAT IS CLOSED LOOP MARKETING?

Closed-loop marketing is a fancy way of saying that sales teams and marketing teams can work together using the data and insights that the marketing team gleans from their analytics.

It means that marketing reports to sales regarding the leads that are ready to be closed and sales reports to marketing on the leads they have received.

By working together, each team can gain a better understanding of what is working with a company’s inbound program and lead nurturing strategies and make more progress closing leads, increasing revenue and growing your company.

In the past, the straight-line method has been harder to measure and calculate things like ROI, cost per lead and cost per sale.

It has also been very difficult for a marketing team to prove their worth via their marketing initiatives.

By “closing the loop”, there are several different things that happen within a company that improve overall sales, the buyer’s experience and even a company’s culture.

It literally ties up loose ends and focusses on the differences between a visitor, a lead and a customer, making it easier to link marketing dollars back to the campaigns that created them.

Like Samsung’s curved television, taking the line and turning it into a curve – in this case a circle – it’s a little easier to conceptualize how all the components work well together and flow throughout the circle.

HOW DOES CLOSED LOOP MARKETING WORK?

Using closed-loop marketing requires connecting your customer relationship software (CRM) and your marketing analytics software. In this way you can use the data you mine from analytics to create better content for your potential clients with your CRM.

In addition, the easiest way to curve the linear nature of the older inbound marketing concept into a circle is to use your website as ‘grand central’ for all of your marketing efforts. Filter your organic searches, social media marketing, email campaigns, social shares, paid programs and other offline activities straight to your website so that everything can be tracked.

Furthermore, every marketing effort you create should have a URL attached to it on your website to make following each campaign’s progress. By attaching URL’s to each link you provide on your different marketing channels, anyone who clicks that link will signal your chosen analytics tool where they are coming from.

This also applies to your email efforts, paid searches and referrals.

You can research your marketing software or your analytics tool and make sure that you have the capability to put tracking cookies in place.

By using tracking cookies, you will know when a visitor comes back to your site. Although they are still anonymous, they are still interested as well.

Making sure that your visitors and your data get assigned to the appropriate categories is imperative for the closed-loop process.

HubSpot has broken up the circle into four pieces that include the buyer’s journey, the marketing team, as well as the sales team and how they all interact within a company’s inbound marketing strategy to create brand awareness, produce more leads and close more sales.

These four steps include:

Step 1: Visitor Arrives on Your Site

Step 2: Visitor Browses Your Website

Step 3: Visitor Converts Into a Lead

Step 4: Lead Becomes a Customer

Each of these steps can be broken down into several moving parts.

STEP 1 – A VISITOR ARRIVES AT YOUR SITE

When a visitor arrives at your website they might have typed your URL directly into a search engine.

They may very well be ready to buy your product, know your company and have their credit card in their hand.

Wouldn’t that be great?

But for the vast majority of your website visitors, it’s going to take a little more work.

Most likely, your visitor arrived at your website via a social network, email, blog or other content that you distributed; pointing them back to a landing page.

Attracting visitors to your website using offers and great content is how inbound works. As a marketer, it is your job to get more traffic to your website.

With closed-loop marketing, a visitor entering your site is the entry point of your system.

Getting them to fill out a form on your landing page in order to receive an offer is critical to having them progress further throughout your loop (also considered the sales funnel).

When a visitor arrives, they can be assigned a tracking cookie that will follow them throughout the entire loop. These tracking cookies will allow you, through your marketing software, to identify where they came from, track a visitor’s trends, and compare which channels are working best for you.

If you aren’t attracting much action from Instagram, but your Pinterest account is gaining lots of traction, you know where to put more effort – at least in stage one of the process.

The data will tell you exactly what you need to do.

In this stage of the process, it’s all up to the marketing team.

STEP 2 – A VISITOR BROWSES YOUR WEBSITE

If you can attract a visitor and get them to stay on your website for longer than a few seconds, then you have done a great job so far.

Now it’s time to identify where they came from and track their behavior.

What pages are they looking at on your website?

How long are they staying?

Pinpointing this information will allow you to map out a better optimized path for future visitors and faster conversions.

The most complex part of the closed-loop marketing process happens in Step 2. This is where a visitor is most likely to convert into a lead if you are appealing to what they need and value.

However, it is also important to know their movements while they were still anonymous. This is where a good marketing automation platform comes in.

While Inbound Marketing Agents utilizes HubSpot for marketing automation, there are several excellent platforms available that can do the same thing.

Step 2 is still very much in the hands of marketing.

STEP 3 – VISITOR CONVERTS INTO A LEAD

If you want the most value out of your inbound efforts, which means sending qualified leads to your sales team, then converting visitors into leads is the next step in the closed-loop marketing circle.

Ideally, visitors are coming to your website directly onto a landing page. If designed correctly, a landing page will entice them to give you some of their valuable personal information (on a lead-capture form) in return for an offer they perceive to have some kind of value.

At this point, they are no longer an anonymous visitor, but a lead.

As you create more offers that gently push leads further down your sales funnel, you can collect even more Intel on your leads. The more you know about your leads and who they are, the better chance you have of converting them into a paying customer.

By the time you hand over a qualified lead to your marketing department, they will have enough information about the user’s online behavior, demographics and personal information to be able to close much easier than with traditional sales methods.

Step 3 is a crucial part in closing the loop because you get concrete information about your visitors based on the fields you put in your form. Name, email address, phone number and other information can all be added to your lead database and added to as your lead is nurtured through the funnel.

This step of the process also takes the most time, depending on the industry you are in. Even if your buying process only takes a couple of weeks, your company will want to have offers and emails set up that capture your lead and nurture them throughout the funnel.

This is also the point in the closed-loop process where it’s time to decide when to send a lead to the sales team.

STEP 4 – LEAD BECOMES A CUSTOMER

With solid planning, valuable content and a well-timed lead nurturing process, there is no doubt that your inbound marketing campaign will close leads.

• Which offers worked best?
• Which marketing channel contributed to the most sales?
• How can you optimize those processes for more success in the future?

Having a closed-loop marketing plan in place allows you to figure out the answer to all of these questions.

Take a look at your closed leads and trace them back to their beginning marketing sources.

If you don’t have an automated marketing system, then keeping the information in spreadsheets could work for you, especially if you are a small business just starting out.

For many companies, closing the lead is the responsibility of the sales team.

However, isn’t it great how the loop brought sales and marketing together?

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO MAKE CLOSED-LOOP WORK?

Ideally, having a CRM and an automated marketing platform are the best ways to institute a closed-loop marketing program for your company; however there are ways around it.

There are other analytics programs available, and spreadsheets work fine for businesses with smaller databases.

There are also other components to ensuring the success of your closed-loop methods.

Having a sales team and a marketing team who are on board together with the program is probably the most important aspect to turning this new wheel.

Then there are the buyers themselves.

The closed-loop method recognizes how important a delighted customer is.

In the second part of this blog we will discuss pulling the sales and marketing teams together in order to make it all work.

We will also examine how your current customer base has become a critical element in getting new leads on social networks like Facebook; who now wants your advertising dollars in order to show your feed.

And we’ll wrap up with some ways you put closed-loop marketing to work at your company.

For now, tell us how you feel about this new process. Is it a little overwhelming, or are you all over it? Do you think you can pull it off using free analytics and spreadsheets, or is your company at the tipping point where they are too large? Give us a comment or two about what you think about re-inventing this marketing wheel, and, as always, feel free to ask questions.

Photo Credits: Samsung Commercial by Agency 72 and Sunny, Los Angeles, CA

Thanks to HubSpot for the Closed Loop Image.

One of the life experiences I credit most for teaching me about marketing was the five years I spent in sales. I came to that job in a roundabout way – a division of Wells Fargo Bank wanted a paperless office and asked me to make that happen. I knew nothing about technology (and ultimately failed to create paperless-ness) but I quickly fell in love with computers.

My boss at that company helped too, giving me some of the best career advice I’ve ever received. He told me “You’ve got to love the core business you’re in or you’ll never get ahead.” I hated the core business I was in (banking), so I cut bait and started trying to find a job as a salesperson in a technology company.

My first assignment was a sales “overlay” position that focused on winning more business from the current customer base. I loved it and grew revenue by 300%, but the reps weren’t happy that someone else was making money from their customers. Management didn’t want to irritate the reps, so they eliminated my position and offered me a job in marketing.

Fast forward ten years, and in another company I spent four years in charge of both sales and marketing teams.

So while I consider myself a marketer, those five years in sales helped me see that several aspects of the way we differentiate the two roles is illogical and costly.

Consider this:

1. Sales and marketing are both about persuasion. The sales person’s job is to persuade one buyer at a time, while the marketer’s job is to persuade markets full of buyers.

When I was in sales, it was marketing’s job to get a buyer to notice us, and then it was my job to persuade that buyer to choose us. This was a great division of labor, because it’s way more difficult to persuade a market full of buyers than one at a time. But today’s buyers have changed the rules, navigating 60% to 80% of their decision before they talk to a salesperson. Companies that haven’t made the shift to persuasive marketing risk elimination before the salespeople have a chance to do their job.

2. Salespeople have the opportunity, permission and training to listen to buyers before they build a strategy to persuade them. Marketers have none of these things.

As a sales rep, I learned to dedicate the first part of every sales call to listening to my buyer, gaining real insight into that account’s needs and expectations. Then it was my job to describe our solution in a way that established a perfect fit between that buyer’s needs and our product. Go tell sales management that you want their reps to stop listening to buyers before they sell to them, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. But everyone expects marketers to do just that.

3. Sales people have to optimize their time to persuade buyers to buy now, but marketers have to optimize their investments to build pipeline for the future.

By the time I started running sales, I completely understood the importance of marketing. However, it wasn’t long before all of my time and attention shifted to the salespeople. Faced with the urgency of meeting this month’s numbers, our longer-term investments suffered. I learned that it’s really difficult to balance short and long term priorities, and that marketing metrics need to focus on results that impact the next quarter or next year, even if this seems less tangible.

4. While there are dozens of things that every good sales person learns about each buyer, the ability to be persuasive hinges on just 5 key insights.

When I decided to help marketers understand their buyer personas, I knew that many of the things I learned about buyers in sales only worked when I had the opportunity to build a strategy to persuade one buyer at a time. It was easy to see that tracking all of these distinctions about buyers would cause a lot of confusion and far too many different strategies. So I started thinking about what really helped me to be a persuasive sales rep, and that’s how the 5 Rings of Buying Insight became the foundation of buyer personas.

5. Despite everything you’ve heard about price, the company that wins the buyer’s trust wins their business.

The solutions I had to sell were invariably more expensive than our competition. So we didn’t win on price. We competed for the buyer’s business by being the best listeners and using our insights to persuade buyers that we were best qualified to meet their expectations. Now that buyers can avoid sales contact for so long, a lot of that responsibility belongs to the marketing team.

I think it’s fair to say that when I was in sales, we had a lot more impact on the outcome of a deal than the reps I know today. And because this change is driven by buyers who have ready access to the information they think they need, this trend is unlikely to reverse itself. It’s time for marketers to gain the deep buyer insights that have always been the foundation of successful sales.

Management of Complexity (Photo credit: michael.heiss)

As more and more businesses undergo digital transformation, we see more investments pouring into digital technologies. The aim is to be omnipresent and somehow, someway – get a corner of mindshare with buyers. What organizations risk is this – the more they automate, the more they become less humanized with their customers.

It is a scary thing. Customers and buyers can amount to nothing more than accounts and fields on a screen. Recently, I read an article where a customer was referred to as “it”. You cannot get any less human than this!

High Stakes Still Exists In The Digital Age

Many buyers are faced with high stake decisions. In recent buyer interviews I did on behalf of a company I was helping, senior level executives were responsible for purchase decisions well over a half million dollars. Now, not all decisions are as complex or involve such a dollar amount. But, for some, making decisions on a $25k-$50k purchase can still feel like a million dollar decision and just as high stakes.

One thing we can all be assured of is this – if a purchase decision, regardless of the dollar amount, feels like a million dollar decision, it will not be made with one click from a laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet. Such a decision is filled with human fears and emotions. In the evolving hyper-digital world economy, it is easy to get lulled into a belief of every decision becomes a digital one. With no human interactions required.

Human Interaction Matters

What people care about most in the new digital economy is high touch in a high tech world. Organizations must find balance in offering high touch interactions – from actual human-to-human interaction to high touch digital connections, which have human interaction attributes. Let me elaborate a tad bit on this point:

Modern marketers must take care to not be out of balance with digital marketing automation. Focusing entirely on automating processes as opposed to reaching understanding on how to use digital technologies to enhance human interactions.

Without a human-centered approach to marketing, all we may be doing is automating bad processes. And, unintentionally, automating the very things our customers and buyers find as turn-offs.

4 Ways To Build A Human-Centered Approach To Complex Marketing

For complex marketing and sales, organizations can look at these four ways to incorporate human-centered marketing into their company DNA:

1. Get To Know Your Customers and Buyers – With Discipline

For many organizations, getting to know their customers and buyers can be a fragmented experience. Involving the use of CRM, Salesforce Automation, tracking inbound marketing, big data, and much more. What is missing is a disciplined approach to understanding customers and buyers qualitatively – to understand them as people. The modern marketing organization will need to take a disciplined approach to understanding how big data and qualitative research can blend together to tell the story of their customers and buyers.

2. Do Persona Development on Three Levels

The new digital economy is changing the way people work, buy, and operate. Creating new means of digital and virtual pathways towards getting things done. Meaning one-size fits all content and interactions designed for buyers alone just may not cut it anymore. Human marketers will need to develop persona-based understanding on these three levels:

• Customer Personas: developing a human-centered understanding on how existing customers are evolving and developing networks of suppliers as well as collaborators is becoming increasingly important. Treating existing customers generically as “new” buyers will get you out of touch with realities.
• Buyer Personas: as originally intended, buyer personas are focused on how goals and behaviors influence purchase decisions. The goals and behaviors of people engaged in buying can be very different than when they are existing customers.
• User Personas: While designing for users has been a staple of persona development, the rise of user influence in purchase decisions is a new emerging phenomenon. The voice of users becoming increasingly important on how to be more efficient and effective. Interesting enough, we are seeing more organizations focusing on human capital and employee engagement. One way is through active participation in decisions affecting how they work – including the technologies and services they use.

3. Develop Human-Centered Marketing and Sales Strategies

Our deep understanding of customers, buyers, and users – in a very human way – is at the core of human-centered marketing. Strategies related to content, communications, interactions, and engagement should be about our human understanding on how to best help people accomplish their goals. Translating our efforts to get to know customers deeply and the use of persona development into meaningful ways to connect with customers and buyers in a very human way. Our marketing and sales strategies delivering the desired types of human interactions customers seek. Doing so in ways where customers see and experience fulfillment.

4. Focus On Enhancing Human Interactions

This point does echo my mention above. The difference here is in having a disciplined approach to translating our understanding of customers, buyers, and users into modeling new ways of human interactions. Adopting digital technologies to help us market and sell better should have the aim to enhance human interactions and human fulfillment. This means we should be looking at all touchpoints involving marketing, sales, service, and support with this explicit aim. Far too often, it is easy to fall into the trap of designing and using new technologies to help internal operations and efficiencies – without incorporating human-centered views towards enhancing the human connection.

Human Marketing Versus Commodity Marketing

Without establishing a personal and emotional connection – a human connection – to customers and buyers, many businesses will be left to compete on only one plane. Price. Relegated to the very cold and inhuman place we call commodity. Where the language is about buying criteria and other cold business speak terminology. Commodity marketing is today’s marketing dead end.

Although we may deal in the complex, it does not mean we have to approach such in a cold and inhuman way. The modern high stakes buyers of today seek to have goals fulfilled and emotions, whether they be fear or passion, be part of a human experience.

Writing a LinkedIn Profile for Business Purposes

Social networking is all the rage in this day and age. You don’t need to look very far in order to see just how much social networking has changed the world we live in. In fact, it’s safe to say that civilization itself would simply stop functioning normally (or at least function awkwardly) if social networking sites were to ever go down or stop functioning altogether. Indeed, it’s even likely that a large number of people would suddenly become depressed and unable to work if social networks to ever come apart. Anyway, here are three reasons why social networking seems to have taken center stage in our society today:

• Social networks provide people with a way to meet other people online. This makes it a lot easier for people to make new friends or reach old ones whom they have lost track of due to long years of separation.
• Social networks provide people with a chance to communicate regularly with friends, family or just about anyone else for that matter. Being part of the internet, communication between two parties can be instantaneous, allowing one person to tell another a specific message in the blink of an eye. Sooner or later, a single message about a specific event can be sent throughout the world if you have enough people relaying the message.
• Social networks provide people an opportunity to do online businesses and connect with potential customers, buyers or sellers. With a social network for business, just about anyone can reach a truly massive audience and have business deals taking place at opposite sides of the world.

One of the more popular social networking sites out there is LinkedIn because it is a massively successful social networking site for business. That’s why writing a LinkedIn profile can be important if you’re interested in doing business online.

Making the Best of Your LinkedIn Profile

So, here are things to remember in optimizing a LinkedIn Profile:

• SEO writing is actually effective in getting a good LinkedIn profile. Be sure to remember this once you get started.
• Make sure that your profile name and the name of your services will be something that potential customers are looking for.
• Make sure to repeat the name of your services several times throughout your profile and put them in places that search engines will scan for.
• Make sure to use keywords regularly to make sure that your services will get a better rank than more common establishments and the like.

Making a Successful LinkedIn Profile

So, are you ready to make a successful LinkedIn profile and do some business online? Well then, I can suggest that you optimize LinkedIn profile with some SEO techniques like mentioned above so that it easily finds a place in the upper parts of search engines like Google and Yahoo. So do some LinkedIn profile optimization now and find out just how successful you can make your business today.

You’ve seen the stats: 60 to 80 percent of the buying process is done before anyone wants to chat with your chomping-at-the-bit sales reps. To make matters worse, more people than ever are now involved in the process of buying complex products. So where does that leave you?

Most likely trying to craft a never-ending stream of content marketing to influence this very process. And that helps, for sure.

But let’s be honest. You need to do more than turn your brand into a publisher … especially as most publishers are having their own issues these days. With that in mind, there’s another approach to influencing the buying process while also supporting your could-be-better content marketing efforts.

Start engaging the influencers.

As you’ve probably heard by now, we trust the recommendations of people over brands. So start with folks that already like what your company is doing. From there, you can move on to others that influence your target buyers in a big way.

1. Brand Advocates

Who better to recommend your brand than those already delighted with it? And you don’t need to be Apple, Harley-Davidson or TiVo to have customers inclined to say positive things. All companies have advocates, even those that sell to other brands (or they wouldn’t be in business).

But how do you identify your brand advocates?

It’s simple. Just email a Net Promoter survey to your customer database. Those that identify themselves as “highly likely to recommend” your company are brand advocates. And within 48 to 72 hours you’ll have identified hundreds or maybe even thousands of advocates. Easy, right?

Now comes the harder part. You need to flag these customers as brand advocates in your CRM database, develop dedicated marketing campaigns to get them sharing branded content, and acknowledge and recognize them along the way. But these efforts will be worth it … since we all know how powerful positive word of mouth can be!

And for mid- to enterprise-sized companies, vendors such as Zuberance and Influitive can give you a leg up with launching and managing your brand advocacy programs.

2. Employee Advocates

Most employees are active on social media and already make recommendations to their personal networks. Plus, many believe in what your company is up to. Sound like a recipe for success? It is.

Imagine if you could get 10 percent of your company’s employees to share, tweet or “like” your latest content marketing offers, and to do so on a regular basis. Think of the impact. Technology providers like Dynamic Signal and SocialChorus think so. They say that employee advocacy results in much higher engagement with branded content and can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in equivalent paid media value.

Whether you decide to bring on specialized technology or not, don’t let that stop you from getting started with employee advocacy.

Just ask your employees to follow your company’s Twitter handle and LinkedIn page. Next, let them know when you’ve tweeted, put up a new blog post or LinkedIn status update, and then ask them to share. The result: vastly amplified reach and engagement for your brand content.

3. The Media

Next up are the online publications and blogs most influential with your target audience. Don’t rely on your PR firm to build media relationships by pitching the occasional customer win, executive hire, product launch or “momentum” release.

Develop your own relationships with the editors, writers and bloggers most relevant to your buyers. Reach out and ask what they like to cover and which story angles resonate most with their audience. This is not as hard as it sounds since many make their email address and/or social media handles public.

Keep in mind that as with all busy professionals, it may take a moment to get their attention. Having said that, once you move beyond the most popular publications, many editors and writers are surprisingly easy to engage in conversations — especially since they’re looking to expand their content sources, too!

4. Industry Analysts

If you’re a B2B marketer you know how anxious everyone gets when a new Gartner, IDC or Forrester Research report comes out about your industry. That shows how influential these analysts are to your buyers no matter which market sector you compete in.

Do you know who specifically covers your industry at not only the big research firms but also the smaller research and consulting firms? Are you listening to them on social media to keep a pulse on what content they’re sharing, and which products, technologies and companies they’re talking about?

By plugging into these social insights, you’ll discover many opportunities to engage industry analysts and share your brand’s story in the context of the big thoughts they’re working on.

5. Thought Leaders

Speaking of big thoughts, there are also many “thought leaders” that write about, discuss at conferences and share on social media their views on topics relevant to your target buyers. Many write for mainstream publications like Forbes and Huffington Post, while others are driving conversations from their perch high up on the executive ladder at a leading industry vendor.

Thought leaders are typically prodigious content creators around specific themes or topics. And they have huge social media audiences that actively amplify every word posted, tweeted, or updated.

For example, when B2B marketers need some fresh ideas on their content marketing, many turn to thought leaders such as Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael) of SAP and Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) of MarketingProfs. Learning the ropes around “social selling”? Tap into what Jill Rowley (@Jill_Rowley) has to say. Want to go deep on the role of one-to-one relationships in a social world? Connect with Ted Rubin (@TedRubin), Mark Schaefer (@MarkWSchaefer), and Bryan Kramer (@BryanKramer). Interested in how social media is impacting HR? Consider following Meghan M. Biro (@MeghanMBiro).

Take the time to discover the thought leaders for your industry and follow, share and engage them on social media. A retweet or mention from one of these influencers can be huge when it comes to driving the influence of your brand messages.

Now it’s your turn.

Which influencer types do you need to focus more of your efforts on?

Want to learn more about who influences B2b marketers? Download the social insights report:

How B2B Marketers Engage on Twitter

(Note: this post first appeared on CMSWire)

The Qoros 3 offers a glimpse of what’s coming next for the Chinese auto market—and for Magna

The Qoros 3 isn’t a fancy car, but it does suggest what’s coming next for China’s automotive market. Some aspects are typical of the small sedans already clogging Shanghai’s streets: its 1.6-litre, 125-horsepower engine drags its wheels a bit, and its interior is somewhat spartan. But that impression is interrupted by the sophisticated eight-inch touchscreen mounted smack in the middle of the dashboard. And with its oddly louvred grille and demurely squinting headlamps, it’s actually a bit of a looker. Most striking, it scored high points last year in a European crash test—setting it apart from other Chinese-built econoboxes, traditionally regarded as coffins on radials.

Although Qoros is testing European interest by selling small volumes in Slovakia, the 3 isn’t coming to a dealership near you. It does, however, reveal something about where Canada’s automotive sector is heading. Subsidiaries of Magna International, the Aurora, Ont.–based global auto supplier, helped build it; through its Steyr engineering centre in Shanghai, Magna participated in developing the vehicle’s architecture and helped Qoros select its suppliers. Along with more familiar models like the Mini Cooper, Ford Fusion and Jeep Grand Cherokee, the 3 was one of the Top 10 vehicle programs for which Magna earned tooling, engineering and other sales during 2012 and 2013. Built in Changsu (80 kilometres northwest of Shanghai), the first sedans went on sale in China in November. Qoros unveiled a new hatchback version at the Beijing Auto Show in April.

Whereas Qoros’s management made a splash at auto shows from Shanghai to Geneva, Magna quietly established a significant presence in China over the past decade. It hasn’t always known precisely what it wanted to achieve there, or quite how to achieve it. But the picture became clearer as China evolved from an automotive backwater into the world’s largest market for passenger vehicles. (Last year domestic sales of motor vehicles reached nearly 22 million units, compared to 15.5 million in the U.S.) With limited growth prospects for its traditional strongholds in North America and western Europe, Magna’s Asian presence has become the road to its future.

Magna first arrived in China as the result of acquiring a seating company in 1996 and a mirror supplier in 2002; both came with Chinese operations. Magna’s closures division also opened a Chinese plant in 1999. The passenger vehicle sector was embryonic at the time; recognizing the crucial role of foreign suppliers, the Chinese government attempted to woo them with a rare concession, offering majority ownership of local companies. But it was not until China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 that suppliers truly took notice. In 2003, then-CEO Belinda Stronach vowed to spend much of her time devising a strategy “to enter the burgeoning automotive market in China.”

Her father, company founder Frank Stronach, built his leading manufacturing company over more than four decades. He watched China’s growing manufacturing prowess with unease. Many competitors and customers (often the same thing, from an auto supplier’s perspective) were already locating plants in low-cost countries. He fretted that low wages and social and environmental standards in China, Korea and India would leave North American manufacturers at a marked disadvantage. As for the growing purchasing power of China’s rapidly expanding middle class, that had yet to capture his imagination.

It was, to be fair, hard to take China’s indigenous manufacturers seriously. Hundreds sprouted up but, as with any country just getting started in automaking, early design work, quality and marketing were all wanting. Some of these companies took the international penchant for alphanumeric model names to an extreme: Dongfeng’s EQ7240BP, putatively a coupe, was seemingly christened by a frisky house cat pouncing on a keyboard. Geely’s diminutive King Kong hatchback in no way resembled its namesake, and its “PU Rural Nanny” (a sort of Chinese El Camino) was lost in translation. But it was not these eccentric new automakers that caught suppliers’ attention. Rather, they simply followed their traditional customer base. Volkswagen, one of Magna’s top customers, arrived in China as early as 1985; the others, including GM, Ford, Daimler, BMW and Fiat/Chrysler, all gradually trickled in. Bending to Chinese requirements, they formed 50-50 joint ventures with domestic companies; Volkswagen formed separate ones with Shanghai Automotive and FAW Group. Dongfeng struck arrangements with Nissan, Honda, Kia and Peugeot.

The pull of these joint ventures was irresistible: within a few years, following China’s WTO accession in 2001, Magna and many of its peers, including BorgWarner and TRW Automotive, began opening plants in China to serve them. Jack Perkowski, a former Wall Street investment banker who established a successful auto-parts supplier called ASIMCO in China during the early 1990s and managed it until 2009, says the progression was both natural and inevitable. The international automakers generally built models that had succeeded elsewhere. “When GM or Volkswagen brings a model to China, to design a new brake system from scratch is a daunting task,” Perkowski explains. “So they tend to bring their suppliers from the home country—the company that designed that system originally for the U.S. or European market.”

The financial crisis reinforced the need for suppliers to perform in Asia. Most of Magna’s largest customers took a drubbing, and two (GM and Chrysler) required government rescue; Magna laid off more than 10,000 workers in response. But Chinese demand continued surging. “The global center of gravity of automotive strength has shifted east,” noted a report that year by Booz & Co., a consultancy.

Magna repositioned accordingly. Today, more than 11,000 of its 125,000 employees are in Asia. Most of them work at its 28 manufacturing operations and nine product development, engineering and sales centres in China, located predominantly along the country’s eastern seaboard. These represent the breadth of Magna’s capabilities: they churn out seats, instrument panels, bumpers, mirrors, latches, oil pumps, fuel tanks and much else besides. Last year Magna opened a powertrain plant in Tianjin, an electronics production line in Zhangjiagang, and an engineering facility in Shenyang. And in February it announced a new joint venture with Chonquing Guangneng Rongneng Trim Co., which will assemble front-end modules at a new facility in Hangzhou. Symbolic of its growing importance, this year Magna broke out financial reporting for its Asian division from its “rest of world” segment, which now largely consists of its struggling South American division. Magna Asia is run by chief marketing officer Jim Tobin, who spends much of his time in China, Japan and Korea, with occasional visits to India.

All this has gone largely unnoticed by those preoccupied with Magna’s short-term performance. Questions about North American and European operations still dominate Magna’s conference calls with equity analysts, for instance. This is unsurprising; despite the rapid growth, Asian sales accounted for just 4% of Magna’s total last year. The rebound of the North American auto industry, and the speed with which Magna has addressed troubles at its European operations, are of greater immediate concern. Even Magna’s struggling South American operations receive more attention.

The further one looks out, however, the more important Asia becomes to Magna. “The North American auto recovery is nearing the end of the road in terms of its double-digit growth,” claimed global consultancy PwC in a recent report. European suppliers are still reeling from economic stagnation, unfavourable demographics and overcapacity. Magna itself has soured on South America, complaining of inflationary pressures and difficulties squeezing acceptable margins from customers there. PwC expects strong demand for passenger vehicles in Russia, India and Brazil in the years ahead, but guesses those markets combined will remain half the size of China’s. Daimler’s top man in China was hardly going out on a limb earlier this year when he told reporters that “for anybody working in the automobile industry, if there’s one place to be, it’s China.”

Many auto manufacturers and suppliers bet that continued strong economic growth will help many more Chinese buy their first car or SUV in the coming decade. Just 6% of the population owns a vehicle, according to data from Bloomberg. And whereas first-time car buyers have been found largely in China’s coastal provinces, promising markets are now opening up further inland.

Perkowski, who sold his auto-parts company to Bain Capital in 2010 but continues to serve the sector through a consulting company in Beijing, believes Chinese auto sales could double again by the end of the decade. He notes China’s massive market for “unconventional” vehicles—which include everything from motorcycles to so-called inkfish (smoke-spewing agricultural vehicles). An increasingly affluent society will replace these unconventional vehicles with passenger cars and other, pricier vehicles, he predicts.

At an industry conference in January, CEO Don Walker noted that China “continues to experience massive growth in percentage and absolute terms.” He announced plans to open six more plants there before the end of 2016, by which time he expects Magna’s in-country sales to have doubled again from current levels. Thanks largely to growing production volumes, Magna expects its margins in Asia will increase from last year’s 5% to 9% or more.

For all the early fears of Chinese automakers flooding global markets with low-cost vehicles, the irony is that they’re struggling just to maintain their position at home. According to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, their market share in China has fallen for six months straight, and currently stands at about 38%. The expansion of American and European brands has come at their expense. The Chinese export machine, at least as far as autos are concerned, is in neutral.

Yet Qoros, founded as recently as 2007, reveals growing sophistication. It’s a joint venture between an indigenous manufacturer (Chery) and Israel Corp., an Israeli holding company. The 3 might not be the most imaginative name for a small car—Mazda has one, too—but at least it’s not called the X9HAK124. The styling can be chalked up to European design: the company has design and engineering teams in Munich and Graz, Austria, and many of its executives are veterans of the European auto market. Magna is one of more than a dozen international suppliers to Qoros, which has from its inception vowed to bring European quality to the Chinese market.

Perkowski believes China’s auto-supply market has now entered a second phase in its development. “The supply base is now looking to go beyond their traditional customers,” he says. Those indigenous manufacturers not backed by the State are often more price-sensitive and cash-strapped than their international counterparts; getting paid on time can be challenging. But Qoros isn’t Magna’s only indigenous customer; it has $350 worth of content in the H8, a new SUV from Great Wall Motors. It also sells to Brilliance Auto, Geely, First Automobile Works and Chery itself. Which of these will endure what is expected to be a gruesome consolidation among indigenous manufacturers remains to be seen. But should any of them thrive into global players, who can say where they might lead Magna next?

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You think you know, but you have no idea. As a salesperson, you probably spend a lot of time researching prospects and getting prospect intel on their purchasing decisions. You may have even paid a company to do a massive demographics run on your current and past customers. When it comes to your “target audience,” you couldn’t be more honed. Or could you? Lead intelligence is a crucial, but often a missing element in a sales cycle.

Sales managers and their teams spend hours trying to learn more about how their prospects buy, but the truth is that most of this intel is pure speculation. When we’re talking lead intelligence, we want to know down to the click how an ideal customer is behaving. You can do this one of two ways: hide in their office and watch as they navigate your website, or get an analytics software that can give you some serious intel. Of the two options, the software is a little more feasible. But what exactly do you want to know about your ideal prospect? Let’s explore in more detail.

How they found you.

You might say to yourself, “Our receptionist asks every single time she answers the phone and encounters a new prospect how people find us.” Odds are your receptionist isn’t asking for the exact search phrase, banner ad, PPC ad or other social media platform they were using when they actually found you, nor what page they landed on and exactly when they did this. A prospect might be a little weirded out with 20 questions the moment they call. By understanding exactly how your prospect found you, your marketing team can gain insight into which efforts are working and spend even more time focusing those efforts. If your company invests heavily in marketing, this is information that is absolutely critical to the success of that marketing.

What made them reach out?

As you probably know from years of experience in sales, prospects don’t just reach out to buy. There’s a massive learning curve when it comes to your products and services. Prospects need to be carefully nurtured, educated and given multiple opportunities. They have to feel great about choosing you, and their final decision involves some pretty in depth research. In regard to lead intelligence, you need to know if it was the free sample, the one-time promotion, or that industry case study that pushed them over the edge. By gaining understanding of which actions are turning your prospects to leads and leads to customers, you can better determine who your ideal buyer is, better understand your sales cycle and avoid unnecessary steps in the process.

How they’re interacting with your correspondence.

It might seem a little creepy, but it’s time to move beyond the read receipt. There is nothing more annoying than a read receipt on a completely cold or salesy e-mail. But you need to know more, right? You’re definitely not happy logging into the company newsletter platform and seeing if they clicked on some links. You need to know exactly whom the best point of contact is within that organization and what they think of your organization. If they’re not opening your e-mails, opening them and not clicking or clicking multiple resources and actively engaging with the attachments and proposals you’re sending. Having intelligence like this completely breaks down the confusion and frustration that often results in prospects falling through the cracks.

You’re not a psychic. It’s practically impossible to get all this insight on your own. In order to run a really successful sales and marketing partnership, this is the type of lead intelligence that you really need. You can look at demographics all day long, but the odds are you don’t know exactly what you need to know in order to hone your marketing efforts and shorten your sales cycle. A little insight goes a long way. It’s time to unwrap your sales and marketing initiatives and put them under the microscope. Marketing and sales can work together seamlessly with a little communication and analytics. Get the most from your marketing and make your executive team really, really happy by uncovering your ideal prospects with marketing analytics.

The blame game between sales and marketing

It’s a long held stereotype that marketing and sales do not get along. Marketing blames sales for never following up on the “awesome” leads passed forward. Sales complains that all marketing ever sends over is junk.

The simple fact, is both things are true. Companies that are working to move from the Traditional marketing phase to the Lead Generation phase of the Revenue Marketing Journey™ fall into this trap almost 100% of the time. It’s the first time marketing has signed up for a formal Lead Generation goal. They’ve got a nifty new email tool, they’re doing some pay per click and search marketing, and they are in a state of perpetual giddiness over their newly acquired email addresses. “We have leads, let’s pass them to sales!”

What happens next is like a scene pulled straight from a Dr. Phil episode. Sales sees the new lead pop up into the CRM queue and they are excited, initially. “Look, it’s a new lead from marketing. Wow, this is a first.” That excitement quickly wanes after sales picks up the phone to call the prospect, only to discover that they are:

1. Not the right fit.
2. Not the right size.
3. Not the right point of contact.
4. Not even interested

Eventually, sales stops paying attention and begins completely ignoring marketing leads. Over time, marketing becomes increasingly irate over the fact that they are passing leads over to sales and no one is doing anything with them.

Where’s the rub? It’s likely that sales and marketing never really had a conversation about what constitutes a qualified lead. And, even if they did, the conversation probably went something like this:

Marketing: What kind of leads do you want us to send your way?

Sales: I’ll take anything. I need to fill my pipeline. Just send me everything you’ve got and I’ll take it from there.

Well… that’s just plain not true is it? The only time sales is going to cold call on an even colder prospect is when they literally have nothing else in their pipeline. If everything marketing passes to sales is cold and unqualified, they aren’t going to call on any of it. And, frankly who can blame them?

If marketers want to move beyond being seen as a cost center to being seen as a revenue generator, it’s time for a little sales and marketing marriage counseling.

This starts with a frank and honest discussion between marketing and sales that identifies the characteristics of a qualified lead. Both teams must mutually agree on the attributes and determine what level of engagement indicates a readiness to buy. This is easy to say and very hard to do. By the time marketers are ready to move to the Demand Generation phase of their Revenue Marketing Journey, damage to the relationship has already been done. There is often so much bad blood between marketing and sales that it’s nearly impossible to have a productive conversation. But, it’s worth the pain. Through active dialogue comes healing. That may sound pretty Zen, but it’s true. Regardless of how contentious the relationship between marketing and sales may be, no one wakes up in the morning thinking, “I think I want to fail today.”

The key to starting that healthy dialogue is having both a sales leader and a marketing leader willing to bridge the gap. Both have to leave their egos at the door and not dwell on the “as is” state. Now is the time to focus on the “future state”.

It’s the marketer’s job to find, nurture and qualify prospects until they are sales ready. Both sales and marketing need to agree on what “sales ready” means and commit to adhering to the criteria. Once marketing sends those leads over, it’s sales’ turn to follow up. But, it’s what happens next that is the most vital.

Measure and Evaluate!

If something isn’t working, tweak it. This is where it’s easy to fall into the same ole blame game. But, if both sides are committed to identifying qualified leads, then constant discussion, measurement and evaluation must take place.

Alignment is a tough nut to crack. But, if both marketing and sales are willing to come together to have a meaningful conversation about leads, then you will be on your way to a more peaceful co-existence and a much healthier bottom line.

You may find yourself wondering how to even start this conversation. Here are some tips:

1. Determine what specific criteria make for a good lead.

• For example are annual revenue, number of employees, industry or region relevant indicators?

2. Determine what job role and function are mostly likely the decision makers within your target companies.

• Do you find yourself closing deals with Directors and VPs?
• Are they typically in finance, marketing or sales?

3. Determine how, and at which point, a lead is passed to sales.

• Does it makes sense for marketing to have an inside sales presence who pre-qualify leads to get a sense of their interest?
• Are there specific behaviors that exhibit interest signifying a lead may be ready to buy?

So… what’s the moral of this story? As is the case with any successful marriage, communication is key. One has to work to maintain a healthy marriage and the same holds true with the relationship between sales and marketing. There will be struggles and disagreements along the way. But, as long as everyone is unified toward a common goal, willing to talk it out, and enthusiastic about generating revenue, a long and happy life together is attainable.

Congratulations on your union and may you have many lucrative returns.

Before you can solve your biggest marketing problems you first have to clearly identify them. For instance, it’s common for many companies who are experiencing a problem with sales volume to initially blame it on marketing.

“Our marketing is not doing its job!” Have you felt or heard that before? You are not alone.

Learning How To Identify Your Marketing Problems

There are 3 Phases of Inbound Marketing Where Problems Exist

1. Unable to Generate Traffic
2. Able to Generate Traffic, but Not Converting Visitors to Leads
3. Getting Leads, But Not Increasing Business

Every business has their version of these problems that they are trying to solve. Some companies may be making enough new sales, but want to get even more efficient. It all depends.

However, by creating an inbound marketing process that runs smoothly in all three of these phases and by closing the loop between marketing and sales, we are able to create what I call the “Marketing and Sales Handshake.”

In other words, we don’t just stop at saying, “we got you leads!” and consider our job done – which is what a lot of SEO and Internet Marketing Companies do, unfortunately.

For example, we monitor calls and track form submissions based on the type of traffic (paid vs. organic) the leads are generated from and we request that our clients provide us (or we create) reports on the sales generated from those leads.

In many cases we can define the name and/ or phone number of the lead we generated.

This helps drive home a very important point – marketing can drive traffic and leads, but if sales are not happening, it’s a fruitless effort.

How Can Sales Cure My Marketing Problem?

Think of it this way, if all the marketing you are doing is driving enough visitors and generating leads, all you need to do is figure out how to close those leads.

The source of the closing leads issue could be coming from one of the following places. Start looking here first:

1. The Leads are not fully qualified for what you are selling
2. The Leads are qualified, but for the wrong type of sale or price point
3. Nurturing the Leads may be required after they are obtained, and that is not happening

There may be even deeper issues – like your voice message is too long, or maybe the phone calls are not even being answered (we’ve seen that).

If you figure out how to make sales from the Leads that come in with your marketing efforts, you’ll solve all your marketing problems! It sounds simple, but you would be surprised at how hard it can be if you do not come at it from a systematic approach.

What’s the most difficult part of the funnel for your company?

Investing in vain?

We all know that business success requires trial and error; experimentation & innovation.  But even knowing that, it’s easy to rue business investments which seemed sensible and adequately justified but which fail to deliver expected returns.

Many B2B Manufacturing companies find themselves in that position after pouring resources into content marketing…and receiving minimal return.

As we recently explored, the return on inbound marketing isn’t linearly correlated to effort and work.  And as many companies discover after buying into the sexy story, inbound marketing requires not only hard work and consistent allocation of resources, but also technique, vision and perspective in execution.

Spending hours, days, weeks and months on content creation may be fruitless if it’s not done well.  Even great content will be for naught if the process breaks down at other points.

Translating effort to results

Great content must be supported by great processes to succeed. And once real, honest to goodness Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are generated, they must be sold artfully – not in some ham-fisted ’80s style.

Typically sales people schooled in a traditional direct B2B sales approach approach “leads” with a presumptively.  The conversation sounds something like “You requested information on our XXYY970L product.  Tell me about your application requirements and let’s see if it’s a fit.”  Sound familiar?  Sound effective?

You probably answered “yes” and then “no.”  Because it is so common, and oh so ineffective.  And it fails for many reasons.  First, nobody is interested in your product.  The interest is around how your product creates business value for them.  Second, they are unwilling to be sold.  The internet has spoiled them – they now buy.  They research solutions to their problems using abundant information available online, and they only entertain sales conversations once they are approximately 70% of the way through their buying process.

Strong sales people today discern among their leads those which really are (and strong B2B marketing facilitates that with behavioral algorithms and metrics.)  Of course they review the prospect’s website and LinkedIn profile before contacting them.  But they know that’s not enough, so they go further.  They also:

• know precisely which pages on their site the prospect has visited for how long, how often and within what window (has the investigation been over 3 day sor 3 months)
• infer from the specific content pieces which a prospect has consumed both what business issues they are focused on AND how advanced they are in their research and analysis – in other words how far along they are in their buying process
• gauge how the initial visitor has shared the site and content with colleagues (by evaluating unique visitor behavior, source and timeline)
• identify areas of suspected concern for prospects (e.g. a visit to warranty information and technical support pages) which should be artfully, but preemptively, addressed as part of a dialog (or perhaps nurturing content)
• consider how the prospect has responded to nurturing – was theirs a one-time, fleeting interest or are they journeying not only on their own but participating in the virtual dialog of marketing automation

And then, armed with that nuanced insight, they reach out to prospects – not to discuss a product, but to acknowledge their research, to affirm the business issues the prospect hopes to overcome and the implications/value of failure/success in doing so – their goal is to become a resource.  Successful B2B sales people today are knowledgeable guides for the complex buying journey.  And they must seamlessly pick up from and draw upon the B2B marketing resources and content.

And marketing must execute flawlessly too

It’s not just sales that must refine and substantially improve their game.  Marketing must now not just collect business cards in a fishbowl at trade shows, but understand that they are now performing 70% of the B2B sales function.

The demands on both sales & marketing now range from minutiae to high level strategy.  Not only must they understand the cascading operational and financial implications of their solutions, but they must instinctively understand execution details including:

• Suppressed navigation on landing pages
• Personalized email subject lines
• A/B testing of Calls to Action
• Nurturing and behavioral segmentation
• Extensive cross-selling on thank you pages
• Individualized website content

And it’s not merely enough to have vague familiarity, but success requires a deep understanding of the technique, rationale for and objective of each of those details and many more.  (Hint – if you don’t know what these mean, why they are important and whether your effort incorporates them, then you’re the one I’m talking to!)

The bottom line for B2B manufacturing and industrial companies is that simply deciding “to do content marketing” isn’t enough – sadly, in fact, it’s likely a recipe for squandered resources.  Undertaking a DiY program is akin to purchasing a used mill and lathe and having the shipping clerk start to fiddle with them to produce some parts for your products.

You wouldn’t run your manufacturing that way….so why do you run your sales and marketing with an approach you wouldn’t tolerate in production?

Kim wants to purchase a crib for her newborn daughter. She works a lot, so she’s dreading being shown model after model by an overeager salesperson at the store. To save time, Kim figures she’ll pick out the crib on her own.

She starts searching various websites, finding information on the prices and features of different cribs on the market. Kim needs the safest crib for her precious bundle of joy, but she also needs an affordable crib. This is also Kim’s first child, so she doesn’t know what brands or models to look at, let alone what extra features she needs to keep her baby safe.

Kim’s search leads her to a blog post on the importance of crib safety written by the leading supplier of cribs in the industry. After signing up for their newsletter and receiving a promotional email, Kim decides to purchase a crib from their catalog. She spends the next week reviewing options on their website and orders a mid-tier crib that meets all of her needs.

Kim just traveled through the exciting marketing/sales funnel.

The marketing/sales funnel is nothing more than a model that illustrates the sales process. Anybody with a need or desire for your product pours into the top of the funnel. It’s then up to your business to introduce your product to those people and secure them as loyal, satisfied customers.

The model takes the shape of a funnel because not everybody is like Kim. Most people leak out along the way. Not everybody who sees your website will purchase your product. The goal of a company is to retain as many people as possible from one stage to the next, satisfying the needs of many people who, like Kim, will benefit from what you offer.

While each funnel is unique, there is a common skeleton that can be applied to any company’s selling process:

Stage 1: Awareness and Interest

This is the top of the funnel. There are many people with a problem that your product can help solve. Kim has a baby, and that baby can’t sleep on the floor. She needs a crib.

Your company’s task at this stage is to attract people to your product. There are many ways to do this, from advertising to blog posts (hi there!). It’s important to create a connection between your company and the solution to the buyer’s problem. From there, you can escort them to the next stage of the process.

Stage 2: Consideration and Intent

Once the person knows what their problem is and has looked into solutions, they’ll be weighing options and deciding on a purchase. Kim has to choose between a simple refurbished wooden crib, a fancy feature-packed crib, or an inexpensive box for her daughter to sleep in. Which is best for her?

Now that they know of your company and what you offer, these people need information to guide them to a purchase. Kim knows you offer a brand new crib with many safety features to protect her baby. But does she really know the benefits of those features?

The best move you can make is to set up an informative product page or landing page, or even a catalog to give the potential customer the knowledge they need to figure out what’s right for them. Present your product as the best solution, Kim’s golden crib, what her precious daughter deserves.

Stage 3: Purchase and Retention

The buyer has chosen their product, and they want to purchase it. If they chose your product, congratulations! But you don’t want to be temporary, you want to be the permanent solution to their problems.

Kim decided to buy your crib, but she also needs to buy a stroller and car seat for her newborn. Lucky for you, she’s already your customer. If she loves your crib, she should also love your stroller and car seat. Soon she would also need a booster seat, a toddler bed, and more. These lifetime purchases are very valuable for both Kim and your company.

On your end, have a simple and streamlined purchasing system. Make the purchase itself as easy as possible. And keep customers satisfied. Customer loyalty is extremely important in the long run, as explained above.

The Future of the Funnel

With the evolution of technology and the business model, the viability of the funnel has been coming into question. Nowadays, people may not be flowing so smoothly through a linear process. Kim may have found a link to your crib on Twitter, and jumped right to the check-out page where she immediately purchased your product. Or maybe she has already bought cribs in the past, and is jumping into the funnel halfway through. With the importance of customer lifetime value, the funnel may not even be a funnel at all, but a circle or web.

Sure the sales funnel may be growing somewhat obsolete, but it’s still a useful tool in marketing and sales. By laying out a sales funnel for your company, you can segment your business or website to capture the most sales.

You can also analyze bottlenecks in the process and find out where people are getting clogged and not coming through. Maybe Kim can’t access the check-out page of your website, preventing her from buying your crib. This creates a substantial bottleneck in your business model.

So, you may say the sales funnel is dead. But to you naysayers, I present to you Kim. Kim traveled through the sales funnel, and now has the perfect crib for her baby.

B2B sales today call for a strong back-and-forth between brand and customer to fully nurture a lead or create a long-term relationship.

Don’t believe me? Ready…set…stats!

• 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy (Gleanster Research)
• Only 25% of leads are high-quality and should advance to sales (Gleanster Research)
• Companies with lead nurturing strategies generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower costs (Forrester Research)

To launch a lead nurturing campaign that will drive more sales, consider approaching prospects as you would a stranger and engage in a discussion rather than a series of sales pitches. Here are some steps to follow when discussing products or services, rather than selling them:

Don’t Be Afraid to Scare Them

After introducing the company and its mission to a prospective buyer, ask some open-ended questions to make him or her consider how new solutions could improve current operations. Within a content marketing strategy, this would require messages to do more than lay out a company’s basics like a presentation. It would call for marketing communications to instill a sense of urgency or fear in the customer.

For example, if your company offers marketing automation solutions, your campaigns will outline the many uses and benefits of the technology. What the content should be sure to include is the potential negative impact of NOT using marketing automation solutions, such as: inaccurate campaign reporting, inconsistent messaging, or missed leads. When buyers realize the error of their ways, they will feel compelled to avoid costly oversight and discuss solutions to get back on track.

Identify Needs

Once fear has been appropriately instilled, the customer will start to research what options are available. Sales and marketing teams should be at the ready to field these phone calls, emails, and other interactions swiftly and efficiently. To put the customer at ease and let them know you have the right solutions, marketing and sales should first discover the buyer’s specific needs or concerns. This means more listening and less pitching.
Don’t think of the initial encounter with the buyer as the first and last chance to sell them on a product or service. Rather, think of it as a first date. Get to know one another, hash out the fears and expectations, and ask enough questions to make the customer feel the experience is customized. The more details you obtain initially, the easier it will be to exceed expectations later in the sales conversation.

Follow a Train of Thought

If a buyer starts to browse a company’s website or social media content and is interested in engaging in a dialogue, be sure to track what messages prompted the interaction. For example, a phone call can be traced back to a display ad, direct marketing piece, or other source with call tracking technology, while Google Analytics identifies visitor behavior on websites. When you know where a lead is coming from before a conversation is started, sales and marketing can discuss appropriate needs and solutions based on demonstrated interests.

Tracking technology should be placed on all marketing initiatives to provide a more detailed look at the customer experience and relationship when the data is stored in a CRM. Marketing and sales can access a customer profile in the CRM to see what messaging they have been exposed to and what they sought out on their own. This will guide teams on how best to nurture the lead with consistent messaging and appropriate follow-ups.

After a customer downloads an e-book or participates in a webinar, marketing and sales should make themselves available to answer any questions or guide customers to specific blog posts, research reports, or other content that is most relevant to his or her needs. Sales and marketing must place themselves in the shoes of the buyer and predict their train of thought throughout the sales cycle to pre-emptively provide the best information at the appropriate times.

Provide Advice

No matter how hard you fight it, there will always be customers who are interested in the product or service, but may not fit into the ideal buyer mold. Rather than focus energies on a sale in the short-term that will not build a trusting relationship, fully nurture a lead and provide unbiased guidance centered on what is in the best interest of the buyer.

If a customer acknowledges your company as a trusted advisor and not working to sneak in an unnecessary upsell, they will be more likely to return in the future for other purchases and refer the brand to their customers or partners. Just as you wouldn’t give your friend or coworker bad advice just because it is convenient for you, so too marketing and sales should have honest conversations with buyers to ensure the outcome is win-win!

To learn more about how marketing analytics can enhance a conversation with customers, download our “Google Universal Analytics & Call Tracking” webinar.

Sometimes misleading content isn’t misleading by any fault on its own. Take this Forbes article on Popeyes shares catching up dangerously close to KFC.

Others may not be so lucky. In an age of increasingly dominating online content, you only want authentic prospects looking you up and converting into high-probability sales leads.

Luckily, many an expert marketer will tell you that a filled up form or an inbound inquiry isn’t automatically a lead. For example, if you want sales leads for accounting businesses, you’d still want to learn more things like the kind of business a prospect runs or how big they are.

That doesn’t help when your content uses keywords or titles that aren’t tailored enough to attract the right audience. That’s how bounce rates tend to get worse on your site. It’s also how some prospects grow confused over the topics you discuss and the actual services you provide.

So what are some quick and easy ways to tweak your marketing content so that readers and viewers will be given a more accurate impression?

• Think like your prospect – This sounds like a no-brainer but again, look at the Popeyes example. Given the confusion between Popeye the Sailor and Popeyes the fast food chicken chain, you’re only piling the confusion when you say it’s beating a fat-inducing rival like KFC. Think about it, what could it have also meant if Popeyes stood more for a vegan franchise? (The sailor is more about spinach after all.)

• Know where impressions are strongest – In a world of fast-paced content, the title alone is already half the contest. If you don’t know the first thing that gets a prospect’s attention, following-up with anything will be of little help. Don’t just think in terms of technical SEO. Again, think like a real reader. Even if you’re at the top result of a Google search, your prospect’s not going to click if you’re still far from what they’re looking for.

• Get behind the search – Ever wondered what goes in a prospect’s mind when they’re searching for information? This is where the process of prospecting and lead nurturing is wholly undervalued. It’s the best opportunity to ask a prospect about what they were thinking as they were searching. It’s not just your salespeople who’ll benefit. It can also help you dig deeper into their minds as you create materials that are more aligned with their needs.

If you’ve been frustrated by your own Google searches sometimes, then you know what happens when you follow misleading content. Avoid creating the same problems with others and fine-tune your marketing materials to be less misleading.

When I deliver Command of the Message®, one of the questions I am asked the most involves discovery. I think one of the keys to effective discovery is preparation, but I also believe there are some learned skills that help salespeople master the discovery component of a sales process.

I’m from Cleveland (Go Browns!). And, like many college-aged students, I worked at Cedar Point in the summer. (For those of you who may not be aware of this Ohio wonder, it’s a giant amusement park, consistently voted #1 in the world.) It was a great place to work, especially when you were young.

I had the best job in the park, working on the Western Cruise boat ride; filled with plastic animals and frontiersman shooting their guns while I drove the boat and told the jokes. I worked there with my identical twin brother, Patrick. One day while I was working on the ride, there was a request that my brother and I report to the Head of Parks’ office immediately. I had no idea what it was about, but Patrick sure did.

We get there and my brother says, “Just shut up, I got this covered.” Well, silence was never my strongpoint. It was like a scene out of a movie. Mr. Head of Parks was in his leather chair facing out the window, with his back to us. As he heard us come in, he told us to sit down. I sat there dumbfounded, ready to defend myself against whatever misguided accusations were coming my way.

He turned in his chair, wagged his fingers at Patrick and me and said, “Which one of you is causing trouble in my cafeteria?”

I jumped all over him, ignoring my brother’s advice. “Jack, I wasn’t even in the cafeteria today. I don’t know what you are talking about. I didn’t do anything,” and I carried on and on, so much so that it probably sounded like I was guilty.

That’s when Patrick spoke up and said, “That would be me.”

Jack looked right at me and said, “Here’s some free advice. You need to get comfortable with silence.”

Mr. Head of Parks gave me important words of wisdom and something I still use to this day (as best as I can). Silence is a great tool for effective discovery.

Silence Can Be a Great Asset in Discovery

Most sales people are natural conversationalists. That’s why we’re good at selling. However, because of that, we’re very comfortable talking with ourselves. If you’re highly direct and open like a lot of salespeople, you can get yourself in trouble with discovery. It doesn’t mean you can’t be effective.

Remember this: Know thyself.

Understand that you, likely by your nature, enjoy carrying the conversation. But, when you’re in the middle of a discovery conversation, the conversation isn’t about you in any way. That’s why you need to be quiet.

When salespeople ask me for discovery tips, I break it down into two major tenets: (1) listen and (2) be quiet. I can’t stress these two points enough. It’s difficult to be effective at the sales discovery process if you don’t do these two things. Below I’ve listed two simple techniques that will help you execute.

Edit Your Questions

Start with the question list you’ve created for your discovery process. Edit it down to four or five questions you know will get to the answers you need. If you have any more, you’ll be so focused on your questions that you won’t be listening. Your discovery session will move from a conversation into an interrogation. Your prospect doesn’t need an inquisition. Don’t interrogate.

If you’ve prepped for the call, you don’t need twenty questions. You already have a point-of-view. You know where you need to end up in the conversation. Use your main questions as an outline for the dialogue. Use your listening skills to help you execute. Use the answers to these great questions to ask other follow up questions.

In an effective discovery process, you have a dialogue that demonstrates your perspective and positive business intent. Use your discovery questions to validate your point-of-view and pull information out of the prospect that leads towards a value driver.

Wait Five Seconds

How many times have you asked a discovery question, and your prospect answered so quickly, it almost sounded like a canned response? That quick response tells you they’ve been asked that question before. It’s what happens next that differentiates great sellers from those who barely make quota.

Best-in-class sellers listen. 

If you ask your prospect a question, really listen to the answer. Absorb it. Stop for a minute. Write down the answer and any notes that may be relevant for your follow-up questions. Then, wait. If you’re willing to sit back and be quiet for a minute, often keep the prospect will start talking again.

Now I’m not saying you should have a silent stand-off, but give it a good 5-10 seconds. Write something down. Look pensive, whatever you need to do. Silence is uncomfortable. Your prospect will likely feel the need to break it. It’s human nature.

When the prospect starts talking for the second time, that’s when he/she moves away from the boilerplate answers that he/she is giving every other vendor. That’s when you’ll learn things that you can use to frame your own sales conversation.

You will also probably come up with your next question, one that wasn’t on your list. That will likely be the question that gets you the nugget you need to (1) determine your value driver and (2) make your business case.

Remember, the best questions often come from the answer you just heard. The one you heard.if you were listening.

When it comes to addressing your customer and audience, knowing who they are and where they come from are two of the most fundamental musts before attempting to reach out.  Let’s refer to the customers’ “who” as their “buyer persona” and their “where they come from” as their “buyer journey.”

Allow me to define both of these terms:

Buyer Persona: It’s exactly that, the person and personality of your target customer.  HubSpot defines it as something that “helps an inbound marketer visualize the ideal prospect, their behavior, demographic profile, and psychographic information.”  Setting these terms allows for marketers to continue working toward reaching a specific audience.  Having the criteria of the target customer clearly laid out helps to prevent from any inadvertent deviation and to keep a campaign on track.

Buyer Journey: The buyer journey consists of the steps through which a prospective buyer goes when in need of a product or service.  First is awareness that there is an issue for which they need something or someone to fix it.  Next is consideration of what product or service might suit that need best.  The last step is decision time where the consumer chooses the best fit for them.

Now that we’ve established some vocabulary, let’s talk about why these two things are so necessary in any inbound campaign.

Establishing a buyer persona lets you create a vision for what you want to reach.  As aforementioned, it helps to prevent deviation and to maintain a constant attention to the same goal.  Figuring out who your desired persona is can get tricky.  Fortunately, HubSpot has given us some thoughtful questions to help us get there.  Before anything, what’s the role of this person’s life or work?  What industry do they come from? On a more personal note, what are some of their goals and challenges?  What are some of their pain points that you can help to alleviate?  Where do they hang out or gather their information from?  What kinds of shopping interests do they have?  Answering all of these questions will help you arrive at what kind of person or target customer your buyer persona will be.

Now, knowing how to navigate your buyer through their buyer journey is imperative.  You’ve established that persona and gotten them to arrive at your product or service.  During that initial awareness stage, whose product is the consumer thinking of?  Are you making your own available enough so that it’s the first one to come to mind?  In the consideration phase, do you have enough information on your website about your product?  Does that information and writing speak directly to the buyer persona?  It should.  If you’ve spoken to that established persona clearly enough, then the decision stage is cake.  They pick you!

In short, establishing a buyer persona will keep your campaign on track and will help to keep the message and its delivery uniform so to fit to the persona’s needs.  Making sure that your digital and website information speak clearly to that target customer will unconsciously guide them through the buyer journey.  Having a clear message that can be easily understood by your persona is what will lead new customers to your product in the decision stage and thus convert them from leads into actual sales and ROI.

Do you know what a salesperson looks at first when they look at a batch of leads that has been delivered to them from marketing?

We’d like to think it is the lead score, since we worked together (and yes, this is an assumption) to build out a scoring system based on the title and level of the buyer, basic company background, and activity-based (and sometimes channel-based) components. When added together, these factors should add up to a minimum requirement for that lead to be passed over to sales. So what’s the problem?

Sales isn’t necessarily looking for more leads, but rather more leads from companies they feel are in the “sweet spot.” If they find one good company in every ten leads, then they will need twenty leads to find two companies that they feel they can sell to. That’s why they want more leads … in order to cherry-pick the best ones from the companies they want to be calling on.

That’s the first thing they look at … the company a lead is coming from. They want to know if this is a lead from a company that is likely to buy.

Sales has been taking this account-based approach for a long time, but most marketers are focused on ‘net new’ names, or lead volume as an indicator of success. In fact, according to some preliminary results from our currently in-progress B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Survey, ‘net new leads’ was the most-measured KPI with 72% of marketers tracking it. If we want to be truly aligned with sales, then an account-based approach to marketing might be the right strategy for your team — and perhaps the KPI to shoot for should be new leads from target accounts.

How do you get started?

Build a target account list

Take a look at your best customers, and identify what they have in common. Are they all from a select group of industries, with certain minimum revenue thresholds? Are they all using the same CRM system, or ERP? Did they just receive a round of funding, or report earnings that were in line with expectations? Identify their common ground, and then search for more companies that share similar characteristics to build your target account list.

Adjust your lead scoring to add bonus points if a company is on your target list

Your sales team would rather get a manager or director from a company on the list than a VP from a company that will never buy. Target account leads should bubble to the top faster than ones from other companies.

Leverage your target account list in your demand generation efforts

When considering sponsorship at a live event, look at last year’s attendee list. Are at least 40% of the companies there on your list? If not, then maybe it’s not the right event for you – even if you have always attended that show or consider it to be “important to the brand.” Also, when negotiating for content syndication programs or email list rentals, see if you can limit the leads you receive to come from only target accounts. These vendors may resist you, because many are not set up to operate in this way, but work with them to find a way to focus on target accounts. Consider lowering the title minimum to include manager and higher from target accounts, rather than director and up. The CPL might be higher, and your reach may not be as wide, but in the end the quality of leads coming in will make sales happy because they are from the accounts they want to be selling to.

Consider investing in account identification technologies

Look at the technologies that will shine a light on target account activity on your website, or that will identify a visitor from a target account when they fill out a form using their personal email address. When you understand the web traffic sources (or paid ads) that are driving the most traffic from your target account list, then you know where to increase your spending next quarter. Also, people often lie on forms, which can impact lead scoring. With backup identification at the corporate level, you can more easily identify the accounts where there is likely an initiative you want to know about. They may not be ready to engage yet, but with a little bit of knowledge you can drop employees from that account into a nurture program which will solidify your place at the table when they are ready to talk.

Sales doesn’t want to spend time calling on leads from companies that are not likely to buy. Understanding and acting on your target account list may decrease the overall quantity of your leads, but if the quality is there the impact will show in your pipeline and revenue numbers.

Leaders Raise the Standard is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

A leader raises standards.

The leader raises the bar for everyone. She sees what is possible for an organization and for the individuals that make it up–even when they do not. She believes that her vision can be made real even when no one else yet believes.

By raising the standard, a leader insists that her people do better. She insists that they perform at a higher level, often a level that they don’t believe possible. She inspires, pokes, prods, coaxes, demands, and insists that they raise the bar. She forces them to use one of the greatest of all human attributes–resourcefulness–to find new ways to do the things necessary to moving towards her vision.

And she leads. She holds herself accountable for doing the toughest jobs, making the toughest decisions, and changing herself and the organization to become what it is capable of becoming.

The people who follow this leader will describe them as the person who did the most to help them become what they became, to realize their potential. But they won’t say that this leader made it easy for them. They’ll say this leader stretched them, starting with their vision.

A leader raises the bar.

Leadership is not a job. It isn’t a title you find on an organization chart. There are some people with titles that indicate they are supposed to be leaders, but their behavior betrays the fact that they aren’t.

The non-leader lowers the bar or leaves it where they find it. They accept the organization and the people that make it up right where they are, never imagining more, never demanding more. Their lack of vision, their unwillingness to raise the standard, and their unwillingness to demand more wastes the potential locked up in the people who make up the organization they lead.

If you lead others, raise the standard. No matter your position or role, you always lead yourself; raise your standard.

“Anybody here think you have nothing to create content around? No exciting stories to tell?”

Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute, has heard this issue from a lot from B2B marketers. Many do not think they have any content that is relevant or exciting enough to share to their audiences.

As he gave his keynote address at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013, he revealed that he also gave a presentation for metal working manufacturers that also posed the same question: What do we talk about?

“If you really want to get into content marketing, you have to realize the golden rule is: Your customers don’t care about you, they don’t care about your products … they want a solution,” he said.

Watch this video replay from his keynote for  a case study on how B2B shipping container and energy company Maersk Group used content marketing to garner 1.5 million Facebook page likes (now at 1.8 million) including  more than 25,000 people actively talking about the company.

One key takeaway from Joe’s session was a challenge for marketers to ramp up efforts to deliver content that’s relevant to their target audience.

“My call to you is:  Do you really know what the pain points are of that persona, and what the bigger story could be?”

Watch the full video replay of “Content Marketing: 6 forgotten strategies to execute now” to discover the five remaining strategies to aid your content marketing efforts.

You might also like

Content Marketing: Consulting firm nets 388% more leads with 4-step strategy [Case study]

Content Marketing: 3 tips for how to get started [More from the blogs]

Content Marketing: Targeted persona strategy lifts sales leads 124% [Case study]

What if an acronym was the outline for all you needed to do in professional, business-to-business selling?  There is one, and I was reminded of it last week at InsideSales‘ customer conference Accelerate ’14 in lovely Park City, Utah.

In Ken Krogue’s full day session on Business Development – inside sales tips, strategies, tools, and methodology,  this acronym was one of the highlights of his session because it brings everything you need in sales together. Ready for it? The word is CLOSERS. Here is how it covers the gamut of selling -

• Campaign – (strategy)
• List / leads
• Offers
• Skill
• Effort – (increased dialing, etc)
• Reporting / results – (benchmarking)
• Systems – (technology)

Campaigns are a way to break up your calling and even make it more enjoyable because you can work several different campaigns in a week and it will be a bit more interesting. Ken has identified over 27 types of inside sales campaigns. The idea is that you can try many different campaigns, or ways to reach potential buyers. Different sellers have different results with a number of them, so they are important to explore.

[Tip: throughout the day Ken reminded everyone about A/B testing. Always try something to see how it works, and you can try a second way and compare your results. This is a very effective way to improve prospecting, messaging, and web demos.]

Lists and leads, Ken says, “Leads have needs, lists have interest – and interest is the counterfeit of need.” An interested person can waste hours and hours of everyone’s time – including their own. Make sure to understand whether they are in a position to purchase, assuming there is enough value in it for them.

Offers are on your website and have calls to action. These might include downloading a white paper,  clicking to an offer from your blog, or getting research and e-books from your site. All of these items help educate buyers at the stage that they are in – about issues they may be dealing with, and about the possible solutions – including yours.

Skill is the training piece – how you prospect, message, engage, follow-up, track and help clients buy. Basic selling skills can be taught.

Effort is where more or less dials are made, more or less conversations are had and more or less emails are crafted and sent. You can increase sales just in this one area alone – being motivated enough with great contacts to make and incentive to do so.

Reporting and results are the measuring portion of the inside sales team. How do you track what you are doing, and how can a new person learn from existing reps? To be consistent you must have good reporting that is timely so it helps sales reps as the go along, not just periodically. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Systems includes technology – the science part of the equation. There are dialing technologies, CRM technologies and thousands of sales tools to help in every aspect of the buying journey.

Which part of this does your company have down well? Which areas need improvement?  Is there one area you can make a bigger impact in? Will you do it?

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

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

The post Money Monday – Are You a Sales CLOSER? appeared first on Score More Sales.

In today’s competitive sales landscape, it’s no longer enough to assume that agents are simply making the right number of dials, especially if you’re managing a dispersed sales team operating out of multiple locations, which makes it difficult to keep track of your team’s activity. Deeper, more complex data is required to make sure a sales team is functioning and executing in the most effective way possible. Luckily, there is now an abundance of advanced sales analytics and tools that give sales managers access to detailed accounts of their teams’ activity. One such tool that shouldn’t be overlooked, however, is speech analytics through call recording.

Sure managers can track data like number of appointments made, number of times the phone rang, and ultimately number of conversions, but these statistics only demonstrate whether something is working or not working. Speech analytics, on the other hand, provide the why behind these results, giving managers of non-centralized sales teams insight into important qualitative elements of the sales process that shape the end results.

Here are the three most powerful benefits speech analytics provides sales mangers.

1. Call Results

Speech analytics can help managers learn why some calls convert and others don’t, and why some agents perform better than others. Companies have the ability to set keywords or phrases that trigger push notifications to immediately alert managers of a conversion.

For example, advanced speech analytics can track adherence to an established script and report an aggregate score in almost real-time. Managers are notified and can intervene instantly if an agent who is missing too many opportunities is varying too much from an approved script. Additionally, managers can be informed right away of a prospect’s competitive mention, or sensitivity to fees and other charges.

2. Lead Scoring

When recording every call agents make, speech analytics tools can track known indicators of high, or low, quality leads such as designated words or phrases, the percentage of silence on a call, or the rate of speech, which enables them to score prospects appropriately. Agents are then able to prioritize leads for follow up, and focus on the best leads first, instead of chasing down every lead only to discover most were casual inquiries.

3. Emotion Alerts

When it’s not the specific words that are causing agents to miss opportunities, but rather their emotional state or their reactions to the emotional state of a prospect, call recording with speech analytics can capture otherwise completely unattainable data. Tone, rate of speech, volume, and silence percentage are all valuable clues as to how an agent interacts with a lead and what additional training might be necessary to improve that agent’s outcomes.

In many cases, the prospect’s reaction on the phone may not be related to the salesperson. If many leads are confused or frustrated on the phone, perhaps there’s a problem with an outbound marketing campaign. The data delivered through call recording and speech analytics helps managers adjust the campaign accordingly in an appropriate amount of time and improve the quality of the leads his or her team is chasing down.

At the end of the day, sales managers of dispersed teams can only be as effective as the tools they use. With call recording and speech analytics, it’s far easier for managers to recognize and reward top talent based on hard data, and provide targeted training and support for struggling agents. Instead of a team with one or two stars, managers can build teams of top performers, vastly improving their overall productivity and effectiveness, and the company’s bottom line.

Author: Tony Yang

It was 2007 and I had just finished business school and joined my first startup — a small bootstrapped SaaS company that offered a large file transfer solution.  At that time, I was the only marketer and employee #5 in the company, and we were starting to get some real traction in customer acquisition.  Our basic value proposition was all about making it easy to send large files without having to deal with email attachment size limits or using FTP clients that are too complicated for the non-tech savvy.  We thought this addressed the primary pain point that brought most of the customers to our site…and to some degree, we were right.

A Taste of Being A 10X Marketer

However, we started noticing that we were getting more and more customers that were accounting firms, so I called them up to learn more about their needs.  What I discovered was that they didn’t buy our solution because they had a problem with sending out large files.  What they cared about, which in hindsight seems so obvious, was data security, data privacy and the ability to track access to files for auditing and compliance purposes — which are all capabilities that we had.  The files that they sent back and forth with their clients were mostly spreadsheets and PDF documents containing financial data, which usually aren’t big enough to trigger email file caps but certainly required a certain level of security and privacy measures.  And so, our primary messaging was mostly missing the mark for this audience, not to mention any content we were nurturing these prospects with.

With this newly gained insight, we got more laser-focused with our value prop towards this particular segment.  We ended up partnering with several major CPA associations and we built a bunch of microsites with relevant messaging to more effectively reach this new market.  We ran an integrated campaign where we wrote up a quick case study, developed additional thought leadership material, sponsored a mini event, and presented in a webinar.  I spent a total of about $12K and as a result we closed over $100K in annualized revenue attributed to this campaign.  That’s a 10X in return on investment…how’s that for an ROI??  You can bet that I was trying to find ways to replicate this type of campaign!

Lead Scoring & STP – Bringing Marketing Basics To the World Of Modern Marketing

The moral of the story is that targeting the right audience with the right message drives success.  This is essentially the STP (Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning) process covered in Marketing 101.  Obviously this isn’t anything new or revolutionary — anyone who has ever taken a basic marketing class or has been doing marketing for a while knows this already.

So why are we talking about STP in the same discussion with lead scoring?  Marketo describes lead scoring in its Definitive Guide To Lead Scoring as a methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness.  The experts at SiriusDecisions defines lead scoring as a methodology to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents, and is used to determine which leads a receiving function (i.e., sales, partners, teleprospecting) will engage.  If we stop to think about it, I’d venture to say that the concept of lead scoring is simply a modern implementation or incarnation of the STP process.  Or more accurately, it represents the segmentation and targeting aspects of STP.  When set up correctly, doesn’t lead scoring help us find the right audience to segment and target our marketing and sales efforts?

If you’re a regular reader of the Marketo blog or any other sources of marketing content, the concept of lead scoring is also not new.  The problem is that setting up a lead scoring system that works (i.e., is accurate) takes A LOT of time and effort.  If you’ve ever taken part in building up a lead scoring model, you’ll know that this is true.  The marketing automation experts at The Pedowitz Group recognized that you’ll probably need to refresh your lead scoring model several times before you get it right.

The idea of lead scoring isn’t broken, and implementing the mechanics of a basic scoring system in your marketing automation tool is easy enough.  In fact, many marketing automation systems like Marketo do a great job at tracking a prospect’s demographic, firmographic and behavioral data that we can build our scoring model upon.

The challenge that many marketers face is knowing exactly what data points to base your scoring upon, how much weight to assign to these data points, what those scores actually mean, and how to utilize those scores effectively.  Do we add 10 points for these industry fields or five points?  Is an e-book download worth 25 points?  What about attending a webinar?  And should I pass the lead over to sales when it hits a score of 35 or 50?  Should I grade this prospect with these characteristics as an “A” lead or a “B” lead?  Without knowing a better way, we resort to rules of thumb, gut feeling, and a lot of guesswork to answer these questions.

So how do we identify the right prospects who are ready to buy without having to rely on guesswork or after-the-fact behavioral data that may take a long while to gather, which extends the sales cycle and perhaps puts you at risk of losing a hot lead because you’re still gathering the data to score that very lead?

Predictive Lead Scoring Does The Hard Work For You

Instead of relying on the aforementioned methods of rules of thumb, gut-feel, and guesswork to build your lead scoring model, a better approach is to utilize proven scientific and statistical methods to predict who is most likely to buy.  The idea is to use data science (i.e., statistical analysis, look-alike modeling, machine learning, etc.) to identify both the data within your customer database as well as external data signals gathered from all over the web that have a high correlation to converting prospects into customers.  We call this process predictive modeling, and the output of this process is defining your ideal prospect profile.  Therefore, your ideal prospect profile by definition gives you a picture of leads that have the highest propensity to buy from you.  This profile should be the target that you base your lead scoring against.

So rather than building your scoring model on potentially arbitrary data points, predictive modeling will tell you what your ideal prospects should look like according to characteristics of your customers.  It will show you how to build your lead scoring on the data points that actually matter, so you no longer have to guess.  In other words, predictive lead scoring is a methodology that identifies how closely matched a lead is to your ideal prospect profile, and thus has much greater meaning and is more accurate because it’s based on data points that have a high correlation to actual customers.

For example, if I have had this capability back at my previous company, the predictive model would’ve revealed to me that a prospect who is in the accounting industry, who cares about SOX compliance because she tweeted about it many times, and who runs SSL encryption on their company website will be 4.2 times more likely to buy from me than leads with other profiles.  With this level of insight, I would’ve been able to make my existing lead scoring much more accurate and immediately actionable or supplement my existing fit and behavioral scores with an additional score.  I could have then identified right away any new prospects who will most likely buy from me with this predictive score.

Some companies are already doing predictive lead scoring with an in-house team of data scientists.  For those who don’t have a PhD in data science and statistics in their back pocket, there are consulting firms for hire that specialize in this.  Lastly, there are several technology vendors that offer out-of-the-box solutions for predictive lead scoring and analytics, and several even integrate with Marketo, like my company Mintigo.  The main point is that in order for us to use lead scoring to target the right audience, we need to understand which data fields to base the scoring model on to truly make it effective.  Otherwise we’re just pretending to be data-driven marketers, and that’s not the fastest path on becoming a 10X marketer.

If you’re interested in learning more about how predictive lead scoring can help you target the prospects most likely to buy, join Tony Yang, Director of Demand Generation at Mintigo, and Gary DeAsi, Senior Marketing Manager at SmartBear Software and Marketo Champion, in our LaunchPoint webinar: “Predictive Lead Scoring: How to Turn Data into Revenue”. The webinar takes place on Wednesday, June 4^th at 10:00 AM PDT.

How Predictive Lead Scoring Takes The Guesswork Out Of Identifying The Leads Most Likely To Buy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com