As a sales manager, you may not consider yourself a sales leader. After all, strategic leadership issues fall within the purview of senior executives such as the Chief Revenue Officer. But ask your sales team to describe your leadership qualities and you may hear comments such as “She knows how to communicate what she wants,” “He makes the right decisions at the right time,” “She’s very persuasive,” or “He works twice as hard as anybody else on the team.”

LinkedIn is a social site — a place for finding others and getting found. From personal experience, I can say with confidence that the more effort you put into using it the greater your ROI. There are many myths and misnomers out there about what works (and what doesn’t!) when it comes to job searching on LinkedIn. It’s time to set the record straight.

LinkedIn Myth/Misnomer #1: LinkedIn is Just for Job Seekers

While this misnomer was likely fact back in the early days, today that is certainly not the case. Hop on LinkedIn and you are likely to see job seekers, yes, but also all sorts of people using the platform to share their advice and sell their services and wares.

While no doubt LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for those looking to make a career move, it is also a great site to maintain your professional network, promote yourself AND your business.

LinkedIn Myth/Misnomer #2: A LinkedIn Profile is Equivalent to Having a Personal Website

Similar to a website, LinkedIn is a great platform to help decision makers and connections understand what you’re about professionally. Also similar to a website, when written well, it should contain keywords that will lead others to your page.

It has the potential, however, to be MUCH more.

When used optimally, unlike a website which is often static, LinkedIn is a dynamic snapshot of the professional you. In other words, it is (or should be) constantly changing with new connections, updates and activities.

Here’s how:

Check-In Regularly: Make time regularly to post something to your feed and add connections (with personalized notes!).

If you are in full-throttle job search mode, I recommend posting 3X a week and adding 3 connections each time – ideally thought leaders in your industry.

Passive job seekers can pare this down but aim for at least 1 post and new connection weekly.

Join Groups: Select a handful of groups (2 or 3 providing they appear active) and start chiming into conversations, and/or sharing role/industry-relevant content together with your own thoughts on topics of interest.

Leverage Tools for Sleuthing: LinkedIn’s search function can help you identify thought leaders, potential connections and companies of interest. Truly everything you need to kick your job search into high gear or keep your network primed and ready.

LinkedIn Myth/Misnomer #3: LinkedIn is for Online Networking Only

While LinkedIn is certainly an online platform, it can and should serve as a springboard to launch deeper conversations off the site – via skype, phone or even in-person coffees, etc.

Savvy LinkedIn users often engage in an online discussion, follow it up with a customized connection request, and once accepted send the person a quick note asking them to schedule some time to talk and learn more.

Maximizing your LinkedIn ROI

Your ROI when it comes to job searching on LinkedIn is directly related to how you use the platform. Whether a job seeker or not, it pays to make a habit of using the site regularly, take advantage of its tools, and having a dynamic, complete and current profile.

Outside the crop of construction cranes that now dot Vancouver’s bright, downtown greenways, in a suburban business park that reminds you more of dentists and tax preparers, is a small office building belonging to D-Wave. This office — squat, angular and sun-dappled one recent cool Autumn morning — is unique in that it contains an infinite collection of parallel universes.

Founded in 1999 by Geordie Rose, D-Wave worked in relative obscurity on esoteric problems associated with quantum computing. When Rose was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, he turned in an assignment that outlined a quantum computing company. His entrepreneurship teacher at the time, Haig Farris, found the young physicists ideas compelling enough to give him $1,000 to buy a computer and a printer to type up a business plan.

The company consulted with academics until 2005, when Rose and his team decided to focus on building usable quantum computers. The result, the Orion, launched in 2007, and was used to classify drug molecules and play Sodoku. The business now sells computers for up to $10 million to clients like Google, Microsoft and Northrop Grumman.

“We’ve been focused on making quantum computing practical since day one. In 2010 we started offering remote cloud access to customers and today, we have 100 early applications running on our computers (70 percent of which were built in the cloud),” said CEO Vern Brownell. “Through this work, our customers have told us it takes more than just access to real quantum hardware to benefit from quantum computing. In order to build a true quantum ecosystem, millions of developers need the access and tools to get started with quantum.”

Now their computers are simulating weather patterns and tsunamis, optimizing hotel ad displays, solving complex network problems and, thanks to a new, open-source platform, could help you ride the quantum wave of computer programming.

Inside the box

When I went to visit D-Wave they gave us unprecedented access to the inside of one of their quantum machines. The computers, which are about the size of a garden shed, have a control unit on the front that manages the temperature as well as queuing system to translate and communicate the problems sent in by users.

Inside the machine is a tube that, when fully operational, contains a small chip super-cooled to 0.015 Kelvin, or -459.643 degrees Fahrenheit or -273.135 degrees Celsius. The entire system looks like something out of the Death Star — a cylinder of pure data that the heroes must access by walking through a little door in the side of a jet-black cube.

It’s quite thrilling to see this odd little chip inside its super-cooled home. As the computer revolution maintained its predilection toward room-temperature chips, these odd and unique machines are a connection to an alternate timeline where physics is wrestled into submission in order to do some truly remarkable things.

And now anyone — from kids to PhDs to everyone in-between — can try it.

Into the ocean

Learning to program a quantum computer takes time. Because the processor doesn’t work like a classic universal computer, you have to train the chip to perform simple functions that your own cellphone can do in seconds. However, in some cases, researchers have found the chips can outperform classic computers by 3,600 times. This trade-off — the movement from the known to the unknown — is why D-Wave exposed their product to the world.

“We built Leap to give millions of developers access to quantum computing. We built the first quantum application environment so any software developer interested in quantum computing can start writing and running applications — you don’t need deep quantum knowledge to get started. If you know Python, you can build applications on Leap,” said Brownell.

To get started on the road to quantum computing, D-Wave built the Leap platform. The Leap is an open-source toolkit for developers. When you sign up you receive one minute’s worth of quantum processing unit time which, given that most problems run in milliseconds, is more than enough to begin experimenting. A queue manager lines up your code and runs it in the order received and the answers are spit out almost instantly.

You can code on the QPU with Python or via Jupiter notebooks, and it allows you to connect to the QPU with an API token. After writing your code, you can send commands directly to the QPU and then output the results. The programs are currently pretty esoteric and require a basic knowledge of quantum programming but, it should be remembered, classic computer programming was once daunting to the average user.

I downloaded and ran most of the demonstrations without a hitch. These demonstrations — factoring programs, network generators and the like — essentially turned the concepts of classical programming into quantum questions. Instead of iterating through a list of factors, for example, the quantum computer creates a “parallel universe” of answers and then collapses each one until it finds the right answer. If this sounds odd it’s because it is. The researchers at D-Wave argue all the time about how to imagine a quantum computer’s various processes. One camp sees the physical implementation of a quantum computer to be simply a faster methodology for rendering answers. The other camp, itself aligned with Professor David Deutsch’s ideas presented in The Beginning of Infinity, sees the sheer number of possible permutations a quantum computer can traverse as evidence of parallel universes.

What does the code look like? It’s hard to read without understanding the basics, a fact that D-Wave engineers factored for in offering online documentation. For example, below is most of the factoring code for one of their demo programs, a bit of code that can be reduced to about five lines on a classical computer. However, when this function uses a quantum processor, the entire process takes milliseconds versus minutes or hours.

Classical

# Python Program to find the factors of a number

define a function

def print_factors(x):

This function takes a number and prints the factors

print(“The factors of”,x,”are:”)
for i in range(1, x + 1):
if x % i == 0:
print(i)

change this value for a different result.

num = 320

uncomment the following line to take input from the user

#num = int(input(“Enter a number: “))

print_factors(num)

Quantum

@qpu_ha
def factor(P, use_saved_embedding=True):

####################################################################################################

get circuit

####################################################################################################

construction_start_time = time.time()

validate_input(P, range(2 ** 6))

get constraint satisfaction problem

csp = dbc.factories.multiplication_circuit(3)

get binary quadratic model

bqm = dbc.stitch(csp, min_classical_gap=.1)

we know that multiplication_circuit() has created these variables

p_vars = [‘p0’, ‘p1’, ‘p2’, ‘p3’, ‘p4’, ‘p5’]

convert P from decimal to binary

fixed_variables = dict(zip(reversed(p_vars), “{:06b}”.format(P)))
fixed_variables = {var: int(x) for(var, x) in fixed_variables.items()}

fix product qubits

for var, value in fixed_variables.items():
bqm.fix_variable(var, value)

log.debug(‘bqm construction time: %s’, time.time() – construction_start_time)

####################################################################################################

run problem

####################################################################################################

sample_time = time.time()

get QPU sampler

sampler = DWaveSampler(solver_features=dict(online=True, name=’DW_2000Q.*’))
_, target_edgelist, target_adjacency = sampler.structure

if use_saved_embedding:

load a pre-calculated embedding

from factoring.embedding import embeddings
embedding = embeddings[sampler.solver.id]
else:

get the embedding

embedding = minorminer.find_embedding(bqm.quadratic, target_edgelist)
if bqm and not embedding:
raise ValueError(“no embedding found”)

apply the embedding to the given problem to map it to the sampler

bqm_embedded = dimod.embed_bqm(bqm, embedding, target_adjacency, 3.0)

draw samples from the QPU

kwargs = {}
if ‘num_reads’ in sampler.parameters:
kwargs[‘num_reads’] = 50
if ‘answer_mode’ in sampler.parameters:
kwargs[‘answer_mode’] = ‘histogram’
response = sampler.sample(bqm_embedded, **kwargs)

convert back to the original problem space

response = dimod.unembed_response(response, embedding, source_bqm=bqm)

sampler.client.close()

log.debug(’embedding and sampling time: %s’, time.time() – sample_time)

“The industry is at an inflection point and we’ve moved beyond the theoretical, and into the practical era of quantum applications. It’s time to open this up to more smart, curious developers so they can build the first quantum killer app. Leap’s combination of immediate access to live quantum computers, along with tools, resources, and a community, will fuel that,” said Brownell. “For Leap’s future, we see millions of developers using this to share ideas, learn from each other and contribute open-source code. It’s that kind of collaborative developer community that we think will lead us to the first quantum killer app.”

The folks at D-Wave created a number of tutorials as well as a forum where users can learn and ask questions. The entire project is truly the first of its kind and promises unprecedented access to what amounts to the foreseeable future of computing. I’ve seen lots of technology over the years, and nothing quite replicated the strange frisson associated with plugging into a quantum computer. Like the teletype and green-screen terminals used by the early hackers like Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, D-Wave has opened up a strange new world. How we explore it us up to us.

One of the reasons you might lose a deal is because your dream client doesn’t agree to the process. They decide they want to do things that don’t serve them or not to do what they need to do to make a good decision. One of the ways you avoid losing is by selling your prospect the process.

Once you are sitting in front of a contact (or contacts), you need them to commit to exploring change. There really is no other reason for you to be sitting across from them or them you. When they ask you to share information about your company and your solutions, your compliance means you are allowing them to do their discovery instead of your helping them to discover something about themselves and their business. Neither of you are near the point where you should by sharing why you are the right partner, and allowing them to drive you pitching proves you may not be.

It’s not uncommon for some people to decide they want to see a presentation or a proposal without doing some of the things they need to do before you reach that point. They skip discovery and the collaboration that helps you to provide a solution you are confident will work for them. If that’s not bad enough, they often try to move forward without inviting the people who are going to be working with to participate in the process. Your contacts believe they are acting in their own best interest, speeding up the process and eliminating the resistance they are certain to encounter from some of their peers.

For as long as most people can remember, the idea of closing has pertained only to the final ask, the commitment to decide and sign your contract. Of all the many commitments you need to gain, the final ask is one of the easiest to obtain. It’s all the commitments that come before that ask that makes it easy to gain—or the most difficult, spending on how well you have sold the process.

The ten commitments that help you create value for your client while creating a preference to work with you are what helps you ensure that you provide your client with your best help in making the right decision. Before you sell anything else, sell the process.

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Opportunities are too rare to take for granted. Engagement is a gift, and one that deserves your respect. A dream client with a compelling reason to change is a starting point for a competitive displacement. Every opportunity deserves your best effort, your very best shot.

Every interaction with the people who are going to decide whether to work with you is an opportunity to create a preference. It can move them towards working with you. And it can just as easily be an interaction that moves your contacts to consider a competitor—or to move towards them.

Believing that sales is business as usual, that it’s simply punching a clock and going through the motion, is taking opportunities too lightly. Not preparing for meetings, not determining the outcomes you need to achieve, and not planning to create compelling value for the contacts sitting across from you in a sales call is to take half measures.

Without a real pursuit plan, a strategy to win, you leave yourself susceptible to a loss. Without spending the time to decide how you are going to win—and how you might lose—you risk losing where a win is possible. It takes effort to think, to strategize, to consider possibilities.

The opportunity you are pursuing may not be available to you again in the future. It may be years—or decades—before your dream client decides to reevaluate their partner. A poor showing may make it more difficult to get another shot in the future. You need to be impeccable in every interaction, in every opportunity, every time. It is important to win, but if you are going to lose, you must lose having made it an impossibly difficult decision for your dream client.

The post Every Sales Call, Every Opportunity, Every Time appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When someone asks you how much of a company you own, the answer could be two very different numbers. You might own 10,000 shares and there might be 1mm shares issued and outstanding. That would suggest you own 1% of the company. And that would be correct, as of right now.

What is often not calculated in these sorts of numbers is future dilution, particularly dilution that is visible if you look closely. The most common form of future dilution that is visible are outstanding options and warrants to issue stock that have not been exercised.

Let’s say this fictional company that has 1mm shares outstanding also has a 20% unissued option pool (so 200,000 options in it), and lenders have warrants to purchase 50,000 shares.

That would be another 250,000 shares that are not issued, but will be at some point, making the “fully diluted shares outstanding” equal to 1.25mm, and your 10,000 shares now represent 0.8% of the company. That is your “fully diluted ownership.”

Nowhere is this issue more important than the crypto token sector. There are many crypto tokens trading in the market that have a relatively small amount of their total supply outstanding and the market value numbers on many of the sites that track this market are a bit misleading.

For this reason, I like the concept of “year 2050 market cap” that the site OnChainFx reports.

Take Numeraire, a token issued by our portfolio company Numerai, and a token that USV owns some of (that is a disclosure if anyone is confused).

Coinmarketcap reports Numeraire’s market cap at roughly $7mm suggesting that you could purchase 1% of Numeraire for $70k.

But by 2050, there will be a lot more Numeraire out there and as OnChainFX reports, the 2050 Market Cap is more like $110mm. It would take more like $1mm to purchase 1% of Numeraire’s total supply.

This concept of a market cap that includes future dilution is called a “Fully Diluted Market Value” and it is something investors need to be focused on when thinking about value, upside, and dilution.

I am right now in a program with a framework that goes against my deepest beliefs and habits. I’ve been familiar with this program for a long time, and I never engaged with the content they provide, believing the program would not benefit me. But all of my growth has come from looking at beliefs, ideas, and strategies with which I disagree. So, I engaged and opened up the opportunity to change what I believe.

Moving Towards That With Which You Disagree

If you disagree with a belief or an idea or a strategy, the fact that other people have found value in it is evidence that it might be useful. While the fact that other people have found something helpful is not proof positive that it will be helpful for you, it is enough that it should cause you take note. Most people avoid idea with which they disagree, seeking information that confirms what they already believe. Growth, however, comes from changing your mind.

If the ideas and beliefs and strategies you have now are capable of producing the results you want, you’d already be producing those results. If you want things to be different than they are now, you are the first thing that you need to change.

The more you are locked into what you already know and believe, the more you are locked in and limited to your present state. If you are unwilling to even look at ideas that you find challenging, you eliminate new ideas, new beliefs, new strategies—and the new choices you might have available to you.

Change Starts in the 8 inches Between Your Ears

Twice in as many weeks, I have encountered a strategy I find difficult. It’s a rather simple idea, and I believe it has value. But part of me continues to argue that it is not possible for me. The idea is that you carry two smartphones. The first phone is your main phone, and the first step is to eliminate all social apps and email from that phone (now you know why this is difficult). The second phone (or device) is for your social apps and your email. By removing these potential sources of distraction, you give yourself the gift of greater focus. You are also intentional about how you process your email and your use of social apps.

When confronted by this strategy, my mind immediately comes up with an exhaustive list of all the reasons my email must remain on my primary phone. Even though I would have another device with email a few feet away from me. It’s difficult to overstate the amount of power these devices have over our behavior—and our lives. And since I hate the idea, there are now two phones sitting next to me.

Growth requires change—and that change invariably comes with discomfort.

If you want to help other people change, there is no better training than learning to change yourself first. What beliefs, ideas, and strategies are you willing to give up and replace with new ones?

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LinkedIn, the social network for the working world with close to 600 million users and now under the wing of Microsoft, has announced an acquisition as it continues to work on expanding the ways that people already on the platform use it. It has acquired Glint, a startup that provides employment engagement services for businesses and other organizations.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. For some context, Glint had raised nearly $80 million — including these rounds for $27 million and and $20 million in the last two years — was valued at around $220 million in its last round according to PitchBook. Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners.

The news was announced both by LinkedIn and Glint itself in blog posts.

Daniel Shapero, VP of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn, said that the team from Glint will join LinkedIn and continue to work as a salient entity within it under current Glint CEO and founder Jim Barnett.

One big focus for LinkedIn over the years has been how to expand the amount of engagement — and therefore revenue — it derives from paying customers, and in particular businesses that are on its platform. Today some of LinkedIn’s revenue generating products include premium memberships, recruitment (Talent Soutions) and education, by way of Lynda.com. Glint is another step ahead in that wider strategy to build out more services for those users, alongside existing services like education, CRM tools and, most recently, business intelligence.

And the blog post from Shapero, who heads up Talent Solutions, is another indication of how this will fit into LinkedIn’s recruitment business. Today a business might use LinkedIn for recruitment. Now, tomorrow, it can continue to use LinkedIn for more services around those employees once they have been hired. Glint’s current list of products including Employee Engagement, Employee Lifecycle, Manager Effectiveness, and Team Effectiveness. As we have described before, Glint works by way of employee surveys, which it then analyzes using machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics. Its reports measure how employees feel about things like management, compensation and workplace culture and makes suggestions for how companies can improve their scores.

The idea is that this helps to reduce the expense of recruiting and training new employees.

LinkedIn has already been building out solutions to help employees with their career development (for example with its educational products), and this will play an adjacent role on the company-wide front, since some of the feedback can be used to help tailor training courses for employees, and so on.

“We believe that Glint has uncovered a modern HR best practice that every company should do: Regularly gather employee feedback on work, culture, and leadership, and give leaders the tools they need to translate those insights into action,” Shapero writes. “At LinkedIn, as a customer of Glint, we’ve experienced the value that this brings first-hand. Glint provides executives with the tools to answer questions about the health and happiness of the talent they have, while giving managers at all levels the access and insight they need to improve.”

LinkedIn tells me that Glint will not be shutting down its existing service as it integrates into LinkedIn.

The timing of this announcement is also notable: LinkedIn is kicking off its big Talent Solutions conference and this helps set the tone for where it’s hoping to take the division.

Updated with more about what happens to Glint post-acquisition

StockSnap / Pixabay

As is most common in businesses today, there is enormous pressure to achieve short-term immediate results. Today’s hyper-focused mode of operating on the short leash can make it difficult for business leaders to step back, gather critical customer insights, and take a long-term view. Yet, the necessity to do just that has never been more pronounced as now.

Chief Marketing Officers, Customer Success Officers, and Chief Sales Officers, in particular, can benefit from taking a long-term view. Investing in human-centric forms of insights gathering with aims of being ready to adapt to new buying behaviors and customer expectations in 2020.

“The most critical capability of the CMO is to have a profound deep understanding of customers and their needs and know how to engage with and serve them.” -Jamie Moldafsky, CMO, Wells Fargo

What is important to note is the need for human-centric forms of insights. The growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can most certainly be informative and insightful. As many business leaders are finding, relying on just AI alone is risky. The human elements of thinking and behaving are the most difficult to access and to understand. Yet, paramount to truly being able to connect with customers.

Human-Centric insights

Living in a data-driven world day in and day out can make it easy to lose sight of the importance of understanding human elements that do not show up in data alone. As we approach a new decade in just a little over a year, this importance will only grow.

What are critical human elements of insights leaders will need in order to enter 2020 successfully?

Context Gets To The “Why”

No matter how much data, analytics, and artificial intelligence we throw at it, the only sure way to understand why certain decisions are made is through human-centric insight gathering. Without question, as we fast approach a new decade, we will need deeper insights into why people are making the decisions they are. One way to get to “why” is by understanding the context surrounding why decisions are made. You can bet that context that is meaningful today to a decision will change again by 2020. A critical area to stay up to date on.

Choices And Choosing

How people make choices is hard to isolate with data and analytics alone. Understanding, for example, how two people come together to make a choice can be vastly different when ten people are involved. Now, we have to consider how people are digitally enabled to make choices. How much more different will they be enabled by 2020 is key human-centric insights needed by CMO’s and other leaders.

Digital Experiences

The ease and speed at which decisions can be made today will only get faster by 2020. Creating a digital experience for customers and buyers with built-in ease and speed is a challenge facing many companies today. New digital technologies mean that expectations for experiences will change rapidly every time new technologies and platforms are introduced. Staying abreast of how experience expectations will continue to change has to be part of any insights-gathering plan.

How We Work

Plain and simple, how we work today has changed drastically in the last decade. And, we are heading for more drastic changes by 2020. The way people communicate and network have undergone an enormous transformation. Yet, transformations that have taken place may only represent the tip of the iceberg of what is coming on the horizon in the new decade of 2020.

Preparing in 2019 – A Matter of Survival

A clear mandate for leaders is to restructure insights gathering to include qualitative human-centric elements. One of the issues that have plagued such gathering is they have suffered from a “snapshot in time” mentality. Qualitative in nature, they can appear to have an expiration date. Modern challenges and approaches call for ongoing human-centric insights gathering.

It comes down to a matter of survival. Without gathering human-centric insights and making adaptive changes, an organization lowers its chances of sustaining considerably. And, leaves itself prone to new organizations who can come in and fill gaps.

What organizations today will need to prepare for by 2020, is the bar of entry into new markets will be lower than ever. Meaning the ability for newer models and technologies to disrupt existing markets will be that must easier.

The ability to leapfrog entities behind on human-centric insights will no longer be that big of a jump.

Sales onboarding – every company does it, but few do it as well as they’d like. According to a report from The Sales Management Association, 62% of companies consider themselves to be ineffective at onboarding.

When sales onboarding is ineffective, the costs are high – not only for the sales department but for the entire organization:

• Underprepared sales reps can damage your business reputation and may not sell to buyers the way they like to be sold to
• Poorly onboarded reps are less likely to perform well, so they may not stick around – and it costs nearly $100,000 to replace the average sales rep.
• Reps that take too long to ramp can have a difficult time hitting revenue targets – on average, reps spend 10 weeks in training but only become productive after 11 months.

These challenges created the need for a sales rep onboarding process that is faster and more flexible – areas in which the software industry is already well-versed.

Taking a Page from Agile Software Development

Software companies used to spend months or years developing new products. But when software-as-a-service (SaaS) became popular, companies needed to move more quickly – constantly innovating and developing and releasing software with quicker turnarounds.

“Today’s accepted norm for every SaaS company is the ability to continuously operate, with no down time, 24/7/365,” says Sandeep Soman, VP of product and design at Brainshark.

This need for speed gave way to agile development methods. Agile allows companies to develop software and push out incremental updates continuously, with the ability to make adjustments along the way.

This methodology, described in the 4 steps below, can easily be applied to sales because it offers the speed and flexibility that ineffective sales onboarding programs desperately need.

• Planning: make a list of business priorities or features that need to be created or updated
• Sprints: start executing on your list and get feedback along the way
• Review: review work and make necessary adjustments or ‘bug fixes’
• Retrospective: look at what worked, what didn’t and what could be changed for next time

RELATED: The Beginner’s Guide to Agile Sales Management

4 Steps of Agile Onboarding

So what does an agile approach to sales onboarding look like? Here are 4 steps that agile developments use to maintain its pace and efficiency – each of which can be directly applied to new hire training:

#1: Planning: Make a list of required competencies of which a salesperson needs to demonstrate mastery. Competencies can be anything from listening and closing skills to negotiation skills and objection-handling – anything a rep needs to be proficient at to be successful.

By the end of the Planning stage, the idea is to have a master list of competencies, as agreed upon by sales enablement and sales managers, that will help a new rep become as productive as possible.

“Focus your early onboarding efforts on getting reps really good at the things that lead to productivity,” says Jim Ninivaggi, chief readiness officer at Brainshark.

#2: Sprints: According to Scrum.org, in software development, Sprints are defined as having “consistent durations throughout a development effort. A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.

Each Sprint may be considered a project with no more than a one-month horizon.” In short, the purpose of a sprint is to narrow the scope and ensure engineers have laser focus.

When it comes to onboarding, Sprints refer to activity-based training and assessments where reps are expected to complete the task in a given amount of time. Activities can include the first prospecting call, first demo call or first sales call.

For example, if a rep has her first prospecting call in 14 days, set up relevant training, a video coaching assessment (i.e., when a rep records a video response, such as an elevator pitch, and submits it for feedback) and a certification for her to complete in a 14-day sprint before the call happens.

RELATED: 3 Unmatched Sales Enablement Strategies to Try in 2018

14 Day Sprint: Training → Video Coaching Assessment → Certification = First Prospecting Call

“It’s about how we are defining those key activities the rep needs to execute on and building out sprints where we get that person just ready enough to do that next activity really well,” says Ninivaggi.

The key here is the coaching; it’s where you determine if the rep has absorbed the material and can relay it back and move onto the next sprint, or if they need more training (can they do it? vs. did they do it?).

#3: Review: At the end of the day, agile is about continuous learning and improvement. Check with sales leaders on a biweekly basis to review the status of reps and overall effectiveness of the program, by answering the following questions:

• What’s working? What’s not working?
• Are reps hitting KPIs at the right time?
• What was learned during the sprint about the training and rep’s competencies? Is anyone falling behind?

“Get insights from the embedded coach, sales enablement leader, or sales manager to know which reps are doing well and which aren’t and address it with targeted learning or coaching,” says Ninivaggi.

The advantage here is that you can look at team and individual progress and address any potential issues early on, helping to reduce turnover and identify whether a rep is (or isn’t) cut out for the job.

#4: Retrospective: Every 3 months, review where the program added value, what could’ve been done better and what could be changed next time, by answering the following questions:

• What worked well that we should repeat?
• What didn’t work well that we need to fix?
• What are we measuring?
• How many activities, modules and coaching activities were completed?

“The retrospective stage is all about looking for those critical outcomes from our salespeople that demonstrate competency, confidence and the ability to add value to their customer interactions,” says Ninivaggi.

Agile Onboarding Best Practices

In addition to the 4 steps, apply these agile onboarding best practices:

1. Agile is highly collaborative. Get buy-in from key stakeholders such as sales leadership and sales managers
2. Use a sales readiness platform to create content, set up training and coaching and measure results
3. Remember that onboarding and training are never done – reps need to keep on learning and receiving coaching from managers in order to find long term success

For more on agile onboarding, check out our eBook, The Brainshark Agile Sales Onboarding Methodology.

The post How the Agile Approach Can Ramp Up Sales Onboarding appeared first on Sales Hacker.

How organizations approach their MarTech differs among various organizations. The 16^th annual 16th annual Marketing Performance Management (MPM) benchmark study found that the group known as the Value Creators (those that earn 90 or greater grade by the C-Suite) are far more likely to have a strategic Marketing Ops function. A number of characteristics distinguish this Best-in-Class (BIC) from their colleagues named the Sales Enablers and Campaign Producers (the group earning 80-89 and the group earning 79 or less named the Campaign Producers respectively). The Marketing Ops role is present in 82% of the Value Creators organizations compared to only 54% of Campaign Producers who have this role.

One of the primary responsibilities among Marketing Ops among Value Creators is Technology and Automation. In fact, it is the second primary responsibility after Marketing Performance Management of the Marketing Ops function for Value Creators.

Source: Cooking Up the Best Marketing Performance, The 2017 Marketing Performance Benchmark Study

In 2018, Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec.com shared his Marketing Technology Landscape, which identified 6,829 solutions offered by 6,242 unique companies. Econsultancy found that that 51% of organizations use 21 or more MarTech solutions. MarTech still accounts for as much as 20% or more of the Marketing budget. As the MarTech landscape continues to expand, it will become increasingly important for Marketing organizations to be able to successfully implement and deploy the technology. And yet, a good portion of MarTech remains shelf ware.

In our work, we have found four major causes contributing to both low MPM scores and unsuccessful MarTech implementations:

1. Automating outdated/flawed processes
2. Clinging to metrics that don’t matter to the business
3. Not aligned with the top line business goals
4. Not adapting to changes rapidly enough

Our findings reflect the findings of other experts. Buyers often fall into the trap of thinking that software will solve their problems, when software is just one tool. Ignoring the necessary upfront work on processes, metrics, and change management will lead to MarTech failure and, ultimately, to low ROI.

The Proven Best Practices Behind the MarTech of the Best in Class

What can we learn from the BIC groups who are successfully implementing MarTech and earning the high marks from the C-Suite? Our conversations with these organizations reveals that in some way they all leverage three proven best practices.

Proven Practice 1: Define Your Processes

Marketing runs on processes: planning processes, reporting processes, customer journey mapping, content creation processes, opportunity management processes, etc. However, if your current processes are not effective or efficient, then automating them with a workflow application won’t improve anything. You’ll just get faster at following a bad process.

Make sure all of your processes are defined and documented before you implement, configure or deploy any technology. Before you implement a workflow application, map and process-engineer issues.

The same applies to Marketing planning and Marketing dashboard applications. It’s hard to create the right dashboard if you’re not reporting on the right metrics and measures. A Marketing plan that is accurately aligned with the business will achieve high marks from the C-Suite.

Proven Practice 2: Know the Problem You Are Trying to Solve

Often, it’s a lack of change management that robs you of ROI. People cling to the old methods when implementing a new system, and then when those methods continue to fail, they blame the new system.

Be clear about the problem you are trying to solve, solve it, and then automate it. The old adage applies: “What you put in is what you get out.” Your Marketing plan should be outcome-based and customer-centric before you try to upload it into the application. The same applies to alignment, accountability, and analytics initiatives.

Proven Practice 3: Support the Change

It is imperative to allocate sufficient resources for the change management issues related to new processes, metrics, alignment and accountability. Otherwise, you’ll remain as ineffective and inefficient as before.

Most companies we talk with don’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to commit internal resources to the implementation of new technology. Expertise reduces the time any task takes, and time is a component of ROI, so they engage external resources to help. Regardless of the provider type you choose (a MarTech vendor’s consulting/customer success group, a MarTech vendor partner or an independent Marketing firm), they should have plenty of years of experience re-engineering the relevant Marketing processes, creating metrics that matter, assembling actionable dashboards, guiding change management, etc. They should also have proven methodologies, tools and templates to speed the accomplishment of your goals, and of course, they should have solid, world-class customer references.

Have you ever wondered how to become a VP of Sales? I can tell you exactly how to do it, because I’ve lived this journey myself. By the time I was 30 years old, I was working at Oracle (via startup acquisition) helping them build the #1 performing SaaS sales team in my region. At the time, I had two years as a VP of Sales under my belt. And while there is no one perfect trajectory that a sales career follows, there are some key questions you should ask yourself before you start the journey.

How can you become a VP of Sales? Are you prepared to be in charge of the company’s most critical assets? Are you ready to hire and retain a sales team of the best and brightest? Can you spot sales performance issues before they blow up? Are you ready to create predictable revenue based solely on your leadership skills?

My answer to all of the above was ‘yes.’ I have achieved the dream many have of becoming a Sales VP by a 30-in fact before I was 30. I joined the ranks of Prime Point Media in 2006 selling national accounts, and by 2008 I had built the entire Midwest territory. A company called Dukky recruited me out of that job and is where I sold my first SaaS platform. It was there that I led the company to over $4MM in sales, a $35MM valuation, and earned my first title of Vice President of Sales. I had just turned 27 years old.

So how did I do it?  I’m 37 now.  However, if I could go back 10 years and give my 27-year-old self some career advice, I would point out some important actions that would help make the process a little more seamless.

RELATED: Here’s How to Hire a VP of Sales That Will Last Longer Than 19 Months

5 Essential Tips on How to Become a VP of Sales 

1. Banish All Boring Meetings

“Same sh*t… different day” could easily be the motto for most sales meetings. As a VP of Sales, one of the most effective things I did was banish traditional sales meetings. No one wants to attend a meeting just to attend a meeting—not to mention the meetings that never seem to talk about sales.

A 2017 study revealed some scary numbers. Essentially, the results indicated that over 31 hours a month are spent in unproductive meetings, where you will find 91% immersed in a daydream and 39% falling asleep on and off. And that’s not even including those who are nursing a hangover-salespeople aren’t exactly known for quiet nights in.

Holding an ineffective “sales” meeting is, however, a great way to lose value for your company and help the CEO forget you are vying for a VP position.  Instead, hold a meeting that aligns and energizes the team, helping them to think strategically about how they approach their accounts.

Stay standing and keep it short

The best way I have found to make my sales meetings productive is by conducting meetings standing up. It may seem odd to some but it does help keep attention levels from dropping and attendees engaged and interested.

Some key characteristics are:

• Each meeting is between 5 and 15 minutes long
• Everyone remains standing, acting as a reminder to keep it brief
• Each meeting is short but meaningful
• We meet at the same time, same place weekly
• Each group member will succinctly discuss:
• Any updates of progress
• Current project
• Any obstacles or challenges
• We do NOT discuss each sales reps deals

These meetings—while short—are packed full of information. We use a combination of project management style of software called Monday.com and Pipedrive which is a Kanban-style CRM to keep everyone on the same page. It is a visual, collaborative tool that helps keep us all organized on one board where everyone can see the exact status of where everyone else is at.

2. Get creative in your communications.

If you’re looking to become a VP of Sales at a young age, you have to find innovative ways to stand out and be noticed. Instead of doing the same old boring email or company meeting update no one listens to, I set myself apart by doing a weekly video, updating my boss on my progress and highlights. This weekly video built more trust and transparency and broke through the noise. I found that just sending a quick, simple video each week summarizing the weekly wins and opportunities was a small effort with a big payoff.

Key Takeaway

Think outside the same old inbox. Using video for internal communication is just one example of using a creative communication method to instill trust, promote transparency, and share insight to all levels of your organization. Don’t assume all video has to be a viral Youtube sensation to be a success.

A new Buyer Engagement survey found that 1 to 1 video is gaining traction as a sales communication tool. If video is not for you, think of other ways you could stand out and be creative: an infographic, a mini-podcast, an interpretive dance (ok, maybe not the last one…but you do you.)

3. Hire Two or Three Closers Now!  

Closers that focus, not fold

If I could turn the clock back in time, I would force myself to hire at least three excellent closers no matter where I was working. Three, because in my experience, one of those three won’t work out. It is essential that you do not settle for just any closer. The key is to look for someone who has overcome adversity and lived to tell about it.  

The sales industry requires resilience and persistence—someone with a thick skin. A master closer is someone who comes back stronger after every obstacle. Someone who controls their thoughts and beliefs with a strong mindset. This mindset is what allows them to succeed while others fail. A leader is only as strong as his team. Without closers, your own executive career in sales can’t really take off.  

4. A Hustle is a Must

“Hustle is relentlessly pursuing what needs to be done at the time.” – Dan Norris, Entrepreneur

There’s a lot of bullshit out there in regards to what it means to hustle. Sports offers the best analogy. In sports, hustle means doing the only thing you could think about at that exact time to beat the person with whom you are competing. Sales is the same thing.

To be a successful sales executive at a young age, you must be determined to succeed and always demonstrate self-control. You should be forward-looking, maintain a positive outlook, and have a world-class hustle.

I have hustled my entire career hustling is also about breaking through the noise to get to the accounts that truly matter. I have used multiple marketing techniques during my rise through leadership to get my foot in the door. For instance, early on in my career, I sent an empty Manolo Blahnik shoebox to the CMO of a major New York City insurance company. I included a note that indicated the ROI I would create for the company would allow her to buy at least ten pairs of Manolos. My effort was enough to land me a phone call from the CMO herself.  

Another time I went to Macy’s and bought some cheap wallets and filled them with fake plastic credit cards. I sent them via FedEx to my chosen target audience of Marketing VP’s and included a business card with each. Surprisingly I got about a 50% response rate giving me compliments on my creativity.  

Yes, I could have just done a bunch of cold calls and called it a day, but I chose to laser-focus and pool my energy into the account that matters most–that’s hustle.

5. Don’t just hit your numbers, exhibit leadership

If you’re wondering how to become a VP of Sales, it’s first important to understand how much the role has evolved. The VP of Sales is no longer a former sales manager who has risen through the ranks. The VP of Sales is no longer the company’s top closer promoted. No, the VP of Sales is someone who has the ability to provide leadership to the sales team so that they can scale their growth. The role has shifted and evolved and continues to change even today and can even be filled by someone with no sales experience because at their core they are business leaders.  

RELATED: Sales in 2018 is Different: This is How You Should Adapt

Bonus Tip: Fight for the Best Sales Technology

Sales reps waste far too much time…at no fault of their own

I know I said I had five tips, but as a hustler, of course, I will give you one extra piece of advice. As an executive, you must fight for the right technologies for your sales team. Technology used to be a capital expense. It’s now a necessity that will literally make or break your culture. If they’re using shit that bogs your reps down, then they will spend half their day doing admin work.

Hint: If you don’t have at least $1 million per year to spend on proper Salesforce CRM development and customization then you shouldn’t be using it. Now, you’re paying sales reps to spend half their time customizing it for themselves.

A great VP of Sales leads their teams to achieve aggressive goals. I don’t think anyone is going to deny businesses are getting increasingly dependent on technology. Well, technology also has a huge impact on sales and the sales team. In fact, a huge issue with today’s sales reps is they are spending way too much time on non-essential tasks and not enough time doing what they were hired to do: selling.

The Mystery of the Missing Sales Numbers

Recently, I was working with a CEO who couldn’t figure out why his sales numbers were off by around $100k each month.  I regretfully informed him that he was lucky. In fact, he was lucky that they were not off by more like a million, given what I suspected the problem to be.  From there, I recorded exactly how the sales reps were entering their data into Salesforce and sure enough, the reps were entering data about the speed of a snail with an average of 31 clicks. Assuming the average click is 5 seconds of one’s day, then that’s 155 seconds or nearly 3 minutes of data entry per contact! That’s entirely too much data entry work.

Have you ever tried to kick box someone? How about jump rope? Or really anything requiring physical exertion for three minutes straight? It’s exhausting and tries your mental focus. Now, try doing that same exercise 40 times in one day. That’s 40% of the sales reps time spent on data entry. I can personally attest to the radical transformation technology can have on a company starting with the prospecting process all the way to the close.

Once you become a VP of Sales, you must be consistent. This means being consistent when it comes to technological tools. The sales reps are the ones driving revenue. If your aim to be their VP, then it is your responsibility to figure out how technology can be used in the most optimal way.

Conclusion: Becoming a VP of Sales is an Honor and Awesome Responsibility

I hope you have enjoyed my overview of how to become a VP of Sales.  I have learned many lessons in the past ten years. Some have been gradual realizations. Others came at a painful price. One thing I can say for sure is everything happens for a reason and without pain, you never grow.

Most importantly, becoming the VP of Sales is a huge responsibility. There is no perfect road to getting there. My advice is to stop wasting time and let technology start doing the work for you. Always work hard to cultivate solid relationships. And above all, you are about to become the second-most important person in the company. Revenue depends on your talent at keeping the talent. Tread carefully and respectfully and be grateful every day for the awesome responsibility you’ve been given.

The post How to Become a VP of Sales by the Time You’re 30 appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Customers are busier than ever — in fact, more than 60 percent of people work at least 40 hours a week on top of countless hours of housework. Even with this full plate, they still must make well-informed buying decisions and find ways to familiarize themselves with brands.

As a result, your organization should provide personalized customer online training resources that audiences can peruse at their own pace. With eLearning course development, you can tailor your brand to tech-savvy customers instead of relying on traditional strategies that feel more intrusive.

What to Consider as You Approach eLearning Development

Developing effective online learning courses isn’t easy — especially when you’re just starting out. It’s important to consider a few circumstances before implementing an online training course.

First, you must consider the cost of customized in-house content versus outsourcing to a vendor or using templated online training courses. Choose the option that works best for your needs, and have a firm grasp on your target market and product as you begin eLearning course development. It’s more than identifying consumer buying behaviors and product specs — you must also identify how your brand stands out, which pain points it addresses, and which gap it fills in the market.

Second, you must remember that online training won’t always result in a direct sale. An online customer education course should impart skills that empower online learners to overcome obstacles. While your company’s product or service should make this obstacle more surmountable, you are offering this course because you want to establish trust.

Lastly, your team must be prepared to provide superior service or risk losing out on any customers you do gain from your online courses. An established online training program can equip your employees with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

How to Create Effective Online Courses

The best eLearning courses are flexible, convenient, and accessible. Once you have covered those bases, consider the following tips to ensure your online course is valuable for everyone involved:

1. Define measurable goals based on business and customer objectives.

Establish clear goals (that you can measure), and conduct online surveys and focus groups to research customer expectations. If you want to build brand loyalty and consumer confidence by launching a product knowledge course, you must determine what customers know — and don’t know — about your product.

Once you have that information, you can set realistic sales targets and measurable goals that focus on customer satisfaction scores and repeat business. These goals, objectives, and outcomes will serve as a basis for your entire eLearning course development and online curriculum.

2. Invest in an extended enterprise LMS.

Using an extended enterprise LMS for customer training will help you develop and deploy your online training course while tracking learner engagement. With an LMS, you can launch customized online courses that users can access from any device. You can also assign specific resources to certain demographics or customer groups based on their buying habits and product needs. It’s also wise to invest in a rapid eLearning authoring tool that features built-in assets to maximize resource allocation.

3. Incorporate microlearning resources for supplemental online training.

A one-off online training course can give learners the information they need to make an educated buying decision. However, microlearning online training resources offer on-demand support after the fact. Customers can use these bite-sized activities to refresh their memories and learn more about add-ons, services, and tie-in products that address their needs.

You can even incorporate microlearning online training resources as you create online courses that cater to different learning preferences. While some online learners might prefer to listen to podcasts regarding your new app, others can explore the app’s features and test out the interface via gamified training.

4. Integrate game mechanics to motivate and inspire customers.

Gamification involves game-based rewards and mechanics, such as levels or badges that serve as an added incentive. Companies have been using gamified customer loyalty programs for years, and you can integrate it into your learning objectives to motivate and inspire online learners.

Customers earn points for every online training module they complete, making them more likely to engage and participate. This leads to better brand loyalty, and it ensures they know as much as possible about your products and services. The key is to choose the right rewards to reinforce behaviors while aligning with learners’ personality traits and preferences.

5. Host live events to interact and engage.

Online learners go at their own pace, but they still enjoy the opportunity to interact with your brand and fellow customers. Host live events, launch a social media training group, and encourage interaction through blogs and forums. You can even host online workshops or Q&As so online learners can see the human side of your brand and feel like a part of your virtual community.

That said, some online learners might not have the time or inclination to attend live events. Make sure they can still access this information through online courses or view recorded events to get up to speed without the need to rearrange their schedules.

It could be challenging to win over upper management and other key stakeholders, as eLearning development is an investment. However, you can make the case that online customer training increases sales and satisfaction while making your brand more accessible. You might even reach untapped markets thanks to your tech-centered online training strategy that breaks down geographical and demographical barriers.

4 eCommerce Tools You Can Use to Increase Your Sales

Attracting new customers is a vital component to increasing conversion rates on your website. Your business needs the best sales tools in order to accomplish this. Do you need to improve your bottom line? Take advantage of these great resources, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Improved visual search – Syte

You have a great product or service, but need to enhance the user experience. Syte software is a great tool that provides image recognition AI technology. Reach more people visually with increased engagement and an interactive product description. The intuitive software puts the control in their hands as they are able to choose what they are looking for.

2) Recover abandoned website visitors – OptiMonk

If you need a better way to encourage your potential buyers to stay and make a purchase then you will enjoy this smart tool. OptiMonk CRM provides onsight retargeting features that allows you to recover up to 15 percent of visitors who leave a page. Track the user’s behavior, learn when and why they leave, provide valuable offers, and more. Strong A/B testing is also included along with real-time analytics.

3) Sell where your customers are – Sellbrite

Generate more sales online from multiple channels. Sellbrite allows you to reach more people where they are shopping from. Features include inventory management, listing management, inventory control, and order fulfillment in one easy to use dashboard. Avoid overselling items as well as capture more interested prospects with this robust tool.

4) Improve your customer communication – LeadChat

Would you like to reach your prospects immediately with helpful information? LeadChat is a leading customer service tool that allows you to chat with your customers and leads right from your website. Have a ready staff available 24/7 with a personal touch that will drives more sales for your business.

Hopefully you will find these eCommerce tools helpful to building more sales for your business. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

Dale Bierce, Sandler trainer from Sacremento, CA, talks about the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques sales managers and leaders should have towards sales forecasting. Is your sales pipeline predictable and reliable? Learn how to succeed in knowing what is coming from Sales.

Making pitch decks isn’t easy. Sure, you can make a few slides in just a matter of hours and call it a pitch deck. However, creating a pitch deck that will actually help you achieve your business goals is a different matter altogether. In this article, you’re going to learn how to avoid the 10 biggest mistakes people make when presenting a pitch deck.

But first, what exactly is a pitch deck?

A pitch deck is simply a slideshow or presentation that is designed to pitch your company, your services or your products to a select audience. A pitch deck, when done correctly, is a powerful tool that can help you get additional funding from new investors. Whether you’re raising money for the seed round or series A, B, C, and so on, a well-designed and well-presented pitch deck can help your company grow.

Pitch decks are made with presentation software such as PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, Prezi, and many more. For simplicity’s sake, however, we will stick to PowerPoint in this article since it’s still pretty much the de facto presentation software used in many pitch decks. If PowerPoint is not your cup of tea, don’t worry. All the tips here will still apply to your presentation software of choice.

The 10 Biggest Mistakes To Avoid In Pitch Deck Presentations

Ideally, presenting pitch decks should be left to the pros. People who actually know what it takes to convince investors to write out a check and invest in a business. But in the real world, we all know this is rarely the case. So, here are the top mistakes you should avoid when you face the spotlight.

1. Not Making The Presentation Simple Enough

As a presenter, you want to come across as competent, reliable and trustworthy to your audience. As a result, you may think you need to impress them that you know your industry inside and out. While this is perfectly acceptable, you need to check first if your audience is familiar with your industry. In most cases, they won’t be.

If you flood your presentation with technical jargons, your audience will lose interest. What you say will simply fly over their heads, and they’re not going to interrupt you to clarify what you mean. The trick, therefore, is to keep your presentation as simple as possible.

Use simple words to convey complicated ideas. Use simple transitions and animations in your presentation slides so as not to make your audience’s head spin! There’s really no point in complicating your presentation because it will only end up blocking your path to success.

2. Boring And Outdated Pitch Deck Design

You don’t need to have design skills to create a visually-pleasing and professional-looking pitch deck. But you certainly can’t use your lack of creativity as an excuse to go out there and present slides that look like they were created in the 1990’s!

When it comes to pitching, you want to grab your audience’s attention. With an outdated design, you can grab their attention, but it’s going to be for the wrong reasons. They’ll probably write you off as someone who’s not connected to the modern world, someone who’s going not going to know how to handle their investments and financial contributions.

If you don’t want potential investors to think of you like that, then you need to make sure your pitch deck design is going to be visually attractive. The good news is there’s no need for you design your pitch deck from scratch. For starters, you can use free PowerPoint templates and these templates will help you get your pitch deck off to a good start. You can edit it any way you see fit, and you’ll have your very own high-quality pitch deck in a matter of minutes!

3. A Weak Introduction Won’t Get You On The Right Footing With Potential Investors

There’s no shortage of startups looking for investor funding. They want to get the best bang for their buck, so to speak. So, if you want to receive a check made out to your startup, then you need to hook their attention from the get-go. Otherwise, they’ll eventually end up funding somebody else!

It doesn’t matter if you have the most incredible business idea. If you can’t capture your audience and win them over to your side, then your awesome idea is going to waste. Unless, of course, you come up with a way to improve your presentation strategy.

A strong introduction will leave them wanting to know more about your company and what you can do to help them reach their financial goals. They’re not running a charity after all. They need to know they can trust you with their sizeable investments.

4. Your Pitch Is Running A Little Bit Too Long

Investors are busy people. You’ve got to show them you respect their time by making sure you don’t hold them up for far too long. If you’ve only got a 10-minute appointment, then make sure you finish your presentation well before the timer’s up. You don’t want people to keep looking pointedly at their watch or worse, walking out of your presentation.

Time your presentation when you practice. Are you mentioning all the important details? If you aren’t, then cut out the fluff and stick to the things that matter. Remember our first point in this article – you’ve got to keep your presentation simple and direct to the point.

Don’t spend far too long discussing your startup’s history or your founders. Don’t bore them with details. Instead, do your best to keep them on the edge of their seats, excited to know more about your startup. If they would like to know the nitty-gritty details of your business, you can email it to them later on.

5. Don’t Pull Random Numbers Out Of Thin Air

You can’t bluff data on your pitch deck. That’s just an absolutely wrong way to go about building your business. You need to have concrete numbers on your slides. Otherwise, you’re just wasting everybody’s time.

You don’t want to talk hyperboles in your pitch. Sure, you may come up with something that sounds good, but what do you think will happen when you get caught on your bluff? Definitely, nothing good will come of it.

Lawsuits are no joke. You could ruin your reputation by lying about your startup’s data. The best way to go about avoiding this mistake is by actually taking the time to research your market and going out into the real world to prove your idea is feasible.

In short, you need to have concrete data first before you even attempt to get funding from angel investors and venture capitalists alike. There’s simply no better way to prove the opportunity exists. Let the data speak for itself, and you’ll have investors knocking at your door!

6. No Compelling Vision

Many startups fail because they don’t have compelling visions. The founders themselves may think they’ve got something special going on, but investors may beg to differ. If they think you’re simply presenting a rehashed version of another successful startup’s efforts, then they’re not going to give you any money.

When you pitch to investors, it’s your job to convince them they’re going to earn big time if they place a little bit of trust in your company. Convince them with facts and real-life metrics and show them what the future could possibly look like.

If you don’t get much traction on your first few presentations, then you may want to refine or rethink your vision. Again, don’t forget to make sure it’s grounded in reality, and not some fantasy that will be near to impossible to achieve!

7. No Story To Tell

Investors, like most people, love listening to stories. They especially love listening to stories with happy endings. For instance, stories where they invest a certain amount of money and potentially reap huge rewards in the near future!

When telling your story, you’ve got to make it relatable for everyone. Find the common denominator in your audience and use that to craft a story they can very well relate to. Weave your narrative from the very beginning to the happy ending.

Another reason why stories work so well is that it’s more memorable than a presentation filled with dry facts. Just make sure not to overdo it though. Your pitch deck should correlate with your story. It’s going to take a lot of work and practice, but your chances of success may be much higher!

8. Asking Potential Investors To Sign A Non-Disclosure Agreement Or NDA

It’s understandable for people to become wary of sharing their billion-dollar ideas with just about anyone. And many think that the best way to go about protecting themselves is by letting investors sign an NDA even before they present their pitch. If you think this is a good idea, then you’re in for a surprise.

The truth is no legitimate investor is going to sign an NDA. They get pitched all the time. Chances are they’ve probably heard a variation of your idea from one startup or another.

Investors aren’t your competitors, not technically. They invest in startups because they want to make their money work for them. They don’t want to invest the time to build a business that’s going to be exactly similar to yours. It’s true they may have the finances to build a better product than you, but they won’t have the passion to build it. So, no, asking investors to sign an NDA is a big no-no.

9. No Exit Strategy In Place

It probably sounds odd to talk about exit strategies when you’re still in the process of getting funding. It’s like you’re letting people walk away before they even start! But it’s actually a good idea especially if you’re presenting to venture capitalists.

Here’s why:

Venture capitalists are looking for ways to grow their investment. They don’t want their money sitting idly in a bank earning a small interest per annum. They want an excellent return in their investment. One of the best ways to convince them to spend a small fortune on your startup is by letting them see just how much their ROI is going to be in just a few short years.

When you present a solid exit strategy or strategies, it means you’ve done your homework. It helps build your credibility and reassures them their money is going to be in good hands.

10. No Clear Value Proposition

Last but not least, most pitch decks lack a clear value proposition. Make it easy for your audience (potential investors) to visualize your value proposition. Why should they choose you over your competitors? What makes you unique? Why should they cut a check for you instead of another startup?

Your value proposition should be relevant to your target market, it should solve specific problems and should have specific benefits, and it should highlight why they should choose to invest in your business.

You need to go back to the basics to define a clear value proposition for your audience. Without it, your amazing story, your visually-stunning pitch deck, and your charming self-aren’t going to be enough to convince your audience to cut that check for you.

Identify your startup’s value proposition and craft a compelling story around it. Don’t focus on your product’s features. Instead, focus on the benefits. You may need to tinker around with the copy, or you can hire an expert copywriter who can bring your product to life.

Are You Ready To Present Your Next Pitch Deck?

As you’ve learned in this article, it would be extremely difficult for anyone to successfully wing their pitch presentations. If you want to get sufficient funding for your business, then you’re going to have to take the time and effort to present a truly compelling and engaging pitch deck. Take note of all the mistakes we’ve covered in this post, and you just might find yourself at the receiving end of a sizeable investment!

One of the biggest challenges for any scaling company is to bring a new sales rep up to speed quickly. Decreasing the time to productivity for new reps is crucial to meeting ever-expanding goals and closing more deals. While building a strong onboarding program that includes knowledge acquisition and skill development is key to sales ramp, it’s only part of the process. Measuring performance and progress throughout this period is also critical. Lessonly, like many other growth-focused companies, has tested processes, measures, and individual plans to evaluate the growth and ramp performance of our scaling sales team.

Identify key measurements

When it comes time to track ramping quotas, sales leaders have an abundance of data at their fingertips. It’s important to put time and consideration into choosing the data that will provide the most insight into sales rep productivity throughout the entire sale cycle. While this may take some trial and error, the right combination of data will provide a real-time, in-depth snapshot of rep performance. After several rounds of experimentation, Lessonly’s sales team decided to look at 10 data points that include 5 objective and 5 subjective KPIs.

Each of our objective figures matches a key success measure for our reps and aligns to skill development that’s part of the onboarding process. These measures come directly from our Salesforce dashboard and are up-to-date when it’s time for our review session—ensuring we have the best information for our evaluations.

Objective:

1. Self-sourced opportunities
2. Pipeline
3. Win rate
4. Average Contract Value (ACV)
5. Quota attainment

Then, each rep’s manager completes a survey that focuses on Lessonly’s five subjective measures. During this time, our managers consider the rep’s day-to-day activities and responsibilities to gauge how well they’re acclimating.

Subjective:

1. Grasp of role
2. Conveying value
3. Navigating process
4. Meaningful sales conversation
5. Confidence in success

We capture and record each measurement on a scorecard every month. At that time, we also assign a score of 1-10 for each data point on a weighted scale based on goals as they correlate to the timing of the review cycle. For example, in a rep’s first month of hire, their pipeline development goals are much lower than what is expected in their third month.

Translating the data

Compiling this data enables us to do two things. First, we take the combined data score (objective) and the personal score (subjective) and rank the reps. Then, we plot each rep’s score on a quadrant to provide a visual indicator of ramp progress.

The quadrant provides additional insight that we use on a monthly basis to track the path of each rep. This allows us to monitor how each rep is progressing—or regressing—throughout their onboarding. We also compile the entire team on a single quadrant to give us a snapshot view of every rep and how they’re performing in relation to the rest of the team.

An inside view of the process

Over time, we’ve found that completing this process on a monthly basis gives us ample insight and action steps that we need to lead our reps to ramp success. At this time, the sales management team reviews the data prepared by the enablement team to:

1. Review how each rep is progressing in their onboarding journey
2. Identify reps who are experiencing difficulties, and establish a development plan to assist their progress

Here’s a glimpse of our agenda:

1. Review the action steps put into place during the previous month’s meeting. Our managers and enablement team share takeaways from working with each rep during 1:1’s, call recordings, and pipeline reviews.
2. Assess team data, both quadrant and stack rank, to see how the team is ramping as a whole.
3. Evaluate each ramping AE and their month over month progression (or regression).
4. Build development plans for individual coaching that provide defined next steps that are owned by each manager.

Over the next 30 days, each manager reviews the data and action plans they created with each rep. This is a great way for both the manager and rep to get on the same page and create commitments for the rep to make progress on before the next month’s review meeting. This process doesn’t just get results—it gives the rep ownership of their development and ensures they are on the path to sales success.

Lessons learned

After nearly a year of using this process with our sales team, we have a few key takeaways that any team can consider when creating an effective ramp program.

First, this process has given us essential visibility to the development of every rep during onboarding. We know exactly where they each stand on an individual and team level which helps us make quick, informed decisions for their development.

Additionally, the visibility into each rep has provided data that we can use to predict who may or may not be successful during onboarding. In doing so, we can move reps through the process quicker, or if needed, determine if they would perform better in a different role based on their skillset.

The time it takes from bringing in a new rep to the stage when they’re able to hit their quotas is a key measure of success. In our experience, a robust process coupled with a high-quality onboarding and sales enablement curriculum has been key. In fact, we’ve found it so beneficial that we’ve decreased our ramp time by more than 40% to positively impact productivity and better performance overall.

The post How We Reduced Sales Ramp Time By 40% appeared first on OpenView Labs.

• Steve Case is the billionaire founding CEO of AOL and the head of Washington, DC-based venture-capital firm Revolution.
• Case led the first wave of internet companies with AOL, fulfilling the vision he had of a "digital age" in college.
• He is now using Revolution's "Rise of the Rest" initiative to benefit from the emerge of the new "third wave" of the internet, by investing in startups outside of Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston.
• He said that his career has, above all, taught him the importance of building mutually beneficial relationships.

When Steve Case was in college, he read a book that said a digital revolution was coming. It seemed like a ridiculous idea at the time, but it stuck with him.

A little over a decade later, he helped bring about that new age as the founding CEO of America Online. He left AOL in 2005, but his career was far from over. Now, he's focused on driving what he calls the "third wave" of the internet, and through his venture-capital firm Revolution, he's betting on companies outside of Silicon Valley to make it happen. He's calling it the "Rise of the Rest."

It's a massive undertaking that echoes some of the vision he had back in the '80s as a fledgling tech entrepreneur.

Listen to the full episode here:

Subscribe to "This Is Success" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

• "Flash Boys" star Brad Katsuyama
• Promoter and restaurateur Larry Morrow
• Yuengling sisters Jen and Wendy
• Designer Pnina Tornai

Come hear Steve Case speak at Business Insider's IGNITION conference December 3-4.

Transcript edited for clarity.

Steve Case: One of the things I was really passionate about with those early days in the '80s and '90s, and trying to basically make the internet part of everyday life, was leveling the playing field in terms of access to information. When I was growing up, there was basically three TV networks, and maybe in your town there's one, sometimes two newspapers. But there weren't a lot of diversity of voices, you didn't really have a way to kind of get your voice out there. I didn't think that was helpful, and similarly, it was harder to compete with some of the bigger brands and shop the commerce space.

So, the idea of the internet was kind of leveling the playing field, and giving everybody access to information, education, commerce, reviews, whatever it might be, and that we felt was tremendously empowering. The "Rise of the Rest" is similar, and now it's leveling the playing field in terms of opportunity. How do you make sure everybody really has a shot? And so, even though they're very different ideas, and they're separated by more than three decades, to me they are kind of similar.

Richard Feloni: It's kind of come full circle.

Case: A little bit full circle.

Pursuing a wild idea

Feloni: So, as an entrepreneur who has this passion for high-growth startups, are you one of those people who are through and through an entrepreneur? Like, you knew that from the point you were a kid?

Case: Yeah, pretty much. When I was a kid, I didn't know what an entrepreneur was. I don't think I had heard of the word. But the idea of starting little businesses and trying to create new things and see new possibilities, kind of always intrigued me. And so, I guess I was wired to be more entrepreneurial. It's just kind of a little bit unusual, because my family is not particularly entrepreneurial. My father was a lawyer, worked with the same law firm for 60 years. My mom was a teacher. And so when I was pursuing some of these entrepreneurial ventures, particularly in the early days of AOL when it didn't look like we were necessarily going to make it, they were fairly anxious about that. Just something about it that intrigued me.

Feloni: So you came from a background where it was more like, maybe this is a bad idea, like why don't you just go a traditional path in finance, or something like that?

Case: Yeah, some of that. And I'd say I grew up in Hawaii, and Hawaii like many parts of the country is a wonderful place, but tends to be a little cautious, a little risk-averse. That fearlessness, that sense of possibility that does exist in places like Silicon Valley, doesn't exist in many parts of the country, and didn't certainly exists where I was growing up.

So some of it may have been just a broader cultural kind of dynamic. But also, in terms of my family, it was more of a comfort zone was more kind of working for more traditional company. Then I actually did when I graduated from college in 1980. I had already decided I wanted to get into this internet thing, because I had read some things in the late '70s about kind of tele-techs and video-techs, interactive TV, and online services, and a bunch of people were trying different things out in sort of early versions of interactive service. So I knew that's something I wanted to do, but when I was graduating, there really wasn't a way to do it. It was not really any consumer internet companies to go to, because it didn't yet really exist, and there really wasn't much of a startup culture back then, so the idea of kind of doing my own thing just really wasn't on the table.

So probably my parents thought it was awesome when I went to work for Procter & Gamble, a company they had great respect for. Little bit less awesome when I went to work for Pizza Hut, and much less awesome when I left the Fortune 500 world for the crazy startup world. In fact, the first thing I joined in 1983 when I moved to Washington, DC, ended up failing. It was unsuccessful, so it was kind of a wake-up call that startups are risky. Some obviously are successful, many fail. And so, it was part of my journey, I guess part of most entrepreneurs' journey.

Feloni: So if you didn't grow up in a culture very much like, yeah, I go out, take these huge risks, like just follow your dream, or just like go do this. Where did that come from? Was that just something that was innate in you, or did you have a turning point?

Case: I'm not sure. I guess there was a turning point in this early 1980s timeframe, I just became mesmerized by the idea of the internet. I read a book back then, I think it was 1979, by Alvin Toffler, called "The Third Wave," and he wrote —

Feloni: Which you named your —

Case: I wrote a book — I named it "Third Wave," and thankfully he was still alive at the time. He's since passed away. Part of my introduction to the book was really acknowledging kind of the critical role he played, and kind of guiding my thinking. I read his book, and he had talked about the agricultural revolution, and then that was followed by the industrial revolution, and then he was predicting is the third wave is going to be the technology revolution, the digital revolution, which of course now we take for granted, but when he wrote that in the late 1970s, so four decades ago, it was kind of a crazy idea.

But I read that and I knew he was right. I knew it was going to happen. I just knew it. When I was a senior in college and was trying to get a job, I was writing to different companies with my résumé, and my cover letter basically was predicting the dawn of this digital age, and I'm sure most people thought I was like —

Feloni: Who is this kid?!

Case: Who is this crazy kid? Yeah. They're, like, what is he talking about? So most of those letters went unanswered. But it was something that was intriguing to me. And I just thought it would be important, and I wanted to be part of it, and wanted to figure out ways to popularize it. And so, I became kind of fixated on figuring out some way to break in, some way to kind of have a role in this first company I went to that started failing. That was the bad news. The good news is two of the people I met there and I ended up starting AOL, was then called America Online in 1985. So, even though the startup was a failure, some of the relationships I forged there, and some of the insights we gleaned there ended up helping in terms of the creation of America Online.

When we started AOL in 1985, only 3% of people were online, and they're online an hour a week. And so, it was a concept. The reality is, people weren't online. Most people didn't think anybody would want to bother getting online. Like, why would somebody go through the trouble buying a personal computer so they can type a message on a keyboard to somebody when they can just pickup the phone and call somebody? Like, that's not going to ever work. And that skepticism was there for more than a decade.

Finally, the idea of the internet kind of took off, and thankfully, at that point, AOL was well positioned and kind of got America online at our peak — about half of all the internet traffic in the United States went through AOL. But for a decade, most people didn't believe.

I have that similar sense, that déjà vu sense, when I'm talking about the Rise of the Rest. I recognize a lot of people are skeptical, but we hope to prove them wrong, and we believe we will prove them wrong, and maybe there's some part of my personality that's sort of, when people say it can't be done, that's sort of the challenge, and say, OK, well, we'll see about that.

Making the vision a reality

Feloni: Ahead of AOL, when you were at Quantum Computer Services — so this was your first tech company that you were helping build up — you were saying how that didn't work out well. You were working with Apple, but there were a lot of bumps along the way. Just looking at that experience, what did it teach you ahead of AOL? How did it prepare you for building a company that became huge?

Case: Well, the early days of when we started what's now known as AOL. In 1985, initially, the name was Quantum Computer Services, and the initial strategy, and it was true for the first several years, was essentially a partner with personal-computer manufacturers to create custom, almost private label online services for each of them.

So that really was our strategy. We weren't able to raise much capital. Our initial venture capital raise was about $1 million. At the time, there was a company called Prodigy backed by IBM and Sears, and they had committed $1 billion to launch Prodigy, so our $1 million was not going to beat the Prodigy $1 billion. So rather than trying to compete head to head, we decided to kind of have this strategy of partnerships. And so for the first several years, that was how we built the company; it was on the back of these partnerships.

And so they actually worked quite well and took us from this startup to actually being a real company. But one of the key partnerships was with Apple. We licensed their brand name to create this Apple Link service, and not long after launching it, they decided they didn't really like the idea of kind of having some other company use their brand. I don't think they had licensed their brand to anybody else before. I'm not sure they have since.

So that was frustrating, and kind of scary, because we thought that was going to be a big part of our growth for the next few years, but it was clear that Apple was firm about that, and so we negotiated kind of a settlement to go our separate ways. And since we couldn't call it Apple Link anymore, we said, OK, we need to call it something. We had a little internal contest, and it ended up being America Online was the winning brand. So the challenges of that partnership with Apple kind of led us to have to kind of relaunch as America Online, and then over time that service really got traction, and then we ended up kind of changing the company name, a couple years later, taking the company public.

The lesson was those partnerships were critically important to get us going, we would not have been successful without them, but there was a point where we kind of have to kind of stand on our own two feet, and move away from being so reliant on these core partnerships. We had 300 partners at our peak and worked with a lot of media companies, and computer companies, and software companies, and communications companies, and so have a diverse kind of roster of partners, but not be reliant on any one of them.

Feloni: When did you realize that AOL was a huge success, that the skeptics were wrong, that it actually had become mainstream?

Case: It was easily a decade after we got started. It was probably 1995, maybe 1996. And we had started in 1985, so it was a good decade. Even when we went public in 1992, it was the first internet company to go public. But nobody really cared. It didn't get much attention. As I recall, we raised $10 million in that IPO, and the market value that day was $70 million, and it was just like some quirky little computer services company going public. It didn't get much attention.

The other one I remember, the date I remember where it just felt like we arrived, I guess, was in, I think it was in 1996, we had shifted from kind of charging by the hour to use our service to essentially a flat rate monthly fee for unlimited access, and we knew that would result in a lot more usage, but the amount of usage exceeded our expectation, so we had a huge problem with busy signals at one point. The whole system was down, I think it was for 23 hours, or something, and the fact that AOL was down, led the news for all the networks with one of the lead stories, headline in almost every newspapers in the country that AOL was down, and it was striking because it was only a few years before that nobody knew or cared what we were doing. If we had been down for a month, nobody would've noticed. Suddenly, the fact that we were down for a day was this national crisis, and that was because people had embraced the internet, and really were relying on it for their email and many other services. So, it went from something that was fringy and viewed by most people as sort of nonessential, maybe even irrelevant, to something that was quite fundamental.

Learning from the rise and fall of a mega-corporation

Feloni: And then shortly after that, you started ending up appearing on magazine cover after magazine cover. Not only AOL becoming part of the mainstream, but you became like, the face of the company. How did that feel to you when that started to happen?

Case: It was a little weird. I did feel that from the early days, because that people were a little, I don't want to say scared of the technology, but a little uncertain about the technology in terms of the internet and what it was going to be like, and it just seemed this computer stuff seemed a little forbidden to some people, or just a little scary to people; that we needed to make sure that AOL had a friendly face, and that everything we did in designing the software and the services were trying to make it more engaging, make it easier to use, more useful, more fun, more affordable. Part of the reason we even had the people signed on, the welcome message of "Welcome" and "You've got mail" was to make it feel more personal, make it feel more human.

And as part of that, I concluded that I needed to kind of be the face of this service, and I needed to be kind of like in addition to being the CEO of the company, kind of the mayor of the community. So, I'd write letters to our members every month with updates on what was happening, not just with AOL, but more broadly with the evolution of the internet, and then I became a more visible spokesperson not just for AOL but for the medium at large, and started getting involved in the late '90s on to some policy issues, including, as the internet kind of came of age, how do you make sure that the right policies are put in place. I went from being kind of relatively unknown to being quite visible.

Feloni: Was there a side of you that was thinking, OK, I'm making this digital age that I wrote about when I was 20 years old a reality?

Case: It's something I had been thinking about for many years, and by the time it really took off, it had been 15-plus years from the point where I first became curious about this in 1978-79, to the point where, in the mid '90s, things really started to take off. In the late '90s is when things really accelerated. But in some of those early years, wasn't just the partnership with Apple, we had many other challenges where we'd have to go through layoffs, and there were times where it didn't look like the company was going to survive. So there were near-death experiences.

Feloni: So when AOL became a behemoth, by the end of the '90s, what led to the decisions to merge with Time Warner in 2001?

Case: It was a bunch of things, some offensive, some defensive. We really did believe that the next wave of the internet was going to be broadband. Of course, now, that's taken for granted. But in 1999, we were the leader, AOL was the leader by far in what was then the dial-up, narrow-band world, and the market was beginning to transition to higher speed broadband access, and we needed to be well positioned for broadband. So, that was part of it, was to make sure we were as well position in the broadband world as we were in the narrow band world.

The other reason was more of a financial diversification point that AOL stock had soared in the 1990s, and went from going public in 1992 as $70 million market cap, by the end of decade seven, eight years later, it was $160 million. It was the best performing stock of the decade. I think it was up something like 11,000%. And so by merging with Time Warner — and our shareholders ended up with the majority of the combined company — instead of having 100% ownership of a company that AOL owned — I think was $5 billion of revenue and $1 billion of profit — the combined company with AOL and Time Warner was more like $40 billion of revenue and $10 billion of profit. And so that was a more diversified mix of businesses, also, was something we thought was important to kind of protect us on the downside.

So, strategically, it made a lot of sense. The challenge there, the reason it struggled and really failed as a merger was not the strategic potential, which was certainly there, but the execution. And I've cited this quote from Thomas Edison he said it over a century ago, that "Vision without execution is hallucination." Having a good idea is important, but being able to execute the idea is even more important, and that comes down to people and priorities, and we were unable with the combined AOL–Time Warner company to get that side of it right. The assets were there, but we didn't get the people and priorities right.

Feloni: So were there lessons around execution that stuck with you that you implement even today?

Case: Yeah. There are many lessons, and some of it was also the timing. Just right after we did the merger, the market crashed, and most internet companies went out of business —

Feloni: The dot-com crash.

Case: Stock was in free fall. And so that was the timing of, it kind of played into it, as well. But a lot of it was a sort of a culture clash that people coming from the AOL side of things were viewing the internet as a great opportunity. People coming from the Time Warner side were viewing it a little more as a threat. They were worried that this internet would cannibalize their business, and of course there was risk of that, but that led to different kind of approaches. So it really came down to trust, and kind of there was not a common vision that the team embraced and was aligned around. I had seen the success of AOL really was having that clear vision, and having a team that was kind of very aligned on, and passionate about it. Instead of running it as one company, it really was run as independent divisions that each were doing their own thing, and there was more of a bias toward playing defense, to protect what was there, and make the near term kind of numbers work, and a little less of playing offense to kind of seize the opportunity.

So that was a difficult chapter, and certainly difficult for me personally. But having watched that, having been part of that, I realized that vision without execution is hallucination, and realized that ultimately it came down to people, and therefore the efforts have been tried to be focused on in the last decade or so, whether it be policy, issues, working on the jobs act five or six years ago, to jump starting our business startups act, or more recently being the advocate for the investing and opportunity act, I've spent a lot of time talking to democrats and republicans, and trying to build relationships, trying to build good will, trying to build trust so there is more of a willingness to at least listen, and perhaps kind of buy into things.

Feloni: And in this period too, you've noted before how like, in 2000, Vanity Fair named you the No. 1 person in their new establishment of movers and shakers, and then a couple of years after that, the media had kind of turned on you, blaming any struggles within Time Warner mostly on you. What did that feel like? How did you recover from that when it seemed as if public opinion had kind of shifted against you?

Case: Well, I didn't enjoy it. It was hard to deal with that, and the Vanity Fair thing was particularly kind of odd, because it was two years running, I was, like, No. 1 on their list, and then suddenly I was off the list altogether. It kind of went from being this important person in the world to being kind of irrelevant.

I understood that that kind of goes with the territory. It's the nature of how these things kind of work. In terms of the merger itself, there's mixed views on it. I was the architect of the merger; it was my idea. I proposed it to Jerry Levin, who was the then CEO of Time Warner. So the idea of merging AOL and Time Warner, I am completely responsible for, and I own that completely.

The execution of that merger, I have a somewhat different view on. I was the chairman of a company, but I did step down as CEO, and so none of the businesses, including AOL, reported to me. And we had some big fights in the boardroom about what to do, and the decision was to go in a different direction, which is why ultimately I decided to kind of step down as chairman and leave the board. So I share some of the frustrations around how the merger was executed. There were enormous missed opportunities, and I accept some of that responsibility, but not all of it, because I was not really on point kind of running it day to day. I certainly accept the responsibility for the idea of the merger because it was indeed my idea.

Finding a new revolution to lead

Feloni: When you left AOL, and you resigned from the board at AOL Time Warner, that was back in 2005, you could've done a much more traditional path, like maybe go on some boards, start another company, or just have even a more standard venture-capital firm. But with Revolution, it became something where you're, like, traveling the country in a bus, investing in all these different cities usually overlooked. Were you just trying to make things more difficult for yourself?

Case: No. It took a little while after I stepped down as CEO to figure out exactly what I want to do, but I spent some time with some entrepreneurs, starting making some investments, and I enjoyed that, just sort of mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs and learning about other sectors of the economy, things that I hadn't necessarily focused on when I was running AOL. And then started ramping that up, but definitely, the whole idea of bus tours and the Rise of the Rest, then sort of was motivated by a recognition that right now it does matter where you live in terms of whether you have an opportunity to pursue the American dream.

It's crazy to me that 75% of venture capital goes to just three states, you know, California, New York, and Massachusetts, and the other 47 states are fighting over the other 25%. These are big states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — each gets less than 1% of venture capital last year, and California got 50%. That just doesn't make any sense. There's a fairness aspect to it, but also just a kind of an opportunity aspect to it. How do you make sure that we really are going to level the playing field, and we really are trying to back entrepreneurs everywhere across the country, across many sectors of the economy, so that we can continue to be the most innovative entrepreneurial nation in the world, and we can try to create jobs everywhere, not just in a few places.

Feloni: It's really become a really big movement that has some of the top investors in the country involved, and you visited what, like, 33 cities?

Case: Thirty-eight so far.

Feloni: Are you motivated by wanting to be at the forefront of a new era, like, as you say, the third wave? Is this what's driving you to that? Is that what is the main motivator?

Case: Yeah, there's some of that. I want to be involved in that, and there's something I can do to help drive that. Because I've done it in the past. I have a voice, and a platform, and I want to do something constructive with it. I want to make sure I'm doing everything I can to be helpful, and so that's a key reason why I do it.

I recognize that America itself was a startup. Two-hundred fifty years ago, it was just a startup. It was just an idea. And this country led the way in the agricultural revolution, and led the way in the industrial revolution, and more recently led the way in the technology revolution, and gone from this fragile startup nation to the leader of the free world. I want to do what I can to make sure we continue to lead, and we're not going to be able to do that unless we continue to innovate.

The internet now, of course, we take for granted, but in those early days, most people didn't believe it ever would be a phenomenon. So what are the other ideas out there that some entrepreneur has somewhere in the country that could not only create an interesting company but help create a whole new industry that this country can lead the way on. So that's a critical part of this.

I've seen with jobs and innovation entrepreneurship that is one area where you can bring people together, and kind of forger a consensus and find some common ground. So, for all those reasons, it's something I'm super passionate about.

Feloni: I joined you on the Rise of the Rest tour for Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Louisville. When you're investing in places like this throughout the country, I would imagine that some of the challenge in terms of both pitching it to a city and just bringing in that inclusivity would be, when you think of startup jobs, you would think typically, people who already have some money, who maybe are highly educated ... How do you find ways that it actually does benefit an entire city, and doesn't just create a new just basically benefit the elite class of that city?

Case: Well, there are a number of facets to it. First of all, when we talk about backing startups, we're not just talking about tech startups. Obviously, there are many tech startups, but we back nearly 100 companies, and a whole variety of different sectors — food companies, clothing companies, all kinds of things, not just tech companies.

The second point is to recognize that the startups aren't just creating jobs directly within those companies. The data suggests that for every startup job there are five other jobs created. It could be construction people where people build homes. It could be kind of service-economy jobs, restaurants, other kind of things. They have a kind of a flywheel effect, and they create other jobs in the community that are critically important. At the same time, and we've said this in really every city we visited, it does require intentionality. It does require making sure that you really are trying to make sure that you have a diverse mix of entrepreneurs that you're engaged with. There have been audiences as I travel around the country where I've looked at, and it's 100% white guys. Last year, over 90% of venture capital went to white men, less than 10% to women. Last year, less than 1% went to African-Americans, so this is a great entrepreneurial nation, we should be proud of it, but the data suggests it does matter where you live, it does matter what you look like, it does matter who you know, whether if you have an idea you can really turn into a company, and really have a real shot at the American dream.

So we have to figure out ways to level that playing field and be more inclusive.

Feloni: So it's kind of like rethinking the concept of entrepreneurship in America, basically.

Case: Yeah. Entrepreneurship takes many forms, and the small-business sector is obviously important. It accounts for a lot of jobs. Some of those small businesses could end up being big businesses. Every Fortune 500 company starts as a startup. So some of those small businesses, if they kind of have access to capital, or mentoring, or partnerships, or other ways to accelerate their growth, could be big.

You mentioned being with us in Chattanooga. The winner of our pitch competition there, Freightways, was basically building a Bloomberg data system for the trucking industry. And I didn't know this until I got there, but as you saw it, Chattanooga's actually kind of like the Silicon Valley of trucking. A lot of big trucking companies happen to be in Chattanooga. So, if you're building a data systems platform for the trucking industry, doesn't it makes sense to be in Chattanooga where people understand trucking, and the big customers, the big partners are kind of right around the corner? It seems like that's an advantage to Chattanooga, and we're seeing this in other cities as we've gone around the country, that they're building on their unique skills.

So, it is happening, we just need to tell those stories, and get more people understanding what's happening in these communities, and backing these entrepreneurs, including the investors, because the capital they need to start and scale their company is harder to get if you're in these what some call fly over country. And as a result, there's a huge brain drain where people grow up in those places, end up leaving. So how do we slow that brain drain so people are able to stay where they want to say? And even, how do you trigger boomerang if people left, now feeling like maybe it's time to come back, maybe it's time to come home?

Entrepreneurship 'is a team sport'

Feloni: When you look at your entire career, and then where you are now, how do you personally define success?

Case: It's about impact, and I do have a desire to have a broad impact. And so, trying to kind of reach more people, more places, whether it be with the internet, or more recently with the Rise of the Rest, it's trying to have the broadest possible impact. I want to try to maximize the impact I have. And so, I tend to pick bigger problems, and try to have a bigger impact. I recognize when you do that, they are also bigger risks. Some of the things we try to do will not be successful, I understand that. But for me, it's how do you make sure you are doing everything you can to make the world a better place, and try to kind of lift up as many people and communities as possible.

Feloni: You spent years mentoring entrepreneurs; it's something you still do regularly. But is there maybe a go-to piece of advice you'd give to someone who just wants to have a career like yours?

Case: It ultimately comes down to people and teams, that entrepreneurship is a team sport, it's not about any one person. The founding CEO tends to get most of the attention, but it really is a team effort. That's certainly the case with AOL. It's the case with all the companies that we're involved in as investors. So recognizing the team dynamic, and trying to make sure you have the right mix of skills and perspectives on the team, is important.

And yet, a related point, there's an African proverb I love, which is, "If you want to go quickly, you can go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together." I think "going far, going together" means partnerships. And so, that partnership orientation is very important.

Feloni: It's all about relationships.

Case: Yeah. Ultimately, it comes down to people. Whether it be individual people on your team, or the people you need to work with to establish partnerships, or the people you need to increasingly work with in this third wave that are going to impact policy, regulators, other folks. If you get the people right, almost anything is possible. If you don't get the people right, I'd argue nothing is possible.

Feloni: Well, thank you very much, Steve.

Case: Thank you. Great to be with you.

SEE ALSO: IEX CEO Brad Katsuyama talks about life after 'Flash Boys' and how he's taking on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq

Join the conversation about this story »

On this edition of The Predictable Revenue Podcast, we welcome Patrick Campbell, CEO of Boston-based business intelligence firm ProfitWell.

The post ProfitWell’s Patrick Campbell on the nuances of pricing and why salespeople aren’t more involved appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Playbooks are big.  There are lots of tools and never ending content around playbooks for marketing and sales.  Inevitably, these playbooks are intended to guide us through our marketing and sales processes–providing us relevant questions and content to move the customer through their buying process.

Every playbook I’ve seen is very linear in its approach–start at the beginning of the customer buying process, then go sequentially

Classically, we have always thought of buying as a linear process:  Define a problem or opportunity to be addressed, identify needs/, goals, assess alternatives to meeting those needs/goals, make a decision, implement.  We map critical buying activities, informational needs, decisions, exit criteria for each stage of the buying process.  All to help provide the customer a roadmap through this linear process.

This is done in the spirit of being helpful, and facilitating the in an orderly, effective, and efficient navigation through this process.

We align our own marketing and sales activities to this buying process with the intent of creating value for customers as they navigate the process and to maximize our ability to influence their decisions about the solutions they choose.  We optimize our own organizations around this model–creating awareness, driving demand, creating MQLs which, hopefully, SDRs convert to SALs passing them on to AEs to qualify, discover, propose, and close.

We develop playbooks and battlecards to help us navigate this buying and selling process.  We provide roadmaps as some form of “customer playbook” to help them navigate their process, addressing the issues we think they should address.

All vert logical, straightforward, and focused on helping customers, marketing, sales converge on a decision in very predictable ways.

But is that really how buyers buy?

The more we understand the buying journey, the more we understand it isn’t that logical flow.  Some years ago, Hank Barnes describe it a “Squishy,” (I still think that’s an apt description).  More current Gartner research shows it as chaotic.

Each situation is different.

It proceeds in stops and starts.

It circles back on itself.

Players change.

Priorities and requirements change.

It may be budgeted, or it may also be an budgeted initiative.

Goals/objectives change.

It starts and stops….

Through the process, customers are seeking information, not only about products, but what others have done, how others have approached similar problems, trends/issues, events that impact what they are trying to do.

There is no “single source” of information they rely on, they leverage multiple information channels simultaneously–web sites, sales people, experts, peers, and others.

In the end, the majority of buying processes end in no decision made–less because the customer can’t select a solution, more because they can’t align themselves around a work plan or navigate the buying process.

And then it may start again–perhaps a few months or a few years later.

As one reflects on this “journey,” some key ideas come to mind.

Our marketing/sales playbooks focus on what we’d like to see happen, but aren’t aligned with what really is happening.

Our selling processes tend to assume a linear buying flow, so our selling processes need to be tuned to reflect the chaotic flow of the buying journey.

More importantly, this chaotic flow is not what the customer wants to happen, it’s more a reflection of the internal complexities and dynamics that exist within the customer’s own organization.

This presents us a huge opportunity.  How can we help the customer reduce the complexity, simplifying what they are trying to achieve?  How do we help them simplify and navigate this process more successfully?  What can we do to help them succeed–because if they don’t succeed, we never will.

This requires us to develop new skills and capabilities.  Critical thinking/problem solving skills–to understand and help the customer make sense of what’s happening and how to proceed.  Project management, facilitation skills to help the customer navigate the complexity of their organizations and their “process.”  Curiosity to understand what’s happening and why, to understand the issues that serve as roadblocks to the customer’s ability to make progress.  Agility/nimbleness/flexibility–to be able to adapt to where the customer is, without being constrained by our own views of the process.

There is not playbook for buying, consequently, we must rethink our own playbooks, if we are to help our customers succeed.

Before we dig into our interplanetary advice (no, really, anyone from anywhere can use these tips), let’s take a step back. You can’t even begin to create an effective promotional email if you don’t know what your goal is. Ask yourself:

• What are you offering?
• Whom are you offering it to?
• What do you want readers to do with your email?
• Do you want to convert readers into buyers or spread awareness for a new product?

Answering these questions will help you determine your goal and drive direction during the email creation process. Now, on to some tips and promotional email examples.

How to write a promotional email

1. Subject line

Subject lines are the first thing recipients see, and they can make or break your email open rates. Creating subject line copy that is awesome and attention-grabbing should be a priority as you write a promotional email, so be specific about the promotion you have without sounding too spam-like (e.g., don’t use “FREE, open this email NOW” as a subject line). Additionally, don’t promise something in the subject line that you can’t follow through on. Here’s an open-inducing subject line from online consignment store thredUP:

2. Email body

Whatever you promise in your subject line, make sure you follow through. Show that your emails are of value so recipients look forward to seeing things from you in their inbox. Demonstrating this value will capture, and keep, your potential customers’ attention, while endearing your brand to readers and encouraging them to take action. Here’s a good promotional email example from thredUp that not only shows how the company backs up the promise made in the subject line above, but also gives readers a reason to be excited about the email:

3. Call to action (CTA)

Your CTA should drive to the action you want readers to take from your email. A good way to get people to act is by not telling them everything about your promotion. Capture their interest and then leave something to the imagination to get them clicking to your site. Keep in mind, though, that you need to be respectful of readers’ time: Don’t create copy or a CTA that misleads your reader. For instance, if your CTA says, “learn more about this promotion,” but sends people to your homepage, your blog or an unrelated product page, you’re betraying the trust they exhibited by clicking your CTA.

ThredUP effectively uses two CTAs in the email below. The first CTA, “Start saving,” ties in with the subject line and the rest of the email body, while the secondary CTA at the bottom drives a different action.

4. Email format

Make your email easily scannable with things like images, bullets and titles. Break up the information by placing your main message at the top of your email, which broadcasts its importance.

5. Mobile-friendliness

People are glued to their phones. If you want them to be glued to your emails as well, captivate them with the above tips while also ensuring your emails are mobile-friendly. To be mobile-friendly, your emails must have a responsive design, meaning that the visual and copy components of your email will readjust to any screen size it’s being viewed on. Here’s thredUP’s email above as seen on a mobile screen:

Now that you’re in the know, create a promotional email and blast it into space (or readers’ inboxes). We think they’ll be impressed.

The year 2020 beckons on the horizon. A pivotal year for organizations as the rapid evolution of a customer-centric world calls for new approaches and new forms of interactions. While one eye will be on succeeding in 2019, forward-thinking leaders will have another eye towards preparing for a new decade in 2020.

What are 5 reasons and key forces forward-thinking leaders will need to gain in-depth buyer insights on for the year 2020?

Increasing Complexity In Decisions

The simplicity of just a few decades ago, at least perceived, in how choices and decisions were made have given way to a myriad of complex interactions. Existing concepts related to understanding customer journeys and interactions will undergo an even more radical transformation in the next two years. Behavioral changes in how organizations operate and how workers interact will reshape decision-making in the year 2020.

From Solution Selling to Insight Selling To Insight Collaboration

Many leaders are struggling with just how to interact and transact with customers and buyers. In the last few years, there have been attempts to redefine selling around the notion of providing insights. Going at lengths to shift from solution selling to insight-based selling. An issue for leaders in this current mode of transition is working with existing solution-selling skills and hope for the best that sales forces can adapt. The term insight selling is a most contradictory one also. It presumes that the insights being offered are what customers desire. Surprisingly, it presumes a one-way sharing of insights. In the year 2020, new skill sets and attributes will be needed to engage in insight collaboration with customers and buyers. Whereby there is an exchange of insights that help to attain specific goals.

Accelerating Customer-Centricity

The mandate for customer-centricity has been a rallying cry for this entire existing decade. It remains so today with increasing urgency. The urgency brought on by the continued elusiveness in shifting entities as a whole from product-centricity to customer-centricity. With the year 2020 barreling down the road like a runaway train, leader’s fear time is running out. Gaining insights on how to accelerate the transformation to customer-centricity is badly needed.

Transformation To A “Human-Centric” Digital Experience

In the barrage of new terms and pressing issues, one heard as a mantra over and over is digital transformation. Problematic in digital transformation is answering the question of – what end goal is digital transformation working towards? Leaders today know that sitting pat with existing systems is not an option. Yet, transforming to digital capabilities for transformation sake only is not a very good option either. Understanding and predicting the digital experience customers and buyers will embrace and engage with by the year 2020 is a must-have. More importantly, insights are needed towards creating “human-centric” digital experiences for customers and buyers.

New Customer and Buyer Expectations

The above-mentioned point to new expectations on the part of customers and buyers heading into the year 2020. Expectations that will undoubtedly be redefined from those of today. Resulting in far-reaching implications for many organizations. Pressing leaders to attempt to answer two critical questions: What are the new customer expectations to expect in 2020? – and – What will be required to meet new customer expectations by the year 2020? Answers to these questions will depend on in-depth buyer and customer insights.

At this time of year, the crunch to finalize next year’s budget begins to play out. It will take resolve and discipline to do so with the year 2020 in mind. Making the necessary allocations to build in yearlong preparation towards attaining deep understanding, knowledge, and insights.

Without critical buyer and customer insights, the chances for any best-laid plans to succeed in the year 2020 and beyond will be significantly lower than those possessing critical guiding insights.

(Here is an interesting video from Tricia Wong regarding big data and how human insights can be missing. Buyer Insights for the year 2020 will need human-centric insights and thick data indeed.)

The CMO of a Fortune 500 company offered the CRO the following options regarding spending $100,000 on a marketing campaign. He was willing to provide the sales team one of six choices:

1. 200,000 targeted contacts (name and title) in the right vertical (no email addresses)
2. 100,000 companies with up to three executive contacts in the right companies (no email addresses)
3. 20,000 companies with multiple contacts and verified technical environment information in the right verticals (no email addresses)
4. 4,319 contacts who downloaded a white paper but may or may not be in targeted companies or have any need or authority to buy (email addresses, many bogus, no company firmographics and no telephone numbers)
5. 117 appointments with people in the right companies but may or may not have any need or authority to buy
6. 81 highly qualified sales opportunities with the right contact who has a need backed by some form of compelling event

The CMO came up with these options because he was fed up. No matter what he did, no matter how he spent the company’s money, the CRO would complain about lead quality (and quantity). Marketing was convinced that sales never effectively followed-up on any leads. I know. You have heard it all before.

(To find out which alternative the CRO picked, you’ll have to read to the end of the blog.)

What is a Lead?

This blog about lead cost summarizes a lot of research I have done on the subject. There is a table in that blog that recaps the cost-per-lead based on lead source.

It is interesting to note that one of sources (content aggregation) has a $23.15 cost-per-lead—which at first glance sounds like a great deal for a B2B lead. What is misleading about this is that cost-per-lead assumes that all leads are equal in quality. In this case only 3% of the total were qualified (and only about 12% were worthy of nurture)—meaning the leads that were worthwhile actually cost more than $2,500 each because so few of the total were qualified. And that doesn’t even count the expense needed to discern which are worthwhile (a minority) and which weren’t (the vast majority).

Before answering the question “What is a Lead” I will cover what I don’t think is a lead:

1. A BANT qualified (or ANUM or any other formula) target: I still hear marketing and sales people talking about wanting BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) qualified leads. The problem with BANT qualification criteria is that once a prospect has a specific budget and timeframe it is highly likely that they have already selected a preferred vendor and the best you can hope for is to be column fodder in an evaluation that has already been won by a more agile competitor.
2.  An Appointment: Many sales reps will say “just get me in front of the right person and I can sell them.” The problem is that to an appointment setter everything looks like an appointment (just like to a hammer everything looks like a nail). When the goal is an appointment, vs. qualification with the right target, appointments end up being a disappointing waste of time for the sales rep. Read more in this white paper.
3. Hand Raisers: We’ve found that the lead rate is inversely proportional to the number of times an individual has consumed your content. So, if someone consumes six or more pieces of content (whitepaper download, webinar sign-up, blog subscribe, etc.), it’s likely they have no authority to make decisions. Yet, these are the “prospects” who score a lot of points in a marketing automation solution.

Pain, Priority, Process, Environment

So, we’ve talked about what isn’t a lead, now let’s delve in to what is. Understanding the level of pain, which I also call condition of need, is key. Determining the level of priority that need has within the organization is also essential. Uncovering the decision process is necessary before you can say this target’s a lead. And, answering questions about the environment and whether it’s conducive to your solution is also required before that CRM entry can be deemed a lead.

Pain: There are three levels of pain (or need) that drive someone to purchase something (whether for themselves personally or on behalf of a company). I call these conditions of need:

                Fear of loss in the current situation

                Perceived risk of deterioration in the current situation

                Opportunity to improve the current situation

Compliance laws are a good example of how a fear of loss condition of need is reached: If you don’t comply with this regulation or that guideline, you will be fined and lose money. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) this condition represents a small percentage of the situations that motivate a buyer to buy.

A majority of the time a perceived risk motivates a buyer to act. A good example is a buyer worrying about their customers’ experience in dealing with their company. The emotion you find in this condition is that things are OK now, but they could get worse in the future, or our competitors could do something first, etc. I will add that while this condition of need is most prevalent, it is also the one that results in a “no decision” outcome.

I call selling into an opportunity to improve situation selling into a rainbow. Only the most self-actualized (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) individual is going to buy for this reason. An example is a company with a high net promoter score (NPS). If the company’s customer experience scores are high, then it may be nice to have it inch up another 1/10 of a point, but it’s probably not going to be a priority at the board level. There are just too many real problems that require your time—and that precludes spending time on something that is a luxury in the business world.

It is important to recognize which condition of need you are selling into. Fear is a powerful motivator. The prospect is going to do something—but these situations are few and far between. Risk is less motivating than fear, but more powerful than the opportunity to improve situation. Deciding whether to spend time with each prospect depends on your analysis of the degree to which risk is going to motivate a decision. You can’t decide to pursue an opportunity based solely on the condition of need. However, it is important to first evaluate that the condition of need is sufficient to invest your time.     

Priority is the second thing to evaluate when determining if a suspect is a prospect or lead. This is where you access the following on behalf of the prospect: Why change? Why now? Why us? Every one of us in sales has been guilty of “pushing rope.” When that happens, we did not ask the prospect (and ultimately ourselves on their behalf) the “Why” questions.

Process questions replace the budget and timeframe questions in the BANT criteria. Questions such as “in addition to yourself, who else will be involved in the decision and what roles will they play” and “what criteria or measurement will be used to justify a decision” will help you determine if there is a concerted effort to handle a pain or need, or if the individual you are talking to has good intentions but no authority to act.

Environment questions help answer the following: Should we compete? Can we win? Do we want to win? For each opportunity there is an environment that signals the potential to compete and other environments that say stay away. The environment can be technical, political, financial and encompass many other factors. For example, if you provide an outsourced solution, and the prospect is dead set against outsourcing, then regardless of the other qualifying criteria you are probably better off going to the next prospect, or at least get them over this objection before trying to sell to them. The key is to understand high potential environments as well as deprioritizing low potential environments.

The Verdict

So, which option did the CRO select?

She selected Option #3. Subsequently, 20,000 companies with multiple contacts and verified technical environment information in the right verticals (no email addresses) were distributed via CRM to sales. Perhaps the happy medium appealed to the CRO—a good quantity, but with some qualification.

Guess what happened? These “leads” ended up in a black hole—with $100,000 wasted. The same reps who did not effectively follow-up on 81 high quality sales opportunities that were previously provided by marketing were, predictably, highly unlikely to call on 20,000 suspects.

The only way to stop the finger pointing: “Marketing sends us bad leads/Sales never follows up on the leads we send them” is to instill accountability.

If every CMO was accountable for sending only qualified leads to sales, without expecting sales reps to sift through to find the 1%, or 10% or xx% that were worthwhile, things would start to change.

And if every CRO was accountable for insuring the sales force followed up on every lead delivered, there’d be a lot less money wasted, and a lot more business closed.

Share your experiences on the  topic, please.

By Sheena McKinney, Executive Assistant to Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

I recently wrote about how Giving is Better, Receiving is Hard where I share how really hard it can be to receive (help, get compliments, etc.).  I led with the old adage “It’s better to give than receive” and I believe it’s true.  But in business, in sales specifically, does this apply? If so, how?
According to Allen Cheng’s summary of author Adam Grant’s’book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.

People are one of three things:

• Takers like to get more than they give. They feel the world is a zero-sum game, for them to win means others must lose. They self-promote and make sure they get credit. They help others strategically, when the benefits to them outweigh their personal costs.
• Givers like to give more than they get. They help others when the benefits to others exceeds their personal costs.
• Matchers like to balance and giving exactly, practicing quid pro quo.

In our personal relationships, giving is more familiar territory.  In business, generally speaking, being a “matcher” is more common.  But is that better?  If you want to be successful, giving is actually the better way to go as long as you don’t give so much you shirk your responsibilities or give away “the company store” in the process.  My dad, who recently passed away, was a huge giver who modeled giving and fostered it in others.  He tried owning his own business, but it didn’t succeed because he was too nice and didn’t want to charge or collect from people what he was worth.

Grant talks about how and why giving can be “better” in sales:

Givers build larger, more supportive networks; they inspire the most creativity from their colleagues; and they achieve the most successful negotiations. Givers find ways to grow the pie and take their share of it.

Selling

It turns out givers are the most effective salespeople, showing higher results across industries … Givers want to help their customers solve their problems, and they use powerless communication to achieve it.  In sales, givers ask lots of questions to understand the clients’ scenario, customize a solution to best match the client’s needs, then allow the client to make her own conclusion.

Givers practice powerless communication by asking questions, signaling vulnerability, and seeking advice. This reduces ego tensions, helps them gather more information, and makes for more effective sales and negotiations. Powerless communication in sales also works because, as a consumer, you’re flooded with strong messaging all day, from advertisers to politicians, and when you hear a powerful sales pitch, you tend to get suspicious. You don’t want to be tricked, and you prefer not feeling manipulated. A giving, powerless approach guides you to making your own conclusions.

Presenting

When giving a presentation, revealing vulnerability and humanity make you approachable and get people to empathize with you. Givers are interested in helping others, not in establishing dominance, so they’re not afraid to show vulnerability.  In contrast, takers worry that showing vulnerability will limit their ability to gain dominance. Their powerful communication, however, can clash with other people who want to assert dominance, or when the audience is skeptical of your influence, and the message gets lost.

Powerless communication only works, however, if you signal your competence in other ways, such as credentials or the content of your speech. If you’re competent and vulnerable, audiences like you more. But if you’re incompetent and vulnerable, audiences like you less.

It will be an exercise in learning to “receive” for my boss and President of Heinz Marketing, Matt Heinz to hear this….  He’s a huge giver.  I’m honored to work with and for him.  I believe much of his success can be credited to his generosity.  It is in fact one of our core values here at Heinz Marketing.

He’s also a great salesman, presenter and speaker because of his giving nature and humility.  He’s extremely competent and also willing to be vulnerable.

On a side note—Matt describes himself as an introvert, but I think he’s an ambivert… yet another reason for his success.

Grant explains it this way:

Despite the widespread assumption that extraverts are the most productive salespeople, research has shown weak and conflicting relationships between extraversion and sales performance… Ambiverts (a balance of extrovert and introvert) achieve greater sales productivity than extraverts or introverts. Because they naturally engage in a flexible pattern of talking and listening, ambiverts are likely to express sufficient assertiveness and enthusiasm to persuade and close a sale but are more inclined to listen to customers’ interests and less vulnerable to appearing too excited or overconfident.

Whether you’re an extrovert, introvert, or ambivert, giving— both personally and professionally– truly is better… and not just for what you get out of it.

Like your personality type, your tendency to be a taker, giver, or matcher is largely innate.  But you can grow in these areas as Jason Connell learned.  In his article “Becoming a Giver:  The Most Important Lesson in a Decade”   he says his mentor told him:

“You know, the real trick to business is being generous. Give as much as you can. The more good you do for the world, the better your life will go.

“Try to give the exact thing that you’re looking for. If you want to become successful, figure out how to help other people succeed. If you want happiness, spread happiness. That’s how it works.

“But there’s a catch: you actually have to care. You have to be generous for the sake of being generous, not for the sake of trying to gain something. If you can do that, everything will go better than you can imagine. I don’t know why or how this works; I just know it does. It’s really that easy.”

And herein lies the reason I so respected my dad.  He listened and cared.  These are also some of the reasons I respect Matt Heinz.

The bottom line is this.  The best way you can sell is to listen and care.  These are truly gifts that keep on giving.

The post Selling by Giving: How Generosity and Vulnerability Leads to Loyalty appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Earlier this week I found myself in a discussion about the value of “business relationships.”  The point the person was making is there are business relationships and personal relationships.  My argument was if you have a business relationship, then it’s pretty shallow at best, but if you see yourself as a sales leader, then all relationships are personal.

My argument is businesses don’t do business with other businesses, rather it’s people in a business doing business with another business.   If there is such a thing as a business relationship, then it’s going to be very narrow in scope and most likely extremely price sensitive.

You are a sales leader, and if you allow yourself to subscribe to the theory of business relationships, then you’re purely performing a function.  With that being the case, don’t forget that any function can be done very well by a computer or a machine.   If that’s the case, you’re not needed and you can change your company ID to read “machine 302.”

Sales leaders lead with their personality, and in so doing, they invite those around them to bring out their personality.  When we lead with our personality, we are authentic. When we’re authentic, our conversations become more open.  Our goal as a sales leader is to have open conversations with customers and others and by doing so we will help others.

Take a few minutes and make two lists — one containing the names of people you have personal relationships with and the second being a list of those you feel you have a business relationship.  Your task this next week is to take each name on the business relationship list and begin interacting with them in a manner to get them moved to your personal relationship list.

You might be asking yourself what is the relationship you have with me?  I would hope you see it as personal. If not, then reach out and let’s begin to make it personal.

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

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

Will AI Take Over?

As time goes by, artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly vital role in sales. In fact, as some companies relegate some of the more straightforward selling tasks to AI, lower level sales jobs are beginning to dry up.

Just think about how thousands of retail salespeople have lost their jobs as Amazon and other e-commerce sites have taken over.

These websites are not just order-takers. Their complex algorithms enable them to cross-sell. For instance, when you search for a book, you’ll see a message saying “Customers who bought this item also bought [an array of other tempting items].” They also upsell by suggesting “Compare similar items.” Usually, you’ll see some items that are bigger and better.

It would be challenging for a retail salesperson to keep track of all the information necessary to cross-sell and up-sell as efficiently as these algorithms.

Feats AI has conquered beyond the sales arena make people nervous that machines could gobble up many white collar jobs. For instance, IBM’s Watson, a supercomputer, beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. Jennings had previously had the longest undefeated streak on Jeopardy ever, starring in 74 consecutive shows.

Given that AI can outdo the best and the brightest among us, it’s understandable that salespeople are concerned that it will supplant their persuasive powers.

Routine Task? AI, You’re Hired

So where does AI fit into the sales process? It can play a starring role in lead qualification, which consumes 80 percent of sales reps’ time. For instance, AI tools provide business insights and personality profiles for target customers and can follow up on leads using two-way email or text messages. Also, AI can make phone calls easier and more productive by suggesting responses during conversations.

Thus, by leveraging AI, salespeople can not only increase the number of qualified leads but also stop wasting time on those that are unqualified.

Humans, Please Apply

While AI can and will take over predictable sales functions, the best salespeople will still have jobs, handling tasks that require a human touch.
Here’s why. Only humans can:

• Build Relationships

Since B2B purchases are typically large, salespeople must be able to earn the buyer’s trust and build rapport with them. After all, relationships are essential for differentiating similar products and solutions.

AI can perform some trust building functions, such as being responsive and providing vital information. However, it cannot find common interests to chat about that help make the conversation “human.” A salesperson, on the other hand, may be able to share an interest, such as sports or travel. They can share a joke or laugh at one the buyer tells.

• Use Emotional and Social Intelligence

B2B buying decisions are emotional, and people like to work with others who care about them. The best reps empathize with customers’ problems and are excited to help them explore opportunities.
Not surprisingly, AI doesn’t care.

Also, AI is less likely to pick up meaning that’s conveyed by tone of voice, to read between the lines or recognize sarcasm. A salesperson, however, understands these subtleties, picking up on prospects’ cues even when they’re not stated in black and white.

• Think Creatively

In B2B sales, reps often need to be able to solve unique, complex problems. That takes creativity.
Because AI needs to see patterns of behavior to work correctly, it’s not good with the one-offs. So when a new situation arises, AI may be unable to come up with creative solutions. That’s when a live salesperson who can think outside the box needs to step in.

• Demonstrate Personality

“The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore,” said David Ogilvy. AI may know more than any salesperson, but it doesn’t have a personality.

There are pros and cons to AI and humans. The beauty, however, is that we don’t have to choose between them.

AI is not sales people’s competitor. It’s their force multiplier. It enables them to escape the drudgery of mundane selling tasks, so they can invest their time building relationships, handling exceptions and creatively answering strategic questions. The salesperson can leverage AI’s knowledge while adding the human touch that seals the deal and builds long-term personal relationships.

Account-based marketing (ABM) requires you to use a multi-channel approach and a wide array of marketing tactics, which means you’ll also need multiple technologies to make it a success. When it comes to ABM, there’s a vast number of technologies you can use to execute effectively. It’s important to know exactly what an ABM approach looks like before embarking on the journey.

Flip the Funnel

ABM challenges marketers to flip the funnel by identifying target accounts and building a plan around directly engaging those people before and after they become a customer. Generally, the stages of the funnel look like this:

• Identify target accounts.
• Expand your reach within those accounts.
• Engage those accounts with relevant content and outreach.
• Advocate—turn customers into advocates.
• Measure the results of the campaigns.

61 ABM Technologies

As you consider the funnel stages and where your company needs to focus, you’ll use technology for key ABM activities, such as finding data on accounts, storing customer information, communicating with key stakeholders, and running ads. Below, I’ve broken technology out based on how your company could use it to facilitate ABM.

CRM

The data and utility of your CRM or account management system are critical to managing account details and communication, but your CRM can also help you determine the best accounts to prioritize and help you map essential stakeholders and past relationships to accounts. Some of the best CRMs on the market for supporting ABM include:

• Salesforce
• HubSpot CRM
• Nutshell

Whatever CRM you decide to use, there are some key features that will be valuable for ABM:

• Ability to match leads to accounts
• Lead and account-level reporting
• Built-in account insights
• Integrations or an open API to connect with other key ABM platforms

Account Mapping

Mapping the landscape of the account, as well as your strategic communication plan, is an essential part of ABM. The tools that are best for you depend on the CRM you use, because there are quite a few plug-ins and integrations that streamline account mapping in your CRM. Some common tools include:

• Revegy
• OrgChartHub (HubSpot only)
• Org chart building tools, like Google Slides or Pingboard, that can help organize and map accounts

Data Enrichment

When building out profiles of key people within accounts, you will need additional data and information about those people. You will also need to understand the specific account and key aspects of the company like what’s in their technology stack. As you look to enrich your data, there are several technologies available, including:

• D&B Hoovers
• Datanyze
• ZoomInfo
• DiscoverOrg
• HubSpot Insights

As you select this type of technology, there are a few important things to keep in mind:

• Some platforms are better suited towards start-ups, small organizations, or, enterprise data.
• Most are priced around the volume of contacts and data calls.
• Accuracy varies, even on the best of these platforms, so validation by your sales team is important.

Do your homework carefully. This purchase tends to be a big investment, and the best tool varies based on the types of accounts you target and the tools you’ll need in order to integrate with the data enrichment platform.

Predictive Analytics

Beyond data enrichment, you can also identify target accounts through predictive analytics such as lead scoring and account intelligence. A few of the major marketing automation platforms have this capability built in, but there are also stand-alone tools that can help you analyze your current accounts to identify targets.

• HubSpot
• Marketo
• Act-On
• LeanData
• Mintigo
• Lattice

Sales Enablement

Technology is essential for sales teams to facilitate conversations and coordinate efforts with marketing and other team members. Beyond the tools we’ve already discussed, your sales team can also benefit from these technologies that facilitate communication and the sales process.

Email Tools

Email is a big part of ABM campaigns and sales enablement. Most CRM and marketing automation tools have built-in capabilities for sending brand-approved email, tracking email engagement, and providing performance insights. Here are some email tools that can benefit ABM:

• HubSpot Email Tracking
• ContactMonkey
• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Seventh Sense

Chat, Messaging, Video, and Calling

As you engage with key people at target accounts, SMS, web chat, phone, video, and messaging platforms can be a valuable way to connect, both when you’re doing outreach and when accounts reach out to you. The following list is big because communication plays a big part in ABM:

• [Calls, text, and video] Twilio
• [Calls] CallRail
• [Calls] Invoca
• [Chat] Drift *Note: Drift has some pretty cool features built for ABM.
• [Chat] HubSpot Live Chat
• [Chat] SnapEngage
• [Video] Vidyard
• [Video] Wistia
• [Video] CloudApp

Social Media

Social selling is a crucial aspect of ABM. All major social media platforms that your target accounts utilize will be valuable. You can make those platforms easier to manage and more effective through these technologies:

• HubSpot Social Media allows you to monitor, publish, and engage with critical social channels. It also includes a handy extension that’s great for a busy sales rep. This tool is only available when you purchase the platform.
• HootSuite is similar but is a standalone social management platform, so there’s no need to buy a comprehensive marketing or sales solution to get the full functionality. It’s also great for an enterprise, because it includes workflows to help stay compliant and on-brand.
• Buffer is like Hootsuite or HubSpot Social but less robust.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator not only allows you to research and identify target accounts, but it also has some neat features built in for sharing sales content and showing you those in your network that could help make an introduction to key contacts.

Monitoring Beyond Social

Beyond the monitoring you can do on social media, there are also tools that allow you to keep an eye on brands outside of social media channels and across digital, which is valuable when monitoring acquisitions, product releases, leadership changes, and industry news. Some of my favorites include:

• Mention will give you updates straight to your email, like many of these platforms do, to share information about brands or terms you want to monitor. You can also use the platform for competitive analysis and to identify key influencers at the account or industry level.
• Cision is a PR tool, but it can also serve as an excellent tool for monitoring digital news of target accounts. However, it is expensive, so it is only worth the investment if you plan to use it for PR in addition to ABM campaigns.
• Meltwater combines social media and news monitoring, which makes it useful for supporting ABM monitoring, as well as an excellent tool for marketing.

Marketing

When it comes to ABM, sales and marketing need to be like PB&J, and any marketing efforts along the way must carefully coordinate with the tools and activities of sales. This is why marketing automation is one of the first and most essential marketing ABM technologies to consider.

Marketing Automation

I’m a firm believer in getting the most out of your marketing automation tools. The following tend to enable that, but there are some tools on the list that are also effective at supporting the capabilities mentioned above for ABM. If you are looking to minimize your stack with ABM, HubSpot is best suited to accomplish that.

• HubSpot Marketing Platform
• Marketo
• Act-On
• Pardot
• Eloqua

CMS and Content

The tools and technology required of conventional demand generation or inbound marketing campaigns apply to ABM. You’ll need tools to create content for your website, social media, and sales enablement strategy and tactics.

With ABM, you’ll need to be even more nimble in developing and launching materials. Not only that, but you’ll also need to be very strategic about resources and the campaigns you develop. It’s easy to put too much effort into one or two targeted accounts and see little to no ROI. To ensure the highest ROI and also the best experience for your target accounts, these tools and features will be valuable:

• Conversion Forms: Although you likely don’t need to focus on lead capture with ABM, you do need to collect account intelligence and measure engagement. Thus, having conversion forms, especially early in the campaign, and how this integrates with other ABM tools is an important consideration when choosing your tech stack.
• Progressive Profiling: With marketing automation tools such as HubSpot or Marketo, you’ll be able to collect only the information you’ll need at the moment, while gaining account intelligence. This is important for ABM, in which you typically have a good portion of data already available on your account profiles.
• Landing Page A/B Testing: Utilizing A/B testing of landing pages through your CMS is essential as you target your accounts via advertising and digital campaigns, but you can also use an add-on tool like Optimizely to conduct tests.

Ad Targeting

Reaching your accounts across digital channels is vital to ABM success. We’ve all probably heard that a person sees a brand seven times before taking action, but I’d argue that it’s more like 30 times in the ABM world where other brands wanting their attention are inundating your target accounts. The following tools are great for stealing your target accounts’ attention:

• Terminus
• DemandBase
• LeadCrunch
• LinkedIn Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Google Display Network

Offline Campaigns

Not only do you need to reach target accounts digitally, but to keep your brand at the top of their mind, you’ll need to integrate non-digital channels for ABM, including events, direct mail campaigns, and even passing out swag at on-site visits. Keep in mind that these efforts need to be carefully coordinated with digital efforts. These are some tools you can use:

• [Direct Mail] PFL allows you to use digital actions to trigger direct mail campaigns.
• [Direct Mail] Enthusem does the above but is specially built to integrate with HubSpot.
• [Event Planning] Whether you host a small event for a single account or a significant event for multiple accounts, Bizzabo is the tool you need to orchestrate it all.
• [Live Events] If there are people within the account that can’t make it to a live event or if you want to simulate a live event experience, Facebook Live is a great tool to do that.
• [Swag Management] Take the headache out of sending and managing swag with Printfection.

Integrations

Depending on what your final tech stack looks like, you may need to integrate critical technologies. While there are standard integrations built into many of these technologies, you may need to rely on one of these tools for integration:

• Bedrock Data
• Zapier

Measuring Performance

As mentioned earlier, you can quickly diminish returns on ABM campaigns if you aren’t carefully monitoring ROI, especially when you factor in the technology required to make the campaigns successful. You have to use data and analytics to measure performance and ensure you’re putting dollars where they will have the most significant impact. While many marketing automation and CRM platforms have built-in analytics, ABM will undoubtedly cause you to compile data from multiple sources. For this reason, you’ll likely need data analytics tools such as:

• Databox
• Grow
• Tableau
• Qlik Sense

What to Consider When Finding Technology for Your Needs

Kudos to you if you’ve made it this far through the article! Your brain has probably never been so full of options for ABM technology. While I’d love to deliver you the ultimate ABM tech stack, doing so wouldn’t set you up for success because what you need is unique to your organization. When finalizing your stack, think about these factors:

• Your Target Accounts: Whom you are trying to reach with ABM plays into your final tech stack. For example, let’s say you are only going after a few accounts where building out profiles could be done manually instead of utilizing a data enrichment tool such as ZoomInfo. In this example, your campaigns and tech stack will differ from a strategy that targets thirty accounts.
• Your ABM Campaigns: You should always put the campaign strategy first when it comes to ABM. Look at what technology you’ll need to achieve your campaign goals.
• All-in-One Solutions: As mentioned earlier, it is possible to get a good chunk of your tech stack covered in one solution. If this is your aim, you’ll want to approach technology accordingly.
• Integrations: If you have multiple systems you’re tied to that will need to work with ABM campaigns, take into account any critical data that will need to pass between systems. As you identify the best technology for your ABM stack, make sure you’re selecting with integrations in mind.
• Budget: Obviously, you’ll need to be very careful about every dollar you spend on an ABM campaign. Tying up too much into technology can cause your campaign to fall flat.