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To succeed in most anything, you must first pay your dues. Olympic athletes don’t just show up in a host city once every four years in order to get some exercise. Instead, these legends in sport invest countless hours of preparation and study before the starting gun goes off. Ultimately, you can be sure that whoever takes home the gold medal at the end of the day has paid their dues well in advance.

Speaking of paying your dues, I’ve always said that I would have joined the military right out of college if I could enlist as a Colonel. Think about it, you’d get a company car, free meals, housing provided, and you’d get saluted everywhere you went. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way.

So, instead of joining the military, I went into sales. I didn’t really know much about selling when I first started, but they were willing to “train” me and I was willing to learn. Lo and behold, I finished my first full year on commission at a whopping 45% of my sales quota; which I actually thought was good. I was glad to be above zero, to be honest. My manager didn’t share the same opinion. Still, I hung in there year after year and I busted my butt to make the grade, but I didn’t achieve my quota a single time in my first five years in sales. Things were not going well to say the least. I did, however, come into the office two or three nights a week to completely reorganize our resource library, so putting together customer presentations and responding to RFPs became exponentially easier. I also read every magazine article I could find that had anything to do with healthcare, because I was selling into the healthcare marketplace at the time. I didn’t receive any compensation for that extra effort, though I’m pretty sure that my sheer desire to add value is why they kept me on board.

Finally, I started to figure out how to sell lots of stuff and as a result, finished seven consecutive years above 200% of my sales quota. From there, a chain of more than coincidental events caused me to sit down to write my first book. What did I know about writing books? Nothing—I just started putting words on paper—another place where sheer determination and desire kept me going. Within 90 days, I had compiled 270 pages of written material, which was a purging of my strategy on selling you might say. I decided I better read it to see if I was on track, and frankly, it was terrible. Sure, I had amassed a cacophony of ideas, but the material was hardly book-worthy. It wasn’t even editable. Thus, I shoved it aside and started again, this time trying to organize the concepts into some sensible format rather than a random mind dump. Eleven months later, I had completed just shy of 300 pages. So, I decided to go back and read it again. It read just as poorly as the first time around. That was discouraging to say the least.

Nobody paid me a cent for rewriting the book five times over three years, or for the nine times (count ‘em) we went back and forth with the editor before Secrets of Question Based Selling was eventually published. It was all on my dime, a significant investment that involved a tremendous amount of time, effort, and personal sacrifice.

While I was working on the book I was concurrently holding down my day job. I was also working to organize the sales system I had developed into a repeatable methodology that could be customized and taught to other sales organizations in virtually any industry. Again, it was a long hard road before I had a product that was ready for prime time. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t compensated for these upfront efforts either.

As it turns out, my commitment to making sure QBS would exceed client expectations has paid off many times over, mostly because I was willing to invest the time, effort, and commitment (i.e. pay my dues) in advance. BTW, although it got easier each time as I’ve gained some book-writing experience, still I continued to invest much time and effort by publishing four more books after the first one took off.

What have I gotten in return for my trouble? Well, I haven’t made a single mortgage or car payment in the last 23 years. My student loans were paid off in less than six months. In fact, we have no debt whatsoever. Both our kids’ college years are 100% funded. I bought a house for my mother. We give generously to causes we believe in, and financial security is something we no longer have to think about. My intention here is not to brag about my own success or boast in any way. I’m just making the point that none of these things would have happened had I not been willing to invest the time and effort in advance.

Do you want to know how to turn an investment in extra effort into your own personal success formula?

It’s simple really: all you have to do to be successful in sales is be willing to put in the time and effort necessary to “out-work” the rest of the pack. Think about it this way. Somebody is going to succeed in the next account; it might as well be you.

Our oldest daughter is about to graduate from the University of South Carolina next month. She doesn’t have a job lined up yet, but that’s fine by me. She completely buys into the strategy that if she can finish strong and maintain her 3.8 GPA, then she won’t have any trouble finding opportunities in the month or two after graduation. Again, pay your dues upfront and opportunities will surely follow.

Of course, when she does jump into the job market, she won’t get paid a dime for the time she invests interviewing, or even for hustling to set up potential interviews. At that point it comes down to her willingness to make the necessary investment in time, effort, and personal sacrifice. She can watch Ellen, play video games, or hang out on Facebook once she lands an opportunity. But until then, the daytime hours give her opportunities to be on the phone or meeting with people, and the evening is a great time to write thank you notes or craft introduction letters. Somebody’s going to get the best jobs, one of those people might as well be my daughter. After all, she’s already got 21 years of QBS training under her belt just by growing up in a QBS household.

So, let me get back to the question about how you’re going to reach your sales goals? Let me ask: how many articles have you read about your industry in the last 90 days? Great! Now double that number in the next 90 days. Make it a passion to become an expert on your customer’s world. Sure, you could just try to be empathetic and walk a mile in their shoes. But, if you are committed to paying your dues upfront, then I would keep walking until you’ve lapped the field and there’s a perceptible difference between talking with you and your competitors.

Along the same lines, don’t wait for someone else in the corporate marketing department to create a more compelling presentation at some point down the road. Use your newfound expertise, be creative, and develop your own positioning strategies that are more impactful than the customer has ever seen. Also, take the time to learn how to work the white board and how to visually explain how your product will impact their business more than other options in the marketplace.

Trust me. If you are willing to go above and beyond and put in extra effort even when you are not being directly compensated, two things will happen:

a.) First, you will never (ever) have to worry about money again.

b.) Second, your services will be in high demand, such that you will never again have to worry about landing a top job. 

At the end of the day, success is a choice, not some kind of lottery system. So, what if you choose to take all the resources you could otherwise spend hoping to win the human lottery and instead invested heavily in your own skills? I can tell you right now that those people who are willing to turn off the television, unplug your video games, and maybe even skip a few bowling nights, will find that the odds will suddenly become heavily stacked in your favor. Although this article was written with the sincere intention of encouraging you to become part of the solution, at the end of the day, the ball is ultimately in your court. The difference between the level of success you desire and wherever you currently are is, in fact, you. The good news is, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The QBS Methodology has already been created for you. All you need to do is be willing to step outside the box of traditional thinking and put a series of proven and strategic question-based techniques into practice. From there the formula for success is relatively simple: If you are indeed willing to invest in yourself, in a similar way that I invested in myself when I created QBS, then as the late Zig Ziglar would have said, “I’ll see you at the top.”

Let me know how I can help. (Contact Us)

The field of Marketing Automation has seen incredible growth in recent years. The volume of products and features has increased substantially, and so too has their complexity.

If you are shopping for a Marketing Automation product, selecting the best software for your needs has become harder.

SMBs and large enterprises have completely different needs

Marketing Automation is beneficial for a diverse range of companies – from SMBs to large enterprises.  Yet, most of the research produced by analyst firms is focused primarily on the needs of large enterprises, and their coverage align to products which serve those companies.

If you are a small business running a complex demand generation program or conversely, a larger organization with simpler needs, you can’t just rely on traditional source of information to identify the best marketing automation product that addresses your requirements.

First-hand insights from users are incredibly valuable

Today, through search and social forums, prospective buyers increasingly have access to unfiltered insights from their peers. In particular you can now use business software review sites such as TrustRadius to compare products and see what others have to say about them.

Similar to Amazon.com, Yelp or Trip Advisor in the consumer space, review sites allow you to hear unvarnished user stories and what it’s really like to work with a vendor on a day-to-day basis. You can also access multiple perspectives from peers who have been authenticated as real users.

Look for those users with similar needs

When using product reviews as part of your evaluation focus on those users whose needs most closely mirror your own.

If you are unsure which marketing automation products you should be looking at, or to help narrow your choices, TrustRadius recently released the TrustMap™, the first visual depiction of the best software products as rated by users within each market segment – small business, mid-size companies and enterprises.

Based on 400 in-depth reviews and over 10,000 comparisons run on TrustRadius, the TrustMaps help you identify the products most closely aligned to your needs and most highly rated by your direct peer group (you can access the SMB and Enterprise TrustMap here)

They also provide you a launch pad for you to do more in-depth research by reading full reviews, running comparisons and connecting with other users to learn about the context in which the product is being used.

One last thought

As you engage with your peers, make sure to not only ask why they choose a particular marketing automation solution, but also the challenges they’ve faced implementing that solution. That will help you refine your choice and potentially save you a career set back.

It started innocently enough when I replied to my industry colleague and social selling advocate Jill Rowley via Twitter to something she asked me. I said, “let’s talk – by telephone” She responded by saying,

What’s wrong with Skype or a Google Hangout? 

It made me feel like the phone – the conventional phone, is being misaligned. I say, what’s wrong with using the telephone?

Remembering Pamela Paul’s New York Times article, Don’t Call Me I Won’t Call You back in 2011, it garnered 468 reader’s comments. Three years later, the phone is still in use in every company in North America with the exception of only a few. It is underutilized among many sellers who think no one will pick up or will listen to their message.

Yes, I like Skype and I like Google Hangouts, don’t get me wrong.

Sales professionals in companies doing business with people in other companies should not minimize the power of the telephone and in many cases, use it MORE often. If you are relying on email and social platforms only to communicate with buyers I’d caution you to add in the old-school conventional phone conversation – whether by Skype or smartphone or desk phone for the following reasons:

Hiding Behind Email: Some sales reps ONLY email back and forth with potential buyers. This means that they do not have a multi-faceted strategy for success. I talked about having a multi-faceted strategy in a session on the InsideSales Accelerate 14 Summit and believe it to be a key strategy for success in an inside sales position.

Reaching Buyers When You Need To: Some buyers will not reply to an email but they will answer their phone. They will listen to your well-crafted voice mail message. Social selling gives you the insight to make good use of the buyer’s time once you do reach them or offer them a compelling message.

Making Good Use of Time: I have seen sellers spend 30 minutes or an hour working on a well-crafted email when they could have simply picked up their smartphone or desk phone and called. Save hours every week by using the phone.  I can make dozens of calls, leaving a valuable, impactful message in the time that an email seller crafts and sends their email.

Mixing it Up: Setting up your day or week with a variety of communication strategies to talk with more buyers makes the time fly.  There is no reason not to create a schedule that keeps you more interested and engaged. Doing the same thing over and over and over all week causes many to be disengaged and lower energy.

Practicing Your Part of the Conversation: It’s not called a pitch when you are engaging potential buyers and learning from them. Know the value that you, your product, your service, and your company bring to the buyers you talk to.  Understand their role and their industry. To be comfortable, you need to practice what it is that you say. If you email exclusively it makes it very difficult to sound as confident talking about what it is that you bring to the table. Meet your buyers where they are and communicate in a way that makes them want to engage further.

Leaving your Brand and Building Credibility: When I leave you a concise, professional message that is more about you than me, and I say that I will call you back or send you a follow up email — then do it — I’m in a position to build trust. I’m good with my word. I said I’d try you again next week and I did. I also left a sound bite sure to pique your interest. A potential buyer may not call me back, but they are learning more about the value I can offer them and why they might want to have a quick conversation. My enthusiastic tone and my confident voice shows something I can’t really show via email or text or a Twitter reply.

I love the use of video – especially when both parties can see each other. It is the ultimate, “next best thing to being there.”  But other than my Silicon Valley software-as-a-service clients, most of MY mid-market clients don’t use Google Hangouts and a great number don’t use Skype. The phone still wins out for ease and availability in many businesses.

Are you using the phone and voice mail messaging as part of your strategy?

Post your thoughts – we’d love your feedback

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

The post What is Wrong with the Telephone in Sales appeared first on Score More Sales.

Access to so much data has made marketing analytics overwhelming for many a marketer. We have traffic data, conversion data, lead data, email marketing data, social media data ... the list goes on. Figuring out what data to pull, and when, is the tricky part.

While no two businesses are alike, often they'll find themselves facing similar problems, and unsure of how to use data to guide them through their decision-making processes.

With that in mind, I tried to think through some common scenarios marketers find themselves in, and what data they'd want to pull from their marketing analytics solution to help guide their decision-making. Take a look, and see if you find yourself in any of these stages yourself.

Scenario #1: You need brand awareness.

Most businesses will get to a point where they need to think about brand awareness. The company could be an early stage startup creating their brand identity for the first time, or a more mature company looking to do a rebrand. You'll ask yourself: Do people recognize their company and/or logo when they see it? What do people know about their company? What does someone think about when they hear their brand's name? Analytics can help you get to an answer to these questions.

Look at traffic.

Increasing the amount of traffic to your website is important as you begin to gain more brand awareness. Take a look at the different sources that are sending traffic to your site to figure out what channels are the most successful. The amount of traffic coming from each particular channel can help you figure out how to tailor your marketing efforts in the future.

You should also look at how much traffic is coming to your homepage, specifically. Traffic that comes to your homepage is branded traffic -- in other words, they already know your company name, and are visiting you as a result. Compare this amount to traffic coming to other pages of your site, or through sources other than direct traffic. Look at how that number is changing month-over-month.

If you're a HubSpot customer, you can use HubSpot's Source's report to help you get this insight.

Look at search engine rankings.

As your company creates more content to generate more awareness, you should see an uptick in your search engine rankings for keywords that are important to you. But if you're focused on branding, you should look for an improvement in traffic driven from brand-specific terms, in particular.

Create more content around keywords that you want to rank for on search engines, and drive site traffic for at a greater volume. This article will help you get started on your keyword research so you can create content that helps you do that.

Look at social media reach.

Finally, a wide social media reach can be a good indicator of brand awareness. Look at how big your following is across each social network, as well as how engaged that following is. If you don't have a big social media reach, consider looking at how often your content is shared. Remember, just because you don't have a lot of fans or followers doesn't mean your content isn't popular on social media, giving your brand more exposure as a result.

Scenario #2: You need to grow your database.

Sometimes a ton of visitors to your site isn't enough anymore -- branding aside, you need people to convert on your site and become leads in your database. Or, perhaps you've got leads in your database already, but you've nurtured them to oblivion and you've neglected to keep feeding the funnel.

Either way, you have a hungry sales organization and database growth is critical. Here are some metrics to look at to help in this scenario.

Look at blog visits.

Creating more content on your blog gives you more opportunities to rank for relevant queries in search engines. Use your analytics to see if your blog is helping you achieve this -- if your traffic is growing on your blog, it's a good sign your lead growth could follow. If traffic is flat or declining to your blog, this will be the first thing to remedy in your quest for a growing leads database.

Look at social media reach.

Social media provides another opportunity for you to grow your leads database, and often can also help you grow that blog traffic (which will have an impact on database growth, as well).

If social media reach has stagnated, start new discussions on different channels and start promoting interesting content more frequently -- particularly your blog content. 

Look at landing page traffic and conversions.

As your traffic grows on your TOFU channels, you'll need to see whether they're actually getting to your landing pages. That's where the database growth actually happens, after all. Check your analytics to see if that traffic is viewing your landing pages and converting on them.

If you're seeing a ton of traffic to your landing pages, see where it's coming from so you can optimize the source channels -- whether that's search engines, blog posts, social media, emails, etc. Additionally, it may make sense to compare the conversion on each page against each other to gain a better understanding of what your audience really wanted in terms of content; if certain topics or content formats yielded more conversions, it'd be wise to focus your content strategy there.

HubSpot customers, you can check out your landing page analytics right from your landing page dashboard. 

Scenario #3: You need more qualified leads.

Your business may be getting tens, hundreds, even thousands of leads in any given month. But does it matter if you get thousands of leads if only a handful of them are qualified?

When I say "qualified," I mean they're actually interested in not only reading content and browsing your site, but they're interested in becoming one of your customers.

Are there any usual steps that someone takes before becoming a customer? Does talking to one of your sales reps make them a qualified lead? Does looking at your pricing page make them a qualified lead? Find out those things that make one of your leads qualified so you can replicate your success there. There are a few metrics that can help you with that.

Look at call-to-action clickthrough rate (CTA CTR).

It's important to have calls-to-action in prominent, highly trafficked parts of your website as a way to help your visitors and leads take the next step in finding out more about your company -- blog posts, web pages, etc. -- as well as in your lead nurturing emails to help move people further down the funnel.

But sheer volume of conversion on those CTAs isn't always helpful if you're looking to improve lead quality. To help with a lead quality goal, use your analytics to identify which calls-to-action bring in more leads than others, and which of those leads convert at a faster rate than others. You might end up finding certain locations of CTAs play a role in the quality of conversion (CTAs on the homepage might be better than a CTA on a blog post -- or vice versa), or that the content behind that CTA matters more.

If you are a HubSpot customer, you can use the HubSpot CTA tool to figure this out. This information will help you determine what types of content your audience is interested in and what subset of your audience is qualified to become a customer for your company.

Look at landing page conversion rates.

In addition to taking a look at your CTAs, take a closer look at the conversion rates on your landing pages. The conversion rate is the percentage of views based on a form submission. Comparing the conversion rates of different pages gives you a better idea of what types of content leads to higher conversion rates -- and using closed-loop analytics, you can track the entire funnel to see which conversions actually turn into customers.

You can also experiment with different format of your landing pages from the way the content is presented to the length or design of the form. Try segmenting your audience before sending them to certain landing pages and see how that performs. The conversion rates will give you a better idea about whether or not these experiments are successful in converting more opportunities, and how you can improve your landing pages for the future.

HubSpot customers, check out your landing page dashboard to get better insight into the performance of your pages.

Look at work rates.

Your sales organization might be working certain leads more than others. For instance, an inbound sales organization will probably be apt to work leads that first converted on a blog post over leads that came in through PPC. See which channels bring in leads that actually get worked to identify which channels to put more muscle behind.

You might find that your sales organization has a bias toward certain lead types that's not data-backed -- old habits die hard, you know. Be sure you use closed-loop analytics to get a full-funnel view of whether the leads being worked at the highest rate actually do correlate to more closed won. If rep productivity and closed wons remain high on those leads with the highest work rates, it's a good sign your reps are working the right leads, and you should bring in more of those types.

Scenario #4: You need to close more business. 

At a certain point, some businesses may reach a stage where they have a steady flow of traffic and leads to their site. This is great! But what if the funnel clogs there? What if they're getting a good flow of traffic and leads, but these people aren't taking the next step to become customers? 

You may need to take a closer look at your conversion rates and your lead-to-customer conversion rates to figure out how to keep the steady flow of customers month over month. Note that this isn't only an issue that mature businesses can come up against -- businesses of any size may need to take a closer look at these metrics.

Look at lead-to-customer conversion rates.

We talked about landing page conversion rates a bit before, but let's dig into some things that may affect your lead-to-customer conversion rate. First, you'll want to look at the effectiveness of your lead nurturing sequences. Are there certain workflows that have low engagement rates? To which segments are they going? And what content are those recipients receiving? Identifying underperforming lead nurturing workflows and optimizing them will help you help Sales move customers further down the funnel to the BOFU stage.

Lead-to-customer conversion rate is also impacted by more soft metrics, though -- like how Marketing works with Sales. Is your relationship agile, communicative, and high-touch? Is Marketing creating sales enablement collateral that'll help close more deals? Is Marketing available to hop on sales calls to close deals not just at the end of the month -- but throughout the month? These assessments of soft metrics are just as important to improving lead-to-customer conversion rate as the data that comes out of your analytics.

Are you new to inbound or think your current campaigns could use some direction? Over at OverGo we’ve come up with a pretty foolproof and seamless process of creating a marketing strategy. It’s really quite simple, all you need to do is set the goals, create the basics, automate the processes, and analyze the results. Let’s dig deeper!

Step 1: Setting Goals

The first step to creating an inbound marketing strategy is to define your business goals. Based on where you are and where you want to go, it’s important to create a road map of how to get there. Along this road you can define the KPIs that tell you how your inbound marketing campaign is doing. You can look at your competitors, your industry market, and where you are in that market to create realistic and attainable goals.

Discovery Session

The first step in setting a direction is to set customized goals during a discovery session. Conducting a meeting with you and your team to identify your ideal customers is the best way to go about this. In this meeting you can discuss your key metrics, revenue goals, and your sales process to produce the best customized strategy.

Create a Buyer Persona

A deeper understanding of your audience provides direction for the content you create and keeps your visitors coming back for more. You can create a research-based representation of who your buyers are, what they want to accomplish, pain points that shape their behavior, and how they make buying decisions.

Industry Research

An understanding of your competitors and what other companies are doing in your industry is ideal. You can pinpoint your specialty and see where the holes are in your industry that could be filled.

Step 2: Getting Found

Keyword Research

Once we get an understanding of your audience, it’s important to find out how people are searching for your content through keyword research. This allows you to see the estimated global and local search volume, ranking difficulty, and also predicts the cost of running paid campaigns. Through this research you can decipher which terms and phrases to target in order to attract the right visitors to your website.

Onsite SEO

This consists of all the factors on a website page that influence search engine ranking. In order to get found for the keywords that are chosen in your keyword strategy, it’s important to optimize every page that is created on your website. All pages should include the appropriate keyword within the content, page properties, and the image tags. Performing onsite SEO for all current and future pages that you build out for your website is very important.

Editorial Calendar

Before beginning your blogging campaign, come up with an editorial calendar to ensure that you are publishing and promoting content on a regular basis. An editorial calendar will not only make it easier to schedule content, capitalize on upcoming product or service launches, but it will ultimately encourage discipline in the running and updating of any blog.

Blog Writing, and Posting

Blogging is the basis of bringing traffic to your website and relevant visitors will come to your site when you blog about the right content. The key is to create content around your buyer personas pain points and main industry topics. Keeping up with blogging is high priority in getting your website found online, the more frequent you blog the more visitors you will attract.

Pay-Per-Click

PPC campaigns give you an opportunity to put your message in front of an audience that is seeking your product or service. Through keyword research, strategic bidding, and a compelling advertisement you can get the results you want. PPC is no longer limited to search engines, you can also run PPC campaigns on various social media platforms.

Social Marketing

Social media is THE platform for sharing content and odds are your audience is engaging on at least one social media platform. Sharing content on your social media accounts allows you to reach your audience on multiple channels- Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn. Social media acts as a gateway for potential prospects to find your website so it is important to be relevant, active and engaging in this sphere.

Step 3: Getting Leads

Premium Content Production

Premium content converts visitors to leads on your website. Specifically, premium content is an offer that contains unique informational value to your target audience. Visitors are willing to fill out a form with their contact information in order to gain access to your premium content. Examples of premium content are eBooks, Webinars, Whitepapers, Case Studies, etc.

Landing Page Design

Landing pages are where premium content lives. Sending your potential clients to landing pages where you capture their information and create new leads for your sales team is a best practice. A good landing page is eye-catching, properly designed, and attracts new leads. The basis of a good landing page is to have a desired user action, which is what you want your visitors to do once they land on your page.

Call-to-Action Creation

A call-to-action (CTA) can make or break your website’s lead acquisition rate. CTA’s direct visitors to your premium content landing pages. We work with the branding of your website in order to create professional and exceptional graphic buttons your visitors will be compelled to click. We think of CTA as mini billboards positioned on your website to direct visitors to the next steps you want them to take. To facilitate lead generation you can design A/B CTA test groups and position them on various pages throughout your website.

Step 4: Acquiring Customers

Alignment of Sales and Marketing

Utilizing CRM integration allows you to provide your sales team with information that will make them better equipped for sales calls. With CRM systems you can track every action a lead takes on your website, your email marketing and on social media. This kind of information puts your sales team one step ahead on sales call. They will be able to prepare themselves for the type of product or service the lead is interested in, and build on the trust the lead has already established with your business.

Lifecycle Communications

Getting to know your potential clients better is also important by creating a lead lifecycle plan based on your website content and sales funnel. Lifecycle plans segment leads based on who they are, how much interaction they’ve had with your business online, what kind of content you want them to receive, and at what part of the sales funnel you want them to receive it.

Lead Nurturing

The best way to move a lead through a sales funnel is to launch lead nurturing campaigns. You can do this with a workflow which allows you to trigger a follow-up email or a series of emails based on the action that a lead may take. This helps nurture and educate leads so they are prompted to take next steps and prepared before they even talk to a sales person.

Automated Workflows

Workflows are more than just a lead nurturing tool. They help you automate common marketing processes, moving leads through your funnel in an efficient way. Sending marketing emails, changing contact properties, and sending internal notification emails, are all possible with workflows. They bring marketers the same kind of automation a sophisticated CRM system provides to sales, bridging the gap between both processes.

Closed-Loop Reporting

Closed-loop reporting gives sales an opportunity to report on what happened to the qualified leads we provided, helping \ further understand your best and worst lead sources. With closed-loop reporting, you are able to plan more strategically for the future by focusing on your best lead sources, those with the best lead to customer conversion rate.

Step 5: Retaining Customers

Closing sales and getting customers are great goals to have. But I think the inbound marketing mentality supports the fact that the relationship with your customers doesn’t need to end there. After you bring in leads from online tactics you can focus on turning customers into promoters of your business. After all, the best advocates of your products or services are those that have experience with them. Options for continued retention processes include implementing referral programs, continued customer education pieces, and segmenting customer newsletters in order to keep your customers coming back for more.

Continued Education Pieces

Inbound allows you to segment your customers into lists based on their needs and implement marketing automation. You can communicate information on any additional needs they may have as a customer. Perhaps there is an opportunity to cross sell but your customer was not aware of it, these communications will make sure they are well educated on the full scope of your products and services.

Segmented Customer Newsletters

Newsletters aren’t just for leads and potential customers; you can send segmented customer newsletters so they continue to see you as experts in your industry. Customers receive newsletters that contain updates on current events in your industry, as well as press releases and product and service announcements.

Referral Programs

A referral customer comes at a much lower cost and has a higher potential for retention and loyalty. If applicable for your business, you can create referral programs that make it easy for current customers to promote your product or service.

Step 6: Account Analysis

Marketing Benchmarks

Always analyzing your main marketing benchmarks is key. These metrics include customer acquisition cost (CAC) and ratio of customer value to CAC which is the total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer.

You can also look at the time to payback CAC which is the number of months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers, marketing originated customer percent which shows what new business is driven by marketing, and the marketing influenced customer percent which takes into account all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads anytime during the sales process.

Onsite Analysis

Consistently performing a full onsite analysis of your website is also important. You do this by looking at keyword performance and rankings, organic search traffic and conversions, search engine optimization, blog performance, page performance, email click-through-rates, and much more.

Offsite Analysis

Offsite analysis goes hand in hand with onsite analysis. You can perform offsite analysis which is the measurement and analysis of your online presence away from your website. This includes paid search campaigns, social media accounts and paid social campaigns.

Monthly Reporting

Lastly, you can keep track of your unique business goals with in-depth reports based on your custom key performance indicators. Your reports are designed to foster communication and collaboration within your company so customizing it to your goals and with your sales and marketing teams is very necessary.

Takeaway

Setting up your strategy the right way might take a little bit of time, but in the end it’s worth it and will produce the type of results that turn into leads and customers for your marketing and sales teams!

How often does your company blog? Are you a religious 3x a week blogger? More? Less? By now you probably have some idea that blogging can be one of the best ways to get your company in front of its target audience, but being diligent about blogging and coming up with creative, unique content every week can be difficult. If you’re seeing some stagnant blog traffic, have seen your leads recently plateau or are just plain burnt out on blogging, I have a little piece of inbound marketing advice for you: it might be time for your company to blog less. Seem a little crazy? An inbound marketing evangelist telling a company that they need to blog LESS? Hear me out. Sometimes quality is better than quantity.

Your blog views are unimpressive and nothing seems to help.

You feel like you’re doing everything right. You have a content calendar, you blog regularly, even on the same days and around the same time. You know that your following has a good idea of when you post – yet your blog views have been awful as of late. You receive little to no comments and you just can’t get the engagement back. You’re definitely not alone, but it may be time to take a step back and start blogging a little less frequently. The quality of the content that you’re writing is much more important than how frequently or regularly you post (though if you can post AMAZING content on a regular basis, that’s always better). Spend time brainstorming, talk to other people in your company or even call up a client or customer. Get inspired. Often we find that blog topics come from everywhere. The more you step outside the box, the more likely you are to find amazing content that’ll captivate your readers.

You focus heavily on social media and have great interaction, but get very few leads from it.

If you have an impressive number of connections on LinkedIn, followers on Twitter and Facebook likes, odds are you’re doing something right with your audience. After all, they signed up to keep in touch and get the latest from your company. But if your engagement is great on social media and you’re still coming up short in your sales goals, something’s not right. Take some time to do some content alignment. Drill down closely and discover exactly what makes your buyer persona tick. Discover their wants, needs, and pain points are and cater to those needs with content. Like you are in the everyday of your business, be a problem solver. HELP PEOPLE. You started your business with a vision and goal in mind. Your products and services help others. Don’t get away from that. Keep it in the back of your head when you’re crafting your content.

You just aren’t “feeling it” anymore.

It’s easy to get bored writing your own content. Believe me. I know. We write blogs for a living. You can’t always be “in the mood”. Just like in a relationship, the glamour and interest that you may have once had for blogging can wane and wither away. It doesn’t mean that blogging isn’t useful or that you can’t rekindle your love for blogging. Take a step back from your blog for a bit if you’re losing your passion. It will still be there when you get back. Explore the world and find a story that relates to your audience. Never lose your ability to tell a story. One of my favorite writing gurus, William Zinsser says, “All writing to me is a journey. It’s saying to the reader, ‘Come along with me; I’ll take you on a voyage,’ Writers do that by never losing sight of the fact that they are telling a story.” It’s that simple. If you’re telling a story and not just selling a product when you write a blog, you’ll engage others.

Sometimes writing sucks. It’s definitely a process and it definitely takes a lot of work to writing engaging content for your audience week after week. But rather than becoming discouraged, take some time and remember that blogging less is okay – as long as the content that you’re offering is valuable. A single article can be picked up by the right website or news outlet and gain massive exposure, resulting in tons of leads and sales. If you remember that quality, relevant, engaging content should always be your number one goal – you’ll never lose your readership and will continue to gain exposure with your target audience.

Outside sales is a profession in flux. The growth of digital commerce has reimagined the ways reps can reach out to potential customers, as well as how those customers want to make their purchases. And sales as a whole has expanded to incorporate new approaches beyond the basic outside versus inside division. Yet in the face of all these changes, successful companies are preparing their reps in the field to deal with those issues.

What businesses are excelling in this new marketplace? What steps lined their paths to success? We chatted with Paul McCord, president of sales training company McCord Training and Development, to get his insights about what makes these companies tick.

What Are The Leaders Doing Right?

Part of the success for each of these companies comes from a deep knowledge of their markets. For instance, Xerox has long had the reputation of a powerhouse outside sales team. One reason for this success was switching from a product-focused sales organization to a market-oriented one. Rather than have its outside sales reps highlight a single item, the company gave them specific, narrow audiences as specialties. The company’s decision to have reps specialize in a certain audience lets them hone how to build rapport with those people. Better relationships mean better sales results.

McCord highlighted the importance of training in keeping the top performers at the top. “Each of these companies are willing to invest significant amounts of time and dollars in each member of their outside sales team,” he said. “So many companies mistake product training as sales training and they are not the same thing.” A business that puts resources into keeping its outside sales team on the cutting edge will stay ahead of the competition. When Selling Power ranks the best companies in the country to sell for, one of the three criteria is hiring, compensation, sales training and enablement. The best in the business recognize the importance of training. Hilti and UniFirst are in the top ten of the 2013 ranking, and McCord also highlighted them both as companies that are leading the outside sales field.

Another key to great outside sales comes from the broader company culture. “A focused sales process rooted in a commitment from top management to support the sales team with high quality products and great after the sale customer service and attention,” McCord explained. Consider Avon, one of the classics of outside sales. The company’s direct selling approach places a high priority on excellent products, with the sales rep offering consultation rather than a hard pitch to potential buyers. Xerox is again a great example. CEO Ursula M. Burns has been working to adopt a culture that cultivates excellence rather than just niceness among employees. “The top leadership in the company sets the tone for the remainder of the company, including the sales team,” McCord said. “The sales team members will perform to the level set by the company executives.”

What Can You Learn From Them?

McCord said the idea of adopting a company-wide sales approach is often given lip service, but not always implemented correctly. “Too often companies allow each seller or each sales manager to sell in the manner they see fit,” he said. “Successful companies have a well thought out, consistently trained and managed sales process that reflects the values and goals of the company.”

The Girl Scouts of America have nailed that concept. The organization has a thorough process for training its scouts when the time comes for cookie sales. The appeal of young entrepreneurs and supporting a good cause certainly helps in making the sale, but the Girl Scouts also succeed in the cookie drives because they are so well prepared to make those boxes move.

Another important trait of successful sales teams is how much value they place on the individual. Even though the different departments of a business need to work together, brands that want to excel will only hire the best to join that team. Jennifer Trzepacz, former head of human resources at LivingSocial, explained the daily deal site’s rigorous process of vetting new hires, putting them in challenging mock situations to test their abilities. She said the company’s top sellers were able to be resilient in the face of change, in addition to possessing excellent organizational and communication skills.

McCord added that good sales reps will also be proactive in wanting to improve. When their companies aren’t helping them to learning more or surpass a plateau, they’ll make the investment on their own. “Not only will it make you a better seller, but you learn skills that will make you a better seller no matter where you go,” he said. He also focused on keeping good company within the company. “If you want to become a top seller, hang out with the top sellers in the office and emulate what they do,” he said.

What Tools Can Help?

Many of the steps to becoming a top outside sales organization are part of a mental game. But even when your company is making those big shifts, having a good set of tools can give you that extra edge along the way.

For instance, McCord noted the importance of focusing on the sale. “During selling hours, spend time on revenue-generating activities — prospecting and selling — not busy work,” he said. Keeping that level of dedication comes partly from practice, but it also helps to have a reliable, streamlined system for the tangential tasks. A CRM like Base where data entry isn’t a burden and where reports can be generated automatically can free you up to focus on the sales work.

He cited a few other common tools for sales success in any field, such as a file-sharing service, Google Alerts, and social media, particularly LinkedIn. And remember, all your outside sales reps are mobile, so they need tools that will travel with them to client meetings, product demos, and customers’ offices.

Like this post? Subscribe to the blog. We were recently named one of 18 Sales blogs to follow in 2014 by Sales Engine!

This post originally appeared on the Base blog.

Such storytelling isn’t easy to find.

When organizations and consultants go through branding exercises and come to be part of associating words with their brands, they rarely highlight “cold” or “heartless” (suppose someone selling ice fishing equipment might go for “cold.”).

After scouring the Web I finally found one.

Meet Nick Murray, a self-professed “premier speaker” on the financial services industry.

I don’t know Mr. Murray. He could be great at his profession and the second warmest human being in the world behind the Dali Lama.

But if you want information on Mr. Murray speaking at your fine organization, you’ll come to his speaking page structured with five core sections: Fee, Deposit, Expenses, NO-NOs and Conference Calls.

In spirit of analyzing how to suffocate storytelling techniques, let’s examine each module.

That’s big of Nick to be open (no guarantee) to allowing the client to fork over another $4,500 for him to speak a second time on the same day.

I always get a kick out of someone talking about himself/herself in the third person. Famous athletes employ this technique, “It wasn’t a good night for LeBron.”

I suppose Mr. Murray figured a clause like “Nick will NOT return the deposit if he has to cancel the engagement at any time for any reason” might not go over well.

Glad we’re clear on who keeps the original receipts and who receives the photocopies. I can’t even count the number of business relationships that have soured from this issue.

To Mr. Murray’s credit, he doesn’t make any weird requests like insisting that a six-ounce jar of watermelon Jelly Bellies must be in a hotel room upon arrival.

No question, this is the section where Mr. Murray bears his soul.

First, I love the use of informal language in the subhead, which softens the point. Going with the formal “What Nick Will Not Do” might put off potential buyers.

Still, if I am a potential buyer, I would find some of this language confusing.

Like what is the difference between people are drinking and people who were just drinking alcohol?

And while I appreciate that Mr. Murray wants all attention on him, the section on speaking at breakfast or lunch leaves too much open for interpretation. If he’s speaking in front of 100 people over lunch, must every single person be finished? What if just two people are slow polishing off the peach cobbler? Does sipping coffee count as eating? If the waitstaff can stand perfectly still like statures on the perimeter, are they allowed to listen, and if yes, does this incur an extra cost?

Savvy pricing strategy.

If $10K for a keynote is too high, you can still get Mr. Murray on a conference call at half the price point.

Knowing the audience will be so captivated they will insist on the 30-day audio playback for another $5K, Nick ends up with the same fee and with zero risk of running into people “who were just drinking.”

Perfect!

Obviously, I don’t have any insights into Mr. Murray’s operation.

It could be that the cold and heartless business communications serve as a filter to keep the speaker requests at a manageable level.

But I’m guessing that’s not the case.

Selling is unpredictable. It didn’t always used to be that way, but that was when the seller had all the power. With the scales officially shifted and buyers holding all the cards, sales reps no longer get by with one-way monologues and single-surface spiels. B2B buyer confidence and decision consensus must be earned, and this means creating textured sales presentations that speak to buyers on their terms – and with more than just stats on a slide.

Voice strikes a cord.

Winning sales presentations respect buyer intelligence. They demand attention with interactive engagement. They pinpoint pains with hyper-personalized, precision-targeted messaging. But, most important, winning presentations invite the buyer into the conversation.

Buyers want to be spoken with, not sold to. With buyer portal technology, your reps use the greatest power they have, their conversational skills, to speak to the buyer with a voice that engages, assures and informs.

Your buyers have to feel your presentations. This requires stepping onto that field of emotions, which means changing the tune of your sales game – because not everyone is a reader.

All buyers are people. No person is the same.

If you gave a group of people the option to watch a video or read an article – both on the same topic – the video would take the cake. Watching video is, for most people, a lot more enjoyable than reading text. But the video’s entertainment advantage is nothing new, and it’s not the whole story.

Audio-visual presentations are about more than just entertainment and aesthetic appeal. Some buyers need this show-and-tell sell to truly get on board with the information. Remember: Buyers are people, and some people absorb content more easily when it’s streamed through their eyes and ears – not just plopped on a page or flashed on a slide.

• Visual learners make up 65% of the population.
  Charts and graphs make more of an impact than plainly stated stats.
• 30% of the population is composed of auditory learners.
  These people learn and remember best when they hear the information.

Understanding the way people learn and process information isn’t just for the education sector. This awareness has huge ramifications for businesses, too. Consider these findings from a Forbes Insight report on senior executives’ preference for video:

• 59% prefer to watch video instead of reading text.
• 65% visit a vendor’s website after watching a video.
• More than 50% share work-related videos with colleagues at least weekly, receiving them just as often.

It’s not because we’re lazy that we crave information on that multimedia platter. Our palate for interactive content stems from basic biology.

• Our brains are wired for visuals.
  The brain processes visual information 60,000 faster than text.
• We pay special attention to faces.
  There’s a particular part of the brain, the fusiform gyrus, that’s entirely dedicated to recognizing and interacting with faces. It’s hardwired to make us zero in on the human face as a focal point for information and believability.
• We perk up to voice.
  The sound of the human voice triggers the auditory parts of our brain to listen up and take heed.
• Emotion makes a difference.
  Expressions relayed in voice intonation and body language spark the limbic system: the part of our brain that regulates mood, motivation and drive. This tags the content being presented as more impactful, memorable and likely to be shared with coworkers, friends and family.
• Movement moves us.
  The V5 area of our visual cortex is specialized to detect movement. This ability dates back to the days of cave dwelling, when recognizing and reacting to peripheral motion were essential to survival.

If you really want to speak volumes to your buyers and get your reps selling to the tune of sales enablement, you need to recruit the right technology.

The buyer portal puts a voice to your words.

Put simply, a buyer portal is a content management platform.

• Organized as a private, secure and typically web-based environment, the portal is a place where both buyer and seller are able to share and view content, meet virtually and communicate.
• The portal offers a specialized repository for the sales rep to upload and send everything a buyer may need. This singular hub keeps all content in one place, all processes consistent and all team members on the same page.

Portal technology brings a lot of benefits to the sales enablement table, but perhaps the most powerful one is the merger of spoken voice and written word.

Voice is great.
It conveys emotion, but it’s not always possible.
Words are good, too.
They’re efficient and easy, but they don’t engage like audio with inflection and tone.
But voice and words together?
Now you’re talking.

It’s the conversation that sells.

Your buyers hate the hard sell. They don’t want the pundit pitch. Today’s buyers demand to be engaged and respected, to take part in and have control over the sales process. A buyer portal solves this pain by empowering your sales reps with the art of conversation.

• Invite the buyer in.
  The buyer gets access to a reservoir of powerful information and industry knowledge, feeling a sense of control over the buying process and gaining confidence in your business.
• Do more and reach more.
  Multidimensional presentations tap into your buyers’ various senses and brain regions at once. Plus, they cater to all types of learners: auditory, visual and even tactile.
• Create an experience.
  Reps pull their unique conversation styles and skills into a dynamic, voice-annotated message, setting the groundwork for an exceptional, personalized experience that’s critical to sales enablement.
• Cater to each buyer persona.
  Reps are able to pinpoint specific buyer pains by choosing which value points to convey and what information to emphasize via images, graphs, notes and other personal touches.

Cash in on the perks of the portal.

With portal technology and sales presentation software, it’s easy for your reps to create vocal slideshows that talk your buyers through the information and redefine the way people think about your solutions.

Reps add texture and tone to sales presentations, amping up the value of their message, with a variety of content options:

• Slides
• Pages
• Movies
• Website links
• Images
• Sticky notes
• Voice overlay
• Comments

It’s the conversation that sells. Speak to your buyers (and let them be heard) with sales and marketing technology that adds voice and vision to your presentations.

Sure it is a hot topic across the web. Expert and influencer content has determinedly become key in helping big (and small) brands in driving consumers through the buyer’s journey. From start to finish, it has been determined that the right content from the right person can lead to more sales. And so it begins.

In a recent piece I wrote on Forbes I discussed the importance of influence on the various stages of the buyer’s journey. In the Nielsen study I referred to it showed unequivocally that the expert was far more influential in building brand awareness than a brand could ever be. Further, the expert drove better results in the middle and late stages of the journey as well.

The Student Becomes The Teacher and The Expert Becomes The Influencer

Now that brands are latching on to the fact that people are influenced to buy based on what those around them are saying (this is nothing new by the way) they have taken to their CFOs for budgets to expand their influence programs. I can hear hundreds of CMOs running to their CFO and saying:

“Look at this study, it says experts drive awareness, affinity and purchase intent. Let’s hire experts to write content about our brand to help drive more revenue.”

CFOs being rigid number crunchers, these studies would undoubtedly lead them straight to the checkbook and away we would go, but as they skip hand and hand down the road of influence, are they asking all the right questions and considering all of the facts?

Moreover, are influencers really experts and how does money exchanging hands impact their effectiveness?

Real Influence Is Advocacy

When your neighbor pulls into the driveway in the car that you are thinking of buying and you walk over and ask them their thoughts, what they say next is probably going to carry some weight.

If they turn to you and say “I love this car” and then they go on to share how great their buying experience was, what a fun car it is to drive and how the service is second to none, that is going to make a big difference.

On the other hand if they tell you that it is the biggest piece of junk they have ever driven and they wish it would vanish in a flood, that is going to make a difference too, but not in a way that helps the brand.

Either way, the real influence is in having real people that we know and trust helping to reduce buyers dissonance and making the journey more satisfying. This can be done by informing the potential buyer and driving confidence that they will be satisfied with their purchase; regardless of whether they are buying a car or signing up for a new cell phone plan.

Why I don’t Want To Be An Influencer

Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in influence marketing, but there is a reason I don’t want to be an “influencer.”

In the above sentence, buried in the subtleties of the parenthesis lies the “Why.” It is because I want not to be an influencer, but an evangelist for the brands I may consider working with. I want to be able to put my head down at night and know in my heart that those people who may make a buying decision because of me have made a great choice.

In the day of social networks and unprecedented content at our disposal everyone to some extent has influence, but what brands really need are advocates. Whether they pay them or not they need people who would have said great things about them for free.

And in that is the litmus test for influence, if you are only saying because they are paying… then your doing a disservice to the brands that you represent and the consumers by which you engage.

Call it influence if you want, but make sure to know the difference. Brands don’t need influencers, they need advocates; otherwise they may be putting the core of their brand into the hands of hucksters in disguise. If influence is the result you seek, then advocacy is the road to hoe.

Need a reason to embrace content marketing?

People tend to fear what they do not understand.

Therefore, they are unlikely to work with your business if they do not understand your process for helping them.

Your current customers are your customers because you have earned they trust. They know, like, and understand you and your business.

The others are simply not ready to step forward because they have doubts that are holding them back. Your content marketing can remove those obstacles.

You understand your current customers well, so naturally your business seeks to attract more folks just like them. They are out there in the communities your business serves, but there are challenges that may include the following.

• They don’t recognize they need help
• They are not quite ready to change
• They are unwilling to do the work
• Use your content marketing and social media to remove these three obstacles, and more.

#1 – Help Buyers Understand How You Can Help Them

In the film A River Runs Through It, Jesse asks Norman: “Why is it the people that need the most help won’t take it?”

There are plenty of buyers out there that your business can help, but for whatever reason they are not ready. Use your content marketing to help them recognize they have a problem.

If you bend to accommodate them you will then compromise your ability to help others. This often comes in the form of cutting prices, which we all know doesn’t work. So, don’t do it.

Instead, refine and share your success stories to clarify what your business does well and why it is unique. These stories create memorable and shareable content that prepares prospective buyers to be your next customers.

#2 – Increase The Pain that Your Solution Eliminates

This is probably the most important time to be committed to your process for helping your customers.

When you seek to put a “Band-Aid solution” on a big problem your value plummets. If a Band-Aid will do, then how necessary is your premium solution?

Without sensationalizing, take bold moves to help your buyer feel the pain.

Buyers are people, so they will differently respond to different stimuli. Some will have to see how your solutions work, some feel it, and others hear it.

Therefore, use the available multi-media formats to create content that reaches all types of buyers. Here’s a tip:

Help your buyer feel good about their pain; it means they care about something. Tweet this

#3 – Remove Obstacles to Adopting Your Solutions

When you build trust with buyers they will share the truth with you.

We learned early on at the landscape business I founded that many buyers wanted to upgrade their landscape, but only if they could be assured it would be properly maintained.

We quickly realized we had to launch a maintenance division to remove this obstacle. We also had to create tutorials for those that preferred to do the work themselves.

I’m sure you will not be surprised that to learn that many that initially did the work themselves later called us in to do the heavy lifting, such as the spring cleanup, tree trimming, and mulching. Why? Because our content marketing helped them understand there are no shortcuts to doing things right. (#1 above).

How about your business?

Helping is the New Selling

Your content marketing will sell more business if you design it to be helpful. Every single piece of educational content you create (such as a blog post) is either a stand-alone tutorial, or a portion of something more comprehensive (such as an eBook or printed reference guide).

Helping people understand how you can help them goes beyond answering questions. Facts and figures are useful, but they are impersonal and easily forgotten. Stories are relatable, and therefore memorable.

Your stories should help buyers understand how you can help them, why you want to help them, and why they will enjoy working with you.

When you do that you will make emotional connections that will move buyers to sign on the line which is dotted.

Photo Credit

While location-based social media platform Foursquare has not been nearly as successful as experts predicted, it appears to be making a comeback. Foursquare’s revenue has improved drastically over the past year, and according to CEO Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s mountain of data leaves it poised to dominate the mobile scene. But how can local businesses take full advantage of Foursquare’s local, mobile audience? With these 4 brand examples and 7 tips for success, your local business can grow its customer base and generate new leads using Foursquare.

Foursquare in the News

Last year, Foursquare made headlines for impressively bad revenue – though it was initially valued at $600 million, the social network only drew $2 million in revenue in 2012. However, Foursquare’s profits have increased dramatically over the past year. CEO Dennis Crowley reported a 600% increase in revenue in 2013, which left Foursquare on track for a 500% increase between Q1 of 2013 and Q1 of 2014.

While they did not provide exact numbers, based on the $2 million they made in 2012, Foursquare’s 2013 revenue was likely $14 million, and the Q1 2013 revenue was likely $21 million. This puts Foursquare slightly behind the predicted revenue of $15-20 million for 2013. This impressive growth shows that the company has developed a solid plan for monetizing its app and meeting investors’ predictions.

As Foursquare reaches its sixth birthday, Crowley has big plans for its future. He believes that Foursquare is the future of mobile search, and that it stands out above similar services such as Google and Yelp because it takes the user’s personal experience into account. Foursquare focuses on passive engagement – it relies on a continuously growing mountain of data to provide recommendations based on preferences and location. Crowley envisions a future where Foursquare can automatically check you in, furthering this ideal of passive engagement.

What exactly is this mountain of data Foursquare relies on? Here are some of the stats:

• Foursquare has over 45 million users.

• The app sees 6 million check-ins per day.

• It has recorded 5 billion total check-ins in 5 years to 60 million places across the globe.

• 50 million brands and publishers have used Foursquare.

• Over 60,000 developers have used Foursquare’s location data for their products.

• Over 40 million tips have been left by the Foursquare community at locations worldwide.

Successful Foursquare Campaigns: 4 Examples

Still not convinced that Foursquare is for you? Check out these 4 examples of small businesses who ran successful marketing campaigns on Foursquare.

Bright Eyes Family Vision Care

While the vast majority of promotions on Foursquare come from venues such as restaurants and bars, this local eye doctor created a strong presence on Foursquare using a range of rewards and perks. For special occasions such as Foursquare Day, Bright Eyes Family Vision Care provided great deals such as 50% off and buy one, get one free eye glasses. Although they can’t afford to offer these promotions all the time, the vision care center came up with an even more creative reward for users who checked in: locally-made hot sauce. Bright Eyes Family Vision Eye Care enjoys using Foursquare to better interact with the local community and expand their reach.

Angelo & Maxie’s

Although this local New York steakhouse has since closed (and reopened under a new name), Angelo & Maxie’s ran a successful Foursquare campaign based on real research. They found that most of their customers who order meals also order dessert, so they offered a Foursquare special: free dessert with the purchase of any entrée. The campaign ran for 45 days and saw 400 check-ins. 60% of those who checked-in were first time customers, and the restaurant found that revenues rose 18%.

AJ Bombers

AJ Bombers, a local restaurant in Milwaukee, gained a Foursquare following by offering something that users of this social network want: badges. The restaurant asked users to check-in on a specific date to obtain a Swarm Badge, which is earned when 51 or more people check-in to a Foursquare location at once. This promotion drew 161 check-ins. Another way AJ Bombers utilized Foursquare was by posting a tip about their Barrie Burger on their page, which caused a 30% increase in sales for that item.

PYT

Using Foursquare, local Philadelphia burger joint PYT has been able to draw over 11,000 check-ins. This restaurant offers free beer to anyone who checks-in on Foursquare. This means, of course, that they have given away more than 11,000 beers for free, but the campaign has paid for itself multiple times over because the majority of customers who check-in to receive the free beer also stay and purchase food.

7 Tips for Foursquare Success

Ready to get started on Foursquare? Here are 7 tips to help your local business succeed.

1. Claim location: The first step in launching a Foursquare campaign is to claim your business’s location. After downloading the app, first try searching for your business. If you can’t find it, use the “Add This Place” option to add your business’s name, location, and category. After filling out the profile or claiming your venue if it already exists, verify your location either by mail or phone (there is a nominal fee involved).

2. Create a page: Once you have claimed your location, another option is to create a Foursquare page. This will act as the hub for your company where you can manage multiple locations and be followed by other users. Add a photo and bio to complete your page. You can also leave messages for your customers as well as tips at your locations.

3. Offer specials and deals: Begin engaging customers by offering a Foursquare special. Foursquare specials are discounts and deals that are available only to other Foursquare users who check-in to your location. Create specials designed for new customers as well as loyal customers.

4. Promote local updates: Foursquare offers features that allow your business to send updates to local customers. These updates will appear in the Foursquare feeds of other users, and they can include coupons, deals, specials, announcements, and important information about your venue.

5. Provide incentives: Another way to engage Foursquare users is to offer incentives that are unique to this social network: badges and mayoral perks. While Foursquare offers a number of badges such as the Swarm Badge described above, you can create customized badges. Foursquare users can also earn the title of mayor of your location by checking in frequently, and you can offer freebies, gifts, or other perks to celebrate the most loyal customers.

6. Engage with tips and trivia: One way that users communicate on Foursquare is by leaving tips, or messages for specific locations that provide helpful information, such as advice about the best seats in the house or best menu items. You can leave tips for customers at your locations as well as at other local venues. You can further engage users by adding fun trivia that’s relevant to your industry.

7. Use analytics to maximize effect: Finally, you can use a range of analytics to better understand demographics and reach your Foursquare audience more effectively. You can collect data on the number of check-ins received, where customers are sharing check-ins, ages and genders of customers, times they check-in most often, and how often they check-in. Better understanding the behavior of your Foursquare audience will allow you to develop more effective tools for reaching them through deals & promotions.

How does your brand use Foursquare to reach a local audience?

Many businesses are turning to outsourcing because of the benefits that are provided when they do so. It cuts down on the amount of time that they spend on areas like marketing or  product support and allows them to focus on the more important tasks, such as closing the deal.

Although there are numerous ways for you to outsource, one that should not be overlooked is outsourcing your appointment setting. In order to meet or exceed lofty sales goals, businesses need to efficiently manage dozens of meetings, presentations and appointments with potential clients. An outsourced appointment setting service can help you in several ways:

Increases Revenue

You would hate to lose out on a lucrative contract or sale due to a scheduling mix-up. If you use a quality service for appointment setting, you can rest assured that all your appointments and meetings are scheduled correctly. Eliminating possibilities of a missed sale will help you see an almost immediate boost in your revenue stream. From that point, you can scale your business in order to increase the revenue substantially.

Lowers Your Costs per Sale

When you have a qualified outsourcer which is taking care of your appointment setting, it will help to lower your cost per sale. That is due to the fact that they will be able to generate more appointments from qualified leads.

Gives You Additional Time

One of the most difficult parts of operating a business is taking care of everything that needs to be done. You may find that you are struggling until you begin to outsource and take some of the weight off of your shoulders. By outsourcing the appointment setting services, you will be able to focus on more important parts of your business that need your personal attention (Source).

Displays the Benefits of Outsourcing

Outsourcing your appointment setting services can show you just how powerful a tool outsourcing can be. Companies have seen tremendous success outsourcing aspects of the business like lead generation, marketing, and product support. For business owners new to the concept, starting out by outsourcing appointment setting services is a perfect stepping stone towards using outsourcing to their advantage in other areas (Source).

Inside sales is becoming a popular sales model for many companies today. Ken Krogue of Inside Sales.com defines inside sales as “remote sales,” most lately called “virtual sales,” or professional sales done remotely. Where Outside Sales or traditional Field Sales is done face-to-face.

To take it a step further, inside sales can be comprised of:

1. Sales – those that sell products or services in their inside sales position and/or

2. Lead Generation – those who generate leads for the inside sales team or field sales team.

Is it complicated? Not really.

How Inside Sales Works Within Organizations

A few instances when inside sales can work is when companies want the field representatives to manage and close sales and have a separate lead generation function. If the sales price of the product or service is low, it may lend lends itself to inside sales activity.

Some Organizational Models for Inside Sales

1. An inside sales team generates leads to fill the enterprise sales pipeline, for the field or outside sales organization’s response. The field or outside reps focus on closing deals.

2. An inside sales team generates leads for the entire enterprise, while management and closing activities are divided between inside sales and outside or field sales. An inside sales team generates leads and fills the enterprise sales pipeline. The field sales team manages and closes the larger enterprise sales opportunities, while the inside sales team manages and closes smaller ancillary products and services sales opportunities.

3. An inside sales team manages and closes smaller ancillary products and services sales opportunities. An inside sales team generates leads to fill the smaller ancillary products and services sales pipeline, and inside sales representatives focus on closing smaller deals.

Q&A

What inside sales models are working for you? Need fresh ideas for inside sales to fit with the way you operate? Enter your questions or ideas in the comments.

English: Climber on fixed rope (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Part 3: A Closer Look At Modern Marketing Challenges

The transformation to a new digital economy has been rapid. A force of acceleration hit B2B organizations beginning the first decade of the 21st century. During the past few years, in particular, we have seen the pace of acceleration quicken. Causing many B2B organizations to either be caught unaware or be slow in matching the pace of transformative changes occurring.

A New Way of Thinking Needed For Modern Marketing Challenges

The new digital economy is turning traditional marketing on its head. Presenting new challenges to CMO’s. For many CMO’s, adapting to the new realities of the digital economy is a test of learning on the job – literally. Strategies and tactics existing a decade ago are either a small percentage of overall marketing today or obsolete. What is separating adaptive CMO’s from non-adaptive CMO’s is their ability to think of new challenges in the context of new modern marketing thinking. Solving modern marketing challenges with nearly obsolete traditional marketing thinking will be an exercise in futility.

Essential to modern marketing thinking today is the ability of CMO’s to understand shifts taking place in buying behaviors. Modern marketing CMO’s will need to expand beyond limiting their thinking to just content marketing or inbound marketing. We have seen a rise in these two tactical approaches as a direct result of a shift in buyer behavior. However, they are both still rooted in early behavioral concepts related to search and research behaviors. Today’s modern buyers are advancing behaviors well beyond just search and research.

New Landscape Of Challenges

The modern marketing CMO is faced with challenges, which are a direct impact of the new digital economy. New technologies have also created new forms of interactions and engagements with customers and buyers. Digital technologies opening up multiple channels of which many did not exist just over a decade ago. The modern marketing CMO is faced with a new landscape of challenges:

Limited understanding of the modern buyer: Modern buying behaviors are shifting rapidly each year. Information about customers is spread across many functions of an organization, which creates an incomplete and disparate view. Logistically, pulling data together to understand the modern buyer is an exercise liken to putting puzzle pieces together – except you do not know the picture on the box you are aiming for.

Poor responses and results from new marketing strategies and tactics: One pattern is very clear from numerous surveys conducted over the past few years. Satisfaction with response rates and results of marketing efforts generally have been in the thirty-five (35%) or lower range. Meaning sixty-five (65%) or more of marketing leaders are dissatisfied with results. The consistency in the dissatisfaction rate over the past few years suggest modern marketers are having a tough time learning how to make this valued connection with modern buyers.

Shift from lead quantity to lead quality: The role of marketing in generating leads in the past decade and a half has increased substantially. B2B organizations responded to early movements in buying behaviors towards search and research with a focus on capturing as many leads as possible. The result has been B2B marketing organizations housing tough to mange volumes of leads with no parameters around quality. Not to be confused with qualified leads, this pertains to an issue of too many leads of low quality.

Diminishing value of campaign thinking: The always-on attributes of modern buyers is causing a diminishing value of returns on what is fast becoming out-dated campaign thinking. Whereas old thinking on campaigns were event-driven and time-bound, new modern marketing must account for an always-present nature of campaigns matching the always-on nature of modern buying.

Concepts of buying are changing: Many marketing organizations continue to be rooted in viewing customer purchasing through the sales funnel, buying processes by stages, or attempting to view buying processes as a buyer’s journey. This is turning to be problematic for modern marketing CMO’s. Modern buyers are breaking down barriers associated with stages and time as well as introducing new activities and contexts for buying. Modern marketing CMO’s will need to be rooted in understanding contextually how buying is taking place in the new digital economy. With stages and time-bound rigidity becoming obsolete in the digital age, it will be incumbent upon CMO’s to adjust their thinking on how to understand new concepts of buying.

Meeting The Challenges Of Modern Marketing

While the current needs of meeting short-term targets can be pressing, the modern marketing CMO will need to be vigilant in pursuing understanding the modern buyer. Forward thinking as well as study on how buying is being reshaped by the new digital economy will have to be a CMO constant activity. Without this constant study and vigilance, the modern marketing CMO will find it increasingly difficult to meet modern marketing challenges – as well as know the modern buyer.

(Part 1 of this new series is here: The CMO Modern Marketing Guide To Buyer Personas And Buyer Insights Research -Part 1)

Enterprise marketers won’t be competitive—against rival organizations or against rival job applicants—without a solid understanding of content marketing.

These days, many of us are revenue marketers. We’re tied to (and measured on) lead, opportunity, and revenue numbers, just like our sales counterparts. It doesn’t matter how much engagement we drive. If we’re not driving business, we’re failing.

But do you really understand how your content supports your business objectives? Or how to incorporate content into your marketing strategy? If not, it’s time to figure it out—for the sake of your business and your career.

Companies like yours are investing more budget in content than ever before—45% are hiring content marketing professionals in the next year. If you don’t know how content fits into your marketing strategy, how will you be able to support these new roles?

To equip enterprise marketers with the right tools to coordinate and implement successful content marketing campaigns and tactics, we asked 5 brilliant marketers to share their experiences, research, and advice on April 24 in San Francisco.

In the meantime, here are five things each and every enterprise marketer—regardless of title—should understand about content marketing.

What Makes Content Compelling

If content is going to be important to your marketing strategy, you need to know how to create good content. Otherwise, your organization will simply add to the chaos. Compelling content stands out from the crap. It tells a story. It attracts your target audience and, most importantly, it compels them to take action.

Which Analytics Are Actually Useful

Figuring out which metrics to track and why starts with understanding your marketing goals. Your content should always support specific business objectives. For the revenue marketer, it’s often to generate leads, opportunities, and sales. For the brand marketer, it might be increased engagement and influence. Regardless of your role, knowing which metrics to track is critical to evaluating whether your efforts are effective or falling short.

How to Build Influence

Quality content makes your organization an influential voice on topics that matter to your target audience. But without influence, your content, no matter how brilliant, won’t be consumed and therefore won’t impact your business. This is where influencer marketing comes in. By reaching out to well-known people in your space and asking them to contribute to or promote your content, you’ll gain traction and authority more quickly (and with the right people).

Why Globalization Requires Process

60% of global marketers have no strategy for multilingual content marketing. Without established processes for content localization and translation, efforts are duplicated across teams and the timely delivery of content is near impossible. Every global marketer needs to understand how to streamline these complicated processes—across borders and timezones.

When to Repurpose Content

You should be getting the most out of every single piece of content you create. For example, did you know that a single eBook can be turned into at least 269 content assets and fill your blog editorial calendar for a month? By coming up with a plan for your content campaigns, you’ll be able to leverage your assets for the maximum impact on your audience and your business’ bottom line.

Understand these five areas of content marketing to stay ahead as an enterprise marketer. It’s a lot better than trying to catch up.

Do you have a Facebook Page?

Okay, I know you do. It’s 2014, that question is pretty much a rhetorical one by now.

But are you driving traffic to a Facebook Landing Page? You should be!

This article will dive right into Facebook Landing Pages – critiquing five Facebook Landing Page examples to hell and back. I’ll tell you exactly what I like about these five pages (taken from some of the biggest brands on Facebook) and also what needs improvement.

So let’s get started!

Why a Facebook Landing Page?

We know that every PPC and ad campaign has more success when it sends people to a dedicated landing page, yeah?

Well this is just as true on Facebook as it is for your website (after all, isn’t your Facebook Page just as branded as your website?).

The variables contained in the Facebook Landing Page examples below increase the chance of a click-through far more than if ads or Posts simply sent traffic to a website – oh, and they can earn your business some serious Facebook profile domination as well.

While Facebook Landing Page tabs are currently only available through a third-party app, they can be well worth the investment. Here’s why:

They keep Facebook users on Facebook.

Many users will “bounce” as soon as they realize a link you’ve provided is sending them to a website. Even if they are genuinely interested in your business’ content it doesn’t matter. Facebook Landing Pages keep your possible leads or customers comfortable – and therefore more likely to convert.

Facebook Landing Pages can also have a huge influence on your Facebook profile through “Like-Gating” – something I’ll refer to a few times in this article. Like-gating is hands-down the best way to increase your social media profile.

Let’s check out 5 Facebook Landing Page Examples to show you what I’m talking about.

1. Lowe’s Subscription-Focused Landing Page Asks for a Sign Up

What I Like:

• Integrating with other social platforms: This is one of the most under-used ways to increase social profile – tying their “top tips” email sign-ups with their top-tips board on Pinterest drives traffic both to and from that platform.
• The weather widget: This is a cool touch, making their brand communication more personal.
• Slogan matching: Whenever you can match message (between ad, post, landing page and website) do so. Continuity increases engagement as – again – it assures visitors that they’re in the right place and ensures they’re comfortable.
• The Video/Image: It’s essential that your Facebook Landing Pages have solid images. Lowe’s incorporates an image, an engaging video, and a top-tip all in one for their landing page.

Where this Page Could be Optimized:

• The length: Not included in the image above is another four or five boxes the same size as Pinterest’s. This is too much information for your average Facebook user. Much of this information would be better used on its own Facebook tab.
• The Color Scheme: Lowe’s website color scheme is a darker blue, and (as I mentioned above) you should always strive to match your brand profiles as well as possible. This would be an easy fix that might help with brand recognition.
• The CTA: “Sign Up” on the top right is this page’s Call-to-Action, but it could be more obvious. I recommend using the green from the weather widget as a contrasting color to make the CTA button stand out. Numerous case studies have shown that making your CTA button stand out is a best practice.

2. Costco’s Online Landing Page Drives Users Off-Platform

What I Like:

• Pages that collect Facebook users and then direct them: This Facebook Landing Page is an awesome part of the Costco sales funnel. A post or ad would drive traffic to the Costco page, and then this tab collects people interested in savings and drives them to the page on their website focused on internet-only deals.
• The Length: Short and to the point, this is a visually appealing landing page that doesn’t sidetrack Facebook users with unnecessary variables or distractions.
• The Products: Featuring six different product types (everything from garden beds to shoes) shows off Costco’s range. It also increases the chance that no matter what a Facebook user might be looking for, their interest is piqued.
• The Color Scheme: This landing page matches perfectly with the corresponding page on the Costco website. This kind of cohesiveness is great for designing a well-oiled sales funnel.
• Online-Only: Ensuring that any Facebook traffic knows they have to engage with Costco online in order to get access to the coupons is a great way to keep them within the sales funnel. If this landing page said “You’re totally fine to go to your nearest Costco store and get these exact deals” they’d lose a lot of leads.

Where this Page Could be Optimized:

• Exclusive!: I would recommend testing the same focus for “Valid through 4/20/14” as there is for “online only offers”. Exclusivity can have a huge influence on the success of a coupon campaign.
• The CTA: Once again, this page’s CTA should stand out more. I’d recommend testing making a CTA button the same purple as “April” on this page and the accent color on their corresponding website.
• Dollar Value: I’d like to see an estimated dollar value of these online deals. For instance, on the Costco website itself it’s evident that the red and grey couch above is discounted at $300 dollars off. Advertising this fact with an evident “$300 dollars off” would increase click-throughs.

3. Dodge “Like-Gates” your Signature Style Landing Page

What I Like:

• The “Like-Gate” Focus: Like-Gates are simply the best way to generate Facebook Likes for your business: offering something of value and then limiting access to it for the small price of hitting “Like”. Dodge knows this, and darkens out the rest of the page until you click “Like”
• The Mutually-Beneficial Brand Relationship: Dodge knows that using the “Red Bull” logo will increase excitement and engagement with their promotion. It’s best practice for your business to show off any relationship you have with a recognizable brand name.
• The Image: Although it’s darkened until a user clicks “Like” the image is still an exciting one. Bursting off the page, people want to see the surfer image in full color.
• The CTA: Although I’m not entirely sure what my signature style is (or could be), Dodge’s “Like Dodge to Discover your Signature Style” is an effective CTA. Any phrase which excites or intrigues your landing page visitor will be clicked on more than a simple “enter here” or “click for entry”.

Where this Page Could be Optimized:

• Clarity: I have no idea what this promoting. Generally “Like-Gates” are reserved for contests, coupons or a valuable resource. Visitors to this page aren’t exactly sure what they’re engaging with. Remember an exciting image only goes so far.
• Where’s the Value?: What do I stand to win? Finding out my signature style (whatever that might be) is not enough to induce a click-through.
• Too much Obscured: While it’s effective because people want to see the full picture, I’m not sure that tinting the main image and the rest of the page is actually any more effective that telling people exactly what they’re going to get and not hiding the promotion in an air of mystery which is probably increasing bounce rates.

4. Coors Light Promotes the Stanley Cup Super Fan Facebook Landing Page

What I Like:

• Working with What’s on their Customer’s minds: Online marketing and social media don’t exist in their own little bubble. I like that Coors is tapping into what people care about by working the Stanley Cup Playoffs into their promotion (something that, up here in Canada, is a pretty monumentally huge deal).
• Showcasing the Competition: Showing the gallery of other entrants encourages people to enter as well. First, because they think “Hey, I can take a better picture than that!” and second, the ever-awesome peer pressure factor of social media marketing. It also creates a social ‘tribe’ of like-minded people.
• The Security Policy: While not the sexiest variable on the page, I like that beneath the email entry box it reads “Coors Light will not sell your information to anyone…” Including this small sentence will have a positive effect on entries, and costs Coors nothing.
• Fan of the Week: I like that Coors is running this contest on a weekly basis – maximizing the promotional value and also giving people more than one chance to enter and win. This increases the chance of the contest going viral and being shared.

Where this Page Could be Optimized:

• The USP/Value Proposition: I’d test a few different USPs. While “Looking for your own 15 seconds of fame?” isn’t bad, I’d like to see the results from “Want to see your face on the big screen?” or “Get your face on TV!” – both of which make it a bit clearer what entrants stand to win as well as being less cliche.
• The CTA Copy: Sometimes it’s the smallest details that matter the most. Rather than “Continue” I’d test “Enter Here!” or “Let’s get started!” – something more exciting or even sports oriented (given that this is a male-focused promotion).
• The CTA Button color: Another small detail I’d like to see tested would be making the CTA button the same color as the blue banner at the top of the page. This would make the entry button stand out that little bit more and increase conversions.

5. WWF Asks for Support

What I Like:

• The Panda: Small, cute and the ubiquitous symbol of WWF, the panda is a solid choice for this landing page’s image.
• The CTA: Bold, large and orange, the CTA button stands out intensely from the rest of the page.

Where this Page Could be Optimized:

To be honest with you, this page could use some serious work. Here’s what I’d like to see tested…

• Colors: Black text on white background dates your business quite substantially. The WWF website’s color scheme is black and orange, and would work far better to make the page visually appealing.
• The CTA Location: I do like the CTA, but I’m not a fan of where it is. The CTA should never be the first thing that your landing page traffic sees, it should be the third (after the USP and a solid and appealing image). In this case it’s not only the first thing that people see, but pretty much the only thing they can see.
• The CTA Copy: You need to strike a balance between clear and just plain pushy. Why not “Get involved Today” or “Do your Part” instead of “Donate Now” (and, for that matter, “Support our Work” at the top). Check out my article “How to Sell Without Selling” for more tips.
• Grammatical Error: It may just be because I’m a content marketer and copy editor, but “adopt a animal” is grammatically incorrect (and my word processor agrees). Anytime you use an article before a word beginning with a vowel (or an “H”) you should use “an”, not “a”. WWF should know this. Grammatical errors, spelling errors and typos do have an effect on conversion rates. Remember to edit before making your landing page live!
• The List of Countries: WWF is a worldwide company, so they should have international landing pages relevant to those countries – or at least language-oriented pages. This list of 15 or so countries does nothing to encourage engagement or a click-through. I’d do whatever it takes to change this formatting.

Conclusion

Facebook Landing Pages are awesome, but only if they’re optimized for conversions. They funnel Facebook users intelligently and successfully, winnowing out the random clickers and honing in on people you actually want to communicate with, engage with, or have as customers.

Remember that “Like-Gating” your page is still only available through 3rd party apps, but is seriously one of the best ways to encourage the growth of your Facebook Page.

Remember also that, in order to get the most out of your Facebook marketing campaigns, you need to be driving traffic to a website (or a landing page) that matches with your Facebook campaign. Don’t switch up the images, language or color-schemes or you’ll throw off your traffic and they’ll bounce.

By James Scherer

The importance of lead nurturing can’t be overstated. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads, at 33% lower cost.

Lead nurturing benefits your sales and revenue marketing efforts by leveraging content to build relationships with qualified prospects and accelerate their journey through the buy cycle.

Best practices learned from my experience at The Pedowitz Group have led to my 10 Commandments for Lead Nurturing Success:

1. Freshen up old content – You have a lot more content than you think. The most efficient way to get started with lead nurturing is to think about how you can freshen up old content (emails, blogs, articles, and sales presentations) and turn it into educational assets for use in demand generation campaigns.
2. Work closely with the sales team – Lead nurturing simply won’t work without an agreed upon understanding of goals, timelines, and processes between sales and marketing. Sit down to discuss and define the definition of a “sales ready” lead. A best practice is to create service level agreements (SLAs) with sales defining a sales-ready lead, lead routing, timeframe for follow up, and consequences when the process is broken.
3. Create compelling content - Be sure to keep all prospect communication brief, relevant and unique. Include industry news, educational resources, and helpful tips to show your thought leadership. If your content isn’t compelling, targeted, and delivered at the right time, you’re likely to be overlooked when buying decisions are made.
4. Map content to buy cycle – Not all content is created equal. Not all leads have the same needs. Therefore, you need to map your content to the prospect buy cycle. As potential customers interact with your campaigns, the content needs to drive them towards an action.
5. Don’t underestimate subject lines – A great subject line can make all the difference!. The more people who open your emails, the more chance you have to influence your prospects. Think about how A/B testing can help determine the best subject lines. Think about how to optimize subject lines to increase email deliverability. All are important factors in lead nurturing.
6. QA, QA, QA – This is the part of lead nurturing, and campaign management in general, that is most often neglected. If you don’t do anything else, please be sure to establish a QA process for all outbound communications. Make sure you check the grammar, logical flow, and appearance of your content. Make sure you’re sending to the right people. If you’ve using Marketing Automation, make sure you’ve set up your tokens custom tags, and the right steps for your program statuses.
7. Establish lead scoring – It’s surprising to hear that 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring (Source: MarketingSherpa). Lead scoring is vital to sending better-qualified leads to sales. Start by working with sales to develop a common scoring system. Decide which interactions and demographic information should be scored, and how much each is worth. Be flexible, as your scoring criteria may change over time.
8. Follow data management best practices - Without clean data, you’re doomed from day one. Too many marketers ignore this aspect of lead nurturing. Take the time to clean up your data. As a result, both marketing and sales will spend less time researching lead information and more time engaging and qualifying new leads.
9. Report the correct metrics – Take a keen interest in measures that show lead nurturing’s contribution to the sales pipeline and revenue. Track the number of qualified leads marketing sent to sales. Measure conversion rates along the buy cycle. Gauge whether there is an increase or decrease in deal size, sales cycle, and campaign return on investment. What you track will change as your Revenue Marketing practice matures, so focus only on those key metrics and trends that help drive your business in a meaningful way.
10. Re-nurture leads – Not every lead is ready to buy after the initial phone call. To avoid lead leakage, be sure to re-nurture leads that don’t convert right away. Create an agreement with sales and make it easy to re-route leads back into a nurture program.

“Big data” is one of the trendiest buzzwordy terms in marketing/technology/business today.

So before it gets replaced by the next trendy buzzwordy term, here’s some marketing-related big data for you: 83 valuable facts, stats, and research findings covering strategy, social media, SEO, online advertising, email marketing, content, blogging, social networking, video and more.

2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends–North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs

What do 40% of B2B buyers say about LinkedIn, that only 19% say about Twitter? Which “social” brands aren’t really social at all? What do only 48% of searches result in? What do 91% of B2B marketers do, but only 36% do well? (No, not that.) What do 73% of reporters say press releases should contain?

Find the answers to those questions and many, many more here in more than 80 social, content, search, and email marketing facts and statistics from the past few months.

4 Marketing Management and Measurement Stats

1. Just 35% of B2B marketing executives say they can calculate the ROI of their marketing spend most or all of the time. 42% say they can calculate ROI only some of the time, rarely or not at all. (B2B Marketing)

2. While two out of three U.S. CMOs say they feel pressure from the top to prove the value of marketing, just 51% of CEOs agree “that marketing’s financial value is clear to the business.” (MarketingCharts)

3. That’s likely because only 45% of CMOs are confident “that they know which metrics or business outcomes their key stakeholders care about.” (MarketingCharts)

4. “Data analytics are currently most commonly used by B2B marketing leaders to measure and report marketing’s performance (64%), as well as to justify (55%) and allocate (52%) the marketing budget. Analytics are least commonly used to fine-tune the marketing mix (14%).” (MarketingCharts)

4 B2B Marketing Stats

5. Consumerization of B2B marketing? 57% of B2B vendors say they are shifting their B2B commerce transactions from offline to online and self-service, and 44% agree “that B2B commerce is adopting B2C best practices in order to optimize the purchasing experience.” (MarketingCharts)

6. Online sales currently account for about 35% of total revenue for B2B vendors, though that’s higher (41%) among US companies. (MarketingCharts)

7. 40% of B2B buyers say LinkedIn is important when researching technologies and services to purchase; 19% say the same for Twitter. (Social Media Today)

8. B2B buyers today are 70%-90% of the way through their “buying journey” before they reach out to a vendor. (B2B Marketing)

6 Social Media Marketing Stats

9. Social media marketing budgets are projected to double in the next five years. (SocialTimes)

10. The top three social networks used by B2B marketers are LinkedIn (91%); Twitter (85%); and Facebook (81%). However, just 62% of marketers say that LinkedIn is effective, while 50% say the same for Twitter and only 30% of B2B marketers view Facebook as effective. (FlipCreator)

11. This one may surprise you: Google+ actually averages more visits per month than Facebook. Google+ receives 1.2 billion visits per month compared to Facebook’s 809 million. (iMedia Connection)

12. 83% of B2B marketers invest in social media to increase brand exposure; 69% to increase web traffic; and 65% to gain market insights. (Social Media Today)

13. Some brands perceived as social aren’t—at all. As of 2013, Apple had yet to claim a Twitter account, Facebook page, or any other type of social media presence. Ditto for Trader Joe’s. (iMedia Connection)

14. People spend, on average, 4X more time on Tumblr and Pinterest than they do on Twitter. (iMedia Connection)

7 SEO and Search Stats

15. Every month there are more than 10.3 billion Google searches, with 78% of U.S. internet users researching products and services online. (B2B Marketing)

16. 54% of B2B buyers begin their buying process with informal research about business problems; nearly 80% of the time spent researching is done line. (B2B Marketing)

17. 33% of organic search clicks go to the first result. (SocialTimes)

18. The top 4 positions, generally those considered to be “above the fold”, receive 83% of first page organic clicks. (Brent Carnduff)

(However, as noted here previously, “a lower position isn’t always bad. If the searcher clicks the ‘back’ button because the top result didn’t meet expectations, then he or she is 5-8 times more likely to click on a lower result than on the initial search.”)

19. It’s also important to consider that only 48% of searches result in an organic click. The remaining 52% result in either a click on a paid ad, leaving the search engine results page without clicking on any listing, or starting a new search. (Brent Carnduff)

20. In addition, as search intent becomes more detailed or specific (long-tail search phrases), the click distribution across the first page organic listings begins to even out, as searchers look for the best match or answer to their query. (Brent Carnduff)

21. And furthermore, long-tail searches have higher overall organic click-through rates. 56% of searches for phrases of four words or more result in a click on an organic result, compared to just 30% for single-word search queries. (Brent Carnduff)

7 Online Advertising Stats

22. Of the three major types of online advertising (search, display, and social), search is viewed as the best channel for driving direct sales, cited by 40% of marketers (vs. 26% who use display to drive sales and 18% using social). However, just over a third of marketers view each channel as valuable for lead generation. (eMarketer)

23. Landing page optimization is viewed as the most important tactic for optimizing the performance of paid search advertising, while targeting by segment is most important in optimizing display ad performance. (eMarketer)

24. 8% of Internet users account for 85% of online display ad clicks. (iMedia Connection)

25. In 2013, Internet advertising expenditures surpassed newspaper ad spending for the first time. Internet ads now account for 21% of all advertising dollars, second only to television at 40%. (Ad Age)

26. Of the 100 largest global advertisers, 41 are headquartered in the U.S., 36 in Europe, and 23 in Asia. Consumer electronics and technology is the fastest-growing ad category among the Global 100. (Ad Age)

27. The average click-through rate (CTR) for online display ads is 0.11% (roughly one click per one thousand views). CTRs aer highest in Malasia (0.30%) and Singapore (0.19%), and lowest in Australia and the U.K. (both at 0.07%). (Smart Insights)

28. Among different display ad formats, large rectangle ads (336 x 280 pixels) generate the highest CTRs on average at 0.21-0.33%, while full banners (468 x 6) generate the lowest at 0.04%. (Smart Insights)

3 Email Marketing Stats

29. Mobile matters. A lot. In 2013, 62% of emails were opened on a mobile device (48% on smartphones and 14% on tablets). (Heidi Cohen)

30. Adding social sharing buttons to email messages an increase click-through rates by more than 150%. (SocialTimes)

31. 48% of consumers say email is their preferred form of communication with brands. (iMedia Connection)

14 Content Marketing Facts and Stats

32. Though more than 90% of marketers now use content marketing, just 42% of B2B marketers and 34% of B2C marketers believe they are effective at this. (e-Strategy Trends)

33. Still, more than 70% of both B2B and B2C marketers plan to produce more content in 2014 than they did in 2013, and six out of ten plan to increase their content marketing budgets. (e-Strategy Trends)

34. 78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing. It’s not clear what the other 22% are thinking. (SocialTimes)

35. Customer testimonials are the most effective form of content marketing. (SocialTimes)

36. The top challenge for content marketers is “lack of time,’ according to 57% of B2C and 69% of B2B marketers (multiple responses permitted). (e-Strategy Trends)

37. When forced to choose only one “top challenge” in content marketing, 30% of marketers said “not enough time”; 11% said “producing enough content”; and another 11% said it was “producing engaging content.” (@Robert_Rose on SlideShare)

38. Content creation is taking an increasing share of marketing budgets. Nearly half of marketers devote at least 10% of their total budgets to content development. One in five spend 25% or more. (eMarketer)

39. The two most popular formats for marketing content are articles (including internal and guest blog posts), used by 76% of marketers, and video, used by 60%. (eMarketer)

40. 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing. But just 36% say they are effective at it. (FlipCreator)

41. The most effective B2B content marketers 1) have a documented strategy; 2) use more than a dozen different tactics; 3) use an average of seven different social media platforms; and 4) devote nearly 40% of their budgets to content marketing, as shown below. (FlipCreator)

Image Credit: 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends–North America: Content Marketing Institute / MarketingProfs

42. The top three content marketing tactics used by B2B marketers are social media other than blogs (87%); articles on their own websites (83%); and e-newsletters (80%). (FlipCreator)

43. B2B marketers rate in-person events and case studies as the most effective content marketing tactics (see full list below). (FlipCreator)

Image Credit: 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends–North America: Content Marketing Institute / MarketingProfs

44. The top three organizational goals for B2B content marketing are brand awareness (82% of companies); lead generation (74%); and customer acquisition (73%). The top three metrics used to measure success are website traffic (63%); sales lead quality (54%); and social media sharing (50%). (FlipCreator)

45. 60% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from it. (iMedia Connection)

9 Social Networking Demographics Figures and Statistics

46. Pinterest is from Venus, Google+ is from Mars. Two-thirds of Google+ users are male. 69% of Pinterest users are female. (Digital Buzz Blog)

47. Women are more social than men. (Shocking, I know.) One-half (49.0%) of U.S. adult women visit social media sites at least a few times per day, versus one-third (34.0%) of men. (New Media and Marketing)

48. About three-quarters of all Internet users are members of at least one social network. (WordPress Hosting SEO)

49. Grandma and grandpa are crashing teenagers’ social media party. The fastest-growing age cohort on Twitter is 55-to-64 year-olds, up 79% since 2012. And the 45-54 age bracket is the fastest-growing group on both Facebook and Google+. (Fast Company)

50. But social media use is still much more common among the young. 89% of Internet users aged 18-29 are active on social networks, versus 43% of those 65 and older. (WordPress Hosting SEO)

51. Millennials, aka Gen Y, will account for 27% of the total U.S. population in 2014 (vs. 26% Baby Boomers), and 25% of the labor force (vs. 38% Boomers). (AllTwitter)

52. 56% of millennials won’t accept jobs from firms that prohibit the use of social media in the office, and more than eight in ten say that user generated content on company websites at least somewhat influences what they buy. (AllTwitter)

53. The collective spending power of millennials will surpass that of Baby Boomers by 2018, and millennials will comprise 75% of the global labor force by 2025. (AllTwitter)

54. Millennials are, in general, not loyal to employers (91% expect to stay in a job for less than three years) but are loyal to brands (95% want brands to court them actively).(AllTwitter)

7 Business Blogging Stats and Facts

55. 76% of B2B companies maintain blogs. (FlipCreator)

56. 52% of marketers say their company blog is an important channel for content marketing. (eMarketer)

57. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t. (SocialTimes)

58. 62% of B2B marketers rate blogging as an effective content marketing tactic. However, 79% of best-in-class marketers rank blogs as the most effective tactic, while just 29% of their least effective peers concur. (FlipCreator)

59. 57% of U.S. online adults read blogs. And of that group, two-thirds “say a brand mention or promotion within context of the blog influences their purchasing decisions.” (New Media and Marketing)

60. Among U.S. adults aged 18-34, four-fiths say bloggers “can be very or somewhat influential in shaping product or service purchasing decisions. (New Media and Marketing)

61. Though 62% of marketers blog or plan to blog in 2013, only 9% of US marketing companies employ a full-time blogger. (Fast Company)

3 Facebook Marketing Stats

62. Facebook now has nearly 1.2 billion total users. (Digital Buzz Blog)

63. 23% of Facebook users check their account more than five times per day. (Digital Buzz Blog)

64. 47% of marketers say Facebook is overrated as a marketing platform. (iMedia Connection)

3 LinkedIn Marketing Stats

65. 45% of B2B marketers have gained a customer through LinkedIn. (Social Media Today)

66. LinkedIn is adding, on average, two members per second. However – LinkedIn has a lower percentage of active users than Pinterest, Google+ (?), Twitter or Facebook, which means “you’re probably not going to have as good a response with participatory content on LinkedIn, like contests or polls, as you might on Facebook or Twitter…(though) passive content like blog posts or slide decks might be just right for your LinkedIn audience.” (Fast Company)

67. Only 20% of LinkedIn users are under the age of 30. (iMedia Connection)

3 Twitter Marketing Stats

68. B2B marketers who use Twitter generate, on average, twice as many leads as those who don’t. (Social Media Today)

69. 71% of tweets are ignored. Only 23% generate a reply. (iMedia Connection)

70. Advertising on Twitter costs nearly six times as much as Facebook ads on a CPM basis; however, the CTR for Twitter ads is 8-24 times higher. (Smart Insights)

3 Google+ Marketing Stats

71. Google+ has more than one billion total users, though only about a third (359 million) are active. (eConsultancy)

72. Users spend an average of three minutes per month on Google+. (iMedia Connection)

73. 70% of brands have a presence on Google+. (WordPress Hosting SEO)

6 Visual Content (Image and Video) Marketing Stats

74. Nearly two-thirds of people are visual learners, and visual data is processed much faster by the brain than is text. (SocialTimes)

75. Adding videos to landing pages can increase conversions by nearly 90%. (SocialTimes)

76. YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18-34 than any cable network. (Fast Company)

77. More than three-quarters (77%) of brand posts shared on Facebook are photos. (iMedia Connection)

78. 73% of reporters say that press releases should contain images. (SocialTimes)

79. There are five million new businesses started each year. One out of 500 get funded and achieve a successful exit. (@Robert_Rose on SlideShare)

3 Marketing Career-Related Stats

80. 79% of B2B marketing executives report noticable skills gaps in the teams they manage. The top areas for skills gaps are in data analysis, customer insight, and digital marketing techniques. (B2B Marketing)

81. Social media experts are in demand. Job postings on LinkedIn for social media positions have grown 1,300% since 2010. (The Strategy Web)

82. Looking for a job in social media? The top five cities for job openings with “social media” in the title are:

• New York
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco
• London
• Chicago

(The Strategy Web)

(That social media job had better pay well though. NY, SF and LA are all among the top 10 most expensive US cities to live in and London is the 15th-most expensive city globally.)

And One Final Statistic that Simply Cannot be Categorized

83. Food is the top category on Pinterest; 57% of users discuss food-related content. Garlic Cheesy Bread is the most repinned Pinterest Pin. (Digital Buzz Blog)

Ping Identity has gone through a top to bottom transformation in marketing over the last year. A successful organization that fed impressive growth, reaching growth and revenue records year over year, the marketing organization relied on a proven B2B outbound marketing model that precisely measured lead capture rates.

My interest for the last decade has been in inbound marketing models that rely on content to drive business opportunity. More significantly, I follow the advice of many friends who I would call contemporaries in B2B marketing, like Steve Mann at Lexis-Nexis and Chris Selland at HP-Vertica, who align their marketing demand gen efforts to account-based scoring… opportunities instead of leads.

When you combine inbound marketing with account-based scoring, you get a very potent combination of predictable opportunity funnel that also benefits from lower customer acquisition costs. The latter is essential for on-demand subscription models where customer acquisition costs (CAC) has to be recovered in a short upfront time period, and the former increases the volume of business funnel to work through, again essential in any business that has a wide range of pricing options, from free to enterprise license agreements.

When I took over the team in the 4th quarter of last year I made a couple of quick changes, most significantly breaking up the demand gen team into distinctive task teams focused on net new customers, base expansion, and retention outcomes. The demand center teams would respond to product & solution marketing, as well as partner marketing to drive campaigns, content, events, and interactive (SEO/SEM) for the specific outcome being targeted. We roll this up with a range of sales and marketing operations activities to drive opportunities, which are companies who buy our stuff as opposed to discrete contacts at companies.

I am fortunate to have a data scientist on my team, a PhD in statistics no less, who also has a keen ability to aggregate data from many different sources, from Salesforce to Splunk. We know from this data that there are tipping points that occur in the opportunity (account) scoring that should and do cause additional sales activity. I won’t share the specifics here because they represent hard won intelligence that is a form of IP for us, but I also believe that much of this is actually not easily transferred to another company like us. In other words, each company needs to learn the unique attributes and dynamics of their sales and marketing model rather than simply copying what another company is doing.

Underlying all of our marketing strategy is the notion that we, as a business, have grown in size to the point that we are beyond the point that generalists, high bandwidth people who can do a lot of things well, will serve our growth. We have made a number of changes in the team composition in order to achieve a high degree of specialization in each function… I want the best people at each position in the team. The equation is simple, we use people and systems to feed a data model that we constantly iterate to explain and then predict our performance. 

I saw this fascinating video of a Ferrari F1 pit stop that reminded me of what we are striving to achieve. Each pit crew member has a job and there is no confusion about who is doing what. Notice how the crew members responsible for removing the front wheels know exactly where to place their hands in order to capture the approaching race car… this is the level of specialization that we are building.

Many businesses will let their pay-per-click accounts sit idle and running on autopilot once they start to generate some traffic. If you are not utilizing the services of a professional pay-per-click management company, then it is probably a good time to give your Google AdWords account a cleaning. This can also help you to improve the performance of your campaign.

While we perform full paid search marketing audits and complete PPC management, not all companies have it in their budget and must attempt to do it all in-house. The following five tips can help clean up your AdWords account and get it performing better. These tips can help any business that is currently running a paid search marketing campaign through AdWords.

1. Remove Keywords That Don’t Perform

If your AdWords account has been running on autopilot for a while then you probably haven’t added or deleted any keywords in some time. PPC requires constant changing and adapting in order to maximize your ROI. You will want to remove keywords that are not performing, as this can help to improve your overall click-through-rate within your ad groups and campaigns.

This is an example of keywords that are performing well. These you would want to keep active:

You will want to delete keywords that are receiving impressions but not any clicks. Low performing keywords will have a negative impact on your overall click-through-rate of your campaign. Delete keywords that are not performing well and try different variations. Constant changing and testing is what makes a PPC effort successful.

These are prime examples of keywords you would want to delete from your campaign:

2. Improve Your Quality Scores

Many companies will achieve a decent quality score and then just let the campaign sit idle, assuming that the score will remain the same. This is not true, as the quality score will change according to the campaign performance. If your click-through-rate drops then your ad positions can also drop, along with your quality score. Having a low quality score will place your ads in lower positions and you will end up paying a higher cost-per-click, so it is very important to get your quality score as high as possible. If you have specific questions about your quality score then contact us and we will review your AdWords account and see if we can help you improve the performance.

If you notice that your quality scores are dropping and you are unable to move them up it is a good idea to pause the campaign to avoid having them fall even further. You end up spending more money when your quality score drops. Often times we see companies leave their AdWords accounts idle and the quality score continues to drop over time without their knowledge and it ends up delivering less traffic at a higher price.

3. Utilize Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are a great way to attract extra attention to your ads. Google’s ad extensions allow you to add additional information to your ads, including your phone number, address, Google+ profile, and additional site links. Not only can it help your click-through-rate, but also it can help push more actions and conversions. The goal of your PPC campaign is ROI – sales and leads – so why not give your prospects a way to directly contact you as well?

If you need additional information about Google Ad Extensions then click here.

4. Clean Up Your Ad Groups

We see so many PPC campaigns that have a few ads with hundreds of keywords in each. This makes it very hard to achieve a high quality score and this approach will hurt the potential a campaign has. You should create a new ad group for every main keyword. Within that ad group you can include variations, but having it broken down this way really allows you to gather accurate data. This helps to further optimize and improve the campaign.

5. Opportunities

The opportunities feature shows you potential improvements that can be made by following the suggestions provided. In the example below you will see that there could be over 86,000 more impressions by adding the suggested keywords. Now, don’t just automatically add all of the suggested keywords. Going back to the point above, you do not want to clutter the ad groups with a bunch of keywords. Instead, take the suggested keywords and create new ads. This will keep your campaign organized while still taking advantage of the potential missed traffic. The opportunities feature will also show you how many impressions you are possibly passing up because of low bids on keywords. This feature is available with a single click, so make sure to take advantage of it.

Use these tips to help improve your paid search marketing performance. If you have specific questions or would like to schedule a pay-per-click campaign audit please contact us today. We offer audits along with complete campaign management.

If you want to achieve sustainable improvement in your sales and marketing, you’ve got to be scientific in your efforts. And that means being rational: making only informed tweaks based on real, quantifiable evidence. If you think that sounds a whole lot like sales enablement, you’re spot on. Successful sales enablement actually uses the scientific method to catalyze sustainable sales success.

But before we get to this rational approach to sales success, let’s revisit the good ol’ scientific method – because it’s probably been quite some time since you recited those six steps in unison with your classmates.

The Scientific Method: The Method To Real, Quantifiable Scientific Knowledge

1. Ask a question.
2. Perform necessary background research.
3. Construct a hypothesis.
4. Test your hypothesis by experimenting.
5. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion.
6. Communicate your results.

Sales Enablement: The Method To Real, Quantifiable Sales Success

If you want real, quantifiable anything, you need to be scientific about it. You want real, quantifiable sales success? Put your lab coat on and get your team on board with evidence-based sales enablement.

1. Ask a question.
   Ask your target audience (clients or prospects) what they need from you. In other words, what’s their main pain?
2. Perform necessary background research.
   Gather enough information to create a buyer persona for this target audience, outlining their specific needs, preferences and situational factors in as much detail as possible.
3. Construct a hypothesis.
   Based on the information you’ve accumulated, put forth a solution that most logically resolves your target’s pain.
4. Test your hypothesis by experimenting.
   Make your chosen solution available as an offer to your target, and analytically record their responses and reactions.
5. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion.
   Come up with a reasonable conclusion based on your assessment of your audience analytics.
6. Communicate your results.
   Share your findings with your team and work together to leverage this knowledge into continuous improvement of sales and marketing ROI.

Just as the scientific method uses evidence from existing scientific knowledge to cultivate additional scientific knowledge, sales enablement uses the evidence from past sales successes to propel future sales success. Scientific sales enablement is therefore a positive feedback loop, systematically transforming successful sales results into more successful sales results.

There is a difference, though, between sales enablement and the scientific method. The difference lies in the tools – and that’s where the scientific method, in all its indubitable glory, falls short.

Sales Enablement Goes Beyond The Steps

While the scientific method must be combined with tools and information to produce real, quantifiable knowledge, sales enablement includes those resources to produce real, quantifiable sales success.

Not only is sales enablement the scientific approach to fiery sales success, but it’s also the technology that fuels the fire.

So while your sales team always has that six-step scientific strategy to reference when they’re working with prospects or clients, they still need the technology to direct their success.

That’s where your sales reps need some outside support. They are unable to rely solely on memories of science classes past to direct real, quantifiable sales success. You must supply them with the various types of sales enablement solutions that streamline processes, automate steps and crank out the data to make informed decisions for continuous sales process refinement.

Sales And Marketing Technology: Putting The Enablement In Sales Enablement

The right technology connects every step and propels every process of your revenue-generation efforts, helping you to clinch sales and marketing alignment for that all-important marketing ROI and game-changing sales success.

Here are three examples of the different types of sales enablement solutions out there, technologies that keep your sales team on top of their game and dominating the market with indelible distinction:

• Sales Portal
  Sales portal technology organizes and stores marketing content, but it goes way beyond information accumulation. A portal amps up your sales game with powerful analytical insight into all of your target audiences. Serving as a singular, secure meeting place for your reps and clients/prospects, the portal opens the door to seamless communication and easy content sharing. Reps are also able to exchange findings and best practices with each other – keeping pace with the modern buyer and fanning that sales enablement fire.
• Presentation Management
  Presentation management software provides sales reps with lots of options and tools to customize and upgrade their demonstrations. With the emotional advantage of multimedia, multisensory sales presentations and the power and precision of dynamic, hyper-personalized messaging, your reps are able to engage, impress and win over their audience. If information sharing between your reps is what fans the fire of sales enablement, it’s the exceptional B2B buyer experience that throws oil on the flames.
• Content Marketing
  With personalized content marketing software, you get the best of both ends of the communication spectrum: automation for efficiency and customization for distinction and impact. The technology helps sales reps leverage the most relevant research, distinctive thought leadership and compelling content to maintain fruitful dialogue with prospects/clients. It goes without saying that this customized communication automation includes keeping leads primed (and dormant leads alive) with precision-targeted lead nurturing campaigns.

Win over today’s information-empowered B2B buyer with a sales process that catalyzes sustainable sales success with evidence-backed, technology-stacked sales enablement.

Over the last few years, there has been a shift in the business world. It used to be that you could run a few ad campaigns, start cold calling, hop on a plane, go golfing, have a couple drinks and close a six or seven figure deal.

Since then, the internet and technology as a whole has changed the way we sell. Prospects and leads have gotten much smarter and more skeptical of sales professionals and marketers. They are now able to research your business before you reach out to them and can point out what’s crap and what’s quality solely from the reviews they find online. They also have the power to impact your existing clients through the stories they share and the relationships they develop.

These changes have been taking place for over a decade. Over the last few years, there hasn’t been much development to help marketers and sales professionals truly excel in this new landscape. After lots of work, careful analysis and chatting with professionals, we’re excited to announce that social selling has finally arrived.

We’ve built a product that makes social selling real. It gives you the insight that you need to make the right decisions for your company and help your team work more effectively and efficiently. On top of that, it plays a key role in giving your team the tools they need to implement a social selling approach that combines big data, content marketing and social media to establish a sales process that actually works.

Social selling has already been shown to drive real results for organizations that embrace it. So organizations need to stop making excuses! We’ve talked about how important relationships are in business and even conducted research in which 98% of the top sales professionals agreed that relationships were the most important part of generating new business.

It’s time to stop making excuses as it relates to why you’re not using social selling as a part of your business strategy. Here are two studies that further push the fact that social selling is here to stay and is going to continue to shape the way marketing and sales are done as whole:

1. B2B Buyers Want Content Before The Conversation

The whole idea of sharing or providing content to B2B buyers before you contact them is relatively new. In the past, sales professionals and organizations tried to keep their information hidden so buyers interested in their services would have to talk to a rep to learn more. In today’s highly competitive market, it’s a disadvantage to not have content about your offering online.

In this study from IDG Enterprise, they asked B2B buyers how many pieces of content they typically review before speaking with a sales representative. The study shows that B2B buyers involved with major enterprise and IT products download an average of 8 pieces of content. The study also found that B2B buyers researching a specific solution typically requires 5 pieces of content before being ready to speak with a sales representative.

2. Your Buyers Are Now Prospecting YOU on Social Media

When Forrester Research investigated how B2B decision makers were using social media in North America and Europe, the results quickly confirmed how social media is changing everything. Here are just a few of the stats that reiterate how B2B decision makers are leveraging social media to influence their perceptions and business decisions:

• 85% visit brand-agnostic communities or forums at least monthly, with 18% doing so primarily for business purposes, and another 63% for business and personal purposes;
• 81% visit LinkedIn every month with 26% doing so primarily for business purposes and another 48% for mixed reasons;
• 81% also visit Facebook at least monthly, but only 2% do so primarily for business purposes, as opposed to 42% who do so primarily for personal purposes;
• 80% use vendor support forums or discussion forums on vendor or brand websites (for that specific vendor or brand), with 23% doing so primarily for business reasons.

The prospects and leads you’re trying to close are spending more and more time online than ever before. In fact, they’re spending time reversing their role as the buyer and empowering themselves in a way that is allowing them to prospect both you and the product. Buyers are now on the hunt for information about your business in communities, forums and on social networks.

If you’re looking for an opportunity to grow your business, these communities might be the right place to start. Identify what channels your target audience is spending time in, and look for forums where people in their industry share insight and knowledge. If you can identify these communities, you have the opportunity to make yourself a part of the conversation and influence what’s being said.

So there you have it, these stats show that not only is social selling changing the landscape of business but that it works. Still not sold? Check out our eBook on how the best sales professionals are using CRM and new technologies to drive results for their business.

Should the same inside sales representative perform both outbound prospecting and inbound marketing functions?

Last month we visited the topic of inside sales: when it is used, and what models are typical.

A very typical inside sales position is one that generates leads for the organization. Then, either the inside or outside sales representatives handle, manage and close these leads. The field reps focus on selling larger, more expensive products or services, while inside sales representatives selling smaller, lower cost or ancillary products or services.

Inside Sales Is Often Expected to Perform Two Roles

There are more nuances to inside sales than meet the eye. An inside sales representative generating leads is usually referred to as a lead generator, lead developer or sales developer (among many other names). Their role is usually twofold: 1) to do outbound prospecting and 2) to do inbound marketing. But what does that mean and how do they do it?

To outbound prospect means to proactively perform an outreach activity to key contacts within target accounts. To do inbound marketing means to reactively respond to inbound inquiries from customers or prospects.

We believe the skill set to perform outbound prospecting is different than the skill set needed to do inbound marketing. Asking for double duty spells trouble. Here’s why.

Outbound Prospecting and Inbound Marketing Require Different Skills

To outbound prospect, one must be a hunter — that is, someone who can navigate through an account and identify key contacts within target accounts. During contact, the representative must engage in conversation, to uncover pain points and prioritized plans to implement change. This is a qualifying dialog – to see if the contact is truly a sales lead. This person is comfortable in a proactive environment and with a research oriented function. He or she is able to make a large quantity of qualified outbound attempts to customers and prospects.

To inbound market, one must be able to accept a large volume of inbound inquiries from prospects and customers. These people must engage in conversations that quickly, and effectively qualify and uncover pain points and prioritized plans to implement change. While they are not expected to be proactive navigators, these representatives are expected to be solid qualifiers. There are times when researching a prospect or customer is important, however, in this situation, it is less needed than in an outbound capacity.

Recommendation: Staff Outbound Prospecting and Inbound Marketing Individually

While some feel these can be similar enough skill sets, we disagree. We maintain that each skill set is varied enough to warrant staffing each role. Inbound marketers follow up on inbound inquiries, and outbound prospecting staff proactively reach out to customers and prospects.

Do you prefer double-duty reps, or separate staffing? What are your thoughts? Enter your response in the comments.

Social media is the most important gear in the sales and demand generation engine. Simply put, it’s the science of social media and lead generation physics. The bigger the gear size the harder the gear works. And the harder the gear works, the faster and more productive the machine will work to create revenue.

The Physics Of Social Media And Demand Generation

Do you remember riding a bike and you tried to pedal as fast as you could to make your bike go faster? You made sure you worked the highest gear to make the wheels get you to your destination faster. The same physics apply to demand generation. You need to work your biggest gear, social media, to make sure you successfully get to your goals.

I want to explain to you why it is important to integrate social media into your B2B demand generation strategy.

Inbound Marketing Is Critical for Demand Generation Success

In many demand generation environments, many B2B marketers only use paid media and email. Unfortunately, the new buyer journey tells us that decision-makers are using search and social channels to find their content. They are starting the demand generation process without the seller! In fact, SiriusDecisions report that 67% of the B2B buying experience is done digitally! So, we all need to figure out how to be a part of that digital and social selling experience, huh?

HubSpot reports that inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads than outbound marketing, so it makes sense to think about layering on social media to the demand generation strategy to build awareness, engagement and influence. And, they also report that inbound marketing delivers these inbound leads at a 50% lower cost, so getting these leads into the funnel is cheaper. And in my book, more and cheap is good.

The big difference between inbound and outbound leads though, reported by Gleanster, is that inbound leads take 30-40% longer to advance through the sales pipeline. With this lag, marketers need to figure out how to nurture these customers without bombarding them with email and telephone calls.

The Other Important Gears

A demand generation machine cannot work smoothly with just social media gears. Other inbound and outbound lead generation gears like search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (SEM), email and social selling all play a key role, too. Successful demand gen marketers will create an end-to-end approach to maximize the user experience and deliver the most customer-centric experience at each touch point.

Source: HubSpot

5 Social Media Gears In The Demand Generation Machine

1. Reach = Getting Your Targeted Message Out To Your Target Audience.
Demand generation is a numbers game, so the more awareness a brand creates, the bigger the reach, the more effective impressions we can deliver with Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, YouTube, SlideShare and other content marketing tools. It’s like casting a large net using relevant content as the bait. But reach and impression metrics are only BIG VANITY METRICS unless we get customers to take a step closer to the brand by ‘voting’ on the demand gen-related information and content.

2. Engagement = Getting People to Indicate They Approve of Your Content and Messaging.
B2B marketing professionals need to do more than to get people to consume and view messages. A single ‘read’ might work for many, but you can’t really identify the impact that it has on the business. Measure the efficiency of this social media engagement gear by counting the shares, comments and likes. This is THE BEST INDICATOR to tell if social media is delivering engaging content. Customers will vote with their ‘like’ button. Engagement is one step closer to building a deeper relationship, and this is not really a linear or a cause-and-effect experience. We need to keep feeding the customer with a great experience to build our influence with them.

3. Influence = Nurturing.
Influencing the customer sits between the engagement and conversion stages. Remember, 57% of the buying journey is done before the customer reaches out to a vendors, reports Corporate Executive Board. This “57%” means that customers are finding, consuming and vetting information and content. 85% of B2B tech buyers say it takes 3 or more pieces of content to help make a decision, reported by Act-On. So, brands can affect influence with nurturing and delivering content on the customer’s term, instead of ‘pushing’ for an email registration. This sign-up activity will eventually happen at the ‘conversion’ stage.

4. Conversion = Getting Your Customer To Take A Step Toward Buying.
The demand generation machine is only as efficient as its weakest gear. In many instances, this conversion experience is a landing page where customers register. HubSpot reports that landing page conversion rates (for non-PPC lands) should be 20%. And they have coached many to convert up to 50%. If your lead generation conversion rates are languishing around 5%, then you may be making one of about 20 different mistakes – too many to talk about in this post! Take the time to audit your conversion experience to make sure your social media and other tactics are working hard for a payout!

5. Pipeline Acceleration = Staying Close To Your Customer By Delivering The Right Content At The Right Time.
Social media touches pipeline acceleration in the form of social selling. This is where sellers use their LinkedIn network, Twitter selling skills ,and content marketing expertise to stay in touch and communicate with customers on their terms.

Do you have a demand generation machine story to share? How do you make your social media gears work as hard as possible? If so, please share below. Or, reach out to me directly at MarketingThink.com or on Twitter, Google+ or on LinkedIn.

Get geared up to make social media work as hard as possible for your B2B demand generation machine, so you wont’ be pedaling up hill for sales.

What makes a great website home page? Ask five people and you likely will get five different answers.

As I talk with businesses wanting to improve their online performance of growing leads and converting sales, I often find that what they THINK should be on the home page and WHAT ACTUALLY SHOULD BE are two very different things!

The goal of the home page really is quite simple. It’s to get them to the next page in your website!

If someone comes to your home page and leaves, you’ve really failed.

Getting them to a second page means you’ve gotten them interested and they are ready to dig in further. Without this, it means they’ve glanced and moved on, and it’s much harder to get them to come back a second time!

The web is cluttered with information and people are busy. Therefore you have little time and you need to make the most of it. You have that one chance to make a great first impression! The issue is that far to many website home pages are failing and here are the five most common mistakes businesses make:

Mistake Number One:

Too much copy.

Words, words, and more words cause home pages to fail.

As I noted, people are busy and they are skimming. Lines of text that you think are glamorous and explain all that you do simply blur together into a mass of letters to the skimming eye! Businesses must really boil it down on the home page and keep it simple.

Mistake Number Two:

Headlines and copy about your stuff.

Jay Baer, a noted author and digital media consultant outlines in his book, Youtility, that people are on the web for generally only two reasons. Either to solve a problem or to be entertained. They use social media for entertainment so they are coming to your website to see if you can solve their problem.

The solution, therefore, is to answer how you solve the problem they have. It’s not about you, your products or services, but about them. A great home page outlines the problems your company solves.

Mistake Number Three:

Flash animation.

Animation that requires the browser to have and use a flash player to perform groovy animation and a sequential series of images fading in and out is not helpful. Why? Many devices like Apple products including iPhones and iPads do not support flash and therefore visitors on those devices typically get a blank screen or blank area, or worse yet a big red “x”.

Again, too much animation is too many moving parts. Keep it simple.

You’ve got about 3-4 seconds to capture the attention of the visitor and communicate to them that you can help them with what they need.

Mistake Number Four:

Too many points of interest.

Loads of navigation buttons, competing images, and paragraphs of text all serve to cause viewers to see a dense forest and miss the individual trees! Again, people are moving fast on the web and you have precious seconds to capture their attention and communicate to them.

Give them your one best thing, not the top eight categories and also the five sub-categories you offer because they’ll see only one or maybe two of those items before they move on!

Mistake Number Five:

Bad colors and weird fonts.

Have you noticed a theme? Less is more.

They have a problem, you need to share how you solve it.

Fancy fonts can be hard to decipher and even worse to discern on mobile devices. As well, dark backgrounds with lots of small white text are great if you are in a dark room and have a magnifying glass but that’s not your everyday web visitor! What’s the default background in Microsoft Word? White, with a simple font. That’s done for a reason.

I could go on with a few more points but I’ll bring it to a close to allow you to reflect on your site in relation to these key points.

Take a fresh look at your company and competitor websites soon and see how things rate.

What’s your next doable action step you should take? Do something in the next 24 hours and let me know what you do!

Social Media is an indispensable asset to every company which can be used to broadcast and reach out to their audience. How do they generally plan to reach out and gain authority? The answer lies in conducting campaigns with social media on a consistent basis. These campaigns can be stand alone and singled out for only one social media platform or can be a part of (or assisting) an overall digital/offline campaign.

One of the pain points which brands/agencies face is to justify spend of the campaign with quantifiable results. Hence, measurement is a key step for any social media activity to tell you the effectiveness of your campaign and place it in accordance with the goals you have set in place. The questions a brand needs to ask to assess the result for their campaign can be generalized with the below set of questions:

1. How far did my message reach? [Reach]
2. How did the audience react to my message? [Engagement]
3. What was the outcome of the broadcasted message [Leads, Brand Awareness, Sales]

Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms which is being increasingly adopted by Brands for real time conversations with their audience. In this article, we will look at some of the Twitter tools which can help you track the effectiveness of your Twitter oriented campaigns and track your company’s progress over time.

1. Simply Measured: [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Audience Profiling [Free Report]
- Engagement Stats [Paid]
- Reach [Paid]
- Web Traffic [Paid]
- Influencers [Free]
- Hashtag analysis [Paid]

You simply cannot ignore this tool, Simply Measured lets you track your Facebook/Twitter stats along with a competitive analysis with multiple free options for different social media platforms. The Follower report on gives you a measure of your own Twitter account and the analysis of what, why and where of your Followers.You can get information on the top keywords your followers are using which can determine the type of tweets they do and the topics they might be interested in (for you to include those topics/flavors within your campaign). This report can basically help you with audience profiling which is a necessity before launching a campaign on Twitter. There are other simple but important features covered like

Free Twitter Follower Report : Simply Measured

• When does your audience tweet (To time your posts accordingly for maximum exposure)
• Audience Distribution by TimeZone (To decipher where and when can you target messages for a global brand)
• Most Influential Followers (By Followers & Klout Scores describing the topics which they tweet about most)
• Follower Distribution

SimplyMeasured offers you more options with paid subscription plans which can help you get a holistic view of your Twitter account along with the campaign activity and reach. The integration of the tool with Google Analytics can help you view the impact to your business website (in case of increase in visits or converted leads via the campaign) right within the reports. And you get all the reports in a business friendly Excel or Powerpoint format which you can directly present to your client.

Twitter Account Report :Simply Measured

The paid reports give you detailed engagement stats alogn with content breakdown which you can use to measure a specific campaign (within a limited timeframe) or as a weekly analysis for your brand. Simplymeasured also offers competitive analysis reports for you to compare your brand with your competitors so you can quantify your win against your competitors (Engagement Vs Engagement). The customer service aspect is also covered with detailed report on the response strategy of your brand along with key mentions.

Twitter Customer Service Analysis: Simply Measured

2. Topsy: [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Reach & Exposure of your content
- Mentions
- Engagement Level Metrics
- Location based information
- Sentiment Level

Topsy which was recently acquired by Apple has been there as a popular tool for long. The tool has access to Twitter data since 2006 and can be effectively utilised for real time monitoring of keywords and hashtags related to your Brand. So when you are having that hashtag campaign going for your brand, you can check real time updates or otherwise directly within this tool to check what people are tweeting related to it. The Tool provides you a ‘Social Search’ function which acts as a normal Twitter search function boosted by filters of date range selection and language. Advanced search feature can help you with filtering down results with the help of parameters. The ‘Social Trends’ section offers you real-time engine of Twitter and what is hot and currently active on the microblog which can be a great medium for brands to have real time conversations around their topics.

Topsy Analytics for Twitter

The ‘Topsy Analytics’ section gives you the number of mentions of your account (Use @Twitter Username) or keywords for the last 30 days and can be used to generate insights about the number of times users have tweeted around your hashtag or campaign. You can also try out the Topsy Pro login for a trial of 14 days for some advanced analysis and listening solutions pertaining to your twitter presence. The Topsy paid account gives you a wide range of data to play with including the ability to track geography of users who interact with your content along with your contents reach & exposure. Various operators provided allow you to drill down and listen to specific keywords inside Twitter (For example: “site:digitalinsights.in” will give me tweets mentioning our blog posts only). Discovery feature helps you to search around a term and related terms to find out which people are talking about them.

Topsy unlike SimplyMeasured is a Twitter powered search engine which is a multi-utility tool for your Twitter needs from a campaign perspective.

3. TweetReach [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Reach
- Exposure
- Top Contributors
- Tweets Timeline

TweetReach Report for Twitter

TweetReach is a freemium tool which allows you to look at the last 50 tweets based on keywords/hashtags when signed in via Twitter. The free version allows analysis of the first 50 Tweets providing you valuable information about Contributors and ReTweets. You can also download the data in excel by creating an account with TweetReach. Anything greater than 50 tweets will be payable to Tweetreach based on their pricing plans . Paid accounts can give you the capability of inbuilt dashboard with real-time monitoring on Twitter along with engagement drilldown for each tweet. You can capture a quick glimpse into recent Twitter activity around a specific account or topic with a set of snapshot reports. The ability to export full datasets to CSV for further analysis and generate beautiful PDF reports for clients and stakeholders is also a good to have.

4. Keyhole [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Contributors
- Reach & Impressions
- Top Sites & content
- Influential Users
- Location & Demographics Data
- Top sources of Tweeting
- Related hashtags/keywords

Keyhole only focuses on hashtag tracking for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and is a pretty handy tool for your Twitter hashtag campaigns. You can get started by creating your free account in Keyhole and entering your desired hashtag to view the visual analysis. The paid option allows you access to historical data along with the ability to find your contextual influencers with their Influencer Marketing capability. You can also download all the data in excel for advanced analysis through paid subscription only. The premium plans can further give you the ability of real time tracking of campaigns along with new content discovery.

Keyhole Hashtag campaign tracking

The advanced search option is available to get in to minute details and filter according to dates with different operators along with creating sub-categories based on the specified filters. Keyhole truly has some progressive features which when utilised well can prove to be a goldmine of information for your Twitter account/campaign level analysis. You can also name your search and generate your desired url to save your tracking report under your freely created account to refer to it at a later time. Initially, you get the option of creating 3 track (or searches) for free with the tool when you create the account with Keyhole.

Keyhole hashtag analysis

5. Twitter Analytics: [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Follower Growth
- Tweet Level engagement
- Interests and Demographics
- Twitter Card Analytics

Twitter Analytics Tool

When you are talking about measuring Twitter, you cannot forget mentioning Twitter’s own analytics tool which it released for all the Twitter users. The Twitter Analytics dashboard is a great way to look at your owned media performance on Twitter focusing on your engagement and follower growth. So if you do see a spike in engagement, you can narrow it down to which content actually did the job for you by looking at ReTweets and mentions which you can also download in CSV format. You can narrow down campaign ideas with the help of demographics and interests based data straight out of Twitter’s mouth. If you are looking at Lead Generation data via Twitter Cards, you can surely find great information in the ‘Twitter Cards’ tab with link wise traffic information along with influencer identification and sources.

6. Google Analytics [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Traffic to the website
- Lead Generation/Conversion
- User Behavior via Social (User Flow report)
- Campaign Level Analysis

Google Analytics can provide you the data when your campaign goals are relevant to your website (lead conversion, increase in visits to a certain page). The direct impact data can often be tracked by your web analytics tool (which in this case is Google Analytics) with correct attribution to your social channels. When starting the campaign, you can start tagging your links with UTM parameters for correct attribution under your Google Analytics. You can use this handy chrome extension to get started with UTM parameters. This helps us segregate attribution levels when multiple campaigns are being run online and you would want to check the impact of each campaign separately to your business. In this case you can input the Source (i.e:Twitter) of the campaign along with the Medium (i.e: Social Media) & Campaign (i.e: Lead Gen Twitter). You can also integrate the url’s with bit.ly to shorten them and paste it directly on Twitter.

Twitter Campaign Measurement in Google Analytics

To measure the campaign wise impact, you can go under Acquisition à Campaigns àCampaign (which you named ‘Lead Gen Twitter’ earlier). You can find traffic and lead generation related metrics for the particular campaign right inside to measure the ultimate impact of your campaign to your business. GA also provides a separate Social tab under Acquisition tab for you to co-relate and compare your social media performance to your website goals.

Google Analytics: Social Referrals

7. TweetChup [Free]

KPI’s offered:

- Engagement Drilldown
- Tweets Per Day/Hour
- Keyword related tweets
- Most followed users
- Related hashtags to the keyword

TweetChup is a twitter analysis platform to gauge your own performance with similar features to simply measured. You will be required to sign in with your Twitter account to get started and the tool will give you information around your engagement (Mentions & ReTweets breakup by day). You can also perform similar analysis of other Twitter accounts by entering their username and selecting the range for which you would like to display the analysis.

TweetChup Twitter Analysis Tool

TweetChup also provides Keyword/hashtag search functionality within the tool which analyses upto 1,600 recent tweets containing the keywords you specify. Advanced search functionality is also available within the tool and can give you the information around the reach of the keyword along with the users mentioning them. The tool also display the hashtags which have been used mostly in combination with the keywords you specified by the users. TweetChup is a great tool which is free and can give you a good hands-down report as far as Twitter analysis is concerned.

TweetChup Keyword Analysis

Below are some of the tools which are more or less used for the same purpose and can also be referred for measuring any Twitter related campaigns:

8. Twitonomy [Free]

This tool can be used for visual analytics on hashtags and tweets along with the drilldown on favorites/mentions on a particular account along with user level details. Requires you to sign in via Twitter and can be leveraged for a competitive landscaping across Twitter as well.

9. FollowerWonk [Free]

Followerwonk is one of the first tools I explored when I was new to Twitter. Works best when you have to identify relevant people to follow under your niche and can work when you are looking for lead generation and outreach programs for your brand via Twitter. You can analyse your followers and search for Twitter Bio’s for relevant and timely interactions. A handy free tool by Moz which has also got premium plans for detailed analysis in and around your Twitter profile.

10. Twtrland [Free]

Twtrland works similar to Followerwonk but has some additional features for Facebook and Instagram profiling added to it. You can search for Influencers within your niche an also calculate your engagement and impression level details in the Dashboard. Content level analysis is also available for you showcasing who often has interacted with and around your content to identify the top followers for your Brand. The in-depth filtering capability of Twtrland with various options is what set it’s apart from other tool.

11. Twubs [Free]

Twubs is not a Twitter measurement tool, but more or less a real-time conversation engine which can help you monitor and engage with people around a certain keyword. This can help you with hashtag campaigns when the need is to constantly engage and look after your branded keyword. This is a must have tool when your Brand is looking at/planning a Twitter event or Twitter Chat regularly.

12. SocialDon: [Paid]

SocialDon is an owned social media analysis platform which can give you a dashboard around your Facebook/twitter presence with KPI’s around engagement and follower growth. You can try out their paid package for free for 7 days.

13. TweetBinder [Free]

TweetBinder requires you to authenticate your account with Twitter to get started for seeking out keyword related searches on Twitter. The tool is perfect for analysis around an event on Twitter with their paid plans depending on the number of tweets you want to analyse. However, the free version also offers keyword level insights for a limited number of tweets (limited to 2,000 tweets)

14. Quintly [Paid]

Quintly is a paid social media analytics platform which contains insights around Twitter engagement and follower growth. Quintly can be utilized for competitive benchmarking where you would want to compare the impact of your campaign (in terms of follower growth and enagement increase) with that of your competitors.

15. TagBoard [Free]

Tagboard unlike other tools is a cross-network hashtag powered social hub which can help you organize conversations around certain hashtag (Twitter Chats). You can create a visual representation around keywords and give a name to your Tagboard along with choosing the right image/cover image. A new way of monitoring conversations which you can surely try

16. TwitterFall [Free]

Twitterfall is a Twitter client specialising in real-time tweet searches. It has a whole lot of features including activity monitoring and advanced filtering capabilities. The user interface though looks a bit cluttered at first, but can be a good addition in your Twitter toolkit for the future.

With so many tools available for you, choosing the right Twitter tool for the right objective is very important.

Which metrics do you usually track when it comes to Twitter campaigns? We would love to know! Do let us know your views in the comments below.

When a new CSO takes over, he must be fast out of the gate. Chances are there are big visions for the future. It would be nice if this one survived to see the outcome. To help him succeed, Sales Operations must turn vision to tactics. Execution makes or breaks a sales initiative. Execution leads to adoption. When everyone is rowing in the same direction, success follows. This is especially important if the last sales leader failed due to poor execution.

Author: David Cheng

If you’ve seen them movie Moneyball, you already know the basics: the “Moneyball” way of winning relies on analytics, statistics, and numbers, rather than opinions, intuitions, or appearances. This player performance methodology was famously used by the small-time Oakland A’s to compete with financial heavyweights like the New York Yankees. The A’s General Manager, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt in the film), measured players using new, data-centric metrics that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

Before Moneyball, baseball scouts relied on popular but flawed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like RBIs (Runs Batted In) and a player’s appearance (aka “the gut”). But technological advances and a better understanding of statistical correlations made these old scouting reports obsolete, uncovering hidden gems amongst the player rosters.

We’ve talked about Moneyball and marketing automation on the blog before, and the analogy still rings true. Here’s a laundry list of lessons that marketers can learn from the Moneyball method.

Don’t Buy Players, Buy Wins

The Oakland A’s learned that they weren’t buying players – they were buying wins. As a marketer, focus on the KPIs that truly reflect profits earned.

Historically, sales people and marketers have tracked three KPIs:

• Number of leads generated
• Lead conversion percentages
• Revenue per sales person

These KPIs are not necessarily “wrong”, but they paint a wide brush over what’s actually going on with your sales and marketing funnel. This can sometimes lead to a misallocation of resources and the wrong strategy. If you’re using marketing automation tools, you can drill down much deeper – you can track the costs associated with each channel and campaign, and allocate a direct cost to acquire each lead. And by working with your CRM tool, sales, and customer success team, you can then attribute the lifetime value of the customer back to the lead.

Here are some new KPIs you should consider if you want to be a Moneyball Marketer:

• ROI per Lead: The return on investment of each lead takes into account the cost associated with each lead, the lifetime value of the customer, the number of leads generated by the campaign/channel and conversion rate. Each individual metric can be misleading, which is why you need to track them all. For example, a channel that generates a lot of poor-quality leads may compare unfavorably in total campaign value to a smaller channel with whale-sized leads. Frank Passantino suggested this KPI in a recent Marketo blog.

• Prospect to Pipeline: What’s the typical prospect-to-pipeline conversion rate of each of your company’s product-market fits, channels, and campaigns? When AG Salesworks and The Bridge Group conducted a study of 1,000 prospects, they converted 32 of them into the pipeline. That’s a 3.2% prospect-to-pipeline rate – is 3.2% right for your organization? William Tyree, CMO of RingDNA, suggests that marketers examine historical data and start benchmarking future channels, campaigns, and sales people to your P2P index.

• ROI per Referral: This is a catch-all KPI to measure the effectiveness of each of your online channels (inbound or social), landing pages, or affiliate sites. Don’t just measure the traffic and conversion rate per referral. Some referrals provide great lead-gen but poor closing rates. Others may only benefit SEO. Dave Snyder of Search Engine Watch recommends grouping your referrals into cohorts based on benefit, and measuring them within their cohorts for an “apples to apples” analysis.

Ultimately, the measuring stick every company uses is profit. Don’t be blinded by the old KPIs. Measure your top-line and bottom-line with Moneyball Marketing.

You Can’t Beat the Yankees by Playing Like the Yankees

Just like the Oakland A’s couldn’t use the Yankees method to assemble their lineup, the Moneyball playbook is different from a traditional playbook. A Moneyball Marketer has to open up her repertoire to new marketing methods, including data analytics, customer engagement, and product development. Here are some tricks of the trade you should consider:

A/B Test Everything, Including the Product

One of the unique characteristics of Moneyball Marketing is the iterative relationship between marketing and product. For online marketers, this is admittedly old hat. But for marketers in more traditional businesses, having an endless positive feedback loop between marketing and product is still relatively new.

A/B testing is a simplification of this relationship. Marketers can work with the product team to test different versions of the product offering, ideally in parallel. Based on the responsiveness of your leads and customers, refine the product based on customer feedback, measured product engagement, and net promoter scores.

Content Marketing as a Media Product

Content Marketing is not new, but people are still innovating with content. One way to get creative with your content is to NOT talk about yourself. In a previous blog, I talked about the rise of Media Oriented Content Marketing—content marketing that exists as a standalone media product without explicit commercial interests. These content pieces are so good, people will share them or discover them on their own.

Some recent examples include Chipotle’s beautiful ad about their organic ingredients, KISSmetrics’ helpful blog post about Google Authorship and ShareBloc’s very own contest to find The Top 50 Content Marketing Posts of 2013.

Do Something New

Unfortunately, as Mark Suster says in his blog, growth hacking is all about finding the new wave. If someone has widely blogged about a new way to market a product, the effectiveness of that technique has already hit diminishing returns. Experiment and play around with your channels, product, and allies to see what may work.

Marketing with a Moneyball mentality isn’t just about generating leads and passing them onto sales. Take advantage of your new marketing channels and new KPIs and impact product and sales directly.

In Closing

Moneyball Marketing isn’t a new concept; it’s an old one just branded differently. Some call it growth hacking. Others may call it the Physics of Marketing. If there’s one take-away here, it should be to use your marketing automation and CRM tools to get the data you need, and then help your marketing and sales team leverage that data into more sales, larger profits and happier customers.

Moneyball for Marketers was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Sales and marketing alignment has been a hot topic for a couple of years now, but is alignment really enough? The idea of taking two organizations with completely different skill sets and missions and fusing them into one sales and marketing machine is nice in theory, but in practice, there are some issues. Is there a better way to build a rockstar sales and marketing team?

Blending Inbound Marketing and Sales Into a Coherent Process

Some of the best minds in B2B sales and marketing have tackled this issue and presented viable structures that could possibly work. For example, in his book, Predictable Revenue, Aaron Ross talks about transforming your sales process with a hybrid approach involving low-touch email marketing to find and engage decision makers and influencers and traditional sales calling to qualify and close. David Skok expands on Ross’ approach and describes how to break down the sales organization into a new version of the “Hunter,” “Closer” and “Farmer” roles by blending inbound marketing in at the top of the sales funnel. Here’s a David Skok schematic to show how this might work.

In this structure, both sales and marketing are involved in lead generation (Hunting). Inbound marketers attract new leads with content marketing, SEO, demand generation and social media. Leads are nurtured, scored and passed along to the Closers via marketing automation. Depending on the industry and sales model, the inbound marketing team could also hand off leads to an inside sales team or channel sales reps. In addition, Ross’ hybrid outbound telesales/email team identifies and contacts likely buyers at specific target companies and arranges appointments for the closers. Closers do their thing and hand off new accounts to the Farmers for implementation, training, support and, ultimately, retention and upsales.

Where Sales and Marketing Alignment Breaks Down

The Ross/Skok model makes sense if you think about the strengths and weaknesses of your team members:

• Inbound Hunters – analyze buyer personas, attract them with relevant, helpful content, convert them with valuable offers, nurture them with more helpful content, analyze and segment them and notify the sales team when they are ready. This role handles all of the online marketplace and best addresses possible buyers who are not yet known to you and may not be aware of your brand.
• Outbound Hunters – people who love to analyze data, research and identify buyers, find the decision makers and influencers, ask for a simple connection (by email or call), then qualify them by phone and set up appointments for closers. This role handles targeted buyers (for example companies) you would like to see as customers but either aren’t aware of your brand or don’t know that they need you yet.
• Closers – people who are really good at sales and enjoy doing sales. They do their homework (with help from the Hunters) and engage buyers in conversations to help them reach their goals. Skilled in listening, asking questions, overcoming objections and building trust.
• Farmers – people who enjoy delivering value to their customers through consulting, teaching, managing projects and reporting on progress and goal achievement.

You probably recognize these skills in your own people, but how many of them are really good at more than one of these roles? For those with multiple strengths, how many of them can efficiently split time between these roles and still accomplish the mission of each one? The most effective companies recruit for these roles and hire them into teams that work together on specific industry or regional verticals, product types or service offerings. Placing functional specialists together on a sales team leverages the best skill sets and experience of each team member and joins them in a common mission devoid of organizational boundaries or competing interests.

The model breaks down when there is no such structure present, when people are assigned to the wrong roles or have too many responsibilities—or when parts of the structure are missing entirely. For example, a company that relies entirely on inbound marketing for lead generation is going to find it difficult to attract buyers (like CEOs) who are too busy to spend much time researching online or companies that already have an entrenched solution (like an internal department) resistant to change. Skilled outbound Hunters may be the only way to gain entry. Relying entirely on outbound marketing may also backfire, since there is no sustainable process for growth from digital sources. Similarly, tasking hunters and qualifiers with closing account sales may not work either, because they may simply lack the skills and comfort level with closing. Saddling Closers with Farming may dilute their efforts in sales calls and cause a significant drop-off in sales growth over time.

Why Sales and Marketing Should Be Joined at the Hip

You can call these teams whatever you want, maybe it’s business development teams or revenue generators and drop the Sales and Marketing titles. The point is each team is a lean functional unit with a common purpose and complementary skills and roles. Without the overhead of Sales and Marketing Managers, they are free to do what they do best and perform beyond expectations. There is no need for SLAs or other top-down communications designed to force them to work together in harmony—they already do that by definition.

Maybe it’s time to rethink your organizational structure along functional and synergistic lines rather than departments and skill sets. By working as a team, marketing experts can help sales reps accomplish their goals, because they share the same goals. And sales reps can help marketers get a better handle on how to reach and communicate with buyers. Together they create a team that can perform at a higher level than the sum of the parts.

What’s Your Sales and Marketing Structure and Process?

Photo credit: United States Navy