It is commonly accepted that the best sales people are successful wherever and that they go don’t move jobs very often. This is certainly true, but rarely does someone have a perfect career track record in sales.  There are a lot of internal and external factors that can get in the way of consistently achieving quota and even the consistent top sales achievers have blemishes in their career history. Because of the  high level of competition for sales talent and the scarcity of sales people who can consistently produce, it is critical not to reject capable candidates for the wrong reasons.

Here are some of the reasons why top sales people fail:

Sold a Bill of Goods / Mistake in Judgement – Often times a hiring manager will oversell their open positions in order to fill them. They may imply that the job is easier than it actually is, that the compensation and commissions are higher, and/or that the product and offering are more robust than they actually are. While great sales people are good at qualifying companies where they will experience success, in some cases they fall for the hiring pitch themselves only to find out shortly after joining that they didn’t join the company that they thought they were joining or that they overlooked key details which are now a show stopper for them. Since the best people have options, they will usually admit their mistake and move on to an employer where they are set up to succeed.

Personal Changes – There may be many reasons why taking a position makes sense at a certain point in someone’s life, however things change. People get married, have kids, divorce, and/or experience changes in their health which may trigger changes in the types of work they want to perform. I have seen great reps travel 15 days a month, then have kids and resist being on the road, which ultimately affected performance. On surface this would seem like a failure, when in fact, it is simply a change of fit.

Bad Boss – Arguably the most common reason for failure is a sales manager that fails to effectively lead.  Too often the reps are not given enough of the right guidance, development and coaching, or the right structures and support systems are not put in place, which in turn increases the chances that the rep will fail no matter how great their sales DNA.

Poor Cultural Fit – While it is easy to measure sales performance to goals over time and to a lesser extent critical sales capabilities, many hiring managers have no choice but to subjectively measure cultural fit (as will the candidate being recruited), yet this can have an enormous impact on a sales person’s performance. A sales rep is unlikely to perform well if they don’t t have good chemistry with their boss or their co-workers, or simply can’t connect with the vibe and rhythm of the company.

The Company Changed – There are times, for instance a significant change in company direction or an acquisition, where a sales rep who was over achieving before the change must adapt to material changes in what they sell, who they sell to or how they sell. While some people can be successful in multiple selling environments, many cannot, and an otherwise great sales person may see a dip in performance. In most cases a sales person with a strong command of their career will quickly realize this and make a change, but we are all human and in some cases the rep stays on and suffers through the drop in performance before inevitably changing employers.

There are many tasks required to recruiting great sales people, and one of the key steps is a careful and thorough review of the candidate’s career history. 

To your success!

Image courtesy of  ratch0013 | freedigitalphotos.net  

Procrastination and financial success don't typically go hand in hand.

If you wait until the last minute to buy plane tickets, you'll usually pay more. If you put off going to the dentist for years, you might have to pony up for a root canal.

But personal finance blog Frugal Fringe has a different take.

The blogger known only as A. Noonan Moose explains in a recent post that in some cases, procrastinating can actually save you money.

He calls the strategy "profitable procrastination." While it's not the right approach to expenses like saving for retirement or paying your bills (the earlier, the better!), it could come in handy when replacing your TV, buying plane tickets for next year's class reunion, or when you're lured by the shiny leather of that perfectly chocolate-brown bomber jacket. Waiting indefinitely is a more effective method for tackling "wants" than "needs."

Moose points out:

"Buyers have almost complete control over the timing of their purchases (except in rare cases of unanticipated emergencies). Think about it. The seller can’t hold a gun to your head and force you to buy its product. The choice of when to pull the trigger is actually yours. Until the moment you buy, you hold the power."

By reserving this power until exercising it is in your best interest — in other words, by procrastinating — Moose says that you can find better prices and make better decisions. In fact, he can give you examples of times it has saved him personally.

But of course, not buying a new flat-screen may be much more difficult than not reserving a hotel for your cousin's wedding in Nowheresville. Moose provides nine tips to hold yourself back on his site, and here, we've presented three of our favorites:

Set a cooling off period. Create a self-imposed rule to stave off the impulse buys and give you time to compare alternatives. For example, "If I want to buy something over $100, I'll wait a month until purchasing."

Pick an improbably low price point. Tell yourself that you'll buy it ... when it's on sale for 30% of its original price. You'll undoubtedly have to wait a while, and when you finally score your desired item, you'll be triumphant — or you won't even want it anymore, and you'll have saved yourself the lot.

Focus on the process. This tip isn't for everyone, but it's Moose's personal favorite. "Time passes quickly when you concentrate on the buying process itself instead of your ultimate objective," he writes. That means researching other sellers, looking at comparable items, setting alerts for price drops (Hukkster is one service that can help), and generally getting all available information before you buy.

If you have any tips to profitably procrastinate, share them with us in the comments! 

SEE ALSO: This Simple Mind Trick Could Revolutionize Your Finances

Join the conversation about this story »

Many B2B firms find themselves surrounded by the massive changes that have taken place—and are still taking place—in the world of business. And these changes have given birth to a new marketing ecosystem that requires new strategies, tactics and a customer-centric approach.

For decades, B2B marketing has been vastly different than B2C marketing and with good reason. B2B tends to be less transactional and more about building long-term relationships—especially for firms with big-ticket products and services and long sales cycles. But while relationships are still front and center, the truth is, leading firms are initiating and nurturing relationships differently than they have in the past.

Is your B2B firm still relying on the same strategies and tactics that you’ve been using for decades? If so, due to some key changes, your marketing strategy might be in need of a transformation. So here are some compelling reasons for change.

It’s a brave new (digital) world

There’s no doubt the world around us is becoming increasingly more digital every day. Think about it, when you want to research a company, find out about a product, look for an answer to a question or find out almost anything, what do you do? You go to Google, Yahoo, Bing or some other search engine. We’ve become a very web-centric culture, in both our personal and business lives.

Your website is your front door

When you want to learn about a potential client, vendor or even a competitor, the first thing you do is visit their website. And every day there are potential clients visiting your website doing research and vetting your firm. So your website can no longer be just an online brochure. It needs to be the hub of your marketing efforts and a tool for sales and business development.

Your audience is social

Social media’s use in B2B marketing has been met with much skepticism. But social media is no longer just for celebrities and consumer product companies. Today, it has become a dominant component of our daily lives and that dominance has found its way into the business world as well. A study from Hubspot found that 53% of B2B companies surveyed had acquired a customer from LinkedIn and 43% had acquired a customer through Facebook. Social media provides B2B firms with opportunities to connect and engage with prospects and customers, distribute content and drive web traffic.

B2B buyers have changed

Today’s B2B buyers have become incredibly savvy and self-sufficient, researching online—often extensively—before making a purchasing decision. According to a DemandGen Report, 78% of B2B buyers start their research with a web search. A smaller but still significant number (50%) said they turn to social media and peer reviews. Your prospects are researching solutions, looking at their options and educating themselves as much as they can to inform their decisions.

And here’s the big change: much of this research is taking place before they ever pick up the phone or submit a contact request on your website. Studies from the Corporate Executive Board Company have found that today’s B2B buyers go through nearly 60% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales. So what is your marketing strategy doing to engage these buyers before they engage you?

B2C is impacting B2B

All the brand interactions and experiences your prospects and customers have as consumers are starting to impact their expectations for B2B marketing as well. They expect personalization and customization. They expect to receive emails and marketing messages that are relevant to their needs and interests. They expect easy-to-use, helpful and mobile-friendly websites. The bar has been raised and your audience is now expecting marketing from you that is helpful and adds value to their lives.

It’s now a pull strategy

In light of all these changes, innovative marketers are responding and adapting. So what we’ve been seeing for the last few years is pretty substantial—a fundamental shift in how companies approach sales and marketing. It’s moving away from primarily a push strategy and more toward a pull strategy. Instead of the typical “Hey, look at me” marketing approach, pushing company-focused messages and content to prospects, you actually communicate in such a way that they’re attracted to you.

Prospects now seek you out. They give you their time and listen, because what you’re saying has value to them. And this is really the heart and soul of what content marketing is all about—publishing content that focuses on the prospect and customer and what they are actually interested in, as opposed to talking about your company and what you sell.

Changing tactics and shifts in budgets

And with this shift, marketers across all industries are shifting their budgets away from traditional methods (such as purchased lists, cold calling and promotional advertising) that have been the bread and butter of their marketing plans, and they’re moving towards more innovative and customer-centric methods (such as content marketing). The goal is to create marketing that your prospects and customers find relevant, useful and helpful—leading to increased sales and customer retention.

So how is your B2B firm’s marketing efforts adapting to the realities of the new marketing ecosystem? If you’re not on top of these changes and not adapting your marketing efforts to meet the demands of the new marketing ecosystem, then you’re missing out on an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. And your firm is slowly being written off and passed over for more relevant firms.

Being so helpful (or so good) that people cannot ignore you is the basis of enduring relationships. It’s knowing that someone can count on you – no matter what.

Does your marketing communicate that? How about your sales or customer service?

Helping and adding value is the new marketing, selling, and customer service. Thanks to the power of digital, the consumer does not differentiate between them.

Everyone is answering questions and offering advice, and it’s all free.

The winner in business today is the company that does helpful better.

Here’s how to be that company.

#1 – Build a Process for Continuous Improvement

The expression to be so helpful they can’t ignore you was inspired by a very similar quote from comedian, actor, and musician Steve Martin. His mantra when he was building his stand-up comedy practice was to be so good they can’t ignore you.

As he developed his craft he went back to what worked. In the early days he worked in a booth in a carnival. Yet, what works always works if you develop ways to make it better – so good that people cannot ignore it.

What are some of the qualities that people admire, and therefore should be built into your business processes for helping them? Here are a few that come to mind.

• Consistency
• Graciousness
• Personality
• Humility
• Inspiration
• Humor
• Gratitude

If you have a process for improvement you should be proud of it, because it alone earns the attention of those that have yet to experience how you can help them.

#2 – Explain How Your Process for Helping Works

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.

This is the magic of helping, as opposed to traditional selling. Your content marketing strategy should be designed to help people understand how you can help them. This goes beyond answering questions.

Facts and figures are useful, but they are impersonal and easily forgotten. Stories are relatable, and therefore memorable.

Relevant stories help buyers understand how you can help them.

From a business perspective, stories are proof that you can handle the work. This is why original stories from direct experience are so valuable for making emotional connections that move buyers.

#3 – Make it Fun

Just reading the traditional news is enough to bring anyone down. Interacting with many people can also prove to be less than inspiring.

Want proof? Just ask people how their day is going. Most people will respond with something like this: alright, pretty good, not too bad. Not too bad?!

Probably the easiest way for any business to get noticed in this world is to be fun to work with. Your efforts may not always be acknowledged, but they will nearly always be appreciated.

When Steve Martin was at the peak of his stand-up comedy career, he was filling stadiums with nearly 20,000 people. This is why he started wearing a white suit. Even though he was working with massive audiences, he stayed true to his mantra of being someone they could not ignore.

What’s your business mantra for not being ignored?

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Take out a piece of paper, and write down what you think makes your company different from its competitors. Now, Google your competitors and see if you can tell the difference between what you wrote, and how they describe themselves. If it sounds the same, keep reading.

Let’s say you’re the CEO of a fortune 500 company looking for some advice. Two top tier global consulting firms are recommended, and based on their website descriptions of “Who They Are” which one would you chose?

Can’t decide? That’s the challenge I’m talking about. Although one firm uses “advisors”, they are describing what the firms do, not who they are, and as you can see, the sound the same. If some of the smartest guys in the business are getting it wrong, and they’re the “advisors to the world’s leading businesses” you shouldn’t feel bad.

Why is it so hard? There are two key reasons; the first being in B2B, we are conditioned to think that what we do is who we are. It’s the Achilles heel of effective marketing communications, the bad habit of over communicating and focusing what you sell (what you do) versus who you are (what makes you different).

Making things worse is when B2B marketers talk about the value of what their company does, they use terms associated with business value, the functional benefit or business outcome of the product or service being sold (e.g. increase revenue, reduce cost, retain customers, etc.). It’s non-differentiating because competitors use the same language, and that’s the second major challenge to overcome.

Over the years, marketing communication has evolved from talking about how great the company was to talking about what it does for customers. Unfortunately, that has been defined by what it sells. It is time to evolve again and speak to more about the “DNA” of the organization. Research from CEB has shown that buyers figure out what companies sell (what you do) relatively quickly. It takes them much longer to figure out why they should buy from one company or another.

And surprisingly, when they do make the decision, it often has little to do with “business value” of the product or service itself, and more to do with the emotional connection they feel to it, or to your brand. Buyers are not the rational beings we once thought, they do business with businesses for very personal reason, according to the CEB research. As a result, they want to get to know the company as well as they know the product or service.

So, how do you “humanize” the company? Here are some tips to get your started:

• Ask customers – sounds obvious, but rarely happens. Ask them why they do business with your organization and others. You might be surprised by what you’ll learn; it may have nothing to do with your products or services. Use this information to communicate back to them “who you are” in the language and context that is meaningful to them.

• Survey employees – this may help uncover why the organization can’t get on the same page when it comes to defining the company. Employees have a tendency to define the company and what it does, based on their own experience with the products they know, and customers they serve. As a result, they have a myopic view of the organization. You will find multiple views on your value, and the type of company you are, across your organization.

• Decide on the type of company you are – pick up a copy of Michael Treacy’s Discipline of Market Leaders. In it, Treacy and Fred Wiersema define three value proposition types based on business models; Operational Excellence, Product Leadership, and Customer Intimacy. Use this framework as a starting point to define your organization and its’ language. It also helps get everyone on the same page.

• Create a persona – once you have consensus on the type of organization and its value to customers, it is time to figure how to differentiate it. In this step, use brand archetypes to help define the company persona. Here’s a free list of 40 archetypes. Create a working session and have the group discuss how the company views the world, how it reacts to bad or good news, how it speaks — what is the tone? Keep the conversation away from what the company makes or does, and on the organization itself.

Buyers have changed. They want to know who you are, because they already know what you do. And they’re looking for a little of themselves in your brand. Relate to them on a human level. Tell them who you are in a way that connects with them. If you do, it will be differentiated you, because like people, no two organizations are exactly alike.

The Problem:

New convenient forms of technology like smart phones and tablets have drastically changed the consumer’s attention span. This is because the amount of information that they are inundated with daily makes it difficult for consumers to figure out which they should attend to.

Your post is just one amongst hundreds of thousands of statuses, tweets, and posts that people will scroll through everyday. It could be the wittiest, most insightful post ever, but if you’re not targeting it to the right audience, you won’t get the recognition you’re seeking.

How it affects you:

How are you supposed to get people to notice you when they’re so caught up with their various news feeds? You need to stick out from the crowd to get their attention!

How do you stand out from the crowd?

Your ideal customers are out there! You just have to find them, and show them all the wonderful things you have to offer them!

The Solution:

You need to identify your specific audience.

The first step to identifying your audience is to figure out what their demographic is. This will include their age, location, and gender. Sometimes it may even be useful to identify their home ownership and/or employment status.

The second step is understanding their needs. This can include anything from needing a new lawnmower, to finding a sexy single in their area. If it’s the latter, you’ll probably have to pay special attention not to make your ads look like pop-up viruses.

The third and final step to identifying your audience is to profile their behaviour. You should be able to make educated assumptions about the way that certain people will respond to certain content. For example, online memes and pictures of people embarrassing themselves are more likely to appeal to a younger, male crowd, whereas cooking videos and tips on removing stains are more likely to appeal to middle aged housewives.

Figuring out who your customers are likely to be, and what makes them tick gives you a better idea of their buyer persona. Perhaps you could conclude that females aged 18-24 are more impulsive buyers, or that men aged between 20 and 40 are likely to do a lot of research before buying a new car. Buyer personas can make it all the more easy for you to ensure that what you offer them has value, and can potentially fulfil a need, or solve a problem for them. You can then take each segment of your audience and find ways to target them closely, and potentially, individually.

Understanding these kinds of details about your target market will help you to determine what kind of strategies to implement and where. This is because different social media platforms, and different online spaces are occupied by different audiences.

Facebook can offer you a special service where if you’ve accumulated a database of emails, they can take those emails off your hands and find these people on Facebook. Firstly Facebook will make sure that your ads are seen by all of these people. And secondly, Facebook will use information about these people to find people who are similar to them, like their age, location, and interests. This is called retargeting, and it allows you to broaden your audience, but also to make sure that the people seeing your ads are actually people who would be interested in your product or service. Similarly, you can use LinkedIn to target people with specific roles, job titles, or areas.

Other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest all tend to appeal to specific age groups. For example, Tumblr targets the very elusive minds of ‘tweens’ and young adults, whereas Pinterest tends to focus on women aged 20-60. So keeping this in mind, you should be able to figure out which would be most suited to the audience that you’re looking to find.

It’s important to realise that just because you’re putting good, persuasive information out there, it doesn’t mean the right people are going to see it. Being able to utilise all of this information will help you to devise that plan where you are able to find who you’re looking for, and provide them with quality content that they’ll enjoy.

Let me start by stating that I’m a content marketer. I was also a philosophy major, so bear with me as I dig a little deeper on content marketing.

Content marketing fills the pages of this blog. It is what I live and breathe every day. At some point these two words—”content” and “marketing”—came together to form a single term. And they make a lot of sense together. Why?

Let’s take a look at their definitions.

Con·tent [kon-tent]: Something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts.

Mar·ket·ing [mahr-kit-ing]: The activities that are involved in making people aware of a company’s products, making sure that the products are available to be bought, etc.

Arguably, the activities that make people aware of products and services are entirely focused on content. After all, content is a vessel for expression, and marketing is the ability to express and broadcast information to your core customer base. But the critical common denominator between content and marketing is really the customer.

Content + Marketing = Customers

We communicate with our customers and potential customers through content every day. And this is by no means a new phenomenon, as Joe Pulizzi reminds us. For years, people have been consuming content and stories from brands. Those pictures and taglines in classic advertisements, the signage in the grocery aisles, packaging on products, whitepapers, infographics, and Vines—it’s all content designed for the express purpose of influencing and “selling” to your target customers.

You might say, “I don’t create content to sell” or “I create thought leadership content.” Selling/pitching is for the reps and the product marketing folks, right?

We content marketers like to think we’re creating content for the greater good. Content that has an original angle. Content with a point of view. All of these things are important, but we need to embrace the fact that all of these attributes should bubble up to a bigger goal.

Selling Through Content

There is only one real reason why we create content: to sell something to our customers. Period.

But this doesn’t mean it has to be a pushy, scream-into-a-megaphone kind of selling. We sell our personal brand, a concept, an opinion, an approach.

Most importantly, we’re selling common ground to our customers. Picture yourself in a room presenting to customers, and they’re nodding their heads in agreement as you talk. You’re all on the same page. Good content delivers that feeling of being on common ground online.

Here is a first-hand example of how this works:

My company, TechTarget, is in the business of helping technology marketers drive demand by targeting technology buyers more efficiently. This isn’t just about selling programs on websites to deliver leads. It’s about finding common ground with our customers and managing expectations around results.

We work with a lot of clients looking to successfully extend their programs into specific international markets. There are a number of challenges that go along with this. Rather than just letting our sales reps manage these challenges at the point of sale, we used content to establish common ground with our customers and better set up both sides for success.

When not directly selling through product-centric content (i.e. product literature, collateral, demos), content is “priming the pump” for sales teams and the company as a whole. For example, consider the “free” advice and best practices you dole out in your blog. Even if that advice is not exactly talking about your business, you give it with the expectation that when that reader is at the point of sale, he or she remembers all the help and guidance you gave , tipping the scales in your favor when it’s time to buy.

This is a pretty easy concept to understand when you are a company that sells goods and services, but the same concept easily applies to consultancies, services organizations, or market experts that are in the business of delivering (or “selling”) opinions and insight.

For all of you who are like me and have gotten shiny new content marketing titles in the last few years, there are a million reasons why content and marketing belong together, but you only need to remember one: your customers.

We’ve scoured the web for relevant sales studies in order to bring you real-time, actionable insights. This is The Sales Snapshot, a brand new series onThe Command Center. 

Has Social Media Paved the Way for B2B Sales Teams to Sell More Effectively?

Social media has completely changed the way we interact in the B2B sales environment with prospects and clients. Top-performing B2B sales teams are increasingly using Enterprise Social Collaboration (ESC) tools to build a connected sales force.

According to a recent Aberdeen research brief, ESC tools are capitalizing on the familiar functionality of social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to create a sales team that is interconnected and able to quickly collaborate.

Using enterprise software that has a look and feel that’s similar to other social media tools, sellers are more likely to engage with the software, leading to increased performance and better sales metrics.

So the question is, does this kind of social-based tool actually aid or distract the salesperson who is using it?

It turns out that the highest performing sales organizations engaged with social selling tools 91% more than their less performing counterparts. Meaning, there’s something to be said for the impact that collaborative technology can have on your sales team’s bottom line.

Survey Shows Quota Attainment is Down for the First Time in 3 Years

In the 2014 CSO Insights report, the percentage of sales reps who met their annual sales quota is down for the first time in three years.

After the economy fell into a tailspin in 2008, only 51.8% of sales reps were able to consistently meet their goals. In the following years, close rates got increasingly better, peaking at 63%. Then, in 2013, that number suddenly dropped by nearly 5%. Why the surprising decrease?

CSO Insights cites some key contributors to this decline over the past year.

1. Decrease in size of the average B2B sale
2. Lack of formal sales process
3. Decline in qualified leads

In order to combat the decline, CSO recommends these action steps for sales executives:

1. Focus on capturing premium accounts
2. Increase overall sales effectiveness
3. Optimize lead generation efforts

The Myth about the Buyer’s Mindset

According to Forrester Analyst, Mark Lindwall, buyers may not actually know what they want when they begin looking for a product or service. According to his article, prospects are three times more likely to choose a vendor who will help them solve a problem versus a vendor who simply responds to an inquiry about a product or service.

This is important to note, because, in the buyer economy, there are key benchmarks a prospect wants to experience before they begin evaluating solutions.

Your sales process should be properly aligned with the buying process.

When a prospect first begins seeking out information from a vendor, they are in the stage of “recognizing their pain.” In that stage of the buying process, your sales team should be in the stages of “suspect” and “discovery”.

The suspect stage relies mostly on marketing and lead generation – making sure your sales message is reaching the right person.

The discovery stage is where the sales conversation between seller and prospect really begins. In the discovery stage you want your sales team to focus on some important benchmarks:

Uncover

• Pains
• Needs
• Key Players
• Timeframes

Establish

• Required Capabilities

Confirm

• What You Heard
• Next Steps

It’s important to spend the right amount of time in the discovery stage, and not take shortcuts just to close the sale. More than ever, customers are looking for opportunities to be heard and coached. Take the time to set up the right foundation to ensure success through the rest of your sales process.

Unless you’ve had your head in the clouds for the last few years, you have a grasp of the concept of “content marketing.” Essentially, it’s an online marketing approach that incorporates tools like blogs, social media and SEO concepts to attract the interest of potential customers. The key is to provide interesting, educational material to engage a prospect and encourage him or her to move onto the next phase of the sales process.

Of course, nothing stays the same for long in the world of online marketing, and we’re just now starting to see the ramp-up of the next biggest trend: context marketing. If you want to incorporate this strategy into your advertising efforts, you need to understand context marketing vs. content marketing and use both to your advantage.

What’s the big deal?

In a nutshell, context marketing is about timing communication so that it’s most relevant, it’s providing: 1) the right content; 2) to the right prospect; 3) at just the right moment. It goes beyond content marketing that just delivers educational or useful information, because it inserts timing into the equation. Context marketing vs. content marketing also takes into account the specific personality of the customer. Even if you have two of the components nailed down, you could still lose a lead because they’re not the proper audience.

Context marketing is critical to your online marketing strategy because it enables you to provide a more personalized experience for leads. Your existing advertising efforts will actually perform more effectively because you’re giving prospects more relevant information that they need now. So, how do you successfully use a context approach that converts business?

Give Your Online Forms a Face Lift

The number of visitors that click the “Back” button when they land on a form page is staggering. Yet, you need a lead’s information if you want to provide relevant content at the right time. Implement smart forms that don’t require your visitors to insert duplicate information, but rather obtain new details that can help you learn more about them. You’ll get a better idea of how to follow up with more targeted and timely content.

Calls to Action that Pack a Punch

Your prospect is interested and loves your product, but may not be ready to buy. So your call to action needs to fall somewhere in between keeping them engaged, but not turning them off. Current technology can help you develop a smart landing page that self-adjusts to the visitor based upon information that they’ve provided. You can then respond with a CTA that conforms to their stage in the sales cycle.

Step Into Their Shoes

Context marketing vs. content marketing means getting personal with your leads, so creating effective buyer personas is crucial. Doing so will help you fit the right content into the three prongs of context marketing: relevant information, the right person, and the proper timing. As you develop your different personalities, focus on questions that relate to these elements and you’ll be better at getting your prospect’s attention and keeping it.

If you are still looking for the right way to create content check out this FREE Beginners Guide for some awesome tips on blogging for your business!

 

Landing pages hosted directly on your website can generate qualified leads and increase your sales.

Optimizing your website landing pages can increase conversions exponentially. More leads for your business equals more ROI for your bottom line.

Here are 25 tips you can act on right now to improve your landing page results.

Clean and Clear Landing Page Template Design

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The easier you make it for your web visitors to see who you are, what you’re offering, and what you’re asking in return, the more likely that person is going to convert.

Obvious, right? You’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t get this – or just can’t effectively implement it.

Here’s 7 tips to improve your landing page design for conversions:

1. Easy to navigate – Keep your page free of too much information, too many images and too much clutter. Avoid conversion drop-offs by making it easy to see why your visitor is on your page and what they need to do.

2. Bullet points – Your online visitors are skimmers and scanners. Make it easy to understand your benefits and more people will want what you’ve offering.

Example of Wishpond landing page template with easy-to-read bullet points.

3. Whitespace – Use clean designs and direct your prospect’s attention to your offer, benefits and Call to Action. Leave empty space on your page to increase conversions.

4. Images – You know it – pictures tell a thousand words. This is particularly true online. Images are the most shared and liked content on social sites. They’re very effective on your lead-generating landing pages too. The more a potential customer likes your page, the more likely they’ll convert.

5. Complementary (and contrasting) colours – Colour design is extremely important in optimizing your landing page. Use complementary colour schemes to make your page appealing to the eye. Make your Call-to-Action in a contrasting colour to stand out.

If you don’t happen to have a graphic designer in house, there’s a number of free colour scheme tools online such as:

• Hex Color Scheme Generator
• Adobe Kuler
• Color Scheme Designer

6. Above the fold – Keep your CTA, form fields and benefits ‘above the fold’. In other words, make sure all your pertinent landing page information can be seen on screen, without having to scroll down. (People don’t generally scroll – unless they’re very motivated to do so.)

7. 5 second rule – Yup, the ‘5 second rule’ applies to landing pages too. You’ve got about 5 seconds to attract and draw in your consumer. If your page doesn’t appeal immediately, your prospect will leave to other pages – maybe even your competitor’s!

Marketing on Your Landing Page

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Your landing page is the hub of your marketing campaign. It’s where you direct your traffic from social media sites, online advertising, email campaigns and so on. When traffic lands on your page, you need to market effectively to get your interested visitor to convert.

Here’s 7 tips to optimize your marketing tactics for conversions:

8. CTA – Your Call to Action (CTA) is the action you are asking your visitor to take. Your CTA should be the most prominent feature on your landing page. Make your Call to Action buttons clear, with contrasting colours. Keep them short, action-oriented words to invoke an immediate reaction. Show the obvious appeal or value exchange in your CTA – make yours an offer they can’t refuse.

Top action-getting CTA words include:

9. Competitive advantage – Use your marketing smarts to succinctly show how and why you’re better than your competition. Use your company tagline or a unique selling point for your campaign. The more convincing you are to your market, the more leads and sales you’ll get.

10. Sense of urgency – Use scarcity tactics such as a limited supply of your product offering, limited time for your offer, or limited numbers for offer.

To create urgency, use phrases such as:

11. “What’s in it for me?” – Answer your customer’s question by providing a convincing list of benefits your offer provides. Show that your product, service, coupon, contest or whatever it is you’re offering gives so much value that they simply can’t refuse. Show your value proposition with words and images on your landing page.

12. Know your offer – Before you create your landing page, determine what your offer is. Answer questions like:

• What problem are you solving?
• What are the specifics of your campaign?
• How will your offer most benefit your customer – and why should they care?

13. Know your customer – In order to design and create a fully optimized landing page, you need to know who it is you’re marketing to. Make a list of demographics for your target market, or even write out a number of buyer personas that detail the daily behaviours of your intended consumer.

Make customer personas to understand your consumer and their online behaviours.

The better you understand your customer, the more you can appeal to them.

14. Know your competition – It’s business. Check out your competition and do a competitive analysis for their landing page campaigns. Your research can serve two purposes: inspiration to outperform their page, or generate creativity to innovate something unique.

Develop Trust and Consistency on Your Landing Page

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Be upfront about who you are and keep consistent about your offer on your landing page. You’ll gain more trust by clearly communicating your business and what you provide. The more a person trusts you, the more likely they’ll be prepared to convert.

Here’s 7 tips to increase trust on your campaign landing page:

15. Contact information – Show your phone number, social network links, and even the address and a map and of your location. The more accessible you are, the more friendly and ‘open for business’ you look. Don’t hide from your customer if you want their business.

Example of renovation landing page with a clear phone number in the upper left hand corner.

16. Don’t oversell – Perhaps I learned this lesson the hard way. I spent nearly a decade working in politics (yeah, need I say more?). Don’t over-promise only to under-deliver. That is the fastest way to lose trust – and customers. Say what you’re offering, and give your customers what you’ve promised. Once they’ve got what they want – then give them a little more. You may be pleasantly surprised at the word-of-mouth marketing you gain.

17. Keep your campaign consistent – This seems pretty obvious, but when you’re running a marketing campaign, make sure whatever your promotion is about remains the same through your sales funnel. This includes your landing page. Keep your list of benefits and unique selling points the same throughout your online advertising and promotions.

18. Show a face – Studies have shown that using smiling faces (particularly the smiling face of a woman) increases trust. Show the face of you, you and your team or a happy customer. You increase your trust – which means you increase conversions.

Example of Wishpond landing page templatewith images of smiling people.

19. Speak to your customer – Use “you” in your landing page copy. Think of your landing page as a place where someone is visiting you in-person. Craft personal marketing copy that speaks the language of your intended market. If your demographic is the millennial generation, use language and images that relate. if you’re marketing to a geo-location target, use local references to instill trust that you’re a business that relates to them personally.

20. Use customer testimonials – Share good quotes from your customers – and show their face and name. People trust the opinions of people – especially those of friends. Social endorsements are a valuable way to gain and reinforce trust in future customers.

21. Determine the length of your forms – It’s a fine balance between asking too much information in your form fields, and increasing your conversion rate. The longer your form, generally speaking, the fewer people are going to make the time and effort to complete it. Keep your form fields to a minimum such as “first name” and “email” as mandatory contact information. You can always have optional fields to gather richer customer data – without losing as many leads.

Improve Your Landing Page SEO

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A landing page is part of online marketing. Online marketing does have a technical side.

Getting your landing page found is important too. You need to optimize your landing page for SEO.

Here’s 4 tips to increase your landing page SEO:

22. Use keywords in your page title – The URL path of your landing page should include your keywords. No, it’s actually not that hard to do. Just make sure your landing page has a title, and you use that title when you’re creating the page on your website. (If you’re not the one doing your website stuff – tell your request to your webmaster.)

23. Use keywords and keyword phrases in your text – Make it clear to search engines (like Google) what your page is about. Use your keyword phrases (like, what your offer is about) in the text of your page. Think of this as how to speak to Google, just like you speak to your customer to tell them what you’re about.

24. Include social share buttons – Google “likes” a highly shared page. Make your social share buttons easy to see on your page. Put them at the top of your page, and make them highly visible on your landing page.

Wishpond’s Guide to Landing Pages ebook page has social share buttons.

25. Use relevant meta tags – If you’re not a technical type – don’t go all droopy eyes quite yet, you’ve almost made it through the SEO tips. Meta tags are your site’s backend stuff that Google reads. So, yeah, they’re very important. Use them for your Title, Keywords and Description attributes. Use Alt tags too, for image descriptions.

There are many more SEO tactics to use, but I’ll just stick with those….

Conclusion

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Start with a few of these tips – or try them all – to increase your landing page lead-generation success.

As with any online marketing, take the opportunity to test your campaigns. A/B test your landing pages, tweaking and optimizing to obtain a cumulative optimization gain – and get lots more leads and sales.

What do you think? Do you increase your qualified leads with landing pages? How do you optimize your website conversion pages?

Written by Krista Bunskoek @ Wishpond

There’s a lot of talk in the B2B sales and marketing community about “alignment.” It’s constantly brought up in the most reputable LinkedIn groups, and it’s a prominent topic tag on all the best industry blogs. Every business wants a piece of that alignment pie … and who can blame them? No one wants to be unaligned in their sales and marketing efforts.

But just because there’s a lot of talk about a topic doesn’t mean there’s a lot of understanding. So what does “sales and marketing alignment” really mean? And why is it so important to your sales enablement and marketing success?

Let’s talk about understand it.

Sales And Marketing Alignment: What’s The Deal?

What everyone knows about sales and marketing alignment:

• It comprises shared goals, consistent strategies and accepted success metrics that improve functionality, productivity, marketing ROI and growth.

What you need to know about sales and marketing alignment:

• It requires getting your sales team and your marketing team working as one unified force of collaboration to create and propagate content that’s 1) ultra informative and 2) ultra personalized to each buyer persona.

Sales And Marketing Alignment: What’s The Challenge?

Words are great, but in this case, it’s the numbers that hit it home:

• More than 75% of sales reps say they “never” or only “occasionally” use what they get from their marketing department.
  Firebrick Consulting
• 60-70% of content produced by B2B marketing organizations goes unused.
  SiriusDecisions
  
• 58% of a vendor’s marketing content is not relevant to potential buyers, and this disconnect reduces the vendor’s chance of closing a sale by 45%.
  International Data Group
  
• 30% of organizations feel disconnected from the changing needs and expectations of their prospects and customers.
  Aberdeen Group

Now for the words that back up those numbers:

Sales doesn’t want to use your marketing content.
“I can’t use it. It just won’t resonate with buyers.”
“I find myself creating my own materials just to address my buyers’ specific needs.”
“We need buyer-centric content! Content that’s personalized for each buyer persona.”

But, there’s also a flip side to the story:

Marketing can’t keep up.
“We already can’t keep up with content demand, from both digital marketing campaigns and our own sales team.”
“How are we supposed to create versions of our content for every buyer persona, not to mention keep it all updated?”

You want lots of content. But you also want this content to be high quality and precision targeted, meaning it’s got loads of powerful, actionable information and creates an exceptional experience for each buyer persona.

All of your marketing content in every chapter of the buying process – awareness-level tip sheets, consideration-phase whitepapers, decision-stage presentations – needs to be buyer-centric enough for two very important things to happen:

1. Your sales team wants to use them.
2. Your buyers find them useful.

Sales And Marketing Alignment: Here’s The Answer.

If your content’s lacking in persona personalization, it’s going to sit in virtual cobwebs on sales portals and website shelves. And that’s not doing anyone any good.

It’s time to get creative. It’s time to create a new force.

The Revenue Department: sales and marketing alignment made easy.

One team, one goal. Less frustration, more collaboration.

1. Sales and marketing departments unite under the common objective of revenue generation.
2. Sales reps connect your buyers’ pain points with your company’s remarkable solutions.
3. It’s not just the marketing department that gets in the content game. Sales, too, consistently leverages highly tailored content during the sales process to keep the buyer thinking about and warming up to your company.
4. Marketing has visibility into all content that’s sent out to buyers and how the buyer responds, so they’re able to assess buyer acceptance and campaign success.
5. Sales executes powerful lead nurturing campaigns in conjunction with other content marketing tactics in order to keep leads primed.*

*Click here to learn more about jolting those “sleepy leads” with dormant lead nurturing.

Sales And Marketing Alignment: Everyone Wins.

Creating that unified Revenue Department and delivering high-powered, hyper-personalized marketing content is easier said than done. But with the right sales and marketing technology and best practices for alignment, revenue becomes reality.

And when you effectively smooth those seams between your sales and marketing teams, they do more (and do better) with less struggle and stress:

• MARKETING GETS FREEDOM from that night-and-weekend grind on the content-churning machine.
• SALES GETS FLEXIBILITY to connect the value dots for their buyers, even those trickier personas with super-specific pain points and preferences.

Next Up: Sales Presentations That Hit Home With Power And Precision.

Lackluster presentations? Sales team in a slump? It might be your technology that’s at fault, or maybe the problem stems from ineffective messaging. But it’s safe to say that both are to blame. In a market dominated by automation software and dictated by the knowledge-hungry B2B buyer, technology and content must not be (and cannot be) separated.

Stay tuned for our next post on taking control of your messaging, demonstrations and sales enablement with content management software.

With a family background in sales, it’s no wonder I love competition, organization, and numbers. I like that every month your slate is wiped clean and you have another 30 days to crush your numbers. But not only is sales a month-to-month game; it’s also quarterly and yearly. The cycle in which we work in inside sales is organized and allows you to plan your time accordingly.

Everyone has their own strategy to get through a month. I believe starting off strong is extremely important. I always try to create an opportunity and pass over a lead on the first day of every month, more so than the last day of every month. I want to know that I have some “cushion” and start off with great momentum. It’s probably part of my Type A personality, but I do not like to stress at the end of the month, and having opportunities early on always feels great. Of course, it’s not always possible to start off the month with a bang, but putting in extra work in the beginning leads to a smoother ride at the end.

Here are some strategies for creating opportunities early in the month:

• Try to get people live versus leaving messages.
  Instead of leaving messages for your prospects, do everything you can to try to get them live on the phone. Call them several times a day to figure out the optimal time to call. When you finally do talk to someone in person, don’t scare them with too much information. Entice them with your product or service, concentrate on how it can improve their specific situation, and then schedule another conversation for more information.
• Send out a mass email campaign.
  If you take the time to make sure your emails are personal yet professional, concise yet informative, you will benefit from sending out a mass email campaign to hundreds of prospects. In five sentences or less, introduce yourself, the reason you’re contacting the prospect, and the topic you’d like to discuss. Keep your signature personal, so any follow-up responses or questions go directly to you. For more help on drafting effective mass emails, see our Email Strategy Guide. 
  
• Use LinkedIn and Data.com to pull in better titles/contacts.
  Be resourceful! These sites are here for your benefit. LinkedIn is a professional social network filled to the brim with contacts who may need your product/service. Make yourself available and present yourself more like a consultant on LinkedIn. Establish your social presence. In their research, B2B prospects may find you are a respectful thought leader on the social media they visit most. Jigsaw is also a community of millions of B2B decision makers; a continuously updated and most importantly accurate place for data, it includes all company information you may need when building your pipeline. 
  
• Utilize to-do lists when you feel jumbled.
  With so many campaigns going on at once, many inside sales reps feel bogged down by their work load. Instead of crumbling under the pressure, keep a weekly to-do list, whether online (weekplan.net, teuxdeux.com) or in a notebook. Make weekly and monthly goals, and relish the opportunity to cross off completed tasks. Keeping a to-do list will automatically make you more organized and more confident.

No matter how you start your month, the end game is the same. Hit your goal. Surpass your goal. Make your clients happy. Feel good about working hard.

Then it starts all over again.

This is the beauty of sales. There is a cycle that will forever continue, like the Energizer Bunny, until you saturate the market. Every month you’ll need to create new opportunities; find the time to create them earlier so you’re not stressing out later.

If you’re a content marketer like me, you’re in the sales funnel front line for your business.

You blog, yes. You create amazing content. But how are you turning your efforts into lead generation? How do you get the numbers to show your results and increase your ROI?

I’ve got a simple and super effective method: landing pages.

With landing pages you can generate warm leads and show your ROI in a boss-appealing number crunching way.

Here are 21 actionable lead generating landing page tactics you can use to get qualified leads.

I’ve also included a short section on what content marketing is – just in case you don’t know.

What is Content Marketing and Why does my Business need it?

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Many of you know what content marketing is. Heck, you likely wouldn’t have found this article if you didn’t. But, did you know the term “content marketer” isn’t new? Yep, Netscape (remember them at the start of this webrowsing internet thing?) hired the first content marketer way back in 1996 (aka the last millenium). Content marketing is now becoming an essential part of your online business marketing – and it’s here to stay.

Content marketing is basically a method of getting your business’ message communicated to your consumer. In practice, good content marketers don’t sell directly but rather engage, educate and develop or nurture customer leads. Content marketing can include:

• Social media marketing
• Blogging
• SEO tactics
• Brand building
• Public relations
• Journalism (of sorts, that’s uh – slightly biased)
• Online advertising
• Inbound marketing
• Lead generation
• Customer relationship building
• Corporate storytelling
• Strategic planning
• KPI metric measuring and ROI improvements

Content marketing and article writing is one of the ‘leanest’ ways to attract new leads. At the moment, it typically costs 62% less than traditional marketing.

Cool, hey? I know, us content marketers are awesome (if I do say so myself)….

But, with so many jobs to do, you need to stay focused on your results – and you need simple streamlined methods to achieve your business objectives. In this article, I’ll show you how to easily achieve your lead generating objectives. These landing page tactics use your content, warm your leads and get results.

Landing pages are pretty easy to set up (if you’re using a good landing page template builder).

Optimize your landing pages, use online advertising and remarketing campaigns and you can generate tons more qualified leads to send over to your eager sales team.

Marketing for Lead Generation Landing Pages

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We’re all looking for marketing ideas. When you’re marketing online with landing pages, create content that gives your prospects a value exchange they can’t refuse. Here’s a few tips that’ll boost your landing page leads.

1. Create targeted ebooks

You write blog articles, right? Those articles are good quality and business related. You’ve probably even written a series of articles on one particular topic. Use that series of, say, 5-10 full length articles. Compile and edit them into a book. Get it formatted into a compellingly attractive ebook, and turn it into a PDF ebook.

Set up a landing page on your website. Ask consumers for an email in exchange for your product – to create a higher perceived value of your content – and get leads.

2. Use sidebar CTA’s for your ebooks

Once you’ve created a number of great, relevant and interesting ebooks, promote them through your blog. Make a sidebar on your blog pages to promote and generate clicks to your landing page.

3. Make how-to guides

How-to guides are targeted lead generators. You attract potential customers who really want to know about your business offerings. Make your how-to guides related to your exact service, and even include hints about how to use your products to achieve the best results.

Make a landing page on your website so it’s easy to download these guides.

4. Host Webinars

Webinars are a cool way to engage your interested market and generate leads. Make a powerpoint presentation related to a customer problem. Show how to solve it.

Take webinars a step further by recording them for future use, and allowing participants to keep your presentation.

Generate leads by making a simple RSVP landing page.

5. Create Podcasts

A cutting-edge trend right now is turning your blog articles into podcasts. Read out your articles. Record them. Email-gate your podcasts on landing pages to show that they are of value.

6. Create newsletters

Newsletters have been and still are an effective form of content to keep in touch with prospects and customers. Generate more leads by hosting an optimized landing page showing people the benefits of getting your updates.

Use incentives like coupons or exclusive discounts to those newsletter subscribers.

7. Write Whitepapers

If you market for a B2B, whitepapers speak the language of business. Write papers with industry stats, data and trends. Address a problem your market has. Format your content so it’s easy to skim and highlights the important info.

Give it away to your prospects for their email and contact information. Use a landing page with a clear call-to-action and great visuals.

8. Know your customer; make niche ebooks

You’re a marketer, so you know you need to follow the golden rule: Know your customer.

Segment your target markets. List out demographics for each of your buyer personas. Then target your content and write for each of your niche buyers.

Generate leads through super targeted ebooks hosted on a website landing page.

9. Promote your niche ebooks on highly relevant website pages

Once you’ve developed highly targeted ebooks written for your target market, promote them. Market your email-gated content on your own website on relevant pages. Use online advertising to directly connect with interested prospects.

10. Make a series of case studies

Customers love to see how other people use your products. Case studies are a type of social endorsement – and they work to generate leads and sales.

Develop case studies by interviewing real customers with real results. Put a series of case studies together, format it with nice visuals, and email gate it on a landing page.

11. Generate industry reports

If you’re in B2B, your business customers want reports and data. If you have the resources, conduct comprehensive studies on a topic that solves your customers’ problems.

Give it away for the mere price of an email and a name. You get leads of genuine prospects.

12. Create Slideshares

Again, if you’re marketing to business, presentations like Slideshares have an impact. They generate leads too (if you’re on a pro plan). A real benefit to this type of content is that people can download your slides and put them on their own site.

At Wishpond, we’ve generated tens of thousands of views – and hundreds of qualified leads from our slides being posted on hundreds of blogs. You can email-gate a series of Slideshares – just market the resource to motivate by showing the beneficial value exchange.

13. Create a learning centre

You’ve created great content. Make more and segment it by topic or a consumer-centric objective. Compile the targeted content to create an all-in-one learning center for your customers. Make it exclusive content for members.

Make it easy to join via a short form on your landing page. You’re adding value – and generating leads – for your ongoing or future clients.

Lead generation on your business blog

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Did you know that 96% of all first time website visitors will not immediately buy from you? But once those visitors have clicked on to your blog they’re getting warmer. As a smart content marketer, you know this is the time to turn those readers into leads.

Implement one or more of the following strategic blog tactics and you can get tons more opportunities to drive traffic to your landing pages.

14. Make a topbar CTA that directs to a landing page

Code in a landing page banner at the top of your blog posts. Show your benefits, use contrasting colours for your CTA and include a friendly image. Keep your banners focused to match the topic of your articles – that way you’re attracting an interested audience who is more likely to convert.

15. Use landing page sidebars or pop-ups

Try deploying a landing page form directly on your blog. Use a sidebar so your ask is viewed while your readership skims or reads your articles.

This is an alternative to the overly used pop-ups.

Test both methods to determine what gets you the most effective results.

16. Use anchor text in your blog to link to landing pages

Basic SEO tactics not only increase the SERP of your landing pages – they can drive traffic to your website lead generators too. Use keywords on your blog posts to link to relevant landing pages, like your landing pages ebook, your VIP demo or your Free Trial offer. (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

17. Make it easy to subscribe

Put up a blog subscription opt-in form. Make it stand out with contrasting colours to your site. Get creative in your CTA and value propositions. (Like, don’t just use the old school “RSS” feed sign up.)

18. Add a bar on the top on your site

Use tools like Hello Bar or Viper Bar to add those cool little bars to the top of your blog. Yes, they’re all the rage right now – uh, because they work.

19. Add a CTA button at the end

Hey, if your reader is engaged and interested enough to give your article their time ‘til the end, wouldn’t you want to engage them further? You’ve likely warmed them enough to gain trust. Don’t lose the opportunity to post CTA buttons that drive traffic to your email gated content.

Like this, or, er – what’s that at the bottom of this post?

Test, monitor and get results for your landing page

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Tracking your results is a huge benefit in online marketing. You can measure, monitor, tweak, improve and optimize just about any online campaign. Do it, content marketer, do it!

20. A/B test your landing pages

Always monitor your landing pages. Changing the wording in your CTA button, for example, can increase your conversions.

21. Monitor and track your landing page lead generation

Use the right analytic tools and you can easily track the leads you’re generating and where they’re coming from. Connect these analytics to your sales team, and you can have an incredibly powerful method to analyze your best efforts, determine what’s getting you the best ROI, and where to focus your content marketing efforts.

I think of my analytics dashboard as a high performance vehicle monitor. I can tweak the torque, tighten the steering or adjust the tire pressure on any landing page campaign to give me the best results for my business.

Streamline your content production to increase results of your own business objectives. Get more leads, nurture them, build your brand, and increase sales.

Conclusion

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So, what’s the key takeaway of this article? Uh – content marketing is cool, and it’s here to stay. And, when blogging for business, there’s a million ways you can generate leads and prove your marketing results.

What lead generation tactics do you use? How many landing pages do you have on your business website? Do you use a landing page builder with marketing automation options?

Written by Krista Bunskoek @ Wishpond

here it is:

Yes, you can call your potential buyer, but can you stay in contact with them every day?

Yes, you can put an ad in a magazine, but after one pass through the June-July issue, will they really remember you? Yes, you can talk to a purchase agent at a trade show, but what happens after everyone goes home and pamphlets and business cards get lost amid the piles of literature?

An integration of inbound and outbound marketing strategies can bring breakthrough results to a B2B company’s marketing effectiveness.

The marketing strategies of B2B businesses are, in many ways, different from the marketing strategies of a B2C business, simply because their products and targets are dissimilar.

While a B2C business marketing strategy is designed to incite desire for a product or service, creating a specific call to bring the customer to action by purchasing the product, a B2B marketing plan has a trickier end goal – creating a long-term relationship as they partner with other businesses.

Characteristics of a B2B Marketplace

• Relationship-focused marketing orientation

• Global target market

• Fewer sales at a higher price point (than B2C)

• Buyer’s decisions are specification-driven

Common B2B Marketing Strategies

• Trade Shows

• Specialized Magazines

• Direct Mail

• Ad Campaigns

Relationship-Focused Marketing Orientation

In a successful B2B sales relationship, you are not simply selling a product or service to your customer. Instead, you are selling a partnership, a relationship based on mutual trust and respect that will hopefully extend years into the future.

Many companies of this nature pride themselves on their efforts to always provide a face with the name. A company representative or technician typically accompanies the business’ product or service wherever it is presented or delivered, developing a reputation that emphasizes the personability of the brand.

B2B companies take years to build an indelible, longstanding company image. Why do B2B representatives wine and dine their clients? Why do they take them out golfing, or catch up with them over a drink at a trade show? They have a relationship to maintain with their buyers.

Commitment is a Process

Submitting a purchase order isn’t nearly as simple as buying a pack of gum. While a grocery store customer’s buying process might take less than 30 seconds, a B2B purchasing agent’s buying process might take 30 days.

According to an article by Yoast, creator of the WordPress SEO Plugin, only 12% of customers sign a purchase order within the same day of their first exposure to a company’s offering. More importantly, a miniscule 6.6% of contacts become buyers after 4 months have passed since their first contact with the business.

It’s important to have a marketing strategy that targets your contacts during the following four months after your business meets them.

Yoast, creator of the WordPress SEO Plugin, describes the B2B purchase process by saying,

“The long lead time of a B2B purchase obviously doesn’t apply for things like office supplies. However, it does apply for something like a complex technical installation. This has a lot to do with the money and people involved. The technician has to take a look at the performance of the machine, the economic man is interested in the cost of buying and maintaining the machine and if you aren’t lucky, the managing director also has an opinion about the whole thing.”

Interfacing with an agent from a potential buying company at a trade show is the first step. When that individual leaves that trade show, however, how will you keep up with them? What avenues of easily-accessible information do you provide? When they’re finished reading your brochures, is there more?

When they visit your website, will they find helpful information that gives further details about your product? Will they find valuable content, videos, testimonials, specs, and a blog that will provide information about product or service details, case studies, company updates, event announcements, and other information relevant to the industry? They should, because you have four months and counting.

Integrating Outbound and Inbound Marketing: Four Months In Counting…

You meet a contact at a trade show. A satisfied purchasing agent refers a friend to check out your company. An interested party sees your product in action in the field. In these situations, most people don’t immediately pick up the phone. Instead, they visit your website. They read your content and are impressed with the helpful information, perhaps responding by downloading your white paper or eBook, which also provides you with their email address and the company they represent. You send them a follow-up email, asking if you might set up a phone call. Two worlds collide as outbound and inbound B2B marketing work together.

They know you update your company blog regularly, so they revisit your website every couple of days to view your latest article. Your latest post is especially helpful, so they share it via their company LinkedIn profile. The post is re-shared several times, and a friend, of a friend, of a friend sees the LinkedIn post and follows the link to your website. The process starts over again – Website, blog post, share and repeat.

Website: An Inbound Tool with Outbound Results

As people are becoming more ad-blind and frustrated by salespeople, your online presence is often the first face of your business. Even if you’ve already met a contact and they subsequently visit your website, you want them to have a reason to browse as well as a reason to keep coming back. A robust website featuring lots of well-written, relevant content, will supplement your outbound marketing strategy by providing your contacts with a way to stay involved with your company during the days in between your phone calls.

A great website will have:

• A modern theme and layout
• A mobile-compatible design
• An easy and organized navigation and structure
• Detailed service or product pages
• A company blog focused on the right buyer personas

Content: Informative, Valuable, and Engaging

The road to effective B2B content marketing lies in your ability to engage current and prospective customers by providing useful, relevant content that demonstrates how your expertise and quality services will improve their business revenue and take their company to a new level.

This content should be designed to ease the decision making process for your prospective client. This is accomplished by expounding upon the uniqueness and importance of your product and company as a whole, while providing reassuring and honest testimonials or reviews.

Good content will contain specific information that your client will need to make an informed decision on your product or service, such as:

• Interesting or intriguing content that catches their interest

• Testimonials of other satisfied customers

• News of new products or updated services

Social Media: What Can It Do For You?

A recent survey done in the United Kingdom demonstrated that while 86% of current businesses use social media within their marketing strategies, only 32% used it for the purpose of lead generation. The reality is that social media, while a powerful tool, isn’t going to be the driving force in providing your B2B company with leads.

What social media can do for your B2B marketing plan, however, is create heightened brand awareness, encourage social sharing, and create brand trust and brand followers. By creating a tight-nit group of followers, you’ll have a base beneath your business of loyal people that, by their presence, builds trust and awareness with the rest of the world. Namely, other prospective customers.

Keeping Your Enemies Close:

Social media is also a useful tool in keeping tabs on your competitors. Keeping your friends close, and your enemies closer is easily accomplished with social media platforms such as Twitter. Friend those competitors, and learn from them as they Tweet information, new products, or newly published articles.

LinkedIn:

One of the best social media platforms available is LinkedIn. This was created specifically for the B2B marketplace, and it is a place for companies to highlight their products, services, job opportunities and find other businesses to partner with. Maintaining a regular presence here with blog posts, press releases, event announcements, corporate literature, forum and group participation (within similar industries), asking questions and starting discussions will increase your visibility within the business world.

Conclusion:

This collaboration of the two realms of marketing strategies, inbound and outbound, fills all the marketing holes that are hidden in a marketing campaign. While B2B marketing strategies will always require that personal touch of relational outbound marketing, creating an effective inbound campaign to compound the outbound will produce incredible results for your company. Those who slip through the fingers of the trade show reps will hear about your product in a press release, or on LinkedIn.

Broaden your reach and mend all the holes in the marketing nets—customers await you.

Using Content and Language to Increase Leads for Your Business

Small to medium sized businesses everywhere are clamoring to get in on it.

In fact, according to an article called How to Write Email Marketing Copy that Converts by Kim George, the founder of Small Business Sense, entrepreneurs are spending 42% of their marketing budget to harness it.

If you have sat at your computer for any length of time trying to figure out your next email campaign, its content, creating eye-catching design, engaging the appropriate audience or coming up with a captivating headline then this blog post is for you.

The truth about email marketing is that it works.

It is measurable and doesn’t just increase your company’s sales, but increases engagement with your potential customers and your current customers.

Today’s customers require a buying structure that includes online engagement; it creates trust and a sense of connection with your brand.

According to Nielson, 50% of consumers worldwide trust email messages from companies they have signed up to receive.

Yet there are also some myths about email marketing that deserve to be debunked.

WHAT EMAIL MARKETING IS NOT

According to Andy Newbom, writer for SocialMediaToday.com today’s email should not be spam. If it is spam – it is unwanted.

In his recent article 5 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Email Marketing businesses that legitimately receive permission from website visitors who give out their email addresses are not sending spam.

“Email marketing is sending marketing messages to your customers and prospects that they have requested and want to receive. It is a positive communication between the brand and the customer that benefits both parties.”

Legitimate email marketing is permission-based and a viable way to send information to potential customers.

It is by far one of the lowest cost methods of marketing out there, but it is not free.

There is writing, designing, creating and then actually delivering the email to the right people.

Yes, there is a cost, but when done right the results are staggering.

Newbom considers email marketing a “constant dance to bring all the pieces together in precisely the right way.”

Making sure that a campaign is built well, edited, tested, tracked and measured, and adds value and meaning to a potential reader is amazingly difficult, but the results are compelling.

So what is an email supposed to do?

IS YOUR EMAIL CONTENT SERVING ITS PURPOSE?

If you are any kind of an email marketing professional, the majority of your time is spent crafting the content for your campaigns.

Eat, content, drink, content, sleep (or don’t sleep), content.

How do you write another exciting email that keeps your current readers coming back and fosters new readers?

Is the verbiage you include in your email doing what you need it to do?

Are you:

• Driving visits to your website?
• Creating brand awareness?
• Growing your audience with meaningful content?
• Driving conversions in your sales funnel?
• Creating a sense of urgency to explore or even purchase your product?

If your emails aren’t doing these things and creating paying customers, it is time to take another look at how you are approaching your email marketing process.

If someone actually takes the time to open your email then read it, do they know what to do next? People are busy, they don’t have the time to figure it out for themselves.

Creating that sense of urgency, grabbing their attention, and prompting them to action is the content writers’ purpose.

WHO ARE YOU SENDING YOUR EMAIL TO?

When you craft your email ask yourself some questions:

Who is my target audience? What are their “pain points”?

How can my product help the visitor to solve their problem?

Then dig further.

Your buyer persona should contain information about buying patterns, slow seasons and other demographics that affect the sale of your product.

Your product, your business and your audience drive what you include in your emails and when you send them out, as well as the buying cycles of your potential customers.

The times you share specific information throughout this buying cycle is important.

USING ACTION LANGUAGE

Sure, your email has value, you wouldn’t be sending it out otherwise right?

The email that you have put together has important information that your potential customer needs.

But how do you guide the reader to take that next step?

You don’t have to be obnoxious about it, but being direct is certainly a good method.

• Tell readers where to go in order to receive more information.
• Direct readers what they must do next in order to get their offer.
• Give them the phone number that they need to call.
• Provide the link with an easy to see button.
• Let them know how they are going to receive their reward.

Also, think about giving them a deadline to react.

Establish a clear offer with value and then give it to them.

THE SUBJECT LINE

When the people who have signed up for your emails open up their accounts for the day the only thing they really see is the subject line that appears in their inbox.

The few words that are jostling for attention along with company emails, messages from friends, as well as the emails sent by all the other brand content they’ve signed up for are a mess of words on the screen.

Your mess needs to stand out.

If someone signs up for your content, it is still going to go unopened most of the time.

But, according to the website ConvinceandConvert.com 33% of email recipients open their emails based on the subject line.

Subject lines that include your recipients name are also more likely to be opened.

STAYING ON TOP OF THE TRENDS

There is no doubt that creating fresh content that is geared to your target audience is hard.

An excellent way to get relevant information is to take a look at what is going on in your industry. You probably already subscribe to emails and newsletters from industry peers and trendsetters, or even old-fashioned magazines that still cover industry related topics very well.

Monitor your competitors and see what they are sending out.

Take surveys from online friends in the business.

In addition, here are some of our favorite online methods for following market and industry trends:

BuzzSumo – Utilize their main topic board to find the top content and influencers on many subjects.

Feedly – Is the application to use for content from your favorite blogs and websites.

HuffingtonPost – Has the top news from around the world on a variety of topics.

Google Trends – Will allow you to research what SEO tactics other companies are using. The results yield rich content and topic ideas.

Twitter – Is still the place to find out trending topics by typing in a hashtag.

Business to Community – A great site for getting trending news, insights and expert analysis on any topic.

There is a reason why 61% of marketing companies plan to increase their efforts in email marketing in the next year according to Experian Simmons.

SET THE TONE

The online ecosystem has changed the way business talks.

No more boring formal letters.

Write the way you talk.

Use conversational tones and come across in a more personal way.

Your company suddenly becomes a person rather than something coming from behind the screen.

NEVER FORGET THAT CALL-TO-ACTION

The reason your company is sending out that email in the first place is to get the reader to buy your product or utilize your service.

You didn’t send them an email to tell them about dinner this weekend with Aunt Betsy. Well, maybe you did, if it fits.

However, the main idea behind an email is to get the reader to act on another level and take some type of action with your brand.

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Creating an email campaign is still the best way to create more website traffic and increase leads for your business.

Before you even send out your first email, make sure you know who your audience is. Every time you set up a new campaign make sure your emails are valuable to your potential customer. Use captivating headlines and create a sense of urgency to make sure they want to take that next step.

How have you used emails to reach out to your potential customers? Is there a method you prefer to use that makes it easier? Let us know in the comments!

“52% of marketers do not have a formal scorecard for rating agency performance on an annual basis” — CMO Council, More Gain, Less Strain Report

The job of the marketer is to produce results that impact the bottom line.

With the technology available to track campaign performance in real time, CMOs are increasingly being held accountable for return on investment (ROI). This has a trickle-down effect into their agencies and external partners.

Corporations today seek performance-driven agencies that understand how campaigns correlate to sales, and use data to optimize activities for improved results over time.

This requires a systemic approach to reporting and evaluation.

Identify Client Marketing Goals

Start your measurement plan with a solid understanding of your client’s expectations, marketing goals, foundation and potential. This background and benchmark data – which can be collected via initial meetings or an assessment tool – helps you set realistic campaign goals and allocate resources to strategies with the highest success likelihood.

When looking at the sales funnel, the 2014 Marketing Score Report found that marketers’, executives’ and entrepreneurs’ highest priority goals are to generate leads (86 percent) and to convert leads into sales (85 percent).

Flag Top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Identify the most important metrics on which your client measures success at each level of the funnel – brand, leads, sales and loyalty. These should be specific to their organization, but could include: website visitors, leads, customers, revenue, churn rate, customer lifetime value, etc.

Have the client sign off on these metrics. They will be used as the basis for your recommendations and to measure the overall health of the campaign.

Each core KPI should also have five to 10 supporting metrics that enable you to dig a bit deeper if performance starts trending extremely positive or negative, or abnormalities present themselves. For example, if your core KPI is leads, then supporting metrics may be leads by source, lead quality score, event registrations and/or content downloads.

Ensure Tracking Technologies Are in Place

Once you know what needs to be tracked, double-check that technology is in place to capture necessary data. (Your initial assessment of the client’s foundational technology and lead sources is a good starting point here.)

Based on your reporting needs, consider technologies such as:

• Website analytics software
• Marketing automation
• Social media management solutions
• Email software
• Call tracking
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

However, disparate tracking solutions translate to siloed performance reports. Therefore, seek to integrate reports into a central dashboard for ease of ongoing monitoring. We use a custom-built one created in Google Drive.

Related Class: In Proving Value: Connect Agency Service to Performance, we walk you through how to build this dashboard for your clients.

Establish Benchmarks and Goals

Collect at least three months of your client’s historical data for initial analysis. Look for fluctuations and abnormalities, identify benchmarks and use these to set realistic performance goals for each prime metric.

Monitor, Report and Adapt

With a central reporting dashboard that is customized based on the client’s priority goals and sales funnel, you can more readily report on those metrics that matter and prove your agency’s value.

Monitor performance daily, but also provide executive-level snapshots of performance on at least a monthly basis. In these reports, tie activities directly back to prime goals, call out KPIs by funnel section and identify performance highlights and action items to improve.

By taking a performance-centric approach to marketing that centers on transparency and accountability, agencies can run more effective programs, gain greater client respect and solidify larger budgets.

How do you measure and report on client campaigns?

Designed to help you strategically approach digital through a simple execution framework and successfully relay the value of digital to clients, the Agency Digital Strategy and Planning Certification will help you capitalize on these opportunities. Enroll today!

According to EXPO Magazine’s “Corporate Exhibitor Trends Survey,” 66 percent of senior management view exhibit & event marketing essential or important in the marketing mix. And while you may not question the value of your exhibit program, you may need to question its execution.

You know there’s more to an exhibit than setting up a booth and scanning badges. It’s a platform to put your products, services and brand on display in front of possibly thousands of people. Engaging your audience is essential to your program’s success—regardless of the size of your company, booth, or budget. So what are some essentials for moving your trade show program beyond “booth” and into a face-to-face experience?

1. Bring your products to life with a hands-on experience.
From the second an attendee enters your booth their experience with your company begins. Think about how your exhibit can engage their senses and pique their curiosity. This could run the gamut from designing special interactivity into the booth (think: virtual displays and real life experiences through simulation) to in-booth activities including interactive games, education or live entertainment.

Here are two great examples of two companies that took different approaches to creating a hands-on experience, but with the same results – stellar brand engagement with attendees.

“Be the Tire” Simulator: For the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), Michelin created a multisensory experience to engage and educate attendees on the true power of their products. Attendees were able to step onto the simulator floor, place their hands on the dashboard, and, essentially, be the tire. As the speakers revved up and video screens lit up, participants were off on a ride where they could see – and feel – the road from a tire’s point of view – all the bumps and dips and lumps the road has to offer.

“Security Connected” Game: McAfee’s Security Connected game was a unique and effective in-booth activity that helped drive traffic to their booth. World-famous LEGO artist, Adam Tucker, built a model of the Security Connected environment made entirely of LEGOs. Attendees were challenged to observe the Security Connected model and guess how many LEGO blocks were used to build the display. Rather than taking attention away from McAfee’s products, the LEGO display and game gave the sales team an opportunity to strike up a natural conversation with attendees and walk them through the Security Control environment.

These days it has to be more than a passive walk-through of your exhibit. In fact, 59 percent of exhibition attendees want to see product demonstrations, and 58 percent like to have hands-on product interactions (Source: Center for Exhibition Industry Research, “Aligning Exhibitions With What Attendees Want Most”). What happens here is critical. After all, you only have one chance to make a first—and lasting—impression. Make sure it’s the right one and make sure it sticks.

2. Build deeper connections with prospects and existing clients.
Trade shows mean business and those walking the trade show floor are typically looking for products and solutions to fix specific problems or issues. Actually, according to CEIR’s report, The Role and Value of Face to Face, 92 percent of trade show attendees say they are looking for new products and 94 percent have purchasing power.

Does your product or solution help save money, speed up their network or increase revenues? Make it clear – on signage and in conversation—how your goods or services meet their needs.

To find out about their needs, you may want to dig a little deeper into the demographics and profiles of the show’s attendee base. The more you know about them, the better you can plan for them to know more about you.

You can also take advantage of the opportunity a trade show offers to learn more about your visitors. Qualify your leads carefully. Take notes above and beyond the basics and you have a profile to use to continue the conversation after the show. The more you qualify your leads at the show, the more valuable time, energy and money you will save afterwards. And, the greater your success in winning new business.

3. Give people a valuable reason for being at your event.
Provide a take away of value that they can’t get anywhere else. We’re not talking chotchkies here, but ideas, concepts, or propositions that give them something they can consider and weigh or immediately put into action.
Plan your approach like a movie trailer—give them the dramatic highlights, but don’t show them everything. Leave them wanting more. This way you can make continuing the conversation with your company a positive experience that is worth the attendee’s time.

4. Go beyond email after the show.
Sending an email to thank prospects and existing customers for visiting your booth is completely acceptable and a nice way to keep a dialogue going.

But, for those qualified top leads and valuable VIP clients, you’ve got to go beyond the email. It means taking the right notes at the show so you’ll have a real reason to reach out. And if you can leave them wanting more, you’re on your way to a meaningful, long-lasting dialogue with your visitors.

Trade shows offer a tried and true business building opportunity. They create personal connections, allow for the opportunity to ask questions, and, ultimately, help build trust. However, they can fall flat without an effective plan for engagement and follow up.

Your trade show booth is not face-to-face marketing. Rather, your booth is the stage for conducting an effective face-to-face event. By adding interesting layers and interactive elements that enhance your brand, you’ll engage and intrigue attendees with a memorable experience they can’t get online, in an email, over the phone—or anywhere else.

When it comes to online businesses, it is widely accepted that having an analytics platform to keep track of your website’s data is an absolute must. Understanding your audience’s behavior and optimizing your website accordingly is undoubtedly an asset for any company that is trying to optimize its online presence in an effort to increase revenue.

While this is a great start, unfortunately this is where many businesses abandon their analytics data. The powerful data that analytics provides can do so much more, particularly when it is connected to the sales data that many companies already have. Platforms like Salesforce allow businesses to connect their analytics data all the way to the lead, opportunity and eventually even an account through APIs and third party platforms. In the world of B2B service providers, understanding and having this data readily available can help a business further optimize itself for even greater ROI potential. Here are five reasons why having this data is so helpful:

1) See Which of Your “Conversions” Are Actual Conversions

As mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is a great start for any business. Unfortunately, the standard setup doesn’t allow companies to fully understand their data when it comes to the amount of conversions an individual website might have. More specifically, it is hard to tell the difference between an actual conversion and when a goal completion is taking place due to spam.

By tying your analytics data through to your sales data, a company can better understand which “conversions” in Google Analytics are actual conversions and which are not. By having this data, the real value of your website can be more accurately understood and the amount of money a company is making online due to digital marketing efforts can become much clearer for a business.

2) Optimize Your AdWords Campaigns

If your business is running an AdWords campaign, understanding and optimizing your existing campaign can lead to a lower cost per acquisition and an understanding of what your cost per real conversion is.

What do I mean by this? Just because your AdWords report is telling you that you are paying $200 per lead (for example), doesn’t mean that is the actual cost. Leads that don’t actually translate into a sale, and “leads” that are actually spam, are not accounted for by AdWords or Google Analytics. By incorporating this data all the way through to your sales data, you can see what you are actually paying for a customer, a cost per qualified lead – not just a click on a button. For most businesses it is this number that you should be paying close attention to – not AdWords’ “Cost-per-Acquisition” field.

Furthermore, by using third party software like Bizible or Daddy Analytics, you can actually see what keywords people are searching for when they click on your AdWords search or display ads. This means that instead of optimizing for just a “conversion” in analytics, you can optimize based on the actions of leads who you know have become actual customers. This cuts out “acquisitions” that aren’t leading to actual customers and will make sure that your business is getting the best possible ROI out of an AdWords campaign.

3) Better Understand Your Buyer Behavior

Understanding what your actual customers do before they make a purchase is extremely important data to have readily available. By seeing where they go, how long it takes them to convert, and how many times they return to your site, you can better optimize your existing website to increase online conversions. While this data is available in analytics, seeing what actual customers do instead of just a lead that clicked a goal completion button will help paint a clearer picture of what pages on your website are providing the most value.

This is particularly helpful for content marketing. Justifying a business’ spend on content such as blog posts, webinars, infographics and other assets can be difficult to do, because the pages that house these assets are often not the ones that lead directly to someone buying a product or service. When a consumer’s behavior on a website can be tracked from when they entered your site to when they became a customer, it becomes clearer where these assets provide value. The ability to highlight an individual piece of content that appears regularly in the conversion process of users who actually become customers allows businesses to see the value content brings while simultaneously giving content marketers the evidence they need to show businesses what their money is getting them.

4) Understand What Devices Your Customers Are Using

At a time when mobile devices are beginning to overtake desktops as the main source used to connect to the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to understand what devices your customers are using and optimizing accordingly. Once again, analytics provides the framework to do this, but just because a large percentage of your visitors might be coming to your website on a mobile device, doesn’t necessarily mean that a large percentage of your customers are coming from mobile devices.

Making sure that your analytics is being sent through to your sales information will help solve this issue. Furthermore, it will allow you some insight into what the differences are between users who become customers on their desktops versus those on their mobile devices. Getting insights as to what the differences are between the two kinds of users, how much they are wiling to spend for a product or service and what differences exist between the two in what they view on your website will allow you to better understand your customer and optimize your website accordingly.

5) Gain a Clearer Picture of Where Your Customers Come From

While Google analytics data gives you a pretty good sense of where your traffic is coming from, tying that data to your sales information will allow you to better allocate your time and resources for specific channels. If you are paying for placements on sites, or trying to understand where your marketing efforts will be best spent, having data that shows you an actual value that dictates where your time will be worth the most is extremely powerful. For example, if you have three sales a week from your organic traffic and only one from referral partnerships you have built, it might make more sense to concentrate on building up your organic rankings through search engine optimization going forwards, as that is where the real value will be for your company.

Why this is Necessary for Your Business

Using analytics to optimize your online marketing sales is a necessity for any good online business. However, it doesn’t paint a complete picture of what is going on, and often can’t provide marketers the hard numbers to show what their efforts are doing for an online business. By tying your analytics data all the way through to your sales data, you can more effectively optimize your digital marketing efforts while also gaining the ability to show the real monetary value of your marketing efforts.

We have process, right?

If you are reading this article, chances are good your organization has built, or is in the process of building standardized processes for lead processing. Whether you have adopted a “waterfall” model or created your own variation, your model should closely represent your buyers’ journey from anonymity to closed business. Your model should be based on lead taxonomy and stage definitions unique to your solution(s) and buyer personas. (If not, we need to have another discussion entirely!) Let’s proceed on the basis that your process is defined correctly. So, we’re good, right? Maybe not!

Houston, we have a problem!

The issue is very likely hidden in the cracks between your process definitions, and should profoundly affect the way your organization approaches this step. In the Demand Gen world, it’s a basic tenet that you don’t nurture a lead being actively worked by sales. And yet, does your process indicate a single “lead nurturing” process similar to this over-simplified diagram?

If so, your organization may be missing out on a critical component of nurturing: the process is the same, but the intent is entirely different!

Two sides of the same coin.

In your buyer’s journey from anonymity to lead – especially in the B2B world and more so for long-cycle products or services – there are actually two distinct nurturing phases. Each phase may contain subdivisions unique to your buyer’s journey, but the process intent creates two distinct classifications:

1. List2Lead Nurturing: the process of moving the buyer from anonymity to involvement
2. Lead Nurturing: the process of moving the buyer from involvement to investment

To best illustrate both the similarities and the differences, these two classifications are best viewed on a chart measured against process intent, using a specific intent model.

Regardless of your organization’s intent model, nurturing is designed to simultaneously prompt buyer action and allow the buyer to move on his or her own schedule. Notice that there is functional overlap, but the difference in intent dictates we need two distinct processes to accomplish two distinct objectives.

Metaphorically Speaking…

As marketers, we are often too close to our subject matter to objectively see the fine differences in our own value propositions when viewed from a buyer’s perspective. Often, the best way to see those differences is to objectify them through metaphor. For example, if your organization sells financial services to businesses, change your metaphor to selling office furniture to the same set of businesses. The intent and movement along the buyer’s journey are similar, with your market nuances shaping the message delivery based on buyer personas and the value your product or service delivers.

Since the objective of Demand Generation is to create demand, it implies there isn’t necessarily an intrinsic demand. This is especially true if your product or service is innovative or new to the market. Even if your organization is an established market leader, we cannot assume that your prospects will automatically self-select into your lead process. We use a combination of inbound and outbound marketing channels to invite prospects into our lead process. This is where the nurturing processes diverge.

List2Lead Nurturing is focused on the movement from anonymity to involvement. Nurturing tactics in the List2Lead phase should be specifically targeted at generating involvement, not generating leads. This will seem counterintuitive to many traditional marketers and all of your sales team, it makes perfect sense when viewed from the buyer’s perspective. Let’s go back to our metaphor. Does your organization decide one day to trash its existing investment and purchase a new suite of expensive office furnishings without proper due diligence? (If so, Herman Miller wants to talk to you immediately!) Let’s build a buyer’s journey for that kind of purchase.

Start with “why buy?” What are the questions you would ask? Are the questions you are asking at this stage about the high-level advantages of new office furniture, or are they about fabric swatches and finish styles? How would you get those questions answered?

This is the List2Lead Nurturing stage. You are asking your buyer to become involved in the process, not make buying decisions. Your well-designed List2Lead Nurturing process will guide your buyer gently through the “why buy” question and into the “why buy from [your company]?” question with little friction. During this process, you will have demonstrated five of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s principles of ethical influenceⁱ (Reciprocity, Authority, Consistency, Liking and Consensus) and be well on your way towards properly positioning your organization for the next phase: real Lead Nurturing.

Let’s get real.

At this point, it may be occurring to you that you have many of the elements of List2Lead Nurturing as a part of your lead nurturing program already. What’s the point of changing your existing program if the components are already there?  The question can be answered by examining your own lead taxonomy. For example, if you are using BANT criteria, how many of your “leads” currently have an established budget? Authority? Right, that’s why Lead Nurturing is a non sequitur. Real lead nurturing only exists when your prospect is, or is very close to, a lead by your own definition. Real lead nurturing exists with the intent of converting (or re-converting) a prospect to a Sales-accepted Lead (SAL).

Real lead nurturing answers the question “why buy from [your organization] now?” This process is very distinct from our List2Lead Nurturing in that we have shifted from general, high-level advantages to more specific differentiating factors that spell out your competitive advantages to the buyer. The differences between these two conversations are dramatic, especially when we consider measurement! Yes, measurement.

What should we measure? How should we measure?

With Android making major gains as the top operating system for smartphones and tablets, is an Android-powered field technology ecosystem the future for field service?

If someone were to ask you, which is the dominant operating system today—Windows, iOS, or Android—how would you answer? With the prestige of products such as the iPhone and the iPad, many of us would answer Apple; however, recent research reveals that Android is proving to be the true victor.

It’s hard to believe that not too long ago Android’s little green robot was virtually unknown. Since its initial release in 2008, Android has made major strides in the mobile market, gaining 62% of market share in 2013, 26% higher than Apple’s. Other factors such as an increased number of tablet sales, have also helped Google’s mobile operating system climb to the number one spot.

As Android’s dominance continues, it poses the question: Will field service organizations soon be operating solely in an Android world?

Why Android is Winning

• Free Operating System: For starters, Android is prevailing because its operating system is virtually free, which has forced competitor, Microsoft, to change its entire financial structure. Until late, Microsoft profited by charging manufactures for using its Window’s operating system for desktop computers. The company tried to mirror this methodology with its mobile devices and charged handset-makers up to $20 dollar per handset. For handset- makers, this was a ridiculous fee that could be avoided by switching to Android, and it is the reason Microsoft was forced to reconstruct its business model.
• Runs on Multiple Devices and Manufacturers: Another factor in Android’s success is its ability to run on multiple devices. Unlike iOS that only runs on Apple products, Android is available on devices such as Samsung, Nexus, Motorola, HTC, and many others. Being able to run on multiple devices is key for field service organizations because it gives technicians more variety in what devices they can use, especially with the rise of trends like BYOD . To put this into perspective, a technician who uses Android OS can choose to operate on a Nexus 10 tablet and also use a Samsung smartphone, as opposed to a technician using iOS who can only use an iPad and iPhone.
• Affordable Products: Another key contributor in Android’s dominance is the affordability of its products. Devices that run on the Android OS allow for people to get the best of both words: superior technology at an affordable price. For field service organizations that provide devices to their technicians, Android is an attractive option because it is an opportunity to cut costs. For example, you can purchase the Nexus 10, a 10 inch tablet from Google with an HD display for $399, while a similar product, like the Apple iPad Air with a 9.7 inch screen and retina display, is priced $100 more at $499.

Will the trend continue?

As 2014 continues to unfold, the direction of the mobile market is still unsure. As research has shown, Android’s market share dominance is making the operating system a force to be reckoned with. Additionally, with the introduction of devices such as Google Glass and Samsung Galaxy Gear, Android will be able to capitalize on its first-mover advantage in the wearable technology market.

Although research has shown Android to be ahead of its competitors in market share, Apple iOS continues to be the most profitable operating system. Factors such as higher product price points, more app sales, and greater advertising revenue all contribute to Apple’s profitability. With that being said, the popularity of Apple products is undeniable. Based off my own observations, when I look around a room of tablet users, the majority are using iPads. Can you say the same?

And don’t forget about Windows Phone. Although Microsoft’s operating system is not as popular as its competitors, many users turn to Windows because of its ease-of-use and unique capabilities, such as Microsoft services integration.

In the end, deciding the best operating system for field service comes down to user preference. When choosing an operating system, field service organizations should keep in mind all of their options in order to find a solution that’s right for them. And if you’re considering an investment in a service management application, be sure it runs cross platform so you can keep your operating system and device options open. Because, as 2014 research confirms, you never know what the shifting technology tides might bring.

A Little Competition Never Hurt Anyone

While the constant tug-of-war game between Android and other operating systems can seem overwhelming to keep up with, it is actually good for your service organization. Competition between software companies keeps costs down and amps up innovation so consumers receive the most creative solutions. Software companies duking it out for the top spot result in better, more affordable hardware and software for everyone.

A Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Field Service Software: 9 Tips for Choosing a Mobile Solution that’s Right for You

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Much attention is paid to the cost per lead in B2B lead generation. However, what’s more important is the cost per sale. After all, that’s the outcome you’re seeking.

Let’s say a company sells technology solutions to operations managers. Its marketing and advertising efforts result in a list of 200 leads that costs it, for the sake of simplicity, $5,000. The company shares these leads with its sales people based on their territories. The sales people follow up and walk away with five closed sales. When you divide five into $5,000, you come up with the cost of $1,000 per sale.

How to Get More Sales Out of Leads

There are, of course, steps the company’s management could take to reduce the cost per lead by making better use of them.

Instead of sending all the leads directly to their sales force, they could put some inside sales people on the phone to qualify the leads. If they don’t have their own team, they can outsource this task to a qualified tele-services company that makes calls like these every day.

By talking with leads one-by-one, the tele-services agents may determine that 30 are qualified according to BANT criteria (budget, authority, need, and time to buy). So they only pass these qualified leads on to the sales people. The reps, excited to have qualified leads, charge forward and close 15 sales.

Now they’ve closed 15 sales instead of five – how could that be? Aren’t they the same leads? The truth is that the sales people didn’t follow up on all 200 leads. They checked out a few of the leads, found some that weren’t interested or could not afford the sophisticated technology, and quickly moved on to something they considered to be more important.

But that is not the end of it.

The company’s tele-services team also found another 70 leads who are interested in the technology solutions, and have the budget and authority to buy. But given their multiple priorities, they were not ready for the solution then.

They were not ready yet to move forward.

Over time, the tele-services team worked with these people, calling them to offer advice and sending emails with offers of white papers, e-books, webinars, and case studies that could educate them and help to move them through the buying process. They developed deep relationships, and 40 of these leads matured into sales qualified leads, of which 20 turned into sales.

Obviously the company added some costs for qualifying the leads and nurturing them, but now they’ve closed a total of 35 sales through lead qualification and nurturing instead of the original five. What’s more, the 20 sales leads that were nurtured led to larger sales. And those clients ended up remaining loyal for longer than the clients who did not go through the nurturing process. After all, that’s what typically happens when leads are nurtured with the human touch.

To recalculate the cost-per-sale, company managers would have to add the costs of phone qualification and nurturing to the original marketing costs, but with 35 sales instead of five, they’ll most likely discover a much higher return on investment (ROI).

For more information download our FREE e-book: Bridge the Divide Between Sales and Marketing.”

The B2B sales process has undergone a substantial transformation over the last several years. With the proliferation of the web and its impact on increasingly self-sufficient B2B buyers, firms are relying more on marketing to deliver sales-ready leads than ever before.

In the past, the “vendor” controlled the process. They had the information and buyers were dependent upon sales (or business development) people, advertisements, product sheets and brochures to get that information. But times have changed, and today’s B2B buyers spend a lot of time online researching solutions, arming themselves with intelligence to help them make better purchasing decisions.

As mentioned in my previous post, today’s B2B buyers go through nearly 60% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales. So what is your marketing doing to engage these buyers before they engage you? Here’s a list of 3 ways to engage buyers and better position your firm for the win.

1. Attract B2B buyers early on with the right kind of content

Content should play a critical role in engaging B2B buyers before they’re ready to speak with sales. But not just any content will work! What’s needed is customer-centric content—blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, emails, social media posts and web pages—that focus on a prospect’s needs at each stage of the buying cycle.

Sales material is not top-of-funnel content
B2B buyers in the early stage of the sales cycle (top-of-funnel) are not looking for features and benefits, company information or why they should work with you and not your competitors. They’re trying to ascertain their needs, figure out what options exist and be as educated as possible before even thinking about who to buy from.

Focus on the needs and interests of prospects
Your content should speak to what B2B buyers are interested in and searching for online, instead of focusing on your products or services. Be sure to leverage buyer personas and create engaging content that identifies and addresses the problems, challenges, questions and information gaps your audience might have and provide them with valuable information about those topics.

2. Build lead generation into the DNA of your website

The brochure-style websites of the past are no longer effective at engaging today’s B2B buyer. What’s needed is a powerful, marketing-focused website that has lead generation and conversion strategy at its core. A large part of engaging B2B buyers early on in the sales cycle is lead generation: turning an unknown visitor into an identified lead. It’s essentially getting them to “raise their hand” and express some level of interest in your company.

Convert unknown visitors into identified leads
Once a prospect has identified a need, they begin to research for potential solutions or partners. They’re looking for information to help them make a better decision once they’re ready to purchase. And if you’ve attracted a prospect to your website through creating early-stage, top-of-funnel content, you need strategies in place to convert an unknown visitor into an identified lead.

The process of lead generation
So how do you make lead generation happen? First, you should create premium content such as eBooks, whitepapers, reports and webinars specifically to address a buyer’s needs in the interest and consideration stage of the buying cycle (middle-of-the-funnel). Next you’ll want to create compelling calls-to-action and place them in strategic locations throughout your website. These calls-to-action should drive visitors to offer-specific landing pages where they are given the opportunity to provide some basic contact information in exchange for the content offered.

3. Educate leads and push them closer to the sale with lead nurturing

Once you’ve identified a lead, now what? Just because they’ve registered for your webinar or downloaded a whitepaper doesn’t mean they’re ready to sign on the dotted line. In fact, studies suggest that between 30% to 50% of the leads that enter a pipeline represent future opportunities, but they’re not yet ready to buy. But according to a Genius.com study, 66% of buyers indicated that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider.

Nurture relationships with leads who aren’t ready to buy
Lead nurturing is the process used to “nurture” relationships with leads who aren’t yet ready to buy, in order to win their business in the future when they are. One of the primary tactics is creating “drip” email campaigns related to the initial offer or topic of interest. Leads receive a series of relevant, automated emails at scheduled intervals that will keep them engaged over an extended period of time, with the goal of moving them towards a purchase.

Be there when they’re ready to buy
Once a prospect has considered their options, they begin to narrow down the choices and ultimately determine who to buy from. By providing helpful information to potential buyers throughout the sales cycle that can better inform their decision, you’ll stay top of mind and be there when they’re finally ready to make a purchase.

B2B buyers have certainly changed the way sales and marketing is approached. Yes, it’s still about relationships, but leading firms are not waiting to be engaged by potential clients. Instead, they’re leveraging the power of content and technology to initiate and nurture relationships by engaging buyers early on in the sales process.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier just wrapped up another weekend at #1 in the nation with a whopping $41.3 million turnout. It currently holds the top US box office opening ever for the month of April and has maintained a solid 70 score on Metacritic and an 89% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. 

It takes a Captain like that to manage today’s Sales Superheroes! 

In case you’re new to the idea, my ever-popular Sales Superhero talk breaks down the skills, traits, and personalities that make these successful sales professionals such killer Sales 2.0 operatives. As a sales manager and leader of superheros, you can’t do better than emulate Captain America. 

If might be tempting to see him as a little old fashioned, but here’s why sales teams still need The Cap:

1. Loyalty – The Cap is as loyal as they come. Once you’ve earned his trust, he’s got your back “till the end of the line.” That’s a great trait for a sales superhero these days and an even better one for a Sales Captain! With all the talk of lateral career development and job-hopping, it’s hard for a lot of people to feel attached to their companies — and vice-versa. But a sales leader who can develop a sense of loyalty (and instill one in their company, too) is a valuable asset.
2. Trustworthiness – Good sales leadership is built on trust — your reps need to trust your intentions and believe you really are working to advance their careers, not just your own. Your sales team will be far more open to communication and receptive to coaching if you can earn their trust from the beginning.
3. Acts on Principle – Captain America does what’s right and doesn’t have any problems standing up for it. Your squad of Sales Avengers need to know there’s someone running the show who believes in the mission and gives their work some purpose. Nothing will send young talent to your competitors faster than seeing a Gordon Gecko type running your sales team. 
4. Leads by Example – For the same reason that your office neighbors influence how you sell, a great sales captain will spread good habits throughout the team just by demonstrating them. Working hard to earn the trust of your reps, acting on principle, and being loyal will encourage them to do the same with their prospects and with the company.
   

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The post Being Captain America: 4 Traits Sales Managers Must Have to Lead Sales Superheros appeared first on TeleSmart Communications.

And other eggs-citing Easter-themed puns…

Easter is upon us and so, inspired by the Easter bunny, I thought a good topic for this time of year is bounce rates.

Bounce rates are one of the most cited metrics digital marketers use to tell you whether your website is engaging with your visitors. If you have a low bounce rate – that is, visitors are viewing more than the page they landed on – then they’re likely to be more engaged with your message, which will lead to valuable leads and better sales.

Conversely, if your visitors leave your site after viewing just one page, then they’re probably not engaged. But you’ve got to be careful here, because this engagement matrix is slightly more complex than it first appears. For example, if the page they landed on was exactly what they were looking for, then they might not need to view any more pages. So time spent on that one page also needs to be taken into account before that one page view is counted as a bounce.

If your website is suffering from low engagement, indicated by a high bounce rate combined with a low time spent on the site, here are our six top tips for cracking your website’s problems and putting the spring back in your website’s performance:

1. Have a good, clear design with easy-to-use navigation and a strong, visible call to action on each landing page that will drive visitors to the rest of your site.
2. Make sure your site is built to web standards that mean it loads quickly – channel the hare not the tortoise.
3. Make sure your site is easy to use on a mobile device – increasingly your visitors will be viewing your site on the go, and they won’t stand for a site that’s difficult to use on a smaller screen (a few months back over 17% of all web traffic was mobile, and that’s set to grow this year)
4. Optimise your landing pages to give your visitors what they were expecting – close the loop between SEO/SEM listing content and what your landing pages deliver.
5. Cut out distractions such as auto play audio or video. Many users will click off your site if they experience these unexpected intrusions, so just make this type of content highly visible but allow them to click to view or listen.
6. Split up content into easy-to-digest segments. Many people are time-poor and therefore won’t trawl through a thousand words to find the answer. Deal with the key points on your landing page, and invite visitors to click to read more to find their required information.

Following these simple steps will help you get the most from your company’s website, and provide your visitors with a more valuable eggs-perience (last one, I promise). Through this additional engagement and interactivity across your website, you will gain more data and be able to determine your visitors’ motivators and continually tailor and improve your messaging, enabling you to better serve your audience and generate more valuable marketing leads.

This blog post was originally published on the Novacom blog. Click here to view the original post.

On the surface, landing pages seem simple, right? They're one page with one form. They have a paragraph or two of copy, and an accompanying image. If you have all the elements of successful landing pages, you should be good to go ... right?

For a bare bones landing page, that is enough -- but you could lose out on valuable traffic, leads, and customers if you're just shooting for bare bones.

Think of this post as the first step of your game plan to optimize your landing pages. We'll walk you through some of the most common problems people have with landing pages and outline ways you can fix them. Keep in mind that there isn't always one *right* way to fix a landing page problem -- you may have to keep testing to see what works best for you. 

So if you want ideas on how to improve your landing pages, keep on reading. 

Landing Page Problem #1: No Traffic

Did you put together a landing page and have only your mom check out the page (and she didn't even bother to fill out the form)? 

If you want to send more non-mom traffic to your landing pages, check out which channels are sending you traffic now, and see where you could improve -- either by improving poor channels or doubling down on channels that seem to be working. Here are few ideas you can try:

Work on your SEO. 

You don't need to stuff your landing page with keywords -- instead, make sure that your landing page is about the right topics people are searching for, and is written in the same language your audience uses. Use similar terms to describe the offer behind the form on your landing page that your audience would use when searching for information on the topic. Besides just tweaking your landing page to be topic-focused, not keyword-focused, there are a few other SEO changes you can try.

Create more blog posts to promote your landing page.

If you have a decent blog readership, you can try including more calls-to-action leading to the landing page throughout your content and/or create more blog posts featuring those same calls-to-action. More quality blog posts means more potential opportunities to be featured in search results and get found on social media -- which means more traffic coming to your website. If you're looking to generate traffic to your landing pages through your blog, here are some more tips for you.

Build your social media following. 

It's possible that your social media audience is pretty small, which means that it can be harder to get people to your site from that channel. Want to learn how? Check out our guides for growing your following from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. That audience could not only convert on your landing pages in the future -- they could refer new traffic to those landing pages.

Keep in mind that landing page traffic is only one piece of the pie -- you could have hardly any traffic to your landing page but the people who are visiting your page are converting and they're great fits for your business. Sure, more traffic means more opportunities to convert visitors, but looking at the whole picture helps you make a more informed decision on what to fix first.

Landing Page Problem #2: Poor Conversion Rate

Getting people to your landing page but not getting them to complete the form? You've got to get creative if you want to get better results.

If you're stuck on how to fix this very frustrating problem, here are a few things you can try:

Find your proper form length. 

If your form is really long, you may be deterring people from filling it out. Run A/B tests to see how short you can get the form so you're still getting quality leads and making your sales team happy, but you're not putting your landing page visitors through too much to receive the content on the other side of your landing page.

If you've never run an A/B test before, here's a guide to show you how. 

Tighten your headline and body copy. 

It's possible that your landing page visitors aren't completely convinced they're going to get anything of value if they give over their information to you. If you've created compelling content that lives behind the form, you should spend time sprucing up your landing page to better reflect what people will get. Tell them exactly what is behind the landing page form and how it'll benefit them -- in the most concise way possible.

Tweak your promotional elements. 

You've got to promote your landing pages somehow. So ask yourself -- do your promotional elements accurately represent what's on the landing page? People will get annoyed if they expect the landing page to be one thing when click on a call-to-action on a blog post, and then when they get to the landing page, they're shown something completely different. Your promotional elements should never try to dupe people into clicking on them -- not only is it shady, but it's not going to pay off for you in conversions.

Landing Page Problem #3: Poor Funnel Conversion Rates

You already track the conversion rates on your individual landing pages, but you shouldn't stop there. Let's say you're using a landing page to generate leads. You should see how many people who come through that landing page turn into customers -- that's your end goal, after all. If you can keep the business in perspective when optimizing your landing pages, you'll be able to make smarter marketing decisions that'll benefit the whole company. 

You can try improving your overall funnel conversion rates by doing these things: 

A/B test form length and fields on the initial landing page. 

It's possible that your form is way too short and you're getting a lot of "junk" leads into your system. If you want to improve overall conversion rates, you might have to lengthen your form. Warning: You'll most likely get fewer leads into your funnel, but they should convert at a higher rate later on. You might also consider testing different form fields entirely to see if more in-depth questions bring in higher quality leads.

Want to figure out exactly how long your forms should be to benefit your whole funnel? Check out this blog post. 

Investigate the offer behind the landing page.

Sometimes, people fill out a form on a landing page, get the offer behind it (for this example, an ebook), and then are really disappointed in the offer. Maybe they expected the ebook to be a really advanced, in-depth book dozens of pages of content, but it's really a 5-page starter guide. They won't trust your content in the future if this happens -- once burned, twice shy, right?

You can avoid that disappointment and future hesitation by better setting expectations on the landing page -- or you can take a hard look to see if the content behind the page should be there in the first place. Ask yourself the hard questions, and don't be afraid to come to a hard conclusion: Is it worthy of someone's information? Is tailored to the audience who is filling out the form? Would I ever want to download something again from my company?  

If you answered 'No' to any of those questions, it might be time to re-do that offer.  

Launch tailored nurturing campaigns.

It's also possible that the rest of your landing pages are too far down the funnel from the initial offer to convert anyone. For example, the initial landing page was something very top-of-the-funnel -- an industry how-to guide. If you have no landing pages for middle-of-the-funnel offers -- content that talks about your company's place in the industry at large -- it's not surprising you'd have few people converting to customers. They simply haven't had enough information to advance to that stage of their buying process.

If that's happening to your landing pages, you can implement a lead nurturing strategy. This won't be on landing pages -- you'll have to use a combination of email, social media interactions, and smart content on your website to help people move on to the next stage in the buying process. If you want help figuring out how you should be nurturing leads, check out this free ebook.

Landing Page Problem #4: High Bounce Rate*

If you peeked into your landing page's analytics, chances are you've seen this metric before. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who viewed a page, then left your site. They didn't fill out a form, nor did they click to find out more about you. 

Sounds kind of similar to the "poor conversion rate" problem, right? That's because they're related. If someone's leaving your website without interacting with it at all, they're probably not going to fill out a form. That being said, you can have a low bounce rate and a low conversion rate if people are going to investigate other portions of your website. Since they're similar, a lot of the same solutions can be applied to both poor conversion rate and high bounce rate.

*That being said, bounce rate isn't necessarily a bad thing ... unless it's correlated with a short time on site, no conversions, or it's only happening on a certain device. Here's what you can do to address a real high bounce rate problem:

Decrease page load time.

If people are bouncing quickly from your page, there could be lots of reasons why. Most of them were covered in the "poor conversion rate" problem. But one wasn't: Your page may be loading really, really slowly ... so visitors clicked away. There are lots of little ways you can improve your site load time, such as changing the file size of your landing page images. Check out this post for some ideas.

Show certain content to just mobile visitors.

If you find that you have a high landing page bounce rate on mobile -- not desktop -- you've got to do something about it. More and more people are using their phones to access your content, and you don't want to lose out on valuable traffic and conversions because of it. On a large scale, you can fix this by making sure your website is completely responsive. But that may not fully fix the problem -- you can also try displaying certain content only to mobile visitors. Special mobile-only landing page features could help them better convert and consume your content. 

Landing Page Problem #5: Internal Disagreements 

It's much easier to defend yourself to your boss if you have a hard number saying something does or doesn't work. So if you're getting a lot of internal back-and-forth over what you should put on your landing page and what you shouldn't, let people put the data where their mouth is.

Is one person dead set on removing the top navigation on your website and another dead set on not doing it? Run an A/B test to settle that dispute -- and pretty much any other one that comes up. Only through testing will you figure out what works best for your audience on your landing pages. 

Landing Page Problem #6: Driving Traffic to Another Site Page

Did you notice your landing page is showing up as a large referral source to other parts of your website? That's not always good. If your landing page is sending traffic to something further down your funnel -- contacting sales or starting a free trial, for example -- it could be great. But if your "about" page is getting all the traffic, you might want to consider doing something about it.

If this is happening to you, I'd take a guess that the page getting the referrals happens to be in your top navigation -- it's easy to access and might be distracting for a first-time visitor on your site. To combat this, try removing your top navigation from landing pages altogether (here are instructions on how to do so). You might find that it helps increase conversions.

And that's all we've got, folks. These are just a few ideas for you to get started on the path to optimizing your landing pages in the face of common problems. Now's the time to roll up your sleeves and try some tests out.

What other problems do you experience on your landing pages? Share your questions with us in the comments and we'll do our best to diagnose them. 

What Makes Ordinary People Achieve Extraordinary Success?

I had the pleasure to interview international business expert Dan Waldschmidt about his new book and about the idea of being edgy as opposed to what I was told to be growing up. My dad used to say, “Honey, don’t make waves. Just go with the flow.” Having people like Dan in my life help counteract that little voice that pops up for me regularly.

http://scoremoresales.wistia.com/medias/hdwszqwza1?embedType=iframe&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=450

It is rare to meet an individual who stands out from the fray doing his own thing with no regard to the opinions of what others think of him. Sure, many of us say we don’t care what others think but we do. Dan Waldschmidt is the author of the new book, Edgy Conversations – How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success.

What distinguishes an extraordinary person?

How can you predict who will be successful and who will not?

Dan looked at 1,000 ordinary people and found that those who are willing to do a lot more work stand out ahead of the rest to become high performers. He will tell you stories about many of these people – how they were much like you or I and what they did that caused them to catapult into the next realm of success.

I can relate to Dan’s stories – and I loved to read them because the people profiled, like me, would not settle for what we were dealt early on. It is reassuring to read story upon story of people who just kept at it – when others said they should stop. They kept at it, and at it, and at it until they finally saw massive success.

In writing about this blog, as I have many times, I used to wonder who read it, and how could I possibly be a different or better voice to others than what was already out there? I’d go weeks or months without a comment to the blog. I ramped up the posts and started using software to help support the efforts. In just four years, I became recognized for my efforts, and that’s why I concur with Dan and love his message.

See more about Edgy here. Did I say I highly recommend it?

In talking about consistency, Dan discusses those who did the same thing day after day – consistently. You have a cumulative effect that builds up, while all of your colleagues are slacking off. He gives an example:

How do they cut marble or stone? They take a chisel or hammer and do the same tapping over and over. Eventually there is a crack because they began tapping – doing more of this, consistently, until it starts working. Then you have a beautiful piece of stone. It hasn’t changed over the years, and in this case, shortcuts don’t work as well.

I asked Dan if you are doing the same things and they don’t seem to work,  how do you know when to stop?

Dan said, “I didn’t interview a single person who said they did not stop soon enough.

He said they kept doing the same thing a bunch of times, and I started believing in myself.  Two years later, ten years later – it worked.

Dan’s takeaway – successful people just keep on trying.

Ignore temporarily the results or the facts.

Have a plan, and just keep executing.

The giving mindset is one of the four behaviors Dan talks about in the book. It is the  3^rd key behavior.

Dan says, “we really stink at giving. We seem to be bad at this universally. Giving not trading. Giving means you are not expecting a return.

Like boxing – I swing, you duck.

If you want to be transformational in business, you need to be giving.”

Dan”s example is  how Costco does the infamous food sampling at their warehouse stores.  Giving away food. Experts said, “You’re nuts – no one will buy food unless they are hungry”

At that time, so many advisers didn’t believe it would be a sound idea.

Costco also is an example when it comes to paying their employees better than average retail wages – many doubted that as well, but it has proven to set them apart in the retail pay discussions now, and has given them loyal employees.

The quickest way to accomplish success is through giving.

Human element – we are all a little bit broken.

Dan offers some tips for sellers –

Look people in the eye – be present

If you are in Inside sales – send a follow up email to assure a potential buyer that you have their back, even if they are not going to buy today.

We rely too often on technology to score our leads and follow up, and then we wonder why we don’t have a stronger relationship.

Heal yourself and help people heal – we all need a little help to help ourselves physically fit, mentally fit, and emotionally fit. It’s hard to focus on selling when you are deep in debt or your health is in dire straits.

Find a coach – we all need someone in our corner to help bring out our best.

“Now is the time to start working on the future you want. “

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

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. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

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

The post Edgy Conversations for Inside Sales – Interview with Dan Waldschmidt appeared first on Score More Sales.

Modern marketing is all about using technology to more efficiently and effectively produce revenue. Tapping into the “digital body language” of a lead interacting with a company’s content (websites, outbound emails, forms, etc.) provides a reservoir of opportunity for optimizing many marketing efforts.

Digital body language is the compilation of the digital activity produced by an individual as he or she interacts with your content. At a fundamental level, it is transactional data that is captured by marketing automation software. The data – which many times is referred to as an implicit profile – is captured by tracking scripts that are placed on a company’s owned websites and transmitted emails. Email opens, clicks, or forwards, website and blog visits, and Google searches are examples of activity that produce quantifiable digital body language.

Analyzing the digital body language data within the marketing automation tool accelerates leads through the buying cycle by giving you the opportunities to engage the leads. When leads see value in the information they are interacting with, their needs are being met and their questions are being addressed. Marketing automation software facilitates the alignment of leads’ needs by automatically routing leads to receive optimal messages – content – based on digital body language.

As leads interact with categorized content, their activity is analyzed and their digital body language is observed. Content (including whitepapers, web pages, and blog posts) can be categorized on factors like need, persona, and buying cycle and then tagged within the marketing automation software. As leads engage with the tagged content, the marketing automation software watches the interaction, “showing” various implicit perspectives of the leads (e.g., needs, persona, and buying cycle).

Related Class: Marketing Automation Fundamentals for Customer Engagement

Once interest is “shown,” leads can be segmented. Segmenting on this implicit profile, as well as explicit data points like company size and job role, significantly optimizes lead flow and conversion. Segmented leads can be engaged through a variety of marketing programs that have been set up previously. Examples of programs could include nurture campaigns, webinars, email updates, and website ads powered by tools like AdFocus and Bizo.

The more finite the segmenting, the better the lead engagement. Conversely: the more finite the segmentation, the more effort involved in the setup. Starting at a macro level and moving to a more granular level produces immediate results that can be improved on over time.

As leads engage with content, their digital body language provides insights into how they are moving along the buying cycle, when they are ready to be turned over to the sales organization, and even where they are “stuck” in the buying cycle. Through the marketing automation software’s logic and monitoring capabilities, modern marketers can systemically watch what leads are interested in and can continue the conversation based on those specific interests.

Looking to implementing an effective lead scoring program can help you see which leads are most active and, more importantly, which of them are ready for a sale? Tune in to Mary Wallace’s Online Marketing Institute’s class, Lead Scoring Program Fundamentals. Enroll today to learn how to adopting a lead scoring program results in a faster and more effective sales process and ultimately, open up more revenue opportunities for your business.

A successful appointment setting campaign can be a double edge sometimes. Having a lot of leads and meeting so many prospects essentially means loads of opportunities.

It also, however, means loads of work for your salespeople and your appointment setters. You don’t need to see the signs of stress to realize that there’s a point when you need to call it a day.

Everyone wishes they had more time. Even if you managed to cut your work time in half (like in this Hubspot guide), who’s to say someone higher up would want to crank it up to the next limit?

Want more bad news? There’s really nothing to stop it. That’s how a business grows. You don’t get too complacent. You find ways to do more with less so you could do more. It sounds ironic at first but sooner or later, everyone gets bitten by the expansion bug.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything all at once. If you’re getting a lot of leads or at least find yourself in a position that they’re too many to handle, set it aside for another time. The same goes for your marketers. When there’s still just a lot to be done in terms of outbound marketing, content creation, qualification etc, then everyone should save some strength for another day.

The next questions would be: How much work is too much? When exactly do you cut off? How do you maintain productivity?

• Step 1: Establish an average – Whether it’s an average amount of closes, appointments, blog posts, or even landing pages, it must be established. This will be a sort of foothold where going above it means possible exhaustion and going below it means decreased productivity.

• Step 2: Use average as a cutoff – When it looks like your people are at their limit, check the proximity of their results to the average you’ve established. Use that to determine the amount of work they’ll have to finish next time.

• Step 3: Plan for next week’s work – You’ve already established that there’s more work to be done. It only makes sense that you should at least start planning ahead. Ask salespeople to review their prospect details for next week’s appointments. Meet with your marketers about how they will organize their efforts.

• Step 4: Never stay too long under the average –Complacency is the result of staying too long under your established average rate of production. Although, don’t be too quick to start pointing fingers. Investigate the drops and then do what you can to fix what’s wrong.

Calling it a day isn’t the same as calling it quits. Neither should it mean you’re getting too lax about your job. Funnily enough, it can actually be pretty productive when you know how to divide your work across days.

Sales Training Article: Stop Playing Leads Bingo

By John Holland, Chief Content Officer, CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company

Image courtesy of Annankkml at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

During the 90's rash of technology buying, tradeshows peaked as events that "buyers" flocked to. A significant portion of Marketing's budget was allocated to renting booths, filling them with demo equipment and flying in staff from headquarters and the field to address the onslaught of visitors. Smart vendors tried to get their booth near the entrance to maximize flow and offered bags that were useful to visitors.

The bags were necessary for collecting the various trinkets emblazoned with company logos that helped attract visitors. There were T-shirts, flashlights, Nerf balls, sunglasses, etc. that could be gotten, often in exchange for filling out "bingo cards" with contact information that were ultimately distributed as leads to salespeople. It resembled adult trick or treating.

Register for the next sales training workshop to learn how to lead with value instead of product.

For companies with hot new technologies, it was appropriate to lead with product demos in attempts to have early market buyers find them. For most vendors, booths attracted potential users whose sole interest was learning more about products. Buyers had little interest in the potential value of offerings and few had any buying authority.

bingo cardA telecommunications company I was working with came to the realization that these "bingo cards" were mostly a great drain of sellers' time and asked me for help in upgrading the entry levels they might achieve at a show they had already committed to. I suggested printing T-shirts and offering them in exchange for visitors filling out a questionnaire that posed the following question:

The last time your telecommunications network went down, who (name and title) complained the loudest and how was their business day was interrupted?

By using this "quid pro quo" approach, they were able to enter companies at higher levels with some understanding of what value their offering could bring.

Thankfully, interest in tradeshows has waned. They cost a great deal of money and continued to cost vendors valuable seller time in trying to follow up leads. The approach suggested to my client about the questionnaire recognized visitors were lookers rather than buyers.

One of the reasons tradeshow popularity faded is they have been replaced by Websites. How many of the "leads" being generated today are nothing more than electronic bingo cards that will yield low close rates? History has a way of repeating itself even if the medium is different.

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Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.

Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.

If you want to find new potential customers, you need to go to where the people are. And, fortunately or unfortunately—depending on how up-to-speed on current trends your company is—all of the people seem to be on social media sites. Hey, the statistics don’t lie: Facebook users spend on average 6.35 hours a month on the site via desktop computers.

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