A few years back, I wrote a post about leverage: “the ability to influence a system, or an environment, in a way that multiplies the outcome of one’s efforts without a corresponding increase in the consumption of resources.” Leverage, in other words, is advantageous to business because a low amount of cost/effort yields a relatively high level of return. As it goes for business, so it goes for Sales.

Do you employ leverage to get the most from your sales organization? One way to accomplish that is to deploy sales tools. Back in 2010 when I first wrote about the topic of leverage in Sales, I talked specifically about DiscoverOrg.

Apparently, providing sales organizations with a way to benefit from leverage is a great business model because they’ve been on a tear making it onto the Inc 500 list each year since. They’re also a 2014 SIIA Codie Winner.

DiscoverOrg produces insights and contact data on more than 300,000 IT decision makers at more than 16,000 companies. If you sell to IT organizations, you need this information.

Can you get it yourself? Certainly, if you hire and train a full-time staff of researchers and have them contact every one of the companies until a complete org chart and profile are completed.  Then have them go back and cross-check the data every 90 days to ensure quality like DiscoverOrg does.

That would not likely be a good investment on your part. However, paying a relatively small fee to have access to that information would be a good investment. If you sell to IT organizations, here are just a few of the things you’ll need to know or learn about your prospect in order to sell effectively.

• Who makes the decision?
• Who reports to whom?
• Which part of the organization is responsible for buying the types of things you sell?
• Who are all the players involved in influencing a decision?
• What technology do they currently use?
• What is their IT strategy?
• What are their key IT initiatives and challenges?
• What are the emails, phone numbers, and job titles of the IT contacts?

If your Reps are calling on IT organizations without this information, you have handicapped them unnecessarily and that will restrict their ability to accelerate sales. On the other hand, if you give your Reps this critical data at a tiny fraction of the cost of collecting and refreshing the data yourself… congratulations! You’re using leverage.

Last week, I co-presented a webinar with DiscoverOrg about the need for changing the sales number’s game alas Moneyball.  If ever there was a story about using leverage it is how the Oakland A’s were able to scout for and successfully recruit players worth millions at a fraction of the cost. How this came to be is described in a wonderfully entertaining book (and later, a movie) by one of my favorite authors,  Michael Lewis (check out his new book called Flash Boys).

In the webinar, I argue that you can’t compete in today’s world of Sales using the same number’s game that worked in the past. That our game is ripe for a change and those who make the change first, will reap the rewards just like the Oakland A’s did. So how can you get more sales with the same amount of effort and resources? Listen to the free webinar recording to find out. You’ll hear about:

• The biggest problem with the Sales number’s game as it exists today.
• More statistics and trends that strongly signal the need for change
• The tools to help you execute a game-changing strategy without breaking the bank

You’ll also see how DiscoverOrg created a niche solution that changes the game for sellers of IT solutions.

Whether or not you’re able to re-engineer the game of recruiting for prospects like the Oakland A’s did for recruiting players will come down to one thing—creating leverage.

Building strong, stable and reliable sales teams is critical to sales performance, certainly in the long term. Sales rep turnover affects sales production, team morale, customer loyalty and ultimately, the bottom line, so it is incumbent on executive leadership to reduce or avoid unwanted turnover in the sales force.

Hire the Right Reps – Reps who perform well typically won’t want to change jobs for fear of jeopardizing their income, so hiring reps that are uniquely suited to be successful is a critical part of avoiding turnover (see Hire Smart or Manage Tough). This means not only committing to hiring the best reps (see The Traits of Top Sales Performers) versus the best available (see Do you hire the best sales people, or the best sales people available?) but also becoming a magnet for top sales talent (13 Mistakes That Prevent Employers From Attracting Sales Talent), knowing the profile of the rep that will excel in your organization and developing expertise at sales recruiting and hiring. For more on hiring sales people that will be top performers, see more articles on recruiting top sales people.

Compensate Well – According to sales people we speak with, one of the biggest factors influencing a sales rep’s decision to leave an employer is the feeling that they should be receiving higher compensation for their work or talents. In many cases a rep receives less than what they are worth because of flaws in the sales compensation plan or execution (see Three Reasons Sales Compensation Plans Fail). To ensure that your sales compensation plan and approach is not triggering unwanted turnover, reps need to feel that they are paid at least fairly, if not more, so it is critical to make sure the comp plans are simple to comprehend and result in at or above market pay for the sales person (see Components Of an Effective Sales Compensation Plan).

Set up to Succeed – While money may be a big factor in career choices of sales people, according to the Sales Benchmark Index (The Truth Behind Why Your Best Sales Reps Leave), “their number one complaint is lack of coaching from their boss. Reps don’t feel they get the care and feeding from their direct supervisor.” Sales reps are not self managing (see The Myth of The Self Managing Sales Rep). In order to be successful, they need proper leadership, coaching, support and infrastructure. If a rep feels these things do not exist, and that they are not set up to be successful, they are likely to start looking at other career options.

Start Right From the Start – Surprisingly often, a sales rep will join a new employer with the wrong impression about what the role entails or with insufficient support and development to become productive quickly. To avoid losing great reps that are hard to find leading employers have comprehensive and structured on-boarding programs for new sales people to make sure they are successful (see 4 Ways to Set up New Sales Hires to Succeed).

Have Fun – Achieving superior sales is not easy. In fact it requires a lot of hard work and as the old saying goes, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” which translates to being boring and then in turned, bored. People who are not enthusiastic about their work are inclined to underperform and will look to make career changes, so it is critical for sales leadership to find ways to bring a fun factor to sales work. To avoid turnover, it can’t be all grind all the time, there must be downtime and outlets for letting off steam. A smiling rep is a rep who sells more. It is also a rep who is less likely to change employers.

Read more on avoiding sales rep turnover:

19 Simple Ways to Make Your Best Reps Leave
The Top 7 Ways to Keep Your Reps Happy

To your success!

image courtesy of imagerymajestic | freedigitalphotos.net

Salespeople make or break your business.  It’s that simple. So the stakes are literally (business) life and death when it comes to hire a salesperson.  Yet it is shocking how many bad salespeople there are and how casual many companies … Continue reading →

The post [Infographic] Hiring Bad Salespeople May Be Killing Your Business appeared first on SalesDrive.

Negotiations are tough, but even if the idea of negotiating scares you a bit, you don't have to be a pro to get what you want. Scientific American points to three simple, research backed tips that can help you get what you want.

Read more...

Above: Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

By now, you’ve probably heard about the father who found out his daughter was pregnant when Target sent her coupons for diapers.  Or the dad who opened his mailbox to find direct mail from OfficeMax addressed to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed in Car Crash, or Current Business.”

In this age of big data, it’s become all too commonplace for data-driven marketing to feel creepy, overly familiar, or just plain wrong.

This uneasy feeling is known as the uncanny valley. Robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the term to describe the way people react positively to increasingly humanlike representations, until the point at which they become too close to a real human being, when they suddenly become repulsive. It’s this phenomenon that makes clowns and zombies so unsettling, and it’s at play when targeted marketing goes awry.

Rather than the personalized and relevant interactions that these methods promise, consumers experience targeted ads as an unpleasant mix of accurate, annoying, and alarming. As tech writer Farhad Manjoo put it, “Targeted web ads are too dumb to be useful and just smart enough to make you queasy.”

But when big data promises marketers big results at the push of a real-time bidding button, where do we go from here?

To better understand the tightrope that brands face with targeted marketing, we studied more than 8,000 consumers, working with them to understand their opinions on everything from data privacy to loyalty programs. We conducted this research during the summer of 2013 across 52 of our private online communities, using surveys and open-ended discussions.  Group difference tests were performed with age, gender, and country as independent factors.

We found that consumers overwhelmingly prefer anonymity online: 86 percent of consumers would click a “do not track” button if it were available and 30 percent of consumers would actually pay a 5 percent surcharge if they could be guaranteed that none of their information would be captured.

On the flip side, consumers may be willing to share their data if there’s a clear value exchange: 70 percent said they would voluntarily share personal data with a company in exchange for a 5 percent discount.

Some attitudes towards data privacy seem to be age-driven; general interest in exchanging personal data for deals, for example, decreases with age (62 percent of the “Silent Generation” would keep their data private rather than get perks, while only 40 percent of Millennials say this). However, when presented with specific personalized marketing scenarios, consumers showed similar levels of acceptance across age groups.

It is also important to note that not all targeting is created equal; familiar brands have more freedom to use data in marketing efforts.  Offers based on purchase history with a known company are perceived more positively than those based on predictive models or targeted marketing from unknown companies. Indeed, we found 74 percent of consumers think its ok for companies to offer personalized coupons based on their purchase history, but only 13 percent think it’s acceptable for any company to buy or sell personal data in order to personalize.

Consumers are not just distrustful of targeted marketing; they don’t find it to be particularly useful, either. Only 14 percent of consumers, if given the choice, would shop by receiving targeted offers based on their online search and purchase history. Sixty-two percent would prefer to find promotions and discounts from multiple vendors at one centralized site, while 24 percent (more for males and those under 50) would like the opportunity to broadcast their shopping needs to invite retailers to bid for their business.

So what can brands do to avoid creeping out their customers?

1. Exchange eyeballs for engagement.

   Instead of trying to reach everyone all the time, push at moments of intention. Consumers express a desire for a more open marketplace in which they can bypass targeted efforts and proactively initiate brand interactions based on their unique needs.

   These consumers feel that brands should focus their marketing efforts on times of active shopping rather than infiltrating their online lives hoping to distract them with advertising.

   For example, Valpak, an icon of the direct marketing industry, recently added an augmented reality component to its digital coupon app. Consumers hold up their device to see which local businesses have Valpak coupons available; businesses with coupons pop up on the map with information that allows the user to interact with the business at the same time they’re ready to make a purchase.

   Stop chasing reach and instead think about how to respond to customer needs dynamically and in real time.  What would a “consumer RFP” look like for your brand?

2. Don’t become a slave to the big-data machine.

   Just because you have information, doesn’t mean you have to use it.  Our data shows that acceptance of targeted marketing practices varies widely depending on the type of data being used (e.g., earned, inferred, bought) and the nature of the existing relationship with the brand.
   So know your boundaries, avoid sensitive topics (e.g., birth, death, finances), and respect the relationship (or lack thereof).

   Remember, helpful personalization from a familiar company becomes invasive targeting when it comes from a stranger. Marketers need to tap into their own empathy and judgment, and couple machine-driven methods that rely on volume and velocity with collaborative, interpersonal approaches such as private communities.  Doing so is key to finding meaning, not just patterns, and to telling stories, not just visualizing points in time.

3. Use data to create value.

   Big data can be used to personalize the entire brand experience, not just advertising. This means giving customers the keys to drive their own personalized defaults to shape their ongoing interactions with you (e.g., how they navigate your website, type and frequency of communications, privacy settings).

   Also, think about new ways to use data to serve customers rather than yourself.  Show them how their behavior compares to others, or provide tools for tracking, analyzing, and even exporting their transaction history.

   The UK’s Midata Initiative, for example, is working with utility providers, mobile operators,  banks, and others to share data back with consumers, allowing them to track, analyze, and spot  correlations and trends in their behavior over time. In this way, individual consumers become liberated actors who are both more engaged with your brand and actually armed with better data when they do want to share.

And above all, remember the golden rule. You wouldn’t want someone hunting through your trash, real or digital. So stop looking through the window and instead ring the doorbell.  Better yet, unlock your own front door and welcome your consumers inside as true collaborators. When there is a fair and explicit exchange of data for value, consumers are quite willing to share; to be tracked, even.  You might just find that what they have to give is better than what you would have taken.

Katrina Lerman is senior researcher at consumer collaboration agency Communispace.

Google does not yet have a smartwatch on the market. Nor does Apple. But for more than a year, smartwatch darling Pebble has been shipping wrist-based gadgets to eager consumers ready to take the next step in evolutionary computing. To date, it’s put more than 400,000 devices on wrists.

To see what makes Pebble tick (and tock) in preparation of my upcoming interview with Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, I decided to pay a visit to the Palo Alto headquarters of the fledgling smartwatch maker.

It’s an unprepossessing office on a leafy street, blocks away from the Caltrain commuter rail station—and from Migicovsky’s home—making for a short commute. The first thing you see when you walk into Pebble is a display of T-shirts and other giveaways. The company also sees the occasional walk-in sale of its smartwatches (a good way to beat some of Pebble's shipping delays). Yet there isn't a proper storefront. Instead, a Pebble employee swipes their card on a Square reader at the front desk.

Most of Pebble’s 70 employees work in the Palo Alto office, though there are some employees still in Canada, where Pebble got its start, and scattered elsewhere around the world. Migicovsky recruited one developer from Wroclaw, Poland, whose watch face had been downloaded 68,000 times.

Business development and finance have their own area in Pebble headquarters.  

The concrete-walled building is open and filled with light. Some engineers use an Ikea Löva canopy to shade their monitors.

As I poked around corners of the office, I rapidly saw signs that this was a different kind of startup from the typical app developer shop. There are less hardware makers in Silicon Valley then there used to be. Circuit boards and electronic-testing equipment are scattered in corners throughout the office, as well as an area for handling returns and repairs.

What’s impressive is how much Pebble has done with a handful of employees. While Apple and Google have created a lot of buzz about their plans for wearable devices, Pebble has actually been building and shipping wearable devices.

That is no accident. Pebble has been at this for a while. Before the first Pebble smartwatch, there was the Allerta InPulse, an early notification watch that worked with BlackBerry and some Android smartphones. A conference room still has an old InPulse poster, and there are stacks of boxes of the older devices that serve for a bit of nostalgia.

Designing The Wearable Future

At Pebble, there is as much emphasis on the future as there is on the past. In a near-hidden room that’s easy to mistake for a storage closet, Pebble has a design lab, with dozens of watches on display full of boards of design inspiration, from the anatomy of the forearm and wrist to studies of why consumers want smartwatches.

Pebble's leader Migicovsky works at a standing desk near the center of the largest room in the office. From that perch, he lends the place a sense of steadiness and calm, under a sign that declares the office a “no-bullshit zone."

Crunch Time For Pebble

There's no time for bullshit in Pebble’s business. Despite the Pebble’s early lead, it's clear that the giants of the smartphone business don't intend to be left behind by the coming wave of wearable devices. Pebble doesn’t have a color display or a touchscreen interface, like some upcoming devices. But it's not clear whether it needs those bells and whistles.

Pebble’s advantage is simplicity and focus. The smartwatch does a few simple things well, especially notifications that let you leave your smartphone in your pocket. For the rest of Pebble's features and functions, it depends on its growing ranks of independent developers, who create watchfaces and apps that users can load onto wrists. I’m a fan of the Foursquare app: I always feel rude taking my phone out to check in when I’m meeting someone. With the Pebble Foursquare app, I can check in with a few button taps.

What will the future hold for Pebble? I’m looking forward to hearing that from Migicovsky himself at ReadWriteMix.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Most sales people think about objections as being a bad thing, a lot of sales people and worse leaders, get really uptight when it comes to objections. Often before we have even began to define parameters with stakeholders, they’ll say “Oh, and we need an Objection Handling session”, they want to take a tennis approach to managing objections, prospect “throws” out an objection, and they want to hit it back to them. But objections are really not a bad thing, not always convenient or easy to manage, but they are not a bad thing.

Here are three specific reasons why objections are not always a bad thing (no specific order):

• Indicate engagement
• Allow you to introduce more value/information/facts without pitching
• Allow you to qualify – disqualify buyers

The goal here is not to specifically give you techniques, but more to get you to relax a bit and see how objections are good for you, your sales, humanity, and global warming.

Keep in mind that for the most part objections come up in two ways, when you are trying to engage or prospect them, (we did a six part series on this, you can find Part I here). The second is when you are trying to gain agreement, either during the sales on specific points that will move things forward, including simple Next Steps, or at the end when you are trying to complete the sale. In either case, what follows will help you put things in a different perspective and let you use the objective to improve your selling, as a whole, and in specific deals.

Indicates Engagement – Even though some objections during the prospecting phase are knee jerk on the part of the buyer, the fact that they “are responding” allows you if prepared, to deal with that objection and segue to a conversation, key is being prepared. As you get into the sale, the objections will be more specific, a direct reflection of what the buyer is thinking, and how they are interpreting what you are saying, and if they are not clear, an opportunity to correct course. Even towards the end, with the lowest form of objection, the price objection, it is an indication that they are involved, capitalize on it.

Allow you to introduce more information/facts/value without pitching – Every time they object, they are in effect asking a question of for clarification, what a bonus. You can get a sense where their thinking is at, introduce additional elements. You can usually go deeper, and more importantly ask for more clarification on the part of the prospect. “Help me understand what you mean by…” Many objections are really questions, or the buyer evaluating things and they vocalize them, it is my chance to recalibrate, add useful value elements, align with the buyer, and move forward.

Allow you to qualify – disqualify buyers – Sellers are always looking to qualify buyers, well their objections are a good qualifier, and as I have argued in the past, if your qualified prospect to closed ration is less than 50%, your time is probably better spent disqualifying those that you know will not close based on experience, which will leave you with more “qualified” buyers. Objections are a great way to disqualify, if you cannot manage and move beyond, you need to accept that it is time to move on, rather than play objection tennis, where you always lose. The big thing is that every time you disqualify a prospect, you have to replace them with a new one. Which is why some sales people would rather pretended they doing productive things by dealing with insurmountable objections, than doing some prospecting.

How you deal with objections is a different post, and there others out there with some great ways. But first you need to deal with how you view objections to begin with.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

Integrated marketing is one of the most important – and effective – ways for marketers to reach their target audience. A successful integrated marketing strategy uses a consistent identity throughout multiple marketing channels to support a brand’s marketing and sales function. Developing an effective integrated marketing strategy is a time-consuming process. The following marketing tips can help marketers develop an effective integrated marketing campaign that has a dramatic impact on how brands reach their target market.

Focus on the customer. The customer has to be first. Know who your customer is, what your customer wants, and know a lot about your customer’s spending habits in order to utilize the right marketing mix.

Be persistent. Stop changing directions. Successful companies maintain a marketing campaign for an extended period of time. The average marketing campaign lasts 2.3 years as it may take time for a particular campaign to catch on.

Weave marketing into training programs.  Marketing aspects should be weaved into all of your company’s training programs.  This approach creates a seamless transition from one department to another.  This training process will also ensure that everyone knows how to handle a consumer who has a question from any one of your brand’s marketing channels.

Provide excellent service where your customer needs it. Giving your customers great customer service is a given.  Here, I’m emphasizing the importance of knowing exactly what service your customers need.  Do certain buyers prefer accessing your website using a mobile app?  Do some buyers prefer asking questions on your company’s Facebook page?   Talk to your customers and find out exactly what they need from your company.

Take advantage of social media. Social media is a marketing channel that can coincide with an array of other channels.  Social media can also help your brand utilize other marketing channels – like email marketing, video marketing and SEO.

It’s not just about the multichannels. Many marketers are quick to define integrated marketing as multichannel marketing. While integrated marketing involves using multiple channels to communicate a brand’s message, integrated marketing is more about putting the consumer first. Once your customer is the star of your integrated marketing strategy, your brand can gain more traction in the marketplace.

The integrated marketing tips provided can help digital marketers develop an effective integrated marketing strategy. Don’t forget to start by identifying your brand’s customer and doing the research necessary to learn more about your customer’s needs.  Maintaining a consistent voice helps ensure that brands are properly represented in the marketplace.

If you have any integrated marketing tips to share, please post them in the comments.

Objections are inevitable. Responding well makes the difference.

The objections come fast and furious, flying at your head as though shot from a tennis-ball machine.

"This is too expensive."

"I've never heard of you."

"We don't need what you are selling."

Salespeople know they will be shown the door more often than a Price Is Right contestant. But there is a difference between rejections (which are final) and objections (which must be recognized and addressed). Objections are a natural part of the sales process. If the buyer's not finding something to question, she's probably not paying attention.

Rookie salespeople want to dismiss objections as quickly as possible. So they "answer" before the buyer has a chance to explain her concerns. If a buyer has just told you, "The price is too high," you shouldn't come back with, "No it's not! Let's talk about ROI!" That's like giving the buyer a stiff arm to the face and will likely cause her to dig in further.

A better approach is to acknowledge the objection and offer a follow-up question. So, for example, you might say, "Tell me more. Is it way more than you planned to spend? Or is your budget spoken for by other things?" By starting a conversation around the objection, you demonstrate confidence and credibility. The buyer may say something like, "Well, a bit of both. Your pricing seems high. And because this is new to us, we hadn't budgeted for it anyway." Now you're talking.

Additional follow-up questions allow you to address the objection head-on. "I totally understand. Let's discuss both. Our pricing does skew higher because we include a level of service that we believe goes much farther than other options. When you purchase products, how do you factor in service quality?" Alternatively, you might say: "I totally understand. I realize that I'm bringing an entirely new opportunity to the table, and this may not be the right time for you. If that's the reality, I get it. When things like these come across your desk, how do you decide whether this is something you should explore?"

Stay in questioning mode as long as you can. Resist the temptation to dive to the answer. That can be hard, especially if you've already heard the same objection 10 times this week.

Once the buyer has had an opportunity to put some flesh on the objection, it's time to respond. Trot out your ROI argument. Tell her why you are here to stay. Show her how other buyers who didn't think they "needed" your product benefitted.

The final step of handling an objection is to close that part of the conversation. Probably you won't have radically altered the buyer's perspective. But you've given her something to chew on. "Thanks for walking me through that," you say. "I've got some perspective on your decision, and that's helpful. Can we leave that topic for now and move on? Or do you have additional concerns about this?" Show the buyer that your confidence isn't shaken.

Not all objections are surmountable, of course. But such conversations yield lots of information about how customers make decisions. You may not win the sale. But you will have learned something.

My Leads are Running Out! Now What Do I Do?

Welcome to the 21^st century, the era of information in which any and all answers to be desired are a mere Google search away, where impersonal communication trumps the personal, where streams of data don’t run through buyer minds but rather flood, where successful marketing strategy is changing at a rapid rate.

Essentially, an information overdose has spoiled today’s consumers, making them the most knowledgeable group you’ve ever faced. With this knowledge comes a strain of skepticism—a strain so thick that it has forever changed the buyer-business relationship, and not for your benefit.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: buyers no longer trust businesses and, perhaps more importantly, they no longer trust your advertisements. This distrust runs so deep that consumers, like you and an ex after a breakup, are driven to go out of their way to avoid an awkward encounter.

Suddenly, office doors are locked and secretaries are trained only to say the word “unavailable”, phones ring without answer and voicemails are screened—every wall they can build now stands between you and a potential lead. To parody Charles Dickens, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times—the best of times for data craving consumers, the worst of times for marketers eager to draw them in.

So, the question arises: how do you obtain and retain a lead in the skepticism of this era of information?

STEP 1: Buyers Have Changed, Have You?

• The results of a study conducted by GroupM illustrated that, in nearly 60% of all consumer journeys that end in purchase, the starting point is a search.

What this means for you: Businesses have to accept the fact that the internet has now entered the buying cycle, and it is making waves. It’s no secret that, since the mid-90s, the internet has forever changed how people do what they do. In today’s market, that includes the way in which they do business. Essentially, the first meeting between a possible buyer and your business is face-to-screen, not face-to-face. That means a lead has information on you long before you are able to schedule an interview. Therefore, your internet presence and presentation is of higher value than ever before.

• Is Everyone Who Visits Your Website Ready to Purchase?

What this means for you: Perhaps 15% of consumers who visit a website are ready to make a purchase. (Also depends on the type of business you are in) Patience and hard work in the form of lead nurturing is of the upmost importance. Efforts to nurture a lead will spawn buyer trust and loyalty in the buying process. Even 8 to 12 interactions with your business on the same page will not get you anywhere. If you want to convert that visitor into a customer, it is going to require the funneling of the right information over the right time period.

• 78% of consumers say that posts made by companies on social media influence their purchases, as reported by Forbes.

What this means for you: It is time for your company to position itself on a collision-bound course with your prospective buyers—and that course runs right through social media networks. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, you name it—that is where your leads are spending some of their time online. In short, if you want to catch a fish, you have to go where the fish are biting. Today, that lake is filled by the streams of various social media outlets.

STEP 2: Do You Have the Right Bait to Catch the Big One?

Once you get a consumer to your website via search engine or social media or the like, your work is not finished—it has only just begun. The challenge now is to hold the attention that has just been given to you.

• In 2000, the average attention span of an American consumer was 12 seconds. Today, that average has fallen to a mere 8 seconds, a second shorter than that of a goldfish.

If you are going to convince buyers to stay on your site, you are going to need to do it quickly, very quickly. How? With site offers and features designed to incite interest and convert these visitors into potential leads: incentive offers, calls-to-action, landing pages, blogs, and social media widgets.

Offers

Offers are incentives for business, solutions to problems, or educational material aimed at helping buyers overcome the challenges they may be facing. They are presented in the form of ebooks, case studies, checklists, whitepapers, and other informative documents that can be accessed and downloaded at the click of a mouse.

Calls-to-Action

Calls-to-action are buttons or links on your website that push viewers to take action and, essentially, to interact with your business. For example, “Download Now” or “Attend a Webinar.” When calls-to-action are done right and in sufficient quantity, they can ensure visitors will keep coming back for more.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are the webpages attached to call-to-action buttons or links that promote your offers and bring your company screen-to-face with a potential buyer. These pages provide visitors with the opportunity to download your offer and give you some basic information so you can nurture them into becoming a potential customer. As HubSpot published, companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads than those with less than 10.

Blogs

Blogs rich with multi-media content including articles, videos, and links to intra-site material topics that are of interest to your ideal consumer are key in attracting visitors captivated by today’s multi-media world. Increased frequency of a site’s blog also increases leads, for 92% of companies that blog multiple times a day acquire a customer through that blog.

Social Media Widgets

Social media widgets are toolbars embedded in your site’s pages that encourage easy sharing of content on a variety of social networks. By giving visitors the option to share the content they are viewing to Facebook, Twitter, Google + and more, you are appealing to their desire for connection while also boosting the number of eyes your name and brand can potentially reach.

STEP 3: If You’re Not Tracking, Which Direction Do You Move In?

After implementing all the strategies and tools above, how do you know if it’s working for you? You must track the activity your company is receiving online, assessing both the traffic on your website and the content connections being drawn through social media networks. If you are still not obtaining or retaining the amount of leads you desire, make adjustments and keep making adjustments until you get there. After all, in this era of information, one must adapt to overcome the difficulties presented by the skepticism of today’s buyers.

Quite simply, this era of information has changed everything—even business. When the internet entered the life of your buyers, it entered the life of your business. No longer can you afford to leave your generic, or brochure like website alone. If you want to reel in the right buyers, you need the right line, the right hook, and the right bait. Devote your efforts to implementing site offers and features that cater to today’s consumers problems and interests,…MAKE IT ABOUT THEM! That’s when you will get those information-overloaded skeptics to bite—and keep them on your line time after time.

You don’t need to be a data scientist to figure out that the world is going mobile.

The sales of mobile phones and tablets tell this story as does Apple’s cash hoard, $158 billion as of January 2014.

Along a similar line, eMarketeer projects that mobile ad revenue will triple over the next three years.

Drilling down to what’s important to PR, are consumers and B2B buyers getting their news and information on mobile devices?

Again, check the box.

A Pew Research Center study from last year shows well over half of smartphone and tablet users consume news on mobile devices.

OK, this isn’t exactly a breaking insight.

But it’s the velocity of the mobile movement that I’m not so sure is well understood by PR. This velocity becomes clear in plotting out the percent of mobile views of my blog going back to 2011.

After watch-the-grass-grow numbers for 13 quarters, the pace has doubled during the past six months with 33 percent of views now on mobile devices.

As the communications function continues to come up the curve on business storytelling, it now needs to also consider how to shape this storytelling so it plays on mobile devices.

This means jumping on the responsive design bandwagon and making sure your owned media assets, especially blogs, deliver mobile-friendly content. If your blogs reside on WordPress, there are plugins that make it easy to deploy responsive functionality. In spite of my own blog’s hurting design, I was pleasantly shocked to find it actually looks better on a smartphone.

It also means thinking through the type of content that works best on mobile devices. It’s too early for best practices to emerge, though common sense says shorter stories and greater use of visuals resonate with mobile users.

Yet there’s nuance to the issue as reflected in the Pew research called out earlier that noted:

• 73 percent of tablet owners and 61 percent of smartphone news consumers read longer stories at least sometimes.

That’s why it’s important to experiment and learn from the experimentation of others, particularly media properties like Quartz, The Verge and and BuzzFeed built from the start to deliver an online experience.

I think it’s fair to say that the time has come for PR to bake mobile into campaigns and launches.

As tough economic conditions coincide with a game-changing shift in consumer behaviour, many SMEs are finding themselves struggling to generate well-qualified leads, and in turn, make sales. Not only are these companies likely to lose the battle of matching or topping previous sales, but their working culture also suffers, as marketing and sales departments lock horns in a row over poor lead conversion. If this rings true for your business, smart content marketing may be the solution to your predicament, working wonders to both streamline your marketing and sales operations and boost sales.

The numbers speak for themselves when it comes to the changing landscape of customer behaviour: according to iMedia Connection, 93% of business buyers use online search to begin the buying process, meaning that instead of talking to the salesperson before making a purchase, today’s buyers are doing the due diligence themselves, online.

With consumers more clued up than ever, it’s crucial that companies are capable of attracting and engaging customers at the primary research stage. Informative, useful content, that competes with the digital content your prospects are consuming is the key to doing exactly this and if delivered at the right time, can gradually qualify your prospects without the hard-sell that many buyers find off-putting. What’s more, a smart strategy, marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software take the legwork out of nurturing your leads and boosting sales.

The first step should be to use your CRM platform to record all prospect interactions – this is really important, as you can then analyse this data to see which content is gaining initial interest from prospects and which is pushing them further down the sales funnel. This insight can be used by marketing to create content maps for each individual prospect’s journey, whereby the first piece of content acts as a springboard for a unique stream of continual communications. This means that if a prospect reads a blog on your website about, say, dealing with sales challenges, a few days later you can send them a link to a whitepaper you’ve published on the same topic, and so on.

If this sounds labour-intensive, think again: after an initial upfront effort in creating your content, marketing automation software makes distributing it a breeze by automatically sending  out content following the content map in response to prospect activity. What’s more, setting up automated scoring within your automation software will give you tangible insight into a particular prospect’s level of engagement. This awards points based on a prospect’s content consumption, with each piece of content scored according to its influence on the conversion process.  A webinar watch, for example, would have a higher point score than signing up to your newsletter or reading a blog post. Once a prospect accumulates a certain number of points, they are automatically sent to sales through the CRM. This benefits marketing by taking the pressure off, and means that only prospects likely to convert are sent to sales, meaning Sales are no longer wasting their time chasing poor quality leads.

Marketing automation not only sends out the right content to the right prospect, it also does it at the right time – at a certain trigger point – showing the prospect that your company is listening to them and appreciates their interest. At the same time, it facilitates the capture of an unprecedented amount of lead intelligence, giving companies greater insight than ever and ensuring that sales know every last detail about their leads.

A strategy like this also accommodates those prospects who aren’t ready to qualify: undercooked leads are simply pushed back into the marketing pot and are nurtured with a further stream of tailored communications until they are ready to be pushed back in the sales funnel.

Now, the sales department is getting to work only with the hottest prospects and thanks to the intelligence gathered in the nurturing process, they’re geared better than ever towards closing more deals. They know exactly who their leads are, what they’re looking for, when they want it and how much they want to spend. This data can be used to tailor the approach to every potential customer.

After a deal is closed, it’s crucial that your newly-converted prospects aren’t forgotten – tailored communications that provide aftercare must also be integrated into your strategy, to ensure that your customers are getting the most out of their new purchase. This is when you show your customers that they really matter and that their business is valued.

Furthermore, by continually assessing which content is doing the job and which is failing, marketing can establish the most effective way of approaching prospects. Even cold prospects are not redundant, as data on their behaviour enables marketing to improve their communications.

By this time, the blame game between marketing and sales should be over, with both departments working hand-in-hand with a closed loop of information that allows them to pass on customer intelligence and feedback to one another. No opportunity is lost and the business is well positioned to build genuine relationships with customers, while at the same time enjoying soaring sales.

Dropbox now has 275 million users, most of them consumers who use the service to store their personal files and images. But it’s precisely its popularity at home that could help Dropbox at work, as the company pushes out its latest Dropbox for Business update Wednesday.

All Work And All Play

Last November, Dropbox announced some long-awaited updates to Dropbox for Business. The most crucial one was a tweak to Dropbox's familiar, simple interface: In place of the single desktop file folder labeled “Dropbox,” business users would find two folders, one labeled “Personal” and one named after their employer.

Those updates are now live. Dropbox users whose workplace has paid for the service can share pictures, videos, documents and other files, switching between work and personal files without having to juggle two accounts. At the same time, their employers can manage their work files without touching their personal files.

In the past, Dropbox customers had to switch accounts, use kludges like Chrome's incognito browsing mode, or just mix together personal and business files. While it seems obvious that people might want to share all kinds of files with Dropbox, accommodating this scenario was actually quite a technical problem for the company. It required a full-scale rebuild, according to Ilya Fushman, head of Dropbox for Business.

That rebuild frees up Dropbox to build new features, while keeping most of the simplicity Dropbox is known for. In the place of one folder for all your files, there are now two. 

Its rollout comes at a critical time. While Dropbox retails storage services to consumers and businesses, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are slashing prices for wholesale storage. In the short term, this seems like it should be good for Dropbox, dropping the price it must pay Amazon and other service providers for storage and bandwidth. In the long run, though, it seems inevitable that those savings will get passed on to consumers, challenging Dropbox's pricing.

Box, a Dropbox competitor which recently filed to go public, is emphasizing its collaboration features and industry-specific apps built on its platform. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have their own Dropbox competitors, Google Drive and OneDrive, which they are weaving closely into their own suites of online apps.

People Power

Dropbox's account-linking strategy takes full advantage of its biggest asset—its 275 million users, whose ubiquity is a big reason why it's worked its way into businesses in the first place. People use the tool they’re familiar with in the workplace, and when they need to share with contractors, partners, or other outsiders, the odds are good that they, too, have a Dropbox account.

All those consumer accounts—most of them free—still have value for Dropbox. They are word-of-mouth marketing for the brand and built-in leads for its salesforce. That’s why Dropbox is a prime example of how a consumer-friendly tool can work its way into businesses.

Still, some workplaces ban Dropbox, fearing that files will leak out through it. Can Dropbox find its way into these locked-down environments with complex security requirements? 

It already has in some cases. Here are some of the features Dropbox has rolled out, in the hopes of getting a slice of the IT budgets currently going to giants like IBM and Microsoft:

• Remote wipe: Systems administrators can automatically wipe a business account if it thinks the account may be compromised—just the business files, leaving personal files untouched.
• Downloadable audit logs: Customers can have more visibility into who is sharing which documents. Those logs can then be put into an analytics system like Splunk for deeper probing.
• Account transfer: Turnover is a fact of business. Account transfer—a feature already seen in Google Drive—moves files from an ex-employee to a current employee.

Even with these new features, Dropbox faces an uphill battle in courting businesses against Box and Microsoft, which have more feet on the street calling on large businesses.

Microsoft is the real power when it comes to documents, thanks to its Office suite, where so many work documents begin. Office is increasingly tied into OneDrive, the company’s file-sharing and -storage service.

It seems unlikely that Dropbox will hire a large army of salespeople to respond. It still has more jobs listed for engineers than for salespeople—and its sales openings include titles like “sales engineer” and "solutions architect.” While others sell, sell, sell their products, the updates to Dropbox for Business represents a bet that the company can engineer its way to customers’ hearts—at home, and at the office.

Really terrible Photoshop, for which he apologizes, by Owen Thomas for ReadWrite

Sales productivity and effectiveness are two of the most common levers for driving growth in any company. But what do these terms really mean, and how do we optimize investments in these areas for maximum results?

Productivity vs. effectiveness – what’s the difference?

At first glance, this is an easy question, but it has complicated implications: “Do I want my reps selling more or selling better?” Inevitably, the answer is yes, better, and yes, more. Of course, given today’s selling environment, we want it all. Can we have both, though? Let’s take a minute to break down these terms and see what we can learn.

On the surface, productivity and effectiveness produce a similar result – good, impactful work. However, when weighing the benefit of one over the other, management needs to distinguish between when they’re striving for positive change on an operational level and when they’re looking for an increase in the volume – and velocity – of revenue won. The difference between productivity and effectiveness can be summed up in one example – no VP of Sales would ever want to close more deals year-over-year without increasing actual revenue.

I’ve worked in several high-growth companies where “speed is better than perfection” has been the de facto approach. The race is always on to claim first-mover market share, maximize a moment of competitive advantage, or to create the market. In these cases, the quicker reps could get our story out to more people, the better. We created buzz in the market and pipeline grew.

But then, some interesting things started to happen:

• Product Marketing was bogged down with one-off requests for help
• Ten-legged sales calls were a standard and expensive approach for advancing deals
• Our CRM system tracked an increasing number of stalled opportunities
• Intensive negotiations were often required to get deals across the finish line

Ultimately, we lacked the ability and machinery to guide our reps through an effective, repeatable and scalable process that was known to drive the best chance of success.

The lesson learned here is that you can’t drive rapid revenue growth without the skills, processes and tools to drive effective, consistent outcomes – productivity without effectiveness won’t get you where you need to go.

Realistically, no sales leader would ever have to choose productivity over effectiveness, because one leads into the other and vice versa. Sales productivity is the end result of sales effectiveness, which is about selling smarter. When companies can implement strategies or technologies to increase sales effectiveness, they set themselves up to address and solve issues with sales productivity. The goal of every sales organization should be to sell more, and to sell smarter.

So how can you improve your effectiveness?

Successful companies begin optimizing effectiveness by identifying the most common selling scenarios their sales reps face, conceptualizing these scenarios from the buyer’s perspective, and aligning this perspective with the organization’s sales process.

This optimization is accomplished by identifying repeatable tasks, activities, engagement tactics and outcomes that have occurred at each stage across won deals. Once the sales motion is understood and documented, the approach can be modeled and coached to the field. Many companies may achieve this through a pre-fabricated process or methodology, or with the help of a training partner.

Once the process infrastructure is identified, the focus needs to shift to embedding this model of skills, tasks and knowledge into the daily workflow of the field, and enabling sales leaders to guide and coach these best practices.

So how can you improve productivity?

Productivity improvement emerges in the very notion of enabling the sales workflow. If you’re prescribing a best practice approach, you need to support it with tools and technology that enable reps to complete the related tasks and activities efficiently.

For example, you might implement marketing automation to capture and communicate lead nurture data, CRM for automated pipeline management and sales reporting, and a sales enablement platform to automate tasks such as team selling and collaboration, document customization, relationship and value mapping, account planning and proposal generation. Automating the necessary administrative and non-selling activities required of reps creates more time for advancing opportunities.

Which is more important?

At the end of the day, successful companies find a balance between productivity and effectiveness. If you have too much process, then productivity suffers. If you have too much productivity, chances are sales execution will suffer. You need to define productivity for your company, understand how reps spend their time working opportunities, determine what to solve and how.

If you’re investing in the development of process and skills, then you’d better equip your reps with the tools they need to execute those best practices – efficiently AND effectively. Reps require more than pure knowledge to execute effectively. They need context and coaching on how to apply their knowledge to drive value in sales opportunities.

Today I’m going to look at how by neglecting the natural lifecycle process of an organisation, companies risk damaging their customers’ trust.

Companies are born, they’re established or formed, they grow and develop, they reach maturity, they begin to decline and age and – if nothing is done to refresh them and align them to the market – they eventually die. This is the nature of people (except we can’t be revived!), of products and of organisations and yet many of the businesses I work with are not aware that a lifecycle misalignment with their customers is one of their biggest reasons for falling sales.

I spend most of my time talking with companies about truly understanding their customers and building their explicit and implicit wants and desires into their customer experiences and value propositions. While this is critically important, it is equally important to ensure that you are aligning with your customers in how you go to market. Companies’ future successes also lie within their own organisations and their evolving states of development.

Evolution and revolution

In Larry Greiner’s seminal Harvard Business Review 1972 paper ‘Evolution and Revolution as Organisations Grow’ (© 2014 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Reproduced with permission from Harvard Business Review/New York Times), he gives a few great examples of the symptoms of crises, such as:

“Key executives of a retail store chain hold on to an organisational structure long after it has served its purpose, because their power is derived from this structure. The company eventually goes into bankruptcy.”

Does this remind you of any recent organisations? Kodak and Blockbuster perhaps?

“A large bank disciplines a ‘rebellious’ manager who is blamed for current control problems, when the underlying cause is centralised procedures that are holding back expansion into new markets. Many younger managers subsequently leave the bank, competition moves in, and profits are still declining.”

Does this sound like any financial institutions you’ve recently read about or know?

Each growth phase in Greiner’s model is made up of a period of relatively stable growth where no major upheavals occur (he calls this evolution) followed by a crisis when major organisational change is needed if the company is to carry on growing which he calls revolution.

Below is a diagram that shows this process, paraphrased from the points in Greiner’s article:

And below is a summary of the ‘6 Phases’ Greiner shares in his article:

Phase 1: Growth through creativity

With the birth of an organisation the focus is on creating a new product or service and creating a market. Characteristics include:

• The founders are usually technically or entrepreneurially oriented, they often disdain management activities and their energies are absorbed in making and selling a new product or service.
• Communication is frequent and informal
• Long work hours are rewarded by modest salaries and the promise of ownership benefits
• Control of activities comes from immediate marketplace feedback. The management acts as customers react.

This period ends with a crisis of leadership where professional management is needed that can steer the organisation and pull everyone together.

Phase 2: Growth through direction

If companies have survived the first phase they continue to grow under new directive leadership. Characteristics include:

• Growth continues and more organised structures are introduced for different functions
• Systems are introduced for accounting and customer management
• Budgets and work standards are adopted
• Communication becomes more formal
• New leadership and management team set the direction

This period ends with a crisis of autonomy where lower level managers demand more say and involvement. Many companies flounder here as, while delegation and autonomy are seen as the solution, companies who have been in this stage for a long time have not developed their people to be able to make decisions for themselves.

Phase 3: Growth through delegation

• Greater responsibility is given to managers
• Profit centres and bonuses are used for motivation
• HQ executives manage the business by exception based on periodic reports from the field
• Leadership focuses on new acquisitions that can be lined up beside other decentralised units
• Communication from the top is infrequent

Decentralised managers with greater autonomy have been able to penetrate new markets and respond faster to customers but leadership sense they are losing control over a highly diversified business. This period ends with a crisis of control as local managers wrestle with leadership who try to pull together a total company once again. Companies that succeed move ahead with co-ordination techniques.

Phase 4: Growth through co-ordination

• Decentralised units are merged into product/service line groups
• Formal planning procedures are established
• HQ staff are hired to initiate company-wide control programmes
• Capital expenditure is careful weighed up and parcelled out across the organisation
• Each product group/service line is treated as an investment centre where return on invested capital is an important criteria used in allocating funds
• Stock options and company-wide profit sharing are used to encourage whole firm identity

Both HQ staff and business unit staff criticise the bureaucracy that has grown. Local managers resent interference from HQ staff and HQ staff complain about the lack of cooperation from managers. Procedures take precedence over problem-solving and, as a result, innovation is dampened. The organisation has become too large and complex to be managed through formal programmes and rigid systems. The next phase is underway.

Phase 5: Growth through collaboration

This builds around a more flexible and behavioural approach to management. Its characteristics are:

• Focus on problem-solving quickly through team action
• Teams are combined across functions for task-group activity
• HQ staff numbers are reduced and reassigned to consult with, not to direct, the business units
• A matrix-type structure is frequently used to assemble the right teams for the appropriate problems
• Previous systems are simplified and real-time systems are integrated into daily decision making
• Conferences of key managers are held frequently to focus on major problem areas
• Educational programmes are used to train key managers in behavioural skills for achieving better team work and conflict resolution
• Rewards are geared towards team performance rather than individual achievement
• Experiments in new practices are encouraged throughout the organisation

This phase ends with a crisis of internal growth where further company growth can only come by developing partnerships with complementary organisations.

Phase 6: Growth through alliances

Greiner recently added this sixth phase where growth may continue through extra-organisational solutions such as mergers, outsourcing or networks involving other companies.

A crisis of growth may occur because an organisation is more focused on alliances than on its own core business and there is a good chance that an identity crisis will present itself.

The organisation may be taken over completely by other businesses and the ‘old’ situation will disappear completely but the cycle in the new organisation will continue.

(end of paraphrase from Greiner’s article)

Recent experience

I have been working with a number of global organisations recently (many of them household names) that are excellent at selling new products and services to their customers yet singularly very bad at managing those same customers beyond the initial sale. We can argue that the solution to this is putting in place key account management but that alone would only be a sticking plaster approach (Band-Aid for our American readers) without looking at what organisational phase of development they are in, and how their phase is misaligned with their business to business customers.

The big issue here is the changing power of the customer; the customer now has much more power than ever before due to the Internet, technology and liberalisation of communication across countries. One of the mechanisms for responding to your customers’ power shift is to understand specifically where your organisation is in its development phase and how well you are either matching or missing your customers in the process.

One of our customers (we’ll call them ‘Alpha’) was in phase 2 and hitting the crisis of autonomy where their customer-facing staff were demanding that a more formalised account management process and organisation be put in place, and that they manage it. They were frustrated by the lack of Alpha’s support for this. Their customer (we’ll call them ‘Beta’) was equally puzzled by Alpha’s lack of flexibility in account handling and also their slow pace at responding to requests. Beta was currently in phase 5 and were demanding more collaboration, they were much more nimble and innovative and couldn’t understand why Alpha appeared not to want to work with them on new initiatives.

Once the phases and the different stages of development were made plain to both Alpha and Beta’s leadership teams, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. They could actually get on with the task of figuring out how they were going to work together despite their very big organisational and behavioural differences.

How to use the model

It’s probably important to say at this point, that this approach can be done either at an in-depth, rigorous level or it can be done at a more surface level – the kind of level my colleagues would call ‘quick and dirty’.

The key questions for business leadership to determine are:

1. Which phase are we in?
2. Do we know the limited range of solutions available to us at our phase?
3. Do we realise that solutions to one phase will breed a new set of problems during the next growth phase?
4. How is the customer-facing part of my organisation impacted by the phase we are in AND what customer management solutions are available to us?

This requires considerable self-awareness on the part of top management, as well as great interpersonal skill in persuading managers that change is needed. Is it worth the investigation? Absolutely. You will understand each other’s perspective which always leads to better understanding and better working relationships. Most importantly, this could be the single most reason why your business thrives or dies. So when we’re talking about large companies with a significant number of people employed, isn’t it worth a bit of discomfort pointing out where and how change is needed, to not only save the company but potentially save many hundreds or thousands of job and people’s livelihoods.

Do you recognise companies who are very much out of step with their customers and can you see if this has anything to do with their mismatched phases of development?

Please do share your opinion about this article. I’d love to hear from you.

Reference

Greiner, Larry. 1972. ‘Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow’. Harvard Business Review. © 2014 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Reproduced with permission from Harvard Business Review/New York Times

—————————————————————————————
Cindy Barnes is a business and psychology consultant. She is clinically trained in Transactional Analysis and uses this in her business work with companies.

Her background is in product and service innovation, business development and leadership. She is founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Futurecurve who are value solution architects and builders. Futurecurve helps companies navigate from a product ‘push’ focus to a true customer ‘pull’ focus, enabling them to out-perform their peers by delivering genuine value to customers. Customers include global corporations, governmental organisations, start-ups and not-for-profits. Contact Cindy on Twitter @cindy_barnes

All of Futurecurve’s qualitative research understanding customers is based on Transactional Analysis and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and they have combined this approach to create their world-class approach which uncovers both what customers think, how customers feel and how and why they behave as they do. Futurecurve are the pioneers in using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in business and in showing businesses the emotions and motivations of their customers.

In the digital age, more and more communication takes place via email and text messaging, but a person-to-person conversation is still the most engaging way to contact a prospect and convert him into a customer. If your sales are down, perhaps you should reconsider your timing and preparation for making contacts.

Why Cold Calling Still Works

Cold calling, contacting someone you don’t already to know, is one of the most effective ways to make a business connection because it’s so direct and personal. Note, however, that once the conversation begins, you only have about 20 seconds to launch a great first impression.

Your prospect’s reaction is decided in moments and you’ll likely be able to gauge by the end of the call whether the prospect is warm or cold. On the other hand, a marketing email or campaign piece, though effective and compellingly well-written, is less personal and once mailed, is beyond your control; it may not even be opened and read for days (or never), and even if opened, you may not get a response.

Cold Call Timing

Research has shown that the best time to contact a prospect is between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. and between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Calling at these times catches the prospect first thing in the morning when his mind is fresh and he has not yet become too involved in the workday. Likewise, at the end of the day, he is winding down and preparing to relax and therefore may be more receptive to a call that could help him with tomorrow’s work.

The worst time to call a prospect is between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. when he is returning from lunch and energy is at its lowest point of the day. The best weekday to call is Thursday, followed by Tuesday then Wednesday. On Thursday, the week is nearly over and minds are beginning to focus on the weekend. Fridays and Mondays are the worst days to contact prospects as these are the least productive days of the work week.

Peak Interest Timing

Additionally, Stride’s analysis of response metrics has revealed another optimum time for contacting prospects. Stride had a set time in the a.m. for contacting prospects after collecting their opt-in responses to their email drip but discovered the open rate for these email contacts was very low. Changing the strategy to contacting prospects within 30 minutes of receiving their opt-in address dramatically increased open rates.

Calling prospects within half an hour of demonstrated interest in your business is the optimum time for you to close sales. While interest is fresh in their minds, they are much more likely to be open to engagement, as opposed to say calling the next day, when they have already forgotten what you’ve spoken about.

Achieving Positive Results

According to research done by Forbes, businesses lose 46 hours and 53 minutes before they pick up the phone and call a lead and only make 1.3 call attempts before abandoning the lead and moving on to the next. These are warm opportunities lost from prospects who have already shown interest.

Rather than engage the lead while interest is high, businesses allow the lead to languish and then don’t do enough to follow through and establish contact. Following up within 30 minutes, as Stride discovered, may be seen as positive and responsive by the prospect and direct the path toward closing a sale.

To increase your conversion rates, take steps to improve the quality and effectiveness of your sales calls and make them during the optimum contact hours. Research your prospect in advance and find out as much as you can about his organization and needs.

Get a working understanding of the industry and determine specific and viable solutions you can offer to resolve actual challenges. Your prospect may appreciate your knowledge and be more receptive to an approach tailored to real needs than a canned, generic sales pitch.

Speak naturally and never read from a script; it always sounds practiced and insincere. Once you’ve engaged your prospect in conversation, take good notes and review them immediately afterward to ensure you capture the pertinent issues while the conversation is still fresh in your mind. Pay attention to your prospect’s responses and listen more than talk. When you follow up, you will have your notes to remind you of what you discussed.

Success Metrics

To measure your success rate, track all metrics on your sales calls, including the number of calls you make, the time of day and day of the week you called, whether you actually spoke with the prospect or left a message, the length of your conversation, level of engagement and number of sales closed. Analyze your results over time and look for correlations between metrics. This will give you valuable information for adjusting your timing and increasing your conversion rates.

Reconsidering the times you make your sales calls and really knowing and understanding your client’s industry and needs can contribute to helping you close more sales. It’s all a matter of research and timing.

Mike Kamo is the VP of marketing for Strideapp. Stride is a Cloud-based CRM and mobile app that helps small to medium sized agencies manage and track leads, as well as close more deals. They can be found on Twitter and Facebook.




 

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are one of the most over-used and little understood terms in business development and management. They are too often taken to mean any metric or data used to measure business performance.

The role KPI’s play is much bigger and more important. In fact, KPI’s are one of the most important guideposts for any business. Every business should have them.

Here’s one of the best definitions I’ve heard: KPI’s are an actionable scorecard that keeps your strategy on track. They enable you to manage, control and achieve desired business results.

You don’t need a lot of metrics, but you do need to carefully select, report, and take action from the handful you choose. Let’s break down this definition so it’s useful for your business, especially considering the guideposts available on the internet.

Desired Business Result

Always begin the construction of KPI’s with a clear understanding of the desired results. There’s nothing wrong with starting by saying you want to sell more of what you make. But try to be a little more specific. How will you do it? Will you:

1. Shorten the sales cycle by half
2. Generate 50% more leads
3. Create a new usage occasion
4. Get loyal customers to buy 30% or more

If you are clear about where you are going, you can construct KPI’s that get you there.

An Actionable Scorecard

(“Raw #’s:” The top left portion of the Whiteboard)

Now, pick the handful of measurements (generally no more a half dozen or so) that you believe are most important to the achievement of this goal. For example, if you wanted to shorten the sales cycle by half, you could measure:

1. Keyword search for the term(s) that describe the need your brand meets
2. Unique visitors to your website
3. “Bounce Rate” to determine if your site is relevant and people view more than one page
4. Sales (if products are sold on your site)
5. “Average Shopper Value,” since buying more can help determine if you’re meeting your goals

Keep your strategy on track

(The rest of the Whiteboard):

Figure out the “Source” for the “Raw #’s” and how frequently (“Freq”) you report. Then, in the second column, set goals to measure “Progress” to seem realistic to the achievement of the desired results. Finally, in the third column, pick a comparison period like the previous year, or the previous month if you are a start up. Now, the key measurements are more than raw data; they are actionable metrics.

Of course, that’s one opinion, but there are others.

Here’s how 12 experts define Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

• “A metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.” – Avinash Kaishik
• “Measures that help decision makers define and measure progress toward business goals. KPI metrics translate complex measures into a simple indicator that allows decision makers to assess the current situation and act quickly.” – KAIZEN Analytics
• “A KPI: 1) Echoes organization goals, 2) is decided by management, 3) provides context, 4) creates meaning on all levels of the all organizational levels, 5) is based on legitimate data, 6) is easy to understand and 7) leads to action!” – Dennis Mortensen
• ”The most important performance information that enables organizations or their stakeholders to understand whether the organization is on track or not.” – Bernard Marr
• “The selected measures that provide visibility into the performance of a business and enable decision makers to take action in achieving the desired outcomes.” – Aurel Brudan
• “The data necessary to understand the implications of whatever he/she sees and the wherewithal to take appropriate action.” – Shalin Shah
• ”Measurable industry, department or task relevant performance metrics that are evaluated over a specified time period, and compared against acceptable norms, past performance or targets.” – Allan Willie
• “Measurements of activity that is a vital gear in your business machine.” -John Standaloft
• “Help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organisation and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors.” – Bruce Clay
• “A set of quantifiable measures that a company or industry uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals.” – James Oh
• “High-level snapshots of a business or organization based on specific predefined measures.” – (Avinash)
  
• “Should not constitute every company metric for analysis and evlaution. Rather, KPI’s should reflect the most important objectives of the business.” – (Avinash)

Do these definitions help explain KPI’s to you? Have you thought about what is the actionable scorecard for your business?

How to Get Past Cold Calling written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Andrea Hewitt – Enjoy! 

photo credit: Abby Maddison/Red Nova Labs

Cold calling is proven to lead to high levels of anxiety for at least 40 percent of sales people during their careers. That’s why every company should strive to get to the point where they can stop relying completely on cold calling and finally see hot leads coming down the pipeline.

Unless you become a giant corporation, which is not the case for most companies, you’ll still be tracking down new clients through cold calls. It’s the perfect way to touch base with many potential customers that wouldn’t find you otherwise.

But how do you transition to less cold calling and more customers coming to you? Start with these four steps and you’re sure to see more hot leads coming your way:

1. Provide a great product or service

The easiest way to draw people to your brand is to have an incredible product or service to offer them. Find a need in whatever market you want to break into, and make something great to fill the void. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. Find something that needs to be updated and create a better version. If your product is good, people will talk about it and you’ll start to see positive feedback that could attract potential customers.

2. Network every chance you get

If you focus on a specific industry, get to trade shows and use the opportunity to spread the word about your products. If you’re trying to sell to a specific region, go to local festivals, gatherings, and any opportunity for you to mingle with community members and leaders. Hand out as many business cards as you can, then let the customers come to you. Utilize every opportunity to hit the pavement and you’ll be sure to build awareness of your brand.

3. Create an awesome web presence

One of the main ways you can drive leads to you is to have an incredible web presence. If it’s been a couple years since you built your site, create a more modern design. Think of your website like a book—people are judging it by the cover. You also need to make yourself search engine optimized (SEO). For example, if you own an ice cream shop in Duluth, Minnesota, when people search Google for “ice cream in Duluth,” you want to be the first result. Start increasing your SEO by conducting a site audit. This step will point out problem areas that you can work to fix so your site starts performing higher in the rankings.

4. Cultivate a good reputation

Build relationships with the movers and shakers in your industry. If there are publications that many of your potential customers read, contact them with well-written press releases about new products and updates. Or ask if you can write something for them to get your name out there, educate your audience and demonstrate your authority. If there are professional organizations or chambers of commerce that are trusted in your area, get in touch with head honchos and convince them your company deserves public attention. Getting those people on your side and talking about you will lead to more inquiries.

You’ll also create a stellar reputation by having solid customer service. If you consistently go above and beyond for your current customers, they’ll do word-of-mouth marketing for you by bragging to their friends and colleagues.

Once you’ve tackled these first four steps, you’ll be on your way to finding the balance you desire between cold calls and hot leads. This won’t happen overnight but if you take your time and take pride in your exceptional product or service, you’re destined to get where you want your business to go.

Andrea Hewitt is a content writer at StorageAhead, a web marketing company. She spends most of her time writing blogs that help others grow their businesses. She loves tackling a variety of topics and if she’s unfamiliar with one, she’ll do hours and hours of research until she feels like she has enough authority to write about it.

The concept of "social commerce," or the use of social media or social features to drive sales at online and offline stores, has never quite fulfilled its ambitions.

That's because social networks are strongest as sources of retail inspiration and product discovery. Social media is where people come across new sellers and products.  

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we analyzed the data and spoke to leaders in the social commerce space to understand how their companies are adding value at different stages of the retail and e-commerce "purchase funnel," the long process that leads to a retail sale. At the bottom of this post, you can see a graphic from BI Intelligence showing what the purchase funnel really looks like.

Some of the latest trends include building social networks around e-commerce platforms, partnering with brands, and otherwise transforming social commerce's strengths for Pinterest-style digital window-shopping. The report looks at the most important way retailers are leveraging social engagement to drive purchases. 

Access The Full Report, Graphics, And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here's how social commerce companies are driving sales: 

• It's not about click-to-buy: Social commerce is not simply transactional — it's not just about offering a click-to-buy link next to an offer on Facebook. Social commerce will never be what some have wanted it to be, an "Amazon killer." 
• What will help social commerce grow as a sales driver? The key is to help connect the funnel end-to-end, or to connect different mediums — say, social media and TV — to help coax a consumer down the funnel. 
• There are a few ways to encourage purchases: Retargeted advertising may be one missing link. It enables social commerce to connect the sales funnel from end-to-end by serving ads that remind users of products they have browsed across the Web but have not yet purchased. Facebook has made huge strides with its retargeted efforts.
• Also: Clever merchandising and user interfaces allow for sticky merchant-to-consumer relationships that can help nudge a consumer toward purchase over time. 
• Finally, referrals shouldn't be discounted: Another solution is for social commerce to develop as a sales referral engine, and take a cut of the sales. If social commerce sites have a large enough audience, even a low referral and conversion rate will result in a good revenue stream.

• Explains how time-sensitive offers on social media can motivate users to snap out of casual browsing or social media-grazing and into a buying mood
• Includes interviews with three social commerce industry leaders
• Discusses why Twitter has a unique opportunity at the bottom of the funnel
• Looks at Pinterest's prospects as a top-of-funnel platform
• Reveals average order values and order volume for a leading social commerce platform
• Breaks down the share of social media-generated e-commerce sales for each social network
• Looks at the demographics of social commerce consumers
• Compares Twitter, Facebook and more traditional digital methods of retail customer acquisition such as search engines

To access the report and BI Intelligence's ongoing Social Media and E-commerce coverage — including charts, data, and analysis — sign up for a free trial.

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Your B2B customers aren’t the only ones going on their own corporate Easter egg hunt. Finding software leads can be another hunt in of itself. Only this time, the participants are your marketers and sales reps. The eggs in question represent not so much the actual leads but the trigger events that could make them worth pursuing.

So what are trigger events? Hubspot has a basic definition in this blog post. Generally speaking, you’ll find most trigger evens if you really stay up-to-date. If you’re the type to build lots of LinkedIn connections, this should make you heavy user.

On the other hand, that also shows how it might really test your lead generators if you want them helping you along with that search. Think of it like an egg hunt that requires a team effort. It’s important that you know the best likely places that a trigger event might occur so they won’t waste their time searching dead-ends.

Egg Locations

• Social Media – As already mentioned, social media sites are an excellent source of news on potential clients. On the other hand, don’t have all your lead generators camp out on this front. There are only so many connections you can make and keep an eye on. You don’t always get noteworthy updates everyday either.
• Business publications – Don’t just stick to online ones. Your never know when your local paper might just introduce your next client. Sure, you may not want to spend extra subscriptions for your offshore telemarketers. However, it’s at least another name and number for them to call.
• Events – Obviously, events are a staple in any B2B marketing strategy (in one way or another). Tradeshows, conventions, and expos are all major opportunities to hear company announcements. And as you know, such announcements can be major trigger events.
• Prospect’s own marketing – With big data in demand from marketers, anything they do can indicate a need for the tools to execute them. For instance, say you saw a gaming company with a habit of using referral strategies for every new MMO they publish. If you know this is their habit, isn’t it about time you approached them about improving it?

Finding trigger events can be a hassle when it requires you to open up all eyes and ears. You can make it easy on yourself (and your lead generators) if you divide them among the many sources of news. That way your entire marketing campaign stays vigilant while still having enough to qualify any software leads that come through.

Alignment between Sales and Marketing has been a challenge for organisations through the ages. Now, fundamental changes in your buyer’s behaviour are increasingly creating misalignment between these two functional areas. Misalignment breeds inefficiency. Propose to close rates fall, the quality of leads fall – cost of acquisition increases.

The buyer – your target customer – is fundamentally changing the way they buy. They are researching the problems they have differently, they are operating independently, forming opinions of their needs and the solutions they require before dealing with a selling organisation directly. Their buying journey has effectively changed, and Sales are steadily losing influence over the customer buying process.

Research from the Corporate Executive Board suggests B2B buyers have completed over 60% of their purchasing journey before they contact a supplier. With buyers grazing contentedly on a rich diet of information unearthed by Google searches, Blogs, RSS feeds and LinkedIn posts, its Marketing’s job to step into close that gap.

This shift in traditional roles and responsibilities asks marketers to behave more like a sales person than ever before. It becomes vital that marketing sees itself as intimately and directly involved in revenue generation – in the process of persuading a buyer to chose your product or service over another.

This is an uncomfortable place for many marketers to be. Here are 5 steps to achieving alignment between marketing and sales – supercharging your revenue generation engine -extracted from our own engagements with clients.

1. Know your maths

It is crucial that sales and marketing work together to understand the volume and velocity of the revenue funnel. That is to understand the whole cycle from first engagement to the point of sale:

• The number of visitors required to generate;
• The right number of unqualified leads to generate;
• The right number of qualified leads to generate;
• The right number of meetings to generate;
• The right number of proposals to generate;
• The right number of new clients to hit your revenue goals.

By working out the conversion rates between stages and the time it takes for a buyer to move through the funnel, firms can understand the volume of sales and marketing activity that is required to reach their revenue goals. This knowledge alone aligns the sales and marketing teams around a common understanding of their goals.

2. Measure, analyse, improve, repeat

For many, measurement of the funnel is quite a difficult task. Whilst many firms know their propose to close rate (bottom of the funnel) and some may well know the number of website visitors (top of funnel) and perhaps some email open rates, few know their full funnel maths. Marketing automation’s rise in popularity is partially explained by the clarity that the ability to measure your sales and marketing tactics brings.

But measurement is just the start. Having the data doesn’t necessarily drive change in the sales and marketing function. Introducing a systematic process of measuring, analysing and improving drives the organisation forward, based on empirical information. This must be bolstered by formal, structured communications on a regular basis, perhaps through a monthly meeting with both sales and marketing to review the data and the results achieved to determine actions moving forward.

3. Establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Use your funnel metrics to build service level agreements between Sales and Marketing. Define the number and the quality of leads required per time period that must go from Marketing to Sales. Use lead scoring to determine when a lead is truly qualified. Sales and Marketing must work together to analyse the data. Use both demographic (size, job role etc) and behavioural data (article download vs request for price list or request for a demo). Are too many poorly qualified leads being scored as qualified? Or perhaps the bar has been set too high? Adjust the criteria until the balance is correct.

Define how quickly and how often sales will follow up a sales qualified lead. Build a mutual understanding through these metrics of the degree of work and commitment required by the combined team.

4. Technology integration

Crucially, ensure your “funnel management” tools – your CRM and your marketing automation platform are speaking to one another and are tightly integrated. This is the nuts and bolts of succesfully improving your conversion ratios. By illuminating salient information to your sales reps, they will be feeding on a richer diet of prospects and driving better results.

Simplicity is important. Sewing together a patchwork of tools such as an email tool, social media measurement tool, SEO/keyword tool, website CMS, SEM platform to your CRM system is asking for trouble!

5. Recycle premature leads

One of the most powerful and practical tactics of successful lead nurturing is to build a formal recycling tactic into your go to market plan. If a lead is not ready to buy, there must be a formal handing over of this contact by sales to marketing to continue to nurture them to a point they are ready to re engage. Spend time with your sales and marketing team defining the point a buyer has “leaked” from your funnel and what to do with those people. What recycling tactics will be employed to ensure we stay in touch with the prospect?

Alignment is a worthy goal

Research of over 1600 B2B firms from Marketing Profs and Mathmarketing has shown firms that have a well-aligned Sales and Marketing:

• Grow 5.4% faster
• Close 38% more deals
• Retain 36% more clients

The impact on an organisation’s cost of acquisition is profound.

If you’d like to find out more about smarter marketing, please download this complimentary eBook.

Only a year or so ago marketers were arguing about whether social media was a distracting time-suck or a valuable activity. That argument has been won by those who use social as a tool for engagement and brand awareness: a 2013 Aberdeen Group study, for instance, found that 70% of leading companies generate highly valuable inbound traffic through their social pages. Similarly, a report by Social Media Examiner revealed that 64% of marketers saw improved lead generation and lower marketing expenses for using social as little as six hours a week.

Yet even with these successes to its name, social can still be a tough sell for many a brand, as there’s no neat way of tying the time required to maintain a social page (or the campaigns run within a particular online channel) to revenue earned.

In essence, it’s tough to know what ROI looks like when it comes to social.

However, there are certain steps you can take and practices you can follow to make it a bit easier to demonstrate returns.

1. Listen carefully to your buyers and their preferences.

There’s no end to the forms and shapes social media can take, so it’s important that you get a sense of what it is that draws buyers to your brand, and what those potential customers look for in general.

Identify the channels buyers use most, and create content that speaks to those sites. Respond quickly to concerns and questions, so that your prospects feel heard, and make it a point to educate your followers (via helpful articles and sit-downs with industry experts), so people see you as a real resource (versus a soulless corporation).

2. Treat social like any other marketing vehicle.

When you get right down to it, social media simply offers us a different, newer way to communicate, albeit one with a built-in capability to capture feedback (and in real time). The more your channels can support broader product marketing strategies, the more resonant your messages will be, and the stronger your brand will seem.

To this end, you might try targeting your messages, creating a strong differentiator, and making communications trackable. For example: if you’re sending out a white paper via email, supplement that outreach with custom links on social (unique URLs that tell you clickthroughs).

3. Map social campaigns to larger business goals.

Be clear about what ROI means for your company and your efforts. Whether it’s the total number of sales, qualified leads, conversions, traffic, advocates and influencers, conversations had – make sure you’re consistent in your efforts so that you have benchmark for comparison that works across all your channels, over specific periods of time.

Take, for example, a Facebook “like.” If you’re looking to “likes” to gauge reach and return, define the “like” from a business perspective. What will you do to keep the community engaged after the initial like? When and how might conversions happen? Perhaps your conversion will be a straightforward sale, or the download of a white paper, or the publication of a complimentary post. If you run a three-month program and get certain results, you may want to change the program in one or two ways, then let it run for three months and compare results. It all depends on the journey your buyers make and the length of your sales cycle, so work closely with your pipeline to determine just what measures are needed.

4. Don’t neglect qualitative ROI measures.

While it might seem easier to look to pure numbers to track and gauge your progress, there are also a range of qualitative measures you might consider in appraising your social pages. These benefits may include customer feedback, market insight, connections to new partners and suppliers, even recruiting – gains that perhaps don’t fit neatly in a control chart or spreadsheet, but that have real use nonetheless and shouldn’t be forgotten.

5. Stay useful.

As you go about choosing the particular pieces of content you feature across social, think beyond the immediate channels you use. Make it a point to meditate on what your customers do AFTER they’ve connected with you online, and try where possible to speak to that. And when (not if) a problem surfaces, be aware that is your dirty laundry flapping in public. Respond quickly, with a friendly tone, and solve that problem. You can become a trustworthy hero if you make the most of this kind of opportunity.

Whole Foods, for example, has a mobile app that helps shoppers create meals around food they have on hand at home. Tesco, similarly, has a mobile app that lets wine aficionados purchase wines of interest simply by taking photos of labels. Be novel, be unorthodox, be fearless, and your followers are sure to return that attention tenfold.

At the end of the day

Of course, at the end of the day, not every positive result can be cached and measured easily. Often times, social media does its best work in the hard-to-quantify areas of trust and awareness, which is why you’ve got to think long and hard about the metrics that matter most for your business, and track them well. Social media has value well beyond marketing, and the sooner brands recognize it for that, the richer they’ll be for it.

For more ways to ensure that you can justify the ROI in social media, check out our white paper on the topic here, at Act-On’s Center of Excellence.

A March 2014 Study by Adobe titled Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves shows that 64% of marketers expect their role to change in the next year and 81% expect their role to change in the next three years. Continuing along this theme, only 14% of those surveyed said they knew how they could reinvent themselves.

The fundamental issue with this is that B2B buyers haves already reinvented themselves and the longer marketers take to figure things out, the more disconnected they become from the buyer. The same study looked at the drivers that were forcing marketers to change – the top three answers were as follows:

- 73% Expanded number of channels and platforms to reach audiences

- 71% New ways of thinking about audience engagement

- 71% New technologies for analyzing marketing effectiveness

While these are certainly things that marketing has to grapple with, these are fundamentally not the core reasons for the role of marketing to change. The core reason that marketing’s role needs to change is the way the buyer has fundamentally changed. However, according to this study, marketers seem to miss this fact and instead are focused on tactical issues like technology and marketing channels.

There continues to be a wide disparity between today’s marketers and that of the modern buyer. Compare these buyer responses from the B2B Buyers Survey by DemandGen Report to those above:

- 40% of B2B Buyers said they waited longer to engage vendors

- 34% said the number of team members involved in the buying process has increased in the last year

- 68% of buyers have increased the number of sources they use in evaluating a purchase

So while buyers are increasing in complexity and sophistication and involving more roles and personas, marketers are looking at tactical channels and technology as an answer to engagement. Quite the disconnect!

Given the disparity between buyers and marketers, it may very well seem that the greatest obstacle to marketing reinvention is marketers themselves. If the 86% of marketers who say they do not know how to transform, want to begin the process, they need to stop the tactical focus and begin with a focus on the buyer.

A focus on the buyer does not mean simply generating more content, buying marketing automation, pushing out more email campaigns or developing a seven-step drip campaign. It means truly understanding all there is to know about your buyer including:

Their Path to Purchase

As I have stated before, no buyer ever said “I am in the sales-accepted stage of my buying process.” However, when I speak to marketers and ask about their efforts to chart the buying process, inevitably a funnel graphic appears. The buyers purchase path is not a linear 1,2,3, step process – it is more like 1-4,2,7,3,5,9,etc. Add in the growing number of people involved in a typical B2B buying cycle and it gets even more complex. Marketers need to understand this and take every effort (hint: ask multiple buyers their approach to buying) to truly understand the path to purchase as it is key to the development of your content architecture.

Their Content Consumption Patterns

As committees make the majority of B2B buying decisions, it is important to understand that not all of those involved in the buying decision will consume the same content in the same way. I am in the midst of working with one client where, after the research and developing the buyers insights, we discovered that the key executives for this purchase are involved in the early stage of the process and then again in the late stage. They are, in reality, consuming very little content. However, the mid-level managers are consuming vast amounts of content at each and every stage of the purchase path meaning we need to create more relevant content for the mid-level manager than for the executives. Each role has its place in the buying cycle and we cannot treat them all the same.

Their Market Conditions

It is amazing to me how often marketers cannot speak to the market conditions of their buyers. Often times a shift in the market or a regulation in that market will act as a catalyst or trigger event for the organization to begin their buying process. Think about what Sarbanes-Oxley did to financial buyers or the impact the Affordable Healthcare Act has had on IT buyers in healthcare. As marketers we need to understand our buyers’ market conditions so we can message to that and help educate them on how to respond. If we do not know the details of where buyers live on a day-to-day basis, we fail to build the much-needed credibility.

What Their Titles Really Mean

Too many times, when seeking to get a picture of buyers and creating personas, marketers list a set of titles they want to go after. While this will help in segmenting a database with such titles, it does not provide the true insight into the day in the life of a B2B Buyer.

I was once having lunch with one of our clients who was a VP of Demand Generation. As we were discussing content and buyer insight she said “I do not wake up every morning thinking about my title. What I think about is how to make my team more effective, how to drive pipeline contribution, how to manage up to the CMO and how to better enable sales. If just one company would provide messaging to my responsibilities versus my title, I would be very likely to buy from them.” And there you have it, she was not interested in her title, she was interested in her daily responsibilities and issues and that is the kind of content she craved.

With all due respect to the respondents to the Adobe study, the drivers that necessitate marketing reinvention are not new technologies, multiple channels or various ways to engage our audience . . . . . it is the audience itself that is driving this change. And as it is now 86% – we have a lot of catching up to do.

Recently, we were asked by a long-term client to help them reposition their brand in the marketplace. 2014 is a milestone year for the firm as they introduce significant process innovations that will help redefine the way they—and the industry—do business.

Leveraging this milestone with an eye to the future, rather than a look back, provided them a great platform for reinvigorating their brand messaging to better reflect who they are and effectively position them for decades to come.

Over the years, we’ve found that the concept of branding is still somewhat misunderstood. To some, branding is synonymous with designing a new logo or crafting a clever tag line. While those can be important elements of a rebranding, we believe strong messaging lies at the heart of effort and drives the look and feel.

Another branding reality is that your reputation is built 80% on experience and 20% messaging. Organizations must be able to deliver on their brand promise—and engaged employees are those most critical to making that happen. Make sure your message is framed in the context of how it supports the customer experience.

The Brand Repositioning Process

At its core, brand repositioning is about getting a bead on where you are today versus where you want to be—then crafting the messaging first and the look second, to help you get there. When implementing a branding messaging program for our clients, we employ a three-step process outlined below.

Discovery

As the name implies, you start with a solid understanding how your brand is currently perceived by your key stakeholders—customers, employees, shareholders, and industry influencers, for example. In the case of our client, they had a long-standing reputation in the market—a strong foundation on which to build. Look at how you’re currently presenting yourself to those audiences. And, the tougher half of the equation—based on the firm’s vision and strategic plan; articulate what you want the brand to stand for going forward.

An important step in Discovery is to audit your current messaging, by reviewing a wide range of marketing, sales support and communications materials. Your review should include proposals, collateral, articles, digital and social content.

Use the findings of that audit, along with feedback from your stakeholders, to help coalesce the leadership team around the more aspirational brand messaging. What messages still resonate with your targets and represent who you want to be? Conversely, what is overused and no longer a differentiator, has become stale and should be eliminated from your corporate lexicon?

Be sure to get a good cross-section of perspectives—from different functional areas and levels of your organization. Once insights are gathered, common themes begin to emerge and will help guide your message development. Finally, conduct a competitive scan to understand the environment in which you’re positioning must stand out.

Design

In the design phase, you map out the messaging, and set the tone and voice for your new positioning. When building the message blueprint, it is important to capture the firm’s story in a way that not only resonates across key stakeholder groups but is easily tailored to the various audiences and market segments that are important to your business.

The message construct starts with a value proposition—one to two sentences that align your strengths with relevant, high priority client needs and distinguishes you from the competition. Typically, this is one of the toughest parts of the process.

From that base come three-to-five core messages that succinctly spell out what you offer in the marketplace, details where you excel, and how this benefits customers.

Proof points pay off each core message, giving your targets a reason to believe. Any audience or market specific messaging is spelled out here. The result is a common blueprint for brand positioning that will guide development of all your materials.

Delivery

In delivery, it’s all about execution. This is where the new messaging synchs up with the look and feel to roll out your new positioning. Your website is one of the more impactful stops throughout a buyers’ decision journey and as such, is often #1 in terms of delivery priority.

Ensuring Success

When embarking on a brand positioning, it is important to keep the end game in mind. In order to be effective, brand messaging must be:

• Relevant – It speaks to stakeholders most important needs and wants
• Differentiating – It separates you from the competition
• Authentic – It’s in your true voice and consistent with who you are (and want to be)
• Credible – Stakeholders believe you can deliver on the brand promise
• Aspirational – It builds on your existing equity and takes it to the next level

Great positioning can do a lot for a brand in keeping it relevant and distinct in the marketplace. It not only supports the growth of the business, but also can re-energize the internal team. Done right, it should serve you well in the immediate term as well as years down the road. Think about your brand today. Does it reflect who you are and who you want to be?

Sales Training Article: Time for Pipeline Closet Cleaning

Maybe you're better about it than I, but closet clutter is a challenge for me. It was partly caused by a move from a 60-year old center entrance colonial in New England to a newer home in California with our first walk-in closet. Ultimately I've become more careful about what clothes I buy and try to throw out or donate anything that hasn't been worn in a year. Many organizations have pipelines that resemble overstuffed closets and there are two major causes.

Cause #1: Garbage in - At one time or another a seller comes to the realization that their pipeline is thin. It can be a positive development if you've closed a number of opportunities in a given month or quarter. In any event, if you are going to have a pipeline review with your manager there's a tendency to list "opportunities" that have not been qualified. The last thing you want is a manager that feels you don't have enough going on and will be monitoring your activity levels.

For experienced sellers or sellers that have new sales managers, it isn't a huge challenge to "sell" them on opportunities that really don't belong. Part of the reason is pipelines roll up. Managers want to believe so that their district or regional pipelines looks strong. In my experience if salespeople could sell as well to buyers as they can "sell" managers that their pipelines are adequate, they'd all be making their numbers.

Try one of these sales training workshops that can help you learn to better manage opportunities and your pipeline for improved results.

Cause #2: No spring cleaning - Once things get into a seller's pipeline we all know the best way to get them out is to close them. The challenge, however, is that if they weren't qualified when they were entered and they can't be qualified after that, the seller has a problem. He or she doesn't want to declare losses because:

• The manager will start asking about rebuilding their pipelines.
• Their win rates will be negatively impacted.

When new opportunities enter their pipelines many sellers chose that flurry of activity to quietly allow unqualified ones to drop off the radar screen.

In the same way clothes that haven't been worn in a year should be discarded or donated, how long should pipeline entries be allowed to hang with no activity indicating progress such as:

• A champion has been qualified and the seller is getting access to Key Players
• Key Player visions are documented in emails
• A Sequence of Events has been negotiated with an estimated decision date
• A cost vs. benefit analysis has been completed
• Contracts are being reviewed
• A proposal has been issued

Sales managers can do everyone a good service if:

• Qualification criteria are applied before opportunities enter pipelines.
• Measureable progress is required to keep them in the pipeline.
• Outstanding proposals can only be viewed as viable if they are less than 60 days old or there are extenuating circumstances. To minimize this issue, managers may want to set criteria that needs to be met before proposals are issued.

The calendar, if not the weather, says spring has arrived. Would a little spring cleaning of your pipeline give you a more accurate picture of what revenue realistically can be expected in the coming months?

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.

Image Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock

For founders, taking funding is about more than adding working capital — it acts as a catalyst for things to come. It provides a third-party validation that attracts the interest of media, customers, and potential executives you want to hire.

Before taking funding, however, you have to know if you’re ready to light that fire. More importantly, founders need to have a specific plan for what to do with all that cash because too often, startups go guns blazing after a Series A just because it’s the logical next step. Here are several questions to consider before your big payday.

Why does it matter to use VC funding for a specific purpose?

When you accept VC funding, you don’t necessarily have to know exactly what you’ll use it for, but you need to have a clear understanding of your No. 1 goal for the immediate future – what’s most important right now – and how funding can help you reach it. Capital infusion should be the accelerant your company needs to reach the next milestone in a broader strategy.

In the case of my company, Pluralsight, we waited until we had figured out our product, revenue model, and customers before accepting outside financing. After nearly a decade of bootstrapping, we knew we needed to rapidly expand our training library and build out new areas of content (namely IT administration and open source software development).

The market for online training was becoming fragmented, and we knew that consolidation was the best way to achieve a dominant market position quickly, and one built to last. Following our $27.5 million Series A at the start of 2013, we emerged from a decade of stealth in dramatic fashion by acquiring some of our biggest competitors over the course of three months. Taking the market by storm was all part of our broader strategy.

What are the risks of not having a concrete plan?

Investors hold you accountable for how you spend their money, so you have to make sure there is clear value and measurable ROI. If you do not have a plan, you risk: a) getting distracted from your No. 1 goal and allocating resources toward endeavors that won’t help you achieve it, thereby losing credibility; b) making it harder to sell your position in the marketplace and also internally (among staff) by not having clearly defined operating objectives; and c) sitting on the funding for too long and missing out on key strategic opportunities (e.g., if you’re looking to acquire a company, you can be sure someone else is as well).

What leads founders to take an investment too early or without a plan?

Funding now seems like a rite of passage for every startup, but don’t forget that you’re giving up some control of your company and diluting your ownership. When you’ve built your company organically, don’t give away your hard-earned equity without a higher purpose in mind. I think we all know one or two entrepreneurs who were swooned by a big-shot angel investor or VC firm and gave up too much of their company for too little. Every piece of your company that you give up should be carefully weighed and considered against the bigger picture you hope to achieve.

This is not something you want to rush through. Make the process as competitive as possible, and meet with as many investors as you can. If you’re fortunate enough to have many offers, take some time to vet the companies and get to know the leadership team on a personal level. When it came down to which offer we accepted, most of the terms were quite similar, but we ended up picking a firm because we connected with a partner who fit into our culture, understood what was most important to our business, and could add real value. It was that personal trust we established with individuals that ultimately sealed the deal.

Do founders need to prove their business model can be profitable before taking funding?

Ultimately, this question can be answered by how much control you hope to retain in your company. The stronger your revenue model, the more trust your investors will have in you and your management team – and the more autonomy they’ll give you. If you haven’t yet proven your business model, or if you’re losing revenue, you can bet investors will insert themselves a lot more in the day-to-day operations and decisions of your company, especially if they have a controlling interest.

What are some things founders overlook when looking for outside investment?

You absolutely must have buy-in from all stakeholders before accepting the investment. At Pluralsight, we had not even considered taking funding until VCs started initiating the conversation. Our founders mulled it over for a short amount of time and then we went on a hiking trip to Nepal completely unrelated to work. While hiking, we talked about our vision for the company, and by the time we came down the mountain, we’d decided as a group that taking funding was the right thing to do. It sounds like some great epiphany, but the trip was practical in a lot of ways. Giving ourselves time away from the day-to-day of the office to gain some clarity and think about the company from a big-picture standpoint was just what we needed.

In addition, ensure you have a hiring plan in place. If you don’t already have a fully fleshed out executive team ahead of the funding round, one of the first things your investor(s) will require is that you build one out, especially finding a CFO. This can be a grueling process but one that you should take seriously and not rush. It’s essential that you find exec members who will work well together, bring unique talents and perspectives to the table and, most importantly, believe in the purpose, culture and direction of the company.

Taking funding too soon can cause companies to fail, or at least get distracted from their founding vision, so get your ducks in a row beforehand. Your employees, your investors, and your sanity will all be thankful you did.

Aaron Skonnard is CEO of Pluralsight, which provides online training for serious technology professionals. Through Aaron’s leadership, Pluralsight launched in 2004 with in-person seminars, but made the transition to an online training provider in 2008. In 2013, Aaron led the company through a round of Series A funding and three acquisitions that added IT admin and open source training to its library, which now includes 1,400+ courses. Aaron has published hundreds of articles and several books. He frequently speaks at industry events and recently won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Utah Region.

Refresh, Recycle, Repurpose, Refinish, Recreate

Finally some warm temperatures, April showers, baseball season opens again, food and wine festivals, and generally speaking, the joy of spring.

In the world of business, Q1 is over. As the exhilaration of the New Year fades away, the reality of new challenges settles firmly on boardroom agendas. Just like we do with our homes and yards, April is also a good time to rejuvenate your marketing plays.

You already know the essentials of spring cleaning your B2B lead generation:

• cleanse your leads database
• refine your lead generation strategy to do more of what’s working and stop what’s not working
• focus on priming hot leads to make them sales-ready
• carefully prepare for lead progression to drive conversion
• follow the 15-60-25 rule.

What else can you do this year?

Given that content marketing is a key driver of lead generation today, below are 5 easy steps to work with what you have and gain significantly better results:

1. REFRESH: If you have been tracking and measuring the performance of your content pieces over time, you know which ones performed better than others. Give those items a fresh lease on life so your audience can gain new insights on subjects they have clearly shown interest in. And this time, strive for even greater engagement. It’s okay to go out and say “this is old, but we have looked at it with new eyes (so it’s worth taking a look!)”. It’s better to be forthright than to pretend you are giving the audience a never-seen-before piece of content. Remember that if you are placing old wine in a new bottle, the wine must taste just as good and the bottle should look even better than before!

2. RECYCLE: Just because the news is stale and the newspaper isn’t worth reading anymore doesn’t render it useless; it gets recycled. It’s the same thing with your content. An old post may have lived its life on your blog but you can make it come alive again in your next email newsletter, a printed customer bulletin, an industry journal, and so on. A presentation you made internally to your team does not have to go into the company archives. There is bound to be some information, ideas and strategic thinking of value therein for other audiences externally. Get your team to go on a digital scavenger hunt and come up with at least one internal communication piece that can be recycled for an external audience. You’ll be surprised at how much “gold” you can find!

3. REPURPOSE: There’s a whole wide world of social media out there—all of it hungry and thirsty for relevant, useful and interesting content. So what if an article was written primarily for your customer newsletter? With a little creativity, you can clothe it differently for the various social channels you use. Make sure to tailor it for specific audiences and formats recommended by each platform. Keep in mind, however, that simply promoting the same piece of social content on different channels is not repurposing. Each iteration of the same content idea must serve a specific “purpose” for a specific audience. That’s content repurposing.

4. REFINISH: It’s like refinishing your hardwood flooring—you don’t need to remove an old floor and install a new one. You can simply make the old one look as good as new by getting it refinished by a professional. You can infuse an old piece of content with new data, industry updates and a fresh perspective. Revisit the original content idea to encourage interaction and promote engagement with your audience.

5. RECREATE: You have some great building blocks with content that has brought in quality leads in the past. Instead of putting all your time and resources into creating brand new blocks, you can rebuild or recreate engaging content. As long as you remain relevant and contextual for your audience, recreated content has the potential to drive greater lead generation and conversion. While you are at it, download one of our free e-booklets including “13 B2B Lead Generation Mistakes You’ve Made. So What Can You Do Now?”

What are some of the key B2B lead generation spring cleaning tasks on hand for your organization this year? Let’s discuss this on my blog.

Peter Drucker, business genius, once said, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” That concept essentially defines marketing as early stage selling, but since Drucker’s time, many companies have divided marketing and selling into separate disciplines, rather than realizing that they are essentially just different points on the continuum of bringing the customer to the business.

While popular wisdom often cites the statistic that 70 percent of the sales process is completed by the time a customer speaks to a sales rep, recent research from the ITSMA shows that in fact, 70 percent of prospects want to engage with a sales rep before they even decide on their short list. How can such opposite viewpoints exist in the same universe?

The answer is that with the rise in social media marketing, companies and prospects form relationships with potential vendors well in advance of the time they enter the formal sales funnel. They research a company’s website; they read product and service reviews, and they follow the companies they are considering on Facebook or other sites. Obviously, it’s important for marketing to have a cohesive and compelling strategy that helps move the customer through the sales funnel until they are ready to engage with an inside sales rep on a more formal basis.

It’s also important for inside sales reps to have a social media presence. One of the things that prospects evaluate is the sales rep’s reputation as well as the brand’s reputation. Customers know that they will be spending most of their time with their account rep and they want to be certain that the rep is as trustworthy and reliable as the brand itself.

Sales reps can no longer afford to sit back and wait for marketing to deliver qualified leads so they can simply close the deal. Instead, sales reps need to take an active part in pre-selling their brand, product or service, and their own reputation. The rep’s own social media presence may be as important as the product’s or the brand’s reputation when it comes to landing on the short list.

The story that marketing weaves about the product and the brand in its content marketing must be consistent in every tweet and every post to march the prospect through the steps in the sales funnel. In addition, the rep may need to promote his or her online reputation and support the brand story with social media engagement to ensure that prospects feel comfortable adding the product to their short lists.

This means that more than ever before, marketing and sales are intertwined. Marketing must use its best strategy and its social media presence to attract the prospect and encourage engagement with the brand. Simultaneously the inside sales rep should be building engagement and brand reputation that also supports and enhances the company brand. When done correctly, marketing and sales are truly two sides of the same coin united in the task of bringing a customer to the business.

All business leaders face two fundamental demands. They must execute their current business activities well enough to win success in today’s competitive marketplace, while at the same time adapting their strategy to meet tomorrow’s competitive challenges. As Jack Welch, the former Chairman and CEO of GE, once said, “You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-term commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and execute it.”

Marketing leaders face this same business challenge. To build a well-tuned demand generation system that will produce consistent and growing revenues, marketers (and sales leaders for that matter) must simultaneously focus on both the short term and the long term.

Managing marketing efforts to deliver both short-term and long-term results is similar to the military doctrine of fighting close and deep at the same time. In military science, fighting close and deep means that you engage the enemy forces directly in front of you (fighting close), while simultaneously attacking the enemy’s rear echelon forces (fighting deep). The basic idea is to weaken the rear echelon forces before they get to the front lines.

Some of you may be wondering what military doctrine has to do with B2B demand generation. Quite a bit, actually, especially for companies with long and complex demand generation cycles. In these circumstances, maximizing demand generation results requires marketing programs that cover the full depth of the demand generation arena. In other words, companies with high-performing demand generation systems engage both long-term and short-term prospects simultaneously.

From a marketing perspective, a complete demand generation system will include the five types of customer-facing programs shown in the diagram below.

The important thing to remember is that these programs impact revenues over different time horizons. At one end of the spectrum, sales enablement programs provide content and tools that support sales reps as they work with short-term sales opportunities. At the other extreme, reputation-building programs are designed to build brand awareness and credibility that will impact revenues over a longer time frame. The principal objective of reputation-building programs is to lay the foundation for your lead acquisition efforts.

Lead acquisition and lead nurturing usually produce an impact on revenue in a more intermediate time frame, and marketing to existing customers can produce both short-term and long-term results.

During the past few years, a great deal of attention has been given to the role of marketing in acquiring and nurturing leads. One reason for this attention is that, with today’s marketing technology tools, it’s relatively easy to connect these marketing activities to revenues and thus demonstrate the value of marketing.

Lead acquisition and lead nurturing are obviously important marketing functions, but so are the other types of marketing programs. It takes all of these programs to create a demand generation system that will deliver revenue growth in both the short-term and the long-term.

Twitter can be an extremely powerful sales tool. It can help sales professionals generate leads, establish a personal brand and credibility, build and nurture relationships, and close deals. It also provides sales pros with a direct path to purchase-ready consumers and industry leaders.

However, many sales professionals using Twitter aren’t generating the sales results they want. This is likely because they’re spending too much time on activities that don’t provide a lot of value.

Take a look at these five time-wasters and learn how you can start setting yourself up for success on Twitter.

1. Cold-tweeting

I have a friend in sales. He’s great at his job; very likable, intelligent and a great performer. But when it comes to social selling, he’s still figuring it out. One of the first lessons he learned when he began using Twitter as a selling tool, was not to “cold-tweet”.

He developed a group of lists for his prospects and categorized them into effective points of reference. All good. The problem was how he used these lists. He would regularly send mass tweets and private inbox messages pitching his product and pushing for demos. He even had an automatic message, with the same content, sending out to all his new followers.

This approach does not work because it defies the principles of Twitter. Twitter is about engaging in meaningful conversation over shared interests.

It’s about exchanging useful and relevant information with a network of like-minded individuals.

“Cold-tweeting” as he called it, doesn’t work and is a great way to waste precious time and burn through prospects.

2. Selling too soon

Social selling is a lot like dating. The principles of courtship are similar to the rules of engagement with social media.

Rushing into a selling relationship on Twitter is a recipe for failure. Instead, focus first on setting the relationship groundwork by sharing content of value to your prospects and, in-turn, share their content with others. This will help build trust with your prospects so that when it’s time to do business, your prospects feel good about it and part of the decision.

3. Spamming content

This is probably the most frequently practiced time-waster for sales teams on Twitter.

Spamming content on Twitter means that you are not creating and sharing relevant content, sparking thoughtful discussions, or sharing content of value to your followers. Instead, you’re sharing generic intros to blog post and a link or auto-filled tweets from your own website. These types of spam tweets often get lost in the crowd and rarely inspire users to engage with them – click the link, retweet, share, or favourite the content.

Again, it’s important to understand who your prospects are and tailor your content to their interests.

4. Curating, not creating

Many sales professionals spend too much time sharing other people’s content and too little time creating their own. The key is to find a balance that supports both activities.

While a good part of your time spent on Twitter should be retweeting other people’s content and sharing relevant content that wasn’t authored by you or your company, most of the content you share, should be your own.

Finding that balance can be a challenge, but it’s important to position yourself to your prospects as an industry leader, a thought leader, and an expert.

5. Concentrating on gated content

There is definitely value in requiring prospects to sign up for e-books, white papers, and conference series. I also understand the importance of collecting prospect emails and contact information. However, sales professionals often focus too much on creating gated content that their prospects end up getting less from you.

Your prospects on Twitter are looking for a value-added relationship, so it’s important to share information freely and to make your content accessible.

Now that you have so much more time on your hands, tweet us some of your tips to selling efficiently on Twitter.