Rnordman

Companies rarely seek direct input at high volumes about purchasing behavior and experiences from the people who know it best: current, happy customers and former, not-so-happy customers. But why oh why?! Nobody knows more about the value or broken promises of products or services than the people who buy them. ... Read the full article at MarketingProfs

As a marketer, you've likely asked yourself or your team how you can best deliver value to your customers. Adopting an Agile marketing strategy might well be the best answer to that question. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Have you ever written sales copy that didn’t… well, sell?

The background data reports that people are visiting your website, they’re arriving at the checkout page, but they’re not putting their credit card information into those all-important revenue-creating fields.

What gives?

Does your product stink?

Do they not trust you enough?

Or are you not thoroughly explaining the value of your product?

Truth is, good sales copy will sell anything. Sure, if your product is no bueno, then customers will ditch it over the long haul, but the upfront results have far less to do with what your product actually does or is and far more to do with how you present it.

And the best way to present it persuasively is by listening to your inner skeptic – because that’s exactly how everyone else is thinking about your product.

Easier said than done… I know.

So, steal my own strategy.

1. Write down all the objections your target market will have about buying this product from you.

First, look at your product, look at yourself, look at your relationship with the people that you’re trying to sell this product to.

Then, ask yourself “What objections would I have about buying this product if I was on the other side of it – if I was the one reading the sales copy?”

Good news is, those are the same objections that your target market is going to have.

Bad news is, you need to address every single one of those.

If you don’t, then you’re leaving a massive wall between those credit card fields and your target market’s wallets. If every single wall doesn’t tumble to the ground, then you have a 0% chance of making a significant amount of sales.

I like to create this list of objections by typing them out chronologically (in the order that they will arise in the prospect’s mind) on a sort of FAQ page. Then, I’ll write a few-paragraph answer to each question. More often than not, these objections will concern four primary things…

1. Why do they need your product?
2. Why should they buy from you?
3. Why does is cost what it does?
4. Why do they need it right now?

2. Write your sales copy in one sitting, without too much prep.

Armed with the primary objections you need to address, your unique selling proposition, and the believable dream you’re trying to sell, start writing… and don’t stop until you’re finished. That one-push writing practice will create more coherency and consistency in your sales copy than anything else. As long as you stay focused on the task at hand and avoid the random tidbits of information that you really want to include (but are totally unnecessary), you’ll have a half-way decent piece of sales copy in front of you after an hour or so.

And all you had to do was sit down and write.

Of course, you don’t want to go in without any prep at all, but you do want to go in with little enough prep that natural objections are free to arise in your own mind and you’re free to address those as you write.

Because the moment they come up for you is the exact same moment they come up for your target market.

What objections am I talking about?

Things like…

“Why does it cost so much?”

“How do I know I can trust you with my credit card information?”

“How do I know your product will do what you say it’s going to do?”

If left alone, those objections will have your organic and paid traffic clicking the back button faster than you can yell “But wait, there’s more!”

Deal with them the moment they come up. To do that, write your sales copy in one sitting and flow with the punches.

Then…

3. Allow it to simmer for a week and go look at it again.

Nothing is perfect after the first go around, right?

And by letting your sales copy sit on the back burner of your brain for a while, you’ll naturally come up with new ideas, new ways of presenting things better, and new objections that you hadn’t thought of before.

So, allow time for the creative process to take its toll.

Then, return to your sales copy with pen in hand and read through it (preferably out loud), taking note of spots that aren’t quite persuasive enough, spots that lose your attention, and spots that don’t explain something very well.

With each, you have one of only two options…

1. Fix it.
2. Ditch it.

Make a decision and move along.

Finally, add in any of the creative and/or persuasive ideas you had over the previous week. Give it one more read through and voilâ!

You have yourself a wonderful piece of sales copy.

We continue to organize our sales and marketing initiatives around what makes us more efficient or old views of how customers buy.

Classically, marketing’s focus is on creating interest and awareness, then driving demand. The work toward MQLs, turning them over to sales, hopefully as SALs, saying “Good luck and godspeed!, we caught ’em, you skin ’em.”

Sales picks up the process, SDRs call to qualify the opportunity, they hand the lead to an account manager who gets more information, the customer is handed over to a pre-sales person for a demo, then someone else try to close them.

The overall marketing/sales assembly line takes customers through this linear process, all oriented to moving the customer through a buying decision.

Of course there are variants to this, there may be an account focus or orientation, there may be some sort of nurturing loop for customers that are not ready to buy, but as soon as we can we want to drop them into our marketing and sales assembly line.

Except our assembly line/linear customer engagement model doesn’t reflect how our customers buy. Our customers aren’t engaged in a linear buying process, in fact, when we start mapping it, the process is very complex. It’s a series of starts, stops, changes, reassessment, abandonment, restarting, stopping, going backwards, restarting, changing scope, adding new buying team members, more changes………

But we aren’t structured to be able to respond to the customer’s chaotic buying process.

How do we rethink things to have half a chance of intersecting the customer wherever they are at and trying to move them forward?

1. We know the customer will leverage multiple channels, simultaneously, for information at they go through the buying process. Marketing needs to start thinking about their role through the entire process–not just creating awareness and driving demand. What content, programs, systems, tools can they provide to intersect the customer in impactful ways through the entire process (perhaps even into implementation).
2. Likewise, sales shouldn’t be waiting for marketing to create awareness and demand. Sales may be the first point of contact as a customer is beginning or restarting, a buying process.
3. Sales and marketing must both mirror and complement each other, in engaging the customer through their buying process.
4. Helping the customer simplify their process—trying to put order to what the customer is trying to achieve, removing the complexity–becomes one of the greatest areas of value we can create in helping the customer more effectively navigate their buying journey. The chaotic buying process is not something customer do by design, it’s a reflection of the reality customers face in trying drive change in their organizations. This presents a huge opportunity for vendors, whatever can be done to help customer understand what they need to understand, helping them simplify the buying process, navigating the journey far more easily.
5. Simplifying and helping customers more effectively navigate the process requires new selling skills.
   1. Curiosity, the drive to understand what the customer faces–from a business point of view, from a personal point of view, seeing what they face as they try to navigate the buying journey.
   2. Project management, helping the customer better structure what they are doing, establishing a work plan, goals, a process, helping guide the customer through that structured approach.
   3. Resource management, knowing how to most effectively leverage the right resources, in the right way, at the right time through the buying journey. Whether it is the customer resource, your own company resource, or even external resources–all must be leveraged effectively to simplify the process.
   4. Critical thinking/problem solving skills, the ability to analyze the complex dynamics impacting the customer buying process. The ability to understand the complexity the customer faces, the ability to simplify the process, teaching the customer how to better structure what they are trying to do and how to more effectively achieve their goals.
   5. Empathy/EQ, these have always been important sales skills, but they become more important in understanding what the customer is going through in the chaotic buying process.
   6. Patience. Most sales people are in a rush to close. The chaotic buying journey changes everything. Whatever we can do to simplify the process and help customers more effectively navigate that process. In the rush to close, sales impatience will have a greater adverse impact on the overall process and the outcomes of the process.

What’s this mean for sales and marketing organizational structure? I’m not sure I know, but I suspect we will require must closer integration of the functions–possibly bringing the organizations together. Complexity within our own organizations will increasingly become a factor impacting our ability to work with customers in their own complex journey. I suspect we will have to dramatically simplify our own organizational structures, more clearly define roles/responsibilities, and reduce the fragmentation/handoffs in the process. Anything else and we get paralyzed by the complexity of our own operations, incapable of dealing with the chaotic buying process.

For very complex buying decisions, chaos will be the biggest factor impacting our customers. Helping our customers effectively navigate this, reducing the complexity means we will have to rethink everything we do as sales and marketing professionals.

It’s a classic statement that no craftsman can do their job without the proper tools, and this applies to the world of PR as well. Whether you’re having trouble creating effective PR content for clients, with your outreach, or organizing your internal communications/team, there are many platforms that simplify and refine a lot of the processes behind PR.

We’ve curated some of the top tools that can help take your PR initiatives and teams to the next level, and also reached out to a lineup of PR experts and people at companies who use PR services often to see what it is that they value most about them.

Cision, PR Edition

The PR version of the Cision platform is a full suite of software that is designed to help PR professionals both expand their outreach and monitor what is going on with their clients. For example, it connects you to a database of over 1.6 million contacts, including major influencers, bloggers, and journalists—all the type of people who can expand your clients’ base. In addition, the software also makes it possible to monitor media channels for both trending topics as well as mentions of your clients’ brands. This empowers you to react quickly to potential opportunities and issues. This versatility is why Kim Plyler of Sahl Communications Inc. says “It is by far the best tool for starting, tracking and maintaining our relationships with the media. We’ve been using it since our company started and we’ve watched it grow and evolve into one of the best tools in our industry.”

MailChimp

A major part of the PR game is getting out email notifications of events relevant to your client out to influencers and journalists, and MailChimp is one of the top tools to make this process easy. Along with making it easy to send out customized emails to your list of contacts, the platform also has inherent tools to track audience engagement. By seeing who has opened, clicked, or unsubscribed from your email campaigns, you can get a better idea of what changes you need to make to your email PR.
Nate Masterson of Maple Holistics adds that “As retailers across the world are working tirelessly to improve their public relations, MailChimp offers a simple solution by effectively promoting your brand and products/services with captivating and digestible content.”

Hubspot

It might be easier to say what Hubspot doesn’t do rather than trying to pin it down into one category. Similar to Cision, it’s a suite of different software, but where Cision was specifically focused on PR, Hubspot is more geared towards inbound marketing in general. This still is very useful for PR, though.

As Stepan Lavrouk of Gyana puts it, “What makes Hubspot so great from a PR point of view is that it collects a lot of functionality usually offered by several different apps in one website. It allows us to post the same information across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn without having to individually log onto each platform.” This is only the beginning, though, as Hubspot can build conversions on websites, grow web traffic, and fill various other voids through its diverse set of services. For agencies who offer PR as one of their many services, this may be an ideal match.

Boomerang for Gmail

Your average email user spends roughly a third of their workday working in their inbox. This can be due to having a lot of email traffic or being disorganized, but Boomerang for Gmail helps with both issues. Boomerang for Gmail helps schedule emails as well as remind you when you need to follow up with people. If you’re juggling a lot of different clients and contacts, this eliminates the worry of forgetting a potential opportunity or sending an email at a time where it will be missed.

For Krystal Covington of Women of Denver, this was a natural fit.—“I’m terrible at tracking spreadsheets for follow-up to journalists, so Boomerang allows me to program it to remind me if a person hasn’t respond to my pitch,” she explains. She adds that this helps keep her inbox at a lower number and increase productivity.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is something well known in the SEO community, as one of the foremost software suites out there. By looking at both the domains of their clients and their competitors, Ahrefs makes it possible to create custom keyword strategies that are guaranteed to drive traffic. It’s also very useful when deciding how many backlinks you need in order to increase ranking.

However, it has applications outside of the basic keyword research, as Frank Strong from Sword and the Script Media, LLC points out. “Many PR pros use Google Alerts to monitor and get email notifications of news or blog mentions of clients or employers. Ahrefs is similar, but far more thorough. The product monitors domains, so if a third-party site links to a client site for example, without mentioning a brand name, you’ll still get a notification.” As an added note, guest blogging is a great PR boost, and Ahrefs makes it easy to find sites with high domain authority to pitch.

Uberconference

In many cases, PR teams need to be able to communicate with each other more in a more efficient way than calling emergency meetings. This is why conference software is so important in the field, and something like Uberconference stands apart from some of the other markets. There’s a reason why Andy Abramson of Comunicano, Inc, calls it “the easiest, and most useful conferencing solution we ever used…It’s cloud-based and works on any mobile or desktop device. This also keeps cost down.” He adds that since it’s reservation-less, it’s also possible to set up conference calls in seconds.

Some of the features of Uberconference include quality-of-live innovations like call controls to help mute background noise for remote teams, as well as super-intuitive screen sharing to allow teams to discuss designs, data, and even make edits in real-time. In addition, it can be integrated with social media profiles and call recording is free in case you need to store or playback essential chats.

PressRush

Dealing with media lists can be a headache for any PR professional. Not only are these massive databases sometimes unwieldy, but points of contact and publications are constantly changing, rendering your outreach methods out of date. PressRush is unique in terms of PR software in that it doesn’t try to be a “jack of all trades,” instead focusing on online media outreach specifically. By targeting this niche specifically with built-in media monitoring, PressRush makes it far easier to keep track of journalists for future pitches.

For David Martin of Heed PR, PressRush was an essential fit in a time where he needed a more cost-effective platform for his PR agency. “With PressRush, I’m able to find the best writers and reporters for my pitches, construct unique media lists for those pitches, and set up alerts (delivered straight to my inbox) for keywords of my choosing. He also adds that if the email request for a certain contact happens to be missing, it can be requested so it can be found later.

Canva

One thing that many PR agencies have to struggle with is providing design materials when they don’t have a designer on staff. Canva is designed to make this easier, a perfect platform to put together social media graphics and presentation materials. With thousands of different layouts available and a versatile but accessible interface, it’s possible to combine your outreach efforts with stunning visual content for a full package for your clients.

Jennifer McDermott of Finder.com says that she has bonafide proof that using Canva helps with her company’s outreach. “We’ve found that the reports we’ve published using Canva have definitely had a bigger impact with media pick up than those that have been more basic text. Being visually compelling not only encourages media to report on our figures, but their audiences to share,” she says.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a digital marketing suite that combines a lot of smaller tools to handle important tasks like SEO, social media, and (of course) PR work. One essential thing that SEMRush does is gather data about your clients’ websites to see how their online strategy is progressing. In addition, it has applications for outreach as well. For example, a lot of PR is finding the right media outlets to partner with. By seeing the top-ranking outlets in your niche, you can figure out who is worth your time as far as targeting goes.

Fittingly, David Erickson of Karwoski & Courage treats SEMRush as a multipurpose tool, first for “ learning search behavior regarding a client brand. I use the tool to understand the types of searches people are performing about specific brands generally. For media, I use the tool to understand what kind of articles are driving the most traffic to a specific media outlet I may plan on pitching.”

Slack

Anyone who uses remote teams or even teams across different offices knows how difficult it can be to get messages across quickly. In the PR world, where one development or piece of news can completely change the course of your day, communication is essential, and this is where Slack comes in. This communication platform is an alternative for long email chains, with the ability to organize conversations and search through history quickly.

Heather Adams at Choice Media & Communications was a bit skeptical of Slack at first, but was quickly sold when trying it out for herself. “It’s much more user-friendly when searching and structuring your communication. There are public and private channels in case you need to share something confidential. You can upload documents easily and it also connects directly with Google so, for us, that benefited shared documents and calendars,” she explains.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovations changing the world of PR. Be sure to read industry publications and news to see what new PR tools you may want to use next. In addition, recruiting top PR professionals is a good way to help your business get the outreach it needs.

Everyone hated the traveling salesman.

That’s because he came to town, said whatever it took to make the sale, and then left.

In 1900, Sears saw a market opportunity. Their catalog had more variety, sure, but what it really offered was a guarantee. Tens of thousands of people even bought a house from the Sears catalog. They become the twentieth century’s biggest retailer because the company understood the lifetime value of trust—difficult to earn, but worth it.

The internet is going through the same schism right now.

Some folks are happy to sell you something right now, then bye, see ya (or not), because every website is in essence from out of town. With so much pressure on clickthrough rates and yield, it’s not surprising that companies are saying whatever they need to in order to close a sale. Big promises, very little care or support.

At the same time, some successful organizations have taken a completely different path. They’re so focused on maximizing the lifetime value for the customer (and themselves) that they work overtime to tell their customers the truth. It’s not for everyone and it might not be for you. Truth works because it earns trust.

Dropbox, software that I’ve recommended here before, is going through an identity crisis. They’ll need to decide if they want to invest in what it takes to be trusted. I’ve wasted many hours over the last few months trying to work my way through some significant bugs (workflow and data loss) with them, and each of the many customer service people I’ve worked with have pushed me to do more testing, and they’ve clearly stated that my problem is unique. This ‘bluff, stall and get used to it’ strategy is the sort of thing one might expect from a traveling salesman. Yesterday they finally let me know that in fact it’s a known issue, that it affects many people with hardware and software like mine, and I’m stuck with it. I can’t easily rip it out, and I can’t happily work with it either.

If they had told me 4 months ago, they would have had a chance at earning my trust as I built a workaround with them. Instead, they’ve lost a sneezer and a referrer, as well as the benefit of the doubt.

When you tell the buyer to beware, you’ve also told him or her to not bother to trust you.

In complex B2B sales environments - particularly ones that involve multiple stakeholders and lengthy and often complicated buying journeys - it's unwise to rush to propose your solution the moment a prospective customer acknowledges or implies that they may have a need that you might be able to solve.

This tendency towards "premature elaboration" has been the ruin of many apparently promising sales opportunities. If it is a significant purchase, and if your customer takes their decision-making seriously, they are going to take their time. rather than racing ahead of their buying journey, you would be far better advised to first establish your distinctive value.

But before you can position the distinctive value of implementing your solution, you first need to position the value of addressing your customer's issues ...

It's vital that you establish the full cost of their problem before you promote the value of our approach. Kahneman's research into buying behaviour concluded that decision-makers were 2-3 times more likely to take action because of the threat of loss as opposed to the opportunity for gain. Other studies have concluded that a decision to do nothing and stick with the status quo is the most common outcome for complex B2B buying journeys.

It should be obvious that before you attempt to persuade your customer of the distinctive value of your solution, you first need to build the case for change. And that requires a different sort of conversation from the need > solution track that might work in simple transactional sales. It requires a progressive, intentional and thoughtful approach - one that spans the following phases:

[1] Key trends

First, you need to become familiar with the most important industry and market trends that are affecting your target customers. You need to offer fresh perspectives on these trends that will be both interesting to your customers and allow you to progressively develop the conversation towards the recognition that they need your help - but at this stage it is vital that you resist the "itch to pitch" and be very careful not to rush into presenting your solution prematurely, before they have even acknowledged they have a problem.

[2] Key issues

Then, you need to identify the key issues that these trends are likely to be creating for their organisation. These are likely to include threats that if ignored are likely to have negative effect their business performance, as well as opportunities that - if implemented - could have a significant positive impact on their business. Once again, you need to focus our attention on threats and opportunities that - if recognised - you have proven answers to but you need to continue to lead towards rather than with your solution.

[3] Potential obstacles

Having identified some significant threats or opportunities that you are well-positioned to help them to address, it's now worth exploring the existing and potential obstacles that could be preventing them from achieving their goals. Perhaps they have already tried to deal with the issue, but have not been happy with the outcome? If so, you need to understand why. Alternatively, they may want to deal with the issue, but feel that current circumstances are holding them back. Once again, you need to understand why.

[4] Consequences

All of the above is a prelude to identifying the consequences of their current situation. If they feel that there are few negative consequences associated with sticking with the status quo, they are unlikely to see the need for change. And even if they do recognise some important consequences, they may feel that they are insufficient to justify action. You need to amplify the perceived pain of staying as they are by introducing previously unrecognised implications and consequences and in doing so making a compelling case for change.

[5] The need for change

By now, you should have persuaded your customer - if persuasion was necessary - of the need to take action. You now need to help them to think through the changes they will have to make to their business in order to address the issues, threats and opportunities they have acknowledged. These changes may involve their people, their organisation, their behaviours or their systems. Any change is always seen as carrying potential risk - so you must reassure them that the benefits of change will more than justify any short-term disruption.

[6] Potential options

Your customer will always have options, and these options will not necessarily be restricted to merely other vendors or suppliers that might at face value look similar to you. They will often include alternative approaches to achieving the goals your customer has established. They may believe that developing an "in house" solution is a credible option - or they could choose a completely different path. You need to understand what your customer regards as their credible options, and to help them weigh up the pros and cons of each approach.

[7] Critical capabilities

You've now laid the foundation for introducing your key capabilities as "must have" minimum requirements for addressing their issues, threats and opportunities, eliminating their obstacles and avoiding negative consequences. And because your capabilities can now be positioned within a clear business context, your recommendations will have far more power and credibility than if you jumped the gun and attempted to propose your solution the moment that your prospective customer acknowledged a potential need.

[8] Business value

And because your unique capabilities now have a clear business context, you can associate them with a clear business value. Because you have helped your customer to acknowledge the significant costs, risks and consequences of their current situation, you can establish a powerful contrast with the significant business benefits of adopting your approach and implementing your solution. And because you have highlighted the full potential value of the project, you can help your champion to justify its approval.

Contrast drives change

I'm not suggesting that the sales conversation needs to be perfectly linear in following these phases, or that all of these steps can or should be completed within a single conversation. But this progressive framework encourages and equips your sales people to invest their time in truly understanding the nature of their customer's challenges - and allows you to establish the maximum contrast between the customer's current situation and what they could aspire to if they decided to adopt your approach.

If you buy into these principles and want to learn more about the implications of adopting value selling in your organisation, I recommend that you download our step-by-step guide to implementing an effective value selling strategy.

Every industry relies on business meetings to get things done. And most employees dread them.

That’s because even when the meeting is necessary and productive, your team members have about a million other things they need to accomplish. Their to-do lists don’t disappear simply because you scheduled a mandatory meeting.

Add to that the staggering numbers about meetings:

• U.S. organizations hold between 36 and 56 million meetings every day.
• 67% of meetings are considered unproductive.
• Average salary cost of a meeting is $338.
• 37% of meetings start late.
• Employees spend about 31 hours in unproductive meetings.

Time is a zero-sum game. You cannot create more of it, so the more time you spend in meetings, the less time you have for other tasks -- especially important if you’re an entrepreneur.

Business meetings are a fact of life, but you can ensure yours are accomplishing what you intended without demoralizing your team. Here’s how.

Better Business Meetings in 5 Easy Steps

1. Be exclusive

Employees rarely enjoy business meetings. When the meeting doesn’t actually require their presence, you’re wasting their time and watering down your meeting.

Determine which team members legitimately need to be present at your meeting and limit your attendee list to those people only. When you involve unnecessary colleagues in the meeting, it’s easy to get off track and harder to build consensus with a large group.

Experience also suggests fewer people speak out in large groups of people. Instead of sharing their thoughts and ideas, they’ll likely go along to get along.

Amazon calls it the “two-pizza rule:” if you can’t feed the entire group with two pies, you’ve included too many people. Google also caps its meetings at eight.

Task attendees with sharing the meeting’s information with their team members and free the unnecessary people to continue being productive outside the meeting.

2. Stick to an agenda

Without a predetermined agenda, your meeting will stray from its course and likely last longer than it should.

Create a firm agenda ahead of time to keep attendees focused and ensure you cover the material you need to. A few more tips:

1. Allot a specific period of time for each point on your agenda.
2. Invite someone to act as timekeeper and notify the group when time is up.
3. Send the agenda to those who are attending at least 24 hours in advance, so they’ll be prepared to contribute to the conversation and add value.
4. Request attendees review the agenda and send additions or changes ahead of the meeting.

Additionally, if there’s a specific challenge to which you need a solution, encourage them to prepare solutions beforehand, so the meeting focuses on relevant solutions rather than on the problem. This will help employees feel invested because they are contributing to the meeting.

New York Times bestselling-author Mark Murphy suggests having a clear outline can shave as much as 17 minutes off your meeting time. Those 17 minutes can be devoted to productive efforts that generate revenue for your company. Multiply 17 times the number of employees attending, and you’ve saved a significant amount of time.

Don’t have time to create an agenda before your meetings? Ask a virtual assistant to do it.

Business Meeting Agenda [Example]

Meeting purpose: How to increase online sales

Meeting duration: 60 minutes

Topics to Address and review: 5 minutes

1. Review Q1 and Q2 sales figures
2. Discuss challenges causing decrease in online sales
3. Review digital marketing efforts and lead generation

Topic 1: Review Q1 and Q2 sales figures (15 minutes)

Topic 2: Discuss challenges causing decrease in online sales (15 minutes)

Topic 3: Review digital marketing efforts and lead generation (15 minutes)

Action items and next steps: (5 mins)

• Dave, Mary, and Lewis will work on A/B testing of new landing pages
• Joann's team will work on new lead generation assets
• Alex will work on upselling strategies
• Sarah will share meeting notes and confirm takeaways with stakeholders within three hours of meeting end

3. Tell stories

People remember stories better than simple facts.

The London School of Business reports people retain only about 5-10% of the statistics they hear. When you couple those statistics with an image, retention increases to about 25%. When statistics are presented with a story, retention jumps as high as 70%.

That’s likely because facts engage only the language portion of our brains while stories engage multiple parts of our brain at the same time. Stories activate the part of our brains that would have been involved if we had actually experienced the story ourselves.

Not only does a story put our entire brain to work, it helps both teller and hearer to synchronize their brains because they’re experiencing the same story at the same time.

Stories can help the teller “plant” an idea in the minds of the audience, which can be a powerful tool in the context of a business meeting. Authentic stories establish rapport and create emotional connections between people.

If the content of your meeting is important enough to warrant calling a meeting, it’s important enough to help your team retain it. Tell stories to help them remember and understand.

4. Change the scenery

Meetings can be repetitive and boring, which can hamper productivity. When your team gets comfortable with its surroundings, they may disengage and check out.

Shake things up by moving your meeting to a different location. Changing the environment can break up cliques and disrupt routine, which encourages creativity.

Steve Jobs was famous for having walking meetings -- great when the meeting is one-on-one or includes only a few individuals.

New locations also prompt people to be more alert to the unfamiliar surroundings, which ultimately means more engagement.

Move your meeting to a new place in the building or a local coffee shop. Occasionally schedule an off-site meeting that will bring your team together and encourage personalized communication.

Change your setting to increase engagement and encourage productivity.

5. Stand

If changing the scenery isn’t an option, alter the meeting by standing instead of sitting.

Psychologists suggest that stand-up meetings promote productivity by keeping participants more engaged and focused. Standing discourages long meetings by keeping team members from being too comfortable or relaxed.

Melissa Dahl of New York Magazine reported that stand-up meetings can reduce meeting times by 34%. Simply speaking, standing encourages the team to be productive and efficient, and it also combats drowsiness during gatherings.

It’s worth noting, too, that those who wish to command attention during meetings typically stand to do so. In this setting, you’re already standing, so you’ll naturally command more attention.

As an added bonus, since sitting can negatively impact metabolism, it’s healthier for your team to stand briefly than to sit for an entire day.

Productive Business Meetings Guard Your Bottom Line

Business meetings directly impact your bottom line in a couple of different ways.

When they are effective and efficient, they help your employees accomplish the company’s goals, improve your bottom line, and scale your business -- it’s like outsourcing an administrative task and immediately reaping the rewards. If they aren’t effective, they commandeer your employees’ attention and keep them from accomplishing the tasks that will generate revenue for your company.

Honor your employees’ time by keeping your meetings brief and only involving the employees whose attendance is required. Stick to a plan and avoid letting the discussion stray off your stated goal.

Use stories to convey your message to team members and change your meeting scenery to keep your employees from being too comfortable or too habitual.

When your meetings are efficient and effective, they’ll be more productive and less costly. Your employees will reap the benefits and they’ll be happy to attend future meetings.

When that happens, everyone wins.

Canadian assets may finally begin to feel some love.

A deal to join the U.S. and Mexico in a reworked North American trade pact, news that Royal Dutch Shell Plc and its partners are poised to move ahead with a liquefied natural gas project on the country’s west coast, and an offer for a Canadian energy company point to gains ahead for the country’s stock market and currency.

“This is very upbeat news, there was a lot of NAFTA uncertainty weighing on economy, stocks, with equities underperforming,” Michael Gregory, deputy chief economist at Bank of Montreal, said in a phone interview. Economic activity will probably pick up and the Bank of Canada is likely to tighten more than it otherwise would have, Gregory said.

The flurry of developments on trade and energy lift an overhang that has held back business investment and growth in the world’s 11th biggest economy. The Canadian dollar appreciated almost 1 per cent overnight and was quoted at 78.05 US cents against the greenback at 8:53 a.m. in Toronto, the strongest level in four months while S&P/TSX stock futures were little changed.

The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, covering a region that trades more than US$1 trillion annually, gives the U.S. improved access to Canada’s dairy market, stronger intellectual property provisions, and includes tighter rules of origin for auto production, according to two senior Trump administration officials who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.

“The Canadian market has been in the bottom of the league tables all year, kind of dismal and in particular the heavy hitters like the banks and the metals,” David Baskin, president of Toronto-based Baskin Wealth Management, which oversees $1.2 billion, said by phone.”I think a lot of that has to do with uncertainty about trade and the Canadian economy.”

The country’s benchmark stock index is down slightly this year despite strong global growth, making it the 11th worst performer among developed markets and trailing the 9 per cent gain in the S&P 500. The loonie has risen in recent months but is down 2.65 per cent on the year against its U.S. counterpart.

On the oil front, Husky Energy Inc. made a $3.3 billion hostile bid for MEG Energy Corp., setting up a battle between the Canadian oil company linked to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s family and Chinese giant Cnooc Ltd., a major investor in the targeted oilsands producer.

“A global energy company has said oilsands assets are worth a lot — that’s a positive development for Canada,” Ian de Verteuil, head of portfolio strategy at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, said in a telephone interview. “There’s three positive things for Canada.”

Mark McCormick, North American head of FX strategy at Toronto-Dominion Bank, said the important thing to consider is how much of the new trade agreement has been priced in.

“It also depends on whether it moves the needle on Bank of Canada pricing next year. Do we get another hike for instance?”

McCormick said there is room for momentum traders to try to push the Canadian currency lower but “we don’t think this is a game-changer for the loonie.” The Canadian dollar has been the best-performing currency the past three months already, McCormick noted in an email. He sees short-term fair value for the currency at 1.2850 per U.S. dollar.

Bloomberg.com

OTTAWA — The Liberal government will dole out what is likely to be billions of dollars in compensation for dairy farmers, following a new continental trade deal that critics say only further restricts industry’s ability to compete in the global market.

The so-called U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) will widen foreign access to the domestic dairy market by about 3.6 per cent, according to analysts, higher than the 3.25 per cent that was conceded by Canada under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In 2015, former prime minister Stephen Harper offered as much as $4.3 billion compensate dairy and poultry producers for TPP, prompting questions over the cost of the latest round of pay outs.

“You can bet the ask is going to be significant here,” said Martha Hall Findlay, chief executive officer of the Canada West Foundation in Calgary.

The foundation has long called for the scrapping of Canada’s supply managed dairy industry, which effectively controls markets through production quotas, fixed pricing and heavy tariffs on imports ranging between 246 and 300 per cent.

“These piecemeal compensations could end up being far, far more than what it would actually cost to dismantle supply management in its entirety,” Hall Findlay said.

• 'Cheese ninjas' to the rescue: Why Canada's supply management system needs reform
• 'It’s change they’re afraid of': We asked beef farmers what they think of supply management

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday did not specify how much money would be paid out to embattled dairy producers, but told reporters the compensations were “the right thing to do.” Ottawa has not yet detailed precisely how much compensation would be given out to farmers under TPP.

Ottawa joined the USMCA Sunday evening, just hours before a U.S.-imposed deadline. The deal, if completed, would put an end to over a year of negotiations to modernize the North American Free Trade agreement, first signed in the early 1990s.

Analysts say the deal includes some major concessions for producers.

“It’s a hard hit,” said Al Mussell, lead researcher at the Ontario-based Agri-Food Economic Systems.

Mussell said the most striking concession is the elimination of Class 7 milk products, including high-protein products like milk powders and baby formulas, which were long a sticking point in Canada-U.S. trade negotiations. The classification was introduced in March 2017 as a way for Canadian producers to keep input costs artificially low.

The deal also slaps a levy on any Canadian exports of Class 7 milk products over a certain threshold, effectively limiting companies’ access to foreign markets.

Hall Findlay said the Class 7 concessions, combined with wider access to the dairy market for U.S. firms, will restrict the ability of Canadian firms to compete globally.

“It’s a win-win for the Americans,” she said. “Were opening more of our domestic market, but we’re doing nothing to enhance our ability to expand into other global markets. At some point this does not make sense for Canada.”

The USMCA has prompted widespread calls for compensation to dairy farmers, both from producers and conservative-leaning politicians.

“If our farmers are being abandoned because of one-sided concessions from the federal government, they must take immediate action to support the families and livelihoods that are now at risk,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said on Twitter Monday.

Supply management has caused a rift inside Conservative ranks in Ottawa. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, for his part, has been supportive of supply management after securing the support of dairy farmers in his leadership bid — a move seen by some as fundamentally anti-free market. Maxime Bernier split from the party last month to launch his own entity, calling the Conservatives “intellectually and morally corrupt” in part because of its support for dairy protections.

Pierre Lampron, president of Dairy Farmers Canada, had long called on Ottawa to tread carefully in dairy concessions under NAFTA talks. The group criticized the deal Monday.

“We fail to see how this deal can be good for the 220,000 Canadian families that depend on dairy for their livelihood,” Lampron said in a statement.

Dairy analyst Mussell said dairy producers feel they have become the “fall guy” in a string of trade deals including TPP and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which further opened up Canada’s cheese market to European firms.

“I think the producers feel like they’ve been beat up pretty bad,” Mussell said.

The first protections for the Canadian dairy industry were introduced around 1970. Additional protections for chicken, eggs, turkey and other products were phased in over the following decade.

In early markets, customers prefer entire solutions, not best in class point products. These solutions often include significant professional services and education. At the beginning of a new wave, most customers don’t understand the technology well. So, they seek experts to guide them.

Companies that provide services and education often win the early market. They develop customer relationships, reinforce their expertise with a strong brand, define the purchasing criteria in their favor and ultimately grow faster.

In the earliest days of commercial Hadoop, Cloudera educated the market through services. As they grew the user base, they developed subscription products, which now account for about 75% of revenue . In the IoT (internet of things), C3IoT and UpTake have pursued similar strategies. In the cloud native world, Heptio provides consulting and training for Kubernetes, a new infrastructure technology. In each case, the new technology is complex and understood by few.

During this early phase in the market - Carlota Perez calls it the installation phase - professional services is important. Professional services educates new buyers and grows the market. As a market matures and enters the deployment phase, the buyer refines their purchasing decision. They replace pieces of the initial all-in-one stack with best-of-breed point solutions. A few years in, they understand their needs better.

If your startup operates in a new market or champions a new fundamental technology, you have a strategic decision. Do you offer education and professional services at scale?

If you don’t offer those services, you bet that the market will mature quickly enough by itself to create a large market opportunity for you. That enough buyers will self-educate or educate themselves through other means. And, those buyers eventually come to buy your solution at that point. You may have to wait for the market to mature and that timing is difficult to predict. This is a defensive stance.

I believe it’s better to be aggressive: offer PS and education. Instead of waiting, your startup can attack the market opportunity. Selling PS means your startup will find, educate and inculcate new buyers in your philosophies and methodologies. Most of them will choose to buy your software since they’ve asked you to educate them. Revenues will surge, you’ll build a brand, and understand the market in greater depth. You’ll have many more customer interactions. You’ll also influence the speed at which the market matures.

Naturally, there is a tradeoff. Most boards and management teams steer businesses away from professional services. Services revenues are less valuable, less sustainable and consequently less attractive to investors. As a rough rule of thumb, one dollar of software revenue is worth 8x a dollar of services revenue.

But in the early phases of fundamental infrastructure and software shifts, services and education are a powerful tool to shift the competitive playing field in your direction.

Image credit: Rosmarie Voegtli

Customer experience has never been more important. The way people buy has changed, but unfortunately most businesses are still trying to sell things the old way.

Not too long ago Google brought out the term ZMOT, which refers to the point in the buying process when the consumer learns about a product before the seller even knows about them.

Thanks to the internet every customer now has a voice and a wider selection of choices. Bad experiences can have devastating effects on your business.

But with so many touch points it can be hard to keep track of things. Thankfully not all touch points carry the same level of importance.

In this post, we’ll talk about 5 of the most important touch points—those moments of truth that affect a buying decision—and how you can improve them to drive sales.

1. First Impression: Brand content

In today’s world, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase. And according to Forrester, B2B buyers will find three pieces of content about a vendor for every one piece that marketing can publish or sales can deliver.

More people are becoming less susceptible to paid advertisement, the average click-through rate for banner Ads is 0.06% and 25% of Americans used Ad blockers in 2016.

With all the information a consumer needs just a search away, businesses need to shift to a more customer-centric version of marketing.

Content marketing enables a business to reach consumers at the point they’re actively seeking a solution to a problem. For many consumers, content is the first touchpoint they have with a brand and can strongly influence their purchasing.

Content marketing can be on site and even off site. A few examples of off-site content marketing include:

• A guest post on an industry blog.
• A video your team created and posted on Youtube.
• Social media posts on your company’s account.

To create content that’s optimized to send potential customers your way. You need to solve pain points that a lot of your customers have, but these pain points also have to align with your business.

Helpful content creates a positive experience in the minds of your customers.

2. Social Influence: Customer reviews

Online reviews strongly influence a buyer’s decision. Even if you have an effective content marketing program in place, most people will still need to learn more about your business and its alternatives. And they usually turn to off-site recommendations and reviews for this.

Consider that 85% of people trust online reviews just as much as a personal recommendation and a negative review can drive away approximately 22% of customers.

In today’s interconnected world people are sharing their experiences and listening to other buyers before they make a purchase. And since consumers are likely to spend 31% more on products/services from businesses that have excellent reviews, this can positively impact your business.

Even though reviews can’t be directly manipulated, you can improve them with great customer experience. To do that you have to be proactive and monitor incidences of dissatisfaction as they happen. When a negative review is already live, your best option is to acknowledge the feedback honestly, which shows that you care about the opinions of your customers.

In the long run, improving overall customer experience is the only way to ensure you get the most out of them.

3. Competitor Comparison: Your website

Depending on how familiar a user is with your company, your website can be the most critical factor in determining whether they buy from you. At this stage, they’ve likely narrowed their choices to you and a handful of competitors and are now looking for more information.

In fact, a survey of more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in services purchased revealed that 74% of buyers reported their service provider’s website had “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider.

But unlike reviews, your website is easier to optimize. It should clearly convey your value proposition to prospective customers so they can determine if you’re the right fit.

Here are a few ways to improve a customer’s experience on your website:

• Include live chat so your visitors can get personalized service if needed.
• Implement user surveys after important events are completed on your website. For example, after a visitor signs up or completes an online purchase. This gives you insight on which parts of your website need improving.
• Lastly, make your website mobile-friendly. Mobile has surpassed desktop in terms of internet usage, so this ensures your visitors have great experiences with whatever device they use.

4. Product Engagement: Free trial

Free trials are nothing new. They’re not only a great way to market your product, but they let your prospective customers experience your solution first-hand to decide if it matches their need.

A customer’s experience during a free trial can be the difference between whether they become long-lasting customers or abandon your service. A free trial is the first time a customer is engaging with your product so your customer experience has to be excellent.

Facebook’s VP of growth Alex Schultz has talked about the importance of providing magic moments to users as quickly as possible. Magic Moments are those “aha” scenarios where a customer has an experience with your core value proposition. For Facebook, that was the point where new users saw old friends by uploading their contacts.

Every product has a magic moment.

Here are a few things you can do to get users to magic moments quickly:

• Use email automation to teach them about your most important features: They have to understand how to use the product and the value it brings them.
• Be proactive with support: Don’t just wait for users to complain about an issue because only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. Reach out to them and ask if they need any help.
• Use behavior-based analytics: What people say and what they do are usually different. Behavior-based analytics allows you to see beyond what users are telling you into how they use your products and helps you identify the bumps along the way.
• Perform regular product satisfaction surveys: This allows you to learn which features users care about and what they would like to see in the future.

5. Ongoing Support: Community Interactions

Keeping your existing customers is easier and more profitable than acquiring new users. In order to retain customers, you have to deliver great experiences post-sale.

Great support doesn’t just reduce your churn rate. Through word-of-mouth marketing, it can also bring more customers to your business. Research by Nielsen revealed that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than all other forms of marketing.

Ensuring that your current customers are happy is the only way you build a sustainable business.

This goes beyond just providing great customer service. You have to ensure that your customers feel as though they belong to a community. This is the point where they turn from customers to evangelists.

Most brands engage with their customers by hosting live events and supporting interactions through social media platforms and even email marketing.

Wrap-up

Businesses need to let go of the old way of thinking about consumer interactions. It’s now omnichannel and user driven. Customer experience in today’s interconnected world can no longer be treated as an afterthought but as part of your core business strategy.

Looking for a few easy, virtually-free ways to immediately connect with more prospects? I’m willing to bet you just said, "That’s a no-brainer."

Below, I’ve compiled 18 of my favorite methods for reaching prospects. Some of them take seconds to deploy, and all of them will save you time throughout your workday. To help prioritize first steps, I put them in sequential order -- starting with those that offer value the fastest and ending with those that require more time.

However, don’t stop after the first few. They provide the groundwork for the tips at the bottom -- which are well worth the extra effort.

Let’s do this.

1. Understand your prospects’ interests before speaking with them.

Imagine owning a high-end retail store selling designer clothing but not staffing the store with experts who can observe buyer browsing behavior and offer assistance. Crazy, right? Well, that's the way many websites behave.

No matter how little traffic your website gets, there are visitors who could become great customers. Unfortunately, you won’t have a chance to speak with them if your website isn’t optimized to capture these visitors’ interest and intent.

Luckily, technology is available to monitor which site pages visitors view and when they view them. Tools, like the free HubSpot CRM, allow you to monitor how and when your leads interact with your website.

With this knowledge, instead of starting conversations with, "How can I help you?", you can start with, "I bet you're interested in learning about how we can help with X and Y" (X and Y are covered on the pages the prospect viewed on your website).

Think that’s too creepy? Here’s another way to start the conversation: "Companies like yours are usually struggling with how to do X or Y. Are either of these an issue for you right now?”

2. Convert a higher percentage of website visitors into leads.

Many websites convert a small percentage of visitors to customers because they only offer one way for a prospect to contact the company. Marketers might put up a “contact sales” page on their website and call it a day.

Companies can quickly increase conversion rates by creating offers that match the content of different pages on their site. Your forms and CTAs should help buyers find the right products based on their needs and interests.

For example, when Turbine added just one additional conversation point to their site, the new call-to-action generated a staggering 26% of their conversions. The offer? A simple subscription box for their blog.

When they’re first exploring your site, most buyers aren’t ready to buy; they’re in research mode. Match your offers to the different stages of their buying journey, and capture their contact information, so you can attempt to connect and influence them earlier in their decision process.

3. Track which contacts are in-market for your service.

Now that you’re capturing more leads, you’ll likely follow up as quickly as possible to turn some of those contacts into customers. But not all will respond, and most won't lead to an immediate sales opportunity if the timing isn’t right.

When the timing is right, they might not call you, and you probably won't be lucky enough to serendipitously check in with them either -- unless you track their behavior.

HubSpot’s free marketing tools allow you to track visitor actions on your website. Once a visitor converts on your website, use your tools to identify these contacts. I know many salespeople who start their morning calling the leads who converted most recently. And why wouldn't they? These are prospects that are clearly in-market for their services.

4. Connect with more prospects over email.

Crafting a well-written sales email takes time and effort. Smart salespeople don’t wait for prospects to reply. Just because a prospect doesn't write back doesn't mean they're not interested.

Prospects might not respond because they’re too busy, working on a deadline, or they simply get distracted and forget. Recipients are more likely to open and read an email if the message is well-crafted, targeted to the right person, and personalized. They'll consider the salesperson's questions and insights -- and might even click on links in the email to learn more.

If they don’t write back, salespeople don't know about their interest. Instead, they move on to another prospect, or blindly send follow-up email after follow-up email. While sending multiple notes and casting a wide net are critical to prospecting success, these reps miss the obvious opportunity to connect with those interested-but-too-busy-to-write-back prospects who are most likely to respond to the next attempt.

With the help of sales email tracking tools, offered by software like the HubSpot CRM, you can monitor and receive alerts when your recipients open and click your emails. How should you use this information to increase your connect rate?

Call while your prospect is reading your email. If the prospect doesn't pick up, focus future email attempts on these evidently interested prospects instead of blanketing their whole list or giving up. By focusing on prospects who’ve read and considered your email, you can increase your response rate.

5. Automatically track and organize every sales attempt.

The time between a prospect discovering a company's service and making a purchase varies significantly. Some sales cycles are quick, but many have a large number of opportunities that are months -- and maybe years -- old.

As salespeople become overwhelmed managing months’ or years’ worth of opportunities, they lose track of details and communication history. If salespeople change roles, territories, or move on from a company, sales pursuit records are often lost due in part to poor CRM documentation.

It would be a lot better if every email and phone call were automatically logged to the right contact and account in your CRM, wouldn’t it? The free HubSpot CRM integrates with your email client (Gmail, Outlook, or Office 365), your phone system, and your rep’s calendar, to automatically capture every interaction salespeople have with their prospects. It speeds up their sales process and nothing gets lost in translation.

6. Enter contact and company data into your CRM with one click.

Not only do salespeople procrastinate over logging calls and emails into their CRM, many of them don't even bother entering contacts. Instead, they work out of their email inboxes, only entering contacts and companies once they've verified a deal (if at all).

Tools like Zapier and the HubSpot Sales email extension allow you to automatically add contacts to your CRM from emails sent to your prospect. With data entry automated, salespeople can spend more time actually selling instead of record keeping

7. Connect with prospects on social media.

If your salespeople could attend a never-ending networking event where they could meet and talk with prospect after prospect, would you tell them not to go? This is what companies do when they discourage social media use at work.

There's no denying prospects use social media at least occasionally. In fact, 65% of sales reps who use social selling fill their pipeline, compared to 47% of reps who don’t. Encourage your team to monitor social media for potential buyer mentions of your company name, your product or service, or a hashtag aligned with your proposition.

8. Find even more in-market companies visiting your website.

No matter how good your website is at converting visitors into leads, it won't work every time. Even top-performing websites only convert a single digit percentage of visitors. But, there is a way to discover who some of those anonymous visitors are, especially if you sell to bigger companies.

When someone from a large organization visits your website, “reverse IP lookup” or visitor identification software can detect their computer's IP address and match it with their employer's known addresses.

Sales Hub Professional and other software have tools to identify which companies are visiting your website and give your sales team a clearer picture of where prospects are coming from.

9. Schedule email responses.

Salespeople are heavily reliant on email during the sales process but often respond during off-hours -- early in the morning or at night. This means when a prospect gets into the office, the salesperson’s message is buried at the bottom of an inbox avalanche.

With tools such as Boomerang and the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension, salespeople can increase their chances of getting a response by scheduling emails to send when a prospect is most likely to open and read.

10. Use email prospecting messages proven to get responses.

Have you ever had deja vu as you're writing an email to a prospect? Thought to yourself, “I wonder how many times I’ve written an email almost exactly like this?”

Think about the time each salesperson wastes typing the same thing over and over again and multiply that by the number of salespeople at your company. That’s a lot of time wasted.

This is where sales email templates enter the picture. Once they’re created, copy and paste them into your email provider and reuse them as needed. Here are tested and true sales email templates your team can begin using today.

Creating email templates and analyzing their performance can improve your prospecting strategy and decrease the amount of time your team spends typing emails.

11. Automate customized prospecting campaigns.

More than 40% of sales reps find prospecting to be the most challenging part of the sales process, and many give up after a few follow-up attempts. Why is this?

Many salespeople are quick to move on to new leads, looking for the low-hanging fruit. Others just aren't organized enough to follow up several times. Still others worry about being too aggressive. None of these are good reasons. To fill the top of their funnel with opportunities, salespeople must attempt to connect with every prospect more than once.

With the sequences tool in Sales Hub, salespeople can schedule a series of targeted emails to send over time. Once a prospect responds, they are removed from the sequence. Never drop the ball on follow-ups again.

12. Queue up your calls for the day.

While email and social media are great ways to connect with prospects, nothing beats the phone for making meaningful, memorable connections. However, most salespeople are highly unproductive when it comes to telephone prospecting.

Companies often report sales reps need help identifying the right contacts to call, and many marketing generated leads are either lost, ignored, or discarded. When you ask salespeople why this is, they’ll say it’s hard to prioritize and keep track of who to call.

This is where call queueing comes in. As reps go about their day, they can add hot prospects to a call queue and stop wasting time thinking, “Who should I call next?” If you’re effectively tracking who opens your emails and visits your website, call queuing is the key to prioritizing and connecting with these hot leads.

13. Eliminate the hassle of booking meetings.

As effective as the phone is at creating connections, the fact remains most calls go to voicemail. This makes scheduling meetings a very frustrating process for busy salespeople and even busier prospects.

The process often includes looking at a calendar, proposing a list of days and times, having the prospect look at their calendar, and proposing more times. What a hassle. Imagine automating that process so the salesperson only has to send a link to a public version of their calendar showing availability, which allows the buyer to book a time that works for them.

Luckily there’s HubSpot’s meetings tool, Calendly, and Setmore. You’ll schedule meetings with ease and have more time to focus on the rest of your prospecting process.

14. Initiate a dialogue when prospects are on your website.

We've already established technology can enable salespeople to reach out to prospects when they’re visiting your website or opening one of your emails. But they might not pick up or respond. Want to avoid the delay altogether?

Live chat allows your sales team to reach potential customers as they’re browsing your site. Chat solutions like Kayako, Intercom, and HubSpot Conversations give you the ability to interact with website visitors, answer questions, and suggest solutions.

If a visitor has a question, all they have to do is click the chat window to get an immediate answer from a salesperson. This helps your team book more meetings with interested buyers.

You can customize your prompt for different pages of your website. If a prospect is on a page that talks about your pricing, you might write, "Can I help you figure out the right product and price for your needs?"

But if they’re reading a blog post about topic X, a message starting with, "I'm an expert at helping people with topic X. Would you like to have a conversation about whether investing more in X makes sense for you?" makes more sense.

15. Review the conversations your salespeople are having.

The vast majority of sales conversations are never reviewed. Companies hire salespeople, train them, join a few of their calls, and leave them alone.

However, mastering sales is nowhere close to that quick or easy. Trust me: salespeople screw up lots of deals. They miss important details their prospects share. They miss buying signs. They spend too much time with unqualified prospects.

One of the most important thing any company can do to improve win rates is to have sales managers or leaders review calls. This helps reps salvage deals and provides advice they can use to become more effective.

In field sales, it's necessary to do physical ride alongs to observe reps. But in inside sales, call recording makes sales coaching much more scalable. Recording sales calls allows sales managers to continuously review and coach.

Too busy to coach your salespeople? Hire an external sales coach. If you want to annotate calls and build a library of best practices, try tools like ExecVision or Refract.

16. Publish content to expand your reach and engage your contacts.

The key to attracting and engaging prospects online is creating content that informs, educates, and entertains them. But content isn’t just for pulling in anonymous website visitors and converting them to leads.

Once a salesperson is communicating with a prospect, content helps challenge the buyer’s thinking and educate them on potential solutions. In addition, original content reinforces reps’ expertise, compelling prospects not just to take their call, but their advice too.

The problem? Most salespeople don't understand how to leverage content, let alone create it. While not every salesperson is a great writer, all top salespeople are great communicators who understand what it takes to transform a prospect from uninformed buyer to happy customer.

With help from their marketing team, they can share content the company creates on social media and in their 1:1 interactions with prospects. And with help from content creation services like Zerys, Blogmutt, or Contently, reps can turn rough thoughts, recorded calls, and company content into original material.

Once you commit to creating content, the next question becomes where to publish it. If your company has a blog and you’re using the right marketing software, contributing there will make your name known to website visitors, show you which of your prospects viewed your content, and help your company attract new leads -- win-win-win.

If your company hasn't invested in marketing software yet or doesn’t have a blog, publish on LinkedIn. Assuming you've been connecting with good fit prospects during your career, your posts will be presented in their news feed. Starting a conversation becomes pretty easy after a prospect has read one of your articles.

17. Use surveys to understand and connect with more prospects.

When prospecting, most salespeople jump right into what their product does, how awesome it is, and why the prospect should talk to them about it. In effect, they declare, "I have a product to sell. Would you like to talk about buying it from me?" This approach is a recipe for failure.

A better way to pique the interest of a prospect is to ask them about the challenges they face -- that you just so happen to have the ability to help them overcome. And what better way to ask them about their challenges than to invite them to participate in market research in exchange for a report comparing them to their peers?

SurveyMonkey is an example survey software, and their responses integrate with CRMs and other tools used by your sales team. Salespeople can invite prospects to take a survey, which gives the salesperson the ability to start a conversation.

Once the prospect responds, the salesperson has several dialogue openers at their disposal, as revealed by their responses. To further increase the number of sales touches a survey enables, include prospects in the design of the survey, distribute the report to them afterwards, and even offer to present the findings and provide recommendations.

Survey data is also useful when reaching out to new leads after the research has been completed. As Challenger Sale and Insight Selling point out, data-backed insights that encourage prospects to think about their challenges are fantastic conversation starters.

18. Use documents to connect with more contacts at your target accounts.

When calling on larger companies, most salespeople fail to phone enough contacts within the account. Even when they do, they might not connect with more than one or two people.

The problem is that most companies rely on more than one or two contacts to make a purchasing decision. Without having direct access to them -- or even knowing who they are -- it’s difficult for a salesperson to influence these additional stakeholders.

Identify who these other decision makers and influencers are by sending prospects documents they’re likely to forward to others. Documents, a HubSpot CRM tool, enables salespeople to upload a piece of content and get a sharable link.

If the prospect forwards the document link to someone else, that new person is asked to complete a form, which adds them to the account. In addition, reps get data on what content is impacting sales success and what isn’t.

The Future of Sales Is Attracting Prospects to You -- Not the Other Way Around

In an age when prospects are well-informed and often research your company before sales reaches out, it’s time to match their behavior. The future of sales is about attracting prospects to you, but that doesn’t mean you can sit and wait for them to find you.

The techniques above put your company and salespeople in complete control over the number and quality of conversations they have. Depending on the size of your sales team and contact list, you can get started for free. You can even complete the methods above for a relatively small investment, especially when compared to the potential return.

I’m a big believer in sales contests. During my 10 years in sales leadership, I’ve had a lot of time to experiment with designing sales contests—some of which have worked, some of which have been miserable failures. In this post, I’ll share my biggest takeaways on how to put together sales contests that drive excitement and superlative results.

It’s All About the Team

Research shows that creating healthy competition within sales teams can substantially increase results. I know; you don’t need me to provide proof that salespeople are competitive!

Sales contests are the most obvious way to ignite that competitive spirit, but they shouldn’t be about elevating one individual over another.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling event management software or kitchen knives. Running effective sales contests is all about pushing the entire team to reach collective new heights. To do this, you must keep in mind that the three main goals of a sales contest are to:

1. Elevate the performance of poor/average performers
2. Increase overall team activity
3. Enhance team morale

Notice that none of these goals have anything to do with driving more sales directly.  In fact, “sell the most” sales contests usually have a negative effect on all three of the goals above.

A small sync between the Bizzabo AE and BDR teams.

Don’t Build Your Sales Contest Around the Top-Selling Sales Rep

Easily the biggest misconception about sales contests is the notion that their goal is to reward the top-selling rep. In fact, the worst sales contests are created around the premise of “most revenue in a month wins X.”

Rewarding elite sales production, in and of itself, should not be what you design a sales contest around. You should already have mechanisms in place to incentivize that kind of excellence, like a “BDR of the Month” award or an “Account Executive of the Quarter” trophy. And if you have a large enough organization, you also probably have a “President’s Club” where those in the top 10% of production for the year go on a well-deserved, company-paid vacation. You should leave the acknowledgment of top sales results to those types of rewards.

Shake the Tree by Rewarding Front-end Activity

First and foremost, sales contests should almost exclusively be designed around rewarding front-end activity. The primary reason for this is because activity is the great equalizer; if you’re new or struggling, it’s much easier to stay in contention with the top sales performers when you’re judged on booking demos, making a lot of dials, or passing over qualified leads to account executives (or any other top-of-the-funnel activity).  

A secondary benefit to building sales contests around activity is that it tends to “shake the tree” of your top-performing reps. Elite reps who are benefiting from strong pipelines and a mastery of your sales process typically shirk their responsibility to generate high activity. They’re so efficient they’ve forgotten what it means to hustle. But unfortunately for them, if they want to be competitive in an activity-based sales contest, they’ll need to step up to the plate and improve their behavior.   

Moreover, when you structure contests around the top-of-the-funnel and not the end result, you’ll benefit from everything that comes with a level playing field; everyone is engaged and team activity soars.

Strong Sales Contests Don’t Focus on the End Result

Put yourself in the shoes of a new sales rep or someone that is struggling to produce on a consistent basis. It’s the first day of the month and your manager is visibly excited to roll out the new sales contest. As usual, the parameters are around selling more than everyone else to win. The manager thinks the prize, a new 4K TV, will motivate everyone to work hard and the competitive spirit between the reps will lead to a record sales month.

What is more likely to happen is that the top reps who always do well will pull ahead in the contest within the first week. The remaining reps, whose production you actually need to improve, will fall hopelessly behind when they realize they have no real chance of winning. For the next three weeks, the majority of the team disengages from the sales contest and the historically best reps will inevitably win again.

The rich get richer and you just gave an expensive prize to a rep that was going to have a great month anyway. When this occurs, why even bother running a sales contest at all?  

Add an Element of Chance to Your Sales Contest

Even if you’ve changed your contest parameters to reward front-end activity, if the sales contest is still as simple as “most demos booked in a month wins”, you’re missing a huge component of running great contests – having fun with gamification. One of the key learnings I’ve had in running almost a hundred sales contests is the importance of introducing the element of luck.  

By tying qualifying contest activities to playing a game with an unpredictable outcome, it truly makes it feel like anyone can win. More specifically, the randomness associated with playing a game should appear twice in your contests – once when a qualifying activity is completed, and once at the end of the competition to determine the final winner.  

Yes, we are spinning a roulette wheel in the name of better sales performance and morale.

As an example, I recently designed a contest for my BDR team around the number of qualified opportunities accepted by the account executives. To introduce luck, I went online and bought a cheap plastic roulette wheel. I explained to the reps that every time an account executive takes a demo into their pipe, they get to spin the roulette wheel. Whatever number they landed on was then converted into the number of poker chips they earned.

When a “game of chance”  like this accompanied each individual activity, the BDRs were unusually driven to book demos just so they could spin the wheel. While they were having fun, I was basking in a flurry of activity that ultimately leads to more sales.  

Then at the end of the month, all the BDRs took their chips to a no-limit poker table and the person left standing won (and I can assure you, they were not my best rep).  I can’t over overstate the benefit to company morale when everyone was watching me deal the final hand and cheering on the underdog.  All it takes is one successfully run contest to get everyone excited for what you’ll do next.

A High Tide Raises All Boats

When I was an individual contributor at the start of my career, I was involved in many “sell the most” contests.  I experienced first-hand how ineffective they were and vowed to never repeat those mistakes if I were to lead a team of my own.

Once I earned a promotion to management, I put an end to contests designed around the end result – why give more to the best reps only to demotivate the rest of the team?

From my experience, contests that revolve around playing games with top-of-the-funnel activity are a high tide that raises all boats – everyone is engaged throughout the competition, team morale soars, and most importantly, you’ll get an appreciable bump in results.

This is what has worked for me and why I don’t design contests that only reward top producers. Do you agree? Awesome. Disagree violently? Even better. Weigh-in in the comments and let me know what innovative contest ideas have worked for you!

The post Why the Best Sales Contests Don’t Reward the Top Producers appeared first on Sales Hacker.

So you want to become a sales manager? First you’ll need to make sure you’ve got the right skills, experience, drive and track record at the helm in both selling and at managing others—in order to back yourself up.

Making the leap from sales practitioner to sales manager doesn’t have as much to do with being a rockstar that boasts the highest close rate on your team—as it’s concerned with your ability to motivate, lead and elevate others to achieve more.

While all sales manager undoubtedly need hands-on experience converting prospects into customers themselves, there are a wide range of other (equally important) sales manager skills you’ll need to command in order to excel in this role.

Want to get a ready-made set of resources to manage a sales team effectively? Download our sales management toolkit that contains checklists, templates, scripts and more.

First and foremost, what exactly is a sales manager?

While the definition of sales manager can actually vary quite a bit from organization to organization, in the primary context of B2B startups (like those we work with most here at Close.io), a sales manager is defined as:

A sales manager is responsible for building, leading and managing a team of salespeople within an organization.

More practically on the actual job execution level, sales managers are charged with several mission critical functions within most organizations. That includes activities like:

• Setting sales goals
• Managing individual and team quotas
• Creating a sales plan and proactively experimenting to improve execution
• Monitoring progress in real-time and analyzing data
• Overseeing the organization’s sales training
• Keeping an active watch over (and involvement in) key accounts
• Mentoring individual sales reps and administering incentive programs
• Recruitment, hiring and firing of sales reps

Some of these sales manager responsibilities can overlap with those of other related roles depending upon the size and internal structure of your organization.

Especially when it comes to titles like Sales Director or Head of Sales positions, which tend to be more senior and concerned with organizational strategy, than the average sales manager role.

Check out this side-by-side comparison between an open sales manager role and an open head of sales role to see the subtle (and not so subtle) differences:

While there’s a lot of similarity when it comes to the buzzwords in both roles—like developing and supporting revenue targets, overseeing the sales process for your team, setting trends and monitoring projections—it’s also clear that the head of sales role is much more senior than that of the sales manager.

The head of sales job posting clearly highlight just how much of the job function is concerned with strategy and direction (rather than the active management of people that shines through in the sales manager posting).

For example, the head of sales will report directly to the company’s CEO, have ownership of the future scaling roadmap, and be responsible to keep the company on track for their internal growth projections.

That position is a whole lot different than spending most of your day working directly with individual sales reps, helping them to close more deals and achieve revenue targets.

So once you exactly what type of role you’re going after and the corresponding title that best fits, you can begin positioning yourself to stand out from the crowd and make a powerful first impression on hiring managers.

Now, let’s talk about the seven most important skills you’ll need in order to become a sales manager.

7 skills you’ll need to master in order to become a sales manager

If you want to become a sales manager, start with perfecting and then showcasing these key skills throughout your interview process.

1. Identifying, recruiting and hiring talented sales reps

While much of your job as a sales manager will be focused on enabling your existing team to continue performing better over time, keeping new candidates coming in the front door to replace those that either move up or out—and add to the strength of your sales team—is just as important.

And like a fine wine, you’ll naturally improve over time in your ability to identify talented prospective sales reps as you go through the process of recruiting, hiring and building your base of experience. However, by far the best way to improve in your ability to spot and incentivize top talent is to, well… start doing it today.

Lobby for taking a more active role in your company’s sales hiring process. Express your interest in eventually moving up and ask to sit in on some interviews with your manager. Spend a few minutes each day reaching out to potential candidates and starting conversations you can learn from over time.

Take an interest and predict which people end up making it furthest in the interview process. Who goes on to become a top-performing rep?

Which qualities, traits, characteristics, and motivations contribute to their success?

What is it about the top-performers on your existing team that enable them to do well?

When sourcing candidates for internal sales jobs, keep this in mind:

• Real-world results reign supreme. If a candidate you’re interviewing for a sales role can’t clearly articulate a tangible result they’ve achieved at a current or previous sales job, that’s a major red flag. It’s not all about knowing every penny you’ve generated in revenue, but successful salespeople (and those on their way to becoming successful) keep a close eye on their biggest wins and know where they stand.
• Preparation and organization are key. If a candidate doesn’t prepare enough ahead of time to have a case study they can proactively bring up during their interview, how can you expect them to show up prepared and ready to close their first presentation? Another mark of a strong salesperson, beyond just their historical book of business, is their level of organization and how prepared they are when showing up for a presentation, sales call, or meeting—and an interview is the perfect testing ground to gauge this critical quality.
• They’ve been tested and challenged. Don’t hire the person with the perfect record who’s never been through failure before. Rejection is painful, and it comes with the territory in sales—which is why you’re doing yourself no favor when choosing someone who’s constantly sold products that are excessively easy to move. Rather, look for someone who’s experienced enough in sales (or another related field) to know that not every prospect is going to be the right fit, and that rejection & failure are the building blocks of learning and improving as a salesperson. You’re looking for indicators that your candidate is disciplined, so you’ll want to ask about a time they’ve been rejected, or when they’ve missed quota, and try to gauge what they’ve learned from the experience.

The more you can work collaboratively with internal hiring managers during the sales rep recruitment process, the more (and faster) you’ll begin to learn what makes for strong hires.

2. Leadership

Ah, to be a leader… simply don a fancy hat, grab a microphone, display some swagger and you’re a leader, right?

Well, not quite. Thanks to our pal Jack here, we’ve all learned that you’re not a leader simply because you look and sound like one.

The act of proudly standing at the front of your ship doesn’t have any bearing on your ability to empower, motivate or manage your crew. And that’s what true leadership entails.

Managing, motivating, incentivizing and empowering your sales team.

Successfully navigating each of these activities with your team on a regular basis—helping them through the inevitable stormy weather along the way—takes a massive amount of initiative.

You can’t be afraid to experiment and shake things up a bit when the status quo isn’t producing the best possible results from your team. If your reps are underperforming or unhappy with their work, that’s on you. As a sales manager, it’s your job to be occupied with doing everything you can to make each individual member of your team successful.

The best part is, you don’t need to be a sales manager today, in order to build (and start demonstrating) your leadership abilities.

Demonstrate your leadership skills by mentoring another rep on your team that’s in need of a little support and guidance. Start a purpose-driven club and organize events that get other employees off their feet, taking action. Experiment within your own role with ideas to spearhead positive change, rather than waiting for top-down change to come your way. Launch your own side project and show you can execute on building a business.

Remember, once you do become a sales manager, your voyage won’t always go exactly according to plan (ok, that’s enough sailing metaphors). Rather, it’s in remaining humble and showing you’re human too, that will help you build rapport and maintain healthy relationships with your team.

Your job isn’t to do everything for your team, but to instead build the right team that can can excel when given useful tools, guidance and incentive. That’s what leadership is.

3. Ability to train, coach and mentor

Beyond just leading your team, it’s your job as a sales manager to effectively train your team members and continue helping them grow professionally.

Do you have personal experience developing or improving upon your current organization’s sales process? How about with coaching fellow reps through a particularly challenging deal?

Great sales managers can easily toggle between zooming in (to work in a rep’s world) and back out to see the bigger picture of how things are going more broadly on your team.

Are multiple reps experiencing the same challenges? What kinds of blockers are standing in the way to hitting quarterly targets? Grow in your ability to not only identify, but answer these kinds of questions and your value as a sales manager will be all but proven already.

Similar to building your experience as a leader, proving your ability at launching into the mental space of an individual rep and being able to help them troubleshoot the best way to negotiate around an objection, is something you can start doing today.

Look for someone on your team that’s either new to the company, going through a rough quarter, or less-experienced in sales.

Ask if they’re up for you to partner with them and start listening to their call recordings in order to provide constructive feedback and finesse their pitch, rebuild their cold outreach emails, help weigh in with advice, routines, tactics and habits that help you perform better.

It doesn’t matter how much you consistently beat quota in your current position, if you can’t make the jump up to the effectiveness of a sales manager that can also help other people to increase their sales performance.

Don’t underestimate the importance of acknowledging that you’ll need to be ok with stepping out of an active selling role, in exchange for making your primary mission helping others sell.

4. Defining, implementing (and innovating) sales plans

Like it or not, implementing processes and regularly planning are both essential to maintaining a successful business model as your sales team grows and the company scales over time.

Here’s an example. When Steli first ran his own sales team, he was admittedly a pretty shitty sales manager. He’s always been a talented salesperson himself, but when it came to translating that skill and teaching others, he often fell short. It wasn’t until finding his first sales coach that something began to change in his workflow management.

As a sales manager, Steli learned that it was more important to have everybody do a really good (consistent) job than to just have a couple of sales rockstars out blazing their own trail while everyone else falls behind and underperforms. He realized that his sales reps were failing only because they couldn’t replicate what he was personally doing—because what he did was unique to him.

Having an easy-to-follow sales plan, packed with process documentation, scripts, templates, and ongoing training ensures your team members are all on the same level, makes sure your team performs consistently (and hedges against the likelihood of some reps falling behind others).

No matter how hard you hope, wish or pray, a sales plan will never be one of those set it and forget it organizational documents. A sales plan is a living instrument that’s actively shaped in real-time as your organization grows, changes and most importantly learns.

Want to see a sales plan in action? Grab your free sales plan cheat sheet right here.

At their core, all good sales plans are comprised of three distinct sections:

• Sales forecasting and goal-setting
• Market and customer research
• Prospecting and partnerships

Each aspect of your plan naturally works itself into the next, starting with the team’s high-level goals, then taking into consideration market factors, and finally looking at who you know, and how to find more prospects to help hit your sales goals.

As a sales manager, it’ll be your job to maintain, update, enforce and create your team’s go-to-market plan. In order to better prepare yourself for becoming a sales manager, it makes sense to have experience compiling and working with a sales plan, right?

Start by grabbing your free sales plan cheat sheet right here and begin creating your own version of a plan & documentation for your current company. If your team already has a plan, take the initiative to update it yourself. Whether your organization has an active sales plan today or not, this is an invaluable activity to go through just for the experience.

5. Interpersonal and communication skills

How well do you collaborate and work with others?

As you know by now, the bulk of your job once you become a sales manager will be meeting with, talking to and actively problem-solving with the reps on your team.

Most sales manager job postings today clearly highlight just how much you’ll often have to hop on the phone, show up for presentations, dive into partnership development and otherwise be involved in the sales process with key accounts from start to finish.

Therefore, strong interpersonal and communication skills are key. Though that doesn’t mean we’re all very good at these skills.

Several studies have shown that those doing the talking (or presenting) tend to dramatically over-estimate how much recipients are actually processing and retaining what they’ve heard. Also known in academia as the curse of knowledge, it’s easy to develop a cognitive bias once you’ve developed a particular skill, trait, experience or characteristic, causing you to unknowingly assume that others have the background to understand what you’re trying to communicate with them.

Often, the more skilled you are as a salesperson, the more difficult it can be to put yourself back in the beginner’s mindset—making it more difficult to effectively communicate with reps who aren’t quite on your level yet.

If this kind of communication isn’t a strong suit of yours, fear not. You can start flexing that muscle today by purposefully going out of your way to over-communicate (within reason) with your fellow co-workers.

When mentoring a rep that’s going through some challenges, make it a point not to assume they have the same base of knowledge and experience you have. Start further back than you normally would, verbally express what’s going on inside of your head, explain the logic and reasoning behind the troubleshooting steps you take.

6. Organizational skills

Once you become a sales manager, there will be a lot of demands on your time throughout the day. That means you can’t always fly by the seat of your pants, accepting every meeting request that comes your way, right there on the spot.

While your role (and daily activities) have completely changed as a sales manager, it’s also easy to default to going about your day with the same routine as when you were still an individual contributor.

By taking a step back at the beginning of each week to thoughtfully plan out your schedule, account for enough time to interact with your team members, and block out the space you need to work on other key activities like forecasting, planning, experimenting and training, you’ll get a major jumpstart on being organized for the week ahead.

Start thinking carefully about how you’ll have to prioritize tasks as a sales manager.

If your reps aren’t organized and staying on-task, you can’t expect them to always perform at peak capacity and hit their numbers (tools like Close.io can help with that). If you’re not organized, can you really expect your reps to be?

Part of being an effective sales manager—and leader—is showcasing your values and clearly articulating your priorities to your team members. Share exactly what’s expected of them, how you’ll be measuring their performance, and rewarding them.

Equally important is establishing how you want your team to work. Don’t assume everything will just fall into place and you’ll magically hit your targets. Going back to communication here—take the time to explain in detail how you want your team to work. Set the right expectations and enforce your sales process.

Becoming more organized at work starts with your physical space. Keep your desk area uncluttered, have everything you need within reach, maintain control of your email inbox, start your day with a list of your top priorities, and try to avoid the mania of multitasking.

7. Forecasting sales results (within a reasonable margin of error)

Being transparent about the direction your team needs to go in over the coming quarter, and specific about what needs to be achieved on an individual basis are two very important expectations to communicate as a sales manager.

Showing your higher ups that your team can reliably perform based on those expectations and predictably hit goals is equally as important to your success as a sales manager.

While there are a lot of different sales forecasting strategies you can adhere to depending upon your type of business model, industry, length of sales cycle, and otherwise, here are a few of the most common:

• Lead-driven forecasting: The lead-driven method relies on understanding the relationship your leads have with your company, and what they’re likely to do based on that relationship. Here, you’re analyzing each lead source and assigning a value to that source based on what similar leads have done in the past.
• Opportunity stage forecasting: This method takes your sales pipeline, chops it up, and assigns a percentage value to each one based on how likely a lead is to close. So, a new prospect might have a 10% potential close rate, whereas someone who has gone through a product demo might be at 80%.
• Multivariable forecasting: This method takes the best aspects of most forecasting methods, and puts them together into one complex, analytics-driven system. Let’s say you’ve got two reps hustling similar accounts. The first one is working a $10,000 deal and has just finished a successful product demo. Based on your rep’s individual win rate for this stage of the deal, your multivariable analysis says he’s 40% likely to close the deal this quarter, giving you a sales forecast of $4,000. Your second rep is selling a smaller, $2,000 deal and is earlier in the process, yet their win rate is through the roof, also giving them a 40% chance of closing the deal this quarter and a forecast of $800. Your total sales forecast at this point for the quarter would be $4,800.

Even if you’re not great at forecasting sales today, there’s still hope for you yet.

Hands down, the best way to get better at forecasting your own monthly and quarterly results is to dig deep into the numbers—take a look at results from previous periods, calculate win rates, develop and refine your own multivariable forecasting model to see how accurate it can become at predicting your own results.

Over time, you’ll improve and can continue refining your model by testing it out with other members on your team, presenting it to management, and getting feedback.

Do you have what it takes to become a sales manager?

Building the right skills and base of experience are one side of the equation, but so much of landing any job—especially a sales manager job—relies upon your ability to position yourself as the perfect candidate.

Now when you’re making the leap from sales rep to sales manager, you probably don’t have the ability to talk about your experience managing a sales team (unless you’ve taken on interim management roles in the past). So, what’s the next best thing?

While you’re not yet a sales manager in title, you can still show you’re performing many of those activities at work.

Remember all of the sales manager skills we just talked about here? You can start sharpening them and putting each of them into practice, even in subtle ways, at your job today.

Is a fellow rep on your team falling behind? Go out of your way to mentor them and show that your coaching, training and guidance can have a direct impact on their numbers.

Is your company’s go-to-market plan due for a refresh? Show your initiative by taking a pass at updating some of your process documents based on the situation on the ground today.

Build a forecasting model to start predicting your teams results out into the future. Refer high-quality candidates for new sales roles into your hiring managers. Get more organized. Keep improving with communication.

Most importantly, it’s crucial to document all of the change you’re creating. Keep track of all the different ways you’re practically a sales manager already, and you’ll build a compelling case for why you deserve a promotion—or the leveled up title at a different company.

Bonus: Preparing for a sales manager interview (common sales manager interview questions).

Once you’re ready to start interviewing for sales manager roles, start by outlining answers to these common sales manager interview questions, and be sure to come to the table with ample case studies to back yourself up:

• How many employees have you been responsible for managing at previous roles?
• Why do you want to be a sales manager here?
• Pretend I'm a sales rep who has missed quota three months in a row. What would you say? How do you typically deal with under-performers?
• What do you do when a top salesperson is bored and wants more responsibility?
• What do you feel motivates sales reps the most? What made you successful as a sales rep?
• How will your processes inform how you manage your team?
• How important is money to you?
• How often should you meet individually with your sales reps? What do you think makes for a successful rep coaching session?
• What do you like and dislike about our sales process?
• What training method is most effective for new reps?
• How would you explain what [company name] does to a person unfamiliar with what we do?

Don’t forget, this is still a sales-related role. After each sales manager interview, follow up and continue providing value until you get a definitive answer either way.

At the end of the day, making the jump from sales rep to sales manager doesn’t need to be an insurmountable challenge.

Start by identifying the right opportunities where you can put your domain expertise to work, showcase your (proven) ability to be an effective leader and team builder.

And most importantly, prove beyond doubt that you’re a proactive problem-solver who’s going to take initiative and make sure your future team is empowered to outperform.

The next step to becoming a sales manager? Download our ready-made set of resources to manage a sales team effectively:

Download your sales management toolkit for free

Landing pages are an important piece of any digital marketing effort. Landing pages are your secret weapon, generating one million new leads! OK, maybe that’s a bit exaggerated, but they can move the needle, if you know what you’re doing.

Maybe you’ve heard the term “landing page” but are not sure what a landing page truly is. Or perhaps you’re familiar with landing pages but you’ve been having debates with colleagues on how to best set one up.

Time to get back to basics. If you want your landing pages to perform, you need to answer these four questions:

1. What is a landing page?
2. Who is the audience?
3. What should they do?
4. What does success look like?

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page can be the term used to describe any page you land on after clicking a link, whether on the same website or from a different one. But, for our purposes, we’re talking about a specific type of landing page.

So, what is a landing page? I like this definition from Unbounce.com…

In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for the purposes of a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” when they have clicked on a Google AdWords ad or similar.

Landing pages are designed with a single focused objective – known as a Call to Action (CTA).

I asked some marketing friends of mine, “what is a landing page in 5 words or less?” And the responses are on point:

• Minimal, clean, focused, limited, self-explanatory
• Clear, concise, conversational, organized, vibrant
• Destination, value, conversion, trackable, lead
• First Impression for Your Customer…
• Clean, usable, organized, focused & simplistic
• Specific information for specific audience

See any recurring themes here? Landing pages are highly effective if they are highly focused with clear direction.

Landing pages are a chance to connect and convert. Each landing page should have a singular purpose. Here are some common landing page conversion goals…

1. Newsletter signup
2. Petition signature
3. Membership application
4. Job application
5. Sales inquiry
6. Product sale

These are all singular actions. More on this in a bit.

Who Is Going to Your Landing Page? Who Is Your Audience?

We’ve written a few posts on knowing your audience. It’s pretty important to know who you’re talking to in any digital marketing effort. But, it’s absolutely crucial for successful landing pages.

When looking at the audience for your landing pages, it’s helpful to develop some “buyer personas.”

Buyer Personas

These are detailed profiles of sample buyers based on real-world examples. They include some demographic data, motivations, and preferred method of contact and interaction.

They can literally be characters in your digital marketing story where you can give them names and even a profile pic like you see here…

To get to know your personas, answer these questions:

1. Who are they?
2. What do they do?
3. Why should they care about your organization?
4. Where are they and where would they find you?
5. How do you convert them into a client or a fan?

The last two are crucial for the success of your landing page. First, you need to know where they will find you. It could be one or more of the following:

• Facebook ad
• Google AdWords
• Retargeting campaign
• Email marketing

There are also organic search and word of mouth possibilities, but you cannot always control which page they will land on when coming from one of these sources. With the choices above, you can place a very specific link into your ads pointing to your perfectly crafted conversion machine… your landing page.

Get Deep with Your Buyer Personas

If you know where they’ll find you and how to convert them, you’re sitting on marketing gold, but, you need to dig a little deeper. A complete buyer persona should also include a profile of a real user’s…

• Goals: What do they expect to accomplish on your landing page?
• Expectations: How do they envision the journey before, during, and after reaching your landing page?
• Motivations: What problem do they expect you to solve?
• Behavior: What’s their state of mind and how will that affect their interaction with your landing page?

By digging deeper you’ll gain an understanding of more than just who the user is; you’ll understand the how’s and why’s as well. You cannot effectively generate action if you don’t know what motivates a user to take action.

What Should Your User Do on Your Landing Page?

Remember, your landing page should have a singular purpose, a singular conversion goal. Identify this before an ad is created and certainly before you launch a landing page. A landing page needs to support this purpose and nothing else.

Landing Page Design

Eliminate anything that doesn’t support the conversion goal:

• Excess images and text
• Links leading away from the conversion
• Distracting design elements

It’s easy to over-do-it on a landing page, especially if you’re designing by committee. You want to have an understanding up front that the team all needs to agree on the conversion goal. All discussions need to be about achieving this goal because anything else is a distraction.

Don’t get in your own way. An effective landing page has:

• Minimal design and navigation
• Simple, easy to read content
• An obvious call to action

Remember, the Internet is already distracting, don’t make it worse.

And think through the entire experience. Remember, they’re not landing on your site from Outer Space, something sent them there, usually an ad.

A Consistent User Experience

Does the page mesh with what sent them to it?

• Are you using messaging consistent with the message on the ad?
• Is the design consistent as well?

Does the landing page function as expected?

• If on mobile, is it responsive or mobile friendly?
• Does it work in the appropriate browsers?
• If there is video or animation, does it work and does it support the page goal?

Testing is a huge part of a landing page’s success. Mistakes and errors mean little to no conversions. Don’t get in your own way.

The Call to Action

This is where the magic happens, so think about this long and hard. Don’t just slap a button on a page and hope for the best.

The call to action should seem intuitive to the user, an obvious next step. Think through this process…

1. Do they know what they’re getting?
2. Is it obvious how to get it?
3. What happens next?

Think through the conversion and think through each action they took throughout. This may seem like overkill, but skipping these steps will mean the difference between landing page success and failure.

Your entire campaign comes down to one thing: the call to action. Don’t just throw something in there. Think about this experience from the user’s perspective. These questions will help:

• Will they fill out a form?
• How many fields does the form absolutely have to have?
• What happens next?
• Are they getting what they expected quickly and easily?
• Are there any steps you’re missing?
• What steps can you eliminate?

Every action should be anticipated and strategic. Take nothing for granted and think through the entire process. You might be surprised what you’ll uncover.

Pro tip: be mindful of every online experience you have. Whether you’re purchasing something, filling out a form, or simply searching for an article, pay attention to the process. What would you do differently? How could you make the experience better?

By thinking like a UX expert, you’ll start to notice how important the experience is and how often it is ignored.

What Does Success Look Like?

You cannot track success without first defining what it is. Sure, we all want more… more subscribers, more leads, more sales. This is not a time to be vague. You’ve done all that work to get this conversion machine ready for primetime, but how do you know if it’s working?

Define it in a quantifiable way. It could be:

• 1,000 new subscribers
• 100 new sales
• 25 new attendees

Make sure these goals are realistic, attainable, and have a time limit. If you’re doing this type of campaign for the first time, it may be an educated guess. Either way, you’ll need to track these conversions using one or more of the following:

• Google Analytics
• Email Service Provider
• CRM

Plan for Success and Failure

Success planning means a plan for conversion and a plan for failure. Set a goal and have a plan for whether you achieve your goal or not.

Can You Handle the Success?

Do you have the infrastructure in place to handle conversions? Infrastructure refers to all the parts of the machine that deals with each conversion. This could include but is not limited to…

• Hosting solution that can handle an increase in traffic and resources
• Team in charge of order fulfillment
• Email recipients who handle the incoming orders, inquiries, etc.

Infrastructure refers to the people and technology needed to make sure your success isn’t wasted. Make sure you have the staff necessary to handle reaching your goals, and have a plan for adding more resources if you far exceed your goals.

Take your website hosting seriously! No offense to cheap hosting providers but they do not scale easily. Make sure you are on a fast server, with scalable resources, and good customer service if something goes wrong.

Is there a plan for subsequent actions?

A conversion goal reached is hardly the end of the story. If you reach those goals, do you have a solid plan for the next step? Let’s say you build your email subscription by 20%. Great! What’s next?

Make sure you’re capitalizing on that success by having the next steps already mapped out. So, if you get 1,000 new newsletter subscribers, do you already have the next few email drops planned out? And will there need to be more landing pages for these email campaigns?

Is there any potential for a ripple effect? Can one success lead to more efforts and more successes? Think through these things so you can keep the momentum going.

Can you replicate success? If this campaign and landing page were a huge success, how can you replicate this for another effort? By tracking successes, you can use what works and get rid of what doesn’t.

Replication could be one or more of the following…

• A repeat of a successful campaign
• Reuse this campaign for a different persona
• Use this template for future promotions

A landing page is not a one shot deal, success can build upon itself!

Learning from Failure

Failure is a good thing, if you’re ready for it. You can learn a lot from failure. Maybe your ad didn’t work because it was at the wrong time or on the wrong platform. Maybe your landing page didn’t convert because you weren’t clear in what you were asking.

If you’re not hitting your number, it could be because of a few things:

1. The number was unrealistic and needs to be adjusted.
2. Your targeting was off on your ad and needs refinement.
3. The call to action was unclear or its placement was not ideal for conversion.
4. There was a disconnect between the ad and the landing page.

Each failure is an opportunity to make your effort that much better. Take advantage of these learning moments to dial in your digital marketing efforts for maximum success.

Reuse what works. Learn from what doesn’t.

I have to admit being consumed with CSO Insights latest Sales Performance Report.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to read it, make sure you take the time to download and study it.  It’s filled with fascinating analysis, each chart presents huge opportunities for performance improvement.

The chart I keep coming back to is their 2018 SRP Matrix, reproduced below:

Usually, as we look at charts like this, we focus on comparing Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 performances, perhaps being somewhat self-congratulatory it we are at a Level 3.  There are profound differences between poor performers and top performers in the percent of people making quota and win rates of forecast deals.

Ironically, the difference in poor performers and top performers in making plan is probably within the boundary of survey error, even if it isn’t the difference is only 2.1%.

But, as one looks at the data, one can’t help being struck by the huge wastes built into selling.  It begs the the question, “Would we tolerate the same level of waste or non performance in any other part of the organization?”  Clearly, the answer is, “Absolutely not!”  But why do we let this happen in sales (and my guess in marketing.)?

Complex sales is unlikely to be as predictive (even with AI) as a manufacturing process.  There are just to many opportunities for variance that are outside the control of sales.

But that’s not an excuse for the level of “waste” we see in sales.

Let’s focus our discussion on Level 2 performance–since that’s right in the middle and since the majority of organizations fall into that performance level.  But the same discussion applies to Levels 1 and 3.

We see, organizationally, most of these organizations are actually making their overall goal.  94% is a very high level!

But as we go deeper, that attainment is a result of only 54% of sales people making or exceeding their own goals.  This is a little difficult to assess, part of it is impacted by the games managers play in setting quotas.  A certain amount of over-assignment is necessary, we know 100% of people won’t make their individual goals, but too often, the numbers are arbitrary or way too high.  But beyond that, there are other challenges.  What’s happening with the other 46%?  Why are so many not making their goals?

Imagine the overall revenue growth and performance improvement we would get if we could get more of them meeting their goals?  While 94% are meeting their goals, one could/should argue they are dramatically underperforming the potential, they should be over-achieving their goals.

Alternatively, if we are in a low/slow growth market, we could restructure to reduce what we are spending on selling–accomplishing the same results with fewer people, at significantly less cost.

But then we drill deeper into the data.  We win only 46.2% of forecast deals!  Are you as astounded as me?  That’s forecast deals!  These are deals well into the buying/selling process.  They are deals that sales people and sales managers have high certainty about they will be won–enough to commit to a forecast!  How are we so far off?  53.8% of the deals we are “certain” we win, we actually lose or the customer doesn’t reach a decision.

Piling on, these are only the deals we forecast we will win.  But then there are all the other deals that we work, that we compete on, that we invest our time on.  These, probably, represent the majority of sales time and resources, since what we forecast is a small part of what we compete in.

Imagine the sheer amount of resource dedicated to failure.  Imagine either harnessing that resource to be more successful, or in the least balancing our spending on selling.

It seems that trying to understand what causes these huge failure rates and massive overspending should be the focus of management.  We should be asking ourselves:

Why are we making plan, yet 46% of our people aren’t?  What can we do do reduce that number?  What would our performance and growth be if rather than accepting 54% of our people making plan, we raised it to 75%?  What would that mean to our investors and shareholders?  What would that mean to our market share?

Why are we actually winning only 46.2% of our forecast deals?  What happens to the 53.8% of the deals we thought we were going to win, but didn’t?  How can we reduce this number?  How do we win more of what we forecast?

Finding the answers to these questions  can lead us into profound improvements in sales performance and productivity.

This analysis is tough, it requires deep understanding of what our people are actually doing and where we can improve performance.  It means both sales managers, sales ops, and sales enablement need to do deep analysis.

Instead of doing this analysis, trying to assess these performance gaps and what causes them, instead, we focus on doing more.  We accept these performance levels as though they are fundamental laws of physics.  Simplistically, to reach higher levels of sales, we simply have to do more of everything that we are currently doing—not look at how we do it much better.

We drive for increased activity levels—more emails, more calls, more meetings.  We drive for more content, more leads, more tools.  If doing X critical activities produces certain results, the thought is, to increase results by 20%, we simply increase X activities by 20%.

We don’t assess non-performance or non performers.  The data shows only 5.4% of our sales turnover is involuntary or performance related.  But if we are performing so poorly, might it be that a much larger number of our people aren’t performing?

I don’t understand the focus on more and the absence of focus on performance.

Based on this data, it appears we are under exploiting what we already have.  It seems if we just do better at what we already are doing, we have massive opportunity for performance improvement, growth, and over-attainment.

According to Hubspot, converting leads to customers was the number one marketing priority for 70% of companies last year. It’s no doubt a top goal for companies of all industries and sizes. However, there are quite a few myths surrounding lead generation (and what constitutes success.)

From misunderstanding how to find qualified leads to confusion about when the best time to contact them is, the lead generation legends keep growing. As a result, sales teams are confused and left wondering about the best ways to reach — and convert — their most qualified leads.

With that being said, we’re debunking some of the most popular lead generation myths to arm your sales team with new tactics.

Myth 1: Social media is ineffective when it comes to generating quality leads

It goes without saying that social media is an impactful channel when it comes to customer service and engaging with your audience. From handling complaints and questions on Twitter, to sharing your most recent company updates with followers, social media is an integral part of any marketing strategy.

However, social media has repeatedly proven itself as a reliable way to generate legitimate leads. According to Pinpoint Market Research, 64% of B2B marketers generate leads via LinkedIn, 49% through Facebook, and 36% through Twitter.

With social media, the creative possibilities are endless. Take this campaign from Ikea, for example:

The Swedish furniture company gathered qualified leads for a specific audience (in this case, college students) through a contest. Users took the quiz and were automatically entered to win a dorm room makeover. Simple and effective.

Social media is a powerful tool for many reasons, namely due to it’s targeting capabilities. Regardless of the type of campaign you’re running, having the correct targeting in place will ensure you reach only the leads that matter to you most.

Myth 2: Lead generation doesn’t require customer education

You can’t expect customers to visit your website once and then convert — unless, of course, they’ve done extensive research on their own and made a decision beforehand. More often than not, new leads aren’t going to blindly purchase a product they don’t know anything about.

We hate to say it, but a few sleek sales lines aren’t going to convert leads, either.

Enter customer education. Teach your prospects about your product or service and how it can help them reach their goals. Nurturing potential customers through multiple touchpoints is essential to conversion. Whether it’s through informational blog content, webinars, email campaigns, or ads, seeing your brand across different channels will help them warm up to your product.

But it’s not enough to pop into inboxes and news feeds; you must provide value to leads with every interaction. Actionable takeaways, free guides, and useful insights will not only help potential customers remember your product, but will help set you apart from your competitors as well.

Engaging with customers across multiple touchpoints throughout their journey will ultimately be the difference between a customer who converts and one who doesn’t. That’s a fact.

Myth 3: Creating dedicated landing pages is a waste of time

The truth is just the opposite: Creating a dedicated landing page is an integral part of lead generation and can help put important information front and center.

With a dedicated landing page, you can showcase specific parts of your product, educate potential customers, and provide exclusive content catered to a particular audience. It also gives customers a starting point from which they can get to know your product and your company as a whole. This is especially important when dealing with cold leads or customers who are on the fence about moving forward with the product.

Keep in mind that when sending qualified leads to a landing page, you want to make sure it includes content that is beneficial that will ultimately lead them to convert. For example, take Amazon’s Jumanji promotion for Prime members interested in seeing the movie:

This interactive landing page checks all the boxes:

• A clear call-to-action at the top of the page
• An engaging video featuring the stars of the new movie
• Messaging that appeals directly to the target audience
• A related products section to encourage additional browsing and purchases

This landing page resonates with potential leads due to catered and engaging content. Nothing on the page is without purpose, which helps keep things simple and encourages customers to convert.

Myth 4: New leads are immediately ready to be contacted

Once new leads are acquired, it’s tempting to start sending sales information and begin nurturing right away. But bombarding new leads with emails and other materials is a surefire way to overwhelm.

More often than not, when a new lead comes to your website for the first time, they are a cold lead. They are likely trying to get familiar with your company and your products. This is where nurturing comes into play. According to the 2017 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey Report from Demand Gen, bundled nurturing content within a resource hub generated a 3X increase in the lead to pipeline ratio.

As we discussed above, when it comes to nurturing leads effectively, it’s essential to provide value in everything you share with potential customers. Free resources and actionable blog content are great ways to not only offer value, but also to showcase your expertise and knowledge.

Also, allowing leads to explore your site and products at their own pace will prevent them from being scared off. Make sure you have the proper tracking in place so you can gather insights as they navigate through your site. This is a great way to understand why potential leads are interested in you as well. For example: SnapApp allows you to create interactive content that can help indicate where site visitors are in the customer journey.

This particular example uses a survey that’s designed to gauge user interest and understanding of a product or service. Having access to information like this can help you make decisions when it comes to future campaigns and client communication cadence.

Myth 5: There is no effective way to track lead generation results

According to a study from Integrate, B2B marketing teams often spend upwards of 40 hours a month formatting and processing leads for database upload. That’s a lot of time spent organizing sales leads.

Despite this staggering number, this myth couldn’t be further from the truth.

These days, there are tons of ways to effectively track the trajectory of your lead generation efforts. This should be a top priority for your team, as it will help you plan future strategies and campaigns. Regardless of what you’re tracking, you need the proper analytics in place to ensure your team is collecting everything you need to make data-backed decisions.

Whether you’re using sophisticated tracking software or keeping it old school with spreadsheets, understanding where you’re trending with leads will help drive success.

Wrap up

There are many misconceptions about lead generation and how to find those golden leads. It’s important to arm your sales team with the information and tools necessary to make the most of every interaction.

Having a clear understanding of how your team can best acquire, nurture, and convert the most qualified leads is essential to succeed in the sales world. Providing value at every touchpoint will help your leads warm up to your product and move them along the lead generation funnel. Additionally, access to critical data gathered by past interactions can help your team make the most educated decisions when dealing with future leads.

When it comes to lead generation, one thing rings true for all brands: Investing in learning how you can best reach your key audience will ultimately help you convert more leads.

When you’re making a big purchase, you probably don’t walk into the store and drop next month’s rent on the first top-shelf item you see. You do your homework first: You go online to compare specs, read reviews, comb through resources, and weigh your options. And even though there’s a salesperson at your beck and call, you want to be informed when you get there.

B2B buyers operate the same way. They’re spending large amounts of money on behalf of their organizations, and they’re going to make sure no dollar is wasted. To ease buyers’ fears, your sales team needs the right content at its disposal to help educate and build trust with prospective customers. And the best way to achieve that is to align your marketing and sales teams.

A Beneficial Partnership

Your marketing team may be producing engaging content, and your sales reps may be friendlier than Mr. Rogers, but your approach is doomed if the two aren’t on the same page.

A solid partnership between marketing and sales leads to a much stronger content marketing program and brings out the best in each department. In fact, alignment can boost marketing revenue by 200 percent and increase customer retention rates by 36 percent. Highly aligned marketing and sales teams understand the ins and outs of each role, resulting in growth for the entire organization.

Done correctly, aligning these teams forms a mutually beneficial partnership: Marketing can create more specialized, effective content for sales, and sales better understands when and how to use that content to enable conversations and close sales.

5 Ways to Connect Your Marketing and Sales Teams

Unfortunately, aligning marketing and sales isn’t a one-step process. You can’t toss sales reps a bunch of irrelevant content and assume they’ll utilize it, just as you can’t expect marketing to produce effective content without the right insights from sales. Thankfully, there are several strategies to combine the two teams and create a long-term, productive collaboration between them.

1. Get people in the same room.

It sounds simple, but the first step to aligning marketing and sales is to physically get them together. Hold regular content brainstorms every week or month to keep both teams in the loop and working toward their shared goals.

The key to making these meetings effective is to prep for them in advance. Sales reps should come prepared to discuss the objections they’re hearing from prospects and what resources could help them overcome those objections. And marketers should be ready to take notes on the talking points that have worked well with leads so they can incorporate them into future content.

2. Collaborate on content.

Content creation may be marketing’s specialty, but that doesn’t mean sales should step back and “leave it to the creatives.” Involving sales in the creation process does two key things. First, it helps ensure the content meets your sales team’s unique needs because it’s being informed by those with direct sales experience. Second, it helps your sales reps understand exactly what resources are being created and when they can use them in their conversations. This collaboration leads to better content that stands a chance of being used consistently to streamline the entire sales process.

3. Keep communication open.

It’s easy to get complacent after a few productive meetings. But things are always changing, and it’s vital that marketing and sales stay in touch. Communication platforms like Slack provide a convenient way to ask questions that can’t wait until the next meeting. But don’t just reach out when you’re confused. Consider having marketing shadow sales calls to gain more insight and keep the dialogue going.

Surveys are another great way to generate creative ideas for content. Implement a form that lets anyone submit content suggestions. Follow it up with open-ended questions like “Why should we cover this topic?” and “How could this content drive sales?” to engage with your entire team. You never know when a content-related light bulb will go off, and providing an outlet like a form or survey can help capture the inspiration as soon as it strikes.

4. Create a resource library.

Sales reps don’t have hours to spend searching for that one blog post they think the company wrote three years ago. As you continue working together, your content stockpile is only going to get bigger. That’s why creating a central resource library should be a no-brainer for every marketing-sales alignment initiative.

It’s up to you how you organize the library, as long as it’s easy for your sales reps to access. You might consider structuring it by product, sales situation, or some other common theme. This way, sales reps can easily get their hands on the content they need to prepare themselves and their prospects for better conversations.

5. Debrief.

You’ll never know if your efforts are working unless each team shares feedback with the other. Hopefully, your sales team will have a number of successes to report since you started collaborating. Inevitably, though, not everything’s going to work — feedback allows both teams to make the needed course corrections.

So reserve part of your meetings for debriefing. Use your website’s analytics to see what content’s been successful from a marketing perspective, and talk to members of your sales team to determine what content has worked for them during the sales process.

Truly bringing marketing and sales together doesn’t happen overnight. But if you take the right steps and commit to the process, you may find that this alignment is the growth catalyst your organization needs.

Here are some ways sales managers can leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create, keep, and incentivize teams to close the sale.

Lorraine Ferguson, Sandler trainer from Albany, NY and author of the new Sandler book, The Unapologetic Saleswoman, shares her thoughts about being a strong, confident woman in the sales profession. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of top female sales performers, and uncover the challenge and benefits of saleswomen. 

Since McKinsey released a report on how best to use prizes to incentivize innovation nearly a decade ago, an entire industry has grown around social innovation challenges. The formula for these “save the world” competitions has become standard. Drum up a lot of buzz around an award. Partner with big names to get funding and high-profile judges. Try and get as many submissions as possible from across the world. Whittle down the submissions and come up with a list of finalists that get to pitch at a glitzy event with a lot of media attention.

On the final stage, based on pitches that last mere minutes, pick a winner that can get upwards of millions in prize funding. Don’t have a software platform to run a challenge of this kind? No worries, numerous for-profit vendors have sprung up that can do all the work for you—for anywhere from ten to a few hundred thousand dollars. The growth has been so exponential that prizes awarded through competitions has grown from less than $20 million in 1970 to a whopping $375 million just four decades later.

But do these prizes get the sort of world-saving results they aim for? There’s little quantified evidence to back that, and some leaders in philanthropy are broadly skeptical.

For its part, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is trying a different approach to innovation challenges with Solve, taking some of what’s worked in these challenges and fusing it with elements of tech accelerator programs, including post-award training that focuses on results.

Solve is entering an already crowded field of innovation challenges. Many of these prizes overlap, with each vying to be the “Nobel” of its field. More prizes means more noise—which has led to a race to offer more money to get attention.

But even private-sector riches do not guarantee that prize money for innovation gets good results. In 2004, Bigelow Enterprises sponsored a $50 million Space Prize but it failed to capture the imagination of space researchers and eventually folded. Back in 2009, Netflix invited outside teams to improve it movie recommendation algorithm by 10% for a $1 million reward. The Netflix Prize led to a race among programmers, only for Netflix to eventually kill the entire plan because it was getting better results in-house.

Overall, the social innovation competitions tend to reward presentation, glitz and charisma, and penalize speaking English as a second language, introversion and inability to make flashy slides.

Solve, which held its third annual finalists event on Sunday September 23 in New York, is setting its own course.

Unlike other contests where questions are internally decided, Solve crowdsources the questions to begin with. Its team takes months to run hackathons and workshops around the world to decide on the four most pressing questions to become the focus of that year’s challenge. This year, the questions focused on teachers and educators, workforce of the future, frontlines of health and coastal communities.

The competition is then opened up to participants from around the world with relatively low barriers to entry, resulting in 1,150 submissions from 110 countries in the last competition round. (That’s at least one submission from nearly 60 percent of all countries in the world!)

To qualify, though, participants need to have more than just an idea. They must have a prototype that works, be either in the growth, pilot or scale stage, and be tech-driven. Submissions are then evaluated by judges from across industry, intergovernmental organizations and academia to get to 15 finalists for each of the four challenge questions. These 60 finalists get a full day with judges to be asked in-depth questions and have their ideas evaluated.

The day after, with all the preparations completed, the finalists get three minutes apiece to present on stage. Crucially, instead of one winner, eight finalists are chosen for each of the challenge questions.

Each finalist receives an initial $10,000 prize, plus a pool of hundreds of thousands of dollars provided by partners including General Motors, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Consensys, and RISE.

This year, for example, Ugandan health care startup Neopenda brought in an additional $30,000 in funding through Solve, from a UN program sponsored by Citi. An intelligent messaging app called TalkingPoints, meanwhile, received backing from General Motors and Save the Children to develop its personalized coaching technology for parents and educators. (You can see more details on this year’s winners and prizes here.)

As opposed to being a “one and done competition” where winning the prize money marks the end of the competition, managing director of community Hala Hanna tells me that the real work begins once the Solver teams are selected. Each qualifying Solver team gets 12 months of engagement and support from the organization. “Our value-add is providing a network, from MIT and beyond, and then brokering partnerships,” she explains.

Perhaps the biggest testament to the Solve method getting traction is its funders putting in even more cash in support. At the closing event on Sunday, an upbeat Matthew Minor, Solve’s director for international programs, took to the stage decked out in Solve-branded socks and a broad smile. He announced the winning finalists—and more funding opportunities. Two of Solve’s original backers, the Atlassian Foundation and the Australian government, are continuing to invest out of a standing $2.6 million budget for companies in the workforce track. RISE, a global impact investing fund, is putting an additional $1 million into companies focused on coastal communities.

The Australians have already put in funding to help past winners scale after the program. One of them is Ruangguru, a digital boot camp in Indonesia that gives youth dropouts resources they need to earn graduation certificates. The startup had reached nearly a million Indonesians prior to participating in Solve; through the program and the additional funding, it assisted more than 3 million Indonesian youth by the end of last year. Iman Usman, one of Ruangguru’s founders, tells me that Solve enabled them to enter into partnerships that helped them scale across Indonesia in a way they would have never been able to do on their own.

Solve has also been unequivocally good at ensuring diversity, both in its own staffing and—perhaps for related reasons—in those that are chosen as finalists. Of Solve’s 20 full-time staff, 14 are women, as are six out of the seven leadership team members and—by my count—at least seven nationalities from four continents are represented on staff.

The 33 Solver teams selected at the finals this year hail from 28 different countries, with 61 percent of them being women-led. At a time when the tech industry is struggling to increase diversity, Solve’s emphasis on diversity in challenge design and promotion has led to applicants and finalists that reflect the world Solve aims to help.

Hanna noted that increasing diversity is not as difficult as it’s made out to be. “Honestly, we’re not even trying that hard,” she explained. “So whoever says there are no women in tech, I say, crazy talk.”

Still, Solve does have a few kinks to work out. By taking on extremely broad topics, the competition can sometimes lack focus. Lofty questions mean you can get very disparate answers, making it hard to compare them in a way that feels fair.

And while it’s great that the award monies are not all given to a single winner, it is not quite clear how funders pick the teams that do get funding. 15 qualifying finalists this year ended up winning money awards, some winning more than one, while the remaining 18 qualifying teams went home with the minimum amount. This is because Solve funders get to pick which of the teams that qualify at the finals get their respective monetary prizes. Of course, all 33 qualifying teams equally get to be a part of the Solve class with all the support and training that includes.

Another kink is the audience choice award—selected through open online voting prior to the finals—but not tied to any clear concrete benefit. Take the example of Science for Sharing (Sci4S), a Mexico-based startup that trains teachers to better engage students in STEM and has already reached nearly a million children across Latin America. It garnered 419 community votes in the Education Challenge, more votes than any other participant in the category, and handedly won the audience choice award. Ultimately, Sci4S was not selected as a Solver team. Another education startup, Kenya-based Moringa School, only got two votes but was selected. While Moringa and others were compelling and qualified in their own right,  it’s still hard not to think that Sci4S should have focused all of its time on its presentation and ignored the audience vote.

All in all, Solve does get a number of things right where other innovation challenges have failed. Instead of anointing one winner for the entire competition, it selects a class of dozens—reflecting the simple fact that the world’s most intractable problems are not going to be solved by any singular idea. Unlike many challenges put on by educational institutions and open only to their own students, Solve opens its doors wide. And winning at the finals doesn’t end your connection with MIT, it only starts it, with all qualifying finalists getting a year of individualized support, training and mentorship.

Done right, prizes can be effective at incentivizing startups to focus on pressing societal issues that can truly benefit from tech-driven solutions. But prizes for the sake of prizes can add to the noise and dissipate scarce public resources and entrepreneur attention. In the increasingly crowded world of innovation challenges promising to change the world, MIT’s Solve is a step away from the noise and towards effective prize granting.

Things that annoy you are everywhere in today’s life.

Slow wifi speeds bring your YouTube video to a stutter. Traffic lights waste 10 minutes of your life before they reluctantly change. Dog poop plagues your front yard AGAIN, even though you told Mrs. Barrett just last week to damn well clean up after her “Buttercup”.

And one of those things we’d also add to this almost infinite list is the website pop-up. Those annoying boxes you swat at when first arriving (or trying to leave) a website, however, are a marketing essential.

They’re a popular mechanism to nudge people onto your email list, where you can build a relationship that delivers more content, more value, promotions and offers to them, in the hopes of eventually making them a customer.

Sumo reports their studies reveal the average pop-up conversion rate is just 3.09%, while the top performers convert at 9.28%. That’s a huge difference, and one worth trying to make your pop-up as “opt-in worthy” as you can.

So what makes one pop-up annoying and ineffectual, and another still annoying but effective as hell? No two pop-ups are the same, and the elements that make one convert like crazy and the other gathering virtual dust can be subtle or massive.

Let’s look at a few examples of punch-packing pop-ups and why they work so well.

1stdibs

Pop-up: This pop-up displays against products you’re browsing, offering to send you updates if the item goes on sale.

Why it packs a punch: A solid lead magnet, like content or a promotional offer, are good ways of getting people to opt in. But 1stdibs goes one better and offers something ultra-specific: updates on the product you’re looking at right now. Sure, it’s not going to get everyone. But if you see something you like and want to know if it hits a price you like, opting in is a no-brainer.

Brian Tracy

Pop-up: Offering free content is one of the most popular ways of enticing people to opt into your list. Brian Tracy’s opt-in is no different, with the typical free ebook.

Why it packs a punch: The book is perfectly suited to one of the big target markets the business sells to – people interested in personal development. But it’s the headline that really rocks. It’s bold; it’s confronting, it takes no prisoners. “Do you want to be more successful?” is a question with only one answer… and one action to take as a result: signing up.

Conversion XL

Pop-up: Conversion XL is about two things. 1. Delivering Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) services to help businesses make “tons more money” and 2. Teaching marketers the secrets and skills of CRO with various courses. This pop-up serves the second.

Why it packs a punch: A big, bold promise consistent with their brand. It’s not a challenge, like the Brian Tracy pop-up. It’s not a fun little poke like Monday.com. The big promise is backed up by bullets that flesh out those “essentials” from the headline. Plus, we have no doubt this pop-up performed best from the split testing that is the CRO expert’s bread and butter.

Monday.com

Pop-up: Monday.com is a planning, organization & collaboration SaaS app, and like many of its SaaSy fellows, offers a free trial for people who sign up.

Why it packs a punch: Testimonials are a huge part of any modern marketing machine, and this is a 5-start, A1 example of making the most of one. Along with the testimonial, some nice little touches round out the pop-up: the “30,000+ teams” social proof just above the opt-in form and the cheeky “No thanks, I hate hugs” opt-out link below.

* * *

Have you got pop-ups on your website? How are they converting for you? And have you got ideas on how to push your opt-in rate higher and squeeze some business benefit out of the annoyance factor your visitors suffer through?

The electronics influencing changes in manufacturing — from robotics to the IIoT to 3D printing and laser marking and engraving.

In the spirit of becoming more adaptive, organizations have rushed to implement Agile software development. But many have done so in a way that actually makes them less agile. These companies have become agile in name only, as the process they’ve put in place often ends up hurting engineering motivation and productivity.

Agile software development

Frameworks for adaptive software development like Agile, have been around for a long time, and have manifested in many forms. But at the heart of most of these models are two things: forming hypotheses (e.g., what is a feature supposed to accomplish) and collaborating across domains of expertise on experiments, all in the spirit of driving learning and not careening down a path that proves to be incorrect.

When Agile software development was born in 2001, it articulated a set of four critical principles to elevate the craft of software development and improve engineering and product manager motivation.

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

Over the last three years, in our research on human motivation, we have analyzed the practices of engineers across over 500 different organizations using a combination of survey-based and experimental approaches. We’ve found that what happens in practice wildly departs from these stated principles.

For example, in common practice, processes and tools have become the driver of work, not individuals and interactions. In one large Fortune 100 company, the head of digital products said to us, “we’re not allowed to question the Agile process.” In another Fortune 500 organization, product managers and engineers communicate exclusively through their tools, which are used primarily for the former to issue commands to the latter.

Similarly, documentation often trumps working software. In one large tech company, their product team focused significant upfront time writing small requirements (called “user stories”). These requirements were put into a ticket queue as tasks for the next available engineer to start working on. The bar for documentation to keep the queue moving became high. Ultimately, this process became one of many small “waterfalls,” where work is passed from a product department to designers to engineering. This process is exactly what Agile was meant to eliminate. It is no wonder that the CTO of this company said, “my engineers feel like short order cooks in the back of a diner.”

When it comes to “responding to change over following a plan,” this often gets misinterpreted to mean “don’t have a plan.” For example, in one fast growing tech company, the Agile teams did not try to understand the broader strategy of the organization. As a result, their attempts to iterate often focused on low-value or strategically unimportant features.  Without a plan, teams won’t know how to prioritize actions, and how to invest in those actions responsibly. This principle has gone so far as to let engineers believe that it is not appropriate to have timeboxes or common milestones.

It would be one thing if these misapplications actually improved engineering motivation and performance, but we have found that in practice, the opposite happens. Agile, when practiced as described above, reduces the total motivation of engineers. Because they’re not allowed to experiment, manage their own work, and connect with customers, they feel little sense of play, potential, and purpose; instead they feel  emotional and economic pressure to succeed, or inertia. They stop adapting, learning, and putting their best efforts into their work.

For example, one venture capital partner shared with us a story of how a video game development company continued to build a product for a year, despite every engineer feeling like the game was not worth playing. The company realized they wasted a lot of time and money.

Agile processes go awry, because as companies strive for high performance, they either become too tactical (focusing too much on process and micromanagement) or too adaptive (avoiding long-term goals, timelines, or cross-functional collaboration).

The key is balancing both tactical and adaptive performance. Whether you’re an engineer or product manager, here are a few changes to consider to find this balance, so you can  improve your engineering (or any) team’s motivation and performance.

1. Software development should be a no-handoff, collaborative process.

Rather than a process where one person writes requirements (even small ones) while another executes them, all without a guiding strategic north-star, a team striving for true agility should have a no-handoff process versus a process where one person writes requirements while the other executes them. In a no-handoff process, the product manager and the engineers (and any other stakeholders) are collaborative partners from beginning to end in designing a feature.

First the team, including executives, should articulate the team’s strategic “challenges.” Challenges take the form of a question, always focused on improving some kind of customer outcome or impact. Think of them as a team’s detailed mission in question-form to trigger expansive thinking. The challenges themselves are developed and iterated by the whole team, including its executive sponsors (and customers). Every single person on the team (or any team for that matter) is asked to contribute ideas to each challenge whenever they want.

For example, in one bank, a challenge was, “how can we help customers be better prepared for possible financial shocks?”  Another was, “how can we make it more fun and less of a chore for customers to maintain healthy financial habits?” These challenges produced dozens of ideas from many different people.

Then, instead of someone writing requirements while another person executes, these teams develop and mature an idea collaboratively, from rough draft to testable hypothesis.

2. The team’s unit of delivery should be minimally viable experiments.

Teams often find they waste time by adapting too much. To avoid this, not only should ideas be formed for a strategic challenge, but they should also be executed with fast experiments aimed at learning just enough to know what works for customers. In other words, they should be maximizing their “speed to truth.”

In order to reduce wasted effort and increase the team’s decision rights, experiments should be short in nature. If possible, an experiment should be no longer than a week.

Sometimes this requires the team to minimize a feature to what is absolutely needed to test its weakest assumption. Sometimes it means that the team doesn’t code but instead completes an “offline” experiment through research.

3. The team’s approach should be customer-centric.

The process of building software (even internal-use software) should be squarely customer-centric.

At the simplest, these principles should hold:

• “Challenges” are always framed around customer impact.
• Problem solving meetings always start with a customer update, and representatives from the frontline are included frequently in these discussions.
• Every experiment is built around a customer-centric hypothesis. That way, the team can hold themselves accountable to the outcome predicted by the experiment.

However, even more important is that engineers see with their own eyes how customers use their products. This requires the frontline and the engineers working together to see if the product is creating customer impact.

4. Use timeboxes to focus experimentation and avoid waste.

Interestingly, adaptive software development encourages timeboxes as a way to ensure an experiment is given the investment that is justified and to signal the acceptable quality level of given feature. On the other hand, typical Agile practitioners avoid timeboxes or deadlines, for fear that the deadline will be used to create emotional pressure. One of the worst feelings for a software developer is spending a few months working on something that ends up being not useful. This fills you with emotional pressure (“I let everyone down”) and a sense of inertia (“why am I even doing this?”).

To avoid this outcome, you want to be clear on how far an engineer should go before they check to see if the direction is still correct. The greater the uncertainty on a team’s hypothesis, and the greater the risk, the shorter that runway should be. With that in mind, the timebox isn’t a deadline. It is a constraint that should guide the level of depth and quality for an experiment before a real test. In this way, timeboxes can increase total motivation.

5. The team should be organized to emphasize collaboration.

To make sure you end up with a no-handoff process, the various stakeholders involved should function as a single cross-functional team, also known as a pod. The goal of the pod is to drive collaboration. Each pod should contain the full set of experts needed to deliver a great product. This may include senior executives. In one organization, for example product pods include a product manager, front-end engineer, back-end engineer, designer, a quality engineer, and part-time representation from customer service, and a senior executive from a control function.

In many organizations, there are tell-tale signs of “faux pods” — teams that call themselves pods but don’t actually operate that way. Signs of faux pods include:

• Experts are in separate “aligned” teams, not the same team. For example, a product team has dedicated engineering “sprint teams.” These are not pods.
• The team uses tools that prevent real collaboration. For example, while asking one engineering team why they chose the Agile software tools they are using, they said, “these tools will prevent executives from engaging in our work.” All this does is perpetuate a cycle of mistrust.
• Engineering and Product functions actually have different goals from the top. Executives in both functions use their hierarchical power to get their people to prioritize the function’s goals above all others, including their pod’s goals. These conflicts ultimately result in clashes in the working teams that prevent true teamwork.
• Rigidly hierarchical talent processes, like performance ratings, hierarchical titles, pressure to get promoted, and up-or-out systems destroy the teamwork required to make pods function well. These systems will either make team members more beholden to their boss than their team’s customer or they will put team members in competition with each other. Either way they will not function as a team.

Put differently, the stronger an organization’s silos, the more people will solve for the needs of their silo, versus the needs of their team. This makes collaboration and consensus very difficult to achieve without constant escalation.

6. The team should constantly question their process.

A famous maxim of engineering design is known as Conway’s Law. It states: any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication (i.e., process) structure. In other words, if you’re a monolithic organization, you’ll produce monolithic designs. If you’re organized by user segments, your product will optimize for that structure.

If you want to defeat Conway’s Law, the better practice is to constantly adjust your structure and processes to suit the problem at hand. This requires teams that have simple, lightweight processes and structures that they constantly question and tweak.

Thus, rather than building “Agile” as a religion that cannot be questioned, engineering teams should be in the habit of constantly diagnosing and iterating their own team’s operating model. In the best examples we’ve seen, on a monthly basis, teams diagnose their operating model and decide if it needs changing to produce a better product.

***

The ability to attract, inspire, and retain digital product talent is becoming mission critical for organizations. Most organizations have fallen prey to a simple message — implement Agile as a series of ceremonies and everything gets better. Unfortunately, this is often not the case when the human-side of the equation is lost. By getting back to the basics of motivation and adaptive performance, you can build an organization that is truly agile.

Analyzing and mapping the buyer journey is not new. In fact, it’s commonly used in consumer marketing. But despite its tremendous benefits, it has not been widely adopted in the B2B professional services space. That’s a missed opportunity.

You see, buyer journey mapping encourages you to look at the entire lifecycle of a client — identifying every point of contact between your firm and your buyers.

It’s a tool that allows you to identify gaps in your marketing, sales and service processes. And you’ll see where your tactics, online and off, may break down.

Buyer Journey Defined

Understanding the buyer (or “client” in the B2B professional services context) journey involves researching and detailing the steps a buyer takes to move through the purchasing and use cycle. It’s a systematic and comprehensive view of their experience that you can summarize in a buyer journey map.

The buyer journey mapping process puts you in your clients’ shoes so you can understand and enhance their experience. And better client experiences are a critical ingredient to building your firm.

You’ll be compelled to answer questions like, “What goes on inside your buyer’s brain before they launch a project with a service provider?”, “How do buyers make decisions?” or “What factors impact client satisfaction?” By wrestling with these questions, you’ll be able to improve the way you connect with prospective clients — and boost your chances of closing the sale.

But many firms end their mapping process at the point where a prospect becomes a new client. That’s too bad. You should never think of closing a new client as the end of the process — after all, it could be the beginning of a years-long relationship. So your buyer journey map should also explore what goes on during the client engagement, what happens between engagements and how you can encourage former clients to become reliable referral sources. Such a comprehensive, detailed buyer journey map helps you analyze your clients’ experience and better communicate with them. But where do you start? The rest of this article introduces you to a simple model you can use to map out and enrich your B2B client’s lifecycle.

Buyers Journey Stages

To get started, your map will consist of four parts, each representing a stage of the B2B buyer’s journey:

Here’s how to tackle each part:

Stage 1. The Pre-Purchase Experience

The pre-purchase experience starts when potential buyers realize they have a problem — one they can’t solve themselves. As they look around for answers, they become aware of your firm (as well as your competition, of course). That’s great! You’ve overcome the first hurdle — your prospects are aware you exist. Next, B2B prospects need to determine whether you can help them. They might talk to colleagues, check out your website (and those of your competitors) or get on social media to find out how others have solved similar problems. Ultimately, B2B buyers want to find out if your firm’s expertise and past experience are relevant to their problems. Once your potential clients decide which service providers make their short list, they usually do further research, interview the finalists and ask for pricing before making a final choice. At this point in the B2B buying process, there are three possible outcomes:

1. You’re hired. Good for you!
2. Not now. Frustrating, but actually not such a bad place to be. The buyer has good feelings about you, but the timing is not right.
3. No way — you don’t make the cut. In this situation, you may not even know you were in the running. In fact, the buyer might have completed their research without ever contacting you.

Okay, now let’s consider what happens after you’ve been hired.

Stage 2. The Professional Services Client Experience

During a client’s initial engagement, they find out what it’s like to work with you and the value you provide. While one-and-done projects generate incremental revenue, repeat clients fuel long-term growth. So it pays to build enduring client relationships. To win repeat business, you need to meet or exceed your clients’ expectations. So as you map out your B2B buyer journey, ask yourself some questions: Are you living up to your promises? Are you easy to work with? Are you hitting deadlines and staying within budget? And during every engagement, you need to ask yourself how the project is going and what you can do to improve the client’s experience.

Eventually, your initial engagement will wind down. What happens next?

Stage 3: The Between Engagement Experience

After you’ve completed your first project — especially if you’ve made a positive impression — the client may decide they want to use your services again. They may not have an immediate need, but you will be the first firm they call when they are ready. Consumer marketers might call this a loyal customer or regular user. In the B2B buying process this stage is pivotal.

Now, most buyer journey mapping models ignore the stage between engagements, but we believe it’s critical. That’s because it represents a significant opportunity, one that’s often missed.

Let’s consider an example. Suppose at the end of a successful engagement you determine there is a chance you could work again with the client in two to three years. That’s a long time for any company to remember you. If you don’t reach out in the interim, they are likely to slip away forever.

Here’s another example. Often, clients hire you to solve one kind of problem, and in their minds that one thing is the only thing you do. Just as any actor who has played James Bond becomes typecast, your firm runs the risk of being pigeonholed. You can easily lose out on a future job that should be yours simply because the client doesn’t associate your firm with other services you provide.

So as you map your journey, think about what it takes to avoid being typecast. It’s not enough to nurture leads — you need to nurture clients, too, educating them about everything you do. And you need to stay on their radar, even after your initial work is long over. The more they know about you, they more likely they will be to give you a call when the time is right.

Eventually, every client runs its course. But they still have value. Let’s find out how.

Stage 4: The Former Client

Clients leave for a variety of reasons. A contact can retire or take a new position, for example. While you can continue to nurture former clients, some situations are simply out of your control.

In one camp are clients that had a poor experience. Maybe you dropped a ball or two. Or maybe it was bad chemistry. Either way, they aren’t coming back and they probably aren’t going to recommend you to others. Say goodbye to these forever (or at least for a long, long time).

In the other camp are clients who had good experiences. They just don’t expect to need your expertise again. But that doesn’t mean you should forget about them. That would be a terrible mistake.

Why? Well, consider an investment banker who sells a business for a retiring owner. Is that the last opportunity with that client? Probably. Should that firm walk away from that client forever? No, they should stay in touch. You see, that former CEO is going to talk to her friends about the experience. And at some point, an impressed friend is going to consider that same firm to represent him when he sells his business.

Former clients can be powerful advocates for your firm. Just don’t let them forget you.

Why do most companies ignore this final phase? Probably because it doesn’t fit conventional buyer journey models. And it’s far easier — and more exciting — to look to future opportunities than to pay attention to the ones that have slipped into the past. But if you keep in front of your best former clients, you will find that they can be exceptionally loyal, and lucrative, friends.

Mapping Your Touch Points

Every phase in the B2B buyer’s journey is connected to others. So you need to be able to step back and see how it all works. That’s where the journey map comes in. Begin by identifying how and when your firm interacts with clients during each stage. Then note these touch points on your map.

What does an actual buyer journey map look like? It can take a range of forms — from a highly visual infographic to a spreadsheet to a basic Word document. The tool you choose matters less than the quality of the data that goes into it. The goal is to recognize the critical decision points (see illustration above) where buyers will either hire you or take another avenue. Only then can you see how you can meet their expectations and tip the scale in your favor.

At Hinge, we work with a wide range of data to map out a client’s entire buyer journey. To understand the pre-client phase we conduct interviews with prospects in the marketplace, as well as the “got-aways” who ended up selecting another firm. That way we learn what prospects want out of a service provider.

We also talk to current clients to understand the quality of their experience with their professional service provider, as well as to learn whether they understand the full breadth of our client’s services. Finally, we research former clients to understand where they stand on the map and what future prospects they offer: Are they between engagements, or are they gone for good? How likely are they to refer the client, and why? You can plot your own customer journey map with information you may already have — client satisfaction surveys and follow up with former clients. But without detailed research into prospects and “betweeners” — and without a clear understanding of how much clients at every stage know about your range of services — there will be significant areas of terra incognita on your map.

To understand where the gaps exist, you’ll need to analyze each client stage. What proportion of clients experience each outcome? For example, how many prospects become clients? How often do clients move into the “between engagements” stage? How many former clients are recommending you? And, of course, why? Most important, what could improve your clients’ experience — and create better outcomes? If you can’t answer all these questions, you may need to conduct research to see the full picture and make the most of all of your opportunities.

Here’s an interesting thought exercise: how many separate problems do you think you have to solve in order to get outbound sales to work? And what are your chances of solving each of them immediately?

The answer to the first question is pretty scary. Even if you have strong evidence of product/market fit -- and a sales process that can close business at a predictable rate -- there are actually 12 other discrete problems that still need to be sorted out to get from zero to your first outbound sale.

I know this because not only am I CEO of CIENCE, a company that specializes in helping the sales teams we work with build long-term client relationships, but I’ve run right into all of these problems myself while learning how to conduct successful outreach.

Complicating things further, all 12 of the problems are related but discrete problems. Your ability to solve any one of them doesn’t necessarily predict your ability to solve others.

Worse, in order to get this type of outreach strategy to work at scale, you must solve each problem -- not just a few of them.  A “zero” or “unsolvable” on one could mean a zero result on outbound overall.

As a result of the “failure to solve one-step means failure to finish” dynamic, the math is simple. Let’s say you have a pretty good team and an 80% chance of overcoming each obstacle. In that setup, your chance of getting outbound sales right the first time around is a whopping 6.9% (.80^12).

What seemed like a simple problem (e.g., “Let’s reach out to people who look a lot like the customers we already have and start a conversation.”) is suddenly not so simple.

Fortunately, these 12 obstacles are all surmountable. I can say that confidently, because we overcome them every day on behalf of all of clients. Here’s the way we think about them.

The reality is there are actually six discrete problem “categories” each of which has a zero to one (“Can I make this work at all?”) and a one to n (“Can I make this work at the scale I need?”) component. Below are these six problem categories and the obstacle for each.

Outbound Sales Mistakes

1. Sourcing the right leads

• 0 to 1: Once you’ve identified your ideal customer profile (i.e., you’ve figured out exactly who you’d like to speak with), search the internet for anyone else that fits the profile and identify ways to connect. This is harder than it seems, as many prospect segments have constituents that don’t identify themselves on LinkedIn or in other social channels. Once you’ve found a lead, the task of finding a matching email and/or phone number is next.
• 1 to n: Assuming you were able to find just one or two prospects matching your ICP, the question remains: can you find hundreds or thousands more? And through what sources would you find them, over how much time, and for what resources expended?

2. Delivering and connecting

• 0 to 1: Assuming you’ve solved the first problem and identified your leads and their contact information, decide if you can engage them in a channel that catches their attention. This means connecting with them on the phone or in their inbox.
• 1 to n: Solving the email deliverability or phone pick-up problem once doesn’t mean it’s solved at scale. That’s where a new set of challenges await, including domain reputation and email deliverability issues, phone dialers, and refined scripts.

3. Engaging

• 0 to 1: Getting in your prospect’s inbox isn’t enough. The right subject line compels a prospect to open and read; the right copy compels them to take positive action. The right mix of timing, target, subject line, copy, and call-to-action must align to get a response. And until you hear from them, you have no idea how you’re doing.
• 1 to n: Once you’ve gotten a result, the question becomes: “How can I achieve consistent results across multiple reps, campaigns, and touches over time?” Carefully measuring what’s working (and what isn’t) is the key to success here, and it’s nearly impossible to measure activities when they aren’t consistent.

4. Finding the right people

• 0 to 1: The average salesperson sends over 100 messages a day. The most effective SDRs are smart, congenial, and hungry -- and most companies hire the wrong person for the role at one point or another. Getting the right SDR in the seat the first time is difficult.
• 1 to n: Even once you’ve figured out what kind of employee makes the best SDR for your business, sourcing those candidates as you scale can be incredibly difficult, especially when you consider varying performance and employee churn. Most strong sales teams are perpetually hiring SDRs because they want to scale and need to deal with SDR attrition.

5. Training people

• 0 to 1: SDR’s should formulate a successful campaign approach but will also likely discover they hit diminishing returns quickly. That’s because the techniques that worked three months ago are likely to be different this month, and an SDR who isn’t consistently learning new techniques and tools won’t be able to deliver over the long term.
• 1 to n: This problem of SDR education is even more difficult at scale.

6. Getting the handoff right

• 0 to 1: Once an SDR has successfully engaged a prospect and set an appointment, the sales process is almost ready to start. But huge questions await: Will the prospect show? Are they the right contact at the target business? What are they expecting out of the call? What does the sales rep know about the prospect before the call and how do they handle the transition between SDR and rep? Without scripting this carefully, “lost in translation” turns quickly into “lost opportunity.”
• 1 to n: At scale, mastering the handoff from SDR to sales rep is even more critical, because small changes to the conversion rate can have huge downstream effects. For instance, is the SDR using best practices for setting the appointment (getting affirmative buy-in) and using an appropriate reminder cadence? How are no-shows handled? How does the end of the SDR “script” dovetail with the beginning of the sales rep script? This is probably the part of the process that gets the least attention (an appointment is an appointment, right?). Getting it wrong is painful because this is the step closest to opportunity development and eventual sale.

As you can see, solving the entire outbound sales puzzle is not easy. At each step, the outreach team must prove the step can be done once and then economically at scale. Failure at any one step means outbound fails.

Fortunately, there are rigorously tested, data-driven tools and techniques to help achieve success at each step and give your team the best chance at outbound success.

• Media agencies are under fire from a number of fronts, but they aren't taking the existential threats to their model lying down. 
• Many of the largest media agencies, including UM, Zenith, Havas and Mindshare are working to ramp up new offerings for marketers, redefine their roles and propel themselves forward.
• They are investing in everything from building business intelligence to digital transformation capabilities to data and analytics as well as proprietary tech stacks.
• But these channels still need to be adopted more widely and are still ancillary, warned ad analyst Brian Wieser. 

There has been no dearth of apocalyptic predictions saying that media agencies are on their death bed.

• Marketers continue to complain about a lack of ad buying transparency from their agencies.
• At the same time, brands are increasingly taking media-buying in-house.
• Deep-pocketed consulting firms are creeping in on agencies' turfs.
• And just last week, ad agencies were reportedly hit with subpoenas as part of an emerging federal investigation.

But some big media agencies aren't taking these existential threats lying down. In fact, they are vowing to fight off disruption — often by building out new services and divisions that go beyond just buying lots of ad space.

Indeed, recognizing that bulk ad buying power is no longer enough of a differentiator, many of the largest media agencies, including UM, Zenith, Havas and Mindshare are working furiously to increase what they can offer to marketers, while also redefining their roles and ensuring their futures.

They are investing in everything from business intelligence to data and analytics as well as proprietary tech stacks. In other words, media agencies are trying to become a lot more like consulting firms.

"We realize that the industry is changing and that we need to be prepared for the future," Joe Maceda, chief instigation officer at Mindshare told Business Insider. "Disruption only happens to those that are unprepared."

If you can't beat consulting firms, imitate them

One of the biggest threats today to agencies at large comes from consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte and IBM who have been encroaching on agencies' turf by setting up digital, media and creative divisions of their own.

But just as the consultancies are beefing up on their creative chops, media agencies have started to take a page out of the consulting playbook to bring more value, strategy and transparency to the table. Agencies, including UM and Mindshare, have set up business intelligence groups and agile development teams, to help clients tackle broader business problems.

UM, for instance, has established a team with over 500 people globally whose primary job is to analyze data and apply it to clients' media plans, according to global CEO Daryl Lee.

The agency frequently organizes what it refers to as "scrum workshops" to cull together people from strategy, product development, creative and even outside media vendors to brainstorm together on certain clients such as Spotify.

In the case of Spotify, the group often moves so fast that it's not unusual for the members to come up with ideas in as little as 48 hours and execute them as quickly as the following week. This approach has led to an average of three artist campaigns per week, said Lee.

Apart from becoming more agile, by bringing the various players in from the start, the agency says it is able to be more efficient by eliminating some cumbersome processes. 

"Media has typically played a role at the top of the funnel," said Lee. "But what we're doing is shifting that horizontal mode to vertical, in order to create media experiences throughout the consumer journey."

Media agencies are bolstering their data and analytics capabilities 

Agencies have also started investing more in their data analytics and business intelligence capabilities, trying to help clients with not just buying media space but developing products. 

Havas Media, for example, has developed a tool in conjunction with IBM artificial intelligence called Arcadia, which allows the agency to carry out ethnography surveys at scale.

"It helps us combine AI with real human insight and get deep insights at scale," said Greg James, global chief strategy officer at Havas Media. "The implication of that is not just what ads should we make and how to target those ads, but also inform product strategy."

Havas has been using Arcadia for projects with existing clients such as Keurig, as well as in new business pitches. 

They are also taking their services more upstream

Media agencies are trying to offer marketers tools, services and consulting before they decide how and where to advertise — and not just handling the execution phase of media buying

To that end, Zenith has set up a "Growth Audit," a structured questionnaire framework through which it does a deep-dive into the company's assets. It uses the audit to understand the client's organizational design and then works with clients to create new capabilities or make recommendations on who it could partner with to fill in the potential gaps.

"Our business has to move more upstream in a more consultative space for the simple reason that clients are facing the risk of disintermediation and every business is potential at risk," said Vittorio Bonori, Zenith's global brand president. "This system forces both clients and agencies to focus on the business."

The agency is also pumping money into machine learning and artificial intelligence to help clients like insurance provider Aviva figure out where best to spend their ad budgets and which ads are driving sales and leads. 

In Coty's case, for example Zenith developed a "Fragrance Finder," an AI-powered product recommendation engine on the website of British retailer Boots.

The product makes fragrance recommendations to consumers based on their answers to a series of questions, using machine learning to learn the tastes and preferences of the consumer to make better recommendations.

The brand saw clickthrough rates of as much as 30% through the engine. Meanwhile Zenith's digital transformation practice is growing 5 times as much as other areas, according to Bonori.

"We're moving into a new space, and that is opening up new revenue streams for us apart from the core business," he said.

But not everyone is convinced that agencies can move beyond their core quickly

All these investments in data and analytics, automation and artificial intelligence and business transformation are all well and good, but are ultimately ancillary to the way that media agencies make money and always have — that is media planning and buying — according to Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser. 

"If you were to look at their revenue functions, it doesn’t look very different from what it did 10 years ago," he told Business Insider. "If it weren't for those functions, marketers wouldn't really be engaging with them."

Very few agencies have truly evolved their businesses, said Wieser, pointing at R/GA and Wunderman as examples. 

For media agencies to truly transform what they are, investments need to be made at the holding company or sub-holding company level, he said.

"While they are trying to add more value to clients than their core media planning and buying functions, these efforts are still very much at the margins," he said. 

In the meantime, agencies are trying to help their clients bracing themselves for the future

Apart from getting up to speed with the latest capabilities in data and technology, agencies are also ensuring they are prepared for the future.

Mindshare, for instance, has an internal Black Mirror-inspired program called "Media Dystopia," where it explores potential dystopian futures for media based on today’s developments with its clients, and comes up with potential ways to survive them.

One of these programs explored the future of commerce on voice assistants, and what it means when consumers buy things from what is essentially a "voice shelf."

To respond to such a voice-based future, the agency developed the "Mindshare Discovery Risk Index," classifying which brands are likely to be most negatively affected by voice-based purchasing. It then used that worst-case scenario to come up with an Amazon Prime Day hack for a large consumer packaged goods client.

The hack was based on the insight that Amazon Alexa is only likely to recommend two brands in a category when a consumer is looking to shop. To ensure that the CPG brand (Mindshare declined to name the brand) would be one of the brands recommended, Mindshare ran an offer for consumers of the brand on Amazon in the day leading up to Prime Day so that its search results would peak, and Alexa would be more likely to recommend it when someone searched for it using voice.

"By playing out current media trends to their most disruptive ending, we're able to remain ahead of the curve," Mindshare's chief instigation officer Maceda. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: An aerospace company reintroduced its precision helicopter with two crossing motors

A great content strategy starts with keyword research. But not all keyword research is the same.

Most of the guides out there talk about keyword research for consumers but fail to mention the important differences for B2B companies. If you don’t take the time to consider the specific needs of your brand, your research could be a total waste of time — or worse, actually send your marketing efforts down an ineffective path.

But that doesn’t mean that B2B keyword research has to be difficult. In many respects, it’s no harder than B2C research, just a little different.

In this article, I’ll show you how to think about B2B keyword research differently, suggest some helpful tools, and review the most important elements of your keyword strategy.

How To Think Differently About B2B Keyword Research

Business buyers tend to have a much longer buying cycle than consumers for a number of reasons. It’s not often that a department VP types a question into Google and then signs up for the first solution he finds.

That’s why B2B marketers need to focus more on the buyer’s journey when doing their research. While product keywords like “project management software” or “automated 401k” are great for customers looking to purchase, you’ll miss out on a huge section of the market if you focus only on this demographic.

Instead, you must focus on keywords that are related to each stage of the B2B journey. You need to ask yourself what potential customers are searching for from the very beginning.

Let’s take the project management software example. What might customers ask at the beginning of their journey? Probably something like “how to effectively manage projects” or “team collaboration” or “how to organize a code sprint”.

Then, if their situation warrants, they’ll probably realize that a tool could really help them out. So then they might look for “most important features in a project management system.” You get the idea….

B2B content marketing requires a broader net because you want to establish brand authority in the space while still generating leads. If you just pump out a bunch of sales pages, you probably won’t see great results.

With proper content marketing, your prospect will have already visited your site several times before they decide to make a purchase.

B2B Keyword Research Tools

Before I get into the actual strategy, I want to share a few tools that we use at my digital marketing agency when implementing keyword research for our B2B clients.

Google Keyword Planner

This tool is the backbone of many keyword research strategies. That’s because it’s free, simple to use and comes straight from the source: Google.

All you need to do is create a Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) account and you can start getting keyword recommendations and search volume estimates.

I won’t spend too much time going over the tool since so much has been written about it already.

Ahrefs

One of the most powerful tools for SEO is Ahrefs. It’s not cheap but it does a lot. Specifically, for keyword research, it lets you pull lists of keywords that any site is ranking for.

This helps you see where competitors are putting their effort and how you’re stacking up. It also gives you the estimated search traffic and difficulty for ranking against each keyword. Making important decisions is much easier when you’re prioritizing keywords to go after.

LSI Graph

LSI Graph is another free tool that’s useful for developing keyword ideas (with a cheap option for unlimited searches).

LSI Keywords are Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords, which is more or less a fancy way of saying related keywords. These are keywords that are used to help search algorithms better understand the meaning behind your content – although they can also be great article keywords, too (when relevant)!

With LSI Graph, all you have to do is type in a keyword or phrase:

And it will spit out tons of related suggestions:

Quora & Similar Sites

Quora is a popular site where people can ask questions and then crowdsource answers from the collective wisdom of the Internet. This makes it a great place to find keyword opportunities in the earlier stages of the buyer journey.

The great thing here is that these are specific queries that might have a smaller search volume and not show up high on other reports, but that also means they can be easy wins to get in front of prospects while your bigger pages start to rank.

On Quora, you can search for a topic and view the most followed and most asked questions under “Topic FAQ”:

Google

And last but not least, don’t forget about Google for good long-tail keywords.

Let’s say you set up WiFi networks for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). You could type in a basic keyword phrase like “business wifi network” and instantly see some of the most common questions:

Right off the bat, I see a content opportunity around business WiFi network diagrams.

And don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the SERPs to find related questions:

And one last tip here: study the ads on the page, too. These marketers have already done the research on ideal keywords for their ads, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Evaluating a B2B Keyword Opportunity

There are four main elements we use to evaluate a keyword opportunity: volume, difficulty, relevancy, and intent.

Volume is the amount of traffic that search gets each month. It’s easy to grab from the keyword planner, although more specific results will be found in Ahrefs.

Difficulty measures how hard it will be/how long it will take to get this keyword to rank. Higher difficulty scores usually mean that a higher word count, better graphics, more LSI keywords, and more backlinks are required to win. Several tools provide an estimate for this, including Ahrefs.

Relevancy is a qualitative criterion that’s hard to assign a specific number to. Once you’ve created a list, you need to review it and remove any keywords that aren’t really relevant to your brand or audience.

Intent is another tricky one. You need to ask yourself “what is someone who types this actually looking for?” This generally falls into five categories:

• Purchase (customer is looking to make a purchase)
• Informational (customer is looking for information about a product or problem)
• Related (industry topics, not directly related to your offering)
• Broad (many possible meanings or loosely related to your brand; for example “IT”)
• Not relevant (just ignore these)

You mainly want to focus on the first two, but the third category can hold good topics for content that belongs in the earlier stages of the buyer journey.

You also want to ask yourself: “Is the search intent likely B2B or B2C?”

Let’s say your company provides B2B import/export and shipping services. A keyword like “fast international delivery” might appear as a gold mine. But it’s possible that most people searching for that term are looking for personal shipping services for small packages.

Compare that to a query like “freight forwarding” which has a much smaller volume but a much clearer B2B intent.

Some keywords will definitely have a mix of B2B and B2C intent, so don’t cross them off your list immediately. But you should discount high volume numbers and perhaps prioritize it a little lower if the keyword difficulty is too high.

Key Elements of a B2B Keyword Strategy

There are five main types of keywords that you should include in your keyword plan.

1. Branded Keywords

Branded keywords are super specific keywords like your brand name, slogan, product terms, and so on.

They should be pretty easy to rank for, but you cannot afford to neglect them because customers making these searches have a fairly high purchase intent. If they’re looking for information on you by name, they’re at least in the evaluation stage of their decision-making process.

2. Product Keywords

Product keywords are the primary battleground for B2B SEO. This is where you compete for the top spots like “corporate network installation”, “standing desks” or “freight forwarding”.

It also includes broader terms closely related to your products. These will likely require the most effort to rank for, but will also bring the greatest return.

3. Industry Keywords

Industry keywords are those that are relevant to your industry but not directly related to your topic. They shouldn’t be your top priority, but as mentioned before, they can be important in establishing your industry expertise.

The managers who search for “employee productivity” are often involved in the buying process of HR software. So Zenefits made sure to rank for this keyword:

While the article may give them a chance to plug their product, the primary goal is establishing industry authority and brand name recognition and bring the prospect further down the decision-making process.

4. Competitor Keywords

If you’re subscribed to Ahrefs (or using the free trial), then you can pull a report that tells you exactly which keywords your competition is ranking for. It will even show you the specific article URL and position:

You can even export this data into a spreadsheet for easier analysis:

5. Optimization Opportunities

Optimization opportunities offer some of the highest ROI in all of content marketing.

If your site has been around for at least a few months, you may have already started ranking for valuable keywords. But even if you aren’t seeing much traffic from search engines, it’s possible that you’re sitting on page 2-10 for some pages, which will bring almost zero visitors. Often, it won’t take much to break into the top 10.

So what are you going to do? Competitive research on your own site. Follow the same process as above and look for good opportunities ranking in positions 11-100.

Prioritize articles with higher rank and traffic volume and start updating these pieces by adding more content or resources to your existing articles. You can modify the title to include the keyword, but do not change the URL unless you set up proper redirects.

Conclusion

Keyword research is the foundation of any content marketing plan – which is why it gets talked about so much.

Despite a little more complexity, at the end of the day, B2B keyword research isn’t that much more difficult than B2C research. You just need to make sure you’re thinking about it the right way.

If you use these tools to find and evaluate keyword opportunities with your prospects’ decision-making journey in mind, you’ll develop a sound strategy for your content marketing.

The post Keyword Research for B2B Brands appeared first on OpenView Labs.