Buying office supplies for an SMB organization on a regional level is different from buying office supplies for a global Fortune 500 corporation. There are differences regarding processes, volumes, required signatures, etc. But the well-defined and standardized products remain the same. Do these buyers need to talk to a sales professional? Not necessarily, but it’s more likely in the global scenario.

Buying an application management service, a CRM system or a collaboration platform are, by definition, complex projects, but even more so if scaled from a regional to a global level. It’s the same when buying new robot technology required for a local plant only versus for different regions.
How well informed can a buyer be merely by browsing the Internet? Do these buying teams need to talk to a sales professional? Absolutely.

What does your customers’ buying environment look like? Differentiating between two extremes, a transactional and a complex buying environment, is important before evaluating different opinions that are painting a colorful picture of “Buyer 2.0” as always well informed and self-directed for making a decision. What’s missing is context–the buying environment:

• In a transactional buying environment, it’s about defined products and services that can be configured and ordered online. The problem to be solved is well defined. The people running those buying processes are category or vendor managers. The number of buying influences is small and their focus is budget optimization and efficiency. The decisions have a tactical rather than a strategic character; their business impact is at most moderate. The buying focus is mostly on budget optimization and efficiency. Exactly – think about the example regarding office supplies, about a private cloud service, about the renewal of a phone contract. These buyers can find functions, features, benefits, services, configurations, comparisons, pricing and an order form all online.
• In a complex buying environment, it’s different. Complex challenges have many different dimensions that are all connected to each other. How to approach these challenges has to be developed along the customer journey, and the required products and services have to be derived once the solution is defined. These complex challenges may have similar patterns, but their context is always unique. So are the decision criteria and the buying decisions – always different, every time. Buying influences are cross-functional, with different roles, from different levels with different perspectives. They are involved in these teams as part of their day-to-day job because they are all responsible or impacted stakeholders regarding the outcomes to be achieved. Those buying decisions have strategic relevance and a significant business impact and are focused on effectiveness (recall the above examples on business-process outsourcing or new robot technology for a manufacturing plant).

Completely different worlds.

Some of your buyers may live in a transactional environment, and others may live in a complex environment. And most of your customers may live between both extremes. Understanding and applying the implications of your customers’ specific buying environment is key to achieving World-Class Sales Performance. It requires tailoring customer-management and growth strategies. It also requires tailoring your enablement strategy and your enablement services accordingly. Content, messaging and training requirements are different in transactional and in complex buying environments.

Being conscious about where and how to play the game are decisions of strategic relevance. You cannot play football and baseball with the same team at the same time.

 

A talented videogame-designing friend had a ready quip whenever start-up executives asked him if he was a “team player.” “Yes,” he always responded, “team captain.” He usually got hired.

“Makes teams better” is fast-becoming both an essential ingredient to getting hired and a mission-critical skill-set worth measuring. After spending the weekend at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference,  “quantifying chemistry”—identifying those talents, attributes and combinatorial skills that make a team play so much better than a group of talented individuals—has clearly become the new Holy Grail of sports analytics.

How do you identify, blend, develop, train and coach a mix of talents into wholes measurably greater than the sum of their parts? What combinatorial characteristics of high-performers empower everyone else to over-perform?

That’s the “franchise of the future” challenge haunting sports’ brightest minds and biggest wallets.

Of course, identifying Moneyball-like metrics and boosting individual performance remains vital. But this was the first time attending the event where so many of the top-tier athletic luminaries—particularly coaches and managers—spoke so wistfully and ambitiously about the analytic alchemy that can turn teammates into champions.

“The next step in analytics will be how to build chemistry,” asserted Phil Jackson, the former Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles coach who’s won the most NBA championships in history. As an 11-time champion, says Jackson, he was always looking for “what creates the bonds” between players that can meaningfully separate them from their competition.  Jackson was famous—or notorious—for encouraging “mindfulness” training and meditation to get his players in harmony. But, at his Building a Dynasty panel, Jackson stressed that he was always open to numbers and analyses that offered actionable insight into getting his teams to play better together. Motivating individual players such as Shaquile O’Neill or Kobe Bryant was one thing, he observed, but identifying those ingredients that got everyone motivated both during practice and game time was a qualitatively and quantitatively different challenge.

“We should be able to do much more now,” Jackson said.

George Karl, the 7th coach in NBA history to reach 1000 wins, similarly stressed the need for serious coaches and general managers to quantify “teamness.” While sports and election stats guru Nate Silver—who decamped from The New York Times to ESPN —observed that quantifying chemistry in more team-oriented sports such as basketball and football matters far more than in more individualized performance sports such as baseball.

But the larger emergent conference theme was that sports quants and analysts—as well as coaches and general managers—were becoming more creative, innovative and aggressive in identifying not only what player combinations and match-ups were more effective but what were the “special ingredients” and “secret sauces” that went into that success. More quantitative attention is being paid to how well players improve the in-game performances of their teammates. Are their particular game situations where their positive—or negative—influence is statistically pronounced? Can that impact be meaningfully correlated with psychological attributes or other behavioral characteristics? Indeed, how can the coaches improve the TQ—Teamness Quotient—of their players’ performances?

Of course, the MLB, NBA, NFL and FIFA are hardly perfect analogues to either gigantic global enterprises or Silicon Valley start-ups. But high performance companies in industries worldwide are digitally monitoring and measuring their people more comprehensively and rigorously. Professional sports—and even the college ranks!—have become early adopters and innovators in multidimensional measurements for individuals and teams alike. Where Fortune 100 companies once invited pro coaches and athletes in as motivational speakers for internal events, the conversation is shifting to sharing analytic best practice.

How might “teamness” improve the time to market performance of new product development efforts? How might CEOs and boards deploy headhunters and hire executives differently if chemistry can be better measured? Sports teams, of course, compete in physical time and space. But what can—and should—chemistry mean when teamwork is more digital and virtual? The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference doesn’t offer anything close to the answers to those questions. But this is exactly the arena where the future of quantifying team performance and team work is being measurably discussed. You can make an excellent living doing research in physical and/or inorganic chemistry. But if you want to make a real post-industrial killing, come up with cutting edge research in team chemistry.

SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine — Vladimir Putin’s current military gambit in Crimea has caused consternation in Kyiv and outrage in the West. For Irina Niverova, Russia’s occupation of the Crimean peninsula last week is simple to understand and totally justified. “The Crimea […]

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McDonald’s has sold billions and billions of burgers — around 300 billion, in fact. But SendGrid is on track to overtake the fast food giant with its core metric: total emails delivered.

SendGrid today announced that it’s racked up 150,000 customers — including new clients like Snapchat, Dwolla, and Sonos — for which it’s sent out more than 200 billion emails. It delivers a half billion new emails each day, so it won’t be long until it leaves McDonald’s and its burgers in the dust.

“We’re really the only company that has that kind of scale experience [in email],” SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin told VentureBeat.

That’s a massive amount of messages, but it doesn’t meticulously craft each one: The Boulder, Colo.-based startup does “application email” — so when you book an Uber taxi and receive an automated receipt, SendGrid generates and sends that message. Or when Spotify suggests new music via email, SendGrid delivers it.

SendGrid intends to use that experience with cloud-based email infrastructure and delivery to solve other problems for developers.

SendGrid Labs, formed in late 2012, has already released its first product: Loader.io, a load-testing service. It enables developers to test their cloud-based apps and APIs for load performance and scalability. More than 15,000 SendGrid customers use Loader.io, according to Franklin.

Six other SendGrid Labs projects are in the works, Franklin told us. The next scheduled for release is Reflector.io, a notification system for developers. Reflector.io enables developers to provide one “signal” about the state of an app that gets interpreted by multiple parties in ways relevant to them. (Details are scant, as the tool is still under development.)

Franklin also envisions SendGrid as a platform on which others can build “next gen” email apps. Hubspot and Pardot have already built on Sendgrid, he told us.

But SendGrid’s core email service will continue to drive the bulk of the company’s growth, said Franklin. The company is “rapidly approaching” $50 million in annual revenues, he said.

Its primary competitor is Amazon, which offers a “Simple Email Service” for outbound messages. But Franklin said SendGrid’s analytics set it apart.

“It’s not just sending the mail,” he told VentureBeat. “Was that mail received? Was it opened? Was it clicked on? We segment customers by engagement — and that’s something Amazon hasn’t done particularly well.”

Since graduating from the TechStars accelerator in 2009, SendGrid has raised $27.4 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, and others. It has around 210 full-time employees.

Working remotely from home can be a real blessing for businesses with logistical issues. Just think of the convenience of working in the comforts in your own home, coordinate with colleagues from the other side of the coast, and not worry about being late to the office. For the single parents, they can get their work done while watching over their kids. But what about those involved in telemarketing? Will this set-up work well with them? Can this set up help improve their ability to generate B2B leads? These are just some questions that can affect your decision to migrate (or augment) your workforce with a home-based team. But how would you know if this is the right fit for your firm?

Are you only after results?

If you are the type of person who does not care what your people do, as long as they deliver their work, then working at home might be a good set-up for your appointment setting team. If you are also concerned with every move your employees make, then this is will not do well for your mindset.

Can it be done at home?

There are different kinds of work that an employee might be assigned to do, but the real clincher in the home-based deal is data security. If all you do is admin chores, then this might be it. But if you handle lead generation campaigns with sensitive data; an engineering or software project that requires specialized equipment; or brain-storming sessions that need close interaction with colleagues; then you might need to have an actual office to stay.

Are your employees also working outside of the office?

Depending on the volume of work, the kind of sales leads being nurtured, as well as the time required to deal with the work. Letting your employees work in their homes saves them time from shuttling to and from work. It will also let them concentrate more on what they do more profitably. You just might have to arrange for a practical and reliable work schedule to touch base with your home-based sales team.

How willing are your people to work from home?

That is the final, as well as the most important, question that you have to answer. Even after extolling all the benefits of home-based work, if your employees are not receptive to that idea, then this set-up will not work well with your business. There is also the issue of work-life balance. Some employees prefer working in an office, since they can leave it there once their shift is over. Besides, some fear that their productivity will be affected by noisy children or domestic chores that they have to deal with once they are at home.

Working from home is not really a bad business strategy but it will depend on whether a company and the people working for it are willing to make a change. This could help you in your telemarketing campaign, but you have to make sure that you satisfy the questions stated above.

This content originally appeared at The Telemarketing Services Blog.

Sales and Marketing integration. It’s such a nice theory, but yet in so many companies, the Sales team isn’t happy with the amount or quality of leads being generated by Marketing. Marketing is frustrated that salespeople won’t give them the time of day, never mind appreciate that Marketing exists for one reason: to support Sales. If sales are down, fingers point to Marketing for not providing enough leads. If there are no marketing campaigns in the works, fingers point to Sales for not clearly stating what they need.

The result? Sales and Marketing don’t get along or play nicely together.

If you are fortunate to work for a company where Sales and Marketing are aligned and integrated, consider yourself lucky. If not, you are in the majority – but you can get these two teams to play nicely together. All it takes is three components:

1. Physical Proximity – Are your Marketing and Sales departments adjacent in your office environment? You’d be amazed at how much communication will improve when the members of these teams can conveniently get up out of their chairs and talk face-to-face. I’ve seen many companies where these two critical departments are on separate sides of the building, on different floors, and even in different buildings on a campus. If you want two groups of kids to collaborate and play nicely, the parents must at least get them on the same playground. Move some people around – it’s easy, and most will be open to it, so long as you keep a positive spin on it.

2. Emotional Investment – Does your Marketing team attend the weekly Sales team meetings? If the Marketing folks are going to do the best job possible, for the Sales team and for the company as a whole, they’ve got to know what’s on the Sales team’s priority and to-do lists. To make sure everyone is involved, Marketing and Sales should be stakeholders in answering the following questions:

• Who are the hot prospects, and how are we nurturing them?

• How do we define a Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL and a Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL)?

• Once MQLs are handed over to sales, should we keep them in or take them out of the nurture campaigns?

• What industry events do we need to be at, and how can we make the most of these events – before, during, and after?

• What “pains” are our prospects and customers feeling that our products and services can relieve?

• Do we have content that we can push out that will position us as thought leaders in the industries we play in?

• If not, can we craft a white paper, case study or byline and get it out there and within what timeframe?

  Having exposure to these and similar questions help Marketing team members see that they have some “skin” in the sales game. They’ll be emotionally connected to the sales goals. Knowing what the salespeople are focused on every day, and how things change week to week, will get the Marketing team’s strategy and execution juices flowing. Remember this: all marketing people want is to please the Sales team and senior management. They can only do that by being informed. When they know what the sales team is focused on, their enthusiasm will lead to execution and results. What you want from these employees (and all employees) is the critical emotion of passion in their work – and knowledge sparks passion.

3. Food and Beverages – Really?!  Yes!  By the time you’ve addressed #1 and #2, your marketing and sales teams will have made a commitment to get together as teams. Management should then help strengthen and reinforce the relationships between the individual sales and marketing professionals. Sharing food and beverages is a great way for people to make connections and build a community. Marketing can buy pastries for the Sales team on occasion. Sales can take Marketing out to the local watering hole after work once a month, to show their appreciation (yes, I said sales should show their appreciation for marketing!). Individual sales people can invite individual marketing people out for coffee, lunch, or even a game of foosball in the company lounge, and vice versa. Management can promote and underwrite these activities: suggest this behavior at company meetings, announce and praise camaraderie when you see it, and simply project a company culture of employees being nice to, caring for, and communicating with each other. Again, employees want to please management – but you’ve got to let them know that you are pleased.

I cannot emphasize this enough: it’s up to management to infuse this relationship-building. Your sales and marketing people won’t likely do it on their own.

Just this week, I saw a blog post by Sam Kusinitz of HubSpot about alignment between sales and marketing teams, and “mutual accountability” – and this alignment was defined as “Smarketing,” which I thought was great. Many companies are moving towards melding “sales” and “marketing” functions and employees of those functions into one, to be known as “Sales Marketing.” This phenomenon begs the question… Who separated sales and marketing in the first place?!

When Sales and Marketing are aligned physically, mentally, and socially, and when management strives to keep it that way, everyone in the company will notice; and it won’t be long until this “investment” has a healthy effect on your company’s bottom line.

It's vital to take advantage of LinkedIn and Twitter to connect with prospective customers and stay on the radar of previous ones.

Whether you're a sales manager or sales rep, chances are you've heard of social selling. At first glance the trendy phrase is intuitive--selling via social media channels. But while the definition might be straightforward, understanding how to effectively use social media to generate leads and make sales is a much more crafted, considered process.

As a business's operations and overall presence become more digital in nature, so do sales activities. More of the sales process happens online versus in person than ever before. This transition isn't exactly replacing the art of making things happen, though. Selling is still about relationships and knowing how to influence and persuade people to action. Social media is just a new frontier where salespeople can foster and activate those relationships.

By now sales reps should know the first step to social selling is to create quality profile pages, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter. Make connections to establish a strong network. Partake in the digital conversation. But these are only introductory steps at best. Below are a few tips to help you go well beyond that level.

1. Make initial connections on LinkedIn

What's the key to sales and networking, regardless of whether or not you're online? Making strong connections. Beef up your LinkedIn connections as much as you can on your own, but don't be afraid to ask a colleague (or old coworker, boss, friend, even uncle!) to make an introduction on your behalf to a prospect you're trying to connect with online. As long as the introduction is genuine and personable--not overtly promotional--it actually works.

It's also important to note that LinkedIn is not only great for making those connections, but setting up first touch points. For example, if you're having a difficult time reaching a prospect over the phone, simply view their LinkedIn profile. Our sales reps have great success with this tactic, as the LinkedIn page visit alert gets the sales rep's name on the prospect's radar and increases the likelihood of a returned call. Of course, a short message and/or connection request can also work well in cases where you're looking for something stronger than a page view.

2. Find shared interests and backgrounds

Before you begin pitching people over LinkedIn, or even communicating via Twitter, take the time to do your homework. Did you go to the same college, grow up in the same area, or know some people in common? Look for similarities that could open a relevant conversation that's unrelated to your business. Find meaningful information on your prospect that might establish a personal connection. Then begin your outreach online by citing that shared interest or background.

If you don't have a shared connection, you can also just leverage any information that the prospect is likely to be passionate about. For example, it's almost time for March Madness, and most people who went to large universities have great pride in their alma mater. Find out if any of your prospects attended one of the schools in this year's NCAA Tournament, and open your introductory pitch with a line about the upcoming games.

3. Audit your LinkedIn appearance

Most people on LinkedIn display profile pages indicating they're looking for employment. Create a profile instead that cements your expertise. Let contacts identify your online presence as belonging to a thought leader, not a job seeker.

4. Become part of ongoing Twitter conversations

On Twitter, make sure you're able to keep up with discussions and respond to industry-related posts in real time. Don't publish tweets solely featuring your own thoughts, either. Have conversations, and retweet regularly. For every tweet you publish, there should be at least three tweets that come from other sources, such as those mentioning or linking to trending articles, good quotes, or interesting statistics. Communicate with prospects and clients, comment on hot topics, or even share some of your sales team's fun personality with more casual posts.

5. Don't limit social selling to prospecting

At its core, social selling certainly helps sales reps identify and pitch new leads, but social media channels can impact sales throughout the entire process. For example, say a contact has started to fade or become increasingly less responsive. Retweet them, or comment on one of their LinkedIn posts to get back on their radar. Social media channels offer another touch point between sales reps and those key decision-makers.

6. Automate social media monitoring in sales, too

It's a misconception to think that monitoring social media chatter is a function only for marketing departments. Sales reps should always monitor social media streams around their contacts to track conversations and engage accordingly. This can be helpful for staying in touch with prospects and staying in the loop on what's happening in client organizations.

Social selling isn't a replacement to the traditional sales process; it's a complement. By leveraging social media channels optimally, sales reps can foster more relationships and close a lot more deals.

Are you struggling with generating revenue from Facebook or any other social media channels?

You are not alone.

A lot of business owners are not seeing the value in it. However, a lot of businesses are not using social media the way it is intended. Contrary to popular belief, it is not another avenue to push your sales messages. Sales messages have there place, just don’t do it too often. Typically, the more you are promoting your business, the less effective it is on social media.

Why social media should be used as a retention tool

I really believe that businesses would get a lot more out of social media if they used it as a retention tool. I am not just going to share my “beliefs”, but some powerful statistics that back up why customer retention is so important.

Too many businesses focus on “hunting” (new customer acquisition) and not enough are spending time on “farming” (customer retention). Customer retention is more effective, cheaper and happens much faster.

According to White House Office of Consumer Affairs, reported by Return on Behavior magazine;

• It costs 6 – 7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one – Bain & Company
• A 5% reduction in defection rate can increase profits by 5 – 95% — Bain & Company
• An average company loses between 10 – 30% of its customers annually – McKinsey
• A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10% – Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy

Are you seeing the importance of customer retention? Investing more time & money in your current customers and it will add to your bottom line, there is no doubt about that.

I share this statistic a lot of this site. It’s a stat I found last fall from Harvard Business School…

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%

So you could almost DOUBLE your annual profits by increasing retention by just 5%? Social media is a great place to keep in touch with these people.

How to use social media as a retention tool

Start by asking your current customers to join you on the social networks. Reach out (email) to each customer and ask them to join your Facebook community. Incentive them in some way and do not use the boiler plate – Become our fan on Facebook!

Boring!

Give them a reason to join and make it about them. Something like…

Come join our community on Facebook where we have monthly giveaways, share insider information, special promotions and funny pictures of Debbie, our crazy office assistant.

Make it FUN. I talked about this more in this blog post.

Start sending out an email like that to your current customers and see how your Facebook community will grow naturally. Be active and consistent on your Facebook page by sharing local happenings, current events, special promotions, motivational quotes and more. Here is a blog post of 11 creative ideas to post on your Facebook page.

Can social media be used for lead generation?

Of course, social media can be used to generate leads as well. It takes more of a strategy and a know-how to pull it off effectively though. People are not using the social channels to make a purchase. They are using it to be entertained, be social, catch up with family & friends.

There is a science to it, but I am going to let you in on how to do it.

Here is my 4 step approach to effectively selling on Facebook;

1. Create offer – Using Facebook’s ads I can laser target my target market
2. Collect email – The ad directs them to a landing page. This page offers a premium piece of content in exchange for their contact information (name/email)
3. Build trust – Provide value through daily emails. These emails contain proven strategies that can be implemented into their business to increase their bottom line
4. Sell – If we are a fit, this is where I offer my solution to their problem.

So, yes, you can sell on Facebook (or any other social media channel), but it’s not the typical “Buy Now”. Not saying that approach doesn’t work, but it’s much more efficient to collect an email first, for two reasons;

1. It is much easier to sell through email
2. You can continue to nurture the lead through email as they may not be ready to buy

Conclusion

I shared some facts with you on customer retention/loyalty. I didn’t just want to share my thoughts, but had some solid facts to back it up. Social media is a great place to keep in touch with your customer base. It is also a place to stay top of mind with them as well.

Try using social as a retention tool. Remember to have fun with it as well. Share your story and what happens “behind the curtain”. This is how to increase the frequency of transactions with your customers, in turn, you will see a growth in your bottom line profits.

Content marketing is all about building trust and loyalty by delivering helpful information to your audience. While we’ve only just been calling this strategy “content marketing” over the last decade or so, brands have been building these relationships for a long time.

- Harley Davidson’s The Enthusiast was first published by the motorcycle legend in 1916 and is still the longest-running motorcycle publication in the world.

- John Deere’s The Furrow was first published in 1895 to help farmers be more successful. Today, the publication has more than 1.5 million readers in 40 countries and is published in 12 languages.

These content visionaries saw the value of publishing “free” information that helped educate their audiences, tell their stories and make real connections with their customers.

Your brand can also give away knowledge in creative ways:

Speak through your Website

Your website is your handshake. It’s your first impression; your opportunity to connect one-on-one; your 24/7 sales team that works even when you aren’t.

Make sure it includes:

• Information that connects to users.
• Links that keep users engaged.
• A voice that users remember.

Ditch the Jargon

Just today, I stumbled upon a site called TalkLikeTheBoss.com, a website devoted to defining and mocking some of the more egrigious business buzzwords out there. Steele Champion, who runs the site, recently told Inc. Magazine the buzzword “opportunity” makes his blood boil. That’s because the meaning of the word has been changed from “something we should be grateful for” to “something that needs to be improved upon”. So instead of saying things like, “Your on-boarding process is weak in these areas,” I should say, “Your on-boarding process has a few opportunity areas,” said Champion.

Twisting words around to make you look better is no way to connect with your customers. No one wants to read about your company’s “bottom line” and “optimal performance” on your website. Speak to your audience as if you are a person, not a robot.

Be a Giver

A relationship is a two-way street, so don’t just talk about yourself to your customers. And don’t be shy. Being afraid to share your secret sauce will prevent you from revealing the heart and soul of your company.

Here are some ways to share information that lets your expertise shine, without using sales tactics:

• Create a “resources” e-book answering frequently asked questions about your business or service.
• Share quotes from your favorite industry experts or authors, celebrities, historical figures and cultural icons.
• Review a product, service, or book that other people in your community or industry will care about.
• Create a blog to share your expertise and educate consumers. Blogs also have the added benefit of driving traffic to your website and converting leads.

By being honest in the information you share, losing your fear of being too transparent and recognizing opportunities to educate your audience, you will be rewarded with their business.

Learn more about being transparent to build trust in our book, Brands in Glass Houses: How to Embrace Transparency and Grow your Business through Content Marketing.

To reign supreme, your social media marketing should be just one cog in a larger, well-oiled lead generation, sales and marketing machine.

When it comes to marketing a business, social media can sometimes suck all the oxygen out of the room. For 10 years it has been and remains the “shiny disco ball” of marketing that gets a lot of attention. Because of this, a lot of companies fail to see the forest for the trees and understand how social media should fit into a B2B marketing effort.

Unfortunately for some companys, social media marketing is not always aligned with business and marketing goals.

Social media is the #1 content marketing tactic used by B2B companies as indicated in the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends-North America from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

Despite the high usage number indicated in the report, there are still B2B companies not using social media or barely using it.

The reasons companies have not embraced social media for marketing often fall into three categories:

1. They aren’t sure what to do once they’ve set up some social media accounts
2. They aren’t sure if it’s worth the effort (ROI)
3. They don’t have time

To address those common issues, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Have a plan. Start developing your social media marketing plan after you have a firm understanding of your company’s revenue goals. Once you have the revenue goals, work backwards to sales goals, lead to conversion ratios, etc. After you have specific lead generation goals for marketing, only then should you start thinking about how social media can help. The primary purpose of social media marketing is to help close sales. That is done by helping to make connections with prospects, bring them to your site and capture a lead. Secondarily, social media should be used to reinforce the relationship you have with your existing customers.

Research your buyer persona. Start backwards from when a sale is made and list the different people (if more than one) who are researching, evaluating and making a decision on buying your product. What prompts them to start looking for a solution like yours? How do they evaluate their options, what are the barriers to buying from you? How do they ultimately decide to buy? Adele Revella’s “5 Rings of Buying Insight™ for Buyer Personas” is a very solid framemwork for researching your buyer personas.

Create content. Publish helpful content for those different buyer personas at each step of the purchase research phase. Think about every question you and your team receive while a prospect is evaluating your product or service. Post the answers on your blog and put more in-depth content (such as eBooks, buyer guides, tip sheets, recorded webinars) behind landing pages to capture their contact information.

Put someone in charge. Assign an employee the responsibility for managing your company’s social media. Task them with staying abreast of the latest developments in social media marketing. Evaluate their performance against specific lead generation goals. Don’t give the responsibility to an already overburdened employee, either. If you do, you’ll revert back to the problem of not having enough time.

Pick the right watering holes. One challenge for companies ramping up their social media efforts is figuring out which social media networks to use. Go back to your buyer personas and determine which ones they use. Pick a few of the top ones and have a meaningful and effective presence. It’s better to be on just a few social media platforms and excel than to do a mediocre job on several.

Listen and respond. Social media is not a one-way broadcast channel like so many other information distribution pipelines where B2B marketers are accustomed to pushing out their messages. Your customers and prospects will offer feedback and suggestions that can be illuminating and profitable. Also, watch what your competitors are doing to get insights in their social media strategy and their overall business strategy. They’re watching you already.

Be helpful. Share information on social media for which your buyer personas would say “thank you.” Share your own content that is tailored to your buyer personas. But you should share even more information that isn’t yours. This is helpful, but it also positions you as a resource and an expert. This doesn’t mean that you should not occasionally invite your social media followers back to your site to download helpful content. You can and should do that once your followers know, like and trust you.

Be consistent and give it time. Content marketing and social media marketing should be seen as a marathon, not a one-time javelin throw. The social media world is strewn with the detritus of company blogs and social media that were set up amidst great enthusiasm and hope only to be neglected when results didn’t occur almost immediately.

Measure. No amount of traffic from social networks means anything unless a portion of that traffic converts into customers and clients. Once you start to measure the results of your social media marketing, you can “lift and shift fires” and do more of what’s working and less of what’s not working to generate leads, sales and happy customers.

Your turn: What challenges do you face with social media marketing?

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via photopin cc

At least once, business owners and marketing executives who have invested in blogging and content marketing can all share a similar pain: spending the time and energy writing and posting content and not seeing the results – little traffic and no leads.

Frustrating, I know.

But you’re not alone! Over the past few years of working with businesses on their inbound and content marketing strategy, I’ve noticed a trend of common blogging blunders that many businesses don’t realize are hindering their blog’s ability to attract and convert.

So if you’re at that stage where you’d rather pull your hair out than spend one more minute writing a blog post, this article is for you. Here are the four foolproof ways to improve your blog today (and overtime) to attract more quality traffic and generate more leads.

Master the Art of Quality AND Quantity

One of the most common debates when discussing content marketing is “quality vs. quantity.” And here’s the answer: it’s no longer either/or – it’s both.

Google LOVES content – good content, and lots of it. So don’t think of your blog as a typical social network like Facebook or Twitter where you can easily “over post” and annoy your audience. A blog that publishes useful, relevant content on a consistent, frequent basis delivers results.

Want proof?

As an agency that practices what we preach, our team took the HubSpot 30-Day Blogging Challenge and increased our blog posting frequency to publish one new blog post per business day for the entire month of January. The results: visitors that came to our website through our blog increased by 145% in comparison to January 2013, and our blog alone helped us generate 165% more new leads for the month of January 2014 when compared to just the previous month of December.

Write Above the Noise

It’s no mystery that content marketing is effective – which is why so many businesses in almost every industry are implementing content into their marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, this means your competitors are most likely talking about the same topics you are, resulting in content overload for your audience.

In order to combat content overload, it’s critical to spend the time investigating the topics your competitors (or even reputable industry sources) are already overly talking about. How can you put a spin on it? Is there an opportunity to offer different information or even a unique perspective?

Another way to be heard above the noise is to look for “holes,” or subject matter opportunities that your competition has yet to tackle. Some of the best resources to utilize in finding those untapped topics are your sales team and existing customers. What questions or problems are your sales team hearing consistently from prospective customers? Or if speaking with your current customers, where do they feel you could have provided more explanation or information during the sales process or throughout their engagement with your company?

Stick with it

This point seems obvious but where I see a lot of blogs fail is when business’s post for a few weeks or a month and throw in the towel because they’re not seeing immediate results.

Blogging is a long term marketing effort, and typically does not show an immediate “spike” in results that many traditional marketing tactics generate. That said, the overall benefits of implementing a long-term blogging strategy are significant to most business’s marketing goals: establishing authority and thought leadership, increasing your search engine rankings, driving more traffic, and finally, generating more leads.

Inform, Guide and Convert

In addition to driving more traffic, the next stage is to provide those prospects with conversion opportunities, so that once nameless prospect can become a newly identified lead, which you can continue marketing to in the future.

How do we do this? Integrate relevant calls-to-action into each and every blog post that allows your prospects to take the natural next step in learning more about a specific topic.

Each blog post should accomplish the same goal of informing your reader, guiding them to other relevant information, and converting them into a lead by offering relevant, high value content that’s parallel to their interests and needs.

Although this may sound simple, keep in mind this does require you and your team to create more engaging, premium content that prospects will be willing to provide their email address for in order access the material.

To learn more about developing quality content that drives leads, check out my webinar replay, Intro to Inbound: Creating Content that Converts where you’ll learn how to build your own content marketing strategy, as well as how to create content that connects with prospects at every stage of the buying process.

For sales and marketing teams, reaching across the aisle can be a foreign concept. In some cases, that’s putting it mildly.

To be sure, there are salespeople and marketers who comfortably co-exist. Sometimes they even eat lunch together.

But the prevailing opinion is firmly entrenched: Sales and marketing just don’t get along. Don’t understand each other. Don’t cooperate. Aren’t aligned. And, as a consequence, campaign ROI often suffers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact …

Sales and marketing alignment is completely possible.

It just takes a little shift in perspective.

Finding common ground

Although it often feels like it, the sales and marketing divide isn’t actually that wide. Both camps have several responsibilities in common. Here are five of them:

• They both are focused on customers (prospective, new, and returning)
• They both have quotas to meet
• They both have success metrics to deliver
• They both must design campaigns that contribute to company goals
• They both are accountable for driving revenue

The sales/marketing disconnect has less to do with the types of responsibilities and more (some would say everything) to do with the types of deliverables associated with those responsibilities – including how each deliverable maps to job incentives and rewards.

Combine that with a “siloed teams” business model, increased workloads, and compressed timelines… and voila! Disconnection City.

Expanding each side’s myopic view is key to sales and marketing alignment, which, in turn, is key to achieving new levels of success for both.

So without further ado, here are:

Three things both sides must understand

1. The numbers matter.

Metrics are where the rubber hits the road, so it’s incumbent on sales and marketing to learn and embrace what’s important for success. (Knowing math helps, too.)

For example:

• How many leads does sales need to reach quota each month?
• What’s the lead conversion rate through the pipeline?
• How many leads does marketing need to deliver to the top of the funnel?
• How many nurture touches are needed to qualify a lead?
• How many leads ultimately convert to closed sales?

By understanding the numbers, both sides have an opportunity to really understand and appreciate what’s required for success.

2. Collaboration is not evil.

This is not to suggest that sales and marketing should begin living in each other’s pockets. But it IS suggesting that they should figure out how to regularly and consistently share key information that sheds light on the big picture.

Here are some ideas:

• Have representation in key meetings (e.g., a sales person joins key marketing meetings, and vice versa).
• Have marketers listen to (or attend) a live sales call.
• Consider doing “Campaign Alerts” or weekly “Field Notes” to ensure everyone is in the loop on critical information.
• Share calendars, forecasts and timelines.
• Work together on campaigns (especially the multi-touch, robust ones), ensuring sales and marketing roles are defined to work in concert.
• Sit next to each other. Be close enough to hear the day-to-day talk tracks and conversations the other team is having. It’s an informal way to incrementally connect more dots.

Planned and consistent collaboration gives everyone the opportunity to gain valuable insights – including best practices, feedback on campaigns, information on wins and losses, and who needs what and when – which ultimately helps both sides achieve their strategic and tactical goals.

3. Be flexible.

Urgency. Priority. 11^th hour changes. They’re the laws of the jungle for both sales and marketing. When they crop up (and they always will), one side’s needs will often need to be delayed or even sacrificed in order to ensure a larger success.

The ability to accept and roll with dynamic change is a hallmark of sales and marketing alignment.

Here are a few ways both sides can practice their give-and-take skills:

• Proactively address issues together. Be honest in discussing and addressing leads, campaigns, and metrics to get in front of potential snafus.
• Embrace each other’s approach to customer messaging … then choose the path that will deliver the best results. This means marketing can’t always have perfectly constructed and branded emails, nor can sales always have brief CTA-driven dispatches. Let the data be your guide.
• Understand how leads are – and should be – prioritized. For example, marketing wants sales to be responsive to all leads, and sales wants to focus on the “right” leads. A flexible approach by both sides will ensure the right leads are being contacted with the right message at the right time.

Better alignment yields better results

In the end, both sales and marketing teams share the same goal: revenue. It’s easier – and far more productive – to achieve shared goals by working together. Cooperating. Aligning.

At Act-On, our sales and marketing teams have achieved alignment, thanks to a supportive business model and culture, and a robust marketing automation platform. As a proof point (and shameless plug), our sales and marketing teams have never missed their numbers. Alignment is a big part of that.

There has never been a better time to be obsessed with productivity. Startups and veteran companies are churning out tools to help with time management and to-do lists. Some businesses are even encouraging their teams to observe mindfulness and learn about zen practices in the name of productivity.

As a sales rep though, when to work and actually sell vs. when to focus on admin and other tasks is tough to know. Tools like Base help eliminate mundane tasks like data entry so you can focus on selling and research has revealed some patterns for the best times to close deals.

Know Yourself (and Know Your Work)

Working is sales does require keeping to a general schedule, but you might be surprised how much range you have within the usual 9-to-5. And depending on your company, even night owls might be able to have some flexibility about making their best hours their most productive ones.

Start with a little self-reflection. Consider your energy arc during the day: are you raring to go at sunrise or do you kick into high gear in the afternoon? Do your best, most inspiring ideas come to you during the day or in the wee hours of the night? What do you tend to do in the times you’re not being productive during work? When do your breaks in concentration occur?

It might even be worth looking at a bigger time frame. According to a survey by Accountemps, human resources managers ranked Tuesday as the most productive day of the week, while Thursday and Friday were the least productive. Is that how you operate? Or is Monday the roughest day for you, ramping up to a flurry of activity by Friday?

Once you have that basic understanding of your strengths and weaknesses in regard to scheduling, then you can make better choices about how to plan your workday. Put your major meetings with clients at a time when you know you’ll be on the ball so that your customers get the best experience. Make your cold calls when you’re at your mental peak. Catch up on paperwork or data entry at your quiet, low energy times when you’re best suited for repetitive work. By matching your tasks to your best times of day, you can improve your baseline productivity.

Learn How to Be Better (Listen to the Data)

While your body, your mind, and your job may have certain preferences built in, the goal for and sales professional should be to actually sell. That means understanding what times of the day you’re more likely to be successful.

For example, an MIT study reveals that:

• 4-6pm is the best time to make contact with a lead (114% higher than the worst time block)
• 8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to qualify a lead
• Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to make contact with a lead (Friday is the worst day)
• Thursday is the best day to contact a lead in order to qualify the lead
• The worst times to contact and qualify leads are during lunch/crunch time (11am-2pm)

While the numbers in this study can prove helpful as a jumping-off point, it’s important to pay attention to your actual track record.  Base Voice, for example, automatically collects the data needed to generate reports on call length vs time of day, call outcome vs time of day and call volume vs deal value. Use the insights gleaned from your call reports to make customer calls at strategic times or compare the number of calls you made against the value of a deal.

The next step is building up good habits.

Think about the people who are the best in their field. The superstar athletes, the phenomenal musicians, and the elite sales pros all have something in common. They work hard and they practice smart. They don’t aimlessly try new ideas or they don’t let themselves stagnate at “good enough.” The best of the best are always looking for how to improve, and being able to work well at any time is one step toward improvement. Research has shown that this type of dedicated, focused practice yields good results.

If you want to reach your top potential, then any tools or apps that you use should be helping you to practice smarter and work better.

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This article originally appeared on the Base blog.

Today I received an absolutely wonderful blogpost from the incomparable Seth Godin. So many salespeople still have the tragic habit of “showing up and throwing up” about their product or service rather than asking good, high-yielding, open-ended questions! Seth’s blog is a simple, effective example about how even children can have an effective sales conversation, simply by asking a question that evokes emotion. Here’s an excerpt from that blog.

“I thought I’d share a simple sales approach that in my experience consistently doubles the sales rate for Girl Scouts, at the same time it permits a more natural, humanistic engagement. Most Scouts are taught to memorize a fairly complicated spiel, one that involves introducing themselves, talking in detail about the good work that the Scouts do, and finishing with how the money raised goes for this and for that.

This is difficult work even for a professional, but for a kid talking to an adult, it’s frightening and unlikely to lead to a positive experience. The alternative?

“What’s your favorite kind of Girl Scout cookie?”

In less than ten words, all the Proustian memories of previous cookie experiences are summoned up. In one simple question, the power in the transaction shifts, with the Scout going from supplicant to valued supplier.

(And that’s the universal lesson here: A question that avoids a ‘no’, a question that starts a conversation, a question that opens the door to emotion… those are the questions that build careers and create value.)”

So do these three things if you want to be more successful in YOUR sales:

• Stop doing sales presentations, and start having sales conversations.

• Spend less time talking and spend more time listening to your prospects. Then give them what THEY want.

• Ask questions and offer value statements that evoke emotion in your prospects because buying is always done on an emotional, rather than a logical, basis.

And by the way, my favorites are

Good selling!

CLICK HERE, and you can have a FREE subscription to Seth Godin’s blog!

Ready to erase your tracks and disappear online, once and for all? This infographic from Who Is Hosting This reveals the nine steps you need to take to remove your personal information collected all over the web.

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LinkedIn is the best social network for your career, whether you want to use it to find a job or just boost your hirability . It's not without its annoyances, however. If you're prepping your profile for the job hunt especially, you'll want to head to this setting on LinkedIn first, before everything turns to hell.

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A client sales manager wanted to coach his reps on effective content sharing practices. However, it was difficult for him to see them. LinkedIn Updates appear on the LinkedIn Home Page in a time-stream like Twitter or the Facebook Wall. Once a post goes by, newer posts replace it. However, unlike Twitter and Facebook, there are not any internal features or external apps that provide a timeline or digest of connections’ LinkedIn Updates. That prompted me to post the following question in a LinkedIn Group for Social Selling:

“Does anyone know how a sales manager could monitor his team’s LinkedIn posts for coaching purposes?”

The responses to this question surprised me for three reasons:

1 . No Elegant Solutions: Reviewing a connection’s past posts used to be easy when LinkedIn included the Activity section. It showed a connection’s latest posts at the top of their profile. The feature was eliminated in late 2013…at least in the browser version. You can still see a connection’s Activity in the iPad and mobile versions. This solves the problem but it’s one rep at a time and it’s on the small screen only. Clearly, there is a need for a better management tool. The next best suggestion was for reps to simultaneously post LinkedIn Updates to Twitter. There are plenty of tools that can monitor Twitter based on keywords, names, lists, etc. While it may simply to a social-savvy person to get all sales reps to open a Twitter account, remember to do the simultaneous post, and then train a sales managers on a social Listening app, I can tell you that is asking a lot from most sales reps and managers.

2. A Debate Over Whether Managers Should Even Monitor Reps’ Posts: A few of people felt that managers should not spend time monitoring reps social posts, indicating the time could be better spend coaching skills that are relevant to their buyers. What skill is more relevant than communicating information to buyers? These days, that includes social channels along with visits, calls, and email. Given that social selling is still new to most companies and individuals, I’d argue that it warrants more, not less, coaching than other activities that reps have done for years. I mean, how many Objection Handling or Negotiating seminars does it take? To properly coach on content posting, managers need a way to “study the game tape”.

3. A Violation of Privacy: Some people claimed that monitor posts constituted a violation of privacy and that the company was overstepping its bounds. Perhaps I should have used the word “review” instead of “monitor”. Either way, I don’t see any privacy issues. A manager already has access to his reps’ posts assuming that he’s connected to all his reps (Level 1). I’ve heard a few reps bristle when the company suggests guidelines for LinkedIn profiles and posts. If a sales rep is using LinkedIn to represent their company, I think it’s acceptable for the company to expect certain minimums. To illustrate with extreme examples, company guidelines for the offline world might include image guidelines like “don’t wear muddy hiking boots and hunting clothes to the sales pitch to a bank”. Communication guidelines might include “don’t promote your political views in conversations with customers”. It’s similar with online profiles and what reps post online. I am not advocating complete surrender, just a balance of interests.

Corporate social selling is tricky because it mixes Corporate and Individual interests. From the Corporate perspective, it is difficult to manage and coach on anything if it is not observed and tracked. From the Individual perspective, it’s natural to want full control over one’s social network and expression.

What do you think?

Should sales managers review their reps’ social posts in order to coach them and share best practices?

Sales Training Article: Closing Trouble - or Selling Trouble?

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

Image courtesy of Pakorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Unlike other B2B selling skills, closing gets a disproportionate amount of attention. It continues to surprise me when sales executives tell me their people are poor closers. The question I resist asking is: "Is it possible that they are inept salespeople?" It's not as though a strong final scene can make an otherwise pedestrian play a hit. Successfully completing the steps leading up to closes make the likelihood of getting orders higher.

Many problems arise because sellers ask for orders prematurely. It could be they or their managers need the business in the current month or quarter. Whatever the reasons, buyers feel pressured when they aren't ready to buy. The best outcome is getting orders, but often sellers have to give discounts to incent early decisions. The worst outcome is pressing so hard that opportunities are lost.

Attend one of our sales training workshops to learn how to stop losing deals and win more business.

The best way to avoid early closes is for sellers to make sure they have adequate pipelines on an ongoing basis. That doesn't mean there won't be months when seller pipelines are thin (or managers need to pull in orders), but it shouldn't be a fire drill at each quarter or month end. When pipelines are depleted by early closes, repeat performances are likely.

Here are some milestones that should be in place so that sellers earn the right to ask for the business because buyers understand:

• The business goals or outcomes they want to achieve
• The specific capabilities offerings provide so that goals the can be achieved
• Proof that the capabilities can be provided (references; Success Stories; demos; etc.)
• The total price to acquire and implement the capabilities
• The potential payback (value minus cost)

Once these components are in place, sellers should try to ask buyers having the authority to make buying decisions. With committee decisions, these components should be in place for all Key Players.

Sellers that complete all these steps may be pleasantly surprised that sometimes buyers volunteer to buy. In such cases, buying becomes the logical conclusion to buying cycles and there is no need to close.

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

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

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I was 27 when I raised my first round of venture capital for Academia.edu, around $600,000 from some London investors. Since then, I’ve raised close to $18 million from investors like Spark Capital, True Ventures and Khosla Ventures. I’ve learned a few lessons along the way that I thought might be beneficial to entrepreneurs starting out.

Rule number one: You should be embarrassed by the sheer audacity of your vision!

Think big about what the company you’re building may be like in ten years if all your dreams come true. What kind of world would you want to create if you had a magic wand? That is what you want to be pitching to a VC, as that is the outcome that matters to them.

An entrepreneur will be thinking about today’s problems, and maybe thinking 6 months out, but you have to train yourself to look into the crystal ball and become eloquent about the ten year view. VCs know there is a lot of risk and they want to see what wondrous things will happen in return for the amount of risk that you are offering them. So offer them a lot of wondrous things.

When I first wrote down the mission statement for Academia.edu, I was embarrassed. We aspire to accelerate scientific research and help find cures for diseases by building a completely new system for scientists to share their papers and peer review each others work. It felt self-aggrandizing and arrogant to say that a tiny company with five employees could accelerate science. And yet, after saying it a few times and thinking through the narrative of how we get to that point, you start to get comfortable with the audacity of the mission. You will stop being embarrassed as the words trip off your tongue.

VCs are looking for the ten-year level of discourse, rather than the six month level of discourse. Being in an investor meeting is actually the one environment where you can let you imagination rip. It’s not only acceptable to do that but its expected.

Master the Macro Stats

Many entrepreneurs start by solving a problem they experience themselves. They feel the problem intuitively and have an intuitive feeling that there is a decent number of people who experience the problem. But that’s not enough. When pitching a VC, you need to have at your command the macro stats for the industry, because that is how they compare your problem with another idea that someone else is pitching. Intuitions are not enough to make the comparison, and for the partner to pitch his/her colleagues – there needs to be some market data about the size of the market etc.

The reason entrepreneurs often skip this step is that it can be really hard to gather market sizing data. As far as I can tell, the only person who’s ever calculated the number of academics in the world is me. Collecting that data took a decent amount of time.

Many entrepreneurs who haven’t done this work will bullshit or semi-bullshit when a VC asks a market sizing question, and the VC is very used to this, and is very good at detecting lack of expertness “um, yeah, er, the market size is $9 billion’. A VC sees straight through that because they get exposed to it so much. You need to answer in a really confident way with as much material as possible to overcome any feelings of doubt from the VC.

Resist the temptation to be overly obliging

You are asking for capital, but don’t think of yourself as a supplicant, and don’t let that control your intellectual approach. You are a busy person who is an expert on your space, and make sure they realize that. If there is a poorly thought-out question or suggestion, don’t humor it just because you want to be polite. Be confident and treat it just as if one of your colleagues suggested it as opposed to some higher being. I.e. don’t be rude, but don’t give it any time if it is not worth any time. Feel free to say ‘that’s not a scalable way of solving this problem; you just aren’t going to get the buy-in from users’. You want the VC to realize that you are a formidable person who is going to impose their vision on the market place and nothing is going to get in your way. So be dominant in the room with the VC about your area of expertise, and don’t be meek and obliging.

On a second, but related note, if someone offers help and it is moderately useful but not that useful, don’t pretend it will make more of a difference to your company than it will.  When a VC is romancing you, and telling you about the advice they can bring to the table, the temptation is to romance back: “Thanks! That would be so great! It’s a match made in heaven.” Better to call it as it is – if the advice is helpful, great, but don’t go overboard in your enthusiasm.

Projecting a strong, independent stance is actually more powerful than being overly enthusiastic about the help or suggestions coming your way. I only realized this point after Ben Ling at Khosla Ventures said, “one of the thing we liked about you Richard is you’ve got your own clear vision of the company and you’d be open to ideas from Khosla, but not dependent on ideas from us, and that you’re going to be running the business as you see fit. We like that kind of founder.”

Lock eyes with everyone in the room

With some VCs you are in competition either with their iPhones, or with meeting fatigue, or both. It’s frustrating to pitch to a room of VCs where some people are checking their iphones, or their eyes are drooping.

How do you avoid this? A few tips. You want to lock eyes with VCs and just move around the room and continue to lock eyes, and never let your eyes hit the floor as you transition between points. If someone is looking at their iPhone you can continue to talk to them directly until they feel sufficiently embarrassed as they hear your voice coming in your direction to put their phone down and look up.

Interestingly enough I have never experienced this from a top tier VC – not once. Top tier VCs uniformly give the entrepreneur their full attention, and it’s a rewarding experience to pitch them.

Another tip is that you don’t want the deck to control the flow. Too much slideware and people’s eyes start to glaze over. You should master the narrative and have every transition in your head, so that the deck just serves as a backdrop to the narrative you are offering, all of which fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Ideally from the moment you walk in the room you have people’s attention, and they are looking at you, with their eyes locked on your eyes, and your eyes going from one VC to another, and you want to maintain this state till the end of the meeting.

VCs like investing in people who know the value of their own time. They will actually respect you more if you make it clear that you know your stuff and you are a busy person and that you will be respectful towards them and expect that they will be respectful towards you.

What, exactly, is selling with integrity? Is it about creating great solutions that make a difference in companies and lives? Or respecting and serving our prospects and clients and employees?
I’d like to talk about what that means for me…and admittedly, I’m a hammer looking for a nail: I’ve written a NYTimes Business Bestseller (now-outdated) on the subject (*Selling with Integrity: reinventing sales through collaboration, respect, and serving). So excuse my rant. But rant I will.

SOLUTIONS VS. CHANGE MANAGEMENT

The sales model is designed to place solutions: sellers are trained to understand need, and place a solution accordingly. Arguably, the buyer gets what they need and the seller makes a commission: win/win. But is a win/win?

In my map of the world, the above ends up as a net loss. Here’s why: because the sales model merely enters at the solution placement end of the buying decision path, it avoids and ignores the entire path buyers must traverse to enlist the right people, manage the change, and ensure system stability as they attempt to discover their best solution options. Therefore, sellers just come in at the end (or come in far too early with this data at the beginning) to offer a solution, and do not have the skill set to facilitate the back-end change management journey, leaving buyers floundering, trying to get the right people on board, and get the right agreements.

Ultimately, using the sales process without Buying Facilitation® (which manages the change management end of the buying decision journey), sellers end up closing only those buyers who show up with all of their ducks in a row (about 7%) – the low hanging fruit.

Indeed, if all of that needs assessment and relationship building and getting-past-the-gatekeeper stuff worked, we’d be closing a lot more sales. And buyers would be getting their needs met much faster: the time it takes them to figure out how to manage the backend change is the length of the sales cycle.

So by not helping manage the change and the behind-the-scenes decision path – very different from solution-focused/choice activities – we are actually harming buyers: with no help, it takes them longer than necessary to determine the folks to include in defining a solution, or figure out how to manage the change so there is no disruption, or how to get the necessary buy-in, to purchase our solution.

Net net, it obviously harms us also by elongating the sales cycle…not to mention we can’t close those prospects who can’t figure it all out.

OUR BUYERS WILL BUY EVENTUALLY – BUT NOT FROM US

The industry standard says that 80% of our prospects will buy a similar solution as ours within 2 years of us speaking with them. That means: they’ve got the need, but don’t know how to get their ducks in a row to buy. And we didn’t know how to help them figure out how to do it sooner.

Buyers don’t want to buy. They want to resolve a business problem. If they must make a purchase, they must make sure there is appropriate buy-in from the people and rules and and and…

Sellers tend to think in terms of placing a solution. Buyers think of avoiding chaos. We forget that 90% of the decision issues buyers must address before they get to the solution choice stage is based on creating an environment that will accept and adopt a new solution. The last thing they consider is making a purchase.

In my humble opinion :) without helping buyers manage their change -

• getting the right folks onto the Buying Decision Team,
• finding and listening to the voices of those who will ultimately touch the new solution,
• making sure the old and new meld -

we are not in integrity with our buyers, but merely serving our product sale.

Here is the question: are you willing to go outside of your sales thinking, and start considering helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes, non-solution-related change management issues? It’s the Buying Facilitation® process, of course, and not sales. But between the two models, we can truly sell with integrity.

 

*For those wishing a more complete, updated introduction to how buyers buy, the buying decision process, and the system that buyers live in, please read: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

 

Selling With Integrity is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Apple has a prime opportunity in high growth emerging markets, according to a new study by Upstream, done in conjunction with Ovum, showed that among buyers in Brazil, China, India, Nigeria and Vietnam, Apple is the top brand when it comes to consumer wants, with 32 percent interest from the survey pool, with Samsung trailing at 29 percent and Nokia still demonstrating strong brand appeal in third… Read More

The steps of a buying decision differ from the steps of a sale. The sales model has no way to influence the private decisions and buy-in issues that buyers must address before they can buy.

Buyers live in a ‘system’ that maintains their Identified Problem (or ‘pain’) over time, creating work-arounds that become part of the system and, well, comfortable. Indeed, if the buyer really needed to make a change, they would have done so already. It’s only when a group of dedicated, internal change agents are willing to push the river, that a purchase is even considered.

Before buyers can buy, there must be buy-in to the proposed change, a plan that minimizes disruption, and a way to foster agreement between the people, policies and relationships that touch a new solution. A buying decision is far more complex than just fixing a problem.

I’ve developed Buying Facilitation® – a decision navigation model that is an add-on to sales and helps buyers bring together the right people and issues – to enable agreement and ensure change procedures are in place to make a purchase. Here are a few Buying Facilitation® skills to use with sales:

9 STEPS

Help the gatekeeper discover who your best point of contact would be.

Don’t try to ‘get through’ the gatekeeper. She knows the best person to connect you with. And don’t attempt to ‘go to the top.’ The top person usually delegates to the appropriate people. Ask for the CEO’s assistant, and she’ll get you to the right people. Question: who is in control of the conversation – you? or the Gatekeeper?

Use Facilitative Questions to get into rapport and have buyers begin to examine how/if/why they would consider changing their status quo.

Until or unless prospects determine to make a change and get all appropriate folks on board to buy-in to change and ensure there is minimal disruption, it doesn’t matter whether

• you can see their need,
• your solution is perfect,
• they think they need you/your solution,
• they love your solution, price, personality, etc.

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. Do you need to be working out more? It’s not about the gym.

Here is a Facilitative Question I use to start conversations: How would you know if it were time to add new sales skills to the ones you’re already offering your sales folks? This question helps them think about necessary steps and new choices they must consider.

Remember: discussing solutions and needs assessment are irrelevant at this early stage. Facilitative Questions help the BUYER see the whole picture of what is going on strategically and tactically. Until or unless they know how to manage their system first, they will take no action. This is where buyers go when you’re sitting and waiting.

Lead prospects/buyers through the systems issues they must consider in order to determine how any proposed change will disrupt their status quo.

Facilitative Questions and Presumptive Summaries are used to help buyers look at their status quo with an unbiased eye. No matter what their ‘need’ or ‘problem’ if they don’t think they can change in a way that maintains systems congruence, they will do nothing. Remember: the buyer’s environment/culture/system has lived with the Identified Problem until now, and can continue to do so. If they had known how to resolve it differently, they would have.

Facilitate prospect’s discovery of what sorts of strategic issues they must manage to get folks on board with potential change.

There are 3 levels of decisions necessary: systems, strategic, and tactical. Addressing them in this order is optimal although it’s usually an iterative process.

Lead prospects/buyers through tactical issues they must manage before they can choose a solution.

Once they determine that

1. their system would be willing to shift to add something/change/resolve something,
2. their rules, relationships, people, are willing to change,
3. they know how to shift congruently to minimize disruption,

they will then be willing to bring in a new solution. Until or unless their status quo is reconfigured in a way that the insiders are willing to support, they will do nothing: the risk to their functioning is too high. Hence the longer-than-necessary sales cycle.

Buyers must do this with you or without you – so it might as well be with you.

Help the prospect choose the members of the Buying Decision Team.

Help buyers recognize the right people to include. Usually they don’t know who it will be until way down the road, much like you don’t know all the trials you’ll face before you start a move.

Discuss how your solution fits with the internal issues that they must manage.

This step is about melding your solution with the entire range of issues they have to manage internally, including the people, policies, and relationships.

Discuss/present your solution and show the prospect/buyer how it would fit with their need/problem.

Once they do all of the above and get appropriate buy-in to manage change, they will know how and when to buy, and you can discuss needs/solutions according to their buy-in issues.

Follow up to see if there is anything you can do to help the prospect/buyer decide to purchase.

This is part of a good sales job, of course.

SALES TACTICS THAT ARE NO LONGER NECESSARY

Make an appointment to get in front of the prospect

This is a hold-over from another era. Until buyers put together their decision team and figure out how to change without disruption, your bright shiny face and the efficacy of your solution is irrelevant. You can do all of the above without meeting a client. And then, when you get there, the entire Buying Decision Team will be there and you wouldn’t have wasted any time/visits.

Manage objections and differentiate yourself from the competition.

The sales model creates objections because it pushes data/solution info against a ‘closed system.’ When you hear an objection, it’s merely the system defending itself against change and nothing whatsoever about your solution. Once you teach the system how to manage buy-in without disruption, there are no objections.

80% of your prospects will buy within 2 years – but not from you. The time it takes them to manage the buying decision to ensure there will be no disruption is the length of the sales cycle. You can either sit and wait for them to do it, or you can learn Buying Facilitation® and become the GPS system to help them navigate. Would you rather sell? or help someone buy?

sd

Wanting to learn more? Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. In addition, you will also receive a bonus illustrated booklet.

9 Steps that Influence a Buying Decision is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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The line between old-school CRM and new-school marketing automation continues to blur: Marketing automation vendor Salesfusion launched a new integrated lead scoring engine within its core product this morning.

The new function will generate increased efficiency, engagement, and ultimately revenue, a company representative said.

“Lead scoring for marketers in mid-market companies is a frustratingly manual and arbitrary process,” Salesfusion VP Robert Pease said in a statement. “The time and complexity it requires likely explains why lead scoring is so underused.”

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VentureBeat just released the VB Marketing Automation Index, a report on the
top 10 marketing automation systems.

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Predictive lead scoring helps organizations understand which sales and marketing leads are most likely to convert, primarily by analyzing prior leads that did convert. The system looks for key data points that are common to successful sales and then applies them to new leads in an attempt to find similarities. It’s a big data approach replacing the sales rep’s gut feel at scale, and it’s commonly used in CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, but in the marketing automation world has only been available via add-ons such as Lattice.

For instance, competitor Silverpop integrates with Core Motives to provide similar functionality.

Salesfusion acquired the capability when it purchased competitor LoopFuse in January. The new functionality will automatically analyze data from events such as email opens, web page views, webinar attendance, online form completions, and white paper downloads to score leads. The company also has built in Pandora-like functionality that allows you to view “other leads like this” or “fewer leads like that” to bolster machine intelligence with human experience and intuition — thereby training the data engine faster.

Training the system will take some time.

A Salesfusion representative I contacted said the engine needs to see “about 100 events” — meaning sales or conversions — before it can start generating lead scores. The more data it gets, of course, the smarter and more accurate it will become.

At the time of the LoopFuse acquisition, Salesfusion CEO Christian Nahas told VentureBeat he was looking to make marketing automation smarter, via data:

“Rather than [serving just] the mundane muscle of marketing,” he said, ”we’re going to start to attack the brain.”

The company representative I contacted said that only 60-70 percent of marketing automation system installs globally are currently using lead scoring, meaning that most companies have not invested in additional software tools to improve their results. With this announcement, of course, Salesfusion’s customers won’t have to.

“With Salesfusion’s predictive lead scoring, sales and marketing teams get real-time feedback and actionable data,” Nahas said in a statement. “Smart marketing automation is about doing more than reducing friction between sales and marketing, it’s about removing it.”

Content has become a beneficial marketing tool for companies of all sizes looking to engage buyers, collect valuable behavioral data and educate prospects. While content can be a precious asset if used correctly, many marketers are struggling to understand its impact on the company’s overall revenue.

Although marketers can obtain a large amount of data from buyers’ interactions with content, it is important to focus on performance by channel and stage in the buying cycle, observers explained.

“The winners of content marketing are those marketers who really take that wide view of what content is and realize that if you can break it down to all of those channels, you can deliver a really interesting and engaging experience when you mix the content up with offers that drive conversion,” said Damon Ragusa, President of Idio, in an interview with Demand Gen Report.

When it comes to measuring content, marketers need to make sure that they understand the basics prior to taking the next step in evaluating content ROI. According to Ragusa, marketers are focusing more on investing in paid media than the technology needed to analyze the data their content already generates.

“By and large, a lot of companies simply disregarded the value — the executional value and the strategic value — that their own marketing communications channel developed,” said Ragusa. “Companies spend a lot of money on infrastructure and automation, but haven’t really thought about how they can take advantage of customer interactions with content that are being created millions of times per day.”

Start With Short-Term Objectives

While planning for the future is important when it comes to analyzing and measuring the effectiveness of content, it is essential that companies meet short-term goals so content marketers can get the ball rolling and help them understand which pieces of content work in certain situations.

“For small organizations with very limited resources, it’s victory enough to establish and maintain a regular production schedule, clarify a handful of priority audience personas, find where they already congregate online, start developing online relationships, and let the momentum grow gradually,” said Mitchell Beer, President of Smarter Shift. “That back-to-basics approach doesn’t take in everything the big brands are doing, but sometimes it’s all an organization can do to post a weekly blog and develop positive relationships with colleagues whose material they regularly retweet. More than three quarters of small businesses aren’t even doing that, and everyone has to start somewhere.”

Understanding the behaviors that content can create within an audience can lead to a greater understanding of the customer, which in the end can help marketers connect the dots on where content affected the customer buying cycle. If marketers begin to take a look at the overall picture of the customer’s buying journey, marketers will be able to see how their content is affecting each stage — from initial contact to the point of purchase.

“The easiest way to measure your content is to figure out what your end goal is, and start backwards from that,” said Shanelle Mullin, Director of Marketing at Onboardly. “For the most part, all of your channels are going to be affected by content marketing on some level, so I think it would be very difficult to find a startup nowadays that doesn’t have a huge amount of their traffic coming from social media or search engines.”

Buying Journey Provides Clues On Content Effectiveness

Analyzing a customer’s journey from the initial interaction highlights the customer’s interaction throughout the customer lifecycle, therefore showing what triggered the customer’s decision to continue along the buying cycle. This information helps marketers determine what content is the most effective, and whether or not that content played a major role in the customer’s buying decision.

“I think the key to any successful content strategy is a content road map,” said Rachel Balik, Content Marketing Manager at Demandbase. “This map is specifically charted to your customers’ buying journey — the customers’ path from first touch to finally purchasing from your company. By just understanding the path that the customer takes towards making the final purchasing decision, you can plan what kind of content needs to be available at any given time in order to move them along the cycle.”

In the end, content plays varying roles throughout the buyer’s journey. Although a piece of content may not close a deal, there is always a possibility that a piece of content helped a customer take the initiative on inquiring further about the brand and its offerings.

“Not every piece of content is going drive conversions and leads,” Balik said.“Content has to be segmented into stages just like your accounts. Having content that speaks to buyers at different phases allows you to better personalize the experience and enhance overall engagement.”

Analyze The Right Data

With startup companies especially, content is the primary way marketers are engaging with their target audiences. However, a “common misconception” for startups is that “it is extremely hard to measure and track,” according to Mullin.

“This difficulty might have been true five years ago, but isn’t necessarily true anymore,” Mullin explained.“Obviously there are intangible benefits to content marketing such as thought leadership and customer engagement, but I think — for the most part — it is very easy to figure out how your readers are converting and are actually making you money.”

Many startups suffer from believing that they have to measure and analyze all of the data they are able to collect about users’ interactions with content. But eventually being able to tie the data to overall business goals is what will prove content effectiveness. Learning how to do this can save content marketers time and resources, Mullin noted.

“A lot of marketers are relying on vanity metrics that help them feel good about themselves and show signs of progression, but they aren’t actually tied to business goals that will help the company move forward,” Mullin concluded. “If you make sure that you are collecting the right metrics that are tied to your end goal, you will have a much better idea of where your company is and whether or not you’re producing content that anyone cares about.”

This article originally appeared on Demand Gen Report. Register for the weekly newsletter to receive the latest news and insight in the B2B industry.

An entrepreneur reveals how he generated leads and revenue with his LinkedIn blog and show how you can do the same.

16 million.

That's how many people viewed my blog content on LinkedIn last year. Those 16 million page views led to 300,000 followers, thousands of sales leads and books sold and more than $1 million of revenue.

I'm super lucky. I've been part of the LinkedIn Influencer program and that's been a huge part of my success. But now, LinkedIn has opened up its publishing platform to its 275 million users. Now, everyone can blog on LinkedIn. Now, with this roadmap, everyone can make money through LinkedIn. Here's exactly how:

1. Think of a great headline.

A clear, powerful headline that promises to deliver value to the reader counts for as much as 60% of the overall success of your blog post on LinkedIn, as headlines grab readers' attention in an increasingly crowded landscape. Use the headline to guide your content, and deliver what you would tell your best customer.

For example, if you're an accountant, you could try "5 Essential Tax Saving Tips This Year." If you're a small-business growth consultant, you could try "The Secret to Growing Your Business." If you're a recruiter, try "How to Find the Best Talent." Don't worry about giving away your secrets!

2. Find or take a compelling photo.

The "hero image" directly beneath the headline counts for about 30% of the overall success of your post on LinkedIn, as people notice images much more than they notice text. A photo of you, or you with one other person that the post will reference, is perfect. Choosing and licensing a photo from a site such as Shutterstock is another option. Don't ever skip the photo.

3. Write a concise post.

It depends on what you want to deliver, but typically, 400-600 words is good. Use bold, italics, number and block quotes to add variety to your post. Consider embedding Slideshare presentations and or videos through LinkedIn's easy-to-use toolbar. If you want to become a better writer, here is a post on writing that I wrote.

4. Include two strong "calls to action" at the bottom of your post.

Conclude your post with two calls to action for readers: The first should ask readers to comment and give them specific questions to answer related to your post. As comments are a huge driver of virality on LinkedIn, you'll want to solicit comments from your connections and readers. The second call to action is an offer--this is where you'll drive leads, sell books, or solicit app downloads. Drive people to a landing page on your website with a call to action such as "To learn more, click here." Consider a clickable picture here too.

5. Share the post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

LinkedIn is most obvious network to share your post on, for obvious reasons. Consider sharing it both publicly (with all of your connections) and privately (through messages to key connections). Consider sharing it with LinkedIn groups you're in, and your company page if you have one. Don't be afraid to share it up to four times, as your friends and colleagues are logged in at different times through the day and week. Ask your network to share your post with their network.

6. Repeat steps 1 through 5.

To obtain the best results, blog consistently, at least once per week, on LinkedIn. Remember, you don't need to reach a million people on LinkedIn in order to make money, you just need to reach a few of the right people. And chances are, no matter what you do, the right people are in your LinkedIn network and your network's network. To reverse-paraphrase the movie The Social Network:

You know what's cooler than reaching 275 million people on LinkedIn? Reaching the right 275 people, with the right message.

For more examples, ideas, and inspiration, feel free to check out my 98 posts on LinkedIn.

Here's to your first post, and to you making lots of money blogging on LinkedIn.

What questions do you have about LinkedIn's blog publishing platform? Let me know in the Comments section below, and I promise to answer each one.

This is an excerpt from our new ebook, The CMO’s Guide to Brand Journalism. Download your free copy if you want to learn more about how to build a news organization, big or small, inside your company.

Call it what you will: brand journalism, corporate journalism, corporate media. More and more companies are creating “journalistic” content. Some are even hiring journalists and camera crews, building studios, and launching dedicated news sites to cover themselves and their industries.

Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle all operate newsrooms. Maersk, the shipping company, has a news operation. So does Nissan, the Japanese automaker. LinkedIn has a managing editor. So does GE. Three big venture capital firms in Silicon Valley -- Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures -- have hired in-house journalists from the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Forbes, respectively.

It’s not just big companies. Kapost, a small startup in Boulder, CO., hired Jesse Noyes, a former Boston Herald reporter, to run its content marketing operation. I’m another example. I’m the former technology editor at Newsweek, and now I’m a blogger at HubSpot.

If you’re the CEO or CMO of a mid-sized or large brand, you may have started thinking about building an in-house news operation of your own. To help you get there, we’ve created an ebook, The CMO’s Guide to Brand Journalism.

The book will help you structure a team and figure out what obstacles you should expect to encounter and how to get over them. We also explain the structure of a newsroom, and how to map that structure to a corporate environment.

Also provided is an explanation of four business models adopted by various companies. The four models are explained via case studies developed by interviewing journalists and executives at Microsoft, IBM, GE, Intel, Adobe, and other companies.

We also include a section explaining the unique challenges that a small company faces when trying to build a news or publishing operation. Finally, there are a set of "best practices" that apply in mainstream media and make sense for corporate news operations, as well.

Four Models

There are lots of ways to go about creating media inside a corporation. We’ll look at four models that are in use today. They are:

Brand Awareness

You’re publishing stories because you want people to know about your company. You’re not trying to generate sales directly from those articles. Examples: GE and IBM.

Industry News

You write about your own company and your industry, creating coverage that supplements the work of mainstream media. Examples: Intel and Microsoft.

Create and Sponsor

You want to establish your company as a thought leader, so you create an independent site. Example: Adobe’s CMO.com.

Lead Generation

You use content as a way to generate leads that can be converted into customers. Example: HubSpot.

Best Practices

There are some ways in which corporate journalism and traditional journalism should play by the same rules. Here are some best practices from the world of mainstream media that you can and should adopt in your corporate publishing operation:

Be transparent. Be honest about who you are and why you’re publishing this article. Sometimes you can’t avoid having a conflict of interest. That’s fine, but you should disclose it.

Don’t write ad copy. You can (and should) write about your company and your products. But there’s a way to do this that feels honest and legitimate.

Tell the truth. Ethics are the cornerstone of what you’re doing. Just like a newspaper reporter, you should be seeking to tell the truth at all times.

Have an opinion. People respond to content that comes with a point of view. Your point of view is what distinguishes you in the marketplace and defines you to customers.

Admit mistakes. If you goof up, admit it. Express your regret, and apologize. You will be amazed what happens next. Fessing up makes people trust you more. It shows people that you are human -- and honest.

Get people to contribute to your blog. Seek out people I call "megaphones," meaning they have a huge presence on social media. When they write for you, they will promote their article, and your brand will go along for the ride. If you can’t get them to write for you, the next best thing is to write about them.

Be promiscuous. Promiscuity is a virtue, at least in the world of publishing. LinkedIn, Huffington Post, Forbes, and others have huge audiences of business-savvy people. Try to write for them, or get them to syndicate articles that have already appeared on your blog. Do the same with industry publications from your market space, and the local paper. Your goal is to be in as many places as possible.

To learn more about building a newsroom inside your company, check out the form-free brand journalism guide.

1.  It’s something new

Let’s say that the above is representative of a B2B buying process. Yep, it gets a little messy. All the people involved, the back and forth. The side discussions that you’re not part of as you’re returning a lob from a different contact. The bystanders who are observing your every smash and volley.

I’ve been working on scenario planning in my projects with clients. It’s amazing how many variables there are today than just a few months ago. There will be more tomorrow.

But here’s the thing: Most marketers don’t think about the interplay or ping-ponginess (yes, this is a new word) of the B2B buying process. We still have campaign mentalities. We still care mostly about what we want buyers to do – whether we’re accommodating what they want, or not.

We still sit down to plan a campaign and focus on the deliverables. “Okay – let’s publish a couple of blog posts to drive registrations for a webinar, then we’ll follow that with a white paper and a sales pitch. How many leads do you think we can generate for sales if we execute this program in Q2?”

Why don’t we ever think about it like Ping-Pong®? There’s a rhythm to Ping Pong (which I know is table tennis, but it doesn’t have the same ring and you know what I mean), a back and forth.

Playing Ping Pong is like having a conversation.

And this is what your content should be designed to do. It doesn’t mean that the program above won’t work if rethought, but the problem is that it stops dead in its tracks when planned this way. It’s a snippet of the conversation that will need to be held over a complex B2B buying process. As it stands, there’s no connection to anything that comes before or after.

It’s like having a great conversation and suddenly, in mid-sentence, the other person gets a text, glances at his smartphone and steps away to deal with it, never returning and leaving you to wonder if you’re really that boring…

That’s exactly how a campaign treats our prospective buyers.

Think about it:

Buyer: I wonder what my peers are doing to address X?

Marketer: This blog post talks about 6 different ways people are dealing with X.

Buyer: That was great information. Oh, look, they’re having a webinar with more examples. Think I’ll sign up.

Marketer: Thanks for attending our webinar. Here’s a link to the replay.

Buyer: I was there. I don’t need to see it again. What else have you got?

Marketer:

Buyer: Hmm. Those examples got me thinking, butI wonder if there are any industry best practices emerging about X?

Marketer:

Buyer: Where’d they go?

Salesperson: Since you attended our webinar, Marketer thought you might want a demo of our solution. Got 30 minutes?

Buyer: What? I’m not even sure this will work for our situation. I need to talk to Kathy and David and Harvey and Sam…

Salesperson: I just sent you an email about a demo, thought I’d leave you a voicemail, too. Want a demo?

Buyer: I wonder who the experts are who can help me learn more about dealing with X? Maybe I’ll try a #hashtag search on Twitter for X…

Marketer:

If you think I’m exagerrating, I’m not. You may be shaking your head, but this is what so many B2B marketing campaigns look like that it makes my head spin. As someone who does a lot of research to learn about industries and solutions to work on client projects, I get subjected to them every day.

The problem with a “campaign mindset” is that you’re missing the Ping to go with your Pong. And your buyers are very aware of the lapse.

But, not to worry. They won’t be waiting on you to fix that issue. They’ve already moved on to someone else who is more helpful and concerned about what they want and need over the longer term. Someone who’s dedicated to playing the game all the way through.

It’s one thing to map content to the buying process. It’s quite another to plan for the Ping-Pong scenarios that will keep the ball in the air.

What new considerations are you adding to your content strategy to account for the back and forth of extended conversation that won’t abruptly leave your buyers hanging?

If you're getting your website visitors to sign up for anything on your website -- an ebook, a whitepaper, a webinar, a newsletter, a blog subscription, etc. -- you need to create a conversion path. A conversion path consists of five elements, four of which live on your website:

1. A call-to-action - A button or text that lets website visitors (prospects) find your offer
2. A landing page - The page that advertises your offer and includes a form
3. A form - Website visitors fill out this form in order to receive your offer
4. A thank-you page - Your new leads see this page after completing your form
5. A confirmation email - Makes it easy for your leads to reference your offer any time

Many companies forget about one or more of these elements, which means that 1) they will lose out on leads, or 2) they will get lots of leads, but the user experience will be poor once the lead converts.

First, let's dive into the pre-conversion elements of your conversion path:

1) Call-to-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) is a text or button anywhere on your website or blog that links to your landing page.

Your call-to-action should:

• Make it clear what you're offering.
• Include a verb (e.g. "Download" or "Claim" or "Sign Up") to elicit action.
• Stand out on your page. Diverge from your company's typical color scheme if necessary -- you want people to notice your CTA.
• Be above the fold -- don't make people scroll down to see it. An exception might be your blog, where you can add slide-in CTAs or bottom-of-the-post CTAs.
• Match the offer on the landing page so the visitor doesn't get confused.

You should place CTAs throughout your website, especially on your homepage and blog, to make sure that people that enter your website via search engines or social media see the offers you have available. Always test your CTAs to see how to make the clickthrough rates as high as possible.

2) Landing Page

Once people click on a CTA, they should land on ... a landing page. (Intuitive, right?) 

Your landing page should:

1. Make it extremely clear in the headline exactly what the offer is. Don't try to be too witty or clever here -- just get to the point.
2. Include an image of your offer (even if it's an abstract representation -- text only is boring).
3. Have clear and concise copy.
4. Include bullet points outlining what's included in the offer or benefits of receiving the offer.
5. Have a form above the fold.

3) Form

Your landing page should almost always include a form -- otherwise you're giving away free content without learning anything about your website visitor, and you're probably not going to generate many leads that way.

The length of your form will depend on a couple things:

• The offer's stage in your buying cycle - For example, if you're giving away a free checklist or infographic, you might only want to collect first name, last name, and email. But if you're giving away something more substantial like an ebook or whitepaper, indicating that people are further along the research process, you may want to ask for more detailed information.
• How many leads you generate - If your sales team has too many leads to sift through every one, add more fields to your forms so your reps can better qualify each lead, and know which ones are worth calling. And yes, this is an awesome problem to have.

4) Thank-You Page

Congratulations, you've generated some leads from your forms! After they fill out the form, you need to send them somewhere. Redirecting them to your homepage would be a jarring experience ("Wait, did the form submission work?"). But simply replacing the form with their offer (e.g. a download link) would be a missed opportunity for you, since they'll get their offer and then leave your website right away.

Instead, create a thank-you page.

Your thank-you page should:

1. Include the promised offer.
2. Let your new leads share your offer with their friends via email or social media.
3. Include a follow-up offer, ideally for whatever the next stage is in your buying cycle.
4. Be personalized. On this thank-you page example above, the lead's name and company name are both subtly included on the page to make it feel like the page was built just for them. You can easily do this with HubSpot's Content Optimization System.

5) Confirmation Email

Make it easy for your leads to reference your offer later by sending them a confirmation email. 

Your confirmation email should:

1. Be personalized! 
2. Include the promised offer, or a link to the thank-you page where they can obtain the promised offer.
3. Reveal the next step your leads should take. In the example above, we want leads to share the content with their friends. If this offer were later in the buying cycle, we might include a CTA to whatever's next in the buying cycle. It depends on the offer.
4. Provide an easy way for leads to share your offer on social media.

That's it! Your next step should be to create a lead nurturing campaign segmented based on things like your leads' interests, demographics, location, etc. But that's another story for another day. 

               

Social media can turn you into a business-to-business (B2B) marketing superstar by cutting your costs, increasing your leads and helping you earn a measurable return on your marketing investment (ROI). Nearly three of four CEOs mistakenly believe that marketing executives cannot verify the correlation between their activities and their firms’ bottom lines – but with social media, you can.

This disruptive technology constitutes a “revolution in which creativity and analytical thinking collide.” To build a strong advantage, step up and join the revolt – but only if social media communication is appropriate for your firm. These channels don’t fit every commercial enterprise. For example, if you serve five customers or fewer, just communicate with them directly and focus on face-to-face contact. If your prospects’ purchasing agents operate behind firewalls – for example, as with the military – they won’t care about social media. Don’t worry about social media if you need to sell products quickly – that’s not a social media strength. Don’t attempt an initiative on social media if you and your organization can’t devote a lot of time and money to a strategic program.

In traditional marketing, you rent your prospects’ attention by buying ads. In social media marketing, you own prospects’ attention when they read your blog posts or watch your videos. Paid ads have a limited life span, so their costs are one-time expenses. Social media content has a virtually immortal life span online, where it functions as more of an annuity than an expense item.

Social Marketing Leads

To generate leads by using social media marketing, follow this five-step plan:

1. “Get the basics right” – Create “offers, calls to action (CTAs)” and action-oriented landing pages featuring forms that online visitors can fill out to accept your offers. Know who views and clicks on your CTAs. Create compelling, “solution-based” content that aligns with your CTAs and your offers. The wider your reach, the more leads you’ll gain.

2. “Maximize content discovery” – The better your online content is, the more people will share it. Present easy-to-understand ideas. Use such tools as “Google Alerts…Twitter Search…and Board Reader” to monitor reader reaction.

3. “Create conversion ubiquity” – Social media marketers must include conversion mechanisms with their content, by, for example, placing CTAs next to their blog posts. Make easy-to-use conversion devices ubiquitous throughout all your posts.

4. “Test and fail fast” – Get your material online quickly. Reduce internal approval processes and shorten the time between posts.

5. “Optimize for maximum lead flow” – Work to increase your website’s “visit-to-lead conversion rate.” Use web analytics to establish where your website traffic originates and how to make the most of it.

Return on Investment in Social Media

Social media channels don’t just build buzz – they can generate revenue. If you collect the right data “for social media ROI calculations,” you can demonstrate social media’s fiscal contribution. In order to determine your social media ROI, apply the following formula: “TLV minus cost of customer acquisition (COCA) divided by COCA equals ROI.” TLV stands for “total lifetime value,” that is, “the average amount of revenue paid to a business by a customer over the lifetime of the relationship.” COCA represents “all marketing costs, including salaries and overhead of team members, outside agency costs, and contractor costs and all paid advertising for a set period of time, whether it is a month, quarter or year.”

To determine which leads come from social media, you can use two different methods. In the “first-action attribution” method, the lead comes from the first “referrer to the website.”

For example, when the “user clicks a link on Twitter.” With “last-action attribution,” you track “the last marketing event prior to the sale,” for example, when the user clicks on a pay-per-click advertisement. Both methods enable you to measure the sales revenue that derives from your social media activities. To follow both ROI and lead generation, monitor your social media data at least monthly – weekly may be better for big brands. Don’t worry about “meaningless metrics, like the number of “followers, fans…and impressions.” Focus on leads and the sales revenues they generate.