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You’ve sent your initial email. You crafted it well, sent it to a few colleagues to get their feedback, made sure your ask was reasonable, then hit send. A week goes by—you follow up. 

Another week goes by—another follow-up. And still… crickets.

So now you’re asking:

“What did I do wrong? Why didn’t they answer?”

The thing is, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to those two questions. It’s always going to depend on who you are, who you’re reaching out to, what you’re asking for, etc.

Still, you’ll find plenty of hot outreach and follow-up hacks floating around:

• Include numbers in your subject lines
• Namedrop one of your top investors
• Ask them if they want to hear more before you pitch anything
• Follow up every day for a week / follow up once a week / follow up once a quarter

The list goes on and on and on... Do these so-called “outreach hacks” work?

Sometimes yes.

But those hacks are just Band-Aids. If you think adding numbers to your subject lines and calling it a day will boost your outreach and follow-up reply rates, prepare to be disappointed.

So what can you do? Are you doomed because your cold email didn’t get replies? Should you all it quits just because your follow-ups went unopened?

Not quite.

There are definitely ways to up your reply rates and the overall success of your outreach that aren’t just quick hacks. How you approach that first outreach email is important, but the real money is made after that.

It comes down to the follow-up phase. (I’ve written an entire book about the art of following up effectively. You can download a free copy here!)And that’s what we’re going to dig into today, so let’s jump right in to the reasons that your emails are getting ignored in the first place:

1. You haven’t done your research

The most likely reason your outreach is falling flat on its face is that you barely know who you’re talking to.

If you go the mass-outreach route and try to land in as many inboxes as possible, naturally you won’t be able to do the research needed to understand what each recipient is looking for.

Here’s the thing:

Personalization is key.

And no, dropping in some {FIRST NAME} and {COMPANY} merge tags does not count as personalization.

Take this pitch for example:

The email itself isn’t awful. It’s fairly brief, not asking for too much. But here’s the big problem that most prospects will instantly see:

It’s a template that can easily be blasted to thousands of people per hour.

The only bits of personalization in there are the classic {FIRST NAME} and {COMPANY} merge tags. Everything else is cookie-cutter—there’s nothing in there that’s relevant specifically to the person you’re emailing.

You need to understand what the person you’re talking to is interested in, then craft your outreach and follow-ups accordingly.

Here’s how you can go about this:

1. Don’t use a generic (and robotic) template for every email
2. Figure out what they’ve been investing their time in lately
3. Look into the content they’re sharing and talking about most
4. Find the angle that will catch their attention
5. Craft your outreach and follow-ups with this angle top of mind

2. Your emails are way too long

Have you ever met somebody who gets genuinely excited when they open up an email that’s just a wall of text—like this?

I’ll bet you stopped reading at “try to sell you leads…” in that screenshot—and that’s if you even got past “I am sure you get 250 emails like this–” 

The point is this:

Nobody wants to spend all their time in Gmail. And if you’re asking them to dig through an email that’s just a bunch of block paragraphs, the only reply you’ll ever get is the classic “stop emailing me”—sometimes in a much less friendly tone.

Here are the questions you need to answer as efficiently as possible:

• Who are you?
• Why are you reaching out?
• Why should they care?
• What do you want?

3. You’re waiting way too long

Want to know the easiest way to get completely forgotten about?

Wait for weeks between each follow-up you send—or worse, never send a single follow-up email at all.

No matter how much research and personalization work you put in, you’re still only looking at a 40% response rate at best. The real success comes from the follow-ups. And if you’re waiting for weeks before reaching out again, you’re just wasting your own time.

So what’s the best follow-up schedule?

 

Let me introduce you to the Close follow-up formula:

1. Send the first cold email.

Do your research on what’s most likely to resonate, then personalize and send.

2. Wait 1 day, then send follow-up #1 at a different time of day.

This should be a modified version of your first email. Communicate the same message—just in a different format. For example, if your initial email was several paragraphs long, make this follow-up email only two sentences long, and vice versa.

3. Wait 2 days after your second email, then send follow-up #2.

Don’t explain anything at all. Just quickly and clearly restate your call to action. You can ask your prospect to introduce you to someone else in their organization, schedule a call, or just respond to your email—whatever you asked in the first email.

4. Wait 4–5 days after your third email, then send the third and final follow-up.

This is the break-up email. It’s where you say goodbye to the prospect. Here you’re tapping into their loss aversion—a psychological principle that says people strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.

Notice the timeline here:

• Day 1: Send cold email
• Day 2: Follow up
• Day 4: Follow up
• Day 8 or 9: Follow up (break up)

That’s barely a week and a half. If you try to stretch this same formula over 30+ days, you’re not really “following up”—you’re pretty much starting from scratch each and every time.

Wrapping up

The success of your email outreach comes down to the follow-up.

If you don’t follow up at all, you’re leaving money on the table. Simple as that. So how can you make sure your follow-ups aren’t getting sent straight to the trash?

Let’s recap:

• Do your research to make sure your emails resonate
• Keep your follow-ups short and to the point
• Shrink the time between follow-ups

Want to take the next step in mastering the follow-up? Grab a free copy of The Follow-Up Formula.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY TODAY

When you’re selling to a mid- or lower-level buyer, it’s usually a multi-step process to get to the real decision-maker. By the time your careful messaging has run up the ladder, it’s been mutilated. But, if you sell directly to an executive, your sale can get closed faster – and better. 

But selling to C-level buyers requires a different approach than with typical buyers. You need to be concise, be respectful of their time, and be aware of what they care about. You also need to highlight your edge against competitors to stand out – and talking about customer service and your low prices isn’t going to cut it at this level. 

The difference between a typical sales rep that earns $40,000 a year and the one who earns $500,000 a year comes down to approach.  The former tries to apply the same strategies he or she would to a manager, procurement, or HR employee while the latter goes for the bigger guns and targets the C-suite buyers. What sets them apart is that one knows how to speak to these executives in their language. They know what these buyers care about and how to get through to them. 

The difference between an executive buyer and low-level buyers

• They don’t believe the over-the-top claims about ROI from sellers;
• They don’t have time for endless discovery questions – their workload is tremendous;
• They don’t care about all the outreach efforts being shot your way (refer to the last point); and 
• The outreach requests they do look at are filtered based on whether they were referred by a trusted source. 

If you can understand these few points about C-suite buyers, you’re halfway there. You can now start to figure out how your approach needs to change. But that doesn’t mean some tips won’t help you get there faster. 

7 tips for selling high-level prospects

1. Do your research

When you approach a C-suite exec, come prepared. Find credible, relevant sources to reference, and make sure they come from the prospect’s market and region. Doing anything less is disrespectful to the prospect. 

LinkedIn is a good place to do some research on the prospect and their company, as well as competitors, relevant industry trends, etc. It’s also a great place to start for your….

2. Warm introduction

CEOs, COO, CFOs, etc. are all busy. Often, the only way to get past their gatekeepers will be via a warm introduction from someone they know and trust as a credible source. Just make sure you understand the nature of the prospect’s relationship with your introducer – that’ll give you context for how well the prospect themselves will receive your introduction. 

Again, you can use LinkedIn to help with this. Plus, it can help greatly to speak to multiple individuals in the organization about your solution. If you can educate and nurture multiple stakeholders, not only might you get a warm introduction from one of them, you might also have someone on your side to support your pitch to the executive. 

3. Know their industry

This goes alongside the very first point on doing your research – who does the executive’s company define as their competition? Why? Do you have any insights you can provide about them? That’s not to say you should give away trade secrets, but if you have something valuable to offer it will go a long way. 

4. Aim for “trusted advisor” 

Hari Krishnan, CEO of PropertyGuru, defines vendor roles in 3 distinct levels: 

1. Trusted advisor – You collaborate together and are a deeply-involved part of the planning, with a deeply emotional and personal connection and a high level of trust. 
2. Partner – You are strategic to the executive’s business and they are interested in hearing your thoughts during planning. 
3. Vendor – It’s a transaction relationship. Price is the primary way of determining your value. 

To be successful in selling to C-suite execs, aim to be the “Trusted Advisor.” Focus on their best interests; it’s not a cliché, it’s a fact. It takes time to reach this level, but there’s one thing you can do to achieve this more easily: see yourself as a C-Suite executive. 

Set aside any self-esteem issues and don’t talk “up” to the prospect. Instead, no matter their title, sell to them like you’re on the same level, as a peer. Every time. View yourself as an expert on-level with them, and your executive prospects will, too. 

5. Keep it short/get to the point

Again, C-suite buyers don’t have time. Once you get through to them, be friendly, but get to the point right away. You can ask a small handful of discovery questions, sure, but not too many – after a certain point, asking more questions actually decreases your win rate.

This is very different from low-level buyers and is actually one of the most important skills for selling to C-level executives. 

6. Understand how they define success

Conversely, you also need to understand how the prospect defines success in their organization. What motivates them and how do they measure it? What KPIs do they need to improve? If you can glean this information, you can focus on how your solution can help them achieve those things. 

7. Identify and present your solution around bottom-line results

We’ll say it again: C-suite buyers don’t care about customer service or low prices. They care about results – more importantly, increasing profits – EBITA. 

Instead of focusing on those features and benefits that lower-level prospects like to hear about, focus on how your solution can help increase profits. Once they see the real value that your solution provides, they’ll pay your price. 

Wrapping up

To summarize: 

1. C-suite buyers care about different things than lower-level buyers do. You need to adjust your approach to reflect this. 
2. Use LinkedIn to research the best path to a warm introduction and make sure you understand their industry and competitors. 
3. View yourself as a C-suite buyer – you’re an expert on your solution, so see yourself as one, and they will too. 
4. Once you get to them, get to the point and present your solution around the bottom-line results it can provide. 

Selling to C-suite buyers isn’t as complicated as you’d think. However, it does require a different, more strategic approach. Understand what they care about and speak to them in their language. With some practice, you’ll soon be closing deals. 
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The post Effective Ways to Sell to C-Suite Buyers appeared first on CloserIQ Blog.

Texting is almost non-existent in B2B sales. Recent research has found that texting was the lowest adopted of any technology used and sales reps reported only sending .7 SMS messages per cadence, the lowest for every type of medium used.  Despite its low adoption rates, some of the stats below reveal that texting is a […]

The post Tips on Texting in B2B Sales appeared first on The Sales Insider.

Having sales metrics in place is vital in tracking a team’s performance and motivating employees. Read on and find out how a team’s performance can be measured with these metrics for sales effectiveness here! RELATED: 14 Key Sales Metrics [Infographic] In this article: The Use Of Sales Force Effectiveness Metrics Why Sales Is Broken and […]

The post Sales Effectiveness Metrics For Evaluating Your Team appeared first on The Sales Insider.

Sales Differentiation. 19 powerful strategies to win more deals at the prices you want. Lee B. Salz.  2018.  ISBN 9780814439913.  This book delivers what it says and more. The core of differentiation is talking about value as the customer sees it. There are no wasted words in this book, it is current, concise and hits the topic hard.  Any salesperson and sales manager will get much out of the time spent reading and rereading this book. Its totally enjoyable – I could not put it down.  Might just be the best sales book of the year, IMHO

The four levels of value provide an orienting generalization that gives guidance on what your dream clients value. Because value is in the eye of the beholder, creating value means providing something your client perceives as value (for a primer on value creation, read this post). The four levels also offer a way to think about winning big clients.

As a disclaimer, what follows is a generalization. All generalizations are lies (including this statement, and also what follows), but they contain so much truth that they provide useful distinctions.

Level 1: Your Product Itself

When you sell your product, you are selling what is generally the lowest level of value. The fact that “product” is the lowest level of value does not mean that it isn’t important—or even essential. You cannot reach higher levels of value creation without the value of your product. You cannot, for example, have the most strategic of ideas and approaches and fail because your product or service doesn’t work.

For the most part, it is difficult to differentiate on your product alone because it is certain you have many competitors who, if you are honest, also have good products. It can be tough to displace a competitor when there is little difference between your product and your competitors. (For more on competitive displacements, see Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition).

There are plenty of exceptions where the product itself rises to the level of strategic, especially when it is innovative and provides an enormous competitive advantage or solves a systemic challenge in a new way. Much of the time, however, problems at the higher levels create a more compelling case to change.

Because there are so many organizations that make good products, you can find a lot of small deals around the product, and you can find bigger deals that are mostly transactional and treated as commodities.

Level 2: Experience – Easy to Do Business With

One level up from product is “experience.” The value here is what it’s like to do business with you. It includes your service and support. The level of value here transcends and includes of the lower level of value. If your product works but comes with problems and challenges, how well you resolve and eliminate those challenges is a differentiator.

Perhaps because I spent a good part of my sales life selling and intangible, my experience has convinced me that we lose more clients to a poor experience than the product or service itself. If it is a problem that the product or service doesn’t work, the fact that your client can’t get the help they need makes things even worse. There isn’t a company on Earth that is without its challenges, problems, and failures. There is, however, enormous variations in their processes, their approaches, and their responses to those challenges.

If the experience and the support and service are more valuable than the product, it’s often because your client uses more of what of the product and service and needs more help. Companies that don’t buy much of the product or service don’t tend to have as many problems.

A little larger prospective client is likely to have more substantial problems.

Level 3: Tangible Results – Solving Problems

Let’s assume a hypothetical company manages insurance claims. The tangible result their clients seek is the effective management of the claims. Maybe they measure this result with a metric of cases handled. Because many companies can manage claims, it can be difficult to perceive any real differences outside of price. Most companies can solve their client’s problems, often without there being much different in their approaches.

What makes the third level of value greater than one and two is that it includes both of them, and it usually means there is some solution, some problem you are solving. You and your competition can both solve the problem, even if you might do one way while they solve it using another approach. The fact that many companies can solve the problem means we have been commoditized at this level.

When there is a need for a solution, there is more of a problem and more of a need. Bigger problems equal bigger deals.

Level 4: Strategic Value

Because of my long experience in staffing, it provides the most straightforward example for me to demonstrate the fourth and highest level of value. The level three value is providing an employee who can do the work required of their assignment. The fourth level might be providing an employee who can be hired full-time, reducing their turnover, improving their productivity, or reducing their overall cost of hiring.

The problems listed about over are of a greater magnitude than those you find at lower levels. They’re systemic, difficult to improve, and strategic. Improvements here create more value than the gain at the lower levels, all of which is necessary of you to get to level four.

If you need very little of something and going without it for long periods isn’t a problem, then the problem doesn’t rise to “strategic.” If you rely on something and going without puts your future at risk, it’s strategic.

The Big Deal about Big Deals

Every day there are very, very large deals for products. However, even in sales where products are purchased, winning big deals almost always requires something more than price. Imagine a chip manufacturer who sells its components in hundreds of thousands, each with a minuscule amount of four cents. You can imagine the higher levels of value matter very much. The experience, support, and service are necessary. It’s also easy to believe that the failure rate (problems at the third level of value) would also be a factor, especially if the client discovers this fact after they assemble the product they produce with the chips.

At level four, the supplying company’s willingness to invest in equipment to scale up their operation to serve their customer, to locate their factories close to their customer, to carry the cost of inventory, or to provide exclusivity to give their customer a competitive advantage would all be considered more strategic than the other levels of value.

If you want to win bigger deals, you need to start solving bigger, more strategic problems.

The post Winning Big Clients: To Win Big Clients, Solve Big Problems appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The era of mass marketing is long over. Marketers today are looking to understand their customers at the individual level and respond to them with relevant information or experiences.

But in a multi-device world where one customer can interact with a company multiple times across multiple channels within one single journey, understanding the identity of each individual is essential.

To address this topic, we recently hosted a webinar entitled “Understanding Customer Identity Across Channels,” presented by Carter Bradford, President of Precocity, and Matt Thompson, Senior Director of Partnerships at Evergage. In the webinar, Carter provided this definition of identity resolution:

Identity Resolution is the process of connecting all consumer identifiers, both online and offline, to a single individual.

Be sure to watch the full webinar replay to learn more about what identity resolution is, the challenges marketers face as they undertake it, and how to address those challenges.

In this blog post, I want to outline a few of the steps Carter laid out to get started with identity resolution.

1. Develop your overall customer data strategy

Before you get started, you need to figure out your strategy. Each company is different, so there’s no single strategy that Carter or Matt recommend.

You can start by getting relevant parties in a room and asking a lot of questions. What data sources do we have? What technologies do we currently have that collect and store customer data? What does our current view of identity look like? What identifiers do we have? What do our current customer data processes look like? Who is involved? What do we ultimately want to do with our customer data? How are our current technologies handling our data and what are the gaps between our current state and our ideal state?

As you ask and answer questions like these, you’ll have a better idea of what your needs are. Then you can start outlining a path forward to address those needs.

2. Identify a handful of key use cases

Once you’ve got your strategy laid out, start getting more specific. Outline several key areas in which you plan to use your view of individual identity so that you can start with your end goal in mind.

These use cases will likely be examples of personalization in action — the act of tailoring an experience or communication based on information a company has learned about an individual. You don’t just pull all of your data together for fun, you do it so that you can use it to provide a better experience for your customers.

By laying out the ways in which you plan to provide that better experience in advance, you can make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

The webinar offered some great examples of use cases you may want to consider, so be sure to check it out for some initial ideas.

3. Start with deterministic matching

As described in the webinar, when creating a single picture of a person’s identity, there will be a certain amount of stitching and merging profiles together as data is brought in from multiple sources and customers interact with you with or without identifying themselves. There are two main ways to stitch profiles: deterministic and probabilistic matching.

Carter recommends you start with deterministic matching, as he considers it table stakes for any identity resolution program. With deterministic matching, a system stitches profiles together based on clear, unique identifiers such as system ID or email address. For example, if a person visits a site multiple times but never identifies himself by making a purchase, registering for a webinar, signing up for a newsletter, etc., his profile remains anonymous. The first time he does provide his email address, the system recognizes all of his past sessions that took place with the same cookie, and stitches his anonymous profile together with his new identified profile.

Once you have deterministic matching under your belt, you can begin considering probabilistic matching, which has its pros and cons. The webinar offers more detail on both approaches.

4. Understand and weight identity signals

An identifier is a data point that allows you to recognize a specific person. You likely have a number of identifiers within your organization — some more valuable or more accurate than others. You may have cookies, name, loyalty ID, email address, physical address, etc.

You need to assess how you weight each of these identifiers and how you’ll tell your technology (often a CDP) how to react to each one.

For example, a phone number collected at the register may not always be accurate. In the webinar, Matt and Carter told the story about how they often hear that store associates type in 555-5555 when asked for a phone number just to keep the check-out line moving. If that’s the case for you, you don’t want to end up with hundreds of customers stored under one profile based on that one incorrect phone number.

In contrast, a physical address entered by a customer for an online order is likely to be quite accurate, since the customer wants to enter the correct address to ensure her package arrives to the right place. However, a physical address can be shared by multiple individuals, so it’s not always clear as to whether all data belongs to one person, or multiple people within the same household.

Each company has its own considerations, so think through your identifiers and how you will value each one going forward.

5. Carefully consider compliance

When dealing with identity, compliance is an area you can’t ignore. Before you get too far into this process, make sure you’re well-versed on the laws (e.g. GDPR) and general ethical considerations around using customer data.

There are a lot of different ways you can use customer data, but as Carter said in the webinar, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Always keep the end customer experience in mind and don’t do anything with a customer’s data that doesn’t ultimately improve that person’s experience.

6. Define success criteria and key metrics, continuously evolve and refine

As with any business initiative, you need to carefully consider how you will measure success. Track these metrics over time to judge the effectiveness of your program and make changes to improve. For example, you can weight identifiers differently, address data quality concerns, tweak personalization campaigns, etc. and note the impact those changes have on your KPIs to improve your effectiveness.

7. Carefully consider tools

Finally, you need to be sure you’re using the right tools to make all of this happen. Keeping track of individual identity and responding to each person in a relevant way cannot be done at scale without technology.

Each company’s needs are unique, so each company needs a unique combination of tools to accomplish their goals. When looking at companies that will be managing your customer data, you want to look at those who will be long-term partners for you. So don’t take this step lightly.

Final Thoughts

In the webinar, Carter said that “Identity is the foundation of modern marketing.”

This is because, as customers demand personalized experiences, we need to be sure that we know them well enough to speak to them as individual people. If you try to personalize an experience based on a flawed understanding of a person’s identity, you’ll have seriously missed the mark and delivered a very bad experience.

 

Podcasts are a great way to learn new marketing ideas and get fresh perspectives on boosting your business, and we’ve compiled 10 more of the best podcasts for B2B marketers right here, following up on our recent list of “20 Podcasts To Elevate Your B2B Marketing,” and “Now Hear This: 10 Digital Marketing Podcasts to Educate and Entertain.” These podcasts offer marketing news and insight from the innovators behind some of the world’s top firms, as well as their own stories, plus tips and advice to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Whether it’s examining emerging trends in B2B marketing or heartfelt stories of life’s business and personal adventures, the hosts and guests on these podcasts have plenty to offer, and we're certain you’ll find something that strikes your fancy. Here’s our list of 10 more diverse podcasts that will provide a fascinating array of ideas and trends to expand and improve your B2B marketing efforts, presented in random order.

#1 — The CMO Podcast

Summary: The CMO Podcast with Jim Stengel digs into the marketing and life challenges faced by today’s CMOs.

• Hosts: Jim Stengel
• Recent Topics on Tap: Agility: B2B with Purpose, Yoga for Marketing, How Big Brands Can Win Versus Story-rich Craft Brands,
• Recent Guests: Lorraine Barber-Miller, Alicia Tillman, Ann Lewnes
• Episode Length: 45 - 60 minutes

#2 — Ad Age Marketer's Brief

Summary: Ad Age Marketer's Brief takes a weekly dive into current marketing industry news, utilizing Ag Age’s cadre of marketing connections and reporters.

• Hosts: Jessica Wohl and E.J. Schultz
• Recent Topics on Tap: Hershey's head of media dishes on Twitch and other digital plays, Pizza Hut's brand leader: 'We're proud but dissatisfied', When it comes to marketing healthy food, it's all about using the right language
• Recent Guests: Brent Montgomery, Charlie Chappell, Victor Lee
• Episode Length: 25 - 30 minutes

#3 — The Cannes Lions Podcast

Summary: Offering creative marketing insight from some of the industry’s leading voices, The Cannes Lions Podcast takes the famed marketing event from a far-distant festival to actionable tips delivered on your own device weekly.

• Hosts: Philip Thomas
• Recent Topics on Tap: What exactly is great customer experience?, How can brands earn the right to be authentically part of culture?, Why is it so hard to prove the value of creativity?
• Recent Guests: Monique Nelson, Michelle Melendez, Fernando Machado
• Episode Length: 20 - 30 minutes

#4 — A Shark’s Perspective

Summary: With more than 150 episodes, A Shark’s Perspective Marketing Podcast has featured many of the industry’s top marketers, including a recent in-depth conversation with our own CEO Lee Odden.

• Hosts: Kenneth Kinney
• Recent Topics on Tap: How Do You Make an Event an Experience, What Is the Human Element of Branding, What Do You Want Your Audience to Remember
• Recent Guests: Dr. Carmen Simon, Ellaine Wellman, Lindsay Stewart
• Episode Length: 25 minutes - 1 hour

#5 — The Big Story

Summary: Digital advertising insight and interviews are on tap weekly on The Big Story, AdExchanger's podcast covering recent marketing news.

• Hosts: Ryan Joe
• Recent Topics on Tap: Amazon Gets (Ad) Served, The Fire That Burns Brightest, Layser Sights
• Recent Guests: Stephanie Layser
• Episode Length: 25 - 30 minutes

#6 — How I Built This with Guy Raz

Summary: National Public Radio’s How I Built This with Guy Raz explores the innovators behind some of the world’s top firms and digs in to their stories.

• Hosts: Guy Raz
• Recent Topics on Tap: Angie's BOOMCHICKAPOP, Yelp, Dave's Killer Bread
• Recent Guests: Dave Dahl, James Dyson, Angie & Dan Bastian
• Episode Length: 45 minutes - 1 hour and 15 minutes

#7 — The Strategy Inside Everything

Summary: A strategy-focused podcast that explores marketing, business, and more — The Strategy Inside Everything looks to dissect a wide range of pop culture events.

• Hosts: Adam Pierno
• Recent Topics on Tap: You can trust Jasmine Bina, Learning strategy with Kevin Rothermel, Ana Andjelic on brands in retail, digital and luxury
• Recent Guests: Jasmine Bina, Kevin Rothermel, Ana Andjelic
• Episode Length: 30 - 50 minutes

#8 — Making Marketing

Summary: Making Marketing by Digiday is a weekly podcast dedicated to learning marketing by exploring the stories of industry leaders.

• Hosts: Gianna Capadona, Shareen Pathak
• Recent Topics on Tap: National Public Media’s Gina Garrubbo: The golden age of audio is here, Foot Locker's Jed Berger: 'The marketing industry is in for a revolution', Buffy's Paul Shaked: There's Facebook-first mentality in the marketing industry
• Recent Guests: Gina Garrubbo, Jed Berger, Paul Shaked
• Episode Length: 30 - 40 minutes

#9 — Business Unusual with Barbara Corcoran

Summary: Offering weekly business insight, life lessons and motivation, Business Unusual with Barbara Corcoran features the “Shark Tank” star.

• Hosts: Barbara Corcoran
• Recent Topics on Tap: 8 Tricks To Build A Top-Notch Brand, The Secret Sauce To Raising An Entrepreneur, Time For An Attitude Adjustment
• Recent Guests: Brian and Michael Speciale, Rick and Melissa Hinnant
• Episode Length: 10 - 50 minutes

#10 — Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin

Summary: Systems for actively changing our culture are explored weekly on Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin.

• Hosts: Seth Godin
• Recent Topics on Tap: The hype cycle, Enrollment and possibility, Artificial Intelligence is Neither
• Recent Guests: Tim Ferriss,
• Episode Length: 20 - 40 minutes

What Are Your Favorite Brain-Boosting Marketing Podcasts?

via GIPHY This list and the others we’ve researched only scratch the surface of the abundant marketing-related podcasts available. If you have a favorite that isn’t listed here, please leave a comment with your own top choices. Finally, here are several helpful podcast marketing articles we’ve written recently, to help you decide whether a podcasting strategy might be a good addition to your own marketing toolkit.

• How to Promote Your B2B Podcast
• B2B Podcasting: What, Why and How

The post 10 More Marketing Podcasts To Boost Your Business appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Any business that sells products needs to know its COGS, or cost of goods sold.

Why? Simply put, it’s an important cog in the wheel of your financial health. It’s one of the biggest indicators of revenue, profit, and business sustainability. You also need to calculate COGS in order to write it off as a business expense on your taxes.

If you don’t know the first thing about accounting, don’t worry. In this blog post, we’ll dive more into what the cost of goods sold is and why it matters, go over the cost of goods sold formula, and give you a few tips for optimizing the cost of goods sold in your business.

What is Cost of Goods Sold?

COGS is a business and sales metric that determines the value of inventory sold (and created, if you’re the manufacturer) in a specific time. The formula looks at all costs directly related to your inventory, including raw materials, transportation, storage, and direct labor for manufacturers.

Because COGS tells business owners how much it costs to acquire your products, the number ties directly back to profit and revenue. For example, if your COGS is the same as or lower than your revenue for that period, it means you’ve broken even or have lost money and are not profitable.

To benchmark, businesses should look at their COGS for a specific time period (a day, a quarter, a year, etc.) and compare it to a different time period of the same length to see how sales changed.

Cost of Goods Sold Formula

To calculate COGS, follow this simple formula: Cost of Goods Sold = Beginning Inventory + Purchased Inventory – Ending Inventory

So, let’s imagine that you’re crunching your quarterly numbers. You started Q4 with $50,000 in inventory, and you purchased an additional $25,000 in inventory to keep up with holiday demand. At the end of the quarter, you have $20,000 of inventory remaining.

COGS = $50,000 + $25,000 – $20,000

In this case, your COGS for the quarter comes out to $55,000. Calculating COGS varies based on whether you are the manufacturer or the retailer, so let’s walk through both to make things clear.

Cost of Goods Sold Formula for Retailers

If you’re a middleman or retailer, COGS is fairly straightforward. Think of COGS as all of your costs associated with the inventory itself. Here are items you can include in COGS:

• Direct cost of products
• Sales tax
• Freight
• Warehousing and storage
• Product labeling and packaging

Expenses associated with overhead, such as labor, administrative software, marketing, and shipping to customers, can’t be classified as COGS.

Cost of Goods Sold Formula for Manufacturers

Product manufacturers have a more complex approach to calculating COGS. The raw materials and overhead with your factory or warehouse all play a role in your production cost, including:

• Raw materials and parts
• Labor for production and warehousing
• Packaging and labeling
• Factory overhead, including equipment and building costs

Like retailers, manufacturers need to exclude certain administrative expenses from COGS. Building costs, in particular, can be tricky as some but not all expenses can be counted in COGS. Work with a trusted accountant for specific guidance to make sure you get it right.

Cost of Goods Sold Calculator

To calculate your COGS number without running sums by hand, use a cost of goods sold calculator.

HubSpot’s sales metrics calculator is a free spreadsheet where you can plug in numbers to see your key metrics, including COGS, customer acquisition cost (CAC), average win rate, and customer retention rate.

Download this Calculator for Free

How to Report COGS on an Income Statement

One of the primary purposes of tracking COGS is so that you can write it off on your taxes. Each time you incur an expense related to inventory, create a journal entry on your books with the correct expense category. When you pull a profit and loss (P&L) sheet, your COGS will appear on the income statement underneath sales.

	Jan	Feb
Income
Sales	$10,100	$12,250
Cost of Goods Sold	$5,600	$5,750
GROSS PROFIT	$4,500	$6,500

At the end of each quarter or time period, use your accounting software or the cost of goods sold formula above to calculate COGS. Re-verify your goods purchased, goods sold, and current inventory in order to look for loss or theft.

Cost of Goods Sold Examples

Example for Retailers

Let’s take the example of a backpack for a school supply store. Say that you had $10,000 worth of backpacks at the start of the month, but it’s the last month of summer vacation, and so the store stocks up on an additional $20,000 worth of backpacks. At the end of the month, they have just $2,000 worth of backpacks to be sold to their customers.

The variables are:

• Beginning Inventory = $10,000
• Purchased Inventory = $20,000
• Ending Inventory = $2,000

Time to crunch some numbers!

• Cost of Goods Sold = Beginning Inventory + Purchased Inventory – Ending Inventory
• Cost of Goods Sold = $10,000 + $20,000 – $2,000
• Cost of Goods Sold = $28,000

This means that the total amount directly traceable to the backpacks the store had to spend was $28,000.

Where COGS can get layered for retail stores and distributors is with different product lines. Businesses like grocery stores and hardware stores have thousands of different products on their shelves, so tracing what specifically caused COGS to go up or down can be difficult.

Example for Manufacturers

Let’s imagine that instead of selling backpacks, you manufacture them. Think of everything that goes into making one: the metal for zippers, the cloth, the plastic for securing the straps, the tags, and even the labor hours directly traceable to production.

To calculate the COGS for your backpacks in this example, you need to total the amount of inventory in your possession at the start of the time frame.

Let’s say that it’s a one-month period. On the first day of the month, the company has a beginning inventory of backpacks that cost $1,000,000 to manufacture from material and labor.

Throughout the time period, the company produces an additional batch of backpack-making materials at a cost of $700,000, broken down as follows:

• $400,000 on the cloth for the backpacks.
• $200,000 on metal for zippers.
• $50,000 on the plastic for securing the straps.
• $50,000 on the hourly wages of the warehouse workers responsible for producing the products.

At the end of the month, the company has a remaining inventory of backpacks that cost $500,000 to make.

So, let’s identify the variables in this situation:

• Beginning Inventory = $1,000,000
• Purchased Inventory = $700,000
• Ending Inventory = $500,000

Now, plug them into the cost of goods sold formula:

• Cost of Goods Sold = Beginning Inventory + Purchased Inventory - Ending Inventory
• Cost of Goods Sold = $1,000,000 + $700,000 – $500,000
• Cost of Goods Sold = $1,200,000

This means the manufacturer’s total number of backpacks sold during this month cost $1,200,000 to produce.

Cost of Goods Sold Best Practices

Since COGS is so crucial to your business, making efforts to optimize it can pay off in many ways. Here are a few of our recommendations for controlling your cost of goods sold.

1. Work out deals with suppliers.

Suppliers are often willing to negotiate on the price of what they sell you if you can buy in bulk, commit to an exclusive agreement, or sign onto a long-term partnership. If you’re able to do this, you can lower the cost of this inventory and keep the price to your customers the same, resulting in more profit for you and no difference in price or quality for customers.

What we like: It can take a while to find the right vendors and build a level of trust and partnership. If successful, these relationships can be a huge money saver for your business.

2. Organize COGS by category.

While looking at COGS over time provides clear projections of growth and sustainability of the business, it doesn’t provide the opportunity to get granular. One option is to look at COGS for a specific product or product category to measure sales more specifically.

You’ll need to be organized and disciplined to run this analysis. Develop a system for classification and organization that works for your reports.

What we like: Organizing COGS by category gives clear insights into how certain goods contribute to the bottom line. With this knowledge, you can make informed business decisions about which categories of products return a healthy profit margin — and which you should consider cutting completely.

3. Look into automation.

One way for manufacturers to lower the cost of goods sold is to consider automation. Investing in machines that do the job in place of human workers usually requires a hefty upfront payment, but in the long run, your cost of goods sold could be lowered.

AI-powered tools can also benefit manufacturers by forecasting demand for certain products to help them determine how much to manufacture at a time.

Obviously, automation is a hot-button issue in today’s economy and has a bad rep for displacing certain workers. Take the time to run not only a cost analysis but also an analysis of how this could impact the image of your business as a whole.

What we like: Implementing automation is a way to save costs, generate revenue, and build infrastructure in an industry where labor is expensive. In a McKinsey report, 55% of manufacturers reported cost decreases from AI implementation, and 66% reported revenue increases because of AI.

4. Reduce waste and theft.

Waste and theft can create a difference between the inventory you purchase and the inventory you sell. Prioritize efficiency and oversee staff to ensure every piece of inventory goes into the final product, and every final product goes to a customer. This will go a long way in controlling your cost of goods sold.

What we like: Waste not, want not. By tracking your cost of goods sold against your revenue, you can track variations in your COGS and take action if waste or theft is occurring.

5. Contextualize COGS with your gross profit margin.

It’s important to keep an eye on COGS, but keep an even closer eye on your gross margin (GM). Find your GM with the formula GM = (Revenue – COGS) / Revenue to discover what percentage of your revenue is being converted to profit.

A common disclaimer is that COGS is best when it’s low. This is true in part. After all, if your cost of goods sold is zero, that either means you’ve acquired your inventory for no cost whatsoever or you sold nothing. If it’s the latter, you’ve earned no profit. What you want to do is reduce COGS by lowering how much you spend on your inventory.

What we like: By contextualizing COGS with your GM, you’ll get the big picture of how your cost of goods is impacting profitability ratios and cash flow in your business.

How to Calculate Cost of Goods Sold and Grow Your Profit Margins

Calculating COGS can be confusing, but it’s an essential step in measuring the health and growth of your business. Tracking COGS can help you monitor expenses, lower your taxable income, and calculate how profitable your business is.

Recently, I was at a meeting hosted by my friends at Gartner. Scott Gillum made a provocative suggestion, “Do we need outbound sales any longer?” He followed that with a post.

As I reflected on the question, I think we can only discover the answer by changing the question, “Why do customers need sales people any more?”

Increasingly, the answer appears to be “They don’t!” We see all sorts of evidence supporting this. Customers are relying, increasingly, on other sources of information. They have solution provider web sites, influencers, referral sources, and other sorts of channels to learn about new solutions and how different supplier solutions might fit.

We also see customers voting with their time, they are becoming increasingly difficult to reach, they guard their time. Gartner data shows buying groups allocate roughly 17%* of their time to meeting with sales people (that’s not each person, that’s total).

We have all sorts of data showing how unhappy customers are with sales people: “They only talk about what they want to talk about,” “They don’t understand me and my business,” “They don’t understand their products,” or, “They waste my time.”

Sales leaders/managers are also doing things that seem to reduce the need for sales people–or perhaps SDRs. As they adopt strategies that, increasingly, try to make the buying process more transactional, one wonders, can there be a more effective way, further reducing the need for sales people, or at least SDRs. I wrote “What do Uber drivers and SDRs have in common,” as speculation about the future with fewer or no SDRs.

All of this seems to indicate the future of sales roles/jobs is pretty bleak. And it probably is unless sales people (driven by sales leaders/managers) change how we sell.

Stated differently, what the majority of sales people currently do creates little value to the customer. Unless we change significantly, customers will find other alternatives to help them buy.

After this very bleak set up, I’m extremely optimistic about the future of sales and selling! I think the demand for high value creating sales people will sky rocket, as a result the number of jobs for people that can fulfill this role will increase dramatically.

So the future is bright — but only for those sales people/leaders that can adapt to doing those things that create the greatest value for customers!

Here are some of my arguments:

1. We’ve long known that customers struggle to buy. Gartner data shows 53% of buying decisions end in no decision made. These are customers that have an established problem and a need to buy, and funding. But they fail to navigate their buying group to a decision. The underlying reasons have little to do with selecting a soluton, but more to do in aligning the priorities, agendas, needs of the buying group and getting support up the management food chain. Great sales people, facilitating the customer buying process can help more of these people successfully complete their buying journey. Think of it, we (collectively) have the opportunity to nearly double our revenues, not by finding more deals but by helping customers successfully navigate their buying journey.
2. With the introduction of Challenger, Insight Selling, Provocative Selling, we’ve learned the greatest opportunity is, perhaps, customers that need to change, but don’t yet recognize there may be better ways of achieving their goals. Sales people can play a tremendous role in driving new opportunity development by inciting prospect to change. But the skills, capabilities, and expertise to do this is very different than that which we seem to be developing. Not long ago, I suggested we change how we think of SDRs, in my post “My $500K SDRs.
3. More recent Gartner data shows customers struggling to make sense of information they look at in the buying process. The good news is the volume of high quality information about alternative solutions is abundant. Marketing has done a fantastic job (I can’t believe I’m writing those words) in developing high quality, relevant content. The bad news, is customers are even more confused, even slightly skeptical with the information they are receiving. They struggle to make sense of this information overwhelm, sorting through those things that are most important, relevant to them. The emerging opportunity for sales people in creating value with customers is to serve as “sensemakers,” helping customers sort through the information, understanding what’s most relevant to them. Gartner will be providing much more information on the sales person as sensemaking, but Nick Toman, provides a great starting point with his post: How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense Of Sense Making.
4. Along a parallel path with the folks at Gartner, I’ve been looking at the sales person as sensemaker, as well. As I look at the increasing complexity, rapid pace of change, overload, overwhelm, risk, and so forth, customers struggle with understanding and figuring out how best to achieve their goals. The sales person as sensemaker helps the customer better understand an cope with the complexity our buyers face. I’ve written about this a number of times, but the best starting points are: Turbulence and Fear of Buying, and Salesperson as Sensemaker.

The bottom line, is, our customers are struggling. They need help in understanding what they face in doing their jobs, identifying opportunities to grow and succeed, identifying threats they need to address, identifying things that enable them to improve and drive performance, or to just cope.

Those people who help customers do those things, those people who can create value with the customer in finding answers, those people who help customers make sense of what they face will be in high demand and highly valued by customers.

Customers urgently need sales people who can help!

The opportunity for both customers and sellers is phenomenal–it’s just different from what too many do now. Those sales people and organizations that make this transition will be those customers most value.

We leverage decades of experience to determine the most appropriate segmenting method to uncover the most effective solution that will benefit you and your customers.

Organizations spend considerable resources to define and execute the right business strategies to generate revenue and high returns on their investments. A crucial first step to sustaining growth is to identify customers who are most likely to support your product portfolio and engage them with the right marketing messages and communication modes.

Segmentation research is one of the most effective methods for identifying these important customers—yet many organizations are not using it.

This blog provides insight into the challenges of segmentation including common mistakes and best practices from design to analysis.

The Ins-and-Outs of Segmentation Research

All customers are important but not created equal and all certainly don’t represent the same opportunities for businesses. Early adopters, heavy users, and repeat buyers all represent desirable targets. They are often your organization’s brand evangelists who generate over-sized and recurring revenues.

These are critically important constituents. Finding, identifying and establishing products and engagement channels can be accomplished in a number of ways but segmentation may well be the most effective.

Segmenting, or identifying the customer characteristics and desired product benefits which establish cohesion among similar groups of customers and differentiate between disparate customer groups, is a preferable alternative.

Viewing customers in smaller subsets of groups such as these provides the opportunity to concentrate efforts more effectively in areas such as messaging, profitability, and customer relation management including:

• Customer optimization
• Margin enhancement
• Product development and line extensions
• Increased media selection accuracy and targeting
• On point creative and messaging
• Loyalty initiatives
• Improved customer experience

Successful segmentation efforts result in customer groupings that one can differentiate among based on their responses to demographic, attitudinal, and/or behavioral variables.

Effectiveness is measurable and can be determined by whether a segmentation solution results in customer segments that are:

• Attractive: Each segment has good revenue potential to warrant investment in product development and/or marketing efforts.
• Cohesive: Customers within each segment are homogeneous with each other
• Distinct: Each segment is substantially different than the others
• Actionable: Appropriate information is available for customers to be able to market directly to them, preferably in a variety of channels

The Most Common Challenges Companies Face When Doing Segmentation Research

Segmentation research often entails substantial investments of time, personnel and financial resources. A number of considerations should be accounted for in order to avoid a suboptimal result and to optimize the return on these invested assets.

1. Client/End User Engagement: Understanding each stakeholder group’s objectives and how the results from the segmentation will be employed leads to a smoother process from initiation through completion.
2. Hypothetical Segments: Conceptualizing expected segments is useful in effectively constructing survey questions, helping to determine if those segments actually exist.
3. The Right Bases Mix: Identifying the right mix of bases variables used for segmenting that will identify hypothesized segments and meet stakeholders’ information needs.
4. Typing Algorithm: Reliable algorithms typically result from using all of the segmentation criteria, however, most often these criteria exceed 50 survey questions. It is recommended that proposed segmentation solutions include a reliable, shorter algorithm that can be employed for dynamic typing situations.
5. Linkage With Other Data: Segmentation is often criticized for having too narrow a focus. Segmentation usefulness can be enhanced with linkage to other studies and information databases that provide segment monitoring or more targeting detail.

Don’t Forget the 3 Most Important Segmentation Approaches

There is no single approach to segmentation. The best approach is based on available resources and corporate objectives. The most effective segmentation approaches are:

• Database: Employing existing customer records can provide actionable segments, particularly if the database contains a variety of customer-specific criteria including demographics, behavioral and preference information, beliefs, product or service perspectives, etc.
• Needs-based: This survey approach investigates customer needs sets and where product opportunities and gaps exist in the existing marketplace. Identifying the elements that underlie customer decisions enables customization that addresses utilization requirements.
• Attitudinal: Categorizing customers by their closely held attitudes enables products and messaging to resonate at deep, internal levels that address fundamental opinions and viewpoints. Surveying customers for those criteria that connect at a visceral level yields direction for design of products that have enduring significance.

Key Segmentation Stage Best Practices You Don’t Want to Miss

We have shared these and additional insights into this strategically vital technique during a recent webinar that is free to all. Complimenting theory with real-life examples of successes and pitfalls, this engaging webinar is perfect for novice and seasoned practitioners alike. Join strategic research professionals for this one-hour look into how customers which are so different are really so much alike.

In the webinar, you’ll learn more about:

• Common mistakes people make when doing segmentation studies
• Why implementing segmentation research is critical to your business strategy
• How segmentation research works
• Three different segmentation approaches: database, needs-based, attitudinal
• Best practices at key segmentation stages

Click here to watch the webinar now.

You have the perfect prospect. You know how you can help them. You have that initial phone call, and everything feels good. They share great information and provided even more information and insights in response to your questions. You feel like life is good. The call ends and you’ve both agreed on a clear next step: another call next week. You feel good about the time blocked for the call next week. Then, two days before the next scheduled call, they send you an email letting you know that they’re cancelling. Their note is short and sweet and goes something like: “My priorities have changed. I’ll contact you if I see a need to speak again.” Your heart sinks. They’ve blown you off. It’s even worse if you don’t hear anything and they don’t show for the call or respond to your message when you tell them you’re waiting. So, what do you do?

Get all the answers in this video:

 

 

How do you respond to these situations? How should you respond to these situations? Let’s run through a checklist of what you need to do. The last thing you want to do is have a conversation with yourself or worse yet, crickets and an empty pipeline.

Let’s go back and dissect the situation. Your initial excitement of getting what you think is a qualified lead is now long gone. The problem began when you failed to do the two-step follow-up even in your excitement. Don’t go thinking that the thank you email you sent immediately following the call was enough. That’s what every salesperson does. If you want to be a top performer, you must go further. You need to send them a second communication a couple days later where you provide another keen insight and a question along with how you’ll share this and more information during the next meeting with them. This second step is key as it helps to keep their interest level high before the next call.

Let’s shift gears now and talk about how you engage the prospect that will not respond. First, ask yourself: are you giving the prospect a reason to respond to you? If all you’re doing is throwing them information, who is going to blame them for not responding. You want to engage them with something that sparks their interest. The best way to do this is by calling (and yes, leave a voicemail if they don’t answer) or emailing them. State a comment they shared with you and ask them a question about what they said. People love to have their comments and feelings validated. By asking them more about what they shared with you, they will feel valued. I’m amazed at how effective this strategy is in getting people engaged.

The frequency of your messages is always something salespeople struggle with. My answer is simple- the speed and frequency of how often you follow up will be driven by the following three things:

First is the person you’re dealing with. The lower the person is in an organization, the more frequent you can follow up. The higher up the individual, the longer the timeframe should be between attempts. Second, the frequency with what you sell is being purchased. If what you sell is seen as a commodity and the customer is buying from your competitor, you need to reach out frequently. If what you sell is a capital expenditure, your follow-up might be closer to once every 7 – 10 days. Third, is the urgency the customer expressed in proceeding calls. It’s only natural if what they said sounded critical, then you owe it to them to reach out more often.

What does all this mean to you? It means that if you’re selling a commodity, the customer has expressed a real need and you’re dealing with a low-level person, I would call them daily. If I’m dealing with a senior level manager making a capital expenditure, I would call them every two weeks.

These are only guidelines. The key is to develop a plan and stick to it. Too many salespeople fail to follow through themselves. No wonder customers go silent; often, its due to the salesperson. There’s no reason to sit back and allow a customer to go “radio silent” on you. It’s not their job to break the silence, it’s your job to give them a strong enough reason to break the silence.

Check out my ebook on prospecting “10 Reasons Most Prospecting Plans Fail”:

 

10 Reasons Most Prospecting Plans Fail eBook

 

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Result

 

Hello, 

This is Alexei Oreskovic, Business Insider's Global Tech Editor and West Coast Bureau Chief. Starting today I'll be sending a new weekly newsletter — "Trending" — dedicated to Business Insider Prime's tech coverage. 

Whether you work in Silicon Valley or compete with its denizens, our mission is to give you the info you need to stay ahead of the pack, with exclusive, fly-on-the-wall reporting from inside tech's most innovative companies; smart analysis that reveals the real story behind product pivots, management shake-ups, and acquisitions; and honest insight and perspectives from the players shaping the market. 

This week: The cloud is now in the center of the storm

The booming cloud market is suddenly getting a lot of attention from new places, not all of it welcome.

The Pentagon's decision to examine the $10 billion JEDI mega-contract, which was all but a done deal for Amazon,was a big wake-up call in Seattle. Sure, the move may be linked in part to Trump's personal grudge against Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, but it's hardly the only scrutiny Amazon's cloud business is getting. The US Federal Reserve reportedly paid a visit to an Amazon datacenter recently to better understand the processes and safeguards in place; And let's not forget that the big Capital One hack occurred on the AWS platform, even if the mistake was made by Capital One. The price of success is scrutiny, and Amazon is going to have to get used to it.

Meanwhile, the top cloud players are scrambling to bulk up and pair up. As Julie Bort reports in her story on the recent Google VMware partnership, the intriguing backstory of the deal points to the frenzied level of competition and maneuvering going on. And it shows the power of having a shrewd strategist like Thomas Kurian, the Oracle exec that Google poached to lead its Cloud business, on your side.

The wave of big-ticket M&A in the enterprise tech sector is also a direct result of the shifting balance of power triggered by the cloud business, as Megan Hernbroth reports. And Ben Pimentel spoke to IBM's cloud boss about his plans, following the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition.

Check out the stories:

How VMware became a secret superpower in the cloud wars and why Amazon Web Services should not be happy but Google and Microsoft are thrilled

 

New forces in enterprise tech are triggering a wave of mega-deals and Salesforce's $15 billion Tableau acquisition was just the start

 

IBM's cloud boss reveals the game plan for its $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, and says it'll give it 'massive reach' in a $1.2 trillion cloud market

Other recent tech highlights:

• Apple's third quarter profit was weighed down by an overlooked cost — it's now devoting more of its sales to R&D than at any time since it released the iPod

 

• The buzzy fintech startup Arcus has raised nearly $13 million. Here's the pitch deck that's helping it woo top VCs like Andreessen Horowitz
• Everything you need to know about TensorFlow, Google's own home-made AI software that's now helping NASA discover planets and beating champions at Go
• Saudi Arabia just made its first direct investment in a European startup, and it supports a VC theory about the kingdom's power in tech

And more from across the BI newsroom: 

• We identified the 70 most powerful people at JPMorgan. Here's our exclusive org chart.
• Uber marketing employees describe the recent 'bloodbath' when the company laid off 400 employees in more than a dozen countries this week
• 10 books that will give new managers the self-confidence necessary to lead, motivate, and inspire their team

Thanks for reading BI Prime, and you can always feel free to reach out to me directly with feedback, thoughts and tips at aoreskovic@businessinsider.com. You can also take part in our subscriber survey here. 

- Alexei

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why Apple's Mac Pro 'trash can' was a colossal failure

The post What is Product Led Growth? How to Build a Software Company in the End User Era appeared first on OpenView.

78% of businesses have reported attempted or actual B2B payments fraud last year (rising steadily since 2013), and international fraud has risen 136% in the last two years. While nearly half of payment fraud is linked to paper checks and manual processes, emerging digital payment methods are equally vulnerable, prompting banks and businesses to seek out faster and more transparent ways to settle transactions.

Blockchain technology is increasingly gaining traction among banks, lenders, fintechs and merchants. 35% of B2B buyers and suppliers are interested in blockchain-based payment networks and 26% believe blockchain is the “preeminent payment technology of the future.”

IDC predicts that by 2020, 25% of banks, manufacturers and retailers will leverage blockchain networks in some way, and by 2021, at least 25% of the world’s top organizations will use blockchain as a foundation for digital trust and data security. And by 2023, blockchain networks will facilitate over $60B in cross-border payments.

How blockchain for B2B payments works

Blockchain’s foundation is distributed ledger technology (DLT). Transactions are distributed, with records verified by a network of computers versus by one party or bank, and visible to all parties versus held in a central database. They’re also immutable as once recorded, they cannot be altered, reversed or tampered with.

When a buyer or seller submits payment information to the chain, a digital “block” is created and distributed to the network. Multiple computers compete to unscramble the block, and the first to successfully do so shares it with the network for verification. Verification includes confirming funds are available, sender and receiver are reputable, and the request is legitimate.

Once verified, the transaction is authorized and posted to the ledger and designated parties are updated in real time.

Blockchain benefits for B2B payments

Proactive fraud prevention

The public, distributed ledger serves as a “single source of truth” for both buyers and suppliers. While blockchain may not eliminate the need for outside verification agencies reduces settlement risk and makes it easier to track down fraudulent activities.

Prevent “false positives”

For AR and AP departments, tighter fraud controls can lead to more false positives, increasing card declines for good accounts, delays in invoice processing, and can hurt the buyer-supplier relationship. Blockchain’s network-based verification and immutable record recognizes more good transactions and fosters trust between parties.

Faster settlement

Blockchain cuts central banks out of the process, dramatically speeding up settlement. Unlike banks, which can take up to five business days for cross-border transactions, the 24/7 availability of the network supports real-time to next-day fund transfer.

Blockchain’s transparency and automation also save both suppliers and buyers the manual processes of phoning or emailing each other and updating their respective records in multiple systems.

Frictionless payments

The ability to place one-touch orders directly from equipment and sensors on the job site, within a manufacturing plant or even operating room is an emerging opportunity in B2B. The “smart contract” property of blockchain supports automated device-to-device transactions when certain conditions are met, cutting out traditional invoicing and payment processes entirely.

Integrated with payment networks and headless commerce applications, smart contracts and IoT may be the future of replenishment and other micro-transactions between B2B buyers and sellers. Pricing and payment terms are set into the smart contract, with buyer and seller notified of each transaction upon execution and pushed back to their respective systems of record.

How banks are already banking on blockchain

House crypto

Despite most large banks taking an anti-Bitcoin stance, proprietary cryptocurrencies may be the next trend. JP Morgan Chase is currently piloting JPM Coin with a small set of clients. With JPM’s wholesale payments topping $6 trillion every day (through wire transfers that take days to process and complete), JPM Coin could offer significant speed, cost and service advantages to B2B customers.

Open APIs

Visa, MasterCard and Amex are in an arms race to patent and ship new blockchain payment technologies. Their open APIs such as Visa’s B2B Connect allow fintechs and other financial institutions to build custom solutions and payment integrations on top of their respective blockchain infrastructure, including smart contracts and expedited payment settlement to enhance their B2B services.

The B2B blockchain challenge…and the future

While banks and fintechs are wasting no time embracing blockchain, the challenge for B2B merchants remains a steep barrier to entry. Skilled blockchain developers are in high demand and low supply, and running and maintaining distributed ledgers requires hefty computing power.

We can expect that, as the blockchain market matures, banks and fintechs will open their infrastructure and APIs to third-party developers, including B2B merchants. Technology vendors may also begin to integrate blockchain technologies into their commerce solutions.

Delivering value, making the ROI case, retaining customers, growing accounts, recruiting top talent, forecasting, implementing a sales process, using sales technologies, winning against the competition, developing sales managers, coaching sales teams, generating leads, onboarding, productivity, compensation ...

There’s no shortage of challenges facing sales leaders, and it can be difficult to decide which deserve to be prioritized first.

The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research recently surveyed 423 sales, enablement, and company leaders to uncover their top challenges and priorities for the next 12 months.

After reviewing the results, we identified three sales enablement strategies to help leaders address top challenges they face and achieve their priorities.

Here’s what we found:

Top Sales Challenges

1. Recruiting and hiring
2. Lead quality and quantity
3. Developing sales skills
4. Developing sales managers

Top Sales Priorities

1. Improve ability to communicate value
2. Improve productivity of sellers and sales teams
3. Increase business with existing accounts
4. Improve customer retention, repeat business, and renewals
5. Improve sales opportunity approach and planning
6. Improve sellers’ ability to inspire with ideas
7. Win more against difficult competition
8. Improve sales manager effectiveness
9. Drive “new logos” / new accounts won
10. Optimize sales process
11. Increase the average size of sales

You might be thinking, “Why do you have 11 priorities? If you have 11, you have none.” These 11 are the priorities that more than 50% of sales leaders said were “very important.”

When we first saw these results, we thought, “We can’t have 11 initiatives. So how can we look at this and still tackle the majority of them well?” Here’s what we came up with.

3 Sales Enablement Strategies to Solve Challenges and Achieve Priorities

To address these priorities while also tackling three of the four top challenges (two through four), the focus should be on three sales enablement strategies.

For those sales organizations that can execute these initiatives well, it makes the top challenge of recruiting top sales talent much less important because you’ll be getting more out of your sales force and developing your own top talent.

1. Improve sales productivity

What if we told you that the productivity of your sales team could be increased by 46%? Sounds like a pipe dream, right? Well, maybe not.

In our Extreme Productivity Benchmark Report, we found that Extremely Productive people (XP) spend 46% more time each work day on their priorities (investment activities), compared to everyone else (The Rest). Furthermore, The Rest spend on average, 4.3 hours per work day on non-value add (Mandatory and Empty) activities. That’s 4.3 hours wasted each day.

It’s no wonder that improving the productivity of sellers and sales teams is the number two priority of sales enablement leaders cited by 65% of respondents.

The opportunity is there to add 46% more time, without adding new sellers. The good news is that productivity can be learned and changed.

2. Develop multi-skilled sellers

Today’s top sellers need to be better than ever. It used to be enough to have sellers who could lead great consultative sales conversations to win the deal.

Now you need sellers who can do that and prospect, bring value to their conversations over and above the product or service you offer, know your customers’ businesses, are masterful negotiators when dealing with procurement, understand how to grow accounts, and develop executive level relationships, to name a few.

This is probably why so many of the priorities that sales leaders focus involve some kind of skill issue.

You need sellers who can succeed across the Sales Competency WheelSM (the common competencies every organization should possess to build a truly successful sales organization).

Across sales skills and knowledge needed to drive sales performance, Top Performers have significantly stronger skills.

Must each seller master every one of these skills? No. That’s unrealistic. However, they should be better than they’ve ever been. It’s not enough to be a product expert and just pitch. Your sellers should excel across many of these competencies, and your focus should be on building a sales force that covers them all.

3. Leverage sales managers

Sales managers are the ones who work most closely with your sellers, day in and day out. They motivate, coach, keep sellers focused, provide feedback, help sellers win, and keep sellers on track to achieve their goals. Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.

Sales managers hold the keys to unlocking top sales performance. Yet 66% of companies don’t believe their managers have the skills necessary to manage and coach sellers.

That’s two-thirds of companies that don’t have skilled sales managers.

This presents a huge opportunity for sales organizations willing to invest in developing their sales managers and providing them with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to keep sellers motivated and hold them accountable, as well as manage a team that not only meets, but also exceeds sales goals.

I get asked this question a lot, and feel like it is one of the biggest reasons why salespeople are not successful and ultimately end up leaving the profession. Until you can overcome this fear, there is little chance that you will ever be successful. Your lack of confidence is quickly going to be seen by the customer and will either turn them off towards you or make them take advantage of you if they decide to buy.

Here’s a video on this topic:

 

 

Your lack of confidence stems from your unbelief in yourself and how you can help others. When you lack self-confidence, you feel that what you’re doing is intrusive and bothersome. The only way to overcome this is to stop and shift your thinking to the positive outcomes you help others achieve. Focus your thinking on all the ways that your customers have benefited from what you sell. The value you create is not in what you sell, it’s in the outcomes your customers achieve.

The second major area that destroys confidence is with those your associate. We become like those we most spend time with. It makes sense that if you associate with negative people, you will become negative. Personally, I choose to not associate with certain people because of their ongoing negativity. Instead, I intentionally seek out optimists, those people with a positive attitude and outlook on life. So, who do you need to replace in your life? It’s not harsh thinking. This is the real world, and if you want to be in the best position possible to help others, you must monitor closely those you connect with around you.

The third area to work on is setting goals you know you can achieve. Of course, we all want to set “shoot for the moon” goals but that’s a waste of time if you lack the confidence to accomplish even modest goals. I coach people to set simple goals that you know you can achieve right in the first hour of the day. It’s amazing how much confidence and momentum you gain by quickly achieving a simple goal. It sets you up to achieve the next one and and the next one. Then, with each one your confidence will increase and you’ll be more successful.

The fourth and final area to work on is take the time to thank others. Be fully aware of all that you have to be thankful for. Regardless of your situation, you have much to be thankful for. Take time each day to thank others, and take time each day to help someone else. You’ll be amazed at how much your own attitude and confidence changes when you help others and show gratitude. Confidence is not something you’re born with. Confidence is something you earn each day through your actions and how you choose to respond to things around you. The more confident you are, the more opportunities will come. Self-confidence is the foundation from which success is built.

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Result

By Tibor Shanto

While some may argue, salespeople are people, with all the pluses and minuses that come with that. One thing about people you can count on, is they usually find what they are looking for while ignoring the rest. Tell your reps to go out and find people with the pain our product and marketing people tell them they can cure. And that’s what they’ll do, go out and find people with that pain, and ignore all other opportunities that aren’t painted “pain.”  Not much point in talking solution until there is something to be solved.  Better to learn how to turn pains into priorities.

Disqualify to Fly

Most call this process qualification, a number of perfunctory questions to establish the level of quality of the opportunities inherent in a given account. When the prospect tics enough of the boxes, their qualified. You need to change that right away and reprogram your team to disqualify. The current approach tends to set the bar somewhat low, taking away valuable time that can be spent with real prospects. Add to that reps’ propensity to look at things with rose-tinted glasses. What would never qualify the first week of a quarter, looks absolutely promising as we pass the halfway mark, and approved by their manager.

This why teaching them to disqualify may seem counter-intuitive but leads to better opportunities. Sure, the overall number of opportunities may decline, but the quality and revues will rise. So will the number of time reps can spend time developing their skills and territories when they stop chasing marginal things.

More Priorities Than Pain

There is a way you can apply this mindset of disqualifying anything but the best opportunities and still grow. Stop telling your salespeople to look for buyers with pain and fixate them on priorities instead — the buyer’s priorities, not yours or your manager’s or the company. As I have mentioned in past posts, buyers who admit they are in pain or are acting to address that pain, make up a small, the smallest segment of the market. Everyone knows this, and everyone is actively chasing the same segment. (May explain the declining number of B2B reps exceeding quota).  But there are only so many fish to shoot in the barrel. Making quota we need to engage with buyers focused on their priorities in the absence of pain. Sure you can kick them in the shin, but that won’t make them a buyer, just in pain.

Their market experience reinforces this. Every time reps speak to Status Quo buyer and start and stick with pain, they experience a firm NO, if not more. Each time their message is rejected, they take that rejection to heart and share some of the blame on product and pricing. It quickly leads them to conclude that the only sales to be made are to those with pain — the home of declining opportunities.

Two Types of Priorities Will Emerge

Teach your reps to talk about priorities. People who have immediate pain will relate in their way, but so will people with no pain or need for instant results. At the risk of stating the obvious, priorities here is not a list of features they would look for in a product like yours. It is business priorities, usually defined in the accomplishments those priorities lead to. Meaning that the issue that sells, or what the prospect is willing to engage around, needs to be business grounded, and nothing else.

There are two ways you can help your reps focus on priorities and fully capitalize on opportunities. The first is the easier to get reps to try, as it resembles the pain sale they are used to. These are short term opportunities; some are part of the regular cyclicality, others are specific to that company, regulatory events, or other common triggers. These are easy to identify, and respond to, but are not always rooted in pain or need. Getting traction with buyers around something other than pain, need, or solution should expand their “vocabulary” and courage.

In practice, your reps will the ability to pursue and engage with “pain-free prospects”.  Prospects with whom your reps lead with impacts they have been able to deliver for with similar priorities to their current prospect.  This is where they engage on desired and achieved outcomes, independent of the product. For many salespeople, this is like walking a tightrope across Niagara. Talking shop without talking shop, what’s a seller to do?

Go Living In The Past

The answer is usually in your CRM; all you need to do is look. And many do, but with the same useless filters, they use to target buyers. They go looking for which pain and feature led to their success.  Leading to the same opportunity limiting loop, pain ueber alles, while missing everything different. I never understood why people feel the need to take sides. They either review all their losses, or all their wins, not both. Or all pipeline opportunities. When they do the review, it is usually a journey of validation, not learning or discovery.

You should be reviewing all opportunities that cross the starting line of your pipeline. Win, lose, or no-decision. No decisions being crucial, especially given the cost to not only sellers but buyers.  As mentioned in the past, we like to use the 360 Degree Deal Review. This allows our clients to see why things are truly turning out the way they are. More importantly, done right, MM, it can serve as a source of unique talking points with prospects.

Knowing how you have helped companies achieve specific goals is a start. Knowing what they were able to achieve with your product as the hidden enabler, not the front and centre feature.  Subject matter experts can talk about the subject. Product jockeys are left to ride those features in a race of business priorities.

Leaders can help their teams ignore the common and easy and focus on what counts. What counts for your buyers are their priorities, stop leading with your pain. Instead, lead with the success others would attribute to you, not a feature or spec they can buy cheaper elsewhere.

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The post Turn Pains Into Priorities appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

It seems that for decades, experts have been telling us to tear down the wall between sales and marketing. “Okay! We say yes! Love it! Let’s do that.” But how?

While the general concept of having a united messaging force makes a ton of sense, the precise method of how to align sales and marketing teams is underdeveloped. In a survey from JointheDots and LinkedIn, a majority of the 7,000 respondents—largely salespeople and marketers—said that misalignment between the two departments leads to poor financial performance, an unsatisfactory customer experience, and lower customer retention. A majority of those respondents, however, agreed that cross-team collaboration is crucial and leads to greater benefits. We’ve obviously got a long way to go.

Part of the problem is that marketing and sales teams have been raised on their own individual sets of metrics and goals. Marketing is measured on generating demand, and sales is responsible for conversion. But somewhere along the way, collaboration between the two departments became more of a challenge.

If these teams are going to work together as they should, it will be important for both to speak the same language and share the same goals, working together as they go.

Salespeople Are The Next Great Storytellers

Sometimes, by the time a brand story gets from the marketing department to sales teams, it’s notably different than how it started. While salespeople are trusted to know and communicate the narratives marketing creates, they often struggle to share them confidently with the customer because they tend to get less clear as they travel through the company.

A study by Stanford University found that when listening to speeches containing facts and stories, only 5% of students remembered the facts, while 63% remembered the story. Salespeople who can craft their facts into stories will be much more successful because stories are more relatable and more believable.

Marketers use narratives to draw customers’ attention to details they’ll relate to—problems they have, ideas they trust, and things they want. This creates interest, trust, and eventually belief. The best part about this truth, though, is that it doesn’t just apply to customers. If marketers can also move their sales comrades past knowledge and help them truly believe in the message they’re sharing, they can tell stories in a compelling way, which will empower sales to spur the customer on to purchase and loyalty.

Marketers Should Stay Involved In The Process

Marketers live and breathe the story of a brand or product, but they often struggle with it getting diluted as it moves away from them and through the sales funnel. We hear about this challenge again and again, but marketers get so used to it that they understandably give up trying to address it.

But giving up isn’t the answer. Marketers have the power to make a unified team a reality by sticking with the story and following it from inception to execution, even after it leaves their desks. “Hold the story longer” should be the new marketing mantra.

Picture it as if teams were writing a book. Marketers and salespeople each have their chapter to contribute, but if they’re not telling a single story, the book will stutter and confuse readers rather than engage and inspire them. As keepers of the story, marketers have a responsibility to guide it from the first chapter to the final page.

It’s Everyone’s Job To Keep The Story Straight

Mixed motives and messages can make sales and marketing teams feel distant from each other. According to research from the “2018 B2B Marketing-Sales Alignment Benchmark,”  salespeople and marketers have a lack of belief in each other. Only 43% of sellers and 32% of marketers believe their teams are using marketing messages to their full potential.

Holding the story longer can bring everyone involved closer together. If marketing teams are part of the process for longer, they will help sales teams feel more comfortable with the story and improve their confidence in retelling it. Doing this also gives marketers more control over the message that they’ve worked so hard to craft.

Follow these tips to tell a single story:

Talk To Your Teams

Remember that you’re not going it alone as a marketing department. Talk to front-line employees to see what they think of the messages you’re promoting. Understanding their point of view will let you know where the weak spots might be or where you need to provide support, which will ultimately strengthen your message across the board.

Make Connections Internally Before Connecting With Customers

On that note, make sure you don’t just expect sales to tell the story perfectly without help. It’s important that you translate messages for sales teams so the messaging means something to them. If your front-line employees can connect with the story, it’ll be that much more powerful when they help customers connect to it, too.

Take Time

Make sure you’re willing to put in the time your sales teams deserve. If you want them to be engaging storytellers, spend some time helping them understand the narrative so they don’t feel like they’re out-of-the-know or rushed. It will also allow them to take the story and adapt if for their style and voice. That ensures they will deliver the story in a convincing way.

Ultimately, the heart of the idea is to tell a single, consistent story to customers. When you take the time to tell this story to your front-line teams first, you let them connect with it before they have to share it with customers confidently and passionately. If all departments work together, a powerful story can be shared with every listener.

The post Marketing And Sales Need to Rally Around A Single Story appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

• Business Insider has selected the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.
• The list includes scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs fighting to make US healthcare better for everyone.
• Among the honorees are a physicist tackling cancer, a lawyer who guides startups, and a pharmacist changing how patients are cared for.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Healthcare in the US costs more than anywhere else in the world.

For our money, we do get cutting-edge drugs and medical tech. But Americans still die younger than people in other wealthy countries, and healthcare remains out of reach for many.

Meet the people fighting to make the $3.5 trillion US healthcare system better for everyone. They're looking to big data to fight diseases, bringing care to more people in innovative ways, and using new technologies to develop cures.

For that work, they've been named to Business Insider's list of the 30 leaders under 40 who are working to transform US healthcare.

As we selected the list, we were looking for doctors, scientists, executives, and entrepreneurs who are dedicating themselves to improving the way we take care of patients and keeping people healthy.

The 30 people below were selected from hundreds of nominations, based on their potential to improve healthcare. The list is arranged alphabetically.

Read on to meet the top young leaders transforming the future of healthcare.

Blythe Adamson, 34, is using data from cancer-technology company Flatiron to do health research 50 times as fast.

Blythe Adamson moved her family from Seattle to New York for the information that health-tech company Flatiron Health has.

"I dragged my kids across the country so I could get access to this data," Adamson, now a senior quantitative scientist at Flatiron, said.

In her role, Adamson works with universities to mine Flatiron's data, using it to advance projects with researchers. Adamson started her career as a researcher, first in HIV-vaccine development and later in health economics, most recently at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

What excited her was the potential of the information Flatiron had on hand. For instance, Adamson was the lead author on a study that explored how the Affordable Care Act affected access to cancer care, finding that in states that broadened access to Medicaid, the disparity between white and black cancer patients was virtually erased. Adamson started the work as part of a Flatiron hackathon.

The idea came from attending a conference in 2018 and seeing work evaluating the effects of the ACA. Adamson noticed that most researchers had access to data only from 2014, too soon after the law went into effect for any clear signals. In contrast, she used data from as recently as this February for the study presented in June.

"What used to take me two to three years now takes two to three weeks," Adamson said.

—Lydia Ramsey

Gil Addo, 33, and Carlos Reines, 34, want to make it easier for everyone to get healthcare.

Gil Addo and Carlos Reines founded RubiconMD in 2013 to make it easier for people to get expert advice on their healthcare from medical specialists.

With the US facing a shortage of doctors as the population ages, it's critical to find new ways of spreading medical expertise. The founders say the platform can be helpful in rural areas where there aren't many doctors, and for low-income people too.

RubiconMD lets an individual's primary-care doctor consult with specialists for help treating complicated or unusual conditions (say an endocrinologist for diabetes or a cardiologist for heart trouble). In many cases, it can replace costly visits and save people months of waiting to get an appointment.

About half the business is linked to the Medicaid health program for people with low incomes, and RubiconMD is catching on in health plans that serve the elderly as well. Typically, health insurers or health systems purchase a subscription to RubiconMD; the service isn't designed for individuals.

RubiconMD has published some data showing that its service can help people avoid specialist visits and help doctors take better care of patients. A more limited analysis suggests it can save money.

The platform is available in 36 states, and Reines and Addo say they plan to keep growing. They're even getting inquiries from other countries, they said.

—Zachary Tracer

Iyah Romm, 35, and Toyin Ajayi, 38, are using teamwork to take care of patients.

Iyah Romm and Toyin Ajayi tried to change the healthcare system from within, before realizing they could have a greater influence from without.

So two years ago, after long stints at established health plans and state health departments, the pair started Cityblock Health, a spinout from Google parent company Alphabet. Their vision is a model of care that emphasizes preventive health and seeks to treat people in need with respect, recognition, and empathy.

"We think there's an imperative to deliver a modern experience of healthcare that delivers to underserved populations," Ajayi told Business Insider. "And there's a business case there as well."

With Cityblock, there's no single physician calling the shots for a patient. Instead, the company uses a team-based approach to healthcare that unites primary-care providers, specialists, and social workers.

The teams meet patients in their communities and come up with personalized plans to get their health on track. Rather than focusing exclusively on later-stage treatments like medications, the teams also consider preventive variables like patients' diets and sources of emotional support.

Romm and Ajayi's goal? "Totally changing the landscape for what healthcare looks like for underserved populations," Romm said.

—Erin Brodwin

Allison Baker, 29, is prescribing food as medicine at Kroger grocery stores and asking health insurers to pay for it.

As a high schooler, Allison Baker's love of food led to hosting dinner parties for friends. After graduating, she decided to pursue a career at a culinary institute that had an emphasis on food innovation.

While studying nutrition, she shifted her focus to the field of dietetics. She started working at hospitals, but then, while earning her master's, she learned about retail nutrition.

Baker is now the director of nutrition at Kroger, where she oversees a team of dieticians and works with Kroger Health president Colleen Lindholz on the health strategy for the biggest grocery chain in the US, including pharmacy, clinics, and nutrition.

When Baker first joined Kroger, her job was to help coordinate the dietitians working across the organization. There are a lot of ways dieticians work across Kroger's 2,800 grocery stores, by providing food samples, teaching healthy recipes, and consulting with patients.

More recently, Baker's been working to find ways to use the expertise of the dieticians. Kroger's goal is to decrease the number of prescriptions dispensed in favor of promoting healthier lifestyles and food choices to grocery and pharmacy customers.

Kroger is also looking to get paid by insurers. Health insurers already pay for dietician services, such as coaching. Baker wants to get them to pay for a "food benefit," in the same way they cover a procedure or a pill. The hope is to have insurers pay for a box of healthy food to be shipped to a member's house.

—Lydia Ramsey

Ambar Bhattacharyya, 36, wants to help more people get affordable care.

Ambar Bhattacharyya might be sick at the sight of blood, but that hasn't stopped the 36-year-old from shaping the way millions of Americans get healthcare.

Bhattacharyya was the eighth employee at MinuteClinic, an urgent-care startup that was acquired by CVS in 2006, and led the chain's national expansion. Now he manages the healthcare investing arm of Maverick Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC that oversees $400 million.

Bhattacharyya spent his childhood helping manage his father's neurology practice, first in rural Virginia, then in rural California. Many of his father's patients had low incomes. Sometimes they paid him in fruit.

So Bhattacharyya knew from the beginning he wanted to help make the system more affordable. He saw people struggling to get care, which led him to believe that healthcare should be more accessible too.

Today, he says the best way to achieve both goals is to think about healthcare from the perspective of the consumer first. For example, MinuteClinic thrived when it extended its hours to be open for working parents at times when traditional doctor's offices were closed.

"It's one of those things where it was, like, grocery stores don't close at 5 p.m.," Bhattacharyya told Business Insider. "Why should healthcare be like this?"

—Erin Brodwin

Daniel Brillman, 35, is bridging the gap between healthcare and social services.

In 2010, Dan Brillman, a US Air Force Reserve pilot, decided to go to Columbia Business School after his first deployment to the Middle East. During his second year, veterans with whom he was deployed called to ask about health and social services. After some inquiries and searching, Brillman found the healthcare system complicated to navigate.

"I became very frustrated because it was so fragmented and I had to sift through the system on behalf of the people I was trying to help," Brillman told Business Insider.

He wrote a paper on his experience, which was noticed by the dean, who connected Brillman with Brad Harrison, the head of Scout Ventures, who encouraged the business idea.

In 2013, Brillman cofounded Unite Us, a platform that helps connect healthcare providers and hospitals to social-service providers like food banks and homeless shelters. The platform tracks the health outcomes of those they serve.

Unite Us works in 55 communities in 23 states. By the end of the year, over 10,000 healthcare, government, and social-service organizations will be included in its networks. The company recently struck a big partnership with CVS Health to aid some of its insurance customers.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Alexandra Broadus, 35, is changing the way Walgreens pharmacists practice in their communities.

Alexandra Broadus, 35, has been working at Walgreens for almost 19 years, starting as a pharmacy technician while still in high school. She'd planned to study journalism in college, but after working in the pharmacy pursued pharmacy school instead.

She started on a local level working to build out programs with health systems and health plans, until a job opened up in Chicago, where Broadus grew up. She was enticed by the promise that she'd get to change the way pharmacy is practiced.

The idea is simple: Pharmacists frequently tend to see patients living with chronic conditions such as diabetes. Right now, pharmacists are paid based on the prescriptions they're dispensed. But if you could pay the pharmacists to intervene, it could help keep patients healthier. Broadus is working toward that for Walgreens' 9,560 pharmacies.

"My goal is, how do I give our pharmacists the tools and resources that they need to practice at the top of their license and do so easily in a way that patients can quickly get the care that they need when they're coming to visit the pharmacy," Broadus said.

For instance, say a pharmacist notices that a patient with diabetes isn't taking a cholesterol drug but should. If the pharmacist suggests that change and the doctor agrees, can the pharmacist get paid by a health plan for that work? That's a big area she's been working on in her first 10 months on the job.

—Lydia Ramsey

For Emily Drabant Conley, 37, changing the healthcare system through genetics is a personal mission

A passion for genetics seized Emily Drabant Conley during her first job out of college. Working at the National Institutes of Health, which she describes as "Disneyland for research," Conley, who studied psychology and business in college, became fascinated by the role genetics might play in people's brains and diseases such as anxiety and depression.

Conley went on to get a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford before venturing into the business world, snagging a job at a new startup with 30 employees called 23andMe. 

"The cool thing about a company that small is you kind of get to do anything," she said.

Conley had been hired to run research, and it was through vetting external research inquiries that she got involved in 23andMe's business development.

The role was a perfect fit for Conley, who had always been interested in business, science, and people. She worked to ink partnerships with drug companies like Genentech, Pfizer, and, last year, GlaxoSmithKline, while helping fundraise, including a $250 million round for 23andMe in 2017.

The partnerships give drug companies access to 23andMe data with personal information removed to find new targets for their drugs. "I felt like this was exactly what I was meant to do," said Conley, who's now 23andMe's vice president of business development.

—Emma Court

Paul Coyne, 33, is using his experience as a patient and provider to change healthcare for the better.

A heart condition from childhood meant that Paul Coyne got more exposure to the healthcare system at a young age than most. Then, at 22, on the weekend before he graduated from college, Coyne had a stroke.

The experience took years to recover from and would spur Coyne to go back to school, earning a number of degrees, including in nursing and business. To change the healthcare industry, stepping outside of the "little boxes" that it puts people into is crucial, he said.

Today, the 33-year-old's career spans healthcare, business, and technology. He's a nurse practitioner who leads a team of 60 at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, while overseeing the hospital's data-science efforts around nursing.

Coyne also cofounded and serves as president of health-tech startup Inspiren, which puts medical practitioners and technologists into the same room to "meet the true clinical needs of the everyday provider."

Ultimately, Coyne says his career and motivations in healthcare go back to his experiences being sick and living with a chronic disease.

"Walking around the hospital, I always picture myself in the bed," he says. "Most technology I've invented is always from the perspective of me as a patient."

—Emma Court

Joshua DeFonzo, 38, is overseeing strategy at J&J’s $3.4 billion surgical-robot startup.

Joshua DeFonzo said he got lucky with his first job in healthcare. Straight out of college, he took a job as a sales representative for the medical-device company Medtronic, which launched him into the medical-technology industry. "I realize now I was very fortunate to get that job," DeFonzo said.

Since then DeFonzo's worked for companies like NuVasive, Confluent Surgical, and NeuroLogica, commercializing the companies' technologies. In 2015, he became chief commercial officer for CareDx, a company that uses genomics and other technologies to help organ-transplant patients.

That same year he was hired as an independent contractor at Auris Health, a health-tech company that makes a controller-operated robotic camera, helping doctors see inside the body. The hope is to use the device to do surgery, too. He became vice president of clinical innovation in 2016 and then chief strategy officer in 2018.

DeFonzo said he was drawn to Auris because of the potential of the company's technology. "It's the future of healthcare," DeFonzo said.

In April, Auris was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $3.4 billion. Once the deal closed, DeFonzo was made chief operating officer, overseeing Auris' integration with the giant healthcare company.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Sean Duffy, 35, is providing care digitally for diabetes and depression.

Sean Duffy is the cofounder and CEO of Omada Health, a startup that lets people access healthcare virtually. Designed for people with diabetes and other obesity-related conditions, Omada recently began expanding to help treat mental-health conditions too.

The son of an engineer and a nurse, Duffy, who is 35, planned to work in either tech or medicine. But the decision was made for him, he says.

While pursuing a joint MD-MBA program at Harvard, Duffy got the chance to team up with Adrian James, Omada's cofounder and, at the time, the medical-products lead at the global design firm Ideo. Together, the pair got to work on a startup designed to bridge tech and healthcare.

Eventually, that company became Omada. Duffy never looked back. "I started waking up imagining a world where something like Omada existed," Duffy told Business Insider. "It was obligatory, in my view, to run with it."

Duffy sees Omada becoming what he calls "the healthcare provider of tomorrow," where the majority of care is delivered remotely through a combination of video, text, and peer support. That flips the current model — where the first line of treatment usually involves a trip to the doctor — on its head. "I believe about 80% of care can be done digitally," Duffy added.

—Erin Brodwin

Chris Esguerra, 39, is redefining what healthcare means to get patients care for conditions that have been overlooked for too long.

Chris Esguerra learned the power of a supportive community at age 7. He and his family were newly arrived immigrants in California, but "it didn't feel like it was hard because we were always part of a community, always embraced," he said.

Esguerra, 39, brings that experience and his background as a psychiatrist to his role as senior medical director of Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, where his team focuses on members covered by the government programs Medicare and Medicaid.

Because those individuals often have health conditions and need different kinds of social support, Esguerra sees his job as redrawing the lines of traditional healthcare, so it encompasses things like helping people who struggle to get reliable access to food.

That includes treating patients for diabetes alongside food insecurity, by creating a "social needs care specialist" that doctors at his health plan's two primary care clinics could refer their patients to when they didn't have enough to eat.

"We're redefining what health really means, and in that we're saying that health isn't always about when you're sick, health is about all of the other aspects in your life that affect you," like food insecurity and healthcare disparities, he says.

Esguerra says it's the right thing to do, but he also makes a business case for it. Creating the "social needs care specialist" saved Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan $4 million in hospitalizations last year alone.

—Emma Court

Mariya Filipova, 35, is using her firsthand experience with healthcare to better shape where it’s heading.

Mariya Filipova began her career in finance, working at Barclays in London through the financial crisis.

The crisis taught her how to navigate complex situations when things go wrong. And it showed her the importance of leaders who could evaluate a situation from different perspectives.

Healthcare, from where she sits, is a heavily regulated industry that's headed for a massive transition as well, and stands to benefit from leaders with those skills, she said.

"I personally am on a mission to help leaders and people who have been in healthcare for decades, doing things in the business-as-usual mindset, see things that could be done differently," Filipova said.

About 18 months ago, Filipova's life took an unexpected turn when she was diagnosed with a kidney tumor. "I learned more about healthcare in my experience in 18 months as a patient than my entire decade as an adviser," Filipova said.

When Filipova was ready to go back to work, she made the move over to Anthem, where she joined as the vice president of innovation. She made the decision in part because Gail Boudreaux had recently stepped in as CEO and was building a digital strategy.

On the innovation team, she helps look for new investments. Her team also helps other parts of the organization with digital projects, such as predicting if a member might call about a problem and proactively reaching out instead. They also collaborate with other organizations to pin down how the healthcare industry can use new technologies like blockchain.

—Lydia Ramsey

Hadiyah-Nicole Green, 38, is using physics to fight cancer and create an alternative to chemotherapy.

Hadiyah-Nicole Green, a physicist whose research focuses on fighting cancer, says she got interested in combating the disease because of her personal experience.

The day after Green graduated from Alabama A&M University, her aunt who raised her told her she had cancer and that she didn't want to undergo treatment.

"She chose to die, rather than experience the side effects of chemotherapy," Green told Business Insider.

Three months after her aunt passed away, her uncle was diagnosed with cancer. As he was treated, Green saw her uncle experience the side effects of chemotherapy. Seeing her aunt and uncle struggle with cancer became a turning point.

"I wanted to change the way we treat cancer, and that became my mission in life," she said.

After finishing her doctorate in physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2016, she founded the Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation, named after her aunt.

Green is now an assistant professor at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. She's working on a cancer treatment that uses lasers and nanotechnology to fight the disease. So far, it's been tested only in mice, but the early results are promising, Green said. She plans to use funds raised by the foundation to get the treatment into trials in people.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Kristen Park Hopson, 39, is building personalized treatments that could revolutionize medicines for cancer and other diseases.

When Kristen Park Hopson graduated from college, she was just starting to realize a growing interest in science research. So she did what a lot of people do but don't always admit: Hopson "shamelessly" moved back into her parents' basement in Vermont to work as a research associate at University of Vermont's medical school.

Today Hopson, who holds a doctorate in molecular medicine from Boston University School of Medicine, directs key cancer research at the fast-growing buzzy biotech Moderna.

The 39-year-old leads research projects, including on the company's signature personalized cancer vaccines, which are custom-built for each patient in an effort to fight off the disease better. Its two furthest-along cancer vaccine products are in relatively early on in development, or early and mid-stage trials, respectively.

The work "is really transforming not only the way you think about treating a patient but also the way you think about making medicines," she says. "The possibilities could be endless."

—Emma Court

Shrenik Jain, 23, and Ravi Shah, 28, created a social network to help people with addiction.

Shrenik Jain and Ravi Shah are tackling one of the most neglected areas of healthcare: substance use. Their platform, called Marigold Health, is designed to help people with addiction recover by connecting them to a network of peers.

Jain, 23, got the idea for Marigold after spending two years working as a Baltimore EMT and regularly reviving people who'd overdosed on opioids. His cofounder, Shah, 27, watched a close friend who had depression. Both quickly realized that the people they were trying to help lacked the social support needed to stabilize them. "For interventions to work, you need very continuous care," Jain told Business Insider.

So to provide that kind of regular support, Jain and his cofounder, Shah, created a text-based platform that allows people with addiction to tap into a social network tailored to their needs. The goal is to engage people and give them tools to motivate one another.

Marigold recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from the influential Silicon Valley health venture fund Rock Health. Other backers include Rough Draft Ventures of General Catalyst, the Cambridge-based VC that's funded successful startups like Jet, Snap Inc., and Kayak, as well as the tech venture arm of Johns Hopkins University.

—Erin Brodwin

Christos Kyratsous, 38, is figuring out how to tackle infectious diseases while also putting microbes to use in tough-to-treat conditions

Christos Kyrastous studied pharmacy before heading to New York to study microbiology at Columbia. He joined the Tarrytown, New York, drugmaker Regenron after working as a researcher at New York University.

"I always liked basic biology, but I always had this idea of applying the knowledge that we get from human biology to help human health," Kyratsous said.  Eight years in, he's now the vice president of research for infectious diseases and viral vector technologies, a job that has two parts.

First, he oversees the development of drugs to treat diseases such as Ebola. He's also helping develop new technologies for treatments like gene therapy, in which a virus delivers information to help the body produce something it wasn't making otherwise.

To start, Regeneron is working with companies like gene-editing biotech Intellia Therapeutics and hearing-loss biotech Decibel Therapeutics to develop treatments as well as working with companies trying to infect cancer tumors with viruses that fight cancer, known as oncolytic viruses.

—Lydia Ramsey

Kimber Lockhart, 33, is building a healthcare guide for every patient.

As the chief technology officer of primary-care operator One Medical, Kimber Lockhart is working on a suite of tools designed to improve the patient experience, from the time someone reaches out about a health symptom to the time they check out of the doctor's office.

Today, there's an unfair burden on patients to be their own health experts and advocates, Lockhart says. That means that patients can end up talking to the wrong type of clinician or wasting time or money on unnecessary visits or treatments. Lockhart, 32, aims for One Medical to solve that problem by providing the support that patients need.

"Oftentimes we leave patients to fend for themselves, whether it's deciding to get primary care or virtual care or specialty care," Lockhart told Business Insider.

"Wouldn't it be great if everyone had a guide to be able to say, 'Hey, is this the kind of thing I can video-chat with someone about? Or should I come in and see someone? Or do I need a specialist?'"

She sees One Medical's app and much of its software as that guide.

"We do as much as we can to shoulder the burden with patients," Lockhart said.

—Erin Brodwin

Aziz Nazha, 35, is using AI to move healthcare into the 21st century and take better care of patients.

Aziz Nazha always loved computers. But when he took a national exam for universities in Syria, where he grew up, Nazha qualified for the most competitive option instead: medical school.

After medical school, Nazha came to the US to do research and his residency. Today, the 35-year-old physician melds the two interests as director of the Cleveland Clinic Center of Clinical Artificial Intelligence, where he hopes to use the technology to change how doctors think about medicine.

"Computer scientists and statisticians don't speak physicians' languages and vice versa," Nazha told Business Insider, a gap that he also sees as an opportunity to bridge. "It's very hard, by the way. You go and get a lot of resistance from old guys who don't get this technology."

Even creating the center, announced in March, wasn't easy. It took about a year of convincing the institution. Nazha has also worked to create a new coding course for Cleveland Clinic's medical school, something intended to be a model for medical schools struggling to add AI to their curriculums.

As a physician, Nazha has been frustrated by the trial-and-error process to treating cancer with chemotherapy, since there's no way to know which patients will respond best to which treatment option. AI technology could start changing that, he said.

"I always tell people that AI is a tool, and what I use it for is to solve a problem," Nazha said.

—Emma Court

Vinay Prasad, 36, is the Twitter firebrand pushing back on Big Pharma and standing up for patients.

Vinay Prasad is speaking and tweeting truth to power. The 36-year-old hematologist-oncologist, cancer researcher, and associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University wants more of the treatments that doctors offer to help patients in the ways they care about.

A big part of that means combating the hype around new cancer drugs, which are often praised as game changers but are instead typically "marginal at best" in terms of benefit to patients, he said. And Prasad isn't afraid to make a few enemies.

The oncologist says drugs need to be evaluated from the frame of what they do for patients, something a shift to new kinds of research measurements intended to expedite drug development has neglected.

For everything from how cancer drugs are approved to the way treatments are priced, "a misconception is that we are doing the best job we can," he says. "There's tremendous room for improvement."

—Emma Court

Angela Profeta, 37, is working to change how we think about urgent care.

Early in Angela Profeta's career, she worked at nonprofit in Nicaragua, where she saw firsthand what happens when people don't get adequate healthcare. Upon her return to New York, she pursued a master's in health policy, and she's just finished working on her doctorate in health policy and economics at New York University. She decided to focus on the issue of healthcare access in the US, rather than internationally.

"Healthcare access is an issue everywhere, and its connection to poverty in connection to the financial lives of people is a problem everywhere," Profeta said.

At the same time, Profeta worked as a consultant, working with healthcare companies including urgent-care firm CityMD. At the time it had only a few locations. What drew her to CityMD was that it was helping New Yorkers get healthcare.

At CityMD she's the chief strategy officer, a role that entails working with health plans and providers, getting them to work with the urgent care operator in ways they haven't in the past. For instance, she's worked with health systems to keep some of CityMD's centers open later, taking the burden off nearby emergency rooms.

CityMD recently announced that it's combining with Summit Medical Group, a New Jersey doctor group. Profeta plans to be the chief strategy officer of the combined company.

—Lydia Ramsey

Andrew Schutzbank, 37, is improving patient care with new medical record technologies.

In the second year of his internal-medicine training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Andrew Schutzbank met Rushika Fernandopulle, the CEO of Iora Health. Initially scheduled as a 10-minute meeting, the two talked for an hour and a half about a new way of providing primary care.

After finishing his residency, Schutzbank was hired by Fernandopulle to be an assistant medical director. Now Schutzbank has a bigger role at Iora, overseeing growth, managing teams across eight states and implementing new technologies to deliver better patient care.

"Our goal is to take excellent care of patients and change healthcare while doing it," Schutzbank told Business Insider.

Iora is a primary-care practice trying to improve healthcare by offering longer doctor's visits, follow-up calls, and more hands-on care. Iora works with "sponsors," mainly employers or Medicare Advantage health plans for the elderly, to cover the cost.

To aid Iora's mission, Schutzbank has overseen the integration of Chirp, the organization's own electronic health-record system. The system is designed to accomplish everything necessary for individual patients within one workflow so that physicians and care teams have better quality time with their patients.

"In medicine, it's been transaction style over relationships," Schutzbank said. "For 10 years we've tried to make a business model to put patients' needs first and minimize transactions."

—Clarrie Feinstein

Emily Silgard, 36, is using data science to improve cancer treatment.

Every day Emily Silgard, a data-science manager and team lead at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, walks by the wards of the patients she's trying to help. Silgard is using advanced techniques to help doctors and researchers at Fred Hutch come up with new approaches to treating cancer.

"Research studies take years and years to complete, so it feels very hopeless when an illness can only take months to progress," Silgard told Business Insider. "There's a very real reminder every day that we need to move much, much faster."

Having worked the past seven years at Fred Hutch in Seattle, Silgard has made strides in the data-science field. She uses natural-language processing (computers dealing with human language) to advance oncology research by accessing clinical data from medical records more quickly.

Silgard and her team also collaborated with faculty to develop predictive models to assist in preventive care. And she was the lead developer on a project using natural-language processing to search lung cancer patients' records for treatable mutations.

"We're using machine learning and automation to help speed up the loop between bench and bedside," Silgard said, "to help ascertain how we can improve patients' quality of life, and generally how we can enable our researchers to find cures."

—Clarrie Feinstein

Ariane Tschumi, 35, helps healthcare startups stay on the right side of the law.

Healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries in the US. That means it can be easy for disruptive startups to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Ariane Tschumi's job is to keep them out of trouble.

Tschumi is the general counsel at Galileo, a startup that's working to make it easier for people to get access to healthcare. "I don't see myself as a lawyer, as a 'no' person. It's a 'how do we get there' — it's a 'yes and,'" she said. "It is ultimately about calibrating risk for a company."

Tschumi previously worked with startups like Oscar Health and Cityblock Health. She has undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard and worked on healthcare-innovation policy as a presidential management fellow in the Obama administration.

Tschumi said she got interested in healthcare while working in Aceh, Indonesia, to help people recover from the 2004 tsunami. Ultimately, she decided that to help transform healthcare she needed a better understanding of the laws and regulations that shape it.

"My background as a lawyer comes from an interest in the policy and regulatory world and very much that systems-change perspective," she said. "How do we change the law to promote more innovative healthcare models, and separately, how do we operate within those innovative contexts."

—Zachary Tracer

Sara Vaezy, 36, is mapping out the digital future of the hospital.

Sara Vaezy came to Providence St. Joseph Health by accident. Vaezy, who has a background in healthcare administration and policy, had been working as a hospital consultant.

Along the way she had asked her team to prepare a case study on Providence, the West Coast-based health system that runs 51 hospitals and made $24 billion in 2018.

She had learned that Aaron Martin, a former Amazon executive, had joined the organization as its chief digital officer. Martin called her, and their initial conversation lasted two and a half hours. Vaezy, who hadn't spent much time working with folks with technology backgrounds, was surprised by Martin's energy.

"It was unusual in his steadfastness, in 'It's going to be super difficult, we're trying to do 40 years of work within 10 years, and that is very exciting rather than deterring,'" Vaezy recalled of his mindset. In two months, Vaezy had moved to Seattle to join the organization. "I caught the bug," she said.

Three and a half years in, Vaezy is chief digital strategy officer for Providence, working to figure out the strategy that will ideally make care accessible and affordable. For instance, Providence is working on spinning out a same-day-care platform called ExpressCare aimed at helping patients book appointments, as well as formalizing an internal incubator.

—Lydia Ramsey

Sara Wajnberg, 36, is betting a better user experience could improve our relationship with health insurers.

Sara Wajnberg, now the chief product officer at health-insurance startup Oscar Health, joined the company in its early days six years ago.

Wajnberg had a background working in product but hadn't worked in healthcare. Her sister was leading the product team at another company backed by Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital and introduced her to the team. "I was pretty much sold immediately," Wajnberg said.

Wajnberg oversees the technology Oscar uses from the app that members use to the technology the company uses to process insurance claims. Oscar offers health-insurance plans on the individual exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act, plans to small businesses, and, in 2020, Medicare Advantage plans.

Along the way, she and the team realized that there would be a lot they'd have to build themselves, rather than relying on other software services to do it for them. She also helped oversee the development of Oscar's concierge service, which connects members to a team of healthcare professionals that help members navigate benefits and questions about their health.

—Lydia Ramsey

Ben Wanamaker, 37, finds ways to make Aetna members healthier with the help of technology.

Starting out, Ben Wanamaker hadn't expected to get into healthcare. He had a background in finance and worked in consulting before joining a medical-device company. Then he went to work with a Harvard professor, Clayton Christensen, at his think tank, which got him thinking about the roles consumers and corporations play in healthcare.

The way he saw it, "They don't need to be at odds," Wanamaker said. His work led him to Walmart, working on its Care Clinics, where customers could get primary-care services. Wanamaker then headed to one of the largest health insurers in the US, Aetna, where he's now the head of consumer technology and services. (Aetna in 2018 was acquired by CVS Health.)

Wanamaker's job is to figure out how to get Aetna members healthier with the help of programs like one the insurer has with Apple called Attain. The program is a bet that an app and a smartwatch can make you healthier. Two months in, Wanamaker said, people are using the Attain program at a higher rate than he had expected, though it's still too early to get results.

—Lydia Ramsey

Kaja Wasik, 35, is studying the complex interplay between medications and our DNA.

Kaja Wasik has been defying institutional barriers since she was a teenager. Born and raised in Poland, Wasik didn't get a computer until she was 14. And she says she didn't realize how powerful it could be until she moved to the US at 25.

Today, as cofounder and chief science officer of a startup called Variant Bio, Wasik, now 35, is working to develop drugs by studying people with diverse genomes.

The idea came to Wasik after she noticed that people in dozens of countries in the Pacific Islands and Africa were being largely left out of genetics research. "If you don't have European ancestry," Wasik told Business Insider, "you just can't get the same quality of health information." That's particularly relevant when it comes to drugs. White Europeans make up roughly 78% of genetic databases. Wasik hopes to change that.

In the next decade, she hopes to create a pipeline of new drugs based on this research in genetically underrepresented populations and also in populations with unusual medically relevant traits. While the work will focus on underrepresented groups, it'll have benefits for everyone as we learn more about the complex interplay between medications and our DNA.

"These discoveries won't be applicable only to those diverse individuals but to everyone," she said.

—Erin Brodwin
 This slide has been updated to clarify when Wasik first got a computer.

Jonathon Whitton, 36, is working to halt hearing loss with gene therapy.

Jonathon Whitton saw firsthand how his grandfather withdrew from the family as his hearing deteriorated. "Within our family, I watched him disconnect," Whitton said.

For Whitton, the ability to communicate is a profound means for people to connect. This belief led him to train to be an audiologist at the University of Louisville and to work as a pediatric audiologist. In 2010, he started his doctorate in the health, science, and technology program at MIT, focusing his research on developing therapeutics for hearing.

As he was finishing the program in 2016, Whitton was approached by Decibel Therapeutics and hired to work on therapies for hearing loss. "It was the right time and the right place, with people from the inner-ear biology world and the drug development world coming together," he said.

Before becoming the director of clinical development last year, he was the associate director of drug discovery. At Decibel, Whitton has worked on developing drugs and on clinical trials for the company's hearing treatments.

Two treatments he's working on are being tested in early-stage trials in people. One is designed to protect hearing in people receiving cancer treatments that can harm their ears. Another is a drug to prevent people's hearing from being harmed by certain antibiotics.

—Clarrie Feinstein

Gerren Wilson, 38, is fighting to bring communities of color into pharmaceutical company research and ensure that drugs of the future are inclusive.

Gerren Wilson became interested in a career in healthcare early on. While growing up in a big family in St. Louis, Missouri, Wilson would hear relatives talk about their health issues and medicines they were taking. In college at Morehouse, in Atlanta, Wilson observed that "even within black men there was a lot of diversity in backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs."

The 38-year-old brings those experiences to bear at the pharmaceutical company Genentech, which is owned by the Swiss drug giant Roche, where he works to get more diverse groups of patients involved in the company's research for new drugs, keeping in mind the many ways that the healthcare system has historically wronged people of color.

Wilson's work spans Genentech's own research, collaborations with physicians and healthcare groups, patient communities, and government representatives, all in the aim of advancing more inclusive research. The work is important because drugs have historically been tested mostly in white men, and therapies don't work the same across different people.

"Healthcare is an industry where, in order to be a part of this, you empathize with helping others," he says. "That's central to what you want to accomplish."

—Emma Court

Much has been made of the argument that Account-Based Marketing (ABM) gained traction so quickly in B2B marketing primarily because traditional, funnel-based demand generation has stopped working. A recent video making the rounds on LinkedIn asked: “Is Demand Generation Losing its Effectiveness?” (The answer provided was: yes.)

The real answer to that question, I would argue, is more nuanced. Yes, many companies are seeing lower returns from traditional demand gen. I would also allow that many of those same companies could benefit greatly from integrating ABM into their overall demand gen mix. But it would be a mistake to suggest that ABM somehow “replaces” demand generation or that the funnel-based approach is an idea past its time.

Instead, the real problem with modern demand generation is the way in which it’s practiced. I argued previously in this space that one of the primary drivers for ABM, and the frustration that sales professionals rightly feel at the inability of marketing to deliver qualified leads, is that companies are just really bad at lead nurturing. More broadly, it’s not that demand generation has stopped working. It’s more a case that demand generation is being executed poorly.

In this context, it’s ironic that ABM is painted as requiring such a disciplined, strategic approach. To be successful, we’re told, ABM requires a deep understanding of one’s target audience (including personas and buying centers), an abundance of personalized, relevant content, and success metrics that align with specific, quantitative goals and even buying stages. All of which is true. And ironic, because if only demand generation were executed with the same discipline, sales wouldn’t be baying quite so loudly for a switch to ABM.

In the last 5-10 years, demand generation has become overwhelmingly technology-driven, and largely tactical. Demand marketers have fallen victim to the siren call of vendors who would have us believe that finding the right buyer, at the right time, with the right need is really just a matter of having the right data or software. Whether it’s intent data or BANT-qualified cost per lead (CPL) programs, demand gen has become a race to the next short cut.

 

If only it were that easy. Marketers have more options, more channels, more technologies at their disposal than ever, but good, effective demand generation will always be more than a series of one-off tactics. For traditional, funnel-based demand generation to be a worthy complement to ABM, certain fundamentals are required: Precise, quantitative goals by which success will be measured

* A solid understanding of the target personas and their pain points
* Relevant content that speaks to those pain points and provides information of value
* A cohesive message and creative platform that extends across all channels
* Critically, a program to filter, qualify, nurture and convert leads to sales-ready prospects

If “demand generation” means no more than a LinkedIn ad and a handful of leads purchased through content syndication, then yes: demand generation will continue to disappoint. Alternatively, if demand generation is afforded the same strategic focus, discipline, and orchestrated approach required of ABM, then it will outperform expectations and continue to be the revenue driver it should be.

Photo by José Martín Ramírez C on Unsplash

Maybe sales amongst your distributors and other partners have been in a rut. Perhaps your products and services have been around long enough that they’re no longer generating a buzz, or maybe they’re being overshadowed by a newer, flashier line from a competitor. Perhaps you’re operating under a less-than-stellar network marketing strategy.

Or maybe you’re doing everything else right, but forgetting to incentivize your partner organizations to target their persuasive skills toward moving your product. After all, if you’re unable to light a fire under your network of salespeople, they’re unlikely to turn around and devote their energy toward getting customers enthused about your product lines. Research by Bain & Company concludes, in fact, that when sales professionals feel demotivated, their productivity can diminish by 25 to 50%.

“Every day, sales reps are bombarded by outside factors that are affecting their motivation,” notes business executive Sujan Patel in Entrepreneur. “To sell well, salespeople need to be hyped up and ready to go at any time. The motivation of your sales reps will affect productivity, culture and the bottom line. If you want to improve the success of your sales department, it’s time to make motivation a priority.”

That’s where a well-conceived channel incentives campaign that features strong rewards can move mountains when it comes to re-energizing your partners. By optimizing data about your teams as part of your strategy, you can choose incentives that reflect the amounts, rules, and conditions most likely to appeal to their needs and wants.

Here are some tips on spurring your partners’ sales performances in your next campaign.

• Know your audience. Before setting the key parameters of your program, study data and anecdotal evidence to understand as much as you can about your partners’ salespeople. A Harvard Business Review article outlines how different performers require different kinds of attention. “Stars seem to knock down any target that stands in their way — but may stop working if a ceiling is imposed,” notes author Thomas Steenburgh. “Laggards need more guidance and prodding to make their numbers. Core performers … get the least attention, even though they’re the group most likely to move the needle if they’re given the proper incentives.”
• Set reasonable goals. “Every goal-setter knows goals should be specific, time limited, achievable and measurable,” reads a recent Salesforce.com article. “(But) choosing the wrong metrics and wrong goals creates a culture of inspection, and if goals, especially the wrong goals, are focused on too intently, an atmosphere of compliance and anxiety results.”
• Provide ample support. While no one likes to be micromanaged, your partners want to know they’re not tackling sales challenges on their own. Consider hosting a pre-campaign training session or conference call; offering detailed product information that includes FAQs; compiling tips for selling your specific product; and/or arranging for frequent email or SMS messaging that includes updates and words of support.
• Bestow rewards immediately. Keep your campaign structure as transparent as possible, and give credit where credit is due by turning over rewards as soon as they’re earned. “When employees feel they’re being cheated, that motivation can turn to resentment instantly,” notes Emily Murray on Leadfuze.com.

Overcoming objections isn’t just for salespeople. If you want to influence others, you must be able to overcome objections. There are four objections leaders hear regularly. Once you have a basic strategy, you will become more agile and successful influencing others past those objections. The Objections Leaders Hear While these objections may not be stated […]

The post Overcoming Major Objections appeared first on Kevin Eikenberry on Leadership & Learning.

• China's central bank let its currency slip to it's lowest value since 2008, which one economist says is a move to "weaponize" the currency.
• Previously China kept its currency above the 7-per-dollar threshold.
• Capital Economics says China's latest currency move is a bad sign for any trade deal.
• View Markets Insider for more stories. 

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China's move to allow its currency to fall to a 2008 low against the dollar shows that the trade war may get a lot worse.

China's central bank on Monday morning allowed the currency to drift below 7 yuan per dollar, its lowest value since the 2008 financial crash. 

Prior to today's news, China's central bank had erred on keeping the yuan above that threshold in the hopes of ensuring that a deal was made, says Julian Evans-Pritchard, a senior china economist at Capital Economics. 

"The PBOC has effectively weaponized the exchange rate, even if it is not proactively weakening the currency with direct FX intervention," he wrote.

"They were holding back in order to avoid derailing trade negotiations with the US," Evans-Pritchard wrote in a note to clients on Monday. "The fact that they have now stopped defending 7.00 against the dollar suggests that they have all but abandoned hopes for a trade deal with the US."

Global stocks are crashing on the news, with the Hang Seng closing down 2.8%, while US futures were down at least 1.4% this morning.

And the Chinese currency might go even lower. 

"Given that their goal is presumably to offset some of the impact from additional US tariffs, they are likely to allow the currency to weak further, probably by 5% - 10% over the coming quarters," he wrote. "We had anticipated that the PBOC would eventually devalue the currency in response to trade tensions, but hadn't expected it to come quite this soon."

"Although PBOC officials had repeatedly argued that this level is arbitrary, they had previously intervened to prevent the currency from breaching this threshold, no doubt mindful of the headlines it would attract," Evans-Pritchard said. 

The People's Bank of China linked the currency fall to increased tariffs, though did not explicitly mention the US. 

SEE ALSO: US stocks are set to crater as traders fear China's currency move is a sign Beijing won't back down in Trump's trade war

Join the conversation about this story »

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Getting found on LinkedIn is simpler if you have your profile’s privacy settings arranged to your advantage.

With over 600+ Million profiles on LinkedIn getting lost in the masses is easy particularly if you have a common name and professional title. Updating your profile settings can provide a competitive advantage if you want to leverage search capabilities that help you get found. LinkedIn is for standing out, not fitting in and building a network of valued relationships can accelerate your ability to meet your professional goals.

Edit Public Profile Settings

Go to the ME icon (your photo) on the top navigation bar. Access the drop-down menu, under account select ‘Privacy & Settings.’
You are now under the privacy tab and will notice the header: How others see your profile and network information

The first item under that heading is: Edit your public profile
This is important because this setting sets up how your profile appears to non-logged in members via search engines or permitted services.

Click on the word ‘Change’ on the far right to open your profile.
You control your profile and can limit what is shown on search engines and other off-LinkedIn services. Viewers who aren’t signed in to LinkedIn will see all or some portions of your profile based on what you choose.

1. The first step to getting found and increase your visibility is to turn on your profile’s public profile button

2. The second step to elevating your presence by search engines is to turn on the ‘Public’ button. This signal search engines such as Google & Bing that the information you want people to know about you can be shown.

This article is geared toward people who want to increase their visibility online, with that said if you prefer to limit your visibility than you would want to turn off the public profile visibility button.

3. Be sure to turn on the buttons next to the information you want to be made public. This is certainly a personal preference, bear in mind I would recommend showing any information that is relevant to you today and turn off anything from past experience that is not.

Now scroll through the page and you will see exactly what shows up in a search result that others would see!

Who Can See Your Email Address

You want to make it easy for people to get in touch with you and one way to do that is to be sure your email address visible on your profile. Not everyone wants to connect with you, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t wat to contact you.

To access this, you are still under the privacy tab and will notice the header: How others see your profile and network information

The second item under that heading is: Who can see your email address

You can select from the drop-down menu:

• Only visible to me
• 1st-degree connections
• 1st & 2nd-degree connections
• Anyone on LinkedIn

The second part of this section I want to point out it the option to have your email address downloaded with the rest of your profile when a connection of yours exports their own database of contacts.

Many LinkedIn users are unaware that they have the ability to export their connections data files! When you do export your connections if this radio button is not tuned ‘On’ then your email address will not be included in the export of data.

If you use a CRM program outside of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator program, you may very well want to export your connections into your CRM particularly if you have built a solid network that you want to stay in touch with.

Many CRM systems will allow you to upload a .CSV file of contacts so why not upload your LinkedIn connections!

Viewers of This Profile Also Viewed

Also, under privacy settings you will see: Viewers of this profile also viewed
You can choose whether or not your profile appears in search results when someone views a similar profile that contains the same keywords as your profile. I see pro’s and con’s to having this turned on.

Pro’s – if you are looking for more visibility overall, then I would turn this on.

Con’s – if you are in competitive business this could work against you in terms of the viewer being tipped off to other people who offer the same service as you do. Now I personally I consider myself more collaborative than competitive, but in today’s world when we meet people online before we get a chance to talk with them offline, they may make a decision between two competitors without ever talking to either one! This is a reason why having an outstanding professional profile matters in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Who Can See Your Last Name

Also, under privacy settings, you will see: Who can see your last name.

If you want to be visible and found which is the focus of this article, then you would want to choose the radio button next to your full name. If you choose only the first initial of your last name, that is what those who are not connections will see. I recommend you make your full name visible particularly if you have a common name. I have searched for people with a common name and see in a search result many people show up and if there is only a last initial then I am not sure if I have the right person I was searching for or not.

Representing Your Organization and Interests

If you work for a company and link to their company page in the company field of your experience section then LinkedIn ‘could’ mention you with content about your employers or other content you publicly expressed an interest in.

By clicking YES on the radio button they can show your name and/or picture with content about your employers, such as in job posting details and on company pages and insights, and with content related to my publicly expressed interests (e.g. when I like a service or follow a company, or comment or share its posts, LinkedIn may include your name and photo with their sponsored content when shown to my connections)

I see pro’s and con’s to this setting also. If you are the owner of the company it would benefit you.

Profile Visibility Off LinkedIn

Two of LinkedIn’s goals are to help members be found for opportunities and to facilitate better informed professional communications, both on and off the site. For example, public profiles can be found through search engines. In addition, users of certain mail or calendar services may also see in those services “mini” profiles of members they interact with.

To gain a bit of leverage in terms of being found in search, I would turn this to YES.

How others see your LinkedIn activity – This is the next section under privacy and settings.

Profile Viewing Options

Here you can choose whether you want to be visible or not when you are viewing other people’s profiles.

I recommend you set this at 100% visible with your photo & title so when someone checks their “Who’s Viewed My Profile” statistics, you will be visible. First, this is the #1 feature used by LinkedIn users and second, we are curious by nature and we want to know who the people are that view our profile. This is a great way to gain more visibility because I don’t believe in hiding on LinkedIn. I want people to know I viewed their profile. I also will reach out to people who have viewed my profile and I will view theirs. If they did not connect with me and they look interesting, I will proactively invite them to connect knowing they probably had a reason for viewing my profile in the first place.

There certainly are instances when being anonymous has a use, but I would only view profiles anonymously under certain circumstances such as checking out employee candidates or looking at competitor profiles!

Manage Active Status

If you are an active LinkedIn user, you already know the value of this little button. This is to let people know when you are actively using LinkedIn. When you see a solid round green circle next to a connection’s profile picture, that means they are on LinkedIn now. The advantage in knowing this is utilizing the messaging function to reach out in real-time! You increase your chances of the person responding immediately.

If you see the green outline in the circle, that means the person has been active within the past 24-hours but they are not actively on LinkedIn right now. You have 3 options in the settings for this:

1. Choose your connections only will be notified you are active
2. All LinkedIn members can see if you are active
3. No one can see if you are active

Again, if you want to improve your visibility you should turn on active status at a minimum to your connections.

The last three sections under How others see your LinkedIn Activity I believe should all be turned on to yes because they all offer opportunities to be seen.

• Share job changes, education changes, and work anniversaries
• Notify connections when you’re in the news
• Mentions or tags by others

Ultimately account settings are your responsibility. These are the primary sections within the privacy & settings section that you should pay attention to if your goal is to be seen on LinkedIn. I recommend reviewing these settings at a minimum twice a year and make changes based on your experience with each one I mention here.

Your privacy & settings are only the first step toward getting found. Your next step is to optimize your profile so you are attracting the right people when they are searching for someone who has your skills or services.

Check out my free guide to creating a powerful profile:

Not sure about a setting? Ask your question in the comment section below.

Originally published here.

On paper, the segmented sales model that many SaaS businesses use seems great – who wouldn’t want to copy the success of Salesforce?

But there’s a trend I’m seeing that’s making me wonder whether this segmented sales model is actually good for us.

My network is filled with content, posts, comments, etc. from people who are not having good experiences with it as buyers, coupled with my own experiences as a buyer:

Here’s the thing – I don’t believe any sales process is inherently wrong or right, segmented or otherwise.

Having an SDR/AE combo split the full cycle could be great for your business, or it could be terrible too.

It just depends on your buyers and whether it meets them where they are or not.

Here are 4 ways I see the segmented model fail to do this and how you can ensure that this isn’t happening with your sales process.

Incentivize the right behaviors

One of the biggest reasons I see segmentation fail is a disconnect between leadership and the SDR.

The wrong expectations, metrics, and therefore behaviors are being incentivized by focusing on things like call appointment volume instead of meaningful outcomes like deals closed.

This teaches them to just book appointments for the sake of checking off a box rather than focus on only booking the right appointments (that will actually show up).

And this ends up reducing revenue efficiency because your AE’s are spending more time with less qualified prospects.

Instead, it works better if the SDR is focused on outcomes that correlate to the final quota number.

That way, SDRs can stop worrying about hitting vanity metrics and focus on finding the leads that will drive real revenue.

A simple way to do that?

Align the SDR/AE teams with a shared goal they’re responsible for and have them manage their own pipeline together to get there.

Handle call transitions better

Buyers typically do a lot of research online before they ever reach out to a company and talk to someone. Because of that, they come armed and dangerous with a well thought out list of questions they bring to the call.

That or they’re ready to cut to the chase to see your software.

And that’s one of the reasons why the handoff from the SDR to the AE can often feel so choppy for buyers – SDRs often aren’t as smooth as they need to be in meeting buyers where they’re at and making that critical transition.

I’ve been on many SDR calls where the transition felt forced, like the SDR was just doing it because they had to!

Alex Boyd, Founder of RevenueZen, gave a great example of how to fix this:

This is situational, but training your SDRs and AEs to be better at reading where buyers are while correctly positioning the transition will create a more seamless experience for your buyer.

And that’s the key – creating a seamless experience that doesn’t make me feel like I have to wait on you to get what I want.

Train SDRs to go all the way…or make AEs available in real time

One of the absolute worst parts about the segmented sales model for me is when I’m having a great call with an SDR and then I have to wait a week+ to talk to an AE knowing I’m going to have to repeat much of what I’ve just shared.

I’m hooked, so why kill the momentum?

Marc Bodner nails why this kills deals:

Marc points out a simple solution here – ensure that SDRs can take it all the way if the momentum is there. Others are taking this approach too:

However, another equally valid solution to this problem is to simply make sure AEs are available real time to make the transition on the spot.

There’s even tech out there to make it easy should you want to go this route:

Bottom line here – don’t lose buyers by slowing them down with your process when they’re ready to go fast. Find a way to equal their pace!

Nix segmentation where it doesn’t work

There are times where having a single person run the full cycle is simply a better choice. Even former SDRs notice this:

Speaking from experience, there is enough on the line with enterprise buyers (potential $ earned and reputation) that it makes sense to hire a full-cycle seller to handle everything.

The trick here is to not cut corners on who you hire. Spend the money to get the right hire, make sure they’re equipped to do what you need them to and that they can go the distance through the long sales cycle.

Far too often clients come to us to help them recruit heavy hitting enterprise salespeople after they’ve tried the segmented model, cut costs to hire SMB AEs dressed up as enterprise sellers, or someone that hasn’t done the job they need them to do, and seen it implode as a result.

Hire true enterprise salespeople with proven full-cycle results at this level and the stage your company is at or put the hiring process on the back burner. Otherwise, you’re assuming an awful lot of risk that can hurt your business and then some later.

Final thoughts

The sales process is like a machine. One with more moving parts can sometimes achieve things that a simpler one couldn’t, but it also means the potential for things to break increases.

The additional complexity of the segmented model may improve efficiency and provide greater predictability, but it also means more opportunities for turning your buyers off and for deals to slip through the cracks.

The key here is to let your buyers guide the decisions you make (active listening will serve you well).

Many startups blindly follow the segmented model because “that’s the SaaS sales model.” This mindset is not customer-centric and will cause you to lose buyers.

Do what works best for your buyers, not what everyone tells you works for their business!

The post Sales Segmentation Could Be Costing You Deals. Here’s How to Ensure It Doesn’t. appeared first on OpenView.

You’ve sent your initial email. You crafted it well, sent it to a few colleagues to get their feedback, made sure your ask was reasonable, then hit send. A week goes by—you follow up. 

Another week goes by—another follow-up. And still… crickets.

So now you’re asking:

“What did I do wrong? Why didn’t they answer?”

The thing is, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to those two questions. It’s always going to depend on who you are, who you’re reaching out to, what you’re asking for, etc.

Still, you’ll find plenty of hot outreach and follow-up hacks floating around:

• Include numbers in your subject lines
• Namedrop one of your top investors
• Ask them if they want to hear more before you pitch anything
• Follow up every day for a week / follow up once a week / follow up once a quarter

The list goes on and on and on... Do these so-called “outreach hacks” work?

Sometimes yes.

But those hacks are just Band-Aids. If you think adding numbers to your subject lines and calling it a day will boost your outreach and follow-up reply rates, prepare to be disappointed.

So what can you do? Are you doomed because your cold email didn’t get replies? Should you all it quits just because your follow-ups went unopened?

Not quite.

There are definitely ways to up your reply rates and the overall success of your outreach that aren’t just quick hacks. How you approach that first outreach email is important, but the real money is made after that.

It comes down to the follow-up phase. (I’ve written an entire book about the art of following up effectively. You can download a free copy here!)And that’s what we’re going to dig into today, so let’s jump right in to the reasons that your emails are getting ignored in the first place:

1. You haven’t done your research

The most likely reason your outreach is falling flat on its face is that you barely know who you’re talking to.

If you go the mass-outreach route and try to land in as many inboxes as possible, naturally you won’t be able to do the research needed to understand what each recipient is looking for.

Here’s the thing:

Personalization is key.

And no, dropping in some {FIRST NAME} and {COMPANY} merge tags does not count as personalization.

Take this pitch for example:

The email itself isn’t awful. It’s fairly brief, not asking for too much. But here’s the big problem that most prospects will instantly see:

It’s a template that can easily be blasted to thousands of people per hour.

The only bits of personalization in there are the classic {FIRST NAME} and {COMPANY} merge tags. Everything else is cookie-cutter—there’s nothing in there that’s relevant specifically to the person you’re emailing.

You need to understand what the person you’re talking to is interested in, then craft your outreach and follow-ups accordingly.

Here’s how you can go about this:

1. Don’t use a generic (and robotic) template for every email
2. Figure out what they’ve been investing their time in lately
3. Look into the content they’re sharing and talking about most
4. Find the angle that will catch their attention
5. Craft your outreach and follow-ups with this angle top of mind

2. Your emails are way too long

Have you ever met somebody who gets genuinely excited when they open up an email that’s just a wall of text—like this?

I’ll bet you stopped reading at “try to sell you leads…” in that screenshot—and that’s if you even got past “I am sure you get 250 emails like this–” 

The point is this:

Nobody wants to spend all their time in Gmail. And if you’re asking them to dig through an email that’s just a bunch of block paragraphs, the only reply you’ll ever get is the classic “stop emailing me”—sometimes in a much less friendly tone.

Here are the questions you need to answer as efficiently as possible:

• Who are you?
• Why are you reaching out?
• Why should they care?
• What do you want?

3. You’re waiting way too long

Want to know the easiest way to get completely forgotten about?

Wait for weeks between each follow-up you send—or worse, never send a single follow-up email at all.

No matter how much research and personalization work you put in, you’re still only looking at a 40% response rate at best. The real success comes from the follow-ups. And if you’re waiting for weeks before reaching out again, you’re just wasting your own time.

So what’s the best follow-up schedule?

 

Let me introduce you to the Close follow-up formula:

1. Send the first cold email.

Do your research on what’s most likely to resonate, then personalize and send.

2. Wait 1 day, then send follow-up #1 at a different time of day.

This should be a modified version of your first email. Communicate the same message—just in a different format. For example, if your initial email was several paragraphs long, make this follow-up email only two sentences long, and vice versa.

3. Wait 2 days after your second email, then send follow-up #2.

Don’t explain anything at all. Just quickly and clearly restate your call to action. You can ask your prospect to introduce you to someone else in their organization, schedule a call, or just respond to your email—whatever you asked in the first email.

4. Wait 4–5 days after your third email, then send the third and final follow-up.

This is the break-up email. It’s where you say goodbye to the prospect. Here you’re tapping into their loss aversion—a psychological principle that says people strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.

Notice the timeline here:

• Day 1: Send cold email
• Day 2: Follow up
• Day 4: Follow up
• Day 8 or 9: Follow up (break up)

That’s barely a week and a half. If you try to stretch this same formula over 30+ days, you’re not really “following up”—you’re pretty much starting from scratch each and every time.

Wrapping up

The success of your email outreach comes down to the follow-up.

If you don’t follow up at all, you’re leaving money on the table. Simple as that. So how can you make sure your follow-ups aren’t getting sent straight to the trash?

Let’s recap:

• Do your research to make sure your emails resonate
• Keep your follow-ups short and to the point
• Shrink the time between follow-ups

Want to take the next step in mastering the follow-up? Grab a free copy of The Follow-Up Formula.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY TODAY