Rnordman

Every time a customer hears or reads these common words or phrases, they're less likely to buy from you.

British supermarkets are quickly becoming the unexpected pioneers in adding more empathy into retail. In January, Tesco introduced a “slow checkout line” for customers who have dementia or otherwise need more time to check out. This week, Morrisons, another British supermarket chain, announced it would have “quiet hours” to help autistic shoppers to have a more noise-free shopping trip. Both are beautiful non-obvious examples of how a small change can create a retail experience more welcoming to an audience accustomed to being ignored. Not to mention creating plenty of admiration from the rest of us for choosing to be so empathetic in the first place.

A key component of effective target marketing involves developing deep insight into the decision-making process influencing how your customers make their purchasing choices. For organizations working with diverse customer needs, moving your prospects from, “I’m interested,” to “I’ll buy,” is a highly complex process. What is significant and how this will impact each of your […]

Are you successful at coaching your employees? In our years studying and working with companies on this topic, we’ve observed that when many executives say “yes,” they’re ill-equipped to answer the question. Why? For one thing, managers tend to think they’re coaching when they’re actually just telling their employees what to do.

According to Sir John Whitmore, a leading figure in executive coaching, the definition of coaching is “unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” When done right, coaching can also help with employee engagement; it is often more motivating to bring your expertise to a situation than to be told what to do.

Recently, my colleagues and I conducted a study that shows that most managers don’t understand what coaching really is — and that also sheds light on how to fix the problem. The good news is that managers can improve their coaching skills in a short amount of time (15 hours), but they do have to invest in learning how to coach in the first place. This research project is still in progress, but we wanted to offer a glimpse into our methodology and initial findings.

First, we asked a group of participants to coach another person on the topic of time management, without further explanation. In total, 98 people who were enrolled in a course on leadership training participated, with a variety of backgrounds and jobs. One-third of the participants were female and two-thirds were male; on average, they were 32 years old and had eight years of work and 3.8 years of leadership experience. The coaching conversations lasted five minutes and were videotaped. Later, these tapes were evaluated by other participants in the coaching course through an online peer review system. We also asked 18 coaching experts to evaluate the conversations. All of these experts had a master’s degree or graduate certificate in coaching, with an average of 23.2 years of work experience and 7.4 years of coaching experience.

Participants then received face-to-face training in two groups of 50, with breakouts in smaller groups for practice, feedback, and reflection around different coaching skills. At the end, we videotaped another round of short coaching conversations, which were again evaluated by both peers and coaching experts. In total, we collected and analyzed more than 900 recorded evaluations of coaching conversations (pre-training and post-training), which were accompanied by surveys asking participants about their attitudes and experiences with leadership coaching before and after the training.

The biggest takeaway was the fact that, when initially asked to coach, many managers instead demonstrated a form of consulting. Essentially, they simply provided the other person with advice or a solution. We regularly heard comments like, “First you do this” or “Why don’t you do this?”

This kind of micromanaging-as-coaching was initially reinforced as good coaching practice by other research participants as well. In the first coaching exercise in our study, the evaluations peers gave one another were significantly higher than the evaluations from experts.

Our research looked specifically at how you can train people to be better coaches. We focused on analyzing the following nine leadership coaching skills, based on the existing literature and our own practical experiences of leadership coaching:

• listening
• questioning
• giving feedback
• assisting with goal setting
• showing empathy
• letting the coachee arrive at their own solution
• recognizing and pointing out strengths
• providing structure
• encouraging a solution-focused approach

Using the combined coaching experts’ assessments as the baseline for the managers’ abilities, we identified the best, worst, and most improved components of coaching. The skill the participants were the best at before training was listening, which was rated “average” by our experts. After the training, the experts’ rating increased 32.9%, resulting in listening being labeled “average-to-good.”

The skills the participants struggled with the most before the training were “recognizing and pointing out strengths” and “letting the coachee arrive at their own solution.” On the former, participants were rated “poor” pre-training, and their rating improved to “average” after the training was completed. Clearly, this is an area managers need more time to practice, and it’s something they likely need to be trained on differently as well. Interestingly, the most improved aspect of coaching was “letting coachees arrive at their own solution.” This concept saw an average increase in proficiency of 54.1%, which moved it from a “poor” rating to “slightly above average.”

More generally, multiple assessments of participants by experts before and after the training course resulted in a 40.2% increase in overall coaching ability ratings across all nine categories, on average. Given that this was a very short training course this is a remarkable improvement.

What can organizations learn from our research? First, any approach to coaching should begin by clearly defining what it is and how it differs from other types of manager behavior. This shift in mindset lays a foundation for training and gives managers a clear set of expectations.

The next step is to let managers practice coaching in a safe environment before letting them work with their teams. The good news, as evidenced by our research, is that you don’t necessarily need to invest in months of training to see a difference. You do, however, need to invest in some form of training. Even a short course targeted at the right skills can markedly improve managers’ coaching skills.

Regardless of the program you choose, make sure it includes time for participants to reflect on their coaching abilities. In our study, managers rated their coaching ability three times: once after we asked them to coach someone cold, once after they were given additional training, and once looking back at their original coaching session. After the training, managers decreased their initial assessment of themselves by 28.8%, from “slightly good” to “slightly poor.” This change was corroborated by managers’ peers, who reduced their assessment by 18.4%, from “slightly good” to “neither good nor bad,” when looking back at their original observations of others. In other words, if managers have more knowledge and training, they are able to provide a better self-assessment of their skills. Organizations should allocate time for managers to reflect on their skills and review what they have done. What’s working, and what they could do better?

Our research also supports the idea of receiving feedback from coaching experts in order to improve. The risk of letting only nonexperts help might reinforce and normalize ineffective behaviors throughout an organization. Specifically, coaching experts could give feedback on how well the coaching skills were applied and if any coaching opportunities have been missed. This monitoring could take the form of regular peer coaching, where managers in an organization come together to practice coaching with each other, or to discuss common problems and solutions they have encountered when coaching others, all in the presence of a coaching expert. Here managers have two advantages: First, they can practice their coaching in a safe environment. Second, coaches can discuss challenges they have experienced and how to overcome them.

If you take away only one thing here, it’s that coaching is a skill that needs to be learned and honed over time. Fortunately, even a small amount of training can help. Not only does a lack of training leave managers unprepared, it may effectively result in a policy of managers’ reinforcing poor coaching practices among themselves. This can result in wasted time, money, and energy.

Editor’s Note: Due to an editing error, the original published version of this article did not include the author’s final edits. The piece has been updated.

If you make a product that costs $5 to produce and package, how much should you charge for it?

I don’t know.

But there’s a simple bit of arithmetic you can do to understand sensitivity in pricing.

Should you charge $7 or $9?

Well, if you charge $7, you make $2 a unit.

If you charge $9, you make $4 a unit, or twice as much.

Which means, all other things being equal, you’ll need to sell twice as many at $7 as you’ll need to sell at $9.

It doesn’t feel that way, but it’s true. 100 sold at $9 is more profitable than 180 sold at $7. And to take it a step further, you’ll need to sell 800 at $5.50 to make as much as you would have made at $9. Eight times as many.

No one knows what your demand curve is going to be like, no one is sure what impact your pricing will have on all the other items you sell.

But be honest with yourself about contribution.

Price is a story, it’s a story we tell ourselves and others about what we have to offer. But price is also the path to being able to stay in business.

 

[Unrelated helpful tip: A significant bug exists in Word, one that just cost me two hours. If someone sends you a Word file as an attachment in Gmail and then you drag that to Word to start editing it (without formally downloading it first), Word will let you work on it, save it, work on it some more, close it–and then your work is gone forever. Don’t do that.]

Update! Thanks to Justin, Alan, Matt, Luis and other loyal and talented readers, I’ve put together a method that got the file back. My deep searching yesterday didn’t find it, so here it is for the next shmo who gets stuck:

1. Repeat the process that opened in the file in the first place. In my case, drag it from Gmail to the Word icon in the dock on my Mac. The original opens.
2. Hit ‘save as’.
3. You’ll see the usual save window, and you can hit the name of the folder to see the location of the hidden file. In my case, the letter “T“
4. Then, you’ll need to be able to see the invisible files on your Mac. In my case, the easiest thing was to go to Terminal and turn that on.
5. And then, folder by folder, I found my way to the magical “T” folder and there it was, gloating at me, just waiting to be re-opened and saved properly.

Thanks, team!

We all know that personalization increases customer engagement, loyalty and sales because people naturally connect with brands who create relevant experiences that address their wants and needs, but it’s not always easy to get it right. Here are 5 tips to help you improve customer communications that lead to stronger relationships.

• Think of your customers as individuals. Start by determining the implicit and explicit data that you have available to customize your communications and placing them into the following buckets:
  1. Profile: Name, Account ID, Demographics, etc.
  2. Interactions: Purchases, Communication Preferences, Visits, Transactional Preferences, etc.
  3. Customer Service: Service Calls, Survey Data, Ratings, Reviews, etc.
  4. Affinities: Loyalty/Membership, Favorite Products/Brands, etc.
  5. External Data: Social Media, Third-party Sources, Public Information, etc.
• Map out the customer journey. Go through the customer journey (including winback) and prioritize the data that you will not only leverage but collect at each stage. For example, you will probably have very little data during the awareness stage, so you should prioritize the collection of basic account level data to develop a profile. Conversely, you will most likely prioritize service level and affinity data during the winback stage.

• Get in the minds of your customer. Leverage the intelligence you can gain through the voice of the customer (VOC). Determine your customers wants and needs throughout the relationship with your brand to optimize their experience. This can be achieved through simple online surveys post transaction or visit.

• Create the basic communication programs. It can be overwhelming to create personalized experiences for every individual communication piece, but one way to tackle this is by creating programs. The first and most obvious would be to create a standardized onboarding or welcome communications program as this will build the foundation of developing customer profiles. As you gather customer interactions, the next program might be engagement or retention to maintain or increase customer sales.

• Be transparent with your customer. While most customers realize that brands are collecting personal information, the abuse or neglect to protect this data could be the end of not just your customer relationship, but the death of your brand. With the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union is giving consumers control over their personal data and brands the opportunity to be transparent about what and how they will use the data. According to a 2018 study by Deloitte insights, 73% of all consumers across all generations said they would be more comfortable sharing their data if they had some visibility and control.

Creating personalized experiences isn’t easy, but by taking small steps, prioritizing the programs and data capture, and implementing rapid test and learn strategies, your company and customers will see the value of building one-to-one relationships through data.

Content marketing is one of the best long-term marketing strategies that you and your marketing team can employ. However, not all types of content will have the desired effect or be as valuable to your audience as the next. Learning to create strong, valuable, content that stands the testament of time is vital to your long-term content marketing strategy. This type of content is commonly known as evergreen.

So, what can you do to create and then utilize good evergreen content to the benefit of your branded marketing?

What is Evergreen Content?

To put it simply: evergreen content is an article, blog or infographic that is always relevant. Much in the way that its namesake, the tree, retains their leaves on a year-round basis, this Evergreen content does not become dated. The idea is to create compelling stories which are easily picked up by search engines – ideally via keyword research and optimization – and then that they remain ‘fresh’ without the need for constant updates.

Evergreen content is the ideal outcome of every content pieces created for marketing purposes. Though it doesn’t always necessarily work out, there are plenty of ways you can work to make it more likely that your content is evergreen.

Sustainable or Timeless

The trick with creating good evergreen content is that it must be sustainable, not necessarily timeless. What’s the difference when it comes to content? Quite simple really.

A timeless piece of content can include ideas such as, “How to Grow a Sunflower Plant.” In all likelihood the method of growing a sunflower – planting it in the soil, watering it, etc., will not change anytime soon. However, a piece entitled “How to Take a Screenshot on an iPhone” is a piece of content that likely will need updating between models. As the original iPhone doesn’t take screenshots in the same way, the current model does. In this instance, the content must be updated to stay relevant.

In both cases, however, they can both be considered evergreen pieces of evergreen content. As people will always likely search for these types of guides, the sustainable guide simply needs updating periodically to ensure its value to readers.

Research Extensively

Good evergreen content is created off of the back of extensive research. The aim of this type of content is to be valuable for the reader. So, false facts or misleading information can be extremely damaging to your brand if it is placed in any intentionally evergreen content. If you wish to be considered a leading voice in your industry then being accurate, well-informed and educational is vital.

Including your own research at the end of evergreen content, such as citations and references, can also help your piece to appear that much more trustworthy. Especially if you use this to offset your personal opinion. With the right time and resources, it may also be valuable for you to conduct your own original research. Doing so may attract references and citations to your evergreen content itself – which could make the piece extremely sustainable in the long term.

Use Great Visuals

In the modern world, more and more people are digesting content that is less wordy and much more visual. This means videos, infographics and good graphic images throughout your articles is imperative to make content as evergreen as possible. Investing in good stock photos, bespoke design work and the like may seem like a big investment (especially if only used in one blog), but it can be greatly rewarding in the long term.

Visuals can also act as proof to the reader that your content is more valuable. As in many instances, it is much more appealing to the modern internet user, as they can understand and digest information at a more advanced speed.

Don’t Be Afraid to Update Content

At the end of the day, just because your content is intended to be evergreen doesn’t mean it can’t – or shouldn’t – be updated. If new information, studies or the like arise, then it is much more valuable for your audience if you do update the piece.

To be effective with this, you should be aware of any updates and make additions to your articles accordingly as soon as possible. This means being aware of industry changes, keeping on top of news and having a process in place to make these updates as effectively as possible. If you don’t update articles with relevant information as soon as possible, then your evergreen content will quickly fade and become irrelevant, defeating the purpose of the content.

So, keep on top of industry news and update your content as necessary to keep in line with it.

*

Ultimately, evergreen content is a heavy time investment for your team. However, if you manage to optimize and generate good levels of traffic, then it can be an extremely profitable ROI over its existence. Therefore this should be a definitive part of your content marketing strategy and something that you shouldn’t be afraid of investing your budget into.

Where you start a conversation with your dream client matters a great deal. How and where you begin is going to create an impression and set the stage for who you are, the value you create, and whether or not you are relevant—and if you prove you are, lead to another meeting.

The reason you need to delete the first eight slides of your PowerPoint presentation is that opening with your company’s history, your global or national footprint, the logos of all the big, well-recognized clients you’ve won, and your service offerings, is that you establish a few things that don’t serve you or your prospective client.

First, by leaning on your company for credibility, you come across as the “Is my company the kind of company you want to do business with” kind of salesperson. What you are telegraphing is that you don’t have the credibility to belong in a conversation about value, that your credibility comes from your company. Not only do you lean too heavily on your company, by listing all the companies you are doing business with, you are providing further proof, should there be any doubt about your bona fides.

Second, and maybe worse, by talking about your products and services, you give your client the impression that your product and service is how you create value for them and their organization. You may aspire to be a trusted advisor, but your product and service is not advice, making all of these things the wrong context for a conversation.

The context in which you create value is one in which you provide ideas, insight, experience, and direction about what has changed and the implication of those changes for your prospective client. The context for your conversation now needs to be about the strategic outcomes you can help your client generate, how you help move them from their current state to a better future state—one they don’t even know is available to them.

This is the context in which you can establish yourself as someone with the ideas and experience to make you a likely candidate to be your dream client’s strategic partner and not a salesperson with too little value to be worth their time.

The post Why the Context of Your Sales Conversation Matters appeared first on The Sales Blog.

I don’t know how many sales calls I observe.  Over the course of years, it’s 1000’s.  The majority of them are the same—it’s all about our products.  The typical process looks like:

If there is any discovery, discovery is focused on the customer product needs—what capabilities are they looking for (never the question, “Why are these important to you?”), what products do they currently use, what features are they looking for, what is the target pricing…….

As quickly as possible, sales people get into describing their products, the more “sophisticated,” use a Features, Benefits, Advantages approach, but the conversation is focused on the product.

Usually, at some point, there is “show and tell,”  (Thank goodness we had all that practice in Kindergarten and First Grade!).  It may be a demo, it may be looking at the physical product, usually it’s accompanied by the physical/virtual brochures, case studies, testimonials.  Often, the strategy seems to be focused on quantity, as if the more stuff we can inundate the customer with, the more it will influence the customer to make a decision in our favor.

And of course, that “stuff,” is exactly the same as what the sales people have already talked about.

At some point sales provides a proposal, most of the time it’s a quotation–all the products that are being proposed, listed by line item.  How many of each, the unit price, and the extended price, then the total price.  If the customer is “lucky,” there may be a cover letter with a few meaningless paragraphs about why the product and our company is great and a final paragraph saying, “We look forward to being your partner…”

And then the customer has to make a decision…..

The good news, all our competitors do exactly the same thing.

The customer is left to figure out which product is the best for them–the customer is just looking to solve a problem and achieve goals, but all that’s been presented is information about the products.

In the end, it’s hard to choose, so they resort to the only thing that differentiates the alternatives—price.

To them, the alternatives are the same.  To them, any solution will do–otherwise they wouldn’t have even met with us, so the dilemma becomes, which is the lowest price.

And we wonder……..

“Why don’t customers want to see us?”

“Why do customers say we don’t understand them, their goals, their problems, what they want to achieve, their business, and their markets?”

The problem is too often, we view “selling” as being walking, talking product brochures.  Yes, maybe we can go into a little more than the brochures, maybe we can present the data in a more appealing manner.  Maybe we personalize our presentation by using the customer’s name and company, “Martha, our product comes in 20 different, fashionable colors, to fit into any factory environment Acme Manufacturing has…..”

But that’s not what our customers need, that’s not the “help” our customers are looking for, that’s not what creates value for the customers.

If it were, they can get all that information at a web site or in a brochure.

Yet, that’s what too many sales people do……

Selling is more than being a walking talking product brochure.

 

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on the StatusQuota blog here.

The world is full of uncertainty. It is hard to make decisions when hundreds of factors determine success or failure. So it’s no surprise that humans have sought the aid of fortune tellers for thousands of years.

The Ancient Romans relied on augurs. These were priests who determined the right actions by examining bird entrails (yuck). If that’s not your thing, you can get your questions answered by a psychic hotline instead. Or if you’re trying to guess who will win the World Cup, there’s an octopus who has you covered.

Predicting the future is also vital when running a subscription business. Your success depends on keeping customers satisfied so they renew year after year. When customers cancel early, your business loses out on tons of future revenue & growth.

But there’s an important wrinkle here. Knowing which customers will leave is helpful. But it is of limited value. You can’t act on that information, aside from choosing not to spend further time & energy on them. You can write them off, but you aren’t taking action.

What is much more helpful for a subscription business is to know which customers MIGHT leave. This is where you can create real impact. These are customers on the cusp. They are at-risk, sure. But there are definitely things your team can do to ensure the customer sticks around.

But predicting which customers might leave is hard to do. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it already, and customer churn would be tiny. How well does your business predict at-risk customers today? If you’re like most other companies, you have a LOT of room for improvement.

But there is hope! There is a massive opportunity to predict churn way better than you do today. You are sitting on a treasure trove of customer data that can fuel accurate predictions. And you don’t have to dig through bird guts to get your answers

Today, we’ll cover what you need to do to create an accurate churn prediction tool. We’ll begin with identifying the data you need to use to feed a good prediction tool. Then we will discuss how to ensure the prediction tool provides an output that helps you take action.

Ready? Let’s get started!

The Right Data to Predict Churn

The first thing to consider when creating a customer churn prediction tool is the data. You are better able to spot warning signs of churn when you have a lot of signals to track.

Imagine trying to guess the winner of a marathon when all you knew were runners’ shoe sizes. That would be impossible because there is so much more important information available. Previous race times, heart rate during the race, recent injuries – these are the kinds of data you want. And the same is true for churn prediction. Here are the top data sources you will want to include in your prediction:

1. Customer Subscriptions

Subscription data are critical for any churn predictor. The subscription records will help you figure out who has churned in the first place. That information is needed to determine who will churn in the future. You may be able to spot some patterns using this data alone.

Key data points include:

• Customer’s product plan
• Discounts
• Subscription renewal date
• Historical changes in product tier (such as moving from Basic to Pro plan)

2. Payment Transactions

Payment transactions are another important source of churn insights. You’ll want to be on the lookout for late payment activity and expired credit card details. Both suggest involuntary churn risk that you will need to address with a delinquent payment process.

Key data points include:

• Invoice dates
• Payment dates
• Credit card expiry dates

3. Product Usage

Product data will be your biggest goldmine for churn and retention insights. Product usage reveals whether a customer is getting value from your solution. Do you have engaged power users that are in love with your solution? Or are you seeing infrequent login activity and general disengagement?

Key data points include:

• Daily / Weekly / Monthly Average Users per account
• Power Users
• Login frequency
• # of features used
• # of high value / sticky features used

4. Support & Satisfaction

When your customers speak to you, do you listen? You need to have your finger on the pulse of the entire customer experience. Product insights won’t capture that. Instead, you’ll need to talk to your customers and hear from them how things are going. That’s why regular checks on Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) are a must.

The frequency and severity of service issues are also an important churn predictor. Customers frustrated by the product experience won’t want to stick around unless they have no choice. And in today’s hyper-competitive landscape, your customer always has another option.

Key data points include:

• NPS scores
• CSAT scores
• # of support tickets filed
• Severity of support issues

That covers the primary data sources needed to power a churn prediction. Now let’s switch gears and tackle the traits of an actionable prediction.

Getting Actionable Churn Predictions

Once you have your customer data in one place, you’re ready for the fun part: predicting churners. If you have limited analytical support, this may be as simple as dumping all the information into a spreadsheet and looking for patterns. If your customer base is small (a few hundred) and your product simple, this can be pretty effective.

If you have thousands (or millions) of customers and many product features, spreadsheets won’t cut it. You’ll need to bring out the big guns. Data science models can help you make sense of huge customer datasets.

No matter what method you choose to create a churn prediction, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:

1. Predict Future Churn, Not Present Churn

No one would claim to have perfect eyesight if they could only see “perfectly” things right in front of their face. The same holds true for a predictive model. If you can’t predict churn well before it happens, you have a worthless model.

A churn prediction should empower your team to take action. That requires they have time to respond to the prediction made. Knowing an annual contract has big churn risk 4 months before renewal is much more helpful than 4 days prior. That’s the difference between proactive response and reactive scrambling.

Talk with your customer success team to gather their stories on recent account saves. If turning around at-risk customer accounts requires many months of work, your model should reflect that.

2. No Black Box Models – Ensure Explainability

The only thing worse than a model that can’t actually predict future churn is one that no one understands. A “black box” model that doesn’t explain why an account is at-risk is worthless.

A good churn prediction model provides a clear explanation of account risk factors. By providing well-defined risks, the right team members can take the appropriate responses.

Conclusion

Predicting customer churn is a must for subscription businesses reliant on recurring revenue. Subscription, payment, product, and support data combine to provide a complete customer view. When building your predictive model, predict far enough in advance so your team can be proactive, not reactive. You also need to ensure your model isn’t a black box – make sure specific churn risks are identifiable so your team knows how to respond.

Want to make the future less uncertain? Predictive models are your key to figuring out what comes next.

The post How to Predict Churn for Subscription Businesses appeared first on OpenView Labs.

It’s hard to keep track of everything new in content marketing, especially if you consider that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers indicate they are using content currently as part of their overall marketing strategy. There are many articles with best practices, proven strategies, and statistics. But there’s one thing that can beat them all: Clear, actionable, real-life examples. But good content marketing case studies with excellent results can be hard to come by.

That is why in this blog, we’ll cover five extremely successful content marketing case studies including the tactics used, results measured, and why it matters to you as a marketer. 

1.Increasing Blog Referral Traffic by 58% with Onsite Retargeting

The growth hacking tool iSpionage runs a pay-per-click marketing blog. By investing in content marketing, they had hoped to capitalize on additional visits. But despite publishing new articles regularly, they weren’t seeing a lot of referral traffic towards the main website. In this case study, they explain how they managed to increase that traffic by 58.09% in just one month by using an exit intent popup.

Tactic: Onsite retargeting with an exit intent popup. By simply asking a yes/no-question, people answering “yes” were redirected to another preferred page. As soon as blog visitors showed an exit intent, or behavior indicating they were about to leave the page, they got redirected to a page containing content they might be looking for.

Results: 5.47% CTR on their retargeting ads & 58% increase in blog referral traffic.

Why this matters: iSpionage knew what the majority of their visitors were looking for: to download competitors’ keywords. So that’s what they asked in their exit intent popup. Additionally, to avoid cold leads, iSpionage made use of some well-timed triggering. They only let the popup appear to visitors who had spent at least 10 seconds on the blog, making sure their conversions were coming from an engaged audience.

2. Uncommon Infographic Creates over 11K Additional Website Visits in 2 Weeks

When the Game of Thrones series was in full swing, it generated huge buzz online. Lawrence of Morocco, offering tailor-made holidays, took advantage of this as much of the series was filmed in Morocco. By creating related content linking back to their product offering, they generated tons of extra traffic to their website.

Tactic: Creating one flaming-hot piece of content that is extremely shareable. SEOTravel did so by creating an infographic-style map, indicating every single real-life location where the popular TV show was filmed. Sending this to Game of Thrones-hungry journalists made it spread like wildfire!

Results: An increase of 11K+ website visits in just two weeks, with 12 continuous days of all-time high traffic. Coverage in big media outlets like the Washington Post, Mashable, Business Insider, … And more than 100 new domains linking to their site.

Why this matters: SEOTravel managed to jump onto a very popular topic and create relevant content for Lawrence of Morocco’s audience. Their smart outreach made the piece successful. They gave the map as an exclusive to a single media outlet, and as soon as it was online, they created additional buzz by reaching out to geekier outlets. These generated a lot of shares initially, which could then be used as social proof to tackle larger media outlets.

Extra insider tip: If you don’t manage to get an exclusive with one source, it’s likely your content isn’t up to par just yet and won’t generate the buzz you expect.

3. Quick Wins from Content Built with Publicly Available Data

In this content marketing case study, YesOptimist helped a startup, CollegeRaptor, to get from absolutely no organic traffic to 100K visitors per month in just one year. They created a highly relevant piece of content using nothing but publicly available data which was picked up by several big blog sites, giving them the initial boost in high-quality backlinks.

Tactic: Generate links to the website to help improve rankings and search visibility. As College Raptor’s main focus is on matching students with the right colleges, their content should relate to that topic. They simply searched Wikipedia for common information (where US senators went to college), did some analysis and compiled it into an infographic map which was sent to multiple outlets.

Results: After being picked up by the Washington Post, dozens of other outlets started sharing: The Houston Chronicle in Texas, The Deseret News in Utah, Minnesota Public Radio, and Time magazine. The content was even cited for a U.S. Supreme Court case.

Why this matters: This case shows us that you can create some content that delivers valuable insights with publicly available data. There’s no need to invest in expensive studies because there’s a ton of useful data out there that will allow you to create a wide range of content from infographics to deep research.

Extra tip with this type of content: It doesn’t always have to be created for your primary audience. The real goal of College Raptor was to increase backlinks, which will result in building traffic to more relevant content for that main audience.

4. Find the Right Content Topics for Less Exciting Industries

LawnStarter is a company which focuses mainly on homeowners who are looking for professionals to take care of their lawns. The important lesson to learn from LawnStarter is that the most obvious content for your audience is not always what they care about.

Tactic: Create content your audience actually cares about, even if it’s not entirely focused on your product or service. By doing extensive research to understand your audience, you can find more ways to reach out to potential customers by looking for influencers that your prospects listen to. These influencers, individuals, or blogs, can easily be researched to uncover what their most popular content surrounds.

Results: Steady growth by building a relevant audience based on content that people WANT to read. Use your influencers wisely! For example, including quotes from influencers within an article can encourage them to share those pieces with their networks, increasing your reach without spending another dime.

Why this matters: It’s less about how to make a boring subject interesting and more about finding interesting topics and angles to engage your prospects. A structured approach using tools that are readily available to back up your hunches with actual data will make this approach a dream for anyone who loves logical processes.

5. Scale Marketing with Content Loved by Search Engines

Fieldwire, a web and mobile collaboration platform for the commercial construction industry, had a stronger focus on product and engineering but was lacking marketing-focused content. CanIRank helped them shift their focus from conversion to traffic generation and got them to rank in the top three search results for all their main keywords.

Tactic: Boosting the most high-potential pages with data-driven optimizations such as what keywords were they ranking for. Based on currently used keywords, they created well-chosen content that toed the line between traffic value and ranking difficulty. They combined these tactics with influencer outreach campaigns varying from reviews, company profiles to founder interviews. All giving the new pages their initial boost.

Results: These optimizations and new creations lead to higher conversion rates and additional search engine rankings. In just six months, they boosted all their primary keywords to top three positions, added 100 new keyword rankings, and increased 200 existing rankings.

Why this matters: Before heavily investing in a sales- and marketing team, Fieldwire could use a couple of simple processes to move the needle. These initial efforts made them grow in all their marketing efforts and saved them over 10K in Google AdWords investments.

Conclusion

While it’s easier than ever to generate new types of content, it isn’t always easy to find the right direction for your industry or audience. These very different cases show you how different approaches can help, even when the task seems daunting at first.

Which content marketing case study did you find most relatable? Tell me about it in the comments.

The post 5 Inspiring Content Marketing Case Studies with Results! appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Assessing fit and skill is one of the biggest challenges for a hiring team. From application to interviews, employers have a few tactics to help them decide whether a hire will stay or turnover quickly. Unfortunately, more than 50% of voluntary turnover happens within a year of the new hire’s start date and experts estimate 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions. Even with the best efforts, companies are failing to accurately assess talent. Enter technology. Thanks to advancements in HR tech, human resources and recruiting teams have brought better efficiency and automation to their programs. And now, technology is offering even more insight into the performance and fit of a candidate thanks to prescriptive analytics.

What are prescriptive analytics? Sometimes called predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics are a technique that uses data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze current data to make predictions about future. For a talent acquisition team, this means using their existing employment data as a way to make better hiring decisions. Struggling to find diverse talent that fits your team or can’t seem to nail employee retention? This is where predictive analytics shines.

What is Intelligent Automation?

To understand prescriptive analytics, it is essential to first understand intelligent automation. Intelligent automation is data driven decision algorithms that help talent acquisition teams speed up processes. Though these algorithms are more efficient than humans when it comes to data, the real competitive edge of automation comes from the lack of human bias.

Recruiters and hiring managers are great at forming relationships, but not so great at forming unbiased decisions. Since 1989, researchers have studied hiring discrimination with less than stellar results. Over the years, white candidates get an average of 36% more callbacks than black candidates and 24% more than latino candidates. More importantly, there has been no real level of change observed in the last 25 years.

This information goes to show that even the most experienced professional with the best of intentions can suffer from unconscious bias. Machines, however, examine exponentially more data in a fraction of the time all while forgoing those biases. Additionally, when machines do the repetitive work, those HR professionals are free to spend more time on the high-touch, human side of talent acquisition like nurturing great relationships.

What are Prescriptive Recommendations?

Prescriptive recommendations, similar to predictive analytics, use data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to figure out the likelihood of future events based on historical data. The goal is to go beyond knowing what has happened in the past to provide an accurate assessment of what will happen in the future.

Predictive analytics models use known results to develop a prediction value, or model, for new data. Modeling provides results in the form of predictions that represent a probability of the target variable (for example, a loyal candidate) based on estimated significance from a set of input variables.

How Can this Help You?

While predictions are nice, this is where prescriptive recommendations come into play. Simply predicting that a person is a good fit for your company is only one small step of the equation. What if they won’t accept the offer? What if they are highly likely to leave within the first 90 days? Recruiters focused on high quality candidate outcomes also need to know who is most likely to accept an offer and stay with the team long enough to make a substantial impact.

Prescriptive recommendations use data points essential to helping recruiters make better informed decisions in a fraction of the time. This technology maps qualified candidates against the talent DNA of top performers and offers precise recommendations that help recruiters fast track the right talent and accelerate the time to hire. Using prescriptive recommendations gives you the ability to find the right talent of your company while measuring the likelihood of a candidate’s future success within the company.

Over the past few years, numerous articles have been written on the differences that millennials bring to the workforce. Diana Labrien’s post on Lifehack is one of the ones that garnered the most attention. Many pundits have argued that millennial employees are lazy and entitled. The growing prevalence of millennial managers turns this discussion on its head.

As baby boomers continue to retire, millennials will play a greater role in management. However, many of the people they manage will be older than them. This can create friction and even resentment that previous generations did not contend with in the same way. Millennial managers need to understand their own biases and the perception of their generation as they develop their own management styles.

Here are some unique tips that millennials should follow as they rise through the ranks of their organizations.

Emphasize the economic benefits of promoting work-life balance

Kelly Holland Pointed out that millennials feel particularly stressed about their lack of work-life balance. One is CNBC poll found that 35% of millennials said that this has become more difficult. Most of them cited increased responsibilities at work as the prime reason.

This is an opportunity for younger managers to change the expectations of the workplace. Millennial managers that are seeking more time in their personal lives have earned some flexibility to do this. They can also set the tone for their employees to do the same.

Is this possible without sacrificing productivity and organizational profits? Absolutely. A number of countries that expect workers to put in fewer hours each week actually have better productivity. This is because workers are less fatigued and can get more done during the workday when they feel more energetic.

This will not only relieve some of the burdens on the manager but also improve their standing with their millennial subordinates. Even older workers are likely to get behind the idea once they recognize the benefits and are assured that productivity will not be stifled.

There are a number of ways to do this. One is by understanding the importance of automation. There are many great project management tools, such as Basecamp and Trello that help manage workflows and minimize wasted time. You can also invest in a program to learn to be a better project manager, such as taking the steps to get a PMP certificate.

Prove that you understand the importance of the bottom line

There is a stereotype that millennials are too idealistic. Some people believe that they don’t respect the importance of fiscal prudence or the concerns of shareholders. This generalization is, of course, unfair, but millennial miniatures will still have to work hard to overcome it.

If you have been appointed to a managerial role, you must demonstrate that you understand that the bottom line is important. This means you will need to make some hard decisions at times. You may be required to terminate employees that can’t meet their projections after all other avenues have been pursued. You may be required to encourage partnerships with companies that don’t reflect your own personal ideological views.

Making these hard choices is difficult for anybody, but millennial managers will need to show they have the tenacity to do so.

Show appreciation to your older colleagues

Another partially earned stereotype of millennial managers is that they think they have everything already figured out. They dismiss the wisdom of more experienced colleagues. You need to refrain from any insinuation is that you don’t appreciate the insights of your older peers, no matter how subtle those suggestions may be.

It is a good idea to network with people of all generations in your organization. Make sure they realize that you value their experience and take their advice to heart. At the same time, it is important to be sincere with your overtures.

Accept accountability when needed

There is one final stereotype of millennials. Older workers believe they are narcissistic. One of the tendencies of narcissists is that they always blame somebody else for their mistakes.

You need to debunk this stereotype by taking responsibility for your mistakes. This is difficult for anybody but can be even harder for millennials.

Millennial managers must learn to be team players

Older workers often think that millennial managers see themselves as lone wolves – too idealistic, entitled and arrogant to conform to the company’s expectations. The good news is that hard working millennial managers are more than capable of dispelling these perceptions. However, they need to invest the time and energy in meeting organizational goals and showing that they acknowledge their own shortcomings.

The notion of customer experience has always been hugely important, but it does feel that lately, its importance is bigger than ever. Perhaps it’s the changing customer expectations – expecting speedier deliveries, more personalized experiences, and so on. Or maybe it’s because of the biggest millennial brands – like Airbnb and Uber – that are all about ease, speed, and convenience. Whatever the cause/s may be, one thing is for sure: you need to constantly improve the customer experience in order to keep and stand out.

In this blog post, I’m going to share top tips and technologies that will help you improve the customer experience.

Improve customer service and customer experience with chatbots

Every year there are a few buzzwords that everyone is talking about in the world of business, retail, and marketing.

This year, one of those buzzwords is “chatbots”. It’s not that it’s that new of a technology – it’s just that the technology has grown enough and businesses are really starting to see the value in using chatbots. There are fewer cases of “I’m not comfortable talking to a robot” and more of “I really need my questions answered. Now.”

Not only do they help save you time and money as you won’t need as many people to be available for live chat, but they also help improve the customer experience overall:

• You’ll be able to offer customer service every day of the week – at any time
• They help the customer – or potential customer – find the information they need faster and more easily so that they can make an informed decision about whether they want to buy from you or not
• Customers won’t have to wait to get their questions answered – which means less frustration
• You can implement chatbots on the platforms your customers use most: social media (Facebook, Twitter, and more), your website, and other apps like Skype or WhatsApp

This makes for a much better customer experience overall – if you have a good chatbot.

There are different types of chatbots available; one type is the “simple” one: chatbots that deliver prepped responses based on the keywords the person uses. These can lead to some mistakes and bad experiences especially compared to AI-powered chatbots. These types of chatbots use artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand and process more complex conversations – some can even simulate human intelligence quite successfully.

There are also ways to really enhance the customer experience with chatbots in fun, original ways.

For example, Whole Foods came up with a very interesting idea to engage their customers via their Messenger chatbot; among other features, users could select a food emoji like a fruit or vegetable and then see what recipes they could make involving that recipe.

Casper are another great example of unique chatbots; since they are a mattress company, they thought up a chatbot for those who can’t sleep, called Insomnobot3000:

As you can see above, this ingenious chatbot give insomniacs a place where they can talk about their problems going to sleep and generally, help them get through the long sleepless night.

This might not provide a real service to Casper customers or potential customers necessarily, but it does provide a fun experience that can result in funny conversations that are perfect for sharing on social media!

Improve your delivery logistics

When it comes to e-commerce businesses, retailers, and other similar businesses, logistics are incredibly important to the consumer – especially delivery logistics.

Customers’ expectations have changed a lot when it comes to deliveries – it’s safe to say Amazon probably had a big say in this change.

So what exactly has changed in terms of customer expectations for deliveries? Well, in short, customers want more control over their deliveries.

In other words, they want a free and speedy delivery – and if they have to pay for the delivery, then it better be amazing service. But it’s not just that; they also want to have complete control over when and where they receive their packages and as much as possible, to be able to change those details if needed.

Basically, you want to be as much as possible like Amazon and offer an improved delivery experience by implementing things like free deliveries, next-day deliveries by certain times, precise delivery times (people are busy and they’re at work – they want their packages when they’re home to receive them), 7 days a week deliveries, and so on.

How do you compete with that? With a giant this huge, delivering such a good customer experience (most times)? Not only are they dominating markets all over the world, but they’re also delivering packages faster and more efficiently, which is definitely changing customer expectations when it comes to deliveries.

Improving deliveries though is hard work and can get very expensive. Or, you can leverage a platform like Bringg, which is a delivery logistics platform that helps businesses match the Amazon delivery model and improve the customer experience.

Implement personalized marketing for better user experiences

Most of what we’ve covered in this blog post shows how important personalized experiences really are for today’s consumer – both with chatbots and with deliveries. The more you can personalize the experience for your customer, the better – unless we’re talking creepy levels where you know (and share) too much about your visitor or customer.

Personalized marketing is not about that kind of intrusive data – rather, it’s a way to deliver personalized experiences through personalized content by leveraging technology.

Once again, Amazon is one of the top examples of personalized marketing strategies in action – not only that but their personalization strategies have clearly had a massive effect on their success.

Like how they make you buy just a couple more things than you initially planned by including a list of companion products under the product you’re currently buying. Or like how they constantly send you personalized recommendations via email based on the products that you’ve bought in the past and similar purchases from other buyers.

But these methods aren’t just about upselling or making more sales directly, but also about improving the customer experience – and improving sales indirectly as well.

So, how do you implement a personalized marketing experience?

First, you need the technology to do this; tools like Pure360, Evergage, and Fresh Relevance which allow you to implement personalization across your business:

• Deliver personalized content on your website or app, by displaying only relevant content and products based on user behaviour and past purchases
• Send emails with personalized recommendations and content which, like earlier, is based on the users’ past purchases and behaviour on your website

Many businesses already implement some form of personalization – for example, with marketing automation tools – but true personalized marketing is much more than that. A true personalized experience can do wonders for your business and have a massive impact on the overall customer experience.

Conclusion

It’s getting more and more difficult to compete with the biggest brands in the world; they have the money and the manpower to implement new technologies faster and more efficiently, so it’s imperative to keep up with new trends, new technology, and customer expectations in order to compete with the likes of Amazon and other giants in the business world.

It doesn’t matter if your product and brand are world-class if no one knows who you are and how to connect with you. That’s why PR is critical to any company’s existence. But PR in today’s landscape requires a different approach. Simply pouring money into PR initiatives doesn’t work anymore.

Did you know that 94.2% of journalists are on LinkedIn and 62% of them consider it the perfect networking tool? And that’s not all. 49% of LinkedIn’s millions of members are key decision-makers in businesses. So if you represent a B2B business, building a compelling brand presence on LinkedIn is a no-brainer. But even if you are a B2C business, LinkedIn can be beneficial to you in seeking partnerships, and finding events to sponsor, causes to support or PR opportunities to engage. Here are 5 LinkedIn marketing tools that can help you in productively building a brand presence to enable such beneficial activities.

1. Quintly to build a relevant audience & optimize your content strategy

The messages you share on LinkedIn only reach your followers, who should be decision-makers who are potential partners, event managers, journalists, customers or employees. If they’re not, all your content creation efforts are for naught. That’s something that no marketer desires. Quintly is a LinkedIn analytics tool that can be used to analyze your followers and benchmark them with your competition’s followers.

Quintly also pulls engagement data for all your LinkedIn updates so you can analyze your content performance to optimize your content strategy. The tool also measures your interactions and benchmarks it against your goals or KPIs to report your overall progress. Why manually measure your performance and create reports to present to your management, when you can have a tool do it for you? That way to save time for activities that contribute to your results.

2. DrumUp to amplify your brand voice & curate influential content

The messages you share on LinkedIn can reach more than just your followers. In fact, those messages can reach all of your target groups through the influential and unbiased voices of your employees. DrumUp’s employee advocacy platform allows you to simplify content collection and sharing with your employees. It also simplifies content sharing for your employees making it an effortless and fun process. The fun element is brought by the tool’s in-built gamification program.

DrumUp can also help your C-suite and senior-level executives and sales reps curate the most powerful content that their audience and networks would appreciate. Note that 60% of LinkedIn users want to read industry insights, which can easily be curated using DrumUp. This curation and sharing of engaging posts is an important step in building an effective brand presence.

3. Webfluential to identify powerful & brand-consistent influencers to work with

The messages you share on LinkedIn can be delivered to a high-potential target audience via LinkedIn influencers. You may have noticed that several brands on LinkedIn have evangelists who pump product usage to its maximum possible value. You can hire a brand evangelist too or choose to work with an external influencer who represents your brand on LinkedIn. The trick with finding influencers is that you never know who’s ready and available to jump into action.

Webfluential is an influencer marketplace listing active and willing influencers on various social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Using the tool, you can identify and engage the influencer who is perfect for your brand’s messaging and target audience.

4. IFTTT for instant selective content amplification & location-based marketing

The messages you share on other social networks sometimes makes sense for your LinkedIn audience. When you know that they do, you can automatically have them shared as LinkedIn updates just by using a certain hashtag or being in a certain location. IFTTT is an app integrator that helps you automate certain actions via specific triggers. One such example is automatically having every Instagram shot at work shared with your LinkedIn network.

Yet another useful IFTTT LinkedIn recipe is automatically sharing your Medium or Reddit posts with your LinkedIn network. Basically, any IFTTT LinkedIn recipe you have activated will automatically perform its action post-occurrence of its specific trigger.

5. Venngage to powerfully represent use-cases or case-studies for your brand

Decision-makers, such as the ones on LinkedIn, act based on research founded in facts and evidence. If they are certain that your business or products can help them, they won’t hesitate to subscribe. In fact, 74% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn to conduct research and make purchase decisions, and 44% B2B buyers claim to have found new vendors on LinkedIn. Instead of creating upfront sales-y content to help persuade them, you can state your use-cases and case-studies neutrally on an infographic.

Many marketers hesitate to share visual content on LinkedIn because they believe that it’s mostly a text and conversations focused platform. However, visuals in such a text-dense platform can provide the visual break you need to catch attention. Instead of creating infographics from scratch, try using the existing templates on tools such as Venngage, to reduce your effort and amplify your returns.

In conclusion

It’s important for your brand to have exposure on high-potential business networks such as LinkedIn to make an impact on decision-makers. With the support of the right LinkedIn marketing tools, you can productively build a brand presence that contributes towards your goals and KPIs and makes your brand successful.

Prospective customers today are made up of digitally-connected, savvy buyers who take the time to research a variety of competing products and services before deciding on a solution that provides the most value to their organization.

In order to generate sales and drive leads down the funnel, businesses have to understand the unique needs and interests of prospects while demonstrating value to decision-makers. With this in mind, businesses need to align sales and marketing efforts—tailoring both departments to actively engage leads and convert them.

Unfortunately, almost half of all B2B sales reps list lead quantity and quality as their biggest challenge – and that’s a red flag that marketing and sales are not aligned.

(Source.)

Marketers are no longer being asked to deliver a high number of leads, they’re being asked to provide quality leads, ready to convert. And failing in this key responsibility is holding businesses back from achieving their most important goals.

In fact, a study by Aberdeen shows that 90% of marketers say poor alignment keeps them from reaching their objectives.

Then, there’s this research: Three out of four best-in-class organizations operate with complete or strong sales alignment. Because of alignment, they reap both department-specific and organizational benefits, including:

• Being able to better meet the demands of prospective customers
• Demonstrate value across a wider and more complex customer journey
• Provide honest assessment of where prospects are won and lost
• Increases efficiency and maximizes budget spend

In Greg Allen’s recent post, he explored why interactive content can assist marketing and sales alignment. Now, we’ll show—in three steps— how incorporating interactive content can drive marketing and sales alignment.

Step One: Bring Marketing and Sales to the Same Table

The first step toward effective interactive content is to define what “effective” will mean. In other words, marketing and sales teams need to be brought together to discuss where and how marketing can sync with sales team needs. From there, marketers and salespeople can pool together their insights, knowledge, and experiences to ensure interactive content is working toward this shared definition.

With both teams strategizing together, they can ask the questions that lead to better marketing efforts. Here’s an example: is sales not following up on certain leads? Why? Maybe there’s a lead generating content asset that doesn’t lead to a promising sales conversation, so they’ve given up.

By bringing sales and marketing together to discuss where their efforts are working and where they’re falling flat, both teams can begin to align.

Take Paycor, for example. In order to ensure that they were consistently aligning their sales and marketing teams, Paycor established biweekly meetings for the marketing and sales teams — simple as that. These meetings helped highlight what drove the needle for sales and where the marketing strategy could provide support.

Step Two: Identify Shared Objectives

In order to effectively align sales and marketing efforts, the two teams need to identify shared objectives. It’s easy for sales to say they need higher quality leads, but what does high quality mean? Often times, marketing and sales have two separate definitions. Both teams should accurately understand what’s needed by sales and marketing teams, and then develop demand gen efforts to achieve that goal.

With aligned criteria for marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads, prospects can be more quickly qualified or disqualified. Now dig deeper: What are the sales-qualifying questions? Where are the buyer pain points and challenges? Because sales people talk to customers and buyers every day, they will have excellent insight into the minds of potential buyers and marketing can use this insight to create content to address these critical points in the buyer journey.

Step Three: Build Content to Reveal the Best Leads

Once objectives have been laid out, it’s time to start developing interactive content that meets those objectives. By including sales in the process, as we did in in the creation of this interactive content asset, marketers can craft interactive engagements that resonate with prospects and drive the kind of leads sales requires.

In this case study, S&P Global discovered that many of their MQLs weren’t leading to the right SQLs, they decided to align their marketing and sales teams to find a solution.

In the process of integrating interactive content into their marketing strategy, S&P used insights from their sales team to tailor interactive engagements geared toward better lead scoring. With alignment, the content addressed prospect pain points and improved engagement. The measurement opportunities of those interactive engagements then allowed marketers to score leads more accurately, leading to higher quality SQLs for the sales team.

Final Thoughts

For businesses today, the question is no longer if they should align their sales and marketing teams, but how. Interactive content can be a valuable tool, helping provide opportunities for both teams to gain insights (from each other and from potential buyers) and achieve shared objectives.

Generating leads and attracting more customers has always been (and always will be) a top goal for businesses. However, some customers are more valuable than others, especially for B2B companies. For example, a client that has lots of notoriety in their industry will give your brand more credibility, and therefore, attract more customers. Similarly, working with one large client may be easier than managing several smaller accounts that spend the same amount.

But these high-value B2B customers may not come to your brand so easily. After all, they know their value, and so do your competitors. They are likely inundated with sales representatives reaching out and trying to grab onto their business. So how can you make sure that your brand sticks out to these valuable customers?

Let’s discuss.

1. Create Versatile User Experiences

The B2B market used to be all about sales meetings, cold calling, and fostering relationships with client outings. However, today, 93% of B2B customers would prefer to buy online than through a traditional sales representative. Even more, the B2B ecommerce industry is expected to be twice as large as B2C by the year 2020.

Therefore, you must make sure that your brand website user experience (UX) is truly exceptional and different than the competition. Offering a versatile and vibrant UX is the best way to create a clear competitive advantage. Be sure that you use a comprehensive B2B ecommerce platform that supports the features necessary to sustain this.

Source

For example, personalization is an important trend in the B2B market. 93% of marketing teams who utilize personalization into their websites reported a significant increase in conversions. By using an ecommerce platform that creates customer accounts to organize data, you can offer truly customized experiences for each client. Sending out personalized offers or relevant content that addresses their needs can be extremely beneficial in both the long and short term.

2. Offer Self-Sufficient Shopping Options

As B2B customers become more active with online purchases, they are becoming less dependent on sales and customer service representatives to help them along. As your clients prefer to “do-it-themselves” in the research and purchasing process, it is important that your company offers the options to let them have this exact experience.

Most of us greatly dislike calling customer service, especially when we know that we will be put on hold for an unforeseeable amount of time. Therefore, if an issue does arise, it is best that your website offers several options to hopefully solve the issue before they have to call in assistance. Including an exhaustive FAQ page that addresses all sorts of common questions and concerns is certainly a good start. Taking things a step further by creating content pieces around customer pain points is even better, like the B2B customer review service Trustpilot does on their blog.

Source: Trustpilot

Another fantastic way to support a more self-sufficient UX, while still offering your B2B clients with the help they need, is using intuitive live chat and chatbots. Over half of online customers agree that live chat assistance is quicker for issue resolution than traditional customer service, and 45% state that it is more convenient for them. 34% of ecommerce customers also stated that they would be perfectly comfortable using an AI chatbot for assistance as well.

Source

3. Don’t Write Off Social Media Engagement

Many marketers mistakenly believe that while a social media presence is certainly necessary for branding purposes, it is not as influential to a B2B customer as it would be to a B2C. However, according to multiple studies, this is entirely false. The majority of B2B buyers use social media as a top research tool when making a purchasing decision, and 80% of B2B sales leads originally began from a social media search.

While sites like Twitter and Facebook seem like the obvious picks for B2B social engagement, other platforms that were typically reserved for B2C are becoming more popular, too. These days, many brands are engaging with clients through Instagram stories thanks to its highly visual platform.

For example, the B2B marketing analytics tool TrackMaven uses Instagram stories to show their followers exactly how their product works. They also use it as a platform to share marketing news and discuss new and emerging strategies that are relevant to their audience base.

Source

Don’t fall into the trap of using social media simply to build brand recognition (though that is certainly important). Instead, focus heavily on building engagement to attract valuable customers through unique, actionable content, such as “how to” videos or interactive posts like livestreams to discuss questions or share exciting news with your audience.

Conclusion

According to Temkin Group’s research, the CX is one of the most influential factors in the buyer’s decision in B2B, and it can impact long-term loyalty as well. A B2B business that offers a positive UX is 3.5 times more likely to have repeat customers and 73% report higher revenue than their competitors. Therefore, in order to attract the high value customers that your brand desires, you will need to offer a truly extraordinary experience that meets all of their needs.

Start off with a website that is able to offer the types of features that your valuable customers crave. From there, allow them to take care of their needs as independently as possible with helpful tools, such as chatbots, for a self-sufficient shopping experience. And finally, find them where they are engaging on social media.

In the modern B2B market, a better experience will eventually win out over price. Be sure that your business’s CX stands out and provides your high-value clients with a high-value experience.

By Tibor Shanto

A sales process is a document that attempts to bring a roadmap, some objective order to an otherwise all too subjective affair.  It is not a divine document passed on to Chuck Heston by a white-bearded guy or your VP of Sales.  Following the process blindly is not a recipe for success. I know many of you are shaking your heads saying “duh, we know that Tibor.”  So then why are so many out there losing deals and opportunities by following their organizations’ sales process?  We’ll get to that after a couple of recent real-time examples.

Slaves To The Clock

I was involved with a renewal with a client for their marketing automation product, a leader you’d all know, the client was not happy and had made that abundantly clear to their “Customer Success Manager.”  Came the day for the call with a “Renewal Manager,” title like that called for our best suits and list of requirements and possibilities.  Clicked the link in the invite, waiting, waiting, waiting, no show.  We gave up after 15 minutes and got an e-mail from the renewal queen that she had some technical issues, and then things turned bizarre, she informed us that she had another call at 25 after the hour, but if we wanted to reschedule, we can click the link in her signature. – – – – – Yeah, that’s what I said too.  Didn’t seem like a worthwhile activity, and we have not heard from her since.  She followed the process.

Never Let A Good Plan Get In The Way Of Success

Gearing down from renewal mode into search mode, the quest for a replacement began in earnest.  We were close to deciding when I remembered a vendor I had worked with who may fit the bill, reached out and was introduced to a “Senior Account Manager”.  We spelt out that we were deciding in three days and would like a walk through with three specific areas of focus and requirements.  When the invite arrived, it was for only 30 minutes, my client e-mailed her pointing out that we would require more than 30 minutes to fully understand all the things we would need to decide.  She informed us that the call the next morning (decision day -2), would “be brief and will go over your requirements and what you’re needing from XYZ Corp.”

Does this mean we have to go out and dig up another set of requirements over and above the detailed information already provided?  No, it means that she was doing things as she was told to if she wanted to succeed, even if it meant ignoring the opportunity in front of her, no doubt blinded by the glow emanating from the process scrolls.  I understand wanting to be diligent, but we were very specific about what was going into the decision.  There was nothing new to be added, but we said WTF; let’s play, we took the appointment with her and her SE, hoping we could extend the call and have the SE fall into the usual “Tell and Show Pushbutton Demo.” She promised to forward an invite ASAP! As you would imagine, it never came.

I know things happen, but if I had an opportunity teed up with a prospect telling me they are making a decision in hours, not weeks, I would look for the invite accepted e-mail back; given there were multiple invitees, there were multiple opportunities for red flags, all missed.  Even with that, if these same guests were not in the room within minutes of the scheduled time, I would have reached out; but that’s just me, I still cold call, what do I know?

One Small Change

While I have seen, designed and executed a number of well-designed processes, there is one element or instruction that should be added in bold at the bottom of every stage: “We encourage you to think, evaluate and consider the situation around you “now” in the sale.  Synthesize that with your experience, the process and skills and execute accordingly.”

Unfortunately, the day to day reality best described in the cartoon below:

So, Who?

So, who put them up to this, who made the sales process a cult manifesto to follow even at the risk of revenue?  Their manager, the local priest, the face and guardian of the process as presented to their flock.   It would be easy to stop there, but we all know that if we follow the “money”, it leads not only to the top but to very old and tightly held beliefs that are hard to move (sound familiar?) even when proven to be false.  You know why? Its because that’s how they were told to do it when they went to “church”.  Ignoring the science, ignoring the evidence of an alternative path to salvation, I mean revenue; scoffing and stoning; just remember the warm reception The Challenger Sale got from the “relationship” cult?  Unfortunately, these cults seek safety in the wrong number, it should be revenue, not clan size.  Adding new technology to the stack is not selling in a new way, it’s just new technology.  Leaders need to change their thinking and their view of execution.   A change in thinking leads to new opportunities, a change in technology will only lead to a predictive process, often without the results or revenues.

Talmudic Selling

I find the best, most adaptive and innovative sellers are like Talmudic scholars.  They understand that the process is a good starting point.  But as you leave the building and knock up against life, the script(ure) leaves one a little short in the real world and needs to be interpreted and aligned with the truth on the ground, not with the book back inside.  Even worse when the book, or sales process, in this case, is not as dynamically evolving with the realities of the market and your buyers.  Like Talmudic scholars, best sellers start with the process (Chumash), always learning and situationally adapting it to how the sale is unfolding; life in the real world.

Unfortunately for a host of reasons (a future post), many in management, especially frontline (managers or directors) leaders have not developed the skills and abilities to build on the process, leading their team’s evolution based on realities they face, and how they alter their execution as a result.   We could look at the negative impact of organizations rewarding adhering to the process, almost as much as to getting sales.  I know of one manager whose team exceeded quota by 20%, rather than asking how he did it, lessons to share, he was chastised for not forecasting well.  I get it, but their wrath would have made a bit more sense if he had missed by 20%, instead they missed an opportunity to learn, share and grow.

Like a good piece of music, the score is the start, what one does with it, is down to adaptability, insight and execution; any fool can play the Star-Spangled Banner, but only Hendrix elevated it through execution.

In The End

No offence to any of my religious friends and family, but I always found it difficult to understand why people would just blindly follow something without an occasional reality check, an inclination to allow some rational thought to creep in, or just think before running into a brick wall just cause the book said to.  Sadly, it seems that this lemming-like behaviour is alive and pervasive among my favourite tribe, salespeople.

The post It’s A Process Not The Bible appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

When your customers feel valued, they stay loyal to your business. Loyal customers also help you get new customers by telling about your business to their friends and coworkers. They do free word of mouth marketing for you and as a result, your business grows. Therefore, you need to value your customers and make them feel special. Below are 5 ways for it.

• Say “Thank You”: Express your appreciation and thank your customers for doing business with you. You can thank them by sending a card on holidays or a coupon via email for their next purchases. Also, don’t forget to celebrate your customers’ birthdays or anniversary days if you have this information. Doing business is not always about bringing in new customers but also about keeping the existing ones. Therefore, make your customers feel remembered and thought.
• Pay Attention: Pay attention to your customers’ inquiries. Customers can use a variety of channels to communicate with you. You need to track all of them and be responsive. The rule of thumb is to solve the customers’ problems within 24 hours. Also, you always need to have a staff available during business hours to get customers’ calls and you can also take advantage of the automated tools to respond emails, chat messages or social media messages.
• Listen to Feedback: Try to find out what your customers like and dislike by listening to their inquiries and feedback. If you can update your product or service according to your customers’ needs, then, you can be a more successful business. Moreover, let them know that you are releasing a new product or service that will cater to their needs to make them know that their opinions are cared.
• Use CRM: Take advantage of the CRM tools and create a VIP list of customers. You can give these VIP customers special discounts or host an event just for them. Having a VIP list is a must for every business in order to thank the customers who make the most business with you. This way your customers will feel valued and keep making business with you.
• Be Presentable: Always be presentable as a business. This means that your workspace and employees should be clean, neat and professional. If you have an online business, your website and mobile app should always be updated with the latest technology. You can make changes in your website or mobile app design according to latest trends. Moreover, make sure to keep your design as simple as possible for easier navigation.

The post RIP or ROI? Is In-House Sales Development a Revenue Generator or Cost Center? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Creating content is a waste of time if your target audience isn't consuming it. Here are three steps to creating content that prospects will care about. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

You have data, but that doesn't mean you have actionable intelligence. Knowing how to report on that data is what helps you tell the stories you want to share. And the process might be simpler—and more enjoyable—than you think. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

There’s an unassuming restaurant in Dallas called Chop House Burger, home to handspun milkshakes, truffle parmesan french fries, and six innovative burgers. It’s an eight-year-old restaurant in an industry where 80% of new entrants fail in the first five years. And stitched into its origin story is a clue to why some products (and businesses) succeed in the market while most wither and die.

The burger place spun out of a The Dallas Chop House, a high-end steakhouse two blocks away. The Chop House was known for its ribeye, filet mignon, and flat iron steaks, dry-aged in the restaurant with Himalayan sea salt. In an effort to diversify their menu, the owners also offered a gourmet burger. Despite how good the steaks were, the burger became one of the most popular items on the menu. So the owners decided to build a restaurant around it.

Most of us aren’t in the restaurant industry. We don’t all have an established business to test ideas in. Yet the value of establishing demand before you launch the business is just as important for us, whether we’re launching a new company or simply a new product.

In February, venture capitalist database CB Insights conducted an extensive review examining what contributes to the failure of new businesses. After analyzing 101 startup post-mortems, the reviewers found that 42% suffered from a lack of demand for the product or service being offered. They used a harsh phrase to describe this cause of failure: “no market need.”

This one flaw harmed significantly more companies than well-known startup challenges such as cash flow (29%), competition (19%), and poor timing (13%), to name a few.

The findings raise the question: How can entrepreneurs or new product developers test their ideas before investing the significant time and capital required to actually bring them to life? How can we spot the ideas that are likely to succeed instead of wasting our efforts on those that are prone to failure?

Here are three strategies worth trying:

Look for successful competitors. When it comes to establishing demand, thriving competitors are a good sign, not the red flag many entrepreneurs view them to be. Being the first mover in a space can produce situational advantages, but showing up late gives you the benefit of added perspective.

Today, if you were to release a new photo editing software, beer, or car rental service, you could be confident your offering would be understood and in-demand at some level. Yes, you would still have to get the attention of your target customers. You would also have to differentiate yourself from competitors. And there would still be plenty of ways your product or business could ultimately fail. But you would at least be in charted territory.

The food delivery industry contains terrific examples of established companies following the demand validated by early movers, such as Seamless and Grubhub. To better leverage its foodie customer base, Yelp purchased Eat24. Uber applied its successful driver model to meals and created UberEats, which is outgrowing the ride sharing service in some markets. And payment platform Square acquired Caviar, giving restaurant owners a simple way to accept credit cards and deliver meals.

Getting outcompeted is the obvious fear associated with entering a space that’s already home to successful companies. It’s a real risk. In the food delivery space, companies differentiated by finding new restaurants to partner with, expanding to new locations, and offering distinct pricing models. But those opportunities won’t exist in every industry.

Ultimately, it’s worth considering the numbers. In the CB Insights study, only 19% of the analyzed postmortems claimed their startup had been outcompeted, less than half the number that blamed failure on a lack of demand.

Check for search traffic. When people are searching for a product to solve a problem they’re facing, they type what they’re looking for into Google. Through keyword research, entrepreneurs can learn what people are searching for and use the findings to gauge demand for a product or service idea.

According to the keyword research tool Ahrefs, 27,000 people per month are searching for “Photoshop alternatives.” 4,000 are searching for “automatic lawn mower.” And 100 are searching for “truckers’ bookkeeping service.”

Each of these terms has similar variations that increase the total number of monthly searches. You could also gauge potential demand by looking for broader searches that don’t focus on a specific solution but prove the existence of a problem you can solve.

For the examples above, “How to edit photos,” “Don’t have time to mow my lawn,” or “Bookkeeping guidelines for truckers” could be searches worth exploring.

There’s no standardized amount of search volume you can use to validate healthy demand. You will have to interpret the data in the context of your specific industry and business goals. But confirming that people are searching for a product or service like yours is a good sign, and through Google AdWords campaigns or SEO, you can work to get in front of these very people if you decide to launch the idea.

Test your marketing promise. People don’t buy products. They buy promises. Generally speaking, customers don’t truly know what it’s like to own a product until after they’ve purchased it. They don’t spend money because of any realized benefits. They’re paying for the benefits promised in the sales copy and testimonials.

This is a crucial insight for anyone looking to test a new product or service because it suggests that you don’t need a finished product to validate demand for an idea.

You can create the marketing copy for your hypothetical offering and test it through surveys or interviews with targeted prospects. Of course, the most accurate test of demand will involve customers getting out their credit cards. Pre-selling models such as Kickstarter are one way to do that.

There’s no perfect system to pre-validate demand for a product or service, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your due diligence. Business failures are costly. They can result in lost capital, wasted time, and damaged confidence. Some of the challenges uncovered by the CB Insights study will be hard to predict — such as timing, whether you’ve hired the right people, and if you’ll make necessary pivots after launching the business. But demand is one key ingredient you can pre-validate, at least partially.

Had they done a better job of gauging demand in advance, 42% of the companies in the CB Insights study might have chosen to pursue more reliable ideas, which could have better prepared them to avoid business failure and reach success sooner.

After all, the fewer detours we take, the faster we arrive at our goals.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

For marketers, “that” word is engagement. And we use it a lot.

We use it in strategy meetings, tweets, videos, and blog posts. We’ve selected “creating more engaging content” as one of our top priorities in Content Marketing Institute annual surveys. We’ve listed “engagement” as one of our most important content marketing goals in the very same survey. At a recent content marketing event, one speaker used the E word 335,000 times in a 45-minute breakout session. (OK, I didn’t keep count but she used the word A LOT.)

But what exactly do YOU mean when you say the E word?

Some consider engagement to be the number of shares a piece of content receives. Others believe engagement is the number of visitors to a blog post or the number of views a video receives. Still others claim they measure engagement by tracking the number of comments or conversations that result from a single piece of content. Some count “likes” and “favorites” as proof that their content is engaging.

Chances are your definition of engagement is different from mine, which is different from theirs.

We use the E word so often that, within a marketing context, the word has lost all meaning.

It’s time to fix this.

What is engagement?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “engage” means to “occupy or attract (someone’s interest or attention),” while “interest” is the state of “wanting to know or learn about something” and “attention” is “regarding something as interesting or important.”

Marketing engagement is the act of occupying your audience’s desire to know or learn over time. Therefore, if you’re going to measure engagement with your content, you must focus on time-based metrics like time on page or duration of website visit. However, mediums like audio and video have an even better metric for understanding engagement.

Once you hit the play button on a video you’re barreling toward its end with a limited number of options along the way: pause, rewind, fast-forward, stop, and play. As a viewer, you can also bail on the video at any time. Because video is a linear medium, measuring audience engagement is simple: How many people make it to the end?

Getting to the end of a video is essential, as this is where you most often place the call to action. If your “learn more,” “download now,” or “buy now” buttons are the destination and your content consumers never make it to the end of the video, how can you expect them to take action?

YouTube provides one of the most significant engagement metrics of any social platform. Buried in YouTube’s analytics is a simple chart called “audience retention,” comparing the number of views at the beginning of the video with the number of views at the end (or any point in between).

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#YouTube provides one of the most significant engagement metrics of any social platform, says @DrewDavisHere.
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For example, a video with an average audience retention rate of 25% means most viewers watch only 25% of it. A content creator’s ultimate goal is to produce video content with 100% audience retention (meaning the average viewer watches the entire video). That would be a genuinely engaging video. Why? Because, remember, engagement is defined in marketing as occupying your audience’s desire to know something over time. The longer you retain your viewers, the more engaging your content.

What type of video gets highest engagement?

After researching hundreds of videos over the last two years, I’ve learned one type of video typically has the highest audience retention rates: how-to videos. For example, the world’s most-consumed bow-tie tutorial video has millions of views and most of those viewers make it all the way to the end. By definition it’s engaging.

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How-to #videos typically have the highest audience retention rates, says @DrewDavisHere.
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But why do good how-to videos have such high audience retention rates? The viewer has a question, “How do I tie a bow tie?” and the video has the answer. However, if you want to tie a bow tie successfully you can’t bail on the how-to video halfway through. You can’t skip a step. You have to watch the entire tutorial.

How-to videos occupy their audience’s desire to know the answer to a question over time. That’s engagement.

So, engaging content should keep the audience chasing answers.

But what about all the other content you create? How do you make it engaging?

How do you keep your audience curious?

There are two compelling psychological phenomena at work when we consume any piece of content. Not only do these mental factors explain why how-to videos are so engaging, but they also uncover the secret behind successful clickbait.

Humans are curious creatures. We love to fill the gap between what we already know and what we want to know (or even need to know.) Psychologists call this void the curiosity gap. When you create how-to content the curiosity gap is obvious: The audience is consciously asking the first question, such as, “How do I tie a bow tie?” The video maintains the viewer’s attention by ensuring that the end of each step invites the viewer to ask, “What’s next?”

To maintain your audience’s attention, you must manufacture curiosity gaps. How? I’ll get to that after I tell you about the second psychological phenomenon you can employ to maintain your audience’s attention.

(See what I did there? I manufactured a curiosity gap.)

Anytime you create a curiosity gap in the minds of your viewers you’re also leveraging another unbelievably powerful psychological state. Human beings have an innate need for closure: a sincere desire for a firm answer to a question and a natural aversion toward ambiguity. Our need for closure creates tension that compels us to take action even when we know it may cause us pain or make us uncomfortable. Our need for closure explains why clickbait works.

Take this headline: Man Tries to Hug a Lion. You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.

We’ve been trained to spot clickbait and that headline is a classic of the form. We all know that whatever is behind the click won’t measure up to the expectation the headline sets. But our emotional need for closure overwhelms our ability to reason. We must know what happens next. We need the answer and we must avoid ambiguity. We click the bait.

Want proof? You’re probably still wondering what happened to the man who tried to hug a lion. Guess what? The lion hugs him back. (Not that unbelievable, really.)

Herein lies the problem with clickbait: The payoff must be proportional to the curiosity gap. Otherwise, your content erodes your target audience’s trust over time.

Create content momentum by manufacturing curiosity gaps that tickle the deep-seated need for closure. This is how you encourage your audience to stick with you to the very end of your content. The greater the tension, the longer you engage the audience. And the bigger the payoff, the more likely you are to inspire your audience to act.

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Create #content momentum by manufacturing curiosity gaps, says @DrewDavisHere.
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3 simple ways to manufacture gaps

Scottish playwright and literary critic William Archer describes drama as “anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” Your content needs drama.

Storytellers routinely employ the power of curiosity gaps and our need for closure by implementing one of the most compelling literary devices of all: suspense. If you are to create engaging content (even how-to content), you must build suspense.

You don’t have to look far for suspenseful inspiration – just turn on the television.

Dive right in

The final episode aired in 2010, but Law & Order remains the longest-running crime drama on American prime time television. Each episode followed a crime, often ripped from real-life headlines, from two separate perspectives: the police investigation and the prosecution in court.

Law & Order used a simple but powerful technique to immediately grab and keep the viewer’s attention. Every episode begins with the crime; no setup, no character building, no preamble. The crime creates the curiosity gaps, piquing a need for closure with one central question: Who did it?

In the television business this is called a “cold open.” Instead of spending the first quarter of your next case study or testimonial detailing who it’s about, what they do, or the problem they have, start with the most pivotal, dramatic point in the story. Raise a central question and entice your audience to chase the answer.

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Raise a central question and entice your audience to chase the answer, says @DrewDavisHere. #writingtips
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Bury the lede

As a former journalist, I spent years writing ledes designed to mention the most critical and exciting elements of a story. My training implored me to include brief answers to who, what, why, when, where, and how the critical event in the story took place, all within the first few lines of an article. Journalists are trained to front-load the information because newspaper editors assume most readers won’t consume the entire article.

However, to build suspense, you must remember that you control the information – and, most importantly, when you divulge it.

Instead of front-loading your content with answers to every one of the reader’s questions, build suspense by excluding some essential story elements. Keep your audience curious.

Delay the reveal

If you’ve ever watched a makeover marathon on HGTV, you’re familiar with one of the most potent suspense-building secrets in the reality-television business: the big reveal.

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Mention your product w/ in first 85% of content & you eliminate opportunity for big reveal. @DrewDavisHere
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When telling the stories of customers and clients, marketers are often quick to reveal that the answer to each problem is their product or service. Unfortunately, if you mention your company or the product you sell within the first 85% of your content you’re eliminating the opportunity for a big reveal.

Delaying any mention of your brand and the outcome of your story until the last 15% of your case studies and testimonials increases the tension and enhances the story. Too many reveal the clients’ outcome even in the title of the video. Remember, there’s no reason to watch the entire story unless the viewer is chasing the answer to a central question, such as how did they solve these problems? The longer you delay the reveal the bigger the catharsis when the solution is revealed.

The hard truth about engagement

Remember, your goal is to create genuinely engaging content, which maintains the interest or attention of your audience over time.

Unfortunately, when someone says, “Your content is too long,” what they’re really saying is, “I ran out of questions before you ran out of content.”

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Your #content’s not too long. The reader ran out of questions before you ran out of content. @DrewDavisHere
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Keep your audience curious and you’ll keep it engaged – no matter the length.

A version of this article originally appeared in the August issue of  Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our print magazine every quarter.

Let Andrew Davis engage you during his keynote talk at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Discover the Real Value of the E Word (and How to Embrace It) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

China’s two retailing powerhouses, online commerce pioneer Alibaba and social media-gaming pioneer Tencent, have systematically established a duopoly of record proportions in record time. Combined, they have spent more than $20 billion in the past 12 months alone to change the way people in China shop. (The precise value of their investments cannot be determined, given that many of them are undisclosed or private deals. This figure, along with some others in this article, are drawn from a Bain analysis.)

It started when online retailer Alibaba made the seemingly counterintuitive expansion into the brick-and-mortar world. To do this, they invested heavily in everything from Lianhua supermarkets to Intime department stores to electronics retailer Suning. Alibaba is now working to connect China’s millions of mom-and-pop stores with their internet-based distribution network, an initiative called Ling Shou Tong. It has opened futuristic Hema Xiansheng supermarkets, where consumers use the Alipay app to order groceries or prepared food for delivery to their homes—in many places, within 30 minutes.

Tencent took a different path to becoming China’s other retail leader. It began life as a social networking services company, and then added gaming, electronic payments, media content, cloud computing and devices. With successive investments into Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, it has become China’s No. 2 online retailer only four years after entering the retail industry. It invested in Yonghui, one of the fastest-growing Chinese grocery chains, and partnered with Carrefour and Walmart (which also owns 12% of JD.com). Among many other advances, with JD it created the fresh-food supermarket chain 7Fresh and invested in social commerce app Pinduoduo, a rising e-commerce company targeting the country’s booming smaller cities.

Alibaba and Tencent each is valued at around $500 billion on public markets, and both act as the SoftBank or Berkshire Hathaway of the new Chinese economy, investing in hundreds of companies at all stages. With their mounting arsenals of digital and physical assets, each has created its own closed-loop opportunity capture as much information as possible about a consumer — all day and night, at any browsing or buying moment. They gain invaluable data that fuels everything from hyper-targeted marketing to store locations to product assortment to pricing. Now, with a combined 80% market share of the world’s largest e-commerce market and stakes in  four of the top five hypermarket and supermarket chains in China, a fundamental question looms: Is there space for anyone else?

China’s retail landscape has room for companies to elbow their way in. However, in China there are two decisions that guide any retailer. The first one is choosing sides: Do you want to align with Alibaba or go with Tencent? For any retailer hoping to earn its slice of China’s expanding retail pie, at least for now, there is no alternative but to play alongside one team or the other — and there are pros and cons with each.

The second decision involves the partnership model. When partnering with China’s leaders, you can choose from three basic strategies: Do you want to use the big partners as a way to test and learn in this vast market or to enhance a core business or to fully integrate?

Let’s consider the first decision, whether to go with Alibaba or Tencent. Alibaba prefers to integrate all data, marketing, and logistics of acquired companies. For its part, Tencent allows each retailer the choice of connecting and upgrading its existing business activities. The next consideration: What types of data do you need to complement your own? Tencent will have more data on social media behavior while Alibaba will have more purchasing behavior data. Finally, what kind of expertise do you require? For example, unless the partnership is in conjunction with JD, Tencent does not really have core retail expertise in areas like supply chain and logistics.

The second decision — choosing a partnering strategy — depends on your starting point and your ultimate goals.

A test-and-learn strategy is most suitable if you do not already have a presence in China and would like a non-capital-intensive way to test the market — to learn what customers want and how well your products would sell, for example. No physical stores are required, and if the arrangement doesn’t go well it is relatively easy to exit the market. Costco, the U.S.-based store, took this approach, using Alibaba as a way to test its offerings and learn about China before fully committing. In 2014, it opened an online warehouse store on Tmall Global, Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce channel. That move helped it take advantage of a special government program that allows retailers to sell specific goods (with favorable tax status) without being granted a license to operate in China. It also helped Costco gain widespread name recognition. By the following year, Costco had made it into the top 10 sellers on Tmall Global during the 11/11 Singles Day sales promotion.

In 2017, Costco obtained a license to open a flagship store on Tmall and began moving toward its goal of offering nearly 800 SKUs to Chinese consumers. These online steps paved the way for Costco to obtain permission to open physical stores, the first of which is expected to greet customers next June in Shanghai. Costco’s China stores will operate differently than its outlets elsewhere in the world. For example, they will rely on Alibaba’s data-heavy approach, using the past four years of consumer data gleaned on Tmall to determine product assortment and influence operations.

Say you already have a presence in China but want access to a leader’s data and technology without losing control of your brand or operations — and without giving up ownership control. In that case, consider another option: using the partnership to enhance your existing core business in China. That’s the approach taken by Walmart. Through a strategic partnership, it now uses Tencent’s technology to both upgrade Walmart’s in-store customer experience and help it learn more about its customers. Among the innovations: the WeChat Scan & Go mobile payment option, which gives the U.S. retailer access to consumption data from customers paying with the WeChat mobile app. It is data that will help Walmart build more sophisticated consumer profiles. However, there is a downside to this approach that will lead some retailers to take a pass. You have to share a lot more information with your chosen partner to make the partnership really work.

Finally, some companies opt to integrate fully with one or the other. It allows a retailer to gain full access to a leader’s user base, insights, data and technology. It also opens up opportunities to gain scale benefits or share processes such as purchasing. The drawback is that the leader becomes more involved in the operations of the store. Hou Yi, a former leader at JD Logistics, took this path after launching Hema Xiansheng, the online-to-offline fresh food supermarket concept that has since become the most tangible example of what is being referred to as “new retail.” Mr. Hou serves as Hema’s CEO and oversees the rapid expansion that ensued after Alibaba invested in and funded the company — and made Hema a part of its powerful ecosystem.

Now, even as they carve up China, both Alibaba and Tencent are poised for global expansion. When that happens, retailers on other continents may find themselves with the same set of options: choosing a partner and determining their own best partnership strategy if they hope to play in this high-speed game.

Prospects will sometimes reach out and ask for a discount before they even sign up for a trial. What do you do when that happens?

Instead of debating if you should or shouldn't offer them a discount right away, you need to refocus their energy on what really matters: your product!

Let's explore the four core reasons why you never want to negotiate pricing before someone had a chance to trial your product and determine that it's a good fit.

1. You're starting the relationship on the wrong foot

People who ask you to lower your prices before they invested any time into using your product are usually trouble.

This can often lead to winning a new customer that is going to expect you to give 24/7 premium phone support, prioritize features based on their needs all while trying to pay you pennies on the dollar.

If you start the relationship by giving them everything they ask for, don't be surprised if they keep asking for more in an unreasonable fashion. This is unsustainable and unhealthy for both sides.

2. They're buying for the wrong reason 

At this point, they can't tell if your product is a good fit for them since they have never used it. Your first priority should always be to help people explore and discover that your product can really solve their problem before negotiating what the final pricing should be.

Discounting your product upfront might help you close some deals faster. But it will often lead to these customers ultimately discovering that they should have never bought in the first place. They'll churn a lot more often. Don't believe me? Look at the most recent data analyzed by our friends at ProfitWell:

To summarize this chart in plain English: Customers given a discount have over double the churn rate of non-discounted customers. 

Always be wary of prospects that don't want to do their homework upfront. Nothing sucks more than a new customer that cancels immediately after your company invested a ton of time on support, onboarding, and Customer Success.

3. You're negotiating on price vs. value 

The problem with people trying to negotiate pricing before testing your product is that you are forced to negotiate on price rather than value.

They didn't have a chance to build up any desire to buy and discover the massive value your product could deliver to them. All of a sudden, your product turns into a commodity and your only differentiation is offering them the lowest price possible. 

According to ProfitWell's 2018 Study On Discounts, customers who received discounts of 30% of more are 15-40% less willing to pay when their contracts are due for renewal.

4. You're negotiating without leverage

The more time people invest in your product, the more invested they become and naturally the harder it is for them to "throw away" the time they put into exploring your product and making it part of their daily workflow.

You always want to postpone the most difficult/complex parts of the sales negotiation till the end of the sales cycle. That way you ensure the right amount of momentum as you move forward in the sales process and avoid too much upfront friction. 

How to respond when someone asks for a discount without having tried your product

"Thanks for inquiring about pricing options! Why don't you sign up for a trial and give the product a go? If you find out that it's a great fit, I'll take care of you and make sure you get a price that makes you happy. Sound fair enough?"

This works every time. The reply you usually get will be:

"Great! Just signed up and giving the product a go. Thanks!"

This even works on social media, as this little exchange from a few years back shows:

What are the results you should expect?

Nine out of 10 times, the people that turn out to be a bad fit will self-select during a trial and just leave. The prospects that are a good fit will love your product so much that they won't negotiate hard for a discount since they now really understand its value. 

Even if they do, it's fine to give great customers a good price because you know they are buying for all the right reasons and will probably stay with you for a long time.

We've done this thousands of times with great success when people ask us to give them a better price for our sales CRM. 

Want to learn how to handle other common sales objections startups encounter? Click below!

Further reading:

How do you manage the pricing objection in sales?
What usually is behind the pricing objection in sales and how to manage it successfully to close more deals and make more sales.

Lean startup validation: Don't be cheap
If you're the founder of an incipient startup, it's tempting to offer your product or service for free to get to initial traction. That's mostly a bad idea though - which is why I advise founders to focus on getting paying customers as soon as possible. But once you ask prospects to part with their money, you'll encounter resistance. People who just told you how much they love your idea, and how great it would be to have such a thing as yours suddenly become a lot less enthusiastic about your product.

SaaS pricing: You're too cheap if you never lose customers because of pricing
Focus fanatically on this: offering more value to every single customer than you extract from them with your pricing. Do that by constantly adding more value to your customers life instead of lowering your prices and discounting your product heavily.

Many of the clients I’ve been working with over the past few months have been attempting to implement some form of account planning. Far fewer seem to be happy with the current outcomes.

The symptoms of an ineffective account planning process aren’t hard to identify. Sales people are expected to prepare account plans, but this often has the appearance of a one-off or annual exercise.

Once produced, the plan is rarely referred to and even less frequently updated. There often appears to be little causality or correlation between the plan and the sales person’s actual real-life activities.

In such circumstances, you’ve got to ask the question “why bother?” …

To have any persistent value – and whatever format it is created in – an effective account plan must be a living document. It must guide the planning (and re-planning) process rather than be seen as a means to an end. It must stimulate the account owner to think. And above all it must drive effective action.

Thoughtlessly cutting-and-pasting an organisation’s profile from their website, LinkedIn or other sources or gathering data without any analysis or interpretation isn’t planning – it’s valueless activity masquerading as progress.

In fact, any information that is presented “as is” in order to fill in a previously blank field in the plan format without any attempt to assess the value of the information or how it might be acted upon is almost certainly a useless exercise.

The problem often starts with the format of the plan itself. If it is seen as a dumping ground for data, that’s what it will become. If evidence of analysis is not required, it almost certainly won’t happen. If the account plan gives every indication of being a comfort blanket or an excuse for not taking real action, it probably is.

I suggest that you adopt a different approach, and evaluate every element of whatever account plan framework you choose to adopt against the following tests:

• What do we really need to know about the account?
• How can we confirm the veracity of the information provided?
• How would knowing this information influence our actions?
• How should we review whether our actions have been effective?

Demographics are just the start

When profiling an account, basic demographic information (such as size, sector, location, etc.) usually has very little value other than to qualify or disqualify the organisation as being worth further evaluation.

Structural, behavioural and timing information are of much greater value, even if they sometimes require more effort to obtain.

Structural insights

Structural information might – depending on your circumstances – include how the company is organised, who their key executives are, what position they hold in their marketplace, who their current strategic suppliers are and what key systems they have in place.

Having the facts about their current suppliers and systems is often a critically important indicator of our potential to enter a new account or fully develop the potential of an existing one.

Behavioural insights

Behavioural information can include factors like their attitude to innovation (are they leaders, fast followers, in the mainstream or laggards?), their corporate culture, where the power lies within the organisation and the typical nature of their relationship with suppliers.

We also need to clearly understand the organisation’s key current initiatives and strategic priorities, and their perceived threats and opportunities (and what they are doing about them).

Timing insights

Demographic, structural and behavioural information can help us to assess our long-term potential within the account, but timing information is critical to determining where our short-term opportunities might lie.

For example, knowing their replacement cycle for key systems or types of equipment can give us clues as to when we ought to engage with the customer. The announcement of a new high-priority corporate initiative often results in a stream of related programmes and investments.

Major changes in the marketplace – for example key trends, new legislation or regulation, high-profile legal situations and changes in the organisation’s market and competitive landscape can also open up opportunity.

Our relationship

An honest and up-to-date assessment of our true current relationship with the organisation is also a key element of effective account planning. But it needs to be a two-way exercise: we need to honestly assess the current importance of the relationship as well as its future potential from the perspective of both parties:

Their importance to us

• level 4: we regard them as a critical, must-retain strategic account
• level 3: they are amongst a handful of our most important accounts
• level 2: we regard them as one of our more important customers
• level 1: we regard them simply as one of many similar customers
• level 0: we currently have no meaningful relationship with them

Our importance to them

• level 4: they see us as their long-term strategic partner in our space
• level 3: they see us as their primary or exclusive supplier in our space
• level 2: they see us as one of a few preferred suppliers in our space
• level 1: we are one of many suppliers or options available to them
• level 0: we currently have no meaningful relationship with them

Key player engagement

Another key element that an account plan needs to include is the level and nature of our relationship with the key players in the customer account. By “key players”, I don’t just mean the senior executives: I also mean the key influencers and change agents who will inevitably play a significant part in any of the decisions we are trying to facilitate.

In particular, we need understand:

• Who these key players are
• What role they are likely to play in any opportunity we may be involved in
• What influence they are likely to have over the decision-making process
• Their awareness of and attitude to us

We ought to have a clear sense of who the key players are in typical sales opportunities, and we need to find ways to proactively engage and educate them prior to a formal sales opportunity.

Active “opportunities”

It’s obvious that any up-to-date account plan needs to include all currently qualified active sales opportunities, but I’m recommending that you go further, and anticipate likely future opportunities based on what you have discovered about the organisation’s situation and priorities.

There is an undeniable correlation between our chances of success and our ability to engage as early as possible in potential sales opportunities: Forrester found that the vendor that did the most to influence the customer’s vision of a solution stands a three-in-four chance of winning their business.

If we haven’t influenced it, by the time we receive an RFP we end up in the same the same low-chances-of-winning situation as all the other vendors they choose to invite to bid.

The dynamic nature of planning

It should be obvious that much of the above information is dynamic, and that the information contained in any one-off annual plan probably has a half-life measured in weeks or (at most) quarters.

It should also be obvious that in many cases much of the required information is likely to be incomplete, missing, or based on unverified guesswork. That’s why any effective account plan must be a dynamic process.

We need to recognise what we know and acknowledge what we don’t know, and systematically reach out to our account to fill in the blanks. We need to leverage what we’ve learned to influence the account’s thinking.

And we need to acknowledge (to paraphrase Eisenhower) that the plan is nothing, but planning (and implementing) is everything.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Medium here.

How to structure your story to resonate with different personas

In helping CEOs align their teams around a strategic story, there’s one question I hear more than any other. Recently, I heard it from a marketing leader at a public tech company valued at over $1 billion:

“We’re in an unusually complex situation in that we have to speak to multiple target audiences —multiple industries, multiple buyer roles (CEOs on down to field reps). Can we do that with one story, or should we be telling many stories?

When answering, I always reassure the questioner that his or her “situation” is totally normal. In other words, I try, as nicely as possible, to call bullshit: all of us have to speak to multiple audience segments.

What not to do: Separate stories for each audience

The point of tailoring your pitch for different segments is to help a diverse range of buyer types “see themselves” in your story. This might suggest you should craft multiple stories, one for each segment:

But if that’s all you’re doing, there are huge drawbacks. For example, what if you’re addressing a a conference audience consisting of buyers from different segments (industries, roles, etc.)? Furthermore, if your story is geared to one segment—say, users—you’re missing the opportunity to arm those people with the narrative ammunition they’ll need to engage colleagues who actually write checks, such as their C-level budget owners.

Worst of all, the “tell me who I’m talking to and I’ll give you the pitch” approach leaves you lacking a “front door” message for the brand. A striking example—and one that I found heartbreaking, given that I hoped she would become President—was Hillary Clinton’s campaign website:

A better approach, clearly, is to have a simple, powerful, high-level story that connects the low-lever ones together:

But what does that actually look like, and how do you build it? Specifically, what remains consistent in the story you tell to everyone, and what varies by audience?

Change is the glue

In The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen, I laid out a framework for structuring a high-level strategic narrative by dissecting Zuora’s. (Zuora, which recently celebrated a successful IPO, sells a platform for running subscription businesses).

The cornerstone of Zuora’s pitch is an undeniable, relevant change in the world. (In fact, every great pitch starts by naming this kind of change.) Zuora kicks off every sales conversation, website visit, and CEO keynote with some version of this slide:

Of course, Zuora sells to buyers in multiple industries. To make its “change” story relevant for each of them, Zuora shows that the change is playing out across industries. No accident that the industries portrayed here are the ones Zuora targets:

Every CEO I work with has found that a slide like the one above—I call it the “it’s playing out across segments” slide—is key for telling their story across audience types. If you’re speaking to a heterogeneous crowd (people from different segments), you can use this slide to invite viewers to ponder how the change is playing out in their own corner of the universe. (In sales discovery conversations, literally asking that question yields gold.) If it’s a homogeneous audience, you can still make the powerful point that the trend is playing out globally (across audiences) before diving into what the Promised Land looks like locally. For example, if Zuora were speaking to a music industry audience, it might show a slide like this one next:

Zuora also has to speak to multiple buyer roles, since closing a deal can require buy-in from client leaders in IT, product, finance, and marketing. Just as Zuora shows the subscription trend playing out across industries, they show it impacting these leaders in how they approach their jobs:

The metaphor here is evolution: if the subscription economy is a global environmental shift, Zuora shows how each “species” must adapt. The “from-to” messages, in other words, present a persona-tailored Promised Land. At its most recent conference, Zuora even presented a Promised Land message for tailored to consumers:

In other words, the “change” part of your story (subscription economy, etc.) is the “glue” that binds together tailored sub-stories; it’s how you start the conversation when you’re talking to anyone. Then, if you know your audience is of a certain type, you can present a tailored Promised Land message:

In order to reach an audience-specific Promised Land, members of that audience segment will face obstacles (if they don’t, they don’t need your help). Enumerating these audience-specific obstacles in conversations with prospects has turned out to be one of the most fruitful means of sales discovery for teams I’ve worked with.

Special cases

The structure above covers most multi-audience messaging challenges, but there are a few special challenges I’ve come across that I’d like to address.

Pivots

If you’re doing a complete 180, you can just tell a new story. But many pivots are less radical. For example, a leadership team that has achieved some level of success may deem its current product area unsustainable or spot a larger opportunity. These “light” pivots present a special multi-audience storytelling challenge: How do you tell the new, more promising story without abandoning old audiences?

Ideally, you define a new high-level story (change, Promised Land) that serves as an umbrella for both old and new audiences, exactly as above. Sometimes, though, the pivot is just too extreme. In those cases, teams make the hard decision to “cut loose” the old story—still telling it if they know they’re speaking to that audience, but leaving it disconnected from the new “front door”:

Marketplaces

Marketplaces— businesses that bring together buyers and sellers—have a critical choice to make about their “front door” message: Should it target the buyers or the sellers?

Mercari, which lets people buy and sell possessions, tries to address both (“sell or buy”) but puts a stake in the ground in speaking first to sellers:

Airbnb, meanwhile, speaks first to buyers:

I’ve tried to identify a rule of thumb about when it’s best to choose buyers and when sellers, but keep finding exceptions. I suspect it has to do with which side is more in demand and/or which is more likely to attract the other. For example, in 2016 Uber’s home page showed a Promised Land message (“Get there. Your day belongs to you”) and a image that spoke to both drivers and passengers, but the primary call to action was for passengers:

Today, while the message remains unchanged, the image and call-to-action more clearly target drivers, most likely because passengers get Uber on their phones (not uber.com), and Uber needs drivers to fuel its expansion into new services and territories:

Investors

Crafting the story for investors will be the subject of some future post, but the short version is that they really are just another audience for which you can tailor your high-level story of “undeniable, relevant change in the world.” Here’s a slide from Amplitude’s Series C deck that describes a new world in which a product analytics platform like theirs is so valuable:

Investors’ Promised Land, of course, is profiting in the new world, and your job is to help get them over the obstacles: believing the market is large enough, finding the business model sound, and trusting your team.

About Andy Raskin
I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit andyraskin.com.

The post Tailoring Your Pitch for Multiple Audiences appeared first on OpenView Labs.

“Just stop,” spat the COO from across the table.

“I don’t have time for this generic line of questioning.”

I was two years into my first tech sales job, thinking I was doing everything right. I asked open-ended questions to unearth pain. Just like the sales books told me to do.

Yet this COO kicked my teeth in, leaving me and his ops manager twiddling our thumbs. “I’m as confused as you,” uttered the ops manager after the COO stormed out. “We teach our reps to ask the exact same questions.”

Have You Ever Been Here?

If you’re in sales, you’ve probably been in a similar situation. It happens to everyone at some point in their career. In this post, we’ll unpack how to prevent that from happening.

The COO in my story wasn’t simply cranky. He wasn’t “having a bad day.” It’s that -- according to our new data -- “discovery” is counterproductive in a few key situations.

Before you tear me to shreds, read on. It will make sense as we unfold the story.

I’ll start by explaining the data. Our team here at Gong.io analyzed recorded sales meetings from 39,105 deals made on web conferencing platforms.

They were transcribed and analyzed with AI to isolate successful and unsuccessful selling behaviors.

This study revealed our most counterintuitive insight yet:

Asking discovery questions decreases your win rate.

Shockingly, we found a strong negative correlation between asking discovery questions, and closing deals:

Once you’ve asked a small handful of questions, every additional question decreases your odds of success.

In fact, successful sales meetings involve only four sales questions, on average. Unsuccessful (but qualified) meetings have eight.

It’s important to note that the data above is specific to the first meeting with a deal. We wondered whether asking questions at other stages of the sales cycle has the same effect.

It turned out that yes, it’s more or less the same:

Two Gong Studies That Contradict Each Other?

I know what you might be thinking: “This totally goes against the research you published last year about discovery calls!”

For the unfamiliar, last year we analyzed 519,000 recorded discovery calls with AI. Some of the things we learned from last year’s study run counter to the data we just shared with you.

For example, last year’s study said that the ideal number of questions to ask on a discovery call is between 11 and 14:

That’s a far cry from the recommended four questions we mentioned today. So, what gives? Why does the new data run counter to last year’s data?

Simple. The new data has one critical distinction: It’s based on sales calls where only an SVP-level buyer (or higher) was present.

In other words, the new study focuses on selling to senior decision makers at mid-sized and large companies.

Senior Executives Have “Discovery Fatigue”

This takes us back to our opening story. The COO -- a senior decision maker -- felt like he was being interrogated. He had probably been through the "discovery dance" with two-to-three other sellers already. It probably felt taxing to answer all those questions.

But it’s not just him. Senior decision makers in general are becoming fatigued by salespeople’s questions. In fact, you can practically see that fatigue play out over the course of a sales call:

The more questions you ask, the shorter their response. Their patience wears thin. They’ll entertain the first few questions. But very quickly, you receive one-word, irritated answers. The rest of your sales call will feel like pulling teeth.

When Questions Feel Like Pickaxes

Most discovery questions benefit the seller. Not the buyer. They put the onus on the buyer to educate you. Those questions can quickly get annoying for an 80-hour-a-week executive.

Stephen Covey’s analogy below explains what’s happening: Everyone you interact with has an “emotional bank account.” With every interaction, you either make deposits or withdrawals.

When you make deposits, you add value and become closer to that person. “Withdrawals” are the opposite. They erode trust, credibility, or connection. Most sales questions make withdrawals from your senior buyer’s emotional bank account.

That’s particularly true when questions are overused, or used like an amateur. Which leads us to an important question: How do you make deposits instead? How do you sell to a senior buyer if they’re unwilling to entertain a discovery call?

Lead With Insights, Not Information Gathering

One of our customers -- a chief revenue officer -- said it best: “Your job isn’t to ask me what’s keeping me up at night. It’s to tell me what should be.”

That quote holds the key to selling to the C-Suite. Executives aren’t eager to answer a bunch of seller-enabling questions. They want sellers to alert them to threats they haven’t foreseen. Or opportunities that are hiding undetected.

Doing that requires no more than a few carefully crafted, economical questions. Just enough to get the conversation moving in the right direction. And here’s the key to building your sales conversations in this way: Educate these executives about external trends that threaten their status quo.

This is a powerful persuasion method because it uses loss aversion, which drives urgency. Loss aversion is the concept that people will work twice as hard to a avoid loss as they will to gain something.

Executives become driven with urgency when you show them how their current status quo is no longer viable.

How to Sell to the C-Suite

Using loss aversion and insight selling correctly is incredibly nuanced. There are many more wrong ways to do it than there are right ways. And if you get it wrong, you’ll get kicked in the teeth.

Helping you build your own framework for those types of sales calls is beyond the scope of this post. That’s why I hosted a live webinar that's now available on-demand as a recording. You’ll learn how to create high-urgency conversations with senior executives, step by step.

I’ll show you two real-life examples you can use as inspiration. You’ll also learn what to avoid, so you don’t get delegated to a lower level (or worse, walked out on).

So, here are two offers for you:

Offer #1: Watch the webinar. You’ll walk out with an entirely new strategy.

Offer #2: I’ll personally review the sales deck (or other messaging tool) of the best two commenters on LinkedIn.

In the Gong Labs series, we publish what we learn from analyzing sales conversations with AI. Subscribe here to read upcoming research.

This post first appeared on LinkedIn. It is republished here with permission.