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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my successes and failures in sales. I’ve come to the realization that in many cases it was my salesmanship that won deals. I’m not sure exactly what percentage of deals were won by my salesmanship alone, but just like my losses, I was responsible for some percentage of the wins.

I’ve also won deals by being particularly lucky as it pertains to timing. I just happened to show up at the exact moment my prospective client needed something, and capturing the opportunity was more a result of being able to say yes to what they needed than my salesmanship. A win is a win, but luck plays a larger part in success than most imagine—and more than some will admit.

But then there’s another class of wins that are also outside of sales skills and business acumen or some other aspect of good salesmanship. This category is made up of won deals that were, more than any other factor, almost exclusively won on persistence.

Keep Trying Until You Win

I literally called one prospective client every week for 75 weeks in a row. I had no great insight to share, and very little outside of my service that would have allowed me to create value for the prospective client. It was just pure, deliberate, intentional persistence that caused me to dial the 76th time and reach my main contact at his desk. Had I not kept calling, I would not have won the business.

I called on one client for seven years. Thankfully, having matured a little, I did not call the contact every week over those seven years. I called her regularly, and she always rejected my request for a meeting. Then I would go away for a while, giving it a pause for a month or so before trying again. At some point about seven years in, the contact who had kept me out took a new job. Within two weeks of her leaving, I had the client’s business.

Salesmanship may have played a small part in winning the business, but when I showed up, the client had a great need, and I was there to solve it. Had I not persisted, I would not have been given the opportunity that resulted in $2 million worth of sales over the following year.

Your Dream Clients Require Persistence

Persistence is an underappreciated attribute when it comes to sales. Too many people suffer from “recency bias,” meaning they believe that a newer lead is better than an older lead—and infinitely better than a cold target with a contract with one of your competitors. Instead of persisting, most salespeople go away in search of something easier than breaking into their dream client’s account.

Because these salespeople go away, they are not known to the client, nor do they consider them value creators. Because these reps lack persistence, they haven’t nurtured the relationships that would have positioned them for an opportunity when events dictate their dream client do something different.

The character traits and attributes of successful people don’t change over time, regardless of the constant, accelerating disruptive change occurring all around you. Persistence, or determination, is an attribute that successful people have shared throughout all of human history.

The ability to continue to pursue a goal or an outcome even when it is difficult, and even when it is going to take time and energy, is a critical component of success. This is especially true in sales, where clients judge the seriousness of your attempt by your persistence over time and where giving up and going away is proof positive that you are not committed to your goal.

If you give up and go away because things are difficult, what kind of partner are you going to make?

The post The Value of Persistence in Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Go-to-market strategic planning enables executive leadership to make informed decisions. It dictates the development of a path forward into the market. Coupled with an execution plan, shareholder value is created.   In the past, strategic planning was a one-time event. Executive leadership

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my successes and failures in sales. I’ve come to the realization that in many cases it was my salesmanship that won deals. I’m not sure exactly what percentage of deals were won by my salesmanship alone, but just like my losses, I was responsible for some percentage of the wins.

I’ve also won deals by being particularly lucky as it pertains to timing. I just happened to show up at the exact moment my prospective client needed something, and capturing the opportunity was more a result of being able to say yes to what they needed than my salesmanship. A win is a win, but luck plays a larger part in success than most imagine—and more than some will admit.

But then there’s another class of wins that are also outside of sales skills and business acumen or some other aspect of good salesmanship. This category is made up of won deals that were, more than any other factor, almost exclusively won on persistence.

Keep Trying Until You Win

I literally called one prospective client every week for 75 weeks in a row. I had no great insight to share, and very little outside of my service that would have allowed me to create value for the prospective client. It was just pure, deliberate, intentional persistence that caused me to dial the 76th time and reach my main contact at his desk. Had I not kept calling, I would not have won the business.

I called on one client for seven years. Thankfully, having matured a little, I did not call the contact every week over those seven years. I called her regularly, and she always rejected my request for a meeting. Then I would go away for a while, giving it a pause for a month or so before trying again. At some point about seven years in, the contact who had kept me out took a new job. Within two weeks of her leaving, I had the client’s business.

Salesmanship may have played a small part in winning the business, but when I showed up, the client had a great need, and I was there to solve it. Had I not persisted, I would not have been given the opportunity that resulted in $2 million worth of sales over the following year.

Your Dream Clients Require Persistence

Persistence is an underappreciated attribute when it comes to sales. Too many people suffer from “recency bias,” meaning they believe that a newer lead is better than an older lead—and infinitely better than a cold target with a contract with one of your competitors. Instead of persisting, most salespeople go away in search of something easier than breaking into their dream client’s account.

Because these salespeople go away, they are not known to the client, nor do they consider them value creators. Because these reps lack persistence, they haven’t nurtured the relationships that would have positioned them for an opportunity when events dictate their dream client do something different.

The character traits and attributes of successful people don’t change over time, regardless of the constant, accelerating disruptive change occurring all around you. Persistence, or determination, is an attribute that successful people have shared throughout all of human history.

The ability to continue to pursue a goal or an outcome even when it is difficult, and even when it is going to take time and energy, is a critical component of success. This is especially true in sales, where clients judge the seriousness of your attempt by your persistence over time and where giving up and going away is proof positive that you are not committed to your goal.

If you give up and go away because things are difficult, what kind of partner are you going to make?

The post The Value of Persistence in Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Closing is a make-or-break moment in sales. When you use the right phrases, tips, and techniques, you ensure your efforts in nurturing prospects amount to sealing sales deals.

However, 40% of salespeople feel apprehensive about closing deals. Success in closing a sale wouldn't be so thrilling without high emotional stakes, like fear of failure and rejection.

To help you enjoy the thrill of closing deals repeatedly, we’ll cover how to close a sale and 17 sales closing techniques that’ll get you the best win rates as a sales professional.

Let’s get started.

How to Close a Sale

When it comes to closing deals, small tips can make a big difference. See the most helpful advice for closing deals below.

1. Identify customer needs.

First things first, be sure to clearly define the customer needs your product or service is intended to meet. Customers who aren’t a fit for what you offer don’t want to hear from you. Pursuing them will be a waste of your time and resources.

Once customer needs or pain points are clearly defined, you can find specific prospects and businesses with those needs. These potential customers will be interested in hearing from you.

2. Find the decision-maker.

Closing a sale starts long before a customer signs a deal. The first order of business is lead qualification.

Qualifying leads ensures you speak with decision-makers who play a key role in buying your product or service. To effectively do this, you need to develop an ideal customer profile (ICP).

When developing your ICP, include information like:

• Industry. Identify industries your product will best serve.
• Company size. Specify the number of employees a company should have.
• Location. State the locations of your audience.
• Revenue. Define a revenue range that makes a company a fit for your solution.
• Job title. List the common job titles of your ideal customer.

These qualification criteria let you narrow your search for leads. For instance, let’s say I sell a product that’s useful for software development companies. If I wanted to sell to Brainboxlabs, I’d contact Kris Nicolaou, its founder and CTO. That’s because Kris may be a power user of my product in his CTO role.

3. Initiate a conversation.

Once you’ve identified your lead, use tools like Hunter and Snov to find and verify their email address. This lets you send emails that won’t land in your lead’s spam folder.

After the email address verification, tweak, write, and send a brief cold email with a call-to-action that doesn’t sell your product. Your goal should be to get the potential client to schedule a call or respond positively to your email.

4. Explain your product’s benefits.

Having prospects hop on a call or respond to your email is only half the battle. The second half shows how your product impacts your prospect’s business operations.

Don’t make the mistake of selling prospects on features. Show them the benefits of using your product. When you do, they’ll see tangible results of using your product and the issues it fixes.

5. Create a sense of urgency.

You need to establish a sense of urgency to prevent your deals from stalling or falling apart. Urgency creates a reason for prospects to move forward with a deal.

You can create urgency by offering a time-limited discount, free onboarding, or anything that makes the prospect get instant value from your product.

When using this sales tip, ensure you’re offering something prospects truly need. There’s a thin line between creating a sense of urgency and pressuring prospects. Crossing that line could make you miss a deal altogether.

6. Anticipate and prepare to address objections.

Objections can be a good thing. When you get an objection, it shows your prospect wants to move forward, but something bothers them. Address these objections, and you will get one step closer to hitting your quota.

Some common objections you’ll get as a salesperson include:

• We don’t have time.
• We don’t have the money.
• Your product is expensive.
• We don’t need your product at the moment.
• I need to communicate with my partner or another decision-maker.

Preparing to respond to these objections is crucial to closing your sales deal. Doing so sets you up for success because you’ll confidently respond to concerns your prospect raises.

Now that you’re equipped with these sales closing tips, let’s go over 17 proven closing techniques and why they're so effective.

1. Now or Never Closes

This is where salespeople make an offer that includes a special benefit that prompts immediate purchase. For example:

• “This is the last one at this price.”
• "We’ve got a 20% discount just for customers who sign up today.”
• “If you commit to buy now, I can fast-track you to the front of the implementation queue.”

This technique creates a sense of urgency and helps prospects overcome buying inertia. It's also a proven method for closing a sale over the phone because you have the prospect's undivided attention in real-time.

2. Summary Closes

Salespeople who use this closing technique reiterate the items the customer is hopefully purchasing. They stress the value and benefits of their product to encourage prospects to sign a deal. For example:

“So we have the Centrifab washing machine with brushless motor, the 10-year comprehensive guarantee, and our free delivery and installation service. When would be a good time to deliver?”

By summarizing previously agreed-upon points into one tight-knit package, you help prospects visualize what they'd get from a deal.

3. Sharp Angle Closes

Prospects often request price reductions or add-ons when they have the upper hand in a deal. If you have approval from your sales manager, try the sharp angle close technique to catch these prospects by surprise.

When they ask, "Could you add on a few extra hours of onboarding at a discounted rate?" reply, "Sure. But if I do that for you, will you sign the contract today?"

They won't likely expect this response — first, because you agreed to their request, and second, because you've proposed closing today.

4. Question Closes

To achieve the two goals above, reps must ask prospects probing questions. Effective salespeople focus on closing a sale as soon as a conversation begins. Through a series of questions, they develop desire in the client and eliminate purchase objections.

One can even close the sale in the form of a question, which allows the rep to address outstanding objections while gaining a commitment at the same time.

For example: “In your opinion, does what I am offering solve your problem?”

This question lets you know if the prospect is sold on your product while keeping the door open for further selling. If the answer is “no,” it remains their opinion (not yet the truth), allowing you to continue selling. If the answer is “yes,” then signing on the dotted line is the next step.

Here's another question close: “Is there any reason why we can't proceed with the shipment?"

This question asks either for closure or more information about why the customer isn’t quite convinced. It’s a win-win.

5. Assumptive Closes

This closing technique draws on the power of positive thinking. If you believe you will close this deal from the first piece of email outreach, it can have an incredible effect on the rest of the sales process.

What's important here is to closely monitor your prospect's interest, engagement, and objections throughout.

After a call or meeting, ask, "Did this presentation align with your expectations?" If you've just provided them with new information about your product or service, ask, "Does this sound like something that would be valuable to you? Does this meet a specific need or pain point?"

By keeping your ear to the ground — and assuming good intent from the start — you'll bring an authority and direction to your sales process that wouldn't be there otherwise.

6. Take Away Closes

Picture a kid.

If you give this kid a toy and you take it away, what would the kid do? They’ll cry in protest to get the toy back. You can use this psychological approach on your prospects.

If they're balking on price, remove a feature or service and present the discounted offer to them. You can say, “Our product will perfectly fit your budget. However, we can only provide feature 1 or service 1 at the initial price. Does this work for you?”

Often, you’ll find that the prospect will think more about what you removed rather than the discounted price or their proposed price.

7. Soft Closes

The soft close lets you show the benefit of your product to prospects, followed by a low-impact question that ascertains their openness to learning more.

For example, "If I could reduce widget maintenance by 25% and increase widget productivity by 15%, would you be interested in learning more?"

You've clearly stated the benefits without making any demands or sudden requests.

If the example above still seems too direct, you could ask, "If I told you I could reduce widget maintenance by 25% and increase widget productivity by 15%, would that align with your company goals?"

This removes their need to commit to you and gives you more time to learn about their business needs.

8. The Alternative Close

Salespeople use this technique to present prospects with two or more buying options that can lead to a sale. Prospects may believe this puts them in the driver's seat and gives them the feeling of control over the deal.

In truth, it doesn’t. That’s because salespeople can suggest options but subtly direct prospects to the more expensive package they want prospects to choose.

For instance, if your prospect is pushing back on price and wants certain features, you can say, “Would you get our Pro plan, which includes free onboarding and six months of free support, or our Basic plan, which starts at $30 per month but has fewer features and no free support?”

9. The Something for Nothing Close

The something for nothing close involves offering a gesture of goodwill. Salespeople hope prospects repay this gesture by signing a deal. This closing technique is great for companies that lack social proof and want to get customers fast.

It’s also excellent for companies who are trying to get prospects to switch from a competitor's product.

Salespeople can say, “Alright. We know you have lots of data in your [software name], and migrating to ours will cost upwards of $1,500. If you sign today, we would migrate your data for free. Would you like that?”

10. Unique Offer Close

This closing technique is great for prospects with large deal sizes. When you have such prospects, and they develop cold feet, incentivize them by creating a special offer exclusive to them. It’s a win-win. The prospect gets a unique offer. You seal the deal.

For example, you can say, “If I ask my manager to offer you a discount, free trial, or free migration, would you be willing to sign a contract?”

11. Opportunity Cost Close

Use this closing technique when you know your prospect could lose something substantial without your solution. By highlighting their potential loss, you make the prospect rethink their decision about stalling a deal.

You can say: “I wouldn’t like you to deal with [negative outcome 1] and [negative outcome 2] because you lacked the right [category of your product]. Would you like to forestall such outcomes by taking the next step?”

12. The Test Drive Close

Salespeople use the test drive close — also known as the “puppy dog close” — to improve trust by eliminating all risks for the prospect. They do this by inviting the prospect to try a free product before buying.

Because the prospect isn’t locked into a contract, chances for them to say “yes” increases with the test drive closing technique.

Here’s an example: “Would you like to try our product for 30 days free? If you like it after the trial, you can purchase any of our plans. If otherwise, you aren’t obligated to buy. What do you think?”

13. Objection Close

The objection closing technique works when you don’t know why a prospect is stalling. Often, the prospect still has a few objections. After you’re certain that your prospect knows what your product offers, ask if they have more objections.

For example: “Sam, is there any reason that’s holding you back from signing this deal today?”

By asking this question, you can address their objection instantly and get them to sign a deal quickly.

14. The Video Close

Nothing builds trust better than videos. When you use videos to address objections, explain pricing, or talk about a feature, prospects see your face and the effort you put in to close them.

When you use the video close technique, keep tabs on your email to know when your prospect views the video. Once they do, chat with them and address other objections in real time.

You can say, “Hi [first name]. I hope the video answered your question about [issue]. I’d love to answer any other questions immediately.”

15. The Columbo Close

Dubbed from an American TV series, the Columbo Close is based on a famous one-liner — "Just one more thing..."

This technique works best when prospects show they aren’t interested in your product. By stopping prospects in their tracks, you gain their attention with the one-liner and have another chance to re-pitch your product better (without mentioning what your prospect already knows).

16. The Ownership Close

In this closing technique, the salesperson speaks like the prospect has bought the product. This is a classic example of “future pacing,” where you make the prospect imagine how their future looks because they bought your product.

This technique works better when the salesperson has results or case studies to back their points.

For example, you can say, “When you start using your [product, for example, HubSpot CRM], you’ll save time by not juggling multiple software as you’ll have your all-in-one CRM. How would you spend the hours you save using [product] every month?”

17. Offering Competitor Close

In a last-ditch attempt to close a prospect, you can tell prospects the competitors they can try. Though unconventional, Lindy Drope says this closing technique works. “When a pricing objection comes up, I love to talk openly about my prospects' alternative options,” says Lindy.

“Most reps fear bringing up other players in their field, especially when their product is the most expensive,” Lindy adds. Here’s an example from Lindy:

“Hey, it sounds like this type of product/service may be out of your range right now. That said, there are some options our current users checked out prior to signing up with us. Below are the cost savings associated with going with these alternatives.”

The prospect will appreciate your honesty and spend less time shopping elsewhere. Plus, they now know you’re confident about the value of your product and that you care about them. If they hit a roadblock with any product you suggested, they’d likely come running to you.

When using this closing technique, Lindy recommends you know your prospect's pain points and avoid this technique early on in the sales cycle so you don’t come off as demeaning or “too good” for the prospect.

What To Do After Closing a Sale

Once you've closed the sale, it's time to celebrate! But don't forget to tie up any loose ends before you high-five your team. Here are a few pro tips for what to do after closing the deal.

1. Log the deal in your sales software.

Trust us, your sales leaders will thank you for this. Logging your deal will help keep your team on target for forecasting and help keep your pipeline up-to-date.

2. Provide an introduction to the next team.

Closing the deal is likely step one of the customer's journey with your business. From here, they may need to speak with customer success or support to get onboarded.

Set up an e-introduction to the next person taking over so that the customer has a smooth transition into the next step of the process.

3. Follow up with the customer in a few days.

Checking up on your new customer and asking how they feel about their purchase will go a long way when building trust and customer loyalty. If issues arise, you can quickly step in and help or find someone on your team who can.

Seal The Deal With These Techniques

Being skilled at closing is arguably one of the most important techniques a salesperson can master.

While your goal is to sell and hit your quota, it’s important to remember we’re all humans. Humans react based on how they are treated.

So remain friendly when using these sales closing techniques. Be empathetic. You can also find a mentor or fellow salesperson who excels at any of these techniques so they can help you implement these best practices.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The battle for consumers’ hearts, minds and wallets won’t be won in R&D labs. Sure, shoppers love new gadgets and there’s always room for innovation. However, the sad truth is that for the most part consumers don’t see that much difference among competing brands – unless they’re loyal followers of a cult brand like Apple, Nike or the Boston Red Sox.

And when they do form a strong preference for one particular offering, shoppers know that they have a multitude of ways to get it home. Some paths offer great convenience or even significant savings; others stimulate, educate or even titillate. A woman can order a pair of Vince Camuto ankle strap sandals online and wait for the friendly UPS man to pull up to her door two days later. Or, she can visit a bricks-and-mortar store where a friendly salesperson will fawn over her. While she’s there, maybe she’ll use an augmented reality “smart mirror” to see how the shoes will look with four different outfits. She may even take a selfie wearing the shoes, send it out to her “peeps” and get their reactions in real time before she takes the plunge. In all of these scenarios, the shoes get added to the collection that resides in her closet, but the experience of acquiring them is quite different.

It’s that experience that is the value-added many retailers seek. An emphasis on the magic moment where the buyer interacts with the seller goes by many names: Empathy. Customer-centric marketing. CX. The service encounter. Customer journeys.

No matter what you call it, a lot of companies are waking up to the urgent need to design with rather than design for their customers. It’s no longer enough to phone it in by conducting a few focus groups in order to guess at what will resonate with buyers. The market moves too fast and product cycles have accelerated too dramatically to afford this luxury. Again, mass-market segmentation no longer makes much sense in a micro-targeted world.

A revolution in design thinking is here. The fundamental building blocks of this trending philosophy are EDIT: Empathize, Define, Ideate, and Test. You can’t walk down this road without immersing yourself in your customer’s perspective. So, empathy is the first big step.

How can organizations truly understand the lived experiences of their customers so they can design new products and services that will resonate with them? One offshoot of the design thinking revolution is the recognition that managers need to step out of their little boxes and actually cross over to the consumer’s perspective to understand their products from the buyer’s perspective. For this reason a big buzzword today is the customer journey.

This methodology encourages brands to map out in excruciating detail all the steps a customer takes while they interact with the company – no matter where, and no matter how trivial. It’s a powerful way to improve the experience. The journey spans a variety of touchpoints by which the customer moves from awareness to engagement and purchase. Successful brands focus on developing a seamless experience that ensures each touchpoint interconnects and contributes to the overall journey.

The consumer journey concept was influenced by the Japanese approach to total quality management. To help companies achieve more insight, researchers go to the gemba, which to the Japanese means “the one true source of information or value.” According to this philosophy, it’s essential to send marketers and designers to the precise place where consumers use the product or service rather than to ask laboratory subjects to use it in a simulated environment. This approach syncs perfectly with the movement away from the sterile modernist research approaches we discussed earlier — again, fish where the fish are. The postmodern consumer hates the laboratory.

A project by Host Foods illustrates this idea in practice. The company, which operates food concessions in major airports, sent a team to the gemba—in this case, an airport cafeteria—to identify problem areas. Employees watched as customers entered the facility, and then followed them as they inspected the menu, procured silverware, paid, and found a table.

The findings were crucial to Host’s redesign of the facility. For example, the team identified a common problem that many people traveling solo experience: the need to put down one’s luggage to enter the food line and the feeling of panic you get because you’re not able to keep an eye on your valuables while you get your meal. This simple insight allowed Host to modify the design of its facilities to improve a patron’s line-of-sight between the food area and the tables.

A customer journey map is a tool that fits into the broader context of your customer experience strategy. It requires significant customer insight-driven inputs and internal buy-in to be effective. Maps aren’t static — customers and systems change over time – and they must be part of an effort that uses these insights to drive action, leading to actual improvements.

Customer journey maps clarify what customers try to do, what barriers they face, and how they feel during each interaction with your product or service. Refining these smaller steps, such as how people complete a purchase online or file a complaint, is a primary way that journey maps improve the customer experience. Again, these insights can only happen when brand managers climb over the wall that separates them from their customers.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Michael Solomon. Excerpted and adapted from his book “Marketers, Tear Down These Walls!.”

The Blake Project Can Help: The Customer Experience Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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The more businesses move to transactional models with no human interaction, the more human interaction is going to be a competitive advantage. When caring is absent, caring becomes a defining differentiator. If you have ever needed help from the company that sold you something to find that no one was available to help you, you understand the value of caring.

As more businesses chase a super-transactional model, believing that reducing friction (and price is a form of friction) is their competitive advantage, the more they will attract price sensitive buyers. Those who chase a super-relational model will attract the higher end of the market, and the more they will find clients and customers willing to pay for something better.

As automation becomes more prevalent, the more “by hand” is going to be something special. Mass production reduces the costs of manufacturing, making things available to the masses. “By hand” increases craftsmanship, the uniqueness of what one buys, and provides something truly special. One of a million is often something less than one of a kind.

When people are treated like a number, a data point, a record, or a file, those who treat people like an individual will create a special bond, and one that creates the feeling that they are unique and important. There are certain human needs that are so deeply ingrained that they aren’t easily lost. There are also human needs that, when violated, create a repulsion, and the lack of respect is a need of the first order.

When communication is automated, it isn’t personal, and it doesn’t create any feeling inside the recipient. Mostly people consider it spam. There is a difference in mass emailing and nurturing your dream clients. In one case, there is no connection because there is no real person behind the communication. In the other, the communication has a person’s fingerprints all over it. When something is created for you, it is special.

There are some who believe that everything is being commoditized, that there is no real differentiation possible, and so they race towards super-transactional approaches, not understanding that in a race to the bottom there are few winners, normally large, and almost always with the scale necessary to eliminate competitors who play their game. Those who pay attention to these kinds of things understand that playing your competitor’s game puts you at a disadvantage, and so they play a different game, moving in the opposite direction, creating greater value, providing greater care, ensuring a better overall experience, and better outcomes for their clients. They create relationships that allow them to create a market of those who want something more, something better, and something worth paying to obtain.

If you are in the middle, you have to pick a side.

The post Picking Sides on the Future of Your Business appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In an earlier piece, I looked at the rise and possibly the decline of email marketing due to the sheer overload of business emails currently being sent and received each day. When companies begin to experience flat sales, they start looking to change methods and one thing they’re beginning to eye again is a quaint tactic that had previously fallen out of favor: direct mail.

Direct mail satisfies several criteria email no longer can—the ability to stand out from the competition, create a personal relationship and make a compelling offer. According to Target Marketing Magazine and Experian, 70 percent of Americans say that physical mail is “more personal” than email.

Although direct mail once was viewed as the industry scourge, we’re seeing it start to capture the attention and imagination of marketers. Millennial marketers, in particular, seem enamored of the creativity that goes into mailers. And, with its reliance on data to target, reach and engage customers, it still feels familiar. When on the receiving end, 30 percent of millennials said direct mail was more effective at getting you to take action while 24 percent said email.

The old tenets of direct mail still ring true. Success is 40 percent list quality, 40 percent the offer and 20 percent creative. And, companies combining direct mail with online marketing achieve higher brand awareness and recall and an increase in ROI. In fact, marketers at companies with greater than $200 million in annual revenue reported nearly a three times higher effectiveness of their multichannel marketing efforts versus those with non-integrated campaigns, according to direct mail company PFL in its 2018 Multi-Channel Marketing Report.

The buyer’s journey is changing

Direct mail is one way B2Bs are addressing the fact that so many people are tuning out of email marketing. Another is adapting to ways in which the buyer’s journey is changing. From research firms like Forrester and SiriusDecisions and our own experience, we know buyers want to do self-directed research and are loath to talk to a salesperson or be offered a demo too early in the process. Yet, in our quest to send out emails with a compelling offer to achieve downloads and form fill objectives, how many of us are guilty of doing just that?

“Empowered buyers prefer to self-educate, gain third-party validation and rely on peers to learn about new products,” according to Forrester. This desire for third-party validation is swinging the pendulum back to “credibility marketing.” Buyers are seeking proven, trusted, credible sources who aren’t trying to sell them overtly.

Building credibility and third-party validation used to be the bailiwick of public relations, and it still is.

Just because PR doesn’t work the same way in the digital world as it used to doesn’t mean it isn’t vitally important. The holy grail of PR used to be landing coverage in a national publication. Now, savvy companies are no longer relying on a publication to produce an audience. They’re taking the publication content, and their own, and putting it through other channels.

In 2014, NewsCred and Redshift Research surveyed consumers to find out if content can help financial services companies gain consumer trust. The study found that only 20 percent of respondents would trust content written by representatives of their bank, while 53 percent would trust content written by objective journalists with expertise in finance. American Express’s Open Forum editorial strategy is an example of this. It’s designed to help small business owners grow their business by providing insight and resources. And, it leverages outside expertise to build authority.

Open Forum is considered the gold standard of this brand of journalism, and while there can be lead generation elements to some of these types of sites, they aren’t focused on the number of downloads or form fills. They’re publishing and curating content for the benefit of their audience, building community and establishing credibility.

Certainly, marketing automation and email campaigns aren’t going away, nor is a marketer’s need for quality data. Marketers who see the big picture and apply data and new digital tools along with old-school practices like direct mail and PR will set their company on the path to success.

This article was originally published on The Connector and reprinted with permission.

Email.

The best way to follow up with a sales lead is with email. Follow up email campaigns can be automated, set to send out different messages over a period of time after someone enters the sales funnel. These emails can promote discounted offers, contain whitepapers or other marketing collateral, include links to schedule a meeting or take some preferred action.

Email is the best way to follow up with sales leads because it is inexpensive and easy to set up. And the ROI on email marketing is still higher than any other marketing channel available.

Direct Mail.

The best way to follow up with a sales lead is with direct mail. A physical mailing gets the point across way better than an email can, and that’s because it is more impactful to hold something in your hand.

Direct mail also benefits from its seeming decline. Email has become so easy, and so commonplace, and a direct mailing really helps you stand out from the crowd.

You can send a postcard or letter, a pamphlet or flyer. You can send a coupon, or a sign up form, or something that better highlights the benefits of your product vs. the competition.

SMS.

The best way to follow up with a sales lead is a text message. A text message cuts right through the clutter and gets seen – immediately in most cases. Unlike direct mail, it’s instant and cheap. And unlike email, its unique and unlikely to get missed or ignored.

With a text message, you can send a link to important pages on your website, limited time offers, or a reminder to call you back at a certain time.

Phone Call.

The best way to follow up with a sales lead is with a phone call. Outbound dialing campaigns can connect you directly with the prospective customer in a way that is more personal than any message. Through a simple conversation, you are able to showcase all of the benefits of your service and find out what the lead is looking for in a product.

Unlike other channels, the likelihood of closing a deal once you get someone on the phone is much higher. And there are thousands of skilled sales men and women out there who can sell to anyone over the phone.

The Truth Is…

There is no single best way to follow up with a sales lead.

Okay, you got me. But this isn’t just a post about all the different ways to follow up with someone in your funnel. Nor is this one of those, “it depends” answers.

The most successful sales and marketing teams use a combination of some or all of the above channels, and continue to fine tune their messaging on each one over time.

There are a wide variety of consumers out there, and each is likely to respond to different sales channels and techniques slightly differently. By incorporating a number of different outreach methods into your follow up strategy, you cast the widest possible net.

In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

 

Dead Trees, Sales Pipelines & Loss Aversion [Research]
Sometimes you have to let go of prospects that you’ve been hanging on to for way too long. Thanks for your insight, Jill Konrath.

3 Types of Questions that Transform Leads to Sales
A look at some questions that you might not be asking yet, but should be. Thanks for the tips, Deb Calvert.

“Closing” As A Real Sales Skill Is A Myth
Closing a deal isn’t the most important thing. It’s the process of getting the sale that matters most. Great article, Keenan.

5 Psychological Insights to Improve Your Content Marketing
Being aware of psychological principles is important in many aspects of marketing. Thanks for your thoughts, Louisa McGrath.

Embracing Minimalism in Your Martech Stack
It’s important to know your strategy inside and out before acquiring martech stacks. Thanks for the advice, Nick Ciccone.

The Best Podcasts: What You Should be Listening to Now
Some great podcasts that are definitely worth checking out. Thanks for the suggestions Kristen Baker.

The time/decision gap
Sometimes you’ve just got to make a decision. Thanks for your thoughts, Seth Godin.

How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content With One Original Research Survey
A look at using a survey-based research project to help you plan your content for the year. Thanks for the insight, Michele Linn.

9 Reasons Sales Training Fails
Some of the most common reasons that sales training might not be effective. Thanks, Anthony Iannarino.

Closed-Mindedness Will Kill More Opportunities Than Procrastination
Don’t be closed-minded! You might miss out on a great opportunity. Thanks for your thoughts, Miles Austin.

 

The post B2B Reads: Dead Trees, Minimalism, and Closed-Mindedness appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

Our two-year research shows a strong correlation between quota attainment and sales pipeline management.

It is no secret that the turnover rate for salespeople is high. In fact, it is higher than most other industries.

In fact, the sales business has the second highest turnover rate of any industry in the entire world: A whopping 12.6% of salespeople leave their jobs.

And for you, as a Sales Manager, turnover in your company feels like a never-ending struggle.

But, it does not have to be.

If you are able to get into the heads of your salespeople and understand why it is that they are leaving, you hold the key to learning how to make them stay.

There are numerous assessment tools for salespeople, including the all-important sales aptitude test that can give you a telling perspective into the individuals on your team.

Here are the top reasons your salespeople are saying “sayonara” to your company and looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Here’s Why Your Salespeople are Leaving

1. Not Enough Money

This appears to be, across the board, the top reason why salespeople leave their job. If reps feel they are not being properly compensated for their work, it gives them little incentive to stay.

It is important to note, however, that compensation does not come just in the form of their paychecks or commission. While those things are certainly of great importance to your salespeople, so is ample opportunity for bonuses, raises and promotions once they have proven their worth and success.

2. Poor Training

Having a good training program in place is undeniably integral to the success of your salespeople. If they get off on the wrong foot in your company, they will be highly likely to leave.

The key to ensuring your sales training program is solid is to follow these 13 tips to improve your training today.

3. They Are a Bad Fit for the Job

A salesperson may leave simply because they were not good at their job. The harsh reality of this is something you can avoid, with the introduction of a sales aptitude test in your hiring process.

For sales managers, a sales aptitude test is a must. It is your way to weed out those who are not fit to sell and highlight the ones capable of long-term success with you and your company.

4. Too Much Time Wasted on Non-Sales Work

 

Studies show nearly 65% of your sales reps’ time is focused not on sales, but rather on other non-money-making duties? These duties include meetings, CRM data entering and more.

Your reps may be getting frustrated if they are not able to spend their time and their skill doing what they came here to do: sell.

5. Bad Company Culture

Top companies in the United States, such as Google, put a great deal of time, money and effort into building a company culture that employees can love and thrive in.

While you are not expected to compete with one of the top companies in the world for great company culture, it is important you create an environment where your employees feel recognized, appreciated and also challenged.

6. Lousy Colleagues

If your salespeople do not enjoy each other’s company and are stuck sitting in an office with each other for hours every day, it is only a matter of time before they get their fill and leave.

Prevent this from happening by focusing on the implementation of an internal referral program that will utilize the connections of your top sellers to bring in other top sellers with whom they will enjoy working.

7. Lack of Opportunity for Professional Development

The best way for top salespeople to continue to thrive in their work is if they have a thirst for new information. The most successful salespeople are always looking for ways to learn more and, as a Sales Manager, you need to provide them with those opportunities.

Without the chance to participate in workshops, classes, conferences and more, your salespeople will move on to a company that will provide them with that opportunity.

8. Poorly Defined Roles

Hunters and farmers are two completely different types of salespeople, and you need both of them on your team.

The best way to determine whether a potential hire is a hunter or a farmer is via a sales aptitude test.

And, once you have determined the role each new hire will hold, ensure you stick to it. Each salesperson in your company — new or seasoned — needs to understand their specific role and play it.

9. Burnout

Sales work is hard work. And if you are overworking your employees, they will burn out quicker than you can say “prospect.”

In fact, employees who are overworked are 31% more apt to start looking for jobs elsewhere than their coworkers whose workloads are normal.

Give your salespeople the right amount of work that gives your company the results it needs, without sacrificing the happiness of your employees.

10. Minimal or Non-Existent Coaching

Your sales reps do not know it all — they need help from their sales managers to continue progressing and reaching goals.

Thus, it is up to you to play the role of an effective coach. By doing this, you will see productivity increase, morale boosts, improved sales and more.

11. Lack of Recognition

Recognition is of greater importance to salespeople than possibly any other job. And reps who feel they are not getting the acknowledgment they deserve are 11% more likely to leave.

So search for ways to show your reps you value them, and they will continue to value you as a manager.

12. Lack of Challenge

 

Salespeople thrive off of challenge — it is in their nature to have Drive, which is made up of three non-teachable traits:

• Need for Achievement
• Competitiveness
• Optimism

Without that second component, Competitiveness, your salespeople will get bored and sales will tank.

13. You, the Sales Manager

Though harsh, it is possible your salespeople are leaving because of you.

If you tend to micro-manage and are overbearing to your salespeople, they are going to hurry out the door. Conversely, if you are bad at communicating with your salespeople, that can also send them running.

Find a balance between being too involved in your reps’ work and not involved enough.

14. Company Not Handling Dead Weight

Few things can frustrate a top salesperson quicker than a colleague who is not pulling their weight.

And, this frustration can turn into quitting the company if you do not figure out a way to either train, reassign or let go of the poor-performing rep.

15. Outdated Sales Tools

With technology advancing as quickly as it is today, you need to be on top of keeping your sales tools updated, especially when it comes to selling via mobile.

According to a survey done by CSO Insights, 88% of salespeople struggle with being able to properly utilize their phones to conduct business.

So update and upgrade your sales tools to keep your salespeople motivated and successful.

16. No Playbook to Guide Them

A playbook is a key tool to helping salespeople get to know their prospects and how they can move the sales process along.

Buyer personas are a major part of playbooks and without them, your reps will struggle to really get into the mindset of the buyer and truly connect to make a sale.

17.  Lack of Faith in Leadership

Having a CEO or someone in a leadership position who inspires your salespeople to reach their goals is a must.

If your reps do not have faith in the leading roles of the company, what motivation do they have to do their best work beyond compensation? None.

18. Questions About Company Stability

No one wants to work for a company who is at risk of going belly-up.

When layoffs and other questionable actions are happening in the company, your reps will undoubtedly question the stability of the company and begin their hunt for a more solid job elsewhere.

19. Other Companies Offer Better Opportunities

Unfortunately, this is something that oftentimes is out of your control.

However, if a salesperson does leave because there are greater opportunities at another company, it is within your control to see what that company is offering that you are not. In doing this, you can re-evaluate what you are doing and hopefully find a way to give reps things they want, that you currently do not provide.

20. Not Monitoring Your Team’s Progress

 

“Success” is a loosely-defined term — it can mean something different for everyone.

Thus, as a Sales Manager, it is your job to define what you deem to be a success and construct a plan on how to help your team arrive at that point.

However, it is key that you not only focus on the end goal of closing a deal but also that you focus on the progress and the process it took to get there. This will help your team reach peak performance and is a big part of what will keep your reps at your company.

21. Unrealistic Quotas

Though, as mentioned above, salespeople love to be challenged, they do not love an unrealistic challenge in the form of a quota that is impossible for them to fill.

Keep your quotas challenging for your reps, but not unattainable.

22. Lowering Commission Rates on Big Deals

Many reps see companies lower commission rates as they work their way up to close bigger deals. And this could not possibly be a bigger deterrent for a hard-working salesperson. Why would they work as hard as possible to close big clients, only to be punished with a lower commission?

Be fair with the commission you give your reps, and they are more likely to stick by your side.

23. No Autonomy

In every company, there is a certain way decision-making is done, and the people at the top are usually the ones to make the big decisions.

This does not mean, however, that your sales reps want all decisions to be governed by someone else.

In fact, employees who felt they had no say in the way their jobs were done were 28% more likely to find a new company that allowed them more autonomy.

24. Overly Complex Sales Process

We would be lying if we said that selling was easy. However, the sales process does not have to be as complicated as many companies make it.

The simpler the process is at your company, the more likely your employees are to stick around and successfully navigate the route.

25.  Untimely Payments

 

Satisfaction with payment plans in a company is a big concern for salespeople. After all, they have done the work and deserve to get paid for it.

If your company takes too long to pay reps, you are at risk of losing some of your top performers.

26. No Administrative Support

It is the job of the salesperson to sell. However, doing that successfully requires administrative support to fulfill the other duties involved with sales, such as CRM.

For your reps to reach the success both they and you want, they need the administrative support to get there.

27. Lack of Team Goals

Every salesperson will come into a job with personal goals, and that is something you should support.

But you do not want those personal goals to get in the way of, or replace team goals. At the end of the day, your sales team is exactly that: a team. So, set up collaborate goals and watch the teamwork soar.

28. Wrongful Promotion

As a team player, salespeople will support their colleagues getting promoted — when that promotion is warranted.

Wrongfully promoting a rep who is a friend, needs a favor or for some other reason which is unclear to fellow reps will cause some major problems.

Avoid that by making every promotion within your company unambiguous and transparent for everyone.

29. Jumbled Systems between Departments

The sales team is just one part of your company. There are numerous other moving parts and in order for the company to truly be successful, everyone needs to work together.

How your salespeople interact with and are treated by managers, colleagues, staff and other employees will affect how they view the company as a whole, and whether they want to be a part of it.

30. No Long-Term Incentives

Creating motivation in the short-term is very important in the world of sales.

Just make sure that you are not neglecting long-term incentives because that is what will keep your salespeople around.

Things such as yearly bonuses, annual promotions and more keep your sales reps’ sights on the longer game, which is where you want it to be.

 

Final Thoughts

Some of the reasons salespeople leave your company are out of your control, but as you can see, there are 30 reasons why your salespeople are leaving and 30 ways you can make sure that does not happen to you.

 

Incorporating SalesDrive’s DriveTest® assessment into your hiring process is a great way to start things off on the right foot, and make sure your salespeople are ones who plan to be with you for a long time and who will do their best during their tenure.

 

Experience the power of The DriveTest® today by signing up for a free sales aptitude test and see how it can help you keep your turnover rates at an all-time low.

The post 30 Reasons Why Your Salespeople Are Leaving appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

Whether you found him polarizing or prophetic, Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, was certainly eloquent. He touched many with his passion and creativity for making beautiful things, and his legacy lives on through his company and the many motivational thoughts he shared with the world. Here are 25 of Steve Jobs’ most popular quotes on life, leadership, and doing really good work.

Famous Steve Jobs Quotes

1. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

2. “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

3. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

4. “I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”

5. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

6. “Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

7. “It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

Steve Jobs Quotes on Work

8. “I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”

9. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

10. “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”

11. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

12. “My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others’ negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.”

13. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.”

Steve Jobs Quotes on Leadership

14. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

15. “That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

16. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful...that’s what matters to me.”

17. “I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

18. “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”

19. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

Steve Jobs Quotes on Life

20. “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”

21. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become.”

22. “Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

23. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

24. “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So, it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”

25. “I want to put a ding in the universe.”

Thirsty for more inspiring quotes? Here are motivational quotes to start your day, brainy quotes that will make you sound smart, uplifting entrepreneur quotes, and exhilarating quotes by great female leaders.

Knowing which organizations perform the best on any particular dimension used to require subjective surveys or painstaking research. Today, the data to answer those questions exists — it’s captured by the software-as-a-service firms whose services companies use to run their businesses. Mainstream software companies are beginning to hold “data mirrors” up to their customers, allowing scoring and benchmarking of their customers’ strategies. We’ve already seen that it’s possible to use external data to evaluate firms on what business models they are employing, and what those business models mean for their valuations.  Those analyses rely on publicly available data sources, but software providers have accumulated growing amounts of private data on almost every aspect of their customers’ technology, operations, people, and strategies. It’s time that these data accumulators begin to share insights back to the creators of all this data, and several firms are beginning to do so.

The most likely software firms to have such data are those that provide transactional capabilities to their customers using a subscription-based SaaS model. SAP, for example, has data on a variety of transactional domains, from customer orders to vacation balances. One of its business units, Fieldglass, provides insights and benchmarks to customers on external workforce management. ADP, a leading provider of payroll capabilities, allows customers to use its DataCloud tool to compare themselves to other firms not only how much employees are paid, but also metrics like their average job tenure, attrition rates, how much they invest in retirement accounts, and at what age they retire. Neustar’s MarketShare software makes it possible for customers to measure the effects of their marketing programs and compare them to other firms. It is even possible to hold up the data mirror to individual technology users. Microsoft, for example, has a program called MyAnalytics that informs customers of its Office productivity software about how much time they spend on various tasks, and the size and strength of their communications networks.

At the same time that data mirrors and scoring have emerged in the corporate world, capital markets are becoming increasingly interested in the analysis of alternative data sets. Active investors such as hedge funds seek to outperform the market and index providers. Stock index giant S&P bought AI-based boutique analytics firm Kensho for just this reason: to get better at using AI to improve investment decisions, and to diversify the kind of data used to make those decisions. (Kensho uses not just raw financial data but data from all sorts of ‘alternative’ sources.)

Software and other companies that develop data mirrors and scores can grow their top and bottom lines with little or no marginal costs by building investable indices that correlate their unique insight and data to investor returns. These can be marketed and monetized via the capital markets in partnership with exchanges and ratings firms.

We believe there are many more opportunities for software companies to adopt this approach—gathering data, relating it to desired outcomes, and returning it to their customers. Salesforce.com, for example, could let its customers assess themselves on their ability to move sales prospects down the pipeline. Workday could provide even more detailed analyses and benchmarking comparisons than ADP or SAP Fieldglass on the workforce. Oracle could let companies know how their average cost of issuing a purchase order, or its average accounts payable levels, compare to other firms.

Allowing a single company to compare itself to other firms on specific attributes is valuable, but an even greater opportunity to create value from data is to assign customers scores based on data and analytics about how they compare to their peers on broad functions or processes, and provide paths to improve their operations and transform their organizations to become digital leaders. The FICO score is an excellent example; the company reduces a consumer’s complex credit history to a single three-digit score that both creditors and debtors can understand. Imagine if all manufacturers had, for example, a supply chain efficiency score, or all companies had a leadership development score. This would provide motivation to leaders to improve their scores, and allow capital markets to make better decisions about the capabilities of companies in which they invest. The appeal of widespread nonfinancial performance measures for assessing companies has been discussed for several decades, but never achieved—despite continuing growth in assets and priorities poorly measured by GAAP accounting.

Of course, there are several steps that software companies need to take in order to make data mirrors possible. Here are some of the key considerations:

• It’s essential to make sure that your company owns this data or has permission to use it. Many software licensing agreements already allow the use of such data for analysis and comparison purposes, but not all do.
• Aggregate the data and use it to allow comparisons to other customers (or at least averages) so that your customers and prospects know where they stand (analogous to the running and cycling leader boards from Strava.com or RunKeeper).
• Software firms may want to display the data only in anonymized form in order to preserve customer confidentiality. Of course, that lowers the value of the data and inhibits the ability to monetize it. If a company is attempting to provide value for investors, anonymity doesn’t work—but the customers of software firms may find it challenging to get customers to agree to be named. In such situations, the use of publicly available external data can be used for scores and rankings.
• Companies may need some capabilities with artificial intelligence to make data mirrors work, particularly if the score or index is being related to financial performance. Machine learning is the ideal technology for creating a set of predictive scores from a collection of data. Other AI technologies can also be used to extract data from transactional systems, or to analyze and quantify textual data.
• Just as companies like Credit.com provide personalized recommendations for how to improve a credit score, companies need prescriptive analytics and recommendations for how to improve their scores on whatever measure being assessed. Machine learning and natural language generation can provide such recommendations—just as they do so now for investing recommendations at companies like Morgan Stanley.

Almost all of the companies we researched, written about, and have advised are at the early stages of this movement, and gaining momentum.  They increasingly appreciate the potential value of ranking and optimizing a customer’s operations and resources with low-touch recommendations. We’ve referred to this phenomenon as corporate robo-advisers, and we see more of them all the time. But software companies are perhaps better-equipped than any other type of firm to offer them.

This data-first approach obviously opens up a variety of issues related to data ownership and privacy, products vs. services, interpretation of data, monetization strategies, and the power of platform monopolies.  But we expect that data-mirror-builders and the scoring systems that they are creating will change numerous industries, processes, and functions. There is so much internal and external data available now it seems inevitable that at least some of it will be used to assess the current and future growth and prosperity of commercial enterprises.

"Breathless coverage [of entrepreneurship] abounds: sexy stories of the young and old who threw off the yoke and started their own businesses. It’s all goodbye cubicle—hello freedom, vitality, creativity.

Fed by media and online coverage of an idealized lifestyle, this 'entrepreneurship porn' presents an airbrushed reality in which all work is always meaningful and running your own business is a way to achieve better work/life harmony." —Morra Aarons-Mele, Harvard Business Review

The mythology of the wildly rich, famous, and deliriously happy entrepreneur is strong in our culture. And while it is true that the benefits of launching a successful startup can be profoundly life-changing, it is also true that not all of that change is positive. It is a challenging job with a demanding lifestyle, and those who journey down that path must be prepared. In Straight Talk for Startups: 100 Insider Rules for Beating the Odds--From Mastering the Fundamentals to Selecting Investors, Fundraising, Managing Boards, and Achieving Liquidity, Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman offer a book-length "entrepreneurship FAQ" for those who dream big and are ready to work hard. After various chapters on dynamic markets, venture capital, white papers, and liquidity, the authors end with the most important question of all: Why are you doing this? Read more in this excerpt from the epilogue of Straight Talk for Startups.
 

THE CARDINAL RULE

There are plenty of reasons to love entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs live the creative life. They pursue their passions and challenge the status quo. They invent the future, on their terms, and can amass wealth and power in the process. They don't live lives of quiet desperation working nine to five for “the man" in soulless, dreary mausoleums. They have a sense of independence. And with all the surrounding celebrity comes importance.

Stodgy old companies try the equivalent of donning skinny jeans and coloring their hair by offering open floor plans and foosball tables to attract talent, but many young people prefer to carry a business card proclaiming them the CEO and founder of a fledgling spark of an idea, even if it means sharing a tiny ten-foot-square cubicle with their three other co-founders in a building warehousing scores of similarly hopeful independent thinkers. And before there are free lunches, there are always energy bars or, even better, that tasty food substitute Soylent.

From the outside, starting a company looks easy. Just wake up with an idea, tell your friends, and convince one or two people to partner up; take your pick of top-tier venture capital investors, build a product, get swarmed by offers, and sell to the highest bidder.

But we know it isn’t really like that.

While wannabe entrepreneurs can quickly learn from a plethora of books, videos, podcasts, blogs, and tweets how to ideate, create a business plan, present, and hopefully raise some seed money, the rest is a bit more nuanced. How exactly do you execute on your plan? What is the best way to lead a team? How do you choose the right people? What distinguishes the best investors, and who are the right ones for me? How do you raise the proper amount of money to truly build a company? What is a board of directors, and why do I need one? How do you manage them? And then what about an exit? Is there a difference between an exit and liquidity, and which do I prefer? These vital questions are followed by a thousand more, about how to first take an idea and create a product, and then take a product and build a company, and then transform that company into a successful business.

You don’t just dream up a company; you sweat the details and manage operations. You watch every nickel and are strategic about whom you raise it from. You lead through good times and bad. You assemble trusted advisers, coaches, and boards to keep you on track. You don’t dream it; you work it—hard.

The headlong rush into the startup world can obscure the most important questions. Which brings us to our favorite rule. The one we love so much we buried it at the end, for all of you with enough commitment to entrepreneurship to arrive at this very spot.

THE CARDINAL RULE: ALWAYS ASK WHY?

Why this? Why you? Why now?

It’s remarkable how often these questions stump entrepreneurs. After a long pause, they may respond with their vision, or a recitation of their mission, or just a simple “Because it will make a lot of money.” But these aren’t the answers we are looking for.

We want to know what makes you tick. We want to know why you care, and hopefully why we should as well. And we want to know why, among all the other opportunities and challenges we face at this very moment, your opportunity is important and ripe for success.

Don’t prepare for these questions only because you suspect someone may surprise you with them; answer them because they are fundamental to your choice of the entrepreneurial life. With an ever-growing Mount Rushmore of billionaire prodigies, we need to be sure that “Why?” is answered clearly.

Financial success brings power, and power begets either privilege or responsibility. You choose. The world does not need more privileged entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists for that matter. We believe that if there is any meaning in success, it is about fulfilling your responsibility to others. To make a difference, not just a dollar.

Know why this venture is important to you. Why it should be important to others. And, given the low probability of success for any venture, why it is nevertheless worth failing at. Of course you don’t want to fail; success is always preferable to failure. But if you fail, will you feel you wasted your time, or that you fought the good fight?

A great entrepreneur needs to be bright. And tenacious. And passionate. But great entrepreneurs must also have something to prove. Something to rebel against. Some greater calling to fulfill.

We hope this book expands your appreciation for what it takes to be truly successful. And if we did our job, these rules will accelerate and amplify your chances of beating the odds. Then you can create new rules to add to these first one hundred, and share them freely with others, as Tom Perkins did with us and with a generation of earlier entrepreneurs.

But most of all, we hope that our readers will use their success to create value, not just valuations. It’s easy to lose your humanity if your success makes you feel superior to everyone else.

There is joy in mastery and pride in excellence. There is satisfaction in success. But there is true meaning and fulfillment in creating value for others and helping them reach their potential. In the end, successful entrepreneurship is the triumph of human potential.

A sage friend of mine who was a billionaire for a week or so during the 1990s tech bubble once told me that if you can have anything you want, then nothing has value. You don’t have to make any choices. And if nothing has value, then neither do you.

We hope that these rules will help you to make a difference. In your business, in your community, and in your life. If you have the entrepreneurial gift, the gift of creation, then use it to make things better for everyone. And pay it forward by helping the next person fully achieve their potential and share the spoils with the world.

Keep yourself grounded and your wits about you by frequently asking yourself, Why? Entrepreneurship is important because it has the power to make the world better. That is why it is worth all the blood, sweat, and tears.

 

From the book Straight Talk for Startups: 100 Insider Rules for Beating the Odds—From Mastering the Fundamentals to Selecting Investors, Fundraising, Managing Boards, and Achieving Liquidity by Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman. Copyright © 2018 by Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman. Published on June 5, 2018 by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Randy Komisar is the co-author of Straight Talk for Startups (HarperBusiness; June 2018). He is a venture capitalist with decades of experience with startups. He is the author of the best-selling book The Monk and the Riddle, about the heart and soul of entrepreneurship, as well as numerous articles on leadership and startups. He is also the co-author of Getting to Plan B, on managing innovation, and I F**king Love that Company, on building consumer brands. He taught entrepreneurship at Stanford University and is a frequent lecturer at universities, as well as a regular keynote speaker on entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership. He joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2005 to focus on early stage ventures. Prior to that he created the role of “Virtual CEO” to partner with entrepreneurs to help them and their businesses achieve their potential, serving as Virtual CEO for such startups as WebTV and GlobalGiving. He was a co-founder of Claris Corp., and served as CEO for LucasArts Entertainment and Crystal Dynamics. Randy was a founding director of TiVo and Nest. He served as CFO of GO Corp. and as senior counsel for Apple, following a private practice in technology law. He has also served on dozens of private and public company boards and advises such organizations as Road Trip Nation and the Orrick Women’s Leadership Board.

Jantoon Reigersman is the co-author of Straight Talk for Startups (HarperBusiness; June 2018). He’s a seasoned financial operator with extensive experience in startups and growth companies. He serves as Chief Financial Officer of publicly traded Leaf Group (NYSE: LFGR), a diversified consumer internet company. Earlier in his career, he served as CFO of Ogin Inc., investor and member of Goldman Sachs’ European Special Situations Group and investment banker at Morgan Stanley in their mergers and acquisitions team. He also initiated and led the 9000METER expedition, the first expedition to attempt 9000 vertical meters on human power by diving over 152 meters below sea level and by climbing the summit of Mount Everest at 8848 meters. He is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Finance Leaders Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. 

For more information, please visit straighttalkforstartups.com

 

Usually, after a sales call, we ask ourselves, “Did I accomplish my objectives?” (That is if you assess yourself after the sales call.)

It’s a critical question, we need to be purposeful and focused in each of our meetings with the customer. At the same time, it’s self-centered–we salespeople tend to be very self-centered focused on our goals, rather than the customers’.

Perhaps there are a couple of more important questions:

• What did the customer learn as a result of this meeting/call?
• What value did we co-create in this meeting?

If the customer isn’t learning anything, if we aren’t co-creating value in each interchange, then we are wasting time! While we may be accomplishing our objectives, we aren’t helping the customer move forward in achieving their goals.

Often, we forget. Customers are just as time poor as we are. Unless they are in procurement, the “buying journey” is a diversion to their day jobs and what each person is accountable for. So they shouldn’t have much time or patience with buying.

Customers figured this out a long time ago. They are driven to use their time more effectively, as a result, they seek alternatives to dealing with sales people. Where they used to learn from us, they are self educating through digital channels. They are learning, developing their thinking, consequently, deferring engaging sales people to as late and as little in the process as they can.

But what would happen, if we started changing our approach? What if we start evaluating our success and progress through the buying/selling process not just on our goal attainment, but on what the customer has learned and the value created in each interchange.

Now the dynamic has shifted entirely to be focused on the customer and helping them move to their goals as effectively as possible. As a result, we move to achieve our goals more quickly and effectively.

At the end of each meeting ask yourself–and perhaps even ask the customer:

• What did the customer learn as a result of this interchange?
• What value did we co-create in this meeting?

It will change everything!

I’ve long believed that top sellers are storytellers. They are able to call upon a rich fund of relevant anecdotes that they use to communicate and persuade far more convincingly than a conventional sales pitch could ever do. And in sharing their stories they encourage their customers to tell their own stories.

As humans, we are wired for story, and have been since long before the days of Homer. Some of us are naturally gifted storytellers, and others have to work on developing this critical skill. But we can all learn to do it well if we have the right framework and are prepared to put in the effort.

But unlike product knowledge or presentation and questioning skills, storytelling skills have rarely been part of the sales training agenda. It’s a subject that has been woefully neglected. The sales profession has been crying out for a guide, and I believe we have finally found one in an outstanding new book from Mike Adams...

It’s never been more important for sales people to be able to rise above the clutter of cookie-cutter communications and really engage with their customers at both an emotional and a rational level. And it’s never been more important that we cut out all the buzz-word and jargon-ridden nonsense and adopt a more empathetic approach to customer conversations.

All we’ve been waiting for is a guide. And Mike’s new book “Seven Stories Every Sales Person Must Tell” is the most comprehensive handbook I’ve ever come across to enable sales people to both tell more effective stories and to stimulate our customers to share their own stories in return.

According to Mike’s analysis, successful stories incorporate a sequence of events that fit a known framework, are interesting and unpredictable, turn on one main character and make or illustrate a relevant business point. If any of these are missing, the story is unlikely to engage, persuade or convince.

Perhaps most important, the listener needs to be able to relate to the protagonist and see some important aspects of their own situation in the journey undertaken by the hero of the story. And if the story is to be realistic, it must include some believable complications along the way.

If there is no struggle, there is no story. I believe this is why so many overly-sanitised case studies that follow a simple problem-solution pattern without acknowledging any difficulties along the way simply lack credibility - and why you’ve got to question whether there was any value in publishing them.

As Mike points out, myths, movies and novels can have complex narrative structures of the sort described by Joseph Campbell in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but at minimum the narrative arc of any good sales story must include four key elements:

1. Setting: First off, our story needs a setting to establish context - typically including time and place markers that allow our audience to start painting a mental picture
2. Complications: If we are to establish our credibility and engage our audience’s attention, our story needs to incorporate complications and some element of unpredictability
3. Turning point: Although complications are necessary to establish interest and credibility when telling sales stories, we (mostly) want to end on a positive note, so the turning point provides the crucial pivot for the story
4. Resolution: The journey ends with the complications being resolved, tension and suspense being lifted, and a valuable lesson conveyed to the listener

We can embellish or extend these elements. But if any of these four key elements is missing, our story is unlikely to engage or persuade, or be in any way memorable to the listener.

By the way, I also recommend that where possible you add a fifth and final element to Mike's formula: the unexpected benefit. Once you have revealed the resolution, the story can become even more emotionally engaging if you add something like "but in addition to resolving their initial problem, they found that an unexpected benefit was [insert surprising additional benefit]".

Who are the most effective story tellers in your own organisation? I’d expect many of your best-performing sales people and business consultants to be members of this group, but it would be unusual if the company founders weren’t also highly effective story tellers.

How can we learn from their experiences and establish a company-wide story telling competence - one that not only makes existing staff more effective, but also inducts every new employee into a culture of storytelling and shared experience?

Well, it requires that we establish an ever-growing pool of sharable stories and encourage and equip our customer-facing people to practice and continually develop their story telling skills.

Mike’s book provides an essential foundation for this endeavour, and I commend it to you. For a very limited promotional period, you can download the Kindle version from Amazon for only £0.99.

The offer closes on Monday 13th August - so I strongly suggest that you download your copy today.

Well, you're probably asking, what are the 7 Stories every sales person must tell? Well, for the full details I suggest you read the book, but here’s a taster:

• Your personal story
• Key staff stories
• Company creation story
• Insight stories
• Success stories
• Values stories
• Teaching stories

These story types differ in their choice of central character and their purpose. But Mike makes a compelling case for mastering every one of these story types - and provides detailed guidance on how to best develop and articulate each of them.

So - what’s your story? And how has story telling helped you succeed? Be sure to drop me a line or set up a call and tell me about your experiences - and I’d be happy to share my stories in return...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales , a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with high-potential tech-based B2B-focused scale-up businesses, equipping them to Sell in the Breakthrough Zone® by systematically creating, capturing and confirming their distinctive value in every customer interaction.

When you sell through a channel, there are plenty of benefits over direct sales. Partners, dealerships, resellers, and more can sell your product for you, freeing you from the burden of finding and selling to customers. Unfortunately, there are some downsides to this, since you may not know exactly who is buying your products—and you don’t necessarily have control over how your indirect reps are positioning or selling your products.

With inside sales, you know not only who is buying your product, but also where they are located and what their buying behavior is. Your team does the research, the outreach, the sale, the marketing, and the reports. You have all the information you need at your fingertips. But when you sell through a channel, that information often isn’t there. You know your product is being sold, but you don’t necessarily know to whom.

With a channel incentive program, you reward partner sales reps for completing sales. These reps typically must submit their sales in the form of an invoice or verifiable sales data in order to get paid. Most of the time, the orders are simply checked for authenticity and then discarded. However, that information can be incredibly useful.

Look Beyond The Invoice

If you only look at your channel incentives program as a way to reward reps, you are missing out on potential insight into your channel. By taking the information your reps enter and analyzing the data, you are able to learn about your customers and market to them more appropriately. This self-education will also allow you to prepare training materials and documentation to use with your indirect sales reps in order to ensure consistent messaging is going out from all angles.

Set More Accurate Benchmarks and KPIs

Any sales data that comes into your channel incentives program can be used to measure your program’s success. If you analyze the information of the sale beyond simply item quantities, you will be able to understand more of your channel. In fact, you can establish new KPIs and create success benchmarks that were beyond your scope of knowledge before. Look for patterns in the data and track it. By monitoring this information, you can see how your channel is performing against previous promotions.

Uncover Hidden Potential

There is also the chance for you to learn of an entirely new audience that you never considered before. You may think your product could only be used by one group of people, but when you incentivize your products, your reps will, in all likelihood, get creative with who they sell to in order to boost their potential for higher rewards. Some might go off the beaten path to find new customers, which could help you expand your customer base. If this is the case, it also helps to maintain a two-way conversation with your channel partners; if you see a new audience emerging through your channel, find out precisely why these people started buying your products when they may not have before.

The potential uses for the sales information you receive from your channel are endless, as long as you take the time to examine the data!

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Get deep reporting and analytics functionality with our robust channel incentives and loyalty platform. Get a demo today!

It is important to have visibility and control over your sales pipeline because it will lead to greater revenues. But that is the wrong place to start. After all, shouldn’t we first be finding out what, exactly, a sales pipeline is? We should seek to know just what its significance is in the success of your sales department. That’s what we’re going to do today: we’re going to go in-depth and learn about sales pipeline management.

The definition of a sales pipeline

Sales pipeline a visual representation of your buyer’s journey from beginning to final purchase along the stages you have set to your sales process. There is an opportunity at every stage of the sales pipeline and it is based on the actions that the buyer takes, being eventually visually depicted by your CRM system.

The rate of motion of these opportunities through your sales pipeline will differ from opportunity to opportunity, depending on how interested the opportunity is, how urgent it is for them to make a purchase, how much research that opportunity had already done by the time they got into the pipeline, and so on. There are even certain leads that will skip many of the middle stages of the sales pipeline. If your buyer takes the initiative to introducing you to their sales department, then you don’t need to waste time with the nitty gritties and you can go straight to the final stages of the pipeline.

What is the difference between a sales pipeline and a sales forecast?

It is very common to confuse a sales pipeline with a sales forecast. The pipeline includes all the leads being handled by a given salesperson. This includes relatively new and fresh leads as well as old and mature leads. A sales forecast, on the other hand, is a calculation of the potential leads that will close during a certain period.

These two also have different purposes, altogether. As a sales representative, you will use your sales pipeline to figure out where a particular opportunity is in the sales pipeline and what the appropriate actions are to take in order to move them along.

On the other hand, a sales forecast will show you and your managers how close you are to your sales goals and what you need to do to make progress toward that goal. If your sales forecast tells you you are going to miss the objective for the period, then you should become more aggressive in your sales activities. If the sales forecast shows you that you’re about to make double what your sales quota for the period is, then you can relax for the rest of the period and start working on making sure the next period is just as successful, if not more successful.

What is the difference between a sales pipeline and a sales funnel?

It is often the case that people say “sales pipeline” when they mean to say “sales funnel” and vice versa. The two have a lot of similarities. There is, however, a crucial difference in that “sales funnel” is the appropriate term to use when the number of opportunities reduces as you progress further through the sales process.

The reason why it is called a funnel is to help your mind connect with the idea that, if you’re going to have a lot of opportunities making it to the end of the sales process, then you need to have thrice that number at the beginning. A sales manager who decides to implement this idea might ask his sales rep to contact 300 potential buyers just to make sure he gets 100 purchases.

The better metaphor would be a champagne glass with a wide brim. You could have a vast number of prospects at the beginning of the process, but lose a significant number right after the qualification stage. Once the customers are past that crucial point, a majority of them are highly likely to become paying customers.

The most successful sales managers and sales reps have a ratio of prospects to closed deals of between 1.25x and 1.5x.

How do you build a sales pipeline?

There are a few basic steps you can follow to build a sales pipeline. They are outlined below:

• You should begin by having a clear definition of the stages of your sales process, including a comprehensive definition of your sales cycle.
• You should have the number of leads that typically make it from one stage to another on hand.
• You should then try to work backwards to come up with the number of opportunities you need at each stage of your sales process if you’re going to meet your sales objectives.
• You should take stock of what all the converting prospects have in common at every stage. This includes the actions you take yourself as a sales rep and also they the responses given by the prospect.
• You should create a sales process that is tailored to these statistics and actions for optimal results.

You’re probably wondering, after reading all that, how long it takes to come up with a sales pipeline. The answer isn’t exact or even specific. It pretty much depends on a number of factors, including the product you’re dealing with, the number and type of prospects you’re getting, and the resources available to you for your marketing efforts.

If your solution is a low cost one, then you can buy ads on Facebook within a day and try to generate leads from that. On the other hand, if the product you’re selling is a premium quality one, then you might have to grind for many months, or even a year, to get a proper list of contacts and paying accounts.

So we have an outline of the process of building a sales pipeline. We should look at the steps one by one.

The Stages of a Sales Pipeline

The best way to make a definition of these stages would be to come up with a detailed template. You could go on to copy one from the internet, but it’s a better idea to draw up your own so that you can adapt it to your own unique circumstances.

The reason why it’s important to draw up your own sales pipeline template is that your own buyers will have a journey through the sales process that is unique from those of buyers of other products. Here are some of the steps they go through:

• An awareness of the product – This when the buyer notices that they have a need for the product or an opportunity to use the product to their own ends.
• A Consideration of the situation – This is when the buyer has a clear definition of their opportunity or need. They then develop criteria and needs upon which they will base their evaluation. This is there point where the potential for research first surfaces.
• The decision – This when the buyer finally has a concrete strategy involving how they will take advantage of their opportunity or fulfill their needs. At this point, all they are doing is comparing the solutions offered by specific vendors, or within the same vendor.

If we decide to build on this further, we can develop a sales pipeline based on the processes that a buyer goes through. This pipeline might have the stages outline below:

• Connecting with the company – This is the point where the buyer decides to move to engage with your company. It could be something as simple as reading an email sent to them by a salesperson from your company or something as engaging as downloading content from your company website.
• Setting an appointment – This is when the buyer agrees to meet a representative from your company. It is an important stage as it is the stage in which the buyer gets to learn more about your company.
• Completing the appointment – This is the stage where the buyer actually shows up to the meeting with a representative from your company. They get to talk to you and you get a chance to confirm that the next steps in the pipeline will take place.
• The solution is proposed – The buyer receives a presentation and demo of the solution you are offering for their pain point or to help them capitalize on their opportunity. They then express interest.
• A proposal is sent – This is the stage where you send a proposal or contract to the buyer for review.

If you have a complex product, you should expect the sales cycle to be longer and the pipeline to have more stages. The above example pipeline is a simplification based on a simple product.

It is important to know the duration of time spent by buyers in each stage of your sales process. That includes list of prospects in its entirety as well as the buyers who actually end up buying your product. It’s possible that you may find that the prospects that buy spend longer in some crucial stages than the average prospect, such as the demo stage.

This data will help you better predict the likelihood of any given prospect to close.

You should also be able to estimate the yield of every stage. This is the rate of conversion that you can expect from the sage. Once you have reliable percentages, it will be much easier to prepare period estimates and much more accurate sales forecasts.

What is the ideal pipeline size?

Once you have done the groundwork, it should now be easier to figure out how many prospects you need at each stage for your to meet your quotas. You should start with your target revenue per period and divide that by the average amount of your deals. That will give you an idea how many deals you should close in the given period.

Your target number of deals should then be divided by your conversion rate for each stage, which will show you how many opportunities should reach that stage in the given period.

This process should be completed for every stage, giving you all your milestones for the period.

Mistakes made in sales pipelines

If you want to keep your pipeline functioning properly, avoid making these common mistakes:

1. Don’t let your pipeline shrink

Many reps hate the job of prospecting. As a result, they fall into something known as a “sales trap”.

This is when you’re getting a lot of good business and are looking likely to hit your targets. The problem is that you haven’t been prospecting lately and so you look likely to face a barren pipeline in the next period.

To avoid this, make sure your sales pipeline is constantly growing, and that the number of prospects at every stage does not either remain stagnant or diminish.

2. Don’t lose your leads

If your follow-up process isn’t well established, you will eventually lose your leads. That is money slipping through the cracks. Your team should have a proper system for following up with leads to avoid losing them, such as contacting them early, sending them a variety emails and social media touches, and providing them with new information at every touch.

When you keep your follow-up strategy uniform, your reps get to maintain healthy pipelines and know when to disqualify prospects.

3. Don’t allow disorganization in your sales pipeline

It’s important to clean up your sales pipeline every once in a while to ensure you don’t get ridiculous and wildly inaccurate sales forecasts. Sales forecasts typically use the stage at which a prospect is to determine how likely that opportunity is to close. They rarely consider the age of that opportunity.

As an example, consider a situation where you sent a proposal to an opportunity one month. That buyer hasn’t replied to any of your emails or calls since you sent the proposal, which means you can forget about their business.

Let’s say the proposal was $4,000. Your yield probability for the proposal stage is, say, 90%. That means your sales forecast will count that opportunity as a potential revenue of $3,600 for the next month. Your sales forecast will be off by that amount and the gap will only continue to widen for as long as you don’t clean up the dead prospects from the pipeline. You can clean your pipeline in the following ways:

• Find out which prospects have lived in the pipeline longer than average. You can decide whether they should be removed or not based on your own judgement.
• Send prospects an email before you give up on them. That way you’ll get to know if they are still interested or not.
• Keep your data updated and accurate. Sometimes you may have to demote opportunities to a previous stage in the pipeline due to arising circumstances.
• Review your sales pipeline regularly to find prospects that have gone silent or deals that haven’t progressed from their current stage for a very long time.

Ultimately, sales pipeline management is an active process, and your sales pipeline will only be as clean and effective as you keep it. It is a very rewarding process, however, as it ensures that there is a system to your sales process and, over time, increases your revenue.

Most marketers do not have a standardized process for measuring the return on investment of their sponsorships, according to recent research from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB). Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Millennials have been accused of killing so many products and industries — taxis, landlines, snail mail — that it’s become a media trope. But millennials are old news. Today, businesses and marketers are desperately anticipating the murderous whims of Gen Z, the demographic born after 1996.

Sometimes called “post-millennials” or “iGen,” Gen Z makes up more than one-fifth of the U.S. population and is the most racially and ethnically diverse group in the nation’s history. They’re true digital natives who report being online “almost constantly,” according to a 2018 study by Pew Research Center. (Psychologists have said their technology use has produced a national mental health crisis.)

More than 70 per cent of Gen Zers influence their family’s spending, according to a 2017 report from International Business Machines Corp. and the National Retail Federation. With that kind of sway and billions of dollars in spending power, they have businesses scrambling to understand their desires.

• Indians are falling out of love with gold — and millennials are partly to blame
• Millennials are waking up to the grim financial future left to them by baby boomers — and they’re angry
• Forget Millennials, Aldo chain is seeking a foothold in emerging Gen Z market

Their relationship to money, it turns out, has been shaped by the Great Recession, one expert said.

“Their expectations are lower, they’re not as confident,” said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who has studied the generation. “They’re not viewing the world through rose-colored glasses.”

They are less optimistic about economic opportunity and student debt. As a result, Gen Z likes to play it safe. “They are more risk-averse than previous generations in terms of both attitudes and behaviour,” Twenge said, pointing to a study she authored that found today’s teens are less likely to have sex or drink. Still, they also prioritize wealth and material goods. “In psychological terms, it’s a shift toward extrinsic values — money, fame and riches — rather than toward intrinsic values, like relationships and community feeling,” Twenge said.

The generation already wields a deadly combination of economic power and social media clout. A disparaging tweet from Kylie Jenner earlier this year about teen-dominated app Snapchat wiped out US$1.3 billion in Snap Inc.’s market value. But businesses have been declared “dead” before. Millennials, after all, were supposed to kill off wine corks, dating, beer, cereal and bars of soap, but those things are still alive.

Still, if a tweet has the capacity to move that kind of capital, how else will this generation move markets and shape industries?

Malls

Given their love of digital life, the first expected victim of teen spending preferences is brick-and-mortar retail. America’s malls have been closing at a record pace as e-commerce becomes the preferred mode of shopping for millennials and Gen Zers. More than two-thirds of U.S. malls saw a decrease in national retailers in 2018, according to a report from property research firm Green Street Advisors LLC.

Retailers are grappling with young Americans’ demand for personalized, digitally augmented shopping experiences. An astounding 93 per cent of Gen Zers prefer to shop without the help of a sales associate, according to a 2017 survey by Adyen NV, a global payments processor. But only 19 per cent of retailers can provide such an experience, according to the IBM survey of Gen Zers.

The apparel industry at large is already dying. In 1977, clothing accounted for 6.2 per cent of U.S. household spending. Today, that number has halved to 3.1 per cent, according to government data. Even fast-fashion stores, which have made clothing cheaper, are seeing slower growth. Hennes & Mauritz AB is opening fewer H&M stores and struggling to sell unwanted products in the stores it currently operates as young customers increasingly purchase clothing online.

Brands that have historically marketed to teens, which include Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and Urban Outfitters Inc., have seen a 32 per cent drop in the number of store locations in North America since 2016, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Retailers Aeropostale, Pacific Sunwear and American Apparel all filed for bankruptcy in the last two years, and more are expected this year.

Print Magazines

Print magazines of all kinds are seeing newsstand sales decline. But teen magazines have struggled more than others to reach their intended audiences. Just last November, Condé Nast closed the quarterly (once monthly) print edition of Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, Hearst Communications Inc.’s Seventeen magazine, a 73-year-old print publication, slashed frequency from 10 magazines to six in 2016. The company also eliminated CosmoGirl in 2008.

Though print may perish, magazines geared toward young women are bolstering their digital and social channels to spur new forms of online engagement. And it turns out, America’s youth are fired up by online political content.

Teen Vogue was one of the first titles to draw attention for successfully reaching young women on digital platforms during the 2016 election when an opinion piece, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” dominated the news cycle with more than 1.4 million unique views. This year, the brand has seen increased digital engagement, particularly with content on sexual health, reproductive rights and gun reform.

“Teen girls are so much smarter than anyone gives them credit for,” said Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director. “We’ve seen an immense resonance of political coverage with our audience.”

Football

The National Football League has come under scrutiny in recent years over the link between head injuries and degenerative brain disease. Participation in high school football dropped roughly 3.5 per cent in the five years between the 2011-12 and 2016-17 seasons, according to the National Association of State High School Federations (NASHSF).

A Boston University School of Medicine study found that athletes who participate in youth football before the age of 12 have more behavioural and cognitive issues than those who begin playing later. In response to mounting research concerning the risks, California State Assembly members introduced a bill to bar tackle programs before high school — and similar legislation has popped up in other states.

Across the country, there’s been a net loss of almost 150 boys’ high school tackle-football programs in the last five years, as school athletic departments encourage students to pursue alternatives like soccer, baseball and lacrosse, according to NASHSF data.

With fewer teens playing — and watching — football, the pipeline to recruit talented players may be compromised, said Tom Farrey, the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program.

Cash

American teens are four times less likely to use cash than the general public and only use cash for 6 per cent of their transactions, according to data from teen debit-card company Current. Younger generations are also more likely to say they’d like cashless and cardless options at restaurants. And the majority of people under 30 prefer to use cards over cash, even for transactions under US$5.

Unsurprisingly, money-transferring apps — such as Venmo, Google Pay and Apple Wallet — are seeing continued growth.

Venmo, which blends social media and payment processing, has become a favourite among teens. The company said it facilitated more than US$40 billion of payments in the last 12 months and total payment volume grew 50 per cent in the first quarter.

“This generation has grown up with a mobile device that is also a payment device,” said Stuart Sopp, chief executive officer of Current. “They are going to accelerate the adoption of the digital economy because digital payment is native to them.”

Retailers are also moving toward cashless payments. And Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Singapore have made various efforts to move toward a digital economy — pledging to eliminate cheque usage and slash cash withdrawals from ATMs.

“There (are) many reasons why businesses want to see a shift away from cash,” Sopp said. “Now they finally have a demographic cohort that is ready for it to happen. They won’t resist it, they will push for it.”

But forsaking cash altogether could pose a challenge to those who don’t have a bank account — as is the case with many teens. Amazon.com Inc., always looking for ways to drive more spending on its platform, has a plan to make pseudo debit cards called Amazon Cash to tap into Gen Z’s spending habits before they are of age to manage their own accounts. If successful, Amazon could lock in lifelong, digital-centric customers.

Of course, predicting the future is difficult. The NFL and your local mall may escape the Gen Z purge. There’s only one thing we know today’s teens will kill with 100 per cent certainty: articles about millennials killing industries.

Bloomberg.com

One of the most exciting things about the digital revolution is access to information. In the past, getting data was nearly impossible, and robust software tools were expensive. Thanks to Google Analytics, social media, and marketing automation tools, these advancements are available to a greater audience than ever before.

Businesses now have access to tools and data that giant retailers and national chains could have only dreamed of twenty years ago. But if everyone has access, what’s going to set you apart?

In a world where everyone has equal access to game-changing technology, strategy is what separates the winners and losers. The question is: How do you create a strategy that’s going to get results?

Let’s look at seven digital marketing tips to maximize revenue for B2C marketers while saving time and delivering maximum joy to customers.

1. Choose your tools wisely

Your tools are only as good as how you use them. You don’t have time to be everywhere all the time, nor do you need to be to pull off an effective marketing strategy.

Focus on the channels that generate the most engagement with your target audience and overall ROI. Be sure that your work on one platform complements the others. Your social media presence should reinforce your email marketing efforts (and vice-versa).

2. Prioritize email over other channels

B2C marketers who prioritize email marketing average an 89% higher contribution to revenue. What’s more? Email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel, generating $44 for every $1 you put in. B2C marketers can see upwards of 50% conversion rates from email campaigns.

People prefer email over other types of digital marketing, too. Seventy-two percent say they prefer to receive promotional content via email, while 73% of millennials say that email is their preferred way to interact with brands. These numbers point to an obvious conclusion: email is where you should focus a large part of your marketing attention.

3. Use email for brand-building

Email is one of the best ways to tell your brand’s story over an extended period of time. With email newsletters, you can easily reach your subscribers and get them up-to-date with your latest news and offers. Be consistent, delivering relevant content on a regular basis to stay at the top of your customers’ minds.

When you’re not sure about what to send, strive to write the kind of emails that get people talking. As Seth Godin reminds us: “Remarkable means worth making a remark about.”

4. Get personal

As you get more advanced, you can target emails to groups of customers in very specific ways. Email personalization can be anything from including first names in your subject line to customizing the body of your email so that it’s location or gender-specific.

Data shows that it works: 74% of marketers say targeted campaigns increase their engagement and emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened.

You can get creative with how you use personalization, going much farther than adding a first name. For example, you can send emails with promotions based on a subscriber’s birthday.

5. Start with a welcome message

Everyone’s looking for email hacks and tricks, but one of the most effective things you can do is to create a welcome message that capitalizes on the forward momentum of a new sign-up.

Think about it: A welcome email is your very first contact with new subscribers, and it’s also the email they’re most likely to open. Welcome emails have an open rate of 70.5% and click-through rates of up to 152%. Sadly, those numbers tend to fall off with subsequent emails. Don’t waste your chance to make an outstanding first impression.

6. Set it and (sort of) forget it

Over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns. Customer data and profiles allow you to set up triggers based on customer behavior that will automatically deliver emails at a time when they’re most relevant (which reduces the legwork required on your end of things, too.) Triggered campaigns can be anything from special birthday discounts to abandoned cart reminders and remarketing emails.

7. Take a data-driven approach

This final catch-all tip applies to every aspect of your marketing strategy. Whether or not you focus on email, and whether or not you take full advantage of tools like automation–your strategy should be supported by data. Use A/B testing to compare different subject lines. Put your time and marketing dollars behind what works.

The beauty of data-based insights is that they make success repeatable. We see this in B2B marketing where 59% of marketers say they can duplicate the results of an effective campaign by testing and optimizing based on data. Let the numbers be your guide.

Wrap up

Having the right tools is the easy part. Success in digital B2C marketing is a matter of having the right knowledge to build a strategy to get the most out of your tools. It might feel like this comes with a bit of a learning curve, but the good news is that the most revenue positive email strategies are also the easiest.

Personalization and automation not only get you better digital marketing results, but they’re also often easier to use and scale than low sophistication alternatives. Data takes the guesswork out of knowing what’s working, what’s not, and what it takes to crush your marketing objectives.

When an employee leaves their job, the last thing that they probably think about is updating their current role listed on their LinkedIn profile. If an employee forgets to end their current job experience with an employer and they are linked to the employer’s Company Page, they will still show up a current employee on the Company Page. Past employees who are still connected can significantly affect your company’s reliability online, and if you’re a user, it could influence potential job opportunities in the future. So, here is a quick tip on how to update your current work experience whenever you leave a company.

First, head over to your profile and scroll down to “Experiences.” Click on your most recent job experience (the one that you are leaving) and click on the blue pencil.

Next, in the “Edit experience” pop-up window, you will scroll down to “From” which will have your start date previously entered, and you will unclick the box that says “I currently work here.”

Once you do this, a “To” column will appear directly next to the “From” column. Set the date that you left the company and remember to click “Save” once you are done.

That’s it! It is so simple to do, but it’s something many forget to do when they leave a current role. CEO’s and other members of the executive team should be sure to remind people who are leaving the company to follow these simple steps so that your Company Page stays up-to-date. It’s important to keep this updated and monitored as much as possible so that customers, prospects, recruiters, and others using LinkedIn can get accurate information about the employee or the company. LinkedIn is such a great business tool, but it loses value when the information you are sharing is inaccurate.

IBM and shipping giant Maersk having been working together for the last year developing a blockchain-based shipping solution called TradeLens. Today they moved the project from Beta into limited availability.

Marie Wieck, GM for IBM Blockchain says the product provides a way to digitize every step of the global trade workflow, transforming it into a real-time communication and visual data sharing tool.

TradeLens was developed jointly by the two companies with IBM providing the underlying blockchain technology and Maersk bringing the worldwide shipping expertise. It involves three components: the blockchain, which provides a mechanism for tracking goods from factory or field to delivery, APIs for others to build new applications on top of the platform these two companies have built, and a set of standards to facilitate data sharing among the different entities in the workflow such as customs, ports and shipping companies.

Wieck says the blockchain really changes how companies have traditionally tracked shipped goods. While many of the entities in the system have digitized the process, the data they have has been trapped in silos and previous attempts at sharing like EDI have been limited. “The challenge is they tend to think of a linear flow and you really only have visibility one [level] up and one down in your value chain,” she said.

The blockchain provides a couple of obvious advantages over previous methods. For starters, she says it’s safer because data is distributed, making it much more secure with digital encryption built in. The greatest advantage though is the visibility it provides. Every participant can check any aspect of the flow in real time, or an auditor or other authority can easily track the entire process from start to finish by clicking on a block in the blockchain instead of requesting data from each entity manually.

While she says it won’t entirely prevent fraud, it does help reduce it by putting more eyeballs onto the process. “If you had fraudulent data at start, blockchain won’t help prevent that. What it does help with is that you have multiple people validating every data set and you get greater visibility when something doesn’t look right,” she said.

As for the APIs, she sees the system becoming a shipping information platform. Developers can build on top of that, taking advantage of the data in the system to build even greater efficiencies. The standards help pull it together and align with APIs, such as providing a standard Bill of Lading. They are starting by incorporating existing industry standards, but are also looking for gaps that slow things down to add new standard approaches that would benefit everyone in the system.

So far, the companies have 94 entities in 300 locations around the world using TradeLens including customs authorities, ports, cargo shippers and logistics companies. They are opening the program to limited availability today with the goal of a full launch by the end of this year.

Wieck ultimately sees TradeLens as a way to facilitate trade by building in trust, the end of goal of any blockchain product. “By virtue of already having an early adopter program, and having coverage of 300 trading locations around the world, it is a very good basis for the global exchange of information. And I personally think visibility creates trust, and that can help in a myriad of ways,” she said.

It’s all about the commission. The affiliate reps want that percentage to be as high as possible, and the merchants want it to be as low as possible. High commission rates will attract the masses, but cut into your profits. How can you negotiate with affiliates to make sure that you’re getting the best possible deal on your end?

Know your highest commission rate.

Let’s start at the top; literally, the highest commission rate you can afford to pay out to the majority of your affiliates. This is your break-even number, which you can get to having a good grasp of your metrics.

In our previous post on setting your commission rate (recommended reading for this post), we laid out the equation you can use to figure out the Lifetime Value of a new customer:

Average Order Value X Purchase Frequency X Average Lifespan = LTV

Once you have your LTV, this is roughly the highest you can spend to acquire one new customer and break even (give or take some overhead spending). So if a new customer has an LTV of $500, technically you could pay $500 to your affiliate partner for bringing in the sale.

Of course, it’s unlikely you will ever offer a payout this high, but it gives you your ceiling. Now you know roughly how much wiggle room you have when it comes to offering a rate to an affiliate.

Side Note: You might be thinking “but aren’t I setting commissions on the revenue of each sale?” Yes, and we’ll get to that, but LTV is the best metric for your absolute ceiling. So even if you give 100% commission on a single sale, it’s possible to still be profitable in the long run.

Know the industry average.

When you go in to buy a used car, it’s important you know the general amount one is worth. Or else, you’ll be easily swindled. Before you engage in any negotiations, know what others in your industry are offering.

We’ll again refer you to where we highlighted this topic in our previous post on setting commission rates, but here’s a quick chart of industry averages:

As you can see, in general the recommended commission rate is between 10–20%, average being 15%. But do your due diligence and see what your closest competitors are offering.

Know your target affiliate rep.

Realistically, you won’t be negotiating with the majority of your affiliate partners. You will probably advertise a certain commission rate, and potential affiliates will take it or leave it. If they mostly leave it, you probably need to raise the rate a few percentages.

Negotiations really come into play in two scenarios: 1) you only want to work with a handful of very dedicated reps who will ostensibly be your main sales force; or 2) when you want to work with an Influencer.

Working with an Influencer in your niche can be a boom for your business. In a study by Linqia, 94% of marketers found influencer marketing to be effective. That was in 2016 and the market for good Influencers have continued to grow in nearly every vertical. Which means, to get the best ones, you’ll usually have to pony up.

This is where knowing your target Influencer is important. Track their social media feeds to get clues on what their other commission rates may be. What do they enjoy doing? What are their hobbies? What excites them? Knowing these things could lead to offers of bonuses other than strictly money, and also, you’ll vet them as an actual good Influencer.

Done all that homework? Good! Now you’re ready to negotiate with, and hopefully snag, the Big Fish.

The Do’s & Don’t’s of Affiliate Negotiation

Do start negotiations at the high end of your current commission range. That might be enough for your Influencer and you can call it a day. Also, offering your high end prevents them from eventually finding out that they’re making less commission than another one of your “regular” reps, which can lead to bad feelings.

Don’t ever start negotiations at your ceiling; you’ll have no where to go if they say no. If your absolute ceiling is the LTV, and you start with the high end of your normal commissions, you know what wiggle room you have.

Do make it feel like the affiliate has won. Make them feel like they’re getting a special deal, even if it’s not. Starting the relationship off right is great for morale of the partnership. Even consider some sort of “signing bonus” of a gift card or brand merchandise to welcome them on board.

Don’t be afraid to walk away. Sometimes, a busy Influencer will simply ask for too much. If they’re asking for such a high commission rate that the margins aren’t there, you should gracefully bail out of the negotiation. After all, there are other Influencers in the social media sea. But…

Do offer alternatives to cold hard cash to close the deal.

Alternatives to higher commission rates.

Anything above a 50% commission rate on a sale is usually too high (though it does depend on your sales/marketing goals). If the rep you’re negotiating with is simply asking too much, offer these alternatives:

Tiered Commission — Offer to increase the commission rate as they prove that they can bring in customers. Be it a “hot streak” bonus where you bump up commissions if they bring in X sales in Y amount of time, or a permanent bump to a higher tier if they bring in a goal of X sales. It’s a great way to motivate a rep and to reward consistency and proof-of-effectiveness. Also, another way to do this is with Product-Level Commissions. If your rep sells higher-ticket items, they get a higher commission to match.

Trial Period — Alternately, you can start them off at their preferred higher rate but build in expectations that they need to maintain X sales per month to stay at that rate. So initially, it’ll act as a “trial period” that they will need to work to maintain, or else the commission rate will come down.

Store Credit/Family Discount — Especially if the Influencer is already a fan of your brand, you can offer store credit instead of cold hard cash, which may save you money. Offering them a friends & family discount can also sweeten the deal without you having to shell out ultra high commissions.

And again, that homework you did where you learned all about this specific rep can come in handy for alternative payments. Is your rep a huge Disney fan? Maybe season tickets can sweeten the pot. Get creative before you bite the bullet and agree to a higher commission than you ideally want.

Renegotiating and Tracking

Finally, like all good partnerships, there should be reevaluations as you keep an eye on their metrics. If they’re underperforming, then you should be able to renegotiate a lower commission rate. If they’re overperforming, it might be time for a bonus. Either way, it’s hugely important to keep track of their Key Performance Indicators.

Since your Influencer is probably held to a different standard than your other affiliates, you will want to segment them out in your tracking system so you can easily track their performance separately. This can tell you at-a-glance how effective they are compared to the other affiliate segments you’ve created.

At the end of the day, it’s business but it’s also a relationship. Go in to affiliate negotiations expecting success and expecting to make both sides happy. After all, a good affiliate marketing program is win-win. Never forget that.

At some point, you've probably wondered what the top-performing reps on your team have in common. Their individual selling styles may vary, but it’s no coincidence that their names are always at the top of the leaderboard.

To achieve similar results, you’ll need to know what sets them apart. Check out the traits of salespeople who consistently outperform their peers.

What Makes a Successful Sales Rep?

1. They keep a level head

You’ll rarely see a top-performing rep speak too quickly or lose their cool. Staying composed is an automatic credibility booster. Plus, it helps salespeople avoid saying things they’ll later regret.

Maybe your prospect asks for a customer reference or trial extension. Immediately answering -- rather than pausing for a beat -- makes you more likely to say, “Sure, we can do that!” instead of, “Can you walk me through how that’ll help your decision-making process?”

Being even-keeled is crucial during negotiations as well, since getting flustered makes it hard to think strategically. Also, buyers may get more aggressive when they notice your composure slipping away.

2. They don’t get self-conscious

Do you have a hard time remembering the last time you got embarrassed? That’s a good sign. A study of more than 1,000 successful salespeople found that fewer than 5% were self-conscious. 

“The byproduct of a high level of self-consciousness is bashfulness and inhibition,” explains Steve W. Martin, author of the study and sales strategy professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

Not being self-conscious means you’re not afraid to take risks and persistently pursue deals. It also means you’re more likely to bounce back from rejection or failure, since you’ll see these experiences as opportunities to learn and improve rather than signs you’re not cut out for selling. This resiliency will help you overcome the inevitable hard times.

Finally, self-assurance comes into play when you’re using the Challenger Sales methodology. Pushing back on the prospect and focusing on the end goal rather than being liked takes a lot of confidence.

3. They’re deliberate with their time

For reps, time and energy are precious resources. That’s why the most effective salespeople treat every task like an investment: "If I put X in, will I get at least Y in return?"

This test helps them distinguish between high-reward activities and low-reward ones. For example, a rep isn’t going to spend time working with a prospect who’s a bad fit -- it’s a waste of time for both of them.

However, she’ll definitely spend some time researching a prospect who fits her buyer persona to a tee, since this activity is much likelier to pay off in the long run.

Top reps also save time by automating repetitive tasks. After all, every hour they spend logging calls, copying and pasting emails, and scheduling follow-ups is an hour they could’ve spent selling.

The average salesperson spends just two hours per day on revenue-generating activities. Meanwhile, the highest performers spend six hours per day on these tasks.

4. They understand the entire industry

Good reps are well-versed in their product, including its features, functions, and applications. Great reps take their knowledge one step further: They understand every aspect of their prospects’ businesses, from the industry down to their daily responsibilities.

Having industry expertise makes salespeople much more valuable. They don’t just teach their buyers about the product -- they can provide help and guidance with many aspects of the business.

Right now, being an expert in your space is a competitive advantage. But Harvard Business School professor and former HubSpot CRO Mark Roberge points out that in the future it’ll be necessary for survival.

Thanks to the internet, most people aren’t reliant on salespeople for basic information. Your prospects must want to work with you -- which means providing unique value as a consultant is crucial.

5. They're always learning

If you’re meeting quota, it’s tempting to think your training days are over. But in fact, the best salespeople are the most focused on learning new things.

After all, you can’t achieve meaningful career growth without honing your skills or acquiring new knowledge and techniques. And learning literally pays off: Employees produce 50% higher net sales when they work at companies with continuous sales training.

Plus, sales itself is evolving. Strategies that worked 10 years ago probably won’t be effective today -- and strategies that worked 20 years ago will totally flop. You can’t call people out of thin air and nurture prospects by taking them golfing: cold calling has a 1-3% success rate for earning an initial meeting, and prospects are now looking for unique insights into their business strategy rather than a couple free rounds.

If you don’t change your pace to match the beat of the modern buyer's drum, you won’t be able to work with them.

6. They look on the dark side

Ask almost any salesperson if they’re an optimist or a pessimist, and they’ll say the former.

However, seeing the glass as half empty is actually a good thing: According to Martin’s research, two-thirds of top-performing reps actually have pessimistic personalities.

“Inward pessimism drives a salesperson to question the viability of the deal and credibility of the buyer,” Martin writes.

Since they’re more skeptical, pessimistic reps will ask buyers tougher qualifying questions and seek out the true decision makers within an organization.

Not naturally pessimistic? Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University who’s spent 20 years studying how people think about the future, has developed a technique called W.O.O.P.:

• W: Think about your wish.
• O: Think about your ideal outcome.
• O: Think about the obstacles in your way.
• P: Plan for those obstacles.

By preparing for potential impediments, you can harness the benefits of negative thinking while maintaining your natural optimism.

7. They’re persistent yet respectful

Nearly half of reps will abandon a prospect after one follow-up. Yet most sales require multiple touches.

That’s why successful reps are usually persistent. Because they give up less easily than their peers, they win far more deals.

Unfortunately, some people take persistence to mean extreme aggressiveness. If you’re calling and emailing prospects so frequently that even seeing your name gives them angry hives, you’re definitely going overboard. Remember that following up only works if it leads to a relationship -- and no one wants to work with a stalker. Top reps know the difference between following up with prospects and chasing them down.

For instance, calling or emailing “just to check in” is pushy. Asking if they’re still interested in achieving a specific goal and then providing a relevant suggestion, on the other hand, is persistent.

Offering a product demo while they’re still in the education stage? Too much, too soon. Delving into their problems and helping them identify a possible solution will earn you their trust, so that down the line when you bring up the demo they’ll actually say yes.

8. They're motivated by goals

If you don't have goals, you can't move forward. Having monthly sales goals for yourself, activity goals, and stretch goals are important to excelling in sales. 

If you're just aiming for your quota -- without a plan for how you'll get there -- you'll struggle. In fact, a Harvard University study found setting specific goals actually increases motivation. 

Monitor your goal progression throughout the month and celebrate small milestones and wins. A study published on Harvard Business Review found even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. 

Finally, set mentor goals to encourage professional growth and development as well as better sales habits. Find more tips on setting smarter sales goals here. 

9. They're fluent in technology

Any number of things can and will go wrong in your demos. Whether you're presenting a PowerPoint in person or hosting a video meeting, today's successful salespeople must also speak technology fluently. 

Book an hour with your resident IT expert and ask them to teach you how to troubleshoot how to fix common tech issues, from navigating a bad internet connection to unfreezing frozen screens and beyond.

10. They're relationship people

It goes without saying that salespeople must be able to build rapport with just about anyone. The best salespeople know how to strike up conversations with complete strangers, get people to open up, and, above all, are great listeners. 

Find a sales mentor you trust and ask them to teach you their secrets for relationship building. Whether it's conducting research before a meeting, a great ice-breaker joke, or expertly asking follow-up questions -- learning from those who've been doing it successfully for years is the best way to proceed.

Now that you know what it takes to be the best, figure out which traits you already possess and where you could improve. With hard work and focus, you can become one of -- if not the -- best rep on your team.

So you are convinced of the value of referrals and you’re ready to take the first steps towards building a referral channel, but where do you start? In eight simple steps, you can build out and scale a referral channel for your enterprise company.

Step 1: Identify Potential Partners

To start building your channel, you need to figure out your referral target market. To do this, you need to have your marketing and sales teams answer these questions:

• What companies sell complimentary products to your same targets? These companies can include integration partners or companies selling into the same buying group. You can also identify the typical technology stacks and services that are used by your target buying group.
• Who has influence over your target buyers? If you are selling to small or mid-sized businesses, there’s a lot of providers you can consider including people like their accountants and bankers.
• What associations do your target buyers join or follow? Whether they are chambers or local business association, these types of groups are a great way to break into the small business network.
• Are there purchases that typically happen in coordination with yours? For example, when someone buys marketing automation they might also purchase a content platform.
• Are there consultant groups or agencies that advise on purchase decisions in your industry that are complementary to your product? From niche consultants to product sites, there are likely a number of different consultants and review sites that are influencing your target buyers.
• Are your target buyers part of a franchise model? If the answer to this one is yes, it’s good to note that the franchisers have direct access and influence you can tap into.
• Are there under-performing re-sellers in an existing partner channel? If you have an existing partner network made up of re-sellers, you can consider transitioning your under-performing re-sellers into referral partners.

Step 2: Engage and Recruit Partners

Now that you’ve identified your potential referral partners, you need to get their attention and explain to them the value of becoming a referral partner with your business. To do this you can consider the following value props:

• Does recommending your product or service put the partner in a positive light with their customers and network?
• Does it help them become a trusted advisor?
• Does your product or service add value to their other offerings?
• Does it make their current offering more sticky for potential customers by increasing usage or value?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you now know how to sell participation in your program as a win-win. Just add to that an equitable incentive model with a commission or some other form of revenue sharing. The key is to drive partner action by outlining the benefits of your referral program on their business.

Next, you need to get your sales team on-board to send your value prop, and to recruit referral partners. Direct sales has an organic incentive to recruit partners for referrals because they reap the benefit of the resulting leads. So, arm your sales team with the right materials and a simple registration process. You can even get your marketing team involved in delivering recruitment campaigns.

Step 3: Enable Referral Partners

The next step in building out your referral channel is enabling your referral partners by giving them everything they need to be successful. The best way to do this is through a personal referral portal. Here are the six things you need in a portal in order to properly engage your referral partners:

1. Multiple ways to make referrals
2. Product content to educate and share
3. Information on the target buyers, including personas
4. Clear rules that state how a partner earns incentives
5. Transparency into the referral activities and reward statuses
6. Training materials about the program and how to make referrals

Once you have all the pieces in place on the portal, you’ll want to make sure you have a motivating incentive structure in place.

Step 4: Incentivize Referral Partners

There are all sorts of ways to incentives referral partners, but how do you know what’s right for your company? When trying to choose the appropriate reward amount, you should consider the following factors:

• Do you want to reward higher amounts/percentage of revenue for highest performing partners?
• Do you want to motivate repeat referrals by having an escalating reward based on the number of successful referrals within a time period?
• Do you want to vary the reward based on deal involvement or lead stage?

The best way to checkpoint your reward amount strategy is to work with marketing to determine their cost per acquisition (CPA) of a customer coming from inbound efforts. Your referral fee should always come in much lower than the marketing CPA.

Next, you want to consider the following when structuring your reward to meet your business needs:

• Calculation – This can be a flat bounty, a bounty by product purchased or percentage of revenue. When discussing the amount, you may want to offer different rates for different partner types or deal involvement.
• Escalation – Setting achievement levels with higher payouts is a great way to incentivize repeat referrals.
• Timing – If you’ve got a subscription product, you may want to consider a retention period before payout to the partner to make sure the new customer is sticky. In these scenarios, you may want to consider rewarding at multiple stages to keep the partner engaged. For instance, 25% of the reward at purchase and 75% after 6 months retention.
• Accrual – For highly productive programs, it may make sense to accrue reward payments to reduce transaction fees and provide higher accumulated payouts.

No matter how you incentivize, it’s important that this is all manageable for you. The more you can automate your referral system, the easier it will be to handle. Partners that are paid quickly tend to be happy and more successful.

Step 5: Onboarding Referral Partners

Now that you have your recruitment, enablement and incentives all figured out, you need to create a smooth onboarding process. Here are the six key things you need to do during the onboarding process for referral partners:

1. Collect necessary information – Things like tax form information, banking information (if needed) and basic contact information.
2. Educate on the target buyer using personas – Referral partners need to know what types of companies, and titles within those companies, are a fit for your solution.
3. Train on how to make a one-to-one referral ask – Have a conversation with your partners about the best times to introduce your product/service to a target buyer, and the best way to introduce your product/service.
4. Train on various ways to input referrals into your tracking system – Focus your training on the use case and value for using each referral method, with special attention on how to make one-to-one referrals versus one-to-many referral blasts. Referral types include lead forms, verbal referrals, email, shareable URLs, social media and print cards.
5. Discuss what happens to a referral lead once they provide it – Your referral partners need to understand your referral process and how you will be communicating with their prospect.
6. Educate on referral success criteria, data access and any service level agreements – There’s a lot to consider when trying to determine success criteria and incentives for your program. It’s important that you have clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) by which you measure success, and that you are clear in your communications about those KPIs to your referral partners.

Step 6: Keep Referral Partners Engaged

You’ve done the hard work of setting up your program, and recruiting and on-boarding partners. Now you need to figure out how to keep the referrals flowing in. The key here is to make it easy for partners to make referrals, and to give them full transparency into their progress. Here are 7 things you can do to keep your referral partners engaged:

1. Give regular status updates
2. Give regular program and success story communications
3. Involve your sales team to help drive referral activity
4. Have special promotions (internal and external)
5. Offer a coaching program to help improve the performance of struggling partners
6. Offer escalating incentives to help encourage repeat referrals
7. In addition to money, give non-monetary recognition

Step 7: Establish Key Metrics For Your Referral Partner Program

There are 5 key categories you want to measure in order to get the data you need to optimize and grow the output from your referral partners. Those categories are:

• The referral pipeline – For this one, look at the number of partners, the number of referrals, the number of successful referrals and revenue.
• Partner activity – Here, you want to look at the percent of partners that made referrals within a time period, the percent of partners that made multiple referrals within that time period, the percent of partners with successful referrals within that time period, the average number of referrals per partner and the average number of successful referrals per partner.
• Top performers – Look at top partners by number of referrals, top partners by number of successful referrals and top partners by revenue.
• Under-performers – To figure out your under-performers look at your lowest partners by number of referrals, lowest partners by number of successful referrals and lowest partners by revenue.

It’s important to note that you don’t want to take action on the data you collect on a daily basis. Instead, you should check it often and keep an eye out for trends or anything that falls outside of your expectations.

Step 8: Scale Your Referral Partner Program

Now that you know how to measure the success of your program and partners, it’s time to grow! To kick off growing your referral channel, it’s important to consider your goals and identify opportunities. Here are some key areas to think about when driving program growth:

• Do I have great partners, but need more?
• Am I limiting my growth by making my program too complex?
• Am I incentivizing my partners enough to keep them motivated?
• Are my partners becoming disengaged with the program?

If you do find that your partners are becoming disengaged as you try to grow your program, consider automating it (if you haven’t already). Referral program software can remove the operational hassle of tracking, attributing and rewarding referrals. Don’t let this powerful channel go underutilized because you’re still using spreadsheets!

To learn more about building and automating successful referral channels, visit our resource library.

When was the last time you took stock of your productivity? If we’re honest, most of us are too busy to devote time to this important task. But if we did (and I’ll share more on how to do that below), we’d likely find hours of time wasted on mundane tasks each week.

A Workfront survey actually found U.S. employees at companies of 1000 workers or more only spent 45% of their workweek on primary job duties. Where did the rest of the time go? Well, 14% of their time was spent on email and the other 40% was spent on meetings, "interruptions," and … administrative tasks.

This gets a little fuzzy when you consider what an "administrative task" is. An administrative task for a salesperson is different than that of a real estate agent or graphic designer. But we all have them. They clutter up our days and keep us under water and sometimes underperforming.

Luckily, technology has given us a new opportunity to get ahead: virtual assistants. But who are these mythical creatures? How do you know if you need one? And where do you look? I’ve got all those answers and more, below.

What do virtual assistants do

Virtual assistants work on a contract basis for your business. You can hire them to work a set number of hours each week or month, or for the length of a specific project.

You can hire a virtual assistant to help with almost any task, from setting up your office furniture to answering emails and even prospecting for your pipeline.

Virtual assistants can help with administrative tasks, like data entry, that eat up valuable time you or your full-time staff can spend on higher value tasks.

You can also hire a virtual assistant for more technical projects, such as design work or tax help, where a full-time hire might not be necessary.

Benefits of a virtual assistant

Virtual assistants are especially helpful for entrepreneurs, small business owners, or busy professionals looking to skyrocket their careers. Here are a few benefits of hiring a virtual assistant:

• Virtual assistants can be more cost effective than hiring a full-time employee.
• Virtual assistants can help with technical projects, like creating a company video, on an as-needed basis, so you don't have to hire a full-time videographer.
• Virtual assistants can give you more time back in your day by taking mindless or administrative tasks off your plate.
• Virtual assistants can free up more time for you to spend with your family or on personal projects.
• Virtual assistants can decrease stress levels and prevent burnout for you or your employees.

When to Hire a Virtual Assistant

Entrepreneurs often think, "I can do that better myself." In fact, most of us often think that. And while it might be true, it doesn’t make each task worthy of your time and attention.

There’s a difference between self-discipline and martyrdom -- even at work. Here are a few ways to tell you’re ready for a virtual assistant:

• When you have a list of repetitive tasks you complete regularly - Do you spend 90 minutes a day answering emails? Write it down. 30 minutes a week booking hotels? Add it to the list. 15 minutes filling out expense reports? You know the drill. You might be surprised at how much time these small tasks chip away from your week -- and which ones pop up most regularly.
• When you know the process backwards and forwards - Generally speaking, you should be quite familiar with the tasks you’re assigning to your virtual assistant. Because the goal is to get menial tasks off your plate, these should be projects you complete regularly. This also helps you find qualified help you can train thoroughly.
• When you’ve conducted a cost-benefit analysis - You’ve heard the old adage, "20% of the tasks provide 80% of the value." Use your list of repetitive tasks to add up how much time you waste on these projects each week -- and just how much of your salary is being spent completing them.
• When you don’t need full-time help - Don’t use a virtual assistant in place of what should be a full-time job. If you need to hire a web developer, don’t try to cut costs by piecing it out. You’ll put strain on your company and your virtual assistant. And the end result will likely cost you more over the long run. Seek a virtual assistant for one-off projects or small tasks that don’t justify a salaried employee.
• When you have the money - Don’t stretch your budget. Only hire help when your revenue stream can support it or can’t live without it.

1. Document your process

Begin by taking notes of the process you’d like to outsource. Write each step down, include screenshots when applicable, and add nuanced insight into how you prefer these tasks completed. This will help you identify which skills and experience are absolutely necessary to include in the next part of the process …

2. Create a job description

Include tools your virtual assistant should be proficient in, like excel, PowerPoint, or Gmail. Share preferred experience levels and skills. And don’t forget a detailed list of the tasks they’ll be performing. It’s also helpful to describe the scale of your request or business.

If you anticipate your virtual assistant will need to be adept at managing a busy inbox full of requests from fellow executives and enterprise clients, set that expectation in the job description to attract well-qualified candidates.

3. Include an applicant test

Include a test in your application. If you’re a content manager hiring a virtual assistant to manage guest contributors, have them answer a few fake email prompts or schedule several editorial slots on an imaginary calendar. By testing their abilities, you’ll be able to separate those exaggerating their skills from the rest.

4. Add a keyword or 'Easter Egg' in your job posting

This is especially helpful for sites where you post virtual assistant job descriptions and available job seekers apply. Add a line at the bottom of your job description asking applicants to "Include their favorite Steve Jobs quote" in their reply. This ensures you weed out assistants who haven’t actually read your email or are not detail-oriented.

5. Conduct an interview

When possible, conduct an interview. While some virtual assistant companies pair you with an assistant from their database, others allow you to meet with your assistant so both sides can determine fit. If you’re able to conduct an interview, include questions like:

• "How do you manage shifting priorities?"
• "How do you structure your work day?"
• "Tell me about a time when you’ve faced a stressful situation at work. How did you respond?"

These questions will give you insight into the intangible qualities not present in a resume or assistant profile.

6. Start on a trial basis

Again, this is not always possible. If you do choose a company that allows you to trial your assistant, make sure you communicate that early, so both parties are aware there’s an exit if it isn’t a good match. Usually, two weeks is sufficient for deciding whether you’ll work well together.

7. Take time to train your assistant

In order for this to work and for it to save you time, it’s crucial your assistant is well-trained. Invest time during your first few weeks answering questions, providing comprehensive documentation of the tasks they’ll be performing, and explaining why and how you prefer each task to be completed.

8. Have realistic expectations

You’re hiring a virtual assistant, not a full-time employee. There’s a reason you decided not to bring this role in-house, so don’t expect the same loyalty, understanding of your business, or rapport with your virtual assistant as you would a careered professional. Keeping your expectations in perspective is key to finding and maintaining a healthy working relationship with your assistant.

9. Don’t be afraid to cuts ties and move on quickly

That said, if your virtual assistant isn’t working out -- don’t be afraid to sever the relationship quickly. Reach out to customer support for direction on how to move forward.

1. Provide time for onboarding

Don't expect your virtual assistant to be fully ramped after week one. Depending on the type of work they're doing — and how many hours they're working for you each week — it may take them longer to ramp than a full-time employee. Because they're likely balancing a few clients at a time, it can take weeks for VAs to become familiar with your business and industry.

If possible, put your VA through the same training and onboarding process as you have full-time staff undergo. It will provide valuable context for your VA around your business, company goals, and customers. Just make sure you're paying your assistant for their time during onboarding as well.

2. Overcommunicate

During their first week on the job, schedule daily check-ins via Slack, phone call, or video meeting to ask how your virtual assistant is settling, review any questions they have from the day, and discuss any outstanding issues or projects from the day or week.

If, for example, your virtual assistant is writing email correspondence for you, take time to review your latest round of edits in which you provide feedback on your VAs work and allow them to ask questions of you.

3. Provide ample documentation

Prior to your virtual assistant's start date, write out detailed instructional documents for each of the tasks they'll be working on. For example, if you're hiring someone to help you with prospecting on LinkedIn. Write out each step of your prospecting process, best practices for your company, and who to contact for specific questions.

Include screenshots, when possible. When your how-to guide is finished, walk your virtual assistant through the document in a comprehensive training session. And let them keep the training document to refer back to during their first few weeks completing your tasks.

4. Have realistic expectations

Your virtual assistant is not a full-time employee of your company. They likely have other client work on their plate and cannot be expected to prioritize your company's work over another's.

They won't be as invested in your company's goals or culture, and they have more freedom to push back on deadlines or timelines as their availability fluctuates.

5. Prioritize rapport

Just because your virtual assistant provides as-needed support doesn't mean you shouldn't make them feel as welcome or part of the team as you would a new full-time employee.

Host a welcome lunch, introduce them to the other members of your team, and onboard them as you would any other new-hire at your company. The more integrated your virtual assistant feels into your company, the more they'll be invested in producing work that aligns with your values and goals.

6. Know when the position should be a full-time hire

When you're consistently booking extra hours with your virtual assistant, shopping for a second virtual assistant, or your business needs another full-time generalist, consider hiring a salaried employee.

Continuing to outsource tasks that comprise a full-time position will put strain on your other employees, your business, and your virtual assistant, which leads to burnout and stalled growth.

Real Estate Virtual Assistant

Real estate virtual assistants complete small tasks, like responding to emails, updating listings, and following up with leads. This allows agents more time to work with existing clients on closing deals that will grow their business and earn referrals.

Mod Virtual, Real Support, TaskBullet, and Conversational Receptionists all offer virtual assistants specializing in real estate. Virtual transaction coordinators gather and organize the deluge of paperwork required for closing transactions.

Sales assistants identify qualified leads or lead sources and conduct initial outreach. And generalists keep your calendar in order, erect yard signs in new properties, and handle data entry by updating listings on your MLS, Zillow account, or CRM.

Here are a few other areas in which real estate virtual assistants can help your business:

• Build buyer’s packets
• Manage transactions
• Data entry
• PowerPoint or presentation design
• Client feedback
• Graphic design for mailers, websites, or social media
• Social media management
• Write blog posts or emails
• Lead nurturing
• Prospecting
• Client gift management
• Website link building

If you’re hyper-focused on growing your real estate business, consider hiring a real estate virtual assistant. The value they bring can be priceless.

You’ve done enough. Really. Give yourself a break and do the work that counts. Consider hiring a virtual assistant and see what they can do for your well-being and professional growth. And check out this post for more tips on sales tools for small businesses.

Freemium in SaaS is old news. The much-discussed pricing strategy took over the SaaS world and helped fuel the phenomenal success of pioneers like Dropbox, Evernote, SurveyMonkey (now Momentive), and Hootsuite.

These successes then spawned a number of copycats who bet big on freemium only to see free offerings become a resource-draining distraction. I wrote about this phenomenon in The Slow Death of Freemium back in 2016. Freemium appeared to be declining in popularity, and when it was in place, it drove next to zero new annual contract value (ACV) for most SaaS companies.

Flash forward to 2020, and freemium once again felt cutting edge. SaaS companies got much smarter about when to apply a freemium model to their products—and how to do it. They also better understood how to measure the success of freemium and strategies to convert free users into paying customers (hint: product qualified leads are your friend).

Clearbit, for instance, saw great traction from tailored, hyper-specific free products that appealed to their target buyer without cannibalizing their paid products. One of those, their Logo API, went viral on both HackerNews and Product Hunt, creating tremendous buzz and brand awareness.

HubSpot offers freemium versions of their CRM, marketing, and sales products. Last year, CEO Brian Halligan described their revamped go-to-market motion as “a flywheel where the customers are the main driver that pulls new prospects in” and boasted that half of HubSpot’s new customers used the free product before they bought it. SVP of Product Christopher O’Donnell emphasized that they were following a PQL strategy—not traditional freemium. “I would argue that freemium fell short in B2B and from its ashes rose the PQL,” he explained in a post.

Because of product-led growth, a business strategy that puts the product front-and-center in how companies acquire, convert, expand, and retain their users, it’s more urgent than ever to revisit freemium. Product-led businesses need to get their products in the hands of would-be users as efficiently as possible–hopefully at near zero CAC. Freemium, free product, and free trial strategies are particularly important in propelling non-linear growth.

Not satisfied with reaching $1 billion in annual revenue, Atlassian furthered its commitment to product-led growth by jumping on the freemium bandwagon. Co-founder Scott Farquhar mentioned as much during the company’s July 2019 earnings call, saying that, “What we’re talking about here is moving many of our products from a free trial to a freemium approach.” The company now offers free versions of its popular products like Jira, Confluence, Opsgenie, Trello, and Bitbucket.

Here’s a list of the top freemium pricing strategy resources:

Table of contents

• When is freemium the right strategy for your business?
• How to optimize your freemium model
• Freemium success stories
• The dark side of freemium
• Stories of ditching a freemium model

When is freemium the right strategy for your business?

Freemium vs. Free Trial: How to Know Which One to Pick for Your SaaS Startup
The answer, of course, is that it depends. Find out how to make this decision with confidence.

The 2020 Product Benchmarks Report
It’s one of the questions we hear the most at OpenView. 2020’s report found that freemium products convert customers without sales 25% more often than a free trial model. Download the entire, free 41-page report to read even more data-backed insights on going freemium. And stay tuned for the 2021 Product Benchmarks Report—we’re releasing it later this month.

2/6 Freemium or Free Trial?
– Free Trial generates more paying customers, but salespeople are needed as fewer customers are self-serve.
– Freemium generates more top of funnel leads and more convert without ever talking to sales.#SaaS #B2B #MarketingStrategy pic.twitter.com/6Xn0OnqXT3

— Michele @REVgabba (@revgabba) August 19, 2020

Is Freemium The Right Business Model? 10 Questions To Answer
Is freemium an effective lead generation, conversion, and revenue driving strategy for your recurring revenue-based business? Or is it a high risk, dead-end approach likely to burden you with runaway costs and few paying customers? This guide, by LinkedIn’s Head of Global Monetization Strategy Josh Gold, is intended to teach subscription-based businesses how to evaluate whether the freemium model will drive revenue and lead gen for their business or result in failure.

Freemium Benchmarks
According to this 2018 research report by ProfitWell, companies using freemium have 50% lower CAC with NPS scores nearly double those of non-freemium businesses. While the data seems to suggest serious benefits, businesses should keep in mind that freemium plans work best once a company has figured out their unit economics.

Can the Freemium Model Work For You? Here’s How to Know.
Deciding between paid and free models isn’t just about what’s appealing. It’s about big-picture strategy. Think about your budget: if you can’t afford to spend on marketing, a free offering can help acquire customers. No business model is foolproof, of course. But if freemium is right for you, you’ll need to constantly innovate, iterate and evolve – and then, hopefully, gain the traction you need to stand out in a crowded market full of other free products.

Freemium Model for SaaS: The Good, The Bad, and The In-between
The basic premise that the freemium business model operates on is this: Several hundred thousands of users sign up for the freemium plan, and then a good cohort of them will convert into paying customers. So for the freemium model to work, one specific product attribute must already be in place—low marginal distribution and production cost. Follow Chargebee’s take on the philosophy of freemium, in order to avoid pricing mistakes.

A Look at the Impact of Freemium Pricing on SaaS Products
To be free, or not to be free. That is the question. On the one hand, you want as many people trying your product as possible. But on the other, you wish to stay away as much as possible from the the lack of commitment that accompanies the concept of “free” things. Explore the various types of “free” options and choose the correct to boost your business in this piece by Brent Chudoba, COO of Thrive Global and former CRO of freemium all-star SurveyMonkey.

HubSpot’s Ultimate Guide to Freemium
What exactly does it mean to have a freemium strategy? What companies have successfully adopted a freemium model? What are the different varieties of freemium? Get all these questions answered and more from HubSpot. As a bonus, they’ve included a freemium pricing template.

Podcast: Freemium is About Acquisition, Not Revenue
Free products don’t produce revenue themselves. However, freemium is a really potent acquisition model. There are costs and benefits to the model—is the acquisition cost worthwhile for your company? It’s not an easy question to answer, but this article might help you get started on the right path.

Understanding Freemium Models With the Free Cookie Clicker–A UX Analysis
Maybe you’ve embraced the abstract notion of a freemium model. You then have to translate the model into suitable product mechanics. This article from UX Collective offers a thoughtful discussion of common freemium tactics from an accessible UX perspective. It should get you started on thinking about freemium mechanics in your own software.

How to optimize your freemium model

6 Product-Led SaaS Onboarding Lessons (With 8 Great Examples)
So you’ve adopted a freemium or free trial business model, and you’ve nailed 1–3 channels for acquiring new users. Sadly, all that effort could be pointless if you ignore your product’s user onboarding. Check out six SaaS onboarding lessons to steal—with examples from Calendly, Slack, and more.

Podcast: How To Acquire and Monetize Freemium SaaS Customers
Two of the biggest challenges facing SaaS marketers who operate a freemium model is the acquisition of new users and then converting them into paying customers. In this podcast, Hubspot reveals valuable insights on how to build a successful freemium SaaS growth funnel.

How to Increase Your Payment Customers In a Freemium Model
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures found that on average, freemium companies convert between 2% and 4%. But you can find much lower rates—for example, according to recent stats by Dropbox, the service has almost 500 million users, but only 175,000 of them are paying customers. That means for every 10,000 Dropbox users, only four pay. The key in the whole process of improving activation from free to paid is to get your users to know the added value of your premium version as soon as possible.

7 Tips for Successfully Introducing Freemium Business Software
One of the best ways for software providers to win over businesses is to show potential buyers what your tool can do for them. Some of the top software companies in business today use freemium models to engage customers. Here are a few tips from Entrepreneur to help you make it work for you.

5 Ways to Convert Loyal Freemium & Trial Users Into Happy Paying Customers
It’s easy to get someone to want your sample (or in the case of SaaS companies, your freemium plan or free trial) when there’s no risk or loss, but getting someone to commit with a monthly price tag is a whole new ball game. Moving free users into paid service plans has long been a pain point for SaaS companies and salespeople alike. From creating a sense of urgency for your product, to offering a promotion, here are 5 ways of converting a freemium and/or trial user into a paying customer.

Yes, Freemium Businesses Need Salespeople
Low-touch freemium models can work in concert with an inside sales or field sales model. For certain customer profiles or market segments, it may be necessary to combine freemium with a sales team. Read in more detail here to figure out what makes sense for your business.

Key Metrics to Track for Converting Freemium to Paid
Even if freemium is a good fit for your business in principle, perfecting the model has to be an iterative process. In order to know what works, you need to measure the impact of experiments. Here are the metrics you absolutely need to be tracking to get freemium right.

How Freemium SaaS Products Convert Users With Brilliant Upgrade Prompts
It’s pretty well understood that companies like Dropbox, Slack and Spotify have nailed the freemium model. What’s a little harder to grasp is exactly what they do right. It turns out that the key product principles are hiding in plain sight, in the details. Check out this article from Appcues to see how exceptional companies execute the freemium model with smart in-app cues.

Nurture Free Users Into Paying Customers: A Smart Campaign for ‘Freemium Businesses’
Getting started with freemium from a strategic angle is one thing. Actually executing against a freemium strategy is something else altogether. This guide from Intercom gives a thoughtful set of templates for running a campaign to upsell free users. It’s tailored for Intercom customers, but the messaging in the templates is helpful for a broader audience as well.

Freemium to Premium: 6 Conversion Techniques
In keeping with the theme of freemium tactics, this great post from Paddle offers six examples of freemium conversion techniques executed nicely. It includes screenshots from strong PLG brands like Wix and how they communicate the value of a paid product to free user. If you’re looking for some inspiration on campaigns or looking to understand the business logic behind successful campaigns, this article may be a helpful resource.

How 20+ Freemium SaaS Companies Increased Signup-to-Customer Conversion Rate
This article from Databox is rich with insights from top freemium companies like Dropbox, HubSpot, Buffer, Trello and MailChimp. It distills the many insights from freemium SaaS experts down to 20 tips. If you’re able to incorporate even just a few of these 20 learnings into your offering, you’ll have greatly improved your freemium execution.

Freemium success stories

An Inside Look at Snyk’s Product-Led Growth Strategy
Francesca Krihely, Senior Director, Developer Experience and Growth at Snyk, sat down with us to talk about how her company used a freemium model to expand their audience exponentially.

3 Famous Freemium Strategies (And Why They’re So Good)
Giving free access to your product doesn’t guarantee that anyone will end up paying for continued access—you still need strategic execution to be successful with freemium. Victor Eduoh goes over some of those winning strategies in this OpenView blog post.

Product is the Future of Growth—Here’s Why
The future of growth belongs to product led companies. HubSpot realized this a few years ago, which is why they disrupted their own business model before anyone else could. Learn about their journey to product led growth here. 

“#Zoom’s ‘#freemium‘ strategy — dangling a free product to get users hooked, & then persuading a good percentage of them to upgrade to paid plans — has made this a wildly successful year for the company.”https://t.co/CPWBakpkar #LogMeIn #videoconferencing

— Stephen Loynd (@loyndsview) August 22, 2020

How These Freemium SaaS Companies Are Redefining Customer Success
Spotify reaches millions of people who are uncertain about paying for music every day. But they’ve cracked the code on converting those skeptical users into paying customers. Learn how they and other successful freemium companies make it work.

What Makes Freemium Work? Lessons from Dropbox, Evernote, and a Lemonade Stand
In his book, Free, Chris Anderson explains that Freemium works on the 5 Percent Rule—where 5% of premium customers support the remaining 95% of free users. Get freemium success stories here.

SaaS Freemium: How to Succeed and How to Fail
While freemium can propel a company to success, it can also suffocate a company’s financial and labor resources. In Chargify’s early days, the company suffered freemium mistakes early, but in the end achieved success with the strategy.

The Best Way to Win the Freemium Model Is by Challenging the Very Model Itself
In their freemium plan, AWS offers a year’s worth of micro instance for free—a time-bound freemium model. AWS needs adequate time to get a skeptical developer to understand the value that they offer, to get the developer hooked on the product and build on top of it, and to eventually recommend AWS to a fellow developer. Pick the wrong value metric for your freemium plan and you’ve found yourself headed straight for disaster. Learn how to avoid catastrophe here.

Moving Customers From Freemium To Premium: The Art Of Monetizing Virtual Products
When online language learning platform busuu.com started business in 2008, they paid close attention to what people were asking for in additional features to understand what they could eventually charge for. They ultimately gated those features to convert more customers. Learn how here.

Atlassian Launches Free Tiers for All Its Cloud Products, Extends Premium Pricing Plan
Late in 2019, Atlassian introduced free tiers for all of its cloud products. It’s an interesting case study both in what it looks like for an established software company to adopt freemium and also how a company can pursue a freemium model while pursuing enterprise customers in parallel.

How Vidyard Uncovered a Multimillion-Dollar Growth Lever by Moving Downmarket
Companies that succeed with freemium typically start by offering freemium products from day one. Vidyard went about freemium in a very different way; the Vidyard team started out by targeting large enterprises and didn’t have a free product at the outset. Find out here how Vidyard supercharged its growth by moving downmarket and led with a freemium model.

Podcast: How Freemium Helped Hotjar Grow to 21K Paying Customers in 4 Years
The Hotjar founders came from backgrounds creating consumer products, so developing software for end users was a fairly natural transition. But they didn’t hit their stride with freemium right away. Check out this GrowthTLDR podcast episode to learn how the team decided to adopt a freemium model, how they optimized it, and where they settled the balance between freemium and free trial.

The dark side of freemium

How Freemium Nearly Caused Our Business to Implode
In August 2015, Baremetrics introduced a free plan… and it nearly brought them to their knees. They were adding over a dozen new accounts a day, but that’s about where the fun stopped; within a few weeks “free” customers outnumbered “paying” customers and the amount of data the company was storing and processing on their behalf had doubled.

The Slow Death of Freemium—and What Comes Next
Now more than ever, SaaS startups are under pressure to prove that they have a sustainable revenue model and can generate paying customers, not just free users who drain scarce resources. Consequently, freemium has pivoted from being at the core of a SaaS company’s revenue model to just another lead gen tool in the marketing toolbox, albeit one with some pretty significant downsides. But there are viable alternatives to “traditional” freemium options: from free trial to tailored, hyper-specific free products for lead gen, the concept of “free” is constantly evolving, in order to better suit today’s needs.

How to Rescue Your Failing Freemium Startup with Product Qualified Leads
As a freemium startup, you live and die by your ability to convert free users into paying customers. But thanks to higher customer expectations and intense competition, freemium conversion rates have been slowly declining. Migration from a Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) strategy to a Product Qualified Lead (PQL) strategy has proven to be a powerful antidote.

Why Product Qualified Leads are the Answer to a Failing Freemium Model
Not finding success with freemium? Learn how to develop and implement a product qualified lead model here to save your struggling business.

SaaS Pricing: The Two Sides of Freemium
Not all freemium models are created equal. Here’s what to consider before implementing any one of a variety of free plans.

7 Reasons Why Companies Fail with Freemium (And How to Actually Succeed)
Even if freemium is a fit for your product, you can stumble on the execution. Avoiding these 7 mistakes in execution will go a long way toward making sure a freemium strategy works for your company.

The CFO View of the Freemium Model
This is a thoughtful critique of the freemium model from the perspective of a CFO at a company with a free offering. The piece raises several questions you will need to have answered if you’re committed to freemium. It also offers some lessons from having offered a free product over the long run.

Stories about ditching a freemium model

Scott Heiferman Looks Back at Meetup’s Bet-the-Company Moment
In April 2005 Meetup.com went from free to paid and started charging meeting organizers. Many customers were outraged but eventually relented. Learn about the journey here.

LogMeIn Kills Its Eponymous Free Service, Uproar Ensues
LogMeIn, a provider of remote connectivity services, made a name for itself offering easy-to-use, free services with the idea of eventually upselling free users to paid services. The company ultimately did away with its LogMeIn Free plan. Learn why and how here.

The Case Against Freemium–3 Reasons Why Free Is a Wrong Price
Freemium or premium, that’s the question many entrepreneurs ask every day. But determining the right model for their businesses is hard to answer. Learn why free might not be the best strategy after all.

Dropping Freemium: How One Company Killed Its Free Plan and Grew 40%—and You Can, Too
PopSurvey decided to try something radical. They dropped the company’s freemium plan, eliminated its trial period, and doubled the prices of its other plans. The result? A 40 percent increase in revenue in the first month. Learn how in this article.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on August 9, 2018 and was updated with more resources in July 2021. Special thanks to Ned O’Leary and Laura Rosca for helping us compile this research. 

The post Everything You Need to Know About Freemium Pricing appeared first on OpenView.

What should marketing be responsible for in your company? This question is surprisingly hard to answer, even for marketers. Harvard Business Review found that the responsibility of chief marketing officers varies drastically from one job description to another, along with the experience and skills of people filling the role. Most are responsible for marketing strategy, branding, and customer metrics, but beyond that, we can’t seem to agree.

A lot of this confusion stems from the misunderstanding of marketing’s function. Often marketing is looked at in a very operational manner, rather than a function that truly adds value to the business—i.e., the aftereffect of developing a product. But this is far too limiting.

Marketing should be a strategic enabler of sales, a pipeline generator for the company’s future business, and a function that leads the entire company in positioning itself against the competition. Marketers should consider themselves strategists for their individual business streams because they can influence, measure, and interact daily with each potential market. Ideally, they should leverage this expertise to guide the future course of every business, but often, marketing is forced into narrower lanes.

The Untapped Potential of Business Development + Marketing

If there is one area where marketing commonly gets left out, it’s business development. Shockingly, almost half of all service companies don’t coordinate the two. This usually stems from the friction caused by the dual pressures of business development wanting marketing to drive better leads and marketing expecting business development to better nurture leads for higher close rates. But how can either be successful without the other?

Business development is closest to customers and their individual needs, while marketing is positioned to create better messaging and content that will resonate with the market, prospects, and current customers. Each should be informing the other for better results from the highest part of the customer research funnel past deal closure.

Specifically, marketing should be:

1. Finding On-Point Messaging

Business development tends to focus on the leads in front of it, while marketing team members sometimes try to wash their hands of responsibility once leads get handed over to sales. This can lead to a disconnect between the language used in marketing campaigns and the more sales-orientated terms used by business development. When working together, business development can more effectively use some of the campaign language to bridge the gap between what attracted customers in the first place and where sales is trying to move them.

Likewise, business development can give marketing a better idea of the language customers use to describe their needs. Then Marketing can create a full funnel messaging strategy that uses content, events, and specific messaging through the entire sales process to find, capture, and nurture leads more effectively. This results in better sales messaging and support materials that are synced with the marketing campaign language and goals. Ultimately, this should help conversion and retention rates throughout the entire sales cycle.

2. Setting Up Sales Slam Dunks

Business development wants better qualified leads from marketing, but marketing can’t provide those without the help from sales. Marketing must utilize business development’s knowledge of what makes a good versus bad lead to create effective campaigns and target key buyers and influencers. Working together, the two departments can create a key stakeholder map and build strategies addressing the aspects that matter most to company decision makers. Followed by campaigns that drive the most meaningful leads as measured by stakeholder criteria.

Sales should also use marketing as business analyst specialists who, by tying together various data streams, can find the areas of greatest opportunity with different customers and industries. Once marketers bring together that ecosystem of analysts, advisors, partners, and influencers to identify the high-quality targets, they can help business development to create a comprehensive strategy for systematically pursuing them.

3. Clearing the Path Forward

The marketing team’s access to competitive intelligence and activities on social media keeps it at the forefront of industry changes, which will help adjust and refine differentiated messaging to stay ahead of the competition. By working together to form a cohesive strategy, both marketing and business development benefit from consistent messaging, better lead outcomes, and dependable lead tracking through the entire funnel.

The ear-to-the-ground marketing mentality can also supplement business development by ensuring sales has access to the right forums and events where customers and influencers can be engaged. These opportunities are key for sales to demonstrate offerings that are relevant to the prospects, which helps generate some on-ground sales leads through the right positioning and connections.

The toughest part for marketing managers at times is getting invited to the business development party to begin with. Stop waiting for that invite and start looking for ways you can “show and tell” your value. Find any use-case outside of marketing’s defined realm where you can demonstrate a measurable and visible result. The word will spread that you can help other departments improve their performance if they leverage marketing’s expertise.

The End Goal

The dream is that instead of checking with marketing later, people come to marketing first for positioning, messaging, and differentiated strategies. Work toward this dream by finding small marketing wins with other departments, starting with business development.

The long game for marketing is to try to redirect your organization to a marketing-first approach. Marketing should contribute to targeting, business development, sales, and most other functions as the main influencers and bridge to customers. A true marketing-first organization views marketing as a key player in strategy development, lead generation, and innovation. If none of that is in your job title today, consider to add it and make it your mission to prove marketing’s full worth.

Does your marketing team partner with business development to increase revenue? Tell me about your best practices in the comments.

The post Why Marketing Is Business Development’s Most Valuable Player appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.