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Here are solutions to two common mistakes many sales leaders make.

Departing and arriving flights at Heathrow airport.

A pricing metric is the unit of consumption by which customers are charged (e.g. charging per litre for paint). A value metric is the unit of consumption by which the customer derives value (e.g. surface area covered by the litre of paint). For pricing to be successful, the pricing metric should track how the customer derives value from a product or service offering. If the customer cannot connect how they are charged to how they derive value, it creates discontent. Connecting pricing metrics to value metrics requires an in-depth understanding of customer value creation.

In this blog post, we will explore how the same customer can be effectively charged using different pricing metrics using the example of how Heathrow Airport charges airlines for the use of airport facilities.

Heathrow Airport charges inbound aircrafts a fixed amount per landing (based on aircraft size/type) while for the same aircraft, departing flights are charged a fee per passenger.

Why has charging two different pricing metrics been successful for Heathrow Airport, and what can we learn that can be applied across other industries?

Clarity on goals

What are the seller’s pricing goals? Does having multiple pricing metrics for the same customer improve the seller’s chances of achieving these goals? Multiple pricing metrics if implemented incorrectly can end up confusing the customer. The seller must have a solid business case that supports a multiple pricing metric strategy. Otherwise, the strategy will result in customer resistance.

In the case of Heathrow Airport, the overarching goal is to increase revenues through maximizing capacity utilization at minimal cost to serve. Heathrow currently operates at 99% capacity. Therefore, to ensure more efficient use of their scarce runway resources, Heathrow incentivizes larger aircrafts by charging them more economic fixed landing charges than smaller, shorter haul aircrafts. Additionally, in alignment with Heathrow’s environmental goals, aircrafts with lower emission rates also receive more economic fixed landing charges.

Twenty-one percent of Heathrow’s revenue is from fixed landing charges. But, the lion’s share (75%) of their revenue is from charging a per passenger rate for departing fights - which is approximately $29 per passenger ticket. For a high volume airport, charging per passenger results in higher returns than charging a fixed rate per departing flight.

Additionally, within Heathrow’s capacity constraint, the key strategy for passenger growth is to increase the number of passengers on each plane. Currently, there are about  21.6 million empty seats per year going through Heathrow. So the airport also plans on offering rebates per incremental passenger to incentivize maximizing flight loads, which is also in alignment with their overarching goal of maximizing capacity utilization.

Value creation for the customer

For a multiple pricing metric strategy to be successful, there should be:

• incremental value creation for the customer

• each pricing metric must create value for the customer differently

• the cumulative value creation for the customer from being charged different pricing metrics must be greater than if they were charged just one price

In the case of Heathrow Airport, being charged a fixed amount for landing creates value for the airlines by allowing a “predictable” cost of operations.

Additionally, being charged a fee per departing passenger is not detrimental to the airlines, as they pass this fee down to their customers through ticket prices. Heathrow is currently proposing to add in additional incentives to help airlines maximize load and fill the 21.6 million empty seats, by offering rebates per incremental departing passenger in 2019 over 2018 passenger volumes. However for the airlines to receive the rebate, Heathrow’s total number of passengers in 2019 must increase over 2018. This would not only grow passenger throughput for Heathrow, but would allow the airlines to improve their margins per passenger as well.

Customer buy-in

For a multiple pricing metric strategy to be successful, there has to be customer buy-in. For customer buy-in ,the pricing metrics must be perceived as fair, transparent and consistent.

Fair

• Is value being created for both buyer and seller?

• Who does the pricing metric benefit?

• Does it make the pie bigger for all parties?

Transparent

• How were the prices set?

• Who are the stakeholders? Were their motivations considered?

• Is the seller effectively communicating how value is created for the stakeholders?

Consistent

• What are the seller’s goals?

• Are the goals for the different pricing metrics in alignment or do they contradict each other and end up confusing the customer?

In the case of Heathrow Airport, the pricing metrics were set in consultation with all stakeholders within the airline community, which was critical to buy-in and effective implementation.

When done right, a multiple pricing metric strategy can have lasting impact on the stickiness of a product or service offer. But the downside risk of confusing the customer is also very high. So within this high risk-high return scenario, it is critical to have an in-depth understanding of the customer’s economic (monetary) and emotional value drivers. A seller looking to explore this pricing strategy should start with market segmentation and see the different ways they can create value for the same customer.

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You could have conversions within your grasp and not even know it. There are a lot of popular eCommerce myths out there concerning marketing, traffic and advertising that even established eCommerce stores are believing.

This week, we bring you 7 eCommerce myths that stop concessions in their tracks and what you should do instead.

1. Your Biggest Marketing Efforts Don’t Include Your Site

If you believe the myth that most of your marketing takes place off your website, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue opportunities. Compartmentalizing your marketing efforts into UX and promotion without any symmetry will make it hard for you to join the 7-figure eCommerce club. Some of the biggest eCommerce success stories we’ve featured are a testament to how vital on-site marketing is for your online store brand, as it not only moves potential shopper traffic into your sales funnel but helps you convert them.

While small lead-generating changes to your store can help increase your conversions, it’s also important to see your UX not just as a mechanism to sell your products but as a powerful marketing, trust-building and conversion tool. Here are the top ways you can use your site and store UX to convert more potential shoppers:

• Entice new shoppers with good product images and descriptions.
• Have a good, visible return and shipping policy to build trust.
• Offer prompt customer service in real-time with online chat.
• Provide good content that establishes you as an authority in your niche while driving traffic to your store.
• Build product trust by showcasing customer product reviews.
• Use coupon pop-ups to build marketing lists while converting sales, like this online boutique that made $40K in 10 days using Coupon Pop.
• Implement on-site retargeting.
• Catch potential shoppers before they leave with exit pops.

2. Going Viral is the #1 Goal for Social Media Marketing

This may surprise a lot of you, but if your number one goal for your social media marketing campaigns is to go viral, you’re missing the point. That is not to say that there aren’t eCommerce social media videos that go viral, like this store owner that got 8 million Facebook views with a smartphone video. Plus, as you can tell from this example, you don’t need to hire a fancy videographer to do it.

The trick is to create social media marketing campaigns that are aimed at your target audience, with a message that speaks directly to them to reach your marketing objective. The secret to doing just that is to create smaller campaigns that reach a highly segmented target audience, therefore increasing your chance of converting. And if your video does go viral, like these 2017 trending products, that is just the branding cherry on the top.

3. Email Marketing is Old News

If you believe the myth that your email marketing strategies should take a back seat, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue. Don’t take our word for it; this past January, Smart Insights reported that email is still the highest-converting channel.

Every million-dollar eCommerce store owner we’ve interviewed has a sound email marketing strategy that includes email capturing strategies, weekly newsletters, seasonal promotions, remarketing campaigns and automated emails to convert sales and build customer loyalty.

Unlike any other marketing platform, you own your email marketing lists and they give you one-on-one contact directly with your audience and if segmented well, you could increase your email revenue by over 700%.

4. Your Best Products Will Market Themselves

No matter how awesome your products are, they won’t market themselves. It is the myth to the contrary which leads so many online sellers to hold onto their advertising budget too tightly. No matter how bootstrapped you are, the old adage, “You need money to make money” is still true. You can’t rely solely on word-of-mouth or the organic power of the internet alone to drive awareness about your products; you need targeted marketing to break through the noise.

You can break through the noise by ensuring your marketing strategy is segmented, shows the product benefits, talks your target shoppers’ language, and catches potential customers when their buying intent is high. The best way to do that is to have a comprehensive marketing strategy that uses the power of social media and Google to drive awareness, promotional and remarketing campaigns to sell your products.

5. Social Media is Only for Lookie-Loos

There’s a common eCommerce myth that says social media content is good at driving awareness, but that these engagers are looking, not buying. If you believe this misconception, you could be missing out on those Facebook users who purchase after clicking. Some studies have shown that percentages can be as high as 20%.

Even if your social campaigns do have a lower on the average conversion rate that email or search, as shown in the conversion average graph from earlier, social media is far more than a conversion tool. There are hidden benefits of social media, all working together to drive significant traffic, which you can then market on your site and remarket with your email and PPC campaigns. Potential shoppers that you can nurture down your sales funnel to ultimately convert.

6. The Bigger Your Reach, The More Sales You Will Make

A widespread myth, especially with social media advertising, is that advertisers are looking for the highest number of impressions possible from their campaigns. But in truth, it is not the size of your impressions which you should be monitoring, but the results that reach brings.

We know a good marketing strategy is all about segmentation. You WANT campaigns targeting more segmented, smaller audiences to ensure your messages are reaching the potential shoppers who are more inclined to be interested in what you’re selling. It is one of the reasons why Facebook remarketing campaigns are considered expert Facebook strategies for expert eCommerce entrepreneurs.

Yes, the reach/impressions metric relationship is a good indicator of your ads’ performance, but making that pool bigger doesn’t mean more people buy – which means your ROIs suffer.

Which brings us to the next point.

7. Profit and Revenue Are the Only Metrics You Should Care About

We obsess over the metrics and refresh our analytics over and over, looking for sales, revenue, profit. And why wouldn’t we; isn’t it revenue that matters? The problem with this is you need a holistic approach and not everything is about total revenue.

Say what?!

Yes, yes, you want sales. But you also have various sales funnel steps and you need campaigns that reach all your stages with your marketing. Add that to the fact that revenue and profit are not the only KPI (key performance indicator) that shows your store is winning, having tunnel vision could be costing you sales. Here are the must-watch ad, analytics and site metrics:

• Lifetime asset value – how much revenue and profit each of your products bring.
• Traffic per channel – to see where your traffic is coming from.
• Bounce rate – to see how long that traffic sticks around once they get to your page. This will show you which landing pages are lacking, as well as point to areas you need to fix for SEO.
• Session duration – to see how long potential shoppers are spending on your site.
• Conversion rates – to see the percentage of that traffic that is converting.

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Believing these eCommerce myths without testing them for yourself is literally like throwing money away. But don’t take our word for it – test, test, test!

The bottom line is that no matter what the experts are telling you, what the popular beliefs are or what other entrepreneurs swear by, you need to test and try everything to find the winning strategy for YOUR store.

As you’re entering into 2019 budgeting processes, it’s time to talk about how to allocate your training dollars. You’re probably reviewing an array of sales training ideas. But are you also considering training for Sales Managers? You should be.

What’s worse than a discriminatory Project Labour Agreement paying off political favours and forcing unionization on the 85 per cent of construction workers who have chosen to organize themselves differently than the NDP and old-school Building Trades unions want?

How about a sloppily written agreement that contains various errors and claims to attract new workers to the trades by paying them less than minimum wage? The NDP and Building Trades, who for years have positioned themselves as the champions of the working poor, have agreed to pay various pre-apprentices less than the $12.65/hour B.C. minimum wage.

And not just one specific trade. The NDP and their longtime political supporters in the Building Trades have negotiated in the backroom a deal that will pay bricklayer pre-apprentices $11/hour, drywall tapers and finishers $11.78/hour, glaziers $11/hour, painters $11.19/hour, tilesetters $11/hour, and terrazzo workers $11/hour.

Why would young people consider a career in the trades when they can make more working at any other job they can find? Does that sound like a commitment to attracting the next generation, as Horgan and his Building Trades donors constantly stress?

These are high-demand positions. An Independent Contractors and Businesses Association survey earlier this year showed every single one of our glass companies wants to hire more glaziers, and are paying up to get them.

To make matters worse, pre-apprentices could be stuck in their positions for years, as there is a lack of seats in trade schools around the province. The millions of dollars being handed over to the Building Trades unions through a variety of per-hour fees would be better spent in opening up more training seats.

Transportation Minister Claire Trevena says the union-only model will drive up the cost of the Pattullo project by $100 million (we believe this is grossly underestimated, but let’s take the Minister at her word). Investing that $100 million in high school programs to encourage young people to learn a trade and in technical schools to train more graduates would bring a whole lot more people into the trades than handing over millions of dollars to union bosses.

But that wouldn’t repay $2.3 million worth of political favours — the amount given to the NDP by these Building Trades unions since 2005.

Despite 336 pages — including dozens outlining the excruciating minutiae of work camp life and menus — this agreement is poorly written and it’s clear that the NDP rushed it.

In what is likely a four-page-long series of typos (pages 163-166), affecting eight different classifications of Teamsters, the wages listed in this agreement drop by as much as $19 per hour in 2020 and beyond.

For example, a Group 1 Teamster drops from $31.40 per hour in 2019 to $12.13 per hour in 2020, according to the table in the deal. Obviously that’s not going to be the case, but it shows how rushed this agreement was.

Who knows what other errors and surprises lurk beneath the surface of this agreement? And what the NDP/Building Trades will change on the fly to fix it?

While much ink has been spilled on all the perks planned for work camps, trades workers may want to examine what those unionized culinary workers will be paid to be there. Janitors will start at $26.17/hour. Bakers at $34.27/hour. The dishwasher at $26.17/hour. Plus they all collect another $6.77/hour in benefits.

Bakers will out-earn fully-ticketed glaziers, roadbuilding operating engineers, and mechanics. Dishwashers will make more than two-term millwright apprentices and six-term painter apprentices. An entry-level piledriver will make $4 per hour less than the entry-level janitor.

Those bakers, dishwashers and janitors will get five weeks paid holidays. Drywallers, mechanics, operating engineers, and glaziers only get four.

It all sounds crazy, but remember, in partnership with the Building Trades, the government has taken away the right of workers to choose whether to join a union and which union to join. This puts an end to fair, open and transparent procurement. No matter how a construction company organizes its workforce, every company should have the right to bid and win government work.

One year ago, John Horgan promised a new way of doing business in B.C. Sadly, it’s one where he has put the interests of his union donors ahead of what’s best for British Columbians, ahead of fairness, ahead of getting good value for tax dollars, and ahead of what individual workers want.

Chris Gardner is President of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association.

 

If you’ve been following along, we’ve been talking about some marketing resolutions to help you get a jumpstart on your 2019 marketing plan – email, reviews, video, etc. Over the next few posts, I’m going to tackle these suggested resolutions one by one and help you map out how you can crush each one in 2019.

In case you missed it, the resolutions were:

• Build your email list
• Work on earning great reviews
• Produce more videos/build a YouTube channel
• Do less but do it better

Today we’re going to tackle building your email list. Having a strong email list is vital for your business. It’s an asset that you own, and you control. Very few platforms convert more consistently and continuously than effective email campaigns.

Email allows you to target sub-sections of your list, be personal in your delivery and really take advantage of the one to one medium. But before you can take full advantage of your email list – you need to have one.

Make your content something they actually look forward to receiving. While that seems obvious, very few organizations deliver on it consistently. Your content can’t be about you, your team, your special sale or some award you’ve just won. It has to contain ideas or resources that they can learn from, use or share.

Offer different types of subscriptions. Create different resources for different audiences. Help them self-select what insights would be most valuable to them and serve it without the content they don’t care about. You might also offer a variety of frequencies. One person may prefer a monthly communication while another would rather get it in bite-sized pieces every week.

Create free tools, resources or guides that you can trade for email addresses. The key to this strategy is that there has to be a lot of meat on the bone. You can’t earn your prospect’s trust if you skimp on this kind of content.

Create links to capture email addresses throughout your website. Don’t just count on your “sign up for our newsletter” button on your home page. Pepper opportunities for people to join your email list on a variety of pages. Serve up different offers based on each page’s subject matter.

Use other platforms to promote your content. Email may be one of the most effective platforms, but that doesn’t mean the other platforms should be ignored. When you’ve gone to the effort of creating something that is really noteworthy – share it out. Create a private Facebook group or Pinterest board to woo prospects to get a little closer. After they see that you’re focused on adding value to their world – invite them to partake in some of your gated content.

Don’t forget offline events and activities. While we live in a digital world, there’s still plenty of analog activity that allows you to connect with people and identify common interests and needs. As you work your way through networking events, trade shows, conferences and all the other places you bump into people you can help – make those connections. After you nurture those relationships, extend the invitation to join your list so they can get even more of your goodness.

Focus on the two parallel goals in terms of your list. Grow it in quantity and also grow it in terms of engagement. You want people to reply, share, and come to rely on your regular communications. Calendar your communications, so you stay consistent and invest the right amount of time and resources, so you are always serving up something worth getting excited about, from your audience’s perspective.

That’s step one to a very successful 2019.

Next, we’ll tackle the second resolution – getting reviews from your raving fans so you can attract more raving fans!

 

The post Build your email list appeared first on McLellan Marketing Group.

How do you know if your content is actually driving revenue?

Better still, how do you know which PIECE of content is actually driving revenue?

Enter attribution models.

Attribution models assign a value to various touch points a lead had with your company before converting. For content marketing, this means understanding the blog posts, white papers, social content or another type of content that a person engaged with before becoming a lead and ultimately a customer.

For the sports fans out there, you can think of content attribution as a way to credit the assist (or even the second assist).

But here’s the hard part.

How do you assign a value to all your different content and campaigns? How much weight does social content carry? Is the first touch point, the lead creation touch point, or the conversion point more important? Should everything have an equal value, or do the most recent interactions matter most?

This article aims to help marketing directors understand the challenges of content attribution, why it matters, and which model best suits your business.

What is Marketing Attribution?

As marketers, we’re all familiar with the buyer journey. At the top of the funnel a prospect has never even heard of your company – by the end of the journey they know and trust your company so much they’re ready to do business with you.

But how do you know when someone first learned of your company? On the flip side, which piece of content motivated them to convert? And what happened in between these two touch points?

Without marketing attribution, it’s incredibly difficult to answer these questions.

Most attribution models focus on 3 key touch points:

• First touch. The first time a prospect interacted with your company
• Lead creation. The conversion point where a prospect becomes a lead (newsletter, content upgrade, free trial, etc.)
• Conversion. The conversion point where a lead become a customer (purchase, sign up, etc.)

You’re investing a lot of time, energy, and resources into various campaigns so it’s imperative that you know exactly how much value these campaigns return. And doing so will allow you to identify and scale the areas you’re having success while trimming any budget-wasting campaigns.

So rather than saying “I think our Facebook ads have done well, they’ve earned over 1,000 clicks!”, you can say “Our Facebook ads are great, they’ve generated five new customers for over $1,000 in revenue this month!”

Why Does Content Marketing Attribution Matter?

Most marketing teams at established companies have numerous campaigns happening at any given time and countless campaigns over the course of a year. So how do you know which campaigns and which channels were most successful?

Marketing attribution provides marketing teams with a framework to calculate the ROI of various campaigns to see which campaigns are winners and which are duds.

There are lots of other stats that support the importance of marketing attribution as well.

• 67% of shoppers regularly use more than one channel to make purchases
• 9.5 is the number of visits to a retailer’s site before a shopper decides to buy

However, one of the toughest parts with marketing attribution is knowing which model to use. So with that in mind, next we’ll look at the most common models and when to use them.

Single-Touch Attribution Models

The simplest type of model is a single-touch. Here we’re assigning 100% of the conversion value to a single touch point. Naturally, we have two main types of single-touch models: first-touch and last-touch.

First-Touch

Just like it sounds, this model gives 100% of the weight to the first touch-point that created a lead. For example, perhaps a lead filled out a blog form or downloaded an ebook. In this case, that blog form or ebook getting 100% of the credit for the conversion.

Last-Touch

Last-touch focuses not on the lead creation, but the actual sale. If someone subscribes to a blog newsletter but doesn’t convert into a customer until they watch a webinar a couple of weeks later, then the webinar gets 100% of the credit.

When to Use Single Touch Models

While it’s easy to write these models off as overly simplistic (which is true), they are still very useful in their own right.

Single-touch models make sense for companies with a very short sales cycle. It can also be useful to evaluate the effectiveness of your top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content. For example, how much demand does your TOFU content generate? What about BOFU content? If it isn’t producing any leads, then you may want to revisit and improve those articles.

Multi-Touch Attribution Models

Taking these models one step further, we have multi-touch attribution models. While the name is fairly self-explanatory, these models are ideal for companies that use multiple marketing channels or have a slightly longer sales cycle.

Linear Attribution Models

Linear attribution models are just slightly more complicated than single-touch models. In this, we’re assigning equal weight to all our content and touchpoints. The advantage of this model is that it is still relatively easy to calculate while still capturing more information than single-touch models.

Time-Decay Multi-Touch Model

One of the most common types of multi-touch models is called the time decay model. In this case, you assign the most weight to the most recent integration a lead had before converting, with a descending weight to each interaction that preceded it.

U-Shaped Model

A U-Shaped model assigns the most weight to the first and last touch, and every interaction in-between shares a small, equal portion of the credit. The image assigns 40% of the value to the first and last touch with every point in between sharing the remaining 20% evenly, but you can tweak this to better suit your company.

When to Use Multi-Touch Models

The main benefit of multi-touch attribution models is that you can capture all the interactions a person had with your company before becoming a lead and ultimately converting.

While there are some cases where a single-touch model does a good enough job, most companies will rely on a multi-touch model.

Companies with a longer sales cycle (more than few months), multiple marketing channels, or lots of campaigns should absolutely use one of these models. The time decay model is also a good way to look at the effectiveness of a timed promotional campaign because it devalues the first parts of the campaign which didn’t result in a conversion.

Account-based Attribution Models

Depending on your industry, you may be focused on account-based marketing. In this case, lead interactions are grouped at the account level, and interactions with content are counted toward the final conversion.

Here the weight is based more on the leads role and position in a company. So, if both a director and an intern at XYZ Corp. both interact with your content, they are weighted differently.

Algorithmic Attribution Models

Algorithmic attribution models are the most complicated attribution model and are unique to each business. This model requires some fairly sophisticated software, so it’s limited to those companies that can afford it.

Choosing the Right Model

It’s difficult to know definitively which model is best for your company.

In fact, just 22% of marketers say they believe they’re using the right attribution model – with 43% saying they believe their company is using the wrong model and 35% unsure.

If you’re undecided between a few of the different models, answering these questions will help you come to a decision.

How long is the average sales cycle?

If you have a longer sales cycle, then single touch models can’t tell you a whole story. If your sales cycle is anything longer than a month or two, then I’d recommend a multi-touch model.

What the average number of touch points before conversion?

Mo’ touch points, mo’ complicated attribution models.

How many marketing channels are you active on?

The number of channels you’re active on will also play a role here. If you’re on 3 or more channels (which most companies are), then single-touch models won’t cut it.

Measuring Your Content Marketing Attribution

This biggest drawback to marketing attribution is that its complicated and requires an up-front investment into setting up the tools, tracking, and reports necessary to follow prospects throughout the entire journey from discovery to conversion.

That said, having a robust attribution model can give you access to some incredibly valuable data. Known which campaigns are performing well and which aren’t will help you better utilize your marketing budget while increasing growth.

This does not happen online. This does not happen with major retailers.

Recently, I was recommended to a local retailer for some home furnishings. After visiting the store (and ordering some stuff), I was quite taken with the personal service, and it always feels good to support a local merchant. I bought a few more pieces that I had not anticipated on this trip. Soon after, I found myself looking online at the prices of the products I had just purchased. No, I didn't do this beforehand (or while in the store), because I was taken by the conversation with the small business owner, and felt that there was a good rapport. Imagine my shock, when I discovered that the same products were available for 50% less online than what I had paid (some of the products I purchased were even cheaper).

Pricing matters.

I have no issue paying a premium for local merchants and services. I like helping to bolster and support the local small business economy. A local business' success works for everybody. BUT... don't insult me... or my intelligence. When I called the shop owner on this pricing gap, I was able to extract (after a lot of bumbling and stammering on their part) that what I saw online must be a different manufacturer with a far less superior quality. Fine. I asked for the manufacturer's name... they would not provide it. A few days later, I was walking by the store and noticed boxes outside with the proper manufacturer on it. I went back online and - sure enough - it was the same manufacturer. 

Another phone call... and the lies started to flow.

Trust is lost when lies enter the conversation and relationship. The back peddling continued until the offer of a ten percent discount was offered. Not even close to the available price online (from multiple sources). I decided that the order would be cancelled. "That will take us about ten business days to process," the merchant declared. At that same moment in time, I had bought and returned something online from a large home furnishing brand in the States, without question. In fact, once the parcel was placed at UPS for return, I noticed that my credit card was refunded the money. The brand didn't even wait to get the goods (or check them upon return). Flawless. Painless. Customer-centric (great work, Restoration Hardware!).

The bar has been set.

Local retailers don't have to like the effect that big box stores or online merchants have had on their general business, but price transparency and ease of return are, simply, table stakes in business today. The sad reality, is that the bar is not set considerably higher or too complex for these businesses to operate within. Before pricing a product, local merchants simply have to ensure that they're within a reasonable pricing structure to the online world. While establishing retail policies of the store, make it as easy as possible for the customer to do business with you as they operate online. Ten days to process/think about whether or not the retailer is going to accept a return is no longer acceptable. And, yes, we all recognize that the price to operate and run a physical store is a different dynamic to the online channels, but this is the net new reality.

We have been exposed.

Perhaps the biggest lesson for local retailers (and brands, in general) is that consumers have been exposed to these new experiences and expectations. Pricing, ratings, return policies and more are a couple of swipes away. It's easy. Giving consumers the feeling that they may have been taken on the price they paid, or making it laborious to return something are both old school retail tactics that die hard in this digital environment. That genie is not going back into the bottle with online shopping. Adapt or die? Accept or die? Embrace or die? Sure. On the other hand, why not make the offer better than buying it online? And, if you can't do that, maybe it's time to consider another line of business? Harsh? That's not the intent. The true intent is this: do you know the baseline expectations of your consumers in a world where much of what happens in the purchase cycle is available for all to see and experience?

This isn't just the story of a small local retailer who is challenged by our new world. Many brand leaders are currently suffering along by living in the past as well. This should feel like opportunity... and not defeat.

Tags: advertising brand business business blog business strategy consumer trust creativity ctrl alt delete customer centricity digital marketing digital marketing blog disruption ecommerce economics economy innovation leadership local business local merchant local retail major retailer management management thinking marketing marketing blog media mitch joel mitchjoel online channel online shopping pricing restoration hardware retail retailer six pixels group six pixels of separation small business small business owner social media store technology transparency trust ups

Making sure you’re hitting the right notes with your customers is the most important thing you can do. Grabbing the attention, and hopefully loyalty, of new customers is vital to growing your business. They’ll spread the word for you, and your customer base will grow seemingly on its own. However, there are a lot of reasons this doesn’t happen.

If you feel like your sales are lagging behind where they should be and you don’t know why — after all, you’re running ad campaigns, utilizing keywords, and regularly publishing on your blog — read on to see where you might be falling short.

Your organic search keywords are being outperformed

Nowadays, there are tons of tools to keep you on top of your keywords, and not utilizing them is a big mistake. You may think your keywords are good, but you need to track them and figure out which ones are actually helping you, and which ones you’re being beaten at.

Work with an SEO tool that lets you easily see how your keywords are doing compared to those of your competitors. It’s a well-known fact that people rarely scroll down the results page on Google (much less click on to page 2), so if they’re ranking above you, that’s where your potential customers are going. You need to revamp your keywords and see where you can outrank your competition.

Your pricing isn’t competitive enough

In some way, your potential customers see you as more expensive than your competition. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to lower prices to compete. It can also mean experimenting with different ways to appeal to potential customers.

Try having a sale, and reach out to people on your email list to let them know. Do a targeted ad campaign on social media to advertise a limited-time sale that creates urgency to drive purchases. Free shipping is another popular tactic, either by raising the minimum order rate or negotiating a low-cost ground shipping option with a carrier.

Your blog content needs help

Yeah, you have a blog, but is it doing anything for you? Your blog should be a platform that helps you educate, lends authority, and helps you engage better with your potential customers. If you’re not providing well-written, relevant, and useful information to your potential customers, why are you doing it?

There are quite a few ways you can make your blog more appealing to your readers. An easy one is visuals — do you have any? Are your readers looking at a huge chunk of text, and that’s it? Make sure you have lots of high-quality images to make for a better reading experience. The biggest thing, of course, is the content. Put simply: Why will your readers care about what you’re writing about? Aside from being interesting and useful, make it creative and unique to you, instead of just copying the competition.

Your ad budget is going to waste

If you’re spending money on ads and seeing mediocre results, it’s time to take a second look. Are you targeting your demographic properly? Go over your Facebook ads with a fine-toothed comb and see if you can tighten up who you’re targeting, what their interests are, etc. Zeroing in on who is engaging with your brand will help you find better potential customers.

If you’re already using influencers on Instagram, see what you can do about improving results. Are you doing simple promotion, or are you offering an influencer-specific coupon code? Are you being too restrictive with what you’re allowing the influencer to say? Consider what they’re offering their audience, and how your brand is coming across.

If you’re not using influencer marketing, and you have a target demographic that’s responsive to it, what are you waiting for?

Your fulfillment process is costing you

You’ll get hit with bad reviews from customers for things that have nothing to do with the product itself — like late deliveries and mismatched products. Not only does this hurt your online presence, but it also hurts your bottom line.

A great way to save money and make your future customers a lot happier is to make sure you have your fulfillment process at 100%. When your fulfillment process delivers, you’ll get happy customers and build a better reputation.

You’re wasting opportunities to collaborate

Collaboration goes beyond just reaching out to influencers. Do some research on companies in adjacent or complementary verticals that aren’t competitors, but have a common audience. Forming a symbiotic relationship is easy when you both get exposure to a similar type of audience, but that could be filled with potential customers who haven’t heard of the other company. The added bonus to this is that they may not only need your product but they likely already trust the brand that you’ve partnered with.

Your mobile experience isn’t what it should be

Ask yourself: What do your mobile customers want? Even better, ask your customers. Maybe you have an app that your mobile customers find pointless, and they just want you to improve the responsiveness of your website (making it easy to navigate on mobile, making sure the buttons aren’t a weird size, etc.). On the other end, they could really hate going to your site no matter how responsive it is, and just want a simple app to use instead.

The bottom line is to make sure you’re delivering a mobile experience that reflects what your customers want. Potential customers will appreciate it, and your existing customers will appreciate you even more.

You haven’t incentivized loyalty

Sure, you’re targeting new customers with sign-up sales, first-time purchase rewards, and all the social media ads. But what are you doing to create engagement and exclusivity around your brand?

Pick out a specific kind of program — points, digital punchcards, social media shares in exchange for discounts — to incentivize repeat business. Rewards programs are critical, because you’re encouraging and rewarding your customers for coming back time and time again, and the more they come back, the more rewards they reap. The more you do, too! Make sure you’re sending out promotions to people who are subscribed to your newsletter — anything to keep people coming back.

You’re failing at multichannel

The more channels you’re using, the more you have to make sure you’re consistent across all of them. It’s complicated but so important. This means a unified voice across all social media, email, website, and anywhere else you are online. It also means uniform branding — will your customers recognize you everywhere? Is there a consistent look and feel that they will associate with your brand?

Another thing to keep in mind is the UX on mobile and desktop — make sure it’s top-quality on both. In the end, managing your channels inconsistently will mean your customers will feel like you’re second-rate, and they may go elsewhere.

You’re not taking advantage of AI

AI software is the next big thing — in fact, it kind of already is a big thing — and if you’re not using it, you’re missing out. Whether it’s email, CRM, warehouse management, or content creation, AI brings so much potential to improve workflow.

With all the time you’ll save by using AI software, you can execute a winning ad campaign, brainstorm a viral piece of content for your blog, or meaningfully interact with customers. In the end, the more time you spend doing something manually (instead of delegating to software), the less time you have to do all that stuff that really matters.

When you run an eCommerce business, your product is your most valuable asset — so think about how you can alter other variables related to your business to increase ROI without having to change the bedrock of your business.

The IPO has all but disappeared.

In 2012, the SEC’s Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies published a report titled “Where Have All the IPOs Gone”. The report sought to explain the recent decline in IPOs and the steady stream of companies leaving public markets, opting to go private instead through M&A.

Across all industries, an average of 311 firms went public every year from 1980-2000, but between 2001-2011 an average of just 99 firms did so.

For the software industry, the availability of private capital at all stages has accelerated the decline in new pricing activity. Private equity firms are increasingly comfortable with software assets – more PE firms have raised dedicated “pre-IPO funds” or mega-funds, and Softbank’s Vision Fund has put more money to work in the last year than was added to the NYSE in the first half of 2018.

Strategic M&A is also reducing the number of public companies, in effect relegating the IPO to a minor role serving as a stepping stone towards a larger liquidity event. For instance, Mulesoft was still in its infancy (having just turned a “public year old”) when Salesforce took the company private at a 36% premium. Similarly, Adaptive Insights was acquired by Workday on the eve of its IPO for double the valuation it would have received had it listed. Six of the most active strategic acquirers currently have enough cash to purchase nearly 20% of the aggregate enterprise value of the entire public SaaS index¹.

A significant, albeit unintended, consequence of the thinning of the public markets is a lack of data. Operators and investors have far less visibility into financial profiles and operating characteristics of comparable businesses for benchmarking purposes.

At a time when fundraising is at a record high and it’s easier than ever to start a SaaS business, these data help owners properly position themselves to investors and informs strategic decision making. On the rare occasion companies do go public, it’s crucial we spend time evaluating where they’ve been and where they’re going.

With that in mind, let’s look back on activity in the public software markets in the first half of 2018.

2018: The Return of Software IPOs

Despite an overall downturn in recent IPOs, software pricing activity during the first half of 2018 represented a significant step up in momentum from the previous two years where just twelve software companies held initial public offerings (four in 2016 and eight in 2017).

In the first half of this year, ten SaaS businesses priced offerings representing $38B² of aggregate enterprise value. It isn’t quite a reawakening, but early signals promise the second half of the year will only build upon the first’s momentum. For instance, Tenable priced it’s offering in late July and it’s rumored that SurveyMonkey has confidentially filed to go public later in the year.

All the businesses in the “1H 2018 IPO Cohort”³ sell horizontal applications and have raised a combined $4.7B of funding over a median of 14 years. This Cohort includes standout companies from across the U.S. including Dropbox, Zuora, Docusign, Smartsheet, among others.

At a glance, data suggests that the public markets have treated new entrants well. As of June 30, the total enterprise value for 1H 2018 IPO Cohort expanded 15% from IPO to $44B and the Cohort traded at a median 2018E EV / revenue multiple of 11.0x. The IPO could very well again be a viable strategy for long-term value creation.

So how do the financial and valuation data available for these businesses compare to the broader public SaaS index, and what can we learn from this Cohort to inform software businesses at all stages?

We’ll talk about what we can learn from the 1H 2018 IPO Cohort on Labs next week.

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1. OpenView’s public SaaS index includes ALRM, APPF, APPN, APTI, ATHN, AVLR, AYX, BAND, BCOV, BL, BNFT, BOX, CARB, CBLK, CBLK, CDAY, CISN, CLDR, COUP, CRM, CSLT, CSOD, DBX, DOCU, DOMO, ECOM, ELLI, EVBG, FIVN, HUBS, INST, KXS, LOGM, MB, MDB, MIME, NEWR, NOW, TWLO, OKTA, PAYC, PCTY, PFPT, PS, PVTL, QLYS, QTWO, RNG, RP, SEND, SHOP, SMAR, SPSC, TEAM, TWOU, ULTI, VEEV, WDAY, WIX, WK, WTC, YEXT, ZEN, ZUO.
2. Data sourced from Pitchbook on 8/2/2018. Market data as of 6/30/2018.
3. 1H 2018 IPO Cohort includes Avalara, Carbon Black, Ceridian HCM, DocuSign, Domo, Dropbox, Pivotal Software, Pluralsight, Smartsheet, and Zuora.

 

The post The 2018 State of SaaS IPOs appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Win-loss review analysis is one of the most difficult parts of the sales process. If you lost the deal, it feels like you're taking it upon yourself to rub your nose in your own defeat. If you won the deal, it's likely you and your sales team are celebrating. You got the business -- who cares why? Now let’s drink.

Maintaining a positive mindset is essential to being a successful seller, but probing into a recent failure is likely a one-way road to Depressionville.

Win-loss reviews are incredibly important to perform -- in both cases.

Understanding the reasons why a prospect became a customer, opted for the competition, or made no decision at all makes your sales process all the stronger for future bids.

What is a win-loss review?

A win-loss review is an interview that helps determine why a sales opportunity was won or lost. These interviews are often conducted over the phone, and can be performed by your company or a third-party service. 

When developing your review strategy, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who will be conducting the interview?
• What are the criteria for selecting customers or prospects to interview?
• Which questions will be asked?
• How long will the interview take?
• When will the interview be scheduled?

Setting up a strategy for win-loss reviews will help you and your team more successful and close more opportunities. In a 2017 study by CSO Insights, researchers found teams that regularly used win-loss analysis outperformed those that did not. These teams saw a 17.6% increase in seller achieved quota rates. And win rates increased by 14.2% for those who consistently used win-loss reviews.

Whether it’s conducted in-house or through a third-party, via a survey or a conversation, here’s a list of questions that to include in your win-loss review. (Just make sure not to ask all of them -- in-person interviews should be no longer than 15-20 minutes.)

Win-Loss Analysis Questions

1. What was the biggest consideration you based your decision on?

How it Helps: This will surface the high-level reasons you’re winning or losing. Keep in mind that while you’re intimately familiar with your product or service and its pros/cons, prospects don’t have the same experience under their belts. If you’re surprised by a point that comes up in response to this question -- for instance, a feature perceived to be inferior that you know is better than the competitions’ -- use that insight as a jumping-off point for implementing targeted change.

Next Steps: Beware of accepting vague reasons like “price” or “the competition seemed to ‘get’ us better.” Price issues are usually tied to a problem with communicating value, and the common “they just get us” objection points to a problem with your sales process. Keep pressing (gently!) until you uncover the deeper dirt.

2. How well did we do in tailoring our presentation/product/service to your needs?

How it Helps: Personalization is the name of the sales game today. Rather than presenting a canned pitch to each and every prospect, sales organizations should be carefully customizing every detail for the potential client’s needs. A lackluster response here is a gigantic red flag.

Next Steps: If you’re losing deals due to a lack of personalization, you might have problems with undefined buyer personas or a poor understanding of the buyer’s journey. Can your salespeople quickly identify what kind of prospect they're dealing with, and at what buying stage those prospects are in to adjust presentations appropriately? If not, you have some work to do. Alternatively, your reps might need coaching to listen more, talk less, and ask better questions.

3. Did you define your decision criteria? If so, what were they?

How it Helps: Sellers aren’t always privy to buyers’ decision checklists. Knowing how clients are evaluating your product or service can help you decide what features or aspects to play up or down the next time around.

Next Steps: Watch out for criteria out of left field. If potential clients are looking to your product or service for something that it flat out doesn’t do, marketing messaging needs to be adjusted. Conversely, this could be an opportunity to develop an area that your prospects are clearly looking for your company to deliver in.

4. Did you talk to any references about our product/service? What did they have to say?

How it Helps: If you’re like the rest of us, the first thing you do when choosing a restaurant is read Yelp reviews. Same goes for business purchases -- everybody loves to get dirt from a good reference. Getting a sense of what references are saying can help you get a handle on your company’s brand perception.

Next Steps: If you’re hearing negative feedback from references secondhand, you should relay specific complaints to your management team so they can devote more resources to ongoing customer satisfaction. Stem the tide of detractors ASAP.

5. What was your experience with our team?

How it Helps: As Jill Konrath writes in her book Agile Selling, “how we sell is more important than what we sell.” The human element is still a huge part of the buying process, even in our digital age.

Next Steps: Be sure to keep this question open -- don’t restrict it to solely address the sales team. While prospects primarily interact with salespeople, they could also cross paths with marketing, customer support, or executives -- either in person or virtually. If the prospect was left with a bad taste in their mouth after an interaction with any person from your company, probe into what behavior in particular was to blame, and circle back.

6. How did you feel about the timing of our sales process? When did you start investigating a new product/service?

How it Helps: Nobody likes to be left hanging, but they also don’t want to feel rushed along. A process that’s too slow or too fast will deter sales. Think back to your kindergarten days and take a cue from Goldilocks’ insistence on “just right.”

Next Steps: Here’s another area that has implications for the buyer’s journey. If your company doesn’t understand the length or the number of steps in buyers’ research and decision processes, your sales team is bound to present the wrong information at the wrong time. If you sense that your timing was an issue, follow up with the second question to uncover the timeframe of the prospect’s project. If a time trend emerges among several prospects, adjust your pacing accordingly.

7. How do you feel about our road map? Is there anything we’re missing?

How it Helps: It’s possible that you didn’t win or lose based on anything your team presented today. Adopting a new product or service is a significant change management undertaking for organizations, and one they’re not eager to repeat a few months down the line when they realize their choice wasn’t such a great fit.

Next Steps: If road map concerns were a primary reason a prospect signed on with a competitor, direct their concerns back to your management team to possibly adjust your development agenda. If the road map was a primary reason a prospect chose your company, relay this feedback to parties involved in future offers to ensure you can deliver.

8. What is your decision-making process like?

How it Helps: Especially at mid-market and enterprise-sized companies, buying is a complex process that involves multiple parties. It’s entirely possible that one person, say the CMO, could be 100% on board with your product, but procurement vetoed the deal. Don’t lose as a result of neglecting to get all the key stakeholders together.

Next Steps: Identify and round up all relevant parties the next time your team presents to a similar company in terms of size or industry. Address each person’s specific needs -- what a CMO wants is different than what procurement is looking for.

9. How would you rate our product/service? What in particular did you like or dislike?

How it Helps: Since salespeople are the employees explicitly tasked with closing new business, they often get blamed when a deal goes awry. But it's rough to shoulder the blame if it’s not really your fault. Diving into the product or service features can expose issues out of the sales team’s control.

Next Steps: Relay any feature feedback to your development team.

10. Why did/didn’t you decide to buy now?

How it Helps: In B2B sales, you’re not just competing against rival companies; you’re also combatting the dreaded “no decision.” Understanding why a prospect did or didn’t buy can bring to light trigger events or deal-derailing problems that your team may not have been aware of.

Next Steps: Incorporate any new trigger events into your sales research process. Develop plans to proactively address and diffuse issues that could put off a decision.

11. What’s the one thing you would advise us to change for next time?

How it Helps: Win or lose, you should always be seeking feedback from prospects.

Next Steps: Take comments to heart, and execute.

12. What was the biggest difference between us and the other solutions you considered?

How it Helps: This is a more tactful way of asking, "Why did/didn't you choose us over our competitor?" It opens the door for your prospect to share what differentiated you from other solutions in your space -- for better or for worse.

Next Steps: If you're missing a feature your competitor has and losing business regularly because of it, take that data to your product team. If people love your pricing structure, use that as a reason not to experiment with a new pricing plan this quarter. Listen to your clients/prospects and implement what they have to say when you identify trends.

13. How easy did we make this decision for you?

How it Helps: While not always possible, you want to make it easy for your prospect to choose your solution.

Next Steps: If you receive feedback your service was missing a crucial offering making it easy for your customer to choose another company, take that intelligence and improve your service.

14. What is our reputation like within the industry?

How it Helps: Your customer or prospect has just finished taking a deep dive into the industry. Make the most of that and ask them what they found.

Next Steps: Hopefully, you have a pretty accurate and evolving idea of how you're perceived within your marketplace, but it's always helpful to learn more about your reputation -- and how you can improve it.

15. Do you have any additional suggestions or comments?

How it Helps: This opens up the conversation to let the customer or prospect provide any honest feedback that might not have been uncovered from your previous questions.

Next Steps: Whether the feedback is positive or negative, evaluate it and see if there are any ways to improve your processes or service options to meet the customer or prospect expectations.

Win-Loss Analysis Template

It's helpful to have a defined process for conducting win-loss review analysis. Here's a template for how to structure your reviews for success:

1. Conduct a pre-meeting strategy session - Determine what your goal will be for this win-loss review, which questions you should ask, who will conduct the meeting, who will coordinate the logistics, and who will disseminate findings to the rest of the team.

2. Facilitate the win-loss review - Keep your meeting short -- no more than 30 minutes -- to respect your prospect/customer's time. Ask your agreed-upon questions and listen intently. Avoid the tendency to get defensive or jump in with additional comments. And end by thanking them for their time. 

3. Share key meeting takeaways - Write up the most salient points from your win-loss review and share key takeaways with internal stakeholders at your company. If a feature was lacking, reach out to your product team. If your customer service package is what set you apart, congratulate your CS team.

Whatever you do, don't sit on this great information -- share it, iterate on the feedback, and build a stronger company and a better sales team. Looking for more? Learn how to hold an effective postmortem next.

Let’s face it, there’s nothing fun or sexy about sales proposals. You’ve got a hot lead and you’re anxious to close the deal. But before your prospect will sign on the dotted line, you’ve got to provide them with the paperwork necessary to do so in the first place -- and often, that process starts with a sales proposal.

Plenty of salespeople drop the ball when it comes to sales proposals, treating them as nothing more than an administrative hurdle to be jumped in pursuit of the deal. That gives you an opportunity to stand out and differentiate yourself -- if you’re willing to put the time into writing a great proposal.

STOP: Should You Be Writing a Proposal?

But before I get into what a great proposal looks like, I want to point out that there are a few circumstances where sales proposals aren’t necessary (or even appropriate). Ask yourself the following questions before you start writing:

• Is the client serious about moving forward with the project? Only serious prospects should get sales proposals. If you’ve got a tire kicker or someone in the early stages of their exploration, save your effort until they’re further down the pipeline.
• Do you have a realistic shot at winning the business? Is your prospect actually looking for a solution like yours? Do they really have the budget? Time saved not writing proposals for poor-fit prospects is time that can be spent seeking out better buyers.
• Have you talked to the prospect about their budget and the intended scope of work? Plenty of salespeople are afraid to talk specifics too early on, fearing it’ll kill the excitement of the deal. But why would you put energy into writing a proposal if you aren’t sure the scope and budget you’d include would match your client’s expectations? Have the hard conversations first.
• Are you required to submit a proposal to be considered? Sometimes, you can’t get around submitting a proposal - even if the criteria above haven’t been met. In these cases, there’s not much you can do besides get to work.
• Can you repurpose an old proposal, or do you need to start from scratch? Finally, don’t assume you have to reinvent the wheel each time. While your proposal should be customized to the specific prospect you’re pitching, you can still develop a base template you translate to each prospect’s needs.

Pre-Proposal Preparations

A good sales proposal should never be a surprise. Instead, it should feel like the next logical step in the conversations you’ve been having with your prospect and the relationship you’ve been building.

Make sure you’ve answered all of the questions below before starting work on your sales proposal:

• What problem is the client trying to solve? What pains are they experiencing? Yes, proposals need to convey the specifics of the deal. But they should also prove they’ll provide the outcomes the prospect is looking for, so make sure you understand their pain points before undertaking a proposal.
• What’s their budget? If you don’t know their budget, don’t write the proposal. Disqualify prospects that aren’t likely to fit early on by pressing them to nail down a project budget.
• What are their goals and expectations? Why is your work so important to the client? What will having it complete allow the client to achieve? Sales isn’t about what they can do for you. It’s about the problems you can solve for them.
• When do they need results? What are their expectations regarding timelines and deliverables? Make sure you can realistically meet these expectations before capturing them in your proposal.
• Who will be involved in making the decision? Capture key stakeholders not just so you know who to deliver your proposal to, but also to address their individual needs in your document.

Best Practices for Proposal Drafting

The principles below aren’t set in stone. Instead, think of them as general guidelines you can use as a starting point to give your proposal direction. Don’t be afraid to go your own way, when appropriate.

• Aim for no more than one-to-two pages. Unless a longer proposal is required as part of an RFP process, shorter is generally better when you consider people’s short attention spans.
• Make sure your proposal gets to the right place. Do this by directing your proposal to the right person (or people) and including any necessary information at the start.
• Separate your deliverables from your pricing. Mia De Beche of Attach.io recommends separating your offer into individual elements prospects can relate to. But resist the temptation to include pricing with each of them. As she notes, “If you add a price to those sections, you’ll make the prospect to focus on its cost, rather than what it entails to the overall project. As a result, they’ll consider each element in its relation to their budget, rather than as a milestone towards achieving their goals.”
• Anchor your pricing with a range of options. It’s not always the right move, but there’s a reason many salespeople find success offering a range of prices. When a reasonable offer is presented next to a higher-ticket option, it looks even more reasonable, in comparison.
• Keep your language simple. Jargon doesn’t make you look smart. It makes you look out of touch. Cut it ruthlessly.
• Weave copywriting best practices into your proposal. Sales proposal language doesn’t have to be dry. Use relevant statistics to build authority. Use language to paint a picture of the “before” and “after” conditions clients will experience. Include CTAs between sections to entice readers to move to the next section.
• Pay attention to the implications of financial words. As Michael Michalowicz, writing for American Express, describes, “‘Investments’ pay off. ‘Fees’ are money you never see again. The differences are subtle, but very important in terms of client satisfaction.”
• Don’t just promise it. Prove it. Include customer testimonials, case studies and any other content that proves you can deliver what you’re proposing.
• Save details about who your company is until the end. Rather than starting with who you are -- which prospects don’t really care about, by the way -- focus more on the client and their problems than your company and its background.
• Make it accessible. Expect that your prospects will view your proposal on different devices and in different formats (such as print, desktop, mobile, etc. ...). Don’t frustrate them with a viewing experience that isn’t accessible across these different options.
• Make it a signable contract. Capitalize on the excitement your prospects may be feeling after reading your proposal by letting them sign on right away. Several different SaaS proposal delivery programs exist today that will turn your sales document into a signable contract.

Pre-Delivery Proofing Checklist

Think you’re ready to send? Hold your horses. You’ve got a few final checks before sending your proposal on its way.

• Does your proposal have any spelling or grammatical errors? Don’t lose business on mistakes that can be easily caught and fixed. Drop your proposal into Microsoft Word and run spell check to ensure a clean document.
• Have you addressed all elements required by their RFP process (if applicable)? Review your proposal one final time against any specifications covered by the prospect’s RFP guidelines. Missing a single one could take you out of the running.
• Is your proposal targeted specifically to the pain points identified by the client? This point is so important it’s worth a final check. Does your proposal speak more to your needs or your prospect’s needs?
• Are the timelines you’ve proposed reasonable? When a deal is so close you can almost taste it, it’s tempting to speed up your proposed timelines to make your offer even more attractive. But this is a recipe for long-term disaster. Don’t risk disappointing future customers by promising timelines you can’t realistically achieve.
• Have you created an experience that makes it as easy as possible for clients to do business with you? Finally, scan for any roadblocks you’ve inadvertently introduced to the process. If clients need to do anything more than agree with what you’ve written, decide on specific offerings and sign off on the deal, you’ve added unnecessary complications to your proposal.

Post-Proposal Reporting

You don’t sell the way you did when you first got started. Your sales proposal process has to evolve as well. To increase your odds of landing more closed-won deals in the future, you need to be paying attention to your sales proposal KPIs.

A few of the obvious metrics you could track include:

• Number of proposals sent
• Number of RFP processes where you’re chosen as a finalist
• Number of closed-won versus closed-lost deals

However, because the proposal process is so important to your overall success as a salesperson, get creative by moving beyond these base metrics. For example, could you track the number of prospects who reach out with follow-up questions because something in your initial proposal wasn’t clear? If you’re using a SaaS proposal program, are you able to monitor how much time prospects spend viewing your documents?

Becoming a Sales Proposal Rockstar

Landing more business by improving your sales proposals isn’t rocket science, but it does require some effort. Review the guidelines described above against every proposal you send, and look for cues that suggest prospects are responding well to your proposals.

With time and a commitment to continuous improvement, you’ll find that business proposals aren’t something to dread. Instead, when wielded well, they can be a valuable tool in your sales arsenal.

Torrenting is a highly efficient way to transfer files through the Internet

Maybe I should be asking if you even have one, but then you might think that’s harsh. I’m guessing, though, that deep down inside you’ll admit to yourself what you’re doing is more fiction than fact… more a dream than a reality.

Before you panic, take a deep breath and get your heart rate back down to 72 and know many of the things you’re doing are working, even if you don’t think so.  What’s happening is you do have a few things that are not working and they’re overpowering what is working.

I’m excited to be part of an upcoming webinar you won’t want to miss. It’s all about this very topic — fixing what’s broken and leveraging what works in your prospecting process.  You can find out more at this link or click on the below image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You have to realize whether you’re in a team of 20 salespeople or selling on your own, there are two fundamentals that have to be right and they are your mind and a system you can follow.  Could you imagine flying an airplane without a system or process you could follow?  No, there’s no way you could. Same goes for your mind. Would you want fly on a plane piloted by a 2-year old?  No, they simply don’t have the mind to fly.  Same with sales — as big as getting the mind right is, an even bigger part is the getting the process right.

Your customers have changed far more than you realize, and worse yet, the sales process you’re using was built for a different era.  Back to my airplane analogy — the process you’re using was built for a Boeing 727, but you’re dealing in a world of Boeing 787s.  It is simply not going to work.

Fixing what’s broken and leveraging what works starts with first analyzing 2 key measurements. They are:

What is the % of leads that ultimately turn into customers?

How long does it take for a lead to become a customer?

Don’t overcomplicate things. When you know the answers to these two questions and you can answer the following five questions, you’ll then be able to determine the mechanics that will make your process work.

Why do customers buy from me?

Why do customers choose to not buy from me?

Where do my leads come from?

Who is my best customer and why?

What are the outcomes I provide my customers?

You can fix what’s broken and leverage what works in your prospecting process.  To find out more, be sure to sign up for the upcoming webinar at this link or by clicking the below image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

According to InsideSales.com’s “The State of Sales Development” report, the sales development (SDR) role lends itself to more automation than any other role within the sales team due to the very nature of the position. In fact, as part of the report, companies shared that their average spend on sales technology was $3,827 per rep, per year. That’s a lot of technology.

While a powerful and agile tech stack is fundamental to any sales and marketing strategy, the technology alone won’t help your team achieve its goals. Here are three tips for setting your inbound SDR team up for success:

Communicate

Rather than putting your inbound SDRs in a position where they are reacting to your prospect activity, communicate openly and often about upcoming marketing campaigns. This includes larger scale events, such as trade show sponsorships and webinar presentations, as well as less public campaign launches, like email newsletter send dates and premium content offers (think e-books, guides, downloadable worksheets). Don’t forget about PR efforts, either. For example, the date you know your CEO will be featured on an industry podcast, or your VP of Customer Success has a byline in Forbes or Inc. These events, large and small, will inevitably trigger activity from both prospects and current customers, so sit down with your sales development team to learn the best mechanisms for sharing this campaign information with them.

Pro tip: Have your inbound SDRs block out periods of time on their calendars when an email campaign is launching. This is the optimal time for them to reach prospects at their computers or on their phones because those individuals will be engaging in real time with marketing content.

Enable

Consider an inbound SDR as a human layer in your inbound marketing campaign. You publish a blog post that helps your buyer personas recognize a specific pain. From there, you nurture your prospects by sharing more valuable content with them to help them understand how to alleviate their pain. As these prospects begin to consider a potential solution, your inbound SDRs should be ready to provide additional guidance and support. Enable your inbound SDRs with buyer persona overviews, or battle cards, that help them understand the best ways to communicate with these individuals. Understanding a persona’s communication style, communication medium preference (phone, email, social, or text), and their most significant concerns and needs will enable your SDRs to better support your prospects along their buyer journey.

Pro tip: As you develop content for your marketing campaign, try adding a piece of sales enablement in the form of talking points organized by persona. It’s overly optimistic to assume your SDRs will read every piece of content your team creates, let alone be prepared to speak to the appropriate messaging of each persona. A one-page overview for each campaign will enable your SDRs to meet the needs of your future customers in a more helpful and efficient manner.

Analyze

Develop a cadence for analyzing the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaigns as they relate to inbound SDR success metrics. If your inbound SDRs are measured based on booked meetings or sales accepted leads, start analyzing your marketing campaigns through the lens of your SDR metrics. You may discover that your consideration stage content, which is intended to convert a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead or opportunity is falling flat with one of your key personas. In addition to examining the quantitative data, seek qualitative data from your SDR team. Which campaigns yielded the most engaging conversations? Which campaigns were most accessible to both your SDRs and your prospects? Were any of your campaigns overwhelming or even over the heads of the people they were intended to help? This type of feedback is best retrieved from collaborative sessions where you can hear anecdotal information and then discuss opportunities for improvement.

Pro tip: Grab informal time with individual inbound SDRs. Walk to the coffee machine together, or sit down next to someone new at a company meeting. You don’t need to block out an hour on someone’s calendar to get the feedback you need to improve your campaigns. In addition, there may be feedback someone will share with you one-on-one that they might not feel comfortable sharing in a group setting.

As you consider your SDRs to be the human layer of your inbound marketing campaign, you’re bound to uncover many other ways to better communicate with, enable, and analyze those sales development efforts. What tips do you have for inbound SDR team success? Share your stories in the comments here or on social media.

In many organizations, marketing suffers from a crisis of credibility. Many executives believe it exists solely to support sales, or that it is an arts and crafts function that throws parties and puts logos on swag. It’s no secret that the C-suite does not care about the open rate of your last email campaign, or how many likes a Facebook post got. Metrics like click-through rate, impressions, and reach are still important, but only to the extent that they can be connected to revenue and profit. It is worth measuring and tracking the impact of all key activities, but all non-critical metrics should be kept internal to marketing. In other words, only share metrics that matter to the CEO and CFO.

Let’s walk through some first steps that marketing can take to shake this image of irrelevance and earn a seat at the revenue table.

Establishing Accountability

Before marketing can make any progress, we must establish a culture of accountability. If marketing leaders insist that marketing is an art and not a science, then the department will remain isolated from other groups. This shift can be daunting, especially if current performance is unclear. Accountability is a double-edged sword that can reveal either weak performance or good results so it can be tempting to eschew accountability to avoid the truth.

Once you decide to pursue this culture change, confusion can still linger. Basic metrics such as lead source tracking and cost-per-lead are easy to implement, but until there is a holistic understanding of how marketing activities are impacting the bottom line, their upside is limited. Without the explicit connection to pipeline, revenue, and profit, these metrics lack value beyond the short-term.

To reach the accountability stage, marketing must be able to justify their expenditures as investments in revenue and growth. Getting there requires top-level buy-in, investment in the right systems and tools, and a potential restructuring of marketing incentives and compensation.

Reporting for the Right Reasons

Well-defined and smartly executed reporting is at the core of elevating marketing’s stature. Many marketers think of marketing ROI as simply reporting the outcome of their programs. What’s most important, however, is that the reports enable us to make decisions that improve profits. This is the difference between backward-looking measurement and decision-focused management. Remember that being data-driven is not enough. Data must be used to generate actionable insights; descriptive analytics and metrics disconnected from outcomes are worthless.

You should only focus on the decisions that improve marketing. To do this, identify up front what needs to happen to drive profits, and then build your measurements around capturing information that facilitates these decisions. Avoid reporting for reporting’s sake, and focus on measuring only the metrics that will guide you towards improving the bottom line. By aligning data measurements with your company’s strategic objectives, it will be easier to allocate resources by revenue impact.

Metric Mistakes to Avoid

All of this falls apart, however, if the wrong types of metrics are chosen to be reported. There are hundreds of marketing metrics, but most of them are not useful to the C-suite.

Here are some common pitfalls to watch out for:

Vanity Metrics: Too often, marketers rely on “feel good” metrics to justify their marketing spend. New social followers or impressions may look nice, but they don’t give insight into improving marketing performance.

Focusing on Quantity: Only looking at quantity while ignoring quality leads to programs that look good initially but don’t deliver profits.

Activity over Results: It’s easier to see and measure the costs going out the door than the results they produce. But if you don’t make an effort to do so, marketing gets framed as a cost center.

Framing results in terms of costs further perpetuates the notion that marketing is a cost center. That means when it’s time to cut costs, extra budget will be reallocated to a revenue-generating department such as sales.

Redefining Marketing Performance Measurement

CEO ratings of marketing’s performance directly rise and fall with their ability to quantify how marketing campaigns and programs deliver value in line with company revenue objectives. As an informed marketer, it’s your duty to infuse credibility into your organization by way of meaningful metrics that tie directly to your top and bottom line.

What metrics do you measure? Tell me about your best practices in the comments to keep the conversation going.

The post Why Marketing Depends on Metrics appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Have you ever sent a survey and realized, after the fact, that your questions were confusing or misleading? It happens to everyone at some point. And while bad survey questions aren’t the end of the world, they can easily muddy your data and derail your business decisions.

Let’s take a look at the most common pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

Examples of Bad Survey Questions

1. The Leading Question

Leading questions are those that use biased language. This language influences the survey taker’s selection. The problem with a leading question is that it can seem innocuous, but actually be fishing for a certain answer.

It’s not only leading questions that you have to watch out for either, but also the imbalanced response options. If you populate the response options with bias, you’re not going to get the data you need.

When you use leading questions, you’re not going to get actionable, accurate data that can help guide business decisions. Instead, you may be encouraging customers to answer in a certain way.

Examples of leading questions: Did you enjoy our amazing new product offering? Are you excited about what we’ll do next?

What to do instead: Make sure that questions are clear and simple—and refrain from using adjectives like “amazing” that are highly subjective and likely to influence responses.

2. The Assumptive Question

Assumptive questions makes assumptions about what the survey-taker knows and feels without taking a step back and considering where the survey-taker actually stands. For example, an assumptive question might ask someone which email marketing software they use, even though many of the survey-takers don’t use email marketing software at all.

Assumptive questions leave out essential information that is necessary to understand the survey-taker. They are similar to leading questions in that they inadvertently encourage survey-takers to respond in a certain way.

Examples of assumptive questions: When you drink scotch, do you like it on the rocks? Do you go to the park when you’re stressed at work?

What to do instead: Don’t assume anything about your survey-taker. You don’t know if they drink alcohol, work out, or are a native English speaker. Be sure to create big picture questions that set context.

3. The Pushy Question

A pushy question forces survey-takers to make a choice and pushes respondents toward particular favored answers. Usually these questions require a respondent to choose from a list with two few categories, preventing them from answering accurately.

For example, if you ask survey-takers “Ice cream is good on a cold day” and offer only the ability to “agree” or “disagree” you force respondents to answer, whether or not their answer affects their true feelings.

Examples of pushy question: Ice cream is good on a cold day. Agree or disagree? When choosing between software, what do you look for?

What to do instead: As much as possible, try to put yourself in your respondent’s shoes. Consider whether the question is open-ended, or may push the survey-taker in a certain, favorable direction.

4. The Confusing Question

Without meaning to, you may be creating questions that are confusing to survey-takers. These confusing questions may be poorly worded questions and/or responses, be illogically formatted, or be the wrong question type for the matter at hand.

Examples: Do you think our sales team was not unhelpful, or were they helpful? True or false?: Your sales consultant was not equipped for the job.

What to do instead: Avoid double negatives at all costs. In general, using negatives can be confusing. Try to use clear, concise statements and questions to get your meaning across.

5. The Random Question

Random questions are out-of-context and don’t focus on topics that are important or relevant to the survey-taker. Usually, random questions are clearly driven by the survey maker’s interests.

Examples: Do you consider yourself physically fit? How much would you spend on a water bottle?

What to do instead: Make sure that all questions you ask are relevant to the survey and its goals?

6. The Double-Barreled Question

Double-barreled questions squeeze too much into one question, making it difficult for a survey-taker to answer accurately. Sometimes, these double-barreled questions ask respondents to rate/rank two or more things in one question, or combine two different ideas into one question.

Examples of double-barreled questions: How long did it take you to complete the process and on what day of the week did you do it? Agree or disagree?: The onboarding was easy to understand and very comprehensive.

What to do instead: Make sure your questions are asking for one answer to one main idea.

7. The Ambiguous Question

Ambiguous questions are far too broad. The questions and/or responses leave room for interpretation, which leads survey-takers to guess or default to whatever answer makes the most sense.

Examples of ambiguous questions: Do you think your friends would like our jackets? Are we better than other software companies?

What to do instead: Consider adding an “other” field to multiple choice survey questions to capture survey-takers true feelings. Yes, the feedback will be qualitative, but it will be more accurate.

Wrap-Up

When it comes to constructing a survey, there’s a lot to consider. But, if you don’t have questions that are easy to understand and make sense to the survey-taker, you won’t be able to gain information that can impact your business. To improve customer experience, you need accurate survey responses that lead you to take action.

Welcome back to our blog series on lead management. Last week, we saw a general, big picture overview of the seven key stages that make up the lead management process. This week, we’re going to dive deeper into the first of those key stages: reaching an agreement on the definition of a qualified lead or sales ready lead.

Stage 1: Reach agreement on the definition of a qualified lead or sales ready lead

A clearly defined sales ready lead definition ensures that only high-quality leads are passed from Marketing to Sales. All to often, however, Marketing is working with one definition of a sales ready lead while Sales is working with a completely different definition. It’s important for Marketing and Sales to come to an agreement on what a sales ready lead is so that Marketing will pass on usable leads to Sales.

The value in the common definition of a sales ready lead is alignment between Marketing and Sales. This value cannot be gained without doing the hard work of coming together in the same room and hashing out what is and is not a sales ready lead, which is defined by demographic and behavioral attributes.

A sales ready lead is someone who demonstrates a pre-determined fit and buying readiness based on measurable demographic and behavioral attributes that Sales and Marketing agree on. Again, it is the agreement between Marketing and Sales that is important here.

Examples of sales ready lead definitions include the following:

Demographic		Behavioral
Contact name		Demonstrate known interest or need
Serviceable address		Web page visits (frequency, high value key pages)
Phone number		High value form fills (free quote)
Email address		Content form fills
Role (owner, influencer)		Cart abandonment
New logo or existing customer		Attending events (local)
Employee size (flagged SMB)		Email/Outbound engagement
Industry		Inbound engagement

Behavioral examples: Inbound

Digital body language should be the foundation of your definition of a sales ready lead. Take note of how your customers behave online, from website visits and content downloads to searches performed, email responses and social interactions.

For example, behavior in inbound might include a prospect or a current client visiting your website. An action you might take would be to enroll them in a nurture campaign, but you would not pass them on to Sales just yet.

If, however, that prospect/client were to visit your website multiple times in one week and you note that they visit the same solution pages each time, you would likely do the following:

1. Increment their lead score.
2. Keep them in the same nurture campaign.
3. Alternatively, enroll them in a specific (new) nurture campaign on a related topic – message to that persona, and that location in the buying cycle.
4. If this is a key account, alert Sales of the activity.
5. Send as an MQL to Sales.

Behavioral examples: Outbound

Let’s look at behavioral examples in outbound campaigns. When prospects open an email or click on links Marketing sends them, we would not automatically send them to Sales as sales ready leads. Instead, Marketing would simply increment their lead score and switch them to an accelerated nurturing campaign.

If a prospect was to download an asset, however, especially if they were to download multiple assets, Marketing should offer them related content and send them to Sales as an MQL. The same would be true for those prospects who attend live or virtual events and complete forms.

Creating the sales ready lead definition

So how does a company create this unified definition of a sales ready lead? Sales and Marketing must come together in the same room together and discuss it; brainstorm what a sales ready truly means for both departments. Marketing can facilitate the discussion on the value of common lead definitions and provide proof points and value statements as well as examples of digital body language and demographics. In return, Sales can provide Marketing with information about what they are trying to sell and how they are trying to sell it.

Working together, Sales and Marketing can develop and validate the definition (or definitions) of a sales ready lead. These definitions should be reviewed quarterly and updated with key stakeholders as needed. They should be baked into the technology CRM, and it should be ensured they are continuously used by all stakeholders.

Barriers and Accelerators

There are several barriers to accomplishing these goals. Getting Sales and Marketing to work together in the same room can be difficult, not to mention getting Sales and Marketing to agree on behavioral data that matters. Whether or not Marketing can capture the behavioral/demographic data that Sales wants might also be difficult.

In addition, implementing the new sales ready lead definition with Sales and Marketing will be challenging. Both Sales and Marketing will need to be educated on what the new definition of a lead is and what they are doing with it. There will be differences of opinion between different marketing stakeholders, and some stakeholders won’t hold people accountable for doing something with a qualified lead.

To overcome these barriers, there are accelerators. There should, of course, already be a desire and a strong business case for change (to see Marketing contribute to the Sales pipeline). There should also be executive support from Marketing to focus on the quality of sales ready leads over quantity. There should be executive support from Sales to act on qualified leads that are passed over from Marketing. As long as there is agreement between Sales and Marketing on the new definition of a sales ready lead, and as long as executives hold people accountable for new behaviors, you will achieve success.

Next week, we’ll discuss stage two of lead management: seeking agreement on labels and definitions of customer acquisition/retention statuses. In the meantime, head over to our resource hub to learn more about lead management.

While many professionals complain of overwhelm, it seems entrepreneurs and small business owners have it worse than anyone else.

Surveys conducted among small business owners found between 70% and 86% of small business owners feel ‘swamped’ simply running their companies.

Over half of those surveyed reported spending more time working in the business than on the business.

Attempting to maintain this exhausting pace leads to either staff burnout, the business stretching itself so thin that it collapses, or both.

This trait is common among small business owners and entrepreneurs who attempt to run every aspect of the business themselves. While this can work in the infancy of the business, they’ll have to outsource tasks to make significant growth.

Freeing up resources allows you to focus on the core business, which is increasing the sales of their products.

Not sure what to outsource? For a minimal fee, many professionals can handle your:

• Information Technology – A survey by Deloitte found that over 5o% of companies outsource a portion of their IT and another 25% plan to do so. They also found that companies that did so recorded a cost savings of up to 40%.

• Accounting – Handling payroll, sorting out taxes and paying bills are tasks that small business owners dread. Allowing an expert to administer your payroll will decrease cost and increase tax compliance, but 60% of small businesses still try to handle it in-house. According to the IRS, this leads to late, and often, incorrect payments, which costs 40% of small businesses up to $845 in penalties.

• Logistics – As the business out-grows its ‘small’ beginnings, a larger space is required to store and process SKUs. With more moving parts than one person (or a small team) can efficiently handle, outsourcing your logistics becomes a smart option.

This is especially true for eCommerce businesses where initial profits can turn to losses if the business becomes overwhelmed with orders.

With that said, should you still outsource fulfillment?

Look at it this way, an order fulfillment company is an expert with resources that your small business doesn’t have, such as a warehouse, favorable shipping rates and an experienced team. Seems like a no-brainer.

Not convinced, here are a few more reasons to consider outsourcing your order fulfillment:

• Cost Effective – If you sell a seasonal product, you don’t need to rent a warehouse all year round. By using an order fulfillment company, you only pay for what you use, saving you money on unused warehouse space. These companies handle all the ‘heavy lifting’ involved such as inventory storage, repackaging & kitting, transport and delivery of goods. As a small business, it’s not possible to consistently get favorable prices and TOS for all sections of the fulfillment process.

• Leverage Technology – Outsourcing allows you to take advantage of an existing infrastructure for smooth delivery of your products. These companies have invested heavily in software development, tracking infrastructure, staff training etc. Attempting to create something similar is a time- and resource-intensive undertaking. By paying to use their software, you can focus on your business and be sure that all orders are being shipped and delivered.

• Scalability – Rapid business success can cause the collapse of an ill-prepared small business. If an eCommerce business receives an order that is 10 times the volume it can handle, it can overwhelm the existing system. This can lead to inefficient fulfillment, which leads to poor reviews and a tarnished reputation. Using an order fulfillment company allows the business scale up or down without any loss in service quality to the customer.

• Core Business Focus – By now, you can tell that order fulfillment is a complex process with sections that must be gotten just right. Any business that tries to focus on the fulfillment part of their business will lose sight of the core business. Only by concentrating on increasing sales and innovation (not fulfillment), can a small business grow.

By doing all the heavy lifting, an order fulfillment company helps you levels your businesses retail and eCommerce playing field.

Outsourcing order fulfillment allows smaller businesses to compete with the ‘big boys’ in the industry.

• Are you ready to step your game up and play in the big leagues with the ‘big boys’?
• Are you ready to stop losing money because you juggle too many roles?
• Are you ready to sit back and actually enjoy growing your business?

I love good data. Good data in professional sales means that there is a big enough sample group (thousands, not hundreds) and from diverse industries (not just SaaS which is much more tech savvy). I also love innovation and updating what used to work with what works better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demographics are just the start

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

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

Structural insights

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

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

Behavioural insights

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

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

Timing insights

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

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

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

Our relationship

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

Their importance to us

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

Our importance to them

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

Key player engagement

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

In particular, we need understand:

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

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

Active "opportunities"

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

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

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

The dynamic nature of planning

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

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

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

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

Needless to say, these experiences have helped me to come up with some simple, practical templates for developing effective account plans. Please drop me a line or book a call if you’d like to find out more.

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 growth-orientated 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.

Gauging whether a campaign has been successful is one of the key elements of marketing, both in-house and within agencies. A successful campaign provides a sense of pride and achievement, and the knowledge that you have been able to justify the spend on the campaign. But what defines whether a campaign is successful?

In order to answer that question, you firstly have to revisit the very start of your planning process and ask what was the aim of the campaign?

THE AIM

The aim of a campaign is simple – what is it you are trying to achieve by running it? There are many aims a campaign could have. For example:

• Brand Awareness
• Brand Perception
• Lead Generation
• Audience Education

This small list is by no means exhaustive, but they are certainly some of the more common aims of a campaign. In order to measure whether these aims have been hit, each one will have goals and targets associated with it.

GOALS, TARGETS & KPI’s

Marketing campaigns should always have a goal associated with them, as these often shape the measurables. Goals can include:

• Number and value of sales
• Number of Leads generated: this can include a variety of actions including contact form fills, downloads of resources such as eBooks, or event sign-ups.
• Social Media audience engagement
• Social Media audience growth
• Coverage: number of publications, links etc.

From these goals, many people set SMART targets, which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. For example:

“We want to generate 25 leads over the three month period of the campaign” or “We will increase our engagement rate across our social media channels from 3.5% to 5% over the next six months”.

From these SMART targets you can then set Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). KPI’s can be set monthly or quarterly, and are one of the indicators of how your campaign is performing. They will form the basis of the end of campaign report, which is often presented to key stakeholders within the business.

It goes without saying that for different campaign aims, there will be different KPI’s, and so there will be different metrics which will need to be analysed.

• Brand Awareness: Web Traffic, Social Media Engagements (Likes, Followers, Comments, Shares).
• Lead Generation: Conversions, Conversion Rate, Goal Completions, Cost Per Acquisition.
• Sales: Conversions, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Cost Per Acquisition.

The examples above are an indication of the different metrics which should be considered for the specified aims, but you may find that there are other metrics which are more important to your business.

It may also be that you are running an identical campaign to a previous year, for example, you may produce a guide or survey on an annual basis, in which case you can compare the data year-on-year. This will give you a clear indication as to whether a campaign has been more successful this time around.

The success of a campaign is often determined by the margins by which it has hit the KPI’s (or not). However, the crux of how successful a marketing campaign has been successful is whether it has generated return on investment.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Has the activity you have undertaken generated revenue, and has that revenue outweighed the cost of the campaign? Every campaign aim relates to ROI, even brand awareness, as those people who are now aware of your brand should eventually become customers, although this may be further down the line. Whether you are putting money in to a campaign in-house or whether you’re employing a digital marketing agency such as ourselves to do it for you, you want to be able to see financial results. The purpose of spending on marketing is to help the business grow and become more successful. How is that going to happen if your marketing activity and campaigns aren’t driving return on investment?

With this in mind, My Social Agency are hyper-focused on delivering ROI for our clients, and our unique adaptation of the agile approach means that we can test multiple ways of working to see which one generates the most return, over a very short period of time. If one approach doesn’t work, then we scrap it – why waste time and money on an approach which doesn’t deliver results? If you’re not sure how this works, then take a look at our case studies to find out how it’s been successful for a number of businesses across a variety of industries.

Overall, there are a number of metrics which marketing managers and business owners like to look at when analysing the success of a marketing campaign, from web traffic to retweets to conversions, but ultimately they will all lead to ROI, and we truly believe that return on investment is the best way of gauging whether a marketing campaign has been successful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demographics are just the start

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

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

Structural insights

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

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

Behavioural insights

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

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

Timing insights

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

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

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

Our relationship

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

Their importance to us

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

Our importance to them

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

Key player engagement

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

In particular, we need understand:

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

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

Active "opportunities"

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

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

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

The dynamic nature of planning

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

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

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

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

Needless to say, these experiences have helped me to come up with some simple, practical templates for developing effective account plans. Please drop me a line or book a call if you’d like to find out more.

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 growth-orientated 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.

Canva—a popular B2C design tool—has onboarded an impressive 10 million users to date. This is an exceptional feat in itself, but what’s more impressive is that its users are creating 13 designs every second. That’s an average of three new designs every month for every single user. In other words, Canva’s users are thoroughly engaged.

So what’s the secret?

Canva is a great product, but what makes it different from other great products is its ongoing attention to educating and motivating customers with user onboarding.

This shows that you’re missing a lucrative opportunity to maximize user engagement for the long term if you treat onboarding as a one-off or as a side project. But to take user onboarding from the side and put it front and center, product teams need to be aligned to create consistent and compelling onboarding experiences.

Bring onboarding to the fore

It is a familiar story: Product teams learn about the benefits of onboarding, so they give it a go and experiment. They see some improvements from implementing a basic system, but they find it doesn’t deliver the outsized impact they were hoping for. As a result, onboarding falls by the wayside and at best gets a review twice a year. Once ticked off the list, the team moves onto something that they think is more important. But this is a mistake.

As the popular axiom roughly goes: Anything worth doing is worth doing well, but anything worth doing takes effort. And this is exactly the same for user onboarding.

What I’ve found from working with companies like Canva is that the results that great user onboarding can yield—increased activation, retention, and revenue— require at least 5% of your product resources indefinitely. To do this, the leadership teams need to be, well, on board. The reason: user onboarding is a product of various departments: UX, development, customer service, and sales. When onboarding is championed as a driver of user and product success, your team can focus accordingly.

With this dedicated support and focus comes an increased capacity to meaningfully improve onboarding. So let’s take a look at four ways you can make this happen.

1. Align your onboarding and go-to-market strategies.

What a lot of companies don’t realize is that the “ideal” onboarding experience varies, depending on your go-to-market strategy. This is because your users’ motivation and ability are influenced by how they access the product. Aligning your team’s mind-set on this point is a key part of getting onboarding right.

For example, product-led companies who go to market with free trials or freemium products will care much more about user onboarding and want to approach it differently. After all, they are sourcing their paying customers (i.e., revenue) from existing free users. This means it’s critical that the free users engage with the product and see the value as fast as possible.

Pinterest is a standout example of this approach, with their 200 million monthly active users. This achievement is driven by a team that devotes resources to an onboarding process. The result is an experience that’s built for speed and efficiency to get the user to the core value right away.

If companies don’t offer a freemium product or a free trial, they are onboarding actual paying customers—not users—who care about different things. Because customers already have a basic understanding of your features and value, they will be laser-focused on finding a return on their investment as soon as possible. This means customer onboarding needs to reflect these goals and include methods that support all kinds of learning preferences.

Sketch is a good example of this in action. The popular design tool uses a welcome modal to give customers the flexibility to onboard in a way that works best for them, be it through guided tutorials or just diving into the product at their own pace. This onboarding approach offers multiple clear paths to achieve user ROI without leaving customers alienated.

2. Make activation a top-level KPI 

A KPI is a metric that is essential to the success of your business. It creates expectations, supports focus, and aligns teams for action. Because onboarding contributes to the success of the business, activation—a critical onboarding metric—needs to become a top-level KPI.

Activation is all about the first user interactions, where onboarding helps a user successfully engage with the product. This point in the user journey has huge downstream effects on retention, referral, and, ultimately, revenue. Increasing activation will yield greater monthly recurring revenue gains than any other pirate metric.

When you put the performance of your activation rate into the spotlight as a KPI, your team is in a better position to manage, optimize, and react to the way you onboard your users.

3. Appoint someone as the DRI

User onboarding is a team sport. But, as with any team sport, you need a captain. Because without onboarding ownership, you won’t be able to implement the improvements needed to drive any meaningful change.

The directly responsible individual (DRI) is someone who owns the entire onboarding process, from researching, designing and testing to creating educational tools like webinars and in-app messaging. When someone is directly responsible for the success of onboarding—and everything the goes with it—it becomes a recognized business function that gets taken seriously.

So, what does this DRI look like? Because onboarding is a multifaceted subject, the DRI could be a product manager, a product marketer, or a user-experience designer. The main thing is that the person must understand your product inside out and have the ability to empathize with your users. This will help the DRI understand and push through the changes that will have the biggest impact.

Next to this, you need to consider the resources you are willing to allocate to onboarding and then make them abundantly clear to the DRI. How much engineering help will you give them? Are you going to look toward user-onboarding software to supplement your efforts? How much should marketing and/or CS get involved? This will help you set realistic goals when it comes to activation.

4. Know where onboarding begins and ends 

Onboarding doesn’t stop at a user’s first aha moment or after their first session in the product. Onboarding drives users to and beyond the activation event. For existing users and customers, the process continues as you develop new features and increase product value. This is how you improve retention with and loyalty to your product.

For a well-rounded onboarding strategy, your team needs to visualize the full customer journey and anticipate the user’s questions, ability, and motivation at each step to deliver the most effective onboarding solution. This is not something that is reviewed once or twice a year; it should be a consistent focus. Your product is continually evolving; the onboarding process should, too.

Outside of your product, onboarding can take the shape of email, webinars, and sales calls. When you consider the big picture, you can align your teams with each user touch point for a better user experience.

Don’t just check the box

When you fully commit the effort and resources to onboarding, your company will see the results you’ve been hoping for. Onboarding is not a magic switch you can flip on to achieve success; great onboarding needs to be part of your company’s DNA.

Excited to work on making your onboarding great? Take the next step and learn about the EMBED framework for improving your onboarding at The User Onboarding Academy.

The post How to Align Your Team for Maximum User Onboarding Success appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Most businesses have a customer experience vision. Many are developing a strategy and programme. But, few invest in tailored employee training to unite their people around these. For lots of organisations, shrinking budgets, time constraints, the complexity of global and multi-site operations, large employee numbers and high levels of turnover means that customer experience training doesn’t happen. Or it’s sporadic and fragmented. Sometimes companies opt for a quick-fix academic or generic approach, but this often means that the company delivers a ‘vanilla’ experience that’s similar to everybody else. When training is too generic, employees aren’t equipped with the knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and the skills to deliver the difference the business is looking for. When training doesn’t happen, individual management teams and frontline staff interpret what their brand of customer experience looks like the best they can. This inconsistency can impact service quality and brand reputation.

Customer experience leaders stand out because they invest in tailored training. The training is aligned with their branded customer experience programmes to make sure their people are inspired, informed, empowered and motivated to deliver a differentiated experience. Time and again in a consistent way. The most effective brands strategically hard-wire this approach across the business. Best-in-class brands deliver experience their way. It’s distinctive and difficult to imitate.

The customer view

Each and every interaction forms an impression on customers that either adds value or weakens a brand. The quality of the interaction also makes an impression on just about anybody else who is told about a positive or negative experience, or sees a social media comment or overhears a service conversation. And there’s work to do for some companies to improve service quality to ensure the weighting falls on more positive experiences and outcomes. A study by Harris Interactive found that customers came away feeling that customer service agents failed to answer their questions in more than 50% of interactions. This was also evident in research by Aspect which found that the inability to complete a task or answer a question in a satisfactory way was the number one cause of customer frustration. Clearly, there is gap between what companies think they provide and what customers actually experience. Even on the basics of making sure that individual employees are able to efficiently answer and resolve queries and complaints.

Customers still want the human touch

In digital times, customers still want the human touch. Accenture research found that 76% of UK consumers still preferred dealing with human beings rather than digital channels to resolve service issues. While the automation of low-value service tasks is increasing, customers also want to escalate more complex queries to a real person. Training is crucial to equip team members with the knowledge and expertise to effectively answer these too.

Frontline teams need to play a more strategic role in the customer journey

The role of the frontline employee is changing. And they increasingly need to be better trained and better prepared to play a more strategic role in the customer journey. Segment found that 41% of consumers expected store associates to know what they have purchased online, but only 19% experienced this. Retraining staff to use digital technology and proprietary data to make service more relevant is becoming a top priority.

The employee view

A customer promise that clearly states what target customers can expect is a key element of customer experience design. Employees are the gatekeepers of that promise. So it’s essential that management teams understand what the promise means to customer-impacting staff. Do they enjoy the same experience? Or do they feel that their experience falls short of what they are being asked to deliver to customers? Consumers view their experience through the prism of interactions with the ‘brand’ and consistency in what you promise. How you train and empower your employees to deliver this will help ensure the employee experience mirrors the customer experience.

A key question here:

Do you have a reliable and effective programme of training and coaching to build and sustain the ability of your people to deliver your customer experience?

Best practice advice from the customer experience training room

Our expert trainers and digital team have worked directly with many organisations in retail, banking, hospitality, transport, telecoms and the technology sectors. We thought it would be helpful to share best practice advice to inform your training design and the transfer plan you put in place to ensure sustainability. Great customer experience happens by design, not accident. Tailored training helps teams to unite behind a shared vision to deliver a service and sales experience that becomes a ‘hallmark’ of their brand. It’s unique and valuable.

Whether you want to improve skills to better handle complaints, be more efficient at first contact resolution, roll out smart in-store technology to equip staff to make interactions more personalised, easier and faster, or embrace news ways of working, the quality of the training impacts the quality of the outcome. And great training begins with high quality learning design – a skill that is in short supply in the UK.

Training design top tips

• Start by creating a context for the training and link the content to the very specific values, behaviours and skills required to deliver your customer experience
• Tailor the content to different functions and levels
• Create short, focused, modules based on the day-to-day challenges your people face
• Ensure leaders and managers are able (and encouraged) to role-model, coach, recognise and reward the right behaviours
• Build the tools and practical job aids that will ensure the transfer of new skills from the training room to the daily operation

Here are five guiding principles for training to help generate the changes in behaviour necessary to deliver your customer experience

#1 Start with values and beliefs

Skills development on its own does not create belief in a new direction and a commitment to change. The catalyst for change is embedding the new direction into individuals’ values and belief systems. New skills are always required, but these skills need a solid foundation of belief and commitment.

#2 Design from the customer back and link to company purpose and strategy

Be clear about how your employees’ roles connect with your organisation’s purpose, strategy and business results. Designing from the customer back, with a clear linkage to these issues, makes for a much richer experience for participants. It also makes it much easier to secure the active involvement (and attendance) of senior executives in the training rollout.

#3 Create value for the individual

Be clear about the benefit for the employee. The benefit may be in terms of progression, reward or personal satisfaction. Link training to the specific values, behaviours and skills required to deliver your customer experience and highlight the importance of every employee’s role.

#4 Make the training fun and memorable

If training is fun and memorable, the experience carries an important message about the similar impact of behaviours on customer experience. This will also help to consolidate, and trigger, appropriate behavioural responses when employees are back in the workplace.

#5 Model real-world experiences

Model real-world experiences so that employees work directly with the customer challenges they face daily. This creates an opportunity for them to practice, get feedback, reflect and then practice again. This is far more effective in terms of learning than an overly academic or generic approach. When participant’s feel like something is relevant to them they value it more.

Sustaining improvements

If you do not have the internal resource or time to run the training workshops and turn to the expertise of an external provider, make sure capability is transferable so you are self-sufficient and can sustain the improvements.

Customer experience your way

These guiding principles can help unite teams around the vision and strategy that will make the difference to your brand and customers. Valuing and investing in your own people is a major contributor to getting customer experience right. Recruiting for values and training for skills is increasingly common practice among the most forward-thinking businesses. Whether you’re looking at face-to-face workshops or online programmes, or a combination of both, tailored training will ensure your business delivers customer experience your way.

One of the major themes in B2B marketing and sales over the past decade has been the emergence of empowered and independent buyers. Numerous research studies have shown that business buyers are using the wealth of easily-accessible information to perform their own research regarding potential purchases.

Some research has also shown that many B2B buyers are delaying conversations with vendor sales reps until later in the buying process. Several years ago, for example, SiriusDecisions said that 67% of the B2B buying journey was being done digitally, and CEB reported that a typical B2B buyer was 57% through the purchasing process before he or she engaged with a potential supplier’s sales rep.

The idea that B2B buyers prefer a “do-it-yourself” approach has become part of the conventional wisdom of B2B demand generation, but it has not gone unchallenged. For example, in the Altify Buyer/Seller Value Index 2016, two-thirds of surveyed buyers (67%) reported that they sought input from potential suppliers before they began evaluating solutions.

The latest insight on this issue is provided by CSO Insights’ 2018 Buyer Preference Study. This study was a global survey of B2B buyers in 25 industries who are responsible for making purchases of $10,000 or more at companies with revenue of at least $250 million.

In this study, 70.2% of the survey respondents said they prefer to have a clear understanding of their needs before they talk with a sales rep. Almost half of the respondents (44.2%) said they also prefer to identify possible solutions before they engage with a sales rep. So CSO Insights did find that many B2B buyers have a strong preference for self-education in the early stages of the buying process.

This study also revealed, however, that buyers’ behaviors are more nuanced than some pundits have suggested. For example, CSO Insights found that buyers are open to engaging with sales reps early in the buying process under certain circumstances. There is more interest in early engagement when a business challenge is:

• New and unfamiliar to the buyer
• Perceived as risky for the buyer’s company
• Perceived as risky for the individual buyer
• Complex

These findings are consistent with the results of a recent survey of business buyers by McKinsey & Company. In the McKinsey survey, 76% of respondents said it was helpful to speak with a salesperson when they are researching a new product or service. That figure drops to 52% for repeat purchases of products with new or different specifications. And only 15% of respondents found it helpful to speak with a salesperson when they are repurchasing the exact same product or service.

So what should we glean from these research studies? One important point is that B2B buying is a complex phenomenon that cannot be adequately described by a few high-level survey statistics. As humans, we have an inherent tendency to seek simple answers to complex issues, and this often causes us to reach oversimplified and inaccurate conclusions. As Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

The most appropriate watchword for B2B buying might well be “diverse” or “varied.” For one thing, not all B2B purchases have the same attributes. Some are far more complex, require significantly higher investments, and entail substantially more risks than others. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that a rational buyer doesn’t use the same process for every purchase that he or she participates in.

In addition, not all B2B buyers are alike. They have different personalities and decision making styles, and these differences affect how they prefer to learn about business issues and possible solutions. The CSO Insights research revealed that buyers with certain decision making styles are far more likely than others to prefer engaging with a sales rep early in the buying process.

The belief that B2B buyers are self-educating and delaying conversations with sales reps has driven several profound changes in the practice of B2B demand generation. It has provided the impetus for the use of content marketing, led many companies to expand the role of marketing in the demand generation process, and been the catalyst for establishing or expanding ecommerce capabilities. Overall, these responses have been appropriate and beneficial.

But this model of buyer behavior is an oversimplified representation of reality. It is not (and never was) universally true or completely accurate. This means that B2B marketers must be prepared to help sales reps have meaningful interactions with buyers early in the buying process.

Image courtesy of Meaghan O’Malley via Flickr CC.

This article originally appeared at the B2B Marketing Directions blog.

2018 has been a big year for demand gen: From the increasing importance of influencer marketing, content marketing, and email automation, to new laws that change the way businesses are allowed to interact with leads (a ‘little’ thing called GDPR), this year has brought major changes that will either feel like obstacles or opportunities—depending on how prepared you are to deal with them.

The numbers echo this sentiment:

• As of 2017, data shows content marketing has grown to the point where nearly a third of all business spend more $500,000 per year on it—and half of all businesses in the same study have a separate content marketing department.
• Email is still the king of marketing ROI, but it’s also changing as automation and targeting become more important.

To not keep up with these changing trends can be expensive and even lead to legal fallout as the FTC and EU laws catch up with trends in internet communications. Additionally, like most marketing tactics, demand generation is constantly changing to keep up with consumer demand and buying patterns.

In order to crush demand gen this year and stay out of trouble in the process, here are some thing you should know about and integrate into your strategy.

Cultural Shifts in Sales and Marketing Approaches

Changes in marketing trends means changes in marketing culture—and visa versa (as it’s kind of the chicken and egg thing.)

An automated, targeted, multichannel approach requires everyone in your organization be on the same page. Marketing no longer just follows the sales team’s lead. Content creation is no longer just for the creatives; The siloed approach doesn’t work anymore. Instead, you need fluid, cross-channel consistency—because that’s how people use the internet today.

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Customers no longer form an orderly queue at the top of your funnel. As such, your sales and marketing strategy needs to reflect this, taking into account the new “funnel” where customers can enter at any stage. It’s like Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of ANNUITAS, told Invenio Marketing:

“We have to change the way we do B2B marketing, because buyers are light-years ahead of us in terms of sophistication. They want conversations; they don’t want campaigns. They want dialogue; they don’t want one-off contact. They don’t want to be ‘handed off’ to sales; they want continuity with an organization.”

GDPR Compliance

As of May 2018, companies have to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR.) The law calls for some radical and rapid changes for B2B marketers, and while some sources make it sound like a disaster—it isn’t. With the right approach, GDPR compliance is actually an opportunity disguised as a big bureaucratic mess.

GDPR requires some changes in the language surrounding your lead capture process. The wording needs to be less vague so you make it clear people are opting in to your emails. You also have to make it clear that people can unsubscribe at any time.

From a UX point of view, pre-ticked boxes are out. Opt-in options should be granular, meaning that different lists have different boxes to tick for those who want to opt in. It’s also important your consent options are unbundled. This means someone who’s ticked the box agreeing to your terms and conditions hasn’t also subscribed without knowing.

So how is this good news?

While GDPR is going to mean fewer leads, it also means fewer low quality leads. Fewer leads who don’t want to hear from you. Fewer leads who don’t even realize they’ve opted-in. You’ll be trading lead quantity for lead quality.

Thanks to that improved clarity, you can be sure that anyone who opts in really does want to hear from you. Because you’ll have to do more targeting to capture leads in the first place, you’ll be able to reach a niche audience. An easier opt-out process will get rid of the leads who don’t want to be there in the first place and will build trust through transparency.

GDPR will pinch the top of your funnel, but you will see higher conversions farther down the funnel.

Want more on this topic? Separate fact from fiction with our GDPR quiz.

Influencer Partnerships

Influencer marketing has been huge in 2018. According to DemandGen’s report, it topped the effectiveness ratings—right up there with content marketing—among brands and agencies. 33% of marketers are dedicating $500K+ a year to influencer marketing.

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It makes sense as to why: High profile partnerships with influencers help you reach new audiences through channels that can be tough to navigate as a brand.

Consumers expressed equally positive or even more positive feelings towards influencer marketing vs. other forms of advertising in the same media. They rated credibility, expertise, and product experience as top message drivers. People want contextual influencer marketing that feels authentic and comes from a trusted source. As in just about every form of marketing, nobody wants to be “sold to.”

A word of caution: it’s illegal to ask influencers and content creators not to disclose that they were compensated for their partnership with your brand. An alarming 25% of content creators report having received such a request.

Automation

Automation is another trend that’s already big and only getting bigger in 2018.

CMO Editor Giselle Abramovich recently reported that:

• 55% of B2B brands are using automation technologies to nurture leads, perform progressive profiling on leads, and present personalized content.
• 91% of the most successful B2B marketers rate their Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) as “very important” to the overall success of their initiatives.
• Automation improves operational efficiency and reduce overhead (to the tune of around 12%.) It’s one of the best things you can do to adapt your marketing strategy to a multi-channel world.

And marketing experts like Ann Handley of MarketingProfs also see major changes on the horizon for automation. She told us there are three things she’ll be watching for in the rest of 2018:

• User experience. Marketers will focus less on the automation and more on the customer: Is the automation delivering the best possible experience for the customer ? (This could be wishful thinking on my part.)
• Quality content. Less becomes more. (I say this every year. I hope it’s finally true.) Marketers become increasingly sophisticated with their marketing automation programs.
• This is the year of “How can we get more excellent with our use of automation to enhance customer loyalty?”

So why is automation so large in marketers’ minds these days?

Because it does wonders for efficiency. Automation streamlines data collection, analysis, and sharing. The data you collect through automation and segmentation can have benefits across your organization. When automated data is shared company-wide, it helps build appreciation for your marketing team and helps further break down silos.

Email marketing vs. Content marketing

As you can see in the chart below, email is still the most effective marketing channel. Content marketing is close behind, trailing by just one percentage point. But the trouble with content marketing is it’s much harder to execute—as you can see from the orange line (and as you might know from your own experience.)

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The reason? Content evolves quickly and is hard to keep up with. Specialized work like SEO puts a lot of the distribution and exposure out of your hands. Open rates are a challenge, for sure, but it’s hard to beat the inbox for reaching your customers directly and personally.

But that’s not to say this is an either/or situation.

For best results, your content and email strategies should be mutually supportive and work toward the same goals. Content drives email conversion, and email marketing drives people to your content and can even boost SEO.

Demand Gen: Always Evolving

There’s a lot to be excited about this year if you have the right information and are ready to adapt to some changing trends in demand gen.

The future is bright for efficiency, lead quality, conversion rates, and ROI. Even new regulations are something to be excited about as GDPR presents a win-win with less spam and unwanted emails for customers and higher quality leads for businesses.

Why should you add bots to your site? They aren’t some far-fetched, futuristic technology -- and they’re not just for marketing and customer service teams. Implementing a live chat strategy can be game-changing for sales reps. You’ll increase lead retention, demos booked, and pipeline health.

Jack Matsen , a senior account executive at AdStage , a performance marketing reporting and automation company, saw a 38% increase in demos booked within six months of implementing a chat bot.

Matsen says, “Our bots collect information that gives us time to come prepared with potential solutions before we walk into meetings with new prospects. Having this information ultimately leads to better, more beneficial conversations.”

Learn more about Conversations -- the free universal inbox built for teams

Chatbots will help your team scale the volume and quality of incoming leads. Use them to replace your most monotonous exchanges -- like qualifying leads or booking meetings -- so you and your team can stay focused on the very human conversations that matter most.

How to Set Up a Lead Bot

Know when it’s time to install a lead bot

Lead bots are helpful for all reps, but they’re especially valuable for small or young sales teams. If you’re scaling a company with a skeleton sales organization, bots can provide the extra set of sales hands you need at a fraction of the cost of hiring additional reps.

And bots don’t just help you scale, they also keep your team focused on high-quality conversations that have better chances of converting into demos and closed deals.

When your team is stretched thin or focused on efficiency, lead bots can save reps hours of cold email and phone outreach that offer little chance of conversion.

Remember, never add a bot as a barrier. The goal is to make better, faster connections with site visitors. To see the full range of success with bots, you must be ready to engage with and provide value to these leads.

Target the right site visitors with the right message

Know who visits your website and who your messages should be targeted to. If you don’t already have access to this information, your marketing team can help.

When you’ve identified your visitors, provide them with a helpful, targeted message they’re ready to hear. Sometimes, that means sending them no message at all (i.e., existing customers).

Matsen uses bots to improve inquiry response time and the quality of conversations he and his team are having with prospects.

“We know buyers move faster than ever before,” he says. “As salespeople, we have one hour -- from inquiry to contact -- before the buyer moves on. Bots provide a great way to engage with prospects the moment they’re ready to take the next step with your company.”

Choose which page the bot should appear on

Place bots on high-intent pages (i.e., pricing pages, feature pages, and demo scheduling pages). Visits to these pages should signal high likelihood a lead is ready to learn more about your offering.

Putting a bot that asks, “Would you like to schedule a demo?” on a blog page means you’ll provide a bad user experience for casual blog readers and existing customers.

Matsen uses lead bots on the company’s product pages. He explains, “Salespeople are meeting buyers later in the decision-making process. This means prospects are doing their own research. If we have prospects spending a lot time on specific product pages, we can start conversations the moment a buyer has questions.”

In the age of the internet, it can feel like salespeople are becoming obsolete. Bots actually allow reps to infiltrate their prospect’s research phase and become an ally from hour one.

Know what makes a sales qualified lead

Before you deploy your lead bot, revisit the criteria for sales qualified leads at your organization. Then, align with marketing to identify and appropriately message to these people. When determining sales qualified leads, here are a few questions to ask:

• Is this prospect in your territory?
• Do you sell to their industry?
• What’s their company size?
• Does the account fit your company’s buyer persona?

Make sure sales and marketing are in agreement on the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) as well.

This is a crucial handoff point between marketing and sales, so each team should agree on the terminology. It should reflect a combination of traits and actions indicating a lead is a good fit for your company and ready to speak with a salesperson.

Using a lead scoring or lead grading program relying on data from your closed-loop analysis can also determine the importance of different activities to ensure your lead bot reaches qualified leads.

Matsen’s sales team relies on bots as key players in qualifying leads. He says, “We’ve focused our bots on the qualifying process. This gives prospects a way to learn more about our products -- even when we're not there. It also helps us understand what challenges prospects are tackling, right away.”

Matsen explains his sales team has a bot that generically asks, “What brings you to AdStage today?” This broad question actually yields a variety of illuminating responses, from, “I’m looking for a closed-loop reporting tool,” (which AdStage offers) to “I’m looking for a Pinterest ad creations tool” (which they do not). “These responses,” Matsen continues, “allow the leads to qualify themselves, saving us time and valuable resources.”

Know your brand

Leverage your brand voice through the bot. This is another area where working with your marketing team can be helpful. Make sure the tone and language your bot uses aligns with your brand.

For example, if your company sells software to startup engineers and your brand voice is informal, relatable, and quirky, your bot might say:

• Do: “Hello there Earthling, can I answer any questions about our totally-worth-it pricing?”
• Don’t: “Hello. Please let me know if I can answer any questions about our product pricing.”

Whatever your brand voice, your bot’s tone should be personal, friendly, and infused with your brand’s personality.

Build the bot

It’s tempting to slip all sorts of qualifying questions in before the bot routes leads your way. But, remember, bots should make it easier for prospects to learn about your product/service, not harder.

Decide which questions are most pertinent to each targeted lead. If you’re messaging leads on your demo landing page, don’t weight them down with questions about company size, goals, or challenges.

Have the bot ask, “Would you like to schedule a demo?” and share a link to your calendar. Close for the next step immediately, then have your bot route leads to you for follow-up questions -- or simply send them an email.

Route leads to the appropriate rep

If your pricing-curious lead has questions about the premium package, have your bot send that lead to the salesperson who handles premium accounts -- or route these leads to your SDRs to give them a quota boost.

And don’t forget to be helpful to unqualified leads as well. You never want your poor-fit leads to feel like they’re at a dead end.

Assign the bot a helpful response or have it send these leads to a designated salesperson or customer service rep who can put them in touch with resources better suited to their needs.

Once you’ve handled initial questions over chat, follow up with your promising leads via email to take things to the next level.

Building bots is a skill. Build, test, iterate, and improve. Matsen sums up his experience with bots, saying, “Chatbots help salespeople in a myriad of ways. Most notably, they'll help you save time, start more conversations, and connect you with information that leads to a better buyer journey and more closed deals.”

The very best prospectors — and for that matter, the very best sales leaders over all — consistently and persistently ask for referrals.

In my book, “High-Profit Prospecting,” I offer you some specific techniques and situations by which to ask for referrals.  Yes, I know some salespeople are hesitant, but my experience has shown that most people want to help someone who has helped them.

As you excel at providing value to your customers, you already have a foundation on which to ask for referrals. Grab a copy of my book, and you’ll be on your way to mastering the prospecting skills to strengthen your success and ability to serve more customers.

And don’t forget how a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results