Looking for sales tactics for your team? We’ve listed five sales strategies for you, plus a bonus, so read on to find out more. RELATED: Sales Development Action Plan For 2019 In this article: The Evolution of Sales Development Develop a Live Call Framework for Sales Tactics Focus on Multithreading Target Accounts Design SDR Onboarding Activities […]
The post The Five Sales Development Plays To Nail In 2019 w/Dan Gottlieb @TOPO appeared first on The Sales Insider.
Here is a strategy that utilizes the trust ladder to help you reach the highest level of rapport or trust with a prospect. Read on to learn how you can use it to increase your results on a prospecting call. RELATED: Building Rapport With Customers: 3 Steps To Build Trust In Minutes In this article: […]
The post Climb The Trust Ladder To Increase Results In Prospecting appeared first on The Sales Insider.
If you want greater success in any area, these ten questions will help you deconstruct your pursuit and your plan. These ten questions that point you towards success sound simple when you first hear them but answering them proves difficult. The answers, however, provide you with a definite direction about what you need to do to find your success.
Your idea of success may not match anyone else’s. It doesn’t have to, nor should it. The principles of success, however, don’t change by person, time, or place. Let these questions point you towards success.
"The USA Today bestseller by the star sales speaker and author of The Sales Blog that reveals how all salespeople can attain huge sales success through strategies backed by extensive research and experience."
Buy NowThe post 10 Powerful Questions That Point You Towards Remarkable Success appeared first on The Sales Blog.
In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.
Michael Mayday explains just how B2B content consumption habits have changed and the research bears this out. Read all about it (thanks for the mentions too): How Newsroom Models Boost B2B Content Consumption.
The 5 Things Salespeople Need to Build Their Personal Brand. Building a personal brand isn’t about catering to your sales ego. It’s about creating meaningful, trustworthy connections with your prospective buyers that foster a long, healthy relationship with your company moving forward. Well said, Brittni Kinney.
As David Brock will tell you,Our Customers Are Voting With Their Time. Go get your customers’ votes! You will set yourself apart from everyone else.
Better B2B Video: 6 Key Tips.Good ones, thanks to Beth Negus Viveiros.
The One Thing You Can Do to Triple Your Productivity Most of you know how much we like productivity tips. Here’s a really good one from our friend, Anthony Iannarino.
Jill Konrath tells us How to Make Your Value Proposition Stronger with a great reminder: “No one wants to buy your product or service. They only want what it can do for them.”
How to Better Know Your Customer in the Era of Digital Transformation by Hassan Monsoor. Thanks for the great insights!
This is a discipline we try to exercise reguarly. Handwritten Notes Are Still the Best Way to Reaffirm Your Customer Relationships. Here’s How to Write a Good One. We agree, Jason Aten.
3 Easy Steps to Bulletproof your Sales Forecast [Plus Handy Calculator] Fortunately for you, according to Margaret Weniger, hope doesn’t have to be a strategy. Instead you can use this nifty future pipeline calculator to help you use data to generate a realistic number based on facts.
Lee Odden knows, and experienced business marketers know that collaborating with influencers can open doors for B2B brands to connect their value messaging to an audience that’s actually interested. Check out The Guide to B2B Influencer Marketing for CMOs [Infographic]
The post B2B Reads: Stronger Value Propositions, Bulletproof Sales Forecasting, Tripling Your Productivity and More! appeared first on Heinz Marketing.
Imagine this: You’ve been going to the gym regularly for a few weeks and you’ve noticed the same good-looking person there almost every time. You’re single, and this person is piquing your interest.
You work up the nerve to finally make small-talk with them about one of your mutual exercise habits. They respond with enthusiasm which, at first, really excites you. They’re returning your interest!
Within the first five minutes of getting to know each other, however, they ask, “Ok, so, now that I know your name and what you do for a living, how do you feel about having three kids and living over in that cute new suburb on the west side of town?”
(Are you hearing the sound of screeching brakes?)
In that scenario, you would probably run for the hills. This person has just jumped the gun, oh, about 7 years … and demonstrated exceptionally poor judgment, to boot.
In business — especially B2B — when you try to sell to your customer in your first interaction with them, this is exactly how it feels.
There may be a lot of noise today with digital marketing — but it’s getting easier to shut out that noise, too. To keep your customers engaged (and not running for the hills), you have to build the customer relationship in the same thoughtful, deliberate way you would build a romantic relationship — one step, one conversation, one trust-building activity at a time.
Back to the dating analogy: Even on a blind date, the stage has already been set and expectations have been created.
Consciously or subconsciously, they’ve created a picture of you in their mind. The person who set you up described what your date would be like; the place you’re meeting your date influences how the date will go (a coffee date feels much more casual than a dinner date, for example); the time of day you meet tells you about the person’s preferences; and so on.
All relationships begin before the first conversation. Customer relationships are no exception.
The customer relationship begins the first time the customer is made aware of your company.
Whether that be through advertising, word-of-mouth or a Google search, the first moment a person becomes aware that your brand exists, the seed of the relationship is planted — and this is what the customer relationship is going to sprout from.
You have the ability to build, maintain and influence the relationship from before that point of mention all the way through the sale — and beyond.
In fact, when the relationship is managed well, this is a cyclical thing:
There are touchpoints at every step of the customer journey — and every touchpoint is an opportunity to grow the relationship.
Source: Marketo’s State of Engagement report
While you’re getting to know a new, exciting person, you spend some time together doing fun activities and having character-revealing conversations. You go on dates and you share stories with one another.
The more you find out about this person, the more effort you both put forth in developing the relationship. The relationship becomes mutually beneficial.
Building relationships with customers is the same process.
You need to understand the customer to grow the relationship. Who are they? How are they talking about their problem? Do they even know they have a problem? Are they aware that products or services exist to help eliminate the problem?
Ask them.
Ask them directly through customer interviews. Ask them passively through surveys and review requests. Ask them second-hand by mining competitor reviews.
In this stage, you’ll also be assessing where the customer is on the awareness spectrum.
When you get to know your customer on a deeper level, listening to them and understanding how they feel about where they’re at, you can start talking to your customer like the human being they are.
And when you understand who your customer is as a human being, you can help them so much more effectively.
You can share answers with them: “This is what we hear is happening with people like you/companies like yours. Here is how we see people solving the problem.”
You can invite them into conversation with your emails: “If this is a familiar challenge to you, let’s talk about this. Here’s how to connect with me.” (Me, not us. This is a relationship, after all.)
As you grow this conversational relationship, your goal should be to get your customer to feel that yours is a company they can talk to. That you’re going to respond to them. That you’ll welcome anything you bring forward to you.
Once that conversation is started, keep it going! Move them through the spectrum of awareness by providing more value — targeted to their needs — at every step. Blog posts, downloadable assets (like e-books and white papers) on high-level topics, newsletters and infographics are all good content types to get the customer journey started on the right foot.
Assuming by this point you have the customer’s email address, follow up with them and make sure that they’ve found what they are looking for. Send emails from a person, not a department or a company, so you can use “I” and “you” statements. Nurture email sequences are great for this purpose — and don’t let the automation aspect discourage you from asking them to hit reply with any questions!
When you respond, be sure to do it quickly. Studies have shown that the faster you respond to a lead, the more likely they are to buy from you. Even waiting an hour decreases conversion rates 10-fold!
And remember: Do NOT try to sell them on your company at the earliest stages of awareness. You will come off like a sleazy car salesman … and they’ll shut you out.
Encourage customers to engage, to get in touch — not to shut you out. And most importantly, don’t piss them off. I loved how Leah George put it during her talk at Digital Summit Denver 2019: “Attention is the new currency. The challenge isn’t reaching [your audience]; it’s avoiding pissing them off.
As their awareness of your brand and offerings grows, you can start to offer white papers, guides and e-books on narrower topics so the customer can explore their problem more deeply — and start to make the connection between your company and solving their problem.
You develop a conversational relationship by being responsive and helpful. And through conversation, your customer gains an increased awareness of — and trust in — your brand.
Only when the customer knows what their problem is, and that it’s solvable, do you start presenting your solution as an option. At this point in the customer journey, content like case studies can go a long way to telling your customer, “We solved the same problem for someone just like you, and here’s how we did it.”
In the personal relationship scenario, after you’ve been courting a while, people start to ask about your next steps.
When are you going to move in together? Get married? Have kids?
And by now, you have answers to some of those questions. You and your partner have likely already had conversations about how to move forward.
In a business/customer relationship, by now you have established yourself as a trusted resource whose primary aim is to legitimately help your customers. You’ve given them information to resolve their problem, you’ve referred them to helpful resources, and you’ve offered yourself up as a resource too.
As a result, your customer now finds you trustworthy and caring.
Now is the time to pop the question.
Only after you’ve put forth the time and energy to establish and grow the relationship should you directly ask them to buy your product or service. You have to have this connection established, and then you can talk about selling them a solution.
Once you’ve been in a relationship long enough to have memories, it’s nice to reflect back on them occasionally. Maybe you’ll pull out that photo album of your wedding and reminisce about how you got there.
In a business scenario, it can be helpful to think back on the sales experience and map out the customer journey. Start with how the customer heard about your brand, and map out every step in the process up to where the customer is now (hopefully that’s the loyal advocate / repeat buyer stage of the relationship!)
Understanding how the customer journeyed from where they were to where they are now can help you create an even better journey for the next customer. Use what you learned — always be researching (ABR!) — and iterate on the next campaign.
Every happy customer is an opportunity to learn, iterate and improve the journey for the next customer.
The single question I hear most often from salespeople is, “How do I compel my prospective client to take action?” We have to unpack this a bit to explore what’s behind this question. You can compel your client to take action, but much of what salespeople believe is compelling doesn’t achieve the outcome.
One of the reasons for the question as to how you compel your dream client to change is your having lost control over the process—if you ever had it at all. One helpful way to think about selling is that you sell a meeting, sell the process, and then sell your solution. Many—or most—salespeople sell the meeting and then work on selling the solution. By avoiding the sometimes difficult conversation that is selling the process, they leave meetings with no defined next steps—and no commitment from their prospective client (see this video on non-commitments and soft-commitments).
To control the process, you must make a case for the next meeting after each meeting. You can set the stage for that commitment even early in the process. (See Neil Rackham’s Spin Selling and my second book, The Lost Art of Closing). When you leave a meeting without a commitment, you end up trying to compel them to do what comes next over email and voicemail, two mediums that make it difficult to compel action.
Once you lose control, it is difficult to recover. The best thing to do is to sell the process when that is possible.
One of the challenges in traditional discovery is that it isn’t as potent as it once was when it comes to compelling change. The difference between what I call Level 3 Value Creation and Level 4 Value Creation, is that Level 3 tends to be reactive, while Level 4 is proactive. In the first case, you ask your prospective client about their existing challenges. In the second, you set the context for change by working to compel change.
Traditional discovery assumes the prospect knows what and why they need to change. Even though the conventional ways we think of eliciting the prospective client’s challenges and opportunities are still useful, other approaches provide a greater range of action, something we might call Exploration. A Level 4 approach would allow you to help shape the lens your client is looking through to help them recognize the more significant, more systemic threats and opportunities, as well as the improvement to their strategic outcomes. (You can find more information about this approach in Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition).
While traditional discovery assumes the client is—or should be—already compelled to change, we now start with an assumption that salespeople can and should work on making a compelling case for change. A modern approach does not preclude the idea that it isn’t beneficial to develop and test a theory as to what is already compelling your dream client.
In every vertical, there are systemic challenges that some companies have not addressed. There are also external forces that are either putting pressure on these companies to change or soon will be. The easiest way to get a glimpse of what these forces are and how leaders think about them is to look at the financial filings of publicly-traded companies. Their disclosures to investors describe their forward-looking strategies, as well as what they believe to be threats to their results.
If you can tie your theory about why your dream client should change to what is already compelling them to do something different, your solution has a better chance of moving forward.
I once heard a salesperson ask a C-level executive that was speaking at their sales kickoff meeting what he would have to do to become the executive’s number one priority. The executive told the salesperson what he sold would never be their top priority, but that if he could help improve any of the top three, he’d get much attention.
The reason leaders count on trusted advisors is that they are so busy driving results in their business that they can’t track everything going on around them. They tend to surround themselves with people who can see around corners and cover the gaps for them. Sometimes, when you are at your very best, you know what should be compelling them before they do.
A trusted advisor doesn’t show up after their client is damaged by not changing soon enough. The advice, “You shouldn’t have done that,” isn’t helpful after the fact.
There is an advantage in creating and winning opportunities by shaping the opportunity well in advance. By providing the context around why your dream client should change, what they stand to lose or gain, and helping them by providing them the right questions, you position yourself to both create the opportunity and win it. By waiting until someone else has done this work, you end up giving them a distinct advantage.
This is Level 4, proactively making a case for change. If you believe it’s more difficult, try selling against someone who has shaped your dream client’s view of their business and what they need to do.
When your dream client isn’t compelled to take action, including the next meeting, what you are missing implications. There are two things salespeople try to leverage as implications that don’t often rise to that level for their dream clients.
If you want to compel change, you have to focus on the implications of not changing now. Anything less than that isn’t likely to get your prospective client to take action.
The post Why You Struggle To Compel Your Dream Client To Act Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.
Your potential customers want to buy quickly and comfortably through an integrated experience. They sign in from different devices and communicate through all available means. They are real-time users looking for a rewarding shopping experience, and they expect the best service.
Customers used to go to a physical store to see products, check prices and make purchases. Today, they shop digitally through different channels. This means that customers can check your product’s features on social media, request prices via email, and purchase through your webchat. In fact, according to a Zendesk study, 67% of online shoppers have made purchases in the past six months that have involved multiple channels.
This new way of shopping has led companies to offer multiple contact channels as a means for survival in today’s market. It’s extremely important to respond to your customers’ needs through different channels, but it’s useless if you don’t have a strategy to coordinate and organize those interactions.
63% of customers want to be able to switch smoothly from channel to channel. Today having an Omnichannel Customer Service strategy which integrates all communication channels of a company has become a must in order to make interactions easier for customers. The goal is to provide a consistent service so that the user doesn’t notice differences, overlapping or errors between the channels.
In a constantly growing digital landscape, with more and more apps, platforms and channels to interact on, it becomes essential for companies to be where their customers are. And it is not just about being there: it is also about adapting the experience to each channel while, at the same time, providing an integral overall customer experience.
A report by Aberdeen Group revealed that companies with sustained omnichannel customer engagement keep an average of 89% of their existing customers, while those with poor omnichannel customer engagement only retain an average of 33%. A great tool to achieve such high customer retention are chatbots, since they can provide a fast yet personalized omnichannel experience.
Customers want an integrated shopping experience. They expect you to meet their needs and demands even when they use different channels to communicate. You might understand the value of being present in multiple channels but not have the resources to be able to properly support your customers in each one of these. And this is where an omnichannel chatbot comes into play.
An omnichannel chatbot can be successfully implemented in multiple channels like your website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and wherever users interact but can still be managed from a single platform. Some chatbots even offer integrations with voice and live channels, so that clients can call Customer Service or contact a human agent at any time during the conversation.
But working seamlessly across all channels is just the first step. Aside from that, omnichannel customer service also implies considering customers as individuals, analyzing their records, understanding how they interact and knowing their interests and preferences. Once again, chatbots come in handy since they are made to customize each user’s experience.
First of all, this technology learns from all customer interactions and store information from each user. The data collected is centralized in a single database allowing the company to provide comprehensive and consistent service through all channels.This way, you know which channel the customer has used to contact the company in the past, what type of interaction it was and which products or services they purchased.
Then, once the data is collected, chatbots engage in personalized conversations by understanding each customer’s intention behind their question, they access real-time customer data, and adapt the messages to each individual’s situation.
This type of personalisation can have a strong business impact. A study by Harte Hanks Quarterly, customer-centric chatbots can provide a 300% improvement in customer lifetime value. As an example, Movistar, one of Latin America’s biggest telcos, improved their customer retention by 80% after implementing an AI chatbot, while reducing Customer Service costs by 30%.
As you can see chatbots can help businesses’ strategies in a wealth of ways. Some of the main advantages of an omnichannel experience with a chatbot include:
Some customers will prefer to communicate with your company through online chat or email. Others will choose self-service alternatives like forums and FAQs. And there are those who still prefer social media or even being contacted by phone. These different profiles require a service that adapts to their needs and is always ready to assist them through their preferred channel. A chatbot solution allows you to integrate them all: you can add it to each digital channel while still integrate it with your Customer Service phone line.
Time is a key factor for ensuring a positive user experience with your brand. An omnichannel chatbot has a strong impact on immediate responses. It can provide solutions for the user in just a few seconds. In fact, if your chatbot is powered by Artificial Intelligence, it can reply in a human-like way to make it easier for your customers to interact. Therefore, it’s an excellent feature to increase sales: the faster you provide information, the greater the likelihood the customer will make a purchase.
In fact, according to Inside Sales, if you wait 5 minutes to respond after a lead initially makes contact, there’s 10x reduction in your odds of getting in touch with that lead. After 10 minutes, this figure plummets to a 400% decrease in your odds of retaining that customer. Given these stats, it becomes clear that fast responses should be a priority for companies in their customer service strategies.
If the service meets your customers’ expectations, they will be more satisfied with your company — and satisfied consumers buy more. According to a report by Harvard Business Review, a 5% increase in customer retention may mean an increase of up to 95% in a company’s annual earnings. On top of chat, chatbots all alone can increase online sales by 25%. The flexibility offered by an omnichannel experience can be a great ally for your company’s growth.
Storing your customers’ data in a single place helps with predictive analysis, allowing you to make more focused and assertive strategic decisions. Moreover, it’s a great source of information about your current customers and your potential buyers. Having this information at hand will help you develop very efficient Marketing and Sales initiatives.
Consumer behavior is constantly evolving. Adapting and establishing new ways to connect with them is essential. Remember that an omnichannel strategy focuses on your customer’s current needs, so you must be available at all times and through all channels.
With Omnichannel Customer Service, you will encourage successful user experiences, exceed your customers’ expectations and improve your brand’s reputation, resulting in amazing outcomes for your company.
A version of this post originally appeared here.
Adding a trade show interactive has become one of exhibitors’ favorite tools to getting today’s more reluctant show attendees to cross from the aisle and into and their booth space.
Why are trade show interactives more necessary than ever? Let me count the ways:
For all these reasons, trade show interactives are more popular than ever.
What actually is a trade show interactive? It can have many elements about experience, senses, journey, and more. Here is our definition:
A trade show interactive takes attendees beyond just looking at displays or conversing with booth staffers. With a trade show interactive, attendees interact in a staged, planned, personalized, multi-sensory way with objects, technology, games, and people to more memorably experience the exhibitor’s marketing message or story. A trade show interactive can be as small as a trade show game on an iPad or as large as an entire island booth.
Now that we have a more formal definition, let’s do deeper dives into various key aspects of trade show interactives.
Creating a trade show interactive requires a shift in perspective. Marketers and agency creatives have expertise about their company and client brands. They represent those brands in digital marketing campaigns, print ads, direct mail, and other mediums.
Now, the goal is to create activities that help trade show attendees experience, absorb, and retain brand elements and competitive advantages.
You can get inspired for your own trade show interactives by:
Exhibitors love trade show games because they give attendees a fun, non-threatening way to enter their booth and enjoy themselves. Games shake attendees out of their trade show stupor and put them in a more heightened state. At that point, exhibitors can more easily engage their booth visitors in meaningful discussions.
Trade show interactive games can run the gamut from an off-the-shelf activity that sits on a table top or fits in the hands of attendees, to large-scale customized tech marvels played on a stage and overseen by a game host.
The best trade show games not only fun for attendees, but also:
For many exhibitors and attendees, touch screens are an integral part of any trade show interactive. Perhaps the most common tech used in trade show booths are iPads and other tablet computers. Those touch screens allow visitors and booth staffers to navigate websites without a mouse or keyboard.
Exhibitors also design trade show interactives that leverage the touch screen in every visitor’s pockets: their smart phones. This can include creating interactives that encourage or require smart phone use, such as sharing photos with show-specific hashtags in order to win a prize.
To stand out even more, exhibitors go beyond iPads and smart phones in two meaningful ways: First, they use larger touchscreens, and second, they use more sophisticated media than websites.
While an iPad allows for a personalized, one-on-one experience, a larger touchscreen monitor lets groups of attendees engage with a presentation or an app. Exhibitors can build their trade show activity within a custom app that allows for bigger impact, still using the navigational superiority that a touch screen provides.
Custom apps deployed on large touch screens powerfully digitally portray and explain physical products. Prospects can interact with product specs, videos, literature, 3-D product models, capabilities, uses, and more.
While most custom apps let attendees navigate information brought together especially for the trade show experience, other custom apps can take visitors on a digital journey. This may be a game, a self-driven presentation, or more.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are two of the more popular of the higher tier of technologies for trade show interactives.
Virtual Reality allows exhibitors to create trade show interactives that give attendees an even more personalized and sensory experience. Virtual Reality surrounds and submerges attendees within a digital world that portrays your products, locations, games, and customer experiences.
Augmented Reality overlays computer-generated images, animations and objects over real objects seen through the view of a smart phone or iPad. trade show interactives. Attendees enjoy the interactive aspect of Augmented Reality as they digital elements appear and move, prompted by where the attendee aims the iPad.
Exhibitors searching for trade show interactive kiosks and displays can widely range in size and substance:
The first two choices are more common and manageable for exhibitors. Plug-and-play trade show interactives give exhibitors the freedom to experiment with various promotional campaigns as they move through their trade show schedule. Trade show interactive kiosks and smaller displays also let exhibitors integrate the same promotional idea in a wider variety of booth sizes.
When ambitious exhibitors decide to host an experiential marketing campaign, they desire trade show interactive displays in the largest sense of the concept. These exhibitors want their display to act as a stage to host the activity. So rather than design their booth around the usual company features, benefits, and product images, their display instead is designed to facilitate the interactive experience itself. At this point, the exhibit and the experience are combined.
Are You Ready For A Trade Show Interactive?
Trade shows continue to thrive as a marketing medium, because they get thousands of potential buyers in the same big room as sellers. But, to get those attendees into your booth and then have a meaningful, memorable experience, more and more exhibitors are relying upon trade show interactives. Hopefully this article has given you additional insights into what these interactives are, and how they can improve your trade show performance.
This blog post originally appeared here.
If you only had 90 days to penetrate the market and produce sales, what would you do?
While you could come up with a complicated plan that won’t deliver results for half a year or more, you can get better results, faster, by implementing a DRIP Marketing Plan.
Keep reading to learn how to put together this 5-step plan — and penetrate your market in just 3 short months.
In sales, no matter how much you may wish otherwise, the fact is a prospect buys on their own timeline. Not yours.
If they won’t buy today, you must develop a plan to stay in touch until they do.
You need a sales engagement plan to deliver those touches. And you need to take a multi-touch approach, so the effort comes off as natural and organic.
Enter the drip campaign…
Now, traditionally, it was thought that 7–10 touches were required to engage prospects and get them ready to talk to a sales rep. And for that, an automated email series stood out as the best way to deliver those touches.
As it worked.
For a time.
But studies are showing that the old B2B sales and marketing mix isn’t working anymore. In fact, BrightFunnel report found that from 2014 to 2015:
Clearly, a typical, email-only drip campaign isn’t enough.
Which is why my team and I developed a system to penetrate the market with Directed Relationship Intervention Prospecting (DRIP).
Think relationship selling, sales prospecting, and lead nurturing all rolled into one.
A well-designed DRIP Marketing Plan ensures you stay in frequent contact to build a relationship with the prospect over time. Then, when they are ready to buy, they will think of you first — and will either reach out to connect with you or will be ready to start the sales process when you contact them.
Like the old-style drip campaign, each touch is a drip of water. On its own, it might not amount to much, but over time, every drip adds up to a very large pool.
But with our updated DRIP approach, you’re taking a much more strategic approach to prospecting and lead nurturing — which will help you penetrate the market in record time. Keep reading to learn how to put it to work in your sales process starting today.
Here’s how to create your DRIP Sales Plan to penetrate the market in 5 Simple Steps:
Shotgun methods of prospecting may produce results, but it really is sheer luck if they do. The chances that you happen to knock on the right door, or dial the right number, at the exact time a prospect is ready to buy are actually quite slim.
Granted, sales is a numbers game. You already know you have to make a certain number of calls to find one prospect. But what if you could improve the odds?
If it used to take you 20 calls to find one prospect, how much more would you sell if it only took you 10 calls?
The fact of the matter is where you prospect is as important as how much you prospect. In other words, you should spend your time where you have the greatest chance of making a sale today.
It is dangerous to believe that every company can and will buy your product or service.
For example, if you sell restaurant supplies, it is unlikely that you will make any sales to retail clothing stores. You would be better off not even trying to in the first place!
To maximize your prospecting time, you need to clearly define the types of companies that will most likely buy your products. This definition is commonly referred to as your target market, and it is essentially a description of your current and future customers.
RELATED: 4 Steps to Create a Buyer Persona Sales Reps Will Use (Template Included)
This description should include:
Be aware, your target market definition may be more specific, depending on the product or service you sell.
The best way to define where to spend your prospecting efforts is to analyze where you have been successful in the past. Make a list or spreadsheet of all of your last quarter’s sales, and cross reference it to your target market definition, with a separate column for industry, size of business, geographical location, etc.
Do you see trends emerge? Do you make more sales to certain sized companies in particular industries in specific geographical markets? Chances are you do, and that is where you should be spending your prospecting time.
Just as it is dangerous to assume that every business can buy from you, it is just as dangerous to believe that every business within your target market can buy from you at any time!
To successfully penetrate the market, you need to know how often your prospects buy your products. In other words, how long is the typical buying cycle.
This is not the same as how often customers use your products, but rather how often they renegotiate the contracts for their use. For example, you use your car every day, but you only buy a new one every few years.
Knowing where your targets are in their buying cycle ensures, not only are you in the right place, but you are there at the right time. To find this out, you need to develop pre-qualifying questions before you start prospecting.
Asking the right questions can help you determine whether you’re spending your valuable sales resources with the right company (and at the right time).
Here are some sample pre-qualifying questions:
RELATED: Disqualifying Prospects: 50+ Sales Leaders Share Their Best Methods
Now that you have defined your target market and when they typically buy, the next step is to create a list of companies to contact.
Creating a prospecting list can be quite simple. The information you need is readily available from several different sources.
Business Directories – A quick Google search will yield many online directories, many of which can be viewed on the internet at no charge or downloaded for a nominal fee. Some sites to look for include municipal government directories, business associations, the Chamber of Commerce, Boards of Trade, and even the Yellow Pages.
List Brokers – Purchased lists tend to be more expensive, but the benefits of working with a detailed and segmented list may make the investment worthwhile. If you choose to go this route, don’t skimp. A low-quality list broker will often deliver a list that’s old and outdated, making the investment all but worthless.
LinkedIn – Although you can use any social media platform to generate sales leads, the main site for B2B leads is LinkedIn. You can search by company, job title, industry and geographic location. Since every user maintains and updates their own profile information, LinkedIn is the most current and most accurate source for prospecting lists available.
Referrals – Considered by many to be the most valued and effective lead source, studies show very few sales people ever ask. If are one of those sales people, check out this video to get detailed scripts on how sales people should ask for referrals.
RELATED: Why The Sales World Sucks at Earning Referral Business and How You Can Change The Game
Now that all the necessary prep work is done, it’s time to start contacting the companies on your prospect list.
The purpose of your first call is to obtain the name and contact information of the Key Decision Maker (KDM) within each company. A very effective opening greeting that I have used for years is:
“Hi, I hope you can help me today. I am looking for the name of the person in charge of purchasing widgets.”
One of the reasons this greeting is so effective is the job description of the receptionist. We tend to think of them as only gatekeepers; however, in reality, they are responsible to greet and assist all those that call the company they work for.
The chance of any receptionist saying “no” to your request for help in the first sentence is extremely remote. If they did not want to help, they would not be receptionists in the first place!
Also, note that the greeting specifically asks for the name of the person. If you just ask to speak to the person and they are not available, your call could end without you gathering any more information than you had before you made the call. All you have done is waste your time.
By asking specifically for the name of the person, no matter what happens in the rest of the call, at least you have gathered the name of your key contact.
If they are not available to speak with you now, you at least you have their name for next time and can open your second call with, “May I speak to John Doe, please.”
This alone makes your prospecting effort worthwhile!
Lastly, and most importantly, the greeting asks for the person in charge of purchasing your product.
If you don’t actually use the word purchasing, often you’ll get the name of the person who operates or uses your product, as opposed to the name of the person responsible for buying it.
RELATED: A 5-Step Discovery Call Checklist Proven to Increase Conversions by 580%
While important in the process, operators rarely have the authority to make the final buying decisions. Those decisions are normally made by someone higher in the organization, someone who has budget accountabilities for product purchases.
Please note, although you are asking for the person in charge of purchasing your product, you are not actually asking for someone specifically in the purchasing department.
A purchaser’s role is to execute a purchase for a product based on another department’s purchasing criteria. Unless you are selling purchase order forms, your key contact is the person in the other department.
After your opening greeting, be sure to confirm the KDM’s complete contact information, including Proper spelling of name, title, email address.
Even if you don’t talk to the KDM in the company now, your prospecting call doesn’t have to end there. Ask the receptionist your pre-qualifying questions just as you would if you were speaking to the KDM.
The more information you can gather, the better.
In other words, your prospecting call is considered successful if you answered the following questions:
If the prospect passes all you pre-qualifying criteria, and you think they are a prospect today, great! Book your Fact Find appointment and open the sales process.
If not, file it in your CRM system until the prospect’s buying cycle determines further sales contact.
Remember, sales is a numbers game. When doing your first contact calls, you need to be persistent. The chances of you connecting on your first try aren’t great.
As I discuss in detail in my webinar training video, You Can’t Sell Unless You Get In The Door! – How to prospect the executive suites using today’s technologies, use a diversified prospecting approach, including email templates, telephone, and other prospecting techniques, and execute your prospecting activity on a planned schedule.
How many sales touches you make, or how often you “drip” your prospects, will depend on your product and the average prospect’s buying cycle. However, there are some general guidelines you should keep in mind:
If the buying cycle of the prospect indicates he will purchase your product within the next six months, the frequency of contact should be at least once per month until you obtain the Fact Find appointment.
If you believe the prospect will purchase in the next year, the minimum frequency should be once per quarter, moving to once per month in the last six months before the purchase.
When the prospect is not likely to buy for a few years to come, you should contact them at least once per year, and then increase the frequency as time goes by.
If you are not sure of the customer’s buying cycle, or you sell the type of product that can be purchased whenever the prospect sees fit, contact should be made at least once per quarter until you determine otherwise.
As stated earlier, you want to stay in touch with your prospects, so when they are ready to buy your product or service, they think of you first.
The point being, you really can’t stay in touch too often. When in doubt, make the follow-up call!
No matter what we do as sales professionals,
Remember as the old sales saying goes, “Failure is the path of least persistence.”
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We’ve all heard the mantra that the internet has changed the way we do business. Whether it’s video content to bring prospects to your brand, or it’s humans deleting cold emails, there’s no denying that it’s more difficult than ever to reach our customers.
HubSpot is the torch bearer of inbound marketing. Their work led to the launch of inbound sales. But what does that really mean? And can any business put this to work?
First, let’s look at what inbound sales means.
Inbound sales is a sales strategy and methodology that prioritizes the needs, challenges, goals and interests of individual buyers. Forget focusing on closing the sale as soon as possible. Instead, inbound sales professionals know they need to meet consumers where they are, and then guide them through the decision-making process. It’s less about push, and more about helping.
In short, inbound sales is a personalized, helpful, modern sales methodology that focuses on a prospect’s pain points, develops a trusted consultant-user relationship, and turns the traditional sales process into a buyer’s journey.
Got it? Good. Now let’s look at how you can implement inbound sales in your business, on your sales team, or for yourself.
Unfortunately, humans are creatures of habit and finding the path of least resistance. This is true of legacy sales teams as well – they’re human after all! These teams build their sales process around their own needs, not the needs of their buyers.
Too often legacy salespeople ignore the needs of the buyer and fail to support them through the purchasing process. Instead, they tend to focus their energy on simply following a checklist and checking the boxes a sales manager laid out for them.
As a result, the seller and buyer feel misaligned. Worse yet, this self-serving process delivers minimal value to the buyer. Buyers don’t want to be treated like another number; prospected, demoed, and closed. This traditional, legacy path add zero value to the buyer. They can find all the information they would get in these meetings without a sales rep. Sales doesn’t hold that information any longer.
If sales can’t add value beyond the information buyers can find on their own, the buyer has no reason to engage with salespeople at all.
An inbound sales team turns the table, starting with understanding the buyer’s journey. Before they ever pick up a phone or send an email, they make it a priority to understand their buyer’s universe.
It helps to think of the buyer’s journey in three parts:
Awareness
Consideration
Decision
In Awareness, buyers know the challenge they’re experiencing or have a goal they want to pursue. This is where they decide whether it should be a priority.
Want to fully understand your buyer’s awareness stage? Ask these questions:
In Consideration, buyers have a clearly defined challenge or goal. They’ve committed to addressing it. Now they’re evaluating different strategies, tools, and methods available to solve for their needs.
You can begin to understand your buyer’s consideration stage with these questions:
During Decision, a buyer has decided on a solution category. Now they’re looking for a business in this category. They may create a list of specific offerings or brands, and decide on the one that best meets their needs. They could also make this decision very quickly without a list. That’s why inbound marketing is so important to this journey.
Understand your buyer’s decision stage by asking yourself these questions:
You want to support your buyer through their journey. Once you’ve defined that journey, your next step is to build your sales process. An inbound sales process supports the buyer through their purchasing journey rather than focusing on the sales team’s process. With this culture in place, salespeople and buyers feel much more aligned through the buying and selling process. They’re not at odds with each other.
As you begin to develop an inbound sales process, dig into what your salespeople can do at the awareness, consideration, and decision stages to support your buyers.
I’m a fan of HubSpot’s four-part framework for your sales process. They call it the Inbound Sales Methodology:
Identify
Connect
Explore
Advise
First, an inbound sales team identifies strangers who may have goals or challenges they can help with. Consider these strangers leads now that you know who they are.
Next, inbound sales teams connect with these leads. Here they help the leads decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge. At this point the lead becomes a qualified lead if they decide to move forward.
Third, inbound sales professionals explore their qualified leads’ goals or challenges. Here you’re assessing whether your offering is a good fit for the qualified lead and their needs. Good fit? These qualified leads become opportunities.
Finally, inbound salespeople advise opportunities on how their company’s offering is best suited to address their needs. If the buyer agrees, these opportunities become customers.
If inbound sales are sales that come to you, then it follows that outbound sales are sales that you went out and won on your own.
You reached out (probably more than once), spoke with a lead over the phone, through an unsolicited email message, or a cold social media outreach, and finally achieved the sale.
With outbound, you’re convincing the client on how your solution fits their needs, oftentimes even before they know they have a need. This cold outreach and convincing model often takes a long time and a lot of resources. This is an outbound sale.
Inbound sales is newer and shinier than its counterpart. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way, or that outbound is dead. Most businesses find they need both working together to achieve maximum sales.
You can use inbound methods to support outbound efforts.
If you know your different buyer personas and their journeys, you should adjust your sales process and align it to that journey as best as you can. That way, you’ll make sure that you’re providing the most personalized experience possible.
Sure, you could throw it all out and start over, but that’s not likely to happen. Bringing the two together can help you drive growth and revenue. Evolution is often better than starting over.
One inbound tool you can use with inbound sales and outbound sales is the practice of social selling. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and others allow your customers to connect with you more directly than ever before.
This also means salespeople can use the platforms to build relationships with potential prospects and monitor social conversations that affect your business world. Then they can join them at the right time and to present their solution. People do business with people they get to know, like and trust. Your sales team is that face of the solution you’re offering.
Get better at social selling with a few tips from Hootsuite:
As we move into the future, and the relationship between business and buyer evolves, inbound sales shows off the true psychology of sales, marketing, and customers. The process works fluidly with many purchasing patterns and tactics worldwide.
You’re a customer. The next time you buy something, take a step back and consider the three steps of Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. How did you become aware of the fact that you need or want something? How did you consider if it’s the item you really want to buy? And how did you decide whether or not to make that final purchase?
Then put that experience to work for your sales team.
Sales deal photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash
Journey photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash
Software end users keep changing. This is especially true for the new end users. Their mindset and what tickles their ears and interests are not quite the same as those of past customers. We have the internet to thank for all types of information accessible to us at just one simple click. It has also allowed buyers to connect with their peers much faster which means that they can get their opinions about a product or service they are possibly interested in before they spend their money to buy it.
With this, we also need to understand that this is not the only change happening in the SaaS buying process. It is crucial that we also change our tactics and how to go about marketing and selling SaaS to customers. Meaning that there are certain sales methods that don’t work as effectively anymore and we have to adapt and upgrade our strategies as well.
Let us start by looking at what doesn’t work for SaaS anymore and what you can do to improve your software sales strategies.
If you take a good look at any great SaaS company, you will see that they all have good marketing systems. They have a big percentage of activities that focus on new business opportunities every single day, making sure that they are testing them and optimizing those activities.
The mistake here is that most of the time we focus too much on inbound marketing. It’s like being able to create a really cool product, but barely anyone gets to know about it. If we solely rely on inbound marketing, it’s less likely we’ll see revenue.
The answer is very easy! In this case, we highly encourage that you consider that you go outbound. By using outbound lead generation strategies, it will make reaching prospects much easier. All your tools are readily available as well. Sales prospecting calls and email are essential outbound tools that you shouldn’t abandon. As for social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are powerful tools as well.
Every consumer has experienced this one too many times. You download software off of the internet that allows you to use its full capacity for a limited trial period, and most of the time the trial period os much shorter than the time you were able to fully maximize and explore all its features. It’s really frustrating on the consumer’s part. And what does that in return mean for you? Well, it drives another possible consumer away from your product. They will be hesitant towards buying your product because they weren’t able to fully explore all that it had to offer to begin with.
In this case, it is wiser to get rid of the limited trial period and convert it into an unlimited one. Hear me out! We suggest that you have the premium features available for the user to enjoy and explore for a limited time. However, when the special feature’s time is over, it is better to still keep the trial available for the consumer to use. That way, possible clients won’t shy away from your product and have a little more time deciding on buying the full version of your software.
Another option is for you to tease them with key premium features that stay locked unless they buy the full version of your software. Once they realize that these specific features are important and useful to their tasks, they will easily decide to go for the full version instead. See? It’s a win-win situation for both parties.
Back in the days, you would have to yap about your product almost 24/7 in order to land a sale. Meetings had to be conducted in person, and because it was so time-consuming to drive or fly out to meet with a client, you would have to sell the heck out your product which leads to overselling and overpromising the capability of your product. If you oversell your software, you’ll lose customers quicker which will bring damage to your brand instead of revenues.
Don’t hurt your brand. Overselling, fortunately, doesn’t work anymore nowadays. Again, thanks to the internet, you can speak to your clients more frequently now through various channels and FAQ’s to keep them in the loop and to be always ready to entertain their concerns. Say, you have a 28-56 sales cycle days, you won’t have to worry about gasping out all the details in one breath and you won’t have to overpromise to make sure they’ll ‘take the bait’. There is going to be a sense of frequency with your clients, so be honest, open, and in touch.
If you’re still struggling with keeping your sales up even after you’ve done all you can, then maybe it’s high time to change things. The days of having to sell all by yourself are gone. It is always better to go and seek out help than wasting time trying to figure out how you can do it on your own because, let’s face it, you can’t. No one can.
We suggest that you seek out a sales coach or appoint a manager to put together a solid sales team. Leave the sales strategizing to them. This way it will boost and improve your sales performance and you can focus on other important aspects of your software business. If you still lack in manpower, then the best solution for you is to outsource a team of competent and professional salespeople who can aid you in this task. It is tested and proven that teamwork always wins.
So, now that we’ve talked about the different SaaS sales tactics that we should abandon or upgrade, sound off in the comments what other strategies should be a thing of the past and what could be their remedies.
This article is originally published at The Savvy Marketer.
Business is about revenues and driving better ROI. To generate revenue, you need to have sales. To sell something, you should have buyers. To have customers, well… therein lies the challenge.
As time passes by, the marketing landscape changes fast. Strategies that have worked before might not work now; so they must be evaluated and re-evaluated for you to stay in the competition in your industry. Most believe that more lead conversions result in higher ROI; this is why a lot of marketers search for the best lead management tools they can use. After all, it can be argued that increasing sales is not always about generating new leads; rather, by maintaining the leads you already have and keeping them coming back to you. Doing so will not only increase the quality of your leads, but it will also help you lessen your marketing expenses since your loyal leads can refer you to new users who might be interested in trying out your products and services.
What about converting your potential lead to an actual lead? Here, conversion rate optimization strategies come into play. Before we define what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is, let us first define conversion. Conversion, as Moz defines it, “is the general term for a visit or completing a site goal.” This goal may be to make a sale, signing up for newsletters, or downloading an app. CRO, according to Moz, “is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action.” It is about finding out what your visitors do on your website, knowing what stops them from converting and fixing this problem.
There are different factors why your visitors are not converting into leads. It might be because of competition in your industry, a change in your consumer’s expectation for customer experience, to name two. While all leads are important, priority must be given to leads who are ready to purchase. Leads who are not ready to make a purchase should be nurtured towards readiness. The goal is to make your prospects become customers.
In this article, we will discuss lead management strategies you can try, identify areas for improvement, and lead management software and tools you could use to help you enhance your game and optimize your ROI.
Photo courtesy of mohamed_hassan via Pixabay
Think of a funnel. The top of a funnel is wide, and it narrows towards the bottom. Sales are like that. At the top, you have your leads or potential customers. In the middle, you sift your leads and reach them, to find out if they are legitimate prospects. This is also the stage where you engage with them to turn them into customers. At the bottom of your funnel is your paying customer—the lead who availed of your products and services. This whole process of converting your leads into customers is called lead management. Simple as it may sound, it is a complicated process that changes.
Photo courtesy of Markus Spiske via Unsplash
Observe your visitors and their behavior on your site. This will help you get an idea on what they’re looking at, their status in their buying journey, and the probability of them buying your product or services. Having valuable insights into your lead’s behavior will give your marketing people an idea on which marketing tactics and campaigns best communicate to them. This will help your sales representatives personalize their sales efforts to successfully turn your lead into a customer. If it seems overwhelming for you to manage your lead information, it will not hurt to try using lead management software to lessen the weight of your work.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Dawson via Unsplash
A lead score permits you to assign values to the demographics of your lead and/or your lead’s behavior on your website. The scores generated will give you an idea who among your leads are ready to move into sales and who need to be nurtured into making a purchase soon. A higher lead score will be given to a lead who is likely to purchase a product or service from your company. Having a lead scoring will help you understand the interest levels of your lead and determine which leads to weed out. VanillaSoft is one of the best lead management tools you can use for lead scoring.
Photo courtesy of Jo Szczepanska via Unsplash
Leads are different and will earn different lead scores. It is best to sort them based on your buyer personas; doing so will increase your lead management CRM. Buyer personas are a detailed sketch of a customer. It may include characteristics, motivations, needs, wants, and preferences. Identify how the products and services you offer can satisfy the objectives of your persona. Refine your persona, as the marketplace evolves. Remember that a lead may not perfectly fit a specific buyer persona you create.
Photo courtesy of rawpixel.com via Pexels
Once you have sorted your leads, distribute them to your marketing or to your sales representatives, depending on their score and personas. Your leads who are ready to buy should be assigned to sales representatives who can assist them through their buying journey until they make that purchase. Leads who are not ready to make a purchase should be assigned to marketing representatives. These representatives have the goal of persuading them through persona-specific contents see why they must avail of your products and services.
By efficiently and effectively distributing your leads to the right representatives, you are making sure that none of your leads go to waste and that all leads are being taken care of. It improves your lead management CRM, as it ensures that your assigned representatives can contact and engage with your leads, making them more likely to buy from you.
Photo courtesy of You X Ventures via Unsplash
Persona-specific contents will make your leads feel that you are customer-oriented. Since buyer personas have unique needs and requirements, approaching them with accurate content that meets their needs will make them more likely to avail of products from you and trust your brand. This will increase the conversion rate on your website. For example, your lead who is not ready to make a purchase might still be in the research phase. If your representative can nurture that lead by sending relevant content such as product overview and promotional offers, then it could help influence their decision. Note that even when your leads become customers, you should still nurture them and make loyal customers out of them. You can do this by offering content that features other relevant products and services they could avail of in the future. These could also be related to their previous engagements with you. You can also ask for their feedback to help improve your strategies.
Consider the media through which your lead engage in social media, email, mobile, and others since you want to ensure that they will actually receive your content.
Photo courtesy of Jo Szczepanska via Unsplash
Lead management is continuous and ever-changing. Diligently observe the business conditions and market signals, and make adjustments based on the trends. Lead-management operation and strategies should be evaluated at least once a month, to ensure that you are on the top of your game. Moreover, the information you generate form your lead management CRM will provide you with up-to-date statistics regarding the quality and quantity of your leads as well as the efficiency of your website.
As mentioned, you can and must add feedback and suggestions from your customers to improve your relationship with them. This will tremendously help improve your strategies, drive better customer experience, and increase your ROI.
Lead management can be overwhelming. Lead management software and tools can be very beneficial in ensuring the efficiency of your strategy. Here are five lead management software that can help you with your lead management CRM:
HubSpot Sales is an all-in-one software geared towards generating leads, increasing revenues, and exceeding customer expectations. This software can be used for free by
your lead management team. You can start using this software for free as an individual salesperson and USD400 a month for sales teams.
Freshsales is a simple and easy-to-navigate CRM designed for high-velocity teams. This software is known for its ability to depict where leads come from. Its analytics and report system are very detailed and organized. If desired, it can also use different filters to summarize your data, giving you the freedom to organize your results, based on your objectives.
You can avail of Freshsales’ 21-day free trial. After which, you can choose among the four paid options they offer, with prices depending on the scale of your business. An annual payment option is also available, which can save you money compared to paying monthly.
Pipedrive is one of the easiest sales tools to use. This software is customizable, depending on your preference; and you can choose to stay logged in constantly to make sure you can observe how your lead management is working. Pipedrive sorts your leads and helps you approach each type of lead effectively without wasting too much time. They offer three options with varying prices, depending on your needs and budget. The most popular is the Gold option which costs USD29 per user if billed monthly. Paying annually will give you a 17% discount.
Pardot is B2B marketing automation and lead management software. It is known for enabling marketing and sales teams to set up, deploy, and handle online marketing campaigns to improve ROI. It is available in three package options to power your marketing pipeline.
Oxyleads is also a B2B data and lead generation software. Using it will enable you to build contact databases on functioning emails of companies and contacts you are targeting to engage with. They have four pricing options which can be paid monthly or quarterly.
A lead management strategy varies from business to business. Lead management CRM should be flexible and can easily be adjusted to suit your business goals and objectives. When choosing a lead management software for your business, know your needs and budget, first. Then, make sure that the software you choose is efficient in delivering your goals and objectives and is worth your money. You can also opt to find a reputable marketing agency to help you maximize your business’s ROI.
When thoroughly thought out, your lead management strategies could produce significant savings and time for your business, yield to a good collaboration among your marketing and sales teams, and help you gain and maintain customers.
The most difficult part of being productive is making values-based decisions. The words “values-based” not only refers to the rules you use to govern yourself but also what it is that you value. An inability or unwillingness to make decisions based on a set of criteria made up of something more than a task list will cause you to get less done than you should, feel stressed or overwhelmed, and procrastinate. Here is how you make values-based decisions to increase your productivity and the quality of your life.
If you are like most people, you have a task list. That task list is made up of all kinds of different and unrelated tasks. You might have “get cat food” sitting under “develop a plan to save client,” directly next to “make a tuition payment,” and one hundred other things all lined up on a task list. These tasks all require your time, your attention, and your energy. Because they are written in a straight line from top to bottom, or captured in a task manager of some kind, they all appear to be of equal importance.
Most people sort their task list every day, moving what is urgent to the top of the task list to ensure it gets done before some fast-approaching deadline. The single criteria being used to make that decision is, “what do I need to today to not miss a deadline?” It is important to meet deadlines and keep your commitments. If you feel overwhelmed or struggle to get enough of the right work done, it is because urgency is is only one factor you might should use when deciding what to do. Other factors carry equal or more weight, and by using other factors, you not only get more done, you feel the greater satisfaction of living a life of your design, one of meaning and purpose.
If you want to be more productive and more effective, deciding what to do and when to do it is a decision based on a hierarchy of value. Because every task requires your attention, one doesn’t appear to be much different from another. Each task creates a sense of obligation. However, some of the tasks on your list are far more critical than others; they weigh more. To escape the tyranny of your task list, you start by acknowledging the difference in the importance of each task when measured against others.
To make effective decisions, you have start by deciding this task is more important than that task. It helps to have a framework for making decisions that provides better guidance than urgency or deadlines. What follows is a framework for making values-based decisions.
The framework here is how you escape your task list. The work isn’t easy, and it takes time to comprehend. You have to practice it for some time before it sticks. When it holds, it is life-changing.
You start by looking at the long term value. What is the value of task or project or goal or initiative in the future? If what you are considering has an extended impact, it weighs more than something that isn’t going to matter two weeks from now. If the consequences or potential gain is immense when compared to other choices you might make, it needs to rise to the top of the list.
If you have written down your long term goals and targets, what you need to do to reach them shows up on your task list (or Discipline List, if you follow the work in The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need) is now a higher priority than other tasks.Learn Anthony's core strategies & tactics for sales success at any level with The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need
The reason people struggle to do work that gives them a sense of purpose and meaning is, in part, because they are not doing the work that would allow them to exercise their resourcefulness and initiative. Instead, they get mired down in trivialities, things that don’t matter much now—or in the future.
There are specific categories of life that your tasks, projects, goals into which you can sort your initiatives. Your identity is made up of these categories. It’s also made up of your values systems. Success in any of the classes requires you to invest your time and attention in the goals, projects, initiatives, and tasks necessary to the result you want. The order here is important:
I am not sure how many times I have written these next sentences on this platform or somewhere else, but it is critical to being productive and doing good work: “Everything is important, but not everything can be most important. Productivity requires you to be intentional about your priorities.”
If you feel like your work doesn’t provide purpose and meaning, there is more than a good chance you are defining your work incorrectly. Anything with which you bring your whole self to feels like purpose and meaning. When to move what’s most important to the top of the list and spend more time there, your work—and your life—feel very different.
It’s sometimes easier to decide what you are not going to do. When you ask yourself a question like, “What is the longterm value of this project or task,” you start to view it through a lens that is radically different from one that considers urgency only. When you rank things by their value over time, you find that some things are far more important than others.
You are deciding is what you are not going to do now. You are intentionally allowing some things to go undone so you can make room for the few things that produce the highest value. You are saying no to small things so you can say yes to something bigger.
Making decisions about your priorities allows you to schedule those things, crowding out what you are intentionally ignoring. You prevent yourself from failing at what are your most important priorities by ensuring that what’s most important comes first, rather than letting the lilliputian tasks dominate something much more significant.
The truth about productivity is that the most substantial part of it is made up of your attention and your results. It turns out that what we want in the short term often comes at the expense of what we wish for longterm. We sometimes trade novelty, distraction, and little urgencies for the results we want from the future.
What you do now is shaping your future. You are choosing your future regrets. Future You should be deciding what you do now, not Present You. Present You tends to think short term, what do I want now. Future You takes a much longer view, and when you look back at the present from that vantage point, your perspective about what you should do shifts.
If you have not made decisions like this before now, you will discover that you have to clean up some of the tasks that you didn’t get done before they became urgent. The process of making value-based decisions will feel like you are sliding on ice, lacking the traction you need to get where you want to go. You are heading in the right direction, and at some point, you’ll find that you have traction.
You need to make sales. You need help now. We’ve got you covered. This eBook will help you Seize Your Sales Destiny, with or without a manager.
Download NowThe post If You Want to Be More Productive Start with Values-Based Decisions appeared first on The Sales Blog.
A recent prompt suggested that one should only work in sales because they want money or because they want to compete. The second part of the prompt suggested that “helping other people” was not a reason to work in sales. Leaving aside that fact that everyone on Earth wants more money (including Buffet, Munger, Gates, Bezos), a desire for money is not the only reason one might decide to work in sales. As to competition, I don’t know that we acknowledge that aspect enough for people to recognize sales as the place where they belong. There are, however, other good reasons to work in sales outside of money alone.
Before we get to the many reasons you might want to work in sales (or have chosen to), it’s important to clear up some incorrect ideas about money. Money is an outcome. There are only a few ways money is exchanged: 1.) theft, and 2) the exchange of value. The way one increases their income is by creating greater value for others. Increases beyond creating value for others only occurs when you create value for larger numbers of people. What this means is the only legitimate way to increase your income is by helping others.
I believe I am the only person to have written a book on competitive displacements. The first chapter of that book, Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away From Your Competition was a strategy for positioning yourself as a trusted advisor and consultative salesperson and creating a compelling case for your dream client to leave their current supplier. That book also reminds you that only win clients by creating greater value for your dream clients, not by focusing on your competitors, except for differentiating yourself in positive ways.Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch
In The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, I dedicated a chapter to competition because I believe a desire to win makes winning a more likely outcome. If you are dead set on winning, you will do the work. The desire to win does compel many people to work on improving themselves.Learn Anthony's core strategies & tactics for sales success at any level with The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need
In all things, you should avoid most ideas that people present as being mutually exclusive. In most cases, replacing the word “or” with the word “and” creates a more accurate picture. The idea that you can either be money-motivated or possess a desire to help other people is hogwash. Many people are capable of both.
Here is a list of other reasons you might want to work in sales, outside of a money-motivation, in the order in which they occurred to me.
When you look at success in any endeavor, you invariably find a complex and complicated mix of factors. The idea that the only essential attribute one need look at is a money-motivation is to ignore other characteristics, many of which may be even more vital. Whether you are hiring a salesperson or deciding on a career in sales, a view that takes into account additional factors improves your decision-making.
Money-motivation with no interest in creating value for others provides for a different outcome than the two of these things together. The few people who want money and who also possess a low Moral Intelligence don’t tend to do in anything for very long, and in some cases, they end up behind bars. Money-motivation without the discipline to accompany the autonomy or the willingness to be accountable for results also isn’t a good combination for a salesperson.
You need to make sales. You need help now. We’ve got you covered. This eBook will help you Seize Your Sales Destiny, with or without a manager.
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After stumbling into pricing jobs early in their careers, Ismail Madni (InVision) and Madeline Stein (SendGrid) are now subject matter experts who love the unpredictability and complexity of working as senior monetization strategists. They thrive sitting at the epicenter of their respective companies, determining the pricing pivots and tweaks that will maximize the ultimate proof of SaaS success: revenue. Both Ismail and Madeline stepped back from their fast-paced days to discuss how growth-stage SaaS companies can run successful pricing projects through a dedicated monetization function.
A monetization function works cross-functionally with a company’s product, marketing, engineering, finance and sales teams to create, develop and promote a holistic pricing strategy. Pricing managers track market trends, identify target markets, compare competitor pricing, analyze the effectiveness of past price changes and constantly explore new opportunities for improvement through altering base prices, classifying pricing tiers, offering pilots or trials, developing discount programs or packaging features together, for instance.
Companies structure their monetization function to maximize product development and revenue generation. Many monetization functions report into product while others live in the marketing, go-to-market or biz-ops groups. SendGrid and InVision, for instance, sit their monetization groups within their product teams since they’re both product led growth companies that rely on high velocity freemium models to acquire customers. Reporting into product makes further sense for SendGrid since they’re developing new products now and for Invision since they currently have a particularly strong product leader. LogMeIn, on the other hand, has traditionally nestled their monetization function within their marketing team since they are not product-led, acquiring customers more indirectly.
Around 42% of expansion stage companies have pricing teams. While it’s beneficial to create a monetization function early since it will eventually become as important as finance or marketing, companies should also ensure that their organization is sophisticated and mature enough to merit and sustain such a singularly-focused team. Usually a product manager will work on pricing strategy part-time before the executive team recognizes the impact that monetization projects have on revenue growth and creates a full-time team. A couple of basic signs that a company is ready to establish a monetization team are:
A monetization function drives pricing projects from end-to-end. If after tracking market trends, competitor pricing and the effectiveness of previous and current pricing, the monetization group suspects that a pricing change is needed, they will conduct customer surveys and interviews. If this customer research validates the need for a change, managers will work with billing and engineering to implement it within their product. Monetization managers will then work with marketing to communicate the change to customers and create promotional campaigns as well as with sales to strategize about how to pitch the new pricing to prospects.
While the above breakdown of monetization makes it seem simple, executing even a minor pricing change is an intricate dance that affects every aspect of a business and usually takes over a year to complete. In order to ensure a successful pricing project, therefore, monetization functions must prioritize research and measurement.
Since pricing changes take so long to implement, management often bemoans the need for upfront research, which usually takes over a quarter to complete given that pricing managers need to develop and distribute a survey instrument, analyze responses and conduct follow-up interviews. Many executives would instead prefer to intuit and just try different pricing schemes to see what works best. Yet while this more haphazard approach might work for earlier stage companies, an organization with a dedicated pricing team must move slow to move fast since research is the absolute only way to set the scope of a project.
As mentioned above, the second most important key to a successful pricing project beyond research is measurement. Pricing managers must create benchmarks throughout every stage of a pricing project and consistently communicate their performance against these benchmarks to the company. In addition to creating accountability for the monetization function, this approach consistently involves key stakeholders across all functions in the pricing journey so that they can provide useful feedback that improves the project rather than just receive the monetization group’s results and question their efficacy.
The monetization function should be predicting and tracking how a pricing change will affect every KPI from revenue to support tickets to NPS. The most important KPI’s for the monetization function to continuously and primarily monitor, however, are time and churn. While signups and paid conversions should be diligently tracked, the time that it takes to acquire and then convert customers should be scrutinized and minimized, especially in a product led growth company. This time is a basic and key indicator of whether a pricing scheme is effective or in need of improvement.
Similarly, any change in churn is directly correlated with pricing effectiveness. Meticulously monitoring churn will enable managers to determine the tweaks needed to retain customers, maximize upgrades and limit downgrades. Conversely, if there is no churn, then managers can refreshingly explore opportunities for price increases.
There are endless pricing questions for a monetization function to consider. What is their target customer segment? Will a freemium option actually help users realize the value of their product before buying? How and when should they monetize new products? How should they package features (as opposed to just set price points)? In order to tackle these complexities, a monetization function not only needs to prioritize research and track specific KPI’s, but they must maintain a big-picture perspective. The best way to enact this broader, design-thinking view is to consider the fundamental user perspective, simply and consistently contemplating how a certain buying experience will make users excited about and loyal to a product.
Overall, growth-stage companies that are reaching a threshold revenue target and diversifying or expanding their product portfolio should create dedicated monetization functions that win support cross-functionally to evaluate and iterate pricing through highly-researched, intricately-measured projects that consider the big picture and user perspective. Improving pricing is complicated, nuanced work that requires extremely analytical strategists but it’s the best way for an increasingly mature company to exponentially increase revenue and ultimately succeed.
The post Pricing Pros Talk Shop: Lessons from SendGrid and InVision appeared first on OpenView.
Globalization is causing many entrepreneurs and managers to rethink traditional business models. This trend has coincided with a greater demand for outsourcing services. The global outsourcing market is expected to grow to $343 billion by 2025.
There are actually very compelling reasons to outsource certain functions of your business. However, companies that don’t plan their outsourcing selection and vendor management models carefully may encounter a variety of new problems, including a degradation in product quality, problems with customer perception and cost overruns.
You can benefit immensely from outsourcing. The trick is to outline your objectives carefully and pursue the best outsourcing options.
We have reviewed outsourcing guidelines by Deloitte, here are some guidelines that will help your company get the most from your outsourcing.
Before you start crafting and outsourcing strategy, it is important to understand the areas where outsourcing helps the most. Surveys from leading executives help shed some light on these questions.
The most common reason that companies use outsourcing is to cut costs. One survey by Raconteur showed that around 55% of executives were either satisfied or very satisfied with the cost cutting benefits of outsourcing. Only 22% said they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.
The same survey showed that the compliance benefits were even more important. Respondents were overwhelmingly satisfied with using outsourcing as an approach to meet compliance targets.
Unfortunately, outsourcing is not as practical of a solution for meeting all organizational objectives. Respondents were equally dissatisfied as they were satisfied with the following:
This indicates that it is a good idea to keep your priorities in mind before outsourcing. You will need to decide which functions to outsource in order to align with your objectives. If your goal is to improve compliance, then outsourcing could be your best route. On the other hand, your company may not want to consider outsourcing if your objective is to improve innovation.
I have utilized a variety of outsourcing services myself over the years. I have tried using low-cost micro-gig platforms like Fiverr. I have also worked directly with independent contractors.
My experience has been that the quality of work varies tremendously between outsourcing providers. You can’t always know ahead of time which services are going to be most ideal. The old rule of thumb is that you get what you pay for. However, some exceptional workers have offered their services at much lower cost than their subpar counterparts.
The only way that you can choose the right company to outsource to is by reviewing them carefully. You need to check reviews and request samples of their work.
Deloitte has a great white paper on the best practices for outsourcing. The fourth step in the process is to make a commitment. Deloitte recommends holding a stakeholder meeting before signing a contract with the vendor. The goal is to make sure that all relevant stakeholders are on board and agreed that the pricing is ideal.
This suggestion is made for larger organizations with highly bureaucratic decision-making models. As a small business owner, you are not confined to this approach. Unfortunately, this can occasionally be a downside.
One of the problems with being a small business owner is that you may often be oblivious to your own tunnel vision. If you make a habit of making significant decisions such as selecting vendors without any external input, then you might be more likely to make the wrong choice.
Since you are not forced to adopt the same bureaucratic decision-making model, you should try to get input from others. If you have employees or investors, consider reaching out to them. If there are not any other major stakeholders in your company, then you might want to consult with colleagues and other business owners to see whether they agree with the terms the vendor has proposed.
You may be satisfied with the vendor after first making your selection, but that doesn’t mean that they will consistently deliver the results you expect. You are going to need to constantly review their performance and make periodic adjustments as needed. Don’t be afraid to terminate the relationship with them if the results aren’t what you are expecting.
It’s a hard truth: not everyone who comes in contact with your brand will end up buying from you. But with the help of an e-commerce marketing funnel, you can turn more people’s curiosity into paid purchases.
When some business owners hear the words “marketing funnel”, they start to think of the most convoluted way to market their e-commerce business.
I’m here to tell you, that’s not necessary.
You can easily design an e-commerce marketing funnel that can help to optimize your marketing efforts and increase your online sales. The truth is that the not-so-secret sauce to a successful e-commerce store is an amazing marketing funnel.
For this e-commerce marketing funnel, we’ll be focusing on the following:
Let’s get started!
To give you an idea of how you’ll be setting up your e-commerce marketing funnel, below is Sumo’s perfect representation of it:
Smart Insights found out that, on average, 43.8% of your site visitors view a product page, and only 3.3% of them end up making a purchase. That’s a drastic drop, but it gives you an idea of how many visitors make it down an e-commerce funnel. This is what happens during a buyer’s journey.
Understanding your buyer’s journey is important because ultimately, every good funnel is modeled after your customer’s first point of contact to the final stage of making a purchase.
In the first three stages of your funnel – Awareness, Interest, and Decision – the buyer’s journey plays a significant role in pushing your potential lead to the last step, making them a repeat customer.
Buyers in this stage: This buyer recently interacted or found your content online, through a social media post, or they may have visited your website for the first time while searching online for a particular topic or keyword.
They’ve just been made aware of your brand, but they probably aren’t familiar with your services or products. They might not have even considered the solution to the problem your products can solve.
During this stage, your first impression matters the most. Blue Corona found that 47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less before they opt out, making your website load time just one of the many things that can turn people away from the first stage of your funnel.
If only people would come to our website and make purchases without a second thought. Unfortunately, that’s not how people shop online.
Before we even consider the buyer that just landed on your website or came in contact with your brand, you’ll need to do a few things to bring more of them your way. Not everyone knows about your brand, so your job is to work on your awareness.
Overall, no matter what you do for this stage in your ecommerce funnel, your main goals for this stage are building your profile and trust among new visitors and potential customers.
78% of respondents said that companies’ social media posts impact their purchases. If you don’t have a presence on social media or you’re not as active, you’ve missed out on more than your fair share of new customers.
Brands like Glossier grow a cult-like following on social media where customers consistently spread the word on their products online and off. Instagram is a large part of the brand’s success and increase in sales. In fact, when they first launched in 2017, they relied solely on Instagram to promote their products. It proved to be the right move.
When you take a closer look at Decoding Glossier’s Instagram Marketing Strategy, being proactive on Instagram pays off when it’s done right.
When you use social media, be sure to cover all your bases if you want to see real results. You can download your free social media checklist here (no email required!).
Pro Tip: Looking for more ways to harness the power of social media? Here’s a guide to point you in the right direction to find out Which Social Media Marketing Platform is Right for Your Business.
Forbes found that 74% of consumers say there has been a direct link between watching a video on social media and purchasing something.
Brands like Home Depot have been leaders in video content marketing for their products and services, raking in millions of viewers per month. This video, in particular, has over 75,000 viewers and the engagement to match.
Promote your video on social media and other platforms to not only boost visits to your website, but to also keep potential customers on your site for longer. You can create videos like:
Pro Tip: Despite the popularity of Instagram and Facebook, video content on Youtube lives longer and grows in engagement when compared to the two. YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world. Consider putting your video content there first if you’re serious about video marketing and use these 18 Powerful Ways to Grow Your YouTube Channel.
Today, having a website for your business is just as important as the products you sell. 48% of people report that a website’s design is the primary factor in determining the credibility of a business. If your website design is outdated or unattractive, then you can be sure to see organic traffic turn back just as quickly as it comes.
The perfect example of a brand that’s seen a significant improvement in sales due to their website design would be the health brand New Chapter.
They used rigorous A/B testing to create the best possible user experience. Adding quizzes, product bundles and everything in between, New Chapter provides a personalized, choose-your-own-adventure experience for its customers and prospects.
New Chapter’s marketing team reported that in less than one year, their store has gone from a $0 to a thriving, seven-figure website, due to their extraordinary site design.
Pro Tip: From navigation to your home tab, there’s a lot that goes into creating a well designed website. Instead of clicking around to see what works, here’s a detailed guide on Website Creation Fundamentals That You Could Be Neglecting to improve your website.
If awareness is the name of the game, you should already know that SEO is the most important thing on this list. With 1.17 billion unique searches every month, you want to be at the top of the list when people search for topics or keywords related to your business once they click that search button Google.
Why?
Being #1 on Google drives 32.5% of the traffic to your website. That 32.5% decreases the further down you are in ranking.
If you haven’t been getting enough traffic to your website, your SEO ranking could be the main culprit. You can use this Ecommerce SEO Checklist to take an inside look at how you can improve your SEO.
Clothing brand Misguided takes their SEO marketing very seriously. In January 2018, if you Googled “jeans and a nice top”, not only would you get Misguided as the top result, but you’d see a news carousel pop up with articles from The Sun, Metro, Cosmopolitan and POPSUGAR showing off Misguided products that matched the search.
This all started with Misguided answering a tweet from a customer with a meme.
Noted! pic.twitter.com/S92Ge35Szc
— Missguided (@Missguided) January 3, 2018
Which goes to show that SEO and social listening can make a powerful pair when looking for ways to increase sales and awareness.
WE DID IT. Now shop to it https://t.co/rNmBQnSkkh pic.twitter.com/waZwqajaRA
— Missguided (@Missguided) January 15, 2018
Create a blog on your website to build up your SEO ranking. A blog allows you to create shareable and relevant content that your potential customers are searching for online. For example, Beardband sells, as you’d expect, beard oils and grooming tools. They write articles showing the reader how to take care of their beards and what types grooming tools would be best for them, helping to soft sell Beardband products.
Pro Tip: If you already have a blog or you’re just starting you can try these (6 Tips to Easily Optimize Blog SEO for Search Engines)[https://blog.wishpond.com/post/65898762922/blog-seo-how-to-easily-optimize-your-blog-for-search] to grow your traffic and increase sales.
Buyers in this stage: This buyer has come in contact with your content more than once and is considering making a purchase. At this stage your content marketing is starting to pay off, your brand has begun to build trust with this buyer.
About 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying, and 71% of consumers believe it’s very or somewhat important that they recognise a brand before they make a purchase. This means that now more than ever, you need to be on the consumer’s mind before they lose interest or forget and buy from other brands.
That’s because they’re still in the consideration stage, not the purchasing stage. At this stage, it’s time to capture those leads with your newsletter, demo videos, downloadable content or connecting with them via social media.
During this stage in your e-commerce marketing funnel, a lot of potential customers either get lost or leave the funnel completely because they were left alone and their interest cooled. Avoid the mistake of relying solely on awareness to get your visitors to the purchase stage.
Here are some ways you can engage with your visitor in the consideration stage of your e-commerce marketing funnel:
Share your testimonials and reviews on all your online platforms. You want to make sure that no matter what stage or platform your potential customer is on, they see people who enjoy what you have to offer (and so potentially see themselves enjoying it as well).
Testimonials are so powerful that over 55% of shoppers claim that testimonials and reviews influence their buying decision.
The first step is to add a product review section to your ecommerce website. 78% of online shoppers value the availability of product reviews by other shoppers, as well as the opportunity to add their own. Reviews are simply UGC in words and comments.
Popular e-commerce stories like Amazon can attest to how powerful “the read reviews before buying” culture is on a website. Because of that, Amazon has maintained a strict policy towards safeguarding the trustworthiness of its reviews by banning sponsored reviews.
23% of consumers say that recommendations on social media influence their buying decisions and 86% of millennials say that UGC is a good indicator of the quality of a brand.
Taking all of this into account, UGC is one of the best ways to market your brand in this stage of your ecommerce funnel. Plus, UGC is free advertising from trusted customers.
User Generated Content is any type of content that has been created and posted by an unpaid customer, influencer or fan. It can refer to pictures, videos, tweets, blog posts, and everything in between, as long as it’s promoting your brand.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, which is why nothing compares to seeing another person rave about your product to the world. Preview App is an Instagram scheduling tool that prides itself on its community of Insta-savvy content creators who love their app.
Pro Tip: Take a look at Hubspot’s The 10 Best User-Generated Content Campaigns on Instagram, take notes and learn about ways you can incorporate some of that UGC magic into your online and social media efforts.
The key to writing your product descriptions isn’t exclusively to sell. Rather, it’s to explain how you solve a problem that the buyer has. You should ensure that your product’s benefits speak to someone who needs or wants to buy this to make their life better.
When Amazon promoted the new line of products from Belei, they didn’t talk about the price or list reasons you should buy it. They spoke about how each product was made without parabens, phthalates, or sulfates, and that they’d never tested on animals, targeting environmentally-conscious shoppers.
Another example is Bean Bar, who add a little personality to each one of their brews. Both in store and online, they speak about how the benefits of their products and what makes it so special.
Buyers in this stage: At this point in the funnel your visitor is has moved far from browsing products and is thinking of making a purchase…but they haven’t.
They’ve seen your content and customers that rave about your products. Now it’s time to give them a nudge towards the shopping cart.
Good customer service is hard to find, online and offline. If you were interested in buying a product from your favorite store and the sales rep ignored you, how often would you buy from that store?
Never.
Poor customer service cost more than the customer service rep you’d be paying. U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.
You have to treat your e-commerce store just like a brick and mortar store. Yes, your customers can order and check out on their own, but they still need your customer service to help them complete the purchase.
To offer great customer service, you can add the following to your site and checkout process:
1. Live Chat
2. Chatbots
3. Emails
4. FAQ Pages
Take a look at Fashion Nova’s customer service efforts on their e-commerce website:
Fashion Nova even has a dedicated Twitter account for customer service to help their customers every step of the way.
90% of online shoppers prefer free shipping, even if their package takes longer to arrive.
88% of consumers say free return shipping is an important factor in their purchase decisions; that’s why this brand offers it with every order.
Toyshades is an example of how one brand increased sales with free shipping. They incorporated shipping costs into all their sunglasses, so they’re able to reduce friction associated with shipping costs during the checkout. They found that when a site had free shipping, it encouraged 93% of shoppers to buy more.
The buyer in this funnel has successfully passed the awareness, consideration, and the decision phase of your marketing funnel.
Once this visitor has clicked the “Complete Order” button, you’ve got yourself a sale. The problem is, you’ve lost a few leads going down the funnel, and the ones that are here are a bit hesitant.
So how do we make sure this buyer doesn’t change their mind, or start second guessing their purchase?
Just like an in-store customer, they want to look around for the best deals to make sure they’re saving before they make a final purchase. Which most likely means the visitors in this part of the funnel have already scouted out your competition and they’ve shortlisted your website.
At the end of the day, your job here is to convince the visitor that you’re way better than the competition.
Below are a few ways to tip the scales in your favor.
Earlier, we spoke about how important it is for consumers to find the best price for a product. Some die-hard deal seekers are willing to search high and low for the best deals before they pull the trigger and complete a purchase.
Discounts aren’t about losing money. As an e-commerce owner, they’re a way to build customer loyalty and increase the lifetime value of each customer. That’s how important they are to your customers.
You can showcase discounts everywhere. On popups, website banners, and sidebars. Never wait until after a user reaches the checkout to give them a special promotion.
Most people choose to shop online because of the ease and convenience it provides, which is why some customers don’t mind creating user accounts to purchase products, while the majority just want to get in and out with their order without any hassle.
Account creation factors into 75% of customers who leave e-commerce stores without buying anything. If we’re crunching the numbers, it’s the reason [22% of users end up leaving a website], and 28% of all shoppers say that it’s part of the reason they never completed a purchase.
I’m dropping a lot of numbers here, but it’s to give you an understanding about how important account creation is in affecting your sales.
ASOS gives customers the option to sign in for orders using social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Users get quick access to user accounts, and companies get all of the information they need to proceed with the order.
You want to make your customers’ buying process as easy as 1-2-3, or they’ll get frustrated and leave. To avoid that, you can provide more than one trusted payment method.
Every day, new e-commerce websites are popping up, which makes consumers hesitant about who to trust with their credit card or banking information. One wrong slip and their account can get hacked. That’s why trust and transparency are crucial for e-commerce success.
Take notes from Shein, an online clothing brand that sells fashionable pieces to a global audience. They offer the most popular payment methods aside from your typical MasterCard and PayPal features.
It stings when you’re this close to getting a sale when a customer abruptly abandons ship and leaves their cart.
But don’t hold it against them. Maybe they were planning on completing their order when their boss needed an email asap, or they got lost in the rabbit hole of social media and forgot to complete their order.
The average cart abandonment rate is 67.91%, and it’s growing year by year. The best way to get customers back on track is to have a shopping cart abandonment strategy,. That means cart abandonment emails with discounts, offers, and free shipping, exit pop-ups and opt-in forms, and so much more. Here are 5 Proven Strategies to Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment.
Congrats! You now have a paying customer. This may be the smallest section and the most profitable.
But you don’t want a one night stand – you want a long term commitment; you want a repeat customer.
Never make the mistake of thinking that a customer might come back. That could give your competition the edge to steal away new or existing customers. Now is not the time to relax, so consider the following helpful tips if you want to increase your repeat customers.
The magic of retargeting ads is that they’re seen by people who simply clicked or visited your website or online content once. One click is all it takes.
Retargeted ads are mainly used on Instagram, Facebook, and Google. Retargeting works by placing a small cookie in a user’s browser. If that user leaves before making a purchase, you’re able to show them targeted ads to encourage them to come back.
Posting every now and then isn’t enough when it comes to social media. Now more than ever, social media is a competitive playground for business. Once a customer decides to follow you you need to be active to keep their attention on a busy social media feed.
Social media marketing isn’t just for new customers starting at the top of your funnel; it’s also for customers who need to be reminded of how awesome your products are and why they need to keep buying from you.
Wendy’s is a brand known to show off its personality and engage with customers on all of their social media platforms.
Social media contests are a great way to pick up sales and grow engagement with your brand online. Running a social media contest is relatively straightforward, as well as deciding what type of social media contest you want to run.
BarkBox sells monthly subscriptions of dog toys, treats, and chews. In 2016 they created their branded hashtag #BarkBoxDay to help drive awareness for their products. Since then, the hashtag has been used by over 173,665 Instagram posts and counting. and is a trending hashtag among the doggie community.
Barkbox doesn’t have many giveaways or contests on their page. Instead, they collaborate with dog-themed brands that host giveaways and contests aimed at getting more followers.
We teamed up with @barkbox to #giveaway FIVE 1-month BarkBoxes
How to enter: @ 2 friends on this tweet and then leave a comment on this article: https://t.co/cnw9x4bCBi pic.twitter.com/A9qHKCQr9S— slickdeals (@slickdeals) July 6, 2018
There you have it, the complete guide to set up an e-commerce marketing funnel that gets you customers and sales.
Before you’ve even finished setting up your e-commerce marketing funnel, you’ll begin to see potential customers come your way.
The key to continued success is to always be refining your marketing funnel. A/B test your funnel, try to add new designs or items, because no two marketing funnels are the same. One size doesn’t always fit all. You’ll need to find out what works specifically for your e-commerce store.
That’s a wrap!
What do you think? How do you plan to tackle your e-commerce marketing funnel?
“Let’s get ready to rumble!”
Do the famous words of ring announcer Michael Buffer play in your head every time you meet with your marketing team? Trust me, you’re not alone.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018 report, just 26 percent of respondents operate under a marketing and sales service level agreement (SLA). Sometimes it seems like sales and marketing departments are boxing each other into a corner. Maybe it’s because sales teams believe that marketers often take too much credit for deals that they have closed.
Or maybe it’s because marketers believe sales teams always complain about the worthiness of their hard-earned leads.
No matter which side you believe is fighting below the belt, in SaaS sales, you need to learn more about marketing if you want to see 38 percent higher sales wins and 208 percent more revenue.
To help you fight fair, here are five things that every SaaS salesperson should know about marketing.
No matter how great your SaaS product is, you can’t sell on features alone. Creating a desire for your product will help you deliver more value to your customers. That’s where marketing can step in. Marketing campaigns tell a story to your customers that will ultimately help them buy from you in confidence. Some of the different ways marketing can help tell a story are through:
Many of today’s successful sales leaders know that buyers do business with people they know, like, and trust. Marketers help get your buyer personas closer to all three of those goals through content. Relevant, compelling, and consistent content can help build the brand, prove your authority, and provide thought leadership to customers who will eventually refer your service to others.
You should also regularly communicate the problems you are hearing from your buyers to your marketing team. This will help them develop content that addresses how your service can specifically help them solve these problems.
Reporting and analysis is an integral part of any marketing strategy. It allows your marketing team to leverage user data and helps you better understand when a customer is ready to demo your service or ready for a sales conversation. Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and Marketo have made the Buyer’s Journey more transparent than ever. Understanding this user data can help you stay focused and cut through the noise.
A marketing department that is communicative and collaborative can provide you with sales enablement content, such as case studies, testimonials, whitepapers, and product one-pagers for all the different stages of the sales cycle. This will help you drive home the messages that you’ve already conveyed to your customers. Remember, marketing has laid the initial groundwork to get your customers to become aware of your brand and your value proposition.
When the sales and marketing teams’ gloves come off, everyone runs the risk of failing to meet crucial benchmarks and goals. Both departments have a shared goal of increasing awareness and revenue and to execute and achieve these goals, the two departments have no choice but to be aligned. A sales and marketing partnership is essential to your company’s success.
Learning how to run an effective sales and marketing alignment meeting can help both departments better communicate and set clear, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) goals. You should confirm that the messaging marketing is sharing resonates with the leads you’re working with—and that content is addressing the problems and pain points your buyers are experiencing.
When both teams work together, your competition will be down for the count!
What’s better for your business to focus on: customer success or sales? Customer success is the practice of cultivating deep and lasting relationships with your customers, which can unlock lasting customer lifetime value for your business. And sales is, well, sales: a customer makes a single transaction and your business profits. However, no business can thrive without making sales to new customers. So, how can you know which one to devote more resources to?
Customer success and sales are two primary business objectives you should target with equal emphasis. They offer more benefits—from increased customer retention to greater revenue to higher rates of customer satisfaction— when they work together and are pursued simultaneously, as their closely linked nature augments each other’s progress. And if your firm isn’t fully pursuing both customer success and sales together, you won’t receive the full value of it either. Let’s take a closer look at the tightly-knit relationship between customer success and sales and explore ways to enhance both.
It all starts with sales. Your marketing and sales team spends a lot of time and effort finding customers and getting them through the sales funnel and over the finish line. But what happens next? Your sales and marketing teams will go through the process again, while your customer success team works on retaining that customer by cultivating a strong relationship.
When you have a customer success team in place, it’s important to focus on their efforts. You contact the customer after the sale, thanking them for their business and kicking off the onboarding process. It’s important that the hand-off between sales and the customer success team is handled properly and that sales are notified long before renewal rolls around. You monitor their use of your product and periodically send communications teaching them how to fully use and adopt the product. You learn exactly what value the customer wants to gain or what pain points they want to solve. If the customer initiates contact, your customer success team treats it as an important opportunity to better understand the customer journey. This establishes a strong relationship with the customer and puts you on the path to building a lasting bond.
As time goes on and your customer has fully adopted your product, you’ll start to see more benefits. Customers who need additional products or services will be more likely to buy from you. But it doesn’t end there. By demonstrating attentive service and value, you win the customer’s loyalty and trust. They may begin to talk about your brand, recommending you to their contacts and leaving positive reviews. They may share your posts or let people know about your new products or features, providing free marketing. Soon, you will have a loyal following. This raises your brand’s reputation and prestige in the eyes of other potential clients, which generates new leads for you naturally!
You will need to be sure that communication between customer success and sales stays open. For instance, the sales team will want to know about events such as high usage rates, escalations and when renewal will be happening. This way, both teams can continue to work collaboratively.
This is how your sales and customer success team can work together to keep customers happy, which leads to even more sales. The relationship between customer success and sales is that of a positive feedback loop that yields more and more value as time goes on. That’s why you want to work on both goals simultaneously.
To get started, bring your customer success and sales goals into alignment. This means encouraging greater collaboration and communication between your customer success and sales teams. A salesperson is like a hunter who searches for customers and closes sales. A customer success specialist is like a farmer who engages customers after the sale in order to nurture and grow relationships over time. These two roles use different strategies, but they should keep the same overall goal in mind: retention.
Salespeople should not seek to just force a one-time sale; rather, think about helping the customer achieve their long-term goals and present the product as a resource they could use daily. Customer success specialists should also nurture the relationship without hammering home cross-sells or upsells. In fact, you should only encourage an upsell if you know it will truly be valuable for that particular customer. After all, the key to long-term retention is to cultivate mutual trust and an exchange of value, not to pressure customers into spending more money. If you do it right, the relationship will ultimately generate higher profits, as you’ve shown the customer that you value them as a person and don’t simply see them as a source of revenue.
In short, you must humanize the relationship between the customer and your brand. That means interacting with each customer as a valued person with common business goals.
When it comes to customer success or sales, neither one is “better” than the other. And neither one should be your sole area of focus. Instead, your business should seek to advance them both simultaneously. This will raise customer lifetime value, which increases revenue and attracts even more customers.
If your business is struggling to retain new customers, try using a customer success platform. Such software can help you become more customer-centric and improve your ability to proactively present and respond to roadblocks along the path to customer success. Plus, a high-quality customer success platform is designed around best practices that will help you manage post-sales activities for all your customers, no matter how many you have.
So, make sure your business enhances both its customer success and sales efforts. Together, they form two sides of a highly lucrative coin.
What if you could increase sales without hiring new reps or spending any more money? More specifically, what if you could boost your revenues by applying a set of simple strategies?
To help you make more data-driven decisions for your sales process, we’ve compiled compelling sales statistics. We’ve also drawn valuable insights from Zendesk Sell’s CRM Customer Survey data — a survey of over 730 customers who use the Sell platform on a daily basis.
Based on this data, we highlighted actions you can take to ensure that your sales reps are doing their best work in key strategic sales areas. Learn how to increase sales with the following principles:
In order to know whether you’re meeting your revenue goals, you have to track your sales activities. There’s no way around it. Yet 38% of Sell survey respondents said that time spent doing just that was “wasted” and a major challenge for their sales department.
Especially if you’re a growing startup, manually recording activities such as your deal tracking, lead generation, and task completion is tedious and inefficient. Thankfully, there are better (and more efficient) solutions.
Action Item: Organize and manage sales activities through automations, activity reports, and sales activity metrics.
Check sales activities directly within your CRM
While keeping up with sales activities is necessary to be a successful sales team, manually tracking your own sales activities is both a waste of time and a waste of valuable energy. You and your sales reps can spend more time on increasing sales by streamlining and automating your tracking process.
Do you truly understand who you’re selling to? The majority of customers don’t think so — in fact, only 13% of customers believe a salesperson understands their needs. To properly convince a prospect to buy your product/service, you need to learn the prospect’s needs, concerns, and values. This is all part of building a quality relationship that will lead to a long-term sales commitment.
In addition, understanding customer information inside and out adds an extra layer to the qualification process and ensures that you’re selling to people who actually need your product/service.
Action Item: Coach your sales reps to learn everything they can about a potential customer. Use this information, so you can tailor your messages to the client’s specific circumstances.
Source quality leads through support ticket conversations
The benefits of knowing your customer are twofold: 1. You are better able to speak to customer pain points, which can lead to qualified sales, and 2. You can personalize your messaging, which creates a better customer experience and heightens customer loyalty.
More companies look to customer acquisition over customer retention. However, it can cost 7x more to acquire new customers. Customer retention is a less expensive option. And according to Bain & Company, a “5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.”
Action Item: From the start, your reps should be building a relationship with each customer that is authentic, concerned with their needs, and focused on adding value to the customer’s business. Continue this relationship by investing time in nurturing your existing customers and building that relationship, so they’ll want to renew their product/service subscription when the time comes.
Send valuable resources to existing customers to improve their business
Also, use your current client base as a source for new prospects by asking for referrals and testimonials. Every successful sale can contribute to further improvement in your pipeline.
Interactions with customers should be viewed as relational over transactional. The more time you invest in your customers and meet their needs, the more satisfied they’ll be. And a satisfied customer will contribute up to 2.6x more revenue as compared to an unsatisfied customer. You’ll also increase your chance of an upsell.
It’s difficult for reps to move customers through the pipeline if they don’t have a sales process with clear sales steps (e.g., after the Prospecting stage, reps should move potential customers to the Qualified stage). In the Zendesk Sell survey, 16% of customers cited an inconsistent sales process as a major challenge for their sales department. One study also found that, “40% of teams do not have a playbook. Companies that do have a playbook are 33% more likely to be high performers.”
Action Item: Create a sales process roadmap with clearly defined, repeatable sales stages for reps to follow — from the Prospecting stage to Won/Lost. Sales managers can better track reps’ performance and determine which areas need support. Sales reps can better manage their sales activities and ultimately improve their sales results.
Common sales stages in a sales process
Companies like Museum Hack have found the combination of a CRM and a well-defined sales process invaluable. After adopting Sell and creating a more defined and measurable sales process, the company successfully doubled its year-over-year revenue.
Despite the fact that sales is a sales rep’s primary responsibility, the average sales rep spends only 22% of their time actively selling! Too often, they’re bogged down with other administrative tasks (e.g., manually inputting contact information) — necessary but not exactly the most productive or likely to have a significant impact on sales results.
If your own team is having productivity problems, there are effective ways to become more productive — individually and collectively.
Action Item: Implement initiatives that will improve your sales team’s productivity. These initiatives don’t have to be complex or expensive. Better lead qualification, creative motivation strategies, and using your CRM’s automations are all viable options.
Clear buyer personas ensure that leads are qualified
There’s a direct correlation between low sales productivity and meeting quota. The less time a rep spends selling, the harder it is to meet his or her targets, which then affects the sales revenue of the entire company. Implement the above tips to turn your sales reps into productivity pros.
Determining how to increase sales within your own company will ultimately depend on your product/service, but these principles offer a solid foundation to build on.
The best part of these principles is that they don’t cost a lot of money to implement (especially important if you’re an SMB short on funds). And when you combine outstanding products/service and killer customer service with proven sales strategies, you pave the way for increased sales. Take advantage of your CRM’s capabilities to help increase sales.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Why should you care, as long as the leads are qualified? Right?
It matters more than you think. Of all the leads in your sales funnel, only 3% are active buyers at any given time. Another 7% may be intending to buy shortly. The other 90% are either not yet ready to buy, do not have a need or are not interested in buying from you.
But who falls into what category? Lead qualification can help you make that determination. In turn, a lead—properly qualified—allows your salespeople to focus their efforts where it matters most.
Lead qualification also helps ensure that prospects still on the fence receive the follow-up nurturing they need. And those who are the B2B equivalent of tire kickers are moved out of the funnel.
Think of your sales funnel as a flowchart and your qualification process as a way to direct traffic through the funnel.
Let’s now dig into the process so we can understand the difference between an MQL, SAL and SQL.
What Is a Marketing Qualified Lead?
With today’s digital marketing, lead generation, marketing automation and analytics, leads can come into your sales funnel from practically anywhere. Many are the result of inbound marketing tactics used to drive traffic from social media, SEO search, landing pages, pay-per-click ads, content and email campaigns.
When they opt in to a web form, they’re interested. But in what? Receiving a free download, researching products or services as part of their buyer’s journey discovery or just collecting information on a topic?
And if they’re interested in buying, then when?
The first step is to determine if a lead is a PROSPECT interested in buying now or in the near future or a SUSPECT with no immediate plans.
An MQL is any prospect that has entered your lead-tracking system or funnel by showing interest and meeting your minimum threshold for qualification as someone likely to become a customer.
This determination can be based on:
Lead scoring through marketing automation is often used to qualify inbound leads. However, you likely use a more hands-on approach to lead generation as well, such as buying lists of leads that conform to your buyer personas, meeting people at tradeshows or receiving referrals.
At this stage, you have identified leads that meet your criteria but have yet to vet them and determine if it’s time for salespeople to act on them.
Changing Role Dynamics for a Better Outcome
Ask most people the difference between sales and marketing, and you’ll get something like this: Marketing generates the leads, and sales closes the deal.
All too often, this perceived separation of work tasks prevents a sense of collaboration or alignment of purpose between sales and marketing. While MQL qualification improves the lead qualification process, marketing’s criteria and sales’ criteria often remain disparate, and prospects aren’t evaluated for sales readiness.
That changes with the inclusion of the Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) stage. Essential to the SAL is a shared sales and marketing definition of a qualified lead. When marketing sends a lead to sales, they agree to review it in a timely way, reducing the issue of lost leads.
In this process, sales determines whether to shunt a lead back to marketing as an MQL or put it in the SQL bucket. They send it back to marketing based on pre-defined reasons for not accepting a lead. These include inaccurate or incomplete data, not fitting the agreed profile, or not being ready yet and thus requiring more nurturing from marketing.
Telemarketers or inside salespeople may make discovery calls—not to sell but to start a conversation and further qualify prospects based on:
No more than 10% of SALs should be returned to marketing. Anything more than that suggests a misalignment between the two departments’ lead definitions. Marketing nurtures the leads returned to them, moving them to the digital equivalent of raising their hand to indicate they are ready for contact with a sale rep.
Not only does the SAL process prevent lead loss but it also provides for a feedback loop between sales and marketing, so they can work better together.
The SQL that Boosts Revenue
Once the SAL meets a jointly agreed-upon threshold, it becomes an SQL. That means it’s been sufficiently vetted to determine:
The SQL is deemed ready by both marketing and sales to enter the sales pipeline as a viable opportunity and assigned to a rep for a follow-up sales call.
A well-designed B2B lead qualification process and greater collaboration between sales and marketing increases the alignment of activities. You’ll be working together toward the same goal. The result? Companies that align sales and marketing increase the revenue generated by their marketing efforts by 208%.
Producing great content as part of a well-defined content marketing plan first requires consideration of your desired end-results and formulating an overall content strategy. Pinpointing goals for your content is a great first step that will inform the direction, purpose and voice of your content. Before you get rolling, however, it’s also important to be clear on how you will measure and evaluate the performance of the content you and your team produces. We sat down with content marketing pros Emily Neie, Jeff Raymond and Christa Tuttle from Launch Marketing to explore four questions on measuring content marketing.
1. What does ROI mean when it comes to B2B content marketing?
Jeff: When it comes to content marketing, the return aspect can mean different things depending on the organization. For example, “return on investment” could be viewed in terms of conversions (completing a desired action) as a result of engaging with a certain piece of content. Similarly, one may measure “initial lead source” for Won Opportunities and determine which content teed up that outcome. As an organization, you need to define what that return looks like for you. However, the challenge for marketing is that it’s often not just one piece of content that weighs in on that return. The return may include a white paper, a blog post, case study, and other touchpoints along the way. While it’s difficult to allocate weight to each of those elements, there are tools, such as multi-attribution tools, that can help in that regard.
Christa: On the investment side of your ROI, it can also include measuring in dollars the time it takes to create your content. You can look at it in two ways: the amount of time it takes to develop the content and the amount of money it takes to evangelize the content and get it out there. When you use both of those aspects, you can get a quantifiable number. But it’s important to remember that you need to frame it in line with your organization’s goals, whether it be traffic, leads generated by the content or however your organization decides to measure return.
Emily: Another important part of the ROI of content is the amplifier effect and how far that content can get you. For instance, if you’re investing “x” hours or “x” dollars to create that piece of content, do you have a strategy in place to then leverage that original content piece to create other components of the campaign quickly? Does this piece of content lend itself to being leveraged across multiple platforms or are there easy tweaks you can make to integrate that piece of content or build off the content in a way that multiplies the investment you put into it? From the time investment standpoint, does it enable you to create additional content more easily and in a way that’s palatable to other platforms and to other customer segments?
2. What are some ways that organizations can measure content marketing effectiveness or ROI?
Emily: At the beginning, this will mean being very conscientious about tracking how much time you’re spending on various content efforts and who is creating the content. Often, pieces of content can seem to appear out of nowhere and people aren’t really sure where they came from or who created it and what their process was. You don’t want to start considering your content marketing success just because your team produces three blogs every week. It’s more important to recognize if creating a blog three times a week is consuming 50% of team members productive hours, then that might mean you’re not actually getting that big of a return on your blog content and you’re taking up too much of an essential team members time.
Jeff: You can also measure content marketing categorically. For instance, measuring how much blog traffic your site is receiving. You can then even take a higher-level look, evaluating everyone that comes to your site and applying a lead score to them. Then you can do some rough extrapolations to say how much website traffic your blog is contributing and how that traffic translates to closed business.
Christa: Tools like Google Analytics can help your team see the specific posts that people are engaging with the most. You’ll want to do this because often it’s not about a certain type of content, such as if it’s a white paper versus if it’s a blog, but what topic the content is focused on that matters. There are a lot of lenses you can put to your content and there’s certainly a lot of testing you can do as well to help boost your ROI.
3. How can organizations apply what they learn from measuring their content marketing efforts?
Jeff: Testing allows you to form hypotheses out of your content findings, which can be a fun part of your content marketing efforts. You can conduct simple A/B tests to see how you can get higher conversions, open rates, and similar KPIs. One of the simplest and most common A/B tests is email subject lines, which can determine if people are going to engage with one type of messaging more than another type of messaging. When you apply changes after performing these tests, even a 1% open rate increase, if you used on a big email list, can mean $10,000 or $100,000 profit, depending on the scale of your company. Finding those little edits and tweaks and applying them can be incredibly meaningful.
Emily: Measuring content marketing efforts can also be really helpful in understanding how to best fill your content journey for people, or how people are actually going to get to certain pieces of content, such as through your site, your social platforms or email. It’s important to learn which blog posts are performing the best, so you can then say that maybe those blog posts need to include a call to action to download a relevant white paper that requires someone to fill out a form. Since the contact has already received something that’s valuable to them, you can use that to continue to push them down their content journey. And again, you can really measure this effectively with Google Analytics, page traffic, email open rates, etc.
Christa: To build on that, if you have a webinar that you’ve run and then you create additional resources to go along with that webinar or resources that drive to a webinar, just being able to track that path using the right tools showing how people actually got two different gated assets is extremely useful and saves you valuable time. Ultimately, the ratio of return on your investment is going to go in a positive direction, thanks to being able to automate or use tools that make content creation a smoother process.
4. What are some of the mistakes that organizations make when it comes to content marketing?
Jeff: Serving up the wrong types of content at the wrong points in a buyer’s journey is one mistake. If you have somebody that’s top of the funnel and you serve them a deep dive white paper or case study, then off the bat that’s not the right strategy. A case study is more commonly part of the person’s evaluation stage when you want to add credibility. With someone who’s top of the funnel, providing them with something that’s much more digestible, like a blog post or infographic is usually the way to go.
Christa: Another mistake can be a lack of discipline or regularity in making sure that you’re applying SEO best practices or really validating the right type of thematic content or the thematic direction of your content with what your predefined personas want to hear from you. Organizations can also struggle to produce a reliable cadence of content. They may have more peaks and valleys or bursts of content activity, including periods of radio silence where there’s no content at all. Whereas, a constant presence and continual stream of content going out is going to be much more impactful.
Emily: Organizations will often have a kind of squirrel mentality to their content production. They may recognize they need a blog and then mobilize the entire team to turn out a large number of blog posts in a month. There’s a tendency to get a little panicked that they’re behind, so they sprint rather than plan out how they’re going to run the content marathon. If you approach a company as a source of information and learning and see that they haven’t posted anything in a year, that can be a red flag. It’s important to take the time to really step back from the initial excitement or the initial energy of creating white papers, eBooks, webinars or the next big thing and realize what is actually realistic to invest time and money in for both right now and for the long-term.
Jeff: Also, investing too much time and money into one avenue at a time may prevent you from being able to see how that avenue works over a longer period of time. That’s why it’s important for organizations looking to introduce a new form of content marketing or try something new should think about how it will compliment and interact with what they’re already doing. Typically, doing a few things extremely well beats doing more things at just an average level.
Christa: A lot of mistakes can really be attributed to not having a well thought out or well-articulated content strategy. Content strategy focuses on the broader question of “What do we want to achieve with our content?” Many of the issues with content marketing can often be traced back to not having a sound content strategy that everyone was on board with in the first place. It’s important to remember that content marketing isn’t a magical cure all for fixing marketing or sales issues. It’s part of a much larger integrated approach to your marketing strategy and requires knowledge of other aspects outside of content marketing.
c1235366 / Pixabay
Lead nurturing is about building relationships. And relationships require more than a one-size-fits-all formula.
Lead nurturing campaigns are a great way to guide your leads through each stage of the buyer journey and encourage more conversions, and to do that you must provide relevant, valuable content and meet a prospect’s needs at each stage. If you’ve already created and run lead nurturing campaigns, you know they take time to set up and require thorough planning. There also are a lot of companies vying for your target audience’s attention at once. Here are a few tips to help you improve your campaigns for maximum results.
Lead nurturing (done right) takes a lot of planning and strategy. And it needs to be well thought out before the campaign goes live. One of the first, most important things you should do is identify your target audience and define them through buyer personas. This is at the heart of every part of your lead nurturing strategy, as the needs and interests of your prospects vary at each stage of the client journey. Therefore, you want to plan and create content for each of those stages. For prospects in the awareness stage, you should offer educational content that provides insights into a problem they’re trying to solve through blog posts, assessments, infographics, and video. Those in the consideration stage want to identify possible solutions to their problem, so relevant content would include ebooks, webinars, or case studies. And as a prospect moves into the decision stage, give them final encouragement through free trials and product/service demos. As video marketing increases in power and relevance, it will be a valuable tool to incorporate into your lead nurturing campaigns at all stages of the buyer journey. It’s easy to digest and can add more personalization.
Before you start scheduling and sending content to your prospects, it’s essential to set goals for your campaigns. Along with the content, this will be the foundation of your lead nurturing strategy. In order to measure success and plan strategically, you must set benchmarks for what you want to achieve through your campaigns, and then you can adjust your schedule, content and methods accordingly. As you set up a content map for emails in your campaign, be sure to wait to send the first email until you have at least three ready to go. Timing can be just as important as the content you’re serving up, so plan ahead. It’s so much better to tackle the majority of the content creation up front than to do it as you go, throwing together emails that may not be your best quality.
Each of your lead nurturing emails or other touch points should have only one specific call-to-action. This will help prevent any confusion in your email, and when each email focuses on one subject at a time, your prospects and leads will be more likely to take action. Determine what is the one primary action you want your prospects to take and make that the focal point of your CTA. Your CTAs should also correspond with the lead’s current stage of the buyer journey. You wouldn’t want to lose someone by sending them information about your service or inviting them to try a free trial before they’re ready to.
One way to know where someone is in the client journey is to set up lead scoring in your marketing automation software. Lead scoring allows you to assign point values to different actions that a prospect takes and rank them against a scale of the value each lead represents to your firm. For example, a prospect could receive 5 points for downloading an eBook and 1 point for visiting a certain page on your company’s website. The score then helps you identify where a prospect is in the sales funnel. Over time, as a prospect receives more points, you can assume they are moving along the buyer journey, and it gives you insight into what kind of content to send them at each point.
Marketing automation software allows you to create automated and multi-step email campaigns that are triggered by a specific web-based behavior such as downloading an eBook, registering for a webinar, or visiting a particular page on your website. They can even be triggered by a specific combination of behaviors, such as downloading an eBook and then returning to your website during a specific time window. Consider creating a triggered campaign for leads with a high score or for leads that visit high-value web pages such as your pricing page. In general, it will be much more efficient to create several emails upfront and schedule them to be sent automatically every couple of weeks from the first interaction. Stay engaged with leads but avoid sending more than one email per week. It’s a delicate balance between being overbearing and staying top-of-mind.
Segmenting your lead nurturing campaigns is especially important if you target different industry verticals or have several different buyer personas. For example, if you market services to the healthcare and commercial industries, you wouldn’t want companies in both industries going into the same lead nurturing campaign because they have different interests and different problems to solve. You could also segment your contacts based on how they interact with your content, from monitoring how many leads open your emails, who clicks through your links, etc. In order for your campaigns to be successful, they need to be segmented so that you send relevant information to your prospects and meet their particular needs. Most people recognize that just because you address them in an email by their name, it doesn’t mean it’s written specifically for them. They’ll recognize personalization when you modify content to be useful and relevant to a specific lead, and this helps build better relationships.
People want to interact with humans, not companies. For that reason, be sure your emails are written from a member of your marketing or sales team. Personalize the emails in any way that you can and use conversational language. This doesn’t mean you should sound informal or use slang, but rather type like you speak. Emails that sound boring, automated or computer-like are less likely to resonate with the reader and will probably get deleted.
When you think of lead nurturing, most people think solely of email marketing. However, effective lead nurturing often involves a combination of email marketing and retargeting across multiple platforms, such as search, social media, or display retargeting. Consider your different buyer personas. Where do they get their news? Which social platforms do they use? Segment your leads depending on their stage in the buyer journey, their behavior, and their preferred channel. Then plan and promote content on these channels that doesn’t repeat what they’ve already seen through email or on your website. Targeting your leads through multiple channels increases the number of touch points and the likelihood of connecting and resonating with them. It also can increase their familiarity with the brand, and then increase email opens as a result.
Lastly, be sure to track the performance of your lead nurturing campaigns and adjust them accordingly. Study the analytics to determine what content is resonating the most, which channels are receiving the most engagement, when is the best time to contact a certain audience, etc. Use A/B testing to continue testing different subject lines, CTAs, content formats, and social media channels. Watch what your competitors are doing and think about where there are gaps that you can fill in or what you can do better. And remember that your email campaigns are only effective if your prospects see them. Therefore, monitor your delivery and open rates to make sure they are receiving and seeing your messages, and be sure your content is responsive to any of their devices. Continue researching best practices for email marketing, as they are often changing.
Remember that the buyer’s journey does not last for forever, and lead nurturing must eventually include selling. So don’t forget to cater to those nearing a decision, and don’t be afraid to ask for their business when they’ve reached that point. As you research your target audience and develop buyer personas, you will see that different kinds of firms or prospects will have differing buyer journey timespans. But as you nurture those leads and build relationships through personalization and thorough research, you will know the best time and way to lead them to conversion.
Yes, you should tie compensation to your Voice of Customer (VoC) program (it’s the best way to get your people to actually use it!)
But be strategic about how you do it… and when.
Monetary bonus programs
There are many creative ways to tie VoC to compensation, but one of the most common ways is do it through a bonus program.
Your bonus program could be based on people achieving a particular NPS level or customer satisfaction score.
Another approach is to base bonuses on having a certain number of completed surveys per month/quarter/year or having a low percentage of surveys returned with customer issues.
No matter the goal or threshold, if employees reach that target, they are eligible to receive a bonus; if not, they don’t. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it’s motivating.
Setting effective bonuses
There are many factors to consider when establishing an effective bonus program.
For example, are you setting the right goals to encourage the right behavior? Perhaps employees should focus on something other than NPS? And what about your basic survey health? Are you collecting enough customer feedback to define your goals effectively?
B2C companies with thousands or millions of customers, for instance, should make sure that their benchmark goals are based on robust customer feedback. For example, a single hotel can easily serve at least 100 guests a night—that’s 700 a week and more than 2,800 a month. With over 33,000 customers a year, you should always have at least 10% or 3,000-plus responses on hand in a given year to make sure that the bonus plan is based on enough volume to deliver accurate results.
Including (and excluding) the right people
Bonus programs do not need to include every employee either — in fact, bonuses are typically reserved only for the people who are accountable for the customer experience. This could be a general manager of a hotel, as well as the manager who oversees an entire region; it could be the head of the contact center or the head of field services.
These people can choose to set up a bonus system for their team, but they do so as a separate program. There are usually too many employees for the customer experience leader to manage all individual bonuses tied to VoC.
Don’t forget non-monetary rewards
Other incentives do not necessarily involve monetary compensation but can be big motivators.
Awards and public recognition go far, especially when they’re attached to an experience such as a trip or a night out. These incentives are typically connected to programs that are focused on recognition alerts rather than NPS or overall customer satisfaction.
This is an amazing way to motivate and incentivize the front line!
Conclusion
It’s not a question of if you should tie compensation to your VoC program (you should!), but be strategic about how you tie compensation, who you tie it to, and when you start.
According to many market analysts, the market for CRM solutions shows no signs of slowing down. It’s increasingly rare to find established sales organisations of any significant size without some form of CRM solution.
And yet when I talk to many sales leaders about the current state of their CRM implementation, the most consistent impression is one of promise unfulfilled.
They frequently acknowledge that key success metrics around data quality, sales team adoption and impact on revenue still have a great deal of room for improvement.
Of all the possible influences on success, enthusiastic sales force adoption is probably the most critical. So why is it so hard to persuade sales people of CRM’s potential to improve their own personal performance?
The most obvious answer is that many of the traditional CRM platforms, and an even larger percentage of CRM implementations, are seen by their target users – the sales team – as an inconvenient administrative burden, rather than a way of improving their earnings potential.
Systems tend to fail whenever they are seen as an imposed requirement, rather than something that is personally useful. And that, of course, means that the users are likely to do no more than is absolutely necessary to demonstrate their compliance.
Or if – as in so many cases – completing one or a number of fields is required before an opportunity can be advanced to the next stage of the process, there is an understandable tendency to simply enter anything in order to be able to move forward.
It’s no wonder that poor or inconsistent data quality prevents many CRM implementations from achieving anything like their full potential. The old adage “garbage in, garbage out” is particularly true in this environment.
In order for any CRM system to be useful to the organisation that is implementing it, the system must first and foremost be useful to the people who will be using it on a day-to-day basis – i.e., the individual members of the sales team.
That implies that your sales people must see real, tangible value from their use of the system that they believe will enable them to be more effective sales people and to achieve their personal goals – which probably include but are not necessarily restricted to earning more commission.
This has a number of important implications:
Your CRM system is also likely to be better accepted and more useful if it serves to guide sales people in what they need to know and do during each key phase in the evolution of a sales opportunity. It should make it easy for them to quickly access the information they need to be successful.
What this comes down to, I think, is that your sales people need to want to use the system rather than being forced to use it. And the only practical way of achieving this is to actively involve them in the design and deployment of the system.
The most successful CRM implementations have sought out the opinions of top performing sales people. They have involved sales people who are seen as successful and credible role models by their peers. They have been designed to make the sales person’s life easier, not harder – and in doing so, they will make the task of management that much easier (and less frustrating) as well.
Success is more about psychology than it is about systems. Most CRM systems are capable of achieving high levels of sales engagement if they are implemented effectively. Most modern CRM platforms have the potential to achieve this. But they are not all created equal.
Here’s the problem: many of today’s most widely deployed CRM platforms were originally designed (even if they neither acknowledged or intended this) around what I describe as a “sales administration” metaphor, in which the primary purpose of the system is to provide management with the information they believe they need.
Whilst these systems are theoretically capable of providing the much-needed guidance to sales people, this typically doesn’t come “out of the box” and often requires the addition of one or more (typically third-party) add-on modules which add to both the complexity and the cost of the installation.
Some of the more innovative CRM vendors have started with a radically different “sales enablement” metaphor which recognises that the best way of getting the best results out of any system is to make the people using the system more effective. Get that right, and good results will follow.
And because these systems have been designed in a holistic way, they include the required sales effectiveness tools as part of the core system – such playbooks, coaching advice, content management, integrated online meetings and so on. This designed-in integration has a huge impact on both usability and affordability.
In previous segments of our Inside the Sellers Studio series we discussed how valuable video can be in raising awareness, connecting with customers, and growing relationships with customers. However, the top of mind concern for many sales professionals is how they can actually move their buyers along the purchasing funnel from prospects to valued customers. Using video not only offers long term and intangible benefits in a sales relationship but it can also provide a very real tactical advantage within the sales process. While many people assume that video primarily helps with the top of the funnel sales activities to create positive sentiment and impressions, it can also add value towards the more tactical bottom of the funnel as well. In particular, because it can demonstrate both trust and reinforce credibility, it is a fantastic tool in converting prospects into customers creating real value for both the buyer and the seller.
In LinkedIn’s latest State of Sales Report, it is clear that technology has changed the B2B sales landscape. Using collaboration tools and sharing information through networking platforms and enterprise communication tools are now table stakes for sales professionals. However, for decision makers trust is still top of mind; in fact 51% of them rank trust as the top factor they desire in a salesperson. The challenge then for the modern seller is establishing trust and credibility in an increasingly digital world. Sales people today need to interact with customers a much broader scale which often means forgoing the traditional face to face interaction. This interaction and connection can be a critical component in converting someone from a prospect to a valued customer. Getting that last step of buy-ins can be hard when your customer does not have a chance to interact with you in person and for them to really see you as credible and trustworthy. Video is a tool that allows you to share your authentic message, humanizes the seller and enables a seller to leverage both technology and trust.
Buyers today are bombarded with messages and they often don’t know what and who to trust. Creating video and sharing it with your prospects shows that as a sales professional, you are willing to go the extra step and be there for a customer and their needs. In LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report, 93% of decision makers are more likely to consider a brand’s products or services if the communication is personalized. It’s clear that buyers are not just looking for features, benefits, and price but rather a trusted advisor who is aware and cognizant of their needs and objectives. Using video, especially in the critical step when you're under consideration builds on this “trust capital” and can help sellers bridge the gap in converting customers
Video can also build credibility and thought leadership within an industry. Decision makers want to know that they are working with a vendor that is vetted and trustworthy; by leveraging existing relationships through video testimonials and case studies, previous success in conversion can also pave the way for future customers.
Today, we are with Allen Gannett, Chief Strategy Officer at Skyword, a content marketing platform that provides industry leading marketing services to customers. He shares with us his experiences on how video has enabled his company to establish credibility and trust with prospectives and in turn convert that connection into successful customer relationships. In addition, he also provides some useful advice and tactically on best practices for using video to build trust, credibility, and convert customers.
Interested in learning more about videos in the selling process? Check out the previous parts of our series (Awareness, Connect, Grow) to learn more about how valuable videos can be at every step of the sales process.
Feeling inspired to create your own videos? We’ve also created a handbook for the video selling era to help you and your sales teams build the skills to create your own videos.
Download your free copy of Lights! Smartphone! Action! to learn:
The different ways that video can contribute to sales, from one-to-one introductory messages to how-to videos and answers to common questions
The optimum length for video at different stages of the sales journey
Simple ideas for creating on-brand videos that are still authentic and natural
The handful of gadgets that can help create professional quality videos without a complicated editing suite
Strategies for distributing video to maximize impact – and avoid bombarding your audience
The age of video selling is here. Let’s make sure you’re ready for your close up. Download your free copy of Lights! Smartphone! Action! today.
By Lauren Dichter, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing
Did you know that B2B selling is at its most complex right now? If you’re a seasoned professional, you’ve probably noticed the changing scene already. But for those sales professionals who are struggling and aren’t sure why, it could be because making a B2B sale today requires more consensus among buying committee members, which means decision cycles take longer than anticipated. In fact…
Luckily, understanding these changes is the first step to getting over an unwelcome sales slump. This evolution in B2B selling dynamics is best-approached head-on.
And how do you approach something head-on? By challenging it.
The Basics of The Challenger Sale
Using the Challenger Sale doesn’t mean instilling fear in the prospect. The Challenger Sale is so successful because, when implemented correctly, all content, messaging, and headlines…
Also, popular opinion states that The Challenger Sale method is most pivotal when used at the top of the sales funnel, since that’s when the prospect doesn’t yet realize they may have a problem.
In general, a ‘Big Idea’ guides this method of B2B selling. Like a splash of cold water to the face, it should shift the prospect’s perspective and make them think differently about how they operate. With this sales style, you’re selling insights, not solutions.
It should also message in a way that focuses on the prospect’s unrecognized needs rather than unmet ones. An example of a ‘Big Idea’ statement is “Why have CEOs been left in the dark about X?”, referring to insights that CEOs haven’t realized they aren’t privy to but probably should be.
5 Key Strategies for Challenger Messaging
Why Use The Challenger Sale?
When used effectively, it leads to higher customer loyalty and improved revenue performance. Just ask this global powerhouse of a company! SAP saw stunning results after using The Challenger Sale method.
In just 3 years, sales revenue increased by 27%, deals closed increased by 26%, the time it took for deals to close shrunk by 25%, and deals grew by 600%. The verdict is clear: prospects respond well to sales reps who communicate business insights that are specifically valuable to the business challenges prospects are experiencing.
How can you challenge your prospect to think differently? Which of the 5 key strategies of challenger messaging could you see your company’s sales reps adopting? Let’s keep the conversation going—comment below!
The post The Challenger Sale: Trading Pitches for Insights appeared first on Heinz Marketing.
With more and more companies leveraging partner marketing, it’s never been more important for marketers to learn how to build a channel partner program. In fact, in today’s multi-channel, always-on, digital landscape, it has become nearly impossible to generate awareness, trust, and acquire customers in one certain way, at one specific place without enlisting in the help of partners to increase success. More so, 63.5% of companies say partners contribute to their annual revenue1. Prioritizing partner enablement can put your business in the best position to succeed.
Partners can be effective in adding to your total value proposition, better addressing your customer’s needs, further differentiating your product from the competition, and helping acquire more customers, faster. They can even help fill holes in your offerings or delivery, all while extending the strength of your brand to potential customers. Intelligently managing partners also helps marketers understand what can be attributed to each marketing factor and channel to explain the influence on sales. Most importantly, partners should help deliver one shared experience to your end consumer.
Before we dive right in, let’s make a few assumptions. First, your buyers are researching your brand before actually engaging with you. Roughly 80% of the B2B buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer reaches out to sales2. Which is why it’s crucial to build relationships with customers using the help of partners.
Second, let’s assume we’re working off the same definition of partner marketing.
Partner marketing leverages the synchronicities of two companies – each with its own brand equity, core expertise, unique value proposition, and its own distribution strength – to create strategic alliances to gain market share both companies otherwise may have a long and arduous process of acquiring.
For example, a US-based software company is looking to expand into EMEA. Instead of relocating employees, hiring and providing extensive training on culture and processes and GTM strategy, as well as footing the bill for the expensive overhead that comes with more offices, the company decides to develop strategic partnerships in EMEA. These partners are experts in the region, have their own networks and existing customer bases of the target profile, and can be quickly brought up to speed on the product offerings. This will decrease the timeline and cost to acquire and service customers in EMEA. Additionally, this partnership provides greater marketing exposure which, ultimately, drives new customers.
In this instance, the company is able to dramatically decrease the speed to market while increasing the quantity and quality of feedback from their target market, via local, experienced partners.
Another assumption we can make is that you are part of a B2B organization and are looking for ways to create strong, relevant, and effective partner programs.
So, with these assumptions in place, where do marketers start when it comes to developing a partner marketing plan?
Similar to running a referral program, partner marketing is in part a numbers game. Instead of limiting your program to a small niche group, you’re likely to see better results with expanded outreach. When companies open up their programs to different types of partners, activity spikes and the top of the funnel begins to expand.
Here are 3 ways to cast a wider net when it comes to reaching more potential partners:
While quality usually trumps quantity, it’s important to choose the right partners that make sense for your business and to the end consumer. There should be a synergy and balance in the relationship between two different organizations with unique, but complimentary offerings.
Typically, when companies have the right messaging and relevant incentives for partners that are adding to the top of the funnel, passing along leads, and even helping to close deals – a ripple effect is created.
In order for partner marketing to work, it must be beneficial for all parties.
Most marketers today are interested in – okay, obsessed with – metrics, data, and analytics. And conversion tracking is just as important to partners. By giving partners visibility into your sales process, partners are empowered to see the prospect go through the entire lifecycle, not just hand over a lead.
Top of funnel: It’s critical that you recognize your partner’s efforts when a lead they generated converts on your website or is submitted by the partner. If your partner program leverages automation, you can easily notify partners via triggered email notifications.
Bottom of funnel: When a partner’s lead ultimately becomes a paying customer, brands need to share the details with the partner. Often times, the sales cycle can be long, so reaching out to acknowledge the attribution is a great opportunity to validate their efforts and engage with them to continue their promotion of your products and services.
Pay Day! Whether you are paying a one-time fee, recurring commissions, or have a revenue-share percentage agreement, partners want clear communication on when they’re being paid and how much to expect. Again, automated email notifications tend to work best.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing an incentive structure, it’s important to build a program that best suits your company and partners. Determining the mechanics of your commissions or revenue share is the first step in developing an effective program that will generate the most leads for your business. The most successful incentive structures are easy to explain, implement, and payout.
Here are 3 types of incentive types to consider:
Having a partner program in place that can reach new audiences, increase your pipeline, and motivate partners to continue referring new business is the cornerstone of every growing B2B organization’s marketing plan.
If there’s a gap between your sales and marketing teams, looking at your sales funnel might help you figure out why.
As marketers, we’re great at filling the top of the funnel by publishing content, running awareness campaigns, and putting together effective marketing programs. Concurrently, salespeople are experts at the bottom of the funnel, positioning products in ways that close deals.
The middle of the funnel is where it often all falls apart. While this is typically the longest part of any buyer’s journey, mid-funnel engagement is often neglected.
Improving conversion rates isn’t just about stuffing the top of the funnel with more leads. The right tactics and data will help smooth out the center of your funnel, get you on the same page with sales, and drive better business results.
The middle of the funnel is the point where sales and marketing are supposed to come together. It’s when prospects have moved behind researching pain points to consider what types of products and solutions will solve those obstacles.
Engagement becomes a challenge when all your content is either focused on the top or bottom of the funnel. All too often, prospects are left in the dark in the middle of the funnel because your content switches from educational blog posts to product-focused data sheets and solution briefs.
When mid -funnel content focuses too heavily on your own products and services, you can come off as untrustworthy for prospects that aren’t quite ready for your sales pitch. And while case studies are often a great way to succeed in the mid-funnel balancing act, even those are often too skewed toward your product features.
The middle of your funnel should always be focused on the “how” of a prospect’s issues. You’ve explained the “why” in the top-of-the-funnel awareness stage, and you’re building up to explain “what” the prospect should buy in the bottom of the funnel. Remaining educational without being too “salesy” at the mid-point will put you on a path toward better conversion rates.
But no one said it was easy to find that balance. Blindly trying to fix middle-of-the-funnel content can lead you back to a disconnect between sales and marketing. However, when you have intent data at your disposal, you can solve this engagement challenge.
When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, blind spots start to crop up in the core of your funnel. Publishing more case studies and Best-in-Class practice guides might help, but they certainly won’t solve your issues.
Poor hand-offs and a sub-par qualification process will cause these blind spots and lead many prospects to leak out of your funnel at this stage. These three keys to middle-of-the-funnel success will help you plug these leaks and drive more sales:
• Proper Definition of a Sales-Qualified Lead: Downloading a case study shouldn’t automatically mean a lead is sales-qualified. It’s essential to work with your sales team to determine what really indicates that a middle-of-the-funnel prospect is showing purchase intent. This might include stricter rules of qualification, deeper insight into web behavior, or insight into how prospects have interacted with competitors.
• Content Alignment: In the middle of the funnel, prospects should have some degree of interaction with the sales team. These conversations have to be supported by relevant content to make a lasting impact. This means creating content that’s specifically tailored to the middle of the funnel and getting the sales team to buy into that content.
• Well-Timed Engagement: Engaging prospects in the middle of the funnel requires a strong understanding of their behavior. Contacting a prospect that’s only just entering the middle of the funnel is much different than engaging with one that’s nearly ready to close. Your sales team will know how to strike this balance. However, marketers can improve success rates by investing in data that gives you more context around individual buyer behavior.
Third-party intent data provides the insights you need to seal any leaks in the middle of your funnel. Instead of jumping straight from education to product features, intent data tells you more about specific prospect pain points that you can focus on in mid-funnel content and engagement.
Still, not all intent data is created equal. If you want to learn more about the benefits of intent data and how you can best leverage it, download our free report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data.
The other day, I was walking out and about. I had just gotten a sandwich for lunch, and I was contemplating all the awesome leads that were coming through my PPC accounts when I ran into an old friend and his dog. They were terrified and looked as if they’d seen a ghost! When I asked what was wrong, he handed me the following ransom note that was under the windshield on their van:
I had so many questions: How did this happen!? Who could have done this?! Why would someone find magazines and cut them up in the age of the internet???
Well, gang, it looks like we have a mystery on our hands!
The first step to solving any PPC mystery is to look for clues for what might have gone wrong. In this case, I believe that our suspect isn’t kidnapping leads, but rather, haunting our Google Ads account. We might be scaring leads away from us and toward our competitors! The first place we need to start investigating is our user’s journey.
Now, Mystery, Inc. utilizes marketing practices from the 1970s, so it’s important to point out all of the ways a user’s journey has changed over the years. Back in the day, there were only a few ways to reach new prospects. These limited channels provided less volume around your brand but made it easy to maintain brand consistency. Today, there’s virtually no limit to the various ways a user can encounter your business. It can be as exact as a remarketing list, and as broad as a new organic term you don’t even know you’re showing up for.
All of this new technology tends to elongate the sales process. These days, it takes on average between six and eight touchpoints for a prospect to become a sales-ready lead.
A sales-ready lead is a prospect who:
This elongated sales process is mainly due to the increase in available resources for prospects to do their own research prior to deciding on your product or service. They have more time to research competitors, as well as alternative solutions that may be more cost effective. The good news is that these touchpoints can be automated and utilized to provide top-funnel nurturing.
Because your prospects make multiple touch points with your brand prior to making a decision, it’s likely one of our main problems here is lack of cross-device optimization. As of November 2017, the average digital consumer owned approximately three devices that were connected to the internet. This number has likely grown since the time of the survey. We can assume users are switching between various devices on a daily, if not, frequent basis.
Our prospects are pretty plugged in. Where should we focus? Well, with it being 2019, we should obviously have some focus on the main three: tablet, mobile, and desktop.
Going back to our data, each consumer bracket seems to have more than three devices on average. What gives? Well, another device that’s impacting the above data is Smart TVs! Smart TVs are a great device to consider optimizing for, as they’re new to market, and fairly cheap to run ads on.
Now that we understand the importance of cross-device optimization, let’s dive into the suspects that might be scaring our leads away. Our first suspect is account attribution issues. This perpetrator wreaks havoc by limiting the amount of data we have to work with. To optimize for cross-device performance, it’s important we understand what cross-device attribution looks like in our account. When we are missing this data, it becomes harder to optimize our content for the appropriate pieces of our funnel.
Some clues that “Account Attribution Issues” is one of our actual culprits are as follows:
So how do we catch this guy? Well, the first step is to make sure you have 30 days of accurate conversion data. We want to ensure we’re not seeing any warnings for inactive tags, or discrepancies between Google Ads and our CRM before we start to consider the data here. Once we’re confident conversion tracking is set up correctly, and we have enough data to pull from, the rest is pretty simple!
As long as you’ve had tracking in place, Google Ads has already been pulling in cross-device attribution data. You just need to know where to look! The first step to finding your cross-device attribution data is to modify your columns and, under conversions, select “cross-device conv.” This data will pull into our regular metrics within Google Ads.
From there, you can access additional metrics for cross-device attribution by accessing the search attribution page within Google Ads and selecting “Assisting Devices” under the “Cross-Device Activity” tab. This will allow you to see where all of your click-assisted and impression-assisted conversions came from. You can also see top device paths, and more.
So we have all of this new data on assisted conversions. What are they? Let’s look at an example:
Let’s say Velma went to buy a new magnifying glass. She was on a case when she realized hers wasn’t getting the job done.
Here’s what took place:
This would count as a click-assisted conversion for her mobile device since that’s not where the final action took place. In this situation, the tablet would not get a cross-device attribution credit, since the conversion action took place on a tablet.
So what are we supposed to do with all of this data? How do we use it to our advantage? As marketers, it is important to understand where our users are converting vs. researching. If we start to notice trends in user behavior based on device type, we can tailor our overall strategy around those behaviors. Some clues that audience definition issues are lurking in your account are as follows:
Now, let’s start taking a look at different personas by device type. Keep in mind, this may vary from business to business, and even product to product, but this is generally a good baseline to think about.
Here’s a bit about who our personas likely are, and some considerations we should make when marketing to them.
When it comes to mobile users, I always think of Shaggy. Here’s why:
When it comes to tablet users, Velma fits the bill. Here’s how:
When it comes to desktop users, Fred is our classic demographic. Here’s why:
Smart TV is a bit different of a category than our standard three device types. Here’s how Scooby fits the prospect:
User experience issues is our third monster, and this guy does not mess around. In addition to the poor metrics we saw from our previous two monsters, this guy is going to start impacting overall site metrics that might have a negative effect on your SEO, as well as PPC.
Here are some symptoms that this monster’s your guy:
Sound familiar? Well, here’s some good news: You can stop scaring your leads away by making a few choice improvements to your user experience.
Improving your user experience will make a positive impact on both PPC and SEO. Here’s what you should focus on for each device type:
Mobile:
Tablet:
Desktop:
We already went over the target personas for these devices, and the user experience improvements correlate with these. If you’re still in mystery-solving mode, you’ll have noticed a couple common improvements: site speed and easy-to-navigate layout.
And they would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for your understanding of cross-device attribution, your well-defined audience, and your amazing user experience! Congratulations on solving that mystery—and, more importantly, changing how you look at users are interacting with your brand.
