Long time readers might accuse me of asking a trick question.  The obvious answer is, “Duuugggh Dave, it’s Sales Enablement……”

But if you think about it, sales enablement is about helping our sales people achieve the highest levels of performance/productivity in executing our business strategies in the face of the customer.

A lot of people and functions play important roles in doing this, so “sales enablement,” extends far beyond the Sales Enablement function.  Before, I go further, a disclaimer–the Sales Enablement function is an important function in the sales organization, but it is unrealistic to expect that Sales Enablement does everything to enable sales people.

So who else is involved?  Some thoughts:

Perhaps the most critical person responsible for for maximizing the performance of sales people is the front line sales manager.  It’s these people who are directly responsible for maximizing the performance of each person on the team.  They make sure they’ve got the right people on the team, that they’ve set the right performance expectations, that they remove any barriers to their people’s performance, and they are continually coaching and developing each person on the team.  FLSMs are critical in “enabling sales,” and many sales enablement programs are delivered with and though sales enablement.

Senior sales management is key to enabling sales and sales performance.  They translate corporate priorities and strategies to execution by the sales organization.  They make sure we have the right structures, the right deployment model, the right engagement models that enable the entire sales function to maximize performance.  They look at systems/frameworks, processes, tools, programs, training, metrics and incentives.  They make sure the organization has the right talent.  Finally, they assure the sales organization is well integrated to the other functions of the organization.

Marketing is an important player in sales enablement.  They provide programs, content, market awareness/visibility, web presence, demand/lead gen and lots of other things that support sales people in executing in front of customers.

Product marketing, product management packages solutions, they help sales understand the target markets, how the solutions are differentiated, how they are positioned, how they help our customers more effectively achieve their goals.  In fact, without the stuff product marketing and management does, what would we be selling?

There are lots of other players–engineering, manufacturing, customer service/experience, HR, IT,  finance, legal, operations.  All of these contribute to the ability of sales people to perform.

In short, it takes the whole corporation to enable sales people to do their jobs.

The real trick is, “How do we do this as effectively and efficiently as possible, minimizing distraction and complexity, so sales people can do their jobs?”  This is becoming one of the most important issues in sales enablement—but how we “burden” our sales people is another post.

 

 

Mike asks, “ I’m still relatively new to sales, and I’m wondering. Is there ever a genuine situation where you work for a company that sells a product no one wants, but you’re still a good salesperson? Alternatively, could a good salesperson get meetings regardless of the product?”

I’ve hired countless salespeople who, soon discovered that every major prospective client in their territory already had a partner and would reject their attempts to schedule a meeting.  Invariably, the salespeople decided it was impossible to get a meeting with the prospect because no one wanted to change. Instead, they decided it would be better to call on people who did not use what we sold, teaching them how to understand the value of our offering as something that was somehow easier than a competitive displacement (i.e., Eat Their Lunch).

In my first book, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, I opened with the idea that sales success is not situational. Some salespeople sell for Google and Amazon.com, both great products, great marketing, and an enormous tailwind, who still struggle to sell well even with a great product. Some people sell cardboard boxes, the most commoditized commodity anyone might sell, who sell at prices higher than their competitors, displacing lower-priced alternatives by creating greater value. If the product by itself was enough, all you would need to succeed in business is an order taker, not a salesperson.

Every day salespeople sell products and services and solutions that are inferior to other products and services and solutions that their competitors offer. They don’t believe that their product is inferior. The top 20 percent of salespeople that sell something that is not the best in class beat the bottom 80 percent of the sales force that sells something that may be considered the best in category. Salesmanship matters a great deal.

A good salesperson can get a meeting regardless of the product. In fact, a good salesperson is not selling the product when they ask for a meeting. Instead, the meeting is the product that they’re selling. A good salesperson is selling the value of having a meeting with them. To be effective here, you have to believe that it’s valuable for your prospective client to have a meeting with you, regardless of the product. In my second book, The Lost Art of Closing, we call this concept Trading Value. What are you going to provide your prospective client that’s valuable enough for them to exchange their time, their single, finite, nonrenewable resource?

I would never recommend someone sell something that does not serve their client. However, in many cases, it’s not the product that’s inferior; it’s the lack of salesmanship. That lack of salesmanship may be the result of a lack of training, a lack of experience, or a problem with mindset. It might also be a combination of all of these. In any case, wherever there is evidence of other people selling successfully, you can be sure it is not the product.

It’s not the product. It’s salesmanship.

The post Good Salesperson, Inferior Product appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In the past week I was subjected to three instances where public officials – one elected and two professional staff – indicated that debt was a major funding source for a project they were advocating for.

And they said it in such a matter-of-fact way it suggested they considered debt an equal – perhaps superior – form of funding, at least on par with the raising of taxes or the imposition of fees.

Debt. Bonding. The borrowing of money to spend today but repay in the future... My inner Nassim Taleb is screaming.

On page 47 of Taleb’s latest book Skin in the Game is a table labeled “Asymmetries in Society.” It describes “No Skin in the Game” as a situation where one party secures an upside and transfers downside to the others. “Skin in the Game” is where one takes his or her own risk and keeps the downside. “Soul in the Game” is where one takes the downside on behalf of others or for universal values.

Here’s one entry in the table:

I’m not suggesting – and neither is Nassim – that public officials who recommend the use of debt are immoral, but they have a very different set of incentives and risks than those accountable for paying that money back.

This shouldn’t make us distrust public officials, but it should give everyone – especially the people making the recommendation – a vigilant sense of skepticism. One powerful realization from psychology is that we humans can trick ourselves into believing we are doing good, especially when that action aligns with our own self-interest (status, power, enhanced resume) and we don’t experience a symmetrical downside (loss of status, demotion, loss of employment) if things don’t work out.

For a City, What is Debt?

Like many of our current local conversations, our dialogue on debt is distorted in fundamentally damaging ways by the centralization of our national discourse. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed that we’ll get a comment on this article suggesting that debt doesn’t matter, that money is merely a human construct and that we can take on as much debt as we need so long as blah, blah, blah...

We’re also likely to get a comment that blasts the federal government for their debt prolificacy and the fragility that $21+ trillion in federal borrowing has created. These are the parts of a national conversation that are playing out on cable news, social media and other havens of less-than-enlightened discussion. I find them generally uninformed and, in terms of what this means to a municipality, irrelevant.

While the analogy comparing government to a family has some deep flaws, when we get to the level of local government — where we can’t print money, borrow unlimited amounts, bully ratings agencies and trading partners, confiscate gold, threaten others with the use of force, and so on — the comparison starts to have some validity.

That’s because, for a city, debt is something pretty simple: future spending brought forward to today. If our municipal government takes on debt today, it is agreeing to allocate future revenue to retiring that debt.

This is the opposite of savings, which represents a delay in spending today to allow for increased spending in the future. For many reasons – not all of them wrong – cities are generally terrible at saving.

So, much like a family, when a local government borrows money to spend today, there is usually an underlying assumption that the future family/government will be in a stronger financial position as a result of the spending. Thus, that future family/government will have an easy time paying back that money.

This is where that vigilant sense of skepticism comes in.

Debt as Investment

When I suggest that debt is not a funding source, what I’m pointing out is that the funding source is actually the revenue stream that is going to be tapped to retire the debt.

If I take out a college loan, I’m going to identify my future earnings as the funding source that will pay for my education, not the debt. The debt is merely the way I transfer – at an interest penalty – my future earnings to today’s spending.

If I’m going to school to be an engineer and I can confidently project not only the successful completion of my schooling but a future job with significant earnings, I can feel confident about taking on that debt. If I’m going to school to be a percussionist and have reasons to doubt my future earnings potential, that debt is going to be a much greater risk. (Side note: That simple math is one of the primary reasons I’m an engineer today and not a drummer.)

If a city is going to take on debt to maintain a street, the question is just as simple: What is the revenue stream that is going to pay to retire that debt?

If the revenue comes from new growth, then the recommendation to borrow money needs to be accompanied with identification of how much new growth is needed, and where and how it is going to happen.

I’d also want to know, is the new growth contingent on the maintenance of the street – making that project an investment like a college degree – or is that new growth coming from something else? If the former, then I’d like an assessment of the risk of that growth not coming to fruition.

If the latter, I’d have the same question on risk, but I’d also want to know whether maintaining this street today is the best use of that future cash flow. This is where vigilance suggests that Today Me is inclined to value today’s spending far more than Future Me. I need to give intentional respect to Future Me.

When taking on debt, bureaucrats and public officials need to be vigilant in discounting their own spending priorities today and elevating those (largely unknown) priorities of future residents. This doesn’t make borrowing money impossible, but it raises the bar considerably.

Cash Flow versus Insolvency

What if debt isn’t an investment, but necessity because of slow cash flow? After all, for big ticket items, few families and businesses save up money to pay cash. Why would we expect a local government to do so?

This is a good point, but it comes with a high bar as well. If your city is going to take on debt for cash flow purposes, you have an obligation to make sure you’re not merely confusing your insolvency with a short-term cash crunch. Those two situations feel very similar for parties without skin in the game.

I wrote about confusing cash flow problems with insolvency and how to discern the difference four years ago in a post titled "Investing Cheap Money." It’s still relevant, including this:

You have to be pretty intentional, organized and disciplined if you want to discern your true financial status.

Most cities don’t. They want to believe they have a cash flow problem because it is convenient, because insolvency is too difficult to fathom.

Difficult, but not impossible. If I were being asked to take on debt and there were no investment/growth component to that spending, I would demand to know whether we were solvent, whether we could sustain our own systems with our own tax base or whether I was being asked to obligate future citizens to pay for today’s spending — stuff they very likely won’t value then in the same way that I do now.

Skin in the Game

I’ve consistently argued that cities need to be given a larger toolbox. State and federal governments need to get out of the business of managing cities. We need to stop telling them how much they can tax, how they can tax, what they must spend money on and a whole array of micromanagement that has crept into how we do business. This is because, going back to the "Asymmetries in Society" table in Skin in the Game:

Cities have soul in the game. We live with our mistakes. We experience the downside. For us, it’s real.

The only exception is debt. Public officials and bureaucrats can blow up a city with debt. They can cancel the future of a community in a way that is nearly indiscernible to the public until it’s too late. In fact, it’s often done for the very purpose of making today’s stresses – cash flow stresses – indiscernible to the public. Debt is way too seductive for those without skin in the game.

I have a simple solution: Cities should not be allowed to finance anything for periods longer than 25 years (or, put another way: the generation assuming the debt should pay it back). Cities should be limited to 5% of their locally produced revenue for annual debt service. I would allow that to increase to 10% — where I’d set a hard cap — if a majority of voters, through public referendum, approved it.

Such a provision would make life more stressful for today’s local officials, but tomorrow’s officials would find themselves in cities that were far stronger. Making that tradeoff is what it means to have soul in the game. Soul in the game is fundamental to building a Strong Town.

(Top photo from Michigan Municipal League)

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So you’ve gotten your new deck, perhaps some talking points, or even a full script. You may even have seen another team member deliver the pitch or presentation. Now the challenge you’re facing is not quite the magnitude facing Hamlet, but it can feel quite daunting:

To memorize…or not to memorize?

Many salespeople tell me they don’t want to memorize their pitch because they want it to be more conversational and fear sounding canned or phony.

It’s a common misconception that memorizing lines or too much practice will cause you to sound like you’re performing bad Shakespeare. But if memorization was the cause of bad line readings people wouldn’t shell out millions of dollars to watch actors in film, on television and at the theater.

That canned type of delivery you fear has more to do with A) Not investing the time necessary to put the script into your own words, or B) Improperly rehearsing your pitch (Get some tips here on how to remain authentic using a script)

The truth about memorizing your pitch is this:

“The better you know your script, the better you will be going “off script”

Knowing your lines well enough so that you don’t have to struggle for the words or meaning gives you confidence and frees you up to place your energy on being present and responsive to your audience. Knowing your pitch allows you to flow in and out of it as the conversation directs, while still maintaining enough control to get back to points that you want to make.

Improvising or winging it works for a very few lucky people. But even for them, the results tend to be wildly inconsistent. That’s a lot to risk when the stakes are high!

So am I proposing you memorize your pitch word for word? Not exactly, while that does work for some salespeople, a great compromise is to memorize specific key lines and transition points for greater confidence and control.

5 Areas to Memorize in Your Presentation:

1. The first line of your presentation.
   Why do you want to have that memorized? Your first line is too important to leave to chance. Why pressure yourself to think of something brilliant on the spot? Also, as any actor will confirm, nerves are always at the highest when you first step in the spotlight. Having the first line of your pitch down cold will give you welcome confidence until your natural rhythm and practice kick in.
2. The first line of every slide or topic.
   Knowing how you’re going to introduce a slide ensures help you frame it in the best possible way. You don’t want to have to make a choice of where to start every time a new slide comes up. Decide on the best way to begin and stick with it.
3. Transition lines.
   Transitions between slides and topics can be very tricky. How does your current slide connect to the next? If you don’t have some sort of a transition, the next slide often feels like a surprise to you and your audience. Come up with a quick exit line ahead of time. For example, “now that we’ve talked about the challenges associated with how you’re currently collecting data, let’s take a look at a solution.” A little pre-planning allows for a smooth transition and makes you look like a pro.
4. The last line of your presentation.
   If you don’t know what your last line is, it’s very easy to keep talking – long after you’ve made your point. (Some salespeople have been known to talk to themselves right out of a sale by not knowing when to stop!) So know your last line and when you reach it. Let the impact of what you’ve just said resonate with your listener and allow them a chance to respond if they’d like to.
5. Key lines.
   These are any lines that you A) don’t want to forget or B) you don’t want to get wrong. Things like value proposition, benefits, and metrics are typically key lines. Struggling to get out your value proposition or transposing important numbers can cause your prospect to doubt your credibility. Avoid that by having those lines committed to heart.

Memorizing these key lines and sections will insure you consistently communicate your message, free you from your slides, and give you the ability to focus on your prospect and engage in a conversation with him/her, which is really what a pitch or presentation should be.

One of the very best questions you can ask yourself as a sales manager is this: “If I were to leave today, what are the first three changes the person who follows me will make without hesitation?” The power in this question is that you have to face the fact that you have problems, challenges, and opportunities that you are not taking action on now.

If it’s not bad enough that you have problems and challenges that are unaddressed, the more egregious error here is that you are aware that these problems and challenges exist and do nothing. And I’m not being unsympathetic here, because I have yet to meet a leader for which this issue is nonexistent.

It is difficult to hire, train, and develop a new employee. It’s easier to allow the underperforming employee to continue in the role. It isn’t better for the company. Nor is it better for the team on which this employee works. And if they’re customer facing, it certainly isn’t better for the customer. But it’s better for you because you don’t have to recruit, train and develop a new employee.

Your sales team is too transactional. They are not creating enough value for your clients. They lack the business acumen and situational knowledge, and they lack the subject matter expertise. Truth be told, they aren’t very deep in product knowledge either. It’s easier to allow them to simply maintain their existing clients the best they can and eke out the best results of which they’re capable. It’s much more difficult to do the work of coaching and developing individual salespeople into value creators who a client might consider a peer and a trusted advisor.

You live in reactive mode. You have 12 people on your team, most of whom you treat as if they are dependents. You don’t allow them to make decisions for themselves. You handle every difficult client conversation, fearful that they might make a mistake that costs you the deal (something you can’t afford, because they are not prospecting, and you have no real pipeline). The only time you drag yourself away from the inbox is to close the deal for a rep who should know how to effectively win the business on their own.

In sales, we are in the business of helping our clients change. As leaders we are in the business of growing those in our charge, helping them to be more, do more, have more, and contribute more. Leaders are responsible for building a pipeline of leaders. Leaders are also in the business of helping each individual achieve their best performance. All coaches may not be leaders, but all leaders are coaches.

The most difficult person for any of us to change is ourselves. The unfortunate and difficult part of this truth is that until we can change ourselves, we are impotent when it comes to helping grow those in our charge, build a pipeline of leaders, and help each person on our team achieve the best performance of which they are capable.

Problems don’t age well. Producing better results in all these areas starts by first changing yourself. Whether it be apathy, complacency, or burnout, if you are a leader, you are in the business of change. And in this business, you go first.

The post Better Results Require That You Change appeared first on The Sales Blog.

While plenty of evidence suggests that digital care reduces costs and increases shareholder value, most companies are still very much in the infancy of their Social Messaging journey. In a 2016 study, McKinsey found that while more than two-fifths of service interactions with companies begin on an e-care platform, but only 15 percent are digital from start to finish.

Let’s examine the four reasons change is hard and how brands can achieve it faster:

1. Poor CX Infrastructure

The same McKinsey study also found that when some brands launch digital care, their inbound call volumes increase–precisely the opposite of what they had hoped for. This is known as the boomerang effect and it has everything to do with how much these brands invested, or rather, underinvested in digital care.

According to McKinsey, “The experience in most e-care channels does not match high customer expectations. And when customers find their expectations are not resolved through digital channels, they pick up the phone.” Poorly executed digital care, then, might be worse than none at all.

To meet customers’ expectations for digital support experiences, brands must offer:

• Simplicity – Minimal design and few clicks to reach an answer
• Convenience – Single point of contact and ease of interaction
• Interactivity – Links to alternative digital channels and services
• Continuity – The ability to resume conversations and for agents to know customers’ cross-channel histories

Digital Customer Care and the Social Messaging channels that make up Digital CX delivery are all about a seamless experience for both the customer and the agent handling the customers inquiry.

2. Fear of losing revenue

Some enterprises don’t commit to Social Messaging because they’re afraid of jeopardizing revenue and the status quo. They know that traditional support channels are expensive, it’s safe known entity. But this is a counter productive view. Social Messaging can break to what we refer to at Conversocial as the CX Equation.

The CX Equation: Customers fundamentally want a better customer experience, generally driven by inquires being resolved in-channel in a timely and convenient manner. Brands, and contact centers particularly, are driven by lowering the cost-to-serve, among other KPIs. The two ‘wants’ are counterproductive and there is a trade-off in meeting one over the other. But Social Messaging has the power to break the equation.

Today, consumers demand support on messaging platforms which are still one-to-one interactions with agents. Agents can upsell just as easily via Social Messaging channels as anywhere, but for a fraction of the per-resolution cost. And because McKinsey finds that digital channels receive three times as much traffic as traditional channels, that’s a lot more opportunities to upsell.

Plus, with chatbots, brands can recognize and route potential inbound upsells based on the issue. Customers looking to cancel, for example, can be connected directly to an agent whereas customers with a more simple inquiry can be handled by a chatbot.

3. Unclear migration strategies

The same report from McKinsey found that fewer than 20 percent of organizations that deployed digital care had a clear migration strategy. This means that for those brands, stakeholders didn’t agree internally upon a roadmap within other business units of their brand, leaving their digital CX journey uncharted and separated from their traditional care structure.

A lack of strategy leaves customers and employees confused. If traditional channel teams and digital channel teams don’t talk, or don’t have a direct link to higher level management, customers get transferred in circles and are left upset and angry. This is also true for the marketing team, who will feel they have deserved their seat at the table and have ownership of online brand tone.

Digital care works best when brands have a migration strategy. That means defining where Social Messaging fits into the support hierarchy, training agents on the goals and parameters of new and traditional channels, having a migration budget, and having clear executive buy-in.

4. Haphazard implementation

Sometimes, poor digital care implementation comes down to a lack of organization. Many corporate digital care initiatives don’t have dedicated digital teams with a direct line to top management. Only 40 percent have clear digital targets and fewer than 15 percent have the ability to clearly track customer journeys.

Without detailed metrics and a sense of the cross-channel journey, digital support is likely to flounder. Both agents and customers need clarity on where digital support begins and ends, what it provides, and what it doesn’t. And once it’s implemented, brands need to promote it and encourage customers to take advantage of the new digital channels.

The key to better implementation is to do the hard thing and sit down and plan. The rewards often more than repay the investment. A study by Forrester found that companies that successfully implemented Conversocial increased their revenue by $945,000 over a three-year period.

The payoff of care-full planning

The lesson for big brands is clear: Social Messaging isn’t just the future. It’s profitable at present, but especially so if it’s implemented thoughtfully. Brands must offer outstanding digital experiences, write down their migration strategies, arm agents with the tools they need, and commit to the migration – no half-measures.

Whether in support or transport, technology is advancing. It’s up to brands to decide whether they’ll take the lead or drift along in their competitors’ shadow.

“Please” and “Thank You” is something that parents of young children spend a lot of time talking about and enforcing. And it’s something that shouldn’t stop or begin just there. There is incredible value to us as leaders in showing gratitude and appreciation. Thanks in advance for checking out today’s episode. 😉 Tweet it out: […]

The post The Power of Thank You – Remarkable TV appeared first on Kevin Eikenberry on Leadership & Learning.

“Content is king”

We’re so used to this phrase being thrown around that it’s become rather worn out. But let’s back up and reflect on how it became so matter-of-fact today: Bill Gates published an essay on the topic in January 1996.

Yes, the Microsoft founder wrote this more than two decades ago. It’s still incredibly relevant today. We won’t delve into Gates’ writings in this blog post, although we warmly recommend you give it a read if you haven’t already.

We can all agree that it has become crucial for brands to communicate with target audiences by way of their company blog or active presence on the right social media platform. Creative content is the very foundation of the exposure brands aim for. This rings true regardless of whether they are personal brands or businesses that offer products/services.

If you own a blog, you already know it’s important to create content that improves SEO. But that’s not all.

Especially today, in the era of social media marketing, you must continually promote your creative content to widen its reach. That’s where audience engagement comes in.

And what better way to engage your audience than to present them with something they’ll want to show others?

Sharing content: bringing audience engagement to the next level

Today, brands strive to create content that will engage their audience and strengthen communication. Getting your followers to share the content you post is the “Holy Grail” of engagement.

When your content is shared, it definitely increases your exposure. Even better, people perceive your brand as more trustworthy when their friends or anyone reputable presents your content with a “vote of approval.”

Of course, we should all be aiming to generate share-worthy content. But how can we know what will compel people to share?

Let’s look into the psychology of sharing to get a better understanding.

Why People Share?

To get an idea of what actually constitutes sharable content, we should start by asking ourselves why they might share it in the first place. Thankfully, we have a reliable study conducted by the New York Times and Latitude Research to give us valuable insight.

You might think that people share only for attention, but that is merely a tiny part of it. The results of the mentioned study, titled “The Psychology of Sharing”, point to the 5 key motivators for sharing:

1. To bring valuable and entertaining content to others

49% of the study’s respondents said they want to share what they consider valuable with those they care about. Sharing is a way for them to inform others of the products they like, potentially encouraging them to take action or change their opinions.

2. To define themselves

68% claimed that they share content which will give people a better sense of who they are. The content they present is not only a way to define themselves to others, but also to strengthen their own identity with content that reflects who they are or aspire to be.

3. To grow and nourish relationships

78% of the respondents found sharing to be a way of keeping in touch or forming stronger bonds. It is also a way to connect with people who share their interests and to be part of a community.

4. Self-fulfillment

69% share information they find valuable or enlightening, because it will give them a sense of being more involved in the world. They want to be acknowledged for the valuable information they share.

The study also found that people tend to value information more when they disseminate it, and that they enjoy content more when it is shared with them.

5. To get the word out about what they believe in

84% share the causes or brands they believe in as a way to show support or raise awareness about issues that are important to them. Sharing is a tool for empowerment to affect change.

Naturally, these motivating factors overlap. They can all be applicable, but to have any kind of guarantee that your content will be shared, you need to know your audience.

If you look into the way content marketing agencies approach the concept of sharing, you’ll find that they strive to give consumers the tools to realize the core motivations and satisfy their inherent needs.

This is the smartest way to promote a brand, but it requires some further understanding of the types of people you’re trying to reach. That brings us to the next part.

The Different Personas of Online Sharers

The same study outlines the 6 different types of online sharers according to their different motivations. They are as follows:

• Altruists: those who want to share valuable content to be helpful, to get the word out about causes or brands they feel strongly about, and to enlighten those that they care about
• Careerists: They share to build and cultivate their professional reputation. They aim for professional networking, so they also exhibit a high level of engagement with content that is shared.
• Hipsters: This group of sharers wants to present creative content that expands their identity. Sharing is a way to kick off a conversation or spur controversy, and they look for cutting-edge content.
• Boomerangs: seek validation. Boomerangs want any kind of reaction from their audience in the form of comments and likes. That’s why they also search for fresh and creative content.
• Connectors: They’re looking to bring people together and stay connected via shared content. They share entertaining content that will cultivate these relationships, as well as deals and events that people will gather around.
• Selectives: As the name suggests, this is a group of people who select very carefully what they share and whom they share it with. They will share only what they think is new and relevant to a certain person, over email or directly with them.

When creatively brainstorming content to create, you will be best served to know these types of personas and recognizing them in the audience base you’re trying to reach.

The Role of Emotion in Social Sharing

Lastly, we can’t overlook the part that emotions play in sharing content.

First, let me refer to the findings of Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, professors at the University of Pennsylvania. They analyzed just under 7,000 articles of The New York Times in order to determine the distinguishing characteristics of those that were emailed the most.

Berger and Milkman discovered two primary factors that compelled people to share articles via email: how the article enticed positive feelings, and how much excitement it elicited in readers.

Excitement and positive feelings – you can see how brands are capitalizing on strong emotions in their content marketing strategies.

But keep in mind that excitement is a rather broad emotion. It can refer to negative feelings as well, such as anger or outrage at a social issue that calls people to action.

People feel compelled to share outrageous things as much as they feel compelled to share the lovely positive stuff.

The most important thing to focus on when creating content to elicit sharing is this: will it spark feelings, either positive or negative?

All the in-between is deemed average and not really worth sharing. Unsurprisingly, the content that falls into the negative spectrum needs to have a purpose (such as raising awareness or a call to action) – nobody wants to be negative just for the sake of it.

So, What’s the Takeaway Here?

To create content that people will want to share, you need to trigger a strong response. Striking this chord can be based on emotion, but it’s also important to reflect on how sharing your content would benefit your audience’s inherent psychological needs.

Will it help them present themselves as intelligent or knowledgeable? Is it helpful enough to be passed on? How can it contribute to the way they want others (and themselves) to see them?

Most importantly, think about how your brand can relate to people’s lives and relationships. To make a huge difference in your brainstorming process, it pays to know the psychology behind sharing and also to know your audience.

With both of these under wraps, you’ll be able to expand the engagement level past simple likes and comments.

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Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. All images sourced from unsplash.com.

I know far from everything about B2B marketing. However, over the past decade of yielding to the latest demand-gen “hacks,” content marketing trends and cutting-edge marketing tech, I’ve discovered a few rather basic activities will always deliver meaningful results in a big way if you approach them correctly.

While some might see these as stating the obvious, it’s amazing how many times marketers forget these tried-and-true techniques in pursuit of the latest shiny object.

1. Automating the Tedious Tasks Before Investing in the Sexy Tech

Unsurprisingly, and like professionals in every other field, marketers tend to look for technology with a sort of “wow me” factor. Amazement often carries more weight than utility. But it’s utility that feeds the bottom-line.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a good example here. AI has consumed B2B marketing, and for good reason — it’s scientifically intriguing and has great potential for increasing efficiency. What amazes me, though, is that while the entire industry (marketers, trade shows, publications and tech vendors) has its ear to the AI ground, most marketers continue to manually perform the most mundane, time-consuming tasks, such as lead processing and lead source management. In fact, after recently surveying 15 companies, I was shocked to find that, on average, they spent 51.9 hours per month manually processing leads alone. That is greatly inefficient.

It’s insane to think B2B marketers are ready for artificial intelligence when most are still sifting through Excel files to ensure “Mickey Mouse” isn’t injected into their nurture track. It’s like recommending a smart refrigerator to a homeowner who doesn’t yet have a dishwasher (or even electricity). Much like smart refrigerators, AI is pretty awesome, but it’s not going to provide the utility needed until the fundamentals are automated. And right now, B2B marketers need all the utility they can get.

2. Conversing Regularly With Customers and Prospects

Whether you’re conducting interviews for an article you’re writing or trying to gain insights for a research report, regular interaction with prospects and customers provides several benefits. First, these conversations often unveil new ideas, angles and counterperspectives that help you hone your message. And anyone who has spent significant time as a content marketer knows that coming up with new topics to write about is no easy obstacle.

Second, such conversations support brand loyalty among prospects and customers, who will appreciate the fact that you value their insights and opinions. Often this results in expanded reach, because when you quote someone in an article, they’re more likely to share it. Plus, it’s just a good way to gain new friends to drink with at events (the real reason we go to them).

3. Collaborating With Complementary Companies on Content

Despite the disgusting amount of alliteration in this one, collaborating with other companies produces benefits beyond the effort it takes. I often struggle with this step because it does require adding extra steps (and headaches) to the already time-strapped job of a B2B marketer. But I’m rarely disappointed with the results.

Much like conversing with prospects and customers, working with other companies on a common project provides new insights that you wouldn’t have gained otherwise. More importantly, it often gives you welcome access to target accounts and individuals you haven’t yet successfully engaged. It’s like being invited to a party where a lot of people you’d like to meet will be.

With this opportunity, however, comes a greater responsibility. Make sure you carry your weight regarding the workload, or you risk burning a bridge with a valuable partner. Further, use the opportunity to put your best foot forward in front of the new audience, which means great content and timely follow-up.

4. Moving Down-Funnel With Marketing Metrics

B2B marketing is continually evolving, and the way we analyze performance must evolve as well. Think of the book and movie “Moneyball” — changes in how baseball teams recruited, traded and paid for players necessitated a change in the way they evaluated player performance.

In B2B marketing, we’re currently seeing the same thing. Lead volume used to be the gold standard of marketing performance, but top-performing marketing organizations are now focused on marketing-attributed opportunities or even revenue. And I’m sure we’ll find these metrics becoming even more nuanced in the future.

Keeping the big picture in mind is essential. Lead volume only matters if the leads convert to opportunities. Opportunities only matter if they convert to revenue. And revenue only matters if it can scale faster than the resources needed to produce it. Thus, as our ability to measure evolves, so must our resolve to identify and analyze the most important metrics.

5. Switching Effortlessly Between Sales and Marketing Mindsets

Sometimes it’s best to avoid the instinct to sell. For example, when I’m writing a marketing report or guide, I avoid any inclination to sell our product, because I want to display a certain amount of objectivity and provide as much value as possible to our audiences.

Other times, however, such as when I’m working the booth at a conference or writing an Integrate case study, I try to channel my inner Alec Baldwin and pitch Integrate’s software. The difference is knowing when your audience needs you to be a sales rep.

This seems basic, but I often see marketers struggling with the sales-marketing toggle. When someone downloads a guide titled something like “How to Prepare for GDPR,” they don’t want to read all about your product. Instead, they seek objective, educational content that will help them. Yet, if that person comes up to your booth at a conference and asks how your product can help them with GDPR, they expect you to make a sales pitch promoting your product.

None of the above activities are groundbreaking. Rather they’re tried-and-true methods of moving your B2B marketing initiatives forward. Before jumping head-first into any new “hack” or purchasing an expensive new MarTech system, make sure you have the fundamentals in place. Shortcuts and tech won’t fix bad strategies — but they can amplify the effects of good ones.

Prospecting is hard for most salespeople. In fact, getting a response from prospects was identified as the hardest part of the sales process in the 2018 State of Inbound Sales Report.

But, it doesn’t have to be. These 45 tips from three remarkably insightful sales experts should make it much easier for you.I've shared the virtual stage with 50+ sales experts, including longtime sales heavy hitters like Jeffrey Gitomer (author of the Little Red Book of Selling which has been translated into 14 languages and eight other books), Tom Hopkins (author of How to Master the Art of Selling and 17 other sales books), and Mike Bosworth (author of the seminal sales books Solution Selling and CustomerCentric Selling).

While I only “know of" these three gentlemen, I've had the privilege to get to know three other modern sales luminaries on a deeper level during my time at HubSpot: Trish Bertuzzi (author of the newly released book The Sales Development Playbook and president of inside sales consulting firm The Bridge Group), Lori Richardson (owner of Score More Sales and recognized as a top sales influencer by InsideView.com, OpenView Partners, and Forbes) and Jill Konrath (author of must-read books: Selling to Big Companies, SNAP Selling, and Agile Selling).

They are also top-notch experts at prospecting. Jill, Trish, and Lori had amazing sales careers before starting their own businesses. Their prospecting tips are not only based on experience growing their own companies, but also the time they’ve spent helping hundreds of organizations in a variety of industries.

So, without further ado, here are 45 tips on prospecting from three of my favorite sales experts.

Set Yourself Up for Sales Prospecting Success

You can’t wing success in sales, especially when it comes to prospecting. In order to exceed your sales targets (if you’re in a closing role) or your opportunity creation targets (if you’re in a sales development role), you must plan your approach, create your messages, identify and research contacts, and more. Our first 13 tips focus on the many different activities you must master before you even pick up the phone.

1. Plan your prospecting approach

Lori Richardson (LR): Define the who, when, why, what, where, and how. Know "who" your buyer is. Plan "when" you'll reach out and "how" often.  Know "why" you're reaching out and "what" your message will be. Know "where" you can you find them and reach them. Know "how" you are reaching out.

2. Invest in data

Trish Bertuzzi (TB): Don't spend prime selling time figuring out who to call and how to call them. Use data. Consider creating a specialized "data analyst" role to ensure your salespeople have the right contact information for the right contacts.

3. Focus on business value in your messaging

Jill Konrath (JK): Know the primary business reasons why your customers purchase your offerings, and know how you "move" these business drivers. Do you help with lowering cost of goods sold, increasing uptime of machinery, ensuring compliance, maximizing lead-to-customer conversion rates, lowering operating costs, or increasing market share? If so, make this clear in your message.

4. Don’t talk about your product

JK: Don’t talk about your product. Instead, create value proposition statements that demonstrate your knowledge of your prospect's business drivers.

5. Use numbers wherever possible

JK: Prospects will respond to you at higher rates if they think you can deliver quantifiable business value. For example, "One of our ecommerce clients in your space doubled their conversion rates and increased their average order size by 50%," or "We help tech companies reduce the usual lag from product launch to break even revenue by up to 38%.” (Need help? Download Jill's Value Proposition Kit.)

6. Talk to your existing customers

JK: The best way to learn what to say to prospects is to use the words your customers use. Talk to your customers to figure out what problems they were having before investing in your product or service, the cost of those problems, and how you helped them. Know what the status quo was and how you changed it so you can grasp the business case for your offerings.

If you really want to nail your buyer-focused messaging, create a buyer's matrix by listing out important factors about your buyers, including typical business objectives, external challenges, strategic initiatives, and internal issues.

7. Research every contact

JK: The more time you spend here, the better off you'll be when you connect with a buyer.

TB: Create a pre-call plan for every contact. Gather six to 12 pieces of data about your prospect that you can use in your outreach messages to start a relevant conversation.

For each contact, go to the places you need to go in order to gather that information such as their website and their LinkedIn profile, and enter it into your CRM. The next time you need to call this prospect or when you connect with them, simply reference your research.

8. Plan to contact a lot of prospects

TB: In a study of 35+ technology companies, for every 1,000 accounts prospected, the average SDR sourced 33 opportunities. You need to call a lot of people to get to your goal.  

9. Use every communication channel

LR: Deploy a multi-faceted approach in order to connect with more prospects. Use every method available to attempt to connect: email, voicemail, phone, social media, events, newsletters, and blog posts, as well as referrals. There is no magic formula. You have to do it all. Prospects are everywhere. So, be where they are.

10. Use your prospect’s preferred communication methods

LR: Don't spend too much time on social. Stop hiding behind email. Even though it's faster and more efficient for you, it's not nearly as effective as a call or a meeting. Different buyers prefer different communication methods. Adapt to each individual buyer's preference. Do not impose your preference. It's about their convenience, not yours.

11. Use trigger events

JK: Bring up your prospect's recent events in order to highlight the need for your offering. Cite events such as earnings reports, new products they've launched, personnel changes, jobs posted, acquisitions, layoffs, or macro economic changes like market conditions.

12. Put more effort into getting referrals

LR: Not only are referrals easier to close, the lifetime value of a referred customer is significantly greater than one who finds you through your marketing efforts. Create a list of people in your network who aren't competitive with you, but who frequently come into contact with your buyers.

Get to know them, send them referrals when it makes sense, and earn a steady stream of referrals in return. For more tips on how to do this, read the ebook "Winning Teammates: How to Build a Hugely Successful Network of Business Relationships, Referred Partners and Respected Peers." 

13. Stay focused on your prospect’s goals

TB: Sales is about helping people achieve their goals. Don't let anything distract you from that. 

Do Email Prospecting the Right Way

Whether it’s the most effective method or not, email has become the go-to channel for most modern sales hunters. Leveraging email correctly has become critical to sales success. No surprise that the majority of my favorite experts’ tips on email prospecting is about how not to screw it up.

14. Use email templates

LR: Salespeople can't write every email from scratch. Not only is it hard to write a crisp, buyer-focused email, it’s time-consuming -- a great email can take 30 minutes or more to write. That's just too much time.

There are so many new services that allow salespeople to store, customize, schedule, and reuse email templates. Redirect that effort into writing great reusable messages and leverage technology to customize and deploy them quickly.

(Pete: Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that HubSpot’s sales software enables this.)

15. Scrap self-serving messages

JK: When you write your nicely bulleted list of unique, state-of-the art approaches to awesomeness, you turn your prospects off. Get rid of the self-promotion altogether. Check your messages for blatant horn-tooting here.

16. Don't act desperate

JK: Don't tell them you'd be grateful for “just 15 minutes” of their time. Write like a peer or a colleague would, not like a salesperson begging for a bit of their attention.

17. Optimize your messages for mobile

LR: Prospects are reading email on mobile more and more. If your subject line isn't effective, they'll quickly delete it as they scroll through their emails each morning or evening. Keep the message short and make it easy for them to respond to you.

18. If you have a referral, mention it right away

JK: Write "[Referral] suggested we talk" in the very first line of your message. Mentioning the name of a respected colleague early will earn you enough respect to keep them reading.

Don’t Forget Voicemail

While many reps seem to be skipping the important step of leaving voicemails these days, all three sales experts think that’s short-sighted. Even though buyers rarely call you back, most still check their voicemail. Follow these seven guidelines to maximize your chances of being remembered.

19. Make voicemail a key part of your prospecting program

LR: Have realistic expectations about your chances of getting a return call, but leave voicemails anyways. You're not necessarily trying to get a call back. Instead of a return call, make it your goal to simply pique their interest.

TB: Don't call and hang up as your caller ID footprint will just make you look like a stalker. Deliver a little piece of your value proposition in each and every touch. Hopefully, this generates awareness even if voicemails rarely get you a call back.

20. Keep your messages short  

JK: You have a maximum of 30 seconds to leave a positive impression. Don't ramble. Make sure every word matters. Write out a script or at least an outline and practice it before you record.

21. Get right to business

JK: Don't try and be friendly on a voicemail. Instead, be professional and concise. For example, “Mary. Jill Konrath calling. (123) 456-7890.” There's no need to mention your position or your company. 

22. Make the message about them, not you

LR: Stop leaving horrible voicemail messages that are all about you. Make it targeted to them and their situation by providing a relevant insight. Adding an insight demonstrates you have ideas that could help them with their job, their team, or their company.

23. Practice 

LR: On voicemail, you must concisely say what you do, which is harder than it sounds. Write a script. Leave yourself a message. Record your voice. Play it back. Have others critique it. Rewrite it. Then, practice it until you can deliver it flawlessly. Join Toastmasters if you need help.

24. Use voicemail to show your follow through

LR: How? When leaving a voicemail, tell the prospect that you'll send them an email so they can respond there. Or tell them that you'll try them at a specific time later. Then do it. They'll respect your follow through.

25. Leave a different message each time you call

LR: Remember to switch up your messaging with each touch. Your first email and voicemail might leverage a trigger event or reference how you've helped people like them with the same title or in the same industry. Message #2 could call out a common connection. In message #3, include an insight that's relevant to the buyer.  

Make Every Connect Call Count

All of those prospecting voicemails and emails are completely wasted effort if you don’t make every connect call count. Of course, not every call will or should turn into an opportunity, but preparing and executing this step well is key to maximizing the number of opportunities in your funnel.

When you finally do connect with prospects on the phone, follow these 12 tips to increase your chances of success.

26. Block off time to make calls, and only to make calls

TB: Just because you have your headset on all day doesn’t mean you’ve maximized your phone time. Block off time on your calendar just to make phone calls.

27. Block out all of the distractions

TB: When calling, turn off internal chat, email, messaging apps with friends, notifications, and anything else that will distract you. Log out of everything and stay focused on making calls.

28. Start your day off with calls

TB: Don't get sucked into email in the morning. Make 10 calls by 10 AM.

29. Use video chat whenever possible

LR: If the buyer is ready to schedule a phone call, give them the option of doing an online meeting with video instead. This way, you can read their expressions and body language in real time. They can see you too, which will help keep them focused, and enable them to understand and remember you better.

30. Devise and follow a call cadence

LR: Develop a rhythm and sequence for attempting to reach your prospects, in which you alternate email and voicemails.

By having a cadence, you can plan your approach, and track which touches you've already made so you know exactly which message is next. In addition, you can easily schedule time blocks for different steps in the sequence for a batch of prospects. 

31. Group similar activities together

TB: Make it easy for yourself by lumping similar activities and types of messages together. Don't call a prospect for the first time, and then call a different prospect for the fourth time right after. Group all of your first calls together, and do the same with all of your second, third, fourth, and nth calls.

32. Use the 4x4 rule

TB:  If you're calling into mid-sized and larger firms, target four titles for every account you're working. Call each four times. Easy to remember: 4 x 4.  

33. Qualify the company -- not the contact

TB: Don't give up when one person at a company says "no." Call someone else at the company. All it takes is one "yes" to negate all of the other "no's."

34. Call high

TB: When you receive a lead that's lower level, call the likely decision maker and say, "We received a message from someone within your company that indicates [topic] might be a priority. Would it make sense to discuss?"

35. Don't force a conversation

LR: Be respectful. If it's a bad time for an in-depth call, try and schedule time for later.

36. Show them you did your homework

JK: Do research and make sure your prospects realize you did by asking targeted questions or giving them specific compliments. For instance, “I noticed the new X module on your website -- looks great,” or “What drove the decision to add X module to your website?”

37. Mention relevant experience

JK: If you've worked with companies like theirs in the past, tell them so. For example, you could say, "I was talking to one of my law firm clients (like you) who was struggling with Y, and we worked together on solving it using tactic X.”

38. Share a fresh perspective 

JK: Information is everywhere. But relevant insights are hard to find. Tempt your prospects with ideas, insights, or information that can help them eliminate challenges or realize their goals.  

For example, “I have an idea that can speed up your sales cycle” or “We recently completed some research about how CTOs make purchase decisions.” Fresh perspectives pique curiosity and get you one step closer to booking a longer conversation about their needs.  

(For more help with connect calls in particular, download The Bridge Group' s Inside Sales Productivity Kit.)

Market Yourself to Prospects

The vast majority of buyers have stopped trusting salespeople. They call us pushy, self-centered, and biased. As a result, it’s difficult to break through that built-in mistrust to get through to them.

In the last few years, inbound and social sellers have figured out ways to not just break down those barriers, but to actually attract buyers to them. Here are seven tips that will get buyers to call you -- or at least be more likely to take your call.

39. Optimize your LinkedIn profile for selling, not career building

TB: Don't use your job title as your headline. Instead, write something that describes your expertise. Use your summary and career experience sections to highlight how you help your buyers, not to brag to recruiters.

40. Build and strengthen your connections on LinkedIn

TB: Block off time on your calendar to grow your network. Connect with customers and other people you know. Join Groups and actively engage. Interact with prospects and request connections after they've engaged with you.  

41. Become an influencer in your industry

LR: Twitter is a great tool to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. Start by setting up a profile and listening to the conversation. Engage in conversations with others in your space. Share content -- both yours and others.

42. Send group updates

LR: Create email campaigns that focus on different industries. Include news articles that are pertinent.

43. Blog

LR: Publish blog posts that are helpful and non-promotional. Monitor who pays attention and use that insight to reach out and engage prospects and customers.

44. Don’t get distracted

LR: Social is great, but don’t let it distract you from picking up the phone. There is such a thing as a salesperson who is too focused on social selling. At some point, you need to get off social and actually talk to people.

45. Embrace snail mail

LR: Physical mail volume has gone down significantly in the last decade. With this in mind, if you take the time to send a letter or note via snail mail, you have a greater chance of getting your message open and read. If you have a good conversation with a high value prospect on the phone or an exchange via LinkedIn, but the timing just isn't right, send them a quick note on stationery with your logo on it.

Include your business card and sign it. This gets your business card on their desk. Many prospects call back when the timing is right.

4 Steps to Sales Prospecting Prowess

In some ways, prospecting has become harder as buyers do more of their research on the internet and wait to talk to salespeople. But, with the right tips from the right experts, prospecting can get a whole lot easier:

1. Prepare
2. Create a savvy buyer-focused email and voicemail strategy
3. Master the initial call
4. Make a commitment to marketing yourself

Hopefully these tips will be as helpful for you as they’ve been for us here at HubSpot.

If you see one true buyer a week (50 annually), and convert half of them (25) to clients, and your average project fee is $50,000, that’s an annual income of $1.25 million. And if you are successful doing that the next year, but also expand the original 25 with another $20,000 in business, that’s $1.75 million ($1.25 million plus $500,000). And if you reach back to 25 older clients and do just $10,000 ($250,000), that’s a two million dollar year.

Adjust those numbers per your average project and average repeat/referral business, which all should be higher than the example. But that’s how “easy” it is, if you apply yourself to finding real buyers and not spending time on computer backups, social media, and meeting gatekeepers.

The post How to Make Two Million Bucks appeared first on Alan's Blog.

Most B2B buyers have a positive view of B2B vendors but don't think salespeople generally exceed expectations, according to recent research from the Miller Heiman Group. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

The expectations of today’s buyers have undergone a drastic transformation. Consumer-oriented companies such as Amazon and Airbnb have created great user and customer experiences that have set the bar high for more informed and frictionless buying experiences. These expectations have quickly carried over into the world of B2B buying, changing how marketers will engage and influence buyers along their purchasing journey.

In our eBook, which is now available for download, you’ll learn that the modern buyer is more informed, more independent, and more demanding than ever before. But are your sellers equipped to win them over?

Today’s buyers are no longer waiting to be educated by sellers. Instead, they are doing their homework and expect sellers to be prepared when they are ready to engage. To illustrate, 74 percent of buyers choose the sales

rep that was first to add value and insight, which means digital content and sales assets are now the center of the sales conversation. But before sellers can engage educated buyers, marketers must equip them with content that will make an impression and demonstrate value.

Modern buyers also prefer to buy from sellers whose content provides value and helps guide them through their evaluation and purchase decision process. CEB found that 53 percent of customer loyalty is driven by sales reps offering unique and valuable perspectives. Because sellers are no longer the primary source of information in the buyer’s journey, marketers must equip sellers to become the source of the most valuable information.

Selling to the modern buyer has also become more difficult because the number of decision makers and influencers involved in a deal continues to increase. CEB reports that, on average, 6.8 people must formally sign off on each purchase, which is up from 5.4. This is a 25 percent increase in just 18 months, which may indicate that this trend will continue. Stakeholders within these purchase groups are often

from different departments, time zones, hold a range of titles, and have spent countless hours researching and evaluating possible solutions. When they finally engage with sellers, they want information that demonstrates an understanding of their business needs and recommended solutions that will improve their situation.

However, before marketing can begin creating content to engage today’s buyers there are three important steps that must be taken.

• Define the buyer’s journey.
• Define what content is needed for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
• Use analytics to learn the effectiveness of content.

Content that can meet buyers throughout each stage of their purchase journey is the most important tool any seller has in their arsenal, which means that marketers cannot underestimate the importance of the content they create and deliver to sellers.

Check out the full infographic here for a walkthrough of modern buyers’ expectations during the purchase process.

For an actionable step-by-step guide on how to engage the modern buyer, download your copy of the eBook now and modernize your sales and marketing teams’ selling practices today.

 

The IT revolution is not only causing a change in how companies use technology but how ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and other IT service providers market and sell that technology. A strategy focused on channel sales can drive significant growth by more quickly evaluating go-to-market opportunities, expanding into new markets, engaging a sales team that can hit the ground running, and target marketing initiatives to new groups of decision makers.

This roadmap to channel sales will walk you through the stages of channel development from channel evaluation, to market validation and go-to-market strategy, preparing your business to launch a successful channel strategy, and finding and on-boarding the right channel partners to drive revenue growth.

Section 1: Benefits of an Indirect Sales Channel

There are a number of benefits to building a distribution channel and those benefits run much deeper than simply saving money by not having to hire an in-house sales team.

Channel Sales

You may want to seriously consider a channel sales model if…

1. You have decided to shift your sales focus from small business customers to mid-size or enterprise.

Each of these three segments – small businesses, mid-size businesses and large enterprises – have their own unique characteristics. In a small business environment, you are most likely selling to the company’s owner/CEO. He is a businessman who has a number of responsibilities on his shoulders and simply wants your solution to help him achieve his business goals or eliminate a challenge that he is currently facing. This is a business sale as opposed to a technical sale.

Mid-size companies may have a small IT team, but they may or may not have a CIO in charge. For a mid-size company that does not have a CIO, it is often the CFO who is in charge of the IT department and is the person responsible for the IT decisions. In this case, an IT administrator or engineer will most likely be asked to do the research needed to develop a short list of solutions based on the company’s requirements and the list will be turned over to the CFO. The challenge for your sales team in this situation is that the sales conversation will be more technically focused at the beginning and then transition to a business focused conversation when speaking with the CFO. Is your direct sales team equipped and comfortable speaking in both technical and business terms?

Large enterprises have a CIO running the IT team, taking care of the daily IT needs of the company and working on implementing a comprehensive and cohesive technology and business strategy that will serve the company well into the future. Today’s CIO is required to have a positive effect on the business’ bottom line and, as a result, needs to focus on more strategic projects which will drive their company’s growth. You need to help the enterprise CIO eliminate challenges today but also look into the future and provide solutions that will integrate into a forward-looking technology infrastructure and help them meet their business goals in the coming years.

What each of these descriptions shows is that there are different decision makers and different ways of selling as you stop selling to on group and start selling to another. If your company’s strength is in selling your solution to small business owners and you want to begin selling to large enterprises, rather than building a new team of people who are expert at selling into enterprise companies, you can enter a new market more quickly by using indirect channel partners who are already experts at selling into the enterprise and have an already established customer base.

2. You are expanding into new territories.

When expanding into other countries, it is certainly easier, quicker and less costly to utilize a channel business model. But, don’t dismiss this sales model out of hand because you are simply expanding into different regions of the United States.

An ISV in North Carolina who is targeting Asian companies that have offices on the West Coast of the U.S. in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle may benefit from partnering with resellers in those cities who already have a relationship with these companies, understand the unique cultural differences, and can speak to customers in their native language. These customers will feel more comfortable building a relationship with a channel partner who is intimately familiar with their ways of doing business rather than your company, who will take considerably longer to come up to speed.

3. You are talking to line of business executives rather than the traditional CIO.

When looking to acquire new hardware, software or other technology solution, department heads or line of business executives would have traditionally discussed their needs with their company’s director of IT or CIO. The CIO or another member of his team would then reach out to appropriate IT providers. They would conduct research, determine which technology solution was most cost-effective, which would most effectively integrate into the company’s existing network, and was most compatible with the other hardware and software currently in use.

Today, cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have changed the way in which IT products and services are purchased, who is purchasing them and the speed with which they are being implemented. Line of business decision makers like a VP of sales, CMO, or director of finance can now conduct their own research to find the solution that is most appropriate for their needs and purchase, deploy, and use the technology without ever speaking to their internal IT department.

Because channel partners have a deep, 360 degree understanding of a client’s entire organization, they know the right people to target with the right messages at the right time and can close the sale more quickly.

4. You are targeting new vertical markets.

The key to business success is not trying to be all things to all people but to specialize, differentiate and target customers with messaging that resonates with them. The quickest way to do this is to focus on specific industry verticals such as legal, education, healthcare, government, associations, financial services, non-profit organizations, etc.

Industry-specific channel partners understand the needs of their market and their customers extremely well. They know what solutions clients are currently using, if there is any gap which your company could fill, who the leading competitors are and if they can integrate your solution into their existing suite of products and services to deliver a more complete and differentiated offering.

To take this one step further, some partners have begun to focus their sales and marketing efforts at a micro level. For example, channel partners who target the legal industry may now focus solely on mid-size law firms in New York who specialize in corporate law while others may target small boutique firms that focus solely on litigation cases. Working with these potential partners will enable you to reach your target audience faster and build a differentiated solution by combining your offering with those of your channel partner.

Section 2: Go-to-Market Strategy / Market Validation

The most famous quote from the 1980’s movie Field of Dreams is “if you build it they will come.” This is the mindset of some businesses who believe that their product or service is exactly what the market needs so all they have to do is launch it and customers will come knocking on their door. This is certainly a myth.

It is critical that you research if your product or service is something potential customers really want, if similar products already exist, who your competitors would be, if it is an entry point to a new market or an upsell opportunity to an existing market. Before you actually execute on a go-to-market plan, you need to validate whether the solution, target market, and potential customers are all the right fit.

Understand the following to determine if there is a real opportunity:

1. Market Segmentation / Market Research:

The first step is to determine if there are enough potential customers in the market in which you are interested in entering to make all of this hard work financially viable. Reviewing market research conducted by independent third-party analyst firms will give you an overview of the size of your market, opportunities, the leading competitors, etc. Examples of analyst firms and technology associations that study the IT services industry include IDC, Gartner, Forrester, 451 Research, and CompTIA.

The next step is to do an internal and external analysis. Inside your company, engage your sales team to learn their feelings on this new opportunity. They are on the front lines of the sales process on a daily basis, having conversations with customers, attending industry events and selling against competitive products.

Outside of your company, survey your customers. Ask them if your new solution is something they would be interested in. What would the benefits be? Determine why they would choose your solution over that of a competitor. You can also gain a lot of valuable information by participating in sales calls or listening to recorded customer service conversations. Mining the help tickets of your technical support team can also uncover valuable insights. Your goal is to develop a unique value proposition.

2. Market Penetration Strategy:

Is your market penetration strategy going to be an entry point or an upsell/cross-sell opportunity?

The point of market entry is the point at which new customers become interested in what you have to offer. They may be changing their business focus, looking to grow into a new market themselves or their needs have evolved. By positioning your solution so that customers become familiar with it as soon as their need arrives, your company and solution can become the standard by which all other competitors are measured. This is a great position to be in and increases the likelihood that companies will purchase from you.

Alternatively, current customers who are already using your solution successfully will be more open to considering a new offering from you which provides additional services or is a more sophisticated or enhanced version of the current product. This upsell opportunity is likely to be successful as customers have already established a relationship with your business. Cross-sell opportunities enable you to sell complementary or related products to an established customer base.

3. Product Roadmap:

Does your new, proposed solution fit within your existing product roadmap? This roadmap should include your plans for new products and upgrades which you will launch over the next 18 months or so. Will the solution you are considering fit within your existing product roadmap? Is it complementary and will help round out your portfolio so you are able to offer a more comprehensive solution or is it just the “flavor of the month?” If you have decided to develop an AI solution simply because Artificial Intelligence is the hot topic at the moment, you will not be as successful selling a single product as you would be selling a more cohesive offering.

4. Buyer Persona:

It is critical for both your sales and marketing efforts to have a complete and clear understanding of exactly who your target customer is and what makes them tick. Create a buyer persona where you explain the details of your target customer’s business and the profile of the decision maker(s) at that business. Address points like the company size, location, industry, whether the decision maker is business or technology focused, if they are a corporate executive or run a specific department, etc.

When evaluating your target customer, remember that the largest customers may not deliver the most revenue. Also, a healthcare provider or law firm could have the highest close rate for a security solution but have the longest sales cycle because they need to ensure that the solution will help them meet stringent compliance requirements.

5. Customer / User Engagement:

How will your potential customers engage with your company to purchase your solution? One option is for them to interact with your sales team – whether that is your direct sales team or the sales professionals who work for your channel partners.

The other option is a self-service model where a prospect visits your website, learns about the product, signs up online and begins using it without ever speaking with a salesperson.

Since the requirements for each are very different to execute, it will be important to determine up front which option will be more effective.

6. Marketing Communications:

Once you have done your market research, understand your market penetration strategy, developed your buyer persona, and know how your customers are going to engage with your company and your solution, you will be able to complete the marketing component of your go-to-market strategy.

Your marketing communications strategy will include both brand building/brand awareness and demand generation activities but the percentage of each will be dictated by your current position in the market and your business goals. For example, if you will upsell your new solution to your existing customer base, those customers already know your company, so brand awareness is not as important as generating leads through newsletters, your website, webinars and other demand generation activities.

If you have decided to enter the healthcare industry where you have little visibility or brand recognition, you will need to begin with a brand awareness campaign so that healthcare providers become familiar with your company and services and then ramp up your demand generation campaigns.

7. Leverage Brand Equity:

Is there an opportunity for you to leverage the brand equity of other well-known vendors and manufacturers? For example, maybe your solution is a CRM-based product which enables customers to slice and dice their CRM data in new and unique ways. This might be a product that companies like Microsoft, Salesforce or others would be interested in bundling with their CRM solutions and offering to their channel partners.

If this is the case, your marketing efforts can benefit as well. Since you will be able to use the logos and other marketing resources from Microsoft and Salesforce, the brand equity of these well-established companies will enable you to get the attention of prospective customers who might not have given your company a second look otherwise.

Of course, if you are going to market with a new solution and were considering hiring your own sales team, you would evaluate all of the items that I included above to determine if you have a viable product, if there are companies interested in buying the product, if your sales team could actually sell it, who the competitors are and if you have a unique value proposition.

But, when deciding that an indirect channel sales strategy would be the more profitable and quicker option, many ISVs or other providers tend to overlook some of these items or believe that any issues can be resolved by the channel partner.

This couldn’t be future from the truth. Your solution must align with the needs, motivations, and goals of the customer but your business model and sales strategy must align with the needs, motivations, and goals of your channel partners to have a successful, long-term partnership.

Once you have completed your market validation / go-to-market strategy and decided that channel sales is the road you want to go down, the next step is to ensure that your company is “all in” and ready to execute on a channel strategy. The key components of this model should include preparing your internal teams, considerations for partner recruitment, partner evaluation, program structure, marketing, and support.

In the next blog post, we will evaluate each of these components as we continue down the road to channel sales success.

When we’re emailing busy executives, or highly-successful people, how can we get a response from them? Better yet, how can we get a "Yes" from them?

From my experience, there are two factors:

1. Using follow-up email templates that are proven to get a response.
2. Using “no as an opportunity to build long-term relationships.

When most people hear “no, they think, “Alright, well that sucks … and then they move on and never follow-up again. In reality, that is the worst thing you can do.

Because, from my experience, by consistently following up with people who’ve said no, I’ve been able to turn an initial “no into an eventual “yes … many times.

But it requires you to have the correct follow-up email templates and understand the philosophy that focuses on building long-term relationships.

If you get this down pat, I promise you’ll be much more likely to get the 70% response rate I’ve been able to achieve -- and sell more by doing less.

Here are the follow-up email templates that help me turn “no into a “yes:

Step 0: Review of the system

To quickly put this into context, I was reaching out to these executives to speak at an event called Traction Conference in San Francisco.

*Editors update: Traction Conference is held this year from August 8-9, 2018 in Vancouver, BC.

Here are a few of the people I’ve gotten to speak, as a result of these follow-up emails:

The very first email I’ll send people is this:

But if they don’t respond, I send this follow-up email sequence that leads to a 70% response rate.

Step 1: Send the first follow-up email

Here is the first follow-up email I send:

Here are the three options (and actions I take) after sending this email:

• If they say yes, I’ll quickly respond to their email (usually within five minutes) and offer them three suggested times I’m available.
• If they say no, I’ll ask who else from their team or network they’d suggest getting in contact with.
• If they don’t respond, I’ll send a second follow-up email.

Step 2: Send the second follow-up email

For the second follow-up email, I add more social proof. I’ll update them on new speakers that have been added, and encourage a response:

This is very similar to the first follow-up email, keeping this casual and friendly tone … continuously adding more credibility.

Here are the three options (and actions I take) after sending this email:

• If they say yes, I’ll quickly respond to their email (usually within five minutes) and offer them three suggested times I’m available.
• If they say no, I’ll ask who else from their team or network they’d suggest getting in contact with.
• If they don’t respond, I’ll send a final follow-up email.

Step 3: Send the third (and final) follow-up email

If I don’t hear back by the second email, I’ll send one final email (and set myself free of my own personal follow-up email misery):

If they say yes, I’d suggest being very prompt with your follow-ups. I have a reputation for responding to emails in seconds, and as a result, I've gotten great feedback:

"Lloyed is a machine. He responds to your emails in split-seconds … He gives without expecting anything in return. Genuinely a positive force (and literally he is a force). - Hisham Al-Shurafa, co-founder at SnapDx and Pixineers,

Similarly, once we confirm speakers, we are very diligent and detailed in the follow up information we send. Likewise, people love the attention to detail:

“Thanks Lloyed, this is all super helpful. I wish every conference was as organized as yours! - Sharon Kempner, Lynda.com

But of course … this still doesn’t answer the inevitable question: "What if they say no?"

This brings me to my final point -- even if you're using sales automation to speed up your sales cycle, focus on the relationship not the close.

To be successful with this system, focus on building long-term relationships.

By automating my process for finding prospect’s email addresses and sending 250+ emails in just one click using mail merge, my core focus is on:

• Those who said yes: Getting them whatever information they need at lightning speed. Essentially being available at their convenience.
• Those who said no: Keeping them in my pipeline to send them follow-up emails every couple months (only to add value).
• Optimizing my outreach system (A/B testing the entire process), so I can be more productive.

Prioritizing these core areas allows me to spend 80% of my time focused on building relationships. Because the goal of each email is to simply get the first conversation started.

Even if they say “No, focus on building a relationship for the long haul.

I’ve booked plenty of speakers who said “no the first two times, but with more social proof and bigger speakers, they finally end up saying “yes. Or if they say “no for this conference, I’ll reach out a few months later for a different conference.

Statuses change, motivations change, schedules change. If you’re top of mind, your chances of converting a “no to “yes are a lot higher.

I’m confident this system will automate your ability to get new business.

However, every industry will have its own nuances. So, start by trying to understand your target market and build your strategy from there.

For more follow-up sales email templates, check out this massive collection of them.

Want to drive more sales?

If you’re a B2B business owner, you know that’s more easily said than done.

After all, your sales cycles aren’t like those of your B2C peers. You can’t show someone a Facebook ad, retarget them for a few days and have your customer buy a $10,000 piece of equipment.

So, how do you manage the customer relationship for what might be a 6- or 12-month customer buying process?

The answer is email.

Email marketing is still the number one strategy for B2B companies to build rapport and credibility—without stealing precious hours away from your sales and marketing staff.

Here’s how to create incredible B2B marketing that not only boosts sales but does so without taxing your overworked team members.

Understand What Users Want

Before anything else, you need to have a crystal-clear picture of who’s actually buying your product.

This is more complex than it might sound. Sometimes, your target user isn’t your customer and vise-versa. Such is the nature of B2B sales.

For example, United Rentals sells large and expensive used industrial equipment, like $50,000+ boom lifts, cranes, and forklifts.

They need to sell products that forklift drivers and construction workers appreciate—but they need to market to project managers and contractors.

Depending on your business, this might even involve different people. You’ll need to target everyone in the sales cycle, not just the CEO or purchasing manager.

Finally, understand that every business has its own unique sales cycle. We’ll show you lots of examples here, but no two industries are the same.

Learn from these examples, and adapt them to your own needs.

How to Propel the Sales Cycle Forward with Email Marketing

Now that you have a solid grasp of your sales cycle and customers, it’s time to start with an email marketing program that works.

There are three main areas where email marketing shines: bringing on new customers, developing those relationships, and establishing credibility.

Bring on New Customers

As we mentioned earlier, every industry’s sales cycle is different. But perhaps more relevant, there are different sales cycles within each industry.

You’ll probably be attracting different types of customers for different actions.

A staggering 58% of companies don’t use a tailored approach to the sales cycle, which means creating a unique sequence for each will set you apart from the sea of similar companies.

When welcoming a new user to its Business Ride program, Lyft sends a welcome email introducing the program.

But the email doesn’t focus on selling at all. Instead, it teaches the customer the basic layout and features they can expect with the business plan.

If you’re running a software business, you know that converting a free trial signup depends largely on the value they see in what you have to offer.

So instead of a hard (or soft) sell for an upgraded subscription, consider getting that user to his or her first win.

That’s how infographic design app Venngage spends their first email.

After a day of user inaction, they even send a follow-up email, again encouraging the user to their first win.

This leads us to the next way to get new customers excited about your product: reach out to stagnant leads.

While most companies give up on their prospects after a few days or weeks, monday.com continues even after a free trial has expired.

Weeks after a user has been inactive, they offer a trial renewal.

This can be a powerful way to rebuild trust with people who haven’t been hyper-engaged with your offering yet.

But of course, you can’t just pitch the product all the time. You need to build rapport and develop positive interactions with customers before they make a final purchase.

Build Relationships

Developing goodwill with customers isn’t that hard if you know how to go about it.

The first, and perhaps most important strategy is to personalize your approach.

As many as 54% of buyers want B2B sellers to include personalization, but few B2B companies know how to go about it effectively.

Yes, you can send out emails with |*FNAME*| greetings, but effective personalization goes far beyond that. Instead, customize your content itself based on its place in the customer journey.

Here’s how some of the biggest brands do that.

Time tracking software Toggl goes above and beyond with location-based offers to their email subscribers. They offer consultants in the local area to help business owners get set up.

True, they don’t specify the area I live in—which might be a little creepy, since I haven’t given them that information.

But they make a compelling offer to have consultants come to me, instead of helping out remotely with everything.

Team messaging app Slack introduces a key feature (notifications) in their email sequence.

This serves two goals. First, it adds value to the product, since the user will be able to respond to messages faster.

And second, it further integrates Slack into the user’s workflow, making it easier for the user to visit Slack more often (and perhaps upgrade).

But where Slack excels is by including a custom link to sign into my personal workspace. It shows that this was a specific email to me.

Plus, it makes the call to action much simpler, since all I need to do is click the link and try out their suggestions in my company’s workspace.

But not every feature needs to be introductory, like Slack’s notifications.

Leads that have been using the product for a while will appreciate learning more advanced features. This helps build a sense of community around experienced users and grow the relationship with the product.

This is the exact strategy project management tool Asana uses to build rapport with users, by showing additional features to make their lives easier.

You can use this to encourage company-wide buy-in as well, especially for team features. The more members of a team using the tool, the more value the decision-makers in the buying process will see in your product.

But there’s a key piece that often determines whether a B2B sale goes through or not: credibility.

Establish Credibility

There are a few ways to build your authority in the space and instill trust in users, and email can help with each of them.

First, you can announce new features. This shows you’re dedicated to improvement and will keep updating the product. No B2B buyer wants to invest in something that’s stale and outdated.

Influencer outreach tool BuzzSumo does this masterfully. They send out an email to leads throughout the sales cycle announcing (and showing off) new features.

(If you roll out multiple features in a short timeframe, it’s a good idea to follow BuzzSumo’s lead and send one roundup email covering them all.)

Not only do they announce new features, like finding Instagram influencers and searching users by domain name, they give step-by-step instructions for trying out each.

Actionable emails are always better than generic announcements.

Plus, BuzzSumo hits another credibility indicator at the bottom of their email: they show the face behind the company.

Instead of writing as the “BuzzSumo team” or worse—nobody at all—co-founder James Blackwell puts his name at the end of the email.

Yes, it’s a company-wide announcement. But it’s written by James, includes his picture, and even comes from his email address.

Despite the name, B2B sales aren’t really made business-to-business. They’re transactions between people, and showing the face behind a company adds the human touch every sale needs.

But nothing adds to the human touch more than providing value.

There are as many ways to provide value as there are companies. And every good product provides value itself.

But why stop there? Your email marketing sequence can add value, even if someone doesn’t pay to use your product.

FreeeUp is a freelancer hiring platform that differentiates itself by using a rigorous selection process. They provide value with action-packed emails explaining how to outsource work to freelancers.

They also promote step-by-step blog posts and resource guides to their email subscribers.

The important thing about these is that they aren’t only useful to business owners who use FreeeUp—they’re practical tips for anyone running a business, providing value upfront before a sale.

Finally, you can educate existing users. Customer retention will make or break your B2B company’s success, and credibility is key to keeping customers around for the long term.

Influencer marketing tool BuzzStream does this well with constant educational strategies for existing customers.

They offer these in the form of webinars and other multimedia. This has a few advantages.

First, it shows that BuzzStream understands and relates to the needs of their existing customers.

Second, it shows that they are experts in the space who can solve those problems and needs (or connect users to experts who can).

And finally, it creates an image of BuzzStream not only as a tool, but as a resource hub with new ways to grow your business.

(And notice that the email comes from Gracelyn—not the team as a whole, adding a personal touch as we mentioned earlier.)

So now you know the basics of onboarding new customers, building relationships, and establishing credibility.

But it takes testing and improvement, to skyrocket your results.

Measure Success and Improve

The final step in the process is to test and improve.

Decide which emails you’ll use, and structure them into a logical automation sequence.

You’ll want to set this up to run automatically for different types of prospects in your sales and marketing funnel.

Personalization is key, of course, but this can be automated so you don’t need to input variables each time.

The beauty of setting up an automation sequence means you can track where customers are in the stages of the buying cycle, and which emails are effective.

You’ll then want to gradually test and improve different types of emails to see which perform better. By measuring touchpoints and open and click rates, you can get a good idea of how your sequence is performing.

These tiny differences add up. Credit card company American Express wanted to improve the client experience for those companies that used their card.

They studied every detail of the client experience for 30 days, measuring every touchpoint, email, and phone call. The team then used that information to craft a better customer journey.

A year after they implemented the project, American Express boosted existing client revenue by 67% and new client acquisition by 46%.

It all started with tiny changes to their sales sequence that led to outsized results months later.

If you want to grow your B2B business, you must study the sales cycle obsessively.

Conclusion

So, what’s the mystery behind B2B email marketing that sells?

There is no single secret. Start by deeply understanding your sales process, customers, and cycle.

Craft personalized emails to target the three critical areas of the customer journey—bringing on new customers, strengthening relationships, and establishing credibility with existing users.

Next, measure each email and make continual improvements. Keep the sales process first in mind and don’t be afraid to test and experiment.

Implement the changes you need, and you’ll see a dramatic increase in sales. Sales are directly tied to the customer journey.

Improve how you shape the customer journey, and you’ll see results on the bottom line.

The post The Ultimate Guide to B2B Email Marketing that Will Boost Your Sales appeared first on OpenView Labs.

When you’re selling to businesses, there’s one thing you always know: they don’t make whimsical purchase decisions. Credibility and value matter more to them than flashy marketing and fantastic taglines. This makes B2B lead generation one of the hardest challenges you’ll ever tackle.

This also makes SEO a great channel for tackling this challenge.

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is a set of tactics you can use to optimize your content and convince Google to rank your webpages above everyone else’s. The rationale is pretty linear: you rank higher, more people find you, and you do more business. Ranking on Google’s page one is a seal of authority from the world’s no. 1 search engine—it tells people that your voice matters, your business is credible. Now how you rank higher is a mystical balance between content creation and distribution. “Mystical” because there’s no blanket rule to rank on page one, only hacks that have worked for other businesses.

This blog is about what’s worked for us.

If you haven’t heard about us, Freshsales is a cloud-based sales CRM. We didn’t enjoy juggling multiple sales tools to manage our business, and we realized many businesses were stuck with the same problem. So we built a CRM that brings together phone, email, reports, lead profiles, deal pipelines, automations and integrations in one out-of-the-box package.

When we launched in June 2016, we knew we were joining more than 300 players fighting for market share in the CRM software business. Plus we’re a SaaS CRM, which means we had to make peace with high churn rates. We had to quickly find a reliable lead generation channel without breaking the bank, and we turned to SEO.

I’ll start with what everyone talks about first when they talk about SEO: keyword research.

Keyword research and density

Keyword research is to B2B lead generation what market research is to business in general. You cannot win leads if you don’t know the language they use and the needs they have.

At Freshsales, every time we write a blog or create long-form content, we first sign in to Ahrefs and Google Adwords.

Both tools let you check search volumes of keywords. It’s not about only targeting keywords with high search volumes. It’s about picking the right keywords for your business. A keyword like “CRM software” has a search volume of 121K, which means competition is looking at it as well. On the other hand, a keyword like “crm for startups” has a search volume of 320. Both keywords can be targeted, depending on what the goal is.

For our website, we used Ahrefs to choose the keyword “sales CRM.” Why did we pick this? A combination of several factors:

• We wanted one term to identify us across the 100+ pages on our website. Freshsales is a sales CRM at the end of the day. Nothing defines us better.
• It’s also an important keyword in the CRM space, and our competition ranks for this keyword.
• It has a relatively lower search volume, giving us a better chance of breaking into page one on Google.

We revisited our content across the website—every time we used “CRM” in the copy, we reminded ourselves to use “sales CRM” instead.

Keyword stuffing wasn’t our goal, though.

We followed a simple benchmark to monitor ourselves: the 0.5–1% rule.

If a page had 500 words, “sales CRM” would be mentioned 5 times, give or take a couple of instances depending on the narrative. The keyword had to be an organic part of the narrative, and if it didn’t fit into a particular context, we didn’t think twice about leaving it out.

The image below is a grab from Freshsales’s exhaustive all-features page, which quickly lists all the features in Freshsales. The page stands at 2,000+ words. “Sales CRM” is featured 20 times here, excluding a mention in the footer.

By optimizing our website around one keyword, we’ve achieved goal one of SEO: stay at the top of Google’s SERP (search engine results pages). Over the last 9 months, Freshsales has stayed in Google’s top 5 search results for “sales CRM.”

This exercise reminded us about something. We could do extensive keyword research and maintain density in each page, but if we weren’t putting out useful content, Google wouldn’t care. And that would make our B2B lead generation efforts null and void.

Which brings me to the next focal part of this blog.

Creating useful content

You can create useful content online if you successfully answer one question: what are people searching for?

The answer to this question revolves around four touchpoints:

• Think from the searcher’s point of view.
• For the search term you’re targeting, look at page one on Google and find out what those ten search results are talking about.
• Use a tool like Ahrefs to give you a network of related search terms around your target keyword.
• Use these insights to create an exhaustive, long piece of content.

We realized why these four points are crucial when we put out a webpage in February this year.

“What is CRM?” has a search volume of 56K per month. More than 150 million search results show up for this term. Prime property, tough to break into, high on returns.

We spent time imagining what people would expect from a page that answered this question. In fact, what kind of people would visit this page? It wouldn’t always be businesses figuring out what a CRM means; it could also include entrepreneurs who have no idea about any kind of sales tool. So our content had to appeal to the most elementary demographic in that mix.

We then took the help of Ahrefs for keywords around this term, started writing the page, and kept iterating based on inputs from our designer and web developer.

We published the “What is CRM?” SEO page on February 6th, 2018. As of May 31st (excluding June because we’re still in the month), this page has grown at an average of 413% in terms of product signups. I can’t reveal exact numbers, but we’ve hit three figures in product signups—from this page alone, in just about 4 months.

And the reason why this page is helping us in the B2B lead generation game is its position on Google. I’m typing “what is CRM” on Google as I publish this blog, and the webpage ranks at number 4 in the United States and India, and at number 5 in the United Kingdom. And unexpectedly, this webpage also ranks at no. 4 for the highly generic “CRM” keyword, which has a search volume of 1 million.

Optimizing for mobile and desktop

For B2B lead generation, creating useful content is only one half of the journey. Because Google isn’t only reading what your website says.

It’s also analysing how it looks.

Your webpages may look amazing on desktop, but if they’re not optimized for mobile, Google believes your page is not the best option out there.

“Not optimized for mobile” includes a number of things: page load speed, alignment of text, resolution of images, and how animation looks on the smartphone’s screen.

That basically means for every webpage you create, your designers and developers need to create two versions: one for desktop and one for mobile.

That’s what we did.

On our CRM software webpage, we have an important table comparing CRM with spreadsheets and email. The table fits pretty well into a desktop screen, but you had to scroll horizontally to read it on mobile.

Now this isn’t great user experience, especially when you’re swiping every time to read row after row of content.

This is how the page looked on desktop.

For mobile, we didn’t want to shorten the sales needs; they had to remain descriptive. What we could look at was the other three columns—more particularly, their headings. Could we reduce the length of the headings?

Better still, we replaced the headings with icons, like this:

Reading all this, you’re likely wondering if SEO is a highly complex strategy.

You’re right.

SEO is rooted in Google’s algorithms and little details that aren’t always apparent (or appreciated). For instance, it’s hard to imagine how something as simple as a URL can impact SEO in particular (and your B2B lead generation strategy in general). That’s what we’ll talk about next.

The finer details

When you publish a webpage, Google crawls through every part of that page.

Crawling involves looking at on-page and behind-the-page aspects: the URL, page title (for display on search engines), in-page title (called H1 in web parlance), and meta description.

And then Google goes back to the target keyword you’ve used on that page, and sees how all these finer details tie back (or not) to the target keyword.

For instance, if it’s a page on lead scoring, Google first looks at whether the “lead scoring” keyword is present in three key places:

• the page title on Google
• the URL
• the H1 tag

Collectively, these three elements are the first impression you give Google about your page. They’re like your page’s ID card, in a sense. Sure, keyword rules restrain you in terms of language usage, but that’s a small price to pay for a page-one ranking on Google.

But we’re not done with a page’s finer details yet. There’s another important element which is sometimes single-handedly responsible for persuading people to click on your page. And that’s your meta description—those 2–3 lines of text you see below every search result on Google.

A meta description offers readers a brief summary of what they can expect from your page. It’s crisp and descriptive at the same time. The reason why it’s a crucial part of SEO—and by extension, B2B lead generation—is simple: it’s the synopsis your readers need before deciding if they should visit your page.

There are many ways to write the meta description:

• You can pick a collection of keywords to describe what your page is about.
• You can write a conversational snippet to make it read more natural. The snippet doesn’t omit the focus keyword though.
• You can take the main points from your page and put together a summary.

Some businesses don’t write a meta description, in which case Google automatically displays the opening lines from your page. This is not recommended, simply because you’re letting go of rich real estate where you can write fresh, descriptive content. And that’s wasting an opportunity for B2B lead generation.

Remember: Google does not appreciate content duplication, and it does not fail to recognize fresh, optimized content.

Interlinking

I bet you’ve heard of interlinking—the practice of linking pages on your website to one another.

Links are like keywords. They’ve got to be there, but not too much.

Add in more links than necessary, and you’re just spamming your own page (and Google). Miss out on linking to a relevant page in a particular context, and you run the risk of a website visitor dropping off.

Interlinking serves two purposes:

• It improves the user’s experience on your website and increases stickiness.
• It tells Google that a set of pages belong to the same business, upping your website’s recognizability.

This image is an excerpt from our all-features page. Here, we’re looking at how the CRM can help businesses manage deals. We used this space to

(i) link to an elaborate page on the CRM-deal management topic,

(ii) draw attention to the CRM’s Android and iOS apps, and

(iii) keep the conversation going around a different but related topic (reports).

Businesses like to explore related content on a subject before they make a decision. By interlinking your webpages, you hold your website visitor’s interest, supplement their knowledge and take a step closer towards making them your lead. Which is why interlinking was one of the first things we did as part of our B2B lead generation efforts.

Interlinking on its own may not help the respective page to rank higher. But it’s a collective signal to Google about your website, and your domain authority is all the better for it.

Backlinks (or inbound links)

This is perhaps the second most important part of SEO, after content creation.

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Putting out content is not enough, because everyone is doing it. For Google to place your content higher, your content needs to be acknowledged by other websites—and this happens through backlinks. #B2B #LeadGen #SEO
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What’s a backlink?

When somebody’s website links back to yours, a backlink is generated. These links are earned through commercial agreements between websites, or through an organic process where your page is discovered and linked back to because it is relevant to someone.

Think of it this way: someone is citing you in their work, and you earn credibility in the process.

Earning backlinks directly correlates to the kind of relationships you’ve been able to build with people online. Sometimes it’s about writing an article for someone and including a link back to your website in the article. Sometimes it’s an article they’ve written, and there’s a link to your website. Sometimes, it’s a request from a website to feature your article, without you approaching them. Whatever the scenario, when someone chooses to land on your website from a third-party’s webpage, it’s a clear sign that your B2B lead generation efforts are being recognized beyond your website.

This image shows one of our articles featured on Finances Online. Click on the image to read the article—you’ll find a backlink to the Freshsales website.

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Time to get to the bottom line.

You’re probably wondering, “All this is a whole lot of theory. But what did they get out of it?”

The results

• At the time of publishing this blog, Freshsales ranks on page one for 388 keywords in the United States, 65 keywords in the United Kingdom, and 151 keywords in India.
• Between July 2017 and May 2018 (ten months), our organic leads—and by leads we mean product signups—grew at an average of 9.7% month-over-month.
• On average, organic contributed 61% of total leads to Freshsales in these 10 months.

These numbers aren’t as glamorous as a 25x-growth-in-2-months kind of stat. But this is consistent growth with enough indications of being sustainable. Plus we’re only scratching the surface with these results—honestly, there’s a lot more to be won.

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We’re certainly going to tweak our SEO strategy as we keep evolving, but we’ve found our basics. And we intend to build around these principles for the road ahead.

How do you go about your SEO? What are some of the things you do for B2B lead generation? We’d love to know! Tell us in the comments.

Happy selling!

By Tibor Shanto

Last week I looked at the power of the small word ‘NO’ in halting sales, preventing President’s Club, and more; but we looked at it in the context of the prospecting experience, very early in the process. But objections are dynamic, just like the buy/sell cycle, and as such our ability to recognize them and deal with them effectively needs to be as or probably more dynamic.

As we get towards the end of the sale, for me, ‘NO’ becomes more ominous, for one simple reason, I have invested a lot in completing the journey. Oddly enough most salespeople seem to be able to manage objections better at the end, then in a first prospecting call. How else can one explain why salespeople eagerly pursue one type of objections, the ‘NO’ at the end, yet are terrified about hearing the same ‘NO’ at the very embryonic stage of the sale, the first call.

Follow The Stats

If one looks at several sources over the years, you’ll find that across all B2B sales, remember this includes transactional commodities to long drawn out “complex sales.”

1. The average close rate for Sales Qualified Leads is 16.5%
2. The average for people who successfully complete our Proactive Prospecting Program, their conversion rate of “right person conversations” to appointment (live or web meeting), is about 14%.

Let’s change the perspective and see what happens, in the first case,

• SQL to Close, the rejection rate or the ‘NO’ effect is 83.5%
• Conversation with the right people to appointment 86.0%

That is only a difference of 2.5%, but it seems to freak salespeople right out. I am in the camp that says blow me away early and let me save my time and resources for those opportunities that count. Most salespeople seem to prefer the ‘NO’ at the end; they feel they can deal with it better; if only their commissions were driven by emotion not execution.

Get Past The Distraction

Objections or the significant ‘NO’ towards the end of a cycle, remind me of how the British used to go into battle, long before you saw the real enemy you were distracted and haunted by the bagpipes, the sound of the beast about to descend on you. By the time the battle indeed started, many were distracted by the pipes, causing them to take their eyes off the real issue at hand; which in most cases were winnable had the seller not been diverted.

Salespeople are not alone in dealing with crisis or adversity in a mostly reactionary fashion, causing them to abandon their plan or the very process that got them that far. We react disproportionately and emotionally to a crisis based merely on appearance. We respond to the notion and concept or ‘crisis’, not the actual event at hand, not the real issue underneath. (In case you are wondering, hearing ‘NO’ or an objection after you’ve submitted a “real” proposal, it counts as a crisis). We become more emotional, less logical, less confident in our plan, and we go into panic mode, dealing with the veneer rather than the underlying issue.

The appearance of an objection and all that represents in the seller’s mind, all the emotions of past losses after ‘NO,’ come rushing to mind, spiced by feeling and passion, and we wind ourselves up over something that in ‘normal’ circumstances are very predictable and manageable. The first thing to stop.

As in other fields, recognizing things for what they are, and dealing with that rather than every distraction that it is wrapped in, is a trap.

Sure experience shapes our response, but it should also inform and dictate our expectations, and by extension our answers. Start by reviewing deals where you overcame severe objections and explore why and how you were able to deal with them in a way that satisfied the objector.

There is a range of things to explore both on the buyer’s side and on your side. We all believe and buy into the concept that buyers have less time than sellers, and have a bullshit filter so finely tuned that at first whiff, they move on. It would seem odd that after all the time and effort, they would willy-nilly say ‘NO’. It is usually the case that the can’t square a circle and without which they find it difficult to see anything beyond that “issue.” Till we remove that hurdle, barrier or gap, we are stuck. This means work, which explains why many chose the lazier path of discounting. But that will not work where the buyer has clear ideas that we need to help them (not us, but them) work through.

If you followed your process, not an abstract concept, but a detailed step by step approach to the sale, you should be in a position to go back to earlier parts of the discussion and see where you had critical alignment and agreement. Areas of consensus around how they can move their objectives forward, you should be able to see where things have changed, and other factors that got the buyer to this point. By reviewing these, you can usually identify where things have shifted, and then deal with that directly.

There many more examples of this, but common to all, is that you have a choice. You can do what most do when they hear ‘NO’, panic and start the process of rationalizing the loss or be a pro and work your plan, which should always be helping the client achieve their objective. Focus on getting the buyer back on the path to their objectives when others panic, and you will always find solid ground you can work with.

The post ‘NO’ Is Deceiving appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

In sales prospecting, you know that you are going to hear the word “no” (or some version of it) more than a few times.

In my book, “High-Profit Prospecting,” I encourage you to take a different perspective on this word “no.”

It’s never a good idea to view a “no” as permanent. I am committed to helping you build the prospecting skills that will help you succeed. For more insights on the best prospecting skills, check out High-Profit Prospecting.

A coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

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

It’s hard to build a loyal client base for any business, but new businesses definitely have a long road ahead of them. Without a long-standing reputation, it can be hard to gain the trust of potential clients. That’s why it’s so important to build solid relationships with every single customer you receive so as to ensure that they stick around and improve the overall reputation of your business. Let’s talk about some smart client retention techniques.

Solve a problem in the industry.

The world of business can be brutally competitive. You can either stand back and let rival companies overtake your business, or you can be brave enough to take the lead in your industry. There are only so many potential customers to go around in your specific market, so you need to attract consumers who are currently buying similar goods to yours from your competitors. That’s the key to client base growth. But the only way you’re going to achieve this is by solving a problem that consumers face when they buy goods or services from your competitors. Perhaps the price is too high, or perhaps they’re not getting a completely ethical service.

If you’re wondering what problems might exist in your industry then you should conduct some research. As Nicole Beckett over at the OPEN Forum said, you should know your target customer. And that means more than simply knowing that they’re looking for the goods and services sold by businesses in your industry; it means you need to know what they’re feeling and thinking. You need to fit into a focused and relatively narrow niche in order to really make an impact on the client base. Solve a problem that appeals to a very specific but marginalized portion of the target market. That way, you’ll be able to ensure that customers keep coming back to your business with its unique solutions. If your approach is too broad then you won’t be able to stand out from the sea of similar rival businesses. Solve a problem in a unique way if you want to improve your client retention.

Chase leads.

So many new businesses fail to succeed because they don’t chase leads successfully. You might have a reasonably sizeable client base, but it’s not growing as you’d imagine because you’re missing many potential customers who are on the fence. The modern-day consumer finds it easier than ever to weigh up their opinions with tools such as the internet. That can make it hard for them to make a decision between multiple businesses for the goods they want; you need to chase up leads in order to secure those potential clients before they become attached to another brand. You might even want to look into a B2B Lead Generation and sales tool that can identify anonymous visitors to your website. If you can better analyze the traffic your business’ website receives then you’ll be able to follow up on those potential customers who slipped away. You could make an initial offer on their first purchase just to reel them in and sell them on the quality of your product or service. Chasing leads is about getting clients off the fence. Help them come to a decision before they forget about your business.

Focus on relatable branding.

If you want to gain and retain clients then you need to develop a relatable brand. As we’ve discussed before on this site, reputation can be a fragile thing. If you disengage with your clients or potential clients then you might lose them forever. First impressions really do count in any industry. That’s why it’s crucial to make an instant connection with customers and potential customers. You need to build a reputation that convinces consumers that they can trust your business. As a new player on the scene, it can be hard to attract customers and get them to stick around. You’re competing with established brands. Make sure that you relate to consumers in order to separate yourself from the crowd. Maybe you could be the most eco-conscious company in the industry. The modern consumer cares about getting their products ethically.

Build long-term relationships.

Finally, you need to build long-term relationships in order to retain clients. It isn’t enough to simply impress a customer once; they might not stick around after that first purchase. In fact, this study outlined customer retention probabilities based on a sample survey. After they’ve made their fourth purchase, customers are over twice as likely to return to the same business than they are after simply making one purchase. You need to give clients an incentive to return to your business, in other words. That’s the only way to retain customers in the long-term. You need to build loyal relationships. Show your clients that you care by offering them discounts or vouchers after their first purchase as a way of thanking them. This will increase the possibility of them returning and becoming a permanent customer.

Sales revolves around creating conversations. But, starting a conversation is difficult. Incorporating LinkedIn InMail into an outbound strategy is an excellent way to engage prospects.

LinkedIn is the most extensive professional social media website in the world with over 500 million users worldwide. Due to the vast amount of users, finding contacts and researching leads is easy. In fact, 82% of prospects are reachable through social media.

Understanding how to use InMail as an effective outbound strategy is a challenge. Today we’re sharing a few useful techniques we’ve discovered.

Combine InMail with Other Prospecting Techniques

InMail improves traditional outbound strategies. Phone calls and emails are essential prospecting methods, but InMail adds an extra layer. LinkedIn estimates that contact to meeting ratios increased by 8% when using InMail in conjunction with other contact approaches. That’s a significant increase in efficiency!

Cadences allow you to incorporate InMail messages as a step in your outbound cadence. For example, you can follow up a voicemail with an InMail message. Voicemail usage has declined in recent years. An InMail message following a voicemail adds urgency. Additionally, it puts a face to the name so the prospect can make a visual connection. A familiar face helps develop relationships.

A word to the wise, the InMail inbox is not the setting to close a deal. If a buyer senses a pitch, the relationship can quickly derail. Save the selling for the meeting.

Personalized Messaging

Generic messages are boring. InMail is an opportunity for personalization!

Engaging prospects requires personalization. We’ve done the research to prove it (check it out here)! Relationships rarely begin with a template. Cookie-cutter messages won’t make anyone feel special. Instead, command attention by tailoring messages specifically for the prospect.

LinkedIn profiles offer an opportunity to discover relatable information based on the user profile. Company news and recently shared articles are clues to finding the perfect introduction. Recently shared content creates opportunities for ongoing discussions. Shared interests initiate a conversation on a more personal level. Studies reveal a 46% increase in message response rate when there’s a shared interest, skill, or industry group.

Remember to keep the content you share relevant and provide substance. Spamming a prospect’s inbox with unrelated content deters further engagement. The material should provide value and open room for further discussion. A CTA at the end of each message encourages a conversation. “I’d love to meet for coffee and hear your thoughts,” promotes opportunities for future discussion.

The goal is to start a conversation and build a relationship.

Bypass Gatekeepers

Gatekeepers have an important responsibility. They protect decision-makers from overwhelming calls from prospectors. Getting around a gatekeeper is always a challenge. InMail bypasses the gatekeeper and provides direct access to decision maker’s inbox.

The number of emails exchanged daily around the world is astonishing. Radicati, a market research firm, estimates business emails alone total 124 billion per day. That’s a lot of opportunities for your email to be overlooked. InMail boasts a response rate of 15%, which is 5x higher than email! That means prospects are seeing and engaging more with direct messages than traditional email.

Phone calls are the primary method of contacting a prospect but they aren’t always an efficient way to get a response. On average, it can take 8 follow-up calls to reach a prospect. Even more astounding, LinkedIn reports that InMail delivers a response rate that’s 30x higher than a cold call. That’s valuable time for a seller. Direct messages are an opportunity to contact the decision maker directly and engage immediately.

Earn Referrals

Gatekeepers aren’t always the roadblock. Sometimes finding an introduction stands in the way.

Referrals are a powerful tool in sales. Statistically, people are 4x more likely to buy a product or service when it’s recommended through a friend (Nielson). InMail makes it easy to find mutual connections and ask for an introduction. When getting a foot in the door is a challenge, sometimes a friend in common can provide an “in.” Friendly introductions create immediate relationships. Relationships initiate the conversation.

Using InMail effectively in an outbound strategy creates a rock solid message. Including it as a step within a cadence incorporates a social touch along the buying journey. Personalization initiates a conversation and nurtures the relationship. Starting a conversation can be difficult. InMail makes it easy to kick things off and bring home the win!

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Have you heard? SalesLoft now offers a brand new option to add to your cadences: LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps! Find out more here.

The post How to Incorporate InMail Into an Outbound Sales Strategy appeared first on SalesLoft.

The other day, I got a call from one of my long-term coaching clients. He was excited because he had just blown away his sales numbers. He had a 7 million dollar quota and he closed 10 million, but he …
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Whether you’re a full-time blogger or blogging as a content marketing strategy for your business, your goal is for your content to be seen by as many people as possible. Not only can your blog attract more traffic to your website and get you noticed, but it can also help boost your sales. But if you aren’t seeing any results yet, applying growth hacks to your blog can help you get there.

Growth hacking is essentially when content marketers find unique ways to drive more growth for their business at a low cost. If you focus on growth hacking your content marketing, you can get more traffic, more customers and more revenue.

If you want to get more exposure for your content, check out these simple growth hacks to take your blog to the next level.

1. Perform keyword research

You can write amazing content for your blog but that doesn’t matter if no one is able to find you on the web, that’s why you need to consider SEO. One of the first steps to optimizing for SEO is keyword research. Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day, so you need to know what your target audience is searching for on the internet and use related keywords in your blog posts.

Find high-volume and low-competition keywords that your website can rank for and place them throughout your blog post in a natural way. Don’t forget to add your keywords to your headline as well.

There are some other SEO factors to consider other than keywords. Instead of stressing out over having to remember them all, you can use a free tool like Yoast’s SEO Plugin to help you out with all SEO best practices.

2. Link to other relevant posts.

Every blogger knows that having other websites link back to you is awesome but there are many benefits to linking your own content on your site as well. Linking to your other blog posts is not only a great way to promote your other content but it also helps with SEO rankings. Google will take into consideration the phrase you linked as well as the content you linked to and will improve your ranking.

Don’t just pick any phrase and link it to one of your blog posts at random, choose a specific phrase within your blog post and link it to related content from another blog post. Like the example above, linking the phrase “split testing” to a blog you wrote titled, “How to Create a Split Test”, will make the most sense for readers and encourage clicks.

3. Offer content upgrades.

Offering content upgrades is a great way to grow your blog and your email list quickly. A content upgrade is essentially a freebie that you offer to visitors within your blog post in exchange for their email address. People love freebies, so by offering a free ebook, weekly newsletter, or PDF download that’s related to your business, your visitors will have a big incentive to join your email list and it will be easier to sell to them down the road.

Make sure the content upgrade you’re offering is highly specific and related to the topic of your blog post. Think about the burning questions your target audience wants the answer to and create your content upgrade around it.

Consider using an Exit-Intent popup that will grab the attention of your visitors as they try to leave your site. Not only will they be more likely to click the download button for your freebie but you’ll be able to improve your bounce rate too.

4. Repurpose content.

Everyone has their own preference for how they like to consume content, some like reading and others prefer watching videos. By repurposing your content into different formats like videos, infographics or even podcasts, you can please visitors with all different types of preferences.

Over at Moz, they have “Whiteboard Fridays”, where they repurpose their blog content into fun, whiteboard videos. You can easily repurpose your own blog posts into videos using a tool like Lumen5.

Repurposing your content in a variety of formats will also give you a boost in organic traffic and according to BrightEdge, 51 percent of traffic comes from organic search. In addition, you can drive traffic back to your site by sharing your repurposed content, like videos, on other platforms like Youtube and Vimeo.

You can experiment with a variety of growth hacks with no risk since they are low-cost. Now that you know some simple growth hacks for taking your blog to the next level, you can go out there and compete with the big blogs and get just as much traffic and skyrocket your sales.

When you shop for a car, what qualities do you look for? If you’re trying to make the best financial decision, do you pick your car based on its miles per tank or miles per gallon?

At Urban3, we use many different metaphors to help people across the country uncover their city’s economic potential. Urban3’s data-driven approach has found a disturbing pattern that may sound familiar: we're not as rich as we like to believe we are. Our problem is not a lack of growth, it’s a lack of productive development that grows wealth over time.

The solution is to prioritize development that is measurably productive. This is a complicated and multifaceted issue, so the way we frame it matters. That's where the miles per tank vs. "miles per gallon analogy comes in.

Here are five cars, ranked by the size of their gas tank. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks depending on your preferences. Different people want different things from their car, but everyone tends to make the decisions that give them the most value for their dollar. In the post-war era until the 1970s, our economy was booming and gasoline was plentiful and cheap. As a matter of efficiency, it would have been rational to buy the F-150 because it would allow you to drive longer distances without stopping to fill up.

But what seemed rational then now seems laughable, since we’ve realized gasoline is a finite resource with an ever-increasing cost. Car manufacturers now see the need to design vehicles that prioritize fuel efficiency per gallon of expensive gas.

Here are the same cars, but ranked in a way that makes much more sense. If we're trying to maximize the amount we can drive on each gallon of gas, we’d buy the Isetta at 50-70 miles per gallon; it’s a matter of simple division.

So, how does this relate to cities? The lifeblood of a local government’s budget is property taxes. Just like our car assessments before the ‘70s, we have inherited an outdated metric for measuring the productivity of development. We tend to focus on the total value of real estate and the total tax production while ignoring land consumption and space.

This is tantamount to buying a car based on its range, or assuming that land is an infinite resource. Developable land, like petroleum, is not infinite. It is limited by municipal boundaries, and more importantly, by the cost to make it developable.  

This map above displays the total taxable value of developments in Buncombe County, NC. From this illustration, it seems like Biltmore Estate is generating an outsized contribution to the county’s tax base. But this approach completely misses the impact of land consumption and the comparative tax production efficiency. Just as measuring “miles per tank” is an accurate but not particularly useful metric, tax value per property reveals little about the true value of development.

In this second map, we take a “miles per gallon” approach and normalize value by the space it consumes. The warmer shades represent greater tax value per hectare, and the grey areas are nontaxable. The resulting map shows which properties are generating the maximum amount of value for the space and resources they consume, and which are not. By analyzing this pattern, we can see how mixed-use, traditional development close to the city center produces the most value for the county.

We should talk about productivity in our buildings the same way we talk about productivity in our cars. Gasoline is non-renewable, and if anything, land is even more scarce. If we're try to get the most bang for our buck with a $4 commodity, shouldn’t we be even more concerned about this metric for a $40,000 commodity?

Let’s reframe the way we look at land. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to use the development pattern that has proven itself to grow value over time.

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In “9 Helpful Tips to Enjoy the Benefits of Email Marketing”, I showed you that email has a median ROI of 122%, which is more than four times higher than other marketing formats examined, including social media, direct mail, and paid search. In this blog post, you will learn how not to mess up your email subject lines so that people will actually open your emails and read them. First, you will find 6 types of email subject lines you should avoid. Then, you will find 7 tips to optimize your subject line and finally, 20 creative email subject line example templates are listed.

6 types of email subject lines to avoid (and what to try instead)

Kasia Kowalska has found out that these six types of email subject lines should be avoided:

1. Email subject lines with words that trigger SPAM filters

The death knell of any email is when it gets caught in a SPAM filter. If your email gets caught, the chances that your prospect will open and read your email drops to virtually zero. One great step is to look up lists of words and phrases that commonly trigger SPAM traps and to ensure you have not included any. This will vary depending on your industry but a quick Google search will turn up the biggest culprits.

2. Email subject lines that ask for time

Time is the only finite resource. We cannot make more time. So, when someone bestows their time to you, it is a precious gift. Keep this in mind when drafting email subject lines and try to avoid asking them for anything. This is especially true for cold emails. Your prospect does not know you and does not (yet) care what you can do for them. Until they understand why you are contacting them, any request for a meeting or call will feel like a chore. Email subject lines to avoid like this include “Do you have 15 minutes?” or “Can we have a quick chat?”

3. Email subject lines that have typos

Typos look sloppy and unprofessional. If you are not taking the time to run a spell check before pressing ‘Send’, your prospects might wonder what else you will cut corners on. As I mentioned in 20 Powerful Google Chrome Extensions for Entrepreneurs, Grammarly is a great extension that checks your spelling on emails and websites as well as in MS Word.

4. Email subject lines with your company name or branded terms

This comes down to clarity. Chances are, your prospect has not heard your company’s name before. If they are not familiar with your company or branded terms, this will just create confusion. You want the value of your email to be immediately apparent. You do that by putting the customer first. Use language your prospect will understand.

5. Clickbait email subject lines

Just like with video or article titles, you should not put ‘clickbait’ in the email subject lines to avoid category. A common tactic among digital marketers is putting “Re:” at the beginning of the subject line. This works by tricking a prospect into thinking there is an existing conversation. Essentially, you want to avoid email subject lines that entice your prospect to click for the wrong reasons.

6. EMAIL SUBJECT LINES THAT ARE ALL CAPS

Caps lock is the digital equivalent of yelling. While it might make an email standout in an inbox, it is not in a good way. Using exclamation points falls into the same category.

7 tips to optimize your email subject line

Nathan Ellering lists the following 7 tips you can use to optimize your email subject line:

1. Leverage words that have been proven to boost email open rates

His research into email subject line mechanics dug up 100 words, terms, and symbols that are highly likely to influence open rates when you use them in your subject lines. You can find them here. Further analysis suggests you will get the best open rates by using 3 or more of the words/terms and/or symbols from that list in your subject line.

2. Remove words that reduce open rates (or trigger spam filters)

As mentioned above, just as there are words that typically increase email open rates when you use them in subject lines, there are words that negate those opens, too. Here is a shortlist of 100 words, terms, and symbols to avoid using in your email subject lines. It is best to use zero of these words, terms, or symbols in your email subject lines.

3. Include a number in your subject line

Including numbers in blog post headlines increases clickthrough rates by 206%. It turns out, like blog post headlines, using numbers in your email subject lines increases email open rates. A recent study from YesWare that analyzed 115 million emails suggests email open and reply rates are higher when a number is present in the subject line.

4. Put an emoji in your subject line

Campaign Monitor recently researched the use of emojis in subject lines to understand if their inclusion increased open rates. Apparently, brands that are using emojis have seen a 56% increase in their unique open rates. Campaign Monitor is really seeing an increase in emojis, and you can use them as a brand appropriately, and they do add a nice little bit of flare and attention-getting in the inbox. Best practice suggests using 1-4 emojis in your subject line will boost your email open rates.

5. Write the best length email subject line: 17-24 characters

While studies differ drastically on the topic of email subject line length, there is some general best practice advice throughout: keep your subject lines short. The reason for this is 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. iPhones show about 35-38 characters in portrait mode, and Galaxy phones show roughly 33 characters in portrait mode. Long story short: Make sure the 50% of your subscribers who will open your email on their mobile device can actually read the entire subject line.

6. Make your email subject line 3-5 words long

Studies suggest the more words you use in your subject line, the fewer opens you will get. Best practice is a short number of characters and a short number of words.

7. Test title case subject lines

YesWare’s research into 115 million emails suggests that subject lines in title case are most effective at boosting your open and reply rates. That study suggests the psychological reasoning behind title case’s success is perceived authority: even something as small as using title case instead of sentence or lowercase in an email subject line is an authority badge for the sender.

20 creative subject line example templates

Ellering offers you the following subject line templates as a type of “swipe file”: copy, paste, and then fill in the blanks to get started.

1. Stop {Undesirable Emotion} Now
2. {Desirable Outcome} (Your First 3 Steps)
3. New {Thing}: What It Means For {Audience’s Role}
4. What {Credible Influencers} Are Saying About {Topic}
5. {Someone Audience Looks Up To} Can Afford Any {Product}, She Uses…
6. Best {Emoji} + {Emoji} + {Emoji} = {Emoji}
7. {Topic}, {Topic}, and {Seemingly Unrelated Topic}?
8. {Personalized Company Name} + 497% More {Need} = {Emoji}
9. {Emoji} Your {Emoji} With…
10. {Personalized Name}, Earn {Something Desirable} Today Only
11. You’re Missing Out On {Something Desirable}
12. Tonight Only: A {Audience’s Role}’s Dream
13. Want 587% More {Something Desirable}? {Emoji}
14. This Is A Sales Email {Emoji}
15. Don’t Forget! {Event} Today {Emoji}
16. …When You’re Sick And Tired Of {Something Undesirable} {Emoji}
17. “{Quote}”
18. A {Topic} Process To Reduce 30-50% Workload {Emoji}
19. {Topic} + {Topic} + {Topic}
20. “I Love {Something Undesirable}!” (said no one ever)

Lead nurturing should be one of the most effective aspects of your demand generation strategies. In fact, 81% of B2B marketing executives ranked email as the most effective tactic for engagement with later-stage prospects, according to the 2018 Benchmark Survey Report.

This is likely because email heavily supports lead nurturing – a critical component of the demand generation engine. Without lead nurturing to convert more contacts into sales opportunities, your pipeline can’t scale.

Without an effective lead nurturing plan in place, you’re often wasting a lot of the time, resources and budget you’ve already invested in identifying audiences and generating net-new contacts.

At the same time, you can’t just throw a bunch of emails into a drip campaign and call it a day. You need an email nurturing strategy and message that resonates with your contacts.

Demand Generation Lead Nurturing Tips

Understand Your Funnel and Friction

There are a number of varying approaches to the customer’s journey through the sales funnel. Currently, the two most popular approaches are based on the inbound and account-based marketing (ABM) marketing strategies.

The Inbound Funnel

The four phases of the inbound funnel, as defined by HubSpot include:

• Awareness: Attract strangers into website visitors or individuals who engage with your content and brand for the first time.
• Convert: Once awareness has been established, the prospect is converted into a lead using a website landing page, or within the context of content syndication, events, programmatic advertising, or other methods.
• Close: Once a converted lead has been nurtured into a sales opportunity, they can be closed into a customer.
• Delight: When closed customers are passed from sales to the customer success team, efforts to maintain a long-term customer relationship begin.

The ABM Funnel

The ABM funnel is different from traditional marketing funnel strategies because it starts with the identification of target accounts.

The following stages are as identified by Uberflip:

1. Known: Using ABM technologies, the B2B marketing organization works to identify B2B prospects for targeted ABM campaigns.
2. Engaged: When an identified prospect connects with content or campaign materials through activities such as search, content syndication or programmatic advertising and converts to a lead.
3. Qualified Opportunities: When a lead has been qualified based on pre-defined criteria to be passed to sales, such as behavioral qualifications, they become a qualified opportunity.
4. Customers: Closed business is passed from sales to customer success for onboarding and long-term customer retention efforts.

Understanding the Sales Funnel: What’s Really Important

Unless your organization operates within a strictly inbound or ABM methodology, there’s a good chance neither of these models perfectly resembles your organization. In fact, you probably noticed, there’s not much of a difference between the two models, except that with ABM you’re targeting specific companies.

What’s the best sales funnel for your organization? Your own.

Organizations that are beginning the demand marketing journey, often find a disconnect between top-funnel demand generation campaigns and lower-funnel conversion activities (and the technologies that support them).

To optimize your funnel, you first need to understand what’s working and what isn’t. You can’t do this without visibility, which is best achieved with a tool designed for closed-loop reporting.

Closing the loop enables you to watch leads progress through the pipeline in real time and understand how long it takes the typical contact to move through the stages. It will also allow you to optimize nurturing campaign performance at each stage of the funnel and achieve excellence in lead nurturing.

Full-Funnel Visibility Leads to Better Lead Nurturing

Why do you need to know your funnel to create effective lead nurturing campaigns?

Prospective customers are on a buyer journey, and nurturing typically uses marketing automation software to send timed messages in response to their current stage and activity. Mapping your funnel allows you to understand the nuances that are crucial to optimal lead velocity, including the answers to questions such as:

1. What are the common threads that run through the buyer journey on a consistent basis?
2. What common objection/obstacle keeps typical prospects from moving to the next stage?
3. What are the conventional methods/messages that overcome those obstacles?

Mapping out that process, and understanding it at the granular level, makes automated lead nurturing much easier and in tune with the reality of your prospects.

Create Messaging Around Obstacles

Once you’ve developed visibility into your funnel, how do you translate this knowledge into messaging and content for better lead nurturing?

Use insights on why your prospects disengage and turn those insights into lead nurturing content. You can gain these insights through competitive intelligence, interviews with your sales team, or even interviews with current customers who almost failed to buy. Ask:

• Why did a prospect disengage?
• Why did they almost not buy?

Many times, negative information is just as valuable as positive. Knowing why prospects don’t buy can be just as valuable to marketers than knowing why others did.

This knowledge can help you bolster your funnel, allowing marketers to address and reframe those negatives before they lead to drop-offs.

Focus on the first obstacle your prospects encounter, which is typically where your marketing-qualified leads fail to become sales-qualified leads. Then, ask where and why prospects are stalling.

You have a chance to reframe obstacles before they can add friction to the funnel. Whatever you find, translate awareness into education to address your prospect’s objection proactively.

Obstacle-Proof Your Sales Funnel

The most effective lead nurturing experts have obstacle-proofed their sales funnels.

Top B2B marketers tirelessly work to understand obstacles at every stage of their sales funnels and address each one in turn. In fact, they’re experts sleuths when it comes to unlocking hidden objections and mapping them along the sales funnel to learn precisely where and when they cause prospects to disengage:

• Offering survey incentives to learn objections
• Interviewing sales, customer success and customers
• Using social media to conduct competitive research and social listening
• Understanding comparative positioning, feature, price and value

Prioritize By Objections

If you discover that a price-based obstacle drives away 12% of your prospects, while a feature-based objection causes just 6% to disengage, you obviously should address the price-based objection first.

Prioritize By Funnel Stages

Prioritize objections starting at the top of the funnel with awareness, and working down toward consideration. Address early obstacles which can cause MQLs to disengage before working on lead nurturing campaigns to address SQL drop-offs. Conversely, if the impediment to SQL’s is having a much more profound impact than the obstacles higher in the funnel, you should focus on bottom-of-funnel first.

Bonus Tip: Engage with Sales

Chances are, your sales team are the resident experts at overcoming obstacles and objections.

As you work to develop obstacle-based workflows, effective demand generation marketers will engage early and often around objection-based workflows to plant seeds and facilitate productive conversations. Not only can marketing provide sales with high-value funnel insights, but it’s also a two-way street–sales’ education is often invaluable to creating effective objection-based lead nurturing content.

Lead Nurturing Qualified Prospects to Closed-Won Deals

Lead nurturing should be a conversation based on the prospect’s journey, rather than an assumed path the company forces them to take.

If you’re blasting content that tirelessly pushes your product or service, you’re doing it wrong, and you’re probably going to get quite a few unsubscribes and disengaged prospects. If you’re taking full advantage of your marketing automation tool’s potential for behavior-based automation signals and creating multiple nurturing sequences based on the buyer journey and prospects behavior, you’re taking steps in the right direction.

Let your prospects dictate how and when specific conversations happen. Using closed-loop measurement tools and having a profound understanding of objections, work to understand friction in your funnel and create engaging, educational workflows which address these common obstacles.

To understand the health of your funnel, email marketing and other aspects of your demand marketing, download the “B2B Demand Marketing Assessment Guide & Orchestration Workbook”.

A car engine may be extremely well built, but if one vital nut or bolt gets loose, even in isolation, it can suddenly destroy your forward progress. Marketing campaigns face a similar challenge. Various components such as email, direct mail, and paid search must work together seamlessly, not in silos, in order to deliver engaging experiences for consumers, and meaningful results for the business.

Of course, campaign construction is more malleable than automotive engineering. While there’s only one way to wire a spark plug, combinations of marketing tactics may perform differently based on specific brand goals. But whether you’re under the hood of a car or managing a multi-million-dollar budget, synchronization is key to ensuring everything runs smoothly. Every element of a marketing campaign must work in harmony to engage target audiences, enhance their experience, and drive desired business outcomes.

This is easier said than done, however, as many organizations fall victim to silos. These silos not only promote inefficiency, duplication, and waste, but also create a disjointed experience for customers and prospects. If your team is segmented by channel, product, or function, your marketing campaigns may not be achieving all that’s possible.

Silos working solo

The digital age means consumers are accessing content and interacting with brands across a growing number of channels, touchpoints, and devices. Tracking these interactions is relatively easy leveraging the adtech and martech platforms marketers use today. The problem is that much of this data is stored in silos across disparate systems and analyzed using outdated measurement techniques that give all the credit to the last marketing touchpoint experienced by a consumer before he or she converts.

Since the data is managed separately, multiple channels end up taking credit for the same KPI, leading marketers to double-count success metrics. These silos also mean that marketers aren’t considering any marketing channels and tactics from earlier in the consumer journey that may have played a role in influencing a desired action. As a result, marketers can’t tell how these touchpoints are working together to drive desired business outcomes (engagement, leads, conversions, sales) at each stage of the funnel. Even worse, this lack of visibility may mean teams are actually working against each other.

While building campaigns that resonate with customers and prospects at each stage of their journey is challenging, it’s by no means impossible. However, it does require marketers to embrace a more people-based approach.

A 360-degree view

People-based marketing and measurement can help break down the data and functional silos that prevent marketers from having a comprehensive view of campaigns and consumers. People-based marketing is made possible by the creation of a single anonymous identifier, or ID, that connects a consumer to his or her browsers and devices (laptop, mobile phone, tablet, etc.). These IDs combine a consumer’s cookie ID, device ID and offline ID to create an enriched profile of each individual that has been exposed to a brand’s media and marketing across online and offline channels, as well as across multiple devices.

When these enriched profiles are used to feed the marketing analytics process, marketers can uncover the effectiveness of each channel and tactic in driving conversions and other desired business outcomes by audience segment. By understanding how customers and prospects are interacting with their brand and the content, messages and offers that are influencing with different audiences, marketers can create more relevant experiences that drive conversions, retention, lifetime value and other meaningful business results.

Today’s consumers are inundated with messages from brands everywhere they turn. To break through the noise, brands must ensure that their communication is flawless. Just like a car engine, marketing campaigns must be well-oiled and fine-tuned before they’re ready to take off. Demolishing silos enables marketers to come one step closer to achieving their goals and providing their target audiences with the best experiences possible.

Getting inside the marketing mind means not only understanding your customers and how they make decisions but understanding your own marketing efforts to ensure they align with your customers and prospects.

Marketing Mind

Take a look at the infographic at the bottom of this post (if you have trouble reading it, simply click on the figure to enlarge it). The image shows a look inside the marketing mind.

Divided into 2 hemispheres (unfortunately, a division of labor that has fallen out of favor in the medical community) makes the distinction between analytical and creative aspects of marketing. In the not too distant past, these activities would have been similarly divided with the IT and Finance functions concerned with analytical components and marketing/ sales folks owning the creative components of marketing. Just as the notion that the 2 hemispheres of the brain function independently has fallen, so has the functionality of dividing analytical and creative activities between different departments or functional areas.

Today, I’d like to focus on the data side of the marketing mind. For more on the creative side, check out my posts on content marketing.

The analytical marketing mind

It wasn’t so long ago that marketing was dominated by creatives and expressing marketing performance relied on squishy metrics such as ad recall and reach. Today, properly constructed marketing efforts generate a host of metrics that help businesses optimize market performance in terms of sales, conversion rates, AOV (average order value), and customer acquisition — things that translate to the firm’s bottom line.

Based on the infographic, data analysis generates 7X as many inquiries and 4X as many leads compared to firms who don’t analyze such data. I leave it to you to see other benefits of having an analytical marketing mind.

Caveats:

All data has a cost. Those costs may reflect costs to gather, analyze, and store the data. Or, the cost may reflect annoyances to prospective customers that might interfere with conversion–opportunity costs. Either way, you should only collect data that help improve your marketing efforts to reduce these costs.

Data quality is critically important, as well. Bad data lead to bad decisions and the prevalence of inaccurate data makes this a serious concern. Data mistakes come from a variety of sources, but the most common is human error–either the data was input incorrectly or there was a problem constructing the database. Sometimes, data errors come during analysis when data are combined without a clear understanding of the data contained in the database. For instance, combining inquiries with conversions would be inappropriate but it analysts don’t clearly understand what is in the database, they might make such a combination.

Companies with clean data are 3X more likely to see revenue growth, according to the infographic.

Data analysis and application

In the old days, marketing or someone in the C-suite might ask a business intelligence employee to create a report that can be run daily, weekly, etc or for a custom report. The request might take days or weeks to complete. Today, we need up-to-the-minute data, often in real-time, and our data needs change frequently. Hence, marketers must become more analytical with the ability to query databases using SQL, Python, and other tools. At the same time, traditional marketing research is less about surveys analyzed using SPSS, and more about qualitative data collection using text analytics.

Data analysis has moved beyond targeting, to focus on marketing personas, which contain rich behavioral and psychographic data in addition to demographics.

Sharing the marketing mind

Data must be shared among the various folks who’ll use the data–such as sales, creative, operations, NPD (new product development), and other functional areas. Holding the data hostage with only a few people able to access it is counterproductive.

Aligning the creative with data is necessary to optimize market performance. Good, quality, fresh leads need to go out to the sales force (who also need to funnel insights back to the corporation rather than hold them close to the chest). Creative needs to understand which offers, headlines, images, sharing options, and posting schedules are most effective, they need to understand how and why subscribers respond to email messages, they need to know what social media strategies are working best on which platforms. Helping creatives glean actionable insights from the data is critical for performance.

And, that’s why it’s often ineffective to use statisticians or other data crunchers for data analysis. It’s not that they aren’t experts with data manipulation because they are. But, without an understanding of marketing concepts, these data jockeys don’t know WHAT to look for, as not all metrics that contribute to market performance are obvious to those without such training. By the same token, data analysts might have a hard time translating the data into action for creatives who may also not have a good understanding of marketing concepts.

Hence, someone needs to bridge the hemispheres between data and creatives.

Data helps tailor content

Another way in which the complete marketing mind facilitates market performance is through using data to tailor content to individual users. For instance, knowing that a particular visitor is interested in a particular product and how they’ll use that product, helps creatives tailor their content to better align content with the needs of that customer. Knowing where a customer is along the journey toward conversion and loyalty also helps creatives craft content that specifically addresses concerns a visitor might have based on their own customer journey. Knowing how to effectively address these concerns leads to improved market performance.

Image courtesy of Visual.ly