By Jeff Kalter Here’s a statistic you’ve probably heard before: “57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier,” (CEB). One Statistic Should Not Drive Your Sales Model Marketing automation platforms, content marketers, and more cite this stat from CEB because it offers a strong rationale for using their marketing …
No sales business model is “forever.” As our markets change, as our customers change, as our own business strategies change, there is a necessity to reassess our sales business models and go to market strategies.
Unfortunately, too many companies ignore these transitions. They stay stuck with one model, working harder and harder, failing to produce the results, but failing to recognize the characteristics of their markets have changed–requiring a need to change the sales business model.
Or they may have chosen the wrong business model in the first place.
We’re all familiar with the classic “S curves” of growth. Some of this was popularized (at least from a sales/marketing point of view by Geoffrey Moores’ work. These can give us some insight about the sales business model most appropriate for the business. Let me walk through some.
The sales business model for each of these stages is different. The characteristics of customers in each segment are different. The sales business model is different. How we engage innovators, how we create value, how we help them navigate their buying process is different from what we must do for early adopters, early/late majority, or laggards.
Yet if we apply a sales business model optimized for one segment to others, we will fail.
Let’s walk through some of the implications of these:
Innovators: If our ICP is the innovator category, the sales model is very different than other categories. By definition, it’s a relatively small market. These customers are likely to contribute to the development of our solutions and the very early development of the market. “Selling” in this market tends to look more like developing strategic alliances, development partnerships, and so forth. It requires deep expertise and focuses on customers that are willing to experiment, learn, co-develop. They have a high risk profile–they recognize some of these “experiments” may not work. Typically, they will isolate the “experiment” to a small part of their business. Our “selling,” is very focused–probably led by our CEO and other top managers. We are focused on pinpointing these innovators and approaching them at a very strategic level. We have no “sales process,” we have limited to no marketing, we can’t staff the traditional sales roles, because we and the target customers are trying to figure out just what our solution is, what our value proposition is, and who our mainstream customers are likely to be. The big challenge is there is little in our sales approach to these customers that is adaptable and meaningful to scaling our approach to selling.
As we move into the early adopters, we are still in a rapid learning and adaptation position. We are refining our ICP, we are still discovering and refining our value proposition, we are just beginning to develop our sales process, and refining our “go to market strategies.” Early in this stage, we are experimenting, learning, adapting, figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. We start to look for the “patterns” that drive success and what it takes to replicate and scale those. We are less concerned about “efficiency,” more concerned about figuring out what works. Our win rates may be low, but increasing as we move through this stage. Our sales cycle may initially be long, but decreasing as we move toward the early majority stage. The sales people have to be more mature–in each role. They will be the people figuring out the right approaches, refining them and teaching them to new people as the organization grows. The people who focus on day to day execution early in this stage probably end up as the managers and leaders as we exit this stage. As we move to exiting this stage, we have locked in our ICP, our messaging, our sales process, the organizational structure, roles/responsibilities, our value propositions. In this stage, we are focusing on sales effectiveness. As we move to exiting this stage, we add a focus on efficiency–which enables us to scale.
When we move into the early majority, we are rapidly scaling. We have the “formula for success,” now we are trying to replicate and scale this a quickly as possible. We are optimizing our overall operations. Increasingly, we are concerned about efficiency and cost of selling. In some sense our sales efforts may be easier, because the customers/prospects are increasingly more comfortable with the solution category. At the same time, this is where we will see more competition, so we are likely to see greater price pressure as we sell.
As we reach the peak and start moving into the late majority, there’s a huge shift in our selling approach. The solution category is getting commoditized. The perceived risks or the solution are low and very well known. The sale may be moving more toward a transactional sale. The primary focus becomes efficiency, reducing the cost of selling/customer acquisition. We may no longer be able to afford our old selling model, we may have to leverage other channels much more than in the past–perhaps moving much to web based efforts, channel partners, Direct, field based sales may become unaffordable, We look to higher levels of efficiency and much lower cost in our inside efforts. The important thing to recognize as we are moving from the early adopters to the later adopters is it probably means a huge shift in everything we do and how we sell. If we don’t recognize that shift and adapt quickly, we quickly become uncompetitive and our sales organizations are unaffordable.
As we move into the laggards, it’s a very small market, it may be a less profitable market. We need to focus on the lowest cost of selling possible. Some may choose to abandon these markets–the margins for deals may be unacceptable.
Most of this is pretty obvious, but there start to be some complications that start to overlay this–these become sales effectiveness/efficiency/performance killers.
Let’s walk through some of these:
Our marketing changes depending on where we are in the cycle. How, who, what do to engage customers who are innovators is completely different from engaging laggards. Unless we change our approaches based on the target segment, then we won’t be as effective as we should be.
Our selling process is different for each stage in the process. How we engage innovators and move them through the buying process is different than that we need to to with early adopters, the early majority, and so on. If we aren’t changing our sales process as we move through this maturity cycle, we will not be engaging the customers in those stages in the best way possible.
Our value proposition and the way we create value changes depending on which stage we are in. The value proposition for early adopters is different than the early majority. There may be some overlaps, but there will be some important differences. For example a value proposition focused on low risk is probably important to early, late majority and certainly to laggards. But it is likely to be meaningless to innovators.
Each of these stages has different implications for the skills, competencies, capabilities of our sales people. We may need very deep product/solution, problem, market knowledge in some segments, and less in segments that are more mature.
If we sell multiple solutions, some solutions categories may be in very different stages of the solution/market maturity. For example if we are selling ERP solutions, the market is very mature. As we add AI enabled solutions, the solution category is much less mature. Who we target, how we engage each, the skills for success may be very different.
I’ll stop here, I think you get the idea. It’s really critical to understand the maturity the solutions category/customers we are trying to reach and we develop sales business models optimized to those segments.
When oil prices crashed at the end of 2014 — from a high of $110 per barrel to roughly half within a few months, and eventually bottoming out at about $35 in early 2016 — a funny thing happened with Vancouver’s gas prices.
They went down a little, but not nearly the same as the bulk base price.
While the price of oil globally fell by 68 per cent, the price of gas in the Lower Mainland fell just 18 per cent.
And now local gas prices are actually higher than they were during their 2014 peak, while the global price of oil remains two-thirds of its 2014 peak.
What Lee found was that the growth in prices was heavily tied to the resurgent price of crude, but also due to increased profits for refineries. Taxes, which some have said is the big problem, have actually only gone up a comparatively small amount.
“In other words, refiners and retailers stepped in to take greater profits on the down side. Compare this to the almost instantaneous increases in price at the pump whenever there is an accident, bad weather or any other excuse that industry could use to justify a price hike,” he wrote for policynote.ca.
“The refining part is what really jumped out at me, I had no idea that that was going on,” he said this week of how oil companies reacted as crude prices were falling.
CCPA economist Marc Lee has broken down the recent history of gas prices in Vancouver. Here he shows how much is due to taxes and how much is due to other factors.
Gas prices have hovered around $1.50 in the Lower Mainland of late, but you may remember that prices at the beginning of 2016 were about $1.10.
Some of the rise in local price from 2016 is due to a rebound in global crude prices, Lee notes — and there’s really no getting away from the going world price of oil — but a good chunk is due to a rise in “refining margin” — that is, the amount of money the refineries that turn crude into gasoline and other fuels take for profits.
Since the first quarter of 2016, refiners are making 8.5 cents more per litre — and if you go back to what they were taking before oil prices peaked in mid-2014, refiners are taking in more than 20 cents now compared with then.
CCPA economist Marc Lee has broken down the recent history of gas prices in Vancouver. Here he shows how the various factors adding up to the last two years in prices have increased.
The CCPA, where Lee works, tends to be left-leaning in outlook, but he had to give credit to the right-leaning Canadian Taxpayers Federation for leading him to the data, which is available publicly on the website for The Kent Group, a petroleum-industry data company.
“I came across it because I got asked to do some commentary on a piece by the (CTF),” he said. “So I have to add a little hat-tip to them.”
Lee’s calculations suggest oil companies made “$460 (million) to $690 million in price gouging … just in the last year.”
He found it interesting that though what’s been going on with gas pricing isn’t in the broad public consciousness, Ontario’s new premier-to-be, Doug Ford, warned oil companies that when his government removes taxes on gasoline in his province, they had better reduce prices at the pump a commensurate amount.
As for a solution, Lee does wonder if we’ll start hearing about regulation of the fuel market; Canadians are used to their hydro, cable and phone prices being regulated, after all.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.</p
Canadian investors could be forgiven for getting a little excited. The country’s stock market just hit a record, surpassing a January high before its bigger, brasher U.S. cousin.
But look at the longer-term picture and there’s less to get fired up about. Since the financial-crisis low of March 9, 2009, the S&P/TSX Composite Index has gained 117 per cent compared with an increase of 309 per cent for the S&P 500 Index. And Canada is expected to lag again in 2018, with strategists forecasting a full-year gain of about 5 per cent versus 10 per cent for the S&P 500.
The Canadian index fell 0.2 per cent to 16,392.90 at 9:31 a.m. in Toronto. It’s no secret that Canada’s stock market suffers from a lack of diversification, with too much exposure to cyclical commodity stocks and not enough growth drivers like technology and health care. But some of the country’s business leaders say the reasons for its long-term underperformance go deeper than that: a lack of risk capital, too few independent investment dealers, and uncompetitive tax policy.
In Canada, it’s not so easy to bring new companies to market.
Nearly 50 independent investment dealers have closed shop in the past five years due to higher operating costs and weak commodity markets, and consolidation will only accelerate over the next several years, said Ian Russell, president of the Investment Industry Association of Canada.
That means fewer options for companies that want to go public, pushing them to other sources of funding like private equity and venture capital, or to acquisitions by larger competitors. Investors are then left with fewer opportunities to diversify into underrepresented, high-growth sectors like technology — the real standout of U.S. markets.
‘Not Healthy’
There were 14 initial public offerings worth more than US$75 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange last year and four so far this year, down from 30 in 2007 when commodities were booming, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“There’s a fundamental issue with the lack of people like ourselves to help entrepreneurial companies raise money and to help small-cap IPOs happen,” Dan Daviau, chief executive officer of independent dealer Canaccord Genuity Group Inc., said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Toronto office earlier this year. “That to me is not healthy for the Canadian capital markets. In the U.S. we would have 30 competitors that could do different flavors of what we do.”
Those that are listed have a harder time raising equity capital for acquisitions and growth, keeping stock prices depressed, according to Russell. There have been seven secondary share offerings in Canada worth a total of US$756 million year-to-date versus 23 worth US$2.2 billion in 2007, according to Bloomberg data.
As the investment dealers have shrunk, the banks have stepped in, but they tend to ignore the smallest companies, Russell said. Canada’s five largest banks accounted for about two-thirds of equity and equity-linked issuances in 2017 compared with less than half in 2008, the data show.
Take the cannabis sector. Canaccord has led equity financings in the industry, which the big banks were loathe to touch. Now that the industry is well established and Canada is legalizing pot for recreational use, the big banks are beginning to elbow in.
Tom Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Financial Ltd. and CEO of Urbana Corp., is blunt about the implications of Canada’s shrinking pool of independent dealers and the creeping influence of banks.
“They acquire, absorb and obliterate,” Caldwell said. “I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact on job creation, economic growth and innovation.”
Canada’s tax regime also stunts corporate investment through special tax breaks and subsidies that are only available to small businesses, discouraging them from growing past a certain size, said David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc., calling the system “absolutely perverse.” Finance Minister Bill Morneau last year tried to crack down on the use of private corporations, a structure small-business owners frequently use to reduce taxes, but a backlash prompted him to retreat.
“When you have a system in Canada where you reward small, you stay small,” Rosenberg said.
To be sure, the burgeoning marijuana sector has created a new stable of publicly traded companies, which helped lead the S&P/TSX to a record high Wednesday after Canada’s upper house voted to approve the legalization of recreational pot. Canopy Growth Corp. rose 6.7 per cent to $45.36, a record high, giving it a market value of $9 billion.
Canada has also produced some successful, innovative firms like Shopify Inc. In fact, the tech sector, which accounts for just 4 per cent of the Canadian benchmark, is leading its peers by a long shot, up 31 per cent year-to-date.
Managers Needed
Canada actually ranks fifth out of 54 countries in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for perceived opportunities for entrepreneurs — but it’s not good at turning that innovation into commercial success, said Jos Schmitt, CEO of Aequitas Innovations Inc., which runs a Toronto-based stock exchange.
Schmitt blames a lack of risk capital and too few Canadians with the right managerial and commercialization skills. He suggests making it easier for U.S. broker-dealers to access the Canadian market and providing more support to publicly traded companies. Without that, Canada’s stock market is doomed to continue its underperformance, he said.
“A lack of risk capital either leads companies to go somewhere else — and that is often the U.S. where they can find the private risk capital, where they can find the talent they need. Or it leads them to go public too quickly,” he said. “Neither of those two solutions is a good one ultimately for our economy.”
When it comes to startup advice you can never get enough. Starting a business is one of the toughest undertakings you can pursue in life. Statistically, you’re bound to fail and those who succeed take years to reap the rewards. So if you’re ready to take on the challenge it’s time to get informed.
Here are six crucial startup tips you need to know before starting your business.
Choose the right business
If you want to increase your chances of succeeding you should stick to areas of business that you’re an expert in. It’s great to be ambitious and it’s great to try and learn new skills in budding industries. However, if you jump into an area that you aren’t familiar with you’re only stacking the odds up against you. Not only do you have to learn about the industry, but you also have to start a company. The latter is hard enough as is.
In addition to choosing an industry within your knowledge and skill set, you also need to pick something you’re passionate about. When you’re nine months in, running out of cash, and struggling to stay afloat that extra motivation is going to come from within. That’s only possible if you’re truly passionate about what you’re building.
Do your research early
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is jump into building their product or service before researching the market. Your idea may sound great to you, but is there a market for it? Before you go spend a bunch of time and money you need to hit the streets and do your research.
If you’re building an on-demand tutoring app you need to talk to tutors and their students. If you’re building a state of the art spacesuit you need to find your way into the SpaceX headquarters. The point is, your potential customers are out there. It’s your job to learn everything about them before you build them a solution. What if they don’t need what you’re planning to build? This will give you the opportunity to pivot your business or maybe decide it’s not worth pursuing in the first place.
Document your plan
This is two startup tips in one. First and foremost, you need to plan. While that may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs hit the ground running without a proper plan. You need to specify your business goals using metrics and dates. Then you need to develop a roadmap where you can determine which milestones you need to hit in order to reach those goals. This plan will obviously change overtime which brings us to the second tip: document everything.
Not only do you need to plan, but you need to have it written down. To keep things organized I recommend using cloud collaboration solutions. Dropbox Paper is a great collaboration tool for startups. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but has the bare necessities when it comes to documenting your plans.
Test quickly and iterate
You need to take this one with a grain of salt. Not every business is meant to follow this model. That said, the vast majority should. It’s common for us entrepreneurs to become perfectionists when it comes to our products or services. We spend all this time and money perfecting the solution that we fail to understand one of the most basic startup lessons. You need to let the market decide for you.
If you haven’t already, read the book The Lean Startup. The basic premise is that you should develop your minimum viable product (MVP) and put it in the hands of your customers. MVP means spending the least amount of time and money on a product that encompasses your core value proposition. The reason we do this? So we can fail and iterate.
Failure, in this case, doesn’t mean you wrap up the business. It means you take the feedback from your customers, understand where your assumptions were wrong, and iterate accordingly. In fact, entrepreneurs often pivot the business so much their idea changes into something entirely different. If the new idea is what the customers truly want – you’ve done your job well.
Know when to cut your losses
Despite being told to remove emotion from business, it is a very emotional experience. It’s all too common for entrepreneurs to become emotionally attached to their business. This is why it’s so hard to cut our losses when the time comes.
There’s something you need to remember. Time is your most valuable asset. The longer you spend holding on to a dying business the bigger of a loss you’re going to incur. It’s extremely important that you know when to call it quits.
Let’s say you’ve built an app that helps teacher’s take attendance. You’ve tested at elementary, high schools, and universities in three different geographies. The majority of teacher’s told you they’re fine using pen and paper, in fact, they prefer it. Do you take the app internationally? Do you target different kinds of schools? Or do you decide the app isn’t viable. In this case, it’s time to “take it behind the barn”.
Make sure you’re financially in check
As a founder, there’s a good chance you won’t be earning a salary from your business for quite some time. It could be six months or it could be three years. It really just depends on the nature of your business.
As an entrepreneur, you need to survive. If your business can’t pay you, you need to find a way to generate an income. There’s a misconception that you need to jump into your business full time in order to succeed. This statement definitely has some truth. There is a point where you need to give your business your all. That point, however, is when your business can support you.
It’s okay to work odd jobs or side projects while starting your business. In fact, it’s often what’s required in order to succeed. Just remember, there comes a point when you either take it out back or take it on full time.
by Andris A. Zoltners, PK Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer
CAPTION TEXT HERE/Getty Images
Across the technology industry, subscription sales models are growing in popularity. The trend is having a big impact on sales forces. For example, an enterprise software company recently transitioned from selling custom software as a one-time product to selling monthly SaaS (software as a service) subscriptions. The company’s salespeople were used to seeking out new customers, closing big deals, and then moving on to the next prospect. Now, they also had to cultivate ongoing customer relationships to ensure contracts got renewed, in addition to seeking out opportunities to expand business. As ongoing account management activities consumed more and more sales time, new customer acquisition slowed down–and the company’s revenue growth began slowing, too.
The subscription sales trend in cloud computing (and many other industries) means more companies are facing a classic sales management dilemma: Should the same salesperson be responsible for both account acquisition and account management? Or is it better to have one “hunting” role for finding and closing deals with new accounts, and another “farming” role for retaining and growing business with current accounts?
The Pros and Cons of a Single Sales Role
There are several advantages to having the same salesperson who acquires an account also manage the ongoing relationship with that account.
It encourages customer focus and accountability. There is no question of who is responsible for each customer.
Customers like it. They are not disappointed when they can no longer work with the person who sold them initially.
Most salespeople like it. They are motivated by the entrepreneurial culture that comes with “owning” the customers they bring in.
It’s efficient. Salespeople work smaller territories and can live closer to their customers. Also, there are no miscommunications and errors that can occur when handing off customer responsibility from one salesperson to another.
Subscription sales require salespeople to divide their time among many diverse sales activities in order to both acquire customers and support their ongoing needs. Often, salespeople’s bandwidth gets challenged and they start neglecting some strategically important activities. They gravitate toward easy work (e.g. supporting friends and family) or urgent work (e.g. putting out fires for demanding current customers). The difficult and important work of business development gets shortchanged.
In some cases, training, incentives and performance management can redirect salespeople’s effort to strategic activities and enable success with a single sales role. But if such approaches don’t work or are only partially effective, it’s likely time to split the sales role.
The Pros and Cons of Two Roles
Having two sales roles (one for account acquisition and another for account management) has several advantages.
Salespeople are more effective. You can select salespeople whose personality matches each role. Salespeople who are persistent and independent and love to network can take account acquisition roles. Those who are more patient, collaborative, and focused on gaining loyalty can become account managers. In addition, with two sales roles you can train and develop salespeople on a more focused set of competencies, allowing them to bring deeper expertise to customers.
You directly control sales effort allocation. If you want more sales time devoted to new business development, you simply put more people in account acquisition roles. With a single sales role, you can influence sales effort allocation with training, incentives and performance management, but such strategies are not guaranteed to be successful.
You can drive efficiency by using inside sales. Often, the work required to support and retain customers can be performed remotely using video and text chat. By assigning account management responsibility to a less-expensive inside sales role (particularly for those accounts in geographically-remote locations), you can drive substantial cost-savings with little or no effectiveness loss.
Along with the benefits, a two-sales-role model creates some stresses and challenges that must be managed for the model to operate successfully. Continuing effort is required to ensure efficient, effective and customer-focused transfers of account responsibility from one salesperson to another. Requirements include:
Defining how and when the handoff should occur. By specifying the transition steps required and which sales role is responsible for each step, you help ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Most companies set guidelines for when an account manager should take over. For example, the transfer might occur right after the initial sale, 6-12 months after the sale, or once the account’s opportunity is well-penetrated (say 40% or more). Such guidelines need flexibility. Some divisions of an account may be well-penetrated while others still have growth potential. Guidelines must address these gray areas. If the handoff takes time, you may want the account acquisition person to share incentives with the account manager for a brief period.
Ensuring customers see value in the transition. Customers who have become dependent on the salesperson who sold them initially need to know the transition is aligned with their best interests. One strategy is to get the account manager involved during the implementation phase of the customer solution. That way, customer personnel get to know the account manager (and vice versa) and gain confidence they will be in good hands. Well trained, talented and motivated account managers will be able to succeed in the transition.
Creating systems and processes for capturing and sharing customer information. At a minimum, customers shouldn’t have to “train” the account manager taking over. CRM and other systems can organize key customer data and ensure no information is lost in transition.
Synchronizing account acquisition and account manager responsibilities/territories. Coordination efficiencies and teamwork are encouraged when each account acquisition person works consistently with the same account manager(s).
By splitting the sales role at the right time and then managing the ongoing challenges, you can profitably retain and grow a subscription sales business.
ABC: The motivational sales shorthand for “Always Be Closing” might as well also stand for “Always Be Communicating,” because sales runs on communication. From opening pitch to closing deal, effective communication supports every step in the buyer’s journey and provides a critical link between sellers and internal teams such as marketing.
But sales communication can be a double-edged sword. While its importance in providing sales with critical connections is undeniable, it has the potential to overwhelm or distract sellers from their goals if there is no strategy guiding it. Quality, not quantity, is the key for sales leaders looking to create effective sales communication strategies for their teams. After all, sending more email updates won’t make your sales team any more informed if they aren’t finding the content relevant, valuable, or easily accessible. The guiding goal of any successful sales communication strategy should be to provide salespeople with the right information, in the right place, and at the right time.
Read on for the who, what, when, where, how, and why of developing a sales communication strategy. With these best practices, you’ll have a framework for communicating with your sales team that will keep them informed, prepared, and focused on the goals that matter.
These six steps will get you started:
Define what is sales communication
Show why sales communication is important
Outline who is involved in sales communication
Create a cadence of when sales communication happens
Craft how sales communication gets delivered across different media
Decide where sales communication happens
1. What is sales communication?
Sales communication is the process and messaging that keep sales teams informed, engaged, and productive while encouraging their feedback. In some companies, sales communication is a centralized function that acts as editor-in-chief and publisher for all messaging that goes to the sales team.
Whether you have a separate function dedicated to sales communication or not, the key to any successful sales communication strategy is to construct it like the foundation of a house. Strong sales communication fits naturally into the workflow of your sales team to keep them well-prepared and informed without wasting their time. As you begin to scope your strategy, you may want to conduct an audit of current sales communication practices and gather feedback from sales reps. Define efficiency and effectiveness metrics to establish a baseline. Your primary aim should be to create a sales communication strategy that has these two goals:
Reduces the amount of time it takes to create and consume sales communications
Improves understanding, retention, and following of sales communications
2. Why is sales communication important?
Creating a sales communication strategy is important because it establishes guidelines to keep sales reps informed of product changes, company news, or industry trends and guards against communication requiring reps to waste time sifting through internal resources or hunting down missing information.
As you begin to outline your sales communication strategy, keep in mind why it’s important. Having the big picture in mind will help you later explain and justify the decisions you’ve made to sales reps and other stakeholders. Once they understand the rationale behind the strategy, they’ll be more likely to participate and give you buy-in, which greatly improves the chances that your strategy will succeed.
Sales communication itself should also always show why it’s important by relating back to overarching sales themes and company goals. No matter the communication channel, these themes and goals should appear across media in a variety of forms — whether they’re newsletters, company intranet pages, email subject lines, weekly calls, coaching huddles, and other sales communication media.
3. Who is involved in sales communication?
An effective sales communication strategy should define owners for different channels and set processes in place to collect and disseminate information from sources other than these channel owners. Occasionally, subject matter experts such as executives, product managers, or partners could contribute directly by speaking on relevant topics during sales meetings.
If you’re defining communication strategy ownership for the first time, you may at first encounter resistance from those who have gotten used to communicating with the sales team directly without any limitations. This will require you to get their agreement on the rules of engagement laid out in your strategy. Take care to underscore why you created these guidelines: not to stop the flow of information, but to control and coordinate it to make it easier for sales reps to digest.
To make it easier to categorize and prioritize messaging, every communication request should contain these components:
Source: The creator of the communication request, but not necessarily the final sender. For example, the chief sales officer may initiate a communication, but first-line sales managers deliver it to reps during weekly meetings. The source should not solely determine whether and how information gets delivered to the sales team.
Audience: The primary intended audience. For example, both the sales team and service team may receive a communication about software revisions, but the information only impacts the work of the service team, which is the primary audience. The intended audience can determine priority and delivery. If the sales team is not the primary intended audience for a communication, then the information should arrive via a less direct messaging method, such as a sales enablement platform where reps can review news at their convenience without having to sift through their email inbox.
Purpose: Communication should always meet a specific goal, align to sales themes, and contain a deadline if possible. An email about a new sales training class may be informative and relevant, but if its purpose is to order reps to take the class and earn certification by a specific date, it needs to be clearly communicated.
Immediacy: The urgency of a communication. Does the sales force need to know this information immediately, or can it wait? This can inform when and how the sales team receives the communication.
4. When does sales communication happen?
Sales communication happens on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly cycles, and the content and delivery channels should change to reflect the different timescales and priority level. Broadly, sales communication should correlate with the rhythm of the business and support company goals.
As you define your sales communication strategy, decide on a regular cadence of communication with the sales team that takes urgency into account and routes to the appropriate delivery channel. Common communication cadences and channels are as follows:
Daily: The most common daily sales communication channel is email; 70% of organizations that SiriusDecisions surveyed use email to provide reps with both core and non-core selling information. The problem with email is that it does not communicate priority very well. Every email, whether it’s a time-sensitive notification of a buyer’s trigger event or an invitation to next month’s company outing, carries the same weight.
Weekly: The live all-sales meeting is the most popular weekly communication vehicle, according to SiriusDecisions, with 37% of survey respondents reporting that they hold weekly meetings. Weekly sales meetings often include pipeline reviews, important industry or company news updates, and team-building and cheerleading content. They’re also effective as vehicles for information from different sources in the form of guest speakers or presentations. The tradeoff is that weekly meetings require a non-insignificant amount of time and space, and traveling reps miss out on content and discussions.
Monthly: Monthly communications are likely a good fit for channels that allow for asynchronous engagement, such as video, social, and mobile-oriented content that can be consumed anytime and across different devices. Organizations that cite video roleplay as a highly effective training delivery method report a 57% higher rate of rep quota achievement, says SiriusDecisions.
Quarterly: Messaging delivered quarterly or less frequently tends to be event-oriented. Podcasts lead the category at 13% of SiriusDecisions survey respondents. Unlike email or live meetings, recorded videos and podcasts can be available for sales reps instantly at a point of need, depending on the progression of their buyers’ journeys.
Annual: Annual communication tends to focus on sales plan elements including coverage models, quota assignments, and compensation plans. They are best delivered through a cascade of messaging that ensures consistency but still allows for dialogue.
All of the above: Sales enablement platforms allow for asynchronous sales communication, content consumption, and activity-based enablement. They fit into the daily cadence of individual reps’ workflows without cluttering inboxes or interrupting learning and selling processes.
5. How should sales communication get delivered?
Sales communication delivery should differ depending on content, urgency, and priority. These elements will determine the channel of communication and the cadence used to inform the sales team. A sales communication strategy provides guidelines on the channels and cadences for delivering information.
Some of the most common forms of sales communications include:
Electronic newsletter: Often delivered to sales reps at a set frequency, typically weekly or biweekly, on a particular day and time. You’ll want to establish a publishing calendar specifying the contents of every issue with deadlines for contributor submissions, and use a marketing automation platform to track engagement and gauge effectiveness. Create a mobile-friendly template and stick to it so sales reps become can familiar with the layout and navigate it quickly and easily. Keep articles short with descriptive titles and subheadings, and insert a mix of media to accommodate different preferences for consuming information.
Web conferencing session: A regularly scheduled web conference can replace or complement the electronic newsletter. It should last less than an hour (30 minutes is ideal). Like the newsletter, it should employ a consistent format and include visuals and other interactive elements, such as chat, polls, and Q&A. Make sure to record it so that reps who missed it can watch it later.
Video and audio broadcast: Communications delivered via video and audio on a biweekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. They’re sometimes used to augment the newsletter or web conference and can allow reps to listen while driving. Keep them short (15 to 30 minutes) and use a talk-show format to make them engaging.
Internal social platform: Social communication tools such as Chatter, Jive, Yammer, or Slack can augment other sales communications and deliver specific types of information, such as competitive intelligence. They provide the ability to search and create a communications history.
First-line managers: Sales managers can deliver information one-on-one or as part of regularly scheduled sales meetings and can facilitate dialogue or gather feedback from reps. Encourage managers to call on reps during sales meetings to provide a summary of key messages and test for comprehension and compliance.
6. Where should sales communication primarily happen?
A successful sales communication strategy should provide the sales team with a solution that fits into their workflow and naturally draws their attention to the information they need when they need it. A sales enablement platform like Highspot can accomplish this task effectively.
Unlike other sales communication solutions and channels, a sales enablement platform provides the just-in-time information your sales team needs without cluttering their inbox or distracting from their sales workflows. Here are some of the reasons to incorporate a sales enablement tool into your sales communication strategy:
Delivers communications where sales reps spend their time without compromising their ability to find correspondence with prospects easily
Provides analytics to measure engagement with sales communications to identify who is reading them and who is not
Encourages sales and marketing to work together to manage content, pitch and message buyers, and collaborate on projects
Offers ability to communicate priority and urgency through dynamic layouts and eye-catching design that drives higher engagement rates
Intelligently integrates with other sales tools to customize experience based on what sales reps are trying to accomplish at any point in time; for example, could highlight opportunities in Salesforce at different stages and provide relevant information on next steps
Coordinates and manages incoming communications so that sales reps get the information they need and don’t need to dig through internal messages to get critical information
Analysts also recognize the advantages of placing sales communications within a sales enablement function. For example, SiriusDecisions recommends creating a “centralized sales communications function that acts as editor-in-chief and publisher,” with guidelines and governance policies that make it clear that all communications to the field force must be channeled through this function. “We see this function residing with sales enablement,” SiriusDecisions concludes.
Now that you’ve defined the who, what, when, where, how, and why of your sales communication strategy, you may think that your work here is done. But it’s not — and it may never be! A successful sales communication strategy should evolve to meet the changing needs of your sellers and their buyers. Be sure to regularly gather comments from sales reps, marketers, and other internal stakeholders. With their feedback, you’ll be able to keep a pulse your sales communications strategy and gain valuable insight into how to continue improving it, leading to even better sales communications in the future.
Learn more about how Highspot can strengthen your sales communication strategy and take a demo today.
Accurate lead/revenue projections are a powerful tool that all B2B organizations need to manage sales and marketing. Problem is, most lead to revenue calculators out there are overly simplistic.
A useful lead to revenue calculator includes all critically important metrics—including the impact of lead qualification and lead nurturing—on bottom line results. A good one differentiates between prospects and SQLs—which have way different potentials to impact revenue. And an excellent tool provides you with insight into the value of inbound vs. outbound leads.
Guess what. We have a great revenue prediction calculator. PointClear’s Lead/Revenue calculator can help you avoid that sinking feeling when you, as a marketing or sales leader, realize one day that you’re behind, and the quarter or year-end is looming.
Below is a screen grab of the PointClear lead to revenue calculator using hypothetical numbers and followed by descriptions of the line items.
Click on the button at the end of the blog to download the calculator and input your own numbers for accurate predictions of the leads you need to generate the revenue you've projected.
Here’s what a lead to revenue calculator should look like (PointClear’s calculator using hypothetical numbers):
Let’s walk through this example row by row:
We start with prior year revenue—what did you bring in last year? This is a key benchmark.
Your lead to revenue calculation needs to include an estimate the percentage of revenue that will be retained from the previous year. Many companies estimate their retention levels on the fly, without setting goals, measuring them, and actively working this avenue of revenue generation.
In the example, $2,240,000 is revenue retained.
Of course the current year goal is a key data point.
Subtract the revenue retained to get the net new revenue required.
Now project the revenue you expect to generate through inbound leads. Our experience at PointClear over the past 20 years (as well as industry benchmarks) shows inbound leads, properly followed up by sales, contribute 35% of total net new revenue required. (Note this is less than commonly thought. We’ve found that marketers often overestimate this contribution—it needs to be measured.)
In this case, inbound leads contribute $966,000 to the net new revenue goal.
Next it’s time to project the percentage of revenue you expect to generate by nurturing leads. We have found that by properly nurturing both inbound and outbound leads you can triple your lead generation results—and close an additional 11.25% toward your net new revenue goal by expending this effort. (Leads that are worth continuing to work across sales cycles range from those that are qualified/no immediate interest to those that are qualified/no response—read more about determining which leads you shouldn’t give up on too soon here.)
The dollar value of that nurture effort in this scenario is $310,000.
Now project the revenue you need to generate via outbound leads. This is the number that closes the gap between net new revenue required ($2,760,000 in this example) and what you can expect to generate via inbound and nurture ($1,276,500 in this example). In this case, outbound must generate $1,483,500.
Of course the average deal size must be factored in to the calculation: in this case it’s $200,000.
Now you know the net number of outbound deals that are required to close to meet your revenue goal (7.4175).
Next, input your average close rate, in this case 10% …
… to tell you the number of SQLs required (7.1475 divided by 10, or 74.175).
Factor in the outbound marketing lead rate, which in our experience averages 5% (pre-nurture, see #8 above).
If you need 7 deals and 75 SQLs, and there is a 5% lead rate, you need almost 1,500 prospects to hit your number.
While many companies expect that sales reps source 60% or more of their own business, the reality is that each company should provide a higher percentage of potential new business in the form of SQLs. Hence, the 35% used in this example.
This is the number of new prospects (not including inbound, inbound nurture or outbound nurture) that need to be worked assuming sales finds 35% of its own business.
Take a look at what YOUR lead to revenue calculator looks like
PointClear’s Lead/Revenue calculator factors in metrics frequently ignored by others’. It’s a model you can adjust to fit your company. So download this calculator, then multiply, add zeros, adjust percentages or make whatever other changes you feel will shed light on your lead source prediction process.
Another thing you can do—pick up the phone and call me (678-533-2722). Or, contact me here. I can add value by walking you through the process and customizing the calculator with you. I’ve walked through this scenario with many clients and industry contacts. Most have been surprised to see their actual metrics in this format, and how they stack up against other companies. This simple tool has helped them and others better meet the challenge of making their number, year-over-year. It can help you too.
No one knows better than your sales team that unqualified leads are a big waste of time. A lot of time can go into contacting a lead, but if that person is uninterested, or is unable or unwilling to make a purchase, then the time spent was wasted. Identifying qualified leads means finding those people who are interested, able, or willing to purchase what you are offering. An inbound marketing strategy can nurture your prospects, organize your contacts, and automate large parts of your content marketing to help your sales reps work more efficiently.
Use Your Team Effectively
Every salesperson on your team wants to succeed. By contacting the leads that are qualified by sales, your team will spend more time selling and less time trying to push unwilling leads towards conversion.
Sales qualified leads are the contacts on your list that have the authority to push a purchase decision, the means to purchase, the business pain that your company can solve and the awareness of their problem. An inbound marketing strategy should be in place to move prospects towards a position of qualified lead, allowing a rep from your team to reach out and make the sale. Having a smarter strategic system in place to back your sales team will mean they are free to respond quickly and use their talents to help really personalize your approach to customer service.
Appeal to the Pain
A great way to find and attract potentially qualified prospects is to address a point of pain they experience in their lives, role, industry or company. A real business pain is something that is a noticeable source of frustration for your target audience. It is often something they are actively seeking a remedy for and are already prepared to spend for a viable solution. If your content brings in leads that have a business pain your company can solve, then the nurturing work is far easier and the SQL ratio will be higher.
Create Regular Contact
Don’t just stop with the content that draws in your new leads; blog content and webinars are examples of the kind of content that will bring in people interested in a related topic or piece of authoritative value you can offer. But, you will want to use these pieces of value to secure regular contact in the form of emails, SMS messaging, and social media followers. Use great content as a draw to increase and differentiate your contacts lists. Try to identify where your leads are at in the conversion funnel, ensuring your automated marketing will best appeal to each customer and cultivate them towards conversion and loyalty.
Turning Prospects Into Opportunities
Prospects started out as leads who already have a general idea of your product, but have yet to purchase for reasons, such as budget or priorities. Therefore, they should be identified differently because they do not need an introduction to your brand. The opportunity is already there for prospects, so it is crucial to keep them up to date with the latest ideas and developments. Connecting with prospects regularly will give you a great idea of what their major needs are and why they have delayed their purchase. Listening to their needs will help you absorb every little detail to propose the most compelling solution. Make sure to thoroughly maximize the prospect’s perception of the value of your services by representing yourself as a believed leader. This will assure that your brand will be selected when the timing is right. Also, with the help of the automated nurturing process, your relationship will remain dynamic while your sales team is reserved to close SQL business.
At the end of the day, the goal is to create the kind of content that supports your sales and customer service teams. Cultivate with a personalized and customer-centric approach to marketing with content automation strategies and segmented contact lists. Use your content to do a lot of the busywork that would waste the time of your sales team, improving your process and increasing your sales. The right inbound marketing strategy will make it possible for you to grow faster without needing to expand your team right away.
For sales veterans, sales statistics may be uncomfortable to read through, but they reflect the cold hard truths that sales teams come across every day in their work.
By avoiding these mistakes, you can regain the hours of productivity and money that you may have been losing out on.
Calling Sales Statistics
Just when you thought this old school method was dead, the facts tell us a different story.
Cold calling has been a pillar of the sales industry for many years. It’s just as important today as it was at the time of its inception. It’s truly an art form; learning how to cold call like a pro takes time and knowledge. The following are some helpful tips to get you on the right track to being an effective caller.
1 – Nearly 100% of customer interactions happen on the phone. — Salesforce
There is nothing like a real-life human connection. Email is wonderful, but it doesn’t begin to compare to the power of a phone call.
2 – 3 out of 4 managers will take action from a cold call or email alone. — DiscoverOrg
Give your prospects the information that they need to make an informed decision. Once you have successfully created value, your prospects will want to follow through by moving on to the next step of the process.
3 – 85% of potential customers are not satisfied with their experience over the phone. — Salesforce
First impressions are lasting impressions. Be prepared for every possible outcome that may take place on the call before the call even starts. This will ensure that your call is productive and will give off a sense of professionalism to your prospects and customers.
4 – Five years ago, the average voicemail response rate was approximately 5%, and it’s falling. — InsideSales
And you can bet that that percentage has gone down even more since then. No one likes listening to their voicemails. Save yourself (and your customers) valuable time by getting them on the phone. This ensures that you will be able to address their questions and concerns in real time.
5 – 15% of the time sales reps spend at work is leaving voicemails. — Ringlead
Considering that you’ve just learned that the vast majority of people will not respond to your voicemails, you can start spending that 15% of your time doing more productive things. Does this mean that you should never leave a voicemail? No, sometimes it’s necessary. It does mean that if there’s a way that you can automate your voicemail messages, it’s to your advantage to do so.
6 – Sales reps make about 52 calls each day. — The Bridge Group
That’s a lot of phone calls, so it helps to make them as efficient as possible. You can use sales software to help to automate this process.
7 – Leads are 100x more likely to answer the phone if you call within 5 minutes of them submitting a web form. — InsideSales
Tracking the web activity of your leads will enable you to strike while the iron is hot.
8 – Approximately 40% of sales reps don’t feel prepared for their calls. — Lattice Engine
Everyone likes the feeling of being prepared before a call. Have all of the information that you could potentially need right in front you, to give you a sense of confidence. Whether you are the one initiating the call or whether you are on the receiving end of the call, it pays to be ready.
Important: The follow-up – P.S. it matters. A lot.
The magic lies in the follow-up. People tend to avoid doing it because they don’t want to be a nuisance. Following up actually does the opposite of what you might expect; it will get you more clients and help you to close more deals.
Following up actually will get you more clients and help you to close more deals.
It helps to develop a strategy that you can use to help streamline the follow-up process and take some of the pressure off of your shoulders.
9 – 92% of salespeople quit after they are told “no” four times by prospect; however, 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”. — Marketing Donut
What does this mean for you? It means that you must get very comfortable with hearing the word ‘no’ and with the feeling of rejection. Think of it this way: the more no’s you hear, the closer you are to a yes.
10 – It will take at least 5 additional calls to close 8 out of every 10 deals. — Scripted
Hopefully by now, you’re feeling better about the follow-up process.
11 – It takes an average of 8 calls to get in touch with a prospect following the initial contact. — Telenet and Ovation Sales Group
That’s even more follow-up calls to add to what we’ve already discussed. Before you can close a deal, you have to be able to get in touch with the prospect that you’re going to make the deal with. Sounds pretty simple, right?
12 – Nearly half of all salespeople give up after the first follow-up call. — Scripted
Those who are willing to be the most persistent will reap the greatest rewards.
Email Sales Statistics
When used correctly, email is a salesperson’s best friend; however, too often it’s used incorrectly.
This is because many people don’t know how to send an effective cold email. On top of that, many people don’t know how to craft a convincing subject line, which could be considered the most important part of the email.
Email can be a much more powerful tool than it currently is for you, if you pay close attention to these stats and make sure that your email is done right.
13 Email is 40 times more effective at reaching new customers than social media giants, combined. — McKinsey
This one might surprise you, but email still reigns supreme, even over social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. Your new clients are only an email away; don’t miss out on the opportunity to reach them.
14 – Marketing through the use of email has twice the Return On Investment of cold calls. — MarketingSherpa
Considering how difficult many people find cold calling to be, this stat should actually be a huge relief. Knowing that email is twice as powerful as cold calling, sets you up for success. It’s important to note that email can also eat up a huge chunk of your time if you’re not doing it right. Make the most out of the time you’re spending sending emails, by using templates and personalized messages.
15 – More than one-third of email recipients use the subject line alone to determine if they will open the email. — Convince and Convert
First impressions are everything and the subject line of your email is your introduction to your potential customer. Let them know right away that you have something that is valuable and worth their attention.
16 – Almost half of prospects contacted via email will mark it as spam. — Convince and Convert
You may be sending email from a legitimate source, but there’s still a chance that people may think that it’s spam based on the email address. Be sure to have an email address that’s professional and lets people know that they are safe to open the message.
17 – 35% of your prospects will access their emails on their phone. — Convince and Convert
In other words, keep your emails succinct and easy to read. You can save yourself time by having short templates available and ready to use.
18 – Use your recipient’s name in the subject line and they will be more likely to open your email. — Retention Science
This is a quick and simple step you can add to make your email that much more likely to be read. Adding the recipient’s name to the subject line helps to build rapport and trust.
19 – Using dry language in your subject line means the recipient is less likely to open the email. — Adestra, 2013
While facts are important, they can also be a bit dry to read through. You can warm up your subject line by giving your readers something practical yet relatable to click on.
20 – The best time to email prospects is during regular business hours. — GetResponse
That’s more than enough time to make contact with your prospects. It’s also handy to note that this stat applies regardless of where you are in the world because people are the most active during regular business hours, local time.
Productivity Sales Statistics
Companies lose an exorbitant amount of productivity hours each year. Why? They are spending those hours manually entering data and tracking their activity.
Effective CRM software will allow you to interact with prospects and close deals rather than wasting that precious time on mundane tasks.
21 – Lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year. — CMO Council
Even $1 would be too much of a loss because it’s almost completely avoidable.
22 – Almost half of all sales reps will take nearly a year to become productive enough to meet company goals. — Accenture
The faster your representatives are up and running, the more productive they are able to be. Intuitive CRM software will help to get your new hires up to speed and give them the confidence that they need to start closing sales.
23 – 50% of B2B companies see generating high quality, sales ready leads as a challenge for 2018 — LeadForensics
The quality of your CRM will directly impact the quality of your organization. Choose a world class CRM that will bring you the results that you’re looking for.
24 – Top-performing companies are twice as likely to have automated their sales processes. — Velocify
If you’re not automating your processes, you’re leaving money on the table. There’s no need to take our word for it. Look at the top performing companies and whether or not they automate their sales process.
25 – Half of all sales time is spent on ineffective prospecting. — The B2B Lead
It’s important to target a specific kind of customer. Know who your ideal customer is and market to them. Use this profile of the ideal customer as a template to generate other leads.
26 – Sales reps who use social media in their sales are 50% more likely to meet or exceed their goals. — InsideSales
LinkedIn is especially useful for these types of sales.
27 – 60% of sales reps meet their sales goals. — CSO Insights
Poor time management and ineffective CRM software are usually the culprits.
28 – Almost 90% of workers are not actively engaged in their jobs. — Gallup
Not only does a lack of employee engagement result in decreased productivity, it also causes high turnover.
Miscellaneous Sales Stats
The following stats don’t fit into any particular category, but are just as beneficial as the others.
29 – Increasing client retention by as little as 5% can boost profits by as much as 95%. — Bain & Company
You will improve client retention by focusing on perpetually improving your value and by staying in regular contact with your clients.
30 – 50% of websites get only 15 seconds of attention. — MarketingProfs
That’s right; you have about 15 seconds to get the attention of potential customers. That isn’t much time at all, so your website will really have to stand out from the rest. Ask those around you who are in a relatable field to provide you with some honest feedback on how you can improve your site. Ask yourself a few key questions, such as: Is my site user-friendly and easy to navigate? Are users able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily? Is my site visually appealing?
31 – 8 out of 10 potential clients can be reached via social media. —Sergey Gusarov
We live in the age of social media; it would serve you well to maximize your use of it when attempting to get in contact with your prospects. If you’ve tried calling and emailing, but have not been successful, sending a short message via social media might get you some results. It’s not uncommon for some businesses to operate strictly from their social media platforms, so don’t miss out on this opportunity.
The Data Doesn’t Lie
Rather than treating these stats as hard and fast rules for every situation, allow them to stimulate you to think of solving problems in different and creative ways. And remember, data and information is only as good as the decisions and actions you take as a result of it.
The path to productivity and success is paved by creating a solid daily sales schedule. Creating a productive daily sales schedule is one of the most common challenges that sales professionals face. A solid daily sales schedule can streamline productivity and improve the overall flow of your day. Keep these 3 key-aspects of an all-star daily sales schedule in mind when you are organizing your priorities for the day.
1) Make Time For Non-Sales Related Activities In Your Daily Sales Schedule
All-Star sales reps perform all non-related sales activities between 6-8am in the morning and/or 6-8pm in the evening. These activities include planning, territory management, and improving product or service knowledge. Set some time in your daily sales schedule to take care of other tasks earlier or later in the day. Make sales your one and only focus during business hours.
2) Connect With Your Prospects at an Appropriate Time
Elite sales professionals manage their daily sales schedule by prioritizing sales touch points by the Probability of Making the Sale. Pay attention to how your prospect prefers to be contacted. Younger prospects may prefer email or social media, while older prospects prefer a phone call. Sales touch points also include knowing your prospects availability and schedule.
3) Reach Out to Other Sales Leads That Are Under The Radar
Seasoned sales professionals follow up with at least 3 older sales leads every single day. Ensure that your daily sales schedule involves reaching out to your leads in a timely and professional manner. Have your notes ready and be prepared to talk about any relevant issues or concerns. Show your prospects value through professional consulting and offer specific advice to improve their business.
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Medium here.
Don’t just ask, “Any questions?”
Last month, I was enjoying the remarkably good crab cake and poached eggs at Just for You Café in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, when I overheard a mentoring session taking place at the next table. I recognized the mentor as the famous, fifty-something ex-CEO of a household-brand Internet company; the mentee, I pieced together, was the twenty-something CEO of an app on my phone that had raised over $70 million in VC cash.
“My leadership team just gave me anonymous feedback,” Young CEO told Famous CEO. “One thing they said was that I’m not open to being questioned.”
“Are you?” Famous CEO asked.
“Yes!” Young CEO insisted. “After every conversation with my team and every all-hands, I always ask if there are any questions or concerns.”
“Let me guess,” Famous CEO said. “No one ever has any.”
“Right,” the mentee reflected. “Maybe I should hold office hours where people can raise concerns privately?”
“I used to do that,” Famous CEO said. “But here’s what happens. People come in, they talk to you about some important issue, and you give your thoughts. Then they go back to their teams and say, ‘The CEO said ___,’ and they lord your words over colleagues as a weapon. So I stopped doing that.”
“So what should I do?”
By this point, the mentee wasn’t the only one interested in the answer. In my work with CEOs and executive teams around strategic narrative, I often have a similar need – as anyone does who leads groups – to quickly take the pulse in the room.
“Take notes on this,” Famous CEO said. “Because I’m going to tell you what Steve Jobs did, which was related to me by the late [Apple board member] Bill Campbell.”
I ordered another crab cake.
“In the early 2000s,” Famous CEO said, “Jobs was splitting his time between Apple and Pixar. He would spend most days at Apple, but then he would parachute into Pixar. He would have to figure out where his attention was needed really fast, so he would arrange sessions with all the different teams – the Cars team, the technology team, whatever – so there were a dozen or so people in each one. Then he would point to one person in each session and say:
“Tell me what’s not working at Pixar.”
Famous CEO continued: “That person might offer something like, ‘The design team isn’t open to new technology we’re building.’ Jobs would ask others if they agreed. He would then choose someone else and say:
“Tell me what’s working at Pixar.”
According to Famous CEO, Jobs would alternate between the two questions until he felt like he had a handle on what was going on.
Famous CEO said he ran sessions like these with his own teams every few months. He advised Young CEO to “never invite VPs” (i.e., team leaders) to the sessions, since subordinates might feel intimidated and share less freely. Instead, Famous CEO would commit, after collecting issues, to discussing them with the VP in charge, who would be responsible for following up.
A few days later, I led a workshop on strategic narrative design with about 40 CEOs, salespeople, and marketers. Just before it was over, instead of simply asking “Any questions?” as I normally did (which typically won me a roomful of silence), I called on a woman who, judging from her active participation in the class, seemed like she wouldn’t mind being singled out.
I asked her this question, inspired by that third-hand Jobs wisdom:
“What is the thing I made most confusing today?”
I worded it like this to position any confusion as my failing, not my audience’s inability to understand. I was also careful not to phrase it as a “yes-no” question (“Did I make anything confusing?”), which might have been more likely to elicit a polite “no.”
The woman said, “I’m still confused about how exactly the narrative elements fit together.” Of course, it was a question that I myself had been wrestling with for decades. My first reaction was to try to explain it to her in some different way, but instead I just said this:
“I guess that’s because I’m still figuring it out, too.”
The woman smiled, and her classmates seemed relieved. What I learned that day was how it puts my audiences at ease when I make a point to say how hard this stuff is (very), and how long it usually takes for most people to feel like they’ve landed on the right story (weeks, months, years).
Later, I called on another participant and asked: “What’s the thing you learned today that will most help you outside of this class?” As you can imagine, it was rewarding to hear about the positive impact I had made.
If you work with teams in any way, I recommend trying Jobs’s technique, my variation on it, or a variation of your own. And if you’re at Just For You Café, I recommend the crab cakes. They really are very good, even without the complimentary side of Silicon Valley wisdom.
About Andy Raskin I help CEOs and leadership teams align around a strategic story — to power sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. My clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit andyraskin.com.
Almost every leader wants to make more time for strategic thinking. In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the leadership behavior most important to their organization’s success.
And yet in another study, a full 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking. Of course, we’re all oppressed with meetings and overwhelmed with emails (an average of 126 per day, according to a Radicati Group analysis).
But leaders presumably could take at least some steps to prioritize what they claim to be an imperative. What could account for such a massive misalignment between their stated goals and their actions?
One issue is the incentives put in place — often unconsciously — by companies. Even for senior professionals, there’s frequently cultural pressure to put in long hours, which researchers have discovered often serve as a proxy for both loyalty and productivity in the modern economy. Research has shown that employees who work more than 50 hours per week earn a 6% premium over their colleagues who work a more regular schedule.
Tethering yourself to your desk may help you power through more emails, but it’s rarely a recipe for innovative strategic thinking. In fact, research reveals that productivity decreases for those who work more than 50 hours per week. What seems to really power creative thinking, according to a Stanford University study, is activities such as taking a short walk, especially outside. But that behavior may well be penalized in a corporate milieu that prizes face time.
Another barrier to strategic thinking may be internal. At least in the United States, research shows, busyness is a sign of social status. As Silvia Bellezza of Columbia Business School and her colleagues put it, “By telling others that we are busy and working all the time, we are implicitly suggesting that we are sought after.” In addition to the very real demands on our schedules, then, there’s also an incentive to lean into the frenzy: It’s a marker of our professional success. Executives may therefore be subconsciously reluctant to give up the self-esteem benefits that being busy confers.
Given these pressures — both internal and external — that push us toward rote busyness and away from strategic thinking, here are three ways individual leaders can fight back and create the white space they need.
First, it’s important to remember that strategic thinking doesn’t necessarily require large amounts of time; it’s not about taking endless sabbaticals or going on leadership retreats. As productivity expert David Allen told me when I interviewed him for my book Stand Out, “You don’t need time to have a good idea, you need space…. It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don’t have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they’re suboptimal.”
Even with limited time and the same amount of responsibilities, it’s far easier to think strategically if you can clear the decks by doing simple things such as writing down all of your outstanding tasks in one place, so you can properly triage them and aren’t constantly interrupted by the feeling that you forgot something.
Second, it’s useful to be clear on where your time is actually going. Earlier this year I undertook a time tracking experiment, in which I logged how I spent every half hour over the course of a month. It’s not the easiest project to keep up (we’re used to living our lives, not recording them), but the resulting data was invaluable in terms of helping me understand exactly where and how I was spending my time. It’s quite possible there are tasks you could combine, defer, or outsource to help buy you an extra two hours per week — more than enough to step outside the daily hurly-burly and enter into the flow state of considering big-picture strategy.
Finally, once we’re aware of the implicit “busy = important” frame in our culture, it can become easier to let go of it and adopt another frame that’s more conducive to deep strategic thinking. One alternative view, espoused by Derek Sivers, an entrepreneur and author, is that “busy is what happens when you’re at the mercy of someone else’s schedule.”
By extension, one might argue, true status comes from having the discretion to opt out of the frenzy. As Sivers shared in one podcast interview, “I find it funny when people preface their emails saying, ‘I know you must be incredibly busy,’ and I always shock them by going, ‘No, I’m not busy’…. It’s like, ‘No, I don’t have to do anything for anyone, so I don’t do anything I don’t want to do…I’ve got time.” By changing the way we think about busyness — from a marker of status to a mark of servitude — it may become easier to say no to the parade of endless obligations (from catch-up calls to informational interviews) that skitter across our desks every day.
The responsibilities placed upon us are unlikely to diminish anytime soon. In fact, as we ascend in our careers — and as global competition further increases — it’s almost certain we’ll be expected to do more and produce more. Without a concerted effort, it’d be easy for strategy — yet again — to slip to the bottom of the to-do list, despite our protestations about its importance.
By becoming aware of the disincentives to make time for strategy — and taking proactive steps to embed strategic thinking into your life and professional schedule — you can stand up for a goal that you, and 97% of other leaders, recognize as critical.
The key to a successful onboarding program is flexibility and personalization. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution; a tailored onboarding experience is critical for creating successful employees from day one. Flexibility is important when onboarding multi-generational salespeople. Differences in age and experience bring a wide range of challenges.
Today’s workforce is made up of three distinct generations: Baby Boomers, Generation X-ers, and Millennials. Each generation has unique strengths and benefits they can bring to an organization. Onboarding practices that encourage open communication, respect, and collaboration will help an organization capitalize on a diverse knowledge base.
With 52% of workers stating that they’re less likely to get along with someone from a different generation, it’s vital that organizations have a structured onboarding program that addresses generational diversity.
Baby Boomers (1945 – 1964)
This generation has been in the workforce for 30 years or more. They have grown to be leaders. The majority of executive teams and senior-level professionals are comprised of Boomers. They are independent, competitive, and goal-oriented. What they sometimes lack in tech-savviness, they make up for with years of business experience and knowledge.
An organization should have clearly defined parameters and metrics to measure success and track progress during the onboarding experience. Clearly defined goals give Baby Boomers objectives that they need to reach, and being the generation that knows how to produce results they will strive to achieve them and meet their objectives.
One of the challenges of onboarding a Baby Boomer involves technology. This generation didn’t grow up with technology and adapted later in life, so it makes sense that there would be a learning curve when adopting newer technology. An organization should first identify how comfortable the individual is with technology, then develop a plan to build knowledge in those areas.
Baby Boomers are independent, so the open-office layout of modern technology companies might be a challenge. They’re open to collaboration, but a lack of quiet space to focus on work will likely be jarring. Making different workstations available throughout the office could prove beneficial, as it allows everyone to work in the environment where they are most comfortable.
Baby Boomers are excellent leaders in any organization. Their years of experience are a valuable resource to utilize. They also are excellent mentors to younger generations just starting their careers and can help provide professional guidance and insight. An estimated 10,000 plus Baby Boomers retire each day, so it’s crucial that an organization utilizes Boomers’ knowledge and experience to help grow and strengthen the organization before they exit the workforce. This generation is unlikely to job hop, and are most likely with the organization they will retire with. Retaining this generation to help onboard younger employees is an excellent way to share knowledge and experiences, and develop future leaders within the organization.
Generation X (1965 – 1980)
If the Baby Boomers are on the way out of the workforce, it’s safe to say that the X’ers are poised to fill their shoes. This age group possesses the professional experience to step into the senior level and executive vacancies. They are adept with technology, having experienced its emergence first-hand. Clearly define objectives for this age group; however, flexibility can exist within that framework.
Generation X knows what to expect from leadership and the organization. A poor introduction to the company will not sit well with them, so it’s important that the onboarding experience be comprehensive. An effective, organized onboarding experience could include a 30/60/90 day program to follow up on development and growth during the first few months. Such a program will allow a Gen X’er to track their progress and understand expectations and goals within the context of the company’s culture.
Since this age group anticipates stepping into the vacancies that Baby Boomers leave as they retire, an organization will benefit from having a mentorship program in place. Encouraging Baby Boomers to provide career guidance is an excellent way to prepare Generation X for the leadership roles they will inevitably fill. It also serves as a way to integrate new hires into the organization and minimize time to productivity.
Millennials (1981 – 1994)
One of the most talked about generations; Millennials now make up the most significant percentage of the workforce at 35%, or around 56 million (Pew Research). They are known for their technical savvy, constant connection, and enthusiasm as they start their careers. As most Millennials are just beginning their professional journey, they are looking for a way they can establish themselves and further their knowledge base and skill sets. Since they have an affinity for technology, learning new software and systems will be second nature.
Millennials have a penchant for constant connection and team-oriented environments, and these values should inform their onboarding experience. A group onboarding process that incorporates a buddy system or a new hire club is an excellent way to tap into their team orientation. This way, Millennial new hires have a support system in place and can collaborate with others as they learn the inner workings of the organization. An internal social networking system where employees can communicate instantly and remain connected is also a valuable onboarding tool.
One of the most important criteria Millennials look for when choosing a job is the company culture. Millennials expect more out of their companies than previous generations and look for companies with a culture that aligns with their own personal beliefs and values. Incorporating the company culture into onboarding is vital to building loyalty within the organization. That means everything from having new hire material prepared to hosting team building events.
Onboarding should be personalized, stimulating, and social. Sitting in a room all day reading training material can be disengaging for anyone. For this generation of salespeople, it is nothing short of intolerable. Incorporate peer interaction and active participation to keep their attention, and make the training engaging and interactive. Retention should be at the forefront of a company’s priorities for this generation that’s known for job hopping. According to a recent study by Deloitte, a staggering 43% of Millennials plan to leave their jobs within two years. Recruiting and training new employees is a costly process; companies would do well to start retainment on day 1. A study by SHRM found that 69% of employees stay with a company for more than three years, proving it worthwhile to invest in a successful onboarding program.
The Importance of Company Values Across Generations
Company values are key to a workforce that is united across generations, and the first place to introduce this is in the onboarding process. When the same fundamental core values align everyone, it creates the building blocks for a robust and healthy organization. Skill sets, generations, and experiences vary. When employees share the same values, it helps to create a bond that everyone shares regardless of differences.
Organizations only benefit from generational diversity. Set salespeople up for success by enabling everyone to communicate with the confidence of Baby Boomers, channel the drive of Generation X, and share the enthusiasm of Millennials. It all begins with the onboarding phase, but it’s important to remember that onboarding is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The most successful onboarding processes are personalized experiences that adapt based on the needs of the new hire class.
Need more help developing cross-generational sales teams? We’ve got you covered in our new eBook!
The Internet of Things bears little resemblance to traditional IT systems—and that makes it harder to protect
Illustration: Mengxin Li
Connecting physical infrastructure to the Internet makes systems vulnerable to new security threats. What keeps executives awake at night varies by industry, but cybersecurity problems are worsening everywhere.
Security officers in manufacturing worry about employees inserting infected USB drives into machines, while hospital administrators fear that malware will wipe out an unpatched MRI machine, or that a hacker will direct an infusion pump to administer a lethal dose of medicine.
Josh Corman, chief security officer at PTC, a computer software firm based in Massachusetts, has codified six reasons why security for the Internet of Things (IoT) is different from—and more difficult to tackle than—traditional IT security.
The first is that the consequences of failure are more dire. We’ve raised the stakes by connecting more physical systems and facilities to wireless networks. When cars or infusion pumps are hacked, people can die.
Which brings us to Corman’s second reason that IoT security is a special challenge: The adversaries are unlike any we’ve seen before. No longer are they lone hackers trying to make money or cause mischief. Today’s adversaries are nation states hacking systems in an all-out cyberwar.
Stuxnet, the virus that brought down Iranian centrifuges in 2010, may be the earliest example. Then in August 2017, a Saudi chemical plant was hit by a hack designed to cause an explosion and disrupt petrochemical manufacturing. Experts believe the attack was state sponsored and intended to send a political message.
Two more of Corman’s reasons come from timing and economics. When a firm buys a traditional IT system, it can count on the software company’s support for a set amount of time. Only in the last few months have some chipmakers and software vendors offered 7- and 10-year support for IoT products. Some still don’t provide any specified support contracts, or they limit the term to 2 or 3 years.
In some cases, that’s because the economics don’t yet make sense. A connected product that generates a small profit may require years of updates, patches, and security evaluations. In the future, the cost of goods sold may need to include annual security updates and patches.
Corman’s fifth reason has to do with the scary reality that many connected devices are built with software, hardware, and firmware that are created by different companies and pieced together at the end. It takes only one weak link to create a vulnerability, so if the company that created the telematics system for a car doesn’t update its software, the entire car becomes vulnerable. The IT world has a similar challenge, but through years of working together, manufacturers have agreed on systems to keep everything patched.
Finally, many connected devices live in environments unlike any IT system. In a home, there’s no IT manager to push patches to a connected fridge. And in an industrial setting, patching one machine might cause it to stop working with other equipment on the line. Here, the risk of a hack may seem low compared with the risk of stopping a process that produces hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue a day.
In the IT world, there’s an entire industry of life-cycle-management software that tracks patches and rolls back buggy software. In the IoT world, we just aren’t there yet.
This article appears in the July 2018 print issue as “6 Ways IoT Is Vulnerable.”
The old one-two is one of the first combinations rookie fighters learn when they start boxing. It combines a jab—a fast-but-light strike—with the more powerful, but also slower cross punch. By using them together, boxers can draw their opponents attention to protecting the first strike, while getting enough time to make the more powerful punch.
Marketers who only apply one tactic are like boxers who’re swinging with one hand behind their backs—while the hand their’s using may be very strong, they’ll never be as effective as those who’re able to wield and combine different tactics. In digital marketing, just as in boxing, some tactics are quick and easy to implement but modestly efficient, while others take a lot more effort, but yield great results for the brands that master them.
Most brands today get troves of data from all the interactions they have with their customers through multiple touchpoints—brick-and-mortar, e-commerce, social media, etc. Weaving together channels like loyalty, referral, influencer marketing and others allows you to offer a consistent experience for customers and to build retention loops that help you keep your customer base beyond the initial transaction.
In this article, we look at three examples from companies that have successfully applied the one-two in a marketing environment.
Incentivize referrals through your loyalty program
In a hyper-competitive environment, where switching between brands has become effortless, few companies have a choice whether or not they should run loyalty programs. They provide a valuable opportunity to create long-term customer engagement as members of the program get anchored in sustaining the progress they’ve made.
To take your loyalty program to the next level, consider embedding referrals into it. Birchbox runs on a business model where monthly subscriptions drive customer acquisition, while the company makes most of its money selling full-size products through its website. The loyalty program is the thread that keeps the two groups together and ensures the success of the model.
The loyalty program is structured in a way that rewards customers significantly—standard 10% back, rising to 13% to those who spend at least $300 in a given year. Birchbox customers who invite their friends and relatives are rewarded the equivalent of $5 for each referral.
One thing you should keep an eye on when combining loyalty and referral, is to make sure that the lifetime value (LTV) of a new customer acquired in this way is higher than what you need to spend to win them over. In the example above, the risk that Birchbox loses any money on a customer they spent $5 to acquire is negligible, thus, making their referral program a strong channel for customer acquisition.
The great thing about using referrals in your loyalty program is that it creates a strong virtuous loop. Customers who join on an invitation from a friend are much more likely to refer their friends—they send out 5x more invitations on average—thus creating a scalable engine for customer acquisition.
Turn happy customers into advocates of your brand
Discount and rebate promotions, much like loyalty programs, create a loop that motivates customers to keep coming back to your brand. The moment they’ve completed a purchase, or are claiming a discount or a rebate is an opportunity to turn them into advocates of your brand that you shouldn’t miss. This is a time when customers are feeling excited and happy and are most likely to refer friends.
A recent study commissioned by our partners at Hawk Incentives found that 81% of customers would be willing to engage in additional activities at the moment when they’re redeeming a discount or a rebate. 22% of all respondents said they’d be happy to refer a friend to try the same product or service.
The simplest way to take advantage of this trait is by reminding customers to take advantage of the opportunity immediately after they’ve completed a purchase:
Rebates offer a valuable opportunity to collect data on customers and engage them in a meaningful way. In a world where customer experience is ruling the marketplace, this is an important opportunity that companies shouldn’t ignore.
Empower influencers to promote your brand
Influencer marketing a great way to promote a brand and attract targeted, highly-motivated visitors that turn into long-term customers. eMarketer has found that influencers give close to a 7x return on the investment on average.
However, working with influencers can be expensive and it can be challenging to measure the results from such collaboration. That’s where referral marketing comes to the rescue. It allows you to easily track, recognize, and reward successful advocacy by influencers.
Airbnb used influencer marketing in combination with referrals to boost its international expansion. In China, an endorsement by a local celebrity named Anthony who had 2m followers on popular messaging platform Weibo, drove thousands of new signups and bookings when he posted a referral code on the network.
Using referrals for this kind of campaign, rather than a traditional endorsement deal, makes influencers much more vested in having a productive relationship. For companies, it means they can focus their resources on working with advocates who’re the best fit to drive benefits for the brand.
Deal heavy blows with referral marketing
Weaving referrals throughout all channels that you use to acquire new customers allows you to be much more effective in them. On the one hand, it gives you superior data about the behavior of your audience and where new customers com from. On the other hand, it allows you to reward accordingly those channels and partners who’re most successful in driving business towards you without wasting money on tactics that don’t work.
This is an opportunity for marketers to run programs that are much more efficient—by quickly testing to find the channels with the best ROI for their brands, and quickly readjusting budgets to them when there’s a shift in the market. As we know well from boxing, the most formidable fighters are not those who can hit the hardest, but those who know where to hit.
International water treaties do not often make headlines in the media. But the start of formal negotiations on modernizing the Columbia River Treaty between the U.S. and Canada has stimulated a flurry of responses from observers on both sides of the border. Most of these comments have focused on the potential conflict and disagreement between the parties. However, a modernized treaty could offer significant benefits, especially when considering opportunities for restoring ecosystem health to both the Canadian and the U.S. portions of the Columbia as an important priority for the negotiations.
The two main articulated concerns are that the U.S. is paying too much for the Canadian Entitlement — the 50-per-cent share of hydro-power production due to augmented flows from Canadian reservoirs — and the ending of the current flood control agreements in 2024. Both of these issues offer substantial opportunities for Canada to share benefits with the U.S. if restoring ecosystem services plays a central role going forward.
Currently the Treaty dictates that once releases from Canadian storages cross the international border they are charged to the U.S. on the basis that the flows are used to generate power. In fact, some of these regulated flows are now used to augment flows in the Lower Columbia, to facilitate juvenile and adult salmon migration, support irrigated agriculture, and maintain water-based recreation. If the regulated flows from upstream Canadian reservoirs provided just five per cent more water for these uses, the incremental annual value of these flows would be at least as great as the present Canadian Entitlement. Current predictions for a changing climate and hydrology throughout the Columbia in the coming decades will result in less water availability in the U.S. portion of the watershed, particularly in the dry summer months. The value of stored Canadian water for meeting U.S. interests will therefore only increase, and Canada should still be entitled to payment for incremental power production as in the past.
Benefits to ecosystem health in Canada could also result from re-negotiating the flood control component of the Treaty following its expiry in 2024. The annual water level fluctuation in the Arrow Lakes can be reduced once Canada is no longer obligated to ensure there is storage capacity for downstream flood control. This would decrease the exposure of vast areas of reservoir which causes dust storms and difficult access for boaters and recreationists. In addition, large areas of riparian habitat would be restored for wildlife, long-lost agricultural and forest production could be reclaimed, and recreational fisheries could be potentially enhanced.
Minister Katrine Conroy, the lead on the treaty for the B.C. government, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of sharing benefits from a restored Columbia River to reconcile legitimate rights of Indigenous peoples, to benefit community interests, and to ensure the best science is brought to bear in the negotiations. Ensuring the successful return of a sustainable fishery in the Columbia Basin and the reintroduction of salmon to upstream areas where dams presently block access is a critical element in the aspirations of Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border.
At a recent symposium held at the University of Victoria, scientists and policy makers from all levels of government, academia, B.C. Hydro, and Indigenous groups confirmed that more innovative and flexible approaches will be required to modernize the Columbia River Treaty. The existing Treaty is too narrowly focused, as it only addresses power production and flood control. Improving the balance of benefits from flood control, energy systems management, and ecosystems maintenance or restoration will require innovative approaches to future water storage and release regimes. Adaptive management will be required to address the expected rapidly changing values in commercial uses of water and ecosystem restoration especially as the hydrology of the Columbia changes due to a warming climate.
This will ultimately require a different and more adaptable governance model that includes a new focus on ecosystem-based function. Future decision-makers with oversight of the operating entities must develop adaptation strategies and be flexible as both values and water availability will inevitably change in the future.
The Columbia Basin is one system despite the international border. The basic tenet of the Treaty is the equal sharing of all benefits flowing to both Canada and the U.S. Healthy and more resilient ecosystems make economic sense and meet the aspirations of Indigenous peoples as both the value of water and its availability change. There is a real opportunity in Canada and the U.S. working together on water issues, especially in these troubled times as relations with our southern neighbour are tested around trade and other priorities. Water often brings people and communities together and the Columbia Treaty renegotiation is no different.
Dr. Jon O’Riordan is a strategic advisor to the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project and former Deputy Minister in B.C.’s Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management; Oliver M. Brandes is Co-Director of the University of Victoria’s POLIS Project on Ecological Governance; Kim Hyatt leads Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Salmon in Regional Ecosystems Program; Bruce MacLock is the former President of the Canadian Water Resources Association; Mike Miles is the Principal of Miles and Associates Ltd. Consulting Geomorphologists. All of the authors helped organize and deliver the recent Columbia River Treaty Symposium held at the University of Victoria, co-hosted by the POLIS Water Sustainability Project, Centre for Global Studies, and the Canadian Water Resources Association.
Just as the discovery process is best thought of (and most effective) as a two-way exercise, so is the closely-related opportunity qualification process. We can think of qualification as one of the key outcomes of an effective discovery process.
Many sales people tend to behave as if qualification is something they do to rather than with a prospective customer, but we need to recognise that our prospect is also trying to qualify both the nature and seriousness of their problem and our credibility as a potential solution provider.
Just as top sales people have too much respect for their own time to waste it chasing poorly qualified “opportunities” that are either never likely to close or never likely to buy from us, our most valuable potential customers are also trying to qualify whether the problem is worth bothering about and whether we are a credible source of the necessary expertise.
The average sales person’s natural tendency in sales qualification is typically to focus on whether we have a good fit against the customer’s apparent needs and whether an appropriate budget, relevant authority, clear need and realistic timeframe can be established - a set of factors otherwise known as “BANT”.
Whilst these are important questions, and whilst they all need to be answered at some point in the evolution of the opportunity, the over-rigid early application of these four principles can result in a string of time-wasting false positives, and opportunity-wasting false negatives.
In complex B2B sales, initial qualification needs to be more nuanced. The half-dozen key qualifying factors we need to establish early on in our sales conversation include:
Does the prospect have a clear and obvious business problem?
Does the prospect have a potentially compelling reason to act?
Is there an obvious and accessible source of funds?
Is there an obviously urgent need to solve the problem?
If there is any uncertainty about any of these factors (and, let’s face it, there often is), then we need to take focused action to clarify our understanding - or recognise that the foundations of the opportunity are somewhat flimsy.
It’s particularly important that we resist the itch to pitch our solution until we have a clear handle on these factors - once we’ve started down the solution proposal trail it can get increasingly difficult to revisit these foundational questions.
HELPING OUR PROSPECT TO QUALIFY US
But what are our prospects likely to be thinking while we're trying to qualify them? How are they likely to be qualifying both the problem and our credentials as a potential solution provider?
Their considerations are probably going to include:
What is the true nature of the problem? What are its symptoms and implications? How is it affecting my ability to discharge my responsibilities and achieve my goals?
Which of my colleagues are also affected by the problem, and how is it affecting them? Are they likely to agree that there is a need to address the issue? Are they likely to want to have a say in whether and how we choose to solve the problem?
Taking into account all the other priorities I have to manage, is this problem important enough to invest time and resources in evaluating our options and identifying potential solutions?
What is the business impact of the problem, how much is it likely to cost to solve, how could it be funded and what are the key elements that would be needed to support my internal business case justification?
Could I solve this problem using internal resources, or will I have to go into the market to identify commercially available solutions?
What specific potential solution options exist? What do I know of these options, and what do people I trust think of the various potential vendors?
As I learn about and engage with these potential vendors, do they come across as subject matter experts? Do I trust their advice? Am I sure that they will always put my best interests first?
Are my interactions with these vendors making my job easier, or more difficult? Are they making it easy for me to get the information I need? Do I have confidence in them as a long-term partner?
Just as we probably can’t have all our initial qualifying questions answered in one hit, our prospective customer probably can’t, either. But we can be sure that their every interaction with us (including some we may not be aware of) is contributing to their judgement about us.
The quality of our direct interaction with our prospective customer is particularly important. We need to go into every conversation with goals and a plan, but we also need to be aware that our prospect wants to get something valuable out of the interaction as well.
We need to listen actively and be prepared to adapt our plans accordingly. We will never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Let’s make sure that we help them to qualify both the problem and our potential credentials as a supplier while we gather the information we need to make a judgement about whether the opportunity is worth pursuing.
Let’s make sure that everyone involved learns something valuable as a result of the engagement. And let’s help them to qualify us!
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The fishing novice blindly casts a wide net into the sea, hoping that within his haul, he will find enough to produce a meal for that night.
Elsewhere, the master fisherman has strategically selected his location on the water. Peering through the surface, he spots his target, reaches back, and hurls his sharpened spear downward. Moments later, he pulls out a massive sturgeon, capable of feeding his entire family for days.
This angling example serves as the perfect metaphor for account-based marketing (ABM) as it compares to the all-too-common “spray and pray” methodology for sales prospecting.
ABM identifies a finite group of accounts believed to hold the most significant value to a seller, then seeks to develop relationships with key contacts who carry sway in the purchase process.
This approach emphasizes the quality of sales opportunities over the number of opportunities, with a consultative technique that places the needs of the customer at the heart of the sales discussion.
Account-Based Marketing Refines the Sales Process
Traditional methods have sellers collecting surface-level information on numerous companies before conducting lightly personalized outreach. Under ABM, you’ll invest time digging deeper into the select accounts your team collaboratively identifies as best fits for your solution.
This narrowed focus makes your research more efficient and will allow you to customize messaging, offers, pricing, and arrangements for a superior value proposition.
Here’s how you can apply ABM tactics to your prospect research strategy:
Company Websites Offer a Wealth of Information
A company website can be a veritable treasure trove for research. Not only does it house details about the business and its employees, but can also give you a clear idea of how leadership wants the brand to be positioned publicly. This should always be one of your first stops.
An “About” page may offer statements about the company history, operating philosophy, and values. You can shape your outreach around these fundamentals. Meanwhile, a “Team” or “Who We Are” page might include biographical tidbits and organizational structure overviews to supplement your account research on LinkedIn.
Company Blogs Tell the Corporate Narrative
Some businesses use their blogs as modified PR platforms, with a mixture of posts covering announcements and major developments, as well as community events the company is involved in. Others take more of a content marketing angle, broadening their scope to draw inbound traffic.
Either way, you can learn a lot from a company’s blog.
Depending on the layout and configuration, you may be able to quantify prioritized topics through a tag cloud or site search. Make a note of frequently mentioned names or keywords, and the context in which they’re used. These are probably worth incorporating into an eventual pitch.
Additionally, keep your eyes peeled for company news. Updates such as mergers, acquisitions, or new funding could signify timing triggers for the savvy sales rep.
LinkedIn Company Pages Reveal Corporate Priorities
This real estate gives businesses a managed presence on the LinkedIn platform, and a way to extend corporate brand identity with marketing and promotional information. In your quest to build a thorough profile of your target account, its Company Page is a highly useful resource.
Content shared on a Company Page — including links to presentations, blog posts, and reports — can provide you with insight into the state of the business you’re studying. This can be pertinent to your prospecting efforts, guiding the questions you might ask your contacts.
Further, Company Pages include a list of people employed by the company. This enables you to surface connections within the ranks you might not have known about. It can also help you map out buying committees, and pinpoint influential stakeholders.
Better Tactics, Better Results
Research and preparation are essential to successfully fulfilling an ABM strategy. Equipped with knowledge and insight, you’ll be able to target the right people, conduct mutually rewarding conversations, and offer solutions tailored to the company’s unique situation.
Company websites, blogs, and LinkedIn Company Pages are three primary resources in your search for actionable info.
Sure, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But reeling in the big ones requires a more sophisticated approach than simply casting your line and hoping for the best.
Every piece of content has a job to do, whether it’s selling your hot new coaching program or encouraging people to join your mailing list. It pays to have a plan, rather than just waiting for inspiration to strike.
Start with Creating a Content Inventory List
This is a great project to delegate to a virtual assistant. Divide each piece of content based on format (video, audio, blog post, email, etc.) and also categorize each piece based on theme or topic. Then make note of where each piece is located (blog URL, Vimeo or other private storage services, guest blog URL, etc.). It sounds like a daunting task but you’ll be grateful to have the info in one place when you’re putting your promotion schedule together.
Decide How Much New Content You Can Realistically Produce
Now look at your calendar going forward and think about how much content you can produce realistically.
Once per week or 5 times a week?
Can you afford to outsource this content creation?
Which format(s) will you produce?
What Calls to Action will you use?
Do you have products or affiliate products to promote in the Calls to Action?
Remember, your market research will tell you which formats are most popular among your audience so don’t get overwhelmed thinking you need to utilize EVERYTHING. Focus on which format your target client resonates with.
Do you plan specific topics or themes for each week or month?
Planning is often easier when all your posts for the month revolve around one theme. Working with a theme also makes choosing offers for your Calls to Action easier. How do you choose a theme? Revisit your market research. What topics does your audience want to know more about? Center that month’s content on that particular topic and continue working forward on your editorial calendar.
Basically, you want to set up a comprehensive editorial calendar which tracks the types of content you’ll produce and the deadline for publishing it. Once you get into this habit of planning, you’ll be able to work further in advance, with reasonable deadlines and less stress because you know exactly what’s coming up and when.
Types of content you can produce:
Blog posts – the most common type of website content. Some experts recommend writing 1,000 – 2,000 words of valuable content per post but your market may prefer fewer words. It’s more important to cover your topic thoroughly without wasting time with extraneous words. Also, look for guest blogging opportunities. Writing for an established, authoritative blog with a large following can boost your name recognition provided you add value in your article(s).
Videos – YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and users upload 300 hours of video every minute. Not only can you expand your audience reach by creating a YouTube channel but you can establish trust with your audience more quickly using video. And of course, video is a powerful way to engage your audience on social media. Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
eBooks and Short Reports – the most popular lead generation tools. Offers more information than a single blog post and is a natural next step to promote your list when readers are finished with the blog post. In exchange for their email address (and the opportunity to follow up with them), the reader receives your eBook and hopefully follows you on social media. Sell a Kindle book on Amazon to boost your credibility and reach even more new customers.
Pixabay
Podcasts – encourage your followers to listen to you at the gym and in the car! Have you seen the iTunes Podcast section recently? It’s crazy big but you’ll gain new authority and credibility when people see YOU in the list of some big names. Don’t want to produce your own podcast? No problem! Do your research and submit guest applications to those podcasts and hosts you know will reach your target market.
Infographics – for those who prefer looking at charts or who don’t have time to read an entire blog post. Take the most important points from your blog post or latest video and place it in graphic format.
Be Consistent
Now that you’ve narrowed down how much content you can realistically produce each month, determine a way to be consistent with creating and publishing all this content.
Can you devote an entire morning or day to writing blog posts or filming videos? Blocking off time in your calendar and producing multiple pieces at once can get you ahead of schedule and give you an incredible sense of accomplishment. If this style works for you, choose your day of the week and focus on content.
If one of the formats you’re using isn’t your strong suit – such as you’re a slow writer or you get tongue-tied on video – is there a way you can outsource some of the work?
Hiring a ghostwriter or a virtual assistant who specializes in content creation is one viable option. Just send her your list of blog titles at the beginning of every month and she’ll have written blog posts for you to publish the following month.
Hiring a virtual assistant who can make quick video edits will also make producing your videos easier, even if you tend to stumble over words.
Another word on consistency: Do your readers or followers expect your content published on a certain day or time? If so, stick with that consistency. If you have never been consistent, start right now by choosing which days of the week to publish new content.
The worst thing is batching your time to CREATE and then letting it collect dust on your hard drive. Once it’s created, make sure it gets PUBLISHED! This is another easy task for a virtual assistant to handle, especially if you have everything scheduled on an easy-to-read editorial calendar.
Be creative with your content! Yes, you want it to provide value but make it uniquely yours. You need to stand out in the crowd, not look like a cookie cutter image of every other entrepreneur.
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Where do you currently publish and promote your content? Are you using more than just your blog? Are you producing content in various formats to attract more people?
Cold calling is one of the most frustrating responsibilities many — if not most — sales reps will have to put up with at some point in their careers. It has a less-than-stellar conversion rate, and anyone conducting it is bound to face rejection after rejection before they manage to see success.
Still, the method is effective enough to remain a key activity in several sales org's wheelhouses — as an estimated 69% of buyers have accepted cold calls from new providers.
It's a tricky process to navigate with a lot of room for error. Here, we'll review some of the common cold calling mistakes that tend to trip reps up and go over how those pitfalls can be addressed. Let's dive in.
Cold Calling Mistakes to Avoid in 2022
1. Getting Demoralized
Ask anyone who has done it consistently, and almost all of them will tell you: Cold calling can be an absolute nightmare. According to Gartner, 48% of salespeople are afraid to pick up the phone and make cold calls.
The vast majority of cold calls go nowhere — LinkedIn found the practice only has a conversion rate of around 2%, and it typically takes a rep 18 or more dials to reach a single tech prospect. It's a process rife with rejection, frustration, and occasional personal attacks.
That's often enough to take the wind out of even the most willing, eager, motivated sales rep, but letting the tougher parts of the process get to you is one of the bigger mistakes you can make while cold calling.
How to Fix It: Learn to take rejection in stride.
Understand that cold calls are difficult and often fruitless by nature. Your low conversion rate isn't a reflection of you as a person. Rejection is a fact of sales life — especially in the context of cold calling.
Start thinking of rejection as another aspect of the job — something you need to learn how to power through. Keep your legs moving, and put any bad call behind you as quickly as you can. You're bound to convince a prospect somewhere down the line, so keep at it until you do.
2. Disregarding Sales Enablement Resources Like Call Scripts and Pre-Call Checklists
Effective cold calls are almost always guided by some degree of direction and structure. Resources like call scripts and pre-call checklists can set a course for productive conversations — and while they shouldn't be followed religiously, consistently trying to wing cold calls without them can be tough.
Sales enablement resources for cold calls help you follow standards for your sales org's messaging, give you reference points for the key conversational elements you need to address, and help you set a call straight if your prospect goes too far off the rails.
That's why sales orgs take creating those materials seriously. According to The HubSpot Research Global Sales Enablement Survey, 39% of sales orgs prioritized creating call scripts in 2020 — along with 37% that prioritized putting pre-call checklists together. If your company has these resources available, it's in your best interest to reference them.
How to Fix It: Consistently reference these materials — but don't go overboard.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, sales enablement resources like call scripts aren't meant to be abided by religiously with no room for improvisation and finesse — but you shouldn't ignore them entirely.
Take a thorough look at the sales enablement materials your sales org has to offer. Understand the key elements they cover. Know the talking points you should be addressing. Have a general picture of what an ideal call looks like, and use all of that knowledge to thoughtfully structure your conversations.
You don't want to sound like you're reading to your prospect, but you don't want to find yourself figuring everything out as you go on a cold call. Strike a balance between the two — leverage your sales enablement materials without relying solely on them.
3. Not Preparing Enough
You never want to go into a cold call completely blind. Prospects don't want to be treated like another name on a list. Their businesses have unique issues that warrant equally unique appeals. You need to have some picture of who's on the other side of the call if you want your conversations to be productive.
That might sound like a tall order, as you could be making hundreds of calls per week — but if you want to get the most out of your calls, you can't treat your prospects as a monolith.
You might be touching base with companies operating across various industries and verticals. Make sure you have a picture of the specific needs and interests that come with those qualities.
How to Fix It: Allocate time for call prep.
Crunchbase found that top sellers spend an average of six hours every week researching their prospects. You don't necessarily have to block out massive portions of your schedule to pore through every page of a company's website before you reach out to them.
But you do need to take the time to develop a solid picture of the challenges similar businesses generally face — along with some baseline intel on the organization itself.
4. Being Too Loose
There's a line between being disarming and being unprofessional. Prospects don't want to talk to someone who comes off as too stiff, robotic, and impersonal — but that doesn't mean they'll be receptive to someone who sounds like they have their feet kicked up on their desk, solving a Rubix cube like the call doesn't matter to them.
Every cold call reflects on your company, one way or another — and most potential customers don't want to do business with an organization that doesn't take itself seriously. So using overly familiar language in a casual, jaded tone doesn't register with most prospects.
Opening a call with, "What up, dude?" and using too much slang throughout a call undermines your ability to convey legitimacy and develop trust — so you need to know when to pump the brakes on being too comfortable.
How to Fix It: Know the difference between appropriately friendly and overly familiar.
Every cold call needs to have some kind of personal touch. It should be relatively free-flowing and unimposing — but all of that needs to be underlaid with professionalism. Strike a balance between casual and informed.
Leading with "Hi Jim!" is appropriate — starting with "Jimbo, my man! How are we doing, bro?" isn't. A cold call is an opportunity to cast yourself as a trustworthy, consultative resource for a potential customer. If you talk to prospects like you've known them since middle school, they're going to be too skeptical to take you seriously.
Cold calling is every bit as grating as it is ultimately effective — and there's plenty of space for hitches and hiccups while conducting it. When it comes down to it, the keys to avoiding those mistakes are composure, patience, and persistence.
Stay cool, understand that you'll be in for a rough ride, and keep at it until you thrive. If you can remain on top of all of that, you'll be in a solid position to avoid the common cold calling errors that trip even the best sales reps up.
According to HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound report, 40% of salespeople report getting a response from prospects is more difficult now than it was two-to-three years ago.
And it makes sense -- in an age where buyers know more than ever and everyone is incredibly busy, it’s harder and harder to get someone to pick up your call or respond to your email.
Dan Muscatello, a HubSpot enterprise sales rep, has a unique strategy that makes this painful process a little easier and more effective: His prospecting emails are all two sentences or shorter.
Here’s why Muscatello does it:
1. It’s mobile-friendly
Fifty-four percent of emails are opened on mobile, so it’s critical that your email reads well on a phone screen.
Keeping prospecting emails shorter than two sentences makes them far easier to read on mobile, and guarantees that the entire message is displayed without your recipient having to scroll. Here’s an example of a pitch email I received recently that wasn’t written with my reading experience in mind:
And here’s an email clearly optimized for mobile:
If your prospect can read your entire message with minimal effort, it’s much more likely they’ll read the entire email and then perform the action you want them to take. Research shows that the ideal length of a sales email should be no more than 125 words, a limit you're unlikely to hit in two sentences.
2. It matches decision makers’ and executives’ tones
Every month, HubSpot Chief Sales Officer Hunter Madeley posts a sales update summarizing the previous month’s performance on our internal wiki, then emails the Sales, Marketing, and executive teams when it's done.
Here’s a screenshot of Madeley's email with June’s sales update. As you can see, it’s short and sweet:
Executives and busy decision makers don’t write paragraphs-long emails because they don’t have time -- which means you shouldn’t expect them to read an email that’s really long.
A short email also acknowledges that you understand their role, the demands of their day-to-day, and that you respect their time. The more you can address these decision makers at the level they operate on, the more likely they are to respect you.
3. It looks less like a template
Today’s buyers have access to more information than ever before, but it’s also the golden age for salespeople -- sales blogs and publications abound with free resources, webinars, courses, and sales templates.
This is good news for new sales teams and inexperienced salespeople. Seeing what’s out there is a great way to learn and get new ideas for outreach, and the wealth of information makes it easy to write effective prospecting emails.
But the good news cuts both ways. Instead of taking the core ideas from popular templates and customizing them to their company’s unique situation, many salespeople simply copy and paste these templates and send them along.
Prospects know this all too well, because chances are if you’re reaching out to a buyer, other salespeople are too. And if you’re all using the same templates you’ve lifted from the same blogs, your buyers will notice. Even I’ve gotten duplicate or extremely similar emails from reps at different companies.
Keeping your prospecting emails short forces you to condense your message and get right to the point, but it also allays your buyers’ suspicions that you’ve just copy and pasted a generic template you got from someone else’s blog. After all, if you’re sending two hyper-customized sentences to a prospect, it’ll seem more personalized -- even if you’ve sent the same or a similar message to multiple people who are similar to that particular buyer.
4. It lowers the psychological burden of responding
I don’t know about you, but when I read a long email, I immediately get a little anxiety. Am I going to pick up on everything the sender wanted me to? Am I going to miss important information unless I stop everything and read the message incredibly carefully? Am I going to have to write a magna carta in response?
A short email with a clear ask removes all of this anxiety. Its length assures the reader they’ve seen the whole message. It also means you can’t confuse your prospect with multiple asks or too much information they’ll have to prioritize themselves. And most importantly, it means that they’ll be more likely to respond.
Because you’ve given your prospect a clear, singular center to your message, they know they only have to respond to one thing. They don’t need to sift through your 17 questions and determine which ones they want to answer, if at all -- they can just shoot back a two-sentence response.
If you're having a hard time keeping your emails short, try actually writing your emails on your phone so you can see what your prospect sees. It's also harder to compose longer messages, so you'll force yourself to be concise.
In a world where we’re all inundated with information, it doesn’t matter how good your paragraphs-long emails are if they don’t get read and responded to. The easier you make a sales process for your prospects to kick off, the more likely you’ll successfully start a conversation -- and that’s the entire point of prospecting in the first place.
Technology. The great disrupter. It’s a universal truth that technology drives change. This can be seen throughout history and across industries. With every new invention and innovation, people are forced to evolve how they think and act.
B2B salespeople see this as much as anyone, and it forces them to adapt.
The benefit of adaptation is that it helps you get better. On the downside, rapid change can make it harder to organize your own sales team and get everyone on the same page. Today, we explore how the B2B marketplace is changing, and what you can do about it.
How Technology Has Changed B2B Sales
Technology has shifted customer expectations. They act differently because they have more information at their fingertips. By the time you engage a prospect, they likely have a good idea of what they want. And rarely is that a single solution.
More often, they want comprehensive offerings. In order to gain trust, you need to have a complete understanding of the customer’s needs, and offer solutions to more than one challenge.
That’s hardly your only concern. There are are other key ways technology has changed B2B sales.
A rising number of decision makers
Consider this fact: The average number of decision makers involved in a sale is up to 6.8. This has created a more collaborative selling experience. It also means that instead of working directly with one person, sales professionals are required to have a broader understanding of whole organizations.
We’ll go into more detail shortly, but consider the number of decision makers an opportunity rather than a challenge by connecting with everyone who is vital to a sale.
The globalization of B2B sales
Technology connects the world. For salespeople, this can mean navigating multiple languages, timezones, and cultures. It also means customers are looking for solutions that can serve people across the globe.
This also plays into a customer’s need for complete solutions. For global organizations, solutions often need to be geared to multiple countries, which requires you to become an expert on the entire scope of their operations.
Fewer face-to-face sales meetings
It used to be that sales meetings were done face-to-face, especially at the most important points in the sales process. That’s not necessarily the case anymore. With more buyers using mobile, you need to be able to navigate the latest technology. The adoption of video conferencing has also allowed sales to remain personal even when you’re hundreds, or thousands, of miles apart.
How To Take Advantage of Technological Advances
One of the best ways to navigate the changing B2B landscape is to leverage your current relationships — both internally and externally. You can look for experts in your own organization to make connections in areas you may have less knowledge, and it is always important to build and maintain relationships in outside organizations.
Leveraging these internal and external connections requires steady and well-organized relationship data. Knowing who to connect with and doing so efficiently will help you navigate multiple touchpoints and overcome the challenges associated with advanced technology and communication being moved online.
How do you overcome the shifting landscape?
Offer complete solutions
Be consultative internally and externally
Be an expert on the whole organization, not just a product
Build and maintain knowledge about the customer
Know what is happening inside your own organization
The important point here is to craft custom solutions. If you’re selling to a law firm, for example, you should look at their entire organization. Their concerns including attracting and retaining clients, billing, time management, in addition to standard business concerns like human resources and time management.
Having insight into how they currently operate in these areas, along with creating a customized approach by leveraging your own internal experts will allow you to approach their problems holistically, rather than offering a one-off solution.
By balancing all the different touch points you can create a full picture of the most important relationships and information. This is why adopting CRM best practices is so important as it keeps your relationship data accurate and up to date.
What Does the Future Hold?
Technology changes quickly. When thinking about how future science will drive B2B sales, it’s important to look at machine learning, AI, and analytics, but you should also look for ways to leverage these areas for relationships.
Having a broad understanding of your clients’ needs, as well as a full picture of your internal teams will help you adapt to changes. You must be adept to adapt, and leveraging your relationships is one of the best ways to navigate a changing market.
Prepare Yourself For The Tech Transformation
It’s important to stay on top of changes as the B2B sales industry continues to evolve.
Summary: For effective sales meetings, just make it relevant and productive again.
The weekly sales meeting — you know the one. The whole crew gets together for what amounts to an hour-long discussion around menial housekeeping items or which sales rep got a little closer to nailing a sale.
Certainly it’s important information in its own right. But, it’s not worthy of eating up an hour that could be better used securing leads. The substance of the old-school sales meeting, in essence, belongs in a weekly email.
Beyond that, your sales team often dreads that regular meetup — especially if it is, in fact, as dull and ineffective as it was the week before. A recent study by Atlassian confirmed this:
More than 90 percent of employees stuck in pointless meetings end up lost in daydreams; almost 40 percent fall asleep. And a whopping 73 percent of them are doing totally unrelated work while they’re sitting there.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s time to take back the weekly sales meeting—it can be a highlight in your team’s week and, dare I say, even fun.
The idea of acting out scenarios in front of peers and management can be, to say the least, a bit daunting. But it doesn’t have to be — it can be inviting and constructive. To promote this kind of healthy role-play, ensure it’s not spontaneous.
Character roles may switch, sales reps may pitch to their bosses — whatever the mashup, the goal behind role-playing is twofold. To improve performance and spice up your otherwise muted weekly meeting.
The exercise should take no more than 15 minutes, and afterward, peers can share constructive feedback and improvement points. Later, one on one, provide your own feedback to those individuals on a managerial level.
DON’T: Never thrust a pencil in a sales rep’s hand and say, “Sell this to me.” This puts people on the spot and causes immediate negative reactions and discomfort.
DO: Alert your team that for every few sales meetings held, role-playing will be involved. At the start of the meeting, give your staff a handful of common situations or objections that can arise in an interaction with leads; then, the acting begins.
2) Invite guest speakers to chat with your team
Everyone loves to hear from new people — especially when those new people can provide insights and tips into the inner workings of your industry. Jazz up your sales meeting by bringing in experts who can touch on the things that matter most to your team.
DO: Bring in a speaker who is relevant to the type of work you’re doing at the moment. If one of your salespeople works heavily with franchises, bring in a franchise owner. That owner can answer questions, touch on pain points, and explain what his or her industry is looking for from sales teams like yours.
3) Rehearse your story bank
Every sales team should have an arsenal full of past success stories that team members can relay to future prospects in hopes of closing a sale.
DO: Develop a healthy, wealthy story bank. These stories cover common problems the team solves successfully. Having this kind of storytelling in your back pocket is proven to secure leads far better than the washed-up elevator pitch.
A OneSpot study found that relaying information as a story is up to 22 times more memorable than relaying it as facts and stats. The better leads remember what you can offer, the easier they’re converted.
DON’T: If you haven’t memorized those stories, they’re pointless. Having a story bank doesn’t matter if your team hasn’t rehearsed together. If Sally relays a story slightly different than Jim, inconsistency occurs. Thus, that’s what your team becomes known for. In your weekly sales meetings, make sure every success story in your arsenal is a match across the board.
Finally, ask your team what stories have worked best and in what way. Was saying it one way more effective than another? Discuss, practice, and rehearse to solidify your storytelling efforts.
4) Revisit sales training
Sales training occurs anyway. Might as well make it a little more fun by doing it as a team. In every few weekly meeting, include a little collective training. Assuming your company has a defined sales process, identify areas in that process where people may be struggling. Then, knock it out all at once when your team is together; it’s more effective and efficient.
DO: Change up the type of training you conduct in your sales meetings. For example, that varied training could be for the smaller, often overlooked items: How long should our emails to clients be? Are our subject lines fairly consistent? Do we have best practices on client communication? Hold mini-training sessions during your meeting to establish (and train on) these things.
If it’s all relayed in the same space to the same people, that leaves little room for inconsistencies down the road.
B2B salespeople can spout expertise on product and service lines and general business acumen. But, when it comes to having a basic business discussion — one that covers trends or current events — they’re at a loss for words. So in your sales meetings, have conversations about current events.
Years ago when I was a sales manager, I bought everyone on my team a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Once a month during one of our sales meetings, I’d ask each rep to bring in an article from the paper he or she had read within the last few weeks. Are there industry changes we need to know about? Does it look like our consumers are shifting their focus?
DO: To have a pulse on current events and trends is to have a pulse on future prospects. Ensure your sales team is up-to-date and in the know.
While your sales crew currently drags their feet to those weekly meetings — and you probably do, too — it’s never too late to change. Make those meetings something everyone looks forward to, and boost morale (and sales) as a result.
“These buyer personas will help you craft killer content for our client’s audience,” they told me.
They were wrong.
You see, “Marketing Agency X” (unnamed for reasons which will soon become clear) would send us four-page buyer persona descriptions. Each one delved deep into the fictional lives of the characters they had created for their clients – describing a day in the life of that character in Dickens-like detail. And boy, did they love to set a scene:
Meet Sarah Cunningham, CMO at Vertus Capital Limited. She’s recently divorced with two kids; little Jess and Jimmy. Sarah likes to drink Earl Grey in the morning while leafing through the Guardian newspaper. After dropping off her kids at school, Sarah makes her way to work – usually getting caught in a traffic jam or two, which really gets her goat …
Yep. Four endless pages of frankly useless detail.
Not only is this type of buyer persona development a massive waste of time, it can even have an adverse effect.
That’s right. Your marketers, copywriters, and content creators may get so caught up in this made-up story that they tailor messaging exclusively for this Sarah character, excluding a far more true and useful representation of your actual potential prospects (e.g., those buyers who aren’t divorced, don’t drive to work, and don’t drink Earl Grey tea).
Are you guilty of this buyer persona frivolity?
Many marketers are.
And they’re all missing the true power of one of the most valuable weapons a content marketer can wield.
Keep reading, and I’ll arm you up.
You see, a proper buyer persona includes two components.
Buyer profile – explains who your ideal customer is through relevant demographic and psychographic details
Buyer insight – reveals what makes your ideal customer pull out their credit card and buy
Too many marketers stop at the profile. Or leave the buyer insights portion of their buyer personas looking like an unfinished painting.
Buyer insight should detail the buyer’s feelings, motivations, and expectations relating to the part of their life that your product or service will impact. It should identify their goals and doubts, and methods of evaluating products/services like yours.
Buyer insight details their motivations & expectations related to your product or service. @konradsanders Click To Tweet
Buyer insight also encompasses the reasons the persona chooses to buy or not buy similar products/services in the distant or recent past. It specifies what time of day they buy, under which conditions they tend to buy, and how long that buying process takes. It also explains what kind of advertising or marketing they like and respond to.
These buyer insights are the real key to rock solid buyer personas and content marketing results. And most importantly, they are the details relevant to your service and marketing strategy, nothing more!
No favorite morning cup of tea flavors here (unless you’re selling them tea, of course).
Buyer insight difference
Picture this scenario …
You’re helping a friend who’s looking to buy real estate. You talk to the real estate agent to set up some viewings. You could:
Tell the agent your friend is tall, white, married with no kids, works as an architect in the city, plays tennis on Wednesdays, likes to drink Guinness, and reads the Times.
or
Tell the agent your friend is looking for a two-bedroom, well-lit apartment with a garden, within a 10-minute walk from a public transit station on the central line, and won’t pay more than $700,000. His wife is concerned about house safety.
Which description is more valuable to the real estate agent? It should be glaringly obvious.
The inclusion of the buyer insights makes a mahoosive difference in helping the real estate agent show properties that are relevant to the buyer’s interests and needs.
Buying insights make your customers and their purchasing journey real. They tell you all the little things that make them like, dislike, act, or flee.
Buying insights make your customer and the purchasing journey real, says @KonradSanders. Click To Tweet
If you know how to gather this info as you market, you’re a long leap ahead of the competition, most of whom just know the most basic stats (yep, those little feeble buyer profiles). For them, the customer is a stranger. For you, it will be like selling to a friend.
Starting to understand the power of what you’ve been missing?
Gather kickass buyer insights
Adele Revella’s excellent book, Buyer Personas, lays out the methodology and reasoning behind it with crystal clarity. I can’t recommend it enough.
In a nutshell, you’ll need to interview people who have recently evaluated your product or a product just like yours. They might have bought or not. In fact, if they didn’t buy – the insights you squeeze may be even juicier.
Either way, you want to know why.
Find these customers and prospects, offer them a reward for helping you. Get them on a 20-minute recorded phone call with the friendliest person in your team – or, even better, a third-party agency that offers an arm’s length distance, which might encourage the interview subjects to be more open in sharing their real reasons.
Carefully guide the interviewees into answering questions like these:
What triggered your decision to search for a solution like this?
What results were you expecting and hoping to get?
What concerns did you have that prevented you from going ahead with a solution you didn’t choose?
What top three to five factors did you use to compare solutions before deciding on one?
What was your personal role in the final decision?
Who else impacted the decision?
How were they involved and what resources did they trust to guide the decision?
What was the overall process of making the decision?
What was the first step in your process? And the last?
Ask interviewees to tell you the entire story – from the moment they thought “I should consider investing in X” to the moment they parted or didn’t part with their cash. What was the chain of events and thought processes they went through from point A to point Z?
Ask buyers to tell you their purchase story with lots of details, says @konradsanders. Click To Tweet
And, from their answers, build your list of buyer insights and add the buyer profile demographic and psychographic details. Simplify it all, nice and clearly, and stick it up on your content marketing team’s walls for all to see.
The interviews should reveal similarities and differences among the triggers, desired results, objections, comparison factors, and journeys. Group those interviewees with similar responses into a single buyer persona. Not those with similar tea tastes – or even job titles or company types or locations. But those who fit into the same boat when it comes to their entire buyer’s journey – whatever walk of working life they may come from.
Before you interview buyers (or potential buyers), you can glean a great deal of insight from your company’s people.
Send a message to the people in your organization, paying special interest to your top sales operatives, as they are probably in closest contact with your prospects. Ask them to answer the questions with care and reward the most detailed answers (yes, sales people like rewards, don’t you know?).
Here’s an email template you can cut and paste:
Hey team,
We’re going to be delving into our content marketing strategy soon, and I need your help understanding our buyers and the journeys they take.
I’d like you to think of a recent prospect you dealt with. It could be someone that we sealed the deal with or someone who considered our (product/tool/solution/service) but decided not to go ahead in the end. Both are valuable, especially the latter.
Please put yourself in their shoes, from what you know of them, and answer these five questions from their perspective, in their voice:
What triggered your decision to search for a (product/tool/solution service) like ours?
What results were you expecting to get from a (product/tool/solution service) like ours before purchasing?
What concerns did you have which may have prevented you from going ahead – with a (product/tool/solution service) like ours in general, and ours specifically?
What were the top three to five factors you used to compare with other solutions before making a decision?
What was your role in the final decision? Who else impacted the decision? How were they involved and what resources do they trust to guide the decision?
And please just jot down a few facts about them, their company, and their position.
Please shoot the answers back to me ASAP. This is going to help us nail our marketing funnel!
Cheers,
You might find that this exercise leads to a greater understanding of the customer across your organization before you even flesh out your persona.
After you conduct the interviews with buyers, see how close the internal assumptions were. If they weren’t closely aligned, it’s even more important to share your fully realized buyer personas across the organization.
How buying insights lead to a content marketing win
When you have the insights, you have the answers. When you truly understand what’s going on inside the minds of your buyers at each stage of the sales funnel, you can create the content that helps nudge them closer and closer toward conversion.
Let’s imagine you’re selling a shiny new CRM platform, for example.
Your interviews lead you to create a persona for buyers looking for a CRM system to cope with their startup’s fast growth. You create a blog post, How to Keep on Top of Your Startup’s Rapidly Growing Client Base,” to tap into that trigger.
And voilà. You’ve enticed that persona – because of your buyer insight research – into the top of your inbound funnel.
You’ve also discovered through the interviews that prospective buyers perceive your company’s lack of brand recognition as a negative. Now’s your chance to preempt the objection on your website.
You craft home page text: “Yes, we’re the new kids on the block in the CRM world. But no, that doesn’t mean our software is any less powerful. In fact, it means we’re more agile, more future focused, and more committed to each and every client than our old, stagnant competitors.”
This tactic not only overcomes the objection before the prospects have time to dwell on it, it shows them that you understand their thought process. You “get them.” You’re similar to them and you’re cooperating with them to achieve a mutual goal (which are key ingredients in getting prospects to like you; the fifth principle of persuasion detailed by the legendary Robert Cialdini).
Next, your buyer’s journey insights tell you a portion of your typical buyers are fresh-thinking marketing managers with big ideas who have to run everything by their old-fashioned CEOs. These CEOs are the ultimate decision-makers, but not the buyers who interact with your brand during the buying process). And they tend to think spreadsheets are all fine and dandy. They dig the status quo.
Armed with this knowledge, you can help those innovative marketers influence their bosses’ decisions and preempt the resistance. You email an article into their inbox, entitled How to Prove to Your CEO That a New CRM Will Boost Their Bottom Line. Accompanying the email is a downloadable PDF report with all the relevant stats needed to sway your buyers’ stubborn CEO, which they could simply hand to him or her.
You’ve made that buying hurdle a whole lot easier for your buyer to hop over – with pre-calculated, pre-crafted, triggered content. No salesman required.
Boom! Thank you, buyer insights.
See how much you can ethically persuade your buyers when your personas forgo their favorite tea or marital status and comprehensively detail the buyer insights relevant to the journey they might take with you?
Now go forth and gather.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
As a sales leader, you have to make a choice each and every day. Do you control your sales process to the point of scripting out calls and messaging word for word, or do you let your sales professionals express their individuality and give them complete flexibility?
Most sales leaders would say that neither of those options is the right one. If you control too much of the sales process by scripting every possible move, you turn your sales professionals into robots. And that creates a bad experience for the buyer and seller. But if you give your team too much flexibility, you end up with inconsistent results.
Both consistency (control) and flexibility (independence) are required to succeed in sales. Too much of one and not enough of the other leads to missed targets. As a sales leader, one of the biggest responsibilities you have is to manage the right level of tension between the two ends of the spectrum. We’ll borrow some concepts from a management philosophy called “Polarity Management,” which is designed to help you navigate seemingly unsolvable challenges.
What’s important to understand is that you’re not looking for balance. The term balance implies that consistency and flexibility should be equally weighted. That’s almost never the case. Your market, product, and team may demand more of one versus the other. It’s your job as a leader to assess where you should be on the spectrum and then adjust. And keep in mind that markets aren’t static. You should adjust your approach every quarter based on results.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of consistency and flexibility. And be on the lookout for the next article in this series as we provide a framework for how to achieve the right level of tension. You won’t have to dictate the sales process word-for-word. And you won’t have to give your team license to do whatever they want. We believe you should give your reps ‘freedom within your framework’, as one of our customers has appropriately named it.
Consistency: The Pros & Cons In the Sales Process
Pros: Sales teams with a consistent process give buyers the impression that your company is professional and well run. If a potential customer thinks you’re making it up on the fly, they lose confidence in you. When your sales professionals follow the same process and speak the same language, it elevates the whole company. A consistent process makes it easier to forecast, identify what’s working, and coach your team. It’s also easier to add new team members because new hires know what to do to succeed on day one.
Cons: On the other hand, sales professionals are ‘professionals’ because they developed a skill set. Good sales people understand how to build relationships with buyers so they can solve problems together. To do that, they need the flexibility to tailor each conversation to the buyer. Without the flexibility to adapt, sales professionals can feel as if they’re a cog in a machine. For many sales people, that’s last thing they want. More importantly, being too prescriptive can cost you sales. While most buying decisions have the same core elements, the path to get there isn’t always the same. If you can’t make even small adjustments to your process to help the buyer make a better decision, you’ll unnecessarily lose quality deals.
Flexibility: The Pros & Cons In the Sales Process
Pros: Flexibility is about making room for individual judgement and selling style. With flexibility, sales professionals can read a prospective customer’s emotion and can pivot a conversation if it’s not going as well as it should. Flexibility allows a sales professional to feel valued, empowered, and supported in her role. It makes room for humans to do what they do best and that’s relate to another person.
Cons: While sales professionals may enjoy the extra flexibility in their roles, it can make sales leaders uneasy. With loose reins on the sales process, it’s much harder (if not impossible) for sales leaders to properly forecast or even set accurate quota targets. It’s also much more difficult to coach reps on how to improve the sales process or how to articulate certain messaging points when each team member has their own way of selling; their own version of messaging, objection handling, and even how and when to share customer success stories. Handing over the reigns of the sales process is enough to make most sales leaders very uncomfortable – and for good reason.
Managing a Healthy Tension Between Consistency and Flexibility
They are both the “right” approach to sales even though they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum. That can make choosing a strategy seem difficult. What we tend to see is sales leaders swing back-and-forth like a pendulum from one end of the spectrum to the other. It happens because they experience the downside of one end and then overcorrect.
The right approach is to manage the tension between both ends of the spectrum in a way that lets you access the benefits of each approach. The goal is to create a framework for success that allows sales professionals to use their natural abilities to find success within those guidelines (or playbooks, as we like to call them).
There is no magic formula for achieving a healthy tension between consistency and flexibility in the sales process – it depends on a number of factors:
The industry
The audience
The typical (or ideal) deal size
The sales cycle length
The size of the team
The complexity of the solution
And even regulations and compliance
Because each organization is different, as the sales leader, it’s your responsibility to exercise agile sales as a methodology and to constantly guide, measure, and improve your sales process to determine what that tension looks like for you and your team.
The Power of ‘Freedom Within a Framework’
The VP of Sales at Sigstr, Kevin Vanes, likes to refer to the way he manages the tension as ‘Freedom Within a Framework’. Kevin and his team live out the practice of sales agility on a regular basis. Kevin is constantly tuned in to metrics and data to understand the root of what’s working and what needs improvement. Sigstr’s ability to be agile has allowed sales professionals to select the decided upon next step while on the prospect call (flexibility), then continue to use the designated Costello template to stay on message (consistency).
For Kevin, ‘Freedom Within a Framework’ means that although he is operationally-driven, he intentionally puts up guardrails that allow his sales professionals to operate freely and successfully within boundaries. Each Sigstr team member brings something unique and meaningful to the table, so it’s important to Kevin that they are able to flourish in their own way while taking some creative liberties – so long as their freedom remains within the designated framework.
Kevin and his team are just one example of how sales teams that achieve this kind of positive tension can excel at all levels – both individually and as an organization. By achieving this tension, sales teams can continue to iterate and adjust the messaging to keep up with the constantly changing industry demands.
The best marketers in ecommerce today are the ones who have mastered the art of storytelling. As ecommerce becomes more and more competitive, businesses have to work harder to gain the attention and loyalty of online consumers.
The marketing and advertising campaigns that used to work ten, five, and even two years ago aren’t as relevant or effective today. In 2018, people buy from companies that they feel understand them, align with their values, and support their dreams.
Storytelling helps you connect with your target audience on a personal level. Storytelling helps you differentiate from your competitors, both big and small. Storytelling helps you convince people that you’re not just in it to make a quick buck—you’re doing what you do because you care about the people and community you serve.
So as an ecommerce business owner, where do you begin?
Here are five actionable brand storytelling tips that you can use to boost awareness, fuel engagement, increase website traffic, and drive more sales for your business:
1. Craft Your Origin Story
In order to effectively stand out in a crowded market, you need to take the time to craft your origin story. An origin story helps your customers and prospective customers better understand who you are, how you got started, why you exist, who you’re trying to help, how you intend to help, and where you’re going from here.
In a nutshell, your origin story helps people understand what makes your business and products unique. It helps them begin to answer questions like:
Why should I care about this business?
What are the true motivations behind this business?
Are there good people behind this business and these products?
How do I know this is the best business to support?
What makes this business different than other similar businesses in the market?
Does this business align with my values and priorities?
Here are a few examples of origin stories from other ecommerce brands operating in various industries today:
How Beardbrand became the company that fosters style for the urban beardsmen
How Wildbird started based on a woman’s belief that babywearing can bring moms closer to their babies physically and emotionally, while giving them the freedom to take on the day
How L.L. Bean evolved into a powerhouse outdoor retail brand 100 years after the founder returned from a hunting trip with cold, damp feet and a revolutionary idea.
To begin crafting a unique origin story for your ecommerce business, follow these tips:
Tip #1: Document your timeline. Spend some time physically mapping the key moments, milestones, and even setbacks of your business.
Tip #2: Define your mission. Be clear about what motivated you to start your business, and what mission is guiding your work now.
Tip #3: Identify your characters. Help people understand who the heroes are, who the villains are, and how your customers fit into the story.
Tip #4: Paint a clear picture. Create a compelling story by leveraging the 22 rules of storytelling as defined by Pixar.
Tip #5: Offer a glimpse into the future. Help people understand where you’re going in the short and long-term future.
2. Know What Matters to Your Audience
Brand stories focus on values, beliefs, desires, motivations, and experiences that a group of people can relate to and rally behind. It’s the stuff that ultimately differentiates you from the other guys. It’s what makes your brand and products memorable. It’s what draws people back to you again and again.
To be effective with brand storytelling, you need to know who you are and what makes you great, but you also need to have a firm grasp on the things that matter most to your target audience.
Despite everything you’ve read up to this point, brand storytelling shouldn’t focus solely on you and your business alone—it should also be about your customers.
You can have the most eloquently written origin story and the most beautiful imagery your website visitors will see, but if what you’re showing them doesn’t align with, address, or support the things they care most about, it’s not going to matter.
To ensure that your brand stories hit the mark with your audience, ask yourself these questions:
What does our ideal customer care most about?
What are the pain points that they have?
How are we addressing and solving those pain points?
What specific beliefs and values do our customers have?
What movements or causes do they care about?
Why do our customers buy from us? What makes us different or better than our competitors?
Coming up with answers to these questions will help you create brand stories that attract the right people and compel them to take the actions you ultimately want them to take, whether it be visiting your website, commenting on a photo, sharing an email, or buying a product.
3. Create Lifestyle Imagery
When it comes to interacting with online consumers for the very first time, you only have a few seconds to make the right impression. That’s why visuals matter greatly for any business hoping to attract and convert customers through social media channels or their own website. People are in general not very good at quickly processing and storing text-based information—but they are much better at processing and remembering visuals.
As an ecommerce business owner, it’s up to you to create and share visuals that accurately represent your business and products while also making it possible for you to differentiate from your competitors.
To ensure that your brand and product photos don’t look like everyone else’s photos in your industry, invest in lifestyle imagery.
Lifestyle imagery leverages real people—your team, your customers, your loyal fans—to showcase your products.
Here’s an example from Wildbird, a brand that features real-life customers throughout their marketing campaigns and social media publishing efforts:
The goal with lifestyle imagery is to connect on a more personal, relatable level with your audience. That means no more stock photography. No more!
To create lifestyle photography that can be leveraged as part of your brand storytelling strategy, follow these tips:
Tip #1: Create a visual guidelines for your lifestyle imagery. Think about how you want your lifestyle imagery to look. Ask yourself what you want your prospective customer to feel when they see and interact with it for the first time. Need help creating guidelines? Dig into this helpful resource from Canva.
Tip #2: Get help from your employees, family members, and friends. Create your initial lifestyle product images with the help of people you already know. Fine-tune your lifestyle imagery guidelines and use these initial images as examples that you and others can refer back to in the future.
Tip #3: Encourage your community to create original lifestyle imagery content that feature your products. Get original lifestyle imagery from your customers. You can do this by asking them to take and send photos to you, or by visiting groups of customers in major cities and scheduling photo sessions.
Bonus Tip: If you really want to go the extra mile, create guidelines and example for lifestyle video content for your brand.
4. Infuse Storytelling Into Every Channel
As your brand storytelling components start to formalize—your origin story, your mission, your values, the movement you support, the images and videos that represent your brand and community—the next step is to start infusing them across every marketing channel you test and invest in.
Here are some common channels that you might be using and recommendations for how you could incorporate storytelling content for your audience to see and engage with:
Emails: Use lifestyle imagery in product promotion emails, share your origin story as part of the welcome email you send to new email subscribers or new customers, send loyal customers updates relating to your mission and how your brand has been evolving and will be evolving in the near future.
Social (Organic): Encourage your followers and customers to share lifestyle imagery with you on Facebook and Twitter, share brand stories about your founders, your team, your products, and your customers in the form of videos and text-based updates, make the mission you’re aligned with and the movement you’re supporting well-known in your cover photos and descriptions.
Social (Paid): Create social media ads that show lifestyle imagery and videos in an effort to attract and convert new customers. Create a blog post or landing page that highlights your origin story, then create an ad that targets people who fall within your ideal customer audience.
Blog: Create content hubs or themes that promote the values, mission, or movement you and your audience cares about.
Website: Create an About Us or Origin page on your website, add imagery, visuals and stories to product pages, and create a place to showcase original product-related content created and shared by loyal customers. Keep visuals and styling consistent throughout your website by referring back to and sticking to the guidelines you created when you established your brand storytelling strategy.
Marketplaces: Use image-consistent content and text in the listings you have on Amazon and other marketplaces.
Offline: Create brand storytelling visuals and other types of marketing collateral that can be included with the products you send to customers. Include your origin story, visuals, and original content from loyal customers in the lookbooks, flyers, or direct mail campaigns that you send out to leads and past customers.
5. Let Your Brand Story Evolve
As you work to develop and fine-tune your brand storytelling strategy, remember that it’s OK for things to change and evolve over time. You’ll experience new milestones and setbacks, your visual preferences will evolve, and the things your customers care about may change.
Be prepared and embrace the change. Your brand story is not set in stone—it should evolve as your business grows and ages. To ensure that your brand story always accurately reflects your business and remains relatable to your customers, keep the following tips in mind:
Tip #1: Review your lifestyle imagery and guidelines every 6 months. Meet with your team to ensure that the imagery you’re using in marketing campaigns and across your channels still aligns with what you and your customer base cares about and responds to.
Tip #2: Get feedback from loyal customers every month. Talk with loyal customers and ask them for feedback about your brand and the brand stories you tell. Find out what they feel about your photos, your videos, your origin story, and how you’re incorporating everything into the campaigns they see.
Tip #3: Talk to a new customer 1-on-1 within the first 30 days. Take time to get feedback from brand new customers about their experience interacting with your brand. Find out what they like, what they didn’t like, what stood out to them, and why they ultimately decided to buy from you instead of one of your competitors.
Over to You
What stories are you creating and sharing with your audience? Tell me in the comments below.
Whether you’re a budding business or an established enterprise, you should be creating top-notch, original content.
Try these trends when creating a content strategy.
Know Your Audience
Before you outline a blog or brainstorm your podcast, consider your customers.
Converting them will require you to know who they are and what’s important to them.
You can (and should!) gather this information from a range of sources, including past orders, popular content, customer requests, website analytics, social listening tools, and user-generated data.
Content marketers and strategists use this data to create user personas that help them visualize their ideal customers.
Even without user data, you can answer simple questions about your audience:
Where do they live (city, state, region, country)?
What do they do for a living?
Values, what is important to them?
How does your business help solve problems your customers have?
Where do they find content? What kind of content grabs their attention?
Knowing your audience can mean the difference between a trending blog post and a waste of resources.
Understanding your audience’s habits and needs helps you choose the best topics, formats, and platforms for your content—ultimately saving you time and money.
People respond to content that helps or empowers them to fix a problem, learn something new, or better their lives in some way.
Researching your audience helps you uncover your customers’ interests and pain points, so your content always makes an impact.
Write Powerful Headlines
You only have a few seconds to make an impression on your prospective reader.
Your headline should be compelling enough to catch their attention and promising enough to make them follow through on reading it.
No matter how excellent your content, potential customers won’t discover it behind a misleading or uninteresting headline.
Experiment with adding numbers, statistics, active verbs, and a sense of urgency to your headlines.
If you’re not seeing results, try testing additional headlines for every blog post or video, or add subheads to your headlines to convey additional meaning.
Your headline should always be unique, useful, and specific.
Your audience should understand the topic and format of your content before they ever click on it.
Use primary or descriptive keywords at the beginning of your headline to catch your reader’s attention.
Don’t be afraid to incorporate your brand’s voice or sense of humor into your headlines for a more personal touch.
Optimize for Keywords
Every content marketer, strategist, and writer knows about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO).
However, many still believe that SEO is about “writing for search engines”— or gaming a complex ranking system.
Optimizing your content with keywords benefits your readers too by helping them find relevant content.
Search engines like Google and Bing guide users to the best content for them based on factors like keyword usage, website authority, and brand trust.
Use keyword research to better understand what your target audience is searching for, so you can create relevant content they’d want to read.
Google Search Console, Moz Keyword Tool, and Google Trends let you research keywords that might be useful for your website.
Try these best practices when optimizing keywords.
Opt for “long tailed keywords.” General keywords are more popular, which means they have more competition. Use longer, more descriptive phrases to attract your specific audience. Experiment with adding your location (city, state), the colors of your products, or your business’s niche.
Optimize photos and videos. Photos and videos are great opportunities for keyword optimization, as they are also indexed by search engines. Always add relevant keywords to the titles and alt tags of images and videos.
Maintain your metadata. Metadata tells search engines what your website is about, so it’s better ranked among your competitors. Add your keywords to page titles, headers, and descriptions to capture those rankings.
Include your keywords in your content copy. Include your keywords and similar keywords to your content, but avoid “stuffing” your keywords into your text—this can make your copy difficult to read or index and you could get penalized for doing so. Integrate your keywords by including them in the title and where it makes sense on the page.
Use Pictures and Video
Visuals are an easy way to encourage engagement and draw attention to your content.
In addition to attention, visual content helps your audience learn about your products, brand, or solutions.
Visual content like infographics and instructional videos are specifically designed to communicate interesting or helpful content in a manner that’s easier to follow and remember.
Try packaging your content with images or short videos (even GIFs!) to draw attention and help people remember your content.
Creating top-notch content is a process.
However, with time and dedication, businesses of all sizes can produce original, engaging content that converts readers to loyal customers.
Try these tips and don’t be afraid to experiment with how you best share your expertise with your audience and with others.
Tell us in the comments below: what do you use to create top-notch content your audience loves?
Where would you be without customer profiles? It’s not a deep existential question. Your gut reaction is probably “not very far,” and that’s the right instinct. In fact, customer profiles are one of your most valuable tools for lead generation.
You can use the customer profiles you’ve already built to search LinkedIn effectively, find the right prospects, and generate sales.
Back to Basics: Creating a Customer Profile
A good starting point is to review your current customer profiles. If you are in a niche industry or have a singular sales focus, you may have one ideal persona that represents the perfect customer. Or, you may have multiple personas for different services, products, industries, or pain points. Whatever the case, it’s advantageous have personas that fit your needs, and it’s a good idea to also perform occasional reviews to ensure they are still accurate.
An interesting example of customer profiles comes from the book “The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results.” The authors analyzed customer stakeholders across hundreds of organizations and determined that those stakeholders fall into seven customer profiles. While this isn’t a definitive guide for what your customer types should be, it does offer an example of parsing through data to create personas, which is something every organization should do.
When pulling in your own data, consider what is most important to your organization, which may include:
Location
Organizational structure
Company size
Pain points
Sales trends
Renewal or customer retention
Popular product or services
The key here is to leverage your own data to determine what works best for your organization and create concise, yet comprehensive, data-driven customer profiles.
How Do You Use Customer Profiles on LinkedIn?
You’re likely already using LinkedIn for prospecting, but are you using it efficiently?
Think of all the information on LinkedIn that overlaps with customer profile data. Let’s focus on four key areas that can be pulled from a LinkedIn profile and are also used in customer profiles: Location, industry, job title, and company size. Each of these attributes offer valuable insight you can match against your current customer profiles to find the right prospects.
Location
We live in a digital world, which means it is easier to communicate with stakeholders around the world. But it’s not always efficient to work across languages, time zones, and cultures. Consider your own product or service and search LinkedIn by locations that make sense for you.
Industry
What industry are you looking to target? The answer may be obvious depending on your product. However, if you market across multiple industries, your customer profiles can help narrow down your search. Maybe you’ve found success with insurance brokers. Or medical device companies. Or pharmaceuticals. Whatever the case may be, narrowing the industry will help your results.
Job Title
Who are you looking for? You can’t just pull up the CEO for a given company and fire off a message. Sure, they are an ultimate decision-maker, but that doesn’t necessarily make them the best prospect for your purposes. Leverage your past results to determine the right job title for your needs and search accordingly.
Company Size
Fortune 500s and small businesses provide different challenges. The communication is different. The relationship is different. Most importantly, the ROI is different. LinkedIn makes it easy to search by company size, so use your past results to determine your own sweet spot.
Putting It All Together: Cross-reference for Success
Once you’ve determined your customer profiles and sharpened your LinkedIn searching skills, you are ready to take the next step. If you ignore your customer profiles when searching on LinkedIn, or don’t currently incorporate insights from your successes and failures into your process, you have opportunities to improve. In every instance, there is one key question to keep in mind:
Who are your existing high-value clients, and how do you use your knowledge of them to find prospects most likely to buy?
You already have the data to inform your prospecting, you just need to use it correctly. Outside research can help you grow as a salesperson but knowing your own customers will help you find the right prospects. Instead of casting a wide net, use the personas you already know to find higher quality leads and close more sales.
Where would you be without customer profiles? It’s not a deep existential question. Your gut reaction is probably “not very far,” and that’s the right instinct. In fact, customer profiles are one of your most valuable tools for lead generation.
You can use the customer profiles you’ve already built to search LinkedIn effectively, find the right prospects, and generate sales.
Back to Basics: Creating a Customer Profile
A good starting point is to review your current customer profiles. If you are in a niche industry or have a singular sales focus, you may have one ideal persona that represents the perfect customer. Or, you may have multiple personas for different services, products, industries, or pain points. Whatever the case, it’s advantageous have personas that fit your needs, and it’s a good idea to also perform occasional reviews to ensure they are still accurate.
An interesting example of customer profiles comes from the book “The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results.” The authors analyzed customer stakeholders across hundreds of organizations and determined that those stakeholders fall into seven customer profiles. While this isn’t a definitive guide for what your customer types should be, it does offer an example of parsing through data to create personas, which is something every organization should do.
When pulling in your own data, consider what is most important to your organization, which may include:
Location
Organizational structure
Company size
Pain points
Sales trends
Renewal or customer retention
Popular product or services
The key here is to leverage your own data to determine what works best for your organization and create concise, yet comprehensive, data-driven customer profiles.
How Do You Use Customer Profiles on LinkedIn?
You’re likely already using LinkedIn for prospecting, but are you using it efficiently?
Think of all the information on LinkedIn that overlaps with customer profile data. Let’s focus on four key areas that can be pulled from a LinkedIn profile and are also used in customer profiles: Location, industry, job title, and company size. Each of these attributes offer valuable insight you can match against your current customer profiles to find the right prospects.
Location
We live in a digital world, which means it is easier to communicate with stakeholders around the world. But it’s not always efficient to work across languages, time zones, and cultures. Consider your own product or service and search LinkedIn by locations that make sense for you.
Industry
What industry are you looking to target? The answer may be obvious depending on your product. However, if you market across multiple industries, your customer profiles can help narrow down your search. Maybe you’ve found success with insurance brokers. Or medical device companies. Or pharmaceuticals. Whatever the case may be, narrowing the industry will help your results.
Job Title
Who are you looking for? You can’t just pull up the CEO for a given company and fire off a message. Sure, they are an ultimate decision-maker, but that doesn’t necessarily make them the best prospect for your purposes. Leverage your past results to determine the right job title for your needs and search accordingly.
Company Size
Fortune 500s and small businesses provide different challenges. The communication is different. The relationship is different. Most importantly, the ROI is different. LinkedIn makes it easy to search by company size, so use your past results to determine your own sweet spot.
Putting It All Together: Cross-reference for Success
Once you’ve determined your customer profiles and sharpened your LinkedIn searching skills, you are ready to take the next step. If you ignore your customer profiles when searching on LinkedIn, or don’t currently incorporate insights from your successes and failures into your process, you have opportunities to improve. In every instance, there is one key question to keep in mind:
Who are your existing high-value clients, and how do you use your knowledge of them to find prospects most likely to buy?
You already have the data to inform your prospecting, you just need to use it correctly. Outside research can help you grow as a salesperson but knowing your own customers will help you find the right prospects. Instead of casting a wide net, use the personas you already know to find higher quality leads and close more sales.
The sales business model for each of these stages is different. The characteristics of customers in each segment are different. The sales business model is different. How we engage innovators, how we create value, how we help them navigate their buying process is different from what we must do for early adopters, early/late majority, or laggards.
Retention should be at the forefront of a company’s priorities for this generation that’s known for job hopping. According to a recent study by Deloitte, a staggering 43% of Millennials plan to leave their jobs within two years. Recruiting and training new employees is a costly process; companies would do well to start retainment on day 1. A study by SHRM found that 69% of employees stay with a company for more than three years, proving it worthwhile to invest in a successful onboarding program.
Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the
Association of Professional Sales
, a regular contributor to the
International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based
Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with high-potential tech-based B2B-focused scale-up businesses, equipping them to
Sell in the Breakthrough Zone® by systematically creating, capturing and confirming their distinctive value in every customer interaction.
Just as the discovery process is best thought of (and most effective) as a two-way exercise, so is the closely-related opportunity qualification process. We can think of qualification as one of the key outcomes of an effective discovery process.
