InsideSales.com Chief Strategy Officer Dave Boyce shares with us the benefits of collective intelligence and how it fuels the next generation sales platform. Read on to find out more. RELATED: How Artificial Intelligence Helps Sales Reps Close More Deals In this article: Redefining Enterprise Information Architecture The Sales Technology of the Last Generation Sales Reps […]

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Every sales professional has hundreds of prospects who either didn’t answer their calls or emails, told them to get lost, or actually started going through the process — but ultimately, didn’t convert but we need to re-engage those old leads to turn it around. 

Most salespeople want to forget these folks, but that would be a mistake. Getting traffic and leads is the biggest pain of 63% of businesses, so anyone source you can take advantage of needs to be used. Yet despite this, 44% of salespeople give up after hearing 1 rejection from a prospect. 

The problem with that is that most businesses need ~5 follow-up contacts to successfully convert. 

We’re not here to shame anyone. Plus, even if you’re doing things 100% by the book, leads in your database can still plateau. Without proper nurturing, leads can lose interest, feel their needs are not being met, or simply forget about you. 

That’s why we’re going to show you how to re-engage these old leads with some action-worthy tips of what to do, and what to avoid.

What not to do

One of the worst things you can do is not take old leads as seriously as the first time around. Just because you’ve already been in contact with them doesn’t mean that you can afford to get complacent. If you’re going to reach out to old leads at all, put the same amount of care into it as you would if it was the first time. 

To help you with that, here are some common mistakes to avoid: 

• Being too casual
  Don’t try to reconnect by posting on their LinkedIn pages or comments. Proofread any content for language and grammar. 
• Taking past contact for granted
  Your re-outreach needs to be just as professional as the last. Answer any questions they have as if it’s the first — no “I told you that 3 months ago.” By re-hitting the main points, the lead may begin to remember why they liked your product the first time. 
• Ignoring past conversations
  But that said, don’t ignore the fact that you’ve conversed in the past. Remind them of your old conversations before you try to sell them anything; and if there was an issue that ruined your last conversion attempt, discuss how you’ve fixed it. 
• Beating around the bush
  There’s definitely an intro phase to re-engaging old leads, but it isn’t long-term. Don’t take a month to get to the point. 1) Get their attention; 2) tell them why you reached out; 3) ask them for the sale. 
• Forgetting your research
  Again, just because you’ve talked to them before — don’t forget how you do outreach. Research and understand the lead’s problems. Dig through your previous conversations for any patterns of insight; then, use those insights to draft your initial re-outreach.

With what not do out of the way, here are some tips to re-engage right.

8 tips to Re-engage leads

1. Research first

Before you start sending emails, do your prep-work. Dig through your old conversations for insight so you can inject a personal touch. If you took good notes in your CRM, take advantage of them. 

Finally, skim your lead’s social media accounts. Have they been posting articles on topics in your product’s industry? If they have, that can indicate interest (a trigger), suggesting that now is a great time to reach out. 

2. Skip the hard sell, feel them out first

84% of buyers accuse salespeople of being pushy. So rather than going straight for the pitch in your first email, use a “feeler” to catch their interest and open up the channel of communication. That’s just another way of saying to send them something of free, but real, value. A few examples: 

• An ebook, checklist, or guide
• A free webinar or tutorial session
  Schedule helpful webinars or tutorial sessions and invite old leads to participate. 
• A sweepstake or light contest
  You can send out fun quizzes or questionnaires with the promise of a free reward for completion, or big price cuts and discounts on an essential product for a certain period if the lead completes a simple game. 

3. Surveys/opinion poll emails

Another way to reach out to old leads is to send simple survey emails or online polls. Focus on asking where you went right or wrong. Include a priority list of reasons as to why they may have abandoned your funnel. 

Keep the options simple and few, and finish with a call to action to keep the conversation going.

4. Leverage trigger events/experiment with timing

As mentioned earlier, scan through your leads’ social media profiles. If you notice any recent achievements or successes, use it as an opportunity to reach out. Skip the sales pitch in this email — congratulate them, keeping it brief and honest. 

5. Test your subject line

If you aren’t getting a response from any of your re-outreach emails, they might not be opening them. Testing out different types of subject lines could help generate interest, so they open your email and see your message. 

Try using a subject line starting with “How to…”, a list of 3 things or that is time-sensitive. Of course, the content of your email should reflect the subject line. You wouldn’t send an email entitled “How to do XYZ with [product]” when your email congratulates the lead on their company’s acquisition of a competitor. 

6. Talk about what’s changed with them

Once you have the line open, catch up with the lead. It’s been 6 months or more — change is guaranteed. Ask soft, business-related questions in a quick email; or, if you think the phone will elicit a better response, pick it up and call them. 

In either case, listen for things like expressed needs, frustrations with a current solution, and their general demeanor — i.e. are they annoyed that you’ve contacted them? 

7. Now, talk about what’s changed with you

If your lead seems to be open to conversation, move into the next part: talking about what’s changed with your product. For example, you can say something like, “Well, [product] has gone through some renovation since you last looked at it.” 

Then, start talking about what’s different. Focus on new features, discounts, and new processes, and make sure to highlight what benefits those bring to your client.

8. Set up a drip campaign

A drip campaign can be set up using marketing automation software. You create, schedule, and send a series of emails that are designed to speak to the interests of your leads. This is more on the marketing side of things, but it could work to attract old leads’ attention.

Conclusion

Reigniting the interest of old leads in your company is something every salesperson should be doing. It’s an already-established list of people who have had at least some contact from you in the past, making it a step up from emailing cold leads. 

Try these tips out and let us know how they go. You won’t convert every old lead, but you’ll recover at least some. 

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The post 8 Tips to Re-engage Old Leads appeared first on CloserIQ Blog.

You’re an entrepreneur who is excited about growing your small business. Maybe you’ve identified the perfect niche market designing websites for local restaurants or installing high-end home security systems. You’re passionate about your company’s services, growing your business, and polishing your brand. Your focus on those elements of your business is really important to your success, but you might be overlooking an equally important accounting decision that you need to make: Do you use cash basis accounting, or do you use accrual accounting? After years of working with small businesses, I am convinced that accrual accounting is the best option for your company, especially as your company grows and looks for new opportunities.

Cash Basis Accounting vs. Accrual Accounting

Small businesses — which often have to learn basic accounting informally and quickly — can use either method of accounting, but the methods are different.

When using cash basis accounting, a sale is not recorded as a sale until your customer pays you, and an expense is not an expense until you pay for it. Money has to change hands in order for you to account for it.

When using accrual accounting, sales are recorded as accounts receivable at the moment you sell something, such as when you send an invoice to a customer. Expenses are recorded as accounts payable when you receive an invoice from a vendor.

Let’s think about a situation in which you are the owner of a brand-new plumbing company. In April, you performed 10 service calls and sent your customers their bills, totaling $5,000. At the end of the month, five customers had paid their invoices for a total of $2,500. That same month, you paid an invoice for some tools that you bought for $800.

If you are using cash basis accounting, you recorded a profit of $1,700 — the amount your customers paid you minus what you paid for the tools.

If you are using accrual accounting, you recorded a profit of $4,200 — the amount of the invoices you sent minus what you paid for the tools.

Your business is going to have very different financial statements at the end of April depending on the type of accounting you choose, even though the exact same events happened in both instances.

Why Small Businesses Prefer Cash Basis Accounting

I certainly understand why small business owners are interested in cash basis accounting. Here are a few reasons I think they do.

First, you have thousands of tasks to perform and decisions to make.

When you are just starting a business cash basis accounting is simple enough that it seems like a way to save time. Creating a financial statement doesn’t involve much more than looking at your bank accounts. If you see money deposited, you can consider those sales. If you see money paid, those are expenses. It’s easy for you to see a reasonably accurate record of your month-to-month cash flow.

Second, you might have a small business that has its customers paying immediately for services.

These pricing models are referred to as payment due at time of service. For example, think about a boutique financial advisory service. If customers pay immediately at the end of each planning session, there’s not much need for accounts receivable. Those types of small businesses might not see the need for the extra complexity involved with accrual accounting.

Third, cash basis accounting affects when you pay taxes for your business.

If your small business performs a service at the end of December but doesn’t receive payment until January, it doesn’t pay taxes on that income until the next year under cash basis accounting. However, your business is still going to pay its taxes at some point (and recording income received near the end of one year as income the next year is fraudulent, even if it sometimes happens). My point is that this often-mentioned benefit of cash basis accounting really isn’t that big of a benefit.

Even worse, unscrupulous small business owners might attempt to use cash basis accounting to manipulate their income statements. Let’s say you start a mobile pressure-washing company. During the day, you drive from house to house and pressure-wash decks, driveways, siding — you name it. If it has mold or dirt, you pressure-wash it. You didn’t have much money to start the business, so you used a loan to purchase the pressure washer and van. If you stop paying the bills for that pressure washer and van, you don’t record those transactions. At that point, your company’s income statement looks much better than it really is because, after all, you don’t have those expenses recorded.

Despite its benefits, cash basis accounting simply isn’t the best solution for a small business. In fact, it’s not even in accordance with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Why Your Small Businesses Should Use Accrual Accounting

There are some great reasons I think small businesses should use accrual accounting, even if it can seem more difficult. First, it allows you to track revenue and expenses more easily. Second, it helps you create more comprehensive financial statements for people outside of your company. Third, it allows you to calculate key ratios that you might need to know as your business grows. I’ll explain these one at a time.

First, consider how complex your business operations are as you are just starting.

Maybe demand for your pet-sitting business has exploded as your customers spread the word about how reliable you are and how well you care for their pets. You might have hired a few employees. Pretty soon, you find that you’re having trouble tracking who owes what. You know you are due some cash soon, but how much? And when? Ms. Jackson owes exactly how much, again, for watching her Labradoodle? Are you going to remember that in a few weeks?

With accrual accounting, you simply record the amount that Ms. Jackson owes you as an accounts receivable transaction. That gives you some peace of mind when you think about that amount offset against the expense that you recently had for your website redesign with the prominent picture of that Labradoodle at the top. You know immediately where your money is going and where it’s coming from.

Second, as your business grows, other people are going to be reviewing your financial statements.

Accrual accounting gives those people a better idea of the shape of your company. If your graphic design business looks thin on cash one month because you had to pay for a better computer, a quick glance at your accounts receivable allows anyone to see that your cash flow for the following month looks great because your clients are going to be paying you many times the cost of that new equipment.

Keep this in mind as you think about your future needs for credit. Maybe you need a short-term line of credit because of increases to your accounts receivable. If you hand your banker a balance sheet using cash accounting, he won’t even see that you have accounts receivable because it won’t be on your balance sheet. Using accrual accounting, your banker has a better understanding of the health of your company rather than a misleading one based on a snapshot in time.

Third, if your company is experiencing explosive growth and is looking for more credit to continue expanding, you want to keep your banker happy.

The banker is going to review your financial statements and calculate a few key ratios. These ratios are better calculated using accrual accounting.

Take the current ratio, for example. A current ratio is used to get a quick snapshot of a company’s cash position. Your banker calculates this ratio by dividing current assets by current liabilities. You’re not going to have an accurate current ratio using cash basis accounting because your accounts receivable and accounts payable are not being reported on your balance sheet.

Traditional lenders might not want to deal with a business using cash basis accounting to create that type of balance sheet, or they might not be able to account for some money that’s owed to you as they try to underwrite a loan. That’s not good in either case.

Even if you do find a lender willing to work with you while you use cash basis accounting, once you have to start providing other supplementary documents, you increase your chances of committing a mistake — and that might lead to you getting turned down for a loan. Accrual accounting helps you avoid those mistakes by giving your banker the information he or she needs right there on the balance sheet.

And if your small business as a rental property manager explodes, you add employees, and you expand beyond your wildest dreams, potential buyers are going to want to see the most comprehensive financial statements possible — that means you need to be using accrual accounting.

What to Do if You Want to Switch to Accrual Accounting

Making the switch is easier than you think. Because you might not be familiar with all of the tax laws that might apply to your specific business, I recommend talking with your certified public accountant — or hiring a CPA if you don’t currently have one. Your CPA can tell you about any possible tax consequences of making the switch.

The actual switch, though, is easier today than ever. Often, with today’s accounting software, such as QuickBooks, you might just need a few mouse clicks. Once you’ve switched to accrual accounting, make sure you’re consistent. You don’t want to hand someone statements using cash basis accounting one time and statements using accrual accounting another.

Once you’ve made the switch, ask your CPA to help you calculate your current ratio, your accounts payable days (how long it takes you to pay your vendors or other creditors), your accounts receivable days (how long it takes customers to pay you), the percent of gross profit to sales, and the percent of cash flow to sales. Use these ratios or key performance indicators to keep track of the monthly performance of your business — you will be better informed to make decisions, and you’ll be able to tell others outside of the company about your company’s health.

If you’re serious about growing your business, it’s time to embrace accrual accounting. It might be more difficult at first, but accrual accounting benefits your business in the long run, giving you better access to credit and — hopefully — better access to buyers when the time comes.

This week professor David Carroll, whose dogged search for answers to how his personal data was misused plays a focal role in The Great Hack: Netflix’s documentary tackling the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, quipped that perhaps a follow up would be more punitive for the company than the $5BN FTC fine released the same day.

The documentary — which we previewed ahead of its general release Wednesday — does an impressive job of articulating for a mainstream audience the risks for individuals and society of unregulated surveillance capitalism, despite the complexities involved in the invisible data ‘supply chain’ that feeds the beast. Most obviously by trying to make these digital social emissions visible to the viewer — as mushrooming pop-ups overlaid on shots of smartphone users going about their everyday business, largely unaware of the pervasive tracking it enables.

Facebook is unlikely to be a fan of the treatment. In its own crisis PR around the Cambridge Analytica scandal it has sought to achieve the opposite effect; making it harder to join the data-dots embedded in its ad platform by seeking to deflect blame, bury key details and bore reporters and policymakers to death with reams of irrelevant detail — in the hope they might shift their attention elsewhere.

Data protection itself isn’t a topic that naturally lends itself to glamorous thriller treatment, of course. No amount of slick editing can transform the close and careful scrutiny of political committees into seat-of-the-pants viewing for anyone not already intimately familiar with the intricacies being picked over. And yet it’s exactly such thoughtful attention to detail that democracy demands. Without it we are all, to put it proverbially, screwed.

The Great Hack shows what happens when vital detail and context are cheaply ripped away at scale, via socially sticky content delivery platforms run by tech giants that never bothered to sweat the ethical detail of how their ad targeting tools could be repurposed by malign interests to sew social discord and/or manipulate voter opinion en mass.

Or indeed used by an official candidate for high office in a democratic society that lacks legal safeguards against data misuse.

But while the documentary packs in a lot over an almost two-hour span, retelling the story of Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 Trump presidential election campaign; exploring links to the UK’s Brexit leave vote; and zooming out to show a little of the wider impact of social media disinformation campaigns on various elections around the world, the viewer is left with plenty of questions. Not least the ones Carroll repeats towards the end of the film: What information had Cambridge Analytica amassed on him? Where did they get it from? What did they use it for? — apparently resigning himself to never knowing. The disgraced data firm chose declaring bankruptcy and folding back into its shell vs handing over the stolen goods and its algorithmic secrets.

There’s no doubt over the other question Carroll poses early on the film — could he delete his information? The lack of control over what’s done with people’s information is the central point around which the documentary pivots. The key warning being there’s no magical cleansing fire that can purge every digitally copied personal thing that’s put out there.

And while Carroll is shown able to tap into European data rights — purely by merit of Cambridge Analytica having processed his data in the UK — to try and get answers, the lack of control holds true in the US. Here, the absence of a legal framework to protect privacy is shown as the catalyzing fuel for the ‘great hack’ — and also shown enabling the ongoing data-free-for-all that underpins almost all ad-supported, Internet-delivered services. tl;dr: Your phone doesn’t need to listen to if it’s tracking everything else you do with it.

The film’s other obsession is the breathtaking scale of the thing. One focal moment is when we hear another central character, Cambridge Analytica’s Brittany Kaiser, dispassionately recounting how data surpassed oil in value last year — as if that’s all the explanation needed for the terrible behavior on show.

“Data’s the most valuable asset on Earth,” she monotones. The staggering value of digital stuff is thus fingered as an irresistible, manipulative force also sucking in bright minds to work at data firms like Cambridge Analytica — even at the expense of their own claimed political allegiances, in the conflicted case of Kaiser.

If knowledge is power and power corrupts, the construction can be refined further to ‘data corrupts’, is the suggestion.

The filmmakers linger long on Kaiser which can seem to humanize her — as they show what appear vulnerable or intimate moments. Yet they do this without ever entirely getting under her skin or allowing her role in the scandal to be fully resolved.

She’s often allowed to tell her narrative from behind dark glasses and a hat — which has the opposite effect on how we’re invited to perceive her. Questions about her motivations are never far away. It’s a human mystery linked to Cambridge Analytica’s money-minting algorithmic blackbox.

Nor is there any attempt by the filmmakers to mine Kaiser for answers themselves. It’s a documentary that spotlights mysteries and leaves questions hanging up there intact. From a journalist perspective that’s an inevitable frustration. Even as the story itself is much bigger than any one of its constituent parts.

It’s hard to imagine how Netflix could commission a straight up sequel to The Great Hack, given its central framing of Carroll’s data quest being combined with key moments of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Large chunks of the film are comprised from capturing scrutiny and reactions to the story unfolding in real-time.

But in displaying the ruthlessly transactional underpinnings of social platforms where the world’s smartphone users go to kill time, unwittingly trading away their agency in the process, Netflix has really just begun to open up the defining story of our time.

The critics of the word “hustle” make several excellent points about what the word has come to mean in the age of the internet. Many of them talk about hustling as a measurement of the number of hours one works, which contains a small truth about hustling. These critics worry that people are going lessen the quality of their lives by focusing too heavily on their work.

Others use the word to denote a second source of income, commonly described as a “side hustle,” which many of us recognize as part-time work. The critics of the side hustle don’t believe it is worth most people’s time, especially since most try to make money in e-commerce and fail, also a fair criticism.

The way these critics define “hustle” and “success” is not accurate. Neither of these words is limited to work alone, and they have less to do with the number of hours one works (a poor indicator of hustle or success) than some believe. If you hate these words, allow me to offer you another view.

A Better Definition of Hustle

You might deconstruct hustle into four parts.

1. The first part of hustle is effort. The word hustle has long been used to describe people who take action and exert themselves in some result. Note that the result is not limited to their work, and we’ll have more to say about this later. People who hustle seem to have a greater capacity for effort over extended periods.
2. The second component is how important the result is to the person who is hustling and seeking success. Some people go to work but do very little work. Others spend time at home without achieving the results they want in their personal lives. Doing things that don’t matter is not hustling, regardless of the time spent. Your priorities matter.
3. The third part you can call outcomes or results. People who hustle and those who find success have always produced results. It isn’t enough to put forth the effort and do what is meaningful if you don’t produce the outcome you are pursuing.
4. The fourth and final factor is the speed at which people work and the rate at which they produce those results. People who hustle generally pull results forward in time by exerting themselves in what matters to produce a result faster than people whom you might accuse of not hustling.

What It Takes to Hustle

This post is a full-throated defense of the words “hustle” and “success” as I have defined above, a more traditional definition, and one that is more accurate for those who pursue success in life. There is much about the word and idea to commend hustling.

• It is the impetus for growth: When their goals and dreams drive people, they eventually recognize the need to improve in different areas of their lives. They educate themselves and dedicate themselves to continuous improvement. If you want to have more, you start by becoming a person who could acquire the things you want. Growth is as necessary for success at work as it is for success in, say, being a great parent or spouse.
• It creates a greater capacity to produce more: As you improve yourself, you improve your ability to produce better results. There are little rewards for mediocre results, decent rewards for excellence, and incredible rewards for exceptional results. There is nothing about this truth that limits this to your work life.
• It provides a vision of a better future and a path forward: You get to decide what kind of life you have. The idea of “hustle” and “success” is that you can have the life you want if you are intentional and if you take massive action. Those who exert effort in having more end up with a better quality of life and more and better choices. What shows up as abundance shows up outside of work.
• It provides a more exceptional ability to contribute: While it is true that abundance allows you to contribute more, those who hustle tend to create enough to add to others. Part of this contribution is doing purposeful, meaningful work that helps others. Many find that their definition of success is creating more value for more people.

Some mistakenly believe that hustle is a sort of brand, a personality of some kind when it is not. There may be no bigger hustlers than people like Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, and Bill Gates, three people you would hardly accuse of being personality brands. The three are well-recognized for being voracious readers and draw very little attention to themselves.

Unfounded Fear about Hustle

Much of the criticism of the word “hustle” is around people working themselves to death. The same is true for the word “success,” which some resist because it connotes a poor work-life balance.

There is no risk of a significant number of people working too hard on the critical things in their lives to the detriment of their health. There is, however, no end of people who are doing far less than they should, less than they are capable of, and who would improve their lives dramatically by hustling. They would do better to exert themselves doing what is most important in every area of their life, pursuing the life they want instead of the default life they have now, and making their contribution.

If You Still Hate the Word Hustle

If you hate the word “hustle” or the word “success,” then let me give you a couple of alternatives. Swap “hustle” for “work ethic” and “priorities.” If you hate the word “success,” try “happiness” and “achieving my goals.”

Words are important, and we use certain words that can have a negative connotation not intended. I err on the side of choosing the word that gives the highest clarity to the idea, but I also recognize some respond negatively to the best word. However, the ideas here are more important than the words, and if you have an aversion, choose a word you prefer—but don’t avoid the central ideas here.

The post If You Hate The Words Hustle And Success appeared first on The Sales Blog.

As a digital analyst and anthropologist, I’ve studied over the last 20 years, the evolution of disruptive technology and its effect on business philosophies and models. At the same time, I’ve also studied disruptive technology’s impact on society and human behavior. If I had to share just one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that markets are splintering into two notable camps: 1) traditional and 2) hyper-connected aka Generation-C (connected). While this may at first glance seem either obvious or insignificant, I can assure you that the latter group is what’s causing friction at the top of many organizations. Digital is ushering a new generation of incredibly discerning, demanding, and fundamentally different customers and employees in what they expect and value. Not only do they represent your evolving market and workforce, they bring with them the need to change everything you do and how and why you do it.

Pervasive technologies have fundamentally changed how people communicate, discover, and connect. With smartphones serving as digital appendages, we are always on, in real-time, focused on small screens throughout our day…every day…in all we do. Technology’s biggest impact though, is not so much on the devices or the apps that we use, but instead on our behavior.  Specifically, how we learn, how we buy, how we work, how we influence and are influenced, are both evolving and already highly evolved.  This is significant because we take for granted the processes and systems we have in place to manage employee and customer experiences today. A widening experience divide now exists between existing and evolving standards. In the spirit of true candor, how we work, market, and sell are based on dated principles and mindsets designed to optimize tasks for a very different time.

To date, we’ve built upon legacy investments and operational procedures to adapt to technology and market shifts.  In the 1990s the Internet required new expertise, technology and processes to govern it internally and externally. The same was true for desktop PCs, laptops, mobile phones, desktop phones, telecommuting, etc. But most of how we coped or managed transformation before now was done so in a command and control fashion. IT would manage technology, HR would lead operations, managers would ensure productivity.  With social, mobile, real-time, cloud, et al., now part of everyday life, how people think and work outside of work is now radically different.  This is bigger than the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement of letting people use their phones or devices at work.  This is about changing why and how we choose new technologies, how we roll them out, and how we design new processes for improving how people work individually and together.

“It isn’t the past which holds us back, it’s the future; and how we undermine it, today.”- Viktor E. Frankle

There are parts of a command and control methodology that are still relevant today. However, as architects of the future of work, building upon a foundation of the past inhibits our ability to optimally see or plan for an ideal future. Said another way, how we see the future is rooted in how we dealt with it in the past. Therefore, how we need to plan and build for it requires that we see the human drivers behind how people use technology in their personal life. Doing so helps us naturally emulate and foster collaboration and engagement in the work place in ways that are more intuitive and seamless. Otherwise, we are forcing people to conform to inorganic practices that will affect morale and loyalty over time.

We have to see people differently than how we see the world today. We are most likely not the people we are trying to solve for and as a result, we bring legacy mindsets and experiences to challenges and opportunities that in fact need new methodologies to engage and scale an infrastructure for a new generation of employees and customers.

Rather than rebuff the differences in how digital natives work, learn from it and be inspired by it. It’s the only way we can truly lead the future of work. Otherwise, we’re forever doomed to react to it.

We can’t change everything at once nor can we continue with business as usual. But we do need to take small steps to move in a new direction. Change actually begins with us. And it all starts with learning what we do not know. This allows us to see what it is we can’t see today in order to build what doesn’t yet exist.

The future of work does indeed take architecture and we are its architects. But as much as our challenge is affected by technology’s impact on behavior, we cannot assume that technology is therefore part of the solution. To design a meaningful and scalable ecosystem moving forward, we have to appreciate how behavior and expectations are evolving.  With technology now part of the fabric of life and innovation a constant, solving for behavior actually makes technology more human.

Brian Solis, Author, Keynote Speaker, Futurist

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is a world renowned keynote speakerand 8x best-selling author. In his new book, Lifescale: How to live a more creative, productive and happy life, Brian tackles the struggles of living in a world rife with constant digital distractions. His model for “Lifescaling” helps readers overcome the unforeseen consequences of living a digital life to break away from diversions, focus on what’s important, spark newfound creativity and unlock new possibilities. His previous book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design.

Please, invite him to speak at your next event or bring him in to your organization to inspire colleagues, executives and boards of directors.

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The post In the Future of Work, Technology is Both a Problem and Solution appeared first on Brian Solis.

Driving effective cross-functional interlocks is a best practice for B2B organizations looking to accelerate revenue growth. However, one interlock that often gets overlooked in go-to-market transformations is the relationship between Sales and Pricing. Too often, Sales views Pricing as a

Recently, a ChartMogul customer told me, “You know, growing revenue is important to us, but we’re driven by a mission to help as many people as possible. So we have to find that fine balance that allows us to achieve both.”

Admittedly, it’s not unexpected to hear that from a team that’s building a meditation app. However, this also made me think that B2B SaaS isn’t that different. In the typical case, a customer becomes profitable long after they subscribe to a product. Because of that, SaaS companies have to put their customers’ success before their own. That’s the only way to succeed in the first place.

Pricing plays a vital role in that — not just as a way to achieve our own success, but even more importantly, as a way to align our motivation to that of our customers.

Moreover, having the correct pricing is not just about (not) leaving money on the table. Maximizing the value you get out of your customers gives you the resources you need to continue working on the product so that it’s even more useful to your audience.

It also allows you to find the customers who are best positioned to benefit from your product and saves you from trying to target everyone who lands on your site.

These are some of the lessons, we’ve learned at ChartMogul, experimenting with different pricing plans over the last 4-5 years. In this article, I want to share with you our most important learnings.

What is great pricing all about?

Many people in SaaS like to extoll the merits of value-based pricing and it’s certainly worth looking into if you’re still pricing by comparing yourself to competitors.

However, my feeling is that most companies in the industry are beyond this point.

Today, good pricing comes down to finding the right value metric and using that as the basis for your billing structure.

Note that this is NOT the same as “value-based” pricing. Value-based pricing can easily put a limit on how much value you can extract from a customer. Let’s play a little thought experiment with HubSpot’s pricing to understand the difference between the two:

Imagine they only offered the 3 straightforward plans above without the Contacts dimension. In that case, the highest they could charge a customer would be $3,200 no matter whether that customer has 20,000 or 200,000 contacts in their database.

That’s why they use the list size as a value metric to adjust the price for larger customers. Working with a value metric allows you to build your pricing model in a way that doesn’t put a ceiling on your revenue and the success of your customers.

This is key as it allows you to grow as your customers grow, achieving the SaaS holy land of Net Negative Churn.

The right pricing model is a great competitive advantage to your company — it allows you to get in early with a free/low-priced tier, become an integral part of how your customers work, and then grow with them long-term without having to spend on marketing and sales to acquire mature customers.

Slack is a great example of that — they combine a free plan with per-seat pricing, which makes sense in their case. The result is one of the highest net negative churn rates in the industry.

The right pricing aligns you to your customers

Choosing the right value metric means that you have an incentive to make sure your customers grow as that means your revenue expands organically.

That allows you to prioritize building the right features for those customers.

We can see this at play with Slack’s focus on building the tool as a platform. This allows their customers to bring in more teams and departments as they grow, thus ensuring Slack is also growing.

Finally, having this kind of pricing quickly weeds out the companies that are not a good fit for your product. That means you don’t have to worry about or get distracted with building features for them.

Pricing shapes the perception of your company

Low price can be a bad thing if your ideal customers perceive you as too cheap, to the point where they might consider you not professional enough to trust their business with.

Pricing shapes your customers’ perception of who you are and how you operate as a company.

It also sets how your employees think about your business — it can set the idea that you’re not selling a commodity or a widget, but rather something truly transformational and really aligned with your customers.

Now we’ve established why finding your value metric is so important, let’s look at some of the important things you need to consider in order to take advantage of it.

3 steps to build your pricing around a value metric

It’s always easier to understand value metrics when you look at companies who’ve found them and used them to great success.

Just look at those brands that boost the highest net negative churn and you’ll almost certainly find an element of pricing around a value metric.

Unfortunately, finding it isn’t so easy, but here are a few ways that can make it easier to find.

Find your customers’ “desired outcome” and put a value on it

Lincoln Murphy argues that people don’t just hire a product to get a job done, they have a higher goal — a desired outcome — they want to achieve with it.

Desired Outcome > Job to be Done

— Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy) May 4, 2016

When a marketing team adopts MailChimp they don’t do it because they want to send better emails — they want to reach an audience, close more customers, retain them for longer or (most likely) do a combination of all.

That means that for every outcome customers want to achieve, there are usually multiple ways they can do it. A team that’s not using Slack can use Skype, a project management tool such as Asana or even email to achieve the same outcome.

Email is free, but it’s also not built for this type of communication, which means it introduces a lot of friction and ends up costing a lot of time.

Even if a team loses just 10 hours per month as a result of using email (a very conservative estimate) and those cost ~$50/hour, that means a better tool can easily deliver $500 in value.

If your team is building a new Slack competitor and you’re wondering how to price, conventional wisdom says it’s a good idea to provide a lot more value than you’re charging for.

However, putting that kind of numerical value is not always so straightforward — even for the people on the team who experience it. That’s why, especially when you’re starting out, it’s a good idea to provide value at a multiple with your tool.

Use the “10x Rule” and price your product at around 1/10th of the value you’re providing. If your product is saving customers $500/month as we saw in the example above, following the 10x rule would mean you price it at $50/month.

Once you establish that price, it doesn’t mean you cannot change it. In fact, you should. Keep testing to find the optimal price — another rule of thumb is to keep raising prices after each sale until you start to get pushback from about 20% of the prospects you speak to.

Set your pricing to attract customers you can grow with

One of the benefits of pricing around a value metric (especially if you have a free plan) is that it allows you to take on customers who might not be profitable at the moment but have the potential to grow.

Another benefit is that this pricing structure doesn’t pressure your commercial team to extract 100% of the value of a customer at Day 0.

Instead, you can focus on building the relationship by taking the time to learn about your customers, improve the product using what you learn from them, and then upsell/expand to capture the full value they have to offer.

Maximize your revenue with multi-dimensional pricing

Using more than one dimension for your pricing (for example a set of features + a value metric) is a great way to maximize your revenue by targeting several different customer segments.

Companies would always use a feature that would only be useful to one specific type of customer they want to reach. One of the most common examples of such a feature is white labeling, which usually targets agencies and other service businesses:

If there’s a downside to using a value metric for your pricing, it is the fact that it introduces uncertainty for your customers. That could kill many a deal, especially if you’re selling to larger enterprises who budget at least a year in advance.

3-Part-Tariffs (3PT) allow you to overcome this. In this approach, your base fee includes some usage.

Studies show that this pricing structure produces the highest overall impact because it makes it easier for customers to predict how much they’d have to pay and gives them peace of mind.

How we used a value metric & these rules to revamp our pricing

In our initial attempt to turn to arrange our pricing around a value metric, we were charging by the number of active customers on each account. We thought this provided a just basis for our pricing structure that allowed us to dedicate the needed resources towards serving large-volume customers.

However, we quickly realized that created a two-sided problem:

• • • Our prices were extremely high for B2C customers who have a high volume of users/customers, but a low ARPA — that made us unaffordable to them.
    • We were leaving a lot of money on the table with our B2B customers who on average have a lower number of customers, but a much higher ARPA.

This created a need to constantly tweak our pricing on the fly. For example, we started to use discounting in an attempt to offer a level playing ground to all customers and prospects.

It wasn’t the straightforward structure we were hoping for. Clearly, we needed to make a change.

The final push to make a change to our pricing came from an unlikely source — our process to define the company mission that we underwent in 2018.

We defined our mission statement as:

To help companies grow faster using their revenue data.

Soon we realized that the only way to uphold this and align our pricing to our mission was by moving to revenue-based pricing (and more specifically MRR).

That would mean that the better job we do at helping our customers grow their revenue by providing them with critical insights about their customers, their growth, and retention, the more money we can make as well.

Our incentives were now aligned with those of our ideal customers.

In addition, our new pricing completely eliminated the need for us to provide discounts as part of our sales process in an attempt to level the playing field for customers. As our price is not set on the amount of MRR a customer generates, it also means it’s directly correlated with the relative affordability of our product for that customer.

There’s no simple X-step process I can give you to follow to reach your ideal pricing structure. Indeed, I know from ChartMogul’s experience that it took numerous iterations before we reached a model that works for us.

What helped us was following the 3 features I mentioned above.

We focus on the desired outcome

Our customers tell us they were considering hiring a business analyst or building a tool internally to gain insight into how their business is growing before they found our platform.

We know what their desired outcome is — they want to have a clear picture of what’s happening with their business — and we know what the possible alternatives are and approximately how much they would cost them.

That allows us to put a (perceived) numerical value on the benefit our platform provides and use that as guidance when we come up with a price structure.

We attract early-stage customers with a free plan

ChartMogul is free for companies that generate up to $10,000 in MRR.

This allows us to compete with a number of free ways to achieve the desired outcome — the native analytics by Stripe, the App Store, etc.; Google Sheets; and even some of our direct competitors.

Even more importantly, we believe this will allow us to catch the next Airbnb or Uber in its early days and become ingrained in their workflow.

We use a simple 3-part-tariff

Our main plan comes with $10,000 in MRR included in the price and it grows linearly with each additional $10,000 in revenue.

This allows customers to quickly understand how much they would have to pay and also to forecast their subscription rate based on projected growth for the year and actual CMRR.

In addition, for customers that come in straight away with a high level of data and requirements, and/or serious growth projections, our sales team is able to build appropriate proposals.

You won’t always get your pricing right the first time

We’ve used several different structures over the last few years before we got to a point where we feel confident about our pricing model.

I realize writing that might hit your motivation to experiment and improve your own pricing because of how time-consuming and complicated the process sounds.

In reality, this is one of the most important decisions you have to take as an entrepreneur. It deserves your time.

The post How To Achieve Net Negative Churn By Using Value Metrics In Your Pricing appeared first on OpenView.

The words “create value” are used so often and in so many different contexts that it can be challenging to know what it means—or what you are supposed to do to create value. I have written about something I called Level 4 Value Creation to describe a way of thinking about creating the highest level of value possible for your clients and dream clients by focusing on their strategic outcomes. I did my best to make it practical and tactical, but there are limits to the size and scope of a book.Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch

I am going to start with broad intentions and outcomes, going from general to specific.

First Principles

1. Value is in the eyes of the beholder—or the recipient, for our purposes here. You have the right to develop a theory as to what should be valuable for another person, but they possess the right to determine their worth. Because perceptions about value vary, you may have to explain why your dream client should perceive the value in the way you view it.
2. The person receiving the value needs to be better off in some way having received it. If the person is no better off having received the attempted value creation, it is not value.
3. Value exists on a continuum. Some things are more valuable than others. My view of this continuum of value in sales is 1: Product Value, 2: Experience Value, 3: Tangible results, and 4: Strategic Value.
4. Value has a contextual component, meaning something that might have been valuable in the past may not be helpful in the future. Something that would be valuable in one circumstance might be less useful when the conditions are different.
5. Value creation tends to degrade over time; it has a half-life. The value you created in the past is not likely to be as valuable to your clients as the value you create now.
6. Value creation may also build on prior value. It is possible to create an upward spiral of higher value over time.
7. The greater the value you create, the more relevant you will be to your clients and your dream clients. An inability to create value will make you irrelevant.
8. Value creation is found in your understanding. It is as much in your learning as it is your teaching. While it is important you help your clients discover something about themselves, it’s equally (or more) important that you allow them to educate you if you want to create a preference.

Value Creation: In Ideas

One of the ways we create value is with ideas. This is why sharing the slide deck with your company’s history, logos from all your well-known clients, and an exhaustive list of products and services, does not create much value (unless your client is sincerely interested in learning more about your company.

• Ideas that help your client understand why they are struggling to produce the results they need: When you can explain to your client or prospect why they are not able to achieve the results they need, you have created value by educating them.
• Ideas that help your client understand what is possible: There is a better state available, but your client may not be aware of what that better start is—or how to get there (which will give more attention in the next point). Sharing ideas about what is possible is value creation.
• Ideas about how to get to a better future state: The value of your dream client knowing why they are struggling to produce results followed by what the future state might look like leads to the value of understanding how to generate those better results.
• Ideas that help prepare your client for the future: One of the areas where clients perceive value is your keeping them abreast of what’s coming in the future and how they might need to prepare themselves. If you want to be a trusted advisor, you have to be vigilant and protect your clients from harm.

The reasons listed here are why nurturing your dream clients over time provides them value and increases their willingness to explore change with you.

Value Creation: In Providing Advice

Ideas and advice are different. The word consultative may not mean what you think it means. While “being consultative” does suggest something about your bedside manner, what it means is that you tell people what to do, you advise, you offer counsel.

• Advice on following a process that will produce better results: In The Lost Art of Closing, I wrote a chapter on Controlling the Process. In that chapter, I made the case that one should guide their clients through the sales conversation, helping them make and keep commitments. The advice you offer here is value when it prevents your client from making mistakes that hurt their chances of producing the better results they need.No more pushy sales tactics. The Lost Art of Closing shows you how to proactively lead your customer and close your sales.
• Advice on what your client needs to change: The very heart of selling is making a change. In The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, I included a chapter on managing change. You create value when you advise your client on the things they need to different to produce a better result.Learn Anthony's core strategies & tactics for sales success at any level with The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need
• Advice on when and how to change: Telling your dream client how to change is valuable when your client has a gap in understanding what they need to do to produce whatever outcome they are chasing. Telling them when to change is also value creation, especially when you are proactive enough to provide that advice before what they are doing harms them.
• Advice on trade-offs, choices, and decisions: Your subject matter expertise, business acumen, and situational knowledge combine to allow you to guide with the value of knowing what trade-offs your client might need to make, what choice they should consider, and what decisions they should make.

Value Creation: In Execution

There is value in assisting your client with the execution of everything above. If your client struggles to execute, you create value by providing it.

• Execution as a pair of hands: Sometimes, what your client needs is a pair of hands to do some work they can’t do because they lack resources. In some circumstances, it means doing something for your client. In other situations, you will recognize this as outsourcing, taking over all the work for them to produce a result that can’t or don’t want to do.
• Execution in delivering results: You create value when you provide the results you sell. You eliminate value when you don’t (along with your client’s trust—and their future business). Better execution is more valuable to your clients. They also find more strategic outcomes more valuable.
• Execution and accountability: You create value by owning the outcomes you sell, taking responsibility for producing results, ensuring your team resolves your client’s issues. You also create value by mitigating any challenges by being resourceful and solving problems. You own the outcomes, but your team owns the transactions, which means you are accountable for your organization.

There is more to say about execution and results. In part, it may be made up solving problems and eliminating challenges. It might also be made up of taking advantage of opportunities. Some issues are small, making the value creation equally small. Other problems and challenges are enormous, and solving them creates massive value. Opportunities also exist on a similar continuum.

Value Creation: In Context

An important consideration is the context in which you are trying to create value. The idea of context suggests one needs and other-orientation.

• Value in understanding what your client needs to know now: You need to be able to recognize where your client is now to understand what they need to know. It is okay to have a theory, and it is okay to be wrong. However, if you want to create value, helping your client learn what they need to know is a good starting point.
• Value in understanding the context in which you are offering advice: There is a reason we explore change with our clients to know what they need, why they need it, and what the best choices are for them specifically. You create value when you match your advice to the client, getting things right—something difficult to do if you don’t spend time learning from them as well as teaching.

Methods of Value

There are several ways you can create value for your clients and your dream clients.

• Inform: Providing information that helps your client understand something they want or need to learn is value.
• Educate: Teaching your client something they need to learn is a form of value creation. You create even greater value when your client wants to learn.
• Inspire: I am using the word “inspire” in a particular way here. If you believe selling is about helping people change in a way that improves their lives and their businesses as I do, then helping them believe it is necessary to change and take action is value creation.
• Entertain: You can improve how you create value by using methods that engage the people for whom you are creating value in a way that makes it easier to deal with the challenges of changing.

On Being a Value Creator

If you want to create value for others, the ideas here will give you a framework for thinking and acting in ways that others will perceive as value. If you want to produce better results for yourself and your clients, and if you’re going to do work that is purposeful and meaningful, there is not anything that does more for you than doing more for others.

Being a value creator is a choice. It is a personal decision you make. Only others can determine whether what you do is valuable to them or not. You alone can decide to do what is necessary to produce some result that might make them believe you are a value creator.

The post What Does It Mean to Create Value Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Because LinkedIn is putting more limits on the better features of their free accounts, business professionals who use those features to grow their networks and get results are asking me, Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator really worth the $79.99/month?

I've been using Sales Navigator for about five years. Since it's a fairly expensive upgrade, I've put together some facts, figures, and personal thoughts to help you figure out if it's right for you.

Note: These comments do not address all of the Sales Navigator features but merely the ones I feel might justify the significant monthly investment.
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What is Sales Navigator?

It is LinkedIn's stand-alone business development platform that works in conjunction with your regular LinkedIn account. LinkedIn says that Sales Navigator will help you "target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach."

Users don't have a separate profile or separate login. You access Sales Navigator by simply clicking the Sales Nav icon, which will appear at the far right of your top toolbar after you upgrade your account.

There are three levels of Sales Navigator, with increased features and capabilities, beginning at $79.99/month. A free, 30-day trial is typically available. Click here to check out the differences between the three options. I pay $79.99 per month, and my comments here relate to that version.
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You should consider upgrading to LinkedIn Sales Navigator if:

You're tired of LinkedIn limiting your people searches each month. If you're taking advantage of LinkedIn's expansive database and doing lots of searches, you've probably reached the commercial use limit. No one outside of LinkedIn seems to know how many searches you can do before reaching the monthly limit, but it sure seems to have been reduced since the Microsoft acquisition. This is the number one complaint I get from people who are hanging onto the free account but should probably consider upgrading to Sales Navigator.

You can avoid the commercial use limit by upgrading to Premium Business ($59.99/mo), but I'm not convinced this upgrade is valuable enough to justify the investment. You cannot avoid the commercial use limit by upgrading to Premium Career ($29.99/mo).

You want more helpful filters when searching for people. As part of Sales Navigator's Lead Builder function, there are currently 24 very specific filters available—and they're adding new ones all the time. This is one of the main reasons you might want to upgrade.

In my opinion, the best filters to help you find just the right people are: Company headcount, Postal code, Years in current position, Years at current company, Posted content keywords, Changed jobs in last 90 days, Posted content in last 30 days.

Searching for people with the free account, where you need to use Boolean search rules, can be quite challenging, but it's very easy with Sales Navigator.

You'd like to save more than three people searches. Once you've done a good job of figuring out the right filters for a people search, it's usually helpful to save those search criteria for future searches. With Sales Navigator, you can save fifteen searches, and LinkedIn notifies you daily, weekly or monthly when new people meet your preselected search criteria.

This is, hands down, one of the most useful Sales Navigator features. It's like having a virtual assistant who's looking for the right people for you 24/7.

You want to send messages (InMails) to people who aren't first-degree connections. Sometimes you just don't want to connect with someone in order to send him/her a message. A Sales Navigator subscription includes an allotment of InMails. I get fifteen InMails per month, and they carry forward if I don't use them all before month end.

You'd like to track only certain people (leads) or companies (accounts) and avoid extraneous information. On your Sales Navigator home page, there is a feed that looks similar to the feed on your regular LinkedIn account but with one big exception—the only information in that feed relates to people (leads) or companies (accounts) you've designated.

In other words, there's no advertising and a lot fewer posts that really don't interest you because you handpicked the people or companies, and you get everything they share because there's no feed algorithm where LinkedIn decides what you want to see.

Also, you can designate people or companies that aren't part of your network. In other words, they don't have to agree to connect with you, but you can still monitor their activity. Then, if you use some of the information you've learned about them, you might be able to convince them to engage with you.

So, as you can see, the answer to the question of whether Sales Navigator is worth the $79.99 or more per month is yes, no or maybe. For me, it's definitely worth it, because I do a lot of searches for prospecting purposes.

If you'd like a personal tour and evaluation of Sales Navigator, sign up here for one of my specially priced $197 one-on-one, one-hour LinkedIn phone consultations. I will share my computer screen with you during the call.

Also, before the call, I will critique your profile and send you a marked-up copy of it, and we can discuss it during the call.

There are limited spots available, so don't delay. Book your session today by clicking here.

 

The post What Are the Best Features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator? appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

There are two primary strategies for successfully pursuing different contacts within your dream client’s company. One approach is to pursue them one at a time, and another is to pursue multiple stakeholders simultaneously. Both strategies work, and both come with potential challenges.

Multiple Stakeholders Simultaneously

One strategy for finding a way into your dream client’s company is to pursue multiple stakeholders at the same time. You choose titles that generally show up in your deals, you acquire their contact information, and you start running a prospecting campaign against all of them at the same time.

The advantage of this approach is that if one person doesn’t respond, you immediately call the next. If a contact ignores your follow up email, you might get a better result from a different contact. You increase your odds of finding a way into the building, knowing you are going to have to build consensus among some group of people later. You can also learn a lot about what your dream client is presently doing and strengthen your theory as to why they should do something different in the future.

You also gain the benefit of approaching the problem of creating an opportunity by going vertical, from the top of one function to the bottom, and horizontal, finding people in different functions who might benefit from what you do or point you in the right direction. In larger, more complex sales, you are likely to run into stakeholders in different parts of the business, and it is sometimes helpful to have met or spoken with people as you try to build an opportunity.

There is, however, no approach without its downside. By approaching multiple stakeholders, you can draw unwanted attention to yourself. In every company, some people are happy with they are doing now, and some will defend the status quo. You can come to the attention of someone willing and able to tell you to stand down—a person you might have avoided had you known they were going to block your efforts.

It’s also possible that your broad effort put people on notice, allowing them to share what you tell them with your competitor. You might have a client that helps position your competitor to retain their client by giving them your ideas and your pitch.

None of the downside risks means you should not pursue this strategy. Every strategy and every course of action comes with risks.

Pursuing a Single Stakeholder

One of the best reasons to pursue a single stakeholder is you exert all of your effort against a single target. When you apply enough time and energy to any obstacle, the obstacle yields. Four calls to the same stakeholder is different from four calls to four separate stakeholders. In the first case, the person you call knows you are pursuing them. In the second case, you called only once, and the stakeholder does not believe you are anything but another rep who called once and went away.

Calling the person you believe cares deeply about what you do, especially with a theory about what they need to do and why is often a direct and practical approach. This approach has long produced excellent results, and it is likely to do so deep into the future. You also have less of a chance of being discovered by people who would prefer you not speak to anyone in your dream client’s company.

When you pursue contacts one at a time, you can move on to another one after, say, a whole quarter of professionally, persistently, pursuing the first contact. When one isn’t interested, you may find another who is compelled to change. You can still move vertically and horizontally, but it might take more time.

This strategy sounds good, but it is not without its downside, too. If the one contact is difficult to reach, you may spend much time without any return on your effort. While you have limited yourself to one person, you are ignoring all the other stakeholders who might be interested in exploring change. You are cutting yourself from other possibilities.

If you believe that you should start high and get pushed down into the organization, you sometimes end up with a leader who doesn’t have the same interest or isn’t compelled to do anything different. In many cases, you will find the person you need lower in the organization. I call the person who owns the outcome you can help with the “CEO of the Problem,” the person who cares the most about what you do. When a stakeholder with authority says no to the opportunity you are trying to create, it can be a substantial enough no that you will have prevented yourself from working another stakeholder for some time.

Right. Wrong. Choices.

There is no right or wrong answer to the question of how many stakeholders you contact at the same time. There can’t be, as both work sometimes. Most everything in sales works sometimes and lacks efficacy in other times, the context being different from one to the next, which leaves you with choices.

In sales, you are required to make effective choices. You can choose to try to gain a meeting with one stakeholder and put all your effort into gaining that commitment. You can also choose to call on different stakeholders throughout your dream client’s company and find success. You can also try each of these approaches with different sets of dream clients based on what you know, your theory as to why they should change, and your experience in what works best for you when it comes to getting a meeting.

Whatever you decide to do, if something isn’t working for you, explore your choices and try something else.

The post The Best Strategies for Successfully Pursuing Multiple Contacts appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The Making of a Democratic Economy: How to Build Prosperity for the Many, Not the Few by Marjorie Kelly & Ted Howard, Berrett-Koehler

When we speak of the “new economy,” we usually speak of big tech. And as Margaret O’Mara notes in her brilliant new book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Added together, the valuations of tech’s so-called Big Five—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google/Alphabet, and Microsoft—total more than the entire economy of the United Kingdom.” The UK is the world’s fifth largest economy. So the moniker applies well to these (relatively) new economic powerhouses. 

Silicon Valley has become one of the greatest wealth generators of all time, creating “the richest people in the history of humanity”—richer even, relative to the rest of the population, than the robber barons of the original Gilded Age. And yet, according to Second Harvest Food Bank, one in four people in Silicon Valley is at risk of hunger. Those most affected are the community’s most vulnerable—the elderly and the young people. One in three children in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, around 200,000 young people, are considered food insecure. It looks more like a new aristocracy, with updated technology, than a truly new economy. Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard, of the Democracy Collaborative, share some of the numbers in their new book, The Making of a Democratic Economy:

 

Today we live in a world in which 26 billionaires own as much wealth as half the planet’s population. The three wealthiest men in the US—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of America combined, a total of 160 million people. Since 2009, 95 percent of income gains in the US have gone to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, an alarming 47 percent of Americans cannot put together even $400 in the face of an emergency, leaving most of us unprepared to face such ordinary mishaps as a flat tire or a child’s twisted ankle.

 

“There can be no real political democracy,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.” The good news is that there is real progress on that front, on the ground in the real economy, and that is where Kelly and Howard's attention is focused. They define seven principles of a such a democratic economy—community, inclusion, place, good work, democratic ownership, sustainability, and ethical finance—and highlight the people, places, and enterprises that are putting these principles into practice. 

 

What we find emerging is a coherent paradigm for how to organize an economy—one that takes us beyond the binary choice of corporate capitalism versus state socialism into something new.

 

The authors are decidedly anti-capitalist in the sense that they believe that people and planet should be at the center of economic concerns rather than capital, and believe “that it’s possible to design ordinary economic activity to serve broad well-being, not to extract maximum profits.” But they are in no way anti-enterprise or anti-business. The solutions they highlight are all tied to doing business, just not business-as-usual.

When we speak of a “free market,” we usually speak of deregulation and keeping the government out of the economy. Kelly and Howard cite instances in which regulation isn’t helpful, and may even be a hindrance. But adherence to the “free market” is often used as an argument by the powerful to take advantage of their already dominant position to lessen the freedom of, or even oppress, others. You can see this in the way big business uses its money and influence to lobby lawmakers to write legislation in their favor, but it goes much deeper. From its founding, the American economy was, indeed—contrary to the governing democratic ideals written in our declaration of independence and constitution—built on the oppression of entire populations, and it stretched across the Atlantic:

 

“The land that enslaved people planted in cotton,” Harvard professor Walter Johnson wrote, “had been expropriated from the Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, and the Seminole.” In the emerging capitalist system of the 1800s—which knit together the cotton plantations of Mississippi with the looms of Manchester, England, and the financiers of New York—”[e]nslaved people were the collateral upon which the entire system depended,” Johnson noted. As cotton merchants loaned money to planters to finance operations until harvest, they required security. “That security was the value of the enslaved,” Johnson said. “Enslaved people were the capital. Their value in 1860 was equal to all the capital invested in American railroads, manufacturing, and agricultural land combined.”

 

The enslavement of African Americans and genocide of the indigenous population are both our government’s and our economy’s original sins. Kelly and Howard discuss how organizations like the Thunder Valley Valley Community Development Corporation and NDN Collective, rising from the Pine Ridge Reservation on which the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred, are building a new economy by returning to pre-colonial economic models based on the principle of community. They highlight Prosper Portland to discuss the principle of inclusion and the importance of investing in communities historically excluded and dislocated due to overtly racist policies. They visit the Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland to emphasize the principle of place and the “power of institutions anchored in place, like nonprofit hospitals, universities, and colleges, which represent more than $1.7 trillion in economic activity—close to 9 percent of US GDP”—to use their economic power to work in the community and build wealth that stays local. 

One of the most instructive cases is that of the environmental consulting firm EA Engineering, because it had tried and failed using a typical, extractive ownership model before instituting a democratic one. The authors explain how, as the company grew, it was encouraged to go national by advisors, and took the traditional route by going public on the NASDAQ exchange. They quickly found that "[q]uality work and integrity took a back seat to share price,” and staff morale plummeted. They found their environmental mission was incompatible with quarterly earnings, and founder Loren Jensen bought back controlling interest so he could return the company’s focus “immediately to the task of understanding environmental problems and what to do about them.” The company still does work on a national and even international, scale—with projects from Guam to West Virginia to Lake Ontario—but its ownership is now located back within the company. In fact, in 2014 Jensen and the minority partner who helped him buy back the firm eventually allowed themselves to be bought out as they transitioned to employee ownership under an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), while also becoming a public benefit corporation (PBC). The environmental scientist and aquatic biologists who work there are now the company’s owners, and their environmental purpose aligns perfectly with their purpose as a public benefit corporation. After cycling through three presidents and getting into trouble with the SEC over accounting mistakes as a publicly traded company, their financial health has never been better since becoming a ESOP, and that health is widespread:

 

EA’s been profitable ever since. Legal and related costs for the new design were $750,000, but that “was much less than one year’s savings in taxes” … As an S Corporation fully owned by an ESOP trust, EA pays zero income taxes on profits at the enterprise level. Profits pass through to employees, who pay taxes when they retire and withdraw holdings, when they’re in a lower tax bracket. 

 

It not only shows that there is more than one way to structure a profitable company, it is in the authors’ view, “a harbinger of enterprise design for a new era of equity and sustainability.” Founder Loren Jensen even “got additional personal tax advantages for selling to the ESOP.” While all the company’s economic advisors had urged it to go public, it has been through employee, mission-oriented ownership that it has found the best chance to thrive financially and survive to carry out its mission—to benefit both its employees and the environment. As Kelly and Howard write:

 

In the extractive economy, companies are seen as objects owned by shareholders, designed to manufacture earnings like so many ball bearings off an assembly line. EA is a model of a company as a living system, part of the larger living system of the earth, designed to benefit life.

 

Discussing why regulation won’t always work, they share the story of one of EA’s clients, chemical company Ciba-Geigy. EA conducted a study of the wastewater Ciba-Geigy had been dumping into the Atlantic Ocean at its Toms River, New Jersey facility, and found it was killing more than half of the mysid shrimp the water was tested on. So, in the early ’80s, after 34 years of dumping “5 million gallons, per day, of highly acidic, partially treated toxic waste” into the ocean, poisoning the town water supply by seeping toxic waste into backyard wells from a leaking company pipeline, resulting in dozens of childhood cancers, what did the Ciba-Geigy do when confronted with this environmental evidence? 

 

Like many chemical companies at the time, it moved production to places like Alabama, Louisiana, and Asia, where wages and environmental oversight were much lower.

 

It is for this reason that the authors suggest that ownership design, based on the principle of democratic ownership, is just as important as technology and regulation for the environmental movement. And the time is ripe: 

 

Retiring baby boomers are likely to sell or close 2.34 million businesses over the coming decade; many will simply shut down, resulting in layoffs and the loss of local jobs. If these could be converted to employee ownership, it could bend the curve of history.

 

The combination of being a benefit corporation and employee owned is especially powerful alternative:

 

EA Engineering has a legally binding duty to create public benefit, and as the company’s value grows, it goes to employees. The reason is simple but invisible: ownership design.

 

Just as we need to make such changes at the local and company level, we need large systemic change, as well. One of the more radical ideas in the book comes from Carla Santos Skandier, a Senior Policy Associate at the Democracy Collaborative the authors run. To confront climate change, she suggests the federal government “buy out the 25 largest US fossil fuel companies using the power of the Federal Reserve.” It would be accomplished through quantitative easing, costing nothing to taxpayer, and was the method the Fed used to save the big banks, believing their failure posed an existential threat to our economy and way of life. Surely climate change and ecosystem failure rise to the same level of need? Unfortunately, we are not moving in that direction. Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that “carbon emissions must be slashed by 45 percent by 2030 from 2010, then crushed to net zero by 2050,” in order to prevent catastrophic global warming. Also last year, the United States surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest crude oil producer. 

 

This is the extraordinary end game of the extractive economy, which in its infancy did not shrink from commodifying human beings, in its maturity did not blink at dumping billions of gallons of toxins into oceans, and now in its aging fullness contemplates causing irreversible damage to life on earth, and shrugs. 

 

The authors quote Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac to suggest the kind of mindset shift we need to make: “We abuse the land because we view it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Again, we're not exactly moving in the right direction. The Wisconsin sand that Leopold named his almanac after (even though there is no actual Sand County here in Wisconsin), highly sought after for use in fracking, is now being dug up, shipped all across the country, and buried underground in order to violently extract fossil fuel deposits in shale rock. It's emblematic of the larger economy: 

Our economy is not only failing the vast majority of people, it is literally destroying our planet. It’s consuming natural resources at more than one-and-a-half times the Earth’s ability to regenerate them. Soil depletion has ravaged one-third of all arable land. Nearly two-thirds of all vertebrates have disappeared from the Earth since 1970, part of a sixth mass extinction that is terrifyingly underway. We are razing the only home our civilization has, yet we remain caught inside a system designed to perpetuate that razing, in order to feed wealth to an elite.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. The vast majority of human beings on this planet—and the planet itself—would be better off if it were not this way. The biggest change needed to make it happen, as systems theorist Donella Meadows wrote, is “a new way of seeing.” The great achievement of the book is that Kelly and Howard offer such a new paradigm, which they describe succinctly near the end of the book:

 

A different paradigm doesn't start with capital as the center of the universe. It starts from the point of view of life. And reality looks something like this: there’s only one system, the earth, which is precious beyond measure. The economy and everything in it are subsets of this one system.

 

The economic tools needed to build a more democratic economy are readily available and already in wide use. There are examples out there and in the book—some centuries old, some introduced in recent decades—that we can borrow from and build on in our own enterprises. The only thing we need is the imagination, or perhaps moral clarity, to recognize that we don’t have to run our businesses for the benefit of elite, absentee shareholders—that such a system, rather than causing wealth to trickle down, “extracts wealth up from communities and sets it spinning in the ethereal realm of speculative trading.” The “new” economy of big tech extracts even more—our attention and data—and sells it to others who want to sell us a lot of things we really don’t need, just to keep that top spinning. 

Matthew Brown, the Leader of Preston City Council in the north of England, perhaps put it best when he said that for the past 40 years, his community had really seen no alternative, “just managed decline.” Inspired by Cleveland and the way the Evergreen Cooperative partnered with anchor institutions in the city, they began experimenting. Now “[w]ith the pension fund, anchor procurement, the living wage, worker co-ops getting started, the credit union, the [community] bank,” Matthew said, “we’re really building a democratic economy.” It is examples like these that prove we can build a truly new economy, and we can do it anywhere and everywhere. And we’ll have to, because big tech and the financial elites that sit atop our current economic system, one based on extraction from communities like Preston (and most likely yours), are not going to build it for us.

One of the most important hires a small business can make is hiring a sales representative. Sales reps are critical to a startup’s success. These individuals work to help the business grow and close deals. This allows businesses to better identify their target market and continue to keep learning from the sales process.

However, it’s not always easy to find a sales rep that is the perfect fit for your business. Finding a savvy sales team member is about more than someone who can make a few calls. There are certain characteristics that set good apart from great in sales. Here’s a glimpse at the four traits every sales rep should possess.

The ability to carefully listen

Listening is a characteristic that many successful people have in common. The ability to listen is often a basic requirement for anyone in a sales role. It goes hand-in-hand with other traits like being organized and paying attention to detail.

Typically, sales training onboarding requires the new rep to listen in on calls made by other salespeople before they are trained to take calls on their own. Once they begin taking the calls, they listen to the customer and are in a position to better understand and serve their needs. The best way to increase sales, and subsequently build a lasting relationship with a customer, is by listening.

When interviewing potential sales reps, ask them to share an example of a time where listening allowed them to identify opportunities for growth and success. There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, but the answer should be customer-centric. After all, your customers are your best case study. If you listen to what they tell you about where you can add value or where their problem areas are, you are able to learn and take their feedback into consideration. This helps you offer a better service and ultimately increase sales.

Focus

You can glean insight into this trait as early on as reviewing a resume. What kinds of initiatives did the candidate take on, and achieve, in previous roles? Ask potential candidates to share stories of times where they were able to set and stick to goals, despite working on multiple tasks.

Standout potential sales reps will share stories that do more than simply answer the question. They will reveal insight into how the candidate is able to maintain their focus on purpose. Focus is about more than keeping your eyes on the prize, like hitting a monthly goal. It’s about giving meaning to the sale. A sales rep with focus will want to share insights on the benefits to the client and are sincerely passionate about their role. This kind of focus tends to rub off on other sales reps around them, and inspires them to work just as hard to maintain and achieve their goals.

Grit

This is an unconventional trait to seek out in potential sales reps. However, I believe it’s equally just as important a characteristic for hiring any employee to join a startup.

Grit is a combination of persistence, passion, and resilience. If it sounds dirty, that’s because it is. Grit is what allows you to roll up your sleeves and get to work and maintain your momentum. It gets you back up on the horse if you get bucked off. Both of these things will and do happen in sales! There will, of course, always be up and down moments in all aspects of your personal and professional worlds. Grit is the inner will that you think you can and know you can do and be the best — in and out of sales.

We all make mistakes…

Even the most experienced of us.

One of the most common? Letting a qualified prospect fall through the cracks, never to be seen again.

This can happen in a number of ways. The good news, though: all of these pitfalls are avoidable — if you’re consciously aware of them.

Below are five common ways a qualified prospect can fall through the cracks (and what to do instead).

1. The prospect’s activity was ignored.

Reps who don’t respond to inbound leads, referrals, or prospects opening emails or visiting your website miss out on potential buyers who are actively expressing interest.

Unfortunately, salespeople tend to prioritize leads based on when they come into their pipeline. However, a great prospect shouldn’t be pursued based on their title, how they look on paper, or how long they’ve been in the pipeline. A qualified prospect should be pursued based on the amount of interest they express.

When a prospect downloads an ebook, opens a sales email, or views your pricing page, they’re raising their hand. Failing to note this critical activity means a qualified prospect just fell through the cracks.

2. An introductory email wasn’t sent fast enough.

Timing is everything. A prospect can also fall through the cracks because they weren’t contacted at the height of their interest.

According to the Lead Response Management Study, when an inbound lead is contacted within five minutes of visiting a website, reps are 100 times more likely to connect with them.

Wait at your own peril. The odds of connecting drop 400% if a rep responds in 10 minutes instead of 5 — and 1,000% if they wait an hour.

Time is of the essence. Reach out to inbound leads ASAP… or risk losing them forever.

3. You lost track of where the prospect was in the funnel.

Losing track of where a prospect is in the funnel can mean a qualified prospect doesn’t get what they need when they need it.

In the early stages of the sales process, a lead might be looking for more information — and not receiving it — because the rep thinks the prospect is at a later stage in the buying journey.

To avoid this problem, it’s important to use your CRM and sales engagement tools to keep the deal moving forward. Make sure you send an initial email or a bottom-of-the-funnel piece of content when the prospect is likely expecting it.

4. The prospect didn’t receive a follow-up email.

Whether it’s after a discovery call or a product demonstration, not following up with a qualified prospect results in an uncomfortable limbo situation — neither party is sure what to do next.

By forgetting to send a follow-up email, a prospect can feel as if the rep has forgotten about them and simply move on.

Don’t let a forgotten email kill a deal. Send a follow-up email after every touch with reminders about what was discussed and a clear set of options for the prospect going forward.

5. You didn’t provide value.

When a rep doesn’t provide value, their sales touches are more annoying than useful. Always remember, a qualified prospect could convert at any point. Any touch could be the deciding moment.

Consistently low-value touches can make the buyer dread hearing from the rep and result in a lost prospect.

To provide value in every touch, include pieces of blog content, testimonials, and customer reviews. The goal of every touch should be to educate the prospect and provide new information about the rep’s product.

How to Keep Your Qualified Prospect

Unfortunately, things fall through the cracks more often than we’d like — and that’s a part of life.

When it comes to sales, however, there are steps you can take to ensure you qualified prospects aren’t left behind.

To keep your qualified prospect, focus on building relationship:

1. Pay attention to their behavior.
2. Engage them at every opportunity.
3. Send appropriate touches for their stage in the pipeline.
4. Always follow up with the next step.
5. Provide real value at every touch.

Getting a qualified prospect is challenging enough. Keeping them… well… that’s just common sense.

The post So You’ve Qualified Your Prospect (Here’s What NOT to Do) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

The words “create value” are used so often and in so many different contexts that it can be challenging to know what it means—or what you are supposed to do to create value. I have written about something I called Level 4 Value Creation to describe a way of thinking about creating the highest level of value possible for your clients and dream clients by focusing on their strategic outcomes. I did my best to make it practical and tactical, but there are limits to the size and scope of a book.Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch

I am going to start with broad intentions and outcomes, going from general to specific.

First Principles

1. Value is in the eyes of the beholder—or the recipient, for our purposes here. You have the right to develop a theory as to what should be valuable for another person, but they possess the right to determine their worth. Because perceptions about value vary, you may have to explain why your dream client should perceive the value in the way you view it.
2. The person receiving the value needs to be better off in some way having received it. If the person is no better off having received the attempted value creation, it is not value.
3. Value exists on a continuum. Some things are more valuable than others. My view of this continuum of value in sales is 1: Product Value, 2: Experience Value, 3: Tangible results, and 4: Strategic Value.
4. Value has a contextual component, meaning something that might have been valuable in the past may not be helpful in the future. Something that would be valuable in one circumstance might be less useful when the conditions are different.
5. Value creation tends to degrade over time; it has a half-life. The value you created in the past is not likely to be as valuable to your clients as the value you create now.
6. Value creation may also build on prior value. It is possible to create an upward spiral of higher value over time.
7. The greater the value you create, the more relevant you will be to your clients and your dream clients. An inability to create value will make you irrelevant.
8. Value creation is found in your understanding. It is as much in your learning as it is your teaching. While it is important you help your clients discover something about themselves, it’s equally (or more) important that you allow them to educate you if you want to create a preference.

Value Creation: In Ideas

One of the ways we create value is with ideas. This is why sharing the slide deck with your company’s history, logos from all your well-known clients, and an exhaustive list of products and services, does not create much value (unless your client is sincerely interested in learning more about your company.

• Ideas that help your client understand why they are struggling to produce the results they need: When you can explain to your client or prospect why they are not able to achieve the results they need, you have created value by educating them.
• Ideas that help your client understand what is possible: There is a better state available, but your client may not be aware of what that better start is—or how to get there (which will give more attention in the next point). Sharing ideas about what is possible is value creation.
• Ideas about how to get to a better future state: The value of your dream client knowing why they are struggling to produce results followed by what the future state might look like leads to the value of understanding how to generate those better results.
• Ideas that help prepare your client for the future: One of the areas where clients perceive value is your keeping them abreast of what’s coming in the future and how they might need to prepare themselves. If you want to be a trusted advisor, you have to be vigilant and protect your clients from harm.

The reasons listed here are why nurturing your dream clients over time provides them value and increases their willingness to explore change with you.

Value Creation: In Providing Advice

Ideas and advice are different. The word consultative may not mean what you think it means. While “being consultative” does suggest something about your bedside manner, what it means is that you tell people what to do, you advise, you offer counsel.

• Advice on following a process that will produce better results: In The Lost Art of Closing, I wrote a chapter on Controlling the Process. In that chapter, I made the case that one should guide their clients through the sales conversation, helping them make and keep commitments. The advice you offer here is value when it prevents your client from making mistakes that hurt their chances of producing the better results they need.No more pushy sales tactics. The Lost Art of Closing shows you how to proactively lead your customer and close your sales.
• Advice on what your client needs to change: The very heart of selling is making a change. In The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, I included a chapter on managing change. You create value when you advise your client on the things they need to different to produce a better result.Learn Anthony's core strategies & tactics for sales success at any level with The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need
• Advice on when and how to change: Telling your dream client how to change is valuable when your client has a gap in understanding what they need to do to produce whatever outcome they are chasing. Telling them when to change is also value creation, especially when you are proactive enough to provide that advice before what they are doing harms them.
• Advice on trade-offs, choices, and decisions: Your subject matter expertise, business acumen, and situational knowledge combine to allow you to guide with the value of knowing what trade-offs your client might need to make, what choice they should consider, and what decisions they should make.

Value Creation: In Execution

There is value in assisting your client with the execution of everything above. If your client struggles to execute, you create value by providing it.

• Execution as a pair of hands: Sometimes, what your client needs is a pair of hands to do some work they can’t do because they lack resources. In some circumstances, it means doing something for your client. In other situations, you will recognize this as outsourcing, taking over all the work for them to produce a result that can’t or don’t want to do.
• Execution in delivering results: You create value when you provide the results you sell. You eliminate value when you don’t (along with your client’s trust—and their future business). Better execution is more valuable to your clients. They also find more strategic outcomes more valuable.
• Execution and accountability: You create value by owning the outcomes you sell, taking responsibility for producing results, ensuring your team resolves your client’s issues. You also create value by mitigating any challenges by being resourceful and solving problems. You own the outcomes, but your team owns the transactions, which means you are accountable for your organization.

There is more to say about execution and results. In part, it may be made up solving problems and eliminating challenges. It might also be made up of taking advantage of opportunities. Some issues are small, making the value creation equally small. Other problems and challenges are enormous, and solving them creates massive value. Opportunities also exist on a similar continuum.

Value Creation: In Context

An important consideration is the context in which you are trying to create value. The idea of context suggests one needs and other-orientation.

• Value in understanding what your client needs to know now: You need to be able to recognize where your client is now to understand what they need to know. It is okay to have a theory, and it is okay to be wrong. However, if you want to create value, helping your client learn what they need to know is a good starting point.
• Value in understanding the context in which you are offering advice: There is a reason we explore change with our clients to know what they need, why they need it, and what the best choices are for them specifically. You create value when you match your advice to the client, getting things right—something difficult to do if you don’t spend time learning from them as well as teaching.

Methods of Value

There are several ways you can create value for your clients and your dream clients.

• Inform: Providing information that helps your client understand something they want or need to learn is value.
• Educate: Teaching your client something they need to learn is a form of value creation. You create even greater value when your client wants to learn.
• Inspire: I am using the word “inspire” in a particular way here. If you believe selling is about helping people change in a way that improves their lives and their businesses as I do, then helping them believe it is necessary to change and take action is value creation.
• Entertain: You can improve how you create value by using methods that engage the people for whom you are creating value in a way that makes it easier to deal with the challenges of changing.

On Being a Value Creator

If you want to create value for others, the ideas here will give you a framework for thinking and acting in ways that others will perceive as value. If you want to produce better results for yourself and your clients, and if you’re going to do work that is purposeful and meaningful, there is not anything that does more for you than doing more for others.

Being a value creator is a choice. It is a personal decision you make. Only others can determine whether what you do is valuable to them or not. You alone can decide to do what is necessary to produce some result that might make them believe you are a value creator.

The post What Does It Mean to Create Value Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The marketing math is compelling. It’s obvious that the most highly-leveraged moment in every brand’s relationship with a customer is the moment when something goes wrong.

In that moment, when a promise was broken, the customer sees the true nature of the brand. We make up stories about the brands in our lives, but we believe that when the promise is broken we’re about to see the truth of that story.

As brands get bigger (and bigger might be as small as an organization with just two people in it), policies kick in. Policies and budgets and bureaucracy.

The brand has become too big to care. I mean, it might be big enough to pretend to care. To have policies that appear to set things right. But they don’t really care.

The only way to really care is to have human beings who care (and to give them the authority and resources to demonstrate that.)

Once you’ve got that, it’s pretty easy to show that you do.

It is a simple question with a complex answer. How does a startup get from zero to execution when negotiating contracts with potential customers that are large enterprises? The 800-pound gorillas. Situations in which your negotiating leverage is limited (often severely so).

As a commercial contracts attorney, clients often ask me about the one right way to approach deals. Many are looking for a cheat sheet of universal terms they should push for in contracts. But there is no one answer.

Deals are not cookie-cutter, and neither are the contracts on which they are built. That said, a basic framework can help provide startups with some grounding to better think about negotiations with large enterprises. The idea is to avoid over-lawyering, and instead approach the discussion with a legally prudent yet deal-centric mindset.

There are generally six overarching considerations as you head into negotiations with large, enterprise organizations.

Today, like yesterday, has been professional development for me, and it made me wonder about how you and your sales team go about learning and gaining new perspectives.

Twitter is a powerful tool in any company’s or professional’s arsenal. The platform can help you rocket to success and stand out like the majestic unicorn you know yourself to be. But, you’ll only get out of this world results if you truly know how to release its potential.

Chances are, you aren’t getting everything out of Twitter that you could, and you may even be wasting valuable time (or even losing followers) by performing the wrong actions or focusing on the wrong places.

You might also be missing out if your content isn’t engaging your audience.

To really see what is and isn’t working, you need access to hard data. It also helps to be able to find your older messages, in case you need to access the content of some of the highest performing tweets you’ve ever sent out.

And, luckily, Twitter has you covered…as long as you know where to look. To help you truly become the unicorn user you know yourself to be, here are six Twitter super power hacks you’ve most certainly never used before.

1. Find Your Old Tweets

Maybe you’re feeling a bit nostalgic or simply want to locate some information you sent out in a tweet way back in the day. Regardless of the reason, finding your old tweets doesn’t seem like an intuitive process.

Twitter only shows your last 3,200 tweets in your timeline. So, if you’ve been using the service for just shy of a decade and crossed that threshold, you aren’t going to find your old messages there.

Luckily, you can use advanced search operators to hunt down your old messages.

Want to see how it’s done? Check out the instructions here: How to Find Your Old Tweets

Or just click here to view my first 2 tweets from 2008! (notice the use of the “since” and “until” advanced search operators).

2. Get Your Stats for Any Tweet

While viewing your tweet gives you some basic stats (like the number of comments, retweets, and likes), you might want to dig a bit deeper to find more valuable metrics.

The Tweet Activity view lets you do just that! Just click on the bar graph icon and you’ll be presented with a wealth of information.

Now you can see data about the number of impressions and total engagements, as well as a breakdown of the various engagements, as you can see here.

This lets you learn important details about how your tweet performed and can provide you with valuable insights about how to increase your engagements in the future.

3. Promote Your Tweet for Increased Exposure

You may have noticed a section in the image above that allows you to promote your tweet. This Twitter service allows you to increase the number of impressions, getting your message in front of the eyes of more users.

If you press the Promote Your Tweet button, you’ll be presented with a panel where you can select a target location, choose a spending budget, and an estimated reach if you decide to go forward.

While you don’t need to promote every tweet, investing in the right ones can really pay off. If you want to learn more, check out this article: 6 Big Reasons You Need to Use Twitter Ads

And, if you select your top performing posts, the true unicorns in the bunch, the cost per click can actually be very low. Twitter uses an algorithm to determine the price, and engaging content is rewarded with lower costs.

To find your top performing tweets (and confirm your suspicion that the epic unicorn meme you shared a while back really was solid gold), head over to the Analytics section. Then, select the Tweets tab and click the Top Tweets button.

If you want to see the details regarding how this works, check out this article: Twitter Quality Score for Ads: What Marketers Need to Know

4. Gain Super Valuable Insights About Your Audience

You know your audience is special, but do you actually know much about who they are?

Another feature in the Analytics section is the ability to view demographic information about the people who read your tweets, including their various interest.

By gaining a deeper understanding of what your audience is into, you can create content that speaks to these areas. This can help you avoid getting stuck in a restrictive niche while still allowing you to cover topics your audience wants to read about.

Want to know why you should expand your content horizons? Check out this article to see why: 5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5. Download ALL the Data!

If you want to take your data offline so you can really analyze the results of your activities, then downloading it is your best option.

This will give you a format that makes research a breeze, so you can figure out what is working (so you can do more of it) and what isn’t (so you can stop doing that).

While in the Analytics section, head to the Tweets tab and click the Export Databutton located on the upper right-hand side.

6. Create a Twitter Moment Worth Remembering

Twitter gives you the ability to create “Moments,” a sort of slideshow collection of a set of tweets that makes it easier to tell a more compelling story.

You have to use the desktop version of Twitter to access the Moments feature.

Begin by entering the Moments section (the icon on the upper left that looks like a lightning bolt) and click on the button on the upper right-hand side that says “Create new Moment.”

From there, you can enter a title, a short description, and choose a cover image or video. Make sure your title is captivating, but do try to keep it short.

Then select various tweets to add to the collection. They don’t have to all be your tweets, so you do have some power to create a stunning Moment using a mix of your content and tweets from other accounts that you admire.

Once it’s done, you can share it through a tweet to get the word out.

If you want more information, check out the Moment Twitter created to serve as a guide: Tips & Tricks for Making a Great Moment

Originally Published on Mobilemonkey.com

Managing your money under a single financial institution’s roof can make your life more convenient. And, in some cases, it can get you better deals versus opening a new account at another bank. That’s because of “relationship pricing,” which happens when a bank offers you a special rate on a product—usually a…

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They say that there’s very little these days that everyone agrees upon, but I—of course—do not agree with that sentiment either. When it comes to customer experience (CX), I can think of many, many things we all know to be true.

We can all agree customers expect more of us than ever. We all feel it. Research reflects it, too: 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.

We can agree there are more customer interactions than ever before, and some of that is our own fault. With advances in and the rapid adoption of technology, we’re able to interact with customers in different ways and places all along the customer journey.

We can also agree that customer experience is more important than ever. Some are calling CX the new marketing, others are calling it the new brand. By next year, customer experience will outpace price and product as the most important differentiator for B2B customers. B2C customers, who already say it’s easier than ever to take business elsewhere, will follow.

This is one of the reasons having a far-reaching Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiative is so important. If you don’t understand what your customers need or expect—what they like and dislike —how on Earth can you deliver? How can you give your customer a voice within your business? A VoC program must be capable of finding the true pulse of the customer so that businesses can use that information to make the company better.

Understanding the value of your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program

For most businesses, understanding the Voice of the Customer is like trying to figure out how to experience the Grand Canyon. With something so massive, where do we start? How do we begin?

Stop No. 1: map your customer journey

To become a customer-centric organization, Stop No. 1 means you understand and can map out your customer journey.

Too many companies focus on customer touchpoints. A touchpoint is any interaction that might influence the way your customer feels about your product, brand, or business. They are the individual transactions through which customers get to know you. There can be dozens—even hundreds—of touchpoints.

Ask any customer experience expert, and they will tell you to evaluate and improve customer journeys, not touchpoints. Unlike a customer touchpoint, a customer journey has a beginning and an end.

It’s the way you onboard a new client, the way your mobile app functions for your customers, or the way your customer experiences a product return or exchange. A customer journey is the path a customer has to take to complete a task, not the series of steps involved in completing the task (those are the touchpoints).

We focus on customer journeys because they are more strongly correlated with business outcomes than touchpoints. A recent McKinsey survey showed customer satisfaction with health insurance is 73% more likely when customer journeys work well than when only touchpoints do.

The same survey showed that when hotels get the customer journey right, customers are 61% more willing to recommend the hotel than customers of hotels that only focus on touchpoints. There is greater ROI when the holistic customer journey is the focus.

Stop No. 2: identify the VoC data that best helps you measure your performance

Stop No. 2 is determining which VoC data best tells you how your customer journeys are performing. Sixty-two percent of marketers say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of data they have, and 85% are unable to fully utilize that data. But, remember this: the goal isn’t to measure everything. The goal is to measure the right things.

If you’ve ever written something—a book, a presentation, even a blog post—think of VoC data the way you would think of the writing process. As you know, not every detail makes it into the final edit. The same is true with data. Not every data point is relevant to the goals and objectives you’re trying to achieve.

VoC data can be used to generate ideas, improve customer experience, and measure customer satisfaction. Each of these is a valid business goal, but none of these is measured in the exact same way. If you don’t have the data that supports what you need to know, put a measurement in place to learn it.

If you leap into VoC without knowing which direction your compass is pointing, the amount of available data—even the starting point—can be overwhelming. Ancient mariners sailed and explored using the stars as guidance. Data is the modern marketer’s equivalent.

Stop No. 3: evaluate your VoC program

Now, move on to Stop No. 3, and evaluate your VoC program. Remember, an established VoC solution is capable of finding the true pulse of the customer, and that information is used to improve a business. Hence, here’s how I judge the overall health of VoC:

1. Participation rate in measurement mechanism (e.g., surveys, website studies, or the number of customer service interactions on Twitter).
2. The number of insights gleaned from the data.
3. Subsequent NPS/CSAT scores and retention rates.

It is a challenge to broadly benchmark these indicators because the number of variables is infinite. This is why organizations should begin by establishing internal benchmarks through a pilot program.

Use that test as an opportunity to see how many surveys were filled out, to understand the quality of the feedback being received, etc. Then, work steadily to move the mark.

Stop No. 4: exceeding expectations equals great CX

Stop No. 4 is a little trickier, only because every business is different and every combination of data varies. But here’s the common thread: Great customer experience happens when you exceed customer expectations.

Every time a customer interacts with a business of any type, that customer has an idea of how that interaction will go. That’s the customer expectation. When a business exceeds that expectation, it has succeeded. When a business falls short of a customer’s expectation, it has not.

Unless you know how to exceed customer expectations you’re stabbing in the dark. This is why businesses rely on multiple types of data along the customer journey to understand what needs to be addressed.

Consider JetBlue, one of the leading airline carriers in the U.S., who—from the beginning—has committed to exceeding its passengers’ expectations for value and comfort.

JetBlue uses a variety of VoC data to execute on its customer experience vision. For example, 82% of JetBlue passengers don’t care about being able to take their bags on a flight for free. Instead, they preferred less expensive tickets. JetBlue answered and created a pricing structure its passengers to sync with their preferences, not the industry status quo.

Passenger feedback from a Philadelphia-based airport alerted JetBlue to dissatisfaction. The airline tracked this back to a lack of amenities for early morning travelers. JetBlue responded by passing out water, juice, and coffee to customers at that airport.

Your VoC data may not be as structured as JetBlue’s. JetBlue has a massive, mature VoC program. For those of you getting started, remember there is a treasure trove of customer insight in unstructured data and while it can seem overwhelming, the quality of feedback in unstructured data is significant. Let me explain.

In this article, I’ve talked about the fact that marketers feel overwhelmed by how much data is available to them, thus making ROI—or the path to ROI—a muddied one.

Here’s an example I love to talk about because it illustrates how having the opposite perspective can be beneficial. Le Pain Quotidien is an international bakery-restaurant group. The former director of customer experience, Erin Pepper, and her team find insights in unstructured data. In this case, they search and analyze customer reviews. In fact, when Erin started as the director of customer experience, her goal was to triple the number of complaints the bakery chain received because she knew analyzing and sifting through that information was a way to improve the customer experience. That’s the key. Improving customer experience is what leads to ROI.

Specifically, while working on deep VoC analysis, Erin and her team noticed a puzzling trend: many customers complained about lemonade in the southern California region. This was unexpected because Le Pain Quotidien is known to have excellent lemonade. It’s one of the calling cards of the brand, typically. With a further review, Erin discovered the region had accidentally been using the incorrect recipe for the lemonade in their locations. The error was fixed, and customer complaints about lemonade abated.

How your CX vision impacts ROI

Here’s something else we can all agree on: Improving customer experience and measuring the ROI of those improvements is an easier assignment when the purpose of our customer experience is tied to a business goal the entire organization can buy into.

The world’s greatest companies do this. One of the most recognizable examples is from the Walt Disney Company: We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere. Like I mentioned earlier, JetBlue made a commitment to exceeding its passengers’ expectations around value and comfort.

Having a clear vision statement for your business’s CX strategy aligns your employees around a common purpose and goal for your customers regardless of your employees’ functional lane. The vision statement is a conviction about who you are as a CX-focused organization. With that conviction, it’s clear what’s important to the organization and how to work methodically toward that goal.

Free Guide: How to Run a Successful VoC Program

This guide will teach you how to launch a VoC program, take action with your customer feedback, and prove the ROI of your efforts.

Get the Guide

Voice of the Customer (VoC) educational video

We’re not the only ones obsessed with the Voice of the Customer. In fact, we recently partnered with our friends at Forrester and launched a webinar on how to build a simple and effective VoC program that impacts the bottom line.

The webinar covered:

• Why VoC is a critical pillar in a strong CX strategy.
• How to build a simple and effective VoC Program.
• How to quantify the business impact of your VoC efforts.

Check out the full webinar recording here.

Ever had someone ask about your product’s attach rate? Has your reaction elicited that burning sensation of panic when you realize you’re not quite sure what they’re asking? Relax and read on. We’ve got the quick definition, examples, and formula you need to reply calmly the next time you’re asked, “What’s the attach rate?”

What Is a Business's Attach Rate?

The attach rate, also commonly referred to as an attach ratio, is the number of add-on products/units sold in relation to a primary product/unit. For example, how much merch is sold in relation to the number of tickets purchased for a concert?

A business’s attach rate helps them measure the health of the company. If attach rates are high, your customers are likely happy with your product. So happy, in fact, they want to buy more from you. It also signals that your sales and marketing teams are working efficiently and that buyers are aware of and motivated to buy complementary offerings.

If a company’s attach rate is low, you customers may not find value in your product/service, or they may not know you have other offerings available. Survey your buyers to learn which barriers they face and adjust your product or sales and marketing approach accordingly.

To calculate an attach rate, divide the number of secondary units sold by the number of primary units sold. Then, multiply that number by 100.

Here are a few examples:

Examples of Business Attach Rates

What’s the attach rate of new cars sold to the number of dealership maintenance packages sold? If 42 new cars are sold in one month, and 15 maintenance packages are sold, the attach rate would be 36%.

(15 / 42) X 100 = 36%

For every freemium software signup earned, how many paid features are purchased? If your company nets 60 freemium software signups in a month and sells 25 paid feature add-ons to that group of users, the attach rate would be 42%.

(25 / 60) X 100 = 42%

If a bike shop sells 30 bicycles in a month and 25 helmets in that same month, the attach rate would be 83%.

(25 / 30) X 100 = 83%

Attach Rate Forecasting

Forecast an attach rate as you would your normal sales forecasting. Make sure you’re considering internal and external factors that may affect those numbers. These factors can include seasonality, staffing, market changes, product changes, and economic conditions.

For example, if your attach rate for printers (75 sold) to reams of paper (50 sold) is 67% in Q3, but you’re forecasting a decrease in printer sales in Q4 (60 sold) while maintaining the same paper ream sales (50 sold), you might reasonably forecast a shift in attach rate to 83%.

Attach rates can be a helpful business metric to keep your business and your product/service on track and prospering. Calculate yours today and discover more important KPIs to measure here.

Quality over quantity. It’s a mindset you could apply widely across all kinds of marketing activities. But it might apply best to your data-driven marketing strategy.

Studies show that 89% of B2B marketers believe data quality directly drives sales and marketing success. There’s just one problem—only 50% of marketers have any confidence in the quality of their marketing data.

Lack of confidence in first-party data leads plenty of B2B marketers to invest in third-party data. However, results can vary greatly.

The key to success is knowing which type of data will provide the greatest quality (and which providers you can trust).

Intent Data Precision Leads to Quality Over Quantity

In 2018, marketers in the United States spent over $19 billion on third-party data. Turning to data resellers to fill in the gaps of first-party data has become the norm as marketers try to find a balance between quality and quantity.

However, there are different levels of third-party data that could impact quality. All too often, you see marketers purchase a dataset because it provides a massive list audience-specific demographic data. The pursuit of quality falls to the wayside in favor of a spray-and-pray approach with cheap, surface-level third-party data.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by outdated, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed third-party data, you can probably track the disconnect back to one issue—imprecision.

Focusing on quality over quantity requires third-party data that is precise. That’s why intent data is such a strong investment for any B2B marketing team. By nature, intent data is more precise than generic lists of contact information or demographics.

Instead of relying on surface-level information, intent data providers use IP addresses, cookie tracking, content marketing, and analysis of buyer journeys to ensure you get the most accurate, actionable, and targeted insights.

Generally speaking, the process behind intent analytics makes this form of third-party data more reliable than others. However, it’s important not to blindly trust every intent data provider. Like any other third-party data investment, you could run into trouble working with a provider that over-promises and under-delivers.

Before you jump into a relationship with a third-party intent data provider, make sure you do your due diligence.

3 Questions to Ask an Intent Data Provider

When you’re just starting out with intent data, it can be difficult to maintain control of conversations with vendors. You want to make sure you’re working with a provider you can trust. But ultimately, they’re trying to sell you a service and if you aren’t sure how to cut through the noise, you could end up with low-quality data.

By asking a few key questions, you can make sure that the intent data you’re buying is precise enough to drive quality marketing decisions. As you evaluate intent data providers, be sure to ask:

• How Was the Data Collected? Ultimately, you want your intent data provider to have insight into what is being researched, who is researching your key topics, and when key contacts are ready to buy. But to know if that data is precise, you should question how deep the datasets are, how the provider gains insight into search behavior, and how they observe buyer behavior.

• Is the Data Current? Quality data is current data. You want to know exactly when the provider collected their data because behavior and intent can change daily. If intent data is more than a few weeks old, you might form a strategy that revolves around the wrong accounts, content topics, and engagement methods.

• Do You Meet Data Privacy Standards? Emerging regulations like GDPR and CCPA have made it more difficult for marketers to trust third-party data providers. Even one misstep with third-party data can result in a massive fine for your company. Before choosing a provider, ask if they are compliant with data privacy regulations and how the data transfer process works.

These are just a few of the questions that will help you guarantee that you’re getting precise intent data. If you want to dig deeper into the approaches of individual providers, you need to understand the ins and outs of intent data.

For more insight into how intent data works and whether or not you can trust it, download our free report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data.

Google Analytics isn’t just for knowing how much traffic your website is getting, your top pages, and how your traffic sources and marketing efforts are performing. Nope. There is an even better use for it!

It’s also really important to use it to help improve your website – so it converts many more visitors into sales, leads or subscribers. But unfortunately, Google Analytics can be a little daunting at times, particularly with seemingly endless reports to check out and analyze. Where should you start for best results?

To help you make sense of this, I’ve created a list of the best Google Analytics (GA) reports so you can quickly gain more insights into your website performance and what needs improving most. I have also recently included a video of me walking you through these great reports. Let’s get started…

The best Google Analytics reports to improve your website

Update: Watch a video of me guiding you through these key Google Analytics reports

Last year I created a premium video about these best Google Analytics reports. It was originally part of a paid membership but I have decided to now include it on this article for everyone to watch for free. In this video you will also learn how to create a Google Analytics dashboard for these reports. Enjoy!

Check the landing pages report for pages with high bounce rates and low conversion rates
Your top landing pages (entry pages) are crucial to optimize because they often get very high levels of traffic, and are the first pages your visitors see on your website. If visitors don’t find what they are looking for or are confused, they will leave your website often within just 5 seconds!

To improve your website with this report, pull up the your landing pages report for the last 30 days (found under ‘Behavior > Site Content > Landing pages’). Then see which pages out of the top 10 have highest bounce rate (over 50% is high) and which have lower than website average goal conversion rate (both indicated below in yellow) – these are indicators of poorly performing pages on your website.

Then optimize these poor page performers first – improving headlines, benefits, imagery and call-to-action buttons are some of the best ways to do this. Optimizing these helps increase visitor engagement and increases the chances of them converting for your key website goals. You should also ensure you show your unique value proposition more prominently on them.

Analyze your Funnel Visualization report for high-drop off rates and optimize
It doesn’t matter how good your website is if visitors struggle to get through your checkout or sign-up flow pages. To understand how well your visitors complete that process, its vital you check your Funnel Visualization report. On this report (found under ‘Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization’) you can see how many visitors get through each page of your funnel (like your billing page), and which pages are most problematic – even where they go if they go to another page.

You need to pay great attention to any pages with a high drop off rate (more than 40%) and optimize those first – adding security seals and risk reducers, reducing distractions like header navigation, and improving error handling often work well. Improving these pages will greatly increase your conversion rate, and therefore your sales or signups.

Note: Obviously you will need to have made sure you have setup your goals for your website adequately, including adding key pages in your goal flows. Here is a great guide on setting goals up.

Check your traffic overview report for poor performing traffic sources
Improving the quality and quantity of your traffic has huge impact on your website conversion rates, sales or leads, and its vital you gain insights into traffic performance and optimize the major sources.

To help you gain greater insights into this, pull up the ‘Channels’ report as Google calls it (found under ‘Acquisition > Channels) and check which of your top 10 traffic sources (channels) have high bounce rates (over 50%), or a goal conversion rate that is much lower than your website average. This is particularly important to do for any source that you are paying for like paid search or display advertising, as you will need to optimize these quickly to reduce your wasted spending.

You should also look for traffic sources that seem low or missing from the top 10 channels. For example, you may find your email traffic source isn’t as high as you had hoped for or isn’t converting well, so you should optimize your email marketing campaigns as soon as possible.

Note: You may even find your email marketing campaigns are not being attributed correctly to the email traffic channel, which can be fixed by using campaign tracking codes for your emails. I highly recommend doing this to monitor the success of your email marketing efforts.

Discover insights from your organic search ‘not provided’ keywords

You have probably noticed that when you look at your top organic search keywords report that a very high percentage of them are ‘not provided’. This is because users are often logged in to Google when they search and they won’t share their keywords with you for privacy reasons.

Instead of just giving up, you can actually gain insights about what these ‘not provided’ keywords are likely to be. You can do this by finding out which landing pages are most often arrived on from keyword searches. Simply go to Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages, and then filter the report for top ‘clicks’ (click on that column header). This shows you which pages visitors are most often seeing when they arrive via keywords. You will then often be able to infer which of your keywords relate to these pages (especially when you cross reference it with your keywords that are provided in your organic search keywords report).

For example, my top organic search landing page is actually this article you are reading, and when I look at my top keywords searches, I see that ‘best google analytics reports’ shows up in my top 10 search keywords, so that is likely to be the keyword that drives me the most traffic. This organic search landing pages report also shows other very useful metrics like conversion rate for goals, so you can also infer how well your keywords are converting – something that no other SEO tool can tell you either.

Use the mobile overview report for tablet/mobile insights
Mobile traffic is bigger than ever before, often accounting for over 40% of total website traffic depending on your type of website – and these visitors have very different needs due to smaller screen sizes, and often convert much lower than regular website traffic.

To understand your mobile traffic, and its performance, you need to check your ‘mobile overview’ report (found under Audience > Mobile > Overview). Here you need to see just how high your traffic levels are for both mobile and tablet devices, and see what the conversion rate for each is. If conversion rate is much lower for any, you need to check your website on that device for key issues and fix them immediately – in particular ensure you have a mobile-optimized version of your website.

Note that mobile conversion rates are often lower than desktop conversion rates because these visitors are often just browsing when they are not at home and not ready to purchase or sign up, but anything under 0.50% mobile conversion rate is considered very low.

Check the exit pages report to find problematic pages
You also need to find out which pages are most often causing your visitors to leave (called an ‘exit’ page) – and improve and optimize those too.

To find these top exit pages, check your ‘exit pages’ report (found under ‘Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages). In particular look for any pages that shouldn’t be in the top 10, and try to figure out why so many people exit your site on them. Also look for pages with especially high exit rate (over 50%), as this often indicates problems. I recommend that you also use Hotjar to gain insights into why visitors are leaving on these pages.

A few ways to improve these top exit pages is by using and optimizing call-to-action buttons at the end of them (the wording and style of them in particular), and try using exit intent popups to show a great incentive (discounts/free guides etc) before visitors leave your website.

Analyze the top pages report for key missing pages and high exit rates
Your top pages report can contain some real gems for insights – and not just what your top 10 pages currently are. You can find this report under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

First, check if any of your top pages have high exit rates (over 50%) and optimize those as soon as possible. You should also to check if any pages relating to your key goals seem missing from this report or have low traffic. For example, perhaps few people are visiting your important ‘why us’ or benefits page – making links more prominent to these pages will hopefully drive more traffic to them and increase the sales or leads coming from them.

Check the browser report for poor conversion rate performers
Your webpages can sometimes look slightly different or even break in some browsers (often due to small differences in how browsers show CSS code). This can unknowingly cause you many lost sales or leads.

To make sure this isn’t negatively impacting your website, you need to regular check the ‘Browser & OS’ report (found under ‘Audience > Technology) and make sure your conversion rates aren’t much lower for any browsers. If you see ones on this report that are much lower, you should go ahead and check for technical problems like CSS rendering issues and fix them immediately.

These are the simpler reports, there’s many advanced ones too

These are just some of the simpler Google Analytics reports that will help you improve your website. Here are a couple of the many more advanced ones to learn about:

• Using the ‘Converters’ visitor segment to figure out the behavior of people who convert for your main website goals (sales/leads etc).
• Using the ‘Site Search’ report to find pages causing most amount of internal searches (indicates visitors not finding what they need).

If you are interested in learning more about these advanced GA reports, simply comment and let me know.

No time to analyze Google Analytics reports or not good at it?

If you don’t have time or the skills to gain insights from your Google Analytics reports you should check out my ‘Google Analytics Insights’ service – I’m sure you will find it useful for improving your website.

Your customer does not want to buy anything, but they want you to give them solutions. The biggest challenge for you is not knowing the solution that your customer is looking for. Often, the customer doesn’t know the answer either. The customer may think they know what they want, but because it’s the only thing they know. Your job is to them get to the next level.

You can tell a customer what they should buy; however, the customer won’t believe you until they know for certain that you have the right answer. They will just keep resisting. The best way to overcome this is to ask more questions, but I’m not talking about simple questions that anyone can answer. I am referring to questions that really get the customer thinking. Until we get the customer to think, there is little chance that we will get them to change their mind.

How do you get the customer thinking and get a higher price? Watch this video:

 

 

Sales is not about taking the easy route, it’s about doing what’s right and that means helping the customer even when they don’t initially see or know how you can help them. Your customer will always feel your price is too high and they will feel that way as long as they fail to see the full value of what you have to offer.

Your goal today and every day is to ask questions that get them thinking. When you ask thought-provoking questions, you build an ongoing conversation with your customer. The deeper your conversation goes, the higher the value you create.

Your price is not too high. It is only too high in your customer’s mind, because you have failed to create enough value to warrant the price. Customers do not buy, they invest. They invest in value to achieve an outcome, and it’s your job to help them achieve that outcome.

 

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

You may have heard that sellers spend less than 40% of their time actually selling. So you’ve invested in enablement and technologies to help them use their time efficiently.

But even with more than 7,000 sales tools available for sellers today, there are still seven key areas of the sales process that remain inefficient in most organizations.

We got some ultimate efficiency nerds to put together a lesson plan for identifying the biggest time-wasters, and implementing no-nonsense fixes. Join Adam Becker (Chief of Staff to the CRO) and Kelsey Briggs (Sales Operations Manager) from Conga to find out how to increase your sales efficiency.

The post 7 Most Overlooked Efficiency Killers: How to Spend More Time Selling appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Forecasting the business in spreadsheets was not working for TrendKite, an innovator in the digital public relations space, growing 60% YoY. Learn how they added visibility, rigor, and efficiency to their sales process that set them up for a successful merger with their prime competitor, Cision.

The post How to Build the Ultimate Sales Forecasting Approach for Predictable Revenue appeared first on Sales Hacker.

This webinar does not introduce a new “patented” methodology or sales tool that promises to solve all your problems.

Instead, you’ll learn tactics and tips that most sales teams miss, but which have an enormous impact on pipeline.

Join John Healy from Factor 8 as he gets hands-on and shares three things your team can do right now to improve the number and quality of the conversations they have every day.

Get the hacks your team needs to build their skills and confidence.

The post 3 Shockingly Simple Ways to Triple Pipeline appeared first on Sales Hacker.