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By Ed Shineman Sometimes, hard-and-fast rules for inside sales teams can get in the way of doing what’s best for customers and sales results. Here are some traditional inside sales dogmas that are worth challenging based on real case examples from my personal experience. Rule #1: Inside sales reps must not visit customers. Winnie was …

Continue reading "Four Inside Sales Rules That Beg to Be Broken"

As most of you know I’m not a huge fan of templated e-mail cadences but I do appreciate creating efficiencies throughout the sales process and adding structure where appropriate. One area in which we can add structure to is how we follow up with a prospective client after a good discovery call.

Too many of us don’t have a process and end up ‘touching base’ and ‘checking in’ until the frustration kicks in and we start doing some unnatural things to get a response. It becomes subjective and emotional which doesn’t do anyone any good.

You want to make the process as objective and unemotional as you can. It’s about setting very clear expectations with the prospect about the process, documenting it and holding them accountable along the way. If they don’t respond there is only so much you can do before you need to move on, which is why making it objective matters. It allows you to know when to move on.

Here’s the process we follow. If you decide to implement this approach PLEASE make it your own and don’t just copy word for word.

Set Expectations at the End of Qualification Call

1. Set expectations for summary e-mail:
   “I’ll be sending you a summary e-mail with what I was able to gain from our conversation. Could you do me a favor and look it over and e-mail me back to let me know if it’s all accurate and if I missed anything?”
2. Get a defined next step:
   “When do you want to schedule a follow up call so I can get your feedback and talk about next steps? Do you have your calendar in front of you?”

After the Call

1. Send the summary email.
2. Send the meeting invitation for the follow up call.
3. Follow up (if they don’t agree to a scheduled follow up call). See our suggested sequence below.

The Follow Up Email Sequence

Email 1 (1 week after qualification call)

(‘Reply all’ to summary email, keep original subject line)

Hi [name], have you had a chance to look through the content yet?  Let me know if you have any questions and what the next steps are.

Email 2 (4-7 days after email 1)

(‘Reply all’ to summary email, keep original subject line)

Hi [name], when are you free for a quick follow up call?

Email 3 (3 days after email 2)

(‘Reply all’ to the summary email, change the subject line to “Still interested?)

Hi [name], could you let me know where things stand and if you’re still interested in the training either way so I don’t continue with unnecessary follow up?

Email4 (3-4 days after email 3)

(‘Reply all’ to summary email, change the subject line to “Did I lose you?)

(no content in the body other than your signature line and the other 3 emails you sent previously)

Email5 (3-4 days after email 4)

(‘Reply all’ to summary email, keep subject line “Did I lose you?)

I’ll leave you alone at this point.  If training/prospecting ever comes back up to the top of the priority list feel free to reach back out to me directly.  Good luck with everything.

—

Closeout activities and set another activity for 3-6 months out to see if they want to re-engage.

Good luck. Make It Happen!

The post The Qualification Call Follow Up Process appeared first on JBarrows.

Many lists are available if you are looking for Google Chrome extensions that can make your life easier. I kid you not, there is even a list of Google Chrome extensions that can make your Netflix experience much better, including flipping the screen sideways for when you are binge-watching in bed. From the lists of Hammad Baig and Vasudha Veeranna, I have taken the 20 extensions that I feel make an entrepreneur’s life much better. You can find them in Chrome’s web store.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 1: Grammarly

I love Grammarly. It automatically checks every aspect of your writing, including grammar, spelling, and other common issues. The extension for Chrome reaches into some of the sites you use on a daily basis and it gives you advice instantly on your email or blog post as you write it. I can also recommend the plugin for MS Word!

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 2: Ginger

Just like Grammarly, Ginger helps you spell-check and suggests a correction for errors.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 3: Bit.ly

The Bit.ly Chrome extension is best for shortening, measuring, and optimizing links. It helps you customize links for your business and also keep track of which social strategies are working better in terms of engagement and reach.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 4: Unshorten.link

Link shorteners offer a simple solution to long URL’s but they can be quite a security risk. Unshorten.link provides you an in-between page when you click on those shortened URL’s and showcases you where you are redirected to.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 5: Momentum

The typical New Tab page of Chrome is not much to like about. Momentum helps create a useful New Tab page. It shows tasks, schedules, weathers, background images, and quotes.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 6: Noisli

Ambient music helps you focus on work or studies and keeps the mind calm and clear. Noisli offers you ambient sounds for that reason.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 7: StayFocused

StayFocused helps you be at your best while working. It operates on a self-restriction basis and puts a stop to your habits of spending time on addictive sites. The extension has a time-limit setter and allows you to only access the site for a limited bit of time.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 8: Strict Workflow

Have you been spending too much time on social networks and are you thinking of trimming it down? Strict Workflow works like the Pomodoro technique and offers a 25-minute counter where all those time-consuming apps are blocked. At the end of each counter, you will have a 5-minute break after which the counter starts back again.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 9: Adblock Plus

Getting annoyed by ads and pop-ups every time you open a new tab or site? Adblock Plus offers a clean feel of the web pages you intend to visit.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 10: The Great Suspender

Google Chrome seems to have a high power usage and a tendency to crash out. A simple answer is The Great Suspender, which suspends the tabs that are not in use and decreases the usage of RAM.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 11: Save to Pocket

Save to Pocket helps you store web content for offline access. This app lets you save a website or such content to your Pocket so that you can read it on your Smartphone or Tablet PC later.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 12: Readability

Readability turns articles present on websites into a convenient form and offers a Read now or Read Later option.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 13: Print Friendly & PDF

Printing a web page can be very difficult with ads coming into your print profile. Print Friendly & PDF helps to print the user-friendly pages without any cluttering junk and ads.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur -14: Mozbar

Mozbar provides a great deal of actionable information like on-page insights, domain authority, and link metrics. You can also apply search filters like search engine, city, country etc.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 15: Buzz Sumo

BuzzSumo gives you useful insight into the social media presence of any post or page. You can get an overview of the content’s performance including Facebook engagements and Twitter shares.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 16: Zest

Zest lets you recommend your content to a tribe of marketers. It also helps you identify thought-leadership articles, videos, and podcasts from other marketers. The content is manually sorted and filtered by Zest, making it a repository of quality content.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 17: Awesome Screenshot

Awesome Screenshot helps you take screenshots and allows you to edit them with effects like blur and annotations.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 18: Screencastify

This is a simple video screen capture application that allows the user to record all the activities of the screen including audio and more.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 19: Soapbox

Soapbox enables you to record smooth videos. It offers easy transitions that make creating amazing videos super easy. It even offers split screen, full-body, face-specific, and multiple webcam feed features.

Google Chrome extensions for the entrepreneur – 20: Followr

Followr is not like other bots trying to acquire a social media following. It searches for related tweets every 30 minutes. The more you use your Twitter account, the more followers you get. It scores high on relevance and is, therefore, a powerful tool to use.

I hope these extensions make your life a bit easier.

Starting your business is like planting a sapling. First, you have to invest your time and money. Then, you must take care of it while expecting nothing in return. But when your startup blossoms, it makes all the patience and hard work worthwhile.

However, like saplings, many startups fail to grow -- and many die one-to-three years after launch. While there are many factors leading to the failure of a startup, one of the main reasons is the lack of expert startup advice founders receive.

Experience of a seasoned entrepreneur is precious -- and no matter how many theoretical models you study, you simply can’t replace the experience they’ve gained through actually doing the work, failing, and succeeding.

Here are 51 pieces of startup advice from seasoned entrepreneurs to help you propel your businesses in the right direction and stay motivated when you need it the most. Want more inspirational, personal development content? Check out Goodvitae here. 

1. "If we tried to think of a good idea, we wouldn’t have been able to think of a good idea. You just have to find the solution for a problem in your own life." -Brian Chesky, Co-founder of Airbnb
2. "One of the greatest skills of leadership is being unflappable. Anytime you do anything in the world; there’s going to be criticism." -Arianna Huffington, Co-found and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post Media Group
3. "When you are building a startup, it’s difficult. Particularly, a startup that is expanding at the rate of Tinder. You have to give 100%, and you have to be committed. Solving the problem has to be personal or else you’re going to disintegrate." -Sean Rad, Co-founder of Tinder, Inc.
4. "Success depends on employees. For me knowing and connecting with my employees is very important." -Divine Ndhlukula, founder and managing director of DDNS Security Operations Ltd
5. "Selling is not a pushy, winner-takes-all, macho act. It is an empathy-led, process-driven, and knowledge-intensive discipline. Because, in the end, people buy from people." -Subroto Bagchi, Co-founder of Mindtree
6. "Ignore the hype of the startups that you see in the press. Mostly, it’s a pack of lies. Half of these startups will be dead in a year. So, focus on building your business so you can be the one left standing." -Jules Pieri, Co-founder and CEO of The Grommet
7. "It’s important to realize that brand is much more than a logo and slogan. A brand is who your company is: how you function and make decisions." -Joanna McFarland, Co-founder of HopSkipDrive
8. "Do not focus on numbers. Focus on doing what you do best. It’s about building a community who want to visit your site every day because you create value and offer expertise." -Cassey Ho, Founder of Blogilates.com
9. "When in doubt, bootstrap. Using your own personal resources is the easiest way to start a business. You don’t have to convince investors about the merits of your idea. You just have to convince yourself." -Ryan Holmes, Co-founder of Hootsuite
10. "You have to see failure as the beginning and the middle, but never entertain it as an end." -Jessica Herrin, founder and CEO of Stella & Dot
11. "Starting a company extracts so much energy and conviction that not having a clear-cut goal and meaningful mission can hamper your success. This is why, at Virta, our mission was clearly defined: reverse early type-2 diabetes in 100 million people by 2025." -Sami Inkinen, Co-founder of Virta Health
12. "If you know too much before the start, then you will get overwhelmed. Come up with an original idea, and don’t copy because there will be no passion. You need that otherworldly passion. Just start." -Jeni Britton Bauer, Founder of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams.
13. "Don’t assume that borrowing lots of money can make your startup fly. There are many things to the business other than investors, and it’s possible to succeed with your startup without breaking the bank." -Barnaby Lashbrooke, Founder of Time Etc.
14. "Don’t try to do everything by yourself, but try to connect with people and resources. Having that discipline and perseverance is really important." -Chieu Cao, Co-founder of Perkbox
15. "It’s necessary to find a mentor who can invest time to know your personal capabilities and business model." -Nigel Davies, Founder of Claromentis
16. "Don’t get distracted. Never tell yourself that you need to be the biggest brand in the whole world. Start by working on what you need at the present moment and then what you need to do tomorrow. So, set yourself manageable targets." -Jas Bagniewski, Co-Founder of Eve Sleep
17. "You have to get good at ceding control and not taking things personally. Even seasoned entrepreneurs have struggled with that. I think it’s about not taking failures personally and also not taking successes personally." -Leila Janah, Founder of Samasource and LXMI
18. "No matter how many customers you have, each is an individual. The day you start thinking of them as this amorphous ‘collection’ and stop thinking of them as people is the day you start going out of business." -Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder of HubSpot
19. "Your ability to attract, evaluate, and forge strong working relationships with co-founders, early employees, and investors often mean the difference between failure and success." -Clara Shih, Co-founder of Hearsay Systems
20. "Fundraising is much easier now because of crowdfunding. Take advantage of that." -Constantin Bisanz, Founder of Aloha
21. "Being a woman in business doesn’t come without challenges. My advice? Surround yourself with other supportive women that encourage you, share ideas, and get you motivated." -Jessica Alba, Founder of The Honest Company
22. "If you can offer a free tier that provides a lot of value, it will naturally help your product to spread much more rapidly." -Melanie Perkins, Co-founder of Canva
23. "My advice is to focus on the importance of forging a long-term relationship, whether with colleagues, partners, or customers. It is often easy to get caught up in short-term decisions." -Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Founder of Care.com
24. "If you’re starting something on your own, you better have a passion for it, because this is hard work." -Sallie Krawcheck, Co-founder of Ellevest
25. "Be nicer to your customers than your competitors." -Richard Reed, Co-Founder of Innocent Drinks
26. "Passion, creativity, and resilience are the most crucial skills in business. If you’ve got those, you’re ready to embark on the journey." -Jo Malone, Founder of Jo Malone
27. "If you are working on a product that’s going to be consumer-facing, then feedback is invaluable. You should be out there being brave and talking to people and asking for feedback as much as possible." -Emily Brooke, Co-founder of Blaze
28. "In the age of transparency, honesty, and generosity, even in the form of an apology, generate goodwill." -Alexander Asseily, founder of Jawbone
29. "Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to ask. I have been in the news many times just by calling on the news channel and asking them about featuring my business." -Lori Cheek, Founder of Cheekd
30. "Remain self-funded as long as possible." -Garrett Camp, Co-founder of Uber, StumbleUpon, and Expa
31. "Start as small as you can. When I started SkinnyMe Tea, I had $24 in the bank, and I was entirely self-funded. If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product; you’ve launched too late." -Gretta Rose van Riel, Founder of Hey Influencers
32. "As a founder, lay all the possible scenarios -- from best to worst -- in front of you, so you don’t get surprised when something happens." -Brian Wong, Co-founder of Kiip
33. "We learned many things while building FourSquare. One of the most important lessons is to be clear to investors about what the company will and will not do. And be open about the priorities of the things that have to be done." -Dennis Crowley, Co-founder of Foursquare
34. "Don’t let others convince you that the idea is good when your gut tells you it’s bad." -Kevin Rose, co-founded Digg
35. "I can name dozens of failures that we had over the years. Yet, with all these failures, we still managed to build Appster into one of the largest, and best companies in our industry. So, remember every time you fail, remind yourself these words: ‘Life won’t always go my way, but I will always find a way'." -Josiah Humphrey, Co-founder of Appster
36. "If you tune it so that you have zero chance of failure, you usually also have zero chance of success. The key is to look at ways for when you get to your failure checkpoint, you know to stop." -Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn
37. "Some days you're smiling and thinking you're going to make this thing rock. Then the next day a pipe breaks and your costs look too high. You have to learn to keep your eyes on an ultimate goal. If you lose sight of that goal, you have to get out." -Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani
38. "If something is important enough, or you believe something is important enough, even if you are scared, you will keep going." -Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX
39. "One of the things I tend to do is open myself up to a variety of voices. I try to expose myself to the kind of culture shock that occurs when you talk to people who speak a different language." -Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
40. "If you start thinking you are good at something, that's often the day you stop trying to be better and open the back door for someone to come after you. That's why we always aim higher. We never feel like we're done." -Drew Houston, cofounder and CEO of Dropbox
41. "Only the paranoid survive." -Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel
42. "Most of us want to tell our coworkers or friends, or husbands or wives, our ideas. For what reason? We want validation. But I feel ideas are most vulnerable in their infancy. Out of love and concern, friends and family give all the reasons or objections on why [you] shouldn't do it. I didn't want to risk that." -Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx
43. "I'm always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials." -Steve Ells, founder and co-CEO of Chipotle
44. "It starts with not having a hangover with the way things used to be." -Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of Under Armour
45. "There is something artificial when everyone is agreeing with each other. It's useful to indulge people who don't agree, and see their viewpoint or force yourself to explain things better." -David Sack, founder of Yammer
46. "If you are not getting traction on your idea, you try few things. You try pushing harder, cleaning up something, building up to something aggressively -- but if it doesn’t get traction, then don’t bother." -Vijay Sharma, Founder of Paytm
47. "It’s very important for entrepreneurs to look for people in the company who are not afraid of failures, for example, intrapreneurs. They make a business more successful by thinking like an entrepreneur -- but within a company." -Chirag Kulkarni, Founder of Taco
48. "If we are going to be part of the solution, we have to engage the problems." -Majora Carter, urban revitalization strategist and broadcast producer
49. "[Don’t] let anyone convince you that your dream, your vision to be an entrepreneur, is something that you shouldn’t do. What often happens is that people who are well meaning, who really care for us, are afraid for us and talk us out of it." -Cathy Hughes, entrepreneur, radio and television personality, and business executive
50. "Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are 10 goals around health, family and business with expiration dates, and I update them every six months." -Daymond John, founder, president, and CEO of FUBU
51. "There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for whatever success I have attained has been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights." -Madam C.J. Walker, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and political and social activist

Sometimes, all you need to push through the hard times is a little motivation and a lot of advice. Turn to the mentors in your life, and keep a few of these quotes on standby.

Optimizing your customer experience requires a dedicated, ongoing commitment to testing. This is true across channels – from your website to your email and ad campaigns and your mobile app experiences. To drive results, you need to test, test, test, and then test some more. For those reading this blog, we don’t expect this to come as a surprise.

What may come as a surprise, however, is that testing has evolved considerably since it was first adopted by digital marketers in the early 2000s. Traditionally, testing has focused on broad audiences. One might call this a “testing for all” approach. Here, marketers are looking to prove or disprove theories using champion-challenger tactics to determine what works for the majority of their visitors.

For example, a company focused on demand generation may want to test different hero banners on its homepage. To execute this, a marketer would split traffic between experience A and experience B (which could also be the default experience as the “control”). The marketer would then analyze and compare the results of each experience against key goals such as click-throughs and conversions. This simple use case has been highly effective for companies over the years, and there are scores of technology tools that have been successful in helping businesses facilitate these types of tests.

But in an environment where companies are now able to deliver true 1-to-1 personalized experiences across channels, the role of testing is changing. So we must ask ourselves, is figuring out the experience that works for the majority of visitors still applicable? We think it’s a good start, but the best experience for the majority of visitors isn’t the best experience for every visitor.

Here are three ways that testing is changing to optimize visitor experiences and how Evergage is at the forefront of this evolution.

1. Targeted Testing: With the right solution, business users can apply rules that enable A/B and multivariate testing of experiences for user-defined segments of visitors. Referring back to the demand generation example above, instead of testing the hero banners to find which version produces the best results for the majority of visitors, companies can test to determine, among other things, which hero experience works best for visitors from specific industries (e.g., retail, financial services, healthcare), referring sources (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook), locations (state, region, country), and more. For example, they can test different versions of a retail-specific hero experience by only showing those experiences to visitors from the retail industry or those showing a clear interest in retail-related topics.
2. Testing Algorithms: Machine-learning algorithms can deliver true 1-to-1 experiences in the form of individualized product and content recommendations, tailored onsite search results, dynamic promotional offers, and more. The only way to know if an algorithm is fully optimized, though, is to test it. An advanced solution enables businesses to A/B test customized algorithms in order to figure out which is most effective. A solution like Evergage can even provide simulated renderings of recommendations for specific individuals or groups (in other words, they allow you to test recommendations by showing you the experiences they would deliver before you deploy them). Taking things a step further, companies should also be able to test machine-learning algorithms within a specific segment of visitors (e.g., high-value customers or first-time visitors).
3. Cross-Channel Testing: Testing should not be limited to a single channel. To fully optimize experiences, you need to test every customer touch point. Advanced solutions not only allow a company to run tests on its website, but also in a mobile app, logged-in environment, email and more. And the first two points are equally relevant here in that within each channel, an advanced solution would enable users to run targeted tests of machine-learning algorithms and experiences targeted to different segments within specific channels. Among other things, advanced solutions enable companies to test the timing, content and subject line of triggered emails, the content of push notifications and web notifications, the relevance of machine learning-driven, open-time banners and promotions, the effectiveness of rule-based web sequences, the effect of targeted surveys, and the effectiveness of mobile app recommendations.

Final Thoughts

The notion of running a test without thinking about the cross-channel journey, targeting, and 1-to-1 experiences is antiquated. Evergage regularly outperforms or even displaces pure-play testing tools, once business professionals begin to realize the limitations of these solutions for optimizing customer experiences at the segment, micro-segment and individual level. If you’re considering testing today or in the future, you need to do so in conjunction with personalization. Once you start looking for a solution that can help you deliver the most relevant experience for each individual, you’ll find that Evergage has one of the most advanced solutions for testing in today’s world.

There are many levers a sales leader or organization may pull to gain scale, accelerate revenue, drive cost savings, or augment sales team structures. A viable and proven option is handing over some or all of your sales efforts to outsourced sales professionals.

It’s true that outsourcing your sales to a third-party provider can yield favorable results. However, the process may not happen smoothly without preparation and the shaping of expectations by both parties.

• There are many outsourcing companies, but which of them can actually hold a sales quota and get results?
• How can you be sure you’re choosing the right one?
• Will partnering with an outsourced sales provider really impact your top and bottom line?
• And once you select a sales partner, how can you be sure you’re getting the most out of the relationship?

Consider the following do’s and don’ts to make sure you select the sales solution provider that best fits your needs, and starts building revenue.

1) DO place more emphasis on capabilities than cost.
2) DON’T get lost in the selection process.
3) DO play an active role in the partnership.
4) DON’T expect immediate results.
5) DO ensure sales and marketing are aligned.
6) DON’T engage with a basic call center. Find a true sales firm.

1) Do Place More Emphasis On Capabilities Than Cost

When it comes to choosing a sales provider, the cheapest solution is not always the best solution.

When you select the low-cost option, you sacrifice expertise, leadership, and the ability to execute. Is it more important to save a few dollars on a subpar partner or invest in a specialized team that possesses the expertise in a particular channel?

There are many factors you should consider as you assess potential partners for augmenting or extending your sales team.

• Clearly define what you need, especially in terms of outcomes.
• Understand the capabilities of the partner you choose to align with.

Maybe you’re looking to augment your in-house sales team with lead qualification or renewal management. Perhaps you are expanding into the SMB space and have not been able to gain a measurable return.

You might need a team to handle your entire sales process in a new region. Once you know exactly what your business needs are, it’s critical to understand how a potential sales provider’s processes, expertise, and tools can benefit your particular scenario. Ask them to prove it to you.

Questions to ask your future outsources business partner during screening:

• What are your core sales competencies? Eg, consumer sales, B2B sales-specific, or other?
• Can you outline your organization’s sales expertise in my particular vertical/channel and demonstrate that depth of knowledge?
• Can you illustrate your firm’s proven track record of selling in the enterprise, mid-market, or SMB segments?
• How will your company support and enable expansion into a new geography or market segment? (Go To Market Strategy)
• Does your team possess the depth of experience to have executive and decision-maker business conversations?
• What tools and technologies do you leverage for successful sales acceleration and why?
• What level of return can I expect from our engagement, and are you willing to share risk relative to results delivered?

2) Don’t Get Lost In The Selection Process

With so many options in outsourced partner sales, it’s easy to get lost in the process of analyzing the best fit.

While you don’t want to rush into selecting the wrong partner, dragging out the selection process is also a deterrent. It will essentially burn your opportunity to generate revenue faster than your ability to impact your top and bottom line.

Questions to consider during the selection process:

• How well does the provider drive thought leadership and creativity during the proposal process? Are they just speaking to what you asked for or are they providing innovative ideas for how to reach your sales goals? This is a good indicator of what you can expect from a partnership.
• What would my sales team look like and what is the ratio of managers to reps? Who will be managing them?
• Does this provider understand my needs and specialize in the area of sales that I need help with? If you need expertise in selling to the SMB space, do they have current teams actually selling to SMBs?
• Are we aligned on KPIs, and does the sales partner have the right metrics and evaluation tools to properly measure results?

3) Do Play An Active Role In The Partnership

Once you select an outsourced sales provider and complete the onboarding process, you can’t assume that the ship will drive itself.

That’s a recipe for failure. Success comes from a fully engaged and vested partnership. Devote your time and energy to build better business relationships with your new sales partner(s). Continued communication as the partnership advances benefits both parties.

Just as you constantly interact with and guide your internal team, you need to be an active participant in your newly formed sales partnership.

How to maximize engagement with your new partner:

• Understand their selling process—from generating leads to closing deals.
• Train the extension of your sales team as you would internal hires. Make sure they are educated on your business’s strategies, processes, goals, and KPIs.
• Provide the team with relevant and available sales enablement materials, so they don’t waste valuable time searching for or recreating content.
• Meet with your outsourced team on a regular basis, and challenge them and their activities, objectives, and results. Participate in weekly touch-base meetings to stay connected on performance, gaps, and key initiatives.
• Loop your outsourced sales team management into internal meetings that cover forecasting, business strategy, and key sales/marketing objectives.
• When you set goals, hold the outsourced team to them. Evaluate the reality of those goals often. Work closely with your outsourced team to drive alignment on what success looks like. Don’t do this only once a quarter.

Bonus read: 10 Tips to Build Rapport Internally to Navigate Complex Deals

4) Don’t Expect Immediate Results

Just as you account for a learning curve period with internal hires, you should also allow your outsourced sales provider appropriate time to learn your business.

While it’s true that you’ll save a lot of onboarding time by plugging in an as-a-service sales team, the process isn’t turnkey. In general, it will take a new team around 90 days to learn your value proposition, hone their pitch, create sales sequences, build a pipeline, and begin to deliver results.  

How to onboard your outsourced sales team smoothly:

• Use a variable compensation model that includes some level of fixed compensation, as well as a way to reward success. This gives sales reps stake in the relationship and incentive to deliver results.
• Thoroughly train reps up front on your products and brand and encourage your provider to use the information to actively coach reps.  
• Establish an open channel of communication so your outsourced sales team feels comfortable contacting you when needed.  

5) DO ensure sales and marketing are aligned

It is imperative that you have constant alignment with your extended sales team. Also, it’s important to connect them and insert them into your marketing processes. If you didn’t previously have an in-house sales function before adding an outsourced sales arm, your new team can easily become disconnected from your company’s marketing strategy.

Sales and marketing must work together to achieve the same goals. They can help each other reach their individual performance metrics more quickly.

How to align your internal/external sales and marketing teams:

• Invite key members of your marketing team to regularly interact with your outsourced sales team. Insights from the frontline salespeople who have more customer interactions than most will become a valuable asset to your organization.
• Work together to develop buyer personas to ensure that both teams are targeting the same audience. If your marketing team has already developed buyer personas, have them present the data to sales in order to ensure consistent understanding.
• Encourage your sales team to regularly report their findings to marketing. For example, sales can inform marketing on what makes a lead higher quality and why. Marketing can in turn use this information to improve their lead generation/qualification process.

Bonus read: How VPs of Marketing Can Use Call Recordings To Become A Better Sales Partner

6) Don’t Engage With A Basic Call Center. Find A True Sales Firm

There are many consumer-facing call centers masquerading as experienced professional sales providers. The difference between a call center and a sales center is that a call center typically focuses on inbound general customer care or technical support, whereas a sales provider is trained to directly drive revenue.

Expect your vetted sales partner to:

• Have active sales teams that are carrying quota.
• Have the ability to either scale or augment what your internal sales teams are currently doing.
• Cover new geographies or time zones that you didn’t previously have access to.
• Provide an integrated lead development process that feeds you opportunities, not just warm leads.
• Have established sales methodologies that simplify the level of complexity of the modern-day sales motion
• Have processes in place that drive quota attainment with predictability.
• Provide a sales stack that is innovative, but flexible enough to incorporate your own proven tools.
• Provide analysis and forecasting—not just reporting—to guide strategy.

Outsourced sales is a thriving and proven trend that involves: hiring, onboarding, coaching, process development, and high-yielding sales expertise.

A partnership with a third-party sales provider has the potential to boost current revenue and create new revenue streams faster and more efficiently than you can from scratch.

Whether you’re considering augmenting your existing in-house sales team or completely outsourcing your entire sales process, follow the do’s and don’ts above to get the most return out of your partnership.

The post Don’t Hire the Wrong Outsourced Sales Professionals: 6 Handy Tips appeared first on Sales Hacker.

LinkedIn has become an amazing sales tool -- so much so that InsideSales.com declared, "Cold Calling is Dead, Thanks to LinkedIn." Unfortunately, salespeople have also moved many of their bad habits onto the platform. And I'm not just talking about sending spammy InMails. Salespeople are abusing LinkedIn in many other ways.

I'm not the only one noticing this problem. I asked a few buyers and sellers what LinkedIn-enabled sales approaches they hate most. Here are four of their responses.

1. Uncustomized, Cold LinkedIn Connection Requests

"Too many salespeople use the default connection request message,” Greg Linnemanstons, president of Weidert Group, a 25- person B2B inbound marketing agency, says, “They don't bother to customize their note with their reason for requesting a connection.”

Instead, "make yourself visible and relevant in a believable way,” Linnemanstons suggests. “For example, subscribe to your prospect's blog and comment on a post if you can add to the conversation."

Of course, not every company blogs or monitors their blog comments very closely. So if your prospective customer doesn't have a blog, comment or like a post that your prospect has shared on linkedin. If they haven't shared anything, read what they've liked and engage them with context from that article by saying, "What did you like about that article?" If they are completely inactive on LinkedIn, it's probably a sign that they don't use it that often. 

"When salespeople make this small amount of extra effort, and then reference our shared behavior as common ground, I'm far more likely to accept their connection request," Linnemanstons added.

2. The Quickie LinkedIn Sales Pitch

Salespeople aren't stopping their spammy ways once prospects accept their connection requests. In fact, they're using LinkedIn in the same way many abuse email, by sending unsolicited, uncustomized, long-winded, self-promotional InMails.

Lori Richardson, sales expert and owner of Score More Sales, coined this all-too-common use of InMail: the Quickie LinkedIn Sales Pitch.

This type of pitch happens “when a salesperson with a mutual connection or two requests to connect with you, then proceeds to send a very self-serving, promotional InMail within hours of accepting the connection request. It's tempting to ignore these salespeople, but their connection with your trusted colleague implies they're worth knowing."

I recently realized I had 4,000 unaccepted LinkedIn requests. Since I had zero interest in individually reviewing every request that has piled up over the years, I accepted a few hundred of them.

Within hours, I began receiving many "quickie sales pitch" InMails from salespeople. The messages were all about them, their amazing business, and why I should stop what I'm doing and schedule a call with them. The barrage of spam certainly discouraged me from accepting more connections. I imagine I'm not the only one that doesn't accept connection requests for fear of being spammed. And that’s ultimately bad for salespeople -- how long before buyers stop accepting new connections altogether?

Of course, it doesn't make sense to stop connecting with prospects. As Richardson admits, "It is fine to connect to prospects you don't know through someone else on LinkedIn. I even do it occasionally." But instead of spamming them right away, Richardson suggests waiting one or two weeks to familiarize yourself with your connection’s LinkedIn activity.

That way, you can "make sure you have something that will be truly relevant and valuable to them. In other words, target your connection and introduction requests to people you know you can definitely help."

Richardson also suggested spending more time to customize your invitation.

"When crafting your note, make it about them, not you,” she said. “Comment on something they did or share some industry news and why you think it'd be relevant to them. If you're going to talk about yourself, do it in terms that will resonate by talking about how you've helped companies similar to them."

Also, if you actually know someone that knows your prospect, consider requesting a connection through LinkedIn from a trusted mutual contact using LinkedIn's introduction request feature. These types of introduction requests are a lot less likely to be ignored. Why? If a mutual contact passes along your note, it implies you are worth talking to, especially if they add an endorsement. 

3. Spamming LinkedIn Group Discussions

This spammy sales tactic is a personal pet peeve of Krista Moon, a sales veteran turned sales and marketing consultant. 

"Way too many salespeople post their content on LinkedIn Groups,” she said. “Some even pop in and out of multiple groups just to post links to their content in each one."

This behavior has destroyed many formerly active forums. I previously managed a forum for marketing agencies until it was overrun with threads from salespeople more interested in promoting themselves than engaging in a dialog. Managing memberships and moderating became too time-consuming, so we declared bankruptcy on the group entirely.

Krista offers a very simple alternative approach in her article, 3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting in LinkedIn Groups.

"Be a helpful resource that your potential customers can rely on and trust,” she writes. “Focus on adding value with each interaction vs. pitching your products. Whatever you do, don't be sleazy enough to hijack a thread like this salesperson did."

4. Creating Fake LinkedIn Accounts to Spy on Competitors

Instead of creating their own demand, some salespeople spend a lot of time figuring out which competitors they can steal clients from. LinkedIn lets their members see second-degree connections by default, so some salespeople connect with their competitors on LinkedIn to see who their competitor's customers are.

Of course, most salespeople are smart enough not to connect with their competitors. So, in very competitive industries, salespeople resort to creating fake accounts.

"That’s right -- some sellers will actually go so far as to create fake LinkedIn profiles that look like people their competitors want to connect with,” Rowley writes. “And once they trick them into accepting the phony account’s request, they go to town digging through their network. "

I imagine these same salespeople won't think twice about sending un-customized connection requests and "Quickie InMail Sales Pitches" once they do connect with their competitor's customers. These deceitful thieves are the salespeople we really need to stop.

5. Blasting Your Great-Uncle's, Coworkers Cousin on LinkedIn

We've all been guilty of this at one point or another. HubSpot Sales Director Dan Tyre says, "While this might not be a tactic of old, it's a modern tactic that's already tired. Just because you have a distant, third-degree connection doesn't mean they're a qualified prospect." 

Instead, Tyre recommends joining pertinent groups on LinkedIn and commenting on or sharing relevant articles your prospects post. He also recommends reaching out only once you've made a meaningful connection (i.e., When they've commented to thank you for sharing their blog.). 

Lastly, Tyre warns salespeople to "always reply in kind." If a prospect "likes" an article you shared, don't immediately send them an InMail asking for their number. Instead, thank them for the like or extend the same courtesy to them the next time they share an article.

"This might not be the fastest way to move leads along," Tyre says, "But it will be far more successful than pushing a relationship before the other party is ready."

LinkedIn Is a Treasure, Let's Treat it Like One

Most salespeople agree that LinkedIn and especially LinkedIn Sales Navigator is probably the best sales prospecting tool ever created. The value, of course, is that it provides efficient ways to identify, connect, and engage LinkedIn members. It is a treasure trove of prospective customers as well full of insights about those prospective customers. It is a dream come true for new business sales professionals.

But if salespeople don't stop employing the shortcut sales tactics above, we risk killing our prospecting gold mine. Not only will buyers rely less on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will be forced to constrain our activity (even further) in order to protect their golden goose: active engaged members.

Even paid LinkedIn Sales Navigator customers can only send a certain amount of InMails per month. Why do you think that is? Because with no limits, salespeople would abuse the system. Imagine if LinkedIn had to clamp down even further because prospects got fed up enough to leave the site.

Let's cut out this spammy sh*t before it's too late.

When it comes to increasing leads, how can brands ensure their B2B affiliate marketing program is driving pipeline growth? Here are three ways to leverage affiliates in your overall marketing strategy.

1. Connect with the right affiliates

Finding affiliates to promote your product can be a tedious task, but partnering with the right affiliates is the real key to success. Instead of leveraging an affiliate network that hosts hundreds and thousands of affiliates looking for the highest commission rate, a better approach is to personally curate a team of affiliates that are best suited to represent your brand.

As Hailey Friedman shared as THE secret hack to building a successful affiliate marketing program at RealtyShares, “people love being recognized.” A good way to do so is to initially reach out and NOT mention your affiliate program, but instead recognize and engage with their brand. While this may sound counterintuitive, try this approach and you might be surprised by the results.

Once you have established a relationship, it is much easier to attract affiliates to join your program. This also gives your brand the opportunity to do research and make sure the affiliates you are reaching out to are a right fit for your brand.

While vetting affiliates can be more work upfront for your team, its a proven way to set up your B2B affiliate marketing program for success.

2. Offer a competitive commission structure

The incentive structure for B2B affiliate marketing programs can be a tricky process. For our most successful B2B brands, we recommend offering a smaller incentive for passing over a qualified lead (or whatever your company specifically considers a qualified entry point into their pipeline). If that lead ultimately closes, that same affiliate is then given a larger commission for sending you a new customer.

This is effective for one very big reason: When an affiliate knows that there’s a short-term incentive for simply sending over a qualified lead (and a potentially bigger reward for that customer closing), it removes a critical barrier to participation and immediately ramps up affiliate activity.

 

And this doesn’t have to turn into a big budget campaign. Even if the incentive for qualified leads is low (i.e., a flat $50 — a reasonable amount to pay for qualified B2B leads), it almost always ramps up lead generation activity from affiliates. And, like any marketing activity, the more qualified leads you get into your pipeline via affiliates, the better chance you have of driving a healthy ROI.

3. Provide informative content

Like with any marketing program, educating your members is integral to success. Creating a step-by-step guide (even better, a video) to getting started is a great way to make sure your affiliates are ramped up and ready to start sharing your products and services while keeping to your company guidelines. Having easily accessible digital assets and tools for your program is another way to guarantee that your affiliates are keeping to your brand’s style. By investing in education, your program will more likely see higher adoption rates and lasting relationships with valued affiliates.

Achieving Success with B2B Affiliate Marketing

If your marketing goals include getting in front of as many responsive prospects as possible and increasing leads, then B2B affiliate marketing is a great tool to use. When combined with your other lead generation activities, your company is sure to see an increase in pipeline growth.

In an earlier blog post, I discussed some of the major survey findings reported in The 2018 B2B Buying Disconnect by TrustRadius. This report is based on two surveys. One survey included 438 individuals who played a key role in a significant business technology purchase during the previous year, and the second was a survey of 240 individuals who worked for business technology vendors in a marketing or sales capacity.

One objective of this research was to identify what sources of information buyers are using to support purchase decisions, and what sources they deem to be influential and trustworthy. As I discussed in the earlier post, the sources of information that buyers think are most influential and trustworthy include their own prior experience with a product, free trials, product demos, and referrals from a friend, colleague, or peer. Surveyed buyers ranked all types of vendor-provided information (except product demos) as least influential and trustworthy.

TrustRadius also asked buyers about the overall influence that vendors have on their purchase decisions. Only 23% of the surveyed buyers said their vendors are very influential. TrustRadius then sought to identify what attributes and behaviors separated very influential vendors from less influential vendors in the eyes of buyers.

One of the most striking attributes of very influential vendors is that they are open and transparent about the limitations of their product or solution. Fifty-one percent of surveyed buyers who said their vendors are very influential also said their vendors are very forthcoming about product limitations. Only 31% of the buyers with less influential vendors said their vendors are open about product limitations.

In the survey of vendor marketing and sales professionals, 85% of the respondents said they “aim to be clear about where the product works well and where something else might be a better fit.” So there is a significant gap between vendors and buyers on this aspect of transparency.

Buyers who said their vendors are very influential were also more likely than other buyers to say that their vendors:

• Provided customer evidence like reviews and case studies
• Connected them with customer references
• Helped them strategize the best approach for their use case
• Helped them understand potential ROI
• Provided learning opportunities (events, workshops, etc.)

Collectively, these survey findings provide a clear picture of what buyers really want from their vendors. And these findings are consistent with research from other firms. For example, in a 2017 survey of B2B buyers by the Aberdeen Group, survey participants were asked to select two factors (from a list of nine) that play a role in their buying decisions. The three most frequently chosen factors were:

• Total cost of ownership
• How the vendor/solution supports our company’s goals
• Efficiency gains (ROI)

Clearly, today’s buyers are looking for vendors who are completely transparent about the capabilities and limitations of their solutions, and vendors who can help them improve business performance. That’s not particularly surprising, but it’s important to remember.

Illustration courtesy of Amtec Staffing via Flickr CC.

Do you know where your sales come from?

Companies with physical storefronts do. They know how much product they sell at each of their locations. And they can judge the relative success of each location by comparing it to past performance and to all other locations.

For example, Starbucks knows that the storefront at 29th and Park Avenue in Manhattan serves 75,000 customers per day at an average order value of $4.50 per order, for a total daily haul of $337,500.

But what about companies that sell by phone? Or online?

One might think that it doesn’t matter as much for these companies with a more global strategy and reach. Unlike local stores, online stores don’t have to rely on physical locations to drive sales. And so where people are coming from matters less.

Here’s why that’s wrong:

Being able to determine where your sales are coming from is critical for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it is critical for marketing purposes. Even in a digital-first world, location matters in marketing. Companies can spend their entire advertising budget in one state, or one city, if they want to. Location is a targeting feature in almost any kind of online advertising one can imagine.

When we know where our customers are coming from, we can better determine the return on our advertising campaigns in progress. We can also optimize our marketing budgets so that we can capitalize on those regions we’re most likely to succeed.

Second, it matters for logistical purposes. Let’s say you manage an online storefront that ships physical goods. In order to optimize your shipping processes, you need to know where most of your customers are located. Back when Netflix was selling DVDs by mail, the number one reason for their success was how well they were able to predict and model their logistical operations, placing fulfillment centers right where they were most needed.

And lastly, where your customers are located can affect how you communicate with them. If your customers are mostly on the west coast, would it make sense to keep call center hours in the early morning in the east? If your customers are big city dwellers, does it make sense to include imagery of wide open spaces on your product pages and promotional materials?

The more you know about your customers, the better off you’ll be. And that includes where they live.

PR wire services have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve never been a big user, and I’ve never been a big advocate.

Maybe it’s been the kind of work I do (primarily social/digital the last eight-plus years). Maybe it’s been the kinds of companies I worked for in the past. Maybe it’s a combo of both.

But, despite my opinions, PR wire services are still around–primarily Business Wire and PR Newswire.

My big question: Do these wire services still have a place in the 2018 communicator’s toolbox? I set out to find out by asking a few trusted friends and colleagues across the industry:

Cameron Potts, vice president of PR and community management, Deluxe

First, on a day-to-day basis, newswire services no longer have the same place in a PR practitioner’s tool kit that they once did. Journalists, reporters, bloggers are not getting news from press releases put out on the wire anymore. Relationships still matter, even with the changing face of journalism, and at the same time, companies are their own publishers, providing content directly to the audiences they want to reach.

That said, as a publicly traded company, we rely on newswire services to release quarterly earnings information to shareholders, investors and basically just a wider audience than we could reach on our own. In this way, it is a valuable tool I will continue to utilize.

Another way to think about this question is from a marketing standpoint. Using services like PR News and Business Newswire actually help our marketing and sales teams. Because search engines like Yahoo, Google, NY Times and many other will pick up the release on their services, news releases for specific companies and entities help increase search rankings, thus getting the eyeballs of more potential customers onto a new product or service. Moving forward, news wire services might be more suited to be in the toolkit of the marketing professional and not the PR professional.

Ben Saukko, director of communications, AmeriPride Services

News wire services are becoming less relevant in today’s PR environment. As a communications professional, I’m looking for more comprehensive tools that will help me create content, manage and update customized media lists that are specific to my industry, monitor a variety of traditional and social media channels and create reports for my senior leadership. News wires are just one small component in a increasingly complex and diverse digital media environment.

Cydney Strommen, director-North America Marketing Communications, Aveda

I’ve found wire services to be helpful for SEO, but rarely a driver of impactful coverage outside of true hard news – earnings, M&A, etc. At Aveda, most of our news is B2C around product launches, or B2B to a targeted segment of salon owners, stylists and opinion leaders in the beauty and wellness space. With such a narrow B2B audience, many that we already have existing relationships with, we don’t actively use a wire service.

Bruce Eric Anderson, global director-external communications, Honeywell

We use wire services as a means of building a “digital reef” of keywords that we’re building broader campaigns around, then have the wire release out there generating eyeballs. A great example was a connected worker release we did several years ago. We announced that Honeywell and Intel were doing a technology demonstration of a worker prototype at an Intel IoT summit. We continue to get calls today for interviews based on that one release.

Susan Beatty, vice president-public affairs and communications, U.S. Bank

We value and see the great opportunity we have with owned media and our ability to create and extend relationships with media. We still see the role of the wire service at times for financial releases, significant leadership announcements and some products/services. We are however seeing good results from publishing directly to our Newsroom (usbank.com/newsroom) where we can create better content with visuals and video resulting in more positive social media sharing opportunities.

If your sales process relies heavily on cold emailing or calling prospects, the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) isn’t great news for you.

At its most basic, the GDPR changes the way outbound sales teams can collect and use personal data like email addresses, names, and other info about prospects.

So, whether you buy lists of leads to fill out your pipeline, scrape prospects from LinkedIn, or automatically add new inbound contacts to your sales funnel, the sales strategies you’ve used in the past to turn strangers into customers are going to have to dramatically change.

There’s a lot of questions about how GDPR is going to affect sales teams. And the stakes are high if you get it wrong. We spoke to GDPR experts Ken Baylor and Chas Ballew to help answer the 10 biggest questions sales teams have about how to stay compliant while prospecting.

Disclaimer: The content in this blog post (including all responses to comments) is not to be considered legal advice and should be used for information purposes only.

1. What’s covered under the GDPR and do I need to care about it if I’m outside of Europe?

At its essence, GDPR gives EU citizens more control and transparency over who can store and use their personal data. It also means that as a company using personal data to build lists and contact sales leads, you have new responsibilities around how you collect and process that data.

Under GDPR, personal data includes:

• Names
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• IP addresses
• Mobile device IDs
• And even encrypted data

Basically, if the information you have can be used to identify a person in any way, it’s covered under GDPR.

For sales teams, personal data is the lifeblood of outbound sales. To move a lead through your sales pipeline, you need to get in touch with them and pitch. But under GDPR, you can no longer use personal data (like email addresses or phone numbers) unless that person has consented to being contacted by you.

This means no more sending out cold prospecting emails, quick catch-ups, or product demos without that person opting in to receiving your messages.

Now, before you freak out, there are a few details to go over.

First, the GDPR only covers your sales prospecting towards EU citizens. You only need to be concerned with following GDPR guidelines if your business either:

1. Has any sort of established presence in the EU (either an Office, PO box, or employees)
2. Is offering services or products to EU citizens or using their data in some other way (such as monitoring or profiling them)

Second, you may still be able to contact prospects if you have “legitimate interests.” This is a bit of a grey area. But one that Ken says many cold calling companies are going to rely on under GDPR. As he explains:

“If your companies ‘legitimate interests’ aren’t overridden by the individual’s ‘fundamental rights and freedoms’ then you may be able to use the contact data.”

Ken calls this a ‘balancing test’ where, should a prospect send a complaint about your outreach, you may be able to argue that the communication was still legal. However, you’ll want to make sure you document your legitimate interest, make it clear in the communication, and offer an easy opt-out.

Lastly, we won’t know the final effects until the ePrivacy directive is finalized next year. The GDPR is only a starting place for new regulations around personal data. We won’t know the final impact it will have on outbound sales and marketing until another regulation—the ePrivacy Directive—is finalized. In other words, there’s still more change ahead.

2. What is consent and how do I get it from my prospects?

Under GDPR, the only way your sales team can do any sort of outbound sales is if you have consent from your prospects to contact them. More specifically, the GDPR says that consent must be:

1. Freely given
2. Specific and transparent about what it will be used for
3. Able to withdraw it at any time

Consent is key to interacting with your sales leads under GDPR. So, let’s break down each of these factors to make sure you’re collecting it properly.

To show that consent was “freely given,” your lead has to explicitly click an opt in to receive communications from you (i.e. your opt-ins can’t be selected by default). It also means that consent to receive sales emails or calls can’t be a requirement for using your services.

When a prospect gives you consent, you need to be open and transparent about what you’re using that consent for. For example, if a prospect gives you their email to send them an eBook, you can’t then use that as consent to send them sales emails or unrelated content.

Finally, your prospects have to have the ability to withdraw consent at any time. This could mean an unsubscribe link on emails or some other way of contacting you to get off your list.

Because consent is such an important part of being GDPR compliant, you should always record when and how it was given. If a prospect emails you and asks why you have their information, you need to be able to say: “Here’s where we got your data. Here’s the link to our privacy notice. And here’s the unsubscribe link.”

As Chas explained, if there’s a guiding principle to consent, it’s to avoid surprises.

“Don’t make people surprised to see your name pop up in their inbox. You might have to remind them who you are and why they wanted to hear from you, but it can’t be a total surprise.”

3. Do I only need consent if I’m sending bulk emails? What about individual outreach?

Let’s keep this one simple: There is no legal difference between bulk emailing and one-to-one emailing when it comes to cold outreach under GDPR. That means even your “Just reaching out” emails need to have prior consent in order to be legal.

If you’re unsure if you have consent from a prospect to contact them, you probably don’t.

4. How can I build my outbound sales funnel under GDPR? Can I still buy lists of leads?

At this point, it might seem like building an outbound sales funnel is impossible under GDPR. But while some of your tactics and strategies will have to change, there are still ways to grow your list of leads:

1. Double down on content marketing and inbound sales: Both our GDPR experts agreed that inbound marketing and sales is going to become more important moving forward. You should also take time to make sure your forms are set up to properly gather personal data and get consent.
2. Buy relevant lists that have documented consent: You can still buy lists of leads under GDPR. However, to use those lists, they need to come with attached metadata explaining how and when each person gave consent. As long as you can prove they consented to receiving emails from you, the list is okay to use.
3. Advertise on sites that are relevant to your ideal customer: Advertising and getting inbound sales leads is still legal under GDPR. Again, you’ll need to make sure you’re gathering and tracking consent whenever you get a new lead.

5. How will GDPR affect cold calling?

Cold calling isn’t as restricted under GDPR as cold emails. That’s great news for all those sales teams that are already seeing success with cold calling. And if cold calling is not yet part of your sales proces, you might want to consider it now. (Check out this post for a simple framework to figure out if cold calling is feasible for your business.) However, you still need to identify yourself and tell your prospect who you work for, why you’re calling, and how you got their information.

You also need to make sure that you’re only calling companies who have either consented to receive your calls or who aren’t registered on a no-call list.

Unfortunately, there’s no EU-wide no-call list you can check. Instead, you’ll have to look on a nation-by-nation basis. For example, in the UK, businesses and individuals can register on either the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or the Corporate TPS (CTPS).

While cold calls aren’t as heavily scrutinized under GDPR, this all will most likely change when the ePrivacy Regulation becomes finalized next year. Under the proposed Regulation, unsolicited direct marketing by any means—including email, SMS, or automated calling machines—will be prohibited unless direct consent is given.

6. What is the difference between the GDPR and the ePrivacy Regulation?

We’ve mentioned the ePrivacy Regulation a few times already, but it’s worth taking a closer look at what it is and how it will affect sales teams.

As Chas explains, the GDPR is a “general” regulation. So, while it covers all of the EU, it’s only a baseline for data protection regulations. This means that if there’s a more specific regulation or set of data protection rules for an industry, those take precedence over the GDPR.

For example, law enforcement agencies have their own set of regulations around using personal data. So they would follow those rather than the GDPR.

The ePrivacy Regulation will be the more specific set of rules for electronic communication by sales and marketing teams. It covers everything from email to SMS, phone calls, messenger services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, and Skype as well as cookies and other forms of digital tracking.

Unfortunately, the Regulation is still being finalized, which means that there are no firm answers about exactly what it will entail. However, if you want to get a better idea of how it might impact your sales team, here’s a link to the current working proposal.

7. Can I send sales emails to someone I met at a conference or meet up?

If you use in-person events like conferences and meetups to build your sales pipeline, there are only a few minor changes you need to make to stay GDPR compliant.

First, you still need to get consent from your leads to receive sales emails or calls from you and be able to show that consent. This could be as easy as using your CRM like Close.io to write a short customer note, such as:

“I met Jim at X tradeshow and he asked me to follow up with him about our product/service.”

Alternatively, you can include your reason for reaching out to them in your email:

“Hey Jim! We met at the X conference last week and you asked me to follow up with more information about how my company can help you out with X, Y, and Z.”

This also applies if you’ve gotten a referral from a current customer. Ideally, you would have your current customer send an introductory email explaining why they’re putting you in touch. Otherwise, you need to make sure you explain how you got their information and why they would want to talk to you.

As Ken explains, a best practice in any of these situations is to send one tailored and targeted email rather than add a new contact to a sales automation.

8. How will GDPR affect inbound leads from content or webinars?

It’s probably clear by now that inbound sales and marketing is going to take a front seat under GDPR. It’s much easier to get consent when a prospect comes to you. However, you still need to make sure you’re getting the right kind of consent. When someone gives you their information, you need to make sure of a couple things:

You can only collect the personal data you need to do what you’re saying you’re doing. That means if you don’t need a prospect’s home address, phone number, and credit card number to sign up for a free trial, you can’t ask for it.

You need to be transparent about what they’re consenting to and who will get their information. Your opt-in form needs to say exactly what you’re going to be using their personal information for as well as be unchecked by default (to show their consent was “Freely given”). Double opt-ins are always recommend to make sure you’re getting consent properly.

And what if you use partnerships like webinars or co-branded courses to share leads?

This is still legal, but you’ll have to make sure your opt-in explicitly states that you’ll be sharing their information with third parties. And as always, you’ll need to give them an easy way to opt-out of future communication.

9. Can I still use services like Clearbit and FullContact to enrich data about prospects?

A lot of outbound sales teams use services like Clearbit and FullContact to find out more about their prospects and who’s visiting their site. And while these services aren’t prohibited under GDPR, staying compliant with them will come down to the details.

As Ken explains, if you’re using personal data from one of these services, you need to know:

• What personal data has the individual consented to having collected?
• What fields are being transferred?
• How exactly does the data flow?

The easiest way to figure this out is to look at your provider’s GDPR position statement or privacy policy.

Under GDPR, EU customers have the right to ask for all the information you have on them and where you sourced it from. So, if you don’t know where a service is getting their data from, you’re going to have issues answering any questions your prospects have.

10. What are the risks of not following the GDPR when cold emailing or calling?

So what happens if you don’t follow these rules? Well, that’s where the GDPR gets a little scary.

Each country in the EU has its own regulatory body that will enforce the GDPR (such as the ICO in the UK or CNIL in France). If you’re found guilty of violating the regulations, they have the right to:

1. Fine you up to 4% of your worldwide annual revenue from the past financial year
2. Shut your business down until you can prove you’re compliant

Data subjects also have the right to sue you for misuse or mishandling of their personal data. If you run into someone who knows their rights and doesn’t want to receive your sales emails or calls, you might be in a situation where they file a complaint.

To give yourself the best chance of not running into these issues, it’s important to get organized as soon as possible. Inventory all the ways you’re using data in the EU and be clear about what you’re doing with that data and how you’re going to justify it legally when people ask.

As Chas says, if you’re just reacting to GDPR instead of being proactive about compliance, the consequences are potentially company ending.

GDPR might sound like a burden for your sales team. But there are some benefits.

GDPR is bringing some major changes to the way outbound sales teams work. But it’s not all bad news. As Ken explains, the spirit of GDPR is to make sure that you’re only reaching the right customers at the right time:

“Instead of dealing with 98% of people who want nothing to do with them, sales teams will only deal with people who are more interested in what they’re selling.”

“Plus, many potential customers fear contacting companies as they believe they will be bombarded for years by low-quality pitches and have their data resold to other companies. With GDPR, these fears will abate and prospects will be more likely to engage companies to purchase their products.”

Don’t think of GDPR as something meant to kill your outbound sales process. Instead, it’s a shift in the way you think about who your ideal customer is and how to get in touch with them. Do that right and the only difference under GDPR is that you’ll have a small list of qualified leads, rather than a massive list of people who don’t want to hear from you. 

As a Value-Added Reseller, your goal is to drive business value through point-of-sale products. Communicating those values is crucial for any successful VAR, especially when it comes to capturing leads and increasing sales. Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on attracting customers through relevant and useful content and adding value to every single stage of the customer buying journey. Resellers can utilize inbound marketing to create a strong buying journey for potential customers.

If you want to increase sales and successfully communicate the value of the products you are offering, it is time to ramp up your marketing and sales strategy with these five inbound best practices:

1. Clearly Identify Your Target Audience

The most important place to start is creating an inbound strategy is identifying who your target audience is. Focusing on “restaurant” and “retail” as targets are too broad. Instead, it is important to take the time to research and understand the various merchant niches out there. Beyond understanding a merchant’s pain points, it is important to find out how each and every one of your products addresses the customer experience, payment processing, inventory management, mobility, and so on. That way, your marketing is tailored to best address those particular pain points and the benefits that each product can offer to remedy those.

A good place to start in looking at past sales to highlight the key attributes of your best sales leads. Identify their budget, their business-size, specific industry, end-user issues, existing networks, and goals. This information can be used for content creation, vetting, lead scoring, and also forming questions to ask future prospects.

2. Leverage Content Marketing

Chances are, you are probably working with a payment processor and chances are, that payment processor has a marketing department that has produced a variety of content. It is wise to reach out to the marketing department and ask what content has already been produced such as – case studies, white papers, eBooks, surveys, and even videos. All of these pieces of content will help position you as a subject matter expert or thought leader.

If you want to go the route of creating content for your own blog or website, fresh content can help with search engine optimization (SEO) and can drive more traffic to your website or blog. From there, leads can be generated through calls to action within the content. Although, the most budget-friendly and easy approach to this strategy is through finding ways to repurpose existing content as opposed to investing time and energy into a high volume of new and original content. If you have already written a blog, information for a landing page, a social media post, or an email, some of that content can be repurposed into a new blog or post. Beyond the content itself, it is important to promote what you do have, even if it is not a lot. Tell your current clients about your blog or site or social media page and be sure to repost your content frequently.

3. Analyze Data to Drive Marketing Actions

Automation tools for marketing make it increasingly easy to track new prospects as they are being converted (or not) into a customer. With consistent analysis of website data and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data about various campaigns and sales, you can determine what is working and what is not.

Key metrics to define and track:

• Number of leads per month
• Number of sales leads per month
• Dollar value of sales opportunities and closing value, including close rate
• Conversion rate (from prospect to lead)
• Conversion of cold leads to MQLs or SQLs

4. Embrace Social Media

LinkedIn seems to be the social media channel of choice for most resellers but the best social media approach is one that considers having a strong and effective presence in more than one avenue. Twitter and Facebook are both great ways to cross-link your content by sharing across multiple channels. Social media can be embraced both organically and through paid efforts.

Social selling is another great practice to add to your inbound strategy. Join the conversation with other key players in target industries and engage a social media audience through sharing pertinent information. Respond quickly to questions and work to create a dialogue on your personal page and throughout your feed.

These four tips aim to improve your overall marketing approach, which in turn will create stronger leads and increase sales. Focusing on inbound marketing, as opposed to reactionary marketing methods, not only establishes you as a thought-leader and trusted partner, but it also increases your outreach and broadens your audience base.

You’ve heard the saying, “time is money”.

Increasing sales productivity is one of the most powerful growth levers for any company.

A well-oiled inbound sales machine means reps spend less time working low quality leads, and more time closing sales. More leads in, more revenue out.

But, for many B2B organizations the sales engine is not turning. In fact, almost half of B2B sales reps list lead quantity and quality as their top challenge:

(Source)

Sales teams are spending too much time working leads that aren’t ready to buy, or don’t have any to work at all. This might explain why only 15% of sales rep time is spent engaging prospects (Alexander Group).

This lead qualification is a major problem for many B2B organizations. Marketing teams to stop measuring success by lead volume, and start collaborating more closely with the sales team to ensure they are delivering the right content to generate demand, nurture leads, and enable the sales reps further down the funnel.

But, don’t just take our word for it. Here are 15 lead qualifications stats and takeaways that might make you rethink your lead generation approach.

57% of B2B companies identify ‘converting qualified leads into paying customers’ as a top priority. (MarketingSherpa)

Takeaway: The days when marketing and sales operated in siloes are over.

Today, marketing and sales teams need to be tightly aligned and a set of shared goals and KPIs to work from (i.e. marketing only celebrates when sales does).

Both teams should be in regular communication about the questions each persona is asking at different stages of the sales funnel. These questions should be driving content creation in the brand awareness, consideration, and sales enablement phases:

(Source)

There are many benefits to having a symbiotic marketing and sales relationship:

1. Sales teams can send a link to every prospect who asks a specific question
2. Marketing can create targeted content to fill gaps at pivotal points in the sales cycle
3. Articles can rank for specific question-based search terms, which can help build authority and brand awareness
4. Sales have all the content needed to close qualified prospects who are deep in the consideration phase of the sales cycle

61% of B2B marketers find generating high-quality leads as their biggest challenge. (B2B Technology Marketing Community)

Takeaway: Before jumping into any lead or demand generation campaigns, B2B marketers need to get crystal clear on their ideal customer profile.

Specifically, there are 3 focus areas:

1. WHO are your target customers – basic demographics, job title, location etc?
2. WHERE does your ideal customer consumer information online?
3. WHAT messaging will help them move through each stage of the funnel?

Only once you are clear on all three of these areas will you be able to drive out an efficient distribution strategy that targets, and nurtures leads across each stage of the funnel.

If you’re struggling to iron out your personas, here is a handy little template from the folks over at Digital Marketer that will help simplify the process:

67% of lost sales are as a result of sales reps not properly qualifying their potential customers before taking them through the full sales process.

Takeaway: Only a small portion of the leads you generate will actually be ready to purchase.

It’s critical that any B2B organization has a structured lead scoring and nurturing system in place.

The lead scoring model should be used to identify who is ready to move onto the next stage in the funnel, and the nurturing campaigns should be the vehicle that moves them from one stage to another.

Getting both the scoring and nurturing components in place is the key to greasing a well-oiled funnel that passively moves prospects from interested to paying customer.

61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (MarketingSherpa)

Takeaways: Not all leads are created equal.

When it comes to the lead qualification process, it’s critical that you understand the different lead types, and their content needs.

(Source)

This insight will ensure you are sending the right message to the right people, at the right time.

Here is a quick breakdown of the different lead types to consider:

Prospects: These people fit your buyer persona, but have not expressed an explicit interest in your product or service yet. Identifying the prospects is the first step in the sales process.

Leads: These people are unqualified prospects that are showing signs of interest or buying intent. This is where marketing and sales teams needs to collaborate on, and brainstorm the specific types of behavior that would signal buying intent.

MQLs: These people are Marketing Qualified Leads, or folks who have expressed a direct interest in your product or service. This interest will usually be expressed by actions such as an ebook download. For a detailed guide on defining your MQLs, check out this article.

SQLs: These are people who have shown a strong interest in your product or service, and a clear intent to buy. The label is applied to a prospect that has been researched and vetted – first by marketing and then by sales – and it has been determined the lead is ready to be closed into a paying customer.

Sales Opportunities: The people have been fully qualified as a potential customer. They have expressed pain, budget, purchase authority, and are ready to make a decision. They are in your pipeline, and in touch with sales reps. You’re confident about closing them into paying customers.

Closed: People who have paid for your product or service. The next step is to nurture these people to encourage upsells, cross-sells, referrals and product/service feedback.

It’s critical for B2B organizations to clearly outline the different types of leads, and content needs at each stage of the funnel. This insight will help you differentiate the prospects from the SQLs, and help prevent sales team members from working leads who aren’t ready to buy.

Only 3% of your market is actively buying – 56% are not ready and 40% are poised to begin. (Vorsight)

Takeaway: Marketers need to be forward thinkers, building relationships with buyers long before they are thinking of themselves as “buyers” to win in the context of today’s rapidly evolving buyer journey.

Only 25% of marketing-generated leads are typically of a high enough quality to immediately advance to sales. (Gleanster Research)

Takeaway: 90% of the buying process is over before a B2B prospect ever talks to a sales person.

Buyers are more educated than ever before, and there are more stakeholders involved in the decision making process.

This combination of buyer power and stakeholder involvement makes the buying process more complex, and longer than ever before:

(Source)

As a result, the information needs of your buyers has grown exponentially. Buyers are considering multiple solutions, eliminating inferior options, and returning to consume materials at different stages of the funnel multiple times before making a decision:

(Source)

B2B companies need to invest more resources into content marketing, lead nurturing and sales enablement strategies to properly engage, educate and give buyers the information they need to realize “problem-solution” fit.

According to Forrester research, only 8% of B2B companies have sales and marketing departments that are tightly aligned.

Takeaway: Up until recent years, the traditional selling process looked like this:

1. Marketing would collect leads and hand them over to the sales team
2. The sales team would hammer leads with calls and emails in an aggressive attempt to close the sale as fast as possible

The departments operated in silos.

While this “us-and-them” old school mentality might have worked in the past, times have changed. Buyers now have access to a mountain of information to help identify the best solutions for their problems.

Buyers no longer need help in the research phase – they chat with sales when they are ready to buy.

This behavioral change has made it imperative for organizations to break down the siloed walls that once stood between marketing and sales.

Today, sales teams rely heavily on the marketing team to produce content that helps qualify leads, tell a story, communicate value, and ultimately move leads down the funnel from prospect to paying customer.

Organizations with tightly-aligned sales and marketing had 36% higher customer retention rates and achieved 38% higher sales win rates, among other bottom line benefits:

Despite the numbers, misalignment between marketing and sales teams is still a huge problem, and remains one of the top challenges preventing B2B companies from hitting their marketing objectives:

The weakest point in your marketing funnel should not be the hand off between marketing and sales. It’s time to get both sides on the same page.

While sales productivity is typically the responsibility of marketing, marketing does not put a high priority on it — only 4% of marketing resources are allocated to sales productivity initiatives (Docurated)

(Source)

Takeaway: Marketing teams need to understand their responsibility to drive high quality leads into the top of the funnel, nurture and educate them to point at which they are ready to speak to the sales team.

Aside for lead generation, it is also the responsibility of the marketing team to produce sales enablement assets that allow teams to meet the information needs of the SQLs and sales opportunities.

Conducting a lead generation program without first investing in clean data wastes 27.3% of each sales rep’s time, or 546 hours on average a year per rep (Kissmetrics)

Takeaway: This is an incredible amount of time wasted for sales reps and the worst part is it is completely avoidable.

Marketing data is among some of the most valuable and effective assets any sales company can have. This data gives your the ability to know not only who has shown interest in your products, but how to most effectively reach them.

Which is why it is so shocking to see so many companies without clean data in their lead generation programs. Two of the main ways companies can have “dirty” data is by having duplicate or missing/inaccurate data.

This can lead to sales rep’s efforts being wasted trying to contact prospective clients with inaccurate contact information, or sorting through and deleting duplicate entries.

A whopping 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel. (MarketingSherpa)

Takeaway: Without a clearly defined sales funnel the lead generation process is fundamentally broken. You are unable to determine where leads are in the buying process, and have no way of determining which content to serve to move them further down the funnel.

All leads end up getting treated equally. And, as we’ve seen, this results in low close rates and lot of wasted time for sales reps.

Once you have identified the main buyer personas, the next step should be identifying and mapping content to each stage in the buying cycle.

A couple questions you will want to answer before defining your funnel are:

1. What are the information needs at each stage of the funnel?
2. What distribution channels should be used to target each stage of the funnel?
3. How will you move leads from one stage of the funnel to the next?
4. How will you know if a lead has moved from one stage of the funnel to another?
5. How will you identify gaps or leaks in the funnel?
6. How will you use sales team insights to feed content at each stage of the funnel?

(Source)

Just 44% of companies use lead scoring systems. (DecisionTree)

Takeaway: Lead scoring is what greases the cogs in a well-oiled sales engine. If you want to make sure leads arrive on time and are qualified, you need to establish a standardized set of conditions or rules to determine when leads move from one stage of the funnel to another.

It’s kind of like automated quality assurance.

A higher score means the prospect is more interested and intends to buy; lower scores indicate they are not and require more nurturing.

High-performing B2B marketing and sales teams are constantly testing and adjusting the lead scoring criteria to ensure it correlates as closely as possible to conversion rates and buying behavior.

When lead scoring models are too simple or not weighted correctly, the sales team takes the hit. They end up wasting time following up with leads who have been shipped over from the marketing automation platform that are not qualified, or ready to buy.
This probably explains why only 40% of salespeople say they find lead scoring valuable.

An automated lead scoring model can be a catalyst for your sales engine. If you don’t have one set up already, check out this article.

65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. (MarketingSherpa)

Takeaway: Close to 96% of leads are not ready to buy on their first touch.

An effective lead nurturing program will help you engage, educate and move people down the sales funnel on autopilot. It should be developed in concert with your lead scoring model.

A few ways a lead nurturing program will put you ahead of the majority of the competition:

1. Establish contact immediately: speed of contact is the key to connecting with leads. An InsideSales.com study found that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first to an inquiry
2. Become a trusted advisor: People do business with people they know, like and trust.
3. Identify pain points: Lead nurturing emails are a great way to learn more about your leads – what challenges are they facing?
4. Segment your audience: Use behavior-based event triggers to automatically move leads into message sequences that automate the movement of leads through the sales funnel.
5. Close leads faster: Market2Lead found nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle.

If you don’t have a lead nurturing program in place, it’s time to get one set up. It’s one of the fastest ways to boost sales productivity.

Expertise in lead nurturing results in a 50% increase in sales-ready leads, along with a 33% decrease in its cost. (Forrester Research via HubSpot)

(source)

Takeaway: Smart marketers follow the ROI, and stats like these make nurturing your leads a hard tactic to argue with.

A CRM system is believed by 84% of companies to be beneficial in determining lead quality. (Demand Metric Research Corporation)

Takeaway: There are several distinct advantages companies get from working with a quality CRM:

1. Real time information to lead data. Knowing the number of lead touch points, the origin of the contact, and the events that eventually led to the sale is all extremely valuable information for the marketing (lead scoring model and content distribution strategy) and sales team.
2. It will not only help you keep track of lead data, but it can also drive your lead scoring and nurturing systems. This will ensure leads are given the right type of information at each stage in the funnel.

Only 16% of marketers say outbound practices provide the highest quality leads for sales (Hubspot)

Takeaway: Inbound marketing still reigns as the leader when it comes to quality lead generation. It makes sense when you consider inbound leads came to you, not the other way around.

(Source)

While inbound marketing is effective, it’s becoming brutally competitive. On WordPress alone, 91.8 million blog posts are published every month.

People are drowning in content. As a result, standing out amidst all the noise and engage your target audience is harder than ever before.

Marketers are being forced to think outside the box, and look at ways to create content that not only engages, but also qualify readers faster.

Enter: interactive content.

It generates two times more conversions than passive content, and 88% of marketers say it differentiates them from the competition.

As a result, more marketers are starting to invest in interactive content types:

If you’re looking to level-up your inbound marketing campaigns, and better qualify leads without having to gate everything, consider using a platform like SnapApp to create highly engaging assets – calculators, quizzes and knowledge tests, interactive infographics and more – in minutes.

You can see how 28 different B2B companies are using interactive content to drive more quality leads into their sales funnels here.

Your keyword rankings are fluctuating…

We’ve all been there.

A page or article you’ve been trying to rank for months finally hits the first page of Google.

Your traffic stats are climbing.

The leads are pouring in.

And you’re getting giddy waiting for them to turn into sales.

Then, one day, you check your rankings and your webpage has dropped to the bottom of the first page.

Or worse, to the no man’s land of the second page.

Just like weather conditions, keyword ranking fluctuations are a natural part of SEO.Click To Tweet

So you proceed with the most natural course of action: You freak out and send an anxiety-ridden email to your team or agency.

Then, two days later, the article is back at its rightful position again, and you release a massive sigh of relief.

However, at the back of your mind, you’re wishing you could just stay at the top of the first page permanently.

Unfortunately, you can’t.

Ranking fluctuations like these are a natural part of SEO.

Just like changing weather conditions, if you monitor almost any keyword over a period of days, weeks, and (most certainly) months, you will see the results constantly adjusting and changing.

In this article, I’m going to teach you why rankings fluctuate like this, what to expect, and when it is actually time to freak out and take a new course of action.

Let’s get started:

Why Do Search Engine Rankings Fluctuate?

Everything Google does is in accordance with its ultimate goal:

To provide the best results to the searcher.

Why is this their goal?

Because it entices more people to use their search engine, which in turn maximizes their advertising revenue (which totaled 24.6 billion in 2016). Google makes most of their income from search advertising, so search result quality is one of the company’s top priorities.

To continually improve its search results, Google’s ranking algorithm is constantly adjusting to meet this goal, and Google engineers are always adjusting the algorithm itself, as well.

This leads to almost constant fluctuations in the search results based on a host of factors getting more complex as time goes on.

Now, this might sound scary to you.

If Google is constantly changing their results, how can you ever hope to hold a first-page position?

Fortunately, most of these fluctuations are small adjustments.

You might drop a few spots, maybe a page, then bump back up again in a day or two. You might rise a few spots and drop back down again as well.

And if you checked your traffic stats, the change would be marginal. Over a month or two, it would be averaged out.

This is Google’s algorithm trying to find the most optimal ranking order for that search term.

However, it’s also a way for Google to mess with website owner’s heads a bit.

Google sometimes plays games like these to induce you to make a mistake — to build risky links and potentially uncover yourself as someone who games the algorithm.

That way, they can remove you from the rankings and not have to worry about you anymore.

So when you notice a ranking change, it’s important not to make a rash decision.

Many factors could have caused this change.

Factors For Keyword Ranking Fluctuations

Google uses over 200 factors to determine a page’s rank in the search results.

However, not all of them cause the temporary fluctuations you may notice over a few days or weeks.

Here are a few that do:

Note: Assume that each of these are discussed with all other factors being equal.

Site Age

The older your website is, the more Google trusts it relative to newer websites.

Newer websites are also put into the “Google sandbox.”

While in the sandbox, a website’s rankings are usually held back or fluctuate at a greater rate than they otherwise would.

(The sandbox usually lasts anywhere from three to nine months after the site was created.)

Age of the Page

Similar to site age, Google trusts specific pages which have been around longer than other pages.

So if your page is newer, expect it to fluctuate more if the pages around it are a lot older.

News Content (Temporal)

News, or temporal, content fluctuates more than any type of content. If you’re producing news content, expect your rankings and traffic to shift considerably.

Types of Links Built

While Google may not have enough evidence to penalize you, if you’ve built mostly grey or black hat links this may cause your rankings to be more unstable. If you’ve built mostly white hat links, your rankings probably won’t fluctuate as much, but can still jump around a good bit.

How Long You Have Been on the First Page

The time you have been on the first page is also a fluctuation factor.

Newer first page rankings will typically experience more fluctuation than pages that have been on the first page for months or years.

Your Position on the First Page

Finally, the top 3 to 5 results experience less fluctuation than the bottom 5 to 7.

This is yet another incentive to try to reach those coveted top spots.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of factors that can cause temporary changes in your rankings, but they are some of the most common.

In these cases, your ranking shifts are normal and are nothing to worry about.

Continue with your usual SEO activities and they will most likely readjust after a few days or a week or two. Although sometimes it can take longer.

However, there are certain cases when it is definitely time to freak out and change your course of action.

Should You Freak Out After a Ranking Fluctuation?

Put simply, you should freak out if your rankings look like the following (and stay like this for three or more weeks):

This website’s “overall” rankings dropped from a first-page average to below the tenth page (practically invisible) and stay there for weeks.

This is a tell-tale sign of a Google algorithmic penalty.

Small or large ranking fluctuations are normal, especially on a page by page basis.

But large, site-wide ranking drops like this are not.

This website owner has made a mistake with their link building practices or site architecture, and it’s time to identify the mistake and rectify it.

What to Do For an Abnormal Fluctuation

If you’re working with an SEO agency, the first thing you should do is get in touch with them.

A reputable agency will know how to identify what caused the penalty and how to go about fixing it.

They will also be able to tell you if your worries are unfounded.

That is if it’s just a fluctuation, not a penalty.

So if you are ever worried, the best thing to do is contact your agency first.

If you’re doing your own SEO, you need to determine whether it’s an algorithmic or manual penalty.

Algorithmic penalties lead to ranking drops (like in the example above), but your pages are still in the search results.

With manual penalties, your website is removed from the SERPs completely.

Manual penalties require you to fix the issue Google found and reapply to be indexed again.

Algorithmic penalties are a bit more obscure, as you won’t know exactly what you did wrong.

The most common case I come across these days is over-optimized anchor text, but you can’t know for sure until you start cleaning up your backlink profile and monitor what happens to your rankings.

Summing It All Up

Temporary keyword ranking fluctuations are a natural part of SEO.

So there’s no need to freak out in these cases, especially if it’s on a page by page basis.

However, if your entire website drops in the SERPs, you know that something went wrong and it’s time to make a change in your SEO practices.

Want more SEO help? Download my SEO book Free instantly!

Sellers consistently struggle to connect with their buyers in an overcrowded and noisy sales landscape. Conventional wisdom tells us that the more personal we are in our communications with buyers, the better results we’ll see. But do we know if sales email personalization is truly effective? And if so, it still leaves a lot of open questions about best practices, the amount of personalization to include, and establishing the right time/effort tradeoff to maximize results.

Organizations need to rethink their sales email strategy in the age of GDPR for sales. Many are taking the regulation as the catalyst to focus on authenticity and value. It’s time to build a discipline around sales email personalization.

The movement away from the “spray and pray” sales emails is like Toys-R-Us going out of business. We loved the convenience but you can get better results by going somewhere else. That “somewhere else” for sales emails is personalization. Here is the research that will get you started.

Over the past months, our data science team has been exploring the role of personalization and its impact on key performance metrics. The goal of the research is to answer many of the lingering questions that keep sales leaders and sellers up at night. Specifically:

* Does email personalization really increase performance?
* What is the right “amount” of personalization?
* Is there such a thing as too much personalization?
* Where does personalization show an impact?

The Research

Building on our work examining over 200 million sales interactions and uncovering cadence best practices, the data science team decided to dig a little deeper, focusing solely on email interactions to examine the questions above.

The team analyzed a data set of over 6 million sales emails and explored how the amount of personalization in an email impacted its performance. Email performance was limited to directly attributable metrics – email opens and email replies. While not a perfect measure, it’s one that the team felt best allowed them to monitor the impact of personalization without introducing other potentially “noisy” variables.

They began by tracking the email template used to create the email to send to a prospect and compared it to the final email that was actually sent. To compare the difference between the two versions, a proprietary personalization algorithm was developed. The output of this algorithm was a percentage value – indicating the proportion of personalization used for any specific email sent to a prospect or customer. At its simplest level, email interactions that were vastly different than the original template had a higher percentage, reflecting a higher degree of personalization. Conversely, emails sent with little to no change from the original template earned a low proportion of personalization.

Some examples of personalization that sellers leverage in emails include:

• Unique to the individual (attended the same college, worked at the same company, know people in common)
• Aligned to the buyers’ unique challenges (positioned by specific knowledge of the buyer’s pain points)
• Account or company-based (positioned by the specific company that the buyer represents)
• Persona-based (positioned by the role of the buyer)
• Sales stage-based (positioned by where the buyer is in the sales cycle)

While the “type” of personalization utilized was not directly examined in detail in this research, it will serve as a framework for future research.

Insights for Action

Personalization requires both time and effort and up to this point, there has been little solid investigation into the effectiveness of personalization in sales emails. Sales leaders are constantly struggling to strike the right balance between their teams’ time spent personalizing emails and their efficiency in performing sales activities. This research aimed to uncover some of the answers and elucidate insights to improve a seller’s ability to connect with their buyers.

The results of the research demonstrated a number of key insights:

Too Many Are Not Personalizing (It’s Not Personal)
Many sellers are simply not personalizing at all. A majority of sales emails sent contained no discernable difference between the selected template and the final sent email. While this may seem surprising considering the widely held-belief that personalization leads to higher performance, many companies personalize only certain emails in a cadence. Another explanation for the majority not personalizing might be through the use of a highly-targeted template process, matching email messaging to their buyers without the need to adjust the template itself. While both of these options are viable, chances are that most organizations are placing more emphasis on the quantity of email activities over the quality of the content in those emails.

As you’ll see further into the research, even a small amount of personalization can go a long way. Since a large number of emails reaching buyers contain little to no personalization, there exists an opportunity for sellers to drive differentiation from their competitors by crafting messaging directly speaking to their buyers.

A Little Personalization Goes a Long Way. A Really Long Way.
Sellers that are personalizing their sales email communications – even a little bit – are significantly outperforming those who use little to no personalization in their emails. We found that, up until about 20 percent personalization in emails, there were steady increases in both open and reply rates with each percentage increase in personalization. By personalizing 20 percent of email content, open rates increased over 40 percent on average and reply rates increased 112 percent compared with emails with no personalization at all.

The graphic below illustrates the increase in open rate as the proportion of personalization increases. With no personalization, open rates averaged around 23 percent. By personalizing 20 percent of the email content, the open rate increased to 33 percent.

Similarly, as the chart below illustrates, reply rates at 20 percent personalization followed a similar pattern – increasing from 3.1 percent with no personalization to 6.6 percent with 20 percent personalization.

Personalization – The Secret Formula.
Within the data, pockets of heightened performance or “sweet spots” emerged. When examining email opens, two such areas appeared at 17-20 percent and again at around 80 percent personalization before tailing off dramatically with personalization more than 80 percent of an email.

For email replies (see chart below), we again see a spike at around 20 percent personalization before entering a period of diminishing returns. There is another slight peak around the 80 percent personalization mark.

Personalizing 80 percent of your email obviously requires a significant time investment. As such, the first spike we see in the above chart, at 17-20 percent personalization, appears to be an optimal balance between effort and reward. Many sales teams have begun using a 10/80/10 model. This approach means they personalize the first and last 10 percent of an email while keeping the remaining 80 percent of the template consistent with the original content.

Too Much Personalization May Not Be a Good Thing (More is Not Always More).
We are inclined to believe that an email entirely customized to the buyer will outperform any other. However, the team actually found that emails that were completely personalized (showed little to no similarity to the original email template) did not perform as well as expected, with performance dropping off significantly. One explanation of this is that these “bespoke emails” delivered by rogue reps deviate so significantly from the originally planned template, that the fundamental talking points and clarity of message are lost. Be mindful of going from personalized to personal.

Your Mileage May Vary. 
The team extended their research to examine how individual sales teams performed when personalization was included in their email communications. While there existed a lot of variation in the data, the pattern was clear – including personalization increased reply rates. The average ratio increase between 0 and 20 percent personalization was 1.93x the reply rate, with higher performing teams achiving up to 5.27x the reply rate. This supports the notion that the best teams get more out of their personalization efforts, possibly based on the quality of the content, overall product/market fit for the target company, the quality of prospect/customer data etc….

Start Personalizing Today

Personalization in emails is one small facet of creating better selling experiences for your buyers and improving performance. However, as the research indicates, it can prove to be an important one, and one easy to get started with. Below are a couple of quick ways to think about how your sales organization can get started, or improve upon your existing personalization efforts.

1) Conduct a Personalization Audit
It’s incumbent on every sales leader to have a good understanding of how their reps are sending emails. Are they capitalizing on their knowledge of the buyer? Or are they sending automated emails with little to no personalization? Conducting a quick audit on just a handful of emails should give you a good sense of whether or not reps customize any portion of their emails to prospects.

2) Start Slowly… But Do Start
If personalization is not standard practice for your team, it should be. The barrier to get started is low (read: it’s easy) and we’ve shown above that the reward is well worth the effort. No one wants to feel like a number. Personalization creates a more dynamic customer experience and enables salespeople to better engage prospects. Think about piloting with a single member or small team to assess its impact on performance metrics.

3) Operationalize Personalization
Are you doing everything you can to make it easy for your sales team to personalize? Find ways to integrate the data and insights your reps require into the tools they’re already using for email engagement. This way, they can (almost) effortlessly gain a better understanding of their prospects and customers and personalize more effectively to their buyers.

SalesLoft continues to be the platform of choice for customers looking to personalize their sales communications at scale – combining relevant personal and company data with proven templates to provide context when communicating. A native integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides the ability to uncover common connections, relevant ice-breakers, and company news directly into a person’s profile. Native integrations with Owler and Crystal provide company-level and personal-level insights that can be used to establish, develop, and deepen sales relationships

At SalesLoft, we are constantly striving to answer the questions that help provide better sales experiences for your buyers. Today’s buyers want – and expect – more than to be sold to. They want to feel understood and they want the sellers that they engage with to treat them as a partner, not a transaction. Going the extra mile with just 20 percent personalization can be the first step in building the right relationship for mutual success.

The post Sales Email Personalization Research Reveals Key to 2x Reply Rates appeared first on SalesLoft.

When I meet sales leaders for the first time, one of the questions I usually ask is, “Who is your top salesperson?” Very often, the answer is the name of a woman.

AI or artificial intelligence is, at its simplest definition, when a computer is capable of mimicking human intelligence and making decisions/taking action based on that intelligence.

We’ve been slowly evolving to AI being pretty commonplace for years. I’m not talking robot uprising. I’m really talking about tools that help us analyze data and choices to predict best outcomes. Odds are, you are taking advantage of AI today and just didn’t label it as such. The iPhone’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are simple examples of AI. Both use machine learning technology to get smarter based on our choices and actions so they can serve our needs better with each interaction.

There’s no doubt, given all of the consumer data we have at our disposal today, that AI and marketing will merge in some pretty interesting ways. Granted, we’re talking infancy stages, but the truth is you are probably using it today without recognizing it.

Here’s a quick look at some of the elements of our work where AI is already present and will have an even bigger influence down the road.

Digital media: Given the almost infinite number of advertising options and the advent of programmatic media buying it’s easy to see how computer calculations and propensity modeling would save us time, remove the human bias and deliver projected outcomes. Results can be tracked, modeled, modified and improved upon in nanoseconds, as opposed to how long it would take us to do it manually.

Retargeting and ad targeting are two areas where AI is already playing a pivotal role and is getting better every day.

Content: As a writer, I will admit that I bristle at this idea. How can a computer possibly write as well as a human being? In many cases (at least for now) it can’t. A computer can’t generate copy that connects the emotional dots, but it can generate a report or content around factual dots. Check out Wordsmith.com and watch how they can take information like an earnings report or sporting outcomes and create very human-like copy.

There’s also the area of content creation. Can a computer watch what people view and buy and then use data to know what that consumer should be shown next? Amazon, Netflix, and Pandora are already showing us how effective this is. Why wouldn’t you want the same AI to be working on your website or other digital assets?

Who is your next buyer? This is a fascinating and sophisticated aspect of AI and marketing that many organizations have yet to explore. By using propensity modeling, predictive analysis can give you insight into who is ready to move from consideration to purchase and which of your existing customers is most likely to buy. It will also give you an idea of what kinds of offers (products, discounts, etc.) are most likely going to trigger that purchase decision.

From there, it’s an easy jump to dynamic pricing. AI would help you determine who needs a discounted price to convert and who is ready to buy without you having to give up part of your margin.

Earlier in the sales cycle, AI can help with lead scoring. The idea that a computer can sort through our prospect list and tell us where to concentrate our efforts is very appealing.

There are many industries and professions who are probably right to be a little nervous about AI. But for us marketers – AI is poised to be a huge advantage in how we work. It has the capability to help us measure and deliver ROI in a very efficient way, which allows us to spend even more time on the creativity and innovation sides of our business. Because in those spaces, we are irreplaceable.

 

The post Where do AI and marketing collide? appeared first on McLellan Marketing Group.

On this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, we talk with David Priemer, Founder of Cerebral Selling about using empathy in sales backed by science. 

What You’ll Learn

• The core elements of Cerebral Selling.
• Understanding proper buyer motivation.
• Using modern psychology to more effectively engage your prospects.
• The key tactics to effective discovery.
• How to ask questions in the right way.
• Proper objection-handling.
• Managing a sales process that leverages natural buyer behavior.

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast

• We’re on iTunes
• And on Stitcher

Show Agenda and Timestamps

1) Show introduction [00:10]

2) About David Priemer [0:41]

3) Highlights of David’s sales career [2:10]

4) The 2 components of Cerebral Selling [7:12]

5) What the data says about the discovery phase speed [17:07]

6) Emotion-based objections versus logic-driven objections [25:33]

7) Quick-fire Questions [33:39]

8) Sam’s Corner [40:08]

Sales Hacker Podcast—Sponsored by Gong.io

Sam Jacobs: Before we start, a quick thank you to this month’s Sales Hacker podcast sponsor Gong — the #1 conversation intelligence platform for sales. Gong helps you generate more revenue by having better sales conversations. It automatically captures and analyzes your team’s conversations so you can transform your team into quota-shattering super-sellers.

And now on with the show.

About David Priemer and Cerebral Selling: Baseball Card Stats

Sam Jacobs: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast. We’ve got a great episode today. My guest today is David Priemer. You may know David, or you may have seen him on panels on the startup sales circuit.

But David has over 20 years operating experience in b2b tech sales, beginning all the way back in 1997. He’s held every role in the sales organization. He’s done direct sales, service sales and has even been a sales engineer.

And, he himself is a four-time startup entrepreneur and has been through three acquisitions. The acquiring companies being Infor, IBM, and Salesforce.

Since leaving his most recent post at Influitive, he started a platform and a training organization called Cerebral Selling.

David Priemer: Thanks so much, Sam! That was a great intro. It sounds so much better when you say it.

Highlights of David’s Sales Career

David Priemer: There are two things here. When I got into sales, I started my career in solution engineering, and it was an expression of my curiosity. I was always interested in the “why?”.

Why do people buy things and why do they not? How am I going to showcase this solution to make it seem like it’s really, really great?

The second thing was that in the world of sales especially, customers start off by hating you. But sales has evolved so much over the last 20 years. I put these two together and decided it was a space I wanted to help people in.

Bonus read: 5 Game-Changing Trends Shaping the Future of Sales [New Report]

Sam Jacobs: Are there specific tactics?

David Priemer: I’m a big advocate for never falling in love with your tactics. Historically in sales, we think we’re encapsulated. We engage in activities that we otherwise wouldn’t. We cold call people and we ask, “Hey, do you have a few minutes to chat?.”

Or we ask them, “Hey, Sam, how you doing today?” Meanwhile, you know that I don’t care about how you’re doing. And I know that you know I don’t care about how you’re doing.

People just want to be treated like normal people. And sellers should be treating their prospective buyers in the same way that they would want to be treated.

The 2 Components of Cerebral Selling

1) Do the things that work

David Priemer: Look at what the data says and what the science says. I’m not talking the latest data about open rates on this particular email subject line, because those are very fleeting and can change. But the things that are have been shown to scientifically work in terms of persuasive tactics and messaging tactics like personalized emails.

2) Don’t be an asshole

When reps cold call, they invoke the sleazy used car salesman persona that every prospective buyer is on the lookout for, right? It takes a little of that behavior to trigger this response from a buyer. So, just don’t be an asshole.

What the Data Says About the Discovery Phase Speed

David Priemer: We can track back a lot of the conversion rates right to the discovery process or call. It’s not just the questions we ask, but it’s how we position the value of our solution.

The Exclusionary Principle

David Priemer: You could start off with, “Hey, look, this isn’t for everyone. I don’t know if this problem is big enough for us to help you solve.”

You might even invoke a mindset where you say, “I know we’re talking here in terms of discovery. I don’t know if our solution is a good fit for you.” It’s a mindset of the healthy skeptic.

But what happens is, most sellers go into the discovery process with confirmation bias. This way your pipeline has a lot of opportunities that are going nowhere.

Sales cycle length versus the discovery process

David Priemer: A quick look at the data and you know that you’ve spent more time losing than winning deals. Take a look a the time your spend on your discovery process. With my teams, what I found was that they we spending three times as long losing deals.

What this meant was that they spent three times as long in the discovery process because they walked in with a confirmation bias.

Emotion-based Objections versus Logic-Driven Objections

Sam Jacobs: I was reading this blog post that you’d written about the five categories related to objections in sales. And how to think about handling those objections. Walk us through that framework.

David Priemer: We all know that when a customer states an objection, it’s like iceberg. What we see is actually not the real objection. Here’s a fun little exercise to go through in your own business.

In sales, one of the most common objections that we get is budget. It’s too expensive. Go in your own company and write down the objection—it’s too expensive—and then a blank after it. Most often, prospects are just looking for logical answers.

Sometimes, they bubble derailing objections that could potentially make the sales cycle longer. The way to manage these derailing objections is to find those champions within that org who have positive views.

Quick-Fire Questions

Sales and marketing stack

David Priemer: Salesforce, DocuSign, Gong.io, Mixmax

David’s mentors

David Priemer: Definitely Tony Rodoni.

Top reads/podcasts

David Priemer: The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, To Sell Is Human by Dan Pink, and Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein.

Sam Jacobs: David, thank you so much for being a guest. I’m sure your website, cerebralselling.com is a very easy way to connect with you. Thanks again, and I look forward to talk to you soon!

David Priemer: Pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Sam!

Sam’s Corner

Hey everybody, it’s Sam’s corner! Another fantastic conversation, this time with David Priemer. He runs Cerebral Selling but has been working in sales management and sales leadership for 20 years.

I liked a lot of what David had to say. Particularly, as anybody that knows me knows I’m obsessed with the discovery phase. I really think that’s where 80% of the sale happens. The crux of discovery is asking questions.

Don’t Miss Episode 12

To check out the show notes, see upcoming guests, and play more episodes from our incredible lineup of sales leaders, visit www.saleshacker.com/podcast-subscribe

You can also find the Sales Hacking podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. If you enjoyed this episode please give us a share on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Finally, a special thanks again to this month’s sponsor, Gong. If you want to get in touch with me, find my social handles in my bio below.

I’ll see you next time!

The post PODCAST 11: How to Use Empathy in Sales [Backed by Science] appeared first on Sales Hacker.

A long time ago, IBM revolutionized sales with the introduction of BANT. The mantra is familiar to any salesperson: qualify your prospects based on their Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timeline.

This used to work well.

In a world where prospects didn't know and could not figure out solutions to their own problems via a simple Google search, their favorite blogs, or by posting a question on a social media site, they were reliant on salespeople. 

Salespeople could quickly identify a problem through a good well-delivered positioning statement, confirm the prospect's interest in fixing it, qualify on BANT, and schedule a presentation.

Today, prospects are much more informed about you and your competitor's products and services, have identified their own needs, and started to design their own solutions -- all before even thinking about talking to a salesperson.

While new research from RAIN has debunked the myth buyers are 57% of the way toward a buying decision when they first make contact with a salesperson, reps still have less control over the prospect's decision making process than ever before. Put simply, BANT isn't good enough anymore.

One sales qualification process we’ve developed internally to best qualify whether a prospect truly could benefit from our products and services is a three-part framework called GPCTBA/C&I that we go through during an exploratory call.

Yes, we totally agree this is the longest string of acronyms in sales, ever, but it works. Here's a breakdown of each part of this sales qualifying process.

Want to help your team better track prospects through this process? Try the HubSpot CRM -- it's free.

1. GPCT (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline)

Ask questions and listen to your prospect:

• What are your prospect's goals?
• What are their company's goals?
• Are these goals something your product can help them achieve?
• What are your prospect’s plans to achieve his or her goals, and the company’s goals?
• Based on your experience helping hundreds of people in their situation, do you think their plan will get them to their goals? Is there a better way?
• Does their current plan require a product like yours?
• What challenges are your prospects facing, or do they anticipate facing, as they implement their plan?
• Can your product help the prospect overcome or avoid these challenges?
• What is the timeline for implementing their plan and achieving their goals?
• Based on your experience and their situation, is that timeline reasonable?

Goals

The goals you want to identify are quantifiable goals your prospect wants or needs to hit. There are really only a few reasons to buy any product: to make more money, save money, or avoid some risk of losing money.

Sometimes, companies haven't defined or quantified these goals very effectively or they haven't determined how their high-level goals relate to their day-to-day metrics or milestones. This is opportunity number one for salespeople to establish themselves as an advisor by beginning to help prospects reset or quantify their goals.

When discussing goals, salespeople can often help prospects think even bigger or more realistically based on their experience helping others in similar situations. For example, at HubSpot, we often help marketers determine lead generation goals based on their company's sales targets.

Many times, we have to revise lead generation goals down based on the marketer's bandwidth. More often than not, though, we can help a marketer figure out how to more predictably hit their target with less effort or expense than they thought. Some qualification questions you can ask include:

• What is your top priority in 2013?
• Do you have specific company goals?
• Do you have published revenue goals for this upcoming quarter/year?
• Are there any other company goals that are important?
• Do you have personal goals that go along with these?

Plans

Now that you have a sense of what the prospect's individual and company goals are, you want to find out what their current plans are that they will implement in order to achieve these goals.

You want to really nail down whether they tried this before and how it worked. You want to know why they think their plan will succeed or fail, what changes they've made along the way in their plan and why, as well as what their backup plans are if their current plans don't work out.

During this process, you want to begin making your own assessment of whether you think their plan will get them to their goal. Listen for excuses such as "the economy was bad last year, we should do better with reaching goals this year" -- that might tip you off to the fact that they aren't really in control and confident that their plan will work without a little intervention from a higher being ... or someone like you.

You're also listening for good plans such as "We plan to do X, Y, and Z to grow our revenue by 25%." Usually, as you poke holes, your prospect will admit that they aren't 100% certain their plan will work perfectly to help them achieve their goals. At this point, you should get permission to suggest new and better ways that they can get where they need to go. Ask questions such as:

• What did you do last year? What worked and what didn't? What are you going to do differently this year?
• Do you think xyz might make it hard to implement your plan?
• Do you anticipate that implementing this plan will go smoothly?
• Do you have the right resources available to implement this plan?
• Would you like to hear about how other people I've worked with have implemented plans like these?
• Are you open to thinking differently this year about how to reach your goals?

Challenges

The most important moment in any sale is determining whether you can help a prospect overcome their and their company's challenges; ones they're dealing with as well as ones they (or you) anticipate.

Most companies don't invest money just to achieve a goal. They'll prefer to just do more of what they're already doing, and will resist change until they really need to make change. That usually happens because what they've done just isn't working or they ran into a challenge they simply can't overcome. The trick is getting prospects to admit that they are stuck.

Questions you can use to establish challenges are:

• Why do you think you'll be able to eliminate this challenge now, even though you've tried in the past and you're still dealing with it?
• Do you think you have the internal expertise to deal with these challenges?
• What are specific hurdles that you think may stop you from reaching your goals?
• How are you addressing these challenges in your plan?
• If you realize early enough in the year that this plan isn't fixing this challenge, how will you shift gears?

Timeline

It's all about timing. When do they need to achieve their goal? When can they implement their plan? When do they need to eliminate this challenge?

If your prospect doesn't have bandwidth to deal with these issues or has more important goals that take precedence, their timeline might be "in the future" and you have to make the decision whether to invest time now or not. Determine whether you can help them at this time or not by asking questions such as:

• How quickly do these results need to be achieved?
• When will you begin implementing this plan?
• Is hitting this goal a priority right now?
• What else is a priority right now?
• What other complementary (or competitive) solutions are you evaluating?
• Do you have bandwidth and resources to implement this plan now?
• Would you like help thinking through the steps involved in executing this plan, so you can figure out when you should implement each piece?
• Is it more likely that you will revise the goals, or revise the timeline, if they aren't realistic?

2. BA (Budget and Authority)

If you've determined that you can help your prospect achieve their goals, implement their plan, overcome their challenges --- all within their required timeline -- it's time to start talking about how they'll make the decision and where the funding is coming from.

Budget

It’s critical to establish what your prospect’s budget is. After all, you can't help them if they can't invest in your solution. Assuming you've done a good job quantifying their goals and challenges, now's the time to remind them of the upside and confirm that they agree on the potential ROI.

Next, you should find out what else they're spending money on. If they're investing elsewhere to solve the same problems and it's not working, and you have a solution that can do it more effectively and within budget, you can say something like:

"We've established that your goal is X and that you're spending Y now to try and achieve X. But it's not working. In order to hire us, you will need to invest Z. Since Z is pretty similar to Y and you're more confident that our solution will get you to your goal, do you believe it makes sense to invest Z to hire us?"

Authority

In a world where prospects are busy, buying committees are formed to find solutions and lower level non-budget-wielding, non-people-managing employees are sent to search the internet for the latest and greatest goal-achieving, challenge-overcoming solutions.

As a result, salespeople often don't get to talk to the economic decision maker until later in the process, if ever. Yes, great salespeople still call higher-ups. But realistic salespeople are willing to try and turn influencers into champions.

A mistake many buyers and sellers make is thinking that the right way to sell internally is to make it an internal conversation. Make sure to stay involved by guiding the process with the influencer:

• Are the goals we've discussed important to the economic buyer?
• Amongst their priorities, where does this fall?
• Do they have ways they'd like you to overcome challenges?
• What concerns do you anticipate they'll raise?
• How should we go about getting the economic buyer on board with our plan?
• What if they have concerns you haven't considered and we haven't discussed yet? How will you handle those?
• Does it make sense for us to have this call together? How should we prepare? What role do you play versus what I play?

When you do get the decision-maker involved, you should start from the beginning of the process. Don't assume that the goals you've uncovered in their organization based on prior calls are their top priorities. Go over GPCTBA with them and confirm that you understand their world. Emphasize the ROI of your product.

3. C&I (Negative Consequences and Positive Implications)

What are the negative consequences if your prospect does not achieve their goal? What are the positive implications if your prospect reaches their desired goal? Can your product help the prospect mitigate the risk of not achieving his or her goals and further increase the chances of achieving them?

If your product can significantly help them avoid consequences and further aid in achieving even bigger follow-up goals, you've got a very strong value proposition. Questions that can help you determine C&I include:

• What happens if you reach your goals? Does this affect you on a personal level?
• What happens if you don't hit the goal? Does this affect you on a personal level?
• What great things will you do next when you achieve this goal?
• When you overcome this challenge, what will you guys do next?
• Do you get bonuses, stand to get promoted, or get more resources if you can achieve this goal? Would you get fired, lose responsibility, or be demoted if you can't figure this out?

Embracing GPCTBA/C&I has helped our sales team spend time wisely, so that they have more time to spend helping more people. We're on a mission to inspire marketers to make marketing people love. We can't do that without a lovable sales process, too.

Want to learn more? Check out 38 sales questions to quickly identify your customers' core needs. 

Of the top seven threats to professional services firms over the next few years, five involve the eroding value of services. According to our most recent research, increased competition from new and larger firms is creating downward price pressure that is squeezing already low margins. And the ongoing artificial intelligence and automation revolution will only hasten the commoditization of many once-high-value services.

It might seem as if the world of professional services is being turned upside down. After all, how will you generate referrals when the perception across audiences is that cheaper, good-enough alternatives exist?

Fortunately, there is a way out of this looming storm cloud. But first, we need to revisit referrals, themselves.

A Fresh Look at Referrals

There are two general types of referrals:

1. Experience-based referrals — These are the most familiar type of referrals. A client works with you and has a good experience. Later, when someone asks them whom they would recommend to provide the same kind of work, they pass along your name and their positive recommendation.
2. Brand-based referrals — These referrals come from people a firm has never worked with. They are produced on the basis of a firm’s reputation in the marketplace or their perceived expertise.

Experience-based referrals are naturally limited by the number of happy clients you have. Brand-based referrals, on the other hand, are almost limitless — if you can figure out how to get them. For this reason, high-growth firms put a high priority on attracting more brand-based referrals.

Research on professional services referrals shows that 94.5% of firms receive brand-based referrals. When we delved into where people learned about these firms, we discovered a panoply of sources:

• Heard them speak at an event or conference
• Read articles or blog posts written by experts at the firm
• Interacted with the firm on social media
• Read a book they wrote
• Impressed by their website
• Found them in online search
• Read positive online reviews

Notice a common theme here? All of these sources are ways firms share their expert knowledge.

How Visibility Beats the Commoditization Rap

To avoid the commoditization trap, you need to do what the fastest growing firms are doing — make your expertise more visible. In fact, firms that have visible expertise generate 61% more referrals than their general reputation alone would garner.

The most practical way to build the visibility of your expertise is to deploy a content marketing program that puts your expertise — your knowledge and your ability to solve problems — on the front lines. In effect, that means becoming a teacher: to educate anyone who’s interested in your area of expertise how you go about solving problems. You will do this at no charge.

To extend your reach as wide as possible, you will want to find multiple online and offline venues for your content — and you will use SEO techniques to ensure that the people who are interested in what you have to say can find you easily.

When people can sample your expertise that is the first step to developing trust. Over time, they will consume more of your content. And eventually, when they have a need, they will put your firm at the top of their list. To your followers, you will become synonymous with your area of expertise.

While it may sound foolhardy at first to give away your hard-earned knowledge for free, this is a proven path to prosperity. The world has changed. Today, people expect to be able to find the information they want online and for free. If you don’t offer your expertise, somebody else will – and you will never build a large, engaged, brand-based audience for your services.

Differentiation — The Final Piece

While visibility is critical to building a powerful referral marketing program, you need one more tool to overcome the commoditization problem. You need an angle. To distinguish your services from other firms, you must be able to differentiate your approach. Usually, this involves specialization — often in a specific industry or a narrow service offering (click here to discover 21 ways to differentiate your firm).

When clients seek out experts, they gravitate toward firms with deep experience solving the kinds of problems they have. And nobody has more relevant experience than a specialist. This is why specialists can often charge higher fees. Confronted with the choice between a cheaper generalist and a more expensive specialist, most buyers will go with what they perceive as the safer choice: the specialist.

When you differentiate your firm, you give people a reason to choose you — and a reason to say no to your poorly differentiated competitors.

For an overview of differentiation and a step-by-step process to achieve it, check out this in-depth article on differentiation strategy.

Take the Next Step

If you are concerned about competing in a marketplace of increasingly commoditized services, you can do something about it. But advantage will go to those that move early.

To build a referral marketing strategy that can withstand the market forces that are remaking your industry, start designing a marketing program that both increases your firm’s visibility and sets it apart in the minds of your clients and prospects.

Don’t underestimate what this entails. If you take a traditional approach to marketing today — relying on face time with prospects, sponsorships, advertising and the like to bring in new business — prepare yourselves for a radical departure. While you shouldn’t abandon everything you are doing today, you will need to exercise new marketing muscles and introduce new skills to the mix.

More than anything, you will need to retrain your brain to think more like a teacher than a seller.

 

It’s coming: the summer sales slump. When everyone’s hearts turn toward vacation and a much-needed break, it can get very hard to continue to fill the funnel with new business. Here are some tactics to get you through the summer doldrums.

In B2B, without a strong strategy for summer, sales tend to slump. It’s one of those things that is challenging to explain and prove, but we’re all aware of it. So, the best thing we can do is prepare and push into the season with some good strategy.

Keep in Touch

The best thing we can do in this time is to avoid “going dark.” Although the emails and calls are never returned, it’s worth filling each email and call with information and value for your potential customer to keep the conversation going as best as we can. Every interaction is important in the overall conversion conversation.

Plant Seeds

So what do you do on those calls? The way to answer that question starts by changing your goals for the call. If you take off the pressure of getting a meeting or discussing a proposal, what’s the point of a call? It’s to plant seeds of success and discuss problems that detail the future for your customer.

It’s very likely that your customer’s Q1 strategies are solved or underway. So by this time in the year, your potential customer is lacking in real understanding of gaps or challenges that exist. They feel like they are “on-top” of the situation and not in a problem solving mode.

What our goal in planting seeds would be towards looking into the future, Q3-Q4 and what challenges lie ahead. Are they prepared for growth? Do they have a sustainable strategy? Talk about what might lay ahead for them and how they might be able to avoid some pitfalls in some creative ways.

Lastly, send materials they can review on their own. As sick as it is, American’s don’t vacation any more. The annual survey by Glassdoor shows that less than half Americans actually take their vacation days, and even if they do they are connected to work in some way. So why not take advantage of that window to send them something worth reading?

Plan Forward

Lastly, a certain level of acknowledgment of the situation can be healthy. Discussing and staying aware of your prospect’s vacation schedule can be good if you plan to use it.

Get meetings set up for after summer vacation. Find out when they return, and propose a time for a week after they’re back. Energy will hopefully be high on return and you’ll get a better chance at attention. Make sure you have a good agenda and the prospect is ready.

Additionally, you could do the same after your vacation. Schedule meetings after you return and bring a small gift from your travels. It will show some intentionality and thoughtfulness – both of which are lacking in our current sales climate.

Enjoy the Summer with Them

Lastly, the summer is a great time to ramp down and enjoy life a little. It’s a great time to take a prospect out to lunch, play a round of golf, shoot some pool, and enjoy the season. It can show a human side and build some connection. Why not take advantage of the overall joy of the summer season and use it for you and your prospect?

I’ve written before about the critical importance of the discovery process in complex B2B sales. It’s a favourite subject, and with good reason - in my experience the quality of initial discovery is a vital predictor of subsequent sales success.

But it’s critically important that the discovery exercise doesn't just involve us asking the prospective customer a series of questions that are primarily aimed at helping us to qualify the account, the contact and the opportunity.

If discovery is seen by our prospect as only being for our benefit, it’s all-too-easy for these discussions to descend into a relentlessly one-directional “20-Questions” process that can easily discourage our potential customer from continuing the conversation.

That’s why discovery must always be a two-way exercise. Our desire to learn about the customer must be balanced by a genuine desire to share insights that our customer will find valuable, but also - and perhaps even more important - by helping them to acknowledge previously unrecognised implications of their own current situation.

Fact-based, data-gathering situational questions aren’t of much use in this regard. We also need to share insights and ask thoughtful questions that stimulate our prospective customer to pause and think, and to recognise that their current assumptions aren't going to be enough to allow them to fully realise their future potential.

We need to help them to recognise the compelling need for change and to start - even from this early stage - to shape their vision of a future solution that will enable them to get to where they now recognise they need to be.

And, of course, we need to start the process of leading them towards the conclusion that our organisation and our approach is best positioned to enable them to achieve their objectives - and to create distinctive value in the process.

We want them to look back at our interaction and think “that was a really valuable conversation - it taught me a bunch of useful things and caused me to think about my current situation and future goals from a different perspective”.

And, of course, we want them to believe that continuing our conversation would be very much in their interest. Which, of course, they are unlikely to conclude if we treat the sales discovery process as either a sales pitch or an interrogation.

Here’s how I urge you to approach these discovery exercises:

• Think of them as an opportunity to teach and not just to learn
• Balance giving and getting information throughout the conversation
• Prepare thought-provoking insights you want to share with them
• Ask stimulating questions that cause them to reflect before they respond
• Share customer anecdotes that help your prospect see themselves in the story
• Recognise that - although qualification is important - engagement and rapport are vital
• And yes, of course, know what we want to learn from them - but don’t make it the primary purpose of the exercise

One of the best outcomes might be that we help them recognise something in themselves and in their situation that they maybe hadn’t recognised before - or hadn’t realised was as important as it now appears to be.

That way, we can start as we mean to continue - as a respected trusted adviser. And we’ll learn some pretty useful information as well...

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, equipping them to Sell in the Breakthrough Zone® by systematically creating, capturing and confirming their unique value in every customer interaction.

The question whether to scale to the U.S. or not is among the toughest ones for SaaS founders. As many SaaS founders would acknowledge, the added value is limitless. The U.S. is the largest single market for purchasing software. You can also find numerous financing opportunities, as well as acquisition possibilities once you’ve solidified your business.

Even if you decide that expanding your SaaS business overseas is the right step, there are still a ton of things to settle. When and where to start? How to avoid the biggest traps when managing your overseas operations?

These are all questions that founders with global ambitions ponder on constantly. Throughout all the SaaStock events we have run, we have sought to give stage time to founders to share their learnings and find correlation patterns.

We will do so, once more when SaaStock itself crosses the Atlantic for the very first time with SaaStock on Tour New York on June 20th. One of the key sessions on the day will be on fostering a New York City State of mind with Alexis Lê-Quôc, Tomer Tagrin and Ben Hindman. They will be joined by 25 other superstar speakers, speaking in front of a crowd of 400 SaaS kindred souls, figuring out together the biggest of SaaS questions and challenges. Join us.

Meanwhile, we’ve gathered the wisdom of a number of experienced SaaS founders, advisors, and investors who have all graced the SaaStock stage before on how to scale your business to the exciting market across the Atlantic.

1. Find the right product-market fit across the ocean

Before getting into the questions when and where to grow your business in the vast territories of the U.S., you should prepare for the new market you’d be entering. As Roel de Hoop, General Partner at Prime Ventures, notes, you cannot simply go overseas and expect to sell the same way you did at home.

Instead, you should work on identifying a product-market fit for the new market you’re about to enter. Settling this from the start is important, so you can avoid a ton of disappointments and difficulties later on.

2. The right time is an individual decision

Scaling to the U.S. takes a lot of energy and is a long-haul game. The timing has to make sense for you.

Here a few options:

When you want to be a global company from day one

Some companies like Dataiku decide to internationalize early on. Florian Douetteau packed his bags for America quite fast. He managed to hire a small team there, but it was difficult for Dataiku to acknowledge and adapt to the salary differences between France and the U.S.

Eventually, he raised Series A funding from American investors. This was crucial for the proper functioning of Dataiku’s overseas office, as it allowed the company to make better hiring decisions and offer adequate remuneration in the U.S. Having the backing of US investors also gave Dataiku a priceless stamp of approval when it came to large clients like National Public Radio. However, Florian and Dataiku, are more the outlier case, rather than the norm.

When the critical mass of customers demands it

For Rachel Delacour, founder of BIME and now VP at Zendesk, scaling overseas came as a natural and much needed step. BIME is a business intelligence tool that was created in Montpellier, France, far away from the tech noise in California, before getting acquired by Zendesk.

When Rachel and her co-founder (and husband) Nicolas Raspal got a critical mass of traction in the U.S., they had to grasp the opportunity. After raising $3M Series E funding to go to the U.S., they decided to base a local go-to-market sales team in Kansas City, Missouri.

inSided similarly made the move across the Atlantic only after raising funding for that specific purpose. Otherwise it may have been too financially strenuous for the business to take the leap. Its CEO Robin van Lieshout shares that the financing came only after having the strong wish to venture into the new market.

How is such a wish justified, however? It has to come from a clear customer interest. For Adrien Menard, CEO of Botify, it was an overnight trip to Seattle to meet a potential client, which he barely made flying in from Paris. Making a successful sale, he had his validation that Botify could be sold in the US. Even amidst the stress of that, he wouldn’t have moved to the US prior to that validation.

3. Even without a US office, hire a US sales rep

One of the most important hiring questions that any business moving to the U.S. has to face is whether to hire local talent overseas, or move a part of the existing team to the new location. An even more crucial question is whether to create a local go-to-market sales team.

The founder of the Israeli log analytics company Logz.io Tomer Levy kept his team based in Tel Aviv for as long as he could hire enough people there.

But eventually, since half of the market that Logz.io could reach was in the U.S., Tomer saw that having only Israel-based sales people was not working anymore. When the company had more than 100 customers and enough traction, he decided to get an overseas sales representative.

4. Have clear milestones before you move

According to research of 69 high growth companies conducted by Scott Sage and Andy Leaver from London-based Crane Venture Partners, the time period that high-growth tech companies need before they start internationalizing is rapidly shrinking. Previously, it was in the range of 10 years, while now it’s accelerating to less than four years.

Scott and Andy found out that businesses that were most successful in internationalizing had hit four milestones before making the step. These companies had:

1. Set repeatable sales execution in their main HQ
2. Found early international customers
3. Already sold to early adopters
4. Gained an understanding of the local culture they were moving to

5. Go to the East Coast

Another major question that inevitably pops up for SaaS companies looking to expand to the U.S. is whether to choose the tech hubs on the far West Coast, or opt for the more accessible East Coast.

For most European SaaS companies, the East Coast seems to be the place. Moving to cities like Boston and New York is cheaper than the well-known tech mecca on the West Coast. The East Coast time zone is usually more convenient for companies from the Old Continent and Israel, such as Axonista, Falcon.io, and Logz.io. The smaller time difference allows teams on both sides of the Atlantic to have a maximum amount of daylight time together.

All these practicalities in mind, if the East Coast is not the right fit, move. It’s what happened to Showpad after they established an office in New York. It took co-CEOs Pieterjan Bouten and Louis Jonckheere a few months to realize that New York was not the place for them and despite the fact that the West Coast was more expensive, it’s where their potential for growth laid.

6. First hire a local expert whom you know well

For BIME, the logical way to approach the hiring conundrum was to seek a local expert in their new location in the U.S. This had to be a person who could take over organizing and managing the new location — and the new team. Rachel Delacour opted for a U.S. sales team that was well-versed in the specificities of their local environment. The MD she chose had been a close confidant of BIME, one of many relationships, she had carefully nurtured.

Logz.io hired a VP from Silicon Valley who eventually built up their Boston sales team. To Tomer Levy, it had been crucial to find a person who understands the cultural differences between the core team and the new American one, and to blend the best from both worlds skillfully. They approached building out the Customer Success team in a similar fashion.

7. Hire an internal recruiter

Hiring in the U.S. can be tough. For Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-founder & CEO at Algolia, the best strategy had been to hire an internal recruiter. Before that, the management team would travel often to make contacts and find hires. Once they found a recruiter, this person was placed in charge of gathering a solid overseas team. Algolia also uses external recruiters when building their U.S. team.

“One mistake that I made is that we did not hire a local U.S. recruiter early enough.”

– Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku

8. Always work on your network in the US

Dimitris Glezos, CEO of Transifex, also underlines the importance of an internal recruiter, together with building a solid network in the U.S. prior to moving there. When you have the right contacts overseas, they can be the best source of quality team members.

Networking is absolutely priceless according to Rachel Delacour. A solid basis of contacts helps you validate your product, find employees, scale your overseas office, and get through the hard times.

9. Keep product and engineering teams home

Logz.io kept their engineering and product teams in Tel Aviv. Their logic is that customer-facing positions such as customer success, support, and marketing should be closer to the U.S. market, while product-related teams can stay in the home office. The same functional split applied for Transifex.

Ulrik Bo Larsen made a similar split with Falcon.io, keeping product and engineering in the main office in Copenhagen and basing most salespeople overseas.

10. Always have ambassadors between the two offices

Tomer Levy and his co-founder relocated a couple of people from Logz.io’s Tel Aviv office to Boston — and vice versa. They see these team members as ambassadors who can help blend both teams even better.

Robin van Lieshout from inSided also underlines the importance of having senior people from the initial team who know the DNA of your company join the new team. Their presence can be priceless, as they can spark a vibe similar to the one in the office they come from, precisely why inSided relocated an important salesperson early on to help the growth of the new HQ.

11. Eventually one founder should relocate

In some cases, if one of the founders moves to the U.S., it may also speed up the scaling process. Many companies say it’s worth considering moving a senior management person from the home office to the overseas one.

Tomer Levy from Logz.io and his co-founder often spend time between the two offices in Israel and in the U.S. A number of founders point out as a rule of thumb that they usually have one co-founder in each office at all times.

12. Spend a lot of time on company culture

Managing cultural differences can be tough, says Rachel Delacour. Even if your new team is the same age as your current one, you have to understand the nuances in how people function  across the globe. For Rachel, it’s imperative to avoid misinterpretation by over-communicating. It may be exhausting, but is crucial. According to her, it’s always better to give more information rather than leave people to wonder what you mean.

It’s also important to find the right software and buy proper audio visual technology for team conferences that will help you nurture closeness across the ocean. As for financial communication, it’s best to clarify topics about salary differences between the U.S. and European offices as early as possible, so that you kill a potential problem from the start.

13. Respect time zones

In terms of communication, you should respect timezones and avoid triggering meetings that would be out of hours for any of the teams.

An example of what may happen is offered by Transifex. The company is split between a Greek main office and a West Coast office, which have a 10-hour time difference. When the Greek engineering and product teams are ready to go home, their West Coast colleagues are just starting the workday. This is not always conducive to productive talks. CEO Dimitris Glezos has had challenges smoothing out the communication, which he finally managed by having the Head of Engineering fly often between the two offices.

What’s more, CEOs should be the ones ready to get up early and stay up late in order to keep the communication flow. If you want to run an international business across time zones, that’s simply a part of the deal.

14. Make new people a part of the big story of your company

Rachel Delacour shares that it’s key to include new people in the overall picture of your company from day one by engaging them in various activities that you already have. In this way, you ensure continuity of the culture between your offices. You should also not miss out on personal celebrations. It can be tiring but creating this social glue between your people is key to the overall success of your business.

All new employees of Logz.io come to the main Tel Aviv office of Logz.io for two weeks to meet their colleagues and to get a first-hand taste of the company culture. That helps them feel a part of the big team, which in turn makes it easier for them to communicate over distance afterwards.

Robin van Lieshout and Roel de Hoop also underline the importance of initial get-togethers in the home office.

“Have at least one kickoff meeting together, even if it means flying 100 people from the U.S. It is an expensive exercise, but it’s worth every penny.”

– Roel de Hoop

15. Visit often

One of the major mistakes to be avoided, according to Rachel Delacour, is not visiting your U.S. team often enough. If you fail to see them personally on a regular basis, you may create a feeling that you prefer the “original team.” That’s why when scaling, you should prepare to travel as much as you can to meet and connect with the new team.

Tomer Levy from Logz.io shares similar insights in terms of building overseas teams’ culture. He says that he spends much more time with the U.S. team one-on-one, as he feels he needs to bridge the gap. The two founders regularly spend time in both offices.

16. Allow people to suggest changes

Robin van Lieshout from inSided shares an important way to improve the communication flow between offices. An employee from the U.S. office would spend three weeks in the main HQ, and then go back for a week in the satellite office. The person would usually notice so many differences in the functioning, that they would want to address them immediately. They would come back to the main HQ for another week to solve the issues. By following a similar pattern for some time, the person would help bring more uniformity between the way the two offices operate.

17. Adapt to mistakes

Even with a thousand tips, the process of scaling to the U.S. is not easy, so you should proceed with caution. But most of all, you should be ready to accept that you will make mistakes, and continue even beyond them.

“The reality is, and I’d say most companies would admit that, they do f**k up, everyone f**ks up. And the question is really around whether you can adapt to that.”

– Ray Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Datahug

Make sure you don’t miss our SaaS on Tour New York edition taking place on June 20th for an even more detailed outlook on the US SaaS landscape, as well as hands-on tips on how to make the move over the ocean.

The post 17 Priceless Lessons Learned from Scaling to the US appeared first on OpenView Labs.

A large part of any sales training program -- no matter the methodology or approach -- is learning a specific set of questions sellers use to:

• Engage customers in a conversation
• Identify customers’ needs
• Elicit a specific response
• Demonstrate value
• Move the conversation forward

And new sellers, in particular, spend countless hours learning, rehearsing, and ultimately asking those questions, seeking to sharpen their skills with each round of customer conversations.

Even more important is finding the right questions to begin with -- as not all customer questions are created equal. The right questions can easily demonstrate a deep understanding of the customer’s business, a genuine willingness to help, and a legitimate ability to deliver value. The wrong questions, however, can immediately expose a rep’s inexperience, poor preparation, and inability to help.

A recent conversation with a very frustrated head of sales reinforced for me something that’s often completely overlooked in all of this effort to find and learn the “right” questions: At the end of the day, no matter what question you ask, you must listen to the answer.

While we might debate the “right” list of questions, you might argue even the best question isn’t half as important as whatever question you ask next. Your next question tells the customer almost everything they need to know about you, your preparation, and your willingness and ability to help. It’s no surprise then that CEB, now Gartner research found “two-way communication” to be one of the six distinct behaviors that distinguish star performers from everyone else.

I’ve watched this scenario play out countless times across my career working with sales professionals. I’ve even fallen into the trap of asking the wrong next question -- it’s easy to do.

The Wrong Next Question

So, what is the wrong next question? It’s almost guaranteed to be whatever the next question is on your list of pre-prepared questions. How is that possible? It’s simple.

A seller -- even a well-prepared seller -- typically enters a sales conversation with a list of questions they need to ask. Maybe they’ve learned them in training, or perhaps they’re the result of manager coachingor determined by fields in a CRM system. It doesn’t actually matter why the seller has prepared these questions. What matters is they’ve come into the conversation with the primary goal of getting answers to those specific questions.

What happens with this kind of question-based mindset is sellers forget about everything else and focus almost exclusively on the actual act of asking whatever’s next on their list of questions. The problem? Sellers forget to actually listen to their prospect’s answers.

There’s always the perfunctory reply of, “Uh huh. Yeah, I understand.” But it’s almost immediately followed by a complete non sequitur as the seller launches into the next question on their list. It seems like an obviously bad practice, doesn’t it? But it’s so easy to do.

As a result, the problem is pervasive, and the damage is immediate and often irrevocable. The sales rep has just convincingly demonstrated to the customer:

• They’re scripted
• They’re focused on selling, not helping
• They’re focused on their own success, rather than the customer’s success
• They’re highly unlikely to provide any value

From the customer’s point of view, this conversation needs to end as soon as possible.

The wrong next question can say all that and more.

The Right Next Question

So, what’s the right question? Well, it depends. The right next question is a direct product of whatever the customer replies to after the previous question. In sales, context is everything.

So, whatever you ask next should naturally built on everything that’s come before. You might decide to dig deeper into the side comment a prospect made about a competitor or a pain point a colleague has. Or maybe you’ll test the logic of your customer’s thinking or explore their underlying assumptions about your product/service. You might seek additional information or add some of your own and test for resonance. Again, it almost doesn’t matter. As long as what you say next comes naturally and is formed from whatever your prospect just said -- you’re making progress.

How is such a seemingly obvious point so easily overlooked? As salespeople, we’re often so focused on getting to our next question we forget to actually listen to the answer that will determine what that next question should be in the first place.

Listening first, before composing the next question, takes time, thought, flexibility, and practice. But, CEB, now Gartner research shows developing your listening skills is an important tactic to help keep deals moving forward.

So, practice. A lot.

Focus on asking great next questions that follow from a customer comment rather than your previous question. After all, effective selling is based on conversation, not interrogation.

And, at the end of the day, you’ll show customers you’re listening, you understand, and, ultimately, you’re far more likely to offer real value.

For strategic accounts, the last-mile analysis is what demonstrates the value in all your customer and market intelligence investments.

If you’re a small or medium size business selling to consumers, you probably want to both automate and personalize your marketing campaigns. The solution, of course, is marketing automation linked to your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Fortunately for SMB marketers, CRM is becoming main stream. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, “…almost 37% of small businesses are ‘fully adapted’ to cloud-based applications.” And Steve King, a partner with Emergent research, predicts that to increase to 78% of small businesses by 2020.

You likely depend upon CRM software to run your entire business.

Marketing automation combined with CRM is a real benefit to sales organizations. Leads with CRM data are better qualified and therefore easier to close. Here’s why:

• Your sales conversations are more familiar and personal when your inbound sales team can reference notes of previous interactions. A shared history creates deeper relationships.
• Your emails are more relevant. More likely to elicit a response…and less likely to be unsubscribed.
• You can remarket ads more intelligently based on specific interests or positions in the sales funnel.

These are compelling, important benefits. Just not for companies with a closed, proprietary CRM.

The Disconnect

While general-purpose CRM (like Zoho, Salesforce or Pipedrive) play well with marketing automation platforms, many B2C businesses use proprietary CRMs, purpose built for specific industries: pest control, home health aides, dentistry, and dozens of others.

These systems embody decades of esoteric, business-process knowledge. But they’re years behind in terms of pre-customer, top-of-the-funnel campaigning.

Here’s the wish list for a centralized marketing hub to receive, segment, then communicate to prospects.

– Preserve a record of all interactions with a prospect
– Allow agents to tag and segment prospects based on interest or funnel position.
– Automatically detect and prevent duplicate records.
– Automatically message prospects in the pipeline, especially by email.
– Tailor marketing messages based on visits to specific web pages, or a threshold of pageviews.
– Conduct drip email, SMS or Facebook ad campaigns based on segments.

Proprietary CRMs have key roadblocks that prevent you from getting those benefits.

– No (or limited) web-to-lead forms
– No conversion signal to Google Analytics or AdWords
– No support for call tracking
– No support for email campaigning
– No support for SMS
– No support for online chat
– No support for Facebook lead ads.

Worse, information gets stuck in an air gap when a lead becomes a customer. One of our clients must literally retype contact and account information into their proprietary CRM when creating a new customer record.

We’re currently working with a client to find solutions to this seemingly simple issue: how to implement a marketing automation platform without connecting to a proprietary CRM or maintaining a parallel (and redundant) CRM. They do not want staff to waste time maintaining two separate CRMs: one for pre-customers alongside the real CRM.

What we’ve learned (and still are learning) could be useful to other companies with similar challenges.

Three Platforms; One (Potential) Solution

There seem to be three different platforms vying for the role of ‘non-CRM marketing hub’ for SMBs.

• Call tracking hub
• Email marketing hub
• Chat hub

Let’s review the pros and cons of each:

Call Tracking Hub

According to Salesforce.com, 92% of customer interactions happen on the phone.

Many consumer-facing businesses rely principally on phone calls, and increasingly chat and SMS.

Web-based cookies and pixels are associated to phone calls and SMS by call tracking services (CallRail, PhoneWagon, Aircall).

However, tracking numbers applied to offline marketing (brochures, signage, print ads), lack a digital footprint, so manual tagging of leads is required.

That’s where things fall apart. Call tracking vendors expect users to use a CRM. Some vendors (CallRail) offer a rudimentary, quasi-CRM app (LeadCenter), that lacks the robust tools needed for true marketing automation.

And most call tracking vendors don’t (and realistically won’t) build connections to hundreds of proprietary CRMs.

(During our research, we identified one vendor – LeadsBridge – that is attempting to close this air gap by offering integration services to proprietary CRMs with an API. But even that is not assured. Some CRM vendors make API access a profit center while others lack an API.)

CallRail offers a web-form submission option that works with its dynamic number insertion (DNI) script. Without a more robust CRM app, the information can’t be easily exploited for things like targeted email, SMS or Facebook ad campaigns.

Email Hub

Of course, email campaigning is the heart of marketing automation. One potential solution is to use your email campaign manager as a centralized hub for prospect information. Unfortunately, most email campaign platforms (MailChimp, Constant Contact) are really not designed for this purpose.

The good news is that feed form submissions can be easily segmented. And prospects can be automatically migrated from one list to another based on responses and/or actions. Some mail campaign apps now offer a Facebook ad campaign builder.

The obvious downside is when a majority of leads are phone calls. Mail campaign software really isn’t designed to store tracked call, SMS or chat transcripts or recordings. Further, inbound phone agents may find it difficult to create new prospect records if prospects are loathe to give out their email address.

Finally, emails can be slow, get lost in a spam trap or ignored. Too often, if initial contact does not result in a sale, the opportunity is lost as well.

One problem that plagues both approaches is duplicates. Consumers do the darnedest things. They may call in on a tracked number, but then carry on a text conversation using the same number. Then switch to online chat (or a chat bot), then Facebook Messenger.

The challenge is to keep all this interaction straight. Most CRM software have native integrations with popular call tracking services. These will help dedupe repeat calls by recognizing the original caller. But these don’t always work seamlessly (when a prospect uses a 2nd phone), and obviously can’t work when web forms don’t have a phone number.

Services like Zapier promise to connect apps without an IT staff. The truth is that the details (like how to prevent dupes) are monumental.

Chat-Based Hub

Based on our admittedly short research, chat messaging platforms could actually be the best solution to create marketing automation without CRM.

First, live chat, auto responders and bots are increasingly popular, replacing web-to-lead forms and even phone calls. Econsultancy discovered that 73% of customers were satisfied with their live chat experience, compared to just 61% of email users and a 44% of phone users.

Chat platforms can keep transcripts of ALL interactions (email; chat) + campaign responses, so leads have more credibility with sales.

Most chat platforms allow the inbound agent to tag calls & segment prospects. They support email campaigning with conditional workflows. With proper setup (and native integrations), they can dedupe most prospect records without human intervention.

Most importantly, chat platforms are beginning to recognize the importance of omni-channel communications and have added support for phone and SMS.

Intercom.io recently announced a native integration with AirCall, which allows voice and SMS interactions to be stored alongside chat, email and Facebook Messenger). They also raised $125 million on the strength of their “messenger-first” approach to sales software, which their CEO touts is responsible for an “81% greater conversion rate”.

Callrail recently updated its integration with Hubspot (arguably another non-CRM hub), to send phone calls and text messages directly into HubSpot’s “engagements” API. This allows users to add a phone call to a contact, allows new contacts to be created from phone calls without email addresses, and appends call recordings directly to HubSpot contacts.

One vendor already building a chat-based hub is Podium. Their online reviews platform connects to proprietary CRMs for healthcare (Dentrix, OpenDental, Eaglesoft), automotive (CDK, Dealer Socket, DealerTrack), home services (ServiceTitan, ServSuite, Housecall Pro) and a few retail systems (Furniture Wizard, Lightspeed, SPOT, STORIS ). Podium also supports Google Click-to-Message Ads, Facebook Messenger and SMS conversations. They also just announced that it has included web chat as part of its enterprise messaging platform. Unfortunately, no call integrations and no campaigning.

Chat as hub is not a perfect solution for non-CRM marketing automation. For example, in Intercom.io’s world, “users” are registered customers or trial users (like SaaS subscribers) with a login ID and password. Perfect if you are selling enterprise SaaS software. Not real useful if you are a plumber.

Still, if you have a closed CRM and still want to benefit from unified inbox communications with prospects, here’s a list of chat platforms worth checking out: Intercom, Podium, Drift, Chat.io/LiveChatInc, Olark and FrontApp.

How confident are you with regard to prospecting?  Recently I received two notes from people stating how they dread prospecting and they don’t feel confident doing it.

These two people are not alone. I suspect at one time or another, you have struggled with prospecting. Or maybe you are struggling with it now.

The biggest issue that will impact a person’s ability to prospect is the level of confidence they have. Unless you’re confident, there is little chance you’ll be successful prospecting.

Check out this video as I talk about confidence and the role of questions when it comes to prospecting:

Here are 10 ways to build your confidence to prospect better:

1. Write down all of the ways you’ve helped customers in the past.  Use this list as fuel to allow you to realize what you do for customers does make a big difference.

2. Keep a list of all of great things customers have told you about how you’ve helped them. Keep any emails and also write up any positive telephone calls or voicemails you get.  Keep these next to your phone and they will serve as further evidence as to why you need to be making your prospecting calls.

3. Each day contact one current customer and explore with them all the ways they’ve benefited from what you’ve provided them. This is a great exercise to do just before you begin making your prospecting calls.

4. Never fly solo! Sales is a team sport. It’s not played well when you’re the only one involved.  Link up with a couple of other salespeople and each morning text each other with a comment about how the day is going to be awesome or challenge them on goals.  Naturally, they’ll do the same, and as you help pump up others, they’ll be pumping you up. A rising tide lifts all boats, and you’ll find the tide rising quickly.

5. Set hourly goals as to the number of calls you will make. Set them at a level you know you can achieve and congratulate yourself by taking a 5-minute break when you do.  As you progress, over time begin increasing the number of calls you’ll make each hour.

6. At the end of each day, take a moment to record your two most successful activities of the day. Congratulate yourself and then lay out what your goals will be for the next day.

7. Before you end the day, build your plan as to who you are going to call tomorrow and the reason why. By building the plan today, you won’t waste time tomorrow and the speed with which you can start calling will increase your confidence.

8. Record all the questions you ask prospects. Make a note of the ones that worked great and scratch out those that didn’t work well. Over a couple of weeks, you’ll find yourself with a list of questions you’re very confident in using.

9. Keep your expectations in check. Confidence is lost when the goals are set too high for each call. Remember what your objective is. For most salespeople, it’s merely to gain one piece of information and to set a time for a follow-up conversation.  If you can do that with just a few calls each day, then you’ll be incredibly successful.

10. Don’t expect everyone to respond nicely to your calls. We can never forget that when we are reaching out to someone, we have zero clue as to what else is going on in their life at that moment.  We knew we were calling them, but they didn’t know it. Their negative reaction to us could easily be a culmination of a series of events in their day and they’re merely venting on us.

Remember, sales and prospecting are something few people choose to do, and the fact you’re doing it makes you part of an elite group of professionals. Your activity is helping others — not only the customers to whom you sell, but also others in your company and, of course, you and your family.

Sales is something you can be proud of.  Each day you will hear “no” far more than you will “yes,” but that only means when you do hear a “yes,” it’s very special.  Don’t sweat the “no” response, as “no” is only a moment in time, and you have no idea what the next call will bring.

I believe strongly each “no” I hear brings me that much closer to the next “yes.”

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

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

Picture this: you crafted a beautiful email with a great subject line, an interesting hook, and a relevant offer. You hit the ‘send’ button and pat yourself on the back!

A couple of days later, you go to check your reports. To your surprise, you see a mere 2% of the people clicked through in your email. You did everything you were supposed to: developing good copy, using hooks, and providing an offer your list would find useful. Why do you have such a low click-through rate?

Here’s what went wrong: you didn’t optimize your call-to-action (CTA). It’s easy to overlook them, yet it is essential to improving your click-through rates. Today, we’ll explore how you can create email CTAs that will help you increase your email click-through rates.

Start with the end goal of your email

Before you can start designing your CTAs, you need to know what you want people to click on. It’s a basic idea, yet it’s often left until the last moment before sending an email. You don’t want to figure out what your goal is as you write your email; you want to start with your goal in mind before you write anything.

Copywriting legend Joanna Wieber from Copyhackers says:

Every email is a sales email.

Joanna doesn’t mean a welcome email is an opportunity to sell something; rather, she means every email should lead to a final conversion, whether that’s a sale, a donation, or an in-app action. Even if you are “nurturing” a subscriber to build trust in your relationship, the end goal should be the same: taking the subscriber a step closer to a final conversion.

Based on the end goal, you want to establish a call-to-action that will lead your subscriber into the desired conversion. If you check the lifecycle campaigns companies send, you will see they all have a CTA built around the end goal.

For example, Charity Water starts with an email that has CTAs focused on getting their subscriber familiar with their organization.

While having three CTAs is unusual, they purposefully use them to build affinity and trust with their subscribers. After a couple of emails, they send one asking for a donation — which is ultimately their end goal.

Action steps:

1. Define the end goal of every email you send.
2. Write the CTA before you write any other part of your email.

Focus your email content and design around the CTA

Now that you know every email should start and end with a goal in mind, you need to focus the email that leads to the CTA.

People have hundreds of emails waiting in their inbox. Your email needs to be clear enough so they can understand what it is about and take the desired action. Otherwise, you risk getting your subscribers confused, which will lead them to ignore your email, or worse yet, delete it.

Every email should lead to the next step in the subscriber’s lifecycle. To do so, every element of your emails needs to correspond with that final step. It builds your case in the subscriber’s mind before they get to the final CTA and emphasizes why they should click when they get there.

You saw how Charity Water welcomes their subscribers with an email that has three CTAs. This works for a welcome email when the company is trying to get subscribers to know their brand. But if you check their second email, which focuses on the donation, you see they built the whole email with that goal in mind. They used the subject line, the message, and the image around that idea, which makes it easy for you to act on it.

J.Crew designed the following email to lead their subscribers to the “25% off” offer. The typography size, the background gradient, and the copy together take you from a position of being interested in their brand to taking action upon their offer.

Artifact Uprising does a similar job with their survey email, but in this case, they give a very original twist to it.

In this email, the telephone and the color gradient visually lead you to the CTA. What’s more, the copy above the CTA entices people to take the survey thanks to its $10 discount code.

The action that you can lead the subscriber goes beyond making a purchase. For example, Kabbage, the small business finance company, looks to re-engage with the users who have signed up but haven’t applied for a loan yet to fill in a survey.

Such an action would allow Kabbage to qualify the user and refine the next set of emails, one of the key ideas behind behavioral marketing.

Zoom, the video conferencing tool, looks to have people sign up to one of their webinars. They do a great job of focusing the message by creating a sense of urgency. This adds a level of exclusivity that makes the CTA more effective than the commonly used “Sign Up” copy.

Action steps:

1. Focus your CTA on the goal you defined in the previous section.
2. Reverse engineer the email based on the CTA, building every element of the email — subject line, hook, images, and storyline — to lead to it.

Match the message with the CTA

Now that you know the goal of every email and how to structure the message around your CTA, you need to match the former with the latter.

Previously you saw the great job J.Crew and Artifact Uprising did by creating a coherent email that made both the message and the CTA fit. Banana Republic does a similarly outstanding job in the email below:

What makes this email so good is that they picked a color scheme — lemon yellow — that relates to the main idea: getting fresh. They also use the keyword “fresh” twice, once in the title, and another one in the CTA, making the whole email more cohesive and effective.

In the following example, Madewell does a great job of playing with the idea of selling boots, with the image and the CTA:

Action steps:

1. When writing your next email, think how every element relates to the message and the CTA. Play with different variations until you can find the one that makes the email more powerful, like in the examples you saw above.

Use copy that converts

While the goal of the CTA and the focus of your emails around it matter, the CTA copy can have a significant impact on the click-through rates. It’s easy to either go with the standard text (e.g., “Click Here”) or overcomplicate it with too much text that distracts the user.

Since you have so little space in your CTAs, you can’t get too original with your copy. It’s better to take your time to develop a great hook and storyline, and then use your CTA as a way to close the message than focusing on the CTA alone.

While you can’t add much copy to your CTAs, you can always rely on a specific set of time-tested keywords known as “power words,” which tend to evoke emotion and trigger curiosity in the user’s mind.

Some of the most commonly used power words for CTAs include:

• Create
• Enter
• Explore
• Find
• Free
• Get
• Join
• More
• New
• Now
• Off
• Save
• Show
• Start
• Stop
• Try
• Upgrade
• % or $ signs

While none of these words have anything particularly special about them, what matters is how you use them. Adding a bunch of these power words together won’t make any difference if they have nothing to do with the message and desired action.

In the following email, VRBO, the home rental site, matches the idea of spending your next vacation in dream home with the CTA, which is focused on finding the home. They don’t want you to book just yet, that’s why the CTA says “Find a Vacation Home.”

If they were sending an abandoned cart email, they could use something like “Book Your Vacation Home,” as it’d match the previous action and intent of the subscriber. In this email, however, the idea of “finding” a home perfectly fits the intended goal.

J.Crew once again pulls out a great email with a somewhat unconventional CTA:

They start with an intriguing offer, and they finish the email with the idea of “revealing” it if you click on the button. Using the word “reveal” isn’t something often seen, yet J. Crew used it because they knew that word had a powerful connotation in that context.

Using these “power words” is ultimately about creating copy that compels your subscribers to click your CTAs.

Action steps:

1. Take a look at the previous list of power words. Think how you could use them in your next email.
2. Stumped? Use Thesaurus.com to find other words that help you communicate that value of your CTA.

Wrap up

The power of emails lies in the actions they drive. In order to drive the desired actions, you need to define what your end goals are. Once you know what each email you send will lead to, you have to focus the subscriber’s attention by featuring one CTA and matching it with the main message of your email. Using the information we provided in this post, you should be able to include CTAs that increase click-through rates in your emails.

I spent much of my young life on a baseball diamond, and after experiencing both the highs of championships and lows that were not dissimilar from the Bad News Bears, I noticed one ironclad pattern: Championship teams are united.

There are two modalities through which baseball can be understood. Many are of the belief that baseball is an individualistic sport, where one batter is facing one pitcher at a time. There is no collaboration—if the batter gets a hit, he considers himself successful, regardless of what the next batter does. When asked how the game went, these players typically recap their own performance before the teams (i.e., “I played well, but we lost”).

Then there’s the opposing view, which considers baseball the most mentally collaborative sport there is. Sure, only one player hits at a time, but that’s simply their small contribution towards the team’s larger goal of propelling past the competition. One batter can approach his at-bat strategically to set the next batter up for increased odds of success. Lineups can be organized to give the team as a whole the best odds of driving in more runs. Trick plays and sacrifices are critical to winning tight contests. These players are much more focused on the final outcome than their own statlines.

Which perspective do you think brings home more trophies?

The relationship between baseball teammates is eerily similar to that of sales and marketing professionals, but unfortunately, the latter is prone to a less symbiotic existence. In fact, recent research from Aberdeen has found that 92% of companies experience below-average conversion rates in at least one part of the sales funnel due to marketing and sales friction. This friction comes from the “individual” mindset, where sales adheres to their own metrics, and marketing theirs. Not to mention it’s costly, both in time and pipeline.

It’s time for this line of thinking to die. Championships are won through collaborative effort, and in order for your organization to get—or stay—ahead for the long haul, sales and marketing must partner as players on the same team.

In this blog, I’ll outline 5 benefits of strengthening your organization’s sales and marketing partnership that will hopefully encourage you to take action today.

1. Enhanced Customer Experience

The customer experience is the heartbeat of any functioning organization, and by focusing marketing and sales on collaboration, the main benefactor is the customer. Nothing frustrates (or loses) prospects more quickly than an irrelevant piece of content or a lack of fluidity between touches.  Without establishing a single plan of engagement between sales and marketing teams, the overarching brand appears disorganized and impersonal.

2. Better (and More) Qualified Leads

I’m willing to bet there are very few salespeople who haven’t, at least once, muttered “marketing isn’t getting me ANY leads!” even though they’ve been handed dozens, if not hundreds. The problem may be the fact that marketing’s KPIs revolve around quantity, rather than quality of qualified leads. By establishing a strong lead-scoring method through a collaborative process, the guesswork is removed from identifying quality leads and, as a result, better leads come through more quickly and in higher volumes.

3. Clear Feedback Channels

By establishing a strong relationship, sales and marketing not only unify their rules of engagement but warrant continued communication through cross-departmental feedback. Establishing an open line of communication creates the opportunity for further refinement of strategy down the line. Sales feels comfortable asking marketing to refine their criteria for quality leads, and marketing can, in turn, ask sales to alter their style of outreach to prospects. The more receptive each team can be to suggestions, the closer they get to becoming one team.

4. Adherence to High-Level Strategy/Mission

Just like the baseball players who only worry about their own performance, it’s tempting for sales and marketing teams to get hyper-focused on their own metrics. While not inherently bad, this creates a risk of missing the forest for the trees, and worse, could succeed at the expense of other teams. If sales has tunnel vision around their opportunities and bombard them with content, they may unintentionally sacrifice marketing’s efforts to nurture the account slowly. And as mentioned earlier, marketing can fall victim to overvaluing the number of leads they handoff, at the expense of quality. This is where the leadership team must set the tone for the entire company: the goals they establish for their individual teams must incorporate the organization’s overall mission in order to encourage each team to help rather than hinder their counterparts.

5. Better Holiday Parties

This is only slightly a joke. What company hasn’t benefited from employees getting along? The momentum of a harmonious partnership between revenue-driving teams trickles into nearly every facet of the job. Connecting as human beings—not just employees—establishes trust and positivity in all work objectives and should be prioritized from the C-suite down. A positive work environment is one of the most contagious catalysts of performance, and it’s cost-free.

The most successful teams I played for in my baseball career were not always the most talented but played with their teammates’ best interests in mind. Talent and individual successes can only take an organization so far; it takes a level of chemistry and unity to separate the good from the great in sports and business alike. Regardless of your current size or structure, aligning sales and marketing as one revenue-driving unit can provide a tremendous ROI and jump-start the positive culture needed for long-term success. It’s easy to get started today and should be seen as a perennial priority for companies looking to win.

 

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