Social media has become an integral tool for online brand management.

Last year, companies of all sizes used social networking platforms to communicate with over 3.1 billion global social media users

Facebook’s recent data breach, however, demonstrates how important it is to secure your business’s social media presence.

Factors like poor account security and data mismanagement contributed to the scandal and compromised the online security of millions of users.

While your company may not be in a position to adversely affect as many people as Facebook, you can avoid similar vulnerabilities by developing and sharing a social media security plan with your team.

Developing an online presence with social media is an effective strategy for growing your business and its reputation.

Protect your investment—and your customers—against data breaches, malware, and hacks with these four best practices.

Create a Social Media Policy

A formal social media policy document can help your social media team define best practices for branding, legal, and PR purposes.

While giving them the flexibility to be creative and engage with your audience quickly and effectively.

Your policy should outline the purpose of your social media presence and the values you expect each account to uphold, as well as the following:

• Rules and regulations: Outline what can and cannot be shared and the actions to take if an account has been hacked or a mistake has been made.
• Security or legal risks: Explain potential threats, how to avoid them, and what to do if actions have put the company at risk.
• Roles and responsibilities: Delineate specific tasks and who is responsible for them, as well as approval workflows and accountability metrics.

Your social media policy should be customized to your business needs and changes to social media best practices.

Consider this a living document that gets updated regularly, and review your policy often.

Optimize Your Security Settings

Social networking platforms go to great lengths to maintain their account security features.

In response to its data breach, Facebook immediately rolled out changes to its advertising standards to improve data targeting for businesses.

When Twitter suffered its own data breach—and publicized the passwords of 32 million users—it informed its users immediately.

Account security features vary among social networking platforms, so avoid using the same security configurations for multiple accounts.

Instead, optimize each platform’s security settings for maximum protection.

For each social networking platform, review and document the following settings:

• Privacy, visibility, and sharing settings: Don’t rely on default privacy settings. Regularly review these settings for each account and update them as necessary.
• Suspicious activity alerts: If the platform provides suspicious activity alerts, activate them. Keep an eye on reports of hacks and scams yourself so you can respond appropriately.
• Access and publishing privileges: Perform regular audits of who has access to your accounts and update those permissions when necessary.
• Passwords: Create a different complex password for each account and change them often.
• Two-step authentication settings: Enable two-step authentication if it is available.

Additionally, you’ll want to ensure that all team members’ computers have updated antivirus and endpoint security software.

Be Selective about Third Party Applications

Third-party applications, like post schedulers or social listening tools, can be time and resource saving assets for your social media accounts.

However, they can become weak access points—and the more applications you give access to your accounts, the more vulnerable you become.

According to a 2016 report by CloudLock CyberLab, 27% of connected third-party applications are considered high risk.

You can avoid these vulnerabilities by being selective about the third party applications you link to and following these safety protocols:

• Think critically about the benefits and potential pitfalls of linking any application to your account before doing so. If the benefits do not outweigh the potential security risks, don’t use the application.
• Do your research and ensure that you are authorizing only legitimate applications.
• Subscribe to notifications and regularly review security alerts for third-party apps you have given access to your accounts so you are aware of any potential threats or security breaches as soon as possible.
• Read the details of what access and permissions you are giving each application. If possible, customize the settings so each app has access to only the information it needs to function.

Even after taking these precautions, you’ll want to regularly review your social media account settings to revoke access to any unfamiliar, unnecessary, or discontinued third-party applications.

Use a Social Media Management Tool

Many services offer online tools to help maintain your business social media accounts.

Social media management tools can be useful in scheduling, analyzing, and monitoring social accounts and content.

They can also assist with account security by limiting direct access to your social media accounts.

Management tools offer several security advantages:

• By using special permissions to read or write to your dashboard, so individuals can access social content without logging into your accounts—or gaining access to your passwords or other sensitive information.
• Maintaining their own security features, including two-factor authentication and suspicious activity monitoring.
• Allowing you to collaborate across teams while managing access, to ensure the posting of approved messaging
• They allow you to monitor what is being said about your company across platforms, making it easier to spot hacks or other branding issues.

Exercise caution when sharing access to your social media management tools.

Limit access to only necessary team members, like social media marketing, project managers, or editors.

Securing social media accounts should be a priority for any business investing in brand building.

Take the first step by developing a social media policy, using safe third-party tools, and reviewing your account settings.

What other social media account security tips do you have? Let us know in the comments section below!

Being a sales manager is a demanding role, with an ever-changing set of priorities and expectations. We reached out to 6 sales coaches seeking answers to this question: What are the top 3 skills that a sales manager should have (or develop)? 

Craig Eggleton
President & CEO
Sales Bullpen

Top 3 Skills
Coaching
Hiring/Interviewing
Accountability

Coaching is the number one quality/skill for sales leaders to develop. Early in my sales leadership career I was too focused on measuring and managing KPI's. Measuring KPI's are important and must be done but this wasn't coaching. I was fortunate to be a part of a world-class sales organization and the coaching model I was taught is one I continue to use to this day. The following is a glimpse into the process

1. On Boarding-This piece really began before a sales rep started his/her first day. We are setting the table throughout the interview process giving the candidate insight into what they can expect during their first year.

2. Day One--"It's All About Me". This is a one hour meeting that allows me to really get to know the sales rep. I know quite a bit already from the interview process but this allows me to take what I have learned even further and it shows I care about them. We review and establish goals (personal and business), mutually set expectations of each other, learn about their hobbies, and anything else that is important to them. Once I fully understand what is important to them or their "Why" it makes the coaching conversations even more impactful.

3. Set the coaching table. This revolves around 3 areas (Monthly Performance Development Meeting (PDM), Pre and Post Call Debriefs, Daily Hot Laps)

PDM-30 minute monthly one-on-one meeting that is scheduled in advance each month. We review KPI's, Skill gaps, and personal goals and we keep it simple on 1 piece of paper. However you develop this it is important for the sales rep to own this and come prepared. The goal as their manager/coach is to help them help themselves. Like raising children we want people to grow and become self sufficient!

Pre and Post Call Debriefs-I set the expectation that this happens before and after each appointment they have with a client or prospect. This is closely managed for the first year until the sales rep demonstrates they have command of our process.

Hot Laps-I do not believe in micromanaging but I do believe in being highly engaged. This is my chance to pop in and see how they are on a personal level, find out what their game plan is for the day, and ask what help they need from me. This is my way of ensuring we are on track to achieve our goals and just as important I am working to develop a solid relationship with my team.

Lastly, make all of this as fun and engaging as possible. Reward/acknowledge your sales reps when you see them making progress and growing...this really is the most rewarding part of coaching. If you don't have a coaching plan or need some help fine tuning your skills then hire a coach...I bet we know a few!!

Carole Mahoney
Founder, Chief Sales Coach
Unbound Growth

The single most important aspect of a sales manager's job is to lead and develop their team. Yet according to data from Objective Management Group, only 7% of sales managers are capable of coaching their team. This is still happening despite research from the Sales Executive Council that shows coaching salespeople at least 3 hours a month yields an average of 7% over goal. If at least 50% of a manager's time isn't being spent coaching their team, then it's no wonder that barely half make their quota.

Coaching doesn't just impact quota, it also impacts the retention of the salesperson. According to research by The Bridge Group and ExecVision, the quality of the managers matters- a lot. When it costs so much to hire new salespeople and get them up to speed only to have another company steal the best ones away within 8 to 14 months- the front line sales manager role is critical. Salespeople who are coached are 45% more likely to recommend the company to someone else to come and work for. Imagine what would happen to your sales recruitment when more rock star sales people are telling other potential rock stars to come work with them. As Trish Bertuzzi wrote in Chapter 19 of "The Sales Development Playbook"; “Coaching is not a component within the sales manager role; managing is now a component of the new coaching role.”

But wait, there's more! Coaching also impacts customer retention. At HubSpot, when Mark Roberge analyzed customer churn with his team, he found that it wasn't an issue with customer success post sale, but found that the problem was with the salesperson. "We recognized that this customer success journey, is going to be largely depend on our ability to set good expectations during the sales process and seek out best fit customers for our company."

A recent SaaS sales team I worked with became the #1 team in their company and held a retention rate just over 98% after a regular coaching cadence was set up with a manager who was trained and coached themselves to be able to coach their team.

The next most important aspect to a sales manager's role is to motivate their team. Not that it is the job of the sales manager to create motivation, but to help a salesperson dig into their own personally meaningful goals and channel that and keep the accountable to it and remind them of it through coaching. For a manager to be able to motivate their team, they need to be able to understand how to dig into their own motivation. What motivates them and how much? Do they have the desire and commitment to reach their own personal goals? Do they have their own plan for reaching those goals? How do they track their progress? Can they motivate salespeople to do the same thing? Do they know what motivates each individual on their team? Do they have strong relationships with each team member? How do they give recognition?

The third most important thing for a sales manager to do is to measure performance and keep their team accountable. Will they hold salespeople accountable? What daily and weekly metrics will be used? DO they believe it is ok for some salespeople to barely, or not, make quota if others make up the difference? Do they believe their salespeople need to like them? Do they make excuses or take responsibility themselves? Do they tend to jump in to manage the sale, or the behavior of the salesperson? Do they ask enough questions of their salespeople? Do they listen enough to know what their salespeople need from them? How do they manage the pipeline with their team? Which part of the pipeline do they pay attention to?

Aaron Prickel
Vice President/Owner
Lushin Inc.

The ultimate goal of sales management is to simply create self sufficiency. The common challenge among most sales leaders is they fail to accomplish this and create a culture of learned helplessness vs self sufficiency. There are 3 key skills that help accomplish this
overarching goal.

1. Managing behavior- if you manage results you manage the past, if you manage behavior you manage the future.

2. Debriefing-truly dissecting what milestones were achieved in sales conversations to help uncover blind spots in conversations.

3. Pipeline Management-The understanding of how many opportunities exist and where they are in the sales process.

The skill of effectively managing pipelines are crucial to sales leadership. It simply starts with identifying the stages of the sales process within the organization. From here, objective milestones to be achieved for each step must be set and agreed upon. Too often stages are subjective (I feel like this has a 70% chance to close) vs objective (I have answers to A, B and C). Once this is accomplished the sales leader can more consistent with their debriefing since everyone is on the same page and also understand what behavior their team should engage in to reach their desired goals.

Steve McCullough
Founder & B2B Sales Coach
Buyer Aligned Selling

So who is the most important person in a company’s chase for meaningful revenue growth?

A good argument can be made that it’s the front line sales manager. After all, she is the connective glue between corporate strategy and the front line team that’s responsible for interacting with buyers daily, and closing business. She influences up and down the ladder, and can have a tremendous impact on attitudes, focus, behaviors and ultimately results.

So what skills are the most important? Well, there are many such as…

+ Ability to set and model a high standard
+ Translating company goals to the individual
+ Guiding & coaching effectively
+ Managing to accountability
+ Recruiting & hiring top talent
+ Emotional intelligence
+ Ability to focus on the important things
+ Ability to help the team uncover the truth about their buyers and opportunities

But in my experience the three that really set the top managers apart from the rest are…

Top managers make an individual connection with every member of the team
Top managers advocate for the needs of the team
Top managers keep the team buyer-focused

I could write a book on any of these three critical skills but let me zero in on the one that I believe rises to the very top, and should be not only the focus of sales management but also of the entire enterprise.

Keeping the team buyer-focused

Today’s reality is that the buyer is more informed and empowered than ever, and buyer expectations are at an all-time high. Relentless customer focus is today’s #1 business strategy, and the truth is that it begins with the sales team.

So what are the best ways to keep your team buyer-focused?

I recommend three strategies:

1. Help your team prepare for important buyer meetings:
Every meeting should have three components: (1) what to present, (2) what to ask, and (3) what to close for. The sales manager should regularly schedule time to review these three things for every important meeting that their team members are attending in a given week.

Help them think through the information that will connect most effectively with a given buyer; what are the key things the selling team would like to come away understanding; and what are we closing for. On this last point it’s a good idea to think about three potential outcomes that are “good enough”, “great” and “fantastic”. Help your team shoot for “great” or “fantastic” next steps and more of your opportunities will progress intentionally, rather than accidentally.

2. Model effective active listening skills:
When sales managers sit in on calls and meetings they have a great opportunity to model the kind of listening, qualifying and questioning that gets to the heart of the buyer’s concerns and motivations. One must peel not only the business onion, but the personal motivation onion as well.

Help your reps go into each meeting prepared for the questions to ask and the issues to uncover, and pick a few (very few) spots where you can ask a very insightful question that drives understanding to a much deeper level. Then review the insights gained after the call so the sales professional can see the impact of deeper, more thoughtful curiosity.

3. Make sure your team is spending adequate time with their buyers
One of the biggest crimes in selling today is that many companies are allowing their teams to spend less and less time with buyers. Sometimes this is driven by over-bureaucratic processes and systems, and other times it’s a lack of top-to-bottom accountability to the number one objective of sales teams: developing, maintaining and growing buyer relationships. The sales manager serves a critical role here and should be managing to specific goals for the percentage and amount of time spent with early, middle and late stage buyers. Nothing is more important than the buyer, and time is a great yardstick to measure that commitment.

Following these keys will help every sales manager maximize his results and make sure that buyer alignment is the number one focus area for success.

Happy selling!

Adam Zais
VP Business Development
Kurlan & Associates

Coaching: Coaching has become 50% of a sales manager's role. The problem is that nearly every sales manager in the world has no idea what coaching really means, nor do they have any sense of what coaching conversations sound like. To make matters worse, sales managers (and sales leadership) generally think that training and coaching are one and the same. (Richard from Refract and I wrote about this issue here) . The only way to develop into a sales coach is to hear the difference between a coaching conversation and everything else. Once learned, it's all about achieving mastery through practice and having the right tools to enable that practice. (i.e., tools like Refract)

Motivating: The right word here might be leadership, because far too many sales managers think motivation is like cheerleading or lecturing or yelling, none of which is what I mean. I'm talking about the ability to motivate people to change a behavior, put forth more effort, push through their comfort zone, or rally around a goal. Unfortunately, the cheerleader (or professor or drill sergeant) style is how most sales managers operate. The reason for this is that sales managers generally don't understand that effective motivation is about empowerment versus enablement or, worse yet, punishment. Compounding this problem is that sales managers typically don't have any idea about the motivational makeup of each individual sales person. Without this knowledge it is simply not possible to know what motivational approaches are likely to work. The way out of this mess is to use time-tested tools (such as OMG evaluations) to find out.

Holding reps accountable: This is a persistent and widespread weakness among sales managers. True accountability cannot be achieved simply through assigning annual quotas, quarterly business reviews, or pipeline discussions. The common scenario is that three-quarters of the way through the year a sales manager realizes that a sales person is not likely to hit their quota and puts them on a performance plan that generally doesn't do anything but guarantee that the sales rep leaves. Sales managers need to review forward-looking indicators, such as near-term goals and objectives, versus lagging indicators, such as activities logged. The only way to do this, in my opinion, is to hold sales people accountable to measurable progress through a clearly defined sales process, on a daily or at least a weekly basis.

Mary Grothe
CEO
SalesBQ

We’re all human… which means we’re all uniquely different! So why manage your sales team members the same way? Some are naturals in some areas of the job and some not. They aren’t motivated by the same things - motivate them in ways specific to them! Manage them uniquely to the same outcomes.

Skill 1: Behavioral Intelligence

Sales managers who have the ability to observe and understand how emotion and behavior drive outcomes will innately communicate and manage their sales reps differently than those who believe a one-size-fits-all approach works. I’ve seen sales environments where every rep is managed the same, yet outcomes vary. For example, the manager assumes the whole team is motivated by money. The manager causes burnout with a high-pressure, high-expectation culture that is driven with monetary incentives. Successful sales managers manage each rep based on who they are as a person. They use awareness and social / emotional queues to adjust their approach in communication, tone, and types of incentives offered. Sales managers who rank high in the behavioral quotient create high-growth sales teams because everyone feels valued, heard, understood, and cared for. In return, they are inspired by their sales leader and motivated to perform and reciprocate the gesture.

Skill 2: Strengths-Focused

Sales managers who take the time to learn about each team members’ strengths and weaknesses have the opportunity to mold and shift the individual rep roles to accommodate productive behavior and experience high-growth sales. If a sales role requires 3 main duties, but each rep struggles in one of the 3, and that one lacking area drives down productivity, would it not make sense to carve that out, build a role of their strengths, and enjoy 2x or 3x productivity? We are often asked how this is scalable; individualized sales roles. Look at this example.

Rep A: consistently makes 60-70 outbound calls per day, converts 10% to sales conversations, struggles closing.

Rep B: no matter how many times you tell them to prospect, they never do. Yet, they close at 75%. If only they had more at-bats.

Shift Rep A to a prospect and qualify role and shift Rep B to a propose and close role.

Skill 3: Empowerment

Sales managers who dictate the rules and expectations constantly, potentially creating a toxic culture where reps feel micro-managed and feel they’re never good enough, will lose an opportunity to create a high-growth sales culture. Building on skills 1 & 2, once the manager understands who their sales reps are, how to communicate, how to motivate, and how to shape their role, they must create a culture of ongoing empowerment. A sales manager empowers their team by influencing the environment. They help everyone learn to diagnose and solve their own problems, build positive relationships with others in the organization (especially operations), and create a team that helps and supports each other. By empowering the team to take on these tasks, it frees up the sales manager to focus on coaching and mentoring their reps, not being stuck managing all their problems.

When it comes to demand generation, it can feel like you’re moving in the dark. Unsure of what other companies are doing and seeing success with, you only have your own data set to pull from when figuring out what to try next.

But wouldn’t it be nice if you knew some of the research around what’s working (and what’s not) for other marketers focusing on demand gen? It could help guide your strategy and inform some decisions on what to devote resources to, right? Right.

That’s exactly why we’ve gathered 25 current statistics on demand generation (all from the past year) in one place. Take a look at the hard numbers around trends for demand gen in 2018 and find out what you need to be thinking about in the months ahead. We think you might be surprised by some of the numbers.

Demand Gen Statistics

1. Converting leads to customers was the top marketing priority for 70% of organizations in 2017. (HubSpot, State of Inbound)

2. 70% of marketers say their demand gen budgets will increase, and 34% say their spending will grow by more than 20%. (2018 Demand Gen Benchmark Survey)

3. Most midsize to large organizations average less than 5,000 marketing qualified leads (MQLs) per month. (HubSpot, Demand Generation Marketing Survey 2017)

4. 79% of B2B marketers credit email as the most effective distribution channel for demand gen efforts. (Content Marketing Institute)

5. Lack of resources (staff, funding, time) is the biggest obstacle for 61% of marketers working on B2B lead generation. (Brighttalk)

6. B2B marketers consider customer experience and personalization the most promising demand generation trends in the next year. (Econsultancy and Adobe)

7. Only 19% of marketers said they are currently using AI-powered applications today, but 36% of marketers said they are planning to deploy them as part of their martech stack in the next 12 months. (DemandGen 2017 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Study)

8. B2B marketing teams often spend upwards of 40 hours a month formatting and processing leads for database upload. (Integrate)

9. Organizations with revenues under $500 million have a mean cost per lead of roughly $180; companies with revenues above $500 million spend more than double that, at roughly $430 per lead. (HubSpot, Demand Generation Marketing Survey 2017)

10. 33% of demand generation professionals say that generation of MQLs is their primary metric for success, while 30% say pipeline influence is their top indicator. (2018 Demand Gen Benchmark Survey)

11. 64% of B2B marketers generate leads via LinkedIn, 49% via Facebook, and 36% via Twitter. (Pinpoint Market Research)

12. Cost per lead ranges from $150 to $350 on average, with larger companies paying higher costs per lead. (HubSpot, Demand Generation Marketing Survey 2017)

13. 42% of lead gen professionals consider lack of quality data a major challenge around quality lead generation. (Brighttalk)

14. 46% of marketers are using interactive content, with the top reason for moving to interactive being better engagement around demand gen efforts. That same research found that 79% of marketers already using interactive content plan to increase their use in the next 12 months. (Content Marketing Institute)

15. Marketers are now experimenting with buyer engagement through formats other than form fills: Video (66%), thought leadership (65%), and infographics (59%) are being made available ungated to accelerate leads through the funnel. (DemandGen 2017 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Study)

16. In the B2B setting, events help generate the most leads, while case studies help convert and accelerate the most leads. (MarketingCharts)

17. 54% of B2B marketers measure success via revenue-based quotas, while 45% measure success through lead-based quotas (NetLine).

18. The top demand generation priorities for 2018 are: 1) focusing on lead quality over quantity, 2) improving conversion rates and results, and 3) generating increased lead volume. (2018 Demand Gen Benchmark Survey)

19. On average, organizations generate 1,877 leads per month and 1,523 MQLs. Just over 1 in 10 are unable to say how many leads they generate in a given month. (HubSpot, Demand Generation Marketing Survey 2017)

20. Bundled nurturing content within a resource hub (instead of multiple emails) produced a 3X increase in lead to pipeline ratio. (DemandGen 2017 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Study)

21. Email was still the go-to demand gen channel for 67% of marketers, but search grew by almost 10% from last year (moving from 41% to 50%), and online ads climbed 5% (moving from 16% to 21%). (2018 Demand Gen Benchmark Survey)

22. 45% of marketers are still unsure what role mobile marketing will play in their demand gen strategies. (Brighttalk)

23. 66% of marketers use video in their lead nurturing campaigns. (DemandGen 2017 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Study)

24. 53% of content marketers use interactive content in lead generation efforts. (Content Marketing Institute)

25. 64% of B2B buyers they prefer podcasts at the top of the funnel, while 48% said webinars were valuable to them in the mid-stage of their buying journey. (DemandGen 2018 Content Preferences Survey)

Wrap Up

With this information, you can create a demand gen strategy for the remaining months of 2018 that capitalizes on buyer preferences, current trends, and content formats to drive results for your organization.

Have you seen any other recent, interesting statistics around demand gen not listed here? Share it in the comments below.

During my time as an SDR, I’ve focused on developing listening skills that help me spot, internalize, and process sales objections as opposed to using scripted, reactive responses meant to lessen the unpredictability.

Being able to quickly internalize objections helps you maintain a natural flow in conversations rather than breaking things up with an “If prospect says X, then say Y” canned response. Using scripted, robotic answers signals to your prospect that you do not truly understand their needs and will result in a hang up.

The key to handling sales objections over the phone is keeping these scripts in the back of your mind, but not actually using them verbatim. Listening to your prospects, accepting moments when you get roughed up, and learning from mistakes will help you develop a finer understanding of selling situations and the logic behind them.

Here are a few scripts I have at the ready for common sales objections. But remember, no script is going to help you sell to a prospect who's just not the right fit. In a recent study, 71% of salespeople reported that 50% or fewer of their prospects turned out to be a good fit.

Conduct responsible prospecting to ensure this doesn't happen to you.

Sales Rebuttals

1. "Why isn't this of interest to you at this time?"

File this one under “invalid reason.” Usually this is more of an emotional response to pesky salespeople taking up precious time. When you hear this, the prospect is dismissive, and probably did not listen to what was being said. A very terse objection, this one can be the most difficult objection for newer SDRs to overcome.

However, you have a good reason for calling the prospect and you already know exactly why the prospect should be interested. Ask questions to understand why the prospect is objecting while maintaining your composure. In fact, research from Gong.io suggests high performing salespeople follow up objections with questions 54% of the time, while average performers followed up with questions only 31% of the time.

Example script:

SDR: "Thank you Mrs. Prospect. I understand why you may feel that this is not of any interest to you; however, I can assure you that director at CLIENT X told me the exact same thing and now he is using our solution to do W, X, and Y. I understand that improving W, X, and Y are important KPIs for you and your business as well -- can you share with me why improving these metrics is not of any interest to you at this time?"

Asking this question gets the prospect to think about your product and/or value proposition in the context of their business and role and also helps you move beyond the initial resistance --usually into another objection. While it may seem undesirable to move from “not interested” to yet another sales objection, these secondary objections are usually more rational and less knee-jerk.

Pro tip: Speak slowly and clearly. Gong's research also found top-performing reps speak more slowly than average reps (176wpm vs. 188wpm). Sometimes the prospect is not interested because he literally has no idea what you said. Also, “not interested” is just another way of saying “I don’t want to listen.” Sometimes people will not want to listen to you, and that's okay.

2. "We should connect to discuss the benefits for you when budget does open up."

According to new research from Marc Wayshak, 55% of salespeople said budget is the most common reason their strong sales opportunities fall apart. If the prospect has never been in contact with your company and claims they cannot afford your solution, this is just another way of brushing you off.

The more reasonable budget objection occurs when the prospect is working with a boot-strap budget where every penny of the year is already accounted for (“Management slashed my budget in half -- I honestly couldn’t buy your product even if I wanted to”). Sometimes, the prospect will say this to brush you off, but in most instances, it is a genuine concern.

It is up to the SDR's discretion, keen judgment, and instincts to determine if the prospect is being sincere. In this situation, it helps to keep in mind that your solution’s ROI could very well lead to a bigger budget for the prospect in the long run.

Example script:

SDR:"Thank you for the insight, Mr. Prospect. I understand why you may be hesitant to open up some budget for a solution you have no experience with. The reason I am calling you however is to open up some initial dialogue. CLIENTS X and Y implemented our tool to solve Z and K and I understand these are also problems for your business. Even if you do not purchase our solution, it would be prudent for us to connect and discuss the benefits for you when budget does open up."

Another type of budget objection results from the prospect having already evaluated the solution through previous meetings and concluding that it was not worth the cost. If this just happened, it will prove very difficult to convince the prospect that you have an additional value proposition outside of a sizeable discount. If a few months have passed, be sure to reference new clients, product updates, or use cases to demonstrate added value.

Example script:

SDR: "Ms. Prospect, since the last time we connected, we have improved our solution’s UX and expanded integration offerings. These updates are the reason CLIENT X just signed with us last month to increase T and R. Since you mentioned T and R as problems the last time we spoke, it would be great to reconnect and discuss the added value these improvements offer your business."

3. "I'm glad to hear you're already working with a provider."

While it may be tempting to try and overcome this objection by attacking or devaluing the prospect’s current solution, all too often the people we are speaking to are the same people responsible for completing the project we hope to replace. In these instances, implying that you somehow know better than your prospects or being outright rude is a bad idea.

I recommend affirming the value of your prospect’s solution and offering additional value. Think about it: If the prospect is already in the market for your services, it is his duty and in his best interest to be absolutely sure that the current solution is in fact ideal for the business.

Script example:

SDR:"I’m glad to hear that you are already working with a provider -- this confirms that you see the value in using such a solution to increase X and Y. I am calling you because in addition to increasing X and Y, we’ve worked with companies like CLIENT X to boost Z as
well."

4. "That's great. We can help you [insert value add]."

This objection comes up because the prospect is preoccupied with other responsibilities and cannot envision making your proposed project a priority. Whatever reason your prospect gives for not being able to evaluate your solution now, there are still ways to add value on the other side of their objection.

Script example:

Prospect: “We are too busy preparing for the holiday season right now.”

SDR: “That's great -- we can help you improve your checkout flow and guarantee smoother customer experiences during the busy season.”

5. "Buying now will ensure a smooth transition as new teammates join."

A team that's in flux or in the process of hiring new members can feel they're unable to move forward implementing new tools or services. But this can be the best time to pursue helpful solutions.

Show your prospect you can help an understaffed or transitional team function more efficiently. And stress the benefits of implementing the solution now, so they'll be able to train new teammates as they begin.

Script example:

Prospect: “We are waiting for the new manager to start, and we'll call you then. Asking a new hire to abruptly switch solutions after he starts can hamper productivity.”

SDR: “Buying now will help the manager develop familiarity with our solution and guarantees productivity.”

6. "Acting now ensures you capture this value add immediately."

Prospect too busy implementing another solution? Great! That demonstrates they've already acknowledged pain points your product or service can help with. Given that 54% of salespeople consider it harder to get in front of new prospects today than it was five years ago, you've already won half the battle by proving they already know your value.

Explain that your solution works well with the other they're currently implementing and will increase ROI even more.

Script example:

Prospect: “We are too busy implementing SOLUTION V.”

SDR: “Great, clients like X and Y found that SOLUTION V works better when it operates in tandem with ours. Acting now will ensure you can capture this added value immediately.”

When it comes to timing objections, there's usually a way to frame acting now vs. later as an opportunity for the prospect to get more done in the long run.

7. "Would you close today if we offered you a month-to-month plan?"

Some prospects won't be able to get an annual contract approved -- no matter how low the price. Offering a month-to-month plan can move stalled deals over the finish line and rule the "We don't do contracts" objection null and void.

Script example:

Prospect: "We just can't sign a year-long contract without knowing if the ROI would actually be worth it."

SDR: "So what I'm hearing is that you know Solution X will benefit your team, but the annual contract is standing in your way. If I offered you a month-to-month contract, would you be willing to sign today?"

Want to learn more? Check out our ultimate guide to objection handling here.

• Amazon has caused pain for a lot of companies with its disruptive business model. 
• But now it could disrupt entire economies, especially in emerging markets, according to a research note published by a team of analysts at Morgan Stanley. 
• Amazon could be up against thick competition in India, but it is also targeting expansion in several other countries. 
• Watch Amazon trade in real time here.

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Entire economies, particularly emerging markets, are at risk of sweeping disruption as Amazon looks to expand globally, according to Morgan Stanley.

Amazon is known for shaking up entire industries with its malleable e-commerce platform, which has disrupted brick-and-mortar retail, groceries, and even insurance. But it is several countries whose retail sectors are at risk now. Those countries have not yet heavily adopted e-commerce, and when Amazon steps in, brick-and-mortar retail is in for a rude awakening. 

"We see Amazon investing in new international markets to continue expanding," Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote. He says emerging markets are "the next $5 trillion battle ground."  

Here are the emerging markets in Amazon's crosshairs:

India

E-commerce in India amounts to roughly 3% of its total retail sales, according to the latest estimates from eMarketer. By comparison, that number hit 10% in the US in 2017, according to Statista.

Amazon launch its core ecommerce platform, Amazon Marketplace, in India in 2013 and Amazon Prime in 2016. It has invested $5 billion in the country, which included the opening of more than 60 fulfillment centers, Morgan Stanley said. 

Still, it's important to note the heavy competition Amazon faces in India as Walmart just bought Flipkart, the fastest growing e-commerce business in the country. Flipkart's e-commerce market share in India is roughly 40% and rising, while Amazon's share in the country has been slipping in the past few years, according to 7Park Data. 

In the event Amazon is successful in India, Future Retail, a traditional retailer in India, could be seriously disrupted, the Morgan Stanley note said. 

Indonesia and Thailand

Indonesia's e-commerce sales were just 1.4% of total retail in 2015, according to eMarketer. But there is the "possibility that Amazon has been looking to invest ~$600mn in Indonesia," Nowak said.

Amazon could be a serious threat to traditional Indonesian retailer MAP, as well as Indonesian department store Matahari, Morgan Stanley estimated. 

E-commerce sales in Thailand were 1.3% of total retail sales. Amazon just launched the International Shopping Experience app in second-quarter 2018, Nowak wrote. The app is part of the Amazon Shopping App, and it allows consumers in various countries to narrow their product searches down to 45 million products in only their country.  

Latin America

eMarketer estimates Brazil's e-commerce sales were roughly 3% or 4% of total retail sales in 2016. Amazon just opened up a 50,000 foot fulfillment center in Sao Paulo, which is four-times its prior footprint, according to Morgan Stanley. That will allow Amazon to manage and distribute its inventory to consumers in the country.

Amazon also launched Amazon Rechargeable, a debit card in Mexico in first-quarter 2018. Not only would this card make it easier for Mexican consumers to make purchases, but it could also give Amazon critical data on what those consumers want. Amazon leverages that type of data for both its advertising and e-commerce business. 

Latin American department store Falabella and apparel sellers NetShoes and Renners could be in trouble. Additionally, appliance companies like Viavarejo and Elektra are also in the danger zone, Morgan Stanley said. 

Australia

Australia's latest numbers on e-commerce are from 2014, but are expected by eMarketer to hit only 5.6% by 2018, still a far cry from the US.

Amazon could change that too, recently launching Amazon Marketplace and Prime in 2017. And it's not finished with Australia. Amazon just launched a fulfilment center in Melbourne this year, and partnered with Australia Post, a government owned postal service, which brought in roughly $5 billion in revenue in 2017. for last-mile delivery, according to Nowak. The fulfillment center will make the distribution process organized and efficient. The Australia Post partnership could add tremendous distribution volume and capabilities for Amazon. 

Australian department stores David Jones, Myer and BigW could could get hit hard, according to Morgan Stanley. Specialty retailers Supercheap Auto and Harvey Norman could also be hurt. 

Japan 

Perhaps the most developed country in terms of retail on Amazon's target ilist is Japan, which saw e-commerce total 6.7% of retail sales in 2015, according to Statista. But Amazon wants to squeeze some more value out of that market. It launched Echo and Alexa in Japan in the third-quarter 2017. It also launched Prime Now in Japan, the Morgan Stanley note said. Echo and Alexa are artificial intelligence devices that can make it easier for consumers to order products. Prime, of course, is an attractive discount marketplace consumers everywhere love. 

Japanese merchandise and food sellers such as Rakuten, Oisix, and Lohaco are at particular risk, Morgan Stanley said. 

SEE ALSO: 'Thank you for inspiring the next generation of women to dream big': Read the letter JPMorgan top female execs just sent to the new NYSE president

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This $530 Android phone is half the price of an iPhone X and just as good

Many entrepreneurs are jumping on the software craze, hoping to build the next billion-dollar software. Or at least software they can eventually sell off for hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the marketing world for example, data from Chief Martec shows that in 2011, there were only about 150 marketing software. Fast forward to 2016 and the number was about 3,500 and in 2017 it stood at 5,000. Is it crazy to think that number has increased in 2018?

Definitely not. And that’s just for marketing software.

Unfortunately, like many before them, these entrepreneurs eventually realize that it’s difficult, like most worthwhile endeavors.

Some add unnecessary features with hopes that it will bring a few additional bucks at the expense of customer satisfaction. And they end up ruining everything.

With such stiff competition, how can you create user-friendly software? In my experience, it boils down to following these rules:

1. Intuitive user interface

A good user interface (UI) makes it possible for users of a software to easily understand information presented on a computer or phone. It should be easy for a user to take any actions they want to without complications and confusion.

Sure, some folks are naturally more tech-savvy than others, and will navigate any software, whether it has a good UI or not without any problems. But for others, when UI is good enough, they should be able to solve issues they have when they visit the help center or speak to a customer care representative.

Nevertheless, your software should generally be so easy enough to operate that users do not need a manual to understand how it works. Trying to reinvent the wheel or change certain elements users have subconsciously become used to will only destroy user efficiency.

For example, breadcrumbs allows users to determine their current location by providing a clickable trail of preceding pages for easier navigation. In this case, just using a toggle to switch between locations will be confusing when a user can’t tell their current location or how far off they are from where they started. In addition, it’s a waste of precious work time when users have to spend time figuring out where features are located.

2. Excellent technical performance

While elements of a good user interface are clearly visible, elements of a good technical performance from a software will not always be easily visible but can be felt.

For example, if your software takes a while to startup, users will not necessarily see why it’s taking too long to boot. They’ll just know it’s taking forever to start. Still, that’s an example of poor technical performance.

Using the example above, if software takes some time to start, you may consider using containers. Okay, let’s just say you should use containers whether your software boots instantly or not, because it has several benefits apart from enabling faster boot times as this infographic below shows.

Source: Avatier

Containers create a better testing and upgrade environment because working on one container module will not crash the entire software or make it unusable until whenever the developer is through with the test or upgrade.

More importantly, hire excellent developers, and ensure that quality assurance (QA) testers test your software for bugs and other usability problems. The QA testers can then make suggestions for improvement you can implement.

3. Great user experience

The first two rules are an offshoot of this one, but it encompasses a lot more, as you may already know.

Depending on where you’re reading or whom you’re listening to, you’ll hear that user experience (UX) has anywhere from four to six or more elements, including but not limited to:

• Value
• Usability
• Credibility
• Desirability
• Accessibility
• Usefulness

An element like usability determines whether users can easily complete tasks on your software, discover new features, or just generally find their way around your software. The breadcrumbs and toggle example I gave earlier still fits as an example of poor usability.

Your software’s value is a huge part of user experience, because some software have good usability, but are not doing well from a business perspective. However, when your software satisfies users’ needs, it is valuable.

These needs are in two categories — spoken and unspoken. If your software promises to help users track time and it does that, it meets a spoken need. That’s because users know they want to track time, which is why they’ll find your software valuable in the first place.

Nonetheless, when your software is easy to navigate and use, or maybe helps users keep a time log and possibly save it for offline use, that’s an unspoken need which is also valuable to users.

If your software doesn’t add value to the life of users by filling their needs, user experience is terrible no matter how beautifully designed it is. Always aim for a great user experience when creating your software.

One of the hardest things about the fund-raising process for entrepreneurs is that you’re trying to raise money from people who have “asymmetric information.” VC firms see thousands of deals and have a refined sense of how the market is valuing deals because they get price signals across all of these deals. As an entrepreneur it can feel as intimidating as going to buy a car where the dealer knows the price of every make & model of a car and you’re guessing at how much to pay.

I thought I’d write a post about how to talk about valuation at a startup and give you some sense of what might be on the mind of the person considering funding you. Of course, unlike cars there is no direct comparison across each startup so these are just some general guidelines to try and even the information field.

What was the post money on your last round (and how much capital have you raised)?

It’s not uncommon for a VC to ask you how much capital you’ve raised and what the post-money valuation was on your last round. I know that some founders feel uncomfortable with this as though they might somehow be sharing something so confidential that it ultimately hurts you. These are straightforward questions, the answers will have no bearing on your ultimate success and if you want to know the truth most VCs have access to databases like Pitchbook that have all of this information anyways.

So why does a VC ask you?

In the first place they’re looking for “fit” with their firm. If you’re talking with a typical Seed/A/B round firm they often have ownership targets in the company in which they invest. Since they have limited capital and limited time availability they often try to make concentrated investments across companies in which they have the highest conviction. If a firm typically invests $5 million in its first check and its target is to own 20% or more that means that most if its deals are in the $15–20 million pre-money range. If you’re raising at $40 million pre then you might be out of their strike zone.

Many VCs will have a distribution curve where they’ll do a small number of early-stage deals (say $1.5–3 million invested at a $6–10m pre-money), a larger number of “down the fairway” deals ($4–5 million at a $15–25 million pre) and a few later-stage deals (say $8–10 million at a $30–40 million pre).Of course there are smaller funds that are more price sensitive and want to invest earlier and later stage funds with more capital to deploy and write larger checks a higher prices so understanding what is that VC’s “norm” is important.

A second thing a VC may be trying to determine is whether your last-round valuation was significantly over-priced. Of course valuation is in the eye of the beholder but if that VC thinks your last round valuation was way too high then he or she is more likely to politely pass rather than try and talk down your valuation now. VCs hate “down rounds” and many don’t even like “flat rounds.” There are some simple reasons. For starters, VCs don’t like to piss off a bunch of your previous-round VCs because they’ll likely have to work with them in other deals. They also don’t want to become a shareholder in a company where every other shareholder starts by being annoyed with them.

But there is also another very rational reason. If a VC prices a flat or down round it means that management teams are often taking too much dilution. Every VC knows that talented founders or executives who don’t own enough of the company or perceive they will have enough upside will eventually start thinking about their next company and are less likely to stick around. So a VC doesn’t want to price a deal in which the founder feels aggrieved from day one but takes your money anyway because he or she doesn’t have a choice.

Every VC has a story where they did the flat round anyways and the founder said, “I really don’t mind! I know our last round valuation was too high.” In nearly 100% of those cases the founder expresses his or her frustration a year later (and 2 years later and 4 years later). The memory isn’t “boy, you stepped in at a time where we were having a tough time getting other VCs to see the value in our company — thank you!” it is more likely a softer version of “you took advantage of us when we had no other options.”

It is this muscle memory that makes the VC want to pass on the next down or flat round. In a market where there is always another great deal to evaluate, why sign up to one where you know there are going to be bruised egos from the get go?

The “how much have you raised?” question is usually a VC trying to determine whether you’ve been capital efficient with the funds you’ve raised to date. If you’ve raised large amounts of money and can’t show much progress obviously you’ve got a tougher time to explain the past then if you’ve been frugal and over-achieved.

My advice to founders on the questions of “how much did you raise in the last round?” and “what was the post-money valuation of your last round?” is to start with just the data. If you don’t perceive that you have any potential “issues” (raised too much, price too high) then this should be a non event. If you are aware you may have some issues or if you are constantly getting feedback that you may have issues then it’s a smart strategy for you to develop a set of talking points to get in front of the issue when asked.

What expectations do you have about valuation?

It is not uncommon for a VC to ask about your price expectations in this fund raising process. It’s a legitimate question as the VC is in “price discovery” mode and wants a sense whether you’re in his or her valuation range.

It’s a tough dance but I would suggest the following:

• In most cases don’t name an actual price
• Your job is to “anchor” by giving the VC a general range without saying it. Call this “price signaling.”
• Turn the tables on the VC by politely saying, “given you must have a sense of our general valuation, how do you feel the market is pricing rounds like ours these days? After all — we only raise once every 1–2 years!”

Why shouldn’t most founders just name a price? For starters, it’s the job of the “buyer” to name price and you don’t want to name your valuation if it ends up being lower than the VC would have paid or a price too high they the VC simply pulls out of the process.

So then why anchor? If you don’t give signals to a VC of what your general expectations are it’s hard for them to know whether you have realistic expectations relative to their perceived value of you and you want to keep them in the process rather than just having them pull out based on what they THINK you might want on valuation.

Any great negotiation starts by anchoring the other party’s expectations and then testing their reaction.

How you talk about valuation will of course depend on how well your business is performing and how much demand you have from other investors. If I leave out the immediate “up and to the right” companies and talk about most others who have made good progress since the last funding but the next round isn’t a slam dunk, you might consider something like if asked about your expectations:

• We closed our last round at a $17 million post-money valuation and we had raised $3.5 million.
• We closed it 20 months ago and we feel like we’ve made great progress
• We’re hoping to raise $5–7 million in this round
• We know roughly how VCs price rounds and we think we’ll likely be within the normal range of expectations
• But obviously we’re going to let the market tell us what the right valuation is. We only raise every 2 years so the market will have a better feel for it than we will
• We’re optimizing for the best long-term fit for a VC and who we think will help us create the most value. We’re not optimizing for the highest price. But obviously we want a fair price.
• How do you generally think about valuation for a company at our stage? (this is seeking feedback / testing your reponse)

Here you’ve set a bunch of signals without naming your price. What a VC heard was:

• The price has to be higher than $17 million, which was the last round. It was 20 months ago and the founder clearly told me she has made great process (code words for higher price expected)
• She is raising $5–7 million and knows the range of valuations for this amount. If I assume 20–25% dilution that implies a price of between $20–28 million pre-money valuation ($25-$35m post-money). Maybe she wants slightly higher but she certainly won’t want lower.
• She has told me she’s not trying to shop this to the highest price. I’m not so naive as to completely believe that — every entrepreneur will go for the highest reasonable price with a VC they like so I at least need to put my best foot forward. But if I’m in the ballpark of fair she won’t game me and push for the highest price as the only part of her decision.

Are your existing investors participating in this round?

This is a delicate dance as well. Each new investor knows that the people who have the MOST asymmetric information on your performance are the previous round investors. They not only know all of your data and how you’re doing relative to competition, but they also have a good view on how well your management team is performing together and whether you’re a good leader.

On the one hand a new potential investor will want to know that your existing investors are willing to continue to invest heavily in this round and at the same price that they are paying, on the other hand they want to invest enough of the round to hit their ownership targets and may not want existing investors to take their full prorata investments.

Before raising capital you need to have a conversation with your existing investors to get a sense on what they’re thinking or at a minimum you better have an intuitive feel for it. Assuming that most of your existing investors are supportive but want a new outside lead, I recommend answering this something like this:

• Our existing investors of course want to participate in this round. They will likely want to do their prorata investments — some might even want slightly more.
• I know that new firms have ownership targets. I feel confident I can meet these. If it becomes sensitive between a new investors needs and previous investors — I’m obviously not going to tell my investors they can’t participate but I feel confident I can work with them to keep the sizes of their checks reasonable.

What a VC hears when you say this:

• My existing investors are supportive. I will eventually call them anyways to confirm but I can continue my investment assuming they are supportive
• In the future if we raise a larger round this entrepreneur won’t try to screw me by forcing me not to take my prorata rights because they weren’t throwing existing investors under the bus with me
• This entrepreneur is sophisticated enough to know that fund-raising is dance in which I need to meet the needs of both new investors and of previous investors. They will work with me so I can get close to my ownership targets.

When SHOULD you name a valuation expectation?

There are some types of rounds where just naming price might be a better option.

1. Strategics (ie industry investors vs. VCs). For some reason many strategic investors don’t like to lead rounds and they don’t like to name a price. This isn’t true of all strategics but it is true for many of them — particularly those who don’t have a long history in VC. Having a price helps them to evaluate the deal better. Often they’re much better at a “yes/no” decision than naming a price. If you name your valuation you sometimes have to give them rationale on how similar companies are valued so they can justify their internal case. Knowing that other institutional investors (including your insiders) are paying the same price as them in this round helps.
2. Many investors. When you are raising for 8–10 new sources vs. 1–2 sometimes it’s easier just to name price. One reason you might be raising from so many sources is that you haven’t found it easy to find a strong lead investor (for say $20 million) but many sources are willing to write you smaller checks (of say $2–3 million each). Many investors can also be the opposite situation where you’re so successful that everybody wants to invest. In either case, having a price target can help you get momentum.

Turning the information tables

Final point. If done in the right way, each VC meeting can be a great opportunity for you to get feedback on how investors are seeing market valuations in the time that you’re raising (valuations change based on the overall funding economy) and also a chance to hear about how the VCs think about your valuation and/or let you know whether or not you have any perceived problems.

You might politely ask questions like:

• Does your firm have a target ownership range?
• Do you typically like to lead and do you ever follow?
• Are there firms you like to co-invest with?
• Does our fund-raising size sound reasonable to you?
• Are there any valuation concerns you might have that we can address now?

Your goal in forming questions is to get signaling back from the VC. Remember that fund-raising is a two-way process and you have every right to ask questions that help orient you just as a good VC will ask questions of you.

Want to read more?

This is part of a series I’ve been writing on fund raising. If you’ve enjoyed or learned please email to a friend or share through social. And you can follow me on Twitter or on Snap and receive my newsletter direct to you email box here:

https://medium.com/media/73e635308c13a4f3c71517be2826fdb0/href

So far I’ve covered:

1. Why you hear “no” very quickly a fund raising process?
2. How to plan a fund raise before you even start
3. The importance of in-person meetings and re-engagement in your process
4. How to manage your psychology during a difficult raise
5. How many VCs should you meet? And how do you prioritize your time?
6. Why it’s better to send a deck rather than a link to investors
7. Why you shouldn’t send investors all your data too early in the process
8. Why taking some risks in fund raising and being willing to hear “no” can actually help you get to “yes”
9. Why confidence is so important in fund raising
10. Why it’s important to meet more partners at a firm than just your sponsoring partner
11. How much to raise and how long should your money last?

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How to Talk About Valuation When a VC Asks was originally published in Both Sides of the Table on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you had trouble maintaining strong business relationships? Here’s a handy guide on how business texting can help you retain clients.

Business texting has emerged as the heir apparent to traditional email marketing.

Quite frankly, it’s about time.

While email marketing still has social media beat in terms of control and building deeper engagement, it lacks the personal touch of a digital one-on-one with your customers and prospects.

Our own data shows 94 percent of text messages are read within minutes of receipt. Overall, text messages have an open rate of around 98 percent! Compare that to the pathetic 10-15% open rate for emails.

Furthermore, text messages are read instantly… but an email can sit for days before the customer even sees it.

And the typical social media user doesn’t even see a message until they log on to share cat videos or get into a heated political debate. Hardly the mindset you want customers to have when marketing to them about your business and products.

If you’re interested in business texting, here are some ways you can use it to see results quickly.

Here are six quick ways you can use business texting:

1. Generating Sales
2. Acquiring New Leads
3. Keeping Clients Updated
4. Getting to Know Your Clients Better
5. Providing Quick Tips and Advice
6. Boosting Employee Morale

Let’s dig into each idea independently…

Generating Sales With Business Texting

Dr. Eshe Faizah, owner of Herbsistah.com, an Atlanta-based learning ground for health and wellness signed on with us after 10 years of email marketing efforts led to what she described as lower open rates. Sensing that “People don’t read email messages anymore,” she switched to Betwext and noticed immediate ROI.

Faizah decided to send one message per week to her sign-ups, targeting Thursdays and Fridays as her primary “send days.” One of these text messages in the days before Mother’s Day led to $1,400 in new sales.

Business texting is particularly effective at generating sales when you use it in conjunction with special occasions, as Faizah did, or for other promotions and sweepstakes. Random coupons and discounts to your opt-ins via text message may tickle the buying bug as well.

Acquiring New Leads With Business Texting

Melanie Shepard of the Tempe-based religious organization UChurch was able to build a future marketing campaign through the use of business texting. Shepard attends Arizona State University’s Club Day recruiting event each year.

The first year she began using texting as a business tool, she created a single banner asking students to text “ASU” to the UChurch number. The result was over 250 new leads in “a few hours.”

Organizations like UChurch can confidently use these opt-in numbers to market future events and mission efforts. They also can reach out to their community to create awareness for special causes or crowd-sourced emergency fundraising efforts for families and individuals in need.

Keeping Clients Updated With Business Texting

Kristin M. of the world famous Chicago-based Schmaltz Deli incorporates her use of business texting to keep clients updated on specials or promotions, many of them short-notice. “Every time we send a text message, we get customers in the door,” she said.

One instance involves free delivery notifications. Chicago, as many of you know, can experience some pretty harsh winters. Many times, Schmaltz Deli will brave the elements so companies’ employees don’t have to get out of the office to enjoy a hearty lunch.

Beyond this specific use, companies could also use text messages to inform customers their orders have been received or are out for delivery. Doctors’ offices or other service-minded professionals can use it for appointment reminders or for alerts and notifications.

Getting to Know Your Clients Better

When it comes to surveying and polling your customers, length and ease of use are definite hindrances. Think about the last time you bought a meal at a fast food restaurant or a magazine from a bookstore.

Did you ever “go online and fill out our survey to tell us how we did and get $5 back on your next purchase”? Some of you may have, but even so, your response rate is likely abysmal when compared to how many times you were actually asked.

Texting has the power to overcome this because it can be extremely narrow in nature. You can drill deeper with what you ask your customers about their experience or expectations, thus resulting in fewer questions.

And because of the high open rates, you’re likely to get a response, especially when presenting options like, “Text ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ to [NUMBER].”

Using business texting to collect client insights allows you to work with a client/customer who already has opted in to receive texts. She or he wants to hear from you.

Providing Quick Tips and Advice With Business Texting

Service-minded professionals can deliver tons of value to their clients in small, bite-sized doses using SMS delivery platforms.

Examples:

• You’re an exterminator reminding a homeowner his annual termite inspection is coming due.
• As an auto shop sharing make-model-specific maintenance tips to one of your customers right around the time of their next service.
• You’re a gym owner sharing a video to a specific workout technique you know your clients will find useful.

The ability to provide quick tips and advice your clients will actually find useful has a two-pronged effect: 1) it gets them back through your doors or using your services; and 2) it saves money, prevents frustration, provides encouragement, etc.

Boosting Employee Morale With Business Texting

Like any good business, most of these points have been customer-focused. But don’t overlook your employees in all of this because their morale will have an impact on your business as a whole.

Go back to the survey example. Using texts instead of browbeating workers to ask for information from unwilling point-of-sale customers takes an unnecessary burden off the employee.

Also, business texting can keep employees up to date on procedural changes, provide unique insight valuable in helping them carry out duties, and give them a more rapid channel for having questions answered and concerns addressed.

We even know of businesses who use texting to communicate schedule changes to employees… and one group who uses it to ensure compliance with cleaning standards!

Incorporating Business Texting

I hope today’s article gave you some great ideas on how to use business texting to improve your operations. To learn more about getting started with business texting, or to learn how to promote your small business check out our special report… “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Marketing”

According to statistics 79 percent of marketing leads never convert to sales. That figure reveals an even sadder reality: 65 percent of B2B marketers haven’t established lead nurturing. Whatever the reason companies have for not focusing on lead nurturing is a path to self-destruction. With every minute of neglect, the clock slowly ticks until the mechanism finally explodes and destroys everything.

The statistics are shocking given the fact that even multi-billion dollar companies place so much premium on lead nurturing. Take Microsoft, for example; the tech giant bought LinkedIn for a whopping $26.2 billion, the most significant acquisition in its history.

Why would they pay that much? For what?

LinkedIn gives them access to millions of data of the audience they want to become their customers. That data will provide them with an idea what each target wants, enabling them to create a personalized strategy to win their prospects over.

That is a clear and perfect example of lead nurturing. It is so important that another study showed the significant difference it has in companies that have made this a part of their conversion process.

• Annuitas Group revealed that nurtured leads purchase 47% more than the non-nurtured ones.
• Eloqua, Taleo Corporation said their conversion rates increased by 30% more
• DemandGen Report said that lead nurturing emails get 4–10 times more response than standalone email blasts

First Things First

A lot of B2B marketers make the wrong assumption that acquiring a large percentage of leads give them a bigger fighting chance of increasing the sales. If that is the case, then a lot of companies could have become multi-million dollar companies just because of the leads they have, but such is not the case.

Instead, you have to build a relationship with the customer, know what they want, and gain their trust. Once you get to know them, it would be easier to deliver something they want based on their individual needs.

Thus, their conversion is based on how well you can give an exact solution to their pain and also the steps that lead them toward that path. As you lead them along, you should be careful of pitfalls that could jeopardize that conversion journey. We have prepared some tips how you can avoid those mistakes as you nurture your leads.

Value Your Leads

Consumers are wiser and more sensitive today than 20 years ago. Thanks to a vast amount of information that is readily available on the Internet. Now, consumers can easily spot whether you want to make a quick buck or there to bring a solution to a pain point.

So how do you show you value your leads?

By providing them with valuable content for free, something that makes their lives better or solves their pain points. When your leads see that you are concerned about them, they will trust you, and it will be easier to convert them and make the purchase.

Know More about Them

Since you are the ones who lead them on a journey, you have to know your leads so you can provide what they specifically want to make the journey comfortable, convenient, and enjoyable. What are the touch points that your prospects have to go through? That means you have to provide content that is relevant in every point of their journey.

Be Consistent

Being consistent means following your schedule. If you release new content every Tuesday and Thursday, you have to make sure you do so. If you don’t, you send a negative message that you don’t care about your business, and that is bad news for your business. If your target leads see you don’t care, why should they care as well?

Staying on schedule also ‘trains’ your leads to perform actions that are connected to multiple touchpoints. When you get your leads to do this, you are also getting their “Yes” that can eventually lead them to purchase.

Drip Campaigns

Research showed that leads who were nurtured through a drip marketing funnel are likely to spend 47 percent more on purchases than those who went through other channels. More so, they increase the chance of client re-engagement and have higher open rates.

Beyond Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is not a standalone process. Instead, it compliments with other marketing strategies, such as email marketing and landing pages. These elements work harmoniously in a marketing ecosystem that ultimately leads to conversion.

The most important, however, is automating the marketing process. Using software or tool. You create and send trigger information based on the specific client’s behavior. Through this, the target receives the information at the most appropriate time that brings them closer to the sale.

This article originally posted at The Savvy Marketer.

How quickly should the topic of price come up in a prospecting call?  I’m sure you’ve faced this issue. You’re having a first or second conversation with a prospect and the issue of price comes up, and suddenly you’re in a prospecting dilemma about what to do next.

Have you ever parked your car in a manner you would not be able to get it out?  No, you’d never do that.  Same thing applies with prospecting. You never want to go into a prospecting call not knowing how to get out of it.

Don’t view the issue of price to be a one-way conversation where the customer is in control. You have the ability to stay in control if you’ve been pro-active in asking questions that get the prospect to reveal the needs and outcomes they desire.

It’s a big mistake going into a prospecting call and not being willing to ask questions that will get the customer sharing their needs. Now, don’t think this means it’s about the specific product they want to buy. No, it’s just the opposite. It’s about why they are looking for what they feel they need to buy.

Regardless of where the prospect is in their buying journey and regardless if they came to you via an inbound lead or an outbound call, it’s still about their needs.

Asking questions focused on the why and their needs early in the prospecting process is the only way to get it out on the table.  The sooner you have this out on the table, the sooner you’ll be prepared to handle any question they bring up regarding price.

Check out this video of a situation I found myself in dealing with price early in the prospecting/selling phase.

The salesperson who fails to uncover early the reason the prospect is talking to them is setting themselves up for failure, because they won’t have a solid response if price comes up.

Don’t look at price as a cost. Look at price as an investment.  It’s an investment designed to help them achieve the outcome they desire.   The way you handle the issue of price is by linking it back to the outcome the customer wants. (You’ll get a full example of how to do this in the video.)

Remember, it’s never that your price is too high. No, it’s an issue of your value being too low.  Raise your value and you can raise your price, and it starts in the prospecting phase.

Want to learn the secrets to using email and the telephone to prospect? I am offering a FREE prospecting webinar on Monday, June 4, at 2 PM Central.

This 45-minute webinar is all about building a program quickly that will lead to results for you and your bottom line.  If you can watch it live, GREAT, as I will be giving away some extras!  But even if you can’t watch live, still register and you will get the recording.  You’ll get all the relevant tips that could make a difference in your prospecting momentum.

Sign up today at this link.

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

 

Today’s inboxes are hammered with digital marketing messages, spam, forwards, newsletters, and notifications. People check email at red lights and while watching TV. (Don’t get us started on the ones checking mail at the movies.) While email marketing remains the best way to reach leads and existing customers, it’s harder than ever to cut through the clutter. Avoid these common email marketing mistakes and you’ll come out on top.

1. You’re not segmenting your email list.

Who are you talking to? Picture your Netflix account. You probably have profiles set up. You, your wife, your kids. Maybe you share an account with your parents. Each audience has unique tastes. The viewer who loves car chase movies doesn’t want to watch British period romances. The viewer who watches Pokemon doesn’t want to catch up on Game of Thrones.

Show people what they want to see. Your email marketing list consists of just as many audiences. College-aged kids looking for a fun night out. Sales professionals trying to make a big win. Retirees who have put off their next doctor’s appointment and want to feel better. The days of spray and pray marketing are over and today’s consumers expect highly-targeted messages that give them what they want, when they want it.

Want another reason to segment? According to MailChimp, segmented campaigns see over 100% higher open rates than non-segmented campaigns. They also have higher open rates, lower spam reports, and lower instances of unsubscribing.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Segment your email marketing contacts into lists and sublists based on customer data.
• Don’t forget to create suppression lists. These are people you’re not marketing to at the moment.
• Add checkboxes to forms to gather additional information—zip code, birthday, interest groups—from your visitors.
• Don’t forget to be GDPR compliant.

2. You’re not A/B testing.

This isn’t time for instincts. When it comes to email, the only thing you should trust your gut for is digesting your food. Clever marketers don’t try to predict whether or not an audience will love a call to action, subject line, or image. They use A/B testing.

Go to war. Think about it as a battle to the death. Using the email automation software of your choice and a robust recipient list, test your content to see what performs best. Solid programs will send your test emails to sample audiences, and automatically send the winner to the bulk of your contact list. No more guesswork.

This is a rare opportunity to know exactly what’s working and build on that. A/B testing helps you determine what your audience is connecting with (and what they’re not connecting with.) Your emails will consistently perform better when you optimize them regularly.

Here’s how to fix it:

• A/B test the subject line of your next big email promotion.
• Test the next email’s image, offer, or CTA. Only test one thing at a time. This is a science experiment.
• Keep your variables to an absolute minimum to know which changes mattered.

3. You’re not automating your email marketing.

You have a lot to say to your prospects and current clients. But, you probably don’t have time to manually send all the emails you know you should. Reminders, newsletters, thank-yous, promotional offers, and so on. Email marketing could take you all day …. That’s where email automation comes in.

Get your finger on the trigger. The key to a successful automated nurture campaign is to first know what actions or behavior should trigger the email workflow. Triggers are actions or behaviors on your website or at your location, such as filling out a form, downloading a coupon, or abandoning a cart.

Remember: email marketing is about nurturing, not selling. Dig deep into what your recipients want and need. How can you help them solve a pain point? Remind them how good it feels to actually enjoy their destination wedding rather than agonize over all the planning. Offer tips that help them apply for a law degree with less stress. Close with a helpful promo code, or the opportunity to book another experience.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Map your customer journey to find the “triggers” for your email marketing.
• Set up automated workflows that move guests through the funnel by delivering the right message (and the right deal!) at the right time.
• Make sure workflows move customers out of one list and into a new one as they evolve from a lead to a new customer to a loyal one.
• Add helpful reminder workflows. Shopping holiday coming up? Remind them to grab that gift.

4. Your newsletter is selling something.

Don’t send a crappy newsletter. People sign up for newsletters because they anticipate value in their inbox. While that value may come in the form of exclusive discounts and opportunities, it should also make them smile. It shouldn’t waste even 30 seconds of their time with content that’s all about how great you business is.

Short. Sweet. Helpful. Your newsletter should be genuinely fun to read. (Not just fun for your mom to read.) That means limit “news” unless it’s truly interesting, don’t toot your own horn, and keep it nice and short. Think brief tips, at-a-glance event schedules, and exclusive coupons. The end.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Revise your current newsletter. (You do have a newsletter, right?) Would you read it?
• Review delivered, open and click-through rates.
• Establish benchmarks and share more meaningful content to increase those numbers.
• If it isn’t working, A/B test different subject line styles, delivery days and times, images, and content.

5. Your emails don’t work on mobile devices.

Be responsive or go home. Around 80% of your contacts will open your emails on their phones. To get the full picture of what that means, imagine what most people are doing when they open their email on their phone. (Hint: They’re often at a red light.) Your email marketing needs to speak to those people, even if you think they should put their phones down while driving.

No more squinting. Responsive emails adjust instantly and elegantly depending on the screen size of the viewer. Every single email you send should be coded to be easy to read and scroll on a cell phone screen or on a tablet. Emails that aren’t mobile-friendly get deleted because no one has time to try to read microscopic fonts or click on tiny calls-to-action. (What is this, an email for ants??).

Here’s how to fix it:

• Start using a responsive email template.
• Email code is notoriously finicky across platform, software and screen combinations. Use your email software testing tool on every email you send.
• Remember the red-light reader. Put the most important information up front and make it large enough to understand in a 5-second scan.
• CTAs should be big enough to tap with a finger. And not too close together.

6. There’s no call to action in your emails.

Make something happen. Every email you send should have a purpose. (A strategic purpose, not an existential purpose.) Even helpful, non-salesy emails should have a call to action. Book a consultation. Attend an event. Read a blog post. Download a coupon.

Emphasize the action part. There’s nothing wrong with falling back on the old stalwart Learn More as long as you’re asking your reader to do something. Stick to action words. Be as concrete as possible. Book a Massage is better than Start Relaxing. Email marketing calls to action are not an exact science, and you should anticipate tweaking and optimizing them on an ongoing basis to get the results you want.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Review all of your marketing and nurturing emails. Make sure they have a call to action that aligns with the appropriate stage in your customer’s journey.
• Set up tracking links using bit.ly or a platform like HubSpot so you can test the CTAs across a variety of campaigns.
• Test and test and test again. Colors, copy, sizes, and placements can all affect CTA performance.

7. Your emails have too many calls to action.

Whoa, slow down. People don’t like too many choices unless we’re talking about those amazing soda machines that let you make peach ginger ale and grape sparkling water. Many marketing emails have failed by containing too many links, effectively paralyzing the reader.

Focus. It’s normal to have an impulse to offer your readers lot of options. For family entertainment center marketing, it might make sense to pull out all the stops. Pizza. Rides. Escape rooms. Drink deals. Cool events. But to get the best click-through rates on your emails, you must narrow it down to one, or maybe two, calls to action. You can always send more emails, and each one will perform better if you focus your call to action energy on one invitation to click.

And while you’re focusing, make sure that you send your reader where they think they’re going. Don’t bait and switch. That makes people angry, and angry people don’t schedule fun into their agendas. (Even though they probably should.)

Here’s how to fix it:

• Audit your emails and double check for too many links. Narrow it down to one impactful, compelling call to action.
• Newsletters get a bit of a pass here, if done right.
• Use text-based links and a few choice buttons, and keep it as easy to read as possible.
• Check the language of your call-to-action against the link destination. Are you delivering on the CTA’s promise?

8. Your emails are too long.

The clock is ticking. Remember that person reading the email at a red light? Well, that red light just turned green. And your email is marked as read, and they’re never going to open it again. Your email was too long.

Streamline every email marketing communication. When you compose your emails and your newsletter, imagine your reader in line at the grocery store or about to be called back from the waiting room at the dentist. You have mere seconds to get your message across. Use quick, snappy headlines. Don’t oversell or over think or over describe anything.

Emails should be visually appealing and simple. Small chunks of text with easy to read buttons and plenty of color contrast. Think mobile first at all time and you’ll produce marketing emails that your guests can digest and act on no matter where they’re reading. (Because yes, they could very well be on the toilet.)

Here’s how to fix it:

• Fall out of love with your words! Keep it simple and to the point.
• Read your emails out loud and make sure they’re conversational and quick.
• See if you can shorten your message by at least 30%. Now do it again.
• Does the design of the email help a reader scan for information. Colors, icons, and buttons help guide readers quickly.

9. Your emails have the same old subject lines.

Subject lines are the gatekeepers. If you can’t get a reader to open, you’ve lost the battle. Your thoughtful call to action, beautiful images, and elegant words will go to waste. So how do you cut through the clutter of an inbox? Very carefully.

Surprise them into opening. Plumbers around the country send very similar emails. Your industry is no different. You’re working against a flood of information that people are becoming increasingly numb to. Subject lines are your chance to stand out.

Consider personalization, emoji, and surprising language. This is where the A/B testing you’ve decided to embrace comes heavily into play. Try testing literal subject lines against very short, baffling subject lines. Test giving away the contents of an email versus offering no insight into the content of an email. Your recipients will show you what works and what doesn’t, and you can build on that — without growing complacent. This is ongoing work.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Pay attention to what gets you to click. Pay attention to what gets your leads to click.
• Test a wide variety of subject lines.
• Avoid the Promotions tab and the SPAM folder by keeping salesy exclamation marks and percentage symbols out of subject lines. Also, emojis are fun, but too many can trigger the SPAM police.
• Try A/B testing with short, long, personalized and generic subject lines.

10. You’re not tracking email marketing analytics.

Do the (fun) math. Email analytics are useful. They’re also addictive once you start looking. Don’t shy away from these numbers. They’re there to guide you and steer you away from judging the success of emails based on your instincts or feelings. Data doesn’t lie.

Optimize emails based on past performance. Any email automation software worth its price will give you a ton of insight into email performance. Never send it and forget it. Schedule time to regularly dig in and monitor the performance of your emails. Pay attention to open rates and click-through rates. Track how often you lose subscribers.

Data is only valuable with context, so compare against average industry performance and keep in mind that segmented, targeted emails will always perform better than emails you throw at your entire audience. Both have value in their own right. There’s no magic number that indicates success, but you should strive to improve the numbers you see and ensure that they don’t consistently drop.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Get familiar with your email software to see what you can measure.
• Set benchmarks based on your average open rates and click-through rates.
• Experiment with various elements to try to improve those numbers every time you send an email.

11. Your emails are all about you.

Don’t be the annoying guy at the cocktail party. Ultimately, people don’t want to hear about how great you are. They want to know what’s in it for them — or better yet, they just want their lives to be improved in some way by the media they engage with. Sometimes that’s a major perspective shift when you’re the person in charge of crafting marketing emails. But you can do it.

Provide value at every touchpoint. Value is a big, vague notion. In order to know what your guests find valuable, talk to them. Pay attention to how they interact with your emails. Survey them. Treat readers like humans, not pieces of data. Give them something useful in your emails, and the ROI will follow.

This can feel counterintuitive when you’re trying to move the needle and grow your business, but it comes down to this: If your emails read like advertisements, they will be ignored. Consistently. It takes more effort to send great emails, but the return is tangible if you nail it. You’ll convert contacts to leads, and you’ll delight existing guests who will mention you in car line, and in the break room, and via text — in all the places you can’t track. (Yet. The future will most certainly be increasingly creepy.)

Here’s how to fix it:

• Figure out what your guests truly care about. (Open and click-through rates are a good place to get that information, or you can ask them!)
• Make sure that every email you send focuses on the needs of the recipient, not the needs of your business. What value are you bringing? How are you making their day brighter?
• With every email, ask yourself: Is this for me, or is this for my customers?

You can fix your email marketing.

Testing frequently, nailing your frequency, providing value in the content you send and personalizing your messages are important, but it all comes back to respect. Respect your contacts and much of this will fall into place naturally.

Jeremy Klaszus didn’t even have a Facebook account until last August, when he realized that it would be useful for the news startup he was planning to launch.

Nine months later, The Sprawl — a hyper-local, Calgary-based “pop-up” news outlet that focuses on a handful of in-depth stories or projects a year — is not only up and running, but getting a big helping hand from the U.S. social media giant.

The Sprawl is one of the five news startups selected to spend five months in the Ryerson Digital Media Zone (DMZ) incubator, with access to up to $100,000 in seed capital and $50,000 in Facebook advertising to help get their ideas off the ground.

None of these startups aims to take on the big legacy players in the news business. Instead, they each aim to tackle a specific niche, in the shadow of the new media giants — Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon.

• As conventional media flounders, Facebook, Ryerson and DMZ team up to back news startups
• Google cozies up to journalists to ensure they keep producing vibrant, local news, but industry not impressed

Facebook says that since a lot of people get their news from the social media platform, they have skin in the game when it comes to innovation and new models for news production and delivery. The idea of partnering with the DMZ is to take a few promising ideas and foster their growth.

Representatives from each of the startups were at Facebook Canada’s office Monday for a panel discussion on the future of news, as part of Innovation Week.

Among the others are Ground, which aims to use citizen journalists to provide verified information in fast-breaking news stories, and Trebble FM which wants to create an easy tool to let people build interactive newscasts for smart speakers such as the Google Home and the Amazon Echo.

In the case of The Sprawl, the whole business is built off big-tech platforms; Klaszus doesn’t even have a stand-alone website, choosing instead to aggregate content on the blogging site Medium, on top of regular posts on Twitter and Facebook.

“The opportunity is that people can make things quickly using these platforms,” he said. “You don’t need to buy a printing press.… But then you’re beholden to them, in a sense, so it’s a bit of a balancing act.

“One of the vulnerabilities is that all your stuff is living on these other platforms that may or may not be around for a long time.”

The same push toward hyper-specific content is what’s driving The Gist, a sports-media startup aimed specifically at catering to millennial women.

“I think with the future of news, what people are looking for more and more is customized, catered content,” said co-founder Ellen Hyslop. “So for us, we are catering sports news for that female millennial.”

The Gist is still in its early stages, building an audience and figuring out what works, but theoretically a hyper-specific readership could be valuable to advertisers who want to target messages towards that specific slice of the population.

Like The Sprawl, The Gist is trying to figure out how to navigate as a small media startup amid the tech titans, and has noticed subdivisions with its target readership, depending on the platform.

“We have a certain demographic that’s really, really active on Instagram and it’s a slightly different demographic that’s really, really active on Facebook,” said Jacie DeHoop, the other co-founder of The Gist.

Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook Canada, insisted that Facebook doesn’t have a specific vision for how the news landscape will unfold in the coming years, and he said the social media giant isn’t trying to steer things in a certain direction by picking which startups get funding.

“Our hope, obviously, for everybody involved in this digital news innovation challenge, is that at the end of their five-month residency they’re going to come up with really cool business models that are going to be able to scale nationally, and hopefully even bigger than that.”

But on that front, Chan might be disappointed.

Speaking to the Financial Post, Klaszus said he doesn’t have any grand ambitions for growing The Sprawl beyond a good, hyper-local media outlet publishing in-depth reporting.

“I never started with the intention of creating a big institution. This is small,” he said.

“I see it growing in that same manner, where you’ve got a handful of people who are doing really deep work.”

I’m in the process of a relaunching my podcast. After some challenges and a hiatus, it was brought to my attention how much money I was leaving on the table by not bringing it back.

After doing a podcast post-mortem, I’m doing things the proper way this time around. That means I’m creating the offering, creating buzz around it and doing a proper launch. That also means I need to use a calendar to really plan this thing out.

The good news is I’m not a newbie to launching projects. I launched an Amazon best-selling book a few years ago. I also launched a group coaching program last year and made $10,000 in sales the first time around. My idea is to take the same principles I used for those projects to bring my podcast back into the world.

Step 1: Pick a date.

I’m all about reverse engineering big projects. That way, when you use a calendar to map out deliverables you just work backward. This is why the first thing I always do is pick a launch date.

In this case, I’m choosing to relaunch my podcast in July. There are a few reasons why I picked July, including:

• It gives me a few weeks to batch content (more on that in a bit).
• I can use the few weeks leading up to the launch date to promote it heavily on social media.
• There’s enough time to create all the materials I need including video snippets, video intros and some other marketing tools.
• It gives me enough time to get a little help from my friends.
• The summer months are typically slower in my industry, so I actually have the time to dedicate to a launch.

Knowing that the first episode is launching in July, I can then reverse engineer the steps to get there. From there I can also use a calendar to mark the deliverables and work with my team.

Step 2: Figure out the deliverables and their due dates.

The next step is to figure out the deliverables you need for your epic launch. You then use a calendar to give each of those deliverables a due date.

In my case, I need a specific set of deliverables over the next few weeks. Here they are in no particular order:

• All of my solo podcast episodes for the rest of the year must be completed
• At least four months of guest interview episodes must be recorded
• The intro video must be made so we can repurpose the content for YouTube
• We must create systems for the front end of the podcast. This means creating a system that makes it easy for guests to book a spot on the show.
• Additionally, we have to create back-end systems. We must determine what the process is for getting the content out there on a consistent schedule.
• We need to create a marketing plan for when the episodes come out. This includes audio snippets, social media posts, etc.

Is that a lot of work? Yes, it is. The good news is there are plenty of ways to make it happen. These include productivity hacks and working with a team. More on this in the next points.

Step 3: Share the calendar with your team

Once you’ve determined the deliverables and their due dates, it’s time to share the calendar with your team. This is where you can really use a calendar to your advantage because everyone will be on the same page.

For example, my team knows I’m no longer available Mondays because I will be recording podcast interviews. They also know what deliverables they need to bring to the table. For instance, my graphic designer is creating the intro video for the web show component of my podcast.

I also know what deliverables I need to bring to the table and by when. This is really important because as the entrepreneur, I tend to be the visionary. That means I’m usually more interested in the big picture rather than the steps to get there. That’s also one of the reasons I need to use a calendar to keep me focused and grounded. The added effect of sharing my calendar with my team also adds an element of being held accountable.

Step 4: Start batching

I’m a big fan of the batching productivity hack. Batching is when you create time blocks to perform similar tasks. For example, if I’m having a meeting one day, I’ll likely try to put all my meetings for the week on the same day. Or, if I have some assignments due for content marketing clients, I’ll do those the same day.

The same is true of the content for the podcast. This is especially important because I’m trying to create as much content as I can ahead of time. That way I can just roll out new episodes for the rest of the year while still focusing on growing the business.

So, what does this look like for me in terms of batching? Well, first off, I recorded 13 solo episodes over the course of two days. There is half the content for the year already.

It also means I’m blocking off Mondays to interview guests. I have about six already scheduled and ready to go. By blocking this off on my calendar, people are unable to schedule any other kind of meeting with me. This allows me to focus on the task at hand while getting a lot of work done.

Step 5: Market as you go.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from launching my book many years ago was to market the book as I go. In other words, show behind the scenes and market your projects in the weeks leading up to it.

In my case, it looks like sharing audio snippets of upcoming episodes on Instagram to create some buzz. This is allowing me to market the podcast and grow my email list with a specific call to action.

Do you need to use a calendar for this? Not really. At least I don’t because marketing is second nature to me. However, go ahead and use a calendar to set reminders to market your project every single day leading up to the actual launch.

Step 6: Schedule out the content for your launch in advance.

Here is where my team and I really need to use a calendar. The reason we’re creating so much content ahead of time is so we can just schedule it out for the rest of the year.

One of my biggest challenges with my podcast last year was staying consistent in the midst of traveling, moving and a hurricane. This year, I’m being smarter about it by scheduling things out far in advance.

Final Thoughts

Launching projects is an exciting part of running a business. The problem is they can be a little overwhelming because there are several moving parts. That’s why it’s important to use a calendar to figure out the steps before, during and after a launch. You can also use the calendar to delegate and make the launch easier for you.

In this post, I review The Messenger Is the Message: How to Mobilize Customers and Unleash the Power of Advocate Marketing.

It’s getting harder to grab the attention of B2B buyers.

Between meetings and putting out fires, they barely have time for the core part of their job – let alone the time to engage with your brand.

“The average office worker receives more than 120 emails and checks their devices hundreds of times per day.”

So, how can you stand out from the pack and engage today’s time-strapped customers?

Introducing … Your Advocates!

B2B buyers ignore most marketing, as they’re not interested in annoying sales pitches.

Instead, they turn to their peers for recommendations. Research has shown that 84% of B2B decision makers begin their buying process with a referral.

If you want to get noticed by customers, you must find a way into their inner circle.

But your new sales brochure isn’t the way in.

Instead, you’ll need an army of customer advocates who will promote your content and recommend you to others.

To learn more about advocate marketing, I recently read The Messenger is The Message: How to Mobilize Customers and Unleash the Power of Advocate Marketing by Mark Organ and Deena Zenyk.

The book offers a step-by-step guide on how B2B marketers can turn away from self-focused sales – or “selfie marketing” – and transform their business with advocates. It contains advice from advocate marketing leaders, as well as case studies from B2B technology companies that have succeeded with advocate marketing. ​​​​​​​

What Is Advocate Marketing?

Here is how Deena and Mark define advocate marketing:

“Advocate marketing is the process of discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing a company’s most enthusiastic customers to create a marketing engine that powers sales. Put simply, it’s a system for making customers happy, and then capitalizing on that happiness to benefit your business.”

When you make your advocates happy, they will recommend you to others. For example, they will write five-star reviews, send you referrals, serve as references, share their success stories, and much more.

In fact, you can think of advocates as an extended version of your sales and marketing team.

5 Ways to Turbocharge Your B2B Marketing With Advocacy

You likely have lots of customers who are willing to recommend you to others.

You just need to reach out to them.

Here are 5 ways that B2B marketers can harness the power of advocacy to engage customers and drive sales:

1. Listen to your advocates.

A lot of B2B marketing pushes sales messages out to customers – whether or not they want to hear them.

Advocate marketing flips this upside-down by putting the focus on the customer. Instead of telling customers what to buy, you listen to them to find out what they want.

The book states that listening to your community is the key to bringing them on board.

“The primary reason people initially join a community—especially an online community related to a company—is the desire to provide feedback. They want to be heard.”

2. Value your advocates’ time.

Your customers are busy people.

If you want them to take time out of their day to advocate for your company, you must make their experience worthwhile.

The authors recommend that you give advocates something new and relevant every time they interact with you. For example, you can offer them educational opportunities that will help them become superstars at their jobs. You can also give them incentives – such as swag or a VIP experience.

And be sure to thank them when they advocate for you. A handwritten note can go a long way in showing advocates that you value everything that they do for you.

3. Harness the power of social proof.

The first time that I heard about Facebook was when a friend sent me an invite to the site in 2007.

I didn’t know anything about Facebook but thought that if my friends were joining, I should also join. By inviting me, my friend was giving the social network his stamp of approval. I also saw that many of my other friends were active on Facebook, and I wanted to keep up with what they were doing.

This is how online communities grow.

Your advocate community may only start with a handful of people. But as they share their great experiences with friends, it will grow rapidly.

The authors offer tips on how you can harness the power of social proof to build your community. For example, you can:

• Share testimonials from your advocates.
• Encourage influencers to create content about your advocate community.
• Highlight your current members when you promote your advocate community to new members.
• Give potential advocates a sneak peek of the conversations that are happening in your community.

“Science tells us that by pointing to what others are doing—particularly others who share similar characteristics to us—we increase our persuasiveness.”

4. Leverage reciprocity.

As Matron Mama Morton sang in Chicago, “When you’re good to Mama, Mama’s good to you.”

This principle of reciprocity also applies to advocate marketing.

The authors recommend that you give something to your advocates before you ask them to do stuff for you. And for the best results, make your gifts personal and unexpected.

The book says, “Provide a small reward after the advocate engages with the program for the first time. This is a little hit of dopamine that will spur further action.”

Small rewards can include a gift card for a cup of coffee from Starbucks or a $5 donation to charity.

You can offer larger rewards as advocates spend more time with your program. The authors suggest that you stagger these rewards at random times, not just after someone completes an advocacy task.

“Psychologists have shown that gaining variable rewards at variable times have an addictive quality to them—this corresponds well to how slot machines work. While effective advocate programs also provide a clear path on how to gain rewards, the best ones have a random quality to them, which drives more advocacy.”

5. Plan for downtime.

It’s OK if your advocate community has slow periods.

In fact, you should plan for them.

The book states that you shouldn’t approach advocate marketing as an all-in, week in and week out venture, Best-in-class advocate marketers instead “plan for high and low periods of advocate activity. Curated downturns are periods of time when there is very little activity—by design.”

You can use this time to build relationships with advocates, so you can learn more about who they are and what they want. Then, when you launch your next advocate marketing campaign, you will have a better idea of what challenges and incentives will motivate your advocates to take action.

How Can Advocate Marketing Work for You?

If you harness the power of your advocates, you can generate referrals, retain more customers, and make your marketing awesome.

Do you have any opportunities to engage your customers and build a thriving advocate marketing community?

In principle, I recognize the value of flossing my teeth. I know flossing is good for me, but I just haven’t quite implemented it.

Even if you’re a habitual flosser, you’ll probably still recognize what I’m talking about. In life, there are always those things that we know we should do, but aren’t doing for some reason or another. Personalization is one of those things for some marketers. We found in our latest survey that 98% of marketers believe that personalization advances customer relationships. We’re all consumers, and I think we can all agree that 98% is not the proportion of digital experiences being personalized to us. So why the disconnect? Why hasn’t this recognition of the value of personalization translated into execution even though we know it’s good for us?

Every marketing team likely has its own specific reasons for not consistently executing a personalization program. Some may be approaching personalization in a piecemeal fashion, enthusiastically creating a few campaigns to start but gradually slowing to a crawl without a clear strategy driving future initiatives. Some might have developed a solid strategy, but can’t quite execute it successfully. And others might be struggling to develop the internal processes and drive an organizational culture that best supports personalization.

Do you fall into any of these camps? What can you do about it?

Strategy

“I’m not sure what I’m actually trying to accomplish.”

When you aren’t sure of your strategy, it’s tough to really pick up steam with personalization. While you can always get started with a campaign or two to get your feet wet, it’s important to have an overall strategy in mind to guide your efforts.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed without a clear direction, it might be time to take a step back, define your goals, identify the audiences you’re targeting, figure out which channels you’ll leverage, and note how you’ll measure success. Think broadly about your customer experience and what areas you think could be better if they were more relevant to each person. Think about your audiences across channels and what their different needs are. Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers right now, you’ll want to test every campaign you run to make sure it works for your audience. But you should at least understand what you’re trying to do so you know if you’ve been successful.

It’s also a good idea to loop in a professional. At Evergage, our customer success team is skilled at developing strategies to help you achieve your goals.

Execution

“I don’t know how to implement the campaigns I want to run.”

If you have a strategy in place and have identified and prioritized your campaigns, it’s time to actually put those campaigns in place. Of course, you want to make sure you get it right — you don’t want to risk messing with your customer experience.

In order to successfully implement your personalization campaigns, you need three main things: 1) the right data, 2) the right technology and 3) the right people.

Data allows you to understand each individual. If you don’t understand the person, you can’t personalize the experience. Identify the data sources you’ll need to fully understand your customers, bring those data sources together in one place, and make sure that you can act on them to deliver relevant experiences.

This is no easy feat, but the right technology will help. The right personalization technology is one that offers a single platform to leverage across channels, a single profile for every single person, the ability to act on any and all data in real time, the ability to manage the platform without the need to rely on IT or engineering, and robust and accurate attribution analysis.

Finally, even the most in-depth data and sophisticated technology will not do anything without the right people to manage it. If you’re lacking the right person on your team, check out this blog post to make the best hire. Otherwise, keep reading to the next section.

Organization

“We aren’t structured as an organization to effectively personalize.”

Creating the internal processes around personalization is just as important as developing a solid strategy. Without the right internal structure, your personalization efforts will never get off the ground. It’s important to figure out the processes that work best for your organization — so there is no single answer here.

Personalization could be managed by a single team in your organization, or it could be distributed across teams. At Evergage, personalization is managed by our marketing team, primarily executed by our expert, Zach Skole, with others on the team adding input and CMO Andy Zimmerman spearheading the majority of the strategy. That works for our lean marketing team. However, larger companies with different teams managing different channels or touchpoints will likely all need to be involved in the personalization process. These types of organizations will need to do more work up front to figure out internal processes.

Be explicit about who is involved with the personalization program and outline what each person’s role is. Some will only be involved in the brainstorming process, with no additional input after that. Others will help make decisions about which campaigns to implement. Others still will be responsible for actually setting up and testing the campaigns. These may or may not be the same people who will actually publish campaigns. If these functions are spread across teams, determine how those teams will work together toward a common goal of providing a relevant and seamless customer experience.

Final Thoughts

Mastering personalization behind the scenes is not always easy. A marketing team putting personalization at the core of its strategy must shift from thinking about what they would like to tell their audiences to what each individual audience member wants to experience each time they interact with your brand. That is a change that won’t take place overnight. Struggles with strategy, execution or organization are to be expected.

Many of us are lazy when it comes to setting prices. We take a look at what our closest competitors are doing, and price using the same basic pricing metric at about the same level. This is pricing on cruise control. It is not strategic, does not establish your position in the market and locks one into an industry structure that may not be in anyone's best interests. If enough people in an industry do this, one gets what is called, in evolutionary terms, a frozen accident.

A frozen accident is and idea from evolutionary theory. It was proposed by Francis Crick (of double helix fame) and basically states that the genetic code is an "accident" because it was not designed for optimality; there may never even have been a competing alternative. It simply provided a functional system for self-replication, and wound up being used. Sounds like a lot of pricing models.

These frozen accidents exist at the level of specific products and for entire industries. To test if the pricing of your product or service is a frozen accident, ask the following questions.

1. How did we choose our pricing metric?
   If no one can answer this question, or the answer is 'that is how things are priced in our industry, chances are your pricing is a frozen accident.
2. How does the pricing metric track the value our customers receive?
   If this draws blank stares, or a shrug and the comment "we don't really know how our customers get value" then it is even more likely you are dealing with a frozen accident.
3. Can we change our pricing metric?
   If the answer is 'no, this is the way everyone prices' then you probably have an opportunity to disrupt pricing.

The Ibbaka Self Assessment Tool helps you to go a bit deeper into these questions.

Why would you want to disrupt pricing? In most industries, the value chain is structured so that profit pools in one part of the value chain. It is rare to see an even distribution across the whole value chain. In the Apple value chain almost all the profit flows to Apple. It does not go to Foxconn who manufactures the phones, or to the many parts makers, and certainly not to the many development shops building and publishing apps. The same used to be true of the old Wintel duoply (the combination of Microsoft and Intel) that in the 1980s and 1990s absorbed almost 90% of the PC industry's profits. Pricing metric fossilization is one of the ways in which the profit distribution in the value chain gets locked in. If you are one of the companies where profit is pooling, then you will do everything you can to maintain this system. If you are not, then there are some advantages to disrupting pricing. The best way to do this is to find a pricing metric that better tracks customer value.

One way to understand the shift from in-house servers to Amazon Web Services is as a shift in the pricing model. It is worth studying the AWS pricing page to see just how close they get to connecting the value metric to the pricing metric.

Amazon did not like the way it had to buy servers and could see just how much of its profit was being sucked out by the big server vendors. It changed the game, first for its own purposes, and then for the rest of us. This has made a big contribution to the current explosion, first in Software as a Service and now in the Internet of Things and increasingly in all forms of product and services.

This brings to mind another piece of evolutionary theory, punctuated equilibrium. Closely associated with the late Stephen Jay Gould, punctuated equilibrium suggests that evolution goes through periods of explosive speciation and variation, followed by major die offs and the emergence of standard forms, which can remain stable for long periods (equilibrium), followed by another phase of divergence and speciation (the punctuation).

Of course, the truth is likely somewhere between the gradual and punctuated models. Evolution, whether of biological species or business models, probably looks more like episodic evolution.

We can see this happening today in many industries. One of the catalysts for this is pricing innovation. (We will write another time on what is enabling this golden age of pricing innovation.) Pricing innovation can break open value chains and redistribute profits, shaking assumptions about business as usual and thawing frozen accidents to allow new forms to emerge.

So if you answer the three above questions and conclude that your pricing is a frozen accident, don't accept your fate. Companies that do so are likely on the path to extinction. Instead, look for the innovations that will allow you to innovate on your pricing and unlock the value chain.

Give us a shout, we are happy to talk this through with you. info@ibbaka.com 

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With relatively few exceptions, most companies want to be seen to be focused on value, rather than price. You can understand why: in most markets there is only space for one or at most a very few “cost leaders”.

You can see the trend reflected in the number of organisations that claim to have a “value added” strategy. But these positions are often adopted without any clear understanding of how they actually create genuine value for their customers.

More often, their “value added” claims are really intended to justify why they are entitled to charge a premium for extended feature sets and capabilities, most of which only a minority of customers actually end up using.

The rest are left feeling that they are probably being asked to overpay for things that they don’t actually need...

It’s no wonder - in the absence of genuine differentiated value - that customers are so keen to negotiate the price down before they are prepared to move forwards. And it’s no wonder that so many sales people - faced with the risk of losing the sale - are tempted to cave in.

The only value that matters

We can claim that we offer value. But at the end of the day, the only party that can actually determine what is and isn’t valuable is our prospective customer. And slickly spun generic “unique value propositions” (the very concept is an oxymoron) aren’t going to help us.

We need to understand how each potential customer organisation (and often each function and each key stakeholder within that organisation) defines value in their terms, and how our solution could enable them to generate that internal value.

But before we do, and remembering Kahneman’s findings about loss aversion, we had better understand what staying with their current situation is likely to be costing them.

Given that - according to Sales Benchmark Index and other authoritative sources - losing to a decision to do nothing is now a more common outcome in complex B2B sales than losing to a traditional competitor, we had better start by understanding the negative value associated with a decision to stick with the status quo.

The four vectors of value

When it comes to determining the value of change, our customers have four key considerations:

Impact on cost

How much unnecessary expenditure will they incur if they were to decide to stick with the status quo, compared to the money they would save if they were to recognise the need for change (and, more specifically, adopt our solution)?

Impact on revenue

How much potential revenue might they lose if they were to do nothing, compared to the incremental revenue they could expect to generate if they were to agree to change?

Impact on risk

What avoidable risks might they be exposed to if they were to carry on as they are today, compared to the risk factors they could reduce or eliminate by adopting our proposed solution?

Impact on goals

What corporate, departmental, functional and personal goals could be compromised if they refuse to change, compared to their ability to achieve these goals faster and more reliably if they were to approve our project?

Rational and emotional considerations

Many of these value factors can be expressed logically - and most investment cases require a rational justification - but many of them have an emotional dimension as well, and this can have a significant impact on decision-making.

Not value-added, but value-aligned

I think it’s time to ditch the “value-added” mindset - at least when it comes to its current most common use in justifying unnecessary solution complexity - and think instead about being value-aligned.

This, of course, requires that we deeply understand what our customers and the key stakeholders that drive their decisions regard as being truly valuable. And it requires that we understand and help to expose the costs, risks and limitations associated with their current situation.

It requires that we selectively align the most valuable aspects of our purpose, approach and capabilities with the things that our customer - individually and collectively - regards as being most valuable to them.

Valuing your proposals

If you’re at all concerned about whether your sales organisation is as effective as it could be in communicating genuine value, you need look no further than a cross-section of your latest sales proposals.

Do they all clearly articulate what the prospect has agreed are the inevitable costs and risks of inaction, were they to decide to stick with the status quo? And do they clearly and credibly articulate how the prospect has agreed that your proposed solution will enable them to reduce cost, increase revenue, eliminate risk and enable them to achieve their goals?

If not, both your proposal and the customer’s project are at risk. Maybe the proposed project is genuinely of little value, in which case you should have qualified out far earlier. Or maybe the value of the project is being undersold, in which case you run the risk of losing (to no decision, or a smarter competitor) an opportunity you should have won.

And all because your sales people failed to align the business value of what they were offering with the critical business needs and priorities of the customer. I can’t think of a better reason to get focused on the only value that matters - the things that your customer finds most valuable.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU'LL PROBABLY ALSO APPRECIATE:

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BLOG: Are your sales people leading with gain or pain?

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.

If you spend any time online, you have seen and experienced the power of online marketing. By leveraging the internet, many brands have grown from obscurity to prominence. Although many companies have succeeded, many have also failed.

In the past, you may have heard other business owners blame the size of their target market or the specialization of their product line as reasons their digital marketing effort failed. Have the stories of wasted time and money discouraged you? Can you expect to get better results?

Although digital marketing has much to offer practically any business, some get better results than others. Have you have already tried and failed, or do you want to dive in for the first time? Either way, the following reasons while help you understand why digital marketing doesn’t work for you.

Failure to Evolve

Do you remember when the internet was new? Back then, many businesses argued about getting a website. They felt their traditional marketing channels were good enough. After all, if a strategy works, why change it? Many of those firms were late adopters, and some failed to embrace the online world in time to stay relevant.

Since then, technology continues evolving. If you don’t evolve with it, you could set up yourself for failure. Sure, you may have a website, but that’s not enough for the modern business world. Even social media marketing has matured and has become an essential part of every digital marketing plan. Guard against failure by embracing the latest digital marketing tactics and tools.

Rookie Mistakes

In practically every field, getting experience is more important than gaining additional knowledge. This principle also holds true in digital marketing. Regardless of whether you want to create digital strategies for your firm or others, nothing beats experience. So, until you get some experience, you may feel as though digital marketing is wasting your time.

If you own your business, you might not think you have the time or money needed to get the practice you need. If you work as an employee, your boss may want the benefits of digital marketing without spending the necessary time and money. Rather than giving up, get some incremental experience by taking small freelance jobs. This will introduce you to the expectations businesses have and force you to start mastering the latest digital platforms.

Poor Quality

Populating a website with content involves a lot of time and effort. Especially when you try producing visual content such as infographics and videos, you can expect to invest a lot in your content. However, you might not want to. If you already have too much work to do, you might quickly create an article, throw it online, and hope it “sticks.” It won’t.

Shoppers go online at practically every stage of the customer cycle. Whether they’re researching a problem or choosing between several brands, they need information that meets their needs and expectations. For this reason, Google and other search engines assess the quality of your content as they determine page rank. To make digital marketing work for you, publishing only high-quality content to your website and social media profiles.

Naive Expectations

Many businesses fail because they buy into pay-per-click advertising and other opportunities without knowing what they want to achieve. Avoid this mistake by deciding what you want for your business. Next, you need to decide what you want to achieve from each of your marketing campaigns.

While setting goals helps define what you hope to gain, you also need to assess the amount of time and money that you will spend. Additionally, you should create a realistic estimate of your expected ROI. To make this possible, set and track key performance indicators (KPIs). This will help you tweak your digital marketing campaigns as they progress so you can optimize your results.

Skepticism

If you own or manage a business and don’t use the internet much, you might not get too excited about digital marketing. You could have an unfavorable view of the online world and have a failure bias. Similarly, if you work as a marketing professional, the people at the top of your organization may not value the potential of the internet.

Skepticism, regardless of whether it’s yours or someone else’s, can quickly explain why digital marketing doesn’t work for you. To get around this roadblock try to regard social media and other digital platforms as pieces of a puzzle that, if adequately used together can create a beautiful and profitable picture for your brand. In other words, focus on the benefits of each platform rather than their technical nuances.

In conclusion, you should find out why digital marketing doesn’t work for you. The problem could be as simple as having the wrong standard for success. If it’s the experience you need, have patience while you learn how to design and execute profitable campaigns. Meanwhile, stay updated with the latest trends, demand high-quality content and carefully nudge yourself and your business into the vast unknown. Most of all, never give up.

Embarking on an Account Based Marketing (ABM) journey? Excited about the personalized, high-touch programs you plan to run to target accounts? All of these ideas are wonderful, but your ABM initiative will FAIL without first building the proper account foundation. This might sound alarming and scary, but don’t worry, it’s not. Read this blog post to learn four ways to shift from a lead-based mindset to an account-centric one to ensure ABM success.

Moving from MQLs to MQAs isn’t easy, which is why we’ve dedicated an entire webinar to exploring this topic deeper.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) vs. Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) – what’s the difference?

A Marketing Qualified Lead is a person who is starting to exhibit buying behavior. If you have a broad-reach demand generation strategy, then MQLs make sense. You don’t care what kind of company responds to your campaigns. It’s all about the individual, what program he/she responded to, and when is the right time to call this person.

An ABM strategy is much more strategic. You care about certain companies and all the people at them. You want the account to reach a Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) status which means the target account or discrete buying center has reached a sufficient level of engagement to indicate possible sales readiness. An MQA should be a stage in your account funnel and therefore extremely significant.

It’s a milestone in an account’s journey to becoming a customer. Additionally, it’s an early indicator as to how your ABM programs are performing.

Ready to make the move to MQA? Here are four steps to ensure success.

1 – Meet with sales early and often

I can’t stress how important this step is. Bring sales in at the beginning for collaboration and alignment. Help them understand the definition of an MQA and why it’s important. Involve them in defining the threshold for an MQA. Ask for feedback on a regular basis. I meet weekly with our sales development reps (SDRs) and AEs to get feedback, review metrics, and understand how MQAs are tracking.

2 – Bring in all sales and marketing activities

For an MQA to be meaningful you need to track the sales and marketing activities of every person at a target account. You should capture all activities (emails, calls, etc.) logged within your CRM. You want to include sales calendar meetings as well as all outreach via email. Website visits are also important as well as marketing program participation recorded in your marketing automation system. All of these data sources need to be logged as engagement and contribute to the MQA score in order to show a holistic view of the account.

3 – Agree on Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Another necessary item is a SLA – a basic contract between a sales and marketing that details the nature, quality, and scope of the service to be provided. Together you need to define what an MQA is, the rules of engagement, and time period for follow up. Some questions to ask are: Is the AE going to follow up or does it go to the SDRs? When does outreach start? 24 hours? 48 hours? How many times and in what fashion will this account be contacted?

4 – Make MQAs actionable

The easiest way to make MQA data actionable is to surface account engagement data for everyone to view. Send a weekly report to outline what target accounts are or aren’t doing. These types of reports are easy to create and are excellent for joint sales and marketing meetings on ABM account penetration and prioritization. In addition, create CRM views so the SDRs can easily find and call on the MQAs each day.

These four steps will help you build an account-centric foundation, and tracking MQAs are an easy way to identify accounts with buying intent. MQA data can also be leveraged to assist in account scoring, target account selection, account reviews, and quarterly business reviews.

Check out this webinar for a deeper dive into moving from MQLs to MQAs:

I hope you found this blog useful and I would love to hear where you are on your ABM journey!

By Tibor Shanto

Some things just never get old, summer vacations, cold beer on a warm night, and if you are a seller: Voice Mail; who doesn’t love it?  I figure most of us don’t but does that not change the fact that 90% of outbound (cold) calls you make will end up in voice mail.  You can run and hide like many do or accept reality and bend it to work for you.  Here I’ll share three things you should be doing with voice mail to increase your success.

Not one of the three, but a basic you need to adopt if you are going to succeed.  Your attitude and expectation should be that you will end up in voice mail, not the other way.  I see reps trying to be “up” and cheery, and then being instantly deflated when they get a voice mail.  Be a big boy/girl, expect voice mail, and be surprised (but always ready) when a human answer the phone.

Time Saver

As humans we are social creatures, at times we allow ourselves to be drawn into conversations that eat into productive time.  One specific is when a sales person has to deliver a simple fact to a client or a prospect, a data point, a spec, a delivery date, anything that is factual in nature and that sales person committed to communicate or deliver by a specific time.  Often what happens is that the rep will call, there will be some small talk, some business talk but not particularly crucial, but in the course of things they end up spending 5 minutes on the call.  Multiple that by 6 or 7 times and you have half an hour; if this happens twice a week, an hour.  Why not call early in the morning or after hours, deliver the fact or data:  “Harry, it’s Jill here, the measurements of the component do fit within the specs you provided, and will be delivered Thursday between 3:00 and 4:00, please call me if you have any questions or comments, I will call you Friday to…, I am at 617 239-8840.”  The rep gets bonus points for getting back promptly to the client/prospect and does it in a way that over the course of a year frees up a lot of time, time you can use to prospect, upsell, anything but wasted on valueless small talk.

Generating Inbound Calls

, in the past I have written about a voice mail technique I learned and used that generates 5 return calls for every 10 voice mail messages I leave within 72 hours, knowing this data allows me to minimize my “cold calling”.  Once you master the technique, you can start a regular program of leaving message after hours, to generate inbound calls.  You can get on the phone at say 7:00 pm, quickly leave 10 to 15 voice mails with identified leads, at about 30 seconds per message, this takes less than 10 minutes.  Do it three times a week, say 40 messages, and you have just created 20 inbound calls.  Understanding that not all of these will turn into something, even a 4 to 1 conversion rate will lead to 5 new sales conversations, some immediate prospects, some leads to be nurtured.

It’s The Secret Sauce

No one like to cold call, least of all me, but as I have said in the past, I have made the connection between success in cold calling and my kids eating, and you know my kids have this thing about wanting to eat every day.  This dislike has driven many to try alternative means of engaging with potential prospects.  These are different than buyers coming to your site, these people did not wake up this morning thinking about your product, they are squirreled away doing their jobs.  Some have gone social, others have swapped the phone for e-mail as a means of harassing prospects.  But survey after survey shows that any of these in combination with phone is more effective in converting leads to prospects.  Combine e-mail, LinkedIn and phone, and you are way ahead.  So if you are leaning on the first two, you are already behind.  If you grow up and include calling as part of your pursuit, then you are going to end up in voice mail 90% of the time, so you are going to have to learn to deal with it.

I realize these do not make up for all the aggravating part of voice mail, but you may as well make the best of it in simple ways.  For more help, check out our free Voice Mail Success online program.

The post 3 Voice Mail Techniques You Should Use appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

Here on the WordStream Blog, we’ve devoted tens of thousands of words to remarketing.

We’ve touted best practices, #hacks, and cross-platform strategies, shared superlative creative, and made note of just about anything that relates to getting your ads in front of your most valuable prospects (again).

What we haven’t spent much time focusing on, however, is what to do when your beginner-level remarketing program stagnates.

I’m willing to bet a paycheck that you can make a few key changes and squeeze more out of your existing strategy, starting with kicking its degree of sophistication up a notch.

Sooooo…

That’s what I’m here to talk about.

Today, I’ll dive into how you can:

• Segment your audience based on inferred intent
• Prioritize your remarketing offers
• Align your offers and creative

First, though…

The Case for a More Complex Remarketing Program

It’s no secret that remarketing—whether via the Display network, RLSA, or some #programmatic network—is integral to sustained success in online advertising.

After all, it allows you to reach prospects already familiar with your brand, providing them ample opportunity to return to your site and complete some sacred, coveted [desired action].

This is important because people—particularly the ones at the top of your marketing funnel—probably aren’t going to convert on their first (or even second) trip to your site. Customer acquisition can be a high-touch affair, and a perpetual presence across different devices and the websites your prospects frequent makes that a damn sight easier (and cheaper).

In fact, WordStream’s Senior Data Scientist, Mark Irvine, has discovered that people are 2x more likely to convert after seeing your ad 6 times.

Now, obviously there needs to be some semblance of nuance to your strategy; berating strangers with the same played-out banner ad offering a demo or discount two dozen times in an afternoon isn’t going to buy you goodwill or convince them to buy your product.

Funnel-stage appropriate, targeted offers, however, just might.

Of course, making this a reality is impossible without implementing a strategy that goes beyond overly-simplistic “all site visitors” lists.

Granularity in search got you in the door, why oversimplify when the stakes are even higher?

Using Inferred Intent to Segment Your Remarketing Audiences

In search, query data—what someone types or speaks into Google—is the intent signal. Based on the language used, you can reasonably infer where an individual should fall in your funnel. This allows you to tailor your ad copy, landing pages, and offers to this ascribed intent.

Remarketing—outside of RLSA, of course—works a little differently. Here, there are no nuggets of gold, no phrases straight from the horse’s mouth signaling exactly where a prospective customer is in proximity to making a purchase.

Instead, behavior is the crux of a sound remarketing strategy.

The pages a prospect visits are, in many cases, indicators of where they fall in your sales funnel; you might not have “buy men’s nike air force 1 size 12.5 right now” to go off like you did on search, but that doesn’t exactly mean you’re fumbling in the dark.

Let’s say Visitor A comes to WordStream.com, reads nine wonderfully informative blog posts in a single sitting, then rolls out to order lunch or bang out some work or whatever it is they do. Three WeWork cube thingies down, Visitor B heads to the product page for WordStream Advisor, lingers for eight minutes (really letting it all soak in), checks out the pricing page, then makes a beeline for the bar cart (fancy!) to fix a stiff drink.

Who’s more valuable today?

Visitor A might be a seasoned PPC professional(!!), bootstrapping do-it-yourself business owner(!!!), or a curious tween (eh), but Visitor B spent time on more valuable pages. Serving our old pal A an ad for a product demo or free trial would be mighty presumptuous (a whitepaper on the other hand…)

But for Visitor B, it’s a great fit!

Their on-site behavior allows us to infer that they’re a high-intent site visitor, something we’d never have known if we’d leaned on a strategy build atop nothing more than “all site visitors,” “last 30 days,” and their unspecific ilk.

Of course, you need to actually build these more targeted audiences before you can target them.

Turning Inferred Intent into a Remarketing Strategy

Let’s not put the cart before the horse here; to get the ball rolling, you’re going to need to ensure that the requisite tracking code lives on every single page of your website (and that you’re informing European site visitors of its existence, what with the GDPR and all).

There are a boatload of ways to skin this cat—if you’ve got the wherewithal, use Google Tag Manager—but today we’re going to pretend you’re copying and pasting your site’s Global Site Tag (gtag.js) into the beginning of the section of each page on your website.

Once that’s done, head over to Admin > Audience Definitions > Audiences. If this is your first rodeo, click “import from gallery”…

And choose [Engagement Pack] Core Remarketing Lists, which provides you with pre-built remarketing audiences based on the recency, frequency, duration, and page depth of sessions in aggregate. This is the most kick-ass starter kit money doesn’t have to buy.

If you’ve already done this, hit “+New Audience.”

In the Audience Builder interface, choose “Conditions” and enter the appropriate URL string for which you’d like to build more granular audiences. Note that if you’d like to add a time-based parameter to your audience, you can do that here as well (where it says “Page” in the screenshot above, simply switch it over to “Time on Page”).

Once you’ve built audiences for your most valuable pages, ensure you’ve connected your GA and AdWords accounts, and allow your list to grow; you’ll need at least 100 active members in the last 30 days for it to be eligible for use on the Display Network, and 1,000 for use in RLSA.

Mapping your remarketing audiences based on intent

(also known as “janky-yet-effective tool time!” Pardon my lack of aesthetic brilliance)

You’ve got your granular audiences: now it’s time to determine how they relate to one another and, more importantly, what kind of value they represent to your business.

First, make a list of your remarketing audiences. For this exercise, let’s say we’re working with the following 10 audiences:

• All Visitors (30 Days)
• All Visitors (3 Days)
• Home Page Visitors
• Viewed Multiple Blog Posts
• Webinar Registration
• Content Download
• Used Free Tool A
• Pricing Page Visitors
• Free Trial
• Demo Completed (No Purchase)

Now, take your list of remarketing audiences and arrange them based on their anticipated business value from lowest to highest.

I’m a freak, so I draw stuff like this on whiteboards and use sticky notes; that just doesn’t translate to a blog post particularly well, so I made a neat tool for visualizing intent. Your finished product should look something like this:

This will allow you to group your audiences based on the spectrum at the bottom of the map, which indicates proximity to purchase. It breaks out something like this:

• Pre-research (low intent, just browsing): All Visitors (30 Days), All Visitors (3 Days), Home Page Visitors

• Research (so-so intent, informational): Viewed Multiple Blog Posts, Webinar Registration, Content Download, Used Free Tool

• Recommendation (high intent, transactional): Pricing Page Visitors, Free Trial, Demo Completed (No Purchase)

From a budgeting perspective, you’re going to want to push more chips to the right; this doesn’t mean your lower-intent audiences don’t matter, just that they’re further away from converting. Ensure that, when live, you exclude high-value audiences from low-value audiences and vice-versa. This will allow you to serve hyper-relevant offers to your prospects and avoid the fatigue that may accompany seeing your creative 6+ times.

Tailoring Creative throughout the Customer Journey

See that last section on the Intent Map?

That’s where we match creative concepts and, more importantly, offers, to remarketing audiences.

In an ideal world, you’ve got a fleet of plebs ready and willing to create custom everything for each individual audience; in the real world, that’d cost too much damn money so, instead, we’re going to silo remarketing audiences into the three buckets outlined above.

What might that look like in action?

Great question.

Let’s look at how creative concepts (and offers) might differ from the pre-research to research to recommendation phase using athleticwear brand New Balance as an example (big eCommerce usually knows what’s good in terms of remarketing segmentation).

***

So, I’m doin’ my thing, reading about the Celtics-Cavs series, when I see some #sponsoredcontent detailing the merits of New Balance’s fine wears. I click a link to the website, observe some super baller action shots on the home page, then pop back over to the prosaic stylings of Brian Windhorst.

SUDDENLY, I see a banner ad!

Ohhhhhh, such heritage! What quality!

Obviously, it must be clicked.

I spend a bit more time on the site, checking out some sneakers, before duty calls and I must return to the world of blog-writing.

The next day, I’m scrolling through random sites when what do I spy? A New Balance ad.

This time, instead of promoting the brand’s deep-rooted history and the authority of its website, I’m presented with a carousel of sneakers and a few too many prompts to “shop now.” I click one. Death by a thousand cuts.

Within moments I discover a neat pair of kicks. They’ve got them in my size.

I add them to my cart.

I begin punching in my credit card information.

The number.

That funny little security thingy on the back.

The date of expira…

The dang thing’s expired! Thwarted again!

Later that evening as I sit on the couch crushing the most recent episode of Showtime’s hit series Billions, I see an email (Gmail ads ftw!) from New Balance hit my inbox.

I open it and, what do I find? The shoes I left sitting in my shopping cart.

As you can see, New Balance effectively segmented their remarketing audiences to promote different offers to me based on the pages I visited and actions I took, which indicated my rapidly improving proximity to making a purchase.

A More Advanced Approach

Whether you’re a SaaS company looking to fill your funnel and push leads from “hi, how are ya?!” to trial and, eventually, purchase, or an ecommerce shop looking to move units, this strategy—segmenting remarketing audiences based on value and aligning creative and offers accordingly—will significantly improve the effectiveness and ROI of your remarketing program.

What do you think? What are you waiting for?

And, finally, the burning question: Did I buy them?

I review B2B email campaigns regularly in this space, and though I’m not one to be sparing in my opinions, I do try to be conscious of the type and size of company responsible for the campaign, with the thought, I suppose, that some marketers just may not know better.

That said, poorly written and poorly designed B2B emails are not difficult to find these days. My inbox overflows daily with emails containing little or no offer, vague calls to action, and a complete absence of anything (apparently) designed to drive engagement. What you might call the Dismal State of B2B Email Creative is, I believe, creditable to two factors:

1. Creative is now an afterthought to marketing technology and data. Marketers have been bludgeoned into the misguided notion that all one needs to be successful is the right software and enough data about your audience. (Don’t get me started about AI.) But creative, clearly, doesn’t matter.

2. Companies would never consider assigning a TV spot, a national print ad, or a new Website, to just any staff member with the time and inclination to produce them. But it’s clear that no such standard applies to email creative. It’s an email. Anyone can write an email, right?

Take, for example, the campaign below, newly arrived from Oath, a “digital content and advertising” subsidiary of Verizon, Inc. that includes Yahoo and AOL and reported quarterly revenues for Q417 of $2.2 billion. Would you expect a $10 Billion digital content and advertising company to be a showcase of stunning online creative? Yes, you would. And yet, we get this:

* A giant header image of the most generic cell phone image imaginable (in black and white, no less), with no visual reference to the offer or anything else that might inspire action or even curiosity

* An opening line that begins with the clichéd: “In the challenging world of app marketing …” (most readers are now already lost for good) and ends with the banal: “… drive success for your efforts”.

* A second paragraph that begins “With our new ebook …” Sorry, who is this again? The reader doesn’t know because we haven’t told him. If you’re a $10 Billion digital advertising company, why not use that fact to sell the value of your content?

* That same paragraph promises “six specific steps to boost your app marketing campaigns, including understanding the complete app marketing lifecycle.” Eureka! By merely understanding the complete app marketing lifecycle, I’m one-sixth of my way to “boosting” my campaigns, whatever that means.

* But wait, there’s more. “With U.S. mobile app store revenues expected to jump dramatically from $16.3 billion in 2017 to $31.2 billion by 2021, there is plenty of opportunity for those that know how to grab it.” There’s money to be made in apps? Who knew? (If you’re making the case for why the information on offer has value, don’t lead with facts of blinding obviousness.)

Boost success. Generate more users. Drive the best ROI. This is the wealth of learning that awaits me. But the terminology and phrasing is so basic that it loses all meaning. Boost success how? By what measure? How will I learn to generate more users? Emails succeed on the strength of specific, unique, tangible and compelling benefits. On language that entices, intrigues, and drives the reader to action. Alas, none of that is in evidence here.

Earlier this year, Premier John Horgan announced that the British Columbia government was prepared to offer billions of dollars in tax breaks to Royal Dutch Shell should the global fossil fuel giant build a massive liquefied natural gas plant on our province’s north coast.

Absent from the news then, however, was any mention of how the public is being shortchanged billions of dollars in revenues from the fossil fuel industry regardless of whether Shell proceeds with its LNG Canada project.

Happily picking up where the previous B.C. government left off, the current government allows Shell and its competitors to dramatically reduce the royalties they pay on natural gas and other hydrocarbons they drill and frack from the ground in B.C.’s northeast quarter.

Now, in an ominous development, our government says we are not even entitled to know how much the government actually subsidizes individual energy companies.

In mid-March, the government passed an amendment to the Petroleum and Natural Gas Act. Ministry of Finance officials say the new “confidentiality” provision prevents them from disclosing what individual fossil fuel companies pay in royalties.

If this stands, British Columbians of all political leanings ought to worry.

Why? Because you and I and everyone else in the province own our natural resources, including natural gas. We are entitled to a share of their value and the royalties paid by fossil fuel companies reflect that reality. For that reason, all British Columbians deserve transparency about how royalty fees are calculated and what is actually paid.

Companies like Shell gain access to our fossil fuel resources when our government sells them “subsurface rights”. After those sales, companies may produce natural gas and other fossil fuels by drilling and fracking them from the ground. But once they do so, they must pay royalties on what they extract. Those royalties then help the provincial government pay for a very tiny portion of our health, education and other public service costs.

I say tiny because the public benefits derived from those royalties are dropping faster than a stone through water.

In fiscal year 2008, according to the “upstream development division” of B.C.’s Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, British Columbians received $1.16 billion in royalty revenues. By 2017, however, revenues had fallen nearly 90 per cent to $147 million. Yet over that same time, natural gas production shot up 72 per cent and production of gas liquids such as condensate entered the stratosphere, climbing by 250 per cent. Virtually all of the increased output was piped east to Alberta’s oil sands industry.

Now, the government that provided those generous subsidies says the public is not entitled to know what individual companies pay in royalties.

Is our government afraid to let us know? You be the judge.

Every time Shell or its competitors drill deep or horizontal wells in BC – even though such wells are standard industry practice – our government grants them credits allowing them to claim back part of the costs of doing so. The credits translate into far lower royalty payments on the natural gas and gas liquids those companies produce.

In each of the last 10 years, Shell and others used those credits to reduce their royalties by a massive amount. In the last six years in particular, the write-downs were never less than 60 per cent and as high as 73 per cent. What this means is that collectively over the past decade British Columbians lost nearly $5 billion in additional royalty revenues.

And the subsidy train has only just pulled out of the station.

In a startling disclosure last November, B.C. Energy Minister Michelle Mungall said the current value of outstanding credits is $3.2 billion – a whopping $1.1 billion more than the previous year. That eyebrow-raising jump in the credit account is two times greater than the previous record for an annual increase. Yet when asked to elaborate on the unprecedented increase, Mungall’s communication’s director, David Haslam, declined to provide any concrete explanation.

That $3.2 billion and growing pile of credits represents money that you and I will never see.

But if we want to know what individual companies have stockpiled as credits, what they claim as credits each year or what they pay in net royalties we can forget it.

In February, I filed a Freedom of Information request with the Ministry of Finance asking for copies of all royalty invoices. My request was denied. This “sensitive” information could not be disclosed because it would be “harmful” to business interests.

I then asked for just a simple list of what individual fossil fuel companies paid in total annual royalties. This too was denied. David Currie, head of the Ministry’s communications department, not only said that the information was “proprietary” but that the amended Petroleum and Natural Gas Act expressly forbid the government from releasing it.

This is astonishing. For decades our government has sung a far different tune when it comes to B.C.’s publicly owned forest resources. Any one of us can use a government-maintained database to determine exactly what companies pay for the trees they log in publicly owned forests. That’s information on a renewable resource that actually benefits our climate.

I did such a search recently and learned that Canfor Corporation – a sizeable chunk of which is owned by B.C. billionaire Jimmy Pattison – paid $7.3 million last year in stumpage fees for nearly 410,000 cubic metres of trees that the company logged on just a portion of the public forests in which it operates. Is this a fair return? That’s a reasonable question, one we can happily debate precisely because we have access to the data.

That we are apparently forbidden from accessing similar information on fossil fuel companies that exploit non-renewable resources whose uses have dire consequences for our planet is a travesty.

And it will be even more of a travesty in the event Premier Horgan’s promised subsidies help give birth to a massive, new LNG plant in our province.

If we fear the public returns and consequences are bad now, just think how much worse they will be if LNG one day sends gas-drilling and fracking into the stratosphere.

Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

What kind of wholesale marketing collateral is needed to support your business? This can be a tough question for many wholesale distributors and manufacturers. With the advent of online marketing tools, B2B eCommerce portals, and the like, some wholesale brands and distributors might be wondering if investing in other marketing collateral is a waste of money.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Though printed catalogs and price sheets are being replaced by digital versions, the truth is, these tools exist to support customers who have already reached the decision to buy from you. They don’t support the “customer journey” your buyers take before and after they reach their purchase decision.

That’s where wholesale marketing collateral comes in. It serves as a roadmap, of sorts, for the journey your customer will take to purchasing your product. It provides the tangible support and key information they need along the way.

What is wholesale marketing collateral?

When people think of marketing collateral, they often think of printed materials like flyers and brochures. But marketing collateral is more than that. Collateral actually refers to any type of media or content that supports your customers’ decision-making process or “customer journey.” In addition to printed materials, this could include web content, videos, blog posts, or sponsored posts on a lifestyle or industry blog or website.

In wholesale, marketing collateral fulfills two key roles. It can build your brand in the eyes of B2B buyers and provide answers to their questions as they determine whether or not to make that purchase for their business. It also needs to provide information to help them sell to their end customers.

These dual roles make wholesale marketing collateral a pretty broad area. That’s why it’s important to stay focused on the needs of the customer and the journey they take when making the decision to buy from you.

What is your customer’s journey?

The customer journey refers to the steps that a customer takes to make a decision about buying your products. So what are the steps of the customer journey?

1. Need identification

Need identification happens when your customer identifies a problem or need. Some products address needs customers don’t know they have; marketing collateral can help them identify that need.

What types of collateral can help with this part of the customer journey?

• Lifestyle imagery – Lifestyle imagery differs from product photography in that it portrays people in realistic or aspirational situations where they would be using your product, and is great for creating a need for products that are more upscale and less price sensitive. You can use this imagery in your collateral, and provide it to your customers (retailers and the like) for use in their marketing. You could even use it in editorial coverage and PR for your product.
• Lookbooks – Typically used in fashion and design marketing, a lookbook can be online or in print. It is a collection of photographs showing your product line, styled to demonstrate the essence of your brand.

2. Brand awareness

The next step of the journey happens when customers become aware that a solution exists to address their need. Here, branding comes into play to position your product as the best option, and branding materials should definitely be a part of your wholesale marketing collateral mix.

Flyers and brochures are some of the first marketing tools that spring to mind when thinking about brand awareness, but there are other wholesale marketing collateral options that can be even more effective:

• Public relations and influencer marketing – whether you’re working with a fashion influencer or a technology journalist, some of the most effective brand awareness comes from third parties. This type of collateral encompasses everything from press releases to guest posts on blogs or sponsored content.
• Video – Video is rapidly becoming one of the most effective ways to reach customers, whether they are B2B customers or consumers. It can be deployed all along the customer journey, but one of the most effective ways to use it is in your branding.
• Mailers – An essential aspect of branding is staying “top of mind.” Mailers – anything from a postcard to an abbreviated catalog that invites B2B buyers to your online ordering portal – can be a great way to stay in front of customers and drive sales.

3. Research and comparison

As customers move toward making a purchase decision, they will begin researching options. They will have specific questions and are looking for specifications and detail to help them compare options and make decisions. It’s key to understand what sorts of questions your customers are asking in this leg of their journey, and to provide materials that answer those questions.

Here are some wholesale marketing collateral tools that can help your customers with their research:

• Product imagery – Product imagery exists to provide more tangible information as they are doing research about your product.
• Product data sheets – As customers research, they need more information about your product. Customers want to know, “How big is it? Where was it made? What are its ingredients or materials?”
• Demo scripts for highly technical products – These can help train retailers or field sales reps on how to sell products through to end customers.
• Product reviews – Data sheets provide customers with data and specifications about your product, but reviews tell customers about the actual experience of using it. Customers want to know, “What do other people think about this product? Will it be popular?”
• Case studies and success stories – Like public relations efforts and influencer marketing, case studies and success stories lend third-party credibility, or “social proof,” to your marketing efforts.

4. Purchase

Once the customer has made their purchase decision, your job as a marketer isn’t done yet. Marketing collateral should support the purchasing process and make it easy for customers to actually buy your product.

So, what types of marketing collateral can support the purchase aspect of the customer journey?

• Trade show package – If trade shows are part of your marketing strategy, you’ll need a trade show support package. Trade shows are unique because they compress several aspects of the journey – need, branding, comparison and research may all be happening on the tradeshow floor along with the purchase. So when creating your brochures and other promotional materials, make sure to incorporate the elements above, such as case studies and reviews, product data sheets, product or lifestyle imagery to address customer needs to understand how the product might be used, how it compares with similar products, and to provide social proof around your products.

• Field rep support package – Field reps work with the customer throughout the customer journey, but it’s during the purchase leg of the journey that they really earn their keep. Make sure they have the tools they need to deal with those last minute objections and close the sale by providing a complete field rep support package that incorporates your key branding and product information, along with an easy-to-use order writing process.

• Online support materials – Make sure your web copy, imagery, B2B portals and online ordering are well crafted with consistent messaging. Incorporating materials from previous legs of the customer journey, such as lifestyle and product imagery, links to reviews, case studies and complete product specs can help to support the final purchase decision for B2B buyers.

• Mobile order writing – You can also support field reps by making sure the actual ordering process is easy. With a mobile order writing application, your reps can take orders in the field quickly and easily, and immediately sync those orders to your back office for processing.

5. Experience

Once your customer has made their purchase, it’s important not to forget about them. Marketing collateral that supports existing customers can be a key part of retention; it’s always cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to find and convince a new one.

What types of marketing collateral support the customer experience?

• Customer support materials, such as manuals and guides.
• Internal support scripts, to ensure customers get help when they need it and have a great experience with your product.
• Retail Point of Sale displays – If your products will be sold in retail stores, your buyers need materials to support those sales – this helps to ensure they become repeat customers. One way to do this is through providing POS displays, merchandising guidelines, product videos, etc.

Wholesale marketing collateral supports your customers throughout their customer journey, from creating need and awareness, to providing the materials needed to research and compare options, supporting the purchase decision and buying process, and helping to improve the customer experience post-purchase.

What sorts of wholesale marketing collateral do you find most helpful to support your customers through their purchase journey? Please let us know about it in the comments.

“The best service is no service.”

An interesting phrase, this elicits many possible thoughts. Does it imply the complete absence of any kind of service whatsoever will deliver what customers need? Is it that the best possible service is simply impossible?

This phrase comes from the title of a book (shortened from here onward to “TBSINS”) by Bill Price and David Jaffe. Written in 2008, this decade-old narrative still has companies pursuing the many concepts it proposed for radically altering the traditional approach to customer service. Among the notions offered are to:

• Eliminate dumb contacts
• Create engaging self-service
• Be proactive
• Own the actions across the organization

What the authors were describing at the time has strong similarities to a service management-style approach. From its beginnings in IT, the past few years have seen service management applied to other parts of the business, including customer service. Let’s look more closely a the parallels between the book’s ideas and service management.

Eliminate Dumb Contacts

“Prevent the need for many contacts, once and for all.” – Principle 1, TBSINS

Applying the label of dumb sounds harsh, but it’s not referring to the customers; rather, it’s about the associated work. Specifically, these are the customer interactions that are high-volume, low value, uninteresting to agents, and add unnecessarily to service costs because they can be eliminated.

This involves examining the reasons why customers are calling, identifying the root cause of these issues, and taking care of them. Analyzing and addressing the root cause fits into problem management, a sub-process within service management.

I would wager most customer contacts are as a result of a problem a company creates for itself: products arriving broken due to poor packaging, parts missing, unclear instructions, billing errors–the list goes on and on. TBSINS delves further into how the root cause is best approached below in Principle 5: “Own The Actions Across The Organization.”

If eradicating the root cause isn’t possible, there’s another way to address high volume, repetitive contact issues: self-service.

Create Engaging Self-Service

“Because you cannot eliminate all contacts, the next best thing is to enable (self-service) contact mechanisms.” – Principle 2, TBSINS

It’s true it would be impossible to abolish all customer contact. But not every issue needs to be handled over a high-expense, live, one-to-one channel. Similarly with service management, the goal is to provide efficient, intuitive service. Engaging self-service is one such channel for that.

Research supports the need to provide self-service. Forrester has pointed out customers want companies to value their time; the continued growth in the use of self-service illustrates how customers prefer service they can use at a time and place convenient to them.

Changing contact information. Updating billing information. Registering a warranty. These are just a few common interactions that could be automated through workflow, taking the work out of customer service by having customers submit requests directly to the departments that can complete them–another concept introduced in Principle 5, which we will cover below. Other self-service options like knowledge base articles fill the gap for situations that require manual steps by the customer.

Be Proactive

“Alert customers before they need to contact you.” – Principle 3, TBSINS

Customers contact customer service when they have problems. Imagine turning that around, so that customer service contacts the customer when they might experience an issue, addressing it before it manifests. Mastering both Principle 1 and Principle 2 help to streamline the application of proactive service.

Consider this. Eliminating the root cause of an issue means many customers who have not yet experienced it can avoid it. They can be notified using available contact methods–email, text message, telephone call, or even a postcard. If those solutions require actions that can be addressed with automation or simple steps to follow in the form of a knowledge base article, the customer can effortlessly apply the solution because self-service is available.

Another aspect of being proactive is performing preventative maintenance, where applicable. Periodically informing customers of the need to perform certain actions on their own or to have a field service technician complete the maintenance helps circumvent a disruption.

Own The Actions Across The Organization

“It is time to stop blaming the customer service department, which, in the vast majority of cases, is the messenger and not the cause of customer contacts.” – Principle 5, TBSINS

Hear, hear!

Customer service did not cause the wrong item to arrive, the product or service to break, or the invoice to be incorrect. These issues originated outside of customer service.

Earlier, Principle 1 espoused solving the root cause. Only the department that owns that part of the larger customer experience can properly address that root cause. Customer service, therefore, can be the friendly face and voice of the company and collect and triage customer issues. As both this principle and service management suggest, those issues are assigned to the teams who can address the root cause and permanently solve the problem. Workflow connects customer service to these other parts of the organization, keeping all teams on-track and accountable until a solution is delivered to the customer.

Outside of the technology driving it, a strong customer-oriented company philosophy is also needed. From the top down, every part of the organization must be working cooperatively to drive improvements to the customer experience.

Are You Offering The Best Service?

No product or service will ever truly be completely free from problems. There will always be something that requires a customer to contact customer service. Where companies will differ is in their approach to addressing these issues.

If you haven’t read it before (or perhaps it’s been a while since you did), read “The Best Service Is No Service.” Perhaps your company is already practicing many of its principles–or perhaps not. Problems are unexpected and frustrating disruptions for customers and can be costly for businesses to address, and this book as well as a service management approach offer a smarter way to drive a better customer experience.

When Naomi Simson founded RedBalloon, an online gift retailer that sells personal experiences, she was pioneering the category in Australia. With a $25,000 personal investment and a small office in her home, she began aggregating sales leads and aggressively acquiring customers through very traditional marketing means — like yellow page advertisements. It was 2001, and  online advertising was at its nascent stage. Internet Explorer was the leading Internet browser and Google AdWords had only just recently launched. With a cost of customer acquisition of just 5 cents, Simson’s traditional approach to advertising was generating an impressive return on investment. RedBalloon was setting the pace for gifting experiences like outdoor adventures, wine tastings, concert tickets, and spa treatments.

By 2015, RedBalloon was delivering more than four million customers to businesses across Australia and New Zealand that offered “experiences.”  Simson wasn’t overconfident, but at this point, she felt like she knew every audience for experiential gifts that existed in the market, along with the most efficient ways to reach them.

Fast forward to 2016, and almost all of RedBalloon’s brand advertising was invested in traditional media outlets like radio, print, billboards, and pop-up retail stores. The company’s cost of new customer acquisition had ballooned from 5 cents to $50. Despite the fact that the company enjoyed massive brand awareness, escalating acquisition costs were destroying margins. Furthermore, the traditional audience for experiential gifts was no longer connecting emotionally with the RedBalloon brand. The marketing team was getting lost in attribution, pulling the same search engine marketing levers, talking to the same audiences, and creating the same campaigns with diminishing returns. The situation was untenable. Simson knew that the company had to transform marketing to find previously unexplored audiences and to make media buying decisions more autonomous and efficient.

Insight Center

Enter “Albert”, a digital marketing platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Working across Facebook, Google, YouTube and other paid and earned media channels, Albert autonomously targets audiences, mixes and matches creative assets, buys media, runs campaigns, measures performance, applies insights from one channel to another, and then makes adjustments based on what “he” learns to optimize the return on marketing investment. I met the team at Albert (formerly known as Adgorithms) while I was doing research into artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data-driven marketing technologies for my book, Marketing, Interrupted. As part of my research, I interviewed several of Albert’s customers, including Simson.

In 2017, Simson and her marketing team put Albert to work immediately, processing the company’s large database of customer interactions and transaction history. After digesting all of this data, Albert identified and bought more than 6,400 keywords to improve performance across RedBalloon campaigns in the first 24 hours of operation. Most marketers use last year’s attribution models as a baseline to inform decisions for this year’s media buys. Not Albert. He retests in real-time to try and disprove existing models and find a different and more efficient way to reach the target. With Albert’s help, the total cost of acquisition across channels for RedBalloon was reduced by 25% in less than one month. He also relieved the marketing team of many of the manual and process-driven tasks they’d been doing. The time they were spending manually executing search campaigns, researching keywords, or altering social media audiences was redirected to more strategic activities, such as devising campaigns that targeted niche, high value, and previously ignored audiences uncovered by Albert.

Despite Simson’s conviction that she knew every buying audience in Australia and New Zealand, Albert was finding new audiences that the company had never even considered. For example, Albert identified an audience cluster of “men over 65 years old in Melbourne who love to skydive.” Albert also revealed pockets of ex-pat communities in the United States and Europe who wanted to buy experiential gifts for their friends and families back home, but were unaware of RedBalloon.

Albert identified these new high-value audiences by trying thousands of text-image combinations on small “micro-segments,” observing which audiences responded along with the specific combinations that triggered their response. Once he identified the highest-performing micro-segments, he scaled his efforts to larger audiences and served them hyper-personalized messages based on what worked with the smaller groups.

Albert acts on these types of insights as he goes, rather than stopping to ask for approval, which can present a learning curve to new adopters of AI, but he also shares what he’s learning along the way. Using large, rapid scale, multi-variant testing, Albert confirmed his initial learnings and insights and expanded upon them, all while autonomously analyzing and revising his decisions based on changing customer behaviors and patterns over time.

Albert debunked many of the long-held beliefs RedBalloon had about their audiences and the effectiveness of their campaigns. Previously, RedBalloon had only been engaging with about 1% of their reachable base on social media and those campaigns focused primarily on driving conversion at the bottom of the sales funnel. Albert started running campaigns to engage the other 99% of the reachable audience. By not just focusing on “closing the deal,” Albert increased brand relevance and consideration, nurtured the audience, and importantly, plugged leaks in the top and middle of the funnel. As a result, the conversion rate from Facebook campaigns managed by Albert increased by 750% in Albert’s first year of operation.

Albert’s results have been so impressive to date that Simson is now encouraging RedBalloon’s CFO to think in a very different way about the marketing budget. In fact, she’s challenging the notion of a “budget” altogether.  Albert is now generating $15 of return for every $1 of marketing investment.  If you have a finite, bounded marketing budget, that implies that you must stop investing when the budget is exhausted. But if you can get a 15x return, why would you stop? Simson’s argument is that the brand should continue to invest until it sees diminishing returns on that investment. Whether or not she wins that argument, you can bet that Albert will have a bigger slice of the RedBalloon marketing budget to work with going forward.

The adoption of AI in the marketing department will only continue to increase as businesses enjoy the benefits of real-time segmentation of customers, personalized messaging, predictable customer value, and optimized media buys.  By eliminating the tedious manual tasks of tweaking business rules each time new customer information is captured, AI will liberate marketers to focus on more strategic and creative activities like campaign planning. Without AI, it will be too difficult for a marketer to compile and process the huge amounts of data coming from multiple sources like website visits, mobile app interactions, purchase transactions, and product reviews.  Those who are slow to adopt AI will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they won’t be able to make timely, accurate, and profitable predictions about their customers.

Although AI hype today exceeds adoption and usage, best-in-class companies are piloting cloud computing AI projects to discover the most relevant use cases which provide the most beneficial financial and business outcomes.

The Core AI Technologies

• Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Neural Networks
• Natural-Language Processing, Speech Recognition and Text to Speech
• Computer Vision
• Machine Reasoning for Decision Making and Advanced Algorithms
• Advanced Business Analytics and Data Science
• Robots and Sensors

The Artificial Intelligence Journey – Bots, Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Bots are micro-services or apps that can operate on other bots, applications or services in response to event triggers or user requests in many cloud computing applications Often emulating a human, they automate tasks based on predefined rules or via more sophisticated algorithms which may involve machine learning.

Robotic process automation (RPA) bots automate mundane yet complex human tasks primarily related to form-driven workflows such as data collection, sorting, filtering, searching and categorizing.

Chatbots and virtual assistants (bots with simple natural language query capability) assist with high-volume, low-value interactions with customers, employees, suppliers, partners and other roles.

Chatbots and VAs (virtual customer assistants [VCAs]) are predominantly used for customer service and support. Key areas include predictive customer analytics, speech recognition for self- and assisted service, and the use of sentiment analysis.

Robo-bosses are being tried in job assignments, scheduling and monitoring workers.

Cloud computing applications that require a high-volume, high-velocity data within the network (i.e., telecom, investment), can benefit from more-advanced troubleshooting and predictive techniques using VPAs.

The Artificial Intelligence Journey – Conversational AI Platforms

Conversational AI Platforms for cloud computing offer richer dialogue capabilities than bots. These platforms can converse in natural languages with people via touch, gesture, speech, keyboards and, in the future, include capabilities such as virtual avatars, thus reducing the need for computer literacy training.

Conversational commerce and customer assistance via phone.

The Artificial Intelligence Journey – Advanced & Predictive Analytics Models for Decision Making

These cloud computing models enable real-time automated event detection, decision support, risk modeling and customer profiling using large volumes of data. An example is automation for supporting operational and tactical decision-making by front- or middle-office workers in areas with large volumes of data.

Advanced analytics are used in marketing, claims, customer service and production to enable real-time automated event detection (i.e. fraud and security areas), decision support, risk modeling, and customer profiling (i.e. sales prospecting and lead generation). They also help to automatically synthesize large amounts of data to support automation and human decision making.

Predictive analytics analyze data, identify patterns and anticipate future scenarios, making them applicable for forecasting, recruiting and preventative maintenance – they form the basis of recommendation engines for cloud computing applications.

The Artificial Intelligence Journey – Robots, Smart Objects, Sensors & Environmental Inputs for Command and Control

While there are currently no commercial off-the-shelf robots, smart buildings or IoT (Internet of Things) cloud computinig applications yet today, physical assets are rapidly being integrated with IoT applications. For example, master vision, sound, environmental and other sensory input are providing added value to robotics, smart buildings, smart cities and wearables.

AI + IoT is mostly used for data-gathering to feed an AI system for training purposes such as video surveillance cameras in smart city and retail applications, environmental sensors in smart agriculture, wearables in sports and fitness, features in autonomous vehicles, and embedded sensors in surgical robots and some drones. And AI technologies and productized capabilities are often used in combination in the most effective cloud computing applications.

The Artificial Intelligence Journey – by Industry

• Automotive – Industrial robots, self-driving cars
• Banking – Customer intimacy, RPA-based form processing, smart advisors, security/authentication
• Hospitality – Virtual assistants, Human-inspired service robots
• Education – Grading, virtual teaching assistants
• Utilities – Drones, predictive and prescriptive smart grid management
• Healthcare – Medical diagnosis
• Investments – Smart advisors, customer service, customer intimacy
• Property and Casualty, Life Insurance – Customer service, fraud investigations, robo-advisors, smart home, health monitoring
• Military – Detection, surveillance, tracking and monitoring
• Manufacturing – Robotics and robo-advisors, predictive maintenance, quality monitoring and automation, surveillance, tracking and monitoring
• Retail – Workforce optimization, Customer intimacy, warehouse robots, aerial delivery
• Government – Public safety via facial recognition, product simulation, fraud detection/prevention
• Consumer Packaged Goods, Food and Beverage – Market research/scenario forecasting prior to new product launch, brand management, customer purchase analysis
• Transportation – Self-driving, predictive maintenance, aerial delivery
• Telecom – Fraud and expense management prevention, network planning and engineering, contact center, self-care, revenue assurance, field service
• Logistics – Surveillance, tracking and monitoring

The Artificial Intelligence Journey

In general, any industry with very large amounts of data can benefit from AI to deliver the best cloud computing solution. Some industries, such as healthcare, are ripe for disruption. For example, in the medical field, computer-assisted diagnosis was able to spot 52% of breast cancers based on mammography scans up to one year before the women were officially diagnosed.

As the amount of available data increases, there will be few jobs requiring decisions in real-time that involve significant volumes of data where humans will be able to match machine-generated insights, such as in the breast cancer example. However, limits exist for AI cloud computing solutions to consider all options in the broader context — these use cases will require the combination of human thinking and machine analysis.

AI adds value to business today and will do so at an exponential rate in the future. However, AI is complicated and demands interdisciplinary skills. Successful application of AI in cloud computing applications require organizations to work closely with technology professionals to find opportunities to differentiate and drive revenue.

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The poet, John Donne, wrote, “No (wo)man is an island, entire of itself; every (wo)man is a piece of the continent.”

Donne’s point is that none of us and what we do exists in isolation, we are part of a bigger thing–a family, a community, a nation. Alternatively a department/function, an organization, a company, a market ecosystem…..

“Well dughhhh Dave, what’s your point?”

The problem is, too many functions within our companies tend to act as “islands.” I suppose it’s human nature, we all tend to focus on our jobs, our goals, what we do. Over time, we lose focus on why we are doing these things or who we are doing these for. What we do becomes ends in themselves.

Perhaps we are in marketing. We focus on the things marketers do, achieving our goals and objectives. It may be new marketing programs, it may be lead gen programs, it may be something else. But ask sales what they think, “The leads are crap, marketing materials aren’t what I need….” (I’ll get to the sales side of this, so if you are a marketer, don’t despair). Or we paper customers with endless emails, offers, or other spam–always ratcheting up the volumes because they aren’t responding.

Perhaps we are in sales enablement. We focus on training, tools, programs to help, “enable salespeople.” But too often, we find the salespeople aren’t using them, or they have taken the training, but it doesn’t have an impact.

Perhaps we are in sales, we’re goal focused, our managers push us to make quota, so we push our products, focusing on transactions, trying to close deals. Yet our customers don’t want to see us, they are concerned with what they are concerned with.

And our customers are focused on their own worlds, doing what they do, often just trying to survive.

We all tend to focus on ourselves, what we do becomes the center of our universe/focus. Doing our jobs, achieving our goals is the center of what we do and how we behave. Buy in doing this, we lose why our jobs and roles were created, in the first place.

The reality is this isn’t working, this “closed” view of the world keeps us from achieving our goals and objectives, it prevents us from growing as individuals, organizations, and communities.

It’s amazing how things change, how the results we produce change, how our views of the “world” change, when we change our perspective.

When we start looking beyond ourselves, beyond our jobs, beyond our functions, we suddenly connect and start to become more effective and impactful.

At the most root level, none of our jobs/roles exist in isolation. They exist in the context of something else, a customer, other functions in the organization, other people.

Go back to the roots of “efficient manufacturing.” Each step in the manufacturing process exists to serve that “downstream” step or customer. The way we build effective manufacturing processes is by starting at the end of the process, working our way backwards, defining what we need to serve/support those downstream customers. The moment that focus is lost, the process starts to fail.

We need to continue to focus on those people who are our customers, they are the why for the existence of our roles. If what we do isn’t helpful or impactful to what they are trying to achieve, then what we are doing has no value.

We know silos don’t work, we know we have to look outside ourselves, our jobs, our functions if we are going to be impactful and achieve our own goals.

But why is it so difficult to do this? Why do we forget?