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Is it time for your sales team to adapt to new contract management software? Or are you shopping around for one for the first time? When choosing the right platform, it is important that your contract software is a sales tool that enables your team to work through the entire contract lifecycle.

To that end, enhancing the sales process with a customer-centric contract management platform, will greatly improve the customer experience and boost your ROI in the process. 

To simplify a few of the popular tools I’ve tested and pick from the best, this article aims to familiarize you with the tools and all of their features.

Let’s take a look at five of the top-rated contract management software programs for sales teams of all sizes. 

1. PandaDoc

PandaDoc is my pick for the best contract management software, thanks to its many versatility and ease of use. 

In fact, the program is designed to tackle problems and improve efficiency. This can be done through securing electronic signatures more quickly, cutting down the amount of time spent on creating contract documents, and getting a higher close rate.

Just a few of the key benefits worth highlighting include:

• An easy-to-use contract creation and contract renewal system
• Native CRM integrations (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.)
• Improved workplace productivity
• High-level analytics reporting

PandaDoc offers over 20 other document management features, including:

• A document builder
• Document analytics
• Themes
• Access codes
• Forwarding documents
• Document sender selection
• Document autonumbering

Other features worth mentioning are contract lifecycle management, electronic signatures with the entire approval process, payment integrations, roles management, content libraries with easy to use drag-and-drop capabilities, content locking, branding, and an audit trail.

Even if after doing your research you aren’t committed to purchasing yet, you can try out PandaDoc with a 14-day free trial. 

This contract management software is one of the more affordable options on the market.

In fact, the professional plan costs $19 per month per user and includes several features.  For example, a total of five templates, unlimited documents and electronic signatures, document analytics, document builder and editor, custom branding, pricing tables, and product catalogs, and email support.

However, for the business plan, you’ll be paying $39 per month per user. Features include unlimited templates, documents, and electronic signatures, custom branding, email and phone support, manager approval workflow, auto reminders, and a content library.

Lastly, the enterprise edition will vary in price depending on the needs and scope of the business. 

Besides, some key features that this edition includes are all the features listed in the other editions, plus custom integrations, content usage reporting, premium support, multiple teams and workspaces, document expiration settings, and a document embedding option.

2. DocuSign

You may know DocuSign as one of the leaders for electronic signatures with over fourteen million users worldwide.

However,  did you know they merged with Spring CM to provide an innovative Contract Lifecycle Management Platform that promises to help its users save money, time, and trees?

In fact, DocuSign SpringCM helps users to streamline the contract lifecycle through automating the typical agreement processes. 

DocuSign’s user-friendly platform comes with multiple features including:

• Seamless document generation that automatically populates data from your CRM 
• Configurable and automated workflows to keep agreements flowing 
• Centralized collaboration tool to check for changes and approvals, as well as manage versions 
• Clause libraries with approved language that increase compliance and minimize risk for users
• Automated reminders for contract renewals and other important dates so your salespeople never miss another deal 
• Seamless Salesforce integration to link your quotes and contracts within Salesforce

DocuSign Spring CM also offers multiple integrations to fit various business needs including: 

• Salesforce
• DocuSign
• Microsoft Office 365
• Adobe Document Cloud
• Adobe Sign
• Dell Boomi
• OneSpan Sign 

With two different price points for small to medium-sized businesses as well as enterprise-level companies, DocuSign offers two pricing plans:

The Professional Edition, running at $39/user per month is for teams looking to store, create, and send documents and standard sales contracts and offers all of the basic features to generate and review contracts. 

The Enterprise Edition that serves larger companies offers all of the basic functions of the professional edition, plus advanced functionality to fully streamline the contract process at just $79 per user, per month.

3. Agiloft

Agiloft is an all-in-one enterprise contract management solution and comes with multiple features, including:

• Contract authoring
• Contract templates
• OCR file scanning
• Audit logs
• Advanced search and categorization
• Version control
• Email alerts
• Real-time analytics and reports
• Contract lifecycle management

Although it doesn’t have the native e-signature feature, Agiloft does come with a DocuSign integration. 

In fact, this software is arguably one of the most feature-dense options on the market. Yet, this can be a downside for small businesses who don’t need this advanced of a feature set.

However, because it has so many features, it’s also easily one of the most customizable contract management systems out there. This makes it a great choice for large enterprise brands and sales teams. 

Agiloft is free for up to 10 people (5 employees and 5 users). After that, the professional plan starts at $65 a month per license and comes with essential features like automation and email and phone support.

However, for the Enterprise Edition, you’ll pay $120 per month for each license. Agiloft is also worth looking into if you are a non-profit since non-profit entities will get a discounted rate.

Furthermore, a huge perk of Agiloft is that if you are unsatisfied with the product within 90 days, you’ll be fully refunded. This is due to the program’s success guarantee.

Even if after doing a little reading on Agiloft, you’re not sure you want to commit to a purchase, you can always take advantage of their free trial offer. This will allow you to take the software out for a test ride before deciding whether or not it’s a good fit for your needs.

4. Coupa Contract Lifecycle Management

Like Agiloft, Coupa Contract Lifecycle Management comes with a bevy of customizable features. They include contract authoring, contract templates, audit logs, and advanced search and categorization. Besides, other features include workflow automation, analytics and reports, and both native electronic signatures and a DocuSign integration.

Keep in mind this is not a software program for small and mid-sized businesses. It’s designed for businesses with annual revenue of $75 million or more. 

With Coupa Contract Lifecycle Management, you’ll be able to choose between native electronic signatures and a DocuSign integration.

The software includes many different ready-made contract templates, as well as a contract authoring feature. Whereas, other key features of the program include user-friendly search and intuitive categorization, version controls, email alerts, workflow automation, analytics and reports, and API. 

Once again, this program is designed specifically for larger enterprises and B2B entities that handle a large inventory of products and produce a high volume of contracts regularly.

5. Contract Safe

Contract Safe is yet another great contract management tool for businesses of sizes looking to eliminate folders and shared drives for contracts and instead use cloud-based software that’s certified and encrypted to keep your data completely secure. 

The software comes with all the necessary features such as being able to store and manage contracts, speed search to find what you need, permissions for efficient collaboration, and contract reminders to make your life easier.  

Along with those features, Contract Safe also offers integrations with popular software such as DocuSign, Okta/SAML 2.0, and Salesforce to streamline your operations and workflow.

In fact, Contract Safe doesn’t have one, but six pricing plans to choose from to meet a variety of business needs from entrepreneur to full-scale enterprise solutions. See full package options here. 

6. Conga Contracts

Conga Contracts truly recognizes that contracts were meant to evolve past the 90s with their intelligent contracts solution that simplify the entire contracting and reporting process. In fact, this contract management software includes essential features such as:

• Contract templates
• Contract lifecycle management 
• Document management
• Compliance management 
• Completion tracking
• Automated alert reminders 
• Full-text search 
• E-Signatures 
• Messaging
• Workflow and approvals 
• Analytics and reports 

Unlike the previously mentioned platforms, Conga does not provide standard pricing options as they offer customizable package solutions based on business needs. In short, you will need to contact Conga directly for a price quote. 

However, it is worth mentioning that Conga Contracts does offer a free demo and also allows potential buyers to try out a 30-day free trial of their platform.

7. LinkSquares

LinkSquares isn’t your typical contract management software. Instead, LinkSquares is a truly innovative AI-Powered Contract Analytics Cloud. Certainly, it uses advanced technology to analyze text from contracts to identify key data, content, and liabilities and is perfect for in-house legal and financial teams. 

The software comes with several features for those looking to save time manually reviewing contracts such as automated analysis, powerful text search, cloud storage, reporting, and real-time notifications. 

Besides, this software isn’t running short on integrations, with LinkSquares you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate with the following platforms:

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• ShareFile
• Share Point
• Office 365
• OneDrive for Business
• Azure Storage 
• Docusign
• Hello Sign
• Adobe Sign
• Salesforce
• Dynamics
• Oracle Sales Cloud
• SugarCRM
• ZohoCRM
• Pipeliner CRM
• Hubspot CRM 
• Conga
• Spring CM

…and many more! Check out the full list here. 

Additionally, LinkSquares does offer a free trial, but for detailed pricing information, you will have to request a demo or get in touch with their team. 

There you have it… 

All in all, selecting the right contract management software that matches your business needs is no easy task with the plethora of options available. It’s no secret that over 80% of clients seek out professional services and marketing, which is why it’s important as ever to compare available options until you find the one that’s a perfect match for your business. 

Nonetheless, by scaling your business with innovative contract management software, you’re able to promote happier customers through a more streamlined contracting process, get more sales through omnichannel marketing, and maintain sustainable business practices.  

Have questions about any of the contract software programs mentioned above or another one we haven’t mentioned? Feel free to leave a comment.
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The post 7 Great Contract Management Tools for Sales Teams appeared first on CloserIQ Blog.

As a sales trainer, there’s always a balance between research and just picking up the phone and dialing out. How much research do you do before just picking up the phone and dialing?

Too little, and you sound like a cold call, and you’ll get disconnected.

Too much, and you waste time you could spend connecting with the people who you can convince to take an appointment and eventually to buy your product or service.

What you need is a quick and easy way to do some pre-call planning — so you have a successful call without having to invest too much prep time.

RELATED: The 4 Most Important Cold Call Statistics for Sales Success in 2019

Introducing: 90-Second Pre-Call Planning

What? 90 seconds? Can that really make a difference?

Yes! While this pre-call process is most useful for openers (sales reps and business reps), it can be effectively used for inside sales professionals and anyone else who makes their living on the phones.

And once you get comfortable with the process, it will take you only 90 seconds to do, and it will make a measurable difference in your appointment setting activities.

So how does it work? Let’s take a look.

5 Easy Steps to Effective Pre-Call Planning

Cold calling may work for your prospect — but it won’t work for you. Before you pick up the phone, take a couple of minutes to prepare.

This quick process warms you up for the call, so you can focus on selling instead of minor details that could make or break the call.

Step 1: Find their Preferred Name

Find out the person you are calling’s preferred name.

Duh. Easy right?

Not always. Is their name Mike or Michael? Do they go by Susan or Suzie? And how do you pronounce their name?

Make sure you know the client’s name — and that you say it out loud — 4 or 5 times (or longer if it takes you more to be comfortable saying it).

How do you know what they prefer to be called?

A quick LinkedIn search will often tell you, because when someone writes a recommendation for someone, they put their preferred name in the recommendation. If you don’t find it, I recommend doing a quick Facebook check for their name and you’ll often find their preferred name there.

Step 2: Find their Title

What is the title of the person you’re about to call? Where do they sit in the organization? Is a vice president a big deal, or is the organization filled with them?

A few seconds to find this out can help you have a better conversation.

Step 3: Figure Out their Role in Decision-Making

Sure, you can’t know their exact role in decision making, but you can absolutely guess based on their title and how many people in their role are in the company.

An owner or CFO usually has buying power. A vice president might have authority. A project manager probably doesn’t have buying power.

Use these to help you find out if you need to drive harder to figure out:

• Who will help in making the decision
• Who else may need to be involved in a decision
• What types of questions to ask to qualify your prospect

Step 4: What Does the Company Do?

You always want to know what a company does for their core business. Do they sell products or deliver services? Are they in manufacturing or in banking?

Not sure? Take a few seconds and review their LinkedIn company page. Or highlight the company name in Google Chrome, right-click (or control-click if you use a Mac), and do a Google search for the company.

Here’s a tip: Check their time zone. Look at your prospect’s phone number. The first three digits are their area code. Click the link and then search by the area code. Though it won’t be 100% accurate (nothing will), it will help you make sure you’re not calling too early in the morning, most of the time.

Step 5: Review and Practice

There are 3 vital statements you need to practice before you speak to the prospect. Here’s what you need to have ready.

Opening Statement You Will Use To Get The Prospect’s Attention

You’ve developed a few good openers, and you’re ready to get their attention. If you haven’t, re-read 7 Perfect Sales Pitch Examples and modify them for your situation.

Remember: Your opening statement is one of two things you can control, as it’s the first thing your customer will hear after they answer your call.

Two Brush-Off Statements To Use

Many times you’ll get the old brush off. It’s on you to redirect to something relevant and get the prospect’s attention, or you’ll get hung up on fast.

Prepare to use two good brush-off statement, and be ready to use the one that feels the best.

One Voicemail To Leave

The last thing you can control is what will happen for 90% of your calls — leaving a voicemail. Here are 7 voicemail scripts you need to have prepared in your own words that you can deliver when the call goes to voicemail.

Prepare one that fits your style, and practice it until you’re comfortable with it. Then have it ready, so you don’t stumble over your words when it comes time to leave a voicemail.

RELATED: 5 Ways to Get Your Prospects to Pick Up Their Phones

Your Formula for Success

Here’s how it works…

To prepare for a list of 20 people you want to call — giving each of them 90 seconds of prep time — you’ll prep for a total 15 minutes each hour and make calls for 45 minutes of the hour.

Preparation, practice, and then produce is the fastest route to success.

And time is of the essence.

Ultimately, you need to know if your solution is right for the prospect and whether they’re the right customer for you. For that, you need to set an appointment where you can discover the prospect’s needs and the pain they’re experiencing.

90 seconds is just enough time to sound intelligent and win the opportunity to set that appointment.

Don’t Just Wing It

“Just wing it” is a recipe for disaster. Without planning and practice, you can hurt relationships and dramatically reduce your deals.

Instead, prepare… practice… and produce.

I promise, if you do it regularly, you WILL produce.

The post 90-Second Pre Call Planning: A Simple Process for Cold Calling Success appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Facebook, Linkedin, Google, Apple and Amazon have very little ability to promote a specific idea or creator.

That sounds crazy, but culturally and technically, it’s true.

In 1995, Oprah got to put just one person as the lead in an episode of her show. That choice was a commitment and a signal. It said to her viewers, “there were many people who could have been on the show today, but I chose this person.”

In 2000, Random House got to pick one book to be their big business title for November. Just one. Their curation sent a message to bookstores, who stocked more copies as a result.

They were curators and their curation led to promotion and attention. There was a cost to picking junk, and a benefit to earning trust.

The tech giants have surrendered that ability, with the costs and benefits that come with it. They end up disrespecting creations and their creators.

It doesn’t matter if you know someone at Google or if Amazon promises that they’re going to heavily promote your new Kindle book. The people who work at these companies don’t have a dial to turn. Amazon is good at selling everything, but they’re terrible at selling a thing.

Apple gets some zing for a recommended podcast now and then, or for a heavily promoted record, but the same rule is generally true with them–98% of all their content is driven by the algorithm, not a human with something at stake. They don’t care which record you pay for, as long as you pay for something.

The platforms are built on the idea that the audience plus the algorithm do all the deciding. No curation, no real promotion, simply the system, grinding away.

This inevitably leads to pandering, a race to the bottom.

Netflix is an exception because they have so much at stake in the investment of their own products that they insist on curating and promoting, bending the algorithm in the direction they wish it to go.

When a site tries to do both (like Buzzfeed), it’s a perilous journey. The metrics and the algorithm will swallow up the best intent of taste and culture making.

Fintech startup Revolut announced changes to its business accounts this week. The good news is that if you were thinking about trying Revolut for your business needs, it’s now cheaper to get started. But there are some limits.

While Revolut is better known for its regular consumer accounts that let you receive, send and spend money all around the world, the company has been offering launched business accounts for a couple of years.

The main advantage of Revolut for Business is that you can hold multiple currencies. If you work with clients or suppliers in other countries, you can exchange money and send it to your partners directly from Revolut’s interface.

The company also lets you issue prepaid corporate cards and track expenses. Revolut for Business also has an API so that you can automate payments and connect with third-party services, such as Xero, Slack and Zapier.

None of this is changing today. Revolut is mostly tweaking the pricing structure.

Previously, you had to pay £25 per month to access the service with a £100,000 topup limit per month. Bigger companies had to pay more to raise that ceiling.

Now, Revolut is moving a bit more toward a software-as-a-service approach. Instead of making you pay more to receive and hold more money, you pay more as your team gets bigger and you use Revolut for Business more intensively.

The basic plan is free with 2 team members, 5 free local transfers per month and 0.4% in foreign exchange fees. If you want to add more team members or initiate more transfers, you pay some small fees.

If you were paying £25 before, you can now top up as much money as you want in your Revolut account, but there are some limits when it comes to team members (10), local transfers (100 per month) and international transfers (10 per month, interbank exchange rate up to £10,000).

Once again, going over the limits doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to change to a new plan. You’ll pay £0.20 per extra local transfer, £3 per extra international transfer, etc.

Here’s a full breakdown of the new plans:

If you’re a freelancer, there’s now a free plan. You’ll pay 0.4% on foreign exchange and £3 per international transfer, but there’s no topup limit anymore.

Similarly, the old £7 plan for freelancers has been replaced by a new £7 plan that removes the limit on inbound transfers but adds some limits on transfers.

It’s good news if you’re a small customer. But if you vastly exceed the transfer limit in one of the categories, you might pay more than before. With this change, the company wanted to make Revolut for Business more accessible instead of making small customers subsidize bigger customers with high entry pricing.

Existing customers can switch to a new plan starting today. And Revolut plans to switch everyone to the new plans on October 1st, 2019.

This article is Part 1 in a two-part series that will help your product team find the right metrics to demonstrate and improve business impact. Check out Part Two here, when you’re finished with this article.

As a product manager, your job is to drive value for your customers and for the business.

The thing is, you can’t tell whether you’re driving value unless you have a way to measure the value that you’re creating! After all, you need an objective way of determining your impact outside of qualitative feedback from customers and stakeholders.

That’s why it’s so valuable for product managers to be data-informed, and why it’s such a key skillset for any product manager.

Yet, even when product managers are data-informed, one challenge that I regularly see across the industry is that it’s difficult to align current product metrics to the targeted business value.

Let me first explain why product metrics might not align with business value. Then, from there, I’ll dive into a framework for how to leverage metrics to truly drive business impact.

When Product Metrics Don’t Line Up

Many times, product managers inherit an existing product, and therefore they also inherit its current set of metrics and instrumentation.

As an example, at one point I inherited a mobile app into my product ownership. Rather than starting from scratch, I already had the following metrics instrumented:

• Number of installations on iOS vs. Android
• Last login date of user
• Logins per week per user

But, just because you have existing metrics doesn’t mean that they’re the right ones.

The Dangers of Vanity Metrics

For example, it’s dangerous to use the vanity metric of logins per week per user, because that doesn’t explicitly point towards tangible customer value or tangible business value.

When a user logs in, it doesn’t mean that they successfully completed a valuable task. For example, a user might log in just to check for notifications—and if they didn’t have any notifications, then they didn’t get any value from that login.

Therefore, logins aren’t a valid indicator of value, even though it’s an easy metric to measure.

Another vanity metric that I regularly see is “number of times a new feature is used.”

By definition, a new feature will naturally be used over time, because human beings are curious and will try out new things. New feature usage doesn’t necessarily mean value.

Measure What’s Meaningful, Not What’s Easy

The key reason why product metrics might not align to business value is because most instrumented metrics are the ones that are easy to instrument, and not the ones that actually matter to the business.

For example, it’s usually pretty easy to measure how long someone is active in your application, which doesn’t speak to business value. It’s usually harder to instrument the metric of “dollars saved by the customer by using your product,” because it’s inherently difficult (if not impossible) to get live cost data from your competitors.

It’s natural that once you’ve implemented some set of metrics—even if they’re not the right ones!—you won’t look for additional metrics to implement.

After all, implementing new metrics takes development time. On top of that, once you’ve implemented them, you then have to train your stakeholders on what the new metrics mean.

That’s why it’s so crucial to set the right metrics from the very beginning, even if they’re hard to implement.

Rather than falling for the trap of “measuring what’s easy to measure”, we should start from the top and begin with business value. When we begin with business value, we can then determine what metrics to focus on.

So, let me walk you through a framework for how to decide on which metrics to instrument.

A Framework for Valuable Metrics

We can think of metrics as streams of value that flow into larger rivers of value, which eventually flow into the ocean of business value.

Imagine a stream that flows into a lake, which doesn’t connect to the ocean. That stream is never going to contribute to the ocean because it’s flowing into a lake that is disconnected.

It doesn’t matter how fast or how wide the stream is—it’s simply not contributing to the ocean. Focusing additional efforts on that stream is wasteful because it never winds up flowing into the ocean.

Therefore, it’s critical to first define what business value is. What are the key drivers of the business? Every business will have different key drivers, and even the same business will wind up having different key drivers over time. Again, in our metaphor above, the ocean represents business value.

Then, once you know what the various drivers of the business are, you’ll need to select one of them to focus on. Remember, product management is all about tradeoffs—you can’t do everything at once.

Once you know the business value you want to target, then define the north star objective. What’s the core qualitative objective of your team?

Once you have an objective, you can then define a north star metric that moves you towards the objective. Remember, an objective is aspirational, whereas a metric is tangible. In our metaphor, the river represents the north star metric.

Once you have the north star metric, you can then decompose the metric into distinct qualitative problem areas.

As you define a problem area, you can then ideate with business stakeholders and development teams to flesh out a constellation of metrics that you can track and improve. In our metaphor, each stream represents a valuable product metric.

Once you’ve knocked out the highest priority problem area, you can then focus your attention on the next highest priority.

As you strengthen each of your streams of product value, you build additional velocity and momentum into a river of value, which then flows into the ocean of business value.

To summarize:

1. Determine the key drivers of the business
2. Select the single driver you want to focus on
3. Define a qualitative north star objective
4. Define a north star metric
5. Decompose the north star metric into qualitative problem areas
6. Define product metrics that capture each problem area
7. Solve a problem area and measure progress
8. Iteratively knock out problem areas

Note how the framework cycles between qualitative and quantitative steps. That’s intentional! Human beings are naturally driven by stories, and the most robust stories are naturally driven by data.

Summary and Additional Thoughts

Product managers usually use the metrics that are the most convenient to get—those that they’ve inherited through previous implementation, and those that are easy to implement next.

But, the convenience of getting a metric isn’t correlated with how well-aligned that metric is to the business value.

So, to ensure that you drive business value as a product manager, use the framework above.

Begin with the business value that you want to drive, then define a north star objective and metric, then break down into sub-metrics, and iteratively solve problems that will ladder back into the business value.

Of course, frameworks aren’t helpful without live examples.

The World is Flat – Thomas Friedman.

We are in the golden age of globalization. More and more, technology and labor are being sourced throughout the globe at a rapid pace. As Friedman proposed in his 2005 book, technology has enabled a global economy and it does not seem to be slowing down now, over a decade later.

So, if this is true – why is it so hard to land new business in the town 30 miles away from you?

I have a theory I would like to propose. It has no name, just more of a shape that is endearing to me: a donut.

What I’m about to propose isn’t always the case, but it seems to be common based on what we’ve seen from our clients and found in our own experiences. Maybe you’ve seen similar things in your business. Don’t take it as gospel, just an observation.

Basically, there are three rings to geocentric business development.

The Center – Your City

We tend to network and navigate in-person relationships in our own town or city. From Fort Worth to Chicago, Atlanta to Seattle, we have a metropolitan area that we would call home. And when we start working with a company, I would say that most of their referral, network-based new business comes from this area.

I would also say that it’s fairly easy (meaning it doesn’t entail conflict) to generate new business in this area, because, beyond your actual expertise, you share a proximity-based bond with your client. You’re in the same town.

Why does this matter? We’ve heard it phrased a few different ways: “I like that you’re in town, I like that you’re close to me, I like supporting local businesses.” Any way you slice it, people tend to gravitate toward a local service offering because it offers familiarity and control in the form of convenience. When local offerings provide a sufficient level of expertise, people choose local. I don’t need a mechanic in NY; the one over here seems to be sufficient and they’re close, thus increasing my level of control over my life (and maybe the mechanic).

So, proximity is a bonus to the relationship – it adds a psychological benefit as well as a physical one.

Middle – Neighboring Town

The “neighboring town” is the area of the donut that gets complicated. Here, we encounter the strange phenomenon of being close – but not close enough.

Put another way: you’re local, but you’re far enough away that the client starts to lose a little bit of that feeling of proximity control we mentioned earlier. The distance starts to change their perception of their control over your services. It starts to shift from someone I have the option of trusting (“I can pop into their office, deal with issues, or get all my files if this goes bad”) to someone I have to trust.

What you experience is actually a disadvantage compared to the local guy – the guy right around the corner or in the same city as the client. You start to be compared on a different value proposition that includes everyone in the entire service marketplace, but you’ve lost the local edge. You’re local, but you’re not local enough.

The Outer Ring – The National

Once you get out of the 50 to 60 mile radius, you become a national firm. This means that you’re viewed the same in New York City as you would be in Atlanta and as you would be in Tampa, Idaho or Silicon Valley. In this case, it doesn’t really matter where you are – what matters more is what you do and who you do it for. No longer does your geographic location matter. Your value proposition shifts from being the best on the block (or the most accessible and therefore a lower risk) to being the best in the nation.

You’ve entered into a big list of competition. This challenge presents itself as daunting and almost unbeatable until you start to realize you can’t win this market the same way you won the local game. Being accessible isn’t enough.

To win the national market, you must differentiate. You must have a strong USP with a niche strategy to stand out from all the other firms in that scope. You must do something (service niche) for someone (horizontal or vertical positioning) that can put you in the right position in the clients’ minds. When a client chooses to go on a national search, they’re looking for someone more specific to their particular needs for a particular service. It’s call specialization. Specialists win the national game because they limit risk and ensure more control for the client.

Why Does All This Matter?

I’ve only seen this observation when it comes to new business development and how you sell your firm or service. Many people struggle to get out of the local market because they fail to position themselves the right way in the buying decision. Assurance is a form of control the clients mind, and if you don’t position yourself for assurance, you’ll never conquer the market.

So, take your time. Think deeply about your business model, your offering, and how you pitch yourself in the marketplace. Are you simply the local firm (close, controllable), or are you the national firm (assured, experts)? How you position your firm in the market will matter in how you win non-local business.

“Danger is my middle name” Austin Powers, international Man of Mystery

Spying on your B2B competitors just makes sense. A lot of sense, actually.

Unlike observing the marketing strategies of random companies or CMOs that have nothing to do with the dynamics of your own industry, you’d do better, of course, to observe your direct or indirect competitors. Their marketing tactics have context, relevance, and a strong connection to your own interests. Plus, your competitors by nature are targeting your ideal demographics, and that means there are loads of relevant things you can learn regarding your audience.

Basically, if you’re the owner of Coca Cola, you’d rather study the marketing strategies of, say, Pepsi-Cola than Toyota—right? It only makes perfect sense. And despite something of a taboo out there about doing so, totally acceptable and legal ways exist to get really good dirt on your competition.

In this week’s post, we’re going to look into how you can uncover your competitors’ strategies. Using that info, you can benchmark, improve, and get rid of wasted marketing efforts. All of it is no-risk.

So, interested? Of course you are. Here are 5 tips for how you can start sleuthing.

1. Identify and Create a Dossier for Each Competitor

You have two types of competitors, and it’s crucial that you classify them so you can understand them better. Here’s an easy way to classify them:

• Direct competitors. These are businesses that sell and market the same services and products you do. They’re the kind of companies that end up on the same shortlist when customers research your industry. How you compare against them in terms of value, pricing, and features (among other things) will influence your customer decisions to buy or not.
• Indirect competitors. These are companies that don’t offer the same services and products but are targeting the same audience that you’re pursuing. Let’s say you offer a project management software for startups. Your indirect competitors could be companies who develop “to-do” software programs. While to-do software might not be as comprehensive as project management software, it just might do the trick for some startups who are looking to increase productivity and save on cost.

When it comes to product development, look into your direct competitors.

When it comes to improving your content, check out your indirect competitors on top of studying your direct competitors.

Now for the secret sauce. To figure out who your direct competitors even are to begin with, just do a quick search in Google using the following search query: Top/Best [insert your product type here] providers (e.g., “top construction software providers, or “best construction software company”).

Here’s what Google came up with when I typed in the first search query.

Pretty neat, huh?

You should see a couple of your direct competitors in the search results.

2. Tap Into and Monitor your Competitors’ Social Media Channels

Social media is one of the essential marketing tools that both offline and online businesses use to help boost sales, customer engagement, brand awareness, and website traffic. The key is to make sure that your marketing materials and strategies are spot-on.

For example, if you’re planning on doing YouTube marketing, then you need to make sure that your thumbnail sizes are correct, the length of your videos are just enough, the keywords you’ll add in your video titles and descriptions make sense, etc.

Of course, this is where spying on your competitors comes in.

To figure out what types of videos resonate with your audience, you can:

1. visit your competitor’s YT channel.
2. check out which among their videos have the most engagement.
3. look for commonalities on how their best performing videos are created.

As you follow these steps, you should be able to gain insight, one way or the other, on what captivates your audience. If your primary social media platform is Twitter, then you can use TweetReach to view your competitors’ social media performances on Twitter.

The tool shows your competitors’ estimated reach and exposure. You’ll also have an idea of what tweets, hashtags, mentions, etc., that your competitors are using to their advantage. Once you gain access to these details, all you need to do is to reverse-engineer what your competitors are doing.

If their tweet about, say, “10 Ways to Make Money Online” gains traction, then you can do “30 Ways to Make Money from Home.” With this strategy, you’ll have a better chance of getting positive results out of your tweets since your competitor’s tweet has already validated that your audience likes to learn about how to make money online.

Here’s a point for you doubters out there: If you don’t do your competitor research, someone else will. And they will learn these lessons sooner than you will. So save yourself the unnecessary effort by investigating your competitors. They’re watching you, too—you can be sure of that.

3. Eavesdrop on Online Communities

Online reviews can be as good as personal recommendations, and they have a huge influence on people’s decision to buy. The catch is, you need to know where your target audiences are getting these online recommendations.

Aside from directly visiting their websites, your would-be customers go to online communities such as Quora, Reddit, and other social media platforms to ask for recommendations. Customers can post a question on Quora, for example, to find out what other users have to say.

Let’s say they want to find out the best car speaker brands. Once they type in their question, they will get a slew of answers from other users.

You can use this strategy to know what people are saying about your competitor’s best features, product quality, discounts, and more. And if your competitors respond to the questions posed by the community, pay close attention to the thread.

Pro tip: Take note of how they address the questions and concerns since, in most cases, your competitors will reveal the tricks they have up their sleeve just to diffuse whatever issues are raised.

4. Interview Your Own Customers and Document Feedback

If you’d like to know who your competitors are, you can ask your customers. Really, it’s that simple.

You can use a software and survey solutions like SurveyMonkey, which allows you to create forms for your customer feedback (among other things). It’s also one way of getting insights from your customers about the brands and products they were previously considering or using before they chose to purchase from you.

Once you have this information, you can then start researching your competitors’ marketing tactics to check how they were able to reach your target customers. Leverage your customer satisfaction data to help determine the factors that influence their decisions to buy, what needs improvement, the services, and products that they’d like to see on your shelves, and more.

5. Decipher the Google Search Results Page

Although your indirect competitors are not selling the same products and services as you, they can still take website traffic away from your site.

Aside from doing keyword research using tools like Ubersuggest and KWFinder, you can go to the source, Google, to find the websites that publish content that is related to your business. Start by identifying the main keywords in your business and your value proposition. Then type in your keywords on Google’s search box. These are some of the pertinent details that you’ll see:

• The websites ranking in the search results.
• Related searches relevant to your keywords.
• The websites that use paid ads.
• Places where you can shop online, including product images.
• The closest physical stores re your keywords and whether they do e-commerce.

As you can probably imagine, the insights you can gain from analyzing the search results are wondrously useful. Yes, I said wondrously. Here’s an example:

Here I typed in “construction software” as an example. Looking at the search results, you can already see some strategies that the competing companies are using to pull the customers.

Some are offering a free demo and consultation. Others a 7-day free trial. And there are those who are using the “cloud-based” angle to promote their product, which makes a lot of sense, by the way.

When you run your marketing campaigns, you can consider these strategies to come up with more relevant and enticing marketing materials to influence your audience.

When you spy on your competitors, not only will you be able to gain actionable insights about the best ways to market your brand, but you will avoid spending thousands of dollars on market research.

Just look at what your competitors are doing, pay close attention to what’s working, then improve the things that are working, and avoid the things that aren’t.

It’s not risky at all—just effective.

What is the best way to grow your professional services firm? Should you specialize and zero in on a specific market niche? Or would that narrow focus be too risky? Perhaps you should broaden your target audiences. Or would you risk becoming nothing special to anyone?

For many professional services firms the answer is neither. They choose a strategy that combines elements of both approaches. This strategy is called differentiated marketing.

Differentiated Marketing Defined

In Differentiated Marketing a firm pursues multiple target markets using different marketing strategies for each. This approach can be contrasted against two alternative strategies: 1) undifferentiated marketing (or mass marketing), in which a single marketing strategy is used to address multiple target markets; and 2) niche marketing (also called focused or concentrated marketing), in which all marketing resources are focused on a single segment of a larger market.

To illustrate these different marketing approaches imagine that an accounting firm has three service lines, and they market each service using a different marketing approach. The first service is tax filings, which they market with an undifferentiated approach. They pursue all market segments using the same set of techniques, including face-to-face networking and encouraging referrals from existing clients. They bill hourly for this service.

Their second service line, outsourced bookkeeping, targets a single market niche — small family-owned restaurants. To reach this segment, the firm attends restaurant trade shows, partners with trade associations, and invests in online advertising. The firm sells this service as packages carefully priced for this niche market.

Their third service line is operational business consulting. Here they use a differentiated marketing strategy. For one target segment, family-owned restaurants, they use the same strategy as the bookkeeping service, and they sell their consulting services as part of a fixed-price monthly package. For a second segment, small manufacturers, they use a different strategy: they focus on cultivating referrals from bankers, and they price their services on an hourly basis. Different target markets, different marketing approaches — each tailored to the needs and preferences of that target market. That is the essence of a differentiated marketing strategy.

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Differentiated Marketing in Professional Services

The professional services industries are particularly well suited to a differentiated marketing approach. Many services can be applied to multiple target markets. This means there are a lot of opportunities to focus on an attractive segment.

Most services can also be tailored to fit the unique needs of a particular segment. So you can adjust your offerings without having to retool a factory or write off inventory of manufactured goods.

Perhaps most importantly, buyers of professional services usually prefer firms that are familiar with their industry and the specific challenges they face. This behavior gives niche focused strategies a distinct advantage. And a differentiated marketing strategy allows you to address multiple segments with carefully tailored services and marketing plans.

It is true that implementing multiple marketing strategies can be more complex and costly. And it requires discipline to plan and execute a differentiated strategy. But the upside can be tremendous.

When choosing between providers, professional services buyers are most likely to choose the firm that has the strongest track record of solving problems like theirs. Naturally, the advantage goes to the niche-focused specialist.

Figure 1. The top 5 buyer selection criteria that tip the scale in favor of one firm over another.

Differentiated Marketing Examples

A Consulting Differentiated Marketing Strategy: The AIM Institute

The AIM Institute (AIM) specializes in advising Fortune 2000 companies on product development and launch strategies, and they use differentiated marketing to engage two different audiences.

To address its decision-maker audience (strategic leaders/influencers), AIM has produced targeted educational content, including an ebook entitled, “Leader’s Guide to B2B Organic Growth” and an associated video series. AIM also publishes a special executive-level blog that shares “stories from the trenches.” It reads like a CEO sharing battle stories and insights to another CEO running a large company. All the marketing tools and techniques used with this audience focused on how executives like to learn. Messaging covers product launch strategies—and how these strategies contribute to growth.

For its practitioner audience (tactical implementers), AIM has developed a series of specialized workshops that are more practical in nature. These workshops focus more on product blueprinting and de-risking rather than on B2B organic growth.

An AEC Differentiated Marketing Strategy: Woodward and Curran

Woodward and Curran is an ENR Top 100 engineering firm offering a diverse range of services and industries ranging from nuclear energy to manufacturing automation to city-wide urban renewal projects. It realized that it could not keep using a single marketing strategy to engage itsdisparate clietele. But the firm did not want to move forward without some hard facts to guide their marketing.

So it took a step back and conducted brand perception research across several industries to better understand buying behavior and audience issues. It also conducted demand research around specific services such as outsourced environmental health and safety services for private Fortune 100 firms to gauge prospect interest.

This strategy enabled Woodward and Curran to build a messaging architecture that addressed specific objections, anticipated responses, and offered proof points–all organized by target audience, roles, and services. The engineering firm then rolled out vertical-specific marketing plans, channels, and content.

For instance, those Fortune 100 firms received a personalized, multi-channel outreach strategy — including traditional mailings and small in-person events. Municipal audiences, on the other hand, were targeted with LinkedIn content distribution promotions that allowed Woodward and Curran to stay in front of their audience even during RFP blackout periods.

When to Use a Differentiated Marketing Strategy

When does it make sense to seriously consider using a differentiated marketing strategy? While there are no hard and fast rules, here are some situations when it might be an attractive option:

1. You have outgrown the niche you are targeting. The niche is too small to sustain the growth you desire. A differentiated strategy allows you to add additional niches without losing the advantages a niche play enjoys.
2. You are losing your competitive advantage in an undifferentiated market. The services you are offering to your largely non-targeted market are becoming more commoditized. It’s harder to win new clients.
3. Your margins are shrinking. Differentiated services tend to have higher margins and are easier to defend against undifferentiated competitors.
4. You want to simplify your service offerings. Differentiated services are more targeted so they tend to have less client-to-client variation. This makes them less costly to deliver.
5. You want to maximize the overall value of your firm. Well-targeted niche players typically offer the greatest strategic value to a potential buyer. A differentiated strategy allows you to accumulate these valuable niches and maximize the value of each by tailoring your marketing strategy to wants and needs of individual segments.

How to Develop a Differentiated Marketing Strategy

A differentiated marketing strategy requires that you develop a separate marketing plan for each segment you are targeting. We recommend using a strategic marketing planning process similar to the one outlined in this post.

Here are the key steps in the process.

1. Understand the business situation your firm is facing.

The purpose of marketing is to enable a firm to achieve its business goals. If you do not start with a clear understanding of those goals and any constraints that limit your ability to achieve them, you will be unlikely to succeed. What is the business reason behind your selection of a differentiated marketing strategy? What will success look like? How ill you decide which segments to target?

Different types of research apply to different stages of the planning process. For example, opportunity research compares the viability of different markets or target audiences. This type of research helps you decide which segments to target. Client or persona research helps you better understand your target clients and how they select a firm. That is our next step.

2. Research your target client segments so you understand their buying behavior, motivations and priorities.

It’s rare to meet practicing professionals who do not believe that they fully understand their clients, their needs and their priorities. Sadly, they are almost always wrong about some key element of their clients’ thinking and decision-making. They misconstrue clients’ real priorities and they rarely understand how clients choose new providers. Research can set the record straight on all these counts. And it can help you evaluate and price your service offerings..

When you are doing research, focus on your best, most desirable clients within each segment. Which ones do you want more of? Research will equip you to find more clients like them. It will also help you learn how your clients search for new providers and where they get their information. These insights will help you in subsequent steps.

3. Position your firm in the marketplace.

Successful positioning rejects conformity. At its best, positioning elevates a brand above the fray so that people can’t help but take notice. The human brain instinctively looks for things that are different and unexpected. So a brand that stands in stark contrast to its competition will attract people’s attention and have a distinct advantage in the marketplace. Keep in mind that this positioning must work for all of the segments you are targeting.

Positioning starts with identifying the factors that set you apart. These factors are called your differentiators, and they must pass three tests. Each must be:

• True—You can’t just make it up. You must be able to deliver upon your promise every day.
• Provable—Even if it is true, you must be able to prove it to a skeptical prospect.
• Relevant—If it is not important to a prospect during the firm selection process it will not help you win the new client.

Some differentiators may only be relevant to a single target market. That is okay. But you must have at least one differentiator that is relevant to each segment you are targeting. You can’t have a differentiation strategy unless you are different in some meaningful way.

Next, you must use your differentiator(s) to write a focused, easy-to-understand positioning statement. This is a short paragraph that summarizes what your firm does, who it does it for, and why clients choose you over competitors. It positions you in the competitive market space and becomes the DNA of your firm’s brand.

Each of your target markets is likely interested in different aspects of your service offerings or firm. So you will need to develop different messaging for different audiences. All of your messages should be consistent with your positioning, but they may focus on different benefits or overcoming different objections.

4. Define and refine your service offerings.

Often overlooked in the planning process, your service offerings can get stale. Evolving your services over time is how you develop and sharpen a competitive advantage in each of the target markets you have selected.

As clients’ needs change, you may want to create entirely new services to address those needs. Your research may uncover issues clients are not even aware of yet, such as an impending regulatory change, suggesting a range of possible service offerings. Or you might change or automate part of your process to deliver more value at a lower cost with higher margins.

Whatever these service changes turn out to be, they should be driven by your business analysis and your research into clients and competitors.

5. Identify the marketing techniques you will be using.

This starts with understanding your target audiences and how they consume information. You gathered this information in the target client research that you conducted in Step 2. Once you understand how and where your prospects are looking for information about issues they are facing or service providers like you, you can reach them in their preferred channels. It’s all about making your expertise more tangible and visible to your target audience. We call this Visible Expertise®.

Achieving high-level visibility requires a balance of marketing efforts — our research has shown that a blend of traditional and digital techniques works best.

Figure 2. A balanced approach to marketing includes both digital and traditional techniques.

In addition to balancing your marketing techniques, be sure to create content for all levels of the sales funnel — to attract prospects, engage them and turn them into clients. To keep things as efficient as possible, plan to use content in multiple ways. For example, a webinar could be repurposed as blog posts, guest articles and a conference presentation.

6. Identify the new tools, skills and infrastructure you will need.

New techniques demand new tools and infrastructure. It’s time to add any new ones you may need or replace those that aren’t up to date. Here are some of the most common tools:

Website – Modern marketing begins with your website. Your strategy should tell you if you need a new website or if adjusting your current messaging or functionality will be sufficient.

Marketing Collateral – You may need to revise your marketing collateral to reflect your new positioning and competitive advantage. Common examples of collateral include brochures, firm overview decks, one-sheet service descriptions and trade show materials.

Marketing Automation – Software is making it easier and easier to automate your marketing infrastructure. In fact, marketing automation tools can be a game-changer and essential to building a competitive edge.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Online search has transformed marketing. Today, every firm that conducts content marketing needs a solid grasp of SEO fundamentals — from keyword research to on-site and off-site optimization.

Social Media – Adding or upgrading your firm’s social media profiles is often required. And don’t forget to update the profiles of your subject matter experts.

Video – Common ways to use video include firm overviews, practice overviews, case stories, blog posts and educational presentations. If your subject matter experts have limited time to devote to developing content, video may be an efficient way to use the time they have.

Email – You’ll need a robust email service that allows you to track reader interactions and manage your list — it may even be built into your CRM or marketing automation software. Also take a look at your email templates and decide if they need a refresh.

Speaker Kits – If your strategy involves public speaking or partner marketing, you may also need to develop a speaker kit. A speaker kit provides everything an event planner might need to promote one of your team members for a speaking event: a bio, professional photos, sample speaking topics, a list of past speaking engagements and video clips.

Proposal Templates – Proposals are often the last thing a prospect sees before selecting a firm, so make sure yours sends the right message. At the very least, make sure you’ve included language that conveys your new differentiators and positioning.

Don’t forget the skills you will need. Even the best strategy will accomplish little if you don’t fully implement it. Many leaders find it challenging to deliver a full marketing strategy with just the right balance — and it can be even more challenging to keep teams up to date on today’s ever-changing digital tools. Your choices are learn, retain or hire. The fastest-growing firms use more outside talent.

7. Document your operational schedule and budget.

This is where your strategy gets translated into specific actions that you will take over time for each of your target markets. Your written plan should include specific timelines and deadlines so that you can measure your progress against it. Did a task happen as scheduled? Did it produce the expected results? These results will become the input for the next round of marketing planning.

You will need two key documents, a marketing calendar and a marketing budget. The marketing calendar should include every tactic you will use to implement your plan. It can cover the upcoming quarter or even the entire year. Begin by entering any events you know about, such as annual conferences and speaking events. Include every regularly scheduled blog post, emails, trade shows, webinars — everything in your plan.

Recognize that you may need to adjust your calendar regularly, possibly as often as weekly. The purpose is to build in consistency and predictability. Leave room for last-minute changes — but don’t get too far away from your plan and budget.

To build a budget, start with the tools and infrastructure we just mentioned. For recurring elements such as advertising, estimate the cost for a single instance then multiply by the frequency. Use benchmarks when available, and don’t forget to allow for contingencies, typically 5-10% of the overall budget.

Figure 3. Summary of the 7 steps to a differentiated marketing strategy.

A Final Thought

A differentiated marketing strategy is not right for every firm. Smaller firms will likely be better served by a niche strategy, for example. Yet many firms can enjoy the competitive advantages of a niche strategy while diversifying across multiple target audience with well-tailored marketing campaigns. Yes, differentiated marketing is more complex marketing. But it is a challenge that is well worth the effort.

If you’re like me, you started your business for the freedom. The freedom that comes with running your own company. The freedom to earn what you deserve. The freedom to work for whoever you want, when you want, and from wherever you want.

But for many business owners, that dream remains elusive. Instead, they fall into the owner’s trap…

I felt trapped in my business because I knew more than anyone else about the company. Customers expected to deal with me personally; I was involved in creating and delivering most of what we sold; and, I was continually chasing the next deal. I was spinning so many plates, the last thing I felt was freedom.

I learnt that entrepreneurial freedom comes from building a thriving business — a valuable, sellable business.

A sellable business is not dependent on you. You can scale it, sell it, pass it down or run it without being involved in the day-to-day operations.

So, today, I want to share seven things you absolutely must to do to build a valuable business, and avoid the owner’s trap.

Number 1: Drive Financial Performance

Keep in mind, the goal is to build a sellable business — not necessarily because you want to sell it… but because owning a sellable business gives you the ultimate freedom. And when it comes to selling your business, financial buyers are after one thing: they are buying your future stream of profits.

To drive up profits, you have two big levers you can pull:

• how much profit your company will make in the future

• how reliable your estimates are

Number 2: Your Potential to Scale

The second factor that raises your company’s value is your potential to scale up and grow in the future.

Scaling up requires you to isolate a small set of products or services to sell that meet the Trifecta of Scale:

• Teachable

• Valuable

• Repeatable

As entrepreneurs, we’re guilty of pursuing the next shiny thing or of being all things to all people. You might find yourself broadening the list of products and services you sell to customers. But selling lots of things to a few customers is a recipe for underperformance. In fact, the chances are, your business is more likely to become dependent on you. That’s because you are the only person in the company with enough knowledge to deliver such a broad range of products or services successfully.

So, the secret to scaling up is to sell less stuff to more people.

For example…

Most photographers run businesses that are highly dependent on them. Few have gone through the Scalability Trifecta exercise. However, The School Photography Company in Danbury England has.

All they do is school photographs and they’ve scaled up because focusing on one offering has allowed them to teach employees to deliver a repeatable service which customers value.

3. The Switzerland Structure

Creating a valuable business is called The Switzerland Structure. The name comes from the country which is obsessed by remaining independent.

Become obsessed with making sure your business is independent of any one customer, employee or supplier.

• From a customer perspective, your goal should be that no one customer makes up more than 15% of your revenue.

• Ideally, you should be able to switch any of your suppliers without significantly impacting your business

• Probably the hardest part of The Switzerland Structure is to reduce your reliance on one or two key employees

Number 4: Cash Flow

The fourth attribute that drives your company’s value — and ultimately your freedom, is cashflow.

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. The more cash your business needs, the more likely it will need an infusion, the less it’s worth.

The opposite is also true: if your business generates cash as you grow, your business will be healthy and worth more to a buyer.

The reason is simple: when a buyer acquires your business, they have to write two checks: one to you, the owner, and a second check to your business to fund its “working capital”.

The money to write these two checks comes from the same pocket so the bigger the amount the acquirer needs to write for working capital, the smaller the check you’ll end up getting.

Not only does improving cash flow increase the value of your company, but it also makes it a lot less stressful to run.

Number 5: Recurring Revenue

I love Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Not only did it increase the value of my business, it helped me through some really tough times. Recurring revenue is why so many businesses are moving to subscription models.

As I mentioned, a buyer buys a future stream of profit, and therefore, the more reliable you can make your business model, the more valuable your company.

Here’s a simple example: home security businesses have two forms of revenue. Installation revenue they get from coming to install the system in your home. And “monitoring” revenue they collect each month for ensuring they come to the rescue in the event of a problem.

The industry-standard valuation for installation revenue is seventy-five cents for every dollar of installation revenue. For example, if you had a home security business generating one million dollars in revenue, and all you did was installations, your company would be worth seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

The same million-dollar business with one hundred percent monitoring revenue would be worth two million dollars because acquirers pay two dollars for every one dollar of monitoring revenue. The monitoring business is two and half times more valuable than the installation business.

And that’s why subscription billing is so important!

Number 6: Monopoly Control

The 6th factor that drives your company’s value is something I like to call “Monopoly Control” and it refers to how well differentiated your product or service offering is.

Your goal is to find three attributes or benefits of your product that makes it unique in the market. Doing this will give you more control over its pricing, which in turn gives you higher margins, and more money for marketing — allowing you to further differentiate your offering. Starting a virtuous cycle.

Take Panasonic’s entry into the crowded laptop market. When they entered, established brands already owned the attributes customers cared about. Apple was seen as sexy, HP was technically innovative, and Dell held the benefits of buying direct.

So if you’re Panasonic, all of the obvious market positions are already taken. If they had tried to compete directly with any of the incumbents, their only option would have been a lower price, which would have led to lower margins. They may have picked up some price-sensitive customers, but as soon as one of the big incumbents matched their price, Panasonic would have been nudged out of the market.

Instead, they asked themselves the two questions:

1. What do customers care most about

2. How differentiating would that benefit be if we offered it

Most laptop buyers cared about the things Apple, Dell and HP were offering. But there was a segment of the market that cared about something different. Police forces and military customers cared most about how tough their laptop was. They wanted something that could stand up to the rigours of the inside of a squad car or forward operating military theatre.

Panasonic launched the toughest laptop on the market. The ToughBook gave them a monopoly control in a niche market. Helping them reach higher margins and allowing them to market the unique benefits of the ToughBook. Cementing their brand as the laptop choice for people who operate in a rough and tumble environment.

Number 7: Satisfied Customers

Not surprisingly, having satisfied customers is an important ingredient of a valuable business. But having satisfied customers is actually not enough.

Your goal should be to have customers who are not only happy but also willing to re-purchase and refer you to their friends.

That is a much higher bar to reach – as Fred Reichheld discovered.

Reichheld is a Bain consultant, and creator of the Net Promoter System®. Early on, he discovered that there is virtually no relationship between a customer saying they are satisfied and the likelihood that they will either re-purchase or refer you. Many customers would say they were happy and then purchase from a competitor the very next day.

Reichheld worked the numbers and discovered one question which was predictive of both re-purchase and referral: on a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? Turns out, the answer to that question was highly predictive of both referral and re-purchase.

So, ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend or colleague.

Number 8: The Hub & Spoke

The name comes from the airline ‘industry’s reliance on “”hub”” airports, which are efficient ways of moving planes around the globe — at least until a hub gets “”snowed in”” and the entire system breaks down.

Likewise, a Hub & Spoke manager controls their business with decisions centralized at the hub. Remove the hub, and the business grinds to a halt. Which is why companies reliant on their owner are either deeply discounted or worthless.

More importantly, Hub & Spoke businesses are stressful to run because you can never take a break — all the decisions, even the most mundane, are brought to you.

This is where distinguishing between how profitable your business and how valuable your business is can come in handy…

Some people use profitable and valuable interchangeably, but of course, they are often in conflict with one another:

Instead of hiring salespeople, the owner seeking to maximize her profits would do all of the selling herself. Instead of hiring a management team, the owner seeking profit would likely hire the lowest-paid staff they can find to get the job done.

While the profit-seeker may maximize their profits, they would also grow a worthless business. In contrast, the value-seeker surrounds herself with experts. People capable of getting the job done and growing a valuable business.

The ultimate goal of any business owner should be to build a valuable, sellable business because that removes you from the owner’s trap and gives you real freedom.

Full disclosure: I started out my software career as a pre-sales engineer. Call me biased, but what other job inside a software company allows you to exercise so many skills at one time? Part show person, part geek, part industry expert, part teacher!

I love the pre-sales role and the demo. A B2B software buyer’s early product experience is arguably the most critical part of any software sales cycle. But as the way in which software buyers want to buy continues to evolve, and vendors adapt to changing buyer demands and market conditions, the role of pre-sales and the demo must inevitably change.

The opportunities to speak with buyers, complete a discovery call and show them a demo are shrinking. A recent Gartner study of 750 B2B software buyers points to them spending only 17% of their entire buying journey meeting with vendors. If you assume that buyers will check out at least three products, that means that less than 6% of all the time they spend on different buying activities is spent speaking with individual vendors. A similar study from Forrester Research reports that 68% of buyers prefer to research online on their own. If every buyer wants to experience your product before making a purchasing decision, and they spend 94% of their available time buying independently, how can vendors provide them with a satisfactory product experience?

Pre-sales resources are at a premium. Go to any pre-sales engineer meetup or get-together and chances are that every pre-sales manager there will mention that they’re hiring. A quick search on LinkedIn will pull up more than 10,000 open reqs for pre-sales engineers in the US alone.

Pre-sales engineers – and in-person demos are also expensive. ProfitWell’s research points to B2B CAC costs rising steadily over the past five years. This is a concern for many of the CEOs and heads of sales I speak with, whether it’s enterprise software companies moving into SMB markets or companies with low-ticket, high-volume sales models. They’re looking for ways to scale traditional pre-sales resources and demo processes, that satisfy the demands for more and earlier product experiences from today’s autonomous buyer.

The Free Trial – The “other” demo?

The product trial is not a new concept. What is new is using trials as the default way to offer an early product experience – what OpenView has coined as product led. In most cases, software companies adopting this approach offer no demo options. The demo is replaced by the product trial. Buyers get an immersive product experience by using the product, versus someone showing it to them.

OpenView’s research points to the impressive conversion rates of companies that have adopted this approach. It’s also worth noting that this model is not for everyone.

I’m a big fan of product led and think product trials are great – if you’re selling a product that is relatively easy and uncomplicated, to a very knowledgeable buyer, and your organization is built around servicing a trial customer. Or, to put it another way, if your products are bought rather than sold.

Remember, customers are trying to make an informed buying decision in the shortest time possible. Is your process optimized to help buyers quickly experience your product’s “aha” moment? Or are you expecting in-trial customers to complete what amounts to an implementation process before they can begin to see the value of the product?

3 Reasons for Poor Trial Conversion

There are many reasons for low trial conversion rates, including the following:

First, every software buyer wants to see and experience the product before they buy. If there’s no demo option, buyers are forced to start a trial, simply to see the product. The trial becomes a poor substitute for the demo.

Second, buyers want to validate that the product’s functionality will address their needs and deliver the value they’re expecting. If the trial is the first time that the buyer is seeing the product in action, they’re wasting too much time figuring out what the product can do, versus if and how it can do it. Particularly for more complex products, buyers can’t afford the investment of time to evaluate products this way.

Third, most companies are still organized around customer acquisition and selling, not customer success which is required for successful trial conversions. The inability to quickly help in-trial buyers understand and experience functionality that’s relevant to them, results in too many buyers becoming frustrated and giving up.

3 Ways a Product Led Strategy can Improve Trial Conversion Rates

Thankfully, there are ways to scale your pre-sales team and leverage your product demo today that allow any company to start becoming product led and drive higher trial conversion rates. Here are three suggestions:

1. Use your product to drive buyer enablement and help the autonomous buyer learn about your product wherever and whenever they want to. Make your demo interactive and available to your buyers directly from your website and through your digital marketing. This will allow multiple buyers within the same company to experience their individual “aha” moments and become immersed in the product on their own time. Use the analytics from the buyer’s interaction with your online demo to gain visibility into where buyers are in their buying journey.
2. If you’ve already moved to a product led model and are offering product trials, but not experiencing the conversion rates you had hoped for, consider providing access to a high-quality, professional demo that buyers can access before they commit to a trial. You no longer have the typical expenses of in-person discovery and demos, but your buyers benefit from experiencing your product through a great demo before they begin their trial. Offering buyers this type of demo results in more buyers self-qualifying themselves for trials. And assuming the demo is correctly structured, buyers engage with the trial in a more informed and prepared manner. The demo has already answered the buyer’s “can the software do….” questions, allowing the trial to answer their “how does your software do….” needs. As a result, this approach improves trial conversion rates.
3. Most B2B software buyers are looking for solutions that provide multiple benefits, and have their individual list of questions they want answered before they’ll consider buying your product. Use the demo to provide answers to those questions, again before or during the trial. This will let the buyer understand the breadth of value your product offers. Trials are limiting in helping buyers quickly understand the breadth of value they will gain. As one of our customers told me about a recent software trial experience: “we were able to go an inch wide and a mile deep, instead of a mile wide and an inch deep.”

Final Thoughts

As the way we make buying decisions as consumers continues to infiltrate the way we buy at work, we need to consider when and how the demo fits into our customer acquisition processes. Using our products to deliver relevant product experiences early and often in the buyer’s journey not only enables buyers to buy more easily, but helps us sell more effectively.

The post Rethinking the Product Demo for Product Led Growth appeared first on OpenView.

Why is it that some books become bestsellers and others can hardly sell 100 copies? Why do you read some books with passion and interest but can’t get past the first 10 pages of others? What’s the difference?

It’s simple: word choice. The words you use—and the order in which you use them—make all the difference when it comes to crafting sales copy that wins sales. It doesn’t matter if it’s books or websites, but words do matter, so pick yours carefully.

As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Here are seven principles of effective sales copywriting.

1. Know who you’re talking to.

Look at the three pictures below. A skater dude, a busy mom, and a backpacker. If you’re writing sales copy for a product, you should always talk to a specific person.

You should talk differently to each of the people below—no brainer, right? Still, most people try to write copy that works for everybody. Try to figure out the common denominator among all the potential buyers.

Create a customer persona. Describe this person. Give them a name. Imagine what this person is like, how they spends their days, and what their key issues are. Your sales copy will be much better if you write it with a specific person in mind.

 

2. Write to your friend (wife, colleague, etc.).

Don’t forget you’re dealing with people. Even if you sell B2B products, there’s always a person with a name and an identity reading your copy and making decisions.

If you know this, then why are you writing business jargon? Forget buzzwords (“social media management system”) and nonsense that doesn’t mean anything (“flexible solutions”). Say it as it is.

Use the “friend test.” Read your copy, and if you spot a sentence you wouldn’t use in a conversation with your friend, change it.

Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favour of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth.

– Helena Rubinstein, CEO, www.labgroup.com

3. Work hard to create a compelling headline.

People don’t read; they skim. The main thing they do read is the headline, so make it good. If the headline doesn’t capture their attention and make them interested to read further, the rest of the copy doesn’t matter.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

– David Ogilvy, ad guru

Questions to think about while coming up with a great headline:

• What does your prospect care about the most?
• What’s their biggest problem?
• What’s their biggest goal or dream?
• How can you help them achieve it or solve it?

The best headlines communicate a direct benefit. It’s hard to know off-the-bat which headline will work the best. Test them.

4. Don’t make them think.

Thinking is hard. Most people don’t want to do it.

They look at your copy and want to understand what you’re offering. If it’s not obvious in the first few seconds, they’ll move on.

Your main headline might be benefit-oriented, but, underneath it, describe in 2–3 lines:

1. What your product is;
2. What your product does;
3. Who you product is for.

A photo or screenshot of the product is a smart idea—people “get” images much faster than text.

5. AVOID ALL CAPS AND DON’T USE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!

There are no good reasons to put your text in all-capital letters. Putting a lot of words in all caps or bold slows down reading, comprehension, and interest.

Lower-case letters have more shape differences than capital letters. Text in lower case is recognized faster than all caps.

Also, using more than one exclamation mark in a row just shows that you’re 12 years old. Nobody wants your stuff more because you add exclamation marks. Au contraire.

6. Readability matters.

If you want people to read your text, make it readable. The most interesting copy in the world will go unread if the readability is poor.

Key things to improve readability:

• Font size: minimum 14px, preferably 16px;
• Line height: 24px;
• New paragraph every 3–4 lines (empty line between paragraphs);
• Use sub-headlines as much as you can (at least after every two or three paragraphs);
• Use images to break text apart. People read more if patterns are broken.
• Line width: max 600px. If your lines are too long, people won’t read them.
• Use dark text on a light background (ideally black text on white background).

7. Sales copy should be as long as necessary.

Tests have shown that 79% of people don’t read. However, 16% read everything. Those 16% are your target group—the most interested people.

If people aren’t interested in what you are selling, it doesn’t matter how long or short your sales copy is. If they are interested, give them as much information as possible. A study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that 50% of uncompleted purchases were due to lack of information.

Your readers can always skip parts of your sales copy and click “Buy” once they have the information they need. But if they read through the whole thing and they’re still not convinced or have questions, you have a problem.

Conclusion

Great sales copy is essential—and elusive. The best copy ditches the corporate jargon and speaks directly to customers.

If you can remember these seven principles of sales copywriting, you’ll be way ahead of most (and have the sales numbers to prove it):

1. Know who you’re talking to.
2. Write to your friend (wife, colleague, etc.).
3. Work hard to create a compelling headline.
4. Don’t make them think.
5. AVOID ALL CAPS AND DON’T USE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!
6. Readability matters.
7. Sales copy should be as long as necessary.

Social media channels are dominated by top of the pipeline/funnel thinking. The answer to making your numbers is always more demand gen, lead gen and prospecting. There are battles between pundits on which approach is better. For example the traditional prospecting camp and the social selling camp. In reality, we need to do it all.

The message in at least 80% of the articles/books one reads focuses on lead gen, demand gen, and prospecting. Talk to any manager, most will say, “We need more in our pipelines.”

But in, How Do You Win, I suggested our thinking was backwards. Rather than stuffing more into the top of the pipelines, I suggested we are much better off learning how to win the opportunities we have already found, and maximizing the value of each deal.

I won’t rehash everything I wrote in that post, but I suggested we are squandering the opportunities we have, forcing us to prospect more than we really need to. Knowing how to win, enables us to make the most of every opportunity we qualify.

Don’t get me wrong, we need to continually be replenishing our pipelines, we do that by prospecting. But for a given goal, we have to prospect less if we drive our win rates or average deal sizes up.

But knowing how to win is critical for our prospecting results, as well. If we know how to win, we know how to engage our customers in high value creation means. We know what their problems are, what they worry about, how they buy, how they assess the alternatives, how we create value with the customer in their buying process.

The more we know how and why we win, the more we have the actual experience in engaging our customers in their problem solving and buying journeys, the better we can connect with them when we are prospecting.

Customers prefer to let their fingers do the walking through Google. It’s not that they won’t see a sales person, but the digital journey is much more efficient for them. They complain, “sales people don’t know my business or my problems, they don’t know their products and how their products help me address my problems……”

I bet you can see where I’m going………

The answer to the customer problems with sales people is to have sales people who know how to win deals! They’ve been through this cycle many times, they’ve engaged in the questions, they’ve heard the objections, they’ve dealt with competition, they’ve learned how to keep customers moving on their buying journey====and they know how to do that successfully!

The sales person that has a 50% win rate will be a far better prospector than the person with a 20% win rate. They know how to prospect and find the right deals faster, they don’t waste their time prospecting the wrong types of deals. Because of their experience—and success—they will engage the customer in prospecting conversations with far greater credibility.

As a result, just like they don’t squander qualified opportunities, they won’t squander leads or prospecting meetings.

Sales success is less about the volume of activities we do, but it is based on the consistent execution of those activities that cause us to win. And if we don’t know how, we will never be as successful as we should be.

In How Do You Win, I suggested first things first—before you focus on prospecting, make sure you know how to win, at the highest possible value, in the shortest possible time. Do that, and you find you have to prospect less to make your number.

But prospecting is critical! To maximize the results you get from prospecting, you have to first know how to win!

Funny how that works…….

I’ve been very fortunate to serve for nearly 20 years helping top 100 Fortune companies transform their sales operations. And in that time, I’ve seen several evolutions take place throughout the industry – everything from changing buying habits to tighter budgets to technological advancements. But one of the major changes that has revolutionized the way sales processes are done drills down to a sales industry staple – compensation.

When I first entered this business nearly two decades ago, the way compensation was configured, and even the purpose it served, was vastly different than how it’s used today. Primarily, compensation was seen as a payment structure to incentivize sales reps for meeting and/or exceeding the company’s sales goals. In other words, the more customers, revenue and leads a sales rep delivered, the more money he or she would make in compensation for that work.

Don’t get me wrong. Compensation is certainly still used to incentivize the salesforce. However, truly successful sales organizations have learned to utilize new data management technologies to tap into compensation’s true potential to drive process outcomes.

It’s no secret that sales creates a lot of data – a sometimes overwhelming amount of data – that when properly analyzed can uncover profitable insights for organizations. The challenge for companies has always been, “how do you collect that data to make it valuable and actionable?”.

Sales leaders have learned that the answer to mining that data is not through customer relationship management (CRM) systems (the age-old standard), but via compensation systems. It only makes sense that data that is linked to money would be the most accurate because it is the most scrutinized and the most regulated.

Organizations can tap into compensation-related data to drive better results in terms of productivity, profits, customer satisfaction and other company-wide goals. For example, sales reps can gain instant visibility into their performance by analyzing the wealth of information that data can afford them, such as if they are meeting with enough customers each week, what customer pain-points they might need to troubleshoot, which territories need more attention, etc. Armed with this type of information, reps will know exactly how many more calls and meetings they need to schedule each day in order to meet their company’s all-important quarterly metrics.

The first step in turning all that rich data into actionable insights is to harness it – but this can be a burdensome process for non-technical reps who don’t have the same analytical experience as trained data scientists. This is why today’s sales teams are using automated and efficient data management processes, such as no-code extract, transform and load (ETL) tools. These tools enable sales to quickly validate and pre-process data by giving reps the power to make changes or additions to the data management process themselves without needing to involve expert developers or the IT team.

No-code application capabilities give sales reps all the information they need to sell more successfully by tracking their progress with real-time visibility into their daily activities – e.g., they have more direction on which customers to visit and how often, and in turn, they can inform management about individual customer needs. Additionally, sales reps are more successful in hitting their goals because the data consolidation process is automated, freeing up resources to focus on what matters most – selling.

The industry will undoubtedly continue to evolve as more technology and sales strategies tied to those technologies emerge. The one thing that will remain constant is compensation, and the data tied to that compensation. Organizations that learn to harness the wealth of information compensation data can afford them are the ones that will be profitable for years to come.

Imagine working for a company without any employees dedicated to growing and developing the business.

Nobody to challenge you to improve or tell you about new business opportunities, changes in the market, what your competition is up to, or how you can attract your target audience more effectively.

This would make it pretty hard to succeed, don’t you think?

That’s why companies establish business development practices and hire employees to focus on these tasks (among others) to help them grow.

It involves pursuing opportunities to help your business grow, identifying new prospects, and converting more leads into customers. Business development is closely tied to sales — business development teams and representatives are almost always a part of the greater sales org.

Although business development is closely related to sales, it’s important to note what makes them different.

Business Development vs. Sales

As mentioned, business development lives on the greater sales team yet it serves a different function than typical sales work and responsibilities.

Business development is a process that helps your company establish and maintain relationships with prospects, learn about your buyer’s personas, increase brand awareness, and seek new opportunities to promote growth.

In contrast, sales teams sell your product or service to customers and work to convert leads into customers. Business development-related work simplifies the work of a salesperson or sales manager.

Let’s take a closer look at what business development representatives — the people responsible for carrying out the various business development tasks — do next.

Possessing the necessary business development skills and experience will help your BDRs achieve all of their day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

Business Development Representative Responsibilities

Although some BDR responsibilities may change over time and as your business grows, the following list will provide you with a solid understanding of typical BDR tasks.

1. Qualify leads.

BDRs must qualify leads and pinpoint ideal prospects to determine who they'll sell to. Typically, leads are qualified through calls, emails, web forms, and social media.

The key to qualifying leads (leads who are assigned to the BDRs as well as leads BDRs identify themselves) is to consider their needs and then determine whether or not your product or software could be a solution for them.

2. Identify and communicate with prospects.

By qualifying leads and searching for people who fit your buyer personas, BDRs will identify ideal prospects. They can communicate with those prospects directly to learn more about their needs and pain points.

This way, BDRs can determine whether or not the prospect will really benefit from your product or service by becoming a customer. This is important because it increases the potential of improved customer loyalty and retention.

Once the BDRs have identified ideal prospects, those prospects can be passed along to a sales rep on the team (or sales manager, if necessary) who can nurture them into making a deal.

3. Proactively seek new business opportunities.

Proactively seeking new opportunities — whether that’s in terms of the product line, markets, prospects, or brand awareness — is an important part of your business’s success. BDRs work to find new business opportunities through networking, researching your competition, and talking to prospects and current customers.

If a new business opportunity is identified, BDRs should schedule marketing assessments and discovery meetings with the sales reps on the team so they can all assess whether or not there’s potential for a deal.

4. Stay up-to-date on competition and new market trends.

It’s important to stay up-to-date on your competition’s strategies, products, and target audience as well as any new market and industry trends.

This will allow you to more effectively identify ideal prospects. It also helps your business prepare for any shifts in the market that could lead to the need for a new approach to qualifying leads and attracting your target audience.

5. Report to salespeople and development managers.

As we reviewed, at most companies, BDRs report to sales reps and sales managers. BDRS must communicate with these higher-ups for multiple reasons such as discussing lead qualification strategies and how to get prospects in touch with sales reps to nurture them into customers.

BDRs also have to report their findings (such as business opportunities and market trends) to sales reps and managers. Relaying this information and collaborating with sales reps and managers to develop and/or update appropriate strategies for your business and audience is critical to your success as an organization.

6. Promote satisfaction and loyalty.

A BDR's interaction with a prospect might be the very first interaction that prospect ever has with your business. So, creating a great first impression right off the bat is crucial to promote interest early on.

Whether a BDR is working to qualify the lead, learn more about the prospect and their needs, or find the right sales rep to work on a deal with them, their interactions with all of your prospects matter.

Once a BDR researches the prospect or begins interacting with them, ensure they tailor all communication towards the prospect. Customizing all content sent their way shows them they’re being listened to and cared for. These actions are professional and leave a strong impression.

In addition to understanding how BDRs help you grow, business development ideas are another powerful way to engage prospects and identify new business opportunities. Let’s take a look.

Business development ideas are tactics you can implement to positively impact your company in a multitude of different ways. They can help you identify ideal prospects, network more effectively, improve brand awareness, and uncover new opportunities.

The following tactics are here to get you started — every business and team is different, meaning these ideas may or may not be suited for your specific situation. (So, feel free to modify the list!)

1. Innovate the way you network.

It’s no secret cold calls are less effective than they once were. Instead, innovate the way you network by establishing strong relationships with your prospects. You can do this by meeting with them in person at conferences, trade shows, or events related to your industry.

Browse your online networks including LinkedIn and other social sites for potential customers, too. Reach out to the people who sign up for your email subscription or complete other forms on your site.

2. Offer consultations.

Offer consultations and assessments for prospects. Talking about the ways your product or service applies to their needs will help prospects decide whether or not they’ll convert.

In contrast, consultations and assessments may also bring to light the ways a prospect is not an ideal fit for your product (which is equally as valuable since it prevents you from wasting any time nurturing them or having to deal with an unsatisfied customer down the road).

3. Provide sales demos for prospects and leads.

Provide your prospects and leads with sales demos so they can see how your product or service works in action. Ensure these demos are customized to show a prospect or lead how your product solves their challenge. You can share these demos in person, over email, on your website, or via video chat.

4. Nurture prospects.

Remember to nurture your prospects, whether it’s by phone call, email, meeting, or another mode of communication. The point of lead nurturing is to provide any information needed about your product or service so your prospects can decide whether or not they want to make a purchase.

By nurturing your leads, you’ll be able to tailor the content regarding your brand and product so your leads can better understand how your product will solve their specific pain points. You’ll also be able to show your support for the prospect and ensure they feel heard and understood by your company.

5. Provide prospects with several types of content.

Provide your prospects with different content types such as blogs, videos, and social media posts so they can learn more about your brand and product or service.

It’s best to meet your prospects where they are and provide the content they prefer to read or watch. Ensure all of this content is downloadable and/or shareable so prospects can send it to their team members to show them why your solution is their best option.

6. Communicate with marketing.

Although business development lives in the sales department, that doesn’t mean internal business development work only involves other members of the sales team. Host regular meetings and maintain open lines of communication with the departments at your company that impact your ability to succeed such as marketing and product development.

Think about it this way: Marketing creates content and campaigns for your target audience about how your product or service resolves their challenges. So, why wouldn’t you want to talk to them about the blogs, campaigns, social media posts, and website content they’re creating for the people you’re selling to?

Your reps and BDRs can share any content the marketing team creates directly with prospects to help them convert, as well as inform the marketing team of any content they feel is missing for prospects.

7. Invest in your website.

You never get a second chance at a first impression, and in many cases, your website is exactly that — your prospects' first impression of your brand. So, it serves you to make it as accessible, navigable, visible, and helpful as possible.

Taking strides like making your site visually engaging, connecting your social media profiles, optimizing your site for search engines, linking to collateral like sales content, and maintaining an active blog can go a long way when conducting business development.

8. Push your employees to expand and refine their skills and knowledge.

Business development is never stagnant. Strategy, technology, and market conditions are all constantly evolving — so you're best off having your employees stay abreast of these trends.

Anyone involved in your business development should be liable to develop new skills as needed. If your organization adopts any sort of new technology, thoroughly train anyone the change touches on how to use it.

Encourage your employees to learn more about both the nuances of their field and the industries they serve. Is artificial intelligence starting to shift the dynamics of a specific industry? If so, make the BDRs who serve that market learn all they can about how it might change the nature of the companies they interact with.

Business Development Process

A business development process is the combination of steps your business takes to grow effectively, boost revenue, improve relationships with leads, and more. These steps are what your business development team will work on every day. It includes everything related to delighting customers along each part of the buyer's journey.

By working through your business development process, your team will have a strong understanding of your organization-wide goals, sales targets, current business situation, who your target audience members are, and more.

1. Conduct extensive market research.

Successful business development rests, in large part, on you understanding your market and target personas. If you have no idea who you're trying to sell to and the state of the market they comprise, you can't successfully implement any other point on this list.

Study and survey your current customers to see who tends to buy from you. Look into your competition to get a feel for where you fit into your broader market. And take any other strides to get a better feel for the "who" behind your successful sales — without that intel, you'll never be able to shape the "how" side of your business development.

2. Raise visibility and awareness.

Business development, as a broader practice, extends beyond your sales org — your marketing department can also play a central role in the process. You can't source a base of potential customers if no one knows who you are.

Actions like constructing an effective website, investing in paid advertising, leveraging social profiles, participating in co-marketing partnerships with industry peers, and maintaining an active blog can all go a long way in supporting successful business development.

3. Promote thought leadership.

This point is sort of an extension of the one above. Establishing credibility is one of the more important steps you can take when doing business development. You can't just stop with prospects knowing who you are — they need to trust you if you're ever going to earn their business.

Publishing in-depth, industry-specific blog content is one way to get there — if you can show that you have a firm grasp on every aspect of your field, you can frame yourself as a reliable, knowledgeable resource for your customers. That kind of trust often translates to sales, down the line. Other media like webinars, white papers, and video content can also help your case.

4. Conduct outreach.

Actively reaching out to prospects is one of the most crucial, traditional elements of business development. You need to touch base with prospects if you're going to vet them and ultimately convert them to qualified leads.

This step is typically supported by extensive research on individual prospects, paired with contacting warm and cold leads proactively but not aggressively. BDRs typically shoulder this responsibility — and for many people, it's the aspect of the process most closely associated with the term "business development."

5. Qualify leads.

Once your BDRs have connected with leads, they need to qualify them to determine their viability and understand whether they're worth the sales org's time and effort. That generally entails having conversations with leads and asking the right qualifying questions to reveal their fit for your product or service.

This is one of the most pivotal moments in the business development process — in some respects, it could be considered its last step. Successfully executing this point typically means the process, as a whole, has worked.

6. Provide exemplary customer service.

Business development is an ongoing process that involves virtually every side of your business in some capacity — and customer service is no exception. Your service org needs to keep current customers happy to generate positive word of mouth and bolster your company's reputation. That kind of effort offers you credibility and can generate referrals, making business development more straightforward and effective.

7. Develop sales content from success stories.

Another part of business development is translating customer satisfaction into actionable, promotable sales content — pointed, product-specific content that's used to generate sales. While marketing content is used for thought leadership and garnering general interest, sales content is used to appeal to potential buyers, looking into your company specifically.

Sales content can come in a variety of forms, including case studies and testimonials — two mediums that lean heavily on your current customer base. When you use customers' experiences to generate interest in your business, your business development efforts essentially come full circle.

By compiling these elements of business development and sharing them among your team, you create an actionable business development strategy or plan that encourages and promotes success and growth. Let's review the different steps involved in creating your business development plan next.

The purpose of a business development plan (or strategy) is to set realistic goals and targets that allow your reps to grow the business, close more deals, identify prospects, align members of the sales team (and other teams, company-wide), and convert more leads.

1. Craft an elevator pitch.

You can simplify any initial communication with prospects by having an elevator pitch ready to go. This elevator pitch should explain your company’s mission and how your product or service can solve the needs of your target audience. Your elevator pitch should grab the attention of prospects and leads — and get them excited to learn more about what you offer.

Additionally, you can help your team determine which elevator pitches used by both BDRs and reps are most successful in converting leads and then document it in your greater strategy so everyone has access to it.

2. Set SMART goals.

Set SMART goals for your strategy — meaning, make sure your targets are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. By creating SMART goals for your business development plan, you’ll be able to ensure these goals are aligned with those of your entire company.

For example, if one of your goals is to increase your number of identified qualified leads this quarter by 5%, make the goal specific by determining the type of prospects you’ll focus on and how you’ll identify them.

Then, decide how you’ll measure your success — perhaps by measuring the number of these prospects who then go on to talk with a sales rep to learn more about the product or service.

You determine this goal is attainable due to the fact you increased your number of qualified leads last quarter by 3%. 5% isn’t too much of a leap.

Your goal is relevant because you know it’ll help your business grow — it pushes you to make a greater impact on your team by contributing to the sales team’s ability to close more deals and boost revenue. Lastly, it’s timely because you’ve set this goal for the quarter.

3. Conduct a SWOT analysis.

As mentioned above, part of any role in business development is to stay up-to-date on market and industry trends and understand your competition. This is where SWOT analysis comes in handy — SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The key to using SWOT analysis correctly is to have a clear goal in mind first.

For example, if your goal is to determine the best way to handle outreach with prospects, you can begin talking to your BDRs, sales reps, sales managers, and current customers about what works best for them.

Next, think about your strengths — what does your business do well? Maybe you have a large support team that provides helpful onboarding for new customers. Or you have several remote reps who can meet face-to-face with prospects in their desired location.

(You might have multiple strengths that make you stand out, so don’t be afraid to list them all and which ones have the greatest impact on your customers.)

Now, think about your weaknesses. Are your product’s limited offerings requiring some leads to consider your competition’s product in addition to yours? Is the need for your product growing faster than your production, or faster than you’re able to establish a large customer support team to assist your customers?

Onto your business opportunities. Think about where you’re going as a business and what you know you can accomplish. For example, maybe your business has recently partnered with another company that can help you boost brand awareness and attract a much broader base of leads and customers.

Lastly, who are your threats? Think about your current competition — who’s producing a product or service like yours and is attracting a similar target audience? Who could become your competition in the future — is there a market gap that another company (new or established) could identify the need for and begin selling?

SWOT analysis allows you to identify the ways your company can create opportunities to grow and expand. It also helps how you establish new processes to address any weaknesses or threats such as identifying more qualified leads, efficiently converting prospects into customers, and shortening the sales cycle.

4. Determine how you’ll measure success.

Depending on the SMART goals you created and the SWOT analysis you performed, you’ll also need to decide how you’re going to measure your business development success.

Here are some examples of common business development KPIs that can help you analyze your efforts:

• Company growth
• Changes in revenue
• Lead conversion rate
• Leads generated per month/ quarter/ predetermined time
• Prospect and customer satisfaction
• Pipeline value
• Reach

5. Set a budget.

Depending on the type of business development goals you set for the team, you may determine you need to set a budget. Consider your resources, the cost of any previous business development strategies you’ve developed, and other important operational line items (what you need, who’s involved, etc.).

Collaborate with the greater team to determine the amount you’re willing to, and need to, spend on business development to get the process started at your company.

6. Always keep your target audience in mind.

Whatever it is you’re working towards, keep your target audience and ideal prospects in mind. Assess their needs and understand exactly how your business and product or service will meet their pain points.

After all, this audience is the group who is most likely to buy your product. Make sure your plan addresses them and their needs so your team can convert more of them and grow your business.

7. Choose an outreach strategy.

As we’ve reviewed above, a major component of business development is finding new prospects and potential customers. To find new prospects, you’ll need to decide how you’ll perform outreach, or connect with these potential customers. Here are some ideas:

• Network
• Use referrals
• Upsell and cross-sell
• Sponsorship and advertisement

Also, review any expectations or guardrails related to outreach reps are held to so your business has only professional and on-brand interactions with prospects.

Congrats! You’ve just completed your business development plan — with your strategy and ideas, your business will be growing in no time.

Business Development Resources

1. HubSpot Sales Hub

Best for Businesses Interested in a Wide-Reaching, One-Stop Solution

HubSpot Sales Hub includes a suite of resources that enable more focused, effective business development. Features like email templates and email tracking lend themselves to well-targeted, productive prospecting.

Its conversational intelligence capabilities can provide invaluable insight into the "why" behind your BDRs' overall performance — letting you pinpoint the strengths and flaws in key business development elements like your messaging and pain point assessments.

Sales Hub is a dynamic solution that covers a lot of bases for your sales org — including several beyond business development. But that wide range of applications doesn't undermine its utility for BDRs and their managers. If you're looking for a solution that addresses almost every component of successful business development, consider investing in HubSpot Sales Hub.

2. Bloobirds

Best for Businesses Interested in Keeping BDRs and Top-of-Funnel Activities on Track

Bloobirds' suite of products includes an end-to-end prospecting platform, tailored to keep BDRs on track and consistently and effectively qualify target accounts. It includes straightforward, accessible task assistance tools for managers to guide reps from task to task without excessive personal coaching.

The software streamlines the administrative side of prospecting by automatically asking reps for relevant insight after calls with user-friendly forms. It also lets you seamlessly fold your sales playbook into your reps' day-to-days with a pre-built data model and easy-to-navigate dashboard.

Bloobirds' suite of products isn't specific to prospecting and other key business development activities, but that doesn't mean it skimps on that particular area. If you're looking for a solution that can set BDRs on the right track and allow for effective top-of-funnel activities.

3. Leadfeeder

Best for Businesses Struggling to Generate High-Potential Leads

Leadfeeder is a powerful resource for enhancing a central element of any business development efforts — lead generation The platform helps you identify high-potential leads by automatically analyzing your website traffic.

The software removes ISP traffic to pin down visitors' companies and gauge interest. It also lets you create behavioral and demographic filters for better-informed, more productive lead segmentation.

Successful business development often leans, in large part, on your ability to generate high-quality leads — so if you're interested in effectively sourcing those contacts, you'll need to invest in some sort of lead generation software. Leadfeeder is as good a place as any to start.

4. LinkedIn

Best for Businesses Looking for a Free Way to Source Leads

LinkedIn is one of the most prominent, practical, effective resources for certain key elements of the business development process — namely, prospecting. The value behind leveraging social media for top-of-funnel sales activities isn't exactly some well-kept secret.

Plenty of business development professionals already use channels like LinkedIn to source, screen, and connect with potential leads. Strides like scrolling through skill endorsements, using alumni searches, and engaging with users who have looked at your posts are all excellent ways to find interested prospects and enhance your business development efforts.

Business Development Helps You Grow Better

Business development is a crucial part of any successful company. It’s how you determine the best ways to boost revenue, identify your ideal prospects, generate more leads, and close more deals.

Think about how you can make a strong business development plan and ensure you have the right group of business development reps so you can begin growing your business today.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July, 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Scientists in Switzerland have demonstrated a technology that can produce kerosene and methanol from solar energy and air

Summary List Placement

• Cold messaging someone on LinkedIn can help you expand your network and even lead to getting a new job.
• A company insider shared 4 ways to improve your chances of getting a response when messaging someone you don't know. 
• Bring up a common connection, and keep your messages under 100 words. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Cold messaging a stranger you want to network with may feel awkward, but many successful people say it can help you get ahead.

Aside from email, job seekers are using LinkedIn's messaging system InMail to build their community and get them jobs. Making a key connection can pay off: 70% of professionals get hired at a company where they know someone.

Read more: LinkedIn just launched a tool that helps job seekers prep for interviews. I gave it a test run, and it was really awkward — but it showed me 2 major mistakes I've been making.

We spoke with Blair Decembrele, in-house career expert at LinkedIn, about what makes for the most effective InMails — which, it's important to note, are only available to Premium members.

Based on LinkedIn data, Decembrele outlined four strategies for making InMail work for you.

SEE ALSO: LinkedIn just launched a tool that helps job seekers prep for interviews. I gave it a test run, and it was really awkward — but it showed me 2 major mistakes I've been making.

DON'T MISS: This LinkedIn message took 2 minutes to write and got the sender a job at a successful startup — even though they weren't hiring

Keep InMail subject lines short.

Be direct about what you want in your subject line.

Not everyone will read the entire InMail message, Decembrele said, so aim to grab a potential connection's attention with a punchy subject line.

Keeping a subject line to three words or less increases your chances of getting a response by 14%, according to LinkedIn data. 

"Brevity's key," Decembrele said in an email. "And a little intrigue encourages the recipient to open the message to see more."

As in: "Looking to connect" or "Coffee soon?"

Make a personal connection in your opening.

Before you cold message on LinkedIn, make yourself familiar with their profile. Did they go to the same school as you? Did they happen to live in the same state you're from?

Bring up those similarities when you message a potential connection. Response rates increase by 10% when you personalize your note with common groups and experiences, Decembrele said.

Relatedly, academic research has found that hiring managers tend to hire people who remind them of themselves. 

Bring up mutual connections.

Along with their professional background, spend some time looking at who the other person is connected to before you write your InMail.

Recruiters who reference a former employer improve their chances of getting a response by 27%, Decembrele said. Plus, LinkedIn found that more than 70% of professionals get hired at a company where they know someone. 

If you're looking to expand your network, bringing up who you both already know can be a good start.

Keep your messages under 100 words.

Don't ramble, Decembrele said. 

LinkedIn found messages with 100 words or less increase your chances at getting a response, but those with over 200 words decrease the likelihood. 

"That said, be sure to include clear next steps or a call to action, encouraging the recipient to respond," Decembrele said.

Everything is important, but not everything can most important. When it comes to metrics, more is not always better. There are, however, some metrics that tell you much about your sales results—and your challenges. These three metrics in sales can tell you a lot about what you need to know to improve.

New Opportunities Created

One metric towers above all others and that metric is “new opportunities created” and the value of those opportunities. Because it’s true that you cannot capture an opportunity you haven’t first created. New opportunities created is the start of all good things.

This metric is a gauge of your effectiveness in acquiring meetings. It tells you how well you are doing prospecting, and it also might provide an insight into your work ethic. It’s good to be an excellent prospector, but not if you don’t do enough it. A good work ethic will take you most of the way to your goals, but not if you are ineffective.

Opportunities created is a critical metric for another reason: It is the best indicator of your ability to engage in sales conversations that result in your dream client deciding to explore change—and eventually agree to change. New opportunities created means you are adept at the exploration conversation about why your dream client should change in a way that allows them to engage with you on what is sometimes a tricky conversation—and often the conversations that cause them to buy from you long before you get to the Commitment to Decide (what you know as closing).

Average Deal Size

I tend to like all deals, small, medium, and large. I’ve had small sales grow up to monster deals. I’ve also had huge deals turn out to be something less than I imagined possible. You can grow deals, and contracts can also occasionally shrink through no fault of your own. There is also the fact that a deal that might be small in some company or industry might be a massive deal in another company or industry.

Deal size does tell you a lot about where you spend your time. It indicates what kind of targets you are pursuing. Because it is rare for large clients to pursue sales organization outside of an RFP, large deals that were created by a sales rep suggests they are targeting hard-to-win, competitive displacements, something you might think of as your “dream clients.”

Tiny deals might mean you are not targeting the prospective clients that would benefit the most from your solution, and it might also mean you aren’t as effective in larger, more complex deals. You might be creating many opportunities that aren’t large enough to allow you to reach your goals.

One of the ways you make it easier to reach your goals is to win deals that are larger than your average sales. You need to create and win fewer deals. Your average deal size can tell you much.

Win Percentage

There it is: Ink! Alternatively: “No ink!” You win some, and you lose some. You want the balance to be “won,” but no one goes undefeated in sales. The very best reps with the highest close rates still lose plenty of deals.

Your win rate provides an idea about how well you sell. It’s the ultimate metric because, in the end, you will reach your goals or quota by winning opportunities (either new revenue or new logos or some combination thereof).

Won deals indicate that you created a preference to buy from, “preference” is a complicated mix of intangibles, many of which your dream client wouldn’t recognize as a reason for giving you their business. A high win rate is often an indication of how well you control the process. In many cases, a high percentage of won deals measures how well you create value for your dream client; their experience working with you is a preview of what your dream client hopes will be their experience with your company.

A low win rate is an indication of a lack of effectiveness, even though it can be incredibly difficult to tell where you might be struggling to produce better results. It could be a lack of ability to control the process. Frequently, the challenges show up early in the sales conversation, the exploration of change. If there is one area where the real struggle exists in improving win rates is in building consensus.

What Else These Metrics Tell You

You might have wondered about metrics like the number of phone calls you dialed or the number of meetings. The three metrics above will tell you if you are doing enough to get meetings.

These metrics, over time, whether or not you are improving. Deals getting bigger and win rates improving is usually a sign you are getting better over time.

You can look at a host of other metrics, like deal cycle times, the profitability of deals, the time deals are in stages of your sales process, and the growth of existing clients. There is no end to the number of metrics that might show up on your dashboard, but these few fundamental metrics are often enough to decipher where you are succeeding and where you might need to improve.

With these three metrics, you can keep your own scorecard.

The post The Three Most Important Metrics in Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

According to many market analysts, the market for CRM solutions shows no signs of slowing down. It’s increasingly rare to find established sales organisations of any significant size without some form of CRM solution.

And yet when I talk to many sales leaders about the current state of their CRM implementation, the most consistent impression is one of promise unfulfilled.

They frequently acknowledge that key success metrics around data quality, sales team adoption and impact on revenue still have a great deal of room for improvement.

Of all the possible influences on success, enthusiastic sales force adoption is probably the most critical. So why is it so hard to persuade sales people of CRM’s potential to improve their own personal performance?

The most obvious answer is that many of the traditional CRM platforms, and an even larger percentage of CRM implementations, are seen by their target users - the sales team - as an inconvenient administrative burden, rather than a way of improving their earnings potential.

An imposition or a guide?

Systems tend to fail whenever they are seen as an imposed requirement, rather than something that is personally useful. And that, of course, means that the users are likely to do no more than is absolutely necessary to demonstrate their compliance.

Or if - as in so many cases - completing one or a number of fields is required before an opportunity can be advanced to the next stage of the process, there is an understandable tendency to simply enter anything in order to be able to move forward.

It’s no wonder that poor or inconsistent data quality prevents many CRM implementations from achieving anything like their full potential. The old adage “garbage in, garbage out” is particularly true in this environment.

Start by being useful to the user

In order for any CRM system to be useful to the organisation that is implementing it, the system must first and foremost be useful to the people who will be using it on a day-to-day basis - i.e., the individual members of the sales team.

That implies that your sales people must see real, tangible value from their use of the system that they believe will enable them to be more effective sales people and to achieve their personal goals - which probably include but are not necessarily restricted to earning more commission.

This has a number of important implications:

• The information you ask them to capture should be self-evidently important and useful to them, and not just to the organisation
• The questions you ask them should stimulate them to step back and think about the opportunity rather than simply filling in another field
• You should restrict the number of fields you want them to complete to ones that have been proven to be useful in influencing the success of the project
• Most important of all, the system must seek to make the users more effective sales people rather than make managers more effective administrators

Your CRM system is also likely to be better accepted and more useful if it serves to guide sales people in what they need to know and do during each key phase in the evolution of a sales opportunity. It should make it easy for them to quickly access the information they need to be successful.

Keys to enthusiastic adoption

What this comes down to, I think, is that your sales people need to want to use the system rather than being forced to use it. And the only practical way of achieving this is to actively involve them in the design and deployment of the system.

The most successful CRM implementations have sought out the opinions of top performing sales people. They have involved sales people who are seen as successful and credible role models by their peers. They have been designed to make the sales person’s life easier, not harder - and in doing so, they will make the task of management that much easier (and less frustrating) as well.

Psychology, not systems

Success is more about psychology than it is about systems. Most CRM systems are capable of achieving high levels of sales engagement if they are implemented effectively. Most modern CRM platforms have the potential to achieve this. But they are not all created equal.

Here’s the problem: many of today’s most widely deployed CRM platforms were originally designed (even if they neither acknowledged or intended this) around what I describe as a “sales administration” metaphor, in which the primary purpose of the system is to provide management with the information they believe they need.

Whilst these systems are theoretically capable of providing the much-needed guidance to sales people, this typically doesn’t come “out of the box” and often requires the addition of one or more (typically third-party) add-on modules which add to both the complexity and the cost of the installation.

Enablement, not administration

Some of the more innovative CRM vendors have started with a radically different “sales enablement” metaphor which recognises that the best way of getting the best results out of any system is to make the people using the system more effective. Get that right, and good results will follow.

And because these systems have been designed in a holistic way, they include the required sales effectiveness tools as part of the core system - such playbooks, coaching advice, content management, integrated online meetings and so on. This designed-in integration has a huge impact on both usability and affordability.

The future of CRM

Although this approach is still relatively rare, I believe it represents the future of CRM in complex B2B sales environments. It’s one of the reasons that I chose to partner with the next-generation CRM vendor Membrain.com, and why we’ve created a pre-configured value selling edition that makes a successful implementation even easier.

Their opportunity management module is also available as a plug-in for salesforce.com.

If you believe that you could and should be getting more from your CRM, and if you think you might be ready to set aside “sales administration” thinking and embrace a “sales enablement” mindset, we should talk.

Oh - and if you're still confused about your choices, you might want to take a look at G2's very helpful user-reviewed guide to the best CRM software.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, a member of the Sales Enablement Society, a founding contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the Sales Experts Channel and the founder of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading UK-based B2B value-selling experts.

Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and market leaders, Bob is now relishing his role as a pro-active advisor, coach and trainer to high-potential B2B-focused sales organisations, systematically enabling them to transform their sales effectiveness by adopting the proven principles of value-based selling.

From lead scoring to messaging, account-based marketing (ABM) is changing the way inside sales reps (ISRs) and field reps approach sales. With the help of analytics, Big Data and predictive tools, reps can:

• • • Identify prospects that are the best fit for their products and services
    • Segment accounts to better understand their industry, pain points and needs
    • Deliver the right messaging at the right time throughout the buyer’s journey

ABM is paying off with higher ROI. According to a Demandbase survey, 60% of companies using ABM increased their revenue at least 10%, and one in five companies saw revenue increase by at least 30%. Similarly, SiriusDecisions reported that 91% of companies using ABM increased the average deal size, and one quarter reported that their deals had increased by 50% or more.

In terms of potential, however, the fact that ABM can grow new customer pipelines by as much as 200 percent is only the tip of the iceberg. To maximize your sales, look to your existing customers. After all, part of the ABM mantra is “land and expand.”

Use ABM to deliver a better customer experience that translates into lower churn rates, deeper account penetration and more upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Your Existing Customers Are Money in the Bank

While acquiring new customers is a necessary part of any company’s long-term business growth, it’s also expensive—costing as much as 25 times more than retaining existing customers. And that’s not all:

• • • Your chance of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%, but the odds of selling to a new prospect are just 5 to 20% (Forbes).
    • Your existing customers spend 31% more than new customers. (Retention Idea).

Bottom line, Bain & Company and Harvard Business School estimate that simply increasing customer retention by 5% could increase your profits anywhere from 25 to 95%.

And yet, surprisingly…

According to Econsultancy/Responsys, most companies (44%) remain focused on new customer acquisitions; just 16% report having a greater focus on retention.

ABM for Greater Customer Lifetime Value

Throughout the buyer’s journey you’re focused on delivering the right message at the right time to help drive the sales process forward. You can do the same throughout the lifespan of the customer relationship…with a greater return on your investment.

According to the ABM Leadership Alliance, companies using ABM strategies increased their annual account value (ACV) by 171%.

And just as you used ABM strategies to look for patterns in demographics and firmographics to better target a prospect with the right message, you can do the same after the sale…with an added advantage.

ABM operates on data, and once you’re inside a company, you have access to a continuous flow of new data that’s unavailable to vendors who are not doing business with them. You now have the inside intel. You have relationships with key decision makers, and you’re in a position to gather even more information—first hand.

So instead of only analyzing your best customers to help you acquire new customers, you now should be analyzing your customers with the highest customer lifetime value (CLV) and longest retention to build an ideal customer experience profile. Then apply ABM strategies throughout the customer experience:

• • • Onboard New Customers: After the sale, use ABM as a customer-focused marketing program to track interactions and offer personalized follow up. The goal is to get new customers off to a good start, minimize churn rates and maximize lifetime value.
    • Provide Ongoing Nurturing: Building a relationship doesn’t stop after the sale. Nurture customers. Touch base and make the sales relationship an integral part of the customer experience.
    • Segment Existing Customers: You used segmentation to identify specific needs during the sales process. Now you can segment to stay on top of future needs. You’re in a unique position to know about other issues the customer faces and to track buying habits. Use this insight to be proactive.
    • Build Rapport with the Buying Team and Top Decision Makers: Because ABM is about the account rather than an individual, you are already working with a group of decision makers. Continue to strengthen your relationship. Get to know your buying group well, how they work, what they like. Learn about their specific pain points. Become their trusted, go-to person. Ask questions and really listen to the answers; this is the foundation for ongoing sales.
    • Engage More Groups Within the Account: Are there other departments within the company with whom you should be talking? Can you sell your products and services deeper and more broadly across the firm? Use your existing relationships to gain referrals and introductions to other stakeholders within the account.
    • Watch for Business Signals: ABM users rely on signals—changes within a company—to help them know when the time is right to close a sale. This is still useful, and as an insider you are in an even better position to know about management changes, key purchases, expansions, mergers, acquisitions, awards, etc.
    • Deliver the Right Message at the Right Time: Stay in touch and track the buying teams you’re working with to provide personalized content and messaging as part of the customer experience.
    • Upsell and Cross-Sell: Because your existing customers are more likely to purchase additional items, they are the focus of your upselling and cross-selling activity. If you’ve been building the relationship and learning about wants and needs, you can launch a proactive sales effort. Also, your marketing department can deliver a targeted campaign that will further pave the way for your sales follow up.

Once you close the initial deal with a new company, prioritize your opportunities to maximize sales and increase the lifetime value of a customer.

The post Using ABM to Maximize Sales with Current Customers appeared first on OpenView.

• PC shipments were stronger than expected in the second quarter due to a corporate refresh cycle and the resolution of Intel's production issues.
• The uptick was also due to fears that Trump might impose new tariffs on China, which prompted PC makers to build more PCs ahead of time, according to analysts.
• Stronger PC shipments may have given boost Intel and AMD, which are both set to report results. But despite the temporary gain, the chip giants are still wrestling with soft demand for datacenter chips.
• Another winner appears to be Microsoft, which said that its Windows business has benefitted from manufacturers building more PCs ahead of potential tarriffs. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

The PC market, which has been in steady decline in the last few years, has become an unexpected winner in the tech Cold War with China — at least temporarily. 

And this is good news for PC chipmakers Intel and AMD, which are set to report results in the next two weeks, just as it was good news for Microsoft when it reported its results last week. 

Both semiconductor giants have been focused more heavily on revenue from datacenter chips, but some analysts think they got a rare lift from what had been the sagging PC market.

A shrinking PC market 

PC shipments, which includes desktops and notebooks, have been sliding yearly over the last five years, and are expected to total 254 million in 2019, down about 18% from 2014, according to IDC.

But the second quarter saw 64.9 million PCs shipped, up 5% from the year-ago period, and "notably higher than expected," IDC said. 

One reason for the uptick is the upcoming end of support for business PCs running Windows 7 which is expected to spark a spike in demand for new systems running Windows 10 in the corporate world. Another is that Intel, the world's leading PC chipmaker, was able to resolve key production issues that had constrained supply recently.

Jitesh Ubrani, an IDC research, said in a report that "supply for Intel's processors improved markedly during the quarter, allowing most PC vendors to fulfill old orders while also shipping a healthy supply of new PCs into the channels."

Trump tariff fears

But analysts point to another potential reason: worries of another round of Trump Administration tariffs, which sent manufacturers scrambling to build PCs ahead of time before component prices go up. 

US/China trade tensions escalated in May when the Trump Administration blacklisted Chinese tech powerhouse Huawei and imposed new tariffs on Chinese imports. Trump's trade team was getting ready for new talks in Shanghai next week, but fears of more tariffs have remained.

"The threat of increased tariffs led some PC makers to ship a surplus of desktops and notebooks, thereby artificially propping up the PC market during the second quarter," IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said in a note.

Mizuho Group analyst Vijay Rakesh also told clients in a note that he sees shipments "trending significantly stronger" in the second quarter, which he said was likely due to "better commercial PC shipments and a pull-in from the September quarter on fear of a 25% tariff."

Wedbush analyst Matthew Bryson also cited "uncertainty around tariffs" that led to "some pull in" of PCs that were expected to be shipped in the second half of the year. 

Microsoft, which reported results last week, also said its PC division got a boost from a wave of Windows 7 upgrades and PC makers building up inventory ahead of possible tariffs.

A temporary gain

Unfortunately for Intel and AMD the unexpected second-quarter gain in PCs probably means a more downbeat results for the rest of the year, analysts said.

Rakesh wrote that the PC shipments uptick "ahead of China tariff could be a 2H [second half of the year] drag." Bryson of Wedbush echoed that view, saying "these better PC numbers come at the expense of" revenues in the second half of 2019.

Meanwhile, Intel, AMD and another chip giant, Nvidia, continue to wrestle with the uncertainty in the market for chips that power data centers. In April, Intel reported a weaker-than-expected 2019 revenue target, largely due to downbeat expectations from the data center market.

Weakening demand in enterprise data center demand has been a major problem for Intel, which is set to report after the market closes on Thursday. Intel's data center business will not likely offset "lighter PC shipments" in the second half of the year, Bryson of Wedbush wrote.

Rakesh said he does not expect a meaningful rebound in data center spending in the second half of the year which means that "combined with slower PCs and competitive Intel pricing" could limit any upside for AMD, which is scheduled to report on July 30.

Got a tip about Intel, AMD or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, says 2 beliefs have brought him the greatest success in life

At a conference in New Delhi early last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was confronted with a question that his company has been asked many times over the years. Would he consider lowering the subscription cost in India?

It’s a tactic that most Silicon Valley companies have adapted to in the country over the years. Uber rides aren’t as costly in India as they are elsewhere. Spotify and Apple Music cost less than $2 per month to users in the country. YouTube Premium as well as subscriptions to U.S. news outlets such as WSJ and New York Times are also priced significantly lower compared to the prices they charge in their home turf.

Hastings had also come prepared: He acknowledged that the entertainment viewing industry in India is very different from other parts of the world. To be sure, much of the pay-TV in India is supported by ads and the access fee remains too low ($5). But that was not going to change how Netflix likes to roll, he said.

“We want to be sensitive to great stories and to fund those great stories by investing in local content,” he said. “So yes, our strategy is to build up the local content — and of course we have got the global content — and try to uplevel the industry,” he said, identifying movie-goers who spend about Rs 500 ($7.25) or more on tickets each month as Netflix’s potential customers.

Less than a year and a half later, Netflix has had a change of heart. The company today rolled out a lower-priced subscription plan in India, a first for the company. The monthly plan, which restricts usage of the service to mobile devices only, is priced at Rs 199 ($2.8) — a third of the least expensive plan in the U.S.

At a press conference in New Delhi today, Netflix executives said that the lower-priced subscription tier is aimed at expanding the reach of its service in the country. “We want to really broaden the audience for Netflix, want to make it more accessible, and we knew just how mobile-centric India has been,” said Ajay Arora, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix.

The move comes at a time when Netflix has raised its subscription prices in the U.S. by up to 18% and in the UK by up to 20%.

Netflix’s strategy shift in India illustrates a bigger challenge that Silicon Valley companies have been facing in the country for years. If you want to succeed in the country, either make most of your revenue from ads, or heavily subsidize your costs.

But whether finding users in India is a success is also debatable.

Context is everything!

Each of our customers is different, each company has different goals, strategies, priorities, challenges, cultures, values. Though they may compete head to head, or participate in the same industry, or the same markets, every company is very different.

People are different. We categorize them by their titles, CEO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, or by their persona, or by their behavioral style, or by their role in the buying process (remember economic buyers, technical buyers, influencers, decisionmakers.) But each person’s hopes, fears, dreams, and challenges is unique to them, the situation they face at a point in time.

Every buying journey is different. Though we may be able to “fit” them into very generalized steps, for example problem identification, needs identification, evaluation of alternatives, solution selection; how they navigate the buying process is different–both from other organizations and within their own organization–from decision to decision, and within a single buying journey. The Gartner “spaghetti” chart best describes the variability, wandering, starts/stops, that customers go through.

In spite of all this, we try to “fit” every company and every individual into the same “standard” approach. While we have tools that enable personalization (if we choose to personalize), we have the ability to segment by industry, application, problem, role, where they are in the buying process, we try to plug everyone into a common standard.

Our content addresses a broad audience, both in terms of customers and individuals.

Our sales process addresses a broad range of buying journeys.

We build on “one to many,” where what’s important to the customer is “one to me” (not one to one).

Some, naively, think AI/ML saves us. The reality is it doesn’t. It refines our generalizations or categorizations, it can help us become more specific, but it lacks that capability to make human to human, contextually relevant conversation in real-time.

And this is the role of great salespeople. They become the “last mile/kilometer/inch/centimeter in connecting and contextualizing with the customer. The magic of great salespeople is their ability to connect, to understand, to empathize, to teach, to engage the customer, individually or as a group. They can help the customer connect the dots between what they are trying to do, how they do it, and how our solutions help them do this. They do it in terms meaningful to the customer now….and now….and now, recognizing the context is different each time, even with the same individual.

Sadly, too much of what we try to do in the name of efficiency and sales productivity, is we move away from that. We script the conversation, based on what’s been successful in past conversations with thousands of customers each in very different situations. We take what can be a deeply personal and impactful conversation and generalize it.

Too many salespeople are walking talking brochures/datasheets, not translating it to what’s meaningful to the customer. Even something as simple as “Pay attention to page 2 paragraph 5. This is what you are trying to do, this is what it means to you…..”

Context is everything. Context is fleeting, it changes with each person, each company over time.

The only way we can connect in contextually relevant ways it through salespeople that have the capability of understanding and engaging the customer in ways that are meaningful, relevant, and create value with the customer.

For each salesperson, how do you become the “contextualizer” or sense maker for your customer?

For managers, how do we recruit, train, coach, develop, and enable our people to become contextualizers for our customers?

Buyers have taken control of the sales cycle, and successful salespeople today know they need to act like trusted advisors with prospects to simplify their decision-making process, understand their needs and behavior, and deliver immediate value, otherwise they will lose the deal.

Good sales managers and sales reps won’t just accept that a deal was lost – they’ll want to know how it can be prevented in the future. In understanding the reasons your team is losing deals, you can take the steps necessary to improve your sales experience, deliver more value to your buyers, and boost revenue.

So take a step back and evaluate your sales process. Making one or more of the following mistakes can deter a prospect, stall a deal, and even cost you the opportunity. But these actionable insights will help you pull prospects through the pipeline.

1) You aren’t personalizing your selling strategy

Sales is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Deviating from an en-masse strategy is particularly important in today’s marketplace where buyers can drop in and fall out of the sales funnel at any stage in the buying journey. The modern B2B buyer now expects a personalized purchase process and solution that takes into consideration their unique challenges and priorities. As such, sales reps must know who they are talking to (i.e. demographics, geographics, psychographics, and firmographics), where the prospect is in the sales cycle, how a buyer progresses through their journey, the context of their pain points, and the customer’s expectations. Use this information to tailor content, messaging, value propositions, and sales strategy.

A sales enablement tool makes this process scalable, helping to provide that personalized sales experience that buyers demand. Dashboards offer insight into real-time behaviors and into what prospects are looking for so that sales can engage each individual with relevant information.

2) You aren’t selling to the buying committee

B2B sales are increasingly complex in nature. Today’s sales situations and modern sales cycle often involve at least 7 executives, with some buying committees having upwards of 20 people. You should know who all of the decision-makers are and understand each of their needs and pain points. Though the team may have different backgrounds, there are probably multiple people experiencing the same or similar problems. With this information in hand, reps will know how to steer the conversation and which pieces of content will best propel prospects through the pipeline.

3) You aren’t solving the right problem

Many reps make the mistake of talking too much and not taking the time to listen. Most B2B buyers look for vendors who understand their business and the challenges they face. Keep the focus on helping the prospect rather than pushing product on them. Ask questions to get to know the buyer’s needs, challenges, and pain points. If you can’t answer these questions, you will have a difficult time advancing the deal and may simply not be a good fit. Keep in mind that you are helping people and solving problems, not merely making transactions.

4) You are unable to create a compelling case for change

In many cases, your biggest competitor is the status quo – it’s easier to do nothing than to make a change. To avoid stalling the deal, reps need to be able to create a sense of urgency — a reason that the prospect needs to purchase now. What is the impact of not taking action? Is it lost revenue, increased risk, or the inability to effectively compete? Once you have an angle, you can convince the buyer that the cost and risk of choosing your solution outweighs the cost and risk of doing nothing.

Secondly, reps must help prospects build a business case, which will enable them to justify the purchase and to sell the solution internally to other decision makers. It’s also important to demonstrate ROI for the buyer.

5) You aren’t adding value to the sales conversation

Today’s B2B buyers don’t want to hear a pitch – they want to learn something. A recent LinkedIn survey found that B2B prospects are 5x more likely to engage with a sales professional who provides new insights about their business. However, only 1 in 5 sales reps brings value to their buyers.

Adding value means being able to offer perspective on the market that helps a customer understand their weaknesses, see how to improve, know what to say to support their business case, and have the insights to make an informed buying decision. Each time you engage with a prospect is an opportunity to add value. In every engagement, you should be demonstrating that you understand the buyer, their industry, and their challenges, goals, and priorities.

6) You are sharing the wrong content

Increasingly, buyers are relying on content to guide them through the complex purchase process, from research to purchase. In fact, 2/3 of buyers say that the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact on their purchase decision. But, content is not effective if it’s irrelevant to the prospect. Further, sharing irrelevant material can make you look unreliable, untrustworthy, and unworthy of their investment.

You should be sharing content that is appropriate to the buyer’s persona and stage in the sales cycle. It should address any questions or apprehensions, demonstrate value, and show how ROI can be attained. Sales enablement tools automate this process by surfacing the right content at the right time based on the sales situation.

7) You are neglecting the customer experience

In the age of the consumer, it’s important to focus on customer-centricity, a situation in which companies must adopt a customers-first attitude and adapt to ever-evolving customer behavior. It’s important to remember that customer experience goes beyond just post-sales activities. It includes all interactions from before the prospect even considers buying to after the purchase is finalized.

Organizations need to create a buying experience that is engaging, educational, and personalized to the individual and their needs and stage in the buyer journey. This strategy becomes even more valuable when you consider the lifetime value of a customer, as sales experience is worth 53% of a buyer’s likelihood to be a loyal customer and brand advocate.

8) You aren’t following a consistent sales process

How can you replicate best practices and successes without a consistent sales process? Maintaining a workflow enables you to collect data and gather important insights that can guide further improvements and successes. For example, how many touch points does it take to set a meeting? What messaging is most effective at advancing prospects to each consecutive stage? What content accelerates deals and generates the highest ROI? Equally important is leveraging the sales tools you have in your arsenal. Incorporating these technologies into the workflow will drive productivity, help accelerate sales, and give reps back more time to focus on core selling activities.

“Cooperation is not good enough,” says Tim Ohai, Global Lead, Sales Process & Methodology at Workday. In this guest post on Keenan’s blog, he makes a case for sales professionals to avoid cooperation and claims it’s killing your sales effectiveness.

If you’re measuring sales success against only your number of closed deals — you’re doing it wrong. One important sales metric to track besides customer acquisition cost (CAC), win rate, and average contract value (ACV) is your lead velocity.

In this article, we’ll discuss what lead velocity is and how you can calculate this sales metric.

Is lead velocity rate the most important sales metric?

Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, believes the lead velocity rate is the most important metric for sales teams, especially those in SaaS, to measure.

He says, “Your monthly sales tell you about the past, but a pipeline report is cr*p for predicting the future since they are more often about hope than truth. Pipeline for this month is useful, but depends on how various reps estimate (read: guess) their probability of closing right. Next quarter’s pipeline is only slightly better than a guess.”

“Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) is real-time, not lagging, and it clearly predicts your future revenues and growth. It’s more important strategically than your revenue growth this month or this quarter,” Lemkin adds.

But what is LVR, and how should you measure it? Let’s get into that below.

What is lead velocity rate?

The lead velocity rate calculates the real-time growth of qualified leads month over month. It’s often considered the best predictor of future revenue and can be unaffected by seasonality or team quality.

Use this formula to calculate your lead velocity rate:

Title: Lead-velocity-rate-calculation

It’s important not to confuse lead velocity with sales velocity, which measures how quickly deals move through your pipeline and generate revenue. Lead velocity rates focus on the growth of the number of leads coming into your pipeline, not how fast they’re moving through that pipeline.

Sales metrics tools can help you keep track of your LVR.

How to Calculate Lead Velocity

If you run a SaaS business, for example, you could plug in your numbers to the above formula to measure your lead velocity rate:

Qualified leads in June: 50

Qualified leads in July: 55

(55 – 50) ÷ (50 x 100) = 10%

This means your lead velocity rate is 10% between June and July. If you wanted to calculate your annual LVR, you’d have to find the growth rate percentage for each month, then find the average by adding them all together and dividing the sum by 12.

Here is another example of how to calculate lead velocity from an excerpt from Lemkin’s book, The Predictable Revenue Guide to Tripling Your Sales. It uses dollar values instead of the number of leads.

“So if you created $1 million in new qualified pipeline this month, and created $1.1 million in new qualified pipeline the following month, you are growing LVR at 10% month over month. So, your sales should grow 10% as well after a period of an average sales cycle length.”

“Once EchoSign hit $1 million in revenue run rate, we set an LVR growth target of 10% per month. Once we hit about $3 million in run rate, we dropped it to 8% growth per month. The goal of 8% per month was to produce enough leads to grow the business at least 100% year over year.

“We hit the lead generation growth goals — the LVR goals — just about every month, and certainly every quarter, and every year. And by hook or crook, enhanced with an ever-improving sales team and an ever-improving product, the revenue growth followed.

“The growth wasn’t like clockwork every single day. But it emerged clearly over time — every quarter, every year. And one great thing about LVR is while sales can vary a lot by month and quarter, there’s no reason leads can’t grow every single month like clockwork. Every. Single. Month.”

Think you’re ready to track lead velocity rates in your sales team? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Sales Metrics, first.

Get HubSpot Sales and Performance Reports

Meeting Your LVR Goals and Hitting Your Quota

Having a real-time indicator of growth is a huge advantage for your sales team and your business. If you expect a seasonal dip in sales, you can adjust your lead velocity to bring in more leads. If your reps are trailing on quota for the quarter, you can get more qualified leads to give your team the boost they need to meet their goals.

However, for your lead velocity rate to be valuable, your leads must be qualified so that reps can close them and you can have an accurate sales report.

Editor's note: This post includes an excerpt from the book The Predictable Revenue Guide to Tripling Your Sales, and is published here with permission.

Forty-two percent of salespeople report that prospecting is the part of the sales process they struggle with most. But as a sales professional, consistent prospecting efforts are arguably your most important activity. And these days, email is an essential part of an effective prospecting campaign.

The hardest part of email prospecting? Efficiently making the right amount of high-quality attempts to each prospect with the right amount of time in between. The average rep only makes two attempts before giving up, yet the average sale requires eight attempts.

It’s no wonder most salespeople are failing at their jobs. They simply don’t make enough attempts to connect with each prospect.

However, sending more of the same emails isn’t the answer. The reps who are making multiple attempts often send the same message to each prospect over and over again. Or worse, they forward their original message and attempt to guilt trip prospects with lines like “Have you seen my previous emails?” Not a good idea.

To strike the right balance, salespeople need to plan what to say as well as how to say it, and vary their approach. It’s not that hard to make the appropriate number of creative outreach attempts if enough effort is put into creating reusable, quickly customizable email template sequences. And by automating the right parts of email prospecting, you can speed up your sales cycle too.

To inspire you to step up your game, I asked Matthew Iovanni and Holly Berrigan, respectively CEO and former director of accounts at FullFunnel, to share their formulas for success.

Using a process like the one below, they’ve helped clients such as Innovation Asset Group achieve 400% growth in their pipeline. As a Platinum Level HubSpot Agency Partner, they’ve also helped many HubSpot customers produce similar results.

Follow the process below to make more meaningful connections with more of the right prospects.

Effective prospecting campaigns require planning -- and lots of it.

“Most companies take a haphazard approach to prospecting, arming their salespeople with a handful of templates, an email address, and a login to the CRM,” Iovanni says. Here's how not to do that.

1. Use sales software to schedule multiple attempts at once.

FullFunnel uses the HubSpot email sequences to deploy their prospecting campaigns. Sequences leverages sales automation to enable a rep to automatically personalize and schedule a series of emails at pre-defined intervals for each prospect. Once a buyer responds, they are un-enrolled from the sequence and no further automated emails are sent.

“This process saves our clients’ salespeople a lot of time because once we schedule a set of emails to send, we don’t have to worry about which email to send next or when to send it,” Berrigan says.

Sequences users can also schedule tasks for the salesperson, prompting them to make a call before or after an email is scheduled to send, follow and/or interact with prospects on social media, or simply check whether prospects are opening emails or not.

Of course, FullFunnel doesn’t stop there. Over the years, they’ve refined their approach to crafting messages. Let’s start from the top and work our way down the anatomy of a perfect sales email.

2. Use intriguing subject lines to maximize open rates.

Subject lines seem like such a small thing, but they’re incredibly important -- and you should obsess over them more than most salespeople do. If a prospect doesn’t find the subject line interesting, they won't read your email.

“Recipients are more likely to open emails with intriguing subject lines, so be sure to include personalization, exclusivity, and questions,” Berrigan says.

Below are a few subject lines that have worked for FullFunnel’s clients. Customize them to fit your product and persona.

Personalized subject lines:

• [Name], interesting piece of advice.
• Your profile is impressive, [Name]

Exclusive subject lines (note: only use these if you actually have an exclusive offer):

• Invite Only -- [Event Name]
• Secret sauce for overcoming [challenge]

Question subject lines:

• What do you think of X?
• How do you do X?

3. Personalize and customize to demonstrate interest in your prospect.

We’ve all received un-targeted emails from salespeople. At best, it’s annoying. At worst, it pisses us off.

“No one likes to feel like they’re getting a generic email,” Iovanni says. “A potential customer wants to be recognized as the unique and individual snowflake that they are.”

Follow these three steps to effectively customize your messages:

1. Personalize. Use personalization tokens in your emails to automatically populate messages with your prospect’s name, company, title, and any other distinguishing information you have about them. “Just make sure your CRM information is accurate,” Iovanni says.
2. Use a persona. Make sure your recipient matches your target persona. Specific personas (or types of buyers) will have common pain points, so share content related to those pain points with prospects who fit the persona.
3. Research. To maximize response rates, do research to find something unique about the individual you’re contacting. Incorporate this research into your messages, or even focus your entire first message on your findings.

4. Write short messages with the right tone to hit home.

In addition to personalizing and targeting your messages, you must write engaging and concise copy. Customization won't matter if your email is poorly written. By focusing on your message's tone and keeping it brief, you’ll significantly increase engagement.

Many salespeople make the mistake of putting their product's full value proposition in every email rather than something (anything!) about their prospect. FullFunnel uses Sequences to test bite-sized messages, which are more likely to get read precisely because they’re short, according to Berrigan.

“There’s no need to cram everything you want to tell someone in an email,” Iovanni points out. “People want to know how your product or service will benefit them, not how it works.”

In addition, try experimenting with tone in your emails. FullFunnel's reps have seen success keeping their language familiar and friendly, but your ideal tone might be different depending on your target personas.

Below is a mock example of an email FullFunnel uses to market their service. The message this is based on achieved a 33% open and 11% clickthrough rate.

You'll notice that the email doesn’t go into the specifics of what FullFunnel does. Instead, it shows the potential benefit to the recipient’s company. And most importantly, the email is written in the fun and friendly FullFunnel voice.

5. Test images to increase relatability.

In the example email above, you may have been drawn in by the simple graphic. FullFunnel uses images such as these in their emails in several ways.

“Educational infographics work when you want the prospect to come to the same conclusion you’re proposing, while funny images can quickly break the ice,” Iovanni explains.

Here’s an example from FullFunnel client VOIQ, a provider of on-demand sales calling services. Who doesn’t love a little classic Burt Reynolds? (Once again, this is a mock example without any customization based on the individual recipient.)

You can even include animated GIFs, which are supported by almost all email clients.

“Humorous GIFs are great for attention-grabbing messages to difficult-to-reach personas such as those in IT, or for very social personas like those in sales or recruiting,” Iovanni told me.

6. Use content and a clear call-to-action to encourage engagement.

Following the advice above should help you increase your email open rate. But that’s all for naught unless you can get prospects to reply or re-convert on your website as a result of your email.

The content and call-to-action (CTA) you choose to include in your messages will vary significantly on the stage of the buyer's journey your prospect is in. Below are the guidelines FullFunnel recommends their clients follow when choosing content and CTAs:

1. Include links meant to generate website conversions. Use simple action words such as “click here,” “discover,” or “download” to make it clear exactly what you’d like the reader to do.
2. For contacts who are less familiar with your company's offerings, include a link to a landing page with relevant educational offers.
3. In the event that the lead is aware of the company's offerings and likely to be interested, link to a meeting scheduler so the prospect can immediately book time with a rep.
4. For messages that fall late in the sequence or leads that have expressed interest through repeat website visits, email opens, or website conversions, include a link to a case study.

FullFunnel also uses progressive profiling to capture more information about a given lead every time they complete a form. Progressive profiling automatically hides form fields if the information is already known for that prospect, and presents a new field to complete instead. This keeps the form short, while enabling companies to capture more information about leads each time they convert. The additional information collected as prospects complete more fields is used to send increasingly targeted offers, which in turn helps move leads farther along their buyer’s journey.

7. Create reusable sequences for different personas to maximize efficiency.

FullFunnel also considers which target persona a specific lead matches when determining which email sequence to send them.

“For each persona, we recommend creating five or more emails [per] cadence,” Iovanni says. “Each message should hit on pain points your persona may struggle with and present proof that you can help eliminate the problem.”

Save each series of emails as a HubSpot Sales Sequence to automate your prospecting touches without sacrificing personalization.

In Email Prospecting, a Little Planning Goes a Long Way

Ever feel like a little piece of your soul dies when you send the same spammy message to the same prospect over and over again? Ever get frustrated that so many of your prospects ignore you or tell you to back off? With a bit of planning, some content, and the right tools, you can stop feeling this way -- for good.

Create email templates that include content tailored to the persona and buyer stage of each contact, write engaging subject lines, add images where they make sense, keep it brief, and follow through with multiple, creative attempts.

Next, use technology to store these customizable email template sequences and automate the repetitive parts of prospecting by scheduling multiple attempts at once. But don't go overboard with automation -- use your newfound time to do more research and customize each message for each prospect even more.

By quickly accessing and scheduling reusable email templates with CTAs to content proven to convert, you can achieve higher response rates more efficiently. Keep creating new templates and sequences for different stages of the buyer’s journey and different personas, and you’ll build a prospecting machine that puts quality opportunities into your funnel at an ever-increasing rate.

Email Prospecting Software

1. Sales Hub

• Price: Starter, $50/month for 1 paid user; Professional, $400/month for 5 paid users; Enterprise, $1200/month for 10 paid users
• About: Ready to put prospecting on autopilot? Sales Hub doesn't just help you cut down on data entry and organize your pipeline. It also offers email sequences, which allow you to use email templates and customer information to schedule and send targeted emails to prospects with the information they want, right when they need it most.

2. Apollo

• Price: Starter, Free; Basic, $32/month/user; Professional, $100/month/user; Enterprise, pricing available upon request
• About: Apollo offers automated or manual email sequences, calls, and tasks. Plus, they have click-to-call dialing, recording, transcription, and CRM-logging tools. Create rules that take instant action based on prospect activities, stages, or triggers. And integrate with LinkedIn, Gmail, Outlook, and your favorite CRM.

3. PersistIQ

• Price: Lite, $40/month/user; Starter, $60/month/user; $90/month/user
• About: Ready to send personalized emails faster than ever before? Create customized email campaigns full of smart variables that keeps you from sending emails with missing values (i.e., that dreaded "Hi "). Their software can also determine between actual replies and out of office replies. And they flawlessly format your emails using their modern email templates.

4. Outreach.io

• Price: Available upon request
• About: Wish you had software that combined calling, texting, email, and social media to reach buyers where they most want to be contacted? Outreach.io can help. Auto-populated variables, open and click tracking, inbox integrations, and more make this a solid email prospecting option.

5. SalesLoft

• Price: Available upon request
• About: Use SalesLoft's templates to personalize your emails where it counts -- even embedding customized videos or attachments. You can also A/B test automated messages to find out which content serves your prospects best. OOO detection, an email deliverability checklist, timezone detection, and engagement triggers are just a few of the other features that will streamline your email prospecting with this software.

6. Reply

• Price: Individual, $55/month/user, $70/month/user, or $90/month/user; Business, $200/month for 3 users, $300/month for 5 users, $500/month for 10 users; Enterprise, pricing available upon request
• About: Send personalized, automated emails to your prospects, from onboarding to re-engagement. Then, track the performance of those emails with comprehensive statistics on deliveries, opens, and clicks. Oh, and you'll be able to use their template library, of course.

7. Mixmax

• Price: Starter, $9/month/user; Small Business, $24/month/user; Growth, $49/month/user; Enterprise, pricing available upon request
• About: Opens, click, and downloads are all tracked. Meetings are booked with one email. Messages can be personalized and scheduled at scale, and all of your emails, performance metrics, and downloads are automatically logged in your CRM. That's just a sampling of what you'll get with Mixmax.

Email automation doesn't have to be cold, monotonous, or spammy. Follow these suggestions and choose the right prospecting software, and you can enrich the buying experience for your prospects -- and for your career.

Below is a list of 20 things I have found in common with the top 1% of all sales prospectors. Notice that each item on the list is an action. That’s right, they are things you can do! To be great at prospecting, you don’t have to be born with the “sales gene.” It simply means that you must make it happen day after day.

Check out my video where I talk more about what it takes to be in the top 1% of all sales prospectors:

 

 

As you go through the list, don’t just read it. Think through each item and see which ones pop out and demand your attention. You might assume your goal is to do each one of these things at super salesperson level. Yes, that’s the long-term goal but right now, focus in on one action and master it. After you have mastered one, take another and continue the process.

Sales is not a destination, sales is a journey. This list is a step forward in your sales journey.

 

1. Commit to prospecting, regardless of what else needs to be done.

2. Focus on quality leads, not just a list.

3. Persist beyond what anyone else will do.

4. Use multiple processes that fit each segment they prospect.

5. Don’t rely on marketing for your leads.

6. Embrace technology, but don’t let it control you or them.

7. Commit to help other people beyond their customers.

8. Know the most valuable asset they have is their own time.

9. Work consistently to improve their process and more quickly engaging the prospect.

10. Understand the real measurement of their ability to prospect is in their ability to close.

11. Never rely on one form of communication. Know what tool to use and when to use it.

12. Keep the pipeline clean by not allowing it to fill up with prospects that aren’t going anywhere.

13. Use the telephone heavily. Know the potential that a live conversation has in moving a prospect forward faster than anything else.

14. Have a social media presence but do not be overly dependent on it.

15. Be goal oriented to the point of being obsessed.

16. Commit to the customer and their needs, not just on what they sell.

17. Have a marketing plan to remain in touch with those people who aren’t active in the prospecting or buying cycle.

18. Own your prospect’s process.

19. Maintain an optimistic attitude.

20. View prospecting not as an activity, but rather as a lifestyle that you live.

 

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

If you aren’t using your B2B website to increase your firm’s revenue, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Unfortunately, many sales professionals drastically underestimate their company’s digital presence and the power of its ability to generate revenue.

While traditional means of outreach and word of mouth can be great sales opportunities, your company’s website is an excellent source for getting new leads, nurturing existing leads, and keeping the conversation going with existing clients.

In this post, we take a look at how your marketing and sales team can leverage your firm’s B2B website design to increase revenue.

Generate inbound leads using SEO

Looking for a new source of warm leads for your B2B company? Right now, your target market is searching online for your products and services using Google, Bing, Yahoo or another search engine.

Did you know: 68% of B2B customers prefer to research independently online. 60% would rather not communicate with sales reps as their only information source (Source).

The best way to get in front of these potential prospects? Optimize your B2B website for traffic from search engines, aka SEO.

By optimizing your website for search engines and targeting the keyword phrases your target market is using, you can generate new inbound leads. The best part? These leads have already shown interest in your products and services. They are partway down the sales funnel.

Write content to solve problems & address needs

Most B2B marketers understand that creating content is an essential part of their overall lead generation strategy. However, many sales professionals don’t understand the true value of creating content that solves problems and addresses needs.

Consider this: You have a prospect that has 10 questions about the services your company offers and you answer all of them clearly during a one-on-one meeting. You have addressed their needs by providing helpful answers. But what about the prospects that want their questions answered without committing to a one-on-one meeting? Don’t you still want to be a valuable resource to them?

Drafting content that solves problems and addresses needs positions your company as helpful and shows you understand your prospects. By the time a prospect makes contact via your website, you’ve already answered many of their questions and built up trust as a valuable resource. This is a competitive advantage.

Direct prospects to relevant content

As a sales professional, isn’t it ideal to have an array of tools to help you nurture and convert leads? What if your website had a ton of relevant content, including things like pricing plans, the entire suite of service offerings, delivery times, features, functionality, best practices, and implementation strategies?

If your B2B website design hosted all of this relevant content, you could simply send these links to prospects so they can easily view them during their own time. You don’t have to deal with sending documents that need to be downloaded or risk files getting corrupted in transmission. The best part is that your prospect can review these links before they ever get on the phone with you, saving you and them time by getting their basic questions answered.

Retargeting ads to get visitors back to the site

A website visitor arrives on your site, learns about the products and services your company offers, then leaves without completing a form since they are just doing preliminary research. As this person continues to browse online over the next 30 – 90 days, they keep seeing ads for your company on the websites they visit. When it comes times to make contact, schedule a demo, or get a proposal, all they have to do is click on your ad or they already remember your name since the ads have created strong awareness of your company’s brand. This is retargeting.

Studies have shown that it typically requires six or more visits to a website before a B2B prospect initially converts. You need to stay in front of prospects with retargeted ads especially because by visiting your company’s website the first time, they have already shown intent and interest. Retargeting ads are the most cost-effective way to stay in front of people who have already visited your B2B website and to bring them back to convert.

Search ad campaigns to get your company in front of potential leads

Search engine optimization takes time and continual effort to maintain. While organic search traffic tends to perform very well (aka convert), you might want leads now. Running search ad campaigns (also knowns as PPC or pay-per-click ads) is the quickest way to get your company in front of prospects.

If a potential prospect performs a Google search for “accounting software” or “software for accounting firms,” ads directing that prospect to your accounting software website will show up in the search results. Since it’s pay per click, you only pay when the prospect clicks on your ad.

Convert leads, follow up, close leads

If you’ve ever worked retail, you know that anyone who walks into your store is a potential buyer. The same is true for anyone who visits your B2B website, they are all potential buyers. Treat them as such.

Whether they complete a contact form, a demo request, a proposal request, download a white paper or e-book, or sign-up for your newsletter – they are all prospects. While a person who downloads a white paper may not be a “hot buyer” they are still a warm lead. Simply making contact with them after their download can be the difference between closing a deal and losing a prospect to a competitor.

All website leads should be treated as valuable, contacted for qualification, and nurtured. A successful B2B salesperson values all leads especially inbound leads. Ignoring an inbound lead, regardless of whether they request a proposal or simply download an ebook, is akin to ignoring a person shopping in your store.