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By Todd Gracon Sales, like any form of persuasion, is an art. A smooth sales cycle is like a beautiful painting, where individual elements are brought together with masterful finesse. If even one element is out of place or poorly executed – if the lighting is off or the perspective is sloppy – the entire …

Continue reading "Mastering the Art (and Science) of Sales with Emerging Technology"

The amount of data that companies collect and store today is staggering. However, it’s not the volume of data being gathered that’s most important — it’s what companies are doing with that data that matters most. With both unstructured and structured data streaming in from everywhere at an unprecedented rate, making connections and extracting insight is complicated work that can quickly spiral out of control.

Enter machine learning (ML).

Modern businesses know that big data is powerful, but they’re starting to realize that it’s not nearly as useful as when it’s paired with intelligent automation. With massive computational power, ML systems help companies manage, analyze, and use their data far more successfully than ever before. According to Gartner, worldwide business value derived from artificial intelligence (AI) powered technologies reached 1.2 trillion in 2018.

ML and Big Data — Real-World Applications

Machine learning — the branch of artificial intelligence that gave us self-driving cars — is helping businesses analyze bigger, more complex data to uncover hidden patterns, reveal market trends, and identify customer preferences for faster, more accurate results. By automating analytical model building, the insight gained is deeper and derived at a pace and scale that human analysts can’t match.

Healthcare. ML capabilities are impacting healthcare in profound ways, improving diagnostics and personalizing treatment plans. Predictive analysis enables doctors and clinicians to focus on providing better service and patient care, creating a proactive framework for addressing patient needs before they are sick.

Wearable technologies and sensors use data to assess patient health in real time, detecting trends or red flags that could potentially foresee a dangerous health event such as cardiac arrest. Advancements in cognitive automation can support a diagnosis by quickly analyzing large volumes of medical and healthcare data, identifying patterns and connecting the dots to enhance treatment and care.

Retail. In retail, relationship-building is critical for success. Technologies powered by ML capture, analyze, and use data to personalize the shopping experience in real time. Algorithms discover similarities and differences in customer data to expedite and simplify segmentation for enhanced targeting.

Based on learned preferences, deeper analysis is reaching individuals and pushing undecided visitors toward conversion. For example, ML capabilities can present online shoppers with personalized product recommendations while adjusting pricing, coupons, and other incentives in real time.

With customer experience top of mind, Walmart is working to develop its own proprietary machine-learning and artificial-intelligence technologies. In March of 2017, the retail chain opened Store №8 in Silicon Valley, a dedicated space and incubator for developing technologies that will enable stores to remain competitive in the next five to ten years.

Financial Services. In the financial sector, predictive analytics help prevent fraud by analyzing large historical datasets and building forecasts based on previous data. ML models learn behavior patterns and then — with little human interaction — anticipate events for more informed decision-making.

Banks and financial institutions use ML to gather real-time insights that help drive investment strategies and other time-sensitive business opportunities.

Automotive. In the face of stiff competition, the automotive industry is taking steps to differentiate itself by leveraging ML capabilities and big data analytics to improve operations, marketing, and customer experience before, during, and after purchase.

Applying statistical models to historical data helps automakers identify the impact of past marketing efforts to define future strategies for improved return on investment. Predictive analytics lets manufacturers monitor and share vital information regarding potential vehicle or part failures with dealerships, reducing customer maintenance costs.

By identifying trends and patterns from large datasets on vehicle ownership, dealer networks can be optimized by location for accurate, real-time parts inventory and improved customer care.

Final Thought

As machine-learning technologies hit new levels of maturity in 2018, smart businesses are shifting their approaches to big data. Across industries, companies are reshaping their infrastructures to maximize intelligent automation, integrating their data with smart technologies to improve not only productivity, but also their ability to better cater to their customers.

A similar version of this article first appeared in Towards Data Science. See it here.

It seems our world revolves around barcodes. As a customer, barcodes on your groceries get scanned in the checkout aisle. To find out more about a promotion or event, you can effortlessly scan a QR code with your smart phone. Whether you’ve ordered your child a birthday present from Amazon or manage your company’s warehouse, barcodes make it possible to track products as they move across the state or even the world. Since the first 2D barcode was developed in 1987, the world has changed a lot and so have barcodes. In fact, some QR codes can hold as much as 7,000 digits or 4,000 characters of text. But, do 2D barcodes really impact your business for the better? The short answer is “yes!” Here are the reasons why.

Barcodes Reduce Human Error

According to the State of Small Business Report, 43 percent of small businesses used a manual inventory management system or didn’t track inventory at all. However, when organizations use manual data entry, there are high occurrences of human error. Employees invert or misread numbers; they have bad handwriting or skip a line of code altogether. They’re human. It happens. Even the best typists make an error in one out of every 300 keystrokes, meaning one person makes an average of 18 mistakes each hour. That adds up over time, inhibiting productivity and efficiency and wasting money.

Barcodes, however, virtually eliminate human error. They’re fast, reliable, and much more efficient than manual data entry or handwritten records. Data captured with barcode scanners are translated via software and stored in a computer or handheld device. The information is accurate and without mistakes. Information then is easily accessible in real time for reporting purposes.

Companies Save Time

Barcodes save companies a lot of time. Most barcode scanners come with associated computer programs that use the data from the barcode scanners. The beauty is they don’t require any manual data entry. The data automatically updates the central database each time an employee scans a barcode. There is also no time gap time between keying data, uploading data, and generating reports. 2D barcodes also contain a variety of information, all of which is quick and reliable for a variety of applications. Also, one scan can read up to four barcodes at a time, giving you the serial number, part number, lot and date, and other pertinent information.

Further, an employee saves 30 minutes per shift on average when clocking in or out since they don’t have to write down start and stop times.

Training Employees Is Easier

Did you know barcodes conserve time when training new employees? Familiarizing themselves with entire inventory or pricing processes is not easy and could take weeks. When using hand-held barcode scanners to read barcodes, it takes minutes to master its functions. In result, employee training time is much shorter and less costly because onboarding is simpler.

Business Cut Inventory Costs

When it comes to inventory, 2D barcodes help small businesses cut costs when they use barcodes to inventory raw materials, in or out-of-stock merchandise, raw materials, office supplies, and whatever else needs tracked. All it takes is a single scan to help employees recognize items, locate them, and get other information such as cost, price, or supplier.

If your business struggles to reduce its inventory carrying costs, barcode systems are helpful. Inventory data is updated in real time, with accurate reports of true inventory counts. And when inventory counts are precise and up to date, efficiencies improve in through finding equipment or products quickly, reducing lost items and theft, estimating more accurate delivery times, more accurately defining inventory, and setting a more attractive price to market.

Inventory Is Easily Tracked

When one warehouse tracks the coming and going of all of your products, parts, or raw materials, it’s vital to run a tight operation. TopGolf owns four facilities throughout Illinois, Texas and Virginia. Despite the locations being spread out across the country, only one warehouse controls them all. Bryan Harej, inventory manager for TopGolf, said manually tracking inventory was way too-time consuming and inefficient, especially for its re-ordering processes and growing inventory demands. They decided to implement an automated inventory management system with 2D barcodes. Since then, Harej said their ability to track inventory was virtually limitless. Not only is TopGolf’s inventory now accurate, everyone across locations is connected.

“Our whole process has been improved and works effortlessly,” Harej added.

2D barcodes are an important addition for small or medium-sized businesses, whether you run a warehouse or a healthcare facility. Errors decrease and time and costs are cut. Implementing automated inventory management will help your organization function more efficiently and improve productivity.

Amazon’s made a slew of acquisitions in the area of smart home services, and now it’s offering a product that brings them together under one roof — your roof.

Amazon has quietly launched a portal offering home security services — which include all the equipment you would need and in-person visits from Amazon consultants to advise and install the kit. The packages are being sold in five price tiers, at a flat fee — no monthly service contracts, a significant disruption of how many home security services are sold today.

The least expensive, $240 for Outdoor Base, gives you an Echo Dot plus indoor and outdoor lighting designed “to make it look like you’re home” The most expensive tier, $840 for Smartest, includes an alarm siren, motion sensors, safety sensors, a camera, and Echo Dot, the lighting and a video doorbell — potentially rolling in previous security launches from the company like Amazon Key and Cloud Cam. All include two visits from Amazon employees to consult you and help with the installation.

The Last July it emerged that Amazon was quietly working on its own answer to Best Buy’s Geek Squad — offering repairs and installations of home WiFi, smart home devices, Alexa installations, and other hardware-related services.

Amazon never appeared to confirm it at the time, but that service now officially seems to be called “Smart Home Services” and it has expanded to Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and Florida.

Giving consumers the option of a more full-service security offering, beyond selling alarms and other devices a la carte, makes sense for a couple of reasons.

The first is that while there are some early adopters who might like the challenge of installing these services themselves, there will be many middle and later adopters who will not be interested in facing that learning curve. Amazon has positioned itself in the smart home security space as more than just a reseller of third-party devices — although it sells those, too — with acquisitions of the smart doorbell startup Ring and the smart camera and doorbell startup Blink.

The second is that most often, home security systems are coupled with service installations it in your home that include maintenance contracts, so if Amazon hopes to eat up some of that market, it needs to offer something comparable to the market.

It’s an interesting development also of the company’s wider strategy to move into selling services, beyond physical products — one of Amazon’s various efforts to diversify its business by targeting different categories of commerce and different demographics.

Another foray into human-powered services was its Thumbtack-style competitor Amazon Home Services, a marketplace it launched back in 2015 for finding tradespeople and other freelance service providers like masseurs and language tutors. (Notably, Amazon makes a big deal in its security pages of using Amazon employees to install its security systems.)

Earlier this month, it also emerged that Amazon was stealing a march on Apple in smart homes, specifically by inking deals with smart home builders, who were opting for Amazon as their preferred supplier for consulting and installing such services for their home buyers.

A report in The Information noted that one such home builder, Lennar, was “prioritizing Amazon” in its recommendations, while still working with Apple, in part because of the former company’s stronger efforts to integrate with more third-party products, giving buyers a wider range of choices.

Ramping up into security services fits with this, too. Lennar, as it happens, is directly linked now on Amazon’s security homepage, but to be clear, the offering is not exclusive to Lennar homeowners.

We’ve asked Amazon about the security service pages, and the company has acknowledged the question but still has not replied. We’ll update this post as and if we learn more.

• Non-tech companies like Nordstrom and FedEx acquired a record number of tech companies in Q1 2018, according to the PwC Deals report.
• 26% of all US tech acquisitions were made by a non-tech company.
• Industries like defense, autos, and healthcare were the big acquirers, and mostly bought IT and software companies.
• Many of the acquirers are looking for teams who can help transform their existing product models. 

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You may not think of Nordstrom and FedEx as big acquirers in tech, but in the first quarter of the year, both companies earned the accolade.

Through the purchase of two digital retail startups and a digital logistics company, respectively, Nordstrom and FedEx became part of a growing trend of non-tech companies acquiring tech startups to fuel innovation and digital transformation in their existing businesses.  

In the first quarter, 26% — or 132 — of US tech deals involved a buyer from outside of the tech industry, according to the PwC Deals report, published Thursday.

Most buyers came from industries like defense, cars, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and they mainly acquired IT and software companies. 

And they weren't stingy, either. Non-tech acquisitions accounted for $21.1 billion out of a total of $60 billion in deals, according to the report. 

In-house tech can help companies compete with giants like Amazon

Many of these companies look to tech to help them compete tech-native retailers like Amazon, while others may see acquiring an engineering team as a chance to build proprietary software that can't be found on the market, according to Marc Suidan, who leads US tech deals coverage for PwC. 

"This seems to be a common thread popping everywhere: don't wait to be disrupted but go on the offensive to disrupt," Suidan told Business Insider. 

Different companies acquire for different reasons, but Suidan found a few common threads.

Agribusinesses like Monsanto, for example, are interested using IoT to give farmers more control over their crops. 

Suidan said that agribusinesses aren't likely to acquire IoT hardware companies, whose products they can buy on the market like any other customer. Instead, they are interested in buying IoT software companies so that they can personalize software to meets their specific needs and give them a leg up on the competition, which can't access the same tools.

Car companies have also shown a lot of interest in tech M&A as they look to develop autonomous vehicle software, he said. 

While it's clear that outside industries want to take technology in house, it's not clear that the sentiment goes both ways. 

Suidan cautioned that companies can sometimes experience a culture clash when they try to make Silicon Valley-trained teams fit into old school corporate models, which often come with fewer freedoms and less interesting employee benefits than are found in the startup world.

Employees will leave if they don't feel like their job is as fulfilling post-acquisition.

"If you can't foster all of that, then you're paying a big premium for something you're going to destroy," he said. 

SEE ALSO: It's not just the IPO market that's booming — here's why this Silicon Valley VC says 2018 will also be the year of M&A

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Google, Apple, and Amazon are in a war that no one will win

Have you ever wondered why some websites convert better than others?

You can have the best copywriting in the world but if you don’t have effective calls-to-action on each page, you won’t get the sale.

So what’s the best way to get prospects to take action?

In a previous article, we defined what a “Call-to-Action” is and why your website must use them. This article provides effective example calls-to-action to reach shoppers at every stage of the buying cycle to boost conversions.

Offering Free Giveaways

Offering a free download or trial is a great way to build trust with people who are just getting to know your brand.

What can you offer for free to get people to experience your expertise and find value in what you offer?

You could offer a free video, downloadable report, MP3 audio, checklist or even a white paper. It could also be a free 30-day trial if you offer a membership program.

Here are some example calls-to-action links or buttons to get people to join your mailing list or experience your product, service or program for free on a limited basis:

• Sign up for FREE
• Join Free for a Month
• Try for Free for 30 Days
• Start My Free Trial
• Find Out First
• Learn for Free
• Sign up NOW
• Show Me How
• Get it Now!
• Send Me The Free Resources

Building Trust

When people are interested but want more information before making a decision, it’s smart to offer options that let them delve more deeply into working with you without the risk.

Here are several calls-to-action that build trust and desire:

• Learn/Discover More Here: Offer a link to pages that expand upon your offerings or share a link to an FAQ page.
• Schedule a Free Consultation: Giving a free session allows you to show prospects the opportunities they have and the value you can provide.
• Contact Me/Us Today: This gives individuals a way to address any questions they may have and get in contact with you. This serves as an excellent way to find ways you can help them.
• See How We Can Help: This shows a friendlier, more inviting way to open a conversation with your prospects in a non-threatening manner.

Directing Next Steps

For hot prospects who are ready to take action, you want to create calls-to-action that make it easy to work with you and provide them with clear “next steps” for them to take.

Here’s some examples:

• Get Started Today: Tell visitors who are ready to purchase how to get what they need now.
• Add to Cart: Show shoppers how to put something in their virtual shopping cart and keep browsing.
• Buy Now: When people are ready to check out, make it easy to pay.
• Get x% Off: Choosy buyers may be looking for a discount. Offering a percentage off discount if they buy may motivate them to take the plunge.

Every page on your website should include a call to action to engage buyers to take the next step in their journey.

I hope you have found inspiration here to help you boost conversions on your website. Be creative, be clear on what you want the user to do, and test which calls-to-action are most effective in order to get ideal results.

Whether you are selling drill bits or bitcoin, successfully growing a business is about setting goals and measuring your progress towards achieving them. But with all the tools and business advice out there, it can be difficult to figure out where to focus, and even harder when you’re dealing in the relatively new financial waters of SaaS (Software as a Service).

In order to help demystify it all, we recently spoke with two experts in the field of SaaS metrics to learn what metrics matter, how to visualize your progress, and the importance of transparency.

Find your guiding star

In countless posts on his highly popular For Entrepreneurs blog, Matrix Partners venture partner and startup expert David Skok highlights customer acquisition as the most important goal of new SaaS businesses. Getting people to try your product and commit to paying money for it is a good early indicator that you are on the right track. However, what that looks like can vary greatly from company to company, so it is important to get clear about how your team defines and tracks customer growth.

Kaegan Donnelly, of SaaS metrics company Baremetrics, works with companies to help them make actionable decisions from their data. He’s found that tools like theirs open up access to the company’s performance and can help guide the team’s decisions. He says, “Tracking metrics is for yoga studios, gyms, self-help gurus, box services — any model where you are charging people for recurring services.” As for the metric he thinks new companies should focus on first, he suggests Monthly Recurring Revenue (or “MRR”).

Ina Vaduvescu, marketing research analyst at live TV dashboard company Geckoboard, agrees that it is important to focus on a goal in order to make sense of the metrics. “You could be measuring something, but if you don’t have a precise goal of where you want to get to, you may never get there because you don’t know what you’re after.”

Keep it together

Before she joined Geckoboard, Ina got her start organizing team performance metrics and goals while working at her previous company. She was charged with aggregating the team’s data in a way that told a more cohesive story; so she used VC Christoph Janz’s KPI Dashboard for Early Stage Startups. While the name evokes something more sophisticated, it’s just an Excel spreadsheet.

Though it was a simple document, it was effective in getting her and the rest of her team used to tracking goals and performance in one equally-accessible place. Over time, she went on to build out a more sophisticated dashboard, using a Geckoboard screen to more elegantly share it with the team.

“There’s something about metrics that can bring teams together, because it gives you the opportunity to chat about what is important.” — Ina Vaduvescu, Geckoboard

Technical performance metrics around outages, bugs, and site performance may resonate more deeply with developers, and financial metrics may matter more to the sales and “biz” side, but there’s no denying the value of seeing them all side by side.

At an early-stage company, so much is up in the air and everyone is keenly focused on whether the company is on the way to “product-market fit” — a loosely-defined measure of likely long-term viability on the market. So being able to keep an eye on how usage correlates to revenue and whether the lines are trending up or down is useful in maintaining team morale and keeping everyone motivated.

Don’t obsess

While it can feel like it’s of utmost importance to keep your eyes trained on the metrics — especially when you are in a growing company — the experts tend to disagree. Product — Market fit is a combination of hitting product and revenue targets along with achieving a certain level and type of confidence amongst your customers. Even Andy Racheff, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist who coined the term admits a certain level of luck and surprise in achieving success saying, “You often stumble into your product/market fit.”

Looking only at the numbers doesn’t give you the full picture of what’s going on with your company — it’s also important to consider qualitative inputs such as positive customer sentiments expressed to your helpdesk, tweets from happy users, and feedback from teammates.

Kaegan of Baremetrics offers, “Some people look at their metrics too much. One bad cancellation can make your churn rate skyrocket. However, month of bad churn doesn’t necessarily indicate a serious problem in your business. You need to look at trends.”

To teams looking to start tracking progress, Ina of Geckoboard advises startups to set bold targets but remember to be balanced. “There’s a distinction between tracking progress and just measuring things for the sake of measuring them…But be brave. Make those goals, because that is what is going to help you and your team be more productive.”

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What metrics matter to your team? We’d love to hear more in the comments below.

I received an email asking me to check out an article on the Salesforce.com blog that features an infographic they hoped I would promote.

The article focuses on the middle of the funnel and the handoff between marketing and sales.  In doing so, they discuss MQL's (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQL's (Sales Qualified Leads).  While I don't have an issue with the infographic, I have huge issues with the content of the article and if you follow the advice in this article, you'll have far fewer MQL's that your salespeople can turn into SQL's.

Here's why.

In recent times, social selling has grown in popularity because both B2B and B2C companies are using it to get results from their social media participation. Although, there’s still a lot of improvements to be made.

According to CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, 43.1% of respondents felt their social selling training needed improvement. Additionally, 30.4% agreed social selling training required significant redesign; more than any other training process.

The good news is that you can now leverage automation technology to streamline the entire process of your social selling strategy. It doesn’t get better than that.

What is social selling strategy?

A social selling strategy is a plan you put in place to utilize social media to connect with your prospects through your content and interactions with prospects. The main aim of your social selling strategy is to convert your prospects into customers.

That said, here are the 6 steps to implement a social selling strategy with automation technology:

Step 1. Adopt a formal or dynamic approach

Approaching your social selling without a way to measure results is preparation for failure. And what’s the point of the strategy in the first place?

The first step to implementing it is to define the core principles of your workplace and how to measure results.

To get the best out of your social selling, you must define what success and failure means. And also, you must determine how to measure it. Part of this is aligning with your marketing team to get the best insight.

When social selling strategies of sales and marketing are not aligned, 37.2% of salespeople say they are unsure of the primary benefits of using social selling tools. Despite this, only 20.7% of companies have aligned the strategies of the two departments.

What’s the best way you believe you can serve your customers? Sice the core principles determine how you interact with your prospects, does this mean your strategy should be robotic?

Far from that. In fact, having your core principles means your social selling will be unique. More importantly, there should be room for making improvements as time goes by.

Step 2. Social Prospecting

According to HubSpot, social prospecting is about scouring the social web, identifying potential prospects, and engaging them with content to drive them to your website and move them through your funnel.

With the right tool, you can segment your prospects on social media based on criteria that are important to your business.

With a tool like LinkedIn Navigator, you can import your contacts and search for leads using its many filters.

When you use your network’s personal connections on LinkedIn, you can turn a cold outreach to a warm transfer. In fact, 87% of the LinkedIn Sales Navigator customers said they have gained insights into their sales leads they wouldn’t have known otherwise.

According to a LinkedIn report, 34.9% of salespeople rate sales intelligence tools as very impactful while 30.2% rate it as impactful.

Genesys’ sales reps who use sales navigator increased pipeline growth 2.2 times faster and achieved a 16% higher win rate compared to those who don’t use the navigator.

“LinkedIn Sales Navigator has really made prospecting and getting new business so much easier. I can’t imagine any sales professional without it.” – Michelle Tarkowski, Genesys’ Senior Account Executive.

Step 3. Establishing your lead stages

If you’re an organization that moves all leads directly to sales, then you may end up losing leads because most of the leads are not yet ready to buy.

When you create lead stages, you’re able to move your leads a step at a time until they’re ready to buy.

These lead stages include:

• Names
• In-Profile leads
• MQLs
• SALs
• SQLs.

Names are the first information you get from any user who interacts with your social media posts.

In-Profile leads are leads whose information show they could need your product. But they have not shown interest themselves.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are leads that have shown a level of interest in your product through their interactions on your social media pages.

With tools like HubSpot and Marketo, you can determine a marketing qualified if they go through your social media pages to your website to get more information about your product.

Sales-Accepted Leads (SAL) are leads that have been called or contacted and are ready to buy your product.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) are prospects that are qualified and ready to buy your product.

You may use the traditional stages or define yours depending on your company’s selling process to prospects.

Step 4. Producing solid content libraries

There’s no social selling without content. The best way to connect with prospects is to provide relevant content to them.

Bombarding your prospects with promotional content will only get users to unfollow you.

According to Sprout Social, 46% of users say they’ll unfollow a brand if there are too many promotional messages and 41% will unfollow if a brand shared too much irrelevant content.

Most of your fans on social media are soft leads. Providing relevant content to build interest will lead to more interactions, and consequently, turn them into hot leads.

As much as you may be busy, it is important that you post on social media when you’re ready to have conversations with your prospects.

Even though social media is people’s top choice for customer care, most companies take an average of 10 hours to reply to messages from prospects — whereas prospects expect a reply within 4 hours.

Of course, you can use tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to plan and schedule your posts ahead, they’ll also notify you of interactions on your posts so that your sales agents can connect better with your prospects.

By sharing socially-friendly content pieces, LogMyCalls experienced 400% increase in leads in 90 days.

Step 5. Segment your social media leads to boost conversions

Knowing your prospects more than your competitors is an advantage you must utilize to get more customers. More so, it is important to know that your prospects have different preferences.

For instance, with a CRM tool like Agile CRM, you can track prospect’s behavior on your social media pages.

Below is an example of LinkedIn providing segmentation options for your social media messages.

And if you offer more than one product, a CRM system can identify the product a prospect is interested in through your social media content which they have interacted with. This gives you enough information to nurture your leads until they become sales qualified leads (SQL).

Without a powerful CRM system, it can be difficult to segment your social media leads and get information about their behavior on your social media pages.

Step 6. Assess Performance and Offer Feedback

No social selling strategy is perfect. That’s why the final step you must take is to assess employees performance with their sales results through social media.

What’s the performance of each employee in your sales team? This will probably show that some employees failed to achieve needed results with social selling while some achieved higher than the benchmark. This can be assessed when you add a social source of sales opportunities to your CRM.

The main aim of assessing performance is to improve it. When some employees achieve the social selling benchmark, they can be the social selling champion and brief the sales team on how they were able to achieve this feat on social media.

Furthermore, sales training and coaching by social selling experts can be conducted to improve sales team’s performance. Effective training is important because ineffective training can reduce win rates by 7.8% and quota attainment by 7.4%.

When Guardian Life Insurance of America decided to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as part of their social selling initiative, they also engaged their sales agents in the training which LinkedIn provided. This led to a 56% growth in connections, and a total of $21 million in life assurance.

Conclusion

Social selling is the way to go.

Since 70% of sales professionals use social selling tools, making them the most widely used sales technology in today’s competitive marketplace, learning how to use these tools will benefit your business a lot.

With the number of worldwide social media users estimated to reach 2.95 billion people by 2020, every business must embrace social selling to better connect with their target audience and convert them to customers.

In the end, make sure social selling is part of your automation strategy. That way, you’ll get more done by leveraging user data from your marketing automation tool to improve your social selling activities.

This article, Engineers Are Leaving Trump’s America for the Canadian Dream, stimulated a simple thought for me.

Canada has a huge, near-term competitive opportunity over to the US. 

I have a deeply held belief that US entrepreneurship has benefited extraordinarily over since World War II due to the desire of people from around the world to come to make their lives in the US. While this immigration philosophy started with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (and arguably before that with the European colonization of America), it transformed entrepreneurship, the US economy, and the US’s place in the world dramatically from the 1950s on.

While there are lots of issues around immigration, I believe the US’s relative permissiveness around, and openness to, people from other countries had a remarkably positive impact on the US. I wouldn’t be here other than the immigration of my great-grandparents (and my maternal grandfather) in the early 1900’s from Europe and Russia. While I feel deeply (and proudly) American, I know that my family has only been here for a few generations.

I’ve been aware of and engaged in issues around immigration for the last decade. When I saw this article yesterday, titled U.S. startup visa draws only 10 applicants as Trump throttles program, I thought to myself “duh.” I then read the article, which had a good punch line in the second paragraph.

“A big reason for the shortfall is that the year-old program has been constantly under assault since the election of President Donald Trump, whose agenda revolves around tightening immigration rules and dismantling Obama-era policies. The Homeland Security Department has twice delayed implementation of the program but agreed to leave the application process open after venture capitalists won a court challenge in December. No one has been granted a visa, and Homeland Security said last year that it’s working on a plan to kill the rule entirely.”

Yeah, well, I wouldn’t apply for one of those things either. After advocating for and working on the Startup Visa for almost a decade, it was powerful to end up with something at the end of 2016 (the International Entrepreneur Rule, which was the closest we’ve been to this) but disheartening to see the endless and continuous attack and attempt to undermine this by the current administration.

This is a gift to Canada around entrepreneurship, and I’ve already seen the impact of it in many places. The Toronto/Waterloo startup community is on fire. Many companies I’m involved in are exploring offices in Canada, especially Vancouver (for the Seattle folks) and Toronto (for the east coast folks) since it’s so difficult to get work visas in the US for employees. Other entrepreneurs from around the world are simply opting to start the company in Canada rather than the US because of all the uncertainty around visa status.

I’ve always liked Canada. There is a window in time where Canada has a massive strategic geographic advantage over the US. It’ll be interesting to look back in twenty years and see if the country capitalized on it.

The post Canada Is Going To Be The Next, Great, Entrepreneurial Tech Country appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Sales Coaching Effectiveness feels like a string of buzzwords (yes, we heard you groan), but this phrase can actually be translated and applied to create a high-performing culture of accountability.  Better yet, it doesn’t mean having to add more hours to a sales manager’s day.  Using technology can make effective coaching more efficient.

To help you out, we’ve created an eBook, Effective Sales Coaching: How Experts Leverage Technology.  It’s full of practical ideas and real-world examples of how top sales leaders are using technology to put time back in their day while coaching more effectively.

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From live call technology to motivating with YouTube (yes, YouTube) – there is literally something for everyone in this book.

Download a copy today and learn how your sales managers can leverage technology to coach more effectively.

The post Effective Sales Coaching: How Experts Leverage Technology {NEW eBook} appeared first on SalesLoft.

Sales promotions aren’t always necessary to close business. In fact, salespeople shouldn’t get in the habit of regularly using promotions when mastering essential negotiation skills.

However, promotions can often make the customer’s decision to do business with you easier and, as a result, drive more sales for your business. 

When constructed correctly and deployed intelligently, they should enhance, not disrupt, the sales process. Here’s some ideas on how to make your sales promotions draw in customers and drive sales.

Table of Contents:

• What is a sales promotion?
• 14 Types of Sales Promotion
• Sales Promotion Ideas
• Sales Promotion Examples

What is a sales promotion?

A sales promotion is a marketing strategy that aims to boost sales with deals and offers that speak to consumer interests and entice them to purchase a product or service. 

A common type of sales promotion is the buy one, get one free model, but there are multiple different types that you can leverage to help you meet your sales goals.

14 Types of Sales Promotion

1. Discounts

A discount in price — for example, 30% off — is a powerful incentive for prospects you've built rapport with, who love your product/service, and whose only objection is price. If they're the right fit, a good discount can motivate them to get off the fence and make a decision.

2. Coupons

In the same family as the discount but as a one-time use with a hard deadline, a coupon can be a powerful motivator. As a tangible (or digital) thing, the right coupon can compel a prospect to take action, as they psychologically feel as though something's being taken from them if they don't. One-time coupons also affect the bottom line less than ongoing discounts. 

3. Challenges 

Challenges involve consumers taking specific action to win something from your brand, usually a discount or free product. Challenges often take place over social media, where a brand may ask followers to share its content on their own profiles to make entries into the competition. 

4. Flash Sales 

Flash sales are short-run sales where businesses, often ecommerce and retail, offer discounts on products and services for a short period. This can inspire a sense of urgency within audiences, and can significantly boost sales if users want to take advantage of a discount before time is up. 

5. Swag

Promotional products such as clothing, pens, or gear are novel and can add an element of delight in the right circumstances. However, as mentioned earlier, they may not hold much sway during the actual purchasing decision.

6. Free Trials

Free trials give users complete access to products and services for a limited time without payment. The goal is for users to realize the benefit you bring to them and convince them to make a purchase when the free trial period runs out. 

7. Free Shipping 

The most significant reason why consumers in the U.S. abandon their carts is due to high, unexpected extra costs (like shipping). As a result, offering free shipping is a form of sales promotion as consumers are more likely to follow through with their purchases if they’re not hit with additional costs when they check out. 

8. Buy One, Get One Free

Buy one, get one free (BOGO) is when a business offers an additional free product to inspire customers to purchase an initial product. The first “one” of BOGO is what the customer is initially interested in, and the second “one” is a free product. Customers like receiving free things, so offering a free product can inspire them to follow through with a purchase. 

9. Bundling

If you have a suite of products that add more value together than standing alone, bundling them for a discounted rate can make your offer more attractive. This would appeal to prospects concerned about value and weighing their options with your competition in mind. 

10. Add-Ons

Add-ons are a bit more flexible than bundles, as removing them won't affect payment terms. With that in mind, this route is great when needing to provide extra value without risk. You might include throwing in a premium feature only available at a higher tier or giving them "extra" of something that otherwise has limits.

11. Subscriptions

Subscriptions are a sales promotion as products are often sold at a lower rate if a user subscribes to a plan. If a customer were to simply buy the product or service each time they need it, they would end up paying more for the overall subscription cost. 

12. Loyalty Programs 

Loyalty programs are a form of sales promotion as discounts and rewards offered to loyal customers can inspire them to make more purchases than if they weren’t part of the program. For example, if you offer a free trial size item with every purchase, a customer in your loyalty program may be enticed to buy because they want to try something you offer without having to pay for it. 

13. Extended Payment Terms

Similarly, an extended payment term is another way to handle price objections and is a good choice for high-ticket sales because it makes the sticker price a little less intimidating. All you have to do is spread out payments over a period that makes sense, like 3 months. If consumers are worried about being able to pay total costs upfront but they really want what you’re selling, a payment plan may entice them to follow through. 

14. Extended-Use Terms

By providing extended-use terms, you give the prospect more time to consider your solution's value before extracting value (payment renewal) from them. In the right situation, this builds confidence in your product and builds rapport. 

Now that you know all about the different types of sales promotions, we’ll go over some ideas of how you can implement them.

1. Abandoned Cart Promotions

The average cart abandonment rate is 69.57%. The average ecommerce store loses about 75% of its sales to digital cart abandonment. As a result, a valuable sales promotion idea is to send abandoned cart promotions. 

In practice, you can track when customers abandoned carts on your site, and follow up with a promotional email with a code or discount to incentivize a purchase follow through. The cart abandonment email open rate is 43.76% and CTR is 8.76, meaning that you have a significant chance of recovering these transactions. 

2. Influencer Affiliate Links 

A great way to run a sales promotion is to partner with an influencer and leverage the relationship they have with their community.

Audiences trust the judgment and opinions of the influencers they follow, so they’re likely to drive a sale. To add further incentive, the influencers you partner with can share a unique code or affiliate link that gives audiences a discount if they use it to make a purchase. 

3. In-person Event Swag

Save swag to attract new people to your conference booth, brighten a current client’s day, or make a prospect feel extra special during an in-person visit — without expecting anything in return. Swag is a promotion you provide to sow good will, interest, and loyalty. 

4. Location-based Deals

You can offer discounts on your products and services based on the locations your customers are in. For example, you can run specific promotions if your customers visit specific storefronts. 

5. Feedback Rewards

Customer feedback is crucial for business success, and you can combine it with a sales promotion to entice customers to give it. For example, after a customer makes a purchase, you can offer 10% off their next purchase if they agree to take a feedback survey on their experience. A discount can then incentivize customers to make a follow-up purchase. 

6. Partnership Discounts 

If you work closely with other businesses, you can offer discount codes to customers that are also patrons of your partners, and vice versa. Since customers trust the businesses that they buy from and you’re their established partner, they’re likely to trust that you’re worth doing business with, and an added discount can incentivize a purchase. 

7. Time Savings and Additional Services

Leverage a healthy incentive focused on time savings or additional services. This sweetens the pot without devaluing your product/service. For example, you might offer a prospect an additional 15 hours of onboarding support for free if they sign by Friday. Or you could offer a free setup on their new account so they don’t have to waste time on implementation and can get right to doing.

Even a free six-month checkup can be attractive to prospects who are nervous to sign the contract. Offer free peace of mind in return for their trust and business.

8. Seasonal Promotions 

Many businesses run promotions on specific occasions to inspire purchases. For example, you can offer birthday discounts, holiday discounts, etc, to inspire people to make a purchase for those holidays. 

9. Referral Promotions

With a referral sales promotion, you give your existing customers a referral code to share with someone they know to give them a discount for their first purchase from you. The person with the referral code also receives some sort of reward, which can incentivize them to actually take the steps to recommend you to others if they get something out of it. 

10. Cashback Deals 

When you give cashback you return a portion of the money customers spend with you after every purchase. You’re giving customers a discount, despite receiving it after the fact, which can entice them to spend more money with the assurance that a percentage will be returned. 

11. Off-season Discounts 

You know when your slow periods are — maybe July in Phoenix or December in Australia. A sales promotion can be just the tool to get deals moving during these down times.

You can queue up your deals to start on the first day of the month for accounting and quota reasons. Once they hit 120% of plan for the current month, they manage a rolling 60-day cycle.

This ensures they always have deals in the pipeline and are ready for those slow months.

12. Donation Promotions

Now, more than ever, consumers want to align with companies that demonstrate a commitment to social responsibility, and it is a huge factor in their decisions to do business with a company. 

As a result, running a promotion where you donate a portion of your profits to a charitable cause can influence sales, as customers appreciate when you take a stand for social causes. If using this method, however, ensure that you’re genuine about the commitments you make, as customers will take notice of missteps and won't hesitate to move elsewhere, or even call you out. 

13. Deals For Best-fit Customers

Offer promotions to customers already leaning toward choosing your solution. And be honest about whether they’re a good fit for your company.

Leverage promotions for prospects who are actively moving toward a close, engaged with you in conversation and negotiation, and genuinely interested in using your product/service in their business. The result will be fewer concessions on your part, and a bigger payoff in the end.

14. Recurring Sales

Recurring sales occur during set periods, like a bi-annual basis. As you aren’t constantly running discounts and offers, customers eagerly await the sale period so they can make purchases before time runs out. Customers are also likely to spend more money to stock up on their favorite items at a lower price than other times in the year. 

15. Punch Cards

Punch cards are loyalty cards that contain a set number of icons that can be stamped or marked after a customer makes a purchase, usually in-store. When all icons are stamped, a customer receives a reward, often a percentage off of their next purchase or a free item. 

This type of sales promotion encourages customers to continue making purchases from you to receive the reward they’re offered at the end. 

16. App-exclusive Promotions 

A great way to run a promotion for your business is to run an app-exclusive promotion, where users receive deals specifically for downloading or using your mobile app to purchase your business. 

17. Sign-up Promotions 

A sign-up sales promotion involves offering a deal exclusively for new users. It can be a valuable tool to drive sales and customer acquisition, as customers may be excited to follow through if they can make an initial purchase at a discounted rate. 

18. Gift Cards

74%  of respondents to a UK survey said they spend more money than the gift card balance. Respondents to the same survey also said that gift cards inspire them to make purchases at businesses they wouldn’t normally visit. 

In terms of sales promotions, gift cards are a valuable tool in incentivizing recipients to spend more money at your business, with the bonus of new customer acquisition. If a new customer is satisfied with what they’ve bought, you’ve earned yourself a new customer and repeat business, regardless of whether a gift card is involved. 

19. Find Your Discounting Sweet Spot

Don’t offer extraordinary discounting that goes outside traditional guidelines and negatively impacts your company’s bottom line. Just because you’ll make a quota doesn’t make these discounts the right choice.

You risk losing trust with your client, attracting the wrong type of client (i.e., customers buying solely based on price instead of fit), and word getting out that these types of discounts and deals can be expected — or worse, are what your product/service is worth.

Let’s go over some expert examples of sales promotions from businesses that have used the strategy.

1. AMC Theaters — Lifestyle Discount 

AMC Theaters offers a sales promotion in the form of lifestyle discounts, where tickets are offered at a discounted rate for those over 60 years of age, and children under 12. 

Image Source

2. Uber Eats — Referral Promotion

Uber Eats offers a referral promotion where users can share a unique code with a friend that has never used the app before. The new user will receive $20 off their first order of $25, and the existing user (with the referral code) will receive $10 off an order of $25. 

3. Sephora — Recurring Sale

Sephora only runs its Beauty Insider Sale three times a year. As a result, consumers know that they can get their favorite items at a discounted price only three times per year, inspiring them to spend more money during the promotional window to stock up on their favorite items. 

Image Source

4. Taco Bell — App Exclusive Promotion

Taco Bell offers a Taco Lovers Pass, where users can get a free taco every single day for 30 days if they purchase the pass, but it is only offered to those who have the mobile app and redeem their pass through the mobile app. 

Image Source

5. Amazon — Subscription Promotion

Amazon offers a “Subscribe & Save” deal, where users will pay less money if they opt-in to a subscription for the item. In the image below, the standard cost is $12.59 USD, and if the consumer subscribes, the price is $11.95 USD. 

Image Source

Over To You

Sales promotions can be a fruitful way to close deals and build trusting relationships with prospects — just make sure you have your goals in sight.

When most people think of a social media influencer platform, they assume it involves finding bloggers with massive followings and buying social endorsements from big celebrities. Research shows, however, that it’s more effective to build relationships with the right micro-influencers and invest in an influencer marketing platform that allows for end-to-end campaign management – not just parts and pieces.

Micro-influencers tend to have more active and engaged audiences who are more likely to act on those influencers’ recommendations. In fact, 82% of consumers say they’re highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer¹. They are seen as more credible and more knowledgeable about how a product works or could be used than a celebrity spokesperson. Because niche influencers aren’t as inundated with brand pitches, it’s also much easier to access, engage, and build real relationships with these influencers.

Now which of these options would your marketing team choose: Spending time trying to force (or buy) sponsorships with big-name analysts or celebrities, or creating relationships and long-term opportunities that allow micro-influencers to do the talking for you?

The former technically falls into the display advertising bucket and, to be clear, it can be effective if your brand and budget are big enough, or your product/story is truly disruptive. But most brands would be wise to direct their resources towards tools and technology that can help partners become megaphones for their business.

– The Mini Playbook –

What To Look For In A Social Media Influencer Platform

Investing in a social media influencer platform can help your brand methodically cultivate an engaged network, generate unique share links to track activity, manage earnings and payments, and most importantly, optimize and run better campaigns.

With so many different players on the field today, we’ve put together a mini playbook of what to look for when you’re in the market for a solution. Here are four main things to consider when evaluating technology vendors.

1. Easy Enrollment

Whether your campaign is invitation-only or open to as many brand ambassadors that can fit, an influencer platform should allow you to easily build customized programs with varying types of enrollment criteria.

2. Track Engagement

One of the most attractive things about leveraging technology is its ability to do the heavy lifting for you so your team can focus on other priorities. A major must-have in a platform is the capability to manage all of your influencers on one platform and accurately track sharing activity and key performance indicators across multiple devices and social channels.

3. Reward Specific Activities

A key feature to look for in an influencer platform for social media is the ability to customize the activity – or activities – you want to reward, and automate the payout process for influencers with incentives like cash, points, credits, or gift cards.

4. Optimize and Manage

Dashboards, reporting capabilities, KPI tracking – make sure the technology enables you to pay close attention to the metrics. You want the ability to keep a pulse on what’s working and what isn’t, so that you can optimize the results and make the necessary changes to maximize your return on investment.

With influencer marketing driving millions of dollars in sales every year, it’s no surprise that it’s one of the most coveted sources of marketing. By leveraging a social media influencer platform, marketers can massively scale their influencer marketing efforts and its contribution to the bottom line. Revenue is tangible and meaningful to company executives, board members, and investors in ways that shares, tweets, and likes never will be.

The reality is that your time and money is better spent on developing relationships with bloggers, social influencers, fans, and followers — the people on the front lines who have true influence over the audiences you’re trying to target. And technology can make that simpler to manage.

[1] Experticity: Research Shows Micro-Influencers Have More Impact Than Average Consumers

Here's the recording of today's webinar on how to optimize your pricing strategy with Price Intelligently's Patrick Campbell, OpenView's Kyle Poyar and Steli.

In this webinar, we're hearing from Patrick, Kyle and Steli about their experiences optimizing startup pricing for maximum sales growth. Whether you're selling B2B or B2C, nailing your pricing strategy (for the types of customers you want to attract) is a must—and this webinar is a free masterclass in making sure you get it right.

Now... sadly, we had some technical difficulties with the recording and there's some minor video and audio loss throughout the conversation... and then at about 33 minutes in, we experienced total loss ☹️

We're still working with Zoom to see if there's another way to recover the full recording, but the odds aren't looking to be in our favor. So for now, you can watch the first 33 minutes of the webinar recording right here:

Thanks again to our co-hosts Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently and Kyle Poyar of OpenView Venture Partners.

Patrick is the founder and CEO at Price Intelligently (by Profitwell), the industry standard software to help get your subscription pricing on the right track, where customers often unlock 30%+ more growth. Built primarily for growth stage and enterprise organizations, Price Intelligently is used by companies like Lyft, Zenefits, Cisco, BigCommerce and more—to optimize their pricing for maximum growth.

Kyle is the Senior Director of Market Strategy at OpenView Venture Partners, the renowned expansion stage venture capital firm based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Portfolio companies they've invested in and advised with include Calendly, WeWork, Expensify, UserTesting and many more.

Want more webinars like this?

We're continuing this series of conversations with leading sales and marketing leaders from the world's top B2B startups. You can sign up right here for updates on our next webinar.

Who would you like to hear from next?

The Royal Bank of Canada quietly reported this month that housing costs in Metro Vancouver have reached “the worst affordability levels ever recorded anywhere in Canada.”

In this city of relatively tepid wages, the RBC says owning a home requires an “astounding 85 per cent of a typical household’s income.” That compares to 75 per cent in Toronto and roughly 42 per cent in Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa.

Royal Bank CEO David McKay last month became the latest bank head to point to how foreign wealth is contributing to unaffordabilty by “distorting” the country’s housing markets, by adding “gasoline” to them.

“We do not need foreign capital using Canadian real estate as a piggy bank.”

While numerous factors are behind the housing crisis, vested interests have attempted to craft a narrative that counters McKay and other realists. They act as if it’s xenophobic to suggest foreign capital has anything substantial to do with unaffordability in Vancouver and other gateway cities.

Their diversionary methods are not unique to Vancouver, where UBC geographer David Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants, said developers first began playing the “racist” card against affordability activists in the 1990s. Fear of the xenophobia label is why many have not publicly opposed foreign capital flowing into housing in Toronto, London and Sydney. The smokescreen has not proved so effective in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The surprising development in Canada’s housing debate has been the way top bankers have become the latest to publicly join Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, the B.C. NDP, Ontario Liberals and diverse economists and scholars in citing how billions of dollars in foreign capital is warping affordability in Vancouver and Toronto, and even nearby cities like Victoria and Windsor.

It goes without saying there are multiple causes of unaffordability, including interest rates, zoning laws and the availability of “empty” land. But housing specialists who don’t have financial self-interest at stake (and even some who do) have evidence that foreign capital, money made outside the country, is key.

Related

• Douglas Todd: Vancouver's ethnic Chinese irked by inequality, tax avoidance
• Douglas Todd: Canadians are more happy than 'xenophobic'
• Douglas Todd: Vancouverites betrayed by lax politicians

They’re simply following the former governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, who was unfortunately mostly ignored when he warned a Vancouver Board of Trade audience in 2011 that “Asian wealth” was one reason city dwellers were experiencing “extreme” prices and an “inequality crisis.”

How can advocates be truthful about the causes of unprecedented unaffordability, including non-resident wealth, without being unfairly accused of being xenophobic, which is defined as “fear and hatred of foreigners or strangers?”

How can they fight lobbyists for the real-estate industry, some B.C. Liberal politicians, Justin-Trudeau-appointed Senator Yuen Pao Woo, and the occasional academic and blogger (some of whom receive real-estate funding) who have labelled those concerned about foreign capital as fomenters of fear of a “Yellow Peril?”

The best thing is to keep focusing on evidence. It is significant when executives in Canada’s banking industry, who otherwise champion economic globalization, openly admit how destructive foreign capital has been for hundreds of thousands of would-be home buyers.

It is hard for anyone from the political right or left to ignore the declarations of, for instance, The National Bank of Canada, which said “almost $13 billion was spent by Chinese investors in Vancouver” in one recent year alone.

Economist Benjamin Tal of CIBC World Markets also confirmed Ontario’s government had no option but to bring in a foreign-buyers tax. And BMO Financial Group chief Douglas Porter said “foreign investors are a very big part in driving” the market in Vancouver and Toronto, especially for single-family dwellings and high-end condos.

Significantly, the “gasoline” metaphor adopted by the Royal Bank’s McKay is much like the one Vancouver activist Justin Fung, of HALT (Housing Action for Local Taxpayers), has been trying to get out for years.

“I have always made the analogy that local speculators are the firewood and the foreign investors, money launderers and fraudsters are the fire starter. The fire would have burned either way, but with the fire starter added, it creates a fireball,” Fung said.

Still, HALT, whose members are roughly half people of colour, has had to counter fake accusations that it claims foreign capital is the “only” cause of astronomical prices. Ethical analysts know speculation, with both foreign and domestic capital, is key to why housing prices have no correlation to local wages.

So is high in-migration, including by immigrants bringing in wealth made offshore, says Tal. And so are urban density rates, even while the recent census shows the City of Vancouver has the highest density of any city in Canada and one of the lowest portions of people in single-family homes on the continent.

To be clear, it is not just development industry apologists who cite the dangers of xenophobia. UBC sociologist Nathan Lauster, author of The Death and Life of the Single-Family House, posted a blog this year with the stark warning that “anti-foreigner rhetoric is the handmaiden to fascism.”

Lauster, who does not receive funding from the development industry, said this week that even though he would like to “possibly limit the speed and quantity of flows of capital around the world … the left-wing progressive move is to talk about capital and wealth flowing into the city’s housing, without too much concern over its nationality.”

But it’s hard to find Canadians who target foreign people themselves. In general, Canadians have done a standout job of sticking to facts and avoiding stranger fear. One measure of that is the UN’s recent World Happiness Report, which found Canada is “the fourth most accepting country for migrants.”

SFU planner Andy Yan adds that Chinese-Canadians are as worked up as anybody about “wealth-based immigration” expanding the gap between the house-rich and rent-poor in this metropolis of 2.5 million, in which one in five people have Chinese origins.

Fung agrees with Lauster that “by definition blaming foreigners is kind of silly.” But Fung emphasizes it’s not OK to “be naive about Chinese economic soft power” in housing markets. “It’s something we need to talk about. The problem is foreign wealth and much of this wealth can be attributed to China.” 

Upwards of 100,000 wealthy foreign nationals have moved in recent years to Metro Vancouver, Fung said, “and effectively bought their citizenships via the (now defunct) immigrant investor programs, or continue to do so through the Quebec Immigration Investor Program.”

The “fire starter” of foreign capital has in turn fuelled domestic speculation. “We should look at ‘locals’ as well as ‘foreigners,’” said Fung, who supports the B.C. government’s broad anti-speculation taxes. “Whether it is millionaire migrants or ‘old stock’ locals who are speculating on housing, we need to deal with the problem.”

dtodd@postmedia.com

Follow @DouglasTodd

 

MORE RELATED: Why we need to debate immigration economics: SFU’s Sanjay Jeram

Is China bursting Vancouver’s real estate bubble, at the high end?

Douglas Todd: BC mayors start to combat speculation in housing

 

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Marketers have long dreamed about the possibility of communicating with customers and prospects at the individual level. But one-to-one communication isn’t achievable without technology that can collect, interpret and act on data in real time to select the most relevant experience for each individual. Today, the technology exists to make the one-to-one dream a reality. But how are marketers leveraging that technology within their marketing strategies? What does that state of personalization look like today?

That’s what we set out to discover in our fifth annual study with Researchscape International, 2018 Trends in Personalization. The report, which is based on a survey of 300 B2B and B2C marketers from organizations of different sizes and industries conducted in February and March of this year, examines marketers’ attitudes, usage, results and future plans relating to personalization. We compiled some of the key findings in this stat-filled infographic.



Building on the trends we saw last year, marketers certainly see the value that personalization brings to their customer experiences. We found that 98% of marketers believe that personalization advances customer relationships — with 74% believing it has a “strong” or “extreme” impact. As a result, 92% of marketers using personalization report employing it in at least one channel, and 97% plan to maintain or increase their personalization budget this year.

Yet marketers aren’t quite satisfied with this level of adoption and investment. The majority (77%) believe that personalization should be a bigger priority in their organizations — and this number is up four points from last year.

It’s also apparent that marketers don’t feel the industry has cracked the code on personalization just yet, as 69% feel that marketers, on average, are not getting personalization right. More than half (55%) don’t feel they have the data and insights necessary for effective personalization, while a quarter (27%) do not have any of their channels connected.

While marketers are still working through the challenges of bringing data sources together and sorting out their omnichannel strategies, 87% of marketers using personalization report a measurable lift in results. This key finding is the main reason for all the attention being paid and resources being applied to personalization programs.

To access many more interesting findings from the survey, download the full report. To find out what these findings mean for the present and future state of personalization, sign up for our live, 30-minute webinar tomorrow, April 26.

It’s a generally accepted truth that if you want more traffic, you just need to create more content. More blogs and website pages mean more opportunities for people to find your website. But what if I told you that isn’t true, that all more content really means is that you have more content.

More importantly, what if I told you that there was another way to boost your blog traffic? Spoiler alert, it’s all about auditing and optimizing your old content, and if you read ahead, I’ll explain how it helped us get more traffic while doing less writing.

Why the More = More Myth Persists

I’ve seen the analytics for a lot of companies that publish a lot of content, and there’s the consistent theme. If you write a lot of content, eventually you’ll find a golden nugget. It’s these magic bullet blog posts that keep us in the mindset that if we just keep writing more, eventually we will strike gold again. This mentality is an ever-lingering “best practice” from the early days of SEO.

One particular example sticks out in my mind. There was a company in the filtered water industry that had written hundreds of blogs and of all but one of the blogs they’d written had under 200 views. That one other blog post had more than 187,000 views. It outperformed the rest of their website combined.

The truth of the matter is that this method is a complete gamble. It’s possible that you could write thousands of other blog posts and never write anything that reaches this level of success.

So… What Should I Do Instead?

The truth is that we are all competing for the same spaces on the internet, and your only option is to be better than your competition. So, it’s not enough to write a semi-interesting, 400-word blog post that doesn’t help answer your customers’ questions. Creating long-form, in-depth content can feel daunting, but if you already have a library of blog content, then you probably have the tools you need to get started right away.

Here are some steps you can follow that will help you take your content from no man’s land to a thriving hub that drives new traffic:

1. Deal with Dead-Weight Posts

Believe it or not, your collection of underperforming blog posts can actually hurt your website traffic. Think of it like a layer of dust in your attic that makes it harder for search engines to understand what’s valuable and what’s trash.

The first step in your content spring cleaning is to look at your least successful blog posts. I know that seems counter-intuitive but stick with me. Spend some time looking at your analytics to see which posts have driven the smallest number of views in the last 12 months, especially keep an eye out for ones that have had no views at all.

Take a look at each of these posts and do some evaluation:

• Is there good information there or is it all completely outdated and unhelpful?
• Is there anything that could be easily updated to make it useful for your target audience today?
• Does this post have internal or external links that you need to be aware of?
• Is there a better, more current blog about this topic on your site already?

Once you’ve vetted through your blogs, don’t be afraid to unpublish blogs that bring little value. Old announcements, outdated services, etc. Just get rid of them. You CAN delete blog posts. It’s OK. Just make sure that you are creating the right redirects and saving any content that might be useful in another post.

In fact, there are many companies and bloggers (StoryTeller included) that have found deleting old blog posts has helped create a clearer picture of what your website content has to offer.

2. Check for Keyword Cannibalization

The second step is to look at all the posts that are targeting the exact same keywords. If you are like most companies, you probably have over 20 blogs that all use the exact keyword phrase for your core products and services.

Most of the time, this is hurting your results rather than helping. In a lot of cases, search engines don’t have any signals from your website or external sources that help them understand which of your posts are the most relevant to a certain topic.

Search within your blog tool or use the site search function in Google to identify blogs that are written on the exact same topics.

Take inventory of every blog on each topic and group similar content together. In some instances, this might be broader topics that use different keyword phrases, like every post that talks about calculating the cost or pricing of your service. For others, it might be literally blogs that use the exact same keyword phrase. Most likely, your old content will have a combination of both.

Use a spreadsheet and organize your blogs by keyword/topic and then include links to every blog post that matches this topic below as well as the total number of views to this blog and if it has internal links or external links. Once you’ve categorized all of your similar blog posts, you can use the strategies below to improve this content to drive more results.

3. Combine Together Your Best Performing Posts

Take a look at the list of blogs you’ve compiled. Analyze the results to determine which post has the most value to Google right now. Generally speaking, this will be the post with higher views and more external links. While the internal links matter, it’s easier for us to update those to help with our new posts moving forward.

Use your judgment to choose the best blog, but know there might not be a “right” answer. Sometimes, you could make an argument for multiple blogs. Don’t spend too much time overthinking it.

Start with a single blog post. Look at all the other blogs that you have under the same topic and add in any relevant, helpful, or missing data. You may have to rework the structure to make them all work together.

Once you’ve updated the content, don’t be afraid to rework your title and URL to better match the new content. It can be helpful to change your URL to simply be “yourdomain.com/keyword-phrase.” Not only does this help give a very clear keyword signal to search engines, but it makes it easier for you to update the title in the future as your content evolves. As an added bonus, it will help stop you from creating more duplicate content in the future.

Once your updated content is live, unpublish your other contributing blogs and redirect them to your new updated blog post. Make sure to update those other posts that had the old links to them, as well.

4. Create a Content Pillar

Content pillars are the best way to combine all of your knowledge on a single topic into an all-in-one resource that attracts and educates your target audience. The basic idea is that by combining high-level information about a topic on one page and then linking out to longer, more in-depth articles on each subtopic, you can create an ultra-useful guide that works both for search engines and real people.

We’ve written a lot about how and why to create content pillars on our blog before, so we won’t go into super specific detail in this post, but you can check out our other posts if you need more info.

5. Get Clear with Your Internal Linking Signals

This is an important step in the process that a lot of people miss. Search engines use your internal linking structure as a key way to understand how your content fits together. Once you’ve finished updating a piece of content, go back and do another site search of your website. Type into the Google search bar “site:yourwebsite.com” and “your keyword phrase.” Look for all the instances on your website where you use that phrase and make sure it links to your updated blog post.

Basically, this is telling search engines, “Hey! See this page? Any time someone searches for ‘your keyword phrase,’ this is the right page to show them on my site.”

That’s good, we want that.

6. Set Aside Time to Build Backlinks or External Links to Your Content

Now that your website clearly points people to the right place for each keyword term, the only way to keep increasing the reputability of that page is by having other websites validate that this is a valuable resource for a specific search term.

Set aside time to do guest blogging or reach out to other partners to try to get more links to your site. The more links to a single page, the better. This is a time-consuming process, but it WILL help your results.

There are a lot of strategies out there about how to get new backlinks. Once you are ready for this step in the process, check out resources detailing the skyscraper technique, broken link building, and guest blogging as strategies to build your backlinks.

Conclusion

So, the truth of the matter is that this strategy still takes a lot of work. But our organic blog traffic has more than doubled as a result of doing this kind of work on our own blog. Remember to keep an eye on your data and look for signs that your blogs are starting to perform better. It might take several iterations to get your blog performing how you’d like it to.

Content in the digital world is never done. Just keep making it better, more helpful, and more strategic.

Congratulations on setting up a business blog! Take a well-deserved moment to pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Then, settle in to begin the next phase – learning how to maintain a blog that will drive traffic to your website, generate new leads, and ultimately help establish your brand as a mainstay in its industry. As a budding blogger, don’t let the future scare you. Take things one step at a time with this five-part series. Welcome to Part 1: Generating Ideas. Here you’ll learn all about the wide world of blog topic generating before moving on to the next step: integrating other channels.

The Importance of Creating New Content Regularly

You might assume it’s enough to simply have a blog on your business’s website. Do you really need to spend the time and energy to crank out new posts consistently when your readership basically consists of past clients and family members? The answer is a resounding yes. Creating new, unique, original content on a regular basis is critical to the success of your blog as a marketing tool. Otherwise, you might as well not have started a blog at all.

Keep in mind that your blog is just one cog in the marketing wheel. Maintaining your blog with new posts weekly, biweekly, or even more often (HubSpot research shows that blogs with 16 or more new posts per month see almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish zero to four monthly posts) is the task you must complete to make your blog a beneficial part of your marketing strategy. Roll up your sleeves, put in the work, and start brainstorming blog ideas, because research proves that frequent posts are the way to your readers’ hearts.

How Do Bloggers Come Up with New Ideas?

It shouldn’t surprise you that blogging, like all aspects of marketing, has certain rules that make it work. Generating blog ideas takes as much data-driven research as it does creativity. You need both to successfully come up with a running gamut of blog ideas that will pack a punch. First, tackle the research portion. Ask yourself the right questions about your audience and then use keyword research and other methods to come up with answers. The basic step-by-step process may look something like this:

1. Use keyword research tools like the Google Keyword Planner to generate plenty of keywords and phrases to use in your blog posts. Ask yourself what your audience wants to know and how you can fill this niche.
2. Brainstorm a list of titles that grab attention. Don’t think too hard about them – they can be working titles until your team polishes them up. Just make sure they set your article apart from the slew of others that will pop up during a search.
3. Gauge the level of user engagement on similar topics or amongst competitors. Look at the number of comments, likes, and social shares the topic has garnered in the past to see if it will be worth the investment for your business to write about.
4. Add value to your content. Start searching for facts, information, news, and statistics that will add value to your blog post. In other words, don’t publish a post just for the sake of the act itself. Remember that your blog will only succeed if it provides valuable information to readers.

Next comes the dollop of creativity. Blogs give you a certain amount of freedom in content that other pages of your website typically do not. Readers expect blogs not only to inform, but to entertain. For this reason, creativity, comedy, drama, and storytelling are more encouraged in blog posts than other types of content. Your blog should have a distinguishable voice; a tone that sets you apart and flows with your brand. If you struggle with creativity, don’t worry. Many companies opt to create a team of content writers to help pool ideas and brainstorm together. In fact, around 61% of the most effective marketers schedule weekly meetings to come up with fresh blog topics.

3 Blog Topic Generating Hacks

You didn’t think blogger moguls like Neil Patel come up with thousands of poignant blog topics all on his own, do you? Of course not! Everyone could use a little help when it comes to thinking up new content ideas. Now that you have the basics of blog topic generating down, hone your practice with a few tips and tricks seasoned bloggers have come to rely upon. Here are some of the top ways bloggers mine for content gold nuggets:

1. Online tools. Blogging isn’t a new resource. In the decades since blogs first hit the interwebs, hundreds of tools have cropped up to help bloggers. One such tool is the HubSpot Blog Idea Generator. As the name implies, this online tool will help you create blog topics when you plug in a few terms or ideas you’d like to write about.
2. Google News + keyword search. The Google “News” tab is extremely handy when it comes to writing about the latest trends in your industry. Plug in the keywords you found through analytics and press the “News” category at the top of the search bar. You’ll immediately see pages of articles and topics that just hit the web.
3. Spy on the competition. That’s right – some of your best new blog ideas might come straight from the website of your top competitor. Browse the blogs of a few of your rivals and see what topics they’re touching on and how users are receiving them. While you should never copy a blog word for word, perusing adversaries’ blogs can be enough to get your own creative juices flowing.

The goal is to establish your blog as a resource your target audience will come to depend on for trustworthy, reliable, and hot-off-the-press information about your industry, product, or services. Your blog should resonate with your readers or your desired readership, presenting a constant stream of valuable information they can take with them, use, and share with others. Even if you don’t see an enormous audience right away, trust that if you built it, they will come.

If there are areas of your demand generation programs draining your resources, it’s wise to consider the best ways to take the weight off your team.

Many manual, time-consuming marketing problems can be solved with technology; the right marketing tech will simplify complex tasks and improve results, such as by helping you meet new data-privacy compliance requirements or automating time-consuming lead data processing.

Unfortunately, MarTech can’t cure a lack of talent, substitute for broken processes or make up for a bad B2B marketing strategy. Depending on your specific circumstances, outsourcing certain demand gen activities to an agency or consultant may be good choice.

Read on to see whether any of the these seven demand generation services may be right for your team’s needs.

7 Winning Demand Generation Services

Service #1: Lead Generation

2017 HubSpot research states that lead generation is a top challenge for 63% of marketers.

The success of a demand generation program isn’t just measured by the volume of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) generated; the quality of those leads matters, too. And, no matter how you slice it, it’s not easy to get that quality. It’s especially difficult when you’re struggling to scale your results, managing multiple campaigns across an ever increasing number of demand generation channels to grow sales pipeline and marketing-influenced revenue.

With expert guidance into which of hundreds of engagement tactics is the best choice for your organization, you can reach the right B2B decision-makers and accounts in both local and international markets.

The right type of service can lead your program toward an approach uniquely blended to reach your program goals, using insights from leading data providers. The multichannel campaigns you need could mix programmatic display and third-party lead generation to support your account-based marketing (ABM) efforts. Speaking of which…

Service #2: Account-Based Marketing

Are you looking to fine-tune your demand generation strategy with account-based marketing?

ABM involves identifying and targeting key account decision-makers. The right approach to building an ABM strategy starts with establishing a solid criteria for account- and persona-based targeting.

While specific types of software for ABM can help demand generation marketers sync up data from multiple sources to find and engage target-account decision-makers, ABM services can further help you execute your strategy. With ABM campaign templates, tools to connect your campaigns with qualified lead sources and real-time performance monitoring, such services can help ensure your ABM programs live up to expectations.

Service #3: Event Data Management

Live and virtual events are undeniably expensive. Are you able to measure and demonstrate a return-on-investment from your event marketing?

68% of B2B marketers used in-person events as a marketing tactic in 2017, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s report 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends. 36% consider it crucial to the success of their program, according to the same research.

One of the most significant challenges to maximizing the potential returns on events is associated with data management. Such as translating spreadsheets of data from registration forms and business cards into contact records in the CRM.

Manual processing is massively time-consuming and can inhibit successful follow-up with leads in a timely manner.

Event data management services for B2B marketers provide the technology needed to automate event lead processing, including the standardization of data formatting and filtering of leads by qualification criteria. It automates lead routing by assigning leads to the right channel based on your standards; it enhances your data with trustworthy third-party insights and enables rich event performance measurement.

Service #4: Global Data-Privacy Compliance

Expanding data-privacy regulations are overwhelming many B2B marketing teams, especially with the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) right around the corner. Such regulations dictate how B2B marketers should be approaching topics such as consent and opt-ins?

The compliance climate is definitely challenging, and regulatory requirements are changing rapidly. Over half (53%) of enterprises expect to spend slightly or significantly more on achieving and demonstrating compliance over a 12-month period, according to the Thomson Reuter’s Cost of Compliance report. One-third (33%) expect additional requirements to arise in 2018.

Services designed to help B2B marketers manage the pressures of the GDPR and other global data privacy compliance requirements can allow you to maintain demand gen program velocity, without being slowed down by the steep requirements and steeper risks of new regulations.

The right service may guide you through collecting the GDPR’s required agreements from your third-party vendors, including customization by region and industry. It should also help navigate the complexities of new opt-in requirements and meet all the necessary points with consent language for each campaign.

Service #5: Top-of-Funnel Optimization

Multichannel demand generation programs span many different paid and owned channels, from events to third-party lead gen to search and social media targeting. Commonly, B2B marketers face increasing pressure to scale the channels used in a campaign and struggle to achieve any sort of visibility across the top of the marketing funnel.

The right solution for orchestrating demand generation and automating efforts at the top of the funnel should address efficient campaign and source management:

Campaign Management

• Campaign templates to quickly modify and duplicate existing efforts
• High-level and drill-down monitoring of historic and live campaigns
• Tools for unified management of targeting criteria and campaign assets

Source Management

• Centralizing lead sources across inbound and third-party, digital and non-digital channels
• Budget allocation and pacing tools
• Real-time and historic measurement across lead sources

Service #6: Lead Processing & Routing

While B2B marketers can benefit from highly sophisticated technologies that enable predictive analytics and remarketing, many are still spending hours each week doing manual tasks that could easily be automated.

One of the most common areas of demand generation programs we encounter that could benefit heavily from automation services is lead processing and routing.

Many marketing teams spend dozens of hours each month manually reconciling lead data from different sources, in different formats and may be missing crucial fields. Getting data ready for upload is a time-consuming nightmare and the lack of automation in this process contributes heavily to the lead data quality issues plaguing the CRM and MAP of many organizations.

The technology exists to automate processing, including quality checking, standardizing formatting and consolidating delivery to your MAP and CRM.

Services to streamline your lead routing and processing can also improve the results of your marketing-qualified lead generation by automating routing to the right nurturing track or sales representative, ensuring you’re able to follow-up before your competition.

Service #7: Real-Time Optimization and Measurement

There’s a lot at stake if you rely on historic performance measurement, looking back at future results. You can’t win back budget lost on lead sources that performed poorly or content that just didn’t click with your target prospects.

Since demand generation is measured with full-funnel metrics, marketers need real-time, full-funnel visibility into performance. More importantly, B2B marketers need this visibility without having to spend hours crunching and consolidating data from disparate sources.

Services for real-time optimization and measurement should allow B2B marketing programs to import data from the MAP and CRM to be viewed in a unified dashboard, allowing marketers to view the real-time progression of leads and opportunities through the funnel.

Services for real-time measurement also allow demand generation programs to benefit from in-flight campaign optimization. By understanding what’s working from the moment an ad campaign is launched, you can make the most of your budget by removing the worst-performing lead sources, adjusting your budget, swapping out content or improving your targeting parameters.

Create Efficiency with the Right Demand Generation Services

While hiring a high-end strategy consultant may be a great idea if you require help with strategy, your team may benefit more from the efficiencies available in the form of a monthly software subscription. Services that create automation in your program and take the weight of manual tasks off your talent can provide dozens of hours each month in recovered efficiency, allowing you to invest talent, resources and energy where it counts.

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Have you ever ended up on a company’s email list and for the life of you couldn’t recall ever subscribing or filling out any sort of form on that company’s website? Alternatively, have you ever looked at a list of new contacts added to your marketing automation system or CRM and noticed there were new contacts that were added via “offline sources?” If you’re like me, you probably answered “yes” to both of these questions—or perhaps you haven’t been paying attention, and answered that you don’t know. Here at SmartBug, our marketing strategy is 100% inbound, but that doesn’t mean every new person we meet has gone through the ideal process of submitting a form on our site. Here are some typical reasons you might see new contacts pop up from offline sources, even when you’re executing true inbound:

You’ve Been Introduced to a New Member of a Future Customer’s Buying Committee.

Say that Steve Smith at ACME Corporation is searching for help that your company can offer, so he fills out a decision-stage form on your website. Before you know it, you’ve scheduled a meeting to further discuss his needs. However, Steve’s not the only person on his team affected by this need, so he invites his marketing colleague, Patti Prince, to the call. Patti joins Steve in his office, chiming in periodically throughout the call, making her an active member of the company’s buying committee. Being a thorough salesperson, you add Patti to the company and the deal in your CRM. Yes, Patti is engaged in the sales process, but her buyer journey is different from Steve’s. While Steve may have been nurtured by your marketing programs for the last few months after downloading an e-book or attending a webinar, Patti literally just met you and needs to be treated that way.

Your Tech Stack Is Wicked Smart.

Many tools today, including HubSpot’s Sales Hub, have integrations with Gmail and Outlook that allow email communications to be automatically logged on the company, contact, and deal record in your CRM. From a salesperson’s or sales leader’s perspective, this is awesome. All communications with that future customer are saved in one, easy-to-find place. There’s no question of whether you remembered to respond to the customer or vice versa. From a marketing perspective, the only issue is that if an individual who was not already in your database is cc’d on an email, now that person is a new contact in your CRM.

Here’s what you’ll see if you use HubSpot and drill into original source data of your Contact record:

The same is true for an individual who has used one of your meeting booking links to schedule time on your calendar. Whether you’re using HubSpot Meetings, Calendly, or any number of other tools now available that integrate with your Google or Outlook calendar, when an individual books time with you, if you have that calendar integrated with your CRM (and there are countless benefits to doing so), that person is added to your database. Yes, she has agreed to meet with you, but that doesn’t mean she’s interested in your email newsletter.

Your source data will look like this if someone is added to your CRM via a Meetings link in HubSpot:

Another example of brilliant tech is Sigstr. Here at SmartBug, we’ve been having a blast testing out prospect, customer, and internal-facing campaigns with Sigstr’s HubSpot-integrated platform (more to come on that experiment later). As you can see below, the graphic in my signature line piqued Layla’s interest. When we were emailing back and forth about something actually non-business-related, Layla clicked on my signature graphic and was added to our database as a new Subscriber.

All of these are very honest examples of how someone could experience the feeling of “being spammed,” even though you’re executing an inbound marketing strategy. Of course, if you’ve ever purchased an email list, traded a list of leads with a partner, or even manually added your LinkedIn contacts to your CRM so you can keep track of your social selling activities—a person who has connected with you on LinkedIn has not agreed to receive webinar invitations from your marketing team—it’s important that these contacts are also suppressed from external marketing automation activities.

So, how do you keep it kosher and ensure you’re respecting the rights of your future customers? Marketing automation is a powerful tool, so use it!

First of all, you should be able to automatically suppress out a unique individual or anyone from a specific company by their domain. Here’s an example of HubSpot’s “Never Log”: By using an asterisk followed by an email domain, I can make sure we’re not logging every email on staff contact records at SmartBug Media.

Between you and me, I discovered this setting in HubSpot after I inadvertently added a private Google Groups distribution list to our CRM (so embarrassing!!) and was searching for a safety net to ensure it would never happen again.

In addition to the “Never Log,” you should use workflows to add specific types of new contacts to suppression lists. In the example shown below, if a new contact is added to the CRM by way of being included on an email via Gmail, or by way of booking a meeting online, that person is added to a smart list called “SUPPRESSION: Added via sales.” The marketing team knows to always suppress this list when sending any sort of email campaign.

It’s also important to ensure that these contacts are not added to any automated lead nurture campaigns. You can do this by removing them from all other workflows, as seen below:

Now that you’ve spam-proofed your marketing automation platform, you need to use that same powerful system to unlock the gates when a contact organically changes status. In the example shown below, when a member of the suppression list fills out any form on any website page, he is removed from the suppression list and will be nurtured appropriately based on his actions moving forward.

In the “Performance” and “History” tabs on that workflow in HubSpot, you can then see how many of your contacts transitioned from a suppressed to non-suppressed status, and you can drill down to see the activity the contact completed to trigger the suppression list removal, such as registering for a webinar or requesting a consultation.

While all of the examples in this blog show you how to manage your database via HubSpot, any marketing automation platform should allow you to do the same—but it likely won’t feel as intuitive or look as crisp and clean. I love using HubSpot for its ease of use and logical layout. I was an English major (not a Computer Science major), and I appreciate having the simple power at my fingertips to develop and manage sophisticated sales and marketing processes that ensure I’m keeping my future customers (and not my own conveniences) at the forefront of all of our sales and marketing campaigns.

The beauty of these workflows is once you’ve established one, you now have a model for other events that will inevitably emerge over time as the sales and martech landscape grows and matures. I’d love to know if you’ve found yourself in an automation pickle lately that I didn’t address in this blog. Send your issues my way!

B2B and B2C companies alike are investing more and more into lead generation. All in order to increase the number of sales opportunities.

Previously, lead quantity used to be the most important goal. The more leads in your lead funnel — the more sales opportunities you have, right?

But as many companies have seen, quality has become more important than quantity.

With 61% of B2B marketers sending all leads straight through to sales, but only 27% of those leads being qualified, a significant amount of time is being spent by salespeople reaching out to leads who aren’t ready to close.

A lead needs to be identified correctly as ready-to-close before they are even engaged during that final sale step.

Before you jump right into attempting to close a lead, make sure that the lead is actually ready to make a sale — otherwise, you could push leads into a level of the sales funnel they’re not prepared for. Pitching someone who’s not ready loses a deal that could have otherwise been won.

This brings in our key term — sales opportunities. What is that? Here’s a quick definition:

Sales Opportunities: Those leads in the funnel that have shown enough interest to be a potential sale.

To begin with, the lead needs to be qualified as sales-ready. Then, they’ll receive a lead score based on their actions and suitability for close. Finally, they’ll be sales-qualified, and a final conversion from lead to a customer can take place.

Sales opportunities are those leads in the funnel that have shown enough interest to be a potential sale.

Step One: Is Your Lead Qualified?

You can really split a sales-qualified lead into two camps: Inbound or Outbound. Let’s take a quick look at both.

Inbound Sales Funnel

A sales-qualified lead is someone who has been vetted and is ready to speak with a salesperson. These people have purchasing power, and are prepared for engagement from a salesperson. Before they are marked as sales-ready, however, they have to meet specific requirements.

The level of engagement of your leads will be a big indicator of their position in your sales funnel.

If the lead has just visited your website a single time, or just followed your business on social media —they may not be ready. That said, if they’ve downloaded a product or requested more information, then their engagement level will show they’re ready for a discussion with a salesperson.

The steps a lead goes through to become close-ready are usually;

1. General or passive lead (they’ve taken/shown interest).
2. Marketing-qualified lead (MQL) (they’ve downloaded your eBook or some other type of deeper action).
3. Sales-qualified lead (they’ve returned to your website multiple times, have opened your emails every time, or have downloaded multiple sources of content).
4. Finally, a conversion, or closed-won. Or, a closed-lost (which better qualifying helps you keep these down).

Outbound

Outbound is actively looking for those who fit into your ideal buyer persona (or ideal customer profile) and doing outreach. Inbound comes to you via marketing/content/seo. You (or your sales team) goes after leads who are pre-picked.

If you have not already created an Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP), now’s the time. Your sales team should have a specific idea of the buyer personas that make up your target leads when they’re prospecting.

Specific Firmographic information such as job title, industry, company size and revenue, geography, and rank level (such as Purchasing Coordinator vs. Purchasing Manager) all go into creating that ICP. Once you have the information of the lead, and it matches your ICP, you can find the leads that seem to like what you sell.

Then, it’s just a matter of figuring out if they’re a fit in terms of budget and timing.

Note: Buyer profiles are great for inbound, too. Once leads enter your funnel you can match them up to the profiles and see which ones are more likely to buy. You can then change up your process and segment it to close more deals.

To determine if your lead is qualified, answer these three questions:

1. Is this lead the primary decision-maker? Or does this lead have purchasing power?
2. Is this lead ready to buy?
3. Is this lead the right fit for our products? (Do they have the budget, authority, need, and time?)

Make sure your marketing efforts and your sales efforts are aligned to the same goal and collecting the same information.

Research: A study by the Aberdeen Group showed that sales and marketing teams who worked closely together were able to achieve 20% revenue growth annually. Teams who weren’t working in harmony saw revenues decline by 4% — which means a cohesive plan will increase sales opportunities.

Generate more sales-qualified leads

Are your leads coming up short? Try:

• Using more specific qualifying questions, like custom questions on sign-up forms or specific questions in your cold email and even on the phone.
• Scoring your leads early (in the inbound marketing phase) before they’re passed to sales.
• Splitting your lead funnel by type (i.e., by email marketing, content download, outbound, etc.)
• Nurturing your leads further via content. For outbound, if they don’t respond, try again in 3-6 months.
• Revising your keywords to be more specific to your product (inbound). Or, try to add steps to your outbound process, like sending a direct mail piece to go along with your email/calls.
• You can also fill your funnel with verified leads that fit your profiles.

If your lead needs more nurturing, remove them from the list of final, sales-qualified leads. And put them back into a lead nurturing campaign. For outbound leads that don’t respond, put them in an inbound funnel to see if they open/click anything down the road.

These leads are at a level in which they need more engagement, information, and content that makes them want to take action further or engage with the company further.

Step Two: Score Your Leads (inbound specific)

Once your leads have been identified by Marketing and passed to Sales as qualified, it’s time to score them. The idea is that each piece of data that the lead aligns with in relation to your ICP gets a point. And the higher the point-value of the lead the better sales opportunities the leads become.

Set your minimum lead score that a lead must attain to be sales-ready. If you have ten key data points that must be addressed before a lead is sales-ready, set a minimum score (say, 7 or 8 points) that a lead can be before they are sent back to marketing for further nurturing.

Some examples of identifying actions and data that can be scored include:

• Page views — how many pages on your site has the lead visited?
• Site searches — have they searched your site for specific content?
• Email opens/clicks — have they downloaded content from your site and opened it? Have they signed up for your e-newsletter and open it every time?
• Nature of downloaded content — i.e., has the lead downloaded an eBook or pricing guide that is specific to your company and product?
• Company-specific information — does their company’s industry, size, and location match your ICP, and will the lead be a good fit for your sales opportunities?
• Job position — is this person in a position in which they can make purchasing decisions?

During the lead scoring and lead qualification process, narrow down what problem the lead is having that your products are the solution to. The more specific of a product or service you can offer the lead, the more likely they are to trust your salesperson — after all, the salesperson is trying to help their life, not sell them something they’re not already interested in.

The more specific of a product or service you can offer the lead, the more likely they are to trust your salesperson.

Outbound Note: If a lead responds to your email or clicks-through on the offer — consider them qualified for a call (or at least a personal follow-up email). Also, if they open but don’t engage, send them a personal email.

Step Three: Identify The Sales-Ready (Or Close-Ready) Leads

This is the step in which you bring all of the previous information together.

You have an Ideal Customer Profile, and your marketing and sales teams are working closely together to create a unified message and standard for sales opportunities. Your marketing team (or your cold email) has created engaging content that the lead has taken action on, and based on all the indicators, you’ve marked them as qualified.

The lead has been scored, and now you’re ready to make the next, all-important move: assist the lead in taking that final step in your sales funnel from “lead” to “conversion” (or customer or close).

Research: Roughly 22% of sales-qualified leads are converted into customers, according to Marketo.

That means if you’re targeting leads who are not ready to take advantage of sales opportunities, you’re wasting time and resources that could be better spent targeting action-ready leads.

Three ways to tell if a lead is close ready:

1. The lead has filled out a specific “contact us” form or has indicated interest in being contacted.
2. The lead has shown interest by interacting with a CTA, or call to action (i.e., “contact us,” “get my coupon,” “get a personalized quote,” etc.) OR: The lead has interacted with automated content (from an email, a desktop chatbot, or a phone call.)
3. The lead is in the final buying stage.

The buying stages are:

• Early — Someone who is aware of your product. But hasn’t taken one of the higher level actions in step 1 or 2.
• Mid — Leads who have taken an action from step 1 or 2. But whose lead scores aren’t high enough to qualify as sales opportunities.
• Final — Qualified leads. Have taken multiple actions from steps 1 or 2, who have a qualifying lead score and ready for a call from a salesperson.

If you put all of the previous steps into action, then you’ve developed a robust customer profile.

One that’s ready for one-on-one engagement with your salesperson. You’ve established the path they’ve taken on your site, you now know the solution your product solves for their problem, and you have their information in which you can bring a product to their attention.

Are you ready to build a custom proposal, or match the lead with the right solution your product offers? Reach out via phone or email to the lead, and try these urgency-related questions:

• When would you like this problem solved? Is this an immediate need we can help to address?
• Where does this solution to your problem rank in terms of priority and urgency?
• Would you like to hear about other solutions that address your needs? or case studies that show how similar companies have benefited from our product?

Above all else

Treat all of your sales opportunities like your best friend. They’re more than just a sale, they’re a valued, integral partner.

A consumer is more likely to make a purchase from a friend or someone they trust. So, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your company has been aligned in such a way that that familiarity and trust has been established.

If you’re not using automating scheduling in your business, you could be wasting a ton of time, energy, and resources. One of the best things to automate is your marketing funnel. Marketing should be the core outreach tool for your business. It’s how you get new customers, clients, and, business partners.

If you’ve created a sales funnel to move prospects through the process of doing business with you, why not automate it with scheduling to lighten your workload?

Here are some tips to help you get started.

Integrating Workflows

Any automated scheduling tools you use should fit in nicely into the rest of your marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter if you are using email marketing or an automation platform. Always include a scheduling link as part of the call to action in your emails.

By syncing the scheduling tool with existing tools, you will be able to trigger campaigns and automate actions as soon as your leads create a schedule. Some tools even allow you to automate the process of removing active leads from email lists.

Use Scheduling Links In Email Campaigns

Sending a series of emails to your audience?

One of the best ways to create leads is by integrating the scheduling tool with the email call-to-action. I see plenty of email campaigns where the company asks you to like their social media page or check out their latest article in the call to action.

Why not prompt people to skip those steps and schedule a call to actually start working with you? Make it easy (and automatic) for the prospect to find your scheduling link and arrange for a meeting with you.

Warm leads may jump on the opportunity to schedule time with you while other leads may need to keep moving forward in the marketing funnel before deciding to do a consult with you.

Add Scheduling Links to Other Platforms

If you have a website, ensure the scheduling tool is embedded within it. You wouldn’t have to do anything else to include the scheduling tool on your website.

In essence, the embedding can be done on any page of your website. A good example is the pricing page so that a prospect can make arrangements to speak with you or your team if they have any questions. Anyone asking about the price is not far from making a decision to buy.

Use Your Scheduling System as an Analytics Tool

Finally, use your calendar tool for analytics to further market to prospects even after your meeting.

First, you can analyze which marketing emails are leading to the most scheduled calls and make tweaks to your process.

Once you get calls on your calendar, realize that a smart calendar reinforced with AI can help you create an agenda for the call and develop an optimal amount of time for a sales meeting. It can also recognize question words and understand how often the meeting’s leader asked questions that provoked a response from other participants. This can help you figure out where people are in their journey and how to follow up or close the sale.

At the end of the day, don’t take automated scheduling for granted. Use it in conjunction with your smart calendar scheduling tool to boost your business and save you time and effort.

There are lots of ways to attract b2b leads. You can have opt-in forms, webinars, or even an extensive SEO campaign. They’re efficient, but not the best. You need to make the most out of every resource to ace your lead generation strategy. And that can be done by using the best tools designed to rake in more leads.

1. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a cloud-based tool that uses Google Analytics to show the contact information and other useful data of other brand’s visitors. This helps convert your visitors into sales leads. This one’s perfect for all B2B businesses of different sizes.

Top Features

Pipeline Management

It integrates with various CRMs such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, WebCRM, and Zoho. This adds a list of visitors to the sales pipeline every time the lead record is updated. You’ll also be notified if the lead revisits your website.

Source Tracking

This works by tracking your visitor’s browsing behavior and their visited pages. It lets you know how they’ll react. This helps you create content that’s well suited to their interest. You’ll also see the keywords used by the visitor to reach your website.

Lead Scoring and Segmentation

Your leads are ranked based on their contribution. The most promising leads are placed at the top. This helps you know which leads to contact depending on your needs. Your clients can also be filtered using different criteria. Location, browsing behavior, and source, being some of them.

What we like most

It’s great for choosing the right audience to target. You’ll see which sites they visit often and how long they stay on each site. Gauging the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy has never been easier. Leadfeeder also searches for your visitor’s contact information. Almost everything’s automated with this tool.

2. Webtexttool

Webtexttool is an SEO tool that analyses your content’s readability to help it rank on target keywords. This enables you to create high-ranking content while suggesting keywords and ideal SEO processes. You can even use this directly on WordPress and Drupal!

Top Features

Competitor Analysis

It analyses your competitor and gives you an in-depth report containing useful data. You’ll know their content strategy, page views, and targeted keywords. This feature lets you gauge which keywords are best and which audience to target.

Content Management

It lets you create SEO-wise content. It improves your readability and grammar and suggests the proper placement of keywords. You’ll also know which inbound links to use to get a higher DA.

Keyword Research Tools

Webtexttool searches for ideal keywords you can use. It suggests keywords that have high search volume, but low competition as these are the ones that rank highest. Type in a keyword and a list of short-tail and long-tail keywords is presented.

What we like most

You have a lot of options when using this software because of its feature-rich display. Despite this, using it doesn’t feel cluttered because everything is placed in its proper place. Finding the right keywords is also made easier thanks to its keyword research tool. Ranking in Google is made easier with Webtexttool.

3. Sumo Content Analysis

Sumo Content Analysis determines which part of the page your visitors stopped reading. This tool lets you tweak the page and improve its readability, and in the process, get more leads. It’s a tool designed to improve traffic and content engagement. It’s also entirely customizable and expandable thanks to its Sumo Store integration.

Top Features

Content Analysis

It analyses your content and tells which parts aren’t enticing to readers. You’ll know which parts to improve to make it more appealing to visitors. This helps turn them into leads. You’ll also rank better and get a higher DA with this feature.

Heat Maps

It presents you an illustrated feedback on what content your visitors are most interested in. It shows the most-clicked parts, which gives you an idea of what kind of content or topics to create.

Real-time Feedback

It shows you how long your visitors have stayed in your webpage. No need to wait for their comments, because you’ll easily know their preferences. Everything is presented in real-time. Hence, enabling you to make quick changes.

What we like most

The best thing about this tool is its Google Analytics integration which ensures all data are accurate and up-to-date. The interface is user-friendly and effective in maximizing your content. Its dashboard is designed to collect as much data as possible. Everything’s tucked in at the right place.

Conclusion

Producing top-notch content isn’t enough. You need to ensure it’s attracting the right viewers that can be easily converted into leads. Conversion is what you should be after, and that can be done with the tools mentioned above. Use these tools and maximize your content’s effectiveness.

Chatbots truly revolutionized the way small businesses handle customer support. Being able to provide 24-hour support with zero costs is one of the many benefits that chatbots provide for businesses.

In fact, the majority of users prefer to use chatbots to communicate with a company than using an app. 37% of Americans also prefer to use chatbots in case of an emergency to get a quick answer to their questions.

Over the last few years, there have been great advancements in chatbots and AI technology. You can now even setup your own chatbot using apps like ChatFuel and SnatchBot without writing a single line of code, free of charge.

Did you know that you can also use chatbots to generate leads, grow your email list, and boost sales? Here’s how it works.

How chatbots help generate leads

Chatbots started out as a fun way to pass time. The earliest version of a chatbot created by MIT in 1964, called ELIZA, used to simulate conversations. Today, it’s evolved much more beyond just conversations.

Biggest brands and businesses now use chatbots to boost sales and improve customer support.

Starbucks Barista chatbot helps users place orders more quickly.

eBay’s ShopBot helps customers easily find the right products and place orders.

Sephora’s Kik chatbot is another great example of using bots to improve customer shopping experience.

In addition to improving your services and customer relationships, you can also use chatbots to generate leads. Here are a few ways you can get started.

1. Engage visitors with a live chatbot

Providing live chat support is a must-have feature for every business website. Heck, even some of the popular blogs now have live chat, thanks to chatbots.

Live chat allows you to instantly engage with your website visitors by asking a simple question such as “how can I help you?” or “do you have any questions?”. Some of the live chat systems even allow you to engage with visitors by automatically launching a chat window during any step of your buyer’s journey.

How does this help generate leads? Well, imagine a visitor viewing your pricing page opens a live chat window to ask a few questions. Your chatbot answers these questions immediately.

And then, at the end of the discussion, you can share an email optin form and suggest the visitor to join your email list to receive special product discounts and get special deals.

2. Promote lead magnets with educational chatbots

One of the most common uses of chatbots is education. Many websites and brands use chatbots to answer common questions and share useful tips with customers.

If you have an educational bot, you can also leverage the bot to grow your email list by suggesting a content upgrade. For example, you can mention your upcoming webinar, an eBook, or your email courses to let people learn more about specific topics.

For example, the candy company Trolli uses its Facebook Messenger chatbot to promote fun activities for its users and also promote giveaways to spread the word about its products.

3. Help visitors make the right choice

Many of your website visitors will often have a hard time figuring out the right product, right pricing plan, or the right service by themselves. Using your chatbot, you can help them figure out the right choice by asking a few questions.

At the end of a discussion, simply ask for their email if they want further assistant so that you can have one of your team members reach out to them via email.

With the help of apps like Landbot, Zapier, and Google Sheets, you can easily collect the emails from your chatbot and export them to your email list.

4. Use booking and scheduling bots

If you have a website related to hotels, travel, real estate, coaching, or health, then you probably have a booking or a scheduling system on your website already.

Why not make the process easier for your customers by letting them make instant reservations using a chatbot?

This is exactly what Expedia’s Messenger chatbot does.

To generate a lead from a session, simply ask for an email to confirm the booking or appointment. It’s as simple as that.

Wrapping up

Convenience is the most important feature that most customers look for in a company. Thanks to chatbots, now even the smallest startups and companies can afford to answer user questions instantly or provide 24/7 customer support.

By using the tips we’ve shared, you can set up a chatbot to provide a better service to your customers while also generating more qualified leads to grow your business.

A practical guide to turn your product into your best growth tool

In my previous post Why Product Qualified Leads Are Rapidly Being Adopted In SaaS I wrote about the main drivers that led many SaaS companies to adopt a new and more effective approach to qualify prospects. That new approach hinges on leading with the product and using feature and usage as primary lead qualification metrics.

PQL vs MQL

I’ll open with an interesting fact published by SiriusDecisions with regards to marketing qualified leads (MQLs):

98% of marketing qualified leads never result in closed business.

Assuming marketing is judicious about which leads it sends to sales for follow-up, clearly MQLs are not the best way to model leads.

The traditional MQL model

In the traditional MQL model, marketing teams focus on nurturing prospects from awareness to qualified leads. The goal is for marketing to fill up the sales pipeline, and for sales to qualify these leads and convert them to opportunities. Once a deal is closed, sales passes the baton to customer success.

They use marketing automation to nurture prospects over time until they become “qualified” by a lead scoring mechanism. Usually by relentlessly emailing users or getting them to complete a form for gated content or sequence of gated assets.

But how qualified is someone just because they filled out a form or opened a few emails? Most lead scoring models give too much weight to this activity. Marketing sometimes “games the system” to achieve its MQL goals. Send enough nurture emails or run enough webinars and you’ll MQL everyone.

Many of us have been in intense meetings where sales doesn’t make their numbers, and the blame ultimately is assigned to marketing for low-quality leads.

The Customer Journey

The customer journey spans department silos: marketing, sales, customer success and — in some companies — the product team. This fragmentation makes the process more complicated than necessary, making it difficult to satisfy buyer expectations for a seamless experience. The organization tends to lose track of the buyer’s pain points and specific needs, requiring the buyer to continually explain these when interacting with different people in the company.

A fitting analogy is the telephone game where you whisper a story to a group of people one person at a time to see how much it changes by the end. A similar phenomenon often happens in an MQL-driven pipeline: the leads and opportunities you create often look very different from the target persona you built your product for. The gist of it is that “sales and marketing” alignment around MQLs can result in focus on the wrong goals.

The Emerging PQL Model

Product qualified leads (PQLs) are qualified leads that demonstrated buying intent based on product interest, usage, and behavioral data.

PQLs provide a more accurate method of tracking customer journeys from signup to cross-sell/upsell. This is a key metric for any company that’s transitioning to a product-led growth strategy.

PQL is a cross-functional framework and the models will vary from product to product and from B2C and B2B. Here are a few basic metrics gathered from product leaders:

• User and account profiles. Demographics and firmographics such as company size, industry and revenue helps sales focus on the most relevant accounts.

• Behavioral. This is about measuring and discovering key converting behaviors, including feature usage and frequency of use. An example is users that were able to complete their onboarding process or use a golden feature.

• Customer engagements. Tracking product and marketing engagements, whether it’s lead source, in-app messaging, or response to content or emails, can indicate the customer stage or how far they are on their journey.

• Package limits. Number of seats or usage thresholds can be an immediate qualification signal and generate an upsell opportunity.

• Health score. Support tickets and customer feedback can provide additional perspective for the overall qualification score.

PQL model in a product-led growth strategy

The 5 pillars to Accelerate Growth Using Product Qualified Leads

The following 5 pillars are a helpful framework for organizations wanting to accelerate growth using PQLs.

1. Become product led

Make sure marketing, sales and product teams are aligned behind the product and the core personas the product serves. You also want product leadership to make growth a high priority in product initiatives. That means assigning development resources to focus on designing features with the goal of increasing customer acquisition and retention. It also means the product team should be involved in finding ways to nurture users as they use the product.

Delivering great product experiences with every release is fundamental to driving adoption and capitalizing on your engineering investments. Using in-app engagements to onboard relevant users based on real-time behavior and the account profile is key to introducing new features in a contextual and relevant way. Product qualified leads will be influenced by effective onboarding for signup or upselling into a new feature.

2. Drive prospects to sign up

Once prospects reach a certain qualification threshold level, drive them to sign up. Or, if your product can solve an immediate need (such as Dropbox for document storage and sharing), encourage immediate sign ups.

Delivering the product experience via a demo or trial is the optimal way for prospects to realize what your product solves and how can they benefit from it. However, if you’re not providing free trials or demos, offer short videos that illustrate the value of your product. Your product is your best sales tool!

3. Establish a product-oriented sales team

Pricing model is a topic unto itself, and the right model depends on the company’s stage and target market. Due to the consumerization of B2B SaaS, we’re seeing pricing models that are a combination of free-tier to incremental upsells associated with usage and value.

Arm your sales team with the right pricing and packaging levers. Your customers should clearly see the value behind your pricing model and why they should upgrade. Set the right metrics behind features related to package limits or extended capability features as part of your PQL model.

Train your sales teams to understand the core use cases your product addresses. Your sales reps must become trusted advisors. To do that, they must truly understand buyers’ pain points and engage in use case-oriented discussions.

4. Continuously measure and onboard users

Measuring adoption and PQLs will help you learn about your customers.

Focus on the areas of the funnel that help you best address and prioritize based on what’s most impactful for your business: accelerating growth or driving retention and cross-sell. Make sure your first mile of product is optimized by measuring new signups using retention cohorts to learn converting behaviors and features. Don’t ignore marginal users as you grow your install base; the early majority will focus more on basic core features and ease of use than the early adopters.

Even if prospects see the potential and purpose of your offering, they want to know how your product will immediately benefit them when they their first use it. They want both the simple and powerful from a features perspectives, and it’s your job to find the right balance between adding more features or improving the usability and productivity of core features.

5. Democratize data

Giving your product, sales and marketing teams easy access to PQLs and product usage data is key for a successful PQL model. Data access helps expedite decision-making and uncover opportunities across teams. Data-driven discussions are much more productive than ones grounded in opinion.

---

Read the full “Mastering Product Experience: How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy” book or download PDF version.

In this book, we share what we have learned about what it takes to succeed with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. We explain how to deliver a winning customer-centric experience strategy to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to up-sell/X-sell. We show how to implement a faster and more effective product-led go-to-market strategy to meet changing customer expectations. And we share how to optimize Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by building better contextual relationships through personalized product-driven engagement.

The post The 5 Pillars for Product-led Growth using Product Qualified Leads appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In my line of work, I see a lot of different content marketing strategies and tactics. Some are definitely winners, while others are … not.

Content marketing is an incredibly powerful tool in persuading your prospect to consider your service or product offering. Research shows that 51% of B2B buyers use content when making their buying decisions, and 47% consume between three and five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

Those stats represent a huge opportunity for technology companies and organizations.

When it comes to B2B marketing in the tech sector, everyone’s got their pet peeves. In this post, I’m going to talk about the five biggest mistakes I see B2B marketers making — and how to fix them.

Mistake #1: Not Starting with a Strategy

You know that old adage: “If you’re failing to plan, you’re planning to fail.” It might sound like a cliché, but in the world of B2B marketing it’s absolutely true.

Content marketing is a long game to begin with, and with the longer sales cycle in B2B, it can take time to see results. Although 89% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing to reach their target audience, only 41% say they know what success looks like for their content marketing efforts.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

You need clearly-defined objectives and a plan to meet them.

Start with your end goal in mind (for example, generate more leads), and work backwards. Do you know who you’re writing for, and what they care about? What kind of content do they want to consume, and when? And most importantly, how will you measure success?

These are critical questions to answer when you’re planning your content efforts. Anything else is a shot in the dark, and it usually shows in the results. So begin with a plan that’s tied to your business objectives, and make sure it’s solid before you write a single word.

Mistake #2: Not Segmenting Your Audience

We all like to think we know our audience — after all, whose problems are we trying to solve? We even go so far as to develop buyer personas to help us focus on likely pain points and hidden desires.

It’s pretty straightforward in B2C marketing. You might be selling to more than one audience, but you’re usually dealing with only one decision-maker — the consumer.

But as all B2B marketers know, there are usually multiple decision-makers involved in the B2B sales cycle — and they all wear different hats. So while the CEO may be the person who signs off on the purchase order, there are many other individuals who need to buy in along the way.

You need to talk to all those people too.

According to a recent survey, 78% of B2B marketers believe that understanding the customer journey is critical to their success. And 77% said that mapping the right content asset to each stage of that journey is a key part of that strategy.

But is your content addressing the different stakeholders along the buyer’s journey?

For example, one of my clients (a software company), published a series of blog posts on how to negotiate with your boss, and get buy-in on your ideas. The articles recognized that although the reader might not have purchasing authority, they might still have influence.

Make sure you understand who has input on the buying decision, and don’t overlook that audience. They might turn out to be your biggest champions.

Mistake #3: Not Publishing Regularly

This is a tricky one. How much content is enough? How much is too much?

While I’m a big believer in quality over quantity, I also know that it’s important to stay in front of your audience to build that relationship of trust. This is especially true at the top of the sales funnel, where your prospects are likely in a stage of lesser awareness.

The key is to consistently publish content that informs your reader, without always asking for anything substantial in return. Keep in mind that great content builds a long-term relationship with your audience — so you don’t always have to be selling in your content.

Don’t hesitate to mention your product when it makes sense, however — when it fits naturally into the helpful content you’re producing. The advantage is that when you do publish content that more directly asks for the sale, it won’t come out of the blue, or seem self-serving. When you provide a steady stream of content that is truly valuable to your target audience, your brand and voice become familiar and asking for the sale doesn’t feel so pushy.

Look at the sly, yet totally organic way Evernote includes a mention of their product in this post.

A word of caution here: Publishing regularly should be part of your overall strategy, not merely a tactic (see Mistake #1). Quantity is not the same as quality, and focusing on volume alone often leads to burn out — on both sides of the relationship.

Plan out a publishing cadence that you know you can sustain, and more importantly, map out your content so that you have a holistic view of what you’re trying to impart.

Mistake #4: Not Helping Your Audience

Publishing content regularly is a commitment. But it’ll be wasted effort if you keep producing new content just to meet a deadline, without tailoring it what your audience actually needs or wants to know about.

Your content shouldn’t just be informative. It should be helpful.

Too many companies get this wrong. Some publish “fluffy” pieces that might be a fun read, but offer no practical insights on how a topic might affect the audience. Others focus on bottom-of-the-funnel content — extremely technical pieces that assume a high state of awareness (and interest) in the reader.

When you provide content that teaches your prospects something new about their industry, or gives them actionable advice on how to address a challenge, you position yourself as a trusted resource. You become their ally.

Zapier is a great example of this. They not only have an extremely helpful (and fun) blog, they also have a large collection of high-value guides.

Great content that answers the questions your prospect has in their head is really the start of a conversation. They’re not likely to take that next step in the buyer’s journey if they don’t feel you understand them or their problems.

So help them.

Mistake #5: Not Creating Evergreen Content

Finally, let’s look at another unfortunate side-effect of constantly churning out content without a plan.

In the pursuit of SEO, too many marketers get stuck on a hamster wheel of publishing new post after new post, in the hopes of climbing up that all-important first page of search engine results.

The problem is that content created solely for the purpose of “showing up” can quickly become irrelevant if it isn’t detailed, or doesn’t solve a problem. So all the effort that goes into creating it ends up going to waste.

The antidote? Evergreen content.

Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date. It’s as relevant months, even years down the road as the day you first published it. When done right, it continues to drive traffic back to your site and stays high on search engine results pages.

The best evergreen content goes beyond the surface of the topic it covers. It addresses a common problem for your audience, and provides actionable information on how to solve it.

And it builds your business’s credibility along the way.

Look at these two posts from Drip, a popular email marketing automation company. Which do you think is going to produce the longest-term value?

To build out your own library of evergreen content, start by digging into the most frequently asked questions in your industry. Are there common scenarios that come up again and again for your audience? Something that everyone in your niche seems to struggle with?

Content that addresses those pain points effectively will pay for itself many times over. And you’ll be setting yourself up as an authority in the process.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it — my list of top five mistakes that B2B marketers can stop making now to see a greater return on their marketing efforts.

To recap, if you make sure you do the following things, you’ll be in a much better position to see results:

• Start (and stick) with a plan
• Know who’s at the decision table
• Show up on the regular
• Be helpful
• Create a library of lasting content

This is not rocket science. It’s just putting your buyers at the center of your marketing efforts, in a way that recognizes what they need (instead of only what you want them to do).

Everybody wins.

Check out Ibbaka's Self Assessment Tool for Pricing Excellence

In the best companies pricing is a collaborative activity, and pricing experts need to work closely  with their counterparts in finance, product management, marketing, operations and sales. One of the most important collaborations is with sales, especially in B2B companies.

There is an old joke that

"Sales sees pricing as the revenue prevention function."

"Pricing sees sales as the margin destruction function."

This is only funny because it is so often true. To get some insight into how pricing experts should work with sales leaders, we reached out to top sales coach Reg Nordman. Reg leads sales consulting at the consulting firm Rocket Builders and has been the sales leader at a number of software companies. He has been interested in pricing issues for many years and is exceptionally well informed on the tensions and opportunities when sales and pricing people work together.

This interview is a useful counterpoint to our interviews with top pricing recruiter Chris Herbert, pricing thought leader Tim Smith and the founder of pricing strategy and value-based pricing Tom Nagle. This is part of the joint Ibbaka-TeamFit research into the skills needed for pricing expertise. If you are in Chicago for the Professional Pricing Society's spring meeting next week please join us as we present the results of this work.

Ibbaka: What are the critical challenges salespeople face around pricing?

Reg: In many companies the sales function, which is closest to the customer, does not have the authority to manage pricing. As a results, salespeople can only respond to pricing pressure by discounting. Senior management, only hears that "If we don't do something about price we will lose the deal." All the attention is on the top line and not on the profit margin.

This lack of information exchange and focus on the top line means that senior managers are not giving sales the support they need to make effective pricing decisions.

To be effective, sales needs to understand what the pricing strategy is meant to achieve. Has it been set to grow top line revenues, improve margins, drive up gross profit, grow the overall market or category share. It is hard to make good pricing decisions without understanding the goals. 

Related to this, sales needs to understand how prices are set. Is there a value-based pricing process in place? Even when there is, sales is often not aware of it. Too often, the only thing sales gets from pricing is a price list and, maybe, some rules on discounting. This does not give sales the information it needs to be a real partner with pricing.

In many companies, sales people lack the information they need to put pricing in context for their customers. There is a general lack of effective sales training in the companies I work with, and this is certainly true of training on pricing. Sales people are often left out of any pricing training the company provides and this is a big mistake.

Bad pricing puts pressure on margins, so there is no money to train sales people on pricing, so margins keep going down. This is reality in too many companies.

Ibbaka: What skills do pricing people need to work effectively with sales?

Reg: The most important thing is to get out into the field and listen to customers. You cannot craft an effective pricing strategy or set prices sitting in your office and manipulating a spreadsheet. You have to hear what customers have to say.

This means that the best pricing people are good at asking questions and then listening. Really listening. 

Pricing people talk a lot about value-based pricing, but value-based pricing does not work without value-based selling. Pricing and sales need to work together to understand how to improve the customer's business. Pricing people have to learn how to help sales people communicate value. Few pricing people actually take the time to do this.

This is really a leadership issue. The company's leaders have to spend time with their customers and prospective customers, understand how they can help create value, and then get this way of thinking into the company. Pricing people need to be customer focused. Sales needs to be value focused.

Pricing is not something you set at an annual meeting and then forget. It needs to be dynamic, responsive to changes at customers and moves by the competition.

Sales people are often criticized for always wanting to discount to close the deal. There is a simple reason for this. Salespeople are 'coin-operated,' they follow the money. If you want them to pay more attention to margins then compensate them on margins. Tom Nagle has some great points on this in The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. Sales people have no incentive to increase margin so they don't.

Ibbaka: What skills are needed to improve the collaboration between sales and pricing?

Reg: This is not really a question of skills. It needs a change in attitude. The first thing that needs to change is to have all parts of the business focussed on creating value for customers. This can't just be top down, but it does need leadership from the very top. The CEO and other leaders need to understand how the company is creating differentiated value for its customers and what the goals are as part of that value is captured in price.

We need to breakdown the barriers between different silos. One of the best ways to do this is to have pricing, marketing, product, and even finance people go along on sales calls and really listen. A lot of the best practices for this are found in account based marketing. Not everyone has the scale to adopt an account based marketing platform, like Engagio, but even small companies can implement the basics and get closer to their best customers.

At the end of the day, the most important attitude sales and pricing people can have is curiosity. You can't force people to want to know more, whether it is about customers, or pricing, or value, but the people who are naturally curious will want to find out more and put their insights to work. Get sales and pricing curious about the companies they sell to and give them a framework that helps them understand what they are learning and put it to action. 

 

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If your marketing campaigns aren't performing as well as you'd hoped, it may be that they're falling on deaf—or even alienated—ears. Here are five mistakes you need to stop making. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Recently, a student of ours asked whether “we” (content-based marketers who might prefer a more subtle approach) can learn anything from “those” marketers who use somewhat obvious tactics like silly quizzes or hyped-up headlines. In the course of answering this question, the phrase “orange hat marketer” occurred to me. (Don’t worry; this has nothing to
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