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Recently I asked some folks on LinkedIn to share their sales prospecting emails with me so that I could do some live feedback and edits.

For this particular email, I chose to just do feedback rather than edits, since I didn’t have enough context to do more serious revisions.

Take a look at my feedback to see how the sender can improve their sales prospecting email and targeting in order to get more positive responses from qualified leads.

Do you have questions about this email or other sales prospecting emails? Just ask in the comments, and I’ll try to respond directly or in my next video.

The post Quick Fixes That Will Get This Prospecting Email More Responses appeared first on Salesfolk.

Virtually every business professional will agree that a good website is highly valuable for their company. The problem, is many can’t tell you what that value is, especially in regard to sales productivity if sales cannot be traced directly back to a website.

Fortunately, you do not necessarily have to establish a direct correlation between your website and a sale to certify your site’s value. The real value of a good website lies in its ability to support the sales process and provide incentive in the form of valuable content that can encourage sales. The key, of course, is content that provides the relevant, actionable information prospects are seeking. Content that gently nudges them into engaging in a dialog with your organization and provides you with an opportunity to positively influence purchasing.

This relatively new concept of “content marketing” is perhaps most valuable in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. As business buyers make increasingly sophisticated purchases they seek out increasing amounts of information to better inform the decision-making process. With reams of data instantly available on the Web with just a few mouse-clicks, it should be no surprise that decision-making is taking longer as more information spawns more questions. That can also drag more people into the process – studies have revealed that major B2B purchasing now involves, on average, 6.8 stakeholders, up from 5.4 just two years ago.

The reality today is that, whether we like it or not, the Web drives sales. In fact, a recent Forrester study has revealed that 74 percent of executives researching purchases use the internet as their first choice for information about products and the companies that sell them. It stands to reason, then, that with the increase in the number of stakeholders involved in purchasing decisions and their preference for getting information on the Web, having a website that is optimized for sharing information is crucial.

It starts by realizing that your website can be a far more powerful tool than just a lead-generator. Designed and provisioned properly, it can be an effective marketing and sales tool at every step of the prospect’s journey from lead to customer. Content created for each phase of the sales process should resonate with prospects based on the trigger events that would cause them to seek your specific solution. As questions arise at each stage, ideally you have content ready to effectively address them. All of this content and prospects’ engagement with it will build trust in your brand and your sales team because your business and salespeople are acting as helpful, informative agents in the purchasing decision process – and not annoying order-takers simply urging the prospect to buy.

You cannot sell effectively if you do not understand your customer.

The key to being able to effectively engage your prospects and provide meaningful information throughout the sales process is thoroughly understanding who they are, their needs, and what motivates them. This is collectively known as your “target customer persona” and it is the single most important element of your entire sales and marketing effort — because if you do not understand your target audience and what they really want, you stand little chance of convincing them you have what they need.

Now, some might think that you need all sorts of sophisticated data mining software, complex algorithms, and mountains of Big Data to develop your target customer persona. You do not. You can start by talking with your top-performing sales reps. He or she should be able to provide you with some keen insights into your customers and what motivates them. After all, if they didn’t have a thorough understanding of the people they’re selling to, they wouldn’t be top performers. If your organization believes it requires outside help gathering marketing information, then a good place to start is with a buyer persona project through a reputable marketing consultant.

Once you thoroughly understand your target audience and have a clear picture of your target customer persona you’ll have a good idea of the questions they might ask in the process of considering a purchase. This will provide you with the opportunity to answer those questions through blog posts and nurturing tools such as email, social media posts and paid search that leads them back to your supporting information in a blog or an eBook.

It’s critical that your messaging and positioning statements are consistent across all platforms and communications channels –desktop and mobile, social media, paid search, even chat. Consistency helps retention, which helps recall, which helps build visibility, which ultimately helps build your brand and its value in the eyes of the customer. That’s how an efficient marketing and sales process works.

Time to look at digital marketing in a new light.

Don’t look at your digital marketing initiatives as only a lead generation activity. Consider it an integral partner with sales, much in the same way as you would view sales operations or other support staff that make your sales effort more efficient.

Most marketing platforms provide businesses with a way to trace every lead to its source. When marketing automation platforms are integrated with a sales CRM system, a business can trace the path of every sale from the first contact all the way through to the close. So, even though your digital marketing may not generate the initial contact with a client, the content it provides surely has an influence on them or one of the dozen other stakeholders at their company who has a say in the purchase.

Today, a company’s online presence can be complex, layered and nuanced. It is no longer enough to simply maintain a static website. Consumers – including B2B buyers – are hyper-connected, well-informed, and demand a rich, satisfying online experience that maximizes the availability of valuable, actionable information with minimal hassle. Traditional “analog” sales strategies will no longer work in a digital age.

Image Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo

Nobody wants more email. Yet, as a marketer you want your prospects to want more email – to want your newsletters, at least.

How do you create a newsletter so compelling that people not only subscribe to it but also continually look forward to receiving and reading it?

Scott Monty, CEO and co-managing partner at Brain+Trust Partners, has a few thoughts on this conundrum. Aside from publishing his own weekly newsletter, The Full Monty, he enjoys reading and evaluating other newsletters. He shared some of his favorites – and his reasons for liking them – at Content Marketing World in his talk How to Build and Maintain an Audience with a Remarkable Email Newsletter.

Try a little cleverness

Who says your newsletter can’t make people smile?

Scott points to The Hustle, which describes itself as “a daily email with a handful of the important stories in business, tech, and culture that you should probably know.” The Hustle makes it onto Scott’s list of favorites because, he says, “it’s brief and speaks to me in colloquial language.”

The colloquial language gives the hard facts a touch of cleverness. Here’s an example from The Hustle’s version of a story about Lyft, the on-demand ride company. The writer holds little hope that Lyft will succeed in its attempt to serve sparsely populated areas. “Will you really be able to hail a ride in the remote reaches of Alaska after a long day of ice fishing and dog-sledding?” At the end, the link to the full story on The Hustle website has this label: “Your ride will be here in 177 minutes.”

The Hustle doesn’t stick to just the facts. The editorial team throws in content that delights them. For example, Scott looks forward to the weekly section called Friday Shower Thoughts, which has all the wryness of a Steven Wright routine. Scott says, “The Hustle builds in this cadence, this expectation, so that I know what I’m going to get when I get to that section of the newsletter every Friday.”

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In your newsletters, build in a cadence so your readers know what they're going to get, says @scottmonty.
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Here’s a snippet from a Hustle story about The New York Times that caught my eye because it gives a twist to the first joke I ever heard.

This not yet 3-year-old newsletter has more than a million subscribers and boasts open rates of 40% to 60%.

Is your newsletter all work, or does it include a little play?

Deliver news in new ways

Besides providing news stories worth reading, consider how you might get inventive in your delivery.

“Quartz has one of the most inventive news apps out there,” Scott says. It delivers bite-size news in a style that mimics the behavior of text messages, complete with text bubbles that float up as if someone is speed-typing them, GIFs, and buttons that readers click to choose what happens next.

Readers have three types of choices to indicate what they want to see next:

• The small blue arrow to the right of a text bubble brings up the full story, which may be on the Quartz website or on another site.
• The blue button at the bottom left brings up a few bubbles on related stories.
• The blue button on the bottom right brings up a single bubble on an unrelated story.

As I played with the Quartz app – I mean, as I did research for this article – it took me a while to catch on to the way the two blue buttons work. The left button icons relate to the content of the preceding story. In the screen shot above, for example, the paper-and-pencil icon represents Warren Buffet’s letter, and the bag of money represents the topic of money. If you click that button, you see more Warren Buffet stories.

The button on the right (in this case, “next”) means you’re done with Warren Buffet. Clicking this button means, “OK, Quartz, what else you got?”

The IM-like delivery isn’t the only reason people have downloaded the app over 1 million times in two years. This fresh approach has certainly contributed to its success.

Another factor, according to Quartz’s Director of Communications Sona Rai, is the way the app has been showcased in the Apple app store and in Apple’s physical stores for its augmented-reality capabilities.

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The @QZ app's IM-like delivery is one reason for its 1 million + downloads. @ScottMonty Read more >>
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Tell stories you’re passionate about

It’s obvious and worth restating: Readers won’t be drawn to your content if you weren’t drawn to it first.

Josh Spector takes this wisdom to heart in his newsletter, For the Interested, another of Scott’s favorites. This newsletter – “a weekly collection of 10 ideas to help you learn, do, and become better at your work, art, and life” – points readers to recent articles that Josh has either created or curated.

His premise is simple: “I collect ideas and love to share them.” He doesn’t publish anything unless it first sparks his own interest.

When I hopped over to the website to see whether this newsletter is all that Scott made it out to be, one of Josh’s picks caught my eye: Craftsmanship—The Alternative to the Four-Hour Work Week Mindset. I read the article top to bottom, including this line: If you “think of a business as a series of hacks and transactional relationships, you’ll never amass the expertise that your future self and future businesses need to succeed.”

This piece – curated by Josh – touched something in me. The author argued eloquently for the possibility of people finding deep satisfaction in their work, as opposed to looking for ways to do less of it. I was inspired, and I was reminded of the pleasure that my writing can bring me when I’m not fantasizing about chucking it all to go off to an island and read books all day.

I see why Scott trusts Josh’s judgment and looks forward to the For the Interested newsletter every week.

Do your stories inspire you?

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Do your stories inspire you, asks @marciarjohnston. #storytelling Read more >>
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Develop your nose for news

As tempting as it may be to use computer science to figure out what content to publish, the most important algorithm remains a discerning human being.

Scott declares his favorite newsletter to be Next Draft by Dave Pell, self-proclaimed managing editor of the internet. “Dave has more tabs open every single day than you could dream – more than you’ve opened in the past week,” Scott says.

Dave has so many testimonials for his newsletter that none of us has enough sticks to shake at them. To see what I mean, go to Next Draft and scroll down.

Keep scrolling.

Eventually, you get to this statement from Dave:

I am the algorithm. Each morning I visit about 75 news sites, and from that swirling nightmare of information quicksand, I pluck the top 10 most fascinating items of the day, which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight. No bots. No computer algorithms.

Fancy that. The managing editor of the internet relies not on big data or digital algorithms but on his singular, analog, non-scalable nose for news.

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The internet's managing editor curates with his singular, analog, non-scalable nose for news, says @ScottMonty.
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If you’re curating content, how much time do you invest in sniffing out the best stories?

Conclusion

Whether you’re starting a newsletter or reinvigorating one, take a few tips from newsletter lover Scott Monty:

• Try a little cleverness.
• Deliver news in new ways.
• Tell stories you’re passionate about.
• Develop your nose for news.

What else do you do to bring in new subscribers and keep the old? 

Here’s an excerpt from Scott’s talk: 

Please note:  All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Capture great insight from speakers like Scott Monty in person. Attend Content Marketing World 2018. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How the Best Newsletters Get – and Keep – Readers’ Attention appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

• Salesforce Ventures will buy $100 million in Dropbox stock when it goes public, according to a Dropbox filing.
• Salesforce, which previously invested $5 million into the company, will own less than 5% of Dropbox's total shares.
• But analyst say the price tag is unusually high for Salesforce Venture, which could be a sign that it sees an acquisition on the horizon in the long-term. 

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Salesforce's curiously timed investment in Dropbox, on the eve of the tech startup's IPO, could hint at an acquisition further down the line. 

Salesforce Ventures, the cloud computing company's in-house venture capital arm, will buy $100 million worth of Dropbox stock through a private placement tied to the upcoming Dropbox initial public offering, it was announced on Monday. 

The deal, which Salesforce described as "one of its largest strategic investments to date," has raised eyebrows in tech and financial circles.

"That is not typical," Barclays analyst Raimo Lesnchow told Business Insider. 

In the private placement, Salesforce will buy 5.9 million Dropbox shares at $17 each — the midpoint of the $16 to $18 per share range Dropbox indicated it will price shares at IPO. Dropbox is seeking to go public with a $7.5 billion valuation, which is significantly below the $10 billion it was last valued at in the private markets.

Tom Roderick, managing director at Stifel, said that product synergies between Salesforce and Dropbox "make a lot of sense," which could mean that Salesforce sees a Dropbox acquisition in the long-term.

"If you wanted to think what Salesforce sees down the line with Dropbox, it’s not too hard to think about Dropbox being an appealing acquisition," Roderick said. "I certainly don’t see anything imminent, but with the IPO pricing at a discount to Dropbox’s last round, I’m guessing Salesforce sees an attractive valuation on a valued partner."

But don't expect Salesforce to swoop in and buy Dropbox on the eve of the IPO, the way Cisco acquired AppDynamics right before its IPO in January 2017.  There is "no chance" of an acquisition happening ahead of the IPO, Roderick said.

The $100 million price tag is unusually high for Salesforce Ventures

Analysts familiar with Salesforce said the investment size is unusual for the company, which invested less than $100 million in total across its entire fiscal 2018 year, which ended on January 31. 

Salesforce Ventures, the in-house venture arm of the cloud services company, currently has five active investment funds, including $100 million specifically for companies building apps on the Salesforce platform. It also has $50 million for Salesforce-specific artificial intelligence, and a $100 million fund for European and Israeli cloud startups.

But the investments are typically much smaller.

In a note published on Monday, Stifel said there are only 16 companies that Salesforce Ventures has put more than $10 million into, with the highest investment being $90 million.

Salesforce's deal with Dropbox will close as soon as Dropbox officially goes public, Dropbox said in a regulatory filing on Monday in which the $100 million Salesforce investment was first disclosed.

Salesforce had obliquely mentioned the  deal in its own annual report on Friday. Salesforce highlighted its earlier $5 million investment in Dropbox from 2015 and said that its total investment will remain less than 5% of Dropbox's shares. 

Salesforce invests in companies that work well with its products

While the size of the investment is intriguing to analysts, Salesforce' interest in Dropbox isn't unusual in and of itself.

Despite being in an official quiet period when it comes to discussing its IPO, Dropbox announced expanded product integrations with Salesforce last week, and product integrations are a core part of Salesforce Venture's investment strategy across early-to-late stage startups.

The company declined to comment on the specifics of its deal with Dropbox, but laid out its interest in enterprise cloud investments in the annual report: 

"We invest in early-to-late stage enterprise cloud companies for strategic reasons and to support key business initiatives to grow our ecosystem of partners and accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies," Salesforce said in the filing.

"The primary purpose of our investments is to create an ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies, accelerate the growth of technology startups and system integrators and create the next generation of mobile applications and connected products," it said. 

SEE ALSO: Here's what analysts say Salesforce can do to turn its $10 billion of revenue into a $60 billion money machine

Join the conversation about this story »

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Imagine you’re the marketing manager of a mid-size online retailer, and your boss just said you need to create an email marketing campaign that drives conversions. So you roll your sleeves up and start working. First, you open your email editor. Then, you pick your template and write the copy.

Half an hour later, your email is ready. You finish the work by adding the images, the URLs, and the CTA, and you hit “Send.”

A few days later, you check the results of your email campaign in Google Analytics, and you see the email drove a 15% increase in traffic for the highlighted products but produced no conversions. What happened?

Here’s a hard truth: you can do everything right, but if your email doesn’t convert, it won’t make much of a difference in your bottom line. Your ultimate goal as a marketer is to create emails that drive conversions.

In this article, we uncover four secrets behind emails that convert. You’ll learn the elements that make this happen and how you can add them to your email marketing strategy.

1. Everything begins with a subject line

Making people sign up for your emails is great. But people aren’t waiting to receive your emails. The truth is, people subscribe to email lists for many reasons, yet they forget they do so (it’s behind the scope of this article why this happens). That’s why the average open rate in the ecommerce sector is only 11.84%.

What matters is that you need to make people open your emails. If you can’t make them do that, they won’t read your email, and thus, they won’t convert. To make people open your emails takes one thing: a great subject line.

Your subject line is what catches their attention, and ultimately encourages subscribers to open your emails.

Eugene Schwartz, one of history’s most famous copywriters, explains this concept in his 1966’s classic Breakthrough Advertising:

There has been much confusion about how much of a selling job your headline should be required to do. Actually, your headline does not need to sell at all.

Your headline has only one job—to stop your prospect and compel him to read the second sentence of your ad. In exactly the same way, your second sentence has only one job—to force him to read the third sentence of your ad. And the third sentence—and every additional sentence in your ad—has exactly the same job.

Copywriters use many tactics to create click-worthy subject lines, some of which include:

• Using questions that drive curiosity
  ◦ E.g.: Do you know what people like about your email?
• Using scarcity that plays on the fear of missing out
  ◦ E.g.: Only 1% of retailers know how to increase their open rates by 50%
• Using numbers
  ◦ E.g.: 30 ways to increase your open rates
• Using the “curiosity gap” technique
  ◦ E.g.: Here’s what you need to know to increase your open rates
• Using personalization
  ◦ E.g.: John, here’s how to increase your email open rates

(If you want more inspiration to create headlines, steal some of these 75 subject line ideas, and if you want retail-focused subject lines, here you have 75 more.)

Here’s what Privacy.com, a company that helps you save your card’s data privacy, does a few days after signing up for their service:

Do you see how they focus on the benefits? That’s a direct and simple approach that, in the case of a lifecycle email such as this one, can work wonders.

In contrast with the space copywriters work with, email marketers have a much narrow space on which to create their headlines.

While the optimal email subject line’s length is 65 characters, the fact that 51% of people open your emails on mobile, the limit length is much smaller. Here’s what you need to consider when writing an email’s headline:

• The iPhone shows about 35-38 characters in portrait mode and 80 in landscape mode.
• The Galaxy S4 shows 33 characters in portrait mode and 72 in landscape mode.
• The iPad shows 39 characters in both orientations.
• The iPhone 6+ shows up to 63.

Finally, desktop’s length is slightly longer, which depends mainly on the screen’s size, but as a rule of thumb, it’s around 78 characters.

If you want to know what device people use to open their emails, you can do with the help of the client usage report.

2. Preheader text matters a lot

The preheader text is an important, and often overlooked, component of high-converting email messages. A good preheader makes people want to read your whole email.

Before going further, the preheader is the short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox. The preheader is a great opportunity to use a different angle from the subject line while increasing the attention you get from the subscriber.

For example, Wimdu, a vacation rental service, reinstates the idea of the subject line by focusing on the discount you get. The preheader helps to reinforce the main benefit of the email, which is the $40 discount.

Preheaders allow subscribers to prescreen every email. In the previous example, you know if you open the email you’ll find a discount; both the headline and the preheader say so.

If you forget to use a preheader, this is how an email looks:

It’s a shame the sender, AirAsia, hasn’t taken the time to optimize the preheader text correctly. Their headline seems interesting—they are basically offering cheap tickets—but they don’t trigger much further interest.

Take the previous example and compare it with what VRBO does:

VRBO focuses on the appealing beach houses for budget-savvy people, and finish the job by using their preheader to highlight the “endless selection” of beach houses.

They want to show you 6 beach houses, but then they mention they have much more if you want to check.

3. The timing and message are crucial

If you have made people open your emails, you are halfway through the process of increasing your conversion rate. Now, you need to make people read the email and click on the call-to-action (CTA).

To do that, you need to send your emails at the right time with the right message. Customer journeys exist for that reason. The goal of customer journeys is to automatically send campaigns to your customers and prospects based on pre-defined triggers.

The triggers can be defined according to many attributes, including:

• The time since the subscriber signed up for a given list
• The past open and click-through rates
• The past purchases
• The average order value
• The subscriber’s location

The key to finding the right timing and messaging is to know what triggers matter to you and what information to send.

Usually, companies send the same group of customer journeys:

After someone signs up—also known as “welcome emails.”

After someone leaves something in their cart—also known as “abandonment cart emails.”

After a customer made a purchase—also known as “post-purchase emails.”

After a customer hasn’t visited the site in some time—also known as “re-engagement emails.”

The triggers you choose will depend on your own analysis. If you see you have an average or above average open rate (around 12%) but a low CTR (less than 8% for online retailers), you want to test different triggers to send your emails.

For example, these are some of the mistakes you could be doing that are hurting your CTR:

• You are sending a purchase-focused email too early
• You aren’t giving any incentives to purchase
• Your CTA isn’t clear
• You are sending too many emails or too few emails
• You aren’t segmenting your subscribers based on past behavior

Optimizing your messaging and timing is easier said than done. But with some analysis and testing, you can find the right balance of timing and message.

4. Your CTA has to guide subscribers

The final step of a high-converting email is to make people take the desired action. In the case of an online retailer, that’s to make your subscribers visit your page and make a purchase.

A counterintuitive fact is that people won’t take action unless you explicitly tell them to do it. So, if you are sending an email that features your latest products, you need to add a button that tells them to buy it. It’s a simple, yet frequently overlooked, idea.

You need to add relevant CTAs in every email you send. You can focus your CTAs on any action you like, but for the sake of this article, let’s focus on encouraging subscribers to make a purchase.

Let’s take a look at the following email:

This email focuses their CTAs on shopping for products, which is targeted and specific, encouraging subscribers to shop and ultimately make a purchase.

To optimize your CTAs, you need to use action-oriented text related to the desired action. For example, if you want people to make a purchase, using something like “Buy it” or “Shop it” does a good job.

Also, make every CTA large and legible, contrasting the rest of the email. You want people to know what they want to do next. And, of course, keep the text short, as the button can’t take the whole screen.

If you want more inspiration, you can steal the following 75 CTAs ideas for your next email marketing campaign.

Wrap up

After you read this article, your focus shouldn’t be on sending emails and hoping for the best. With the help of the four secrets you learned in this article, it will be much easier to drive more conversions to your online store.

You’ve nailed your opening call, delivered a superb value proposition and you’ve piqued your client’s curiosity. But there’s only a small window of opportunity to present a proposal, so timing is mission critical. Are you sure you’re ready – and what about the client? Is there such a thing as too soon in the world of consultative selling?

While most conferences are starting to become more about networking and stealthy product pitches by sponsors, Sales Hacker’s Revenue Summit 2018 was unforgettable.

After a full day of listening to some of the world’s most innovative sales and marketing leaders at Revenue Summit, I walked away with mind blowing learnings to help up my sales game and prepare me for 2018.

Let’s dive into the Revenue Summit 2018 recap broken down into 5 key takeaways.

1. The Analytics You’re Looking at Are Outdated

During a talk about the future of sales leaders, Jacco vanderKooij (Founder @ Winning By Design) and Rob Jeppsen (CEO @ Xvoyant) emphasized that most sales teams are looking at the wrong metrics.

Volume metrics are not as valuable

Volume metrics a.k.a. activity metrics such as the reports that you see in engagement tools such as Outreach and SalesLoft are outdated. These metrics can tell you only about what activities your reps are logging in, and their results. This information tells you little to nothing about the true value of a rep.

Top sales teams chase conversion metrics

Conversion metrics like the ones that you would find in ZenProspect or InsightSquared are what modern sales teams are looking at right now.

These metrics can tell you about which portions of your total addressable market you are actually converting business from, and help you identify where your bottlenecks may be at each stage of the funnel. Conversion analytics is a huge step forward from volume metrics. They allow your reps to create a repeatable, scalable framework.

Productivity metrics are the future

Productivity metrics allow you to accurately assess your ROI from a sales rep by looking at the churn rates and referral rates from customers after a sale. If it comes time to downsize your team, and your only metric for performance is the revenue that each rep brings in—you might just end up making poor decisions.

2. You Need to Change Your Daily Rep Goals

Sales volume metrics are dying. Sales reps need new entirely news goals and numbers to chase. No longer can goals be pre-assigned, requiring reps to hit a certain number of activities per day while burning through the total addressable market.

Olivia Nottebohm (Senior Director, SMB Sales and GTM Operations @ Google Cloud) and Sean Kester (VP of Product Marketing @ SalesLoft) both spoke about the significant improvements that were made ever since their sales teams switched daily rep goals from being volume-driven to focusing on 3-5 positive conversations per day.

When Volume is the only metric, abandonment of key accounts was higher. Now reps were less likely to abandon companies that they believed the product could help, and the overall results of the shifted focus were higher qualification rates and more revenue closed.

3. Sales Enablement Will Take You to the Next Level

With sales teams placing a higher emphasis on sales efficiency, there has been an increased focus on using the right sales tools to spur growth. 

While speaking about the future of sales, Jacco and Rob mentioned that more teams are likely to spend 4 days per week selling and dedicate 1 day per week on sales training.

Although sales leaders are often focused on maximizing selling time, there’s a point of diminishing returns if you don’t spend time training reps to consistently improve.

New research has shown that what reps care most about in a job is education. Reps want to gain as much experience as possible before switching companies. If you want to retain your reps, then it’s important to ensure they are always learning and growing.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. You must speak with reps or managers directly to understand where they feel strong and where their gaps lie.” ~ Amanda Chang (Senior Sales Enablement Manager @ Zoom Video Communications)

4. Selling is a Team Effort

Amit Bendov (CEO @ Gong.io) has found calls that involve multiple sales reps are 258% more likely to close.

This approach was also used by Jennifer Brandenburg (VP of Inside Sales @ ServiceMax) and Chris Donato (VP of Sales @ DXC Technology) both of whom believe in the importance of a pod structure in closing high-tier accounts.

Jennifer specifically uses a small army to close deals after handoff by the sales development team at ServiceMax. Everyone from pre-sales, sales, and post-sales are paired into single territory pods. Thus allowing teams to work more efficiently on accounts by delegating tasks and keeping other team members accountable.

Chris found that team-based quotas and bonuses helped his reps keep each other accountable. The unusual team-based bonus structure resulted in his sales reps collaborating more to try and accomplish their team goal and moving the needle faster.

5. Creating a Structured Process is Necessary For Massive Success

An old adage in the sales world is that 20% of your sales reps will make up 80% of your revenue. While this might may have been true for decades, it represents some of the greatest flaws and inefficiencies in legacy teams.

If teams can work towards a goal of having 80% of reps make up 80% of revenue, then you truly have a repeatable and scalable process. For the elements of sales that are inside of one’s control, creating a structured sales process is the quickest way to start improving the overall effectiveness of your org.

John Barrows (Owner @ JBarrows Sales Training) and Morgan Ingram (Director of Sales Execution @ JBarrows Sales Training) have found that creating structured training and execution processes for companies that are hiring reps straight out of college, to be highly effective.

They’ve been able to get rid of some of the variability that you’d find in a traditional sink or swim model of sales, and get closer to having 80% of reps make up 80% of revenue.

Revenue Summit 2018—Transformative and a Must-Attend

Whether you’ve been leading a sales organization for years or it’s your first time, you can always improve by learning and be experimenting with new strategies. There’s no place like Revenue Summit to meet and learn from some of the top sales and marketing leaders!

So there you have it, 5 key learnings from Revenue Summit 2018. Which ones will become a part of your 2018 strategy? I’d love to hear from you about some of the unique initiatives that you have, leading into 2018—feel free to comment below!

The post Revenue Summit 2018 Recap: (VP’s of Sales Edition) – Top 5 Takeaways to Supercharge Your Sales appeared first on Sales Hacker.

A few months ago, I was approached by a marketing automation company looking to develop a new brand story.

After digging in, the biggest challenge was a lack of growth. The 10-year-old company was battling flat sales, a dependence on a small handful of customers, and the inability to differentiate itself in an ultra-competitive marketplace dominated by players such as HubSpot, Pardot and Eloqua.

The company had two pressing needs: it had to create a new story that highlighted how it was unique and it had to discover a way to effectively position itself among dozens, if not hundreds, of other marketing automation companies.

Needless to say, it was a major challenge.

The message / positioning exercise began with an in-depth look at the company’s products and services. What were its strengths and places where it shined? Finding the answers took time, research and, frankly, an honest look at the business and the competitive landscape.

It can be difficult for a company to admit its weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Running a business is a half-glass-full proposition despite the inevitable ups and downs. But looking at your warts is a necessary evil to identify unique traits and establish a competitive edge.

To drive things forward, there are brainstorming sessions and interviews with internal and external stakeholders. You are searching for perspective given a company’s leadership lives in a proverbial bubble. They see the world with a particular lens, which drives strategic planning to move the company forward. But is often not a holistic view.

To generate a complete picture, other people need to be involved. Internally, it is marketers, salespeople, customer service reps, account managers and product developers. It is anyone who touches the product and/or the customer. They can see a product in a different light because they have different experiences and skills.

Ideally, there is alignment so a company moves forward with cohesion. But what happens if this is not the case? What if internal stakeholders come to the table with different perspectives and ideas? It is not necessarily a bad thing but these differences need to be addressed to get everyone on the same page.

Then, you need to talk to external stakeholders: customers, analysts, the media and even competitors. What do they think? In their eyes, how does a company stand out? What attracted their customers and how does a company stack up against the competition? This os where the truth often emerges.

For my client, there was a lot of talk about the software’s utility and how it was one-stop shopping for companies looking to leverage marketing automation. But this is table stakes in the marketing automation game. Everyone wages battle using the same weapons. After hours of discussion, nothing really emerged that could jump-start my client’s messaging.

But then we talked to customers and the conversation changed.

Customers talked how my client delivered amazing customer service. It was the day-to-day support, the ability to customize the software, and the in-house expertise. The company delivers customer services as an integral part of its product rather than bolting it on or relying on third-party suppliers.

There was something the company could rally around: it could differentiate itself by telling the world it delivered marketing automation software AND services. In the scheme of things, it was not earth-shattering but it represented a tangible way to attract the spotlight.

Suddenly, things became more interesting. The team was excited because it is difficult to break though when there are so many options.

But there was another important step: making sure this new and refreshed messaging was unique enough to be embraced and turned loose publicly.

It’s about positioning the company within the competitive landscape. How does a company want its customers to think about its brand and products and how they fit into their lives.

It is a difficult exercise because the competition needs to be thoroughly examined: their websites, videos, social media activity, eBooks, etc. What words and language are used? What benefits are highlighted and who do they serve? Who are the market leaders and how did they establish themselves as the top players?

For my client, this involved an in-depth review of more than two dozen competitors: well-known, large, small and emerging. To be honest, it becomes a bit of blur because most of the messaging is similar. Everyone seems afraid to be an outlier or stick out like a sore thumb.

Fortunately, we discovered the combination of software AND service was not a common theme. There was lots of talk about conversions, smart automation, growing sales/business, and systemization.

For a small company battling to stay competitive, a window of opportunity opened. There were no cartwheels or bottles of champagne opened but it definitely felt like a breakthrough.

When you’re able to establish distinct positioning, even in a small way, the marketing and sales dynamic changes. It’s everything from value propositions and benefits to elevator pitches and website copy. It is valuable brand real estate that you can leverage to drive awareness, leads and sales.

My client’s new story and positioning is relatively fresh so it is too soon to tell if it will make an impact on the business. That said, the company is in a better place than it was three months ago. It has a stronger story and a clear position in the marketplace.

For any company, positioning involves hard work, choices, risks and leaps of faith. But it is definitely worth the investment to have a strong and well-articulated presence.

Note: For anyone interested in positioning, a must-read is “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

The post How to Break Through with Your Messaging in a Crowded Market appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In speaking with thousands of marketers and businesses over the past several years, we’ve learned that marketing has an incredible potential to impact people’s lives.

In fact, the American Marketing Association defines marketing as:

“The activity, set of institutions, skills, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

I love that. We as marketers are benefiting society at large!

But marketing skills and career growth don’t come easy in a field that moves at the speed of light. It seems like every week companies are demanding an evolved skill set out of their employees – giving rise to a new era of marketing roles such as the Full-Stack and T-Shaped Marketer.

Brands that can successfully bring a variety of people, marketing skills, and unique perspectives together have a huge advantage when it comes to providing value.

That’s why we’ve partnered with the incredible marketing team at Asana, a leading work management software, to break down the top 7 invaluable marketing skills that help some of the greatest brand teams on the planet produce consistently great content.

Let’s dive in!

7 invaluable marketing skills for teams

As Sujan Patel writes on his blog, “the modern marketer has to be familiar with a lot, good at many, and master of a few.”

Having a variety of skills and tools not only provides ultimate flexibility as a team to create a variety of successful marketing campaigns, but it also allows each marketer to shine as an individual.

These 7 high-level marketing skills will help to ensure your team has ultimate flexibility and individuality.

1. Storytelling

There seems to be a general belief that marketing has always been about storytelling – and that marketers have always identified as natural storytellers.

But that may not be the case.

LinkedIn found that just seven years ago the number of marketers listing “storytelling” on their profile as a skill was obsolete. It didn’t exist at all as a respected marketing discipline.

Today, however, between 7 percent and 8 percent of all marketers on LinkedIn worldwide identify themselves as storytellers based on their profile descriptions and list of skills.

As a marketer, storytelling doesn’t just mean telling your audience what your product or service does or what it has done. Effective storytelling involves a deep understanding of human emotions, motivations, and psychology in order to effectively communicate with them in an authentic and engaging way.

During the writing of this article, Asana CMO Dave King told me: “The best marketers are problem solvers and storytellers. Content creators should ask ‘what problem is this piece solving for my audience.’”

As marketers, there are endless ways to tell a story.

One of my favorite ways to develop a compelling story is to use “The Story Spine” formula created by professional playwright and improvisor Kenn Adams. Over the years, Pixar has won countless awards by using this formula, including 13 Academy Awards, 9 Golden Globes, and 11 Grammys.

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

I encourage you to practice this formula for your own own brand, products, or services.

Let’s give it a shot with a brand we might all know of: Nike.

• Once upon a time there was a passionate shoemaker that wanted to get his shoes into the hands of runners around the world.
• Every day, he worked on perfecting his shoes so that these runners could perform at an optimum level.
• But one day, this shoemaker realized that supplying shoes to thousands of runners around the world was no easy task.
• Because of that, he worked harder and harder to ensure that he had the supply of products needed to be successful despite what critics said.
• Because of that, his shoes continued to improve and more and more athletes started to wear them in prestigious competitions.
• Until finally, it wasn’t just about running anymore. It became about something bigger – finding your inner champion doing what you love in gear that makes you feel great.

As Ken describes, “The Story Spine is not the story, it’s the spine. It’s nothing but the bare-boned structure upon which the story is built. And, that’s what makes it such a powerful tool.”

It’s up to us as marketers to fill in all the little nuances of the story.

2. Prioritizing

As many marketers know all too well – there is always something to be done.

Being an effective prioritizer is one of those marketing skills that doesn’t get talked about enough, but plays a huge role in the success of your team and content.

Producing consistently great content means saying yes to a handful of awesome content ideas/opportunities and saying no to many others.

The Asana marketing team uses a project labeled “Content Opportunities” to which anyone in the company is highly encouraged to contribute ideas. Then, when their marketing team is ready to take action on a piece of content or campaign, they add it to their Editorial Calendar project.

This management of ideas, projects, and initiatives is what allows them to be super focused and productive on a consistent basis.

So how can you develop prioritization as a marketing skill? And how can you prioritize content and campaigns that will perform at a high level?

That’s where the importance of goal-setting comes into play!

At Buffer, we’ve experimented with a variety of goal-setting frameworks such as OKRs, Locke and Latham’s 5 Principles of Goal-Setting, BHAGs, and lots more.

Today, our marketing team is using two types of goal-setting methods depending on the scope. For long-term planning and strategizing, we use a modified Warren Buffett Framework, and for short-term (experimental content), we use a framework called ICE.

The Modified Warren Buffett Framework

My colleague Hailley has long admired the original framework for setting goals from Warren Buffett – a method where you write down 25 things you want to accomplish in your career, and from that, pick the top five as the focus and put the other 20 on an “avoid at all costs” list.

We’ve since adopted a modified version of this goal-setting framework. Here’s a quick overview of how it works (with a real-life example goals from one of our 6-week cycles):

Step 1: Choose 10 goals

Brainstorm a list of 10 goals related to your work on the team that can be accomplished in a certain, predesignated timeframe.

Remember to focus on goals and not tasks. A good way to remember this is that tasks describe how you spend your time, whereas goals are your results.

Ex:

Step 2: Assign a “tag” to each goal

Next, go through and add a tag to each goal with the category that it falls into. The tagging system should be unique for each person.

Come up with your tags, and assign them to each of your 10 goals.

Ex:

Step 3: Pick three goals to focus on (P1s)

This is the most difficult portion of the exercise! Refining the list from 10 to the three that you will focus on during the specified time period.

Pick one goal for each tag that you have on your list.

Ex:

Then, add a P2 and a P3 to prioritize the rest of your goals within the list.

That doesn’t mean you have 10 goals all competing with each other at the same time.

It means that as soon as you complete a P1 in any one of the categories, you then (and only then) move onto your P2 and P3.

ICE Score Framework

“ICE” stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease.

Below is a description of each element directly from the creators of the ICE Score Framework at GrowthHackers:

• Impact: The possible impact the idea could have on the business if considered a “win
• Confidence: This relates to how confident you are in whether it’ll result in a wi
• Ease: This relates to how many resources, and what kind, are needed to implement the idea

For each idea, give each factor a score from one to ten. The overall score is determined by taking the average of the three scores. You should start with the idea that has the highest score.

For example, let’s say you wanted to run a content partnership experiment with a peer or influencer within your industry (similar to this one!) Your ICE score might look like this:

• Impact: 8
• Confidence: 7
• Ease: 7
• Total: 22

Comparing that to other ICE scores, you can quickly determine which ideas to tackle next and which ones to table for the time being. Over time, you’ll be able to score ideas quickly and efficiently.

3. Collaborating

Why is team collaboration necessary?

Part of the answer, according to research from strategy professor Benjamin Jones at the Kellogg School, is that our individual knowledge base is becoming more and more specialized.

Jones gives a great example of the Wright Brothers and building an airplane:

“In 1903, two people designed and flew an airplane. Today, a Boeing 787 has dozens of specialists working on the engines alone. Then there are the controls, the hydraulics, the airframe itself. There is an incredible range of specialized skills needed.”

There is an ever-growing need for collaboration among specialists (teams) within companies to get a product or service off of the ground.

In our experiences at Buffer and Asana, the most successful marketing teams coordinate on two important levels:

1. Messaging: Ensuring there’s consistency in what is being said across channels (blog, website, social, etc.
2. Distribution: Planning and sequencing content rollout for maximum impact across channels

By combining the right set of marketing skills in both messaging and distribution you are setting your campaigns up for a much higher rate of success.

Messaging

Whether you’re launching a full-on marketing campaign or simply posting a video to Facebook, creating a consistent message across channels is an important part of building your brand.

We’ve found that having effective collaboration tools in place makes all of the difference.

Here’s a quick example of some of the tools and workflows we use in order to help our teams create consistent messaging:

1. Kick off a conversation in messaging app, Slack, about the proposed idea or campaign:

1. Start a doc in Dropbox Paper with additional details, comments, copy, etc:

1. Create a project within Asana and assign tasks to team members across the organization:

These three tools are invaluable for transparent and cross-functional collaboration and communication among teams within your organization. They’re especially important for us at Buffer as a fully remote company!

Distribution

Without a solid distribution plan in place, your messages may never reach their intended audiences. Having the skills to not only create the assets, but efficiently deliver those assets across multiple channels, is an important quality for any marketer.

Here’s a quick look at some of the tools and workflows we use to distribute consistent content:

1. WordPress for hosting and creating blog content:

1. Discourse for internal distribution, information, and announcements:

1. Buffer for social media planning, scheduling, and analytics:

At the core of any great team collaboration is trust. Trust is the willingness and openness to intentionally communicate with teammates on your direct team and across the company.

It’s up to you to make space (physically or virtually) for people to meet and share ideas. Pixar is a perfect example of this in action – they designed their offices so that artists, designers, programmers, and marketers would purposely bump into each other.

4. Visualizing

Humans are, by nature, very visual beings.

In the brain itself, there are hundreds of millions of neurons devoted to visual processing, nearly 30 percent of the entire cortex, as compared with 8 percent for touch and just 3 percent for hearing.

In other words, the most successful marketing teams are not only able to communicate messages in written form, they’re also able to create stunning designs that aid in telling a compelling visual story.

We wrote an article in 2017 titled, “Why Every Marketer Needs to Be a (Part-Time) Designer” and the general theory still remains true, even more so, today in 2018.

The best part is there are tons of free resources our there to get started! Here are some of our favorites:

• Graphic Design Basics: Core Principles for Graphic Design (Skillshare)
• How to Create Better Graphic Design (Udemy)
• The Landing Page Conversion Course (Unbounce)
• Graphic Design 101 (Udemy)
• 11 Simple Design Tips to Enhance Your Social Media Images (Buffer)
• Designing Asana: A Day in the Life of a Product Designer (Asana)

Visual storytelling is one of those marketing skills that often goes overlooked, but plays a massive role in the success of every single piece of content.

5. Experimenting

Have you ever wondered how some marketing teams come up with so many great ideas?

Their secret…

Behind every one successful marketing idea or campaign, there were dozens (if not hundreds) of little failures along the way.

It reminds me a lot of what is known as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in product development. A MVP is a product that has the minimum amount of features required to validate if people want it or not.

The same theory holds true for marketing experimentation and testing.

A marketing team that is unafraid of failure and willing to run hundreds of different tests in order to quickly validate ideas will often succeed over a marketing team that puts their eggs (ideas) into one basket (channel/campaign).

The Information, for example, might have hundreds of potential story ideas in Asana at any one time — prioritizing experiments and ideas based on competition, importance, opportunity costs, and lots more.

Although there isn’t a true scientific way of running marketing experiments, this is the formula we’ve come up with at Buffer to systematically test ideas:

We start with setting clear goals and then work backwards from there.

Let’s say we wanted to increase Buffer blog traffic by 10% in one year (goal).

Our marketing team would start by getting together and brainstorming all of the different ways we could accomplish that – SEO, social media, affiliates, etc.

We’d then prioritize ideas based on impact (Warren Buffett Framework / ICE Scores) and begin testing.

Then, we’d constantly measure and analyze results along the way while making incremental improvements.

Approaching experimentation and testing with a growth mindset, similar to developing a product, is a marketing skill that will help take your team to the next level.

6. Analyzing

As marketers, we’re all somewhere on the analytics expertise scale (whether we know it or not!) From the analytics wizards to those of us just starting to dip our toes in data analysis, we all have a base layer to work from.

Our Director of Marketing at Buffer, Kevan Lee, puts it perfectly:

“The great thing about deepening your skills in analytics is that we all have a base layer to work from. We all know how to build intuition. And intuition is just an absorbed history of data. Add to that the ability to ask good questions, and you’re well on your way. (The tools themselves matter far less than you’d think.)”

Asking good questions, when it comes to data and marketing analytics, is an invaluable marketing skill to have on any team.

This graphic from Moz shows just how many BIG questions there are to ask:

At first, asking all of these questions can be a bit intimidating.

What if I don’t know the answers?

That’s okay!

One way we like to think about approaching analytics is this idea of “Crawl, Walk, Run” – It might look something like this if you’re just starting out:

• Crawling: Which channels get the most engagement?
• Walking: Which tactics and/or strategies are contributing to this engagement?
• Running: Which channels, tactics, and strategies should we implement to increase engagement?

Another great way of thinking of analytics is the “Hierarchy of Analytics” model made popular by data wizard Christopher S. Penn:

In the beginning, you might experiment with various analytics platforms and tools in order to get a feel for the basics of marketing analytics. Understanding what data is available, its limitations, and what you can report is a great start.

Then, as you become more skilled and confident with data, you might dive into things like understanding why something happened or what might happen in the future based on your findings.

There are some incredible data analysis tools out there from companies like Google, IBM, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft that can help you do just that!

7. Learning

I like to think that the path to becoming a great marketer is a lifelong journey and never truly complete.

Knowledge, passion, and expertise are intangible qualities that we usually don’t acquire overnight. These are often developed as result of years (even decades) of hard work, mistakes, self-reflection, and personal growth.

Even a virtuoso like Michelangelo was quoted as saying, “I am still learning” late into his career.

At Buffer and Asana, we aim to build our marketing teams around folks who are naturally curious, hungry to learn, passionate, and open to new ideas.

“A love of learning is one of primary skills we look for in marketers because it tells us a couple things: do they love what they do, and are they curious about the world?” explains Kevan Lee. “Those two factors alone can take you quite far!”

Just like food nourishes our bodies, information and continuous learning nourishes our minds.

But where do you start on your learning journey as a marketer?

We’ve found that having a framework in place allows us to identify opportunities for growth. We call it the T-Shaped Marketer Framework:

T-Shaped Marketing at Buffer. Feel free to grab a download of the Sketch file or Canva template we used to build this, if you’d like to customize it for your company.

I encourage you to create one of these templates for yourself. It’s an incredible, eye-opening activity that will provide you with a clear path forward.

Then, we suggest forming habits around the marketing disciplines you’re most excited about:

• If you want to get better at data analysis, try taking a course on Udemy or Skillshare to expand your skills
• If you want to dive into video marketing, experiment with creating a video in Animoto or take a free Adobe Premiere tutorial on YouTube.
• If social media is your passion, we’ve got a ton of great learning resources on our Social Blog, Skillshare, and the Buffer Podcast.
• If you want to improve your organization, workflow, or project management skills, Asana has created a ton of great resources and best practices for work management on their blog.

If you’re curious, inquisitive, genuine, and if your intent is sincere, there will always be people who will support you in your journey.

Experiment and try out new things – some of them might even scare you! Once you gain some momentum, keep it going. That will set you up for a lifetime of success in marketing.

Over to you

Thank you so much for checking out this post!

If you’re interested in learning more about career and marketing skills from some uber-talented professionals in the industry, feel free to check out the Asana blog. It’s packed with some incredible insights.

We’d also love to continue the conversation with you below!

What skills are we missing from this list? What has helped your team create consistently great content? What would you suggest to those looking to hire marketers?

“Ignorance is bliss.”

Or so they say.

BUT, if you are responsible for the health and well being of your customers, ignorance is simply inexcusable.

As a Customer Success Manager, it’s your job to have your finger on the pulse of your customer’s needs, wants, and desires. You MUST know the ins-and-outs of their business as it relates to your products and services. You need to know what their goals, objectives, and success measures are; and you need to be able to anticipate how, when, and where these might change, and why.

Yes, being the point person for your customers is a multifaceted job.

You need to be one part subject matter expert, one part trusted advisor, one part advocate, and one part fortune-teller. Some might call this a Kung Fu Master Jedi Knight in Shining Armor (KFMJKISA for all you acronym lovers – you’re welcome).

Granted, try as we might, balls occasionally get dropped. We can misread a situation, miss an opportunity to be a hero, or offer poor advice.

I never said it was easy to be a KFMJKISA, did I? However, what we can always do is:

1. Listen intently
2. Ask questions

These two simple things give us the opportunity to keep our customers on track. By listening and asking questions, we learn. Learning is knowledge, and knowledge is power, and power is what we need to do our job — delivering value.

A powerful CSM can knock down obstacles, vanquish fires (or avoid them), and take their customers on epic journeys… all the way to the magical land of upgrades and renewals!

But what happens when you don’t listen or ask questions?

Pull up a chair, it’s story time.

Many years ago, I had a client that happened to be one of the biggest companies in the world. This company resold our SaaS product to one the largest companies in the United States.

Need I say that this was a high visibility account?

Fortunately for me, I had an excellent relationship with my counterpart (we’ll call him Jose1). Jose and I got along famously. He was from a small midwestern town and was such a down to earth guy. Talking to Jose was one of my favorite parts of the week.

We’d spend 45 minutes of our allotted hour just chatting about anything and everything. We’d cover topics like family, hobbies, sports, weekend plans, and stories about our past. I’ll always remember when Jose would ask me to ‘hold on’ so he could kiss his wife goodbye and wish her a good day. Sometimes they’d even exchange some light-hearted banter.

Yep, we had a bond, and boy did I have one happy customer on my hands!

Or so I thought.

Ever walk into a lion’s den?

Looking back, I forget the specifics of the incident. Suffice it to say that our Ops team did not accurately communicate the timing of planned maintenance, and the subsequent downtime interfered with my customer’s production environment.

Jose told me that not only was his boss very unhappy, so too was their very large and important client.

My company had some explaining to do, and I was the guy responsible for pulling together a meeting with my internal team, Jose and Jose’s boss (we’ll call him Greg2). This meeting was expected to be contentious, but we knew we screwed up, and upon taking our much-deserved lumps from Greg, we’d put a plan in place to ensure this breakdown didn’t happen again, and we’d be on the road to recovery.

The attendees from my side are irrelevant, save for the fact that I had a brand new boss.

This was the first time I met my new boss as he just happened to be visiting from corporate. I assured him that I had a fantastic relationship with Jose and yes, his boss Greg would be upset, but overall, we were doing a great job and their satisfaction level was high.

Low and behold, the call started pretty much as I expected. Greg ripped into us over the issue. We explained ourselves, fell on our sword, and committed to putting a plan in place to avoid this type of gaffe moving forward.

Just as we were taking a deep breath and getting ready to end the call, Greg angrily said:

“… I have more things I want to discuss.”

My new boss and others in the room shot me a glance that cut me like a knife.

Greg proceeded to hammer home a list of 10 things we were doing poorly, and I’ll never forget how impassioned he was. Greg delivered his list like a preacher would a sermon. If this were a political speech, it would be one of those thought-provoking declarations taught at higher learning institutions for generations to come.

He dressed us down so surgically that I could have sworn he rehearsed for hours.

When he was done, my boss was so angry that he could barely make eye contact with me. I felt like I was hit by a truck. Did my dear, dear friend Jose hang me out to dry?

Why would he do this? We had an epic bromance. I was shattered.

The best excuse I could muster was, “I talk to Jose all the time. He’s never mentioned any of those things. I’m just as surprised as you to hear that list.”

I slinked out of the room and went back to my desk… to call Jose.

I cut right to the chase, “Jose, that was a long list of issues, and today was the first time I heard about them. Why didn’t you mention those things to me before?”

His reply became one of my most valued lessons:

“… because I didn’t want to upset you.”

I was floored. Hit by a truck carrying other trucks.

He went on to tell me that he enjoyed our relationship so much that he didn’t want to mention anything negative.

Never assume. Always ask.

At first, I was upset with him for staying mum and walking me into a lion’s den. Then, I took a step back and looked inward.

This was just as much my fault because I NEVER ASKED Jose how things were going. I never asked him if there were any issues. I never asked if we were doing a good job or if there was anything he needed from us.

Nope, I assumed all customers would simply sound off if they were unhappy. I figured they would speak up and ask for help if they were struggling or dissatisfied.

I learned the hard way — assumption is a cardinal CSM sin.

From that day forward, I’ve always made it a point to ask customers about their experience.

• How are we doing as a partner?
• Are they satisfied with our products and services?
• Any needs that aren’t being met?

Not doing so is ignorant, and ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is soul-crushing.

It’s also unbecoming of a true KFMJKISA.

Re-post of my guest blog written for Natero

1Name inspired by Jose Gonzalez, while listening to Heartbeats

2Name inspired by Greg Laswell, while listening to Comes and Goes In Waves

The question of who to connect with on LinkedIn comes up all the time. And, while we have covered this topic several times over the years, it’s important to revisit. Remember, LinkedIn is 15 years old and how people have used it over the years has changed; people have changed jobs, careers, cities, countries and often need to rethink their networking strategy.

It’s okay to change how you connect with people and network on LinkedIn. It’s your network, and it should align with your career and current job objectives. Too often, I talk with people who say they don’t use LinkedIn because their network won’t be helpful for your current position.

My response? “Let’s clean out and rebuild your network.” It may be time-consuming but, much like cleaning out your closets, it feels good. After all, what’s the point of having connections that you don’t know, will never engage with and are in a completely unrelated industry or geography?

The caveat is that the more extensive your network, the more LinkedIn’s algorithm will connect you with others. You will have a robust 2nd level network. Remember, you don’t know who that 1st level connection knows that may be of value. Nevertheless, a group of 1st level connections not directly tied to your industry or geography may render little actual success on LinkedIn (good connections + value to your network + a needed product/service = connections, phone calls, meetings, and new business).

Take stock
Know who your connections are. I talk to enough people who sheepishly share that they know few of their 1st level connections. Sometimes their remarks feel more like a confession, and I assure them we are not there to pass judgment. Download your 1st level connections (we will share a Quick Tip on how to do this on Thursday so stay tuned) and sort them by position and/or company. Look for the gaps and the opportunities.

Decide
What kind of a network will help you in your current position or over the next couple of years? Decide to keep those people who no longer fit your networking objectives, so your network remains large or cut the cord and disconnect from them and rebuild with more of a blank slate. Either works. Choose the approach that gives you confidence. What do I mean by that?

I was talking with a salesperson who I thought would be a natural on LinkedIn and when I realized he wasn’t using it at all, I asked why. He told me he previously had been a recruiter, and his network reflected that job and not his current position, so he didn’t see the value in using LinkedIn. His network was of no value to him. Easily solved. We see this all the time.

After our conversation, he did the hard work. He cleaned out his network and has become laser-focused on connecting with the right people in his market (decision makers, influencers, prospects, and clients) and is now far more confident about using LinkedIn. He doesn’t sell across the country or even beyond his metro area, so he uses “geography” as a filter. He knows who needs to be at the table to decide on their services, so he uses “title” in a current company as a filter.

Focus
Connect intentionally with the people that fit your industry, geography (this could be local or global depending on what you do and where). We have a client who is hoping to relocate to another city and potentially start a business there. Today they have little to no network there. However, our suggestion was to start to research and connect with people who are leaders in the community and potential Centers of Influence, (my favorite group).

Craft
Continually reassess and clean up your network. It’s okay. Remember, it’s your network. I don’t encourage CEOs and business owners to connect with everyone. Their networks should be focused on advisors, peers, C-level folks in other companies, clients/customers, and top prospects. Connecting with the CEO/owner/president of their top customers should be a top priority. It’s an easy way to keep in touch, remind them of who you are, be visible and share valuable and up-to-date information.

Craft your ideal network. Is it laser-focused or broad-reaching? Write down the types of people you want to be connected to and begin a plan of personalizing messages/scripts to use to connect with those people. Give them a reason to connect with you. Let them know why you want to connect.

If you’re serious about your network and networking on LinkedIn, take some time and turn this into your personal initiative. Research, connect and engage with more of the right people at the right time with the right message.

Every seller wants to have meaningful sales connections with their buyers, but it’s clear from the way sales is traditionally done that very few sellers really know how to pull it off. Deb Calvert has written a new book, “Stop Selling and Start Leading” that reveals many points of powerfully insightful data, taken from a study focused on the 30 primary characteristics of leadership. Her application of those characteristics to the sales process is not only ingenious, it also reveals what sellers are doing wrong, what buyers really want from those who are on the other side of the sales relationship, and how powerful selling can happen once sellers stop selling in begin leading. You don’t want to miss this conversation.

A Zen Master I know, Genpo Roshi, wrote a book called Spitting Out the Bones. The book title is something his Master said to him about Zen. His Master told him that he must “swallow the whole fish and then spit out the bones.”

A lot of us, your humble author included, tend to write in terms that suggest there is only one way to do something, or one right answer. We sometimes set up straw men against which we rail to make a point, but in doing so, we frame things as mutually exclusive choices. Because of the mediums we choose, like a blog post or LinkedIn, we don’t always provide enough context. In law school I learned that every major law had exceptions, and those exceptions had exceptions of their own. Context is always taken into account, and judges (or more accurately, their law clerks) write pages and pages explaining the context and why it matters to a decision.

If you have been here for any time, you know that I want you to stop being transactional and be super-relational. Except when you shouldn’t be super-relational. If what you sell should be sold as a transaction, by all means, transact. You are not creating value by dragging things out for the person trying to buy something from you (unless of course, you are . . . see how difficult generalizations can be?)

You should also defend your price and justify the delta between your price and your competitors. Except for when you shouldn’t. Maybe the discount is strategic, and your company is trying to buy market share (something the Japanese auto manufacturers did in the 1980’s to great effect). Or maybe you live in a place where everything is a negotiation, and where people increase their prices knowing they are going to haggle. In these cases, the advice I offered is harmful to you. It’s out of context.

All things being equal, relationships win. Except when they don’t. There are people who will find enough value in your product and solution that they’ll buy it even if they aren’t head over heels in love with you. As much as my experience informs my belief that relationships are incredibly powerful in creating a competitive advantage, nothing is universally true (except that nothing is universally true, but even that could be false).

When you see me write words like “mostly,” and “likely,” it’s because I believe there is more gray than there is black and white. What works in some cases doesn’t work in others. The reason that I like choices is that when something doesn’t work, you need to try something else.

So, I will offer you what Genpo Roshi’s master provided him. Swallow the whole fish, and spit out the bones. If something isn’t right for you or for some situation, don’t believe that you must follow a rule that leads you to an adverse outcome. My goal is always to write ideas that matter and that are actionable, but that isn’t always going to be true for everyone who runs across this blog.

The post Spit Out The Bones appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When blogging first started, it was a way for early internet users to share their thoughts, stories, passions, and experiences with others all over the world. Now, it’s become a multi-billion dollar industry that turned ordinary people into titans of the online world. If you’re more interested in the latter case than the former, you might want to take a look developing a content creation framework for your blog.

This concept is fairly simple. You just create an outline of what contents you will produce for your blog based on how each topic will affect the next while taking your goals and timeline into account.

Pretty simple, right?

It could be, if you just keep the following pointers in mind. This way, if your goal is to get your visitors to check out Bonds promo code and the like, you can.

Intent

Before ever coming up with a single topic in your content creation framework, you must first figure out what the intent is behind the content creation, to begin with. What exactly are you trying to achieve?

Are you trying to boost your conversion rate? Are you simply trying to establish trust by offering well-written, thoughtful, and valuable contents?

Regardless of what your goal might be, it’s important that you keep it in mind when setting up your framework so that you don’t lose sight of why you are doing what you are doing. This makes you a more effective content creator and blogger.

Target

So, now that you have established the “why” of creating your content, let’s establish who you will be creating it for. You should always have a buyer’s persona or an avatar in mind if you are going to produce content of any kind, and the more specific, the better. Doing so will make it more likely they’ll find that cotton on promo code or whatever else you’ve been peddling.

The internet is already quite crowded as it is without you throwing in your own hat in the ring. You’re more likely to find an audience when you keep your niche as narrow as possible.

For example, instead of trying to attract the attention of users who are shopping for general items, you can focus on users who are shopping for shoes or bags. From there, you can construct your contents based on that goal and with that target audience in mind so that they’ll be more likely to take your word for it.

Timeline

Along with your goal and your target audience, it’s important to set a timeline as to when the contents will go live. For maximum effectiveness, it’s advisable to break up your timelines into different campaigns targeting specific audiences and goals. From there, you can decide whether you want to post the contents on a weekly or monthly basis.

Remember that once you have already set the timeline, you need to stick to it no matter what. A huge part of building trust with your readers is assuring them that once they come back to your site, they’ll find new content that they will find useful. If you can narrow it down to specific hours, it would be even better.

Standards

Blogs have to have a standard that they can stick to and build their brand on. If you don’t have one, the quality of your contents and the handling of your blog can differ wildly, often simply following your mood and emotional state at any given time. This is not advisable.

Your contents, the way you interact with your visitors, how you design your blog, and even high you post your content should be as good, if not better than it was before. Quality should never go below a certain threshold in any respect.

If you want to form a relationship with your readers as someone who can be trusted, they have to see that you are exactly this kind of person through the substance of your blog. Otherwise, they’ll go elsewhere.

Sales Cycle

Keep your sales cycle in mind. Typically, a cycle starts with attracting your target audience, walking them through different stages of consideration, before you convert your leads. This system will affect how you create your contents simply because each topic must correspond to the specific step in the cycle. This will ensure that your content creation framework is as effective as it can possibly be.

Is Someone Stealing Your Blog Content?

Raise your hand if you’re sick of the debate over whether cold-calling is dead or not. All of you? Great! Me too.

As for whether social selling is taking over, well, let’s just say I have a few thoughts to share on this as well.

Buckle up for my mini-rant.

The debate is bullshit. To be successful in sales, you need to use all of the tools available to you. This means the phone, social media, and email. They’re all valuable.

But before I praise the virtues of email and talk about how you can write killer emails at scale, I want to stress one thing first.

You cannot sell over email.

There, I’ve said it. So, you might ask, why am I writing this post?

Great question.

Email is still an incredibly valuable means to engage people, especially when you are trying to secure a first meeting. Consequently, the challenge is that it’s a crowded marketplace with a lot of noise.

The rest of this article will unpack the tools, traps, best practice and strategies for scaling outbound sales emails.

After all, email use around the world continues to skyrocket. By the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will be over 2.9 billion. That’s over one-third of the world’s population! Can you afford not to be reaching them?

Before we get into how to write killer outbound emails, there are a couple of things that I’d like to address. First of all, technology.

The hidden trap of tracking tools

In recent years, there has been an explosion of data tools that allow people to scale and measure the effectiveness of their emails.

There are tools that provide you with lists of accurate data like Clearbit, Datanyze, ContactOut and DiscoveryOrg.

There are also outbound email automation tools like Outreach, SalesLoft, Yesware, ToutApp, PersistIQ and more that enable you to send multiple emails and measure the results.

The combination of these two technologies has enabled many sales people to become more efficient and more effective at creating first meetings.

Unfortunately though, these high-powered tools are also being used by lazy reps to send more crap emails out to uninterested people. These reps are sending out poorly executed emails at scale which are burning the quality leads in their territory and teaching our customers to ignore sales emails.

Still, there is some good news to come out of that.

The amount of crap emails people receive make the truly good ones stand out.

So, what constitutes a good email? Well, that brings me to my second point.

Relevance trumps personalisation every time

It’s no longer enough to insert {First Name} into your mail merge template or tool, and assume you have personalised your message enough for the recipient to think you care.

As Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

The key to showing someone that you care is making your email relevant.

Look closely at that definition. Notice the words ‘connected’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘considered’? It tells you what all emails should be. Which brings me to my next point.

What should you include in an outbound email?

There is a basic structure you should follow to get the most out of an outbound sales email.

Songs, movies, books… what do they all have in common?

They have a storyline.

So too should an email.

The proper structure of an outbound email consists of the three R’s:

R: Relevance

Which consists of research and reference;

Research

An opening line that shows you have done your homework, and indicates this is not, strictly speaking, a COLD call. Think back to Teddy Roosevelt’s quote, and show that you truly care and that the recipient is not just a number.

Reference

A reference to another customer who has had a similar situation or experience. This shows the recipient they are not alone in what they are going through, and that they might be missing out on a potential gain. The psychology of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is famous for a reason!

R: Reward

There is an old saying that you have to give to get, and this holds true in email marketing. If you offer someone value, such as a link to valuable insights or a relevant blog post, they will start seeing you as a resource who understands what is directly relevant to them. They will be more open to meeting as a consequence.

R: Request

Lastly, you need to ensure that you have made a request. Too many emails these days simply fade into the finish line without giving the reader an action to deliver on. What’s the point of writing killer content if you don’t ask them to engage? I am not talking about going straight in for the kill, but you can drop a few breadcrumbs by offering to share additional insights or requesting their perspective on the reward you sent them.

Here are some other best practices.

Do’s and Don’ts of outbound sales emails

• DO Keep it short. Half as long; twice as powerful.
• DO Optimize content for mobile phones. Make effective use of the subject line and the first 50 characters.
• DON’T Start with “Hi my name is … and I work for…” Get to the point!
• DON’T Start your opening sentence with “I”. Make it about them, not you.
• DO Be careful how you lead into your Reference story. Talk about “How Customer X and Y experienced great Benefit A and great Benefit B”, not “Our service offers great Feature A, B and C.”
• DO Offer relevant links and industry insights.
• DON’T Include attachments – always link to content.
• DO Use a person’s first name to draw their attention to a key point.
• DO Close with something social that communicates or relates.
• DON’T Try to close by pushing for a meeting – your primary goal is to gauge interest.

Now that you know the basic structure, we can begin the process.

3 failsafe steps to scale killer sales emails

One question I often get asked is, if I write one killer email, will that be enough?

The short answer is no.

With today’s crowded inboxes, there is a very high chance that your first, third or even fifth email is never read.

Heather Morgan from SalesFolk, who creates email campaigns for hundreds and hundreds of companies, says that the statistics show that at least one third of all email responses come from the fifth or seventh email received.

So if you’re out there thinking you can get away with only writing one killer email, you’re not approaching this with the right attitude.

You need to be building campaigns or an email series with a minimum of 6, preferably 8-10 call-outs.

When I tell people this, they are often concerned.

“Won’t I piss them off if I send them that many emails?”

If you’re sending crap emails, then yes.

But if you’re sending emails that people love with a sound value proposition, then they will lead into a first meeting within the first 1-2. Meanwhile, the people who hate your emails will probably opt-out after 1-2 emails. So really, you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Here’s a quick tip: make sure your emails aren’t all saying the same thing. They aren’t essentially saying, “Hey, did you get my last email?”

You should use your extra emails to systematically sound out different value propositions, for example, the pain vs. gain, to see what resonates with your prospective clients.

Here’s a system you can follow to scale your outbound emails.

1. Know your customer

This is what we call a sales-driven ideal customer profile (ICP). Your marketing team has one. Your product team has one. Most businesses have at least three.

Here is an example ICP:

How do you do this?

1. Get inside their head. Don’t guess, ask questions! If you can’t actually go out and speak to your customers, then go the extra mile and read their LinkedIn profile. Scroll right down to the end to look at their recommendations and see which companies they follow. It will give you great insight into what they like and value. By making an effort to understand the language they use and the type of people that they connect with, you will get a much more informed idea of how to write an email that speaks directly to them.
2. Get to know their digital playground. Where do they go to hang out online and who are they chatting with? This goes beyond looking at LinkedIn. Check out their activity on Twitter or Facebook. Is there a particular meme that they’re sharing around with their friends and colleagues that you can potentially use to break the ice?
3. Think about the rational challenges they face. This doesn’t just mean the challenge they face that you are already planning to solve. It relates to daily challenges in their business or day-to-day life. Why should I care, I hear you ask. Well, again, it’s going to give you that all-around picture. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in today’s customer-centric buying cycle, people are inclined to make emotional decisions first and then rationalise them with data. You need to truly understand your customer to tap into their emotions when you’re writing your emails.

2. Build your IMPACT matrix

So you’ve got this idea of your ICP and you also know how you can impact their business. Now you need to zoom in on whether you can alleviate the pain of challenges they’re facing, or bring a potentially valuable change to their business.

To really simplify this, people are motivated by the opportunity to solve pain in their business or increase their revenue and market share.

But don’t just focus on the positive or the negative. That’s the trick to this, and that’s why you need an email series, rather than just one.

Through multiple emails, you can create what I like to call multi-touch engagement.

Some people respond more strongly to the focus of pain whereas others respond more strongly to the focus of gain.

Your job is to mix the two up and create multiple value propositions.

This prospecting IMPACT matrix will help:

Across the top, list the different features of your product that could provide value to your prospects. This is never to be shared during the prospecting stage but used to identify specific areas where you could positively IMPACT their business. This is just the start to building out your checklist.

Next step is to focus on the specific PAIN you are looking to solve. It might be something such as they’re experiencing an issue with loss of productivity. You will know this from your Research (remember the three R’s?). So that’s clearly costing them in revenue by increasing the cost of goods and reducing the amount they can ship.

You can make a REFERENCE to another customer who had a similar situation or experience. It could be that you knew two manufacturers who were dealing with a loss of productivity which was having a negative impact on their business.

Fill in the first line with your Reference point.

Now think about the REWARD. In this case, it might be, “Here’s an article from the Harvard Business Review which talks about how you can improve productivity in your manufacturing environment.”

Put that into the Reward section of the table graph.

Now for each email, the Reference and Reward will change, as will the pain vs. gain focus. Get it?

Overall, your task is to get rid of their pain altogether. And if you get them to think that you can within your email series, or better yet, secure a face-to-face meeting, then you’ve got the system down pat.

3. Now it is time to compose your emails

Create a timeline for sending out all of your emails. Think along the lines of one email every 4-8 business days. It’s really important that you plan out your emails so that you spread out your key messages for maximum effect focusing on the IMPACT for their business.

A common trap that a lot of people fall into is getting so excited about telling their ICP what they can do for them, that they give it all upfront in the first email. They have nothing to say after that and start writing emails like;

“Just checking to see if you read my last email” or even worse. “I’m just reaching out about my earlier email”.

Stop these bad behaviours immediately! This is a long-haul game, and you’ve got to think of it like that.

Remember, this is not about your ability to be likeable and impressive. It’s about your ability to create a structured sequence of emails for each business relationship you’re trying to nurture.

Do you remember what the third R was? It was Request.

When you are prospecting, it is to begin a conversation. Most people ask for 15 minutes of your time. What for? People know you want to use that time to sell them something. Why not change your request to something that your customer values. A meeting with an industry expert? A chance to learn from their colleagues?

Now you have crafted your emails, it is not time to set and forget and let the sequence of emails run their course. You need to constantly refine your message.

Which brings me back to the email tracking and bulk mail-out tools I mentioned earlier. They help you measure your performance over time. Look at them along the way, not just when your email series is over.

If results show that you’ve got an early subject line right and that it’s created enough intrigue to make someone open your email, then that’s great, but not if it doesn’t follow through as results.

However, it is still useful because it can help you understand what’s resonating and what’s making people engage, and you can tweak future emails to improve your conversion metrics.

I consider an email successful when it receives a reply. Otherwise known as a response to your Request.

So always have that endgame in mind—of getting your ICP to engage with the Request or with information you sent out.

Conclusion

As we’ve discussed, while the volume of emails people receive has increased, it’s still a powerful way to reach people, and it can be an efficient method for engagement when used correctly.

By following the three R’s and spacing out your email series, you will set yourself up for success as well as improve your relationship building capacity.

To get the best results, integrate your email strategy with other channels of engagement to maximise your chances of connecting. Think of it as an extension of multi-touch engagement—emails shouldn’t work in isolation!

And don’t forget to use tracking tools to your advantage. The value of understanding what engages and converts your ICP cannot be underestimated.

Remember how at the start of this article, I said you cannot sell over email? That’s still true. But in the long run, it’s worth your time to master the tools, best practices, and strategies for scaling outbound sales emails, so that you can use them to bring you one step closer to selling in person and securing a meeting.

We’re hiring an intern to the join the Business Insider Intelligence Enterprise sales team.

Business Insider Intelligence is Business Insider’s premium research service, delivering real-time insights on emerging trends, technologies, and disruptors in the digital arena. 

This Internship is perfect for someone who wants to jumpstart their sales career and learn how to be successful within a rapidly growing company. You will be responsible for identifying potential prospects, performing outreach to secure meetings, successfully scheduling meetings for Account Executives, and making warm introductions for the Account Executives to close business.

In this role you will cultivate and manage initial relationships with high-level executives at Fortune 500 companies across the world. You will identify these executives during daily list development sessions while using various sales prospecting software. You will be working closely with the Account Executives to formulate outreach strategies, execute on those strategies, and schedule sales meetings.

You will…

• Create new prospecting lists
 by identifying target accounts and specific executives
• Monitor incoming leads and be fast to act to determine which leads are qualified
• Schedule phone or in-person meetings through warm and cold email outreach using a consultative sales approach that supports their strategic and tactical needs

You are... 

• A tenacious go-getter who is excited by new challenges and stays positive in the face of adversity. You expect yourself to hit - if not exceed - your goals and know how to make it happen.
• A self-starter who takes charge and finds process in ambiguity. You’re always looking for ways to optimize and can embrace Business Insider’s mission: get better every day. 
• A confident communicator, who understands how to effectively tailor messaging and articulate value, be it in person, on the phone, or over email.

Requirements

• Proficient in Microsoft Excel
• Tech savvy –– ability to learn sales CRM software quickly
• B2B sales experience a plus
• Degree in Business, Communications or Marketing a plus

If this sounds like a great job for you, please APPLY ONLINE and include a cover letter telling us a bit about why you're a good fit for the role!

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why 555 is always used for phone numbers on TV and in movies

Sales prospecting is probably the hardest and most time consuming part of your job as a sales rep. However, it’s an important part of the role to find potential customers who are a great fit and have long-term value to the business.

With the never-ending debate about whether leads should be sales or marketing qualified, you spend a substantial part of your work week prospecting new business via email, social media, in person, and through referrals to make sure the leads you work are worth your while.

Best Sales Email Templates

1. Congratulate them.

There’s more information available about prospects today than at any other time in the history of selling. That means there’s plenty of prospect success stories out there for you to find.

Visit your prospect's website for funding updates, search Google for company news, view LinkedIn to dig into the prospect’s professional dossier, and append all this information to your contact records.

Once you’ve found the perfect opportunity to congratulate the prospect, don’t try to pitch them. Simply share a genuine compliment.

Why this email works: This approach is creative and personal. Flattery is always welcome and it’s possible you’ll get a “Thank you, but who are you?” in response.

2. Boost their mission.

Try this approach with executive leaders. Executives and business owners are usually the creators of their vision and are most involved with communicating it. Publicity is the name of the game, especially in startups and small businesses.

Why this email works: This email is genuine and applicable in just about any company. It’s hard for the recipient of this email to turn down an opportunity for free publicity so you’ll likely be able to get your foot in the door by offering your platform to promote their mission.

3. Provide immediate value.

Find a way to provide some value up front, even if it's your own expertise. Just be careful not to be critical in your first email. Starting with a compliment can soften the critique.

Why this email works: Providing immediate value for free is something that software companies have mastered through freemium business models, creating some of the fastest growing businesses ever. Free feature-limited or usage-limited software offers value before any money changes hands.

If you're a service provider, partner with a software company that has a freemium model. For example, if you're an accountant, partner with Expensify to introduce free expense report tools. If you sell sales training services, recommend a product like HubSpot's free email tracking tool. As long as you are the person introducing free value, prospects will appreciate it.

4. Offer help.

Remember, your goal in the initial email is to simply get a response. With this in mind, an immediate fix the prospect needs might not be related to the products or services your business offers. That doesn’t mean you can’t still offer help. Here’s how to do it:

Why this email works: It’s similar to the example above, but it comes across even more genuine. You benefit nothing from offering an intro while the prospect will get the benefit of a new sign that could bring them more business.

5. Compliment them.

You could give cash away to your prospects. That might get their attention. Or you can offer a compliment which costs nothing.

Why this email works: These templates offer kind words and helpful tips. People like to hear nice things about themselves and receiving a specific solution to a problem along with the flattering statements is a recipe for a response back.

6. Build rapport using common interests.

Warning: Don't be creepy. Salespeople of yesteryear could get away with walking into a buyer's office, noticing the photo of the prospect's grandchildren, and remarking, "You have a beautiful family." Today, the framed picture of decades past has become the digital photos on Facebook.

Salespeople should certainly incorporate Facebook into their research. But that doesn't mean you should open with "How was your grandkids' soccer practice on Sunday?" That'll compel a prospect to issue a restraining order, not email you back. Instead, start with safe topics like common personal interests.

Why this email works: You’re making a sincere connection with the prospect using information that’s typically fair game to mention — LinkedIn posts. The prospect will respect your research skills and appreciate that you were tactful in your approach.

Opening with a mutual non-work related interest is smart for another reason: you're giving them a break from the day-to-day and reminding them of something they love to do outside of work.

7. Talk to lower-level employees.

While there is a lot of information online about prospects, nothing beats intel from a trusted source. This is especially critical if you sell to finance, IT, or other back-office professionals since it's difficult to inspect or observe how they do their jobs from an external perspective.The trick to this is starting conversations with the intention of gathering intelligence.

Every company has customer-facing employees. Start with the sales team and ask them what they’re exceeding at in their roles and what they could be improving. They will probably respond in solidarity.

Then, reach out again with the results and see how your product or service can help. If there are goals the company could reach more effectively after implementing the solution you sell, the sales team might be willing to pass along your information to the right contacts.

Why this email works: You’ve already received valuable survey data that you can use for your own content and sales pitches, but you can also use that data to uncover needs within the companies you’re prospecting.

8. Talk to your prospect's customers.

Your prospect's customers and partners are great sources of intelligence, too. Look at your prospect's case study page, if they have one, or check out reviews about them online.

Why this email works: More often than not, you’ll find positive information that will get the prospect talking. But, if you hear from a disgruntled or unsuccessful customer, use that information too. You could motivate the prospect to turn those negative reviews into positive ones — hopefully using your company’s products to do it.

9. Talk to your prospect's vendors.

Vendors are another resource to learn about a company. Trusted service providers are in a great position to refer you. Not only do they know how your prospect makes purchasing decisions — they can make introductions.

Make sure you get permission to use names when referencing vendors. The last thing you want to do is get your referral partner fired. Ask, "Would you mind if I email [Prospect] and say that you suggested we talked?" Then, you're free to write, "[Vendor] asked me to email you to see if I could help." Or just call and start off with "I was talking to [Vendor], and … "

Why this email works: Not only do you have a direct way to reach a prospect, you have the seal of approval from the vendor. The prospect probably gets several sales emails per day, but you’ll stand out because of the connection you made with the vendor prior to emailing the prospect.

10. Talk to friends (and strangers).

While this is not always good advice (especially for children), talking to strangers at the right place and time can be a smart idea. Whether they're friends or acquaintances, talking to people outside of your typical peer group can lead to great connections.

Why this email works: Similar to the vendor emails, talking to strangers through a mutual friend could be more effective. The relationship is built on a causal connection rather than a business one so there’s no pressure to pitch right away.

11. Respond to content your prospects publish.

Pay attention to what your prospects are publishing online. They are sharing massive clues about their current initiatives that provide great openings for dialogue.

Here's an email I wrote up for an SDR from RingCentral who asked for some advice:

Why this email works: Reading an unsolicited sales email or a piece of unsolicited advice isn’t at the top of anyone’s priority list. This approach keeps your email relevant and useful to the prospect.

12. Send your company's content.

For every title or persona that can influence your sale, have content on hand that addresses their specific challenges.

Why this email works: You’re working smart not hard. Rather than creating an entirely new piece of sales material to send to this prospect, you can pass along marketing material that has already been made and is relevant to the needs of the prospect. Take this tactic a step further and add a tracking parameter on the blog link. Even if they don’t respond to your email, you can follow up on the back end to see if they’ve clicked the link to read the article.

13. Send other people's content.

Don't only send your content. Prospects will be less suspicious of your intentions if you send other people's or other companies' content that could be helpful for their situation.

Why this email works: The point is to show them that you care about their success and you want to help them reach it no matter what. And yes, that includes sharing other people’s content if you have to.

14. Publish original content.

For the last few years, I've regularly asked my young son, "How do you get better at things?" Without hesitation, he now says "practice." Not every salesperson is a natural writer, but I'd highly recommend they all start practicing.

Why should salespeople write? Prospects willingly talk to critical-thinking, problem-solving, effective salespeople if they have experience relevant to the prospect's world. So, write about your daily experiences helping prospects. Share your wisdom.

While publishing content to your company website is the best way to go, it's only good for you if you're able to track which of your prospects reads your posts. If you don't have marketing automation software in place that tells you when your prospects are visiting your website, publish to LinkedIn instead. As long as your 1st and 2nd-degree network consists of prospects, there is a chance they'll read what you post.

When they like, comment on, or share something you wrote, start a dialogue by using a variation on the template below:

Why this email works: The really great thing about content is that it keeps on talking with prospects even when you're sleeping, exercising, or eating. It works around the clock for you. Every other prospecting method is ephemeral (especially email). Imagine what salespeople could do if we combined the staying power of relationships with the lasting power of content.

15. Monitor who views your LinkedIn profile.

Why this email works: The really great thing about content is that it keeps on talking with prospects even when you're sleeping, exercising, or eating. It works around the clock for you. Every other prospecting method is ephemeral (especially email). Imagine what salespeople could do if we combined the staying power of relationships with the lasting power of content.

Connect with them and use any of the templates in this article to start a conversation. Lower-level and customer-facing employees are a bit more likely to accept your connection, respond to you, or just check out your profile in return. As soon as they do, use the line above.

Why this email works: It’s short and to the point, giving the prospect a reason why they might want to accept your connection and visit your profile again in the future.

16. Put their name in lights.

If you are publishing content, ask for feedback on your drafts. You can also ask prospects for quotes to add to your article.

Why this email works: People like being asked for help or being asked for their opinion on a topic. This might not seem like the perfect introduction to your next big sale, but it’s a smart way to get a response.

17. Ask for advice.

Most people like to give advice. Asking for advice appeals to their ego. (See the "esteem stage" of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the age of social media, many of us get stuck at the esteem stage on our path towards "self-actualization.")

Psychology 101 aside, asking for advice is a hard request for most of us to resist.

Why this email works: It shows humility and respect for the prospect and their contributions to the industry in which you work.

18. Ask for a recommendation.

Why this email works: It shows humility and respect for the prospect and their contributions to the industry in which you work.

Why this email works: The requests in these examples are sincere and easy to oblige. You’ll find that people are more than happy to help.

19. Offer an introduction.

Why this email works: The requests in these examples are sincere and easy to oblige. You’ll find that people are more than happy to help.

Why this email works: You’ll have more opportunities to get in front of the prospect with each introduction you make. And when those sales reps have calls with the prospect, they’ll mention that they both know you and sing your praises. The prospect will become fond of you, and when you reach out again, you’ll be met with excitement rather than skepticism.

20. Seek referrals.

Everyone with a quota should be part of a networking group. If you sell to bigger companies, join a group (or start one) of professionals who sell to your target market. Try reaching out to other sales professionals like this.

Why this email works: You’ll want to diversify your prospecting approach. COld calling, emailing, social media, and talking to strangers will get you far, but adding other sales people to your network is a way to work smarter. The email template in #19 is the perfect example of the benefits of expanding your sales network.

21. Reference a common connection.

Once you've developed trusting relationships with other professionals, ask them if it's okay to drop their name when connecting with their contacts. You might even ask them for a list of people that they recommend you reach out to.

Why this email works: Name dropping can be distasteful, but not when it’s done like this. A subtle nod to your mutual connection can make a prospecting email come across more personable.

22. Respond to social media posts.

Why this email works: Name dropping can be distasteful, but not when it’s done like this. A subtle nod to your mutual connection can make a prospecting email come across more personable.

Why this email works: You’re carrying on the conversation from a post you found interesting. This could lead to new ideas, solutions, and even a discovery call about a need the prospect has that your products and services could solve.

23. Run a custom analysis.

Depending on what you sell, it might be difficult for you to evaluate your prospect's situation. But, if you can evaluate it, do so. Then send them the results.

Why this email works: Chances are you don't sell marketing services, but if you do, use this approach. If you don't, try to find something you can analyze that your ideal buyer will care about.

24. Provide insights.

According to Mike Schultz, author of Insight Selling, "Educating buyers not only shares the seller's expertise, but it also demonstrates the seller's willingness to collaborate with the buyer."

Why this email works: It provides useful information that is highly relevant to the prospect. Tailor this approach to any new venture or project your prospect has taken on. This could be the data they need to validate the effort they’re putting into it.

25. Ask them what they want to learn from peers.

Marketers use surveys to gather proprietary data. Salespeople should borrow this playbook. Engaging prospects in the design of the survey will ensure the results are interesting for the ideal buyer profile. This is also a suitable reason to reach out which can initiate a dialogue.

Why this email works: You’re building a relationship with the prospect while generating interest in the results of the survey. When you release it, you’ve already established a reason to reach out to them again with a stronger pitch based on the data in your report.

26. Invite them to participate in market research.

Taking the email template above a step further, you can reach out to the prospect again once you and your team create the survey. Now, you can ask the prospect and their team to take the survey.

Why this email works: The great part about surveys is that you can ask tough questions about challenges and goals. It's hard to do that on a phone call right away.

Don't forget to sync your survey software with your CRM and marketing automation software so you can see the responses and use them to customize your future sales and marketing touches to each contact's context.

27. Get their opinion.

Ask your prospects about what they think about something. Just be sure you actually plan to use their opinion in some way — don’t ask an empty question. You can let them know their response might be featured in some content that your company will publish in the future. Or you may be using their qualitative data to validate some quantitative data from a survey you did.

Why this email works: You’re actually turning the salesperson stereotype on its head and acknowledging that people find sales reps to be pushy. As a sales person, you’re actively negating that characteristic by taking a collaborative and curious approach to the prospect.

28. Ask them if they want access to market research.

Why this email works: You’re actually turning the salesperson stereotype on its head and acknowledging that people find sales reps to be pushy. As a sales person, you’re actively negating that characteristic by taking a collaborative and curious approach to the prospect.

Why this email works: If you used this company in your market research, you’re showing them the final project where their responses were featured. Moreover, you’re sharing some valuable industry insights that the prospect will likely find useful.

29. Ask if you've got the right person.

People have a natural tendency to want to help others. Make the most of that and send an outreach email that asks, "Could you help me get in touch with the right person?"

Why this email works: It’s natural to respond to well wishes with a simple “thank you”, but by adding more information to your email about what you do and why you’re sending them a message, they may be inclined to take you up on your offer to meet.

31. Offer motivation.

No matter what industry your prospect works in, they’re probably going through their own trials and tribulations. A word of encouragement might be just what they need to make it through the day. Send a thoughtful message like this one to perk them up.

Why this email works: They’ll remember how you made them feel and appreciate the sincerity you displayed. Instead of taking the opportunity to ask for a connection, a call, or a few minutes of their time, you offered them a moment to reflect on their day and make the most of it.

32. Send them a gift.

When was the last time you received a gift card to your favorite coffee shop or had lunch covered by a friend? It’s not a common occurrence, and that makes it all the more meaningful when it does happen.

Do some research to see if you can find the prospect's favorite restaurant and purchase an e-gift card. Depending on your sales team’s budget, this might be out of reach for every prospect, but for the ones that you feel are a great fit for your product or service or someone you’ve received an introduction to, try this email template out. Remember to use an eye-catching subject line so they don’t miss the free gift inside.

Why this email works: The tried and true reciprocity principle never steers us wrong. A good deed begets a good deed. Your prospect will want to thank you for the gift and probably commend you on the unique approach.

Free Resource: 25 Sales Email Templates [Download Now]

Download These Templates for Free

How to Write a Sales Prospecting Letter That Gets a Response

These templates use a relatively simple set of guidelines. As you implement the approaches shared above, use these guidelines to customize your templates:

1. Research the prospect and their business, and have an idea of how you can help them before reaching out.
2. Grab prospects' attention with an interesting subject line.
3. Personalize your emails. Start messages with something about the prospect.
4. Use "you" whenever possible to make it about the prospect. Use "I" and "We" sparingly.
5. Avoid the temptation to lead with your value proposition. Share it only when it aligns with the prospect's needs.
6. Don't try to book a phone call in your initial email. Only "in-market" prospects will respond to that call to action.
7. Ask open-ended questions or none at all. Many prospects have become desensitized to calls to action, but they are often pleasantly surprised by genuine attempts at personal connection and offers of help.
8. The goal is to get a response, not to advance the sale or sort the interested from the uninterested. You can think about these aims once you get a response.
9. Include a call to action. Make it a very simple one to oblige that has a high chance of appealing to the buyer's self-interest.
10. Keep it short. Three to seven sentences max.
11. Double-check for grammar and spelling mistakes.
12. End with a question if it makes sense, but don't force an off-topic one. For example, if you compliment someone, they'll be likely to respond with a "thank you." If you embrace the goal of simply getting a response, mission accomplished.
13. Before you send an email in the first place, consider picking up the phone instead. All of these approaches will work on the phone too. If you do send an email, use an email open alert system and call the prospect when they're reading your email. This will maximize your connect rate.
14. Avoid the “send more email” approach. You might not get responses as quickly or frequently as you would like. It’s easy to get overzealous and keep sending email after email in response. You have to hold off on that. Sending repeat emails isn’t sustainable. You’ll get flagged as spam and potentially turn your prospects off of what you have to offer.

Setting Realistic Expectations for Email Prospecting

I am not delusional enough to believe that salespeople will all of a sudden stop sending horribly self-centered, blast-you-with-my-value-prop, ask-me-to-marry-you-on-the-first-date prospecting emails. But in sharing these alternative approaches, I hope to get us that much closer to the end of this ineffective practice.

If your response rates are dwindling, think twice before you mass blast another set of prospecting emails. Maybe use that time to start one relationship based on trust, courtesy, and a genuine interest in that person’s success. I guarantee it will pay off in the long run.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

To really win at Facebook marketing you need a variety of campaign strategies. Campaigns that take into account who your potential shopper is and where they are in the conversion stages of your online store – dividing them into groups of people who are, say, getting to know your brand, have visited your site a certain number of times, or who have bought from you before.

What really sets the pros apart from amateurs when it comes to Facebook strategies is that pros play the long game with conversion funnel strategies.

Coming up with a variety of campaigns that reach various segments at various stages is fundamental to a winning Facebook strategy. Why? Not everyone wants to “buy now.” Creating long game conversion funnels can go a long way to setting up brand awareness and promotion sales. Some buyers need more proof – more time to be wooed before they make that cash sale.

Here are some potential shopper stages:

• Cold leads: people who haven’t met your store before
• Lukewarm leads: traffic that has browsed your store but took no action
• Blog/content readers: regular traffic coming from your blog content
• Warm leads: potential shoppers who almost bought from you
• Repeat customers: People who have bought from you before

The ideal conversion funnel should include a variety of ads that attract, convert, close and boost loyalty. Start off right by creating a variety of Custom Facebook Audiences, including a segmentation of potential shoppers, and create ads or promotions based on what stage they are at and include cross-channel marketing incentives.

So what are top campaigns every eCommerce marketer needs to ensure they are reaching potential shoppers across every conversion stage? Here are the 9 must-use expert Facebook strategies for online store marketers.

1. Run Recurring Retargeting Campaigns

On average, as many as three quarters of online shoppers will abandon shopping at checkout and if you’re not running retargeting campaigns the chances of them coming back to make the purchase is less than ten percent. By running recurring retargeting Facebook campaigns you can increase CTRs by as much as ten times.

Creating the perfect retargeting campaign means taking a look at insights and creating highly segmented campaigns that target potential shoppers at the right time. Look at where in the buying process they are ‘jumping ship’ and why they would be doing so.

For example, according to Search Engine Land, up to 55% of shoppers abandoned checkout because they feel the store’s shipping fees are too high, therefore creating a retargeting campaign offering a shipping discount could get those shoppers back in a buying mood.

Pro Tip: Always Exclude Converters

When creating remarketing and other funnel-specific Facebook campaigns, don’t forget to set rules to exclude buyers who have already converted. Otherwise, once they have bought something after seeing your remarketing campaign, for example, they will continue to see the same ad, which they could either hide or ignore, messing with your ad stats and affecting your Facebook costs.

Instead, make sure converts are automatically removed from remarketing campaigns and then moved further down the conversion funnel.

2. Test Upsell Campaigns

In the United States it is estimated that as much as 40% of revenue is earned from repeat shoppers: customers who have bought from brands already. This kind of data is hugely valuable when planning out your conversion funnel Facebook ads because it tells us that upselling campaigns could be very lucrative and are worth a test.

So, what is an upsell campaign? It’s a campaign that specifically targets your shoppers, showing them related products that go with what they have bought.

Say you’re selling in the clothing apparel niche and your customer just bought a dress; you could then direct ads to shoppers who bought that specific product with upsell campaigns for an array of matching accessories. Or you could create campaigns that revive past shoppers from months ago with product updates or discounts.

3. Beat Newsfeed Clutter with Video Ads

In 2018, if you’re not already using video ads, you are falling very far behind the pack. With newsfeed real estate competition heating up, video ads are no longer a friendly suggestion – they are a Facebook ad necessity for eCommerce business. Not only do they offer marketers the lowest CPC, but according to Adobe, video-viewing shoppers are 1.8 times more likely to buy.

There are so many video campaign options out there: from boosting UGC videos of shoppers using your products to showing behind-the-scenes footage of new products before they launch and showing season trends – the possibilities are endless and there’s certainly a video type to suit any level of the conversion funnel your target audience is in.

4. Run Multi-Product Dynamic Facebook Ads

Another must-have expert Facebook strategy is running multi-product ads.

Facebook multi-product ads increase conversions by showing customers a variety of product options or highlighting different product benefits in one ad. But their real power lies in combination with Dynamic Product ads.

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads are remarketing ads, either single or multi-product display, that are automatically displayed based on what products someone viewed on your site. According to Facebook, the following brands reported considerable ROI increases with Dynamic Product Ads:

• Shutterfly reported a 20% CTR increase
• The Honest Company reported 34% CTR increase
• Target reported a 20% increase in conversions

To sum up: If you want to run with the big boys, you need to take ad automation to the next level – making Facebook Dynamic Multi-Product Ads a must.

5. Reach New Shoppers with Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences allow you to target audiences who are similar to people who have already shopped at your store. It’s a great tool for the beginning of the conversion funnel to help you build brand awareness for those more likely to be interested in what you are selling. You can create lookalike campaigns based on conversions – people who have engaged with your content, email lists and page likes.

Pro Tip: Creating Video Lookalike Campaigns

Creating lookalike audiences for people who have watched your previous videos can have awesome results. To build your ‘video’ lookalike audiences, follow these steps:

Step 1: Create a Facebook Custom Audience

Step 2: Use the newly-created custom audience to create your lookalike

The expert trick when it comes to creating lookalike audiences, like with any Facebook targeting, is to ensure you segment as much as possible. Keeping your targeting pools smaller will allow you to create more targeted campaigns for that audience and thus increase your chances of meeting your ad objective.

When segmenting your audiences and campaigns, think about who you’re talking to – what they are interested in, where they are located and what their habits are.

6. Merge Facebook Ads and Content Marketing

If you want to create a well-structured Facebook marketing strategy, you need to include both hard-sell tactics aimed at getting warm leads to push checkout, and interest campaigns delivering relevant content aimed at colder leads: i.e., content marketing.

When it comes to eCommerce marketing, especially when budgets are smaller, it’s tempting to go straight for the jugular: creating hard-sell campaigns and promotions to sell products to warm and cold leads together.

But to be a successful Facebook marketer you need to cover all fronts and all buying stages. By blending your content marketing and Facebook strategies you will build branding and establish yourself as an authority in your niche, all while you turn cold into warm leads and gather engagement data and web traffic you can use for killer remarketing campaigns.

Pro Tip

If you are short on time and budget, create posts, guides and how-tos around big seasonal shopping days.

7. Share Your Brand Story

Another Facebook strategy to include in your strategy should be to show off your brand’s personal side. By using your brand’s unique story in boosted posts and campaigns you will be able to communicate your brand’s story to more people and build brand awareness.

If you don’t think it’s a worthy investment, think again! A Facebook study found that when Refinery changed ads to brand stories, there was an 87% increase in landing page traffic.

There are a number of ways you can create brand stories to incorporate in your Facebook strategy. Here are just a few to get the creative juices flowing:

• Give short pieces of your story in a series of posts like the above example
• Tell your story on video

• Write your brand story in a long-form post with great images showing your store’s ‘human side’
• Create a Facebook ‘Behind the Scenes’ album that you can build and add to
• Do regular Facebook Lives
• Use social responsibility to make a difference and tell a story

8. Match Up AdWords and Facebook Ad Strategies

When it comes to eCommerce traffic, we know Facebook and AdWords is an absolute must. But are you working your strategies in tandem? Lining up strategies can have huge payoffs and it is super simple to do. Here’s an example of the approach:

Step 1: Build brand awareness and get web traffic with Facebook ads

Step 2: Run AdWords remarketing campaigns to retarget those audiences who are searching for keywords you’re bidding on

By partnering up these two strategies, by the time a searcher is looking for what you’re selling they will already recognize your name and thus increase your chances of converting.

9. Turn Happy Customers into Loyal Customers

Last, but by no means least, you should be using Facebook marketing to turn your happy customers into loyal shoppers and brand fans. Think about your shoppers and what added service, value or offer you can create for them specifically. How can you stay fresh in the mind of those happy customers?

A great way to approach this is to run a specific special, promotion, or exclusive content post aimed at past buyers. By using custom audiences and conversions these ads will run automatically based on the rules you set. Or you can use Facebook campaigns to share surveys where you ask for your customers’ valuable insight.

Whichever way you tackle these campaigns, what’s important is that you have at least one campaign in your Facebook strategy bag of tricks that is exclusively aimed at repeat happy customers to ensure you turn them into loyal customers.

—

There you have it, 9 must-use expert Facebook strategies if you want to start driving sales and upping your eCommerce game this year. The bottom line in creating a well-rounded Facebook strategy is this: always go back to the basics – to your target audience and ideal shopper. Think about them at every stage, from getting to know your brand to pushing checkout, and tailor your campaigns to each stage. Remember to keep your audiences as segmented as possible and adapt your promotions to each segment so that you are talking their language and increasing your ad engagement.

Video marketing has been a staple of lead generation for quite some time. Some examples of this are: live video, virtual reality and 3D. But are you using video correctly? Our bet is that most companies are not using this premium content to its fullest potential. Video is undoubtedly one of the most popular marketing mediums right now, but how are you using this content to help move your prospects through the marketing funnel? Are you looking at measurable ways to use video and tie it back into your ROI?

Video marketing exists in various forms and can be used in lots of ways. 2018 is even positioning itself to be a huge year in video. Here are some tips on how to turn your videos into lead generation magic:

1. Use Gates and CTAs In Your Videos

Anyone who has ever been in a parking garage or an apartment complex knows you have to plug in a code or pull a ticket to get that turnstile arm to lift up and let you in. Your video marketing should employ the same methodology. The simplest way to capture prospects’ contact information is to set up a gate or turnstile on your video. Traditionally, inbound marketers would create a landing page requiring an email address or some other type of information prior to sharing the video content on a redirect link. This method is not always ideal due to long page load times and more work for the user, not to mention the landing page is open to sharing and won’t be private. Now products like Vidyard and Wistia have created ways for marketers to display a simple form in the video player, ensuring you grab that lead’s information before the video plays.

Sample of Vidyard’s video player email gate

Keep in mind this kind of gate is best suited to mid-funnel video content. For example, think of your content trail as leading a prospect to your product demo video. All the content that leads them to that demo video is ungated, but the demo video is gated, allowing you to see how many leads will volunteer more information to get that particular video. If you have already offered them a lot of quality top-of-the-funnel content, you will get some high-quality leads.

CTAs are another great addition to your video marketing strategy within your marketing funnel.

YouTube Annotations and other forms of pop-out CTAs are great additions to make sure your viewers are engaging with your content and moving down the marketing path they want to take. You want your viewers to take action, and including these elements during a video is a great way to engage them in the moment—for example, if you are discussing a particular service or product and that annotation text link pops up right at that moment. This is a great way to link people to other content you want them to view.

2. Create a Live Video Series

While one-off videos are well and good, we are in the go-live era. A live video marketing strategy is most successful with a regularly scheduled series that can provide value and keep viewers coming back. Here is a great example of a brand using a regularly scheduled live video series to enhance its online presence.

The best way to approach putting a series like this together is to start with your SMART goals for inbound: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. An example of a SMART goal for a live video series would be to produce a 5-episode series, biweekly, that gets an average monthly viewership of 200 and engagement of 75 over the next 3-6 months.

3. Repurpose Your Live Video Content

It’s one thing to take a chance and produce a cool live video series or a live webinar through Facebook, but some of your buyer personas might choose to live on a different social platform or channel. If our cable providers can give us on-demand video, then surely you can do the same with your content. If you only went live on Facebook, be sure to upload your video to Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo, and other social networks that accept long-form video. This helps keep all of your accounts active and increases the odds of your content being discovered. Referencing the subject matter of a live video in a later blog post is another great example. You can do this in a couple of different ways, such as taking the Q&A from the live video and turning it into a series of social media posts, transcribing your video into a blog article, and even turning that video into a podcast episode by creating an audio file. A few other repurposing ideas come straight outta Hollywood—use smaller clips, take meaningful clips from the live event and edit them down to smaller clips for sales enablement, and use special articles and other references in your content marketing strategy.

4. Create Meaningful Video for Sales Teams

Sales gets left out of the video marketing experience these days, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sales teams now have the ability to leverage video in fun and powerful ways. Video voicemails, one-off demo videos, and quick hand-off videos are great ways to integrate video marketing into the sales process.

Video voicemails are probably the most notable in this list because they have been trending upward recently. One-off demo videos are ways for you to answer a question or highlight a specific product feature without having to go through the hell of coordinating a demo meeting, while engaging with leads in a personalized, helpful way. The quick hand-off videos are something that we rarely see but are extremely effective. In a complex sales cycle, there might be a need to hand off a lead from an inside sales representative to a blue-chip closer. A cool way of doing this is introducing that closer and saying goodbye through a nice video. This is a fun and really personalized experience for a lead who can sometimes feel a little passed around reading about a hand-off in email text. Tie this in with the CTA idea in Tip # 1 above for the lead to schedule some time on your calendar.

Videos are a lot of fun, and there is no real limit to how they can be used in your marketing strategy, especially to generate leads. All you need is some creativity and a willingness to think outside the box. The best way to think about video and all the different ways it can be used is to sit back and think about all the places in a buying process your buyer persona (or maybe even you) would care to have a video instead of something else. Video is the most powerful storytelling device, and as millennials start playing a larger role in the consumer and B2B marketplace, if you do not use it you just might be missing out on tons of ROI and opportunities.

Photo by Terje Sollie from Pexels

VICTORIA — A grateful Premier John Horgan this week assured the B.C. Building Trades they will be guaranteed a piece of the action on billions of dollars worth of publicly funded construction under the NDP government.

Introduced to the conference by the organization’s executive director Tom Sigurdson as “my friend John Horgan,” the premier lost no time laying out his working class bona fides to the 17-member consortium of construction unions and thanking members for their support.

Then came the payback, starting with a commitment that the $1.377 billion Pattullo Bridge replacement will proceed under the first of a series of community benefit agreements guaranteeing local hires and union-equivalent wages, benefits and apprenticeship quotas.

“The first project out the door of the new government will be the Pattullo project,” Horgan told reporters shortly after his mid-day address to the building trades. “This would be a perfect template for community benefits agreements.”

Such agreements are expected to add to the cost of public construction in B.C., an expectation pretty much confirmed by Horgan when he initially described them as “best bid” as opposed to “low bid.”

But the NDP leader continued to insist that the trade-off benefits to British Columbians will outweigh added costs in wages, benefits and hiring quotas.

“We want to make sure when we build public infrastructure, we’re not just getting that piece of roadway, that piece of bridge, that hospital, that school, we’re also making sure that we’re training the next generation of workers.

“We’re making sure that there are women, Indigenous people, and other marginal groups participating in that construction project so that their families can benefit from public investments.”

A second community benefits agreement will cover the NDP’s pre-election promise to make the four-laning of Highway 1 from Kamloops to the Alberta border “a top priority.”

The NDP government has not yet laid out an accelerated construction schedule for a project that consumed $1.5 billion under the previous B.C. Liberal government and is expected to cost billions more to complete.

Both projects are part of the NDP plan to spend $15.6 billion on roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, housing and other taxpayer-supported infrastructure over three years.

Horgan indicated that many of those projects will proceed under variations of the first two community benefit agreements.

“I can see some building trades people here,” said the premier, as he addressed reporters at a press conference to announce $1.8 million in federal and provincial dollars to train and support more women in the building trades.

“There are going to be different situations as we go along; hospitals are not bridges; transit lines are not bridges. So we’re going to adapt agreements, as we’re negotiating with contractors and putting out requests for proposals.

“But our commitment is to make sure that there’s more than just the physical infrastructure that we benefit from. We want to make sure that people benefit as well.”

Horgan offered similar assurances to the building trades on the more than $10 billion in additional projects being built over the next three years by self-supporting (“ratepayer-supported”) crown corporations, mainly B.C. Hydro.

The New Democrats have already directed the giant electrical utility to ensure that all major contracts proceed on the model developed by the Allied Hydro Council, an umbrella group for unionized dam construction workers that dates back to the big Hydro projects of the 1960s.

“The advantage Hydro has had historically with the Allied Hydro agreement is they know what their labour costs are going to be, they know they’re going to have skilled workers to meet the complex work that’s involved in developing Hydro projects.

“And that worked for (premier) WAC Bennett, it worked for (premier) Bill Bennett, and I believe it will work for me.”

Something else that worked for Horgan was his relationship with the unions when it came to defending Site C. Sigurdson, his members, and the Allied Hydro council all weighed in on last fall’s debate on the controversial hydroelectric project, arguing that it was indeed past the point of no return and should be completed.

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The premier’s speech to the trades at a hotel on Victoria harbour Thursday brought Horgan full circle with the construction unions and their influential executive director.

Sigurdson was among the group of friends and supporters that talked Horgan into seeking the NDP leadership in 2014.

“I’m not sure if I want to thank you for that or not,” returned Horgan, when he addressed the trades at their conference in Victoria in spring 2016.

It was a troubled time for Horgan. He was struggling internally with the party’s environmental wing and Sigurdson was angry with him for coming out against a proposed liquefied natural gas development on the northwest coast.

Still, Horgan reminded the trade unionists how the New Democrats, when last in power in the 1990s, had guaranteed the unions a significant piece of the action on public construction projects.

“I am not bullshitting you today,” Horgan declared then, looking ahead to forming a government in the following year.

“You will be at the table with me, working with the proponents … We will build B.C., we will build roads, we will build transit and we will do it with you and your members.”

Two years later, he was back delivering on that promise and all it entails in terms of added costs,  benefits and controversy on public construction in B.C.

Vpalmer@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/VaughnPalmer

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Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple will replace traditional world currencies like the U.S. dollar, Euro and pound by 2030, according to futurologists.

Futurist and author Thomas Frey told Time: “Cryptocurrency is very much here to stay.”

“Cryptocurrencies are going to displace roughly 25 percent of national currencies by 2030. They’re just much more efficient, the way they run.”

Frey will speak before the U.S. Federal Reserve on the topic this September.

Meteoric Rise

The Express said futurists have noted that the “meteoric rise, both in value and popularity, of digital currencies like Bitcoin have made them impossible to ignore.”

The Express also said Frey’s prediction follows a nine-page report released by Goldman Sachs early this year to clients titled “Bitcoin As Money.”

The position taken by Goldman Sachs sharply contrasted the company’s stance on cryptocurrencies made last year when the firm, along with JPMorgan, described Bitcoin as a bubble or candy that’s just worth a penny.

Bitcoin Can Succeed as a Form of Money

Goldman Sachs economy experts led by Zach Pandl in New York said “in theory,” Bitcoin can succeed as a form of money.

Pandl and his fellow economists believe that if Bitcoin can facilitate transactions at minimal cost or provide portfolios with better risk-adjusted returns, it is as good as money.

The Express said analysts view Bitcoin as replacing traditional money in economically-troubled countries where “citizens are faced with a lack of banks and other financial services, and currencies are often devalued by high inflation.”

Frey also said in the Time interview: “Bitcoin is a lot like selling real estate” because when a person changes ownership of property, selling Bitcoin is giving up something to someone else, except that it just happens in the Cloud.

Frey, who used to work at IBM, also said Bitcoin would become a significant part of modern life because they are more efficient to move than fiat currency, which needs a bank to facilitate the transaction.

He said further that the importance of cryptocurrencies should not be shrugged off, citing a warning by International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Christine Lagarde that digital currencies could soon be a threat to central banks and international banking.

“When people like Christine Lagarde say cryptocurrencies could displace central banks and international banking, that’s very significant,” Frey said.

Despite the bullish trend that cryptocurrencies are displaying, investors are still encouraged to exercise extreme caution when selecting which cryptocurrency to support.

Keeping an eye out for qualities that reflect top-rated ICOs is one of the best strategies an investor can adopt. For one thing, the people running the company ought to have an established background in the blockchain scene.

It’s worth mentioning that out of the plethora of ICOs popping up, about 97% of them are expected to fail.

Legitimization of a New Asset Class

Meanwhile, James Canton of the Institute for Global Futures said the rise of cryptocurrencies the past two years represents “the legitimization of a new asset class emerging alongside the traditional global economy.”

“I’d say you can expect an exponential increase of new investment vehicles to come from crypto finance.”

While there would be money lost in the cryptocurrency market, Canton said there’s also the possibility to make huge earnings.

“I see crypto investments similarly to how I see traditional investments in stocks and bonds, which go through cycles. There is more volatility in cryptocurrencies. It’s a worthy area for people to experiment with their investment portfolios really carefully.”

“The future of commerce will be shaped by the crypto supply chain, which will have less friction and more exponential value between buyers and sellers of all products,” Canton added.

What’s Next?

Two futurists have predicted that cryptocurrencies would soon replace traditional money.

What can you say about it? Share your thoughts by commenting below.

If you were foolish enough to listen to some B2B marketers and agencies, you might conclude that the simple act of developing a generic “unique value proposition” for your organisation would somehow automatically make you more relevant to your prospective customers.

Well, the idea might possibly work in some B2C or very simple B2B environments, but the very thought is a complete nonsense in any complex B2B sales situation. Every customer situation is different. Every stakeholder has different motivations. Every opportunity has specific nuances. Generic platitudes are not enough.

What may seem unique and relevant to one customer is likely to be completely irrelevant to another (apparently quite similar) prospective customer. If you spend a moment thinking through the implications, it becomes obvious that anything intended to appeal to the crowds is unlikely to sound anything other than high-level and vague to any specific customer.

So what are we to do? Abandon the quest to establish our unique value? That would clearly be an over-reaction. The most sensible thing we can do is to start thinking of our value propositions not as generic statements, but as a series of nested elements.

I understand why companies believe that having an umbrella “unique value proposition” can be helpful in ensuring high-level messaging consistency in areas such as their website and their generic marketing communications. But that’s all it can ever be: an umbrella.

In complex B2B sales environments with complicated buying journeys, we would be far better served by thinking about our value proposition as being a layered position (not proposition) that becomes progressively more specific, unique and relevant with each iteration.

The market layer

At the highest level or layer, we can think in terms of a market-wide value position. This – designed to appeal to the organisations and stakeholders that represent our core target markets – should serve to differentiate our high-level approach from all the other options that a prospective buyer might consider looking at.

The danger, of course, is in trying to appeal to such a big swathe of the market that we say nothing distinctive at all and end up sounding just like all the other players in our space. I believe that even these high-level value positions should seek to establish clear contrast.

I’m a great fan of adopting a “Marmite” approach: if we seek to appeal to all, we will end up being loved by no-one. Far better to have a clear position that has both raving fans and organisations that would never come near us with a bargepole (on the grounds that they would probably never be good customers anyway).

The positioning formula that Geoffrey Moore first proposed in “Crossing the Chasm” can provide a very useful internal foundation for our market-layer positioning efforts (it tends not to be so effective if used verbatim externally).

But developing a credible and distinctive high-level position is just the foundation…

The account or organisation layer

We then need to take this generalised high-level market position and adapt it to resonate with what we know about a specific target account or organisation. This next-level positioning must be tailored by each sales person to the company they are targeting.

We will inevitably up-weight some aspects of our market layer proposition, down-weight some other elements and introduce new value messages that are specific to the position we want to establish with the organisation – but we can only do this by developing an intimate knowledge of what is important to them.

The functional or departmental layer

For any complex sale into any organisation of any size, the individual functions or departments – whilst (hopefully) sharing some overall value priorities with the organisation as a whole – will also have some unique value priorities that we are going to have to address if we hope to get their support.

We need to be able to anticipate and answer their question “what’s the specific value of your offering to my department or function?” Even if we don’t get asked this directly, you can safely bet that this is part of any potential customer’s consideration.

The role or stakeholder level

But even below these layers (and often as just or more important than them) is our specific value to the key roles and stakeholders who are going to have to make any buying decision and – just as important – to live with the consequences.

We need to be able to clearly position what our specific value is to each of these critical stakeholders. But this does not mean inventing a set of completely disjointed messages for each of these individuals.

Research published by the CEB (now part of Gartner) in The Challenger Customer showed that this was an unproductive – and desperately hard to implement – strategy, and that we need to work through what they describe as a “mobilizer” inside the customer.

Nested dolls

We need to think of our value position as a set of nested custom-crafted dolls – each layer being consistent with the overall position but tailored to address the priorities of the specific audience. The higher layers need to provide an integrating platform for the lower layer details, and the lower layers need to consistently support the high-level overview.

The only way we can achieve this is by having the right conversations with the right stakeholders in our significant sales opportunities, and consciously creating and testing that our messages resonate at every layer.

Built through insights, research and conversations

If we are to develop these layered positions, we can only do so through a combination of insights, research and conversations. We can harness our collective experience to assess what is likely to resonate at each level, test it and adapt it as necessary.

The more we understand about how we have helped similar organisations, departments, functions and roles, the easier it will be to start with credible hypotheses regarding these tailored layered value positions – as long as we are careful not to blindly assume that what worked under one set of circumstances will inevitably work without adaption in another apparently similar situation.

Mastering the layer cake

But if we can master these layers of value – even if we can just become slightly less overtly generic than our competition – we can stand out from the crowd in a way that is both distinctive and highly relevant to our customers. That feels like an investment worth making to me. What about you?

DOWNLOAD: Our Guide to the Value Selling System

It’s likely you’re doing everything you can to provide a great experience when you’re face to face with your customers.

You often know their names, personal preferences, and you enjoy interacting with them.

After doing business with you, they leave with a smile.

What if you could extend that personal experience beyond those face-to-face interactions?

Email marketing can, and should, make your customers smile also.

Your customers want to you to personalize your messages.

Consider that 52 percent of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to them.

As someone who already knows your customers because of the relationships you have with them, you have a huge advantage over big business.

Make a simple shift, so your messages feel more personal.

A funny thing happens when it’s time to send an email to your customers, suddenly it becomes about marketing and sending an email blast.

TIP: Here’s why you should never use the term email blast.

You forget about the people at the other end of the inbox.

Instead, if you think about providing value to the person receiving your emails, you’ll extend those personal interactions and the great experiences your customers expect from you.

How can make your emails feel more personal than ever?

First, you should write your messages as though you’re writing to one person. Your reader should feel as though you’re talking with them directly, not a group of people.

Mimic what the conversation would feel like if you were face to face with your best customer.

Secondly, time and relevance matter. To have the most significant impact, offers, information, and conversations should feel timely and relevant.

How to think about time and relevance.

If you send an email about purchasing a Christmas tree in June, your message isn’t going to feel timely or relevant.

The same holds true if you send an email about cat supplies to a dog owner.

But an email about Christmas trees after Thanksgiving and an email about cat supplies to cat owners start to feel more relevant to the person receiving them.

You can get more advanced with personalization too.

When someone purchases a product, an automated series of emails to help them make the most of the purchase makes sense and are valuable to the customer.

Or perhaps, if someone shows interest in a product or service by clicking a link in an email and you follow up with more information, those emails feel timely and relevant too.

Personalized emails work better.

When you move away from the blast mentality, you’ll find the results of your email marketing improve. You’ll get more opens, more clicks, and more business. These results come from getting more of the right messages to the right people at the right times.

Here’s the simplest way to personalize your email.

Dale Carnegie reminds us that “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

You can use a person’s name in your subject line, the greeting of your email, or within the body of your email.

Can personalization like using someone’s name feel phony?

Yes, if you overdo it. Make sure you read your email out loud. Does it sound natural or too much? If you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it in your email.

Get started in your next email.

Try using someone’s name in the subject line. You can run a subject line A/B test to see if the name has an impact on your email open rates.

Here’s what you need to remember about personalization:

• Write as if you’re talking to one person
• Make sure your messages are timely and relevant
• Using someone’s name is a simple place to start

Remember, think of email as a way to extend the personal experiences you already provide your customers, and you’ll put a smile on their faces. And more smiles mean more business.

What about you? Are you using any personalization in your email marketing? Tell us what works for you in the comments.

Join us for a FREE webinar, How to Create More Personalized Email Messages for Better Results.

In the future of retail, it is likely that bricks-and-mortar stores and online commerce will merge into a seamless and convenient entity, says Vancouver tech entrepreneur Igor Faletski. 

As CEO of the Vancouver-based online-commerce platform Mobify, Faletski has had a front-row view of the trend toward using technology to create a “frictionless transaction” that maximizes convenience for consumers while minimizing the amount of time they spend waiting in line.

“The days of a retail store as a place where you have inventory, you sell it and take money are short, because that’s not enough value to attract (consumers) to come there,” said Faletski. “Therefore, there is more of a focus definitely on frictionless shopping.”

Whether it is simple click-and-collect online grocery shopping, managing investments on your smart phone or using an app to pay for something in store to avoid a checkout line, commerce has become all about “reducing friction.”

Most people are familiar with the concept through online shopping with services such as Amazon Prime.

Shoppers go to a store’s website, click the “place order” button to purchase items that are billed to a credit card linked to their account, and a package arrives on their doorstep, maybe even on the same day.

The trend is to extend that simplicity across all retail.

“Everyone is focused on automating the payment process,” said Faletski, whose business builds ecommerce platforms for retailers to use.

But this means eliminating points of contact between people, which has the power not only to alter the experience of consumers but to shape the nature of work itself.

Replacing those contacts with automation and artificial intelligence shifts where the jobs are in commerce, potentially eliminating whole classes of employment before it is entirely clear if workers will have comparable jobs to move to, experts worry.

It also threatens to increase the so-called digital divide between those who are adept with technology — and can afford the smart phones, computers and data plans that go along with it — and those who aren’t, especially seniors who also face increasing issues with social isolation.

Automation can contribute to social isolation 

“I think we’re still grappling with what the implications are of taking the human element out of some of these transactions,” said Kendra Strauss, director of the labour studies program at SFU’s Morgan Centre for Labour Research.

“And what we’re probably not thinking about is what does it mean for people who rely on those interactions for any human contact in their day.”

That is a prime concern for another SFU academic, gerontologist Andrew Wister, who is studying the prevalence and consequences of social isolation that seniors already face.

“It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?” Wister said of the technology that enables automation in commerce.

On one side, Wister said, technology that lets people shop from their homes is a benefit to seniors with limited mobility who can’t get outside as much as they used to.

On the other side, technology that removes human contact from the equation can magnify the sense of isolation people are already experiencing.

Wister characterizes those everyday contacts as “extremely important” in helping people maintain a sense of connectedness with the community around them.

Social isolation is becoming a big enough problem that the United Kingdom has appointed a minister for  loneliness. In Canada, data shows that between one in four and one in five middle-aged and older citizens experience some form of loneliness, Wister said.

When it comes to counteracting social isolation, face-to-face interactions matter more than conversations via text or social media, he added.

As for technology in commerce, Wister said there has perhaps been too much focus on efficiency and not enough thought about the unintended consequences when it comes to decreased social interactions.

At the front end, removing friction is all about increasing convenience.

“When you remove friction from the consumption of a particular service, people love it,” said Andrew Harries, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business.

He points to examples such as the ride-hailing service Uber, which makes arranging transportation as simple as opening up an app, or mega tech-and-retail firm Amazon, which does the same for online shopping and has upped the ante for all of retail with its Amazon Go store in Seattle.

On its website, Amazon boasts that creating Amazon Go was a four-year journey to weave a network of cameras, sensors and “deep learning algorithms” together for an experience that allows shoppers to scan its app upon entry, pick up items and walk out without going through a checkout.

The cameras and sensors keep track of what shoppers pick up, or put back, then the app bills their credit cards for what they keep after leaving in what Amazon bills as “walkout technology.”

Job loss fears over emergence of artificial intelligence in shopping

“And people will enjoy this too,” Harries said. “But there are two schools of thought on the bigger question about what AI is going to do with the future of work.”

Optimists hold that innovations will create new jobs and new types of work, Harries said.

However, although Harries is inclined toward using technology to streamline services — he was a co-founder of Sierra Wireless and other startups — he is also “deeply concerned about the future of work with the advent of AI.”

Retail and wholesale trade has a big footprint in the Canadian economy, accounting for 389,000 jobs in B.C., 20 per cent of all service sector employment, according to Statistics Canada’s labour force survey.

Within that, Stats Can data classifies 77,000 0f those positions as “sales support” occupations – cashiers, gas-station attendants and employees who stock shelves.

Nationally, those numbers are 2.84 million wholesale and retail employees — just under 20 per cent of the service sector with 624,000 in sales-support occupations.

Previous cycles of the Industrial Revolution saw automation replace dirty and dangerous jobs and workers move on to more skilled occupations, but with AI and robots taking over repetitive tasks, “it’s not entirely clear that there will be better work for people in the future,” Harries said.

Faletski, however, is in the optimistic camp, arguing that even if cashiers are displaced, retailers will need to turn them into more skilled in-store experts to improve customer experience, which will carry more of a premium for retailers in the future.

There is a big drive toward more automated payment systems, Faletski said. The options might not be as sophisticated as Amazon Go, but will involve retailers using mobile-based payment systems, such as the system Apple gives to its in-store staff.

“There’s definitely a trend of putting people into solving more difficult problems (for customers) than just taking your credit card,” Faletski said.

While retailers are trying to reduce friction in transactions, it is still a relationship business, argues Save-On-Foods spokeswoman Julie Dickson, which requires “the human contact piece of it” to work well, particularly in the grocery sector.

Save-On-Foods has embraced online shopping, offering either home delivery or click-and-collect orders in 77 communities via the grocer’s website, but Dickson maintains that the move hasn’t cost the grocer jobs but has created hundreds of jobs to provide new services to customers.

“We have quite a large new group of customer service experts on the phones working on the technical supports needed when customers are new to it,” Dickson said.

When customers aren’t coming into stores, that creates the need for a new group of “personal shoppers” who pick and put customer orders together, right down to selecting the correct ripeness of bananas customers have requested.

“It’s a personal business, it’s a people business,” Dickson said. “It’s about finding ways to use technology and the tools available to us that further enhance that relationship.”

More jobs for technologists who code innovation into reality  

There won’t be any going back, either, according to Tea Nicola, CEO of the AI-enhanced investment adviser WealthBar, which has seen its own smart phone app become central to its services.

“I think that this technology is changing the way that consumers think and behave,” Nicola said, and Amazon, with its Prime delivery service and Amazon Go store has set high expectations for everyone else.

In financial services, it can still take days for transactions that WealthBar executes for clients to clear the layers of bureaucracy within the industry. However, Nicola said, an increasing number of its clients use and depend on the firm’s app.

“There has been pressure on us from customers to improve its functionality, add features and improve speed,” she added, so the company has invested in creating a next generation of its technology. 

WealthBar, as a so-called robo-adviser that uses artificial intelligence to help make decisions within investment portfolios, is a disruption within the industry itself to start with.

However, Nicola doesn’t worry about any of the technology displacing people because she sees new jobs and entire new career fields being created to enable it.

Inside WealthBar, for instance, Nicola said they’ve re-organized their workforce to leave their human advisers free to work with clients and write investment plans while the firm’s marketing team concentrates on recruiting and signing up customers.

And both teams rely on new layers of technology that require their own personnel.

“The advisers of the past didn’t have a software development team and didn’t have a user-experience designer (to support their work),” Nicola said.

“User experience designer didn’t exist as a degree in school when I went to university, now it does.”

Nicola said automation will reduce some roles, so society as a whole will have to embrace the concept of continuing education and training of its workforce as it adapts to new technology.

“I don’t think that’s impossible,” she said. “It’s not, ‘Now we have technology and x amount of people are going to lose their jobs, too bad so sad’.”

Technological change, though, does invite questions about who will be the winners and losers when it comes to what kinds of jobs will be displaced and who will get the new jobs that are created, according to SFU associate professor and labour expert Strauss.

“To my mind, the question, in part, is not just what jobs are going to be created and what kind of jobs lost, but what kind of (new) jobs will they be,” she said.

At one end, Strauss said, the concern is that automation will replace stable, full-time jobs with what labour groups refer to as precarious employment — part-time jobs or contract positions — in the so-called “gig economy.”

Strauss said studies are showing that those in precarious employment tend to be minorities, new immigrants and the young.

Many of the new jobs being created through services such as Uber, Lyft or Airbnb are billed as “side hustle,” Strauss said, or opportunities for people to earn extra income.

“One of the things we’re hearing from younger people is that they’re increasingly cobbling together full-time income from a variety of more precarious, gig-type work,” Strauss said.

Those kinds of contract jobs are hard to capture in Canada’s traditional workforce measurements, such as Statistics Canada’s labour-force survey, Strauss said, so “we’re already a little bit behind the curve in terms of figuring out the shifts we’re in the middle of.”

The kicker, however, is that the big, growing companies that successfully embrace change, such as Amazon, will always have room for more staff in stable jobs, according to Harries.

Those will be the creators, the companies that come up with new ideas for ways of doing things and the technologists capable of coding them into existence.

“I don’t see Amazon laying off all its workers and hiring them back on contract,” Harries said.

depenner@postmedia.com

twitter.com/derrickpenner

Sales interviews are nerve-wracking. Not just for candidates, but also for hiring managers.

You may have to pass on hundreds of excellent sales hires—it’s definitely frustrating.

There are a lot of highly qualified, accomplished, intelligent people out there. Yet as a hiring manager, seeking to build the best sales team in the industry, there are a few things I’ve observed that separate the good from the great—the things that distinguish good interviewees from those who actually end up landing an offer.

At the end of the day, if you’re an “A” player, determined to work in a fast-growing and high-performing organization, you must set yourself apart from your peers.

But creating that separation isn’t easy. Hopefully, these 5 tips will help you avoid many of the pitfalls I see candidates falling into, and drastically improve your sales interview preparation process.

Prepare For Your Next Sales Interview with These 5 Pro Tips

1. Understand that the sales interview process is grueling for a reason.
2. Articulate (and validate) that you’re an “A” player.
3. Demonstrate the depth of your skills, not the breadth.
4. Present how your personal values align with the company values.
5. Be an active participant in the interview process.

1) Understand That the Sales Interview Process is Grueling for a Reason

If you’re interviewing at a hyper-growth company, and you genuinely have the kind of core strengths—what we, at MuleSoft, call Muley DNA—we look for, you’ll undoubtedly recognize that the interview process isn’t hard for the sake of being hard.

When a company is committed to making a massive investment in your personal and professional growth and development, it only makes sense that they’d make a similar investment, up front, early in the process.

On the Account Development (AD) team at MuleSoft, our early career sales team, we have a big, hairy, audacious goal to be both the rocket fuel that drives the revenue and the talent pipeline engine for MuleSoft.

We genuinely believe that the AD organization is developing the future leaders of MuleSoft—and future titans of the industry.

 With such an ambitious goal, hiring the best people possible—the top 3% of their respective peer group—is not only key to our continued success, but also the only way we can execute on such an audacious mission.

At MuleSoft, by focusing on optimizing our process, we’re able to control our own cognitive biases as recruiters. We involve multiple trained interviewers in the process, each with a specific area of focus.

When I say “trained,” I don’t just mean they’ve interviewed before. We have an extensive interviewer training program for people with all levels of experience.

This not only ensures we’re not making a poor hiring decision because of blind spots but, more importantly, ensures we’re creating a complete, holistic picture of a candidate.

2) Articulate (and Validate) That You’re an “A” Player

All too often, I’m compelled to pass on candidates because while you may be “A” players, you’re just not prepared to show me exactly why. 

The impact of bringing onboard a B-Player (or even an A- Minus-Player) far outweighs the cost of passing up someone who might well have been an “A” player but couldn’t validate it.

So, why don’t these “A” players make the cut? Effectively packaging and communicating their accomplishments was not something they incorporated into their interview preparation.

Basically, you’re interviewing for a sales role but you’re unable to sell yourself!

Sales interview must-dos 

• Speak to your specific achievements.
  • Not the achievements of the team, but the impact that you, personally, drove in that role.
• Articulate how these achievements demonstrate that you’re amongst the top of your respective peer group.
  • Can you quantify your performance relative to your peers?
• Articulate the lasting impact those achievements have had—hiring managers scout for people who build things to tackle tomorrow’s problems, not just today’s. Candidates who can “pave roads” versus “blaze trails.”
  • Where have you demonstrated that ability?
  • What will the impact of your work be when you leave your role and move on to bigger and better things?
• Use quantitative or qualitative data to substantiate this lasting impact.
• Present only specific accomplishments that you drove.
• Above all, this is a sales role, so be capable of telling a compelling story.

3) Demonstrate the Depth of Your Skills, Not the Breadth

Depth matters.

A candidate’s resume is chock-full of extracurricular activities, including internships, clubs, papers, and volunteer work. But when you really scratch beneath the surface:

•  You’re a dabbler—your accomplishments merely demonstrate the ability to go an inch deep, and a mile wide.
  • Nobody wants surface-scratchers. Hiring managers most often look for candidates who are coachable and have the potential to master their line of business.
  • Furthermore, depth in your accomplishments demonstrates the kind of grittiness that makes great salespeople.
  • Angela Duckworth defines “grit” as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” Without long-term goals, there’s no depth in your accomplishments, and then it becomes hard to validate that you’re gritty.
• There’s a haphazardness to it all—your experience doesn’t seem like it maps to an end state that you’re trying to achieve.
  • If your accomplishments don’t show a degree of intentionality in your line of work, how can hiring managers be sure that you know what you want out of a career?
• You’re a participant, not a leader—unable to step up to lead or to demonstrate a sense of ownership.
  • Essentially, an Account Executive is a leader of an account team.
  • Companies are unlikely to onboard a quarterback with no leadership ability to carry a team to a championship. Why would they hire a salesperson who lacks the ability to lead/mobilize/quarterback an account team and drive revenue?

When I hire, I’m not looking for someone who’s interested in collecting merit badges. I’m seeking a candidate who wants to attain a level of mastery as a salesperson and leader.

Furthermore, I want to see passion. Passion takes time to develop. It cannot be taught. An exceptional manager can teach a new hire how to sell, but that manager cannot teach that hire how to be passionate about selling.

4) Present How Your Personal Values Align with the Company Values

Core to building a great team is driving towards a shared sense of purpose.

By selectively bringing onboard those whose personal mission and values align with MuleSoft and the team’s, I can ensure we’re going to be driving toward the same, shared purpose.

Ask yourself, in any hiring process, whether your personal values and your personal mission align with the company and the core values and mission of the team that you think you want to be a part of.

As part of your sales interview preparation, make sure you’ve read up on the core values of the company and team, and see that they reconcile with yours.

At MuleSoft, our core values are:

• Be fearless.
• Own it.
• Make it awesome.
• Be a good human.

As an Account Development organization, we look for people who are:

• Gritty
• Growth-oriented
• Coachable
• Accountable
• Passionate about selling

Perhaps you’re driven by a desire to create a world in which social justice thrives. That’s great! But to me, it’s hard to imagine you’ll do the mental aerobics to make the leap between driving social justice and being passionate about selling.

For that reason, it’s critical that you can connect the dots between what you’re passionate about, or your core values, and how these map to the mission and values of the team.

5) Be an Active Participant in the Interview Process 

The purpose of any great sales hiring process is to ensure that if you come onboard, you’re going to absolutely crush it.

It’s equally important to that you’re going to be excited to get out of bed on a Monday morning and come into work.

As a candidate, the only way you can make this determination is if you’re interviewing the hiring manager just as much as they’re interviewing you.

It should be a two-way interview.

Hiring managers are quick to say no to: 

• Candidates who are unprepared, and have canned questions—this is obvious when you don’t speak to the content covered in the interview. 
  • This demonstrates that you’re either not listening, or are not genuinely interested in what’s being said.
• Candidates who fail to conduct meaningful research about the individuals they’re interviewing with.
• Candidates who ask the same questions to everyone on the panel.

Finally, (and this is probably the issue I run into the most frequently), I often see candidates clearly smitten with the company, but unable to articulate why they’re passionate about the role.

I get it.

A company’s growth potential, widespread acceptance, connectivity in the space, and a cohort of the best salespeople may easily get you excited about the prospect of working with them.

But moving beyond that, are you excited to work in that role? If you can’t demonstrate this enthusiasm to me as a hiring manager, unfortunately, I’m going to have to pass.

Being an “A” Player is Just Not Enough

As a hiring manager, if I’ve passed on you, you’ve likely fallen into one of the pitfalls outlined above. 

Remember to always be intentional with everything you do during the hiring process. It’s absolutely essential that you prepare thinking it’ll be the toughest interview ever, but I’m sure you’ll ace it anyway with these 5 tips!

If you’re an “A” player, looking to join a massively talented team, and you can successfully incorporate these tips in your sales interview preparation, you have a very good chance to find yourself launching your career into the next level when you interview with the team at MuleSoft.

Interested in jumping onboard? I’m hiring in:

• San Francisco
• Chicago
• Atlanta
• New York City

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Editor’s Note: You can read our 2017 Ultimate Artificial Intelligence Resources Guide here.

2017 was a big year for artificial intelligence. We saw the first human Go player defeated by a machine (AlphaGo), Saudi Arabia grant citizenship to an ‘empty-eyed humanoid’ named Sophia and – more practically – the expansion of ‘smart speakers’ like Google Home and Amazon Echo.

From agricultural software to B2B marketing applications, from robotics to medical care, last year’s achievements shifted the perception of AI from an emerging technology to a maturing market segment.

There is no doubt that in 2018 the ‘race for AI‘ will continue to guide startup companies and tech giants alike to push to achieve that next big breakthrough.

But, as the focus on AI continues to intensify, one top challenge remains: the already visible shortage of qualified AI talent.

To put this into perspective, a 2017 New York Times article citing Element AI, an independent lab based in Montreal, noted that there are less than 10,000 people, worldwide, with the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research. With so few AI specialists, big tech companies are also turning their attention to the best and brightest of academia.

Thus, as reality and sci fi seem to grow closer by the day, we wanted to take the time to provide you with an updated guide to what 2018’s AI ecosystem may look like.

Thanks to Laura Rosca for her help in compiling the following.

Table of Contents

• Market Overview
• Major Players
• Current Use Cases
• Forecasts & Trends
• Risks & Limitations
• Miscellaneous

Market Overview

The Road to artificial Intelligence: A Case of Data Over Theory
In the summer of 1956, a collection of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to invent a new field of science – artificial intelligence. 60 years and many disappointments later, the field of AI seems to have finally found its way. This article takes a look at the historic grounds of AI research and attempts to outline where we’re headed.

Artificial Intelligence Industry – An Overview by Segment
A lay of the land of the AI market, including its various segments and applications – this article compiles some of the existing efforts by media, research firms, and others to categorize the many facets of artificial intelligence.

The Real Risks of Artificial Intelligence
In the last few years, several high-profile voices, from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk and Bill Gates, have warned that we should be more concerned about possible dangerous outcomes of super-smart AI. But for many, such fears are overblown. Is AI putting us on a path towards Singularity? Maybe not. But AI does have real risks (and benefits, of course). Those are explored here.

Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Overview of Where We Are Today
Deus ex Machina, super-computers and the imminence of Singularity – these themes periodically emerge, sprouting fear. But what are the true capabilities of AI? Read on for a more ‘immediately realistic’ look at some of the classic sci fi themes AI has been predicting for years.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in 6 Charts
AI received $974M of funding as of June 2016 –  a year that saw more AI patent applications than ever before. Take a look at the rise of AI in six charts in this article.

Artificial Intelligence: the next digital frontier?
AI and the future of business: how technology will continue to disrupt future business models.

Valuing the Artificial Intelligence Market, Graphs and Predictions
An overview of AI’s growth and market value in the coming decade, with ample references available for further exploration for those who aim to go deeper.

Major Players

Google’s AI Makes Its Own AI Children – And They’re Awesome
The future is here: Google is betting big on artificial intelligence , and it’s clearly paying off. Apart from offering up collections of code that best the world’s board game champions, Google has also managed to create an AI that, in effect, designs its own AI – and its creations have gone from analyzing words to disseminating complex imagery in a matter of months.

Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce AI Talent
Nearly all big tech companies have an AI project, and they are willing to pay experts millions of dollars to help get it done. But with fewer than 10,000 AI professionals, worldwide, industry giants and startups alike are forced to look for new talent in somewhat unusual places.

Building AI That Can Build AI
Google and others, fighting for a small pool of researchers, are looking for automated ways to deal with a shortage of artificial intelligence experts.

Microsoft launches new healthcare division based on artificial intelligence software
Microsoft is setting up a new healthcare department at its Cambridge research facility as part of the company’s plans to use its artificial intelligence software to enter the health market. Learn more in this article.

Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported
Facebook’s new “proactive detection” AI technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk, their friends, or to contact local first-responders. The social media giant previously tested AI to detect troubling posts and more prominently surface suicide reporting options to friends in the US – now the company is looking to expand AI-powered content analysis around the world.

Google AI invents its own cryptographic algorithm; no one knows how it works
AI technology is developing and fast. The leading companies are pushing AI towards new horizons. A look at open-sourcing machine intelligence designs here.

IBM Gives Watson a New Challenge: Your Tax Return
In its broadest deployment to date, IBM’s Watson will assist H&R Block’s 70,000 tax professionals at 10,000 branch offices across the United States to help more than 11 million people file their taxes.

Current Use Cases

5 Artificial Intelligence Companies to Watch in 2018
From agriculture to medicine and beyond, plenty of startups are using AI in innovative ways. Here are five companies you should expect big things from in 2018.

Why the Secret to Making Customer Service More Human Isn’t Human at All
Is AI able to impact the way we see and assess basic human traits such as empathy? Certainly, according to Joshua Feast, co-founder and CEO of Cogito (an OpenView portfolio company). Discover here how this Boston-based startup uses modern software programming to measure and improve the quality of certain key conversations, such as sales and customer-service calls, in real time.

A robot that once said it would ‘destroy humans’ just became the first robot citizen
Saudi Arabia is the first country to grant citizenship to a robot – Sophia, an ’empty-eyed humanoid’ built by Hanson Robotics.

Applications Of Artificial Intelligence in B2B Marketing
AI is being used more and more in B2B marketing applications. Although digital marketers have already begun exploring the benefits of machine-learning algorithms, the opportunities for implementing AI in B2B marketing are yet to be exhausted. Take a closer look at some of the new marketing areas beginning to explore AI capabilities.

Emotional intelligence is the future of artificial intelligence
Will emotionally intelligent AI emerge as the technology’s next phase? Seems likely according to this researcher.

Forecasts & Trends

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
AI, immersive experiences, digital twins, event-thinking and continuous adaptive security create a foundation for the next generation of digital business models and ecosystems. The ability to use AI to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025. Explore Gartner’s 2018 top 10 AI and machine learning trends in this article.

13 AI trends that will reshape the economy in 2018
While the biggest controversy around AI is its potential to replace jobs, the technology will affect other aspects of the economy in major ways. A recent report from CB Insights highlights some of the key AI trends worth paying attention to in 2018. From robot babysitters to government-sponsored cyber security, from voice software expansion towards non-English speaking markets to edge computing, this article takes a look at some of the trends set to reshape the economy this year.

Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work
Machine-assisted work has always been cause for anxiety when it comes to the shape and future of the labor market. But while some jobs are assigned to robots, mainly due to their repetitive character, others emerge along with the development of niche technologies. Here, a more optimistic take on technology’s impact on the job market.

10 ways AI will impact the enterprise in 2018
Is 2018 the year companies begin more strategic implementations of AI and start realizing its true benefits?

Artificial Intelligence Market by Technology
A global forecast to 2022 estimates the AI market could grow to more than $16 billion. Learn more here.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics
Might AI raise ethical questions and moral concerns? This research seems to think so. Find out how AI and Cybernetics are moving beyond the realm of science fiction and why that matters to you.

Risks & Limitations

Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Artificial Intelligence
The advances that AI is bringing to our world have been a half-century in the making. But AI’s time is now. Because of the vast amounts of data in our world, only the almost limitless computing power of the cloud can make sense of it. From home thermostats to self-driving cars – AI is embedded in today’s reality. But what’s next? Find out in this article.

You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think
There’s no doubt about the impact of robot labor on life today – but where are we headed? Will future employers conclude that robots are just better at your job than you are? A darker look at AI’s potential impact on the labor market here.

Elon Musk warns: Artificial Intelligence is highly likely to destroy humans
Is humanity headed towards the war against machines? Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, argues that AI is likely to become a threat to mankind.

These are three of the biggest problems facing today’s AI
Does AI lack humility? Signs point to yes. Here’s why that’s a problem and other issues we face with today’s artificial intelligence.

The rise of robots: forget evil AI – the real risk is far more insidious
“When we look at the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to get carried away with dystopian visions of sentient machines that rebel against their human creators.” However, the real risk posed by AI – at least in the near term – is much more insidious. It’s far more likely that robots would inadvertently harm or frustrate humans while carrying out our orders than they would become conscious and rise up against us. Learn more here.

Miscellaneous

Artificial Intelligence Startups list
A comprehensive list of AI startups.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: Top 100 Influencers and Brands
Who are the individuals, brands and companies influencing AI now? Find out here.

AI concept/process historical perspective
A brief history of artificial intelligence from ancient history to today.

The post The 2018 Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Grab a tea, coffee, or a comforting beverage of your choice – it’s time for stats.

This week’s roundup includes talk about online sales, search snippets, data privacy and lots more. Be sure to check out the Internet Statistics Compendium too. It’s always jam-packed full of extra info.

Read more...

Every seller wants to have meaningful sales connections with their buyers, but it’s clear from the way sales is traditionally done that very few sellers really know how to pull it off. Deb Calvert has written a new book, “Stop Selling and Start Leading” that reveals many points of powerfully insightful data, taken from a study focused on the 30 primary characteristics of leadership. Her application of those characteristics to the sales process is not only ingenious, it also reveals what sellers are doing wrong, what buyers really want from those who are on the other side of the sales relationship, and how powerful selling can happen once sellers stop selling in begin leading. You don’t want to miss this conversation.

Deb Calvert on How Truly Meaningful #Sales Connections Happen Through #Leadership - Episode 106 of #InTheArena @PeopleFirstPSClick To Tweet

Buyers don’t believe the message until they first believe the messenger

Sales connections are about more than simply setting appointments and running through a sales presentation. It’s about building trust, a phrase we are hearing more and more these days. But do you really know what it means to build trust? More importantly, do you know how to build it? Deb Calvert says that buyers don’t believe anything you have to say to them about your product or service until they first believe in you. They have to see, demonstrated in your behavior, that you are person who can be trusted. What kinds of behavior is Deb talking about? Listen to this episode of In The Arena to find out – and learn how to change the way you sell in order to build greater trust with your buyers.

33% of buyers say the salespeople they deal with don’t come across as credible

Much of the research that Deb and her team did in preparation for her book focused on the experiences buyers had with those who sold to them. In many cases, these were relationships that were already established between buyer and seller – yet 33% of buyers said that the sales people they deal with regularly don’t come across as credible or trustworthy. What does that say about the way sales professionals are going about their work? More importantly, what does it say about the ways we can improve what we do to cause trust to be built from the outset? Deb’s insights into this issue of credibility and trust are incredibly helpful for salespeople who are willing to do the work it takes to apply what she has learned. The good news is this, none of it is hard. It just has to be done.

33% of #buyers say the #salespeople they deal with don’t come across as credible. Learn how to reverse this trend in your #sales career on #InTheArena @PeopleFirstPSClick To Tweet

Sales connections happen through two-way dialogue, not an old-fashioned sales presentation

One of the things that buyers dread the most is the sales presentation. That’s because it often goes into data points and information that isn’t relevant to their situation. It’s kind of like sitting through a timeshare presentation in order to get the free gift, only the buyer doesn’t always walk away with the free gift. Deb’s research revealed that sales connections that matter happen through two-way dialogue, not a sales presentation. Buyers want to know that they are understood and that those selling to them truly have their best interests in mind. If you will apply the simple things Deb shares in her book, “Stop Selling and Start Leading,” your sales will dramatically improve.

Meaningful connections between buyers and sellers still matter

With all the advancements in A.I. and machine learning, there is a lot of hype about whether or not salespeople will really be needed in the future. Both Deb and Anthony believe that the human component of sales will always be in high demand because meaningful sales connections are what build the kind of trust that buyers need to feel. It still matters that there is a person on the other end of a transaction. It still matters that someone with empathy and understanding can approach a buyer’s needs with insight and right applications. As you listen to this conversation you’ll come to realize the truth: meaningful connections in sales still matter and always will.

Meaningful #connections between #buyers and #sellers still matter. Learn what Deb Calvert discovered about the buyer-seller relationship on this episode of #InTheArena @PeopleFirstPSClick To Tweet

Outline of this great episode

• Who is Deb Calvert?
• The kind of research Deb did in her decision to write her book
• The gap between what buyers want to see in their sellers and what exists
• What does it mean for sellers to model the way?
• Buyers need sellers to demonstrate that they have THEIR best interest in mind
• Why salespeople are hesitant about inspiring a shared vision
• What does it mean to challenge the process?
• The thing that matters most to buyers is relevant answers in a timely way
• Meaningful connections between buyers and sellers still matter

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• www.StopSellingStartLeading.com
• www.PeopleFirstPS.com – Deb’s website
• Deb on Social – LinkedIn – Twitter – YouTube – Facebook
• The Outbound Conference
• BOOK: Stop Selling, Start Leading
• BOOK: The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need
• Jim Kouzes
• Barry Posner
• The Leadership Challenge

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/Iannarino

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iannarino

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iannarino

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+SAnthonyIannarino

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannarino

Tweets you can use to share this episode

#Buyers don’t believe the message until they first believe the messenger - from Deb Calvert on this episode of #InTheArena @PeopleFirstPS #salesClick To Tweet #Sales connections happen through two-way dialogue, not an old-fashioned sales presentation. Learn how to make it happen on #InTheArena @PeopleFirstPSClick To Tweet

The post Deb Calvert on How Truly Meaningful Sales Connections Happen Through Leadership  – Episode #106 appeared first on The Sales Blog.