My apologies, up front, I have been trying to resist plunging into yet another discussion about cold calling. The proponents of cold calling (I’m one) and the opponents of cold calling are about as likely to reach agreement as the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are. We each tend to be staunch in our positions, showing zero flexibility in looking at another alternative.
I still conduct a limited amount of training with some of my personal clients. We work with companies in more than 200 industries, from startups to multi-billion dollar corporations, that call on every possible vertical and decision maker, in nearly every geography across the globe. I find that even the most seasoned and resistant of salespeople get to this point: When they realize how much more there is to selling, how much more effective they can be, how much more business they could generate, how they don't need to have the best price, and how much easier selling can be, they become eager learners. That brings us to the question to be answered in today's article: If most salespeople become eager learners and embrace good sales training, why don't all companies experience equally tremendous revenue growth from sales training?
It’s that time of year again for the conference extravaganza known as Social Media Marketing World. Each year I pull together a list of influential voices that are engaging on social networks around the topic social media marketing. My goal? To help showcase speakers for people in the industry to learn from and follow.
Why are these people influential? That’s a great question. I would answer with, “Why is anyone influential?”. Because they have specific expertise that they share publicly, consistently and in a way that improves the knowledge, skills and perspectives of those who follow them.
Influence is not only popularity. Influence is the ability to affect action.
When I started out in my digital marketing career, it was thanks to connecting with some generous people that had a lot more experience than me that I was able to overcome introversion and reluctance to write and become an international keynote speaker, author and blogger with over 1.4 million words written so far. What I have learned about influence is that it is not self-assigned.
Influence is earned by being helpful, effective and relevant as well as having reach. Influence is also earned by mentoring those who are coming up in the industry. While working with influencers transfers influence by association, helping others become influential is when earned influence really skyrockets.
In this year’s list of Social Media Marketing Influencers there are many people who demonstrate this kind of helpfulness and I am encouraging those influencers as well as our community of readers to nominate up and coming social media marketing leaders. You can find more details on that at the end of the post.
About the Methodology for this List:
Specific Scope: Rather than scan the entire social web, the starting data set for this list is having been named as a speaker for the SMMW18 conference. Mike Stelzner and Phil Mershon of Social Media Examiner do an amazing job of hand picking speakers for this conference and this list is an extension of their research and expertise into finding, qualifying and recruiting over 180 social media marketing speakers.
IRM Platform Assisted: Ranking of the people in this list leverages data and algorithms from Traackr, an influencer relationship marketing platform. Unlike the vast majority of lists like this that are published online, this list considers many more data sources than just Twitter. To provide a better sample across the web, Traackr ranking can include citations and links from data sources such as blogs, publications, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+.
Ranking data sources and scoring: For the ranking, this list leverages a combination of data points including:
Each of these signal sources are factored into the algorithmic ranking for identified influencers with a focus on topical relevance, resonance of message with the audience and then audience reach. The result is a combination of broad based influencers as well as individuals with a very specific focus and very high resonance and relevance scores. What I like about pulling this list together is seeing a number of new faces as well as as a variety of disciplines and specialties represented.
This list of 50 industry experts speaking at Social Media Marketing World is worth checking out as you plan which presentations to see, who to follow online and who to meet.
Kim Garst @kimgarst
Live Streaming Strategist, Social Selling Pro, Keynote Speaker at Boom! Social
Presenting: How to Make Money With Live Video
Donna Moritz @sociallysorted
Digital Content Strategist, International Speaker, Visual Content Strategist at Socially Sorted
Presenting: Tips and Tools for Visual Storytelling on Instagram
Brian Fanzo @isocialfanz
Founder and CEO at iSocialFanz
Presenting: Facebook Strategy in Light of the Facebook Apocalypse
Koka Sexton @kokasexton
Advisor, SenderGen
Presenting: How to Turn LinkedIn Into a Funnel for New Leads
Madalyn Sklar @madalynsklar
Social Media and Digital Marketing Strategist, Blogger, Podcaster
Presenting: How to Up Your Twitter Game With Smart Tools
Dan Gingiss @dgingiss
Vice President, Strategic Group at Persado
Presenting: Why Social Media is Key to the Customer Experience
Ian Anderson Gray @iagdotme
Co-founder at Select Performers Internet Solutions
Presenting: How to Create Your Killer Live Video Show: Tools and Tips
Jeff Sieh @jeffsieh
Pinterest Manager at Social Media Examiner
Presenting: Visual Marketing for Non-Designers: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks
Viveka Von Rosen @linkedinexpert
LinkedIn and Personal Branding Expert, Co-founder and Chief Visibility Officer at Vengreso
Presenting: How to Best Use LinkedIn Native Video in Your Marketing
Neal Schaffer @NealSchaffer
CEO at Maximize Your Social
Presenting: How Brands are Breaking Through to Generate Results on LinkedIn
Josh Elledge @joshelledge
Founder at upendPR
Presenting: How to Get Traditional Media Exposure Using Social Media
Robert Rose @robert_rose
Founder at The Content Advisory & Chief Strategy Advisor at Content Marketing Institute
Presenting: Becoming an Audience First Company: How to Understand and Measure the Most Valuable Asset in Your Business
Gini Dietrich @ginidietrich
Chief Executive Officer at Arment Dietrich
Presenting: Crisis Communications: Tips From the Trenches
Carlos Gil @CarlosGil83
Founder, Gil Media Co.
Presenting: Snapchat Ads: How-to Use Snapchat’s Full Service Ad Platform
Darren Rowse @problogger
Founder and Keynote Speaker at ProBlogger
Presenting: 10 Things I Wish I’d Known about Blogging That Will Shortcut the Growth of Your Blog
Mark Schaefer @markwschaefer
Executive Director at Schaefer Marketing Solutions
Presenting: 10 Mind-Bending New Ideas for Our Social Media Marketing Future
Tamara McCleary @tamaramccleary
CEO at Thulium.co
Presenting: Innovating Your Way to Strong Social Media ROI
Mark Mason @masonworld
Quality Manager, Interface Products at Texas Instruments
Presenting: How to Make Your Podcast Stand Out: Tips from the Trenches
Rebekah Radice @rebekahradice
Founder at RadiantLA
Presenting: How to Make Visual Content Your Social Media Secret Weapon
Brooke B. Sellas @madsmscientist
Founder & Chief Executive Officer at B Squared Media
Presenting: Organizing for Social Success: Insource? Outsource? No Source?
Tyler Anderson @tylerjanderson
CEO / Founder at Casual Fridays
Presenting: Winning With Influencer Marketing: What Top Brands are Doing Now
Samantha Kelly @tweetinggoddess
Owner of Women’s Inspire Network
Presenting: How to Convert Twitter Conversations Into Customers
Ian Cleary @iancleary
Founder at RazorSocial
Presenting: 9 Content Marketing Tools to Drive More Traffic to Your Website
Mari Smith @marismith
Keynote Speaker, Brand Evangelist, Bestselling Author
Presenting: The Future of Facebook: What Marketers Need to Know for 2018 and Beyond
Mike Stelzner @mike_stelzner
CEO and Founder at Social Media Examiner
Presenting: Social Media Marketing in 2018: What the Newest Research Reveals
Andy Crestodina @crestodina
Strategic Director at Orbit Media Studios
Presenting: Building Better Mousetraps: A Content-Driven Approach to Conversion Optimization
Bernie Borges @bernieborges
Advisory Board Member at OneMob and Co-founder and CMO at Vengreso.
Presenting: The Secrets to Getting Employees to Engage on Behalf of Your Brand
Alex Khan @1alexkhan
CEO at Attractive Media GmbH
Presenting: Mass Seduction: Proven Techniques to Engage and Build Your Audience
Peg Fitzpatrick @PegFitzpatrick
Director of Social Media + Marketing at Kreussler
Presenting: How to Use Pinterest to Drive Long Term Traffic
Chris Penn @cspenn
Vice President of Marketing Technology at SHIFT Communications
Presenting: Seeing Into the Future: Predictive Analytics for Social Marketers
Michael O’Neal @inmikeswords
Host of The Solopreneur Hour Podcast
Presenting: Becoming an Interview Master and How it Can Massively Grow Your Podcast or Livestream
Brian Solis @briansolis
Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group
Presenting: The Past, Present and Future of Social Media
Park Howell @parkhowell
Founder and President at Business of Story
Presenting: How to Invest in Brand Storytelling to Earn the Greatest Return
Nicky Kriel @nickykriel
Social Media Consultant & Social Media Strategist at Nicky Kriel Social Media
Presenting: How to Use Twitter Data to Improve Your Content Marketing
Melanie Deziel @mdeziel
Brand Strategy Consultant and Speaker at Mdeziel Media
Presenting: 5 Branded Content Best Practices From the World of Journalism
Andrea Vahl @andreavahl
Social Media Consultant at Andrea Vahl
Presenting: Facebook Ads Strategy for Small Businesses
Jay Baer @jaybaer
Founder at Convince & Convert
Presenting: How to Prove Social Media Works to Skeptical Managers
Steve Dotto @dottotech
President at Galileo Consulting and Producer of Dotto Tech
Presenting: YouMake YouFortune on YouTube: Making Money on YouTube
Ann Handley @marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs
Presenting: Creating Better Content in Less Time: 5 Real-World Writer Secrets
Lee Odden @leeodden
CEO at TopRank Marketing
Presenting: How Content Plus Influence Equals Results: The Confluence Equation
Guy Kawasaki @GuyKawasaki
Chief Evangelist at Canva
Presenting: Achieving Social Media Success by Defying Conventional Wisdom
Shaun McBride @Shonduras
Owner Esports/Shonduras Inc
Presenting: How to Influence Influencers: The Creative Process
John Jantsch @ducttape
President at Duct Tape Marketing
Presenting: How to Grow a Highly Profitable Consulting Practice Without Adding Overhead
Jessika Phillips @jessikaphillips
Relationship Marketing Evangelist, President at NOW Marketing Group
Presenting: Relationship ROI: How to Grow Your Business by Focusing on Repeat and Referral Relationships
John Lee Dumas @johnleedumas
Host of the EOFire Podcast
Presenting: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience and Fuel Your Business
Roberto Blake @robertoblake
Owner at Create Awesome Media
Presenting: Mastering and Measuring YouTube Analytics for Video Marketing
Shep Hyken @Hyken
Chief Amazement Officer and Owner, Customer Service Speaker and Expert at Shepard Presentations
Presenting: How to Turn Social Customer Service Into a Marketing Strategy
Jasmine Star @jasminestar
Owner at Jasmine Star Photography
Presenting: How to Create 30 Days of Instagram Content in a Single Day
Bryan Kramer @bryankramer
Keynote Speaker, Emcee and Event Host at PureMatter
Presenting: How to Humanize Your Social Brand for Better Conversions
Brian Peters @brian_g_peters
Digital Marketing Manager at Buffer
Presenting: How to Build and Maintain an Authentic Community on Instagram
If you want to follow all 50 of these fine folks, then check out the speaker list on the SMMW18 conference schedule page.
What about non-digital influence?
I think this is a great question because not everyone that is influential (especially in the B2B world) spends as much time tweeting, blogging and posting Instagram photos as many of the influencers listed above do. And yet they are highly influential.
For example, here are several more speakers that are pretty influential to me, even though they are not on the list above: Amisha Gandhi (client), Beverly Jackson, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Konnie Alex (client), LaSandra Brill, Shannon Paul, Tim Washer, and Ursula Ringham to name a few.
Suffice it to say, I think when you are deciding on which influencers to work with, it’s important to get out of the digital bubble and consider offline-specific influencers as well – especially in B2B.
These are some of the most common topics that come up through my agency’s influencer content marketing consulting with brands like Dell, SAP, LinkedIn, 3M and even mid-market companies like DivvyHQ or Cherwell Software. I’ll be tackling these questions and more in my presentation at Social Media Marketing World 2018. Here are the details:
How Content Plus Influence Equals Results: The Confluence Equation
Thursday, March 1st at 4:10pm Room: 32AB
Content marketing and influencer marketing are hot topics for marketers all over the world as two of the most promising strategies for attracting, engaging and converting ideal customers. But how do you find the right influencers? What kind of content should you collaborate on? How do you best measure influencer and content success? Join Lee Odden to learn from his experience working with brands big and small to develop efficient and effective formulas for influencer content success.
I hope to see you there!
I know some folks are feeling left out and others would have added other social media marketing speakers to this list. Lists are exclusive by nature, but I think it would be amazing for the experts on this list as well as our readers would nominate up and coming industry social media marketing pros that are consistently providing useful expertise, leadership and engaging with their communities.
Please leave full name, title, company and Twitter handle (or other social profile) of your nominee in the comments. I will follow this list up with a People’s Choice style list of Rising Social Media Stars after the conference.
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2018. | 2018 – 50 Top Social Media Marketing Influencers | http://www.toprankblog.com
The post 2018 – 50 Top Social Media Marketing Influencers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
B2B digital transformation demands a lot of businesses. Rapidly evolving technology has forced companies to adapt quickly without always knowing the outcomes. For B2B marketers and new entrepreneurs, it’s important to understand not only the definition of terms like IoT and blockchain. We need to understand how they may impact businesses in the near future.
G2 Crowd, the world’s largest B2B software and services review site, has identified digital trends that look beyond buzzwords and industry jargon. AI, blockchain, and IoT are actual tools driving change in today’s technological landscape. In this post we turned to Aaron Walker, Senior Research Specialist for G2 Crowd focusing on software development and cyber security technologies, to help walk us through how these technologies work.
The term “digital transformation” can mean a lot of things. The trends outlined here are classified across AI, digital platforms, and IoT-related concepts. Integrating new technology related to these trends is not a simple process. Companies and managers must identify the proper fit in order to complement their business’s operations, strategies, and objectives. It’s easy to get distracted by AI-powered tools or blockchain-based applications, but the tools’ actual benefits depend entirely on successful adoption.
Powerhouse corporations like GE are already demonstrating ideal digital transformation practices. While their stock value took a hit, earning the title of worst performing stock of 2017 and losing about 40 percent of its value, the company appears to be successfully evolving to focus on the future by investing in AI and IoT. Despite being well over a century old, GE exemplifies the prototypical example of enterprise-scale digital transformation. The company has embraced SaaS-based subscription models to help bridge a gap between industrial markets and emerging technologies. Predix, their new digital platform, is linking commercial appliances and manufacturing endpoints to IoT automating the supply chain and driving greater efficiency for the organization.
If you’re in marketing, AI is the future. If you’re Elon Musk, it’s the end of the world. While it’s entirely possible, skynet-scale destruction appears a lot less likely than the emergence of tools with AI-driven analytics and intelligent automation.
There are three main components of AI that are going to be most impactful where B2B digital transformation is concerned. This includes embedded intelligence, machine learning as a service (MLaaS) and open data. Embedded AI within an application can add a range of capabilities from predictive analytics to helpful chatbots. It’s already impacting spaces like the ERP market, where the embedded AI provides insights based on historical data and predictive services based on the reaction of prior performance and previously unidentified, or external catalysts.
AI-based SaaS applications have hit multiple markets through MLaaS. For example, CRM software solutions like Salesforce’s Einstein utilize embedded AI to expand automation from thousands of diverse datasets to improve lead scoring, prospecting and save time overall. Microservices providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are hoping MLaaS solutions will be as lucrative as their SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions have been. MLaaS opens the door for startups to plug in machine learning APIs, instead of developing their own unique algorithms.
Open data is a bit less tangible than the embedded AI, but can drastically improve the range of information an AI solution is processing. Open-source and shared datasets can add additional image, geospatial, text, and transport data for big data processing engines to consume and spit out.
Data-sharing won’t be confined to the CRM space, as businesses become more inclined to share their data if it means exponentially more in return. Giving up some information to the public is not absurd to ask if it means additional information and significantly improved predictive analytics, automation, and accuracy.
Blockchain technology will facilitate a wide range of capabilities for a number of industries. The biggest impacts will be seen in Fintech and Finserve markets, but it’s already being applied to cloud storage, security, and supply chain applications. Transaction-centered offerings are already embracing the idea of blockchain for its encryption and transparency characteristics. It can improve sensitive data security for e-commerce payments or financial managers and streamline operations with frictionless payment processing. Industry leaders like Goldman Sachs, Santander and BNY Mellon are already leading the way while similar firms continue pushing enormous amounts of money into blockchain technology.
Security has been the second largest industry impacted by blockchain technology. Some companies are using it to protect everything from large-scale IoT networks and access management systems to streaming data and cryptocurrency storage.
Other markets embracing the technology include virtually every industry that can benefit from secure transactions or data encryption. A few cloud storage and database companies have embraced blockchain to distribute storage and encrypt files. Any number of SaaS tools could integrate some kind of blockchain as a service to instantly bolster security.
IoT is rapidly transforming manufacturing, agriculture, and shipping industries, just to name a few. Internet-enabled machines from medical appliances to assembly equipment can become self-reliant, self-fulfilling, and self-monitoring.
IoT has led to an enormous influx of information and enabled companies to amass, analyze and distribute data in an innovative and accessible way. It’s even caused some experts like G2 Crowd’s Kara Kennedy to proclaim it “..the next industrial revolution.”
Edge computing is another IoT-focused trend that improves computing and data processing by localizing initial storage before cloud deployment. The practice decreases latency and improves efficiency. GE’s Predix is designed to support thousands of edge devices, enabling faster processing with low latency, making analytics more efficient and impactful.
Industries like manufacturing, that appear less technologically innovative on the surface, are embracing IoT through the use of digital twins, which provide virtualized replications of hardware appliances. It’s a proactive model that can reduce endpoint failure and strengthen machine analysis through continuous monitoring. Within B2B digital transformation IoT will play a major role no matter the industry.
Microservices, PaaS, IaaS, and every other “aaS” offering provide a significantly more dynamic application model than traditional development. Today’s technological ecosystem continues to expand the use of microservices, containerization, and serverless computing technologies to manage core business functions.
The microservice architecture provides a malleable, interchangeable application model to quickly add or remove desired functionalities. It’s the basis for widespread offerings from service providers like AWS and Microsoft that deliver virtually any capability a company could want from virtual machines and deployment tools to development environments and database migration.
Containerization technology, prompted by the emergence of Docker, is improving security and development speed while expanding application functionality. Containerized applications, stored within portable, distributed components help companies reduce failover through segmentation and reuse existing application components. Resource isolation also improves efficiency and optimize networks.
Serverless computing, the final component of our digital platform trends, is a rapidly evolving model that allows users to manage applications locally and allocate resources as needed, rather than relying on dedicated servers. A Markets and Markets report predicts the serverless market will grow from a $1.88 billion market from 2016 to $7.72 billion by 2021 (411 percent). The technology will improve scalability, security, and agility for application management.
Conclusion
Companies developing these products and embracing their related solutions will continue to garner attention and gain traction. They’ll lead the way for their competitors and probably be more inclined to receive venture capital funding if they’re in start-up mode. Many of these technologies have significant overlap and will complement each other, improving each independent tool’s capabilities. Successful adoption of an AI or IoT platform may set companies ahead of the pack, but cross-category utilization can build an ecosystem to be reckoned with.
Free-Photos / Pixabay
Time is our most precious commodity—the one thing we can’t ever get more of. For leaders, it’s important that time be spent on things that add value to the business—but as your responsibilities mount, it can be challenging to know how to use each precious minute.
Time management strategies abound, but so do false steps. In fact, it’s easy to be sucked into time traps, which keep you from using your days effectively. In this post, I’m going to highlight three time management traps that I run into at a lot of the businesses I visit. I hope you’ll find this helpful as you seek to steer clear of these common hurdles!
Leaders are, by definition, go-getters. They are high achievers. They take great pride in crossing things off their to-do lists each day—leading the team meeting, handling payroll, doing some accounting, and so forth.
Here’s the problem: At least two of the things I mentioned above—payroll and accounting—are simple, repeatable tasks that can easily be done by somebody else. In other words, you should be delegating them; if you accomplish a lot of things but don’t really do anything unique and value-adding, you’re not being truly productive!
Along the same lines: Just because your day is jam-packed with activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a lot accomplished.
An entire day spent reading email and attending meetings is not really an effective day. Don’t get me wrong: Emails and meetings are necessary sometimes. But your week should be structured in such a way that each day gives you a chance to produce, to lead, or to strategize—not merely to be busy.
A final time management trap to avoid: Spending all day getting things done, but only as a means to procrastinate on the one big project you dread.
There’s nothing wrong with saving some of your more unpleasant tasks until you rack up a few wins—but if your schedule is all about delaying the inevitable, that’s hardly what I’d call wise time management.
The bottom line for business owners: You have the same amount of time in every work day. The question is, how will you spend it?
I had an interesting conversation with Hank Barnes last week. We were discussing competitive displacements, a euphemism for stealing clients from your competitors, and the conversation turned to client priorities. Part of displacing your competitor may also include displacing other priorities. Your client may want to change, need to change, and have every intention of eventually doing so, but yet they push that initiative into the future.
Make It Strategic: There is a reason that you should start at Level 4, strategic outcomes in client conversations. The more strategic the outcome, the more important it is. The more important an initiative is to producing the strategic outcomes your client’s need, the more it is imperative that they take action. To make your opportunity more compelling, you need to tie it tightly to what is already compelling. How does what you are proposing to help your client with even greater outcomes?
Increase the Delta: The larger the difference between the client’s current results and the results they need, the more likely it gets done. But looking at cost savings is only one measure of value, and perhaps not the most interesting. How the savings can be used to invest in their other priorities may make the delta more compelling. More still, if your client’s results are poor in one area, the time and energy being exerted to work around issues should be being put towards the more strategic outcomes.
Critical Path: If there is a way you can make your opportunity part of the critical path to results, you can increase the probability of crowding out other initiatives that aren’t tied to the client’s most important projects and initiatives. If you can show how their results would be diminished by moving forward before making the changes you are recommending, you can increase the need to move your opportunity forward.
None of this is easy. It likely means you need to have big conversations with your client’s leadership team to discuss priorities. You also must be able to position your opportunity as something strategic, something essential to their future success. It is, however, necessary and important to create a compelling reason to displace your competitor—and to displace other priorities.
The post How to Make Your Opportunity Your Client’s Priority appeared first on The Sales Blog.
Employers are continually upping the ante on academic credentials. Nearly a third of jobs that once required only a high-school diploma now demand a four-year college degree, while one in four jobs that used to require a bachelor’s degree now require a master’s degree. Meanwhile, 75% of Americans believe that higher education is unaffordable and out of reach.
Employers often overvalue pedigree out of desire to play it safe — but hiring mistakes still abound. Meanwhile, a huge number of potential superstars are being overlooked.
For over 20 years, we have helped boards and CEOs avoid painful mistakes as they groom and select CEOs and C-suite leaders. In the process of that work, we assembled a data-set of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments and our CEO Genome Project studied 2,600 in-depth to analyze who gets to the top and how. We have seen firsthand that an Ivy-draped diploma doesn’t guarantee someone will be good at the job, but even so, we were surprised to uncover that 8% of CEOs in our sample did not complete college at all.
Getting to the top is never easy, but it is especially hard when you lack the hallmarks of prestige that can wow potential employers. So how did the 8% of our CEO sample make it to the top without a college degree? The CEOs who overcame the odds made themselves look like a safe bet by excelling in three ways.
Become a proven insider: In the absence of ready-made credibility that comes with academic credentials, you can establish bona fides by gaining deep industry-specific and firm-specific knowledge. 89% of CEOs without college degrees “grew up” in the same industry where they served as CEO, and spent 40% more time in the industry where they became CEO compared to their peers with college degrees. Employers often feel safer hiring industry and company insiders. These CEOs’ deep knowledge and relationships gave them a platform for success that more than compensated for lack of formal education.
CEOs without a degree also stayed on average 25% longer in roles and held 13% fewer roles than their college-graduating CEO peers. It typically took 15% longer for them to get to the CEO seat.
In 1970, Bob started his career as a code breaker during the Vietnam War. In his first job out of the military, he worked for an alarm company. By holding multiple positions in two companies and working alongside four different CEOs, Bob built up sufficient trust and credibility to extinguish any concerns over his credentials. His crowning achievement was turning around and selling a security company which had only a few thousand dollars left in the bank, and which had been written down as an investment by the owners when he took it over. The company was sold for nearly $50 million. His deep industry knowledge helped him take the company through a nine-year transformation where he consolidated operations, acquired 24 businesses, and reduced bad debt by 88%, all while doubling revenue.
If you don’t have a strong track record in a single company or industry, you will likely have better luck at smaller companies than large ones. We have found that small businesses are open to a much broader range of educational backgrounds and pedigrees, in part because the available talent pool is often thinner. Finally, there’s always the option of starting your own company. CEOs who don’t have a college degree are twice as likely to be company founders as CEOs who do.
Overindex on results. CEOs who get to the top without a college degree let their outsized results speak for themselves. As we shared in What Sets Successful CEOs Apart, reliability is one of four CEO Genome behaviors that differentiates successful CEOs — and the only one that also doubles your chances of getting hired into the role.
One of the CEOs we studied, “Mark,” had been accustomed to being underestimated and thrived on exceeding people’s expectations. When he started out his career as a truck driver, a competitor noticed that he was delivering three truck-loads a day rather than the expected one daily load. “That was unheard of,” Mark said. “So he asked me to come work for him.” In his first sales job, he again delivered the same outsized results. Although his colleagues were expected to grow their divisions’ sales by 5% to 10%, his boss challenged him to grow his division by 30% and promised that anything over 10% would be returned as a bonus. Undaunted, Mark grew his division by 60% and expanded the company’s footprint from a single city to 13 states. With a laser-like focus on driving results, Mark went from truck driver to CEO of a $50 million business in less than two decades.
Mark’s success derived from the fact that he got things done — and got noticed for them. The majority (56%) of CEOs without college degrees in our survey came up through sales and marketing. Numbers speak louder than credentials, and it’s easier to get noticed in roles that drive measurable topline results for the business.
Interestingly, the CEOs without college degrees had almost twice the rate of military experience than the overall pool of CEOs we analyzed. In the absence of a college degree, military experience can offer opportunities to learn important skills and demonstrate results in early leadership experiences.
Be a talent magnet. The CEOs without degrees that we analyzed were more likely than their peers to proactively surround themselves with strong talent and lean on the team to contribute expertise. They were humble, and more open to soliciting ideas from all types of people, regardless of status or rank.
We met Brian when he became CEO of a $350 million staffing company. His recipe for success? Banking on strong performers and seeking out big ideas — at every level of the organization. Soon after he hired a new administrative assistant, she suggested an idea that landed the biggest contract in the industry’s history. Earlier in his career at a different company, Brian started a practice of asking his customers to name the most talented people they knew in the industry. Although a customer named someone who was much more senior and made significantly more money than Brian, he convinced that person to join his team. “He runs one of their most profitable branches to this day.”
This kind of focus on building a strong team goes a long way. In contrast, we were intrigued to uncover that the CEOs who saw “independence” as their defining character trait were twice as likely to underperform compared to other CEOs.
Each of us faces our own formidable hurdles on the way to the top. While the CEOs we studied surmounted the extra obstacle of not having gone to college, we think their career paths can provide lessons to other leaders regardless of their level of education. We will all do a better job if we learn our business deeply, focus on delivering results, and learn to lean on others.
LONDON — The recent boom in cryptocurrencies isn't just creating wealth for companies issuing their own digital tokens or investors speculating on them — compliance guys are doing well too.
"The start of Q4 to end Q4 [there was] a 10x increase in checks for crypto clients," Eamon Jubbawy, the cofounder and COO of document verification business Onfido, told Business Insider.
The global cryptocurrency market surged towards the end of 2017, doubling in size in a matter of months as startups rushed to raise money issuing their own cryptocurrencies and new investors piled into the market in the hopes of making big returns.
The surge in interest meant many cryptocurrency exchanges, where coins are traded, were overwhelmed with demand. Many of the biggest closed their doors to new customers as they grappled with a backlog in customer verification.
While crypto remains a largely unregulated space, regulators around the world have signalled they are watching it closely. Crypto companies have been proactively following the kind of ID checks and money source verification that are commonplace in the world of regular finance in a bid to head off any future regulatory troubles.
"Quite often they’re doing it in the house themselves before they come to us," Jubbawy said. "They’re doing it manually and then they realise they need someone to be able to automate it and do it at scale."
Onfido runs automated checks of ID documents to make sure they are real, helping companies comply with so-called "know your customer" regulation. Its main crypto customers are exchanges and ICOs, Jubbawy said. Bitstamp, Europe's oldest bitcoin exchange, recently announced that it is working with Onfido after it was overwhelmed with the level of new sign-ups over the Christmas period.
Jubbawy said that Onfido is now doing "millions" of document checks for crypto clients and has verified investor documents from 214 countries.
"Asia is massive, obviously Europe and the US as you’d expect but also places like India as well are big," he said. "It’s a global phenomenon. I’m just looking at the map now and there are all these Pacific Islands where people are buying crypto — it’s quite funny."
Charles Delingpole, the CEO and founder of anti-money laundering checking service ComplyAdvantage, told BI that his business is also seeing a big uptick in crypto business.
"We had a guy who went to the Miami crypto conference and we have a landing page for ICOs but without much trying we’ve had a lot of inbound leads and referrals," Delingpole said. "We’ve had a definite uptick in companies using us for crypto-related activities."
The motivations for crypto companies to work with companies like ComplyAdvantage and Onfido is the same as for any other finance business.
"No company wants to deal with North Korean drug traffickers, right?" Delingpole said. "No company wants to have a supplier who’s linked to corrupt Venezuelan politicians exporting cash."
Echoing the old adage "in a gold rush, sell shovels", Delingpole said: "Levis obviously made jeans for the gold miners right? We would argue that we’re critical components of companies being able to do this without inadvertently laundering money."
Jubbawy said: "The guys who are coming to us are saying hey, we want to make sure the people who are investing are legitimate people rather than people who are looking to move around dirty money, can you verify they’re not on any terrorist watch lists or anything like that?
"We love the fact we can inject a bit of trust and security into an industry that is otherwise set up for potential criminal activity."
For ComplyAdvantage, crypto represents a "small but growing" part of its overall business, Delingpole said. "For us, it’s an additional thing that gives us more scale but it’s a very small portion of our overall business."
Jubbawy said: "It’s not insignificant. A 10X uptick in any industry you’re serving is going to show. It’s definitely helped our growth recently but we work with such a wide variety of people."
This growing revenues have not gone unnoticed. Pawel Kuskowski, a former senior RBS compliance banker, set up Coinfirm in 2016. The company specialises in providing "know your customer" and anti-money laundering services to crypto companies.
Kuskowski told BI: "Demand is huge, and it is increasing. And this demand isn’t just being pushed by smaller crypto and blockchain startups, but by huge, blue-chip multinationals who want to transact in crypto. This demand will become too big to ignore.
"We work with a large number of companies ranging from ICOs, crypto exchanges, and banks. These companies want to know that the business and individuals that are transacting using cryptocurrencies are ‘honest actors’ — in other words, they are not exposed to illicit activities or involved in any other shady practices.
"By ensuring that the necessary compliance procedures are in place, these companies are able to confidently work with a larger client base. It makes sense to all parties involved."
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Here's why the recent stock market sell-off could save us from a repeat of "Black Monday"
In 1937 Dale Carnegie published his celebrated How to Win Friends and Influence People – the first book suggesting sellers build relationships as a route to closing sales. 1937: with primitive transportation, sellers found clients closer to home; telephones were emerging (FYI – Morse Code was preferred for 40 years after the telephone was invented!); marketing avenues were limited, as was advertising (Sears Catalogue, Life Magazine, The Farmer’s Almanac, the local paper or general store). Obviously there was no technology, or global competition, and it was difficult to sell to prospects outside of local markets.
Selling focused on natural customers – face-to-face relationships with neighbors and friends, without whom sales would suffer. And buyers, needing sellers for information and relevance, automatically trusted them. Relationships were vital.
It’s now 2018. We have a plethora of options to present our solutions. Our communications capability is global, cheap, and ubiquitous. With safe payment and delivery options, global competitors are pervasive. And – here’s the big one – our prospects have the ability to receive the information they need to easily choose a solution without us. Buyers contact us only when they’ve done their Pre-Sales change work and are ready. They don’t need a relationship with us.
Connections with strangers proliferate online; we have a far broader reach than ever. But because we don’t know these strangers intimately, we don’t consider them real relationships and don’t automatically trust them – especially when they abuse the connection by attempting to push product. Indeed, the ‘relationship’ angle is now specious, and the Carnegie missive is defunct. Buyers don’t need the relationship to find what they need online. But as you’ll see below, they sure could use a hand becoming buyers.
THE PLOY OF BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
When sellers now attempt to use ‘relationship’ as a ploy to sell, they encourage distrust; the Carnegie dictum is invalid. Here’s the reality:
Buyers can’t buy until they’re ready, willing, and able to bring something new into their status quo regardless of how ‘nice’ you are. In other words, until or unless change is planned for in a systemic way that touches all the right people and policies and garners buy-in and assures non-disruptive change, buyers cannot buy or they risk disrupting whatever IS working regardless of the problem they should resolve, or the efficacy of the solution. Buying doesn’t cause selling.
Change is based on systemic success factors; they cannot buy until they understand the full complement of risk factors involved, regardless of their problem or the efficacy of the solution. [Sometimes, fixing an existent problem is more costly than bringing in a new solution. In all cases, the status quo has been normalized and resistant to change, even though it has caused, and maintains, the problem needing fixing. Buying is a change management problem.] It is possible, however, to develop a real relationship quickly by facilitating a buying decision down the steps of change.
Buyers aren’t swayed by niceness. Buyers aren’t swayed by niceness. It will, however, make you a preferred vendor WHEN ALL ELSE IS EQUAL and WHEN THEY HAVE REACHED THE POINT OF CHOICE when they’re ready, willing, and able to consider buying something (i.e. Step 10 of the 13 step buying decision journey).
It doesn’t work when your focus is a sale. Here is a real dialogue:
SELLER: HI SHARON! AND how are YOU today??
SDM:[picking up the phone in tears] My name’s not Sharon! And I’m rotten. I just put my dog down!
SELLER: Hangs up the phone.
I offered an ‘authentic’ relationship moment, useful as an opportunity to connect: he should have said ‘I’m sorry that happened. Obviously you can’t speak now. Is there a better time? This is a sales call and I’d like to discuss X when you’re feeling better. Again, I’m so sorry about your dog.’
Whether for a large, complex sale, or a small personal item, buyers cannot buy until they have their internal ducks in a row, and know their route and risks through the change they’ll face when altering their status quo with a new solution, regardless of its efficacy. (Step 10 of a 13 Step process). Because the sales model focuses on placing solutions – possible only after buyers have completed their systemic, and very idiosyncratic, Pre-Sales change management issues – we don’t have the focus to discern where buyers are along their Buying Decision Path and end up waiting for buyers show up seeking a transactional connection. Our ‘niceness’ (which I’m differentiating from real customer service) is irrelevant; we just sound like everyone else trying to sell them something. We enter each discussion asking and listening for only what we want to hear, causing distrust.
DIFFERENTIATION?
Following acceptable marketing criteria of the era – words and phrases that are in vogue, graphics and colors that are deemed ‘what everyone is doing’ – it’s hard to be unique. And the myth of being a ‘Relationship Manager’ or ‘creating a relationship’ is supposed to show buyers why they should choose us over the competition. See?? I’m NICE!
Here’s the truth: buyers don’t start off wanting to buy anything whether or not the responses from your (biased) questions makes it sound like they have a need. They merely want solve a problem in the most effective way possible, with an assurance that they won’t face internal disruption if a change is needed. It’s only once they’ve determined their systemic change management requirements (that an Outsider can never know or understand) that they’ll buy – but by then they’ll have chosen their list of vendors and solutions from online data or referrals.
By focusing on attempting to influence people to buy because you’re nice, you’re left out of their behind-the-scenes decision process where you CAN enter and make a difference that creates a real relationship, reduced to running around trying to ‘be there’ when/if they finally show up as buyers (the low hanging fruit, or 5%). Not to mention chasing bad leads with folks who you think should be buyers (Prospects are those who WILL buy, not those who SHOULD buy.) vs offering true leadership to help them through their change management journey.
You can mitigate this and REALLY be nice by entering enter early (and before trying to sell) and facilitating buyers through the confustion route of their systemic change. I’ve coded the steps in their decision sequence and developed a model that facilitates Pre-Sales Buyer Readiness (Buying Facilitation®). You don’t have to use my model – create your own! But entering the buyer/seller interaction as a change facilitator will differentiate you and enable a true relationship.
Buyers would never buy from anyone else when a seller has taught the prospect how to assemble ALL of the folks necessary to be part of the Decision Team, or HOW to get everyone on board for change. Remember: they will do this anyway before they buy – they might as well do this with you.
CASE STUDY: HELP BUYERS BUY AND DEVELOP TRUST
Here’s an example. Years ago, working with KPMG, I spoke with my regular client (Dave, a Senior Partner/Consultant) who said he designing a large presentation with this team of Senior Partners for a first call with Boing for a $50,000,000 global tax solution they thought Boing needed. They were merely working off of what they assumed the prospect ‘need’ was and carefully presenting what KPMG could offer, assuming their facts and professionalism would build a relationship. They had a history of a 3 year sales cycle with their solution, and the first presentation to the Tax Director was crucial for any forward movement of their relationship (usually the second conversation with the CFO occurred 6 months after the first).
I suggested to Dave that before meeting, they should call the Tax Director with one of my Facilitative Questions to help Boing begin the Pre Sales process of discovering where their systemic issues lie, and if they could resolve them internally— the understanding being that when/if they couldn’t, they’d need to buy KPMG’s solution. Here’s the conversation they had.
KPMG, using a Facilitative Question to help Boing begin understanding of where the ‘holes’ were in their system: How are you currently ensuring that your full global management team are communicating in a timely fashion so they all have the same data at the same time to facilitate quick decisions and team buy-in across countries and time zones?
Boing Tax Director: What? I have no idea how to answer that, but I suspect we’re not managing this very well. Hang on a minute. [He left the call for several minutes and returned with the CFO on the other end of the phone thus eliminating the first 6 months of the sales cycle.] Jim, this is Dave from KPMG. He’s asked a very important question that I don’t think we have an answer to but we should have. Dave, can you say that again?
Dave repeated the question, to which Jim replied: Wow. Yes. We need the answer to that. Do you have any more questions we need answers to?
Dave then went through the list of Facilitative Questions I had developed for him that began the process of leading Boing through the internal issues they’d need to determine to figure out if they could resolve their global tax situation themselves (in which case they didn’t need KPMG, but they’d consider this before considering spending $50,000,000 with an outside group). By the time KPMG got to the presentation a month later, it wasn’t needed: the entire Buying Decision Team was present (cutting off another 6 months of the sales cycle) and ready with questions for them. The sale was closed in 4 months rather than 3 years.
The time it takes buyers to discover their own best answers is the length of the sales cycle, regardless of your relationship. In this case, my Facilitative Questions ultimately led them to global buy-in and change management in a fraction of the time – questions used to facilitate their understanding and ability of the effects of the change a new solution would involve, and assemble the right people and considerations, not gather information from a biased mind-set, or be ‘nice’ to build a relationship. The very focus on helping prospects enable their own change develops trust and relationship.
As sellers we forget that buyers have to go through this anyway, with us or without us. We sit and wait for long periods of time while they go through this process, and then compete for the 5% who finally show up. Why not add a skill set and help them make this process efficient AND build relationships!
There’s a way to make money AND make nice. It’s by being a true Servant Leader and change facilitator; by entering into a WE Space in which there is a tracit agreement that everyone will be served. Stop using ‘nice’ as a sales ploy. Stop focusing on the low hanging fruit. Add a change management focus and find real buyers who’ve already recognized a problem, and first facilitate them through their route to inclusive, congruent, systemic change. Then you can become part of the Buying Decision Team, make a difference, close more, waste less time, and act with integrity.
____________
Sharon Drew Morgen is a thought leader and visionary in Change Facilitation, change management, sales, decision facilitation, and win/win collaboration. She is the author of 9 books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and the amazon bestsellerWhat? Did you really say what I think I heard? She teaches, consults, speaks, and coaches sellers in getting on to the Buying Decision Team and helping buyers buy. Sharon Drew has worked globally with many of the Fortune 500 sales departments. She has also developed online learning for sellers and those seeking to communicate without bias. She can be reached at: sharondrew@
Why Building Relationships is an Unsuccessful Sales Technique is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com
As a Customer Success Manager here at Evergage, one of my favorite parts of our platform is segmentation. Aside from the important role segments play in targeting personalized experiences to different groups of people, they are hugely valuable for data analysis. Want to know who and how many visitors viewed a specific category in the last 30 days? Done. Want to understand who has visited the site for the first time today and bought at least $150 worth of product — all while visiting no more than 10 products all together and favoriting a specific category? Um, yes, but why would you need to?
The possibilities are virtually endless.
You can use segmentation to target specific groups of users in campaigns. You can compare different segments to understand the variance in behavior. You can even dive down into our “categories wheel” within each segment to understand which categories and sub-categories this particular segment is engaging with from a purchase, view, and time spent perspective. It’s really, really cool.
But how do you use all of this incredible information to your marketing advantage?
This is a question a lot of my clients ask me and it’s a good one. You have so much data that you can use to point arrows in the right direction to help you increase engagement and conversions — and ultimately provide better and more personalized experiences for your visitors.
The first step I typically take is to browse around a client’s website to identify key activities that a person can take to demonstrate engagement on the site. Is there a blog? Are there videos? Can customers leave reviews on products?
Once I’ve identified some key activities, I create a set of segments. For example, if there is a blog I create this type of segment:
Visitors who have viewed the blog at least one time for all time
Then I create the inverse of that segment:
Visitors who have NOT viewed the blog at least one time for all time
By comparing these two segments, I can see what kind of value the blog brings to this particular client’s site. For example, I can compare the conversion rate for both segments.
Depending on the results, I then have a little brainstorm session:
To summarize at a high level, using segmentation to generate ideas for personalization campaigns can be accomplished by following these five simple steps:
You would be surprised at how easy it is. It’s a practice that can pay off in a big way. Good luck!
David Ogilvy is a name that’s practically synonymous with advertising. If you work in marketing you’ve probably heard of him before. Often called The Father of Advertising, Ogilvy is one of the most influential figures in advertising history…and one of the most quoted. His advertising methods and ideologies have stood the test of time and are as valuable today as they were 50 years ago.
If you’re looking for inspiration, need a bit of guidance, or just want to be entertained, this post is for you. Here are twelve lessons from the master himself that will make you a better marketer:
“Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.” ~David Ogilvy
Writing is only great when there’s conviction. Have you ever tried to write about a product or service that you had no faith in, or just didn’t understand that well? Of course you have—we’ve all been there. To produce our greatest work, you must test, understand, and be enthusiastic about the product. Above all, you have to believe in the product.
Believing often requires placing yourself in the ideal customer’s shoes. Viewing the product through their eyes will help you to focus on the most valuable aspects and identify the elements that generate enthusiasm.
“The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.” ~David Ogilvy
A meat ticket is old slang for a soldier’s identification tags. Headlines need to be targeted, significant, and specific to make an impact. Ogilvy was famous for his headline philosophy: “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Want to know what Ogilvy’s favorite headline he ever wrote was?
“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the New Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock” ~David Ogilvy
Notice that he didn’t use a single adjective? There are no sensationalized elements going on in this headline. It’s pure, unadulterated facts.
“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.” ~David Ogilvy
How do you know if something is producing the best results possible if you never test? Ogilvy was an adamant believer in testing, testing, testing, even going so far as to say that “The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST.”
Try asking your coworkers how they respond to several different headlines or survey customers on which graphics resonate. Testing provides answers that will help you refine your messaging and delivery
Creating compelling copy that sells is one of the hardest jobs in marketing. By his own admission, Ogilvy believed he was a terrible copywriter. Shocking to consider, right? Thousands of copywriters (myself included) have wished at some point that we were as “lousy” at copywriting as Ogilvy. In a 1955 letter, Ogilvy lays out his twelve copywriting habits:
Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.
Yours sincerely,
D.O.
“I’m terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.” ~David Ogilvy
As difficult as it might seem, you should never settle for a result after the first few attempts. Consider every angle, talk to as many different people as possible from a variety of backgrounds, and write as many variations as you can think of. Sure, the majority will stink. But if you put the time and effort into the process your final result will be exceptional.
“The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” ~David Ogilvy
It’s important to remember that advertising isn’t there to just sell someone on something. It needs to inform people. Even if someone is considering the purchase, they might need a tad more knowledge to sign the check. For his Rolls Royce headline, Ogilvy spent three whole weeks absorbing information and pondering the perfect line of copy. While it sounds tedious, it works.
Focus on putting as much value, accuracy, and helpful information as possible into your advertisements. Just don’t try to put everything into one ad. It still needs to be easy to digest.
“What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.” ~David Ogilvy
Delivering the message is the goal of every advertisement. You can’t make someone buy something or carry out a certain action, but you can do your best to reach an interested audience with a message that resonates and compels them to take action. Make sure that what you say is taking precedence over how you say it and your audience will understand the message every time.
“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” ~David Ogilvy
I’ve never participated in a productive brainstorm that wasn’t humorous. When we’re being silly we let our guards down, and that’s when the best ideas happen. Sometimes it’s not the actual joke or silly remark that produces a great idea, but the response to the ridiculous ideas that turns into advertising gold.
Try infusing some humor into your meetings to unleash your team’s creativity.
“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.” ~David Ogilvy
Eye-catching advertisements are fine, but if they’re detracting from the focus of your advertisement (AKA the product or service) they’ve failed to fulfill their function. Ogilvy firmly believed that a successful advertisement would spur the audience to think, “I never knew that before, I must try this product.”
“Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.” ~David Ogilvy
Everything that carries your logo and company name is a representation of your brand. Make sure your advertisements, blog posts, email campaigns, and every other piece of content does your brand justice and improves audience perception.
The best way to ensure your business is enhancing the quality of its brand is to create brand guidelines. When you document your brand specifications and acceptable practices, there’s very little room for interpretive errors.
“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.” ~David Ogilvy
If you don’t study you can’t expect to be successful. This applies to marketing overall, and not just advertising. Researching your audience, client, and market are all essential steps to creating a great campaign. Fake it ‘til you make it isn’t a winning policy.
Create a research process that allows you to identify your ideal customers and how you can fulfill their needs. Buyer personas are one of the most valuable tools a business uses. They help identify the characteristics, buying behavior, and brand preferences of your audience segments, making it easier to target them with accurate messaging.
“Many people – and I think I am one of them – are more productive when they’ve had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I’m far better able to write.” ~David Ogilvy
Let’s clarify—Ogilvy isn’t talking about getting completely hammered. He’s talking about relaxing, having fun, and chilling out to get in a productive mindset. If you’re struggling to concentrate halfway through Friday, a cold, frothy beer could be just the pick-me-up you need to finish that analytics report. Or maybe it’s a 15-minute noontime break to meditate in the fresh air, or a quick run on the treadmill. Find something that helps you to relax and refocus, then make it part of your weekly routine.
There’s a golden nugget that can be derived from these twelve lessons (and, of course, the master himself puts it best):
“Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work.” ~David Ogilvy
Producing your best work means mustering your finest efforts. Hard work breeds success. It’s clear that Ogilvy himself was a believer that hard work, rather than talent, leads to exceptional results.
This article was originally published here.
Outbound sales and prospecting are the sales approaches that most people shudder to think of. Dialing the phone, cold calling, getting past the gatekeepers – it’s enough to discourage anyone if you don’t approach it in the right way. This conversation with Chris Beall of Connect and Sell is powerful simply because it reveals some of the basics of why we go about sales that way in the first place. The numbers don’t lie, and Chris is definitely one to know the numbers. But more than knowing them, he’s effective at interpreting what they reveal about needed sales process improvements. If you want to learn how to do outbound sales and prospecting better than you ever have before, Chris is the guy to listen to. Get a feel for the kinds of things he has to share, on this episode.
Chris Beall ( @chris8649 ) of @ConnectAndSell : #Outbound #sales and #prospecting metrics and what they tell us about #SalesSuccess. Listen to this episode of #InTheArenaClick To TweetThere are thousands of metrics you could track when it comes to outbound sales. But Chris says that the most important metric is the metric of each day. In his mind, the strongest thing you can do is focus on doing the most you can in each day, even if that means taking some of the things you meant to do tomorrow into today’s workload. If you do that consistently, magic happens in your business, partially because you get more done per unit than you are spending. These are the kinds of observations Chris makes that are simple, yet so powerful. Take the time to listen to what he shares in our conversation, it will help you improve your outbound sales game.
One of the things I was curious to know from Chris’s experience was whether or not people who make more outbound sales calls show improvement with the more calls they make. He said that’s not necessarily the case, but what does demonstrate improvement is when those making outbound calls are coached about what they say and how they say it, especially within the first eight to ten seconds of a call. Coaching is vital to enhance effectiveness because it’s through good coaching from an experienced salesperson that an ineffective caller can learn to express comfortable confidence that leads to effectiveness. Learn what Chris means by that on this episode of in the arena.
The first 8 to 10 seconds of an #outbound #sales call is the most important. @chris8649 of @ConnectAndSell shares a quick win on #SalesCalls on this episode of #InTheArenaClick To TweetReferrals are not something we typically think of as being directly connected to outbound sales. But the statistics show that there is a direct correlation. The outbound salespeople who are able to secure more meetings are also the ones who produce more referrals. What’s the connection? It likely that the confidence and demeanor those sales professionals have that enables them to secure the meetings in the first place, is also what enables them to get referrals. Chris Beall has great insights into this phenomenon and explains what salespeople can do to increase their ability in both of those areas. You’ll want to hear this episode.
The goal of outbound sales calls is to schedule appointments with prospects. It’s as simple as that. So outbound sales reps who are doing a good job should be scheduling as many conversations as possible. Chris and the team at Connect and Sell are all about making that scheduling process simpler and easier, and their implementation of technology to make it happen is revolutionary. Find out how 80 sales calls can be made, four actual conversations can happen, and appointments can be set – all within 1 hour. I told you it was revolutionary. Be sure you listen.
#Outbound #sales reps should have as many conversations as possible. Find out how @ConnectAndSell can help you make it happen from @chris8649 on this episode of #InTheArenaClick To TweetThe 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
The post Chris Beall: Outbound Sales and Prospecting Metrics and What They Tell Us About Success – Episode #104 appeared first on The Sales Blog.
Email has the highest conversion rate and ROI as compared to all other marketing tactics. Thus, when we talk about conversions, email is the king of all marketing tactics. For your email campaigns to be effective, you should be able to convert your email audiences into customers.
To get your conversion rates pepped up, you need to pair your email campaigns with well-designed landing pages.
Landing pages are an integral part of any marketing campaign. It is where the conversion happens. A well-designed landing page can persuade the visitors to provide contact details, make a purchase, signup for a newsletter, download content or request demo or consultation.
In this article, we take you through the mistakes marketers often make while creating landing pages with ways to avoid them, for a successful email marketing campaign.
But first,
A landing page, also known as a “lead capture page” is an indispensable part of your marketing strategy, where your visitors take a step further towards becoming customers. Almost half (48%) of the businesses build a new landing page for each marketing campaign according to Marketing Sherpa. Here are the reasons why a landing page is important for your marketing strategy:
Supports your business goals: Your business can have various goals such as promoting a product, getting new customers, targeting a niche, closing more sales or collecting information of your existing customers. Landing pages help you in achieving these goals.
Generates leads: Landing pages help you in improving your lead generation efforts. Instead of redirecting your visitors to your company’s homepage, send them to targeted landing pages that would increase the chances of generating leads.
Improves conversions: The design and content of your landing page can influence a visitor’s decision to sign-up or make a purchase. A landing page can also help in tracking reconversions of your existing leads and hence can be used to identify which prospects are more engaged with your business.
Lets you collect your prospects’ information: Every time a prospect fills a form on your landing page, you get valuable data about them such as their occupation, location, contact details, and persona. This can be used to understand what type of visitors are getting converted.
Gives insights into your marketing activities: When a landing page is linked to an email, a social media campaign or a piece of content, the activities on the page can be recorded and the insights can be drawn to know which channel got you the maximum leads. Such insights can be useful in refining your campaigns and improving the effectiveness of your campaign.
Take a look at this email and its connecting landing page.
This email from Uniqlo has multiple CTAs that are linked to different landing pages. Here, the email has separate landing pages for Women’s Jeans, Women’s Shirts, Men’s Jeans, Men’s Shirts and a common landing page for both men and women. The common landing page features a video supporting the product, followed by distinctive product images and CTAs.
Specific landing pages linked to the various CTAs in the mail make it relevant and involve the visitors in your landing page. This is a great example of a combo of email and its respective landing pages.
Now, let us go through the common mistakes that you may make while creating landing pages for your emails and steps to avoid them.
Adding unnecessary information and beating around the bush, instead of keeping the message concise is something you tend to do. Using multiple images, text and CTA on your landing page will be a distraction to your visitors and will take away the user’s attention from the core message.
To avoid the mistake: While designing your landing page, your main aim should be to have a conversion-centric content and design. Avoid adding any extra information that isn’t related to the primary offer/message that you want to convey to your visitors. Highlight the main message to keep the users focused on the key message and guide them to the main action they should be taking.
Your landing page should not be the one-size-fits-all kind. Marketers often create a single landing page for multiple offers and services, instead of targeting specific buyers’ needs. Having a landing page that promotes the same service, product or offer and which is common for everyone on your email list will result in failure of conversions.
To avoid the mistake: Target specific customer/prospect groups with the help of specific landing pages that are tailor-made to meet your business goals. Create separate dedicated landing pages for each business goal, targeting different buyer personas or selling points. This will help in better targeting your prospects and increase the chances of converting them into leads and customers.
One thing marketers often overlook while designing landing pages is not optimizing the forms for conversion. They often fail to design the landing pages with conversion in mind. For someone who is in the Awareness stage, asking for details more than the name and email address would lead to losing them. It is, therefore, necessary to include forms that are relevant to the targeted audience and tested and optimized for conversion.
To avoid this mistake: Get a good optimization tool that lets you test and track your landing page performance. Start out with the basic information such as the name and email address and test for the various target groups to know what works best. Review the performance and identify areas that can be simplified to get maximum people to sign up.
It is 2018 and majority of landing pages are still not optimized for a decent mobile experience. With heavy imagery and design, the landing pages face loading issues on mobile devices. Also, the CTA going unnoticed is often a matter of concern in landing pages accessed on mobiles. Such errors fail to give a consistent experience across devices.
To avoid this mistake: Make sure you create landing pages by keeping mobile and other smart devices in mind. Keep the design and code lightweight to avoid loading issues. Stick to a single-column layout and place the CTA above the fold. Moreover, keep the content to a bare minimum and use responsive form designs that can adapt to different screen sizes.
The main aim of creating landing pages is to generate leads and convert visitors and the CTA is the deciding element. If there are multiple calls to action on a landing page, it confuses the visitors and leads to killing your conversion opportunity. Moreover, the CTA is often overlooked amidst the content and design elements of the landing page, which leads to losing your potential customers.
To avoid this mistake: Make your CTAs prominent on your landing page. Instead of including more than one CTA, include a single one that grabs the visitors’ attention and stands out on the entire page. Use appropriate colors and design elements to make them visually appealing and evident. Also, place the CTA where it is more noticeable and test different variants to know what works well.
Poor loading time is one of the major issues that hinder conversions in landing pages. Your visitors would leave your landing page if it takes too long to finish loading. According to a recent research, 53% of people will abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. It is, therefore, necessary to boost the speed of your landing pages.
To avoid this mistake: To make sure your page performs well, keep a check on it with regular speed tests and optimization. Minimize the use of bulky designs and codes and optimize for varied devices and screen sizes. Also, use a fasting hosting provider and minimize redirects. Landing pages that load faster have higher rankings on Google and PPC ads.
Before creating your next landing page, check out the anatomy of a perfect landing page. Download the ebook:
Avoid these mistakes and try to be as relevant as possible to provide a remarkable landing page experience to your visitors. The ultimate goal of your business is selling your product or service and an effective landing page will help in moving your prospects a step closer to become customers.
In my group coaching program, part of what I help students do is come up with a core offering. Once they have their one core offering, then they are encouraged to create offerings at different price points.
There are several reasons why you want to consider creating products and services at different price points, but first, I want to clarify what these different price points are.
One of the questions new business owners ask me all the time is what happens if someone can’t afford their offering but still needs help. There are two answers to this.
The first is that they just may not be your ideal client. The second, is they can still get the help they need by trying an offering at a lower price point. Here is a basic breakdown of different price points in a business:
There are several reasons why you want to create offerings at different price points. Here are three.
The thing to note is that you have different levels for different wallets. For example, someone may not be ready for my group coaching experience, BUT they might be ready for a small on-demand course on blogging.
They may not be ready in two ways. First, they don’t have a foundation yet. Second, because they are just getting started they also don’t have the budget.
In my case, I have smaller on-demand classes that express one specific issue – like starting a blog or a freelance writing business. Once students have implemented these on their own for a while, then they may be ready for group coaching.
My group coaching also serves as the starting point before private coaching, which covers more mindset issues.
Creating offerings at different price points helps you scale. For example, my on-demand classes don’t require any of my time, and I’m still getting paid. My group coaching program is also a one-to-many model. Since it’s at a mid-high price point, I still make a good amount of money, but it’s less of my time being put into it.
The final reason why you want to create offerings at different price points is it provides you with multiple streams of income. If one source isn’t providing, another one picks up the slack. Additionally, you meet clients and customers at different parts of their journey which leads to more business revenue for you.
Before going crazy, just note that it takes time to build offerings at multiple price points. It took me years to get the sales funnel for my coaching business totally figured out. However, once you got it, it makes running a business much easier.
Before addressing that question, let me ask another.
What is a lead? Is it the name on a list you bought from a content aggregator for $23? Is it the person who signed up for your webinar this week? Is it someone who swiped their badge at the tradeshow you attended last month?
While all of these scenarios have potential, none could be called a lead. Just try to pass them on to your field sales team and you’ll see. They won’t get followed up.
Why? Because the chances are pretty low—probably 3% to 4% at best—that any of these names are bonafide opportunities if you are a B2B company with a complex sales process. Sales won’t spend the time it takes to cull through 100 so-called leads for 3 to 4 good ones.
Which means those “leads” land in a black hole, and the money spent to generate them is wasted.
Leads aren’t leads unless:
Is this a person with authority to buy? Do they have a driving need for the solution you offer? A hand raiser isn’t a real lead (that is, sales qualified) until they’ve had engagement with a representative of your company to find out the answers to the questions above. And that’s usually not something Sales is going to do. If Sales has to make 100 phone calls to determine which 3 are worth something, they won’t invest the time, and it’s not smart for your company to ask them to. That’s not where their skills lay, it’s not what they’re getting paid for.
It could well be that a qualified lead fits your definition of a lead, but often the time isn’t right. Continued engagement in the form of account-focused outreach (also referred to as Account Based Marketing) makes sure your company is on their radar when the right disruption happens to necessitate a decision, when their current solution’s weaknesses reach the boiling point, or when competition encroaches and fear sets in.
So the first question is answered: A “real” lead is qualified and nurtured by Marketing—and ready for Sales to take over and turn into revenue. It’s a simple equation—and a win-win for both organizations.
Now let’s answer the question that’s the subject of this post. What’s it take to generate a volume of real leads, the ones you really need?
Over the past two decades we’ve worked hard to crack the code on this. What we’re doing seems to be working: The clients we’ve served (some for most of that time period) and the CMOs we’ve worked with (90% of our business is with marketing leaders who’ve done business with us before) will tell you that it’s PointClear’s combination of three things we do well that make a difference:
Let’s start by talking about agile processes.
One dictionary defines agile as “relating to a method of project management … characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans.”
Scott Brinker, author of Hacking Marketing, a great book about agile practices in marketing, sheds more light. Here’s Scott’s Agile Marketing Manifesto:
At PointClear, we apply agile to what we do for clients to save time, save money, prevent frustration and get better results. Continuous learning and validation, client collaboration and responsive planning are some of the agile approaches we take—and the reason why we keep clients, and CMOs keep coming back.
This scenario is in stark contrast to what others in our industry do, which can be encapsulated as follows: Send me a list, send me a script, send me some money—and we’ll send you some leads. (Of course, these leads—which can be attractive to those who value cost-per-lead above other criteria—will be not be followed up by Sales and will end up in the CRM black hole.)
A firm like I described in the previous paragraph is not a partner. They’re not working closely with their clients, and they’re not fine-tuning the clients’ message, the program’s cadence or the market definition based on what’s working and what’s good for the client.
Remember the words in Scott’s manifesto that describe agile? Small experiments, testing and data, intimate customer tribes, engagement and transparency?
What’s a better way to experiment, test, understand who you’re talking to, and figure out what works? Picking up the phone and making some calls.
We start every program by spending a period of time talking to targets to test response. What titles respond to what messages? What time of day are we reaching targets? How many touches does it take to reach them? We measure everything, then look at the data (in minutes, not days or weeks) to see what’s resonating. We adjust the program accordingly, continuously.
By contrast, we don’t try to attract someone (who may or may not be qualified) to a site using IP-based marketing, for example. Instead we drive intimacy with one-to-one conversations. We engage our market. We’re able to be transparent with our clients because we have data to prove our approach works. We become more successful exponentially. This approach, by the way, costs less in the long run and works better than the status quo.
Now let’s explore why all conversation is not the same.
Sometimes our outreach supports inbound marketing (because inbound doesn’t work alone in a complex B2B environment), sometimes we’re qualifying and nurturing leads generated at shows, online presentations or other events, and sometimes we managing response.
All the time we’re having unscripted conversation with our clients’ prospects. We can do that because the associates on our team have what it takes to have the interactions that generate quality leads.
They have the experience, training and the personality traits to insure that the folks on the phone who represent you, represent you well.
How do we know candidates have what it takes to carry the conversations needed to fuel the forecast? We don’t just take their word, we test them (and many self-select out).
Our group is capable of navigating a prospect organization to find the right decision-makers. They know how to drive peer-to-peer engagement with executives. And they have the active listening skills needed to progress a lead until it’s ready to turn over to the client’s Sales team.
We often stress to current and potential employees how important it is to have the right people to assure conversations held on your behalf are high quality. We have competitors who maintain home-based 1099 agents being paid $11 an hour with no benefits can do what we can—read more. They can’t.
And there are others who maintain that their technology can make mediocre people successful generating, qualifying and nurturing executive-level leads for enterprise software companies (for example). That doesn’t work either.
The right platform brings it all together.
Does your CRM manage list segments, cadence, lead data and other outcomes? Does it automatically tee up the next touch with the best prospect at the right time? Can you segment, re-segment or retire lists or list segments in seconds? Do you report on stats such as touches per conversation, touches per lead, best conversion touches?
Our tool, the PinPoint platform, does. Why? It was designed for lead management. It’s a specialized tool that syncs with Salesforce.com and other CRMs.
While process and people are more important than platform, PinPoint is what makes it possible to scale tested processes, support more associates, and turn more prospects into sales qualified leads.
Here’s an example: We had a call from a sales executive recently who wanted to know how we got a prospect on the telephone and turned it into a lead for him. He asked: “How did you get to this guy? I have been trying to get him for almost three years.” The answer was “Email #2.”
Each client’s touch cycle is a little bit different. Touch cycles are tweaked constantly using PinPoint to optimize the number of completed companies and the lead percentage. Touch too many times and you reduce completed companies and leads. Touch too little and you increase completed companies but may decrease leads. It is a delicate balance—and it is carefully measured using our proprietary platform.
The touch cycle or cadence for this client was 12 touches over 10 business days. We followed-up six dials with three voicemails followed by three emails. Voicemails and emails are carefully constructed and tested. Voicemails and emails build a story to encourage response. In the case of this client the prospect responded to … that’s right, Email #2.
In general, Sales people aren’t persistent enough—and they don’t have visibility into what’s required without a solution like PinPoint. I’ve had business peers tell me that they get calls that sound interesting but come at a bad time. They say to themselves, “they’ll call back” but guess what—many times they don’t. That’s why it’s important for Marketing and Sales to have a tool that helps determine the right level of tenaciousness.
One example of an extended, persistent, touch cycle by PointClear was the 42nd touch to the CFO of the country’s fourth largest utility. On the 42nd touch the CFO called us back and said “don’t stop calling me … you are my conscience … I’ve been busy but if you will call me next Tuesday at 10 am CST I’ll take the call.” We did, he did and the deal closed five months later for $1 billion for our client (a global consulting/services company). Seriously, that’s billion with a “B.”
Of course, this is an extreme example due to the deal size. But, it is not extreme when it comes to how we track touches and touch cycles and how many touches it can take to give us, and our clients, the best shot at having a conversation and finding a deal.
This all matters because all the cadence, data capture and workflow is built into the PinPoint platform. Standard and custom reports are either automatically created or can be run in seconds. Finally, actionable market intelligence reports are created on a planned and spontaneous basis to help clients with positioning, messaging and competitive information.
I've always said that what we do is not rocket science, but there are a lot of moving parts that make it difficult to manage lead generation, lead qualification and lead nurturing in-house and/or on a small scale. Either a dedicated manager is too expensive, or the job falls on the sales manager who doesn’t understand the function and doesn't really have time to manage it (not to mention they don’t want to manage it). Or, once initial investment is made, it’s determined just how expensive the whole process is without the right infrastructure. See this blog for an analysis of cost and productivity of internal vs. outsourced teleprospecting.
Let us help you light the fire.
PointClear’s outsourced B2B sales lead generation, lead qualification and lead nurturing stand out, and there are three reasons why:
I'd like to hear from you. What in your experience works, and what doesn't, to fuel your B2B sales forecast?
As long as I have been in B2B marketing, I can’t think of a time where the importance of marketing and sales alignment hasn’t been stressed.
‘It’s critical for success!”
“Align with Sales to drive the best results!”
“Godliness is marketing and sales alignment.”
I am joking on the last point, but most of you know what I mean.
Yet, it never seems like it’s easy, achievable, or common for many organizations. It tends to be more aspirational like hiking Kilimanjaro.
But that could be changing. With the growing popularity and adoption of account based marketing, I have talked to more companies where the revenue teams actually feel…aligned. Account based marketing requires ongoing collaboration – not just a hand-off from marketing to sales. With ABM, marketing and sales need to work together regarding the accounts to pursue, key tactics and outreach, and even analysis on what is working or not. While not a new idea, it hasn’t always been easy to do – but luckily technology can help. Even if ABM isn’t a strategy your team has adopted – here are few components of it that are worth stealing:
ABM can help you with marketing and sales alignment in these 3 simple ways:
1) Have a shared ‘system of record’ to track accounts. It does not help coordination if marketing tracks leads but sales tracks accounts – that is not going to help alignment. Make sure you have a way to have a complete account view to track coverage, awareness, and engagement.
2) Help sales prioritize their time. One of the best ways marketing can help sales is showing them the accounts to spend time on. Time is money and you want your sales team to be able to act quickly and sure up their best bets.
3) Make sure marketing and sales initiatives are visible. All teams want to understand what is working and what is not. Make ALL activities visible so revenue teams can see it’s a joint effort (and rarely it’s just ‘one thing’).
Regardless of your strategy, it is essential for revenue teams to be coordinated and orchestrate activity. These tips will help make alignment a reality and not just an aspiration.
Content Marketing is not prospecting. Even if there is a call to action, you are not asking your client for a meeting to explore change. This is the above the funnel work that helps you create awareness and capture mindshare, both of which are helpful to your prospecting efforts.
Social Selling is also not prospecting. It can create an awareness, mindshare, and it can potentially make prospecting easier because of the familiarity it creates. Because it lacks the request for a meeting, it isn’t prospecting. It’s another above the funnel activity.
Nurturing your dream clients with insights and ideas, something I believe to be critical to sales now, is also not prospecting. When you provide value without making an ask, you are not actually prospecting. You might be tilling the soil and planting seeds, but without the ask, it’s not prospecting.
Because of all these things can—and sometimes do—create an inbound opportunity (an outcome worth pursuing) they are confused with prospecting. But because there is no ask for a meeting explore change, it’s not prospecting. If you call these things prospecting, then you must measure the results in the same way that you would measure them using traditional forms of prospecting.
If you make twenty calls and schedule one appointment, you have a 5 percent effectiveness from this method of prospecting. If you publish a blog post with a call to action that is viewed 2,800 times and results in no new opportunities, you have a 0 percent effectiveness rating from that method. This is true even if you ask the person viewing the blog post to download a piece of content and they provide you with their phone number and email address without agreeing to a meeting to explore change. While the blog post might generate excellent leads, you still have to prospect to create an opportunity.
Just like it’s not the first phone call that generates a meeting, it’s not the first blog post either. If what you are doing doesn’t have people beating a path to your door, it’s not enough for you to give up outbound prospecting.
As you think about your approach to opportunity creation, it’s important to understand the goals and outcomes of the activities you engage in. Above the funnel, passive activities that can occasionally produce opportunities isn’t prospecting. Prospecting is the proactive outreach that moves prospects into your funnel. Believing that your content marketing is going to generate enough opportunities to fill your pipeline is foolish and expects too much of an above the funnel activity.
The post Things That Are Not B2B Prospecting appeared first on The Sales Blog.
Flight instructor Paul Tymstra was flying 7,500 feet over Canada's Confederation Bridge when he spotted this unusual site. Tymstra snapped a pic and Tweeted it:
Here's a closer look:
So what's going on here? The Confederation Bridge, which connects Prince Edward Island with the mainland, has been designed to mitigate the considerable lateral force presented by enormous floating sheets of ice. Rather than beef the piers up to withstand the force, which could require enough material to make the bridge unaffordable, the bridge's designers introduced a very clever bit of engineering. Look at this elevation view of one of the piers:
From "Confederation Bridge – An innovative approach to ice forces" by T.G. Brown, University of Calgary The waterline is above the pressure panels, level with the beginning of that 52-degree-angle cone. When a moving sheet of ice contacts the cone, it has nowhere to go but up. This generates a bit of "ice rubble," and then a crack is induced in the ice, as the sheet simply breaks at that point under its own weight.
From "Confederation Bridge – An innovative approach to ice forces" by T.G. Brown, University of Calgary 
From "Confederation Bridge – An innovative approach to ice forces" by T.G. Brown, University of Calgary The ice can then flow beneath the bridge in neat, rectangular sheets.
Also, to give you an idea of scale, those piers are 250 meters apart. So those ice floes are massive: You could lay the length of nearly two and a half football fields across their width.
Via Kottke
Google Analytics is the gold standard for monitoring the success, traffic, and audience demographics of your website or mobile app. You may even be one of the 30-50 million people using the platform.
Like any other successful service, the Google Analytics platform is constantly updated and improved to give users better features and performance. That said, there are a few things you can do behind the scenes to get the most out of the platform. In this article, we’ll discuss ways you can customize Google Analytics to boost productivity, give you more insight into your audience, increase conversion, and build automated sales funnels.
You likely spend a lot of time in the admin area of your website—why not import your Google Analytics dashboard there so everything’s in one place? Integrating Google Analytics into your site’s dashboard via the Google API will give you a more cohesive snapshot. Simply add the Google Analytics widget to your website’s admin panel. Below are links to plug-ins for some of the most popular content management systems.
Need a more custom solution than a plugin? Hire a freelance developer to whip up a custom-coded Google Analytics dashboard using the API.
Above, typical Google Analytics site stats you can import into your site’s dashboard for a more comprehensive snapshot.
Want to know what people are searching for on your site so you can deliver dynamic, relevant data-driven content? If your site has search functionality, Google Analytics can provide reports about what visitors are looking for, which you can in turn use to tweak your site’s content and UI for a more tailored user experience. For ecommerce sites in particular, tapping into the internal search activity of your online store is one of the most powerful ways to improve your sales by putting in-demand products front and center.
For example, an online perfume store wanted to display items that users were looking for most often. By writing custom-coded modules that pulled data from user search queries and matched them to existing inventory, the store owner was able to fine-tune his recommended items so they always featured products most relevant to users.
As you can see on the site’s analytics dashboard, during this given week the most popular searches were Chanel, Montale and Carolina Herrera 212 man series. Using this data, the featured items for the week were updated to reflect the search query data, increasing conversions 1.4x.
This data is easy to export via the Google Analytics Reporting API to your website using the JSON data transfer format. The basic setup is relatively simple and should only take around 3 minutes.
7. Next, select whether or not you want Analytics to strip the query parameter from your URL.
8. Then, you can turn Site search categories on or off (e.g., displaying results from refined searches when users enter a second search term to narrow down results).
While Google Analytics makes for a great reporting tool, you can also use it as an SEO tool when linked with the Google Webmaster Tools (or Search Console). After linking the two, you’ll be able to view all-in-one analysis, pictured below:
Most of us kick off our day reading through emails, digests, or the news—wouldn’t it be nice if you could have your daily Google Analytics report sent right to your inbox, too? You can, with Google Analytics’ Email Report function. Set this up in your dashboard and choose the frequency: once, daily, weekly, and so on.
These are just a few hacks to make your Google Analytics work a little harder for you.
Can you think of the last time you saw something and you just had to tell your friends about it? Do you remember having a great experience at a restaurant and later on tweeting about it? These could be products of word of mouth marketing (WOMM). It is an organic way of spreading information. It uses components of viral marketing. Unlike viral marketing, it spreads through more natural channels.
Word of mouth is a free form of advertisement or promotion (just one reason it’s so stinkin’ important and why we love it). It’s shared by customers. As mentioned by Entrepreneur, It’s triggered by an event the customer experiences. This event is something beyond what’s expected (can be bad publicity too).
If you want all the dirt on WOM marketing, you need to check out WOMMA.com. They have a ton of information on the topic and some pretty interesting word of mouth promotion techniques to learn all about. After seeing it for yourself, you may be quite impressed by the effectiveness of wom marketing.
How are Word of Mouth Marketing and Referral Marketing different?
It’s all about creating a buzz, no matter what type of business you are or product you have. Whether you are a dental clinic, eCommerce store, or a SaaS business. The more you interact with people the more likely your name will spread. Think of word of mouth advertising as a snowball effect. You start off with a small, interesting post on Facebook. That post impresses a couple people, then those people spread the word. Before you know it that one post is all over. It’s about creating mega brand recognition.
Referral Marketing is marketing that focuses on targeting a specific person. It’s intended to encourage them to refer their friends. Referral Marketing (and other referral type marketing) is a segment of WOMM. But, it focuses on targeting a specific person. It’s intended to encourage them to refer their friends. It’s a more proactive way of generating clientele. As you have to actually control the referral process and track the process of conversion. Instead of doing a mass shout-out, the idea of referral marketing is more personal. Referral Marketing is more about creating a bond with specific people. That way they will refer friends and family.
Why is WOM Marketing Important?
Consumers trust their friends. This is why word of mouth marketing is the most valuable source of marketing. WOM doesn’t stop after just one interaction. One person will tell another, and that person will someone else. Then that person will continue the chain and spread the word further…
Plus, it’s a good way for a business to spread the word about a product or service. Word of mouth statistics has proven that people trust their friends and family more than they trust advertisements. According to a Nielsen study… 92% of consumers believe suggestions from friends and family than other advertising. If 92% of consumers prefer suggestions from their friends then WOM marketing is valuable. Plus, having good wom marketing amongst your customer may make it easier for you to ask for referrals.
How Reviews Affect Word of Mouth Advertising
You can increase your word of mouth advertising numerous ways. One way it can increase is because of happy customer reviews. A positive customer experience can get people talking. When people are open to talking about your product, your online reputation increase, and the channels you’re exposed to expand as well. This is because someone may write a review about you on a site like Yelp. That review can then be searched and shared across other channels. And, when other people search for your type of product or service, they will see your name amongst the competitors. This can then spark word of mouth marketing to occur. As you can see, it’s all interconnected… reviews lead to word of mouth.
For example, Brutus and Mindy were talking about chimney sweeping services. Mindy told Brutus that she needed to hire someone to come to her house before winter hits full force. Brutus explained that he too was searching for someone and that he found a few chimney services online that had good reviews. He named off a couple that he was going to look into further (increasing the word of mouth). Mindy actually ended up picking one that he mentioned and started telling all her friends (including Brutus about them). See how word of mouth increase just by having a few good reviews?
How to Use WOMM
Connect with consumers, stop collecting them. Sure you can have millions of social media followers. But you have to be active and try to connect with them. Sounds like relationship marketing, right? If followers are not interested in you, then they are likely not there to help you grow. They’re collecting dust and clogging your real fan base.
You want real fans and supporters. The more passionate your ‘fans’ are about you, the more likely they will share you. The passing of information through word of mouth is powerful in influencing others. It has a way of reaching parties that it might not have been able to do otherwise.
Think of it as social currency – share what makes you look fun/good/interesting. This will entice sharing. The consumer will feel confident in the information they are sharing. They will be contributing something that is worth talking about. Kudos for being the smart cookie.
Can you tie yourself into other things that your consumers do or use? LiveChat mentioned, “you can design products that are often triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking your products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment”. If people remember you, they will continue to talk about you. Sounds like a great way to start a successful referral program.
If you establish yourself with a few people, they will share the experience with friends. You may not remember the last time you shared a mediocre restaurant or service with someone. But, you can remember an amazing experience at a Japanese restaurant. You also know a coworker who loves sushi. You’ll tell them all about it since it is something that you know that person will value. You know that by sharing valuable information makes you valuable. Great customer service and having a great product are just a few ways to up your value.
Creating emotion goes hand in hand with creating value. People are more likely to share something that promotes high arousal. People are more likely to share experiences in which they had some sort of emotion towards. No one shares an ‘OK’ experience. People share the things that make them happy or upset. Think about Yelp – the reviews are either one extreme or the other. Hardly ever does someone take the time or effort to talk about their experience if it was average.
Other Terms That Fall into Word of Mouth Marketing
Tying in Referral Marketing
Most types of marketing use word of mouth in one way or another. Referral Marketing is no different. In fact, it helps companies get new customers all the time. And after all, that is the whole point of referral marketing. Referral marketing is marketing based on one friend sharing with another. The only real difference is that referral marketing usually tracks the conversion rate. Referral marketing also tracks who is bringing in the new customers. Another reason is there is usually some sort of incentive used in referral marketing. One of these marketing strategies is not ‘better’ than the other. They are not competing to be the ‘best’. Instead, referral marketing is a counterpart. Most times word of mouth is the reason referral marketing works. As mentioned before, people trust their friends and family. Want to take your word of mouth to the next level? Here are some awesome referral marketing tips to help you out.
Most B2B-focused sales people have been taught that it’s more effective to promote the projected “benefits” of their solution than to subject their prospects to a tediously detailed presentation of the features of their product or service.
There’s a natural tendency to want to emphasise the upside – to seek to persuade the prospect of the positive consequences of a decision to implement their solution. But this focus on potential gain runs the risk of ignoring some of the most important elements of B2B buying psychology.
B2B customers are only too well aware that any change involves risk, and that the management of change is a difficult and complicated mission. Faced with potentially risky decisions, they often default to sticking with the status quo – even if choosing to change could bring the possibility of future benefits.
The Nobel Prize winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman has identified two key factors that explain these buying behaviours.
The first is the “status quo bias”. Simply put, it predicts that until and unless people and organisations perceive a compelling and urgent reason to change, they will always be inclined to prefer to stick with the status quo.
A second related factor finds that when people or organisations do rationalise the need for change, the motivation to invest to avoid a probable loss is twice as powerful as the motivation to spend to achieve a potential gain.
Taken together, the status quo bias and the loss aversion effect explain why – despite the positive benefits that could potentially be achieved from change – many apparently promising sales opportunities end in a decision to “do nothing”, at least for the moment.
As if those two factors weren’t enough, their impact is compounded by the decision paralysis effect. Researchers at the CEB (now part of Gartner) have found that the likelihood of a positive change decision declines dramatically as the number of decision makers grows.
When only one person is involved in a decision (rare, except for low-value transactional purchases) the chances of making a positive buying decision are as high as 80%. When a small group of decision-makers are involved (between 2-5), the chance of a positive decision hovers around the 50-50 mark.
But as soon as the number of decision-makers grows to 6 or more, the chances of a positive decision decline precipitously – to under 30%. That means that 7 out of 10 apparently well qualified buying projects with 6 or more actively involved stakeholders are going to conclude in a decision to do nothing.
When you consider the latest research that confirms that the typical complex B2B buying process now involves an average of 6.8 actively engaged decision makers (and that many deals involve many more stakeholders), it’s no wonder that sales cycles are slipping and that losing “no decision” is now more common than losing to the competition as far as many sales organisations are concerned.
When we take all of these factors into account, it’s obvious that we need to find better ways of persuading our prospects of the compelling need for change and that if we can’t, we ought to be carefully requalifying those opportunities.
We need to draw our prospective customer’s attention to the costs, risks, consequences and implications of their current situation that they may not yet be aware of or have so far failed to give the proper attention to – also known as the “cost of inaction“.
And we need to find ways of personalising those potential costs, risks, consequences and implications so that they seem relevant not only to the organisation as a whole, but also to the departments and functions that each key stakeholder represents.
Before we promote the gains to be made from implementing our solution, we need to amplify the “pain of same” – the negative consequences that are likely to follow if the prospect decides to stick with the status quo.
Of course, there’s still a fundamentally important need to help our prospects to recognise the uniquely relevant value that adopting our solution will bring to their organisation. There’s still a critical role to play in promoting the positive gains they can expect to achieve.
There’s still tremendous value from articulating the potential value of our approach and our solution not only to the organisation as a whole but also to the departments and functions that each stakeholder represents (as well as aligning with their personal motivations).
Without selling the upside of change, we are unlikely to win. But without highlighting the downside of sticking with the status quo, we are likely to lose.
The struggle is real.
Brands simply no longer know where to put their money. It's easy to build a dystopian vision about the current state of digital, but it's less about a current media dystopia and more about threading the needle between several key facts the marketing industry is currently experiencing, and then drawing our conclusions from there. Before diving into the current day realities, what was the job of the media world? In simplistic terms: deliver information that was paid for and supported by brands and advertising. A (somewhat) fair and equitable exchange. People want information (news, entertainment, sports, etc...). Brands want to capture eyeballs and attention. Charge brands for access to these consumers and their attention. From there, if these consumers buy and support the brand, there is a winning marketing and sales model. Then, the brand can support this relationship through better ads, loyalty, service and more.
Simple enough? What happened?
One could argue that consumers turned sour on advertising. One could argue that digital changed the kind of media that consumers now want. One could argue that digital doesn't deliver media in the same way. One could argue a lot of other variables. The challenge from my perch - as the evolution unfolds before our eyes - is that the 800 pound gorillas of media in our current age (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc...) may not, in fact, be media companies. Not a new narrative, but something to consider. Nothing makes a Facebook (or Google) executive turn pale, squirm in their seat or lose eye contact more than when they are asked if they are a media company. Don't believe me? Troll through the myriad of conversations that took place at last week's Recode Code Media event in Huntington Beach, California. It's tough to watch. And, candidly, I don't buy into the ideology that these Silicon Valley revenue juggernauts are not media companies. Just take a look at their revenues. They don't come from selling a platform, enterprise solutions, or much else besides advertising. The problem, of course, is that if they admit that they are media companies, this puts them in the precarious position of having to change and shift and act like a media company (it's easy to abdicate the problems of media, when you say that you're just a platform, and not responsible for the content that flows through it). Plus, the public markets like technology companies much more than media plays, so there's that too.
Taking a contrarian (but realistic) perspective.
As the Recode event was winding down, I recorded an upcoming episode of Six Pixels of Separation - The Mirum Pocast with Andrew Keen. On the harsher side of the spectrum, Andrew has been called the "anti-Christ of Silicon Valley." He's the author of the very contrarion books, Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo, The Internet Is Not The Answer and, most recently, How To Fix The Future. Over the course of the past decade, I've had multiple opportunities to debate and converse with Andrew about the state of media and the Internet. I find myself being more optimist about media, social media and connectivity than pessimistic. Andrew would say that he's not pessimistic but realistic about it. With that, maybe I'm more opportunistic about the current state, while Andrew is more realistic? There is one thing that we both definitely agree on: surveillance capitalism.
What is surveillance capitalism, and is that media's true new business model.
What do Facebook, Google, and everyone else truly sell? You know the saying: "if you can't see the product, you are the product." Whether it's access to information, access to individuals, or whatever. The culmination of our highly personalized searches, connections and commentary is the product. In fact, if media used to sell access to an audience that had a combined interest in a piece of media, then media today is selling access to highly personalized information that their consumers are generating to third parties to better target them. These companies don't really sell content or advertising. They do really sell the surveillance of their consumers.
Maybe consumers are ok with that? I don't think that they are.
After all, these are incredible services... and they're free. With that, consumers are not fools. They know that these services were not created as social causes. These are businesses. They are here to generate income (more and more of it). Pushing this further, you could even question the business models that seem - on the surface - to not be based on surveillance capitalism. Take Amazon, as an example . Are we really just buying products and services online for a cheaper price, more convenience and speed of delivery? Think of how rich and valuable the data set is that Amazon has. Add in their Amazon Web Services (which powers a large chunk of our favourite Web services) and what Amazon has (and knows) about consumers, and they're teetering into the surveillance capitalism model (or what now makes them a multi-billion dollar generating media juggernaut). Dive a little deeper into Amazon Marketing Services, if you're struggling to see these connection points. What Amazon knows about the consumer is a much more valuable commodity than selling them smartphone chargers, diapers and books. Remember: "data is the new oil". Nobody has ever said that ecommerce is the new oil, or that content is the new oil.
What does media solve for?
Programmatic technology, beacons, retargeting, a lack of visibility into how consumer data and usage moves through the pipes, where it stops, where it resides, and how it is really monetized, what ambient data is being sniffed up by wifi networks, bluetooth, mobile connectivity and beyond. It's enough to make any consumer paranoid. Their information is the business. And, there's a reason Unilever CMO, Keith Weed, recently stated:
"Consumers don't care about third-party verification. They do care about fraudulent practice, fake news, and Russians influencing the US election. They don't care about good value for advertisers. But they do care when they see their brands being placed next to ads funding terror, or exploiting children... They don't care about sophisticated data usage or ad targeting via complex algorithms, but they do care about not seeing the same ad 100 times a day. They don't care about ad fraud, but they do care about their data being misused and stolen."
This is a company that lives and dies by the media model of paying for consumer's attention, while consumers are engaged with media in the hopes that the consumer choose their consumer packaged goods. Why are they putting the brakes on? Media used to solve for audience and attention. Now, the companies with the biggest war chests don't want to call themselves media companies, and they are all primarily driven by surveillance capitalism. Make money from watching what people do and sell that rich well of information to multiple highest bidders. This is not a business model based on a group of people gathered together by a shared interest in a topic, but it is about tracking individuals from websites, smartphones, emails, and more down to physical spaces and back, using sophisticated tracking technology, physical cameras in public (and private) spaces, using third party data assets, ambient video, facial recognition, and data sources... and now layering all of that on top of machine learning and artificial intelligence to make some very strong correlations.
Media is no longer about targeting your audience's interests. Media looks like it's much more about targeting consumers and selling their data... personally. Is that what consumers signed up for?
Tags: ad fraud advertising advertising agency ai algorithm amazon amazon marketing services amazon web services ambient data analytics andrew keen artificial intelligence attention beacons brand business blog business model chief marketing officer cmo code media connectivity consumer data cpg cult of the amateur data data usage digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog digital media digital vertigo disruption ecommerce email email marketing enterprise solutions facebook fake news google how to fix the future innovation j walter thompson jwt keith weed linkedin loyalty marketing marketing agency marketing blog marketing industry media media company media dystopia mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog mirum canada mirum in canada mitch joel mitchjoel mobile connectivity podcast programmatic recode retargeting silicon valley six pixels of separation smartphone social media surveillance capitalism the internet is not the answer twitter unilever web analytics wpp
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
One of the main challenges facing the leaders of B2B SaaS companies is accelerating commoditization. This is not a bad thing. Commoditization is a sign of success, at least for the industry overall, but it represents a change in phase state for software entrepreneurs.
What is a commodity? Basically, a commodity is a successful category – one in which the buyers and sellers have a clear understanding of the value propositions, there is a standard product definition, and the different offers can easily substitute for each other. That doesn’t mean there is no longer any innovation. In a commoditized market innovation can be intense, but it takes the form of a Red Queen Game. Innovation is continuous, quickly copied and what one company does the others soon meet. Innovation erodes profit rather than increasing it. Value chains become more efficient, there is often less profit to share, and what profit there is, generally flows to the part of the value chain in direct contact with the end user. Differentiation disappears.
There are three main reasons.
1. Innovation is better understood than ever before.
Everything from Steve Blank and Lean Innovation to Clayton Christensen and Jobs to Be Done to Tom Nagle and Value-Based Pricing has helped us understand how to build products and get them to market. Venture Capitalists have picked up on this and whenever they see success they help to flood the market with ‘me to’ companies. Buyers are also more sophisticated and read the same blogs as the investors and innovators. To some extent, differentiation depends on information asymmetry and information asymmetries get driven out of markets quickly these days.
2. Everyone is using the same building blocks.
How many applications are being built on Ruby on Rails and hosted in the Amazon cloud? (I could not find the answer but a search found 1.6 million results of which the first five pages were all telling me how to do this.) Is there a big difference between apps in Microsoft Azure and Amazon? (Not that anyone from Microsoft can explain to me.) Once upon a time, JS was a hand tool. There are now many JS frameworks giving us polished and repeatable user experiences. This is all good. It makes innovation faster and easier. And it leads to rapid commoditization.
3. Artificial Intelligence is driving commoditization.
A decade ago, modern AI was a mystery understood at a small number of places like Geoffrey Hinton’s University of Toronto Lab. Five years ago, startups were piling in and finding all sorts of interesting ways to use AI to get a competitive edge. Today AI is everywhere. There are great open source tools (such as TensorFlow) and all of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) companies offer AI as a service. AI is helping us understand our customers, optimize our systems, segment our markets and build all sorts of functionality. It is not a differentiator. It is table stakes.
The fall back advice from pricing experts is to find differentiation and that even in highly commoditized markets smart companies will find ways to differentiate. I give that advice a lot myself. But let’s face it, differentiation is not always possible, and as we saw above, commoditization is a sign of success.
There are three basic strategic choices: build a brand, rely on regulation, become an OEM vendor.
1. Build your brand.
Consumer products companies have dealt with differentiation for a long time. Does anyone really think there is a difference between laundry detergents? Could you reliably tell the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola? Yet Proctor & Gamble had a market cap at time of writing of US$87 billion and Coca Cola of US$46 billion. These are massively successful companies because they know how to build brands. B2B SaaS companies are spending more and more on brand and customer loyalty as they mature. (What did you think those dressed up user conferences were about?) Brand building will be one of the core skill sets B2B SaaS companies build as their markets commoditize.
2. Rely on regulation.
The second path to success under commoditization is regulation (and its close cousin, technical standards). Generally speaking, regulation is used to make competition more predictable and to slow the pace of the Red Queen game so that more cash flow can be siphoned off into profit. Companies in maturing industries will develop and impose more and more complex technical standards. (How many technical standards get simpler over time?) Look at the people involved in standards committees and you will find that they come from areas that are commoditizing. B2B SaaS companies in commoditizing markets will spend more time and money lobbying governments and refining standards.
3. Become the OEM provider of choice.
Many commoditized applications are used to build other applications. Think databases. How many applications today use a relational database? How many of those databases come from Oracle? Oracle is no longer a straight database company; through a string of acquisitions it has become one of the dominant business software vendors, but that success is built on the top of databases. Expect the same thing to happen in many other software sectors, from digital asset management (DAM) to customer relationship management (CRM), differentiation will shift to new applications built on the base of the commoditized functionality. In many cases, it will be a new company building the new value on top of an OEM solution. Providing a stable, predictable inexpensive set of basic functions to as many different segments as possible can be a winning strategy. This is the strategy Microsoft has been using to slowly erode Oracle’s market position. At the same time, open source options are slowly gaining more and more market share.
An alternative strategy is to use a commoditized solution to disrupt another market by constructing a two-sided market. This is what Zenefits did in HR software as we noted back in 2015. The basic play is straightforward, but difficult to execute.
Zenefits did this by providing free HR software in return for the opportunity to sell benefits packages. With all that AI power out there waiting to be harnessed, many other companies are looking at this business model in the learning, recruiting, digital asset management, customer data and other spaces. This will be one of the defining business models in a period of commoditization.
The post How SaaS Companies Can Compete Under Commoditization appeared first on OpenView Labs.
No one — absolutely no one — will tell you starting your own company is easy. Entrepreneurship has plenty of challenges for those who choose to embark on it.
And most entrepreneurs learn the hard way: from their mistakes. While there’s nothing wrong with that method (failure is a great teacher), you want to save it for the big lessons.
Other lessons, such as managing the books and leading your team, can be taught just as effectively in the classroom.
To help you cut down on your learning curve as much as possible, here are the top free (or very inexpensive) courses online for running a startup, organized from introductory to advanced.
Want to harness your creativity? Take this course. It treats entrepreneurship as a creative process, applying concepts from the world of music creation (like observing, prototyping, and iterating) to career development and business innovation.
You’ll get to hear from famous entrepreneurs, innovators, songwriters, producers, creative directors, educators, performers, visual artists, and chefs.
Anyone who wants to quickly get a grasp on the financial elements of starting a company should enroll in this finance course. It’s designed to “take the mystery out of financial analysis and help you make the right business decisions.” To that end, you’ll learn the various options for funding your business, how to determine whether a new product or service will be financially viable, and how to value a stock, bond, or company for business opportunities.
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for this class on entrepreneurship. It features a combination of videos and exercises, covering:
This on-demand class teaches participants the fundamentals of starting an e-commerce business. Through short, digestible online lessons this course teaches how to find the right product, competitive outlook, selecting a platform to sell from, and the basics of creating a content marketing plan.
E-Commerce Essentials is perfect for the new entrepreneur or side hustler who is looking to create passive income online.
If you’re just wading into the waters of entrepreneurship, this course by famous entrepreneur and investor Guy Kawasaki will help you get your feet wet. It tackles the A to Z process of starting a business — from launching and team building all the way to marketing and evangelizing your product.
With plenty of interactive exercises, anecdotal advice and real-world examples, and engaging videos, Kawasaki’s lecturers are highly informative and entertaining.
Understanding the product creation process will definitely come in handy when you’re running your own company. Whether you’re launching an MVP yourself or working with engineers, it’s critical to know how something goes from concept to spec, which tools to use, and how to find your market niche.
This course features case studies from NASA, Google, Zappos, and more — grounding abstract concepts in plenty of real-world examples. It also teaches you the fundamentals of Agile (the methodology of choice in Silicon Valley right now) and even reveals the secrets of the product management interview process (so you can hire the right product manager when the time comes).
Is it necessary for entrepreneurs to know HTML? No: You can build a billion-dollar company without ever learning the difference between <p> and <br>. However, it’s definitely helpful — not only will you understand the basic components of web pages, you’ll also grok how programming generally works. That’ll come in handy when you talk to developers (plus, you are less likely to get taken advantage of by freelance coders!)
It’s incredibly hard to get into Y Combinator — depending on whom you ask, the acceptance rate hovers around 1.5%. But getting into the online version of the accelerator? A lot more doable.
If you’re actively pursuing a startup, you’re eligible to sign up. Everyone (whether or not they participate in the program) will have access to online lectures and office hours, but participants will also get a peer group. This group is run by a Y Combinator alumni who provides weekly 1:1 consulting over video and email.
The 10 lectures feature famous members of the startup world, like Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz.
If you think you’ll be getting outside investment, I’d recommend this course. It tackles the main financial challenges founders face when funding their startups — specifically looking at tech companies in the early stages. It addresses:
The class also includes a deep dive into the world of private equity.
Need eyeballs on your business? You need SEO. In this course, HubSpot Director of Acquisition Matthew Howells-Barby demonstrates how to evaluate your current SEO, develop an approach for your business, and identify specific areas for improvement.
A helpful workbook and 15 videos you can move through at your own pace make this course a valuable one you shouldn't miss.
Are you a finance or economics nerd? You're going to love this class. It promises to help you begin to understand the "rocket science" behind financial engineering and view financial models with "a healthy degree of skepticism."
Length: 12 hours to complete
Price: Free
Level: Introductory
When you're pitching your business to venture capitalists and private equity firms, it's important to have a firm grasp of their world. If you don't understand valuation or deal-making, you'll lose respect and authority fast.
So, enroll in this course to learn how private equity investors finance through equity companies at different stages of growth, and how they deal with activities including scouting, valuation, and financing.
Fundraising for arts and cultural initiatives have never needed funding more, but the landscape can be difficult to traverse. This course teaches the importance of effective leadership through the diversification of income streams.
Discover new leadership styles, change management strategies, and fundraising techniques that will set your business up for funding success.
Want to become an entrepreneur without ever leaving your current company? That might just be possible. This course explores how to create new business opportunities within existing corporations. You'll learn how to overcome barriers and build partnerships to create new businesses or initiatives inside your company.
This course is designed for junior- or middle-managers who have the ability to start an initiative within their organization.
Sara Blakely, Founder of Spanx, believes everyone has a million-dollar idea at some point in their lives. In her MasterClass, she teaches aspiring entrepreneurs how to turn their idea into viable, profitable businesses. Lessons in this class include finding your purpose, developing your big idea, and entrepreneurial mindset.
They say failure is the best teacher. But free and inexpensive online courses might be the next best thing (not to mention, better for your morale and wallet). I hope you find these ones useful.
The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research (CSR) recently unearthed information that dispels commonly-held beliefs about prospecting. Sales professionals will find the data encouraging, and useful when mapping out their sales process.
The big news? Buyers want to talk with sellers earlier in the process than previously thought. That knowledge opens new opportunities for discovering and responding to a buyer’s pain points at a formative time, before options are whittled down and preferences solidify.
Important findings from the 5 Sales Prospecting Myths Debunked whitepaper include:
The takeaway? Sellers will be rewarded when they consistently pursue connections with their ideal buyer across multiple channels, offering useful information related to the buyer’s industry.
It’s true: 84% of buyers initiate the purchasing process based on referrals and recommendations from trusted sources. That doesn’t mean outreach is a thing of the past, or that sellers should wait patiently for referrals to materialize.
The path to earning a satisfied customer begins with the initial connection, whether that originates from a personal referral, contact submission form, or social interaction.
Outreach takes sweat equity along with a healthy dose of resilience. Sellers who invest in locating their ideal buyers have learned an effective technique for catching their attention: demonstrating value quickly.
One way to get noticed is using InMail to get on the radar of someone you’d like to talk to. For maximum impact, make it worth their time by sharing information they may not have, like a new study or infographic published by your company, or a report from an industry group. Call attention to specific data points or achievements so they’re sure not to miss the relevance.
Outreach is most successful when it’s a consistent, ongoing effort. A buyer may not be ready to take action when you first reach them, but through sustained contact, you can nurture their interest and build your credibility as a seller.
Here are some ways to nurture prospective buyers over time and gain their interest through LinkedIn:
The RAIN Group whitepaper revealed 67% of buyers take meetings or otherwise connect with sellers when they share content that’s been fully customized to the buyer’s specific situation. Personalized, tailored content saves buyers time, minimizes confusion, and provides a simplified means of determining fit.
Sweat equity is important here, too. It takes time to contextualize information and content for buyers, but it is attainable, and as the data shows, worth the effort.
Sellers can use all the tools and resources at their disposal, like company blogs, social networking sites, LinkedIn Company Pages, and Sales Navigator to learn all they can about a prospect, their company, and their current situation. The findings can then be used to prepare materials that speak to a buyer’s motivations and interests, making them feel like time with you was time well spent.
How can a seller make their product or service compelling to a buyer? Ensure your value proposition is completely transparent, and leave buyers feeling confident that you understand and share their objectives. This helps because:
Steps you can take to demonstrate you’re a partner, rather than a vendor:
By cultivating a partnership mentality, a seller can show a buyer he’s interested in the long-term success of the buyer’s business. This can lead to a sense of shared risk and reward, giving buyers more confidence in their purchasing decisions.
Sales trends come and go. What endures are sales techniques that demonstrate a seller’s mettle, respect for a buyer’s needs, and commitment to finding useful solutions.
You can subscribe to the LinkedIn Sales Solutions blog and learn more ways to achieve top sales performance.
TL;DR Making a core values list takes 15 minutes and will help you make better decisions.
Note: If you’d like to skip straight to the full list of personal values, click here.
Have you ever been faced with a difficult decision and not known which direction to take?
Have you ever spent days or weeks or months going back and forth on a decision? You start with “Yes I will do it,” then “no I won’t,” then back to “yes I will.”
Assuming you’re human, the answer to either of those questions is “yes.”
So how do you decide what to say yes to? And what to say no to?
You need to have a list of personal values to refer to.
What are personal values? Personal values (sometimes called core values) are broad concepts that can be applied over and over again across a range of circumstances, as opposed to narrow answers to specific questions.
Your core values are what you consider most important in your life, literally what you “value.”
Whether you are conscious of them or not, you have values for every part of your life — parenting values, investing values, work values, and health values. There are also more overarching life values.
An example of a value would be:
Self-development: to keep growing, advancing, or improving in knowledge, skills, character, or life experience
This value could help you answer questions like “Should I take a slightly higher paying job where I won’t learn as much, or a lower paying one where I will develop my skills a lot faster?”
All successful people have values that allow them to achieve their goals. If you don’t have values, you are just reacting to events that happen in your life without thinking about how to best react to them in a way that lines up with what’s important to you.
Most people have a bad taste in their mouth about core values because we typically hear about them in the context of companies that often blatantly disregard them.
Enron had a list of four core values including “integrity” and “communication,” which they talked about publicly, while behind the scenes they were actually lying and hiding information from their own employees and shareholders.
You’ve probably worked for a company that had a list of core values posted somewhere, but they didn’t seem to make any impact on the way the company was actually run.
But the truth is that creating a list of personal values is both useful and practical, because you can apply them directly to your own life. I make decisions based on my list every single week.
One of my core values is courage.
I discovered this was a core value for me, because I noticed a tendency in myself to pick projects that were not risky enough and have them fail as a result.
I would have the choice between two opportunities, and I would say “this one will almost certainly work, while the other one is a bit riskier, so I’ll do the easy one.”
Then I would start working on the project, and because it didn’t really stretch me, I would get bored or feel like I wasn’t reaching for what I was capable of. That would end with me quitting or doing subpar work.
In cases where I picked the seemingly riskier choice, I became very engaged in the project and while I was working on it, my capabilities grew to be able to actually do it well.
Picking the more courageous choice meant I was more likely to succeed and enjoy the process more.
By adopting courage as a core principle, I was able to identify that repeated failure pattern in myself and fix it. Given the choice between two opportunities, I now pick the one that is more courageous. I also make these decisions more quickly and efficiently than I did before.
If you aren’t conscious of this, you are likely to make the same mistakes over and over again.
So how do you put together a list of personal values? I’ll give some examples of personal values from my own life to help you get started in figuring out your own.
Some of them may be helpful to you, but others certainly won’t. I think the core values that are most valuable to each of us come from our own personal experience, not from being taught and accepting someone else’s.
My hope is that by reading through my list, you will get a sense for how a list of core values could be helpful in making better decisions.
My personal values are very practical for me and I use them in two main ways.
First, I read over them every week as part of my weekly review. During my review, I reflect on the past week and make plans for the next week. In between reflecting and planning, I read through my core values document.
Second, I read them whenever I am struggling to make a big decision like moving cities or changing careers. Typically, reading through my core values list makes it obvious to me what the right answer is.
Over time, I find that I am getting better at internalizing the values and they express themselves subconsciously with smaller decisions, as well.
Sometimes a decision can go either way and both still match up with your core values. I was deciding between two books I wanted to write, and the truth is that both of them matched up with my core values.
In that sense, the decision didn’t matter. I could choose to write either book and I would still be in alignment with what matters most to me.
The decision then became more of a strategic question: Which of these books will sell more copies? Which will be most beneficial to my career? Which will I most enjoy writing?
However, the strategy question only comes after the values one.
Most of us have values that we have adopted from other pre-packaged sources, like a religion, culture, or legal system. There’s nothing wrong with adopting values from somewhere else and often the values from these sources have incorporated a huge amount of wisdom.
However, by adopting a value system without much thought, it’s easy to hold personal values that lead to a conflict between what you say you believe and the actions you take. I’m sure you’ve met someone who says they believe in the tenets of a particular religious or spiritual tradition, but then they behave counter to its teachings.
So how do you discover your own core values?
The best way to find your values is often through making mistakes and violating them. Good judgment comes from experience and you usually get that experience by making bad judgments.
One of the values I recently added to my list was:
Impact: to exert myself into the universe in a way that I believe is important. I work for what I want, not what others want from me.
This may sound egotistical and you may disagree with it. That’s totally fine.
Over a period of two years, I noticed that when I worked on projects that other people told me I should work on, I wasn’t really excited to be working on them. This meant I did poor quality work, and the project ended up not being very good for my own career or for my customers.
However, when I worked on projects that I believed were really important, even when other people thought they weren’t the best idea, I worked incredibly hard and talked about them passionately, which inspired others to help me. These projects ended up being more successful and helping more people.
So for me, the counterintuitive truth was that by working for what I want and not for what others want, I did more to help other people, which is also one of my values.
The other way I discover my personal values is by hearing someone express a deeply held belief of mine that I did not have the words to articulate.
One of my values is that “I have soul in the game.”
This is a term inspired by a phrase used in The Black Swan that immediately resonated with me. The book explains that having “skin in the game” means you are responsible for the consequences of your actions. Entrepreneurs have skin in the game because if they make a decision and the company tanks, they bear the weight of those consequences.
Having soul in the game is going a step further: taking on risk for others. Think of a whistleblower who speaks out at the risk of destroying their own career.
I’d never had a clear way to put it into words until I read the book, but this resonated with me so much that I added it to my list of personal values.
The first time you put together a list of core values, it’s easiest to start from an existing list.
Over time, you can reflect and add or modify these based on your personal experiences, or if you read or hear something that you find resonates with you. Remember that there are no objectively “right” or “wrong” answers.
Look through this list of personal values and make a note of each one that resonates with you by writing it down. Write down at least 10.
If you’d like to download this list to print off or save, you can click here.
Next, go through the ones you wrote down and list them from most important to least important.
Got it?
I keep my values in an Evernote note where I can easily look at them and modify them.
Your values are always changing and you’re also getting a better idea of what you value. I used to value novelty a lot — new experiences and new people. For a period of my life, that really was a core value and I prioritized my life around it. In the last few years, though, I’ve come to value spending time getting to know the people already in my life more than meeting new people and seeing new places, so I took it off my list.
The terms on the list above are just a starting point and not an exhaustive list. You also want to try and pick terms that emotionally resonate with you. The phrase “soul in the game” probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means a lot to me. Whenever I hear something that really resonates with me, I will add it to my list.
Now that you have a list of values, you want to put it to work. Pick a time when you can regularly review them. If you have a time in your week, month, or year where you regularly do any sort of planning, reviewing your core values is a good activity to tack on. Regularly looking over them keeps them fresh in your mind and lets you make decisions that align with your values.
I look at mine every Saturday morning, which is when I do my weekly review and planning.
Takeaways on Making a Core Values List
There was a study done in the 1990s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of “Flow,” where different professionals were studied to see which ones were happy and productive and which were unhappy and unproductive. The most important factor was alignment with personal values.
The happiest, most productive profession was geneticists because all parties involved respected the best science. Even though pharmaceutical companies were injecting a lot of money into the field, geneticists believed doing the very best science on a day-to-day basis led to more benefits for the general public, the pharmaceutical companies, their universities, and themselves — the work they were doing was in alignment with their core values.
The least happy, and least productive profession was journalism. Most journalists had entered the field with high ideals about truth, making a difference, and the free press. But the decline of the family-run newspaper and rise of corporate media empires made journalism a profit center where all that mattered was sales, which meant good journalism was bad for business and was replaced by scare stories, exaggeration, and scandal. Their values did not align with their day-to-day work.
A follow-up study done by McGregor and Little in 19982 found that meaningfulness of individuals’ personal projects depended on how consistent they were with core aspects of self and identity — in other words, their core values.
The happiest and most productive people were taking daily actions in line with their core values.
This gives them a constant sense of motivation because they see how the work they are doing today leads to a long-term vision that they find meaningful.
Your personal values are specific to you and a result of your own life experiences. You can discover and refine your values through life experience or encountering ideas that resonate with you.
Having a written list of your personal values will help you make better decisions.
Acknowledgment: Ray Dalio.
One of the easiest ways to improve the effectiveness of your sales calls is to have an airtight sales voicemail script. Besides preventing you from crafting messages on the spot and rambling on the phone, voicemail scripts increase your chances of getting a callback.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to create effective voicemail scripts that elicit responses. From key elements you must include to actionable tips that improve your execution, this post will teach you everything you need to know — including the exact scripts used by top sales experts.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
With 80% of sales calls going to voicemail, you can’t afford to not leave a message.
Many sales reps are prepared with what to say when a lead answers, but fumble when the call goes to voicemail instead. Given that many people ignore a call if they don’t recognize the number, leaving a voicemail is your opportunity to identify yourself and deliver your message.
Make it as impactful as possible by using a voicemail script to ensure that you say everything you need to without saying too much.
Moreover, a voicemail is another touchpoint with a prospect. Since it takes at least eight touches before a lead will agree to meet, you don’t want to waste the opportunity of leaving a well-thought-out voicemail.
Finally, the more voicemails you leave, the higher chance you have of receiving a callback. And not just leaving any old voicemail, but one that strikes the right chord with the recipient. By being prepared with a solid script, you increase the chances of them returning your call by 22%.
Although voicemail scripts will (and should) vary based on several factors, certain elements apply across all voicemails.
-jpg.jpeg)
Voicemail scripts should contain your name and the company you represent.
Even if you’ve spoken with the prospect before, including this information is important to provide context. That said, use your discretion to know whether to share your name and company at the beginning or end of the call.
Calling out your phone number within the body of your message is best practice.
Although your prospects can find this information through caller ID, dictating it will reduce the effort required to respond to your message. Plus, it’s recommended that you do so twice — earlier in the message and at the end — in case your recipient doesn’t listen to your message all the way through.
State the intention of your message and do so clearly. A great way to do this is by sharing why you’re reaching out to the prospect.
Did they leave an inquiry on your website or download a lead magnet?
Did a mutual acquaintance suggest you reach out to them?
By creating relevance and context, it becomes much easier to grab the prospect’s attention.
Your goal when leaving a voicemail is not to sell to your prospect. Instead, your focus should be to grab your prospect’s attention and incentivize them to return your call.
This means that a good voicemail should be more about the prospect than the salesperson — especially when cold-calling.
How can you help or add value to this person’s business? Can you help them save time or make more money? If possible, mention tangible benefits the prospect can gain by working with you.
But remember not to get bogged down in features and tools. Rather, convey concrete benefits such as results from past customers, how much they can expect to earn or save, etc.
After a prospect finishes listening to your voicemail, they should be clear on the next steps. This can include calling you back or looking out for a follow-up email.
To keep the sale moving, you need to be as specific as possible — even down to your availability.
If you’re asking the prospect to call you back, let them know if there’s a good time to reach you. It can be as simple as “You can call me back at XYZ-1234. I am typically available Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 3 PM.”
Essentially, you want to avoid ending your voicemails with vague statements or instructions like, “The ball is in your court. Please get back to me when you’re free.”
Now that you understand the basics of what needs to be included in your voicemail script, it’s time to discuss tips to help you improve the effectiveness of your script.
-jpg.jpeg)
Too many reps are the inside sales equivalent of chatty grandmas — pitching solutions, discussing features, and sharing lengthy value propositions over voicemail. Often, this leads to long, rambling messages.
Best practice stipulates that you keep your message under 30 seconds. This is the sweet spot to prevent potentially getting cut off by the recipient’s voice mailbox system, or having the listener hang up early because your message was simply too long.
Save your sales pitch for an actual sales call and make your point quickly.
Although you will work with a script, it is still important to personalize your message to the recipient.
This is where you need research. When researching, be sure to note the prospect’s pain points, competitors, recent internal changes within the prospect’s organization, and specific business metrics that matter to your prospect.
Another element to research, especially when cold-calling, is to find any connections in the prospect’s organization. Simply mentioning an internal connection can be a great way to warm up your message and create a sense of familiarity.
Here are some general rules to keep in mind when executing your script.
If you sound too relaxed or overly familiar, you might come across as unprofessional. Likewise, if your tone is all over the place, you might come across as overenthusiastic and sales-y.
On the flip side, if you sound rigid or robotic, your message might appear impersonal.
A good rule is to keep your tone conversational and try to speak to your prospect like you would a business colleague.
Make use of strategic pauses, and change the speed of your delivery to emphasize key parts of your message.
You don’t want to cough into the receiver or sound hoarse. As a general tip, drink water and clear your throat before sales calls.
You should exude confidence throughout your delivery. This means you want to keep the “maybes” and “ums” to a minimum.
Many qualified prospects don’t mind hearing from sales reps as long as they’re helpful, knowledgeable, and show integrity.
However, if you approach a sales voicemail like a used-car salesperson, your prospects are going to delete your messages faster than you can say “lowest price guaranteed.”
Remember, you aren’t trying to sell them anything (yet). You’re simply there to communicate how you can add value. This also means that you want to avoid technical jargon.
Your prospect will only prioritize what’s important to them. If your voicemail gives off the impression that they can respond whenever they want, you won’t make their to-do list. That’s why you need to create enough urgency that’ll make your prospects edgy until they call you.
One way to do this is to state the benefit of what you’re offering. Will it save the prospect’s time, money, or make their processes more efficient? Include these in your script.
Now that you’re equipped with the tips for creating and executing a sales voicemail script, let’s go over some real-world examples.
While there isn’t a magic sales voicemail script that guarantees a 100% response rate, there are voicemail script templates that can significantly improve your odds of getting that oh-so-elusive callback.
Here are 10 voicemail scripts tailored to the four most prevalent scenarios you’re likely to come across as a salesperson: reaching out to prospects, following up a lead inquiry, following up with an old lead, and dealing with no-shows.
Marc Wayshak, bestselling author of The High-Velocity Sales Organization, shared his scripts for sales voicemails with Sales Insights Lab. You can see the script below.
Hi, [prospect’s name], [your name], [your phone number].
I just emailed you a brief report I put together on [the prospect’s company] that will show you some of your strategic strengths and weaknesses. I think you’ll find it useful given [reason].
If you find the report useful, just shoot me a message back — and I can give you some more insight.
Again, this is [your name], [your phone number].
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
The key strategy here is to make the voicemail hyper-relevant to the prospect. Sharing that the caller created a tailored report and mentioning a recent change in the structure of the prospect’s organization shows that the caller knows and cares about the prospect.
It makes the receiver think, “This doesn’t sound like a mass-delivered campaign. Maybe this person could help my company.”
Matt Easton, a sales coach at Easton University, shared his most effective voicemail script.
“Hey, [prospect’s name]. This is [your name] with [company]. You and I [how/why/when you connected].
I wanted to reach out to you personally ’cause I’ve got an idea that may be a game-changer for you, but I’m not sure.
Can you give me a call back on my mobile [your phone number]?”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
By establishing a connection, the prospect mentally re-categorizes the caller from “a complete stranger who’s calling” to “an acquaintance who’s reaching out.”
According to Matt, this script also works well for several reasons.
When buyers feel FOMO, they are more likely to act urgently. John Barrow taps into that instinct with this voicemail script.
“Hi, [prospect’s name], the reason for my call is that one of my clients similar to you used my sales training to [insert result].
I’d love to share with you how they did it to see if we can produce the same results for you.
Could you call me back at [your phone number]? This is [your name] with [company]. Once again [your phone number].”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
This script works because the caller provides value and still makes the message hyper-relevant to the prospect.
By sharing that a client “similar to the prospect” achieved XYZ results, it makes the possibility of also achieving those results feel more realistic for the prospect.
But what’s even more powerful is that the caller finishes the voicemail with a fantastic closer — “I’d love to share with you how they did it to see if we can produce the same results for you.”
No hard selling. No strings attached. Just the promise of immense value.
Will Barron’s referral voicemail script gets prospects warmed up.
“Hi, [prospect’s name]. My name is [your name] calling from [your company]. [Referrer’s name] suggested I should book a meeting with you.
He gave me your details because we have helped them over at [referrer’s company] [insert specific benefit relevant to current prospect], and they think we can do the same for you.
I’ll send over an email right now with details on how [referrer’s name] thinks we can help you.
It’d be great to speak to you this week.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
According to Will, this script works because it uses three principles of influence — social proof, likability, and authority.
Here, the caller uses social proof and likability by leveraging a mutual acquaintance (the referrer). The caller also establishes authority by sharing that they had solved a problem for the referrer.
Matt Macnamara designed his pattern-disruption voicemail script to intrigue the prospect.
“[Prospect’s name], no need to call me back.
I’m about to send an email with the subject line [insert subject line]. When you get a minute, I’d appreciate it if you’d share some thoughts and feedback on that email.
It’s [your name] with [your company]. If I don’t hear back, I’ll call again next week.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
According to Matt, this script works for two reasons:
Unlike most sales voicemail scripts, this one moves the conversation away from the phone and to a channel that the prospect might be more receptive to: email.
Let’s say a prospect has already made an inquiry, and you call them. Aged Lead Store shares a voicemail script that can help you out.
“[Prospect’s name], this is [your name] from [your company].
I’m just following up on the [the specific inquiry, including where/how it was made].
I’m getting ready to send an email that’s got a lot more detail on [your company] and exactly how our process works, but let me tell you [insert value proposition relevant to the inquiry].
I’d love to tell you more about that.
We can follow up on a call — my number is [your phone number]. You can also text me on that number or just reply to my email.
Hope to talk to you soon; have a great day.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
Following up on a lead that has shown interest in your products or services requires a slightly different approach. Here are two things this script does differently from the previous ones:
This voicemail also gives the lead two options regarding how they can respond to the message. This might increase response rates as it provides a simple, low-effort alternative for people who are interested but might be in places or situations where they cannot take or make calls.
No matter what you sell, this voicemail script from Real Estate Uncensored can help you re-engage an old prospect.
“Hey [prospect’s name]. This is [your name]. I’m a [your job title] with [your company].
I’m not sure if you remember or not, but about [insert time frame] you [insert how you got their information] and said [insert what they showed an interest in].
I’m just trying to touch base with you to see if [insert a question asking whether they are still interested in the product or service].
If you have [insert: “already purchased said product or service”], I don’t want to keep bothering you, so could you please get back to me and let me know where you are in the process?
Thank you so much. The best number for me is [your phone number]. I look forward to talking to you.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
This script is pretty similar to the lead inquiry voicemail script. However, one detail particularly makes it suited to old leads: It gives the lead an easy out.
This might seem counterintuitive. However, saying “I don’t want to keep bothering you” encourages the prospect to respond to your voicemail.
If the person is still interested in the offer, they’ll reach out because they think, “This person might not call again!”
On the other hand, if they’re no longer interested, they’ll probably reach out because they think, “I just have to let them know I’m not interested. If not, this person will keep calling me!”
No one likes being stood up, but in sales, that’s sometimes the name of the game. When a prospect skips your meeting, you’ll need to call them. Tanya Aliza, a business success coach, shares three voicemails to help you address the situation.
“Hey, [prospect’s Name]. [Your name] here.
I’m calling you now at our scheduled appointment time, and I hope all is okay. I was expecting to chat with you.
Hey, listen — I’m free for the next [insert time limit]; I’ve blocked this time out for us in my schedule. Please call me back as soon as you get this message.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
Perhaps your prospect had the date wrong on their calendar. Or maybe they had to attend to an emergency. This quick call is a great reminder so they can get in touch and reschedule as needed.
“Hey [prospect’s name]. [Your name] calling here again.
I haven’t heard from you since the last message I left when we were scheduled to meet today, and I’m just calling because I hope everything is okay.
Can you please call me back as soon as you get this message today?
Talk to you soon.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
If you haven’t heard from your contact via a call or email, this voicemail allows you to restart the conversation. The tone of concern will let your prospect know that there are no hard feelings — you care about them as a person, not just a prospect.
“Hi, [prospect’s name]. It’s [your name] calling here again.
I left you a couple of voicemails yesterday regarding our scheduled appointment time that we had blocked off, and I haven’t heard from you yet. I truly hope everything is all right.
Hey, listen, here’s what I’m going to have to do for now — I’m going to have to cross you off my list for the time being.
I know you said you wanted help [insert pain point they needed help with], but I understand if maybe right now just isn’t the right time and that’s completely fine. If things change, just let me know.
But if you could also do me a quick favor and just send me a really quick text or call back so I know that you’re okay.
If you could do that sometime today, that would be absolutely wonderful.
Have an awesome day.”
Here’s what this script looks like in action.
Why This Strategy Works
A meeting no-show can be a tricky situation. The goal of this script is to help the salesperson manage this situation in a way that perfectly toes the line between empathy and firmness.
The third script also does something similar when it says “I’m going to have to cross you off my list for the time being” but ends on a more empathetic note of “could you do me a quick favor and just send a quick text so I know that you’re okay.”
What makes this script interesting is how a more empathetic approach allows the salesperson to provide ample opportunities to get the deal back on the table without sounding — for lack of a better word — desperate.
Becoming an expert in leaving effective sales voicemails requires more than creating scripts. These scripts — and the overall skill — must undergo refinement through rigorous testing, practice, and measurement.
Schedule practice activities that offer ample opportunities for repetition and feedback. A great idea could be role-playing with colleagues and friends where they give honest feedback on your hypothetical voicemails.
You can also create a system to evaluate your voicemails. Start by creating a score sheet with a rating system. Then, grade each voicemail by the following criteria:
Once completed, starting with the voicemails that score the lowest, begin identifying and working on areas of weakness in your script and delivery. Your goal? Consistently score high on these exercises.
All the above strategies go to show that leaving effective sales voicemails is both an art and a science.
By leveraging these tried-and-tested scripts, you can supercharge your efforts and drastically improve your response rates.
As you continue to refine these scripts (and your overall process), over time you’ll develop scripts and formulas that are unique to you and your niche.
With so many moving pieces and parts in a B2B company, sales and marketing shouldn’t be a headache. And yet, for many businesses, there are common aches and pains that many simply don’t know how to deal with.
lukasbieri / Pixabay
While you would think that sales and marketing would jibe like peanut butter and jelly, that’s often not the case. Because the two departments (or roles, for a smaller business) have their own unique goals, sometimes those objectives don’t line up.
Sales is looking for instant gratification. Closing the deal. Marketing wants more brand awareness and activity on marketing efforts. More big-picture stuff. And so sales and marketing often face off, battling for their own interests.
How to solve the issue: The key is getting both sides in the same room. Hold regular meetings where both Sales and Marketing can address their needs and the two can collaborate to achieve everyone’s goals. Step #1, agree on the definition of a lead. You probably think there is agreement already. You may be surprised.
With so much marketing and sales technology available, many companies are overwhelmed with it and aren’t fully leveraging it. They may have tools in place but don’t know which features to focus on, and so they pay for software that they aren’t getting benefits from.
How to solve the issue: To get the return on their investment, here are some recommendations:
– Take one functional area at a time, for example, email marketing or social media, and master that one area before moving on to the next functional area. Seek to understand all the features that come with the tool you’re using and how those features can benefit you. If you don’t need them, don’t use them, but make sure you understand what they are so you make a conscious decision.
– Always keep your outputs in mind. You want clean data for segmentation and reporting. For example, only collect the data you actually need (also important with GDPR going into effect in May), and use drop-downs to minimize free-form fields that limit your ability to segment and report on them.
Along with technology, the sales funnel has changed. It’s because of today’s sales and marketing software that companies have the potential to zero in on qualified leads. And yet, 22% of salespeople say qualifying leads is the most challenging part of their work.
How to solve the issue: The key here is, again, the right technology. Today’s sales tools allow companies to segment leads and nurture them based on buyer behavior and interest, which is helpful. But, take that a step further and score those leads so you know which ones are ready for sales and which ones still need nurturing. Lead scoring is one of those topics you can work with the sales team on (see #1). After you agree on the definition of a lead, complete a Lead Scoring Worksheet – identify what behaviors will impact a lead’s score and the number of points. Then, identify the threshold of points for each behavior what constitutes a high-quality lead that will go to Sales. For example, if they download an offer, that may give them 10 points but they need 30 to be sent to Sales for follow-up. So marketing will continue to nurture that lead. If they submit a Contact Us form, that would be worth 30 points and immediately go to Sales.
There’s no reason you should be lumping all prospects into one bucket when they each have different needs. Customize, customize, customize!
For smaller companies that don’t necessarily have a dedicated sales team, the sales process can be nebulous at best. Often the CEO is the one running sales, and given how busy she is with other aspects of the company, she may not even have a process for attracting leads and closing sales.
While she may function just fine doing things helter-skelter for a while, having a sales process in place can streamline the closing process, cutting down on the time she spends on it. It can also come in handy when she’s ready to hire a dedicated salesperson because she can easily hand that process over for him to learn.
How to solve the issue: Write down everything you do to attract visitors to your site, convert them into email subscribers or customers, and close the deal. Work through it with others on your team until it becomes a streamlined workflow.
B2B companies will always have frustrations. It’s how they manage sales and marketing now that lays the groundwork for the future.
Outbound sales and prospecting are the sales approaches that most people shudder to think of. Dialing the phone, cold calling, getting past the gatekeepers – it’s enough to discourage anyone if you don’t approach it in the right way. This conversation with Chris Beall of Connect and Sell is powerful simply because it reveals some of the basics of why we go about sales that way in the first place. The numbers don’t lie, and Chris is definitely one to know the numbers. But more than knowing them, he’s effective at interpreting what they reveal about needed sales process improvements. If you want to learn how to do outbound sales and prospecting better than you ever have before, Chris is the guy to listen to. Get a feel for the kinds of things he has to share, on this episode.
Chris Beall ( @chris8649 ) of @ConnectAndSell : #Outbound #sales and #prospecting metrics and what they tell us about #SalesSuccess. Listen to this episode of #InTheArenaClick To TweetThere are thousands of metrics you could track when it comes to outbound sales. But Chris says that the most important metric is the metric of each day. In his mind, the strongest thing you can do is focus on doing the most you can in each day, even if that means taking some of the things you meant to do tomorrow into today’s workload. If you do that consistently, magic happens in your business, partially because you get more done per unit than you are spending. These are the kinds of observations Chris makes that are simple, yet so powerful. Take the time to listen to what he shares in our conversation, it will help you improve your outbound sales game.
One of the things I was curious to know from Chris’s experience was whether or not people who make more outbound sales calls show improvement with the more calls they make. He said that’s not necessarily the case, but what does demonstrate improvement is when those making outbound calls are coached about what they say and how they say it, especially within the first eight to ten seconds of a call. Coaching is vital to enhance effectiveness because it’s through good coaching from an experienced salesperson that an ineffective caller can learn to express comfortable confidence that leads to effectiveness. Learn what Chris means by that on this episode of in the arena.
The first 8 to 10 seconds of an #outbound #sales call is the most important. @chris8649 of @ConnectAndSell shares a quick win on #SalesCalls on this episode of #InTheArenaClick To TweetReferrals are not something we typically think of as being directly connected to outbound sales. But the statistics show that there is a direct correlation. The outbound salespeople who are able to secure more meetings are also the ones who produce more referrals. What’s the connection? It likely that the confidence and demeanor those sales professionals have that enables them to secure the meetings in the first place, is also what enables them to get referrals. Chris Beall has great insights into this phenomenon and explains what salespeople can do to increase their ability in both of those areas. You’ll want to hear this episode.
The goal of outbound sales calls is to schedule appointments with prospects. It’s as simple as that. So outbound sales reps who are doing a good job should be scheduling as many conversations as possible. Chris and the team at Connect and Sell are all about making that scheduling process simpler and easier, and their implementation of technology to make it happen is revolutionary. Find out how 80 sales calls can be made, four actual conversations can happen, and appointments can be set – all within 1 hour. I told you it was revolutionary. Be sure you listen.
#Outbound #sales reps should have as many conversations as possible. Find out how @ConnectAndSell can help you make it happen from @chris8649 on this episode of #InTheArenaClick To TweetThe 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
The post Chris Beall: Outbound Sales and Prospecting Metrics and What They Tell Us About Success – Episode #104 appeared first on The Sales Blog.
