There’s a reason why you’re never more than five streets away from a Dunkin Donuts in Manhattan. The more locations, the more opportunities Dunkin Donuts has to sell you a syrupy shot of caffeine.

Being visible in different locations means more visibility, awareness, and opportunities to buy.

On the internet, this is synonymous with expanding your reach from just a website to multiple channels: SEO, email, social, PPC, and more.

There are many places to reach your target market, so putting your budget into a single channel is like building one huge Dunkin Donuts in the center of town and hoping everyone will go there instead of the local corner competitor.

Today, there is an average of 5.4 stakeholders involved in any given B2B sale. And, prospects are much more educated — 90% of the buying process is over before a prospect ever speaks to a salesperson:

(Source)

Your ideal customers are on Facebookand LinkedIn, searching on Google, opening your competitor’s emails, attending events, watching webinars and engaging with brands across many different touchpoints.

Today, 72% of consumers say they would rather connect with brands and businesses across multiple channels. Companies need to take a step outside the traditional marketing silo and look at a more integrated approach.

The solution? Multi-channel marketing.

Today, 84% of companies have made it a key focus in their marketing strategy:

Multi channel customers spend 3-4 times more than single-channel customers. And, 74% of businesses increased sales with a multichannel strategy, while 64% increased consumer loyalty/acquisition

In this post, I’m going to explain what multichannel marketing is, why B2B marketers need to be using it, and show you some great examples of multichannel marketing campaigns.

First up…

What Is Multichannel Marketing?

Multichannel marketing refers to the practice of engaging prospects, leads and customers across a combination of indirect and direct communication channels. A channel could be a device, medium, or network. For example:

• A physical store
• Website
• Email
• Mobile
• In-app
• PPC
• Social
• Direct mail

Multichannel marketing is important for the simple reason that you must be where your customers are. Which is everywhere.

Ideally, a prospect targeted by a multichannel marketing campaign would get a seamless experience across all the different touchpoints. This could be as simple as not getting emailed about a white paper if they’ve already downloaded it through a Facebook ad, or it could be laser-targeted behavioral messaging delivered based on a combination of touchpoints across platform.

Buyers are in complete control of the sales process. There are more channels, more devices, and more options available when it comes to finding the information they need to make a purchase decision.

While this stratification makes marketing more challenging, it also presents a massive opportunity for companies who are willing to adapt.

Why Is Multichannel Marketing a Big Deal for B2B Marketers?

According to a 2015 study by Lewis, just 9% of marketers worldwide will not increase spending on multichannel marketing. Put another way, nine out of 10 marketers planned to invest more in a multichannel marketing approach.

Here are some of the reasons why marketers are ramping up their investment:

Increase brand awareness

Building brand awareness continues to be a major organizational goal for B2B content marketers. In fact, 84% say brand awareness is the #1 priority:

But, here’s the kicker:

It takes an average of five to seven impressions for someone to remember your brand. More channels equals more impressions.

It’s the reason Nike still bothers to pay for pitch side ads: everyone on the planet knows Nike, but if they ignore that channel its users could find another brand.

Multichannel marketing is as much about engaging existing leads and customers as it is about reaching new prospects.

Increase conversions

According to Referral Saasquatch, being on the same channels as your customers “directly aligns your brand with higher levels of engagement and conversions”. It makes sense. If you’re in the right place at the right time, a targeted message could tip the lead over the edge and convert them into a customer.

Increase revenue

90% of marketers report higher profits and sales with multichannel strategies. More purchase opportunities across different channels means customers can purchase more readily.

According to CMO by Adobe, 52% of multi-channel marketers say they “usually” or “always” hit their financial targets.

Deeper analytics

It’s not enough to be looking at anonymized analytics or a list of email addresses, open and click rates — you want progressive lead profiling, enriched by data from multiple channels. That way, you can accurately track campaigns, properly map the lead journey and send targeted messaging on the right channels.

Multi channel marketing can provide a full view of your customer’s digital ecosystem, allowing you to distribute your most engaging content to their favorite channels.

Keep Up With Today’s On-the-Go Users

Multichannel marketing allows you to reach users across mobile, desktop, email and social channels throughout the daily journey – commute to work, at the office, at home in bed, sitting shotgun in the car, and so on. GPS and real-time location services allow marketers to get hyper focused with campaigns.

Better customer insights

Every channel and touch point provides customer insight. Tracking how users interact with your brand across all channels will teach you more about their preferences so you can better personalize the content experience.

A SAP report reveals that a businesses believe a multichannel approach:

• Improves sales (74%)
• Increases customer loyalty and acquisition (64%)
• Improves competitive advantage (62%)
• Improves customer experience (54%)

But, it’s Not All Smooth Sailing…

Whether it’s the wrong technology, lack of experience, or simply bad execution, almost all marketers hit a snag when it comes to multichannel marketing.

Over 90% of marketers struggle to seamlessly connect more than three channels throughout the buyer journey. — Gartner

Here are some of the most common multichannel marketing challenges:

Targeted Messaging

Delivering the message is not enough. It must be fit to audience preferences and factor in demographic, behavioral and transaction history, channel preference and geography. Delivering the right message across so many touchpoints has added another level of detail to an already complex B2B buyer journey.

Attribution Modeling

It’s beoming more complex to determine which channels, messages, and sequence of touchpoints are delivering the most qualified leads to your organization. Having a system in place to properly track all the moving parts, and distribute credit where it is rightfully deserved is critical to maximizing the ROI of your multichannel marketing campaigns.

Campaign Synchronization

Customers are in control of the buying process. Therefore, marketers need to constantlty develop, test, and refine messaging across multiple touchpoints to ensure prospects and leads are being properly nurtured through each stage of the sales funnel. Messaging needs to flow, and make sense across channels, mediums, and devices. A broken link could cause the entire campaign chain to collapse.

Let’s go through the key tenets to make sure your multichannel marketing strategies are dressed for success.

Key Tenets of a Successful Multichannel Marketing Strategy

Executing a successful multichannel marketing strategy isn’t easy. It takes a lot of planning, data, and solid execution.

While every campaign is different, there are a few key tenets that underlie every successful multichannel strategy.

Be on the right platforms

You need to adjust to consumer behaviour by offering a seamless experience between preferred platforms:

(Source)

The graph above shows the popularity of different devices (channels) paired together, and their reach at different times of the day.

As you can see, the transition between desktop and mobile is an important one — this trend, which gained steam with the rise of cheap mobile internet, is the reason why websites should always be responsive. This point is emphasized in ecommerce. Just because a consumer or business adds something to the cart on their desktop device doesn’t mean they’ll click purchase on it:

Apply this mobile-first mindset outside your website. Does the content you’re retargeting Facebook users with work well on mobile as well as desktop? (90% of Facebook’s daily active users access it via mobile.) Define your channels before launching the campaign, and be sure to test every touchpoint from every possible device and channel.

Integrate systems to build a comprehensive avatar

According to American Management Association, 83% of executives think their companies have silos, and 97% think it’s having a negative effect on business. Silos are created by communication breakdowns, whether that’s human-to-human or data that isn’t accessible to other applications.

To pull all customer information into one place and execute a successful multichannel marketing campaign, it means breaking down barriers between different branches of the marketing department, and integrating your marketing tools.

You can use a tool like Zapier to automate the transfer of data between your SaaS tools, or build custom integrations with the APIs of the software you use.

Automate personalized messaging

Personalized marketing generates 2x higher click-through rates. And, 71% of consumers prefer personalized ads. Leveraging data from a variety of channels will allow you to deeply personalize messaging based on the user’s activity and personal information.

That said, the ability to capture lead data and draw actionable insights at scale is dependent on the software you use. Specifically, a central hub of data stored in a marketing automation tool like Google Analytics 360 Suite, Agile CRM or Marketo:

With data from all sources at your disposal, you can send marketing emails when prospects click Facebook ads, or well-timed chat messages informed by a history of customer preferences and activity.

This breaks down the barriers between channels, and allows you to deliver real personalized messages that cut through the noise.

Real World B2B Examples to Inspire Your Multichannel Marketing Campaigns in 2018

Multichannel marketing is a topic so huge and general it’s easy to get bogged down. Let’s shine a light (and give you inspiration for your next campaign) with these real world examples:

Econsultancy’s direct mail and online interactive campaign

This genius campaign was specifically created for Econsultancy to show off the power of personalized, interactive marketing.

The first channel was an interactive quiz that gathered a few personal points and logged the user’s name and time on site. From that, Econsultancy mailed conference invitations with a personalized message and URL:

Out of the 867 recipients, there was a 33% response rate. Over one fifth of respondents requested bookings, and there was a 56% conversion rate!

Imagine a conversion rate like that from using an impersonal message over a single platform.

Burberry’s interactive WeChat campaign

This campaign really moved the needle for Burberry, increasing sales 4% across the board by marketing just a single product — a $2,000 designer handbag.

The campaign was centered around a live event in Shanghai, and delivered through the Burberry’s WeChat app. By interacting with the brand on WeChat, event attendees and viewers of the event’s live stream were able to find out more about the products in real time, as they were being displayed live.

Burberry also uses the WeChat platform to deliver interactive content that helps promote their upcoming events:

This expands the customer experience from digital to physical, and effectively gives Burberry a way to constantly deliver relevant content to its customers.

WWE integrates TV events with conversation over Twitter

In 2011, the WWE started putting wrestler’s Twitter handles underneath their names when they entered the ring:

This was part of a huge push to use Twitter as a user-fuelled promotional tool. Wrestlers now take their theatrical feuds online, letting fans engage in real time as they trash talk each other:

Since the company turned its sights on Twitter, it has built up a huge following of over 10M followers which powers its premium streaming service, live events, and the social presence of it’s wrestlers.

Today, WWE hashtags are constantly trending on Twitter, which increases brand awareness and exposes new viewers to the sport.

House of Fraser set up an internet-only retail store

House of Fraser, a British department store with a strong online presence, set up the first internet-only retail location in 2011 where high street shoppers could order products online through the in-store computers, and return to collect them:

(Source)

The store itself is like one big billboard. In a backwards approach, the store is used as a vehicle to increase brand awareness and generate online sales. The internet retail store helps customers by providing a place where they can try on newly-arrived clothes and return them straight away if they don’t fit.

This multichannel marketing strategy combines brick-and-mortar retail with the convenience of internet shopping, reducing friction for the customer.

Expedia delivers laser-targeted ads to prospective travellers

46% of search marketing professionals believe retargeting is the most underused technology. Ads that retarget visitors that have proven interest in your product have a 10x higher conversion rate.

In the image below, Expedia shows us why it works so well:

(Source)

Expedia shows these kinds of ads to website visitors who have clicked on hotels or travel packages in specific locations. This ad is personalized, and uses urgency to push engaged users to convert.

ASOS’s social strategy creates a seamless shopping experience

Aiming to create the most frictionless shopping experience for its Facebook fans, ASOS launched Europe’s first integrated Facebook store in 2011. Users are able to shop for ASOS products directly inside the application:

(Source)

Sales through the Facebook store surpassed £1 million from launch to December of the same year, more than doubling the company’s forecasts.

ASOS has also generated buzz while promoting a one-hour Skype call with a fashion consultant:

ASOS is a master of multichannel campaigns, seamlessly integrating each channel and finding innovative ways to engage customers wherever they are.

VivoCity Mall used QR codes to build its Facebook audience

QR codes are an excellent way to convert an offline impression to online engagement. By placing them in high foot traffic locations, you can generate more website visitors, app downloads, and other online conversions. But, there’s got to be some form of incentive.

These two colorful characters advertise entry to a contest, but entry is priced at the cost of one Facebook like.

This campaign doubled the mall’s Facebook following, allowing them to advertise exclusive promotions to a larger online audience and bring them back into the store.

Recap: The Keys to Multichannel Success

In order to accommodate a changing buyer journey, marketers are going to have to embrace a more integrated multi-channel approach.

Here are the keys to succeed:

• Plan a marketing campaign with multiple touchpoints. You might be starting out with interactive online content and moving on to send personalized direct mail, or running a retargeting campaign on Facebook. Think about the different stages of the user journey, and how best to market on each channel.

• Centralize data from every marketing channel. Your marketing technology should pull in data from every channel, forming a complete customer portrait you can use to deliver more targeted marketing messages.

• Refine the number of channels. Are you pushing your offline audience to sign up to your marketing emails, or targeting people that use their mobiles while watching TV? Double down on the channel combinations that work to avoid diluting your budget.

• Run A/B tests. Multichannel marketing relies on a lot of data for successful execution, but it also generates a ton. Use that data to determine whether customers that engage across multiple channels are worth more, or more likely to convert.

• Use automation (but keep the human touch). It’s tough to scale personalized marketing, so businesses will need to rely on automation to reach their audiences. With user data pouring in from social networks, email marketing, and more, you can build automated campaigns with a high degree of personalization and deliver them through the right channel at the right time.

Artificial intelligence offers customers better experiences and makes marketers' lives easier—and it's not has hard to implement as you might think. Here are some considerations for using AI in your marketing efforts. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Great marketing extends beyond creating and sharing content – and great marketers take it a step further to ensure their strategy is working. They do this (in part) through Instagram analytics tools.

Let me guess. You’ve asked yourself the following questions multiple times:

Are any of my followers even seeing my posts?
Am I missing any comments on my posts?
How can I spend my marketing budget better?

It’s OK if you have. All marketers question themselves and their strategies, and that’s a good thing. It’s a way of staying accountable.

Thankfully, you don’t have to figure out those answers alone. There are plenty of powerful Instagram analytics tools you can use to keep your strategy in sync.

Want to make better time, money, and energy investments on Instagram? Up your Instagram marketing game with these nine Instagram analytics tools.

Optimize Your Marketing Strategy with These Nine Powerful Instagram Analytics Tools

Instagram Insights

Let’s start in-app. Instagram has an excellent (and free!) built-in analytics tool called Instagram Insights. It’s only available for Instagram Business Profiles and is – at this time – only accessible within the mobile app. (If you’re unsure of whether a Business Profile is for you, read up on our pros and cons here.)

Instagram Insights is limited to the high-level analytics (like follower demographics and top post performance), but these can still be powerful for brands looking to better understand their marketing activity. So, don’t dismiss Instagram Insights just yet.

Here’s what analytics you can expect from Instagram Insights:

• Account impressions and reach
• Profile views
• Clicks on your website and call/email links
• Top posts and the impressions, reach, and engagement for these posts for the past week, month, three months, six months, year, or two years
  • Note: Click on See More to check out the statistics older than seven days
• The days and times your followers are active
• A breakdown of gender, age, and location of your followers
  • Note: To see this demographic information, your Business Profile must have 100+ followers.

Instagram Insights also gives you an overview of Instagram Stories activity (within 14 days of posting). More and more marketers are leveraging Stories to connect with their audience and drive traffic to their website, so you should check out this analytics section.

Tap the See More option to review:

• Taps forward (People clicking through to the next Story)
• Taps backward (People clicking back to re-watch the previous Story)
• Completion rate (People watching the Story to the end)
• Exits (People exiting your Story)
• Replies

Some marketers have complained that Instagram Insights is too simplistic, but I think it’s pretty cool to have that data right in your app. The only negative in my eyes is the extra math involved (which is my least favorite school subject).

As a rule of thumb, remember these equations when crunching your numbers:

• Engagement rate = Total engagement / Total followers
• Follower growth % = [(Present number of followers – Previous number of followers) / Previous number of followers] x 100

If you want to expand your analytics and gain a deeper understanding of your marketing activity, check out the rest of these Instagram analytics tools.

Keyhole

Keyhole provides two primary services: hashtag and keyword tracking and account tracking and reporting. The application measures real-time and historical data and spits out these metrics in easy-to-read graphs. They make it simple to analyze, report, and apply your findings to your strategy.

Keyhole is a paid service, but they provide a free tracking tool as well as a 3-day free trial. For a business looking to use Instagram as a leading tool in their strategy (including influencer marketing), Keyhole could be a worthy investment. Otherwise, their free trial provides insights up to a year prior – a good preview for brands researching Instagram analytics tools.

Socialbakers

The Socialbakers application is multi-faceted. They offer a free Instagram analytics tool that gives you an overview of your, most-liked and top-commented posts, most-liked and most-tagged users, hashtags, distribution of monthly posts, and top filters. These high-level stats mirror the Instagram Insights tool but still provide a decent understanding of your activity – for free.

Want to take it a step further? Check out the Socialbakers AI Social Marketing Suite. This 5-step tool walks you through the entire Instagram marketing process, from researching and understanding your audience, to promoting your very best content, to creating more effective, engaging content, to measuring and aligning your Instagram impact with your business goals.

Depending on how in-depth you want your analytics, the Socialbakers suite comes at a variety of prices. And if you simply want to see how it works before you buy, you can try it fo’ free.

Squarelovin

Are you leveraging user-generated content (UGC) as part of your Instagram marketing strategy? If so, Squarelovin is the tool for you. The Squarelovin application helps you collect, secure rights for, manage, and publish UGC for your brand, all within one platform. They also provide analytics so you can evaluate the revenue, traffic, and conversions driven by each image.

Interested in straightforward analytics? They’ve got that, too. Squarelovin’s Instagram Insights shows you metrics on account growth, information on when to post, insight into your followers’ preferences and interests, and a monthly analysis. Create your free account here.

Websta

Websta is an entirely free Instagram analytics tool. It’s pretty similar to Squarelovin’s Instagram Insights tool (explained above), but it offers a few more features.

Through the Websta application, you can set up Custom Feeds organized by theme or keyword, explore new trends and topics, manage all your Instagram activity (from posting to replying to comments), and get analytics on your posts, engagement, and social relationships.

If you ask me, that’s a pretty sweet deal for a free analytics app. Unsure of whether you should sign up? Websta provides a preview of their tool here.

Union Metrics

Union Metrics provides “social intelligence” for multiple channels. Not only does the application give you organic and paid media analytics and reporting, but it also offers social listening and competitor analysis. These latter two tools can help you learn more about your audience and provide the very best content.

Union Metrics helps brands get started with a free Instagram checkup. The checkup analyzes your activity and engagement for the last 30 days and gives you insights into how you can improve your posting time, hashtags, and content types.

Despite the depth and variety of their product offering, Union Metrics keeps their prices pretty friendly. Again – if you’re looking to invest in your Instagram marketing, this may be the tool for you.

Simply Measured

Simply Measured is another application that provides a wide variety of Instagram analytics tools. From social listening to content analysis to conversion tracking, Simply Measured equips a lot of different marketers.

For the social marketer, their paid tool equips you to discover new audiences, analyze your social media activity, and track where you’re conversions originate.

Similar to Union Metrics, Simply Measured also provides a free Instagram report for accounts under 25,000 followers. Run this report to measure your account’s post effectiveness and performance for the past two weeks.

Pixlee

Pixlee is another platform that aggregates and leverages user-generated content (UGC). Not only does this tool help you collect and repost others’ photos, but it helps turn your Instagram account into an extension of your e-commerce business with shoppable photos, homepage galleries, and social photo contests.

Like Squarelovin, Pixlee offers a free analytics solution, too. Through this tool, you can identify new brand partners and influencers, identify top content and potential posts, turn your day-to-day data into easily shareable reports. Sign up now and get your first report of your past week’s activity.

Social Rank

Social Rank is a paid platform available on Twitter and Instagram. It’s more of an audience insights tool than an activity and engagement analysis tool, but its data is still valuable. (Your audience is the heart of your marketing strategy, anyway.)

The Basic Social Rank package – available for free! – allows you to view your full audience profile and then sort and rank that information. It also allows you to connect multiple accounts, which is ideal for agencies or brands that have numerous Instagrams.

Regarding paid versions, the Premium package allows you to execute campaigns with your audience as well as export data. The Market Intel package enables you to run data on any Instagram profile (as long as it’s public) and gives you pretty in-depth competitor analysis.

Now What? How to Turn Data from These Instagram Analytics Tools Into Actionable, Impactful Goals

Registering, purchasing, and downloading these Instagram analytics tools are great, but these investments don’t pay off until you use them to fuel new goals – and eventually, sales.

How can you turn this newfound data into actionable goals and impactful investments? Here are a few metrics to look for and what they mean for your account and brand performance.

Calculate Follower Growth Rate to Set New Growth KPIs

In and of itself, your follower count means nothing. Sure, 100,000 followers are great, but it doesn’t say much as a standalone number.

By calculating your follower growth rate, you can understand how your community is growing and what content and engagement activity may be feeding that.

Take the below sample calculation as an example. (I’m using an Excel document, but depending on your tool of choice, you may have access to this data within a report.)

On the surface, I can see that my audience is growing (which is still good). But when I break my growth rate down by fiscal week, I know that my growth rate jumped in the first two weeks and then steadily declined in the following weeks.

Knowing this, I’d go back and analyze what factors – like engagement or content – perhaps slowed by account’s growth and then change those strategies moving forward. This data would also equip me to better set KPIs and predict growth in following weeks.

Listen to Follower Comments to Identify Interests and Themes

Receiving likes and comments on your posts is exciting. Engagement is a critical indicator that your audience appreciates and connects with your content.

But, how do you know what exactly they like? Well, those who comment are likely telling you. While it’s easy to double tap and like a photo, those followers who are actually engaged (and not Instagram bots) will probably comment and share what they like about your photo, answer a question you’ve posted, or even tag a friend or other account.

Most Instagram analytics tools will measure and report on the likes, comments, and general engagement of each post. But tools like Simply Measured and Union Metrics analyze and share top comments and the language used in each.

Tracking the sentient of each comment can tell you what your followers like and appreciate about each photo, whether your photography, quote, or product feature. This data can help you create content that your followers consistently like and engage with.

Monitor Hashtag Performance to Discover Niche Opportunities

Posting content with hashtags is a surefire way to drive engagement. In fact, one study found that photos with at least one hashtag resulted in 70% more likes than posts without hashtags.

When posting content on Instagram, it’s easy to snag the most popular hashtags in your industry or circle just to include some in your caption. But, these hashtags are popular for a reason. Their high-volume feeds are likely bogged down with lots of content, meaning your posts could get lost.

If you’re a small business or new brand, you have a better chance of ranking with low- to medium-volume hashtags. To analyze hashtag performance and popularity, use a tool that has a dedicated tracking feature (like Keyhole).

These tools will steadily watch popularity, compare commonly-used hashtags, and show you new hashtag opportunities. This data can help you use the best possible hashtags for discovery and growth.

Over to You

While it’s essential to create beautiful content that resonates with your audience, that’s only half of a successful Instagram marketing strategy. These Instagram analytics tools and platforms can help you bring your plan full circle to ensure your time and budget are efficiently spent.

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.

STATUS QUO BIAS

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.

LOSS AVERSION EFFECT

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.

DECISION PARALYSIS EFFECT

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.

AMPLIFYING THE “PAIN OF SAME”

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.

STILL A PLACE FOR GAIN

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.

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WEBINAR: Selling in the Breakthrough Zone

DOWNLOAD: Our Guide to the Value Selling System

DOWNLOAD: 12-Point Value Selling Self-Assessment

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, enabling them to progressively create, capture and confirm their unique value in every customer interaction.

Every year, there are more technology solutions asking for your consideration. Choosing your next vendor not only takes time, it also makes you continually redefine what you are going to value in this new partnership. Sticking to these values as your foundation will help you quickly thin the herd. But when it comes to choosing a technology partner, what matters and what doesn’t?

In this blog, I’ll show you five values to look for in your next technology partner to fuel growth. 

Ask Yourself, What Sort of Investment Am I Trying to Make?

Understanding the differences between long-term and short-term motives behind your decision-making process will help you determine what differentiation matters for your unique needs. For example, if you want to invest in technology you won’t have to rip and replace or re-evaluate in 12-18 months, then you are thinking long term. In this scenario, you want to make sure scalability is a primary focus. Which technology and which vendor will grow with me? Which can I grow into and get the most out over the course of my journey? Which ones will I grow past or run into walls with? Worry less about investing in something that requires a bit of learning, and more about outgrowing your investment and being stuck with less. Also, make sure to not only evaluate the technology but the vendor itself. This will help you make a more complete investment decision beyond capabilities and checkboxes.

What Does it Mean to Be a Customer?

You should feel pride and identify with the brand qualities of the technology you purchase. This investment needs to complement what you believe in, and the vendor should also feel the same about you and your choice. This is either a healthy partnership, or it’s not. You know how you feel as soon as you consider putting pen to paper, be honest with yourself. You are not just choosing technology, you are choosing people and a network of other customers. Find out how they treat their customers. Do they have fantastic events for you to take advantage of? Do they have a community of other customers that you can belong to and learn from? Do their customers stick around? How will making this investment impact your career over time? These are the things to think about when defining how you value being a customer.

Have Their Customers Achieved What You Want to Achieve?

To have a fulfilling customer experience, you must have a clear path to success. Learning from others and seeing their momentum is the best way to feel assurance in your investment. After all, before purchase it can all feel very abstract. It’s clearer when the road to success is already presented to you, by customers willing to talk and by a team dedicated to supporting your growth after you buy. Along those lines, don’t be afraid to get right into the depth of use cases and workflows. This is just around the corner when you begin to implement, so it’s beneficial to explore how a solution can be used like you have already signed the deal. Putting your potential partner through the paces is the best way to find out what their customer experience looks like, ahead of making any considerable investment.

Do They Understand Your Business and Speak Your Language?

This is relatively intuitive but often goes untested, causing challenges down the line. Building off of our third value, do not be afraid of digging in to validate that a solution can support your unique use cases. This will determine which companies not only want your business, but also provide clear evidence that they understand your business, and how to partner in your success. Red flags are easy to spot. If the points are not clear and the value isn’t fine-tuned with a short path to execution, then you have one fewer vendor to consider because they don’t really get you. However, be mindful that you’re offering up the opportunity for everyone to know you in the first place. Have you provided clear guidelines on your goals? Are you transparent about your needs? No one can demonstrate they understand you without your thorough involvement in that mutual discovery phase. If you want openness from your partner, be open with them too.

How Do They Invest Their Revenue?

Investment track record is a telltale sign of where your potential partner may be headed. Back to our first value, make sure you and your partner have similar goals when it comes to innovation and growth. Perhaps the revenue is invested in growing the team. Great! Wait, which team? Are we talking about more salespeople, more engineers, and support, or more customer success? Do your own investigating to validate what you’re told. Here’s a golden nugget: go on Glassdoor and on to the company’s career page. The reviews will tell you where they need help improving, the careers page will tell you if they are trying to attend to those matters based on the positions they are filling. Bottom line here is that you want to understand your partner’s goals and the most telling way to see them clearly is by seeing where and how money is being spent.

When it comes to choosing a technology partner, it’s important to ask yourself these questions. Consider your motivations and goals for your own business. Are you considering adding any additional technology partners in 2018? Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments.

The post 5 Values to Look for in Your Next Technology Partner appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Author and speaker Deb Calvert of People First Productivity Solutions encourages the empowerment of buyers in her latest podcast appearance.

There is no question that the internet has fundamentally changed society, the economy, and even basic human behavior. Never before has so much information been available so quickly to so many. Got a question about any topic under the sun? Just “Google it.”

We’ve all heard it innumerable times: “content is king.” And that still holds true, now more than ever. So much content is now available – as much as 4.6 billion pieces of new content are produced daily – that consumers and businesses now do a significant proportion of their purchasing research online.

This sea-change in information-gathering has exponentially increased the value of any business’s online presence. It is now more important than ever for companies and organizations to focus their time, energy, and budgets on optimizing their websites, online profiles, blogs and other internet opportunities. The reality is this: if you’re not found online, you don’t exist.

And that’s where Inbound Marketing comes in.

If you’re in business, it’s hard to avoid hearing about Inbound Marketing. That’s because it’s highly effective at achieving visibility and thought leadership to create a competitive advantage for firms of all sizes.

So what exactly is Inbound Marketing? It’s a sales and marketing methodology that uses content to attract and engage a target audience, encourage a relationship, and convert leads into customers. Unlike traditional marketing tools such as mass media advertising that push messages out to a mass audience, inbound marketing draws prospects in – capturing their attention and interest with content that provides valuable information to them. Rather than hoping to stimulate a passive audience into action, Inbound Marketing garners the active attention of prospects already interested in what you have to offer. Their online searches have led them to your content which piques their interest because it has the potential to satisfy their wants and needs.

In short, the benefits of Inbound Marketing include:

Cost-effectiveness Whether you’re an SMB or a large enterprise, Inbound Marketing costs approximately 70 percent less than traditional advertising. That means even a small budget can pack a big punch.

Longevity The goal of Inbound Marketing is to build relationships with prospects with the goal of converting leads into customers. By engaging prospects in an ongoing dialog, you’re creating a number of “touch points” in the relationship over a period of time – far different than the hit-or-miss, short-term impact of traditional outbound marketing programs.

Broader or more focused area of impact – your choice One of the beauties of the internet is that it knows no geographic boundaries. Your content is available to a target audience down the street and around the globe. You can even tweak various aspects of your inbound campaign to attract slightly different audiences based on their interests and locations. That kind of focus and segmentation is simply not available with mass media.

Immediacy Nothing approaches the immediacy of the internet. Post a promotional offer to social media and watch the “likes” and reactions pour in. That kind of real-time input enables you to quickly modify and optimize your campaign in response.

Greater visibility and awareness The right content enables you to demonstrate your expertise, building visibility and brand awareness with your target audience. The internet is the great equalizer – you can appear to be an industry leader offering more value than competitors twice your size if your message resonates with your audience.

Even if all the clients and prospects to whom you need to market are already in your database, Inbound Marketing can be an influential and ongoing contributor to your sales and marketing efforts. Smart marketers use content, social selling, and their online visibility as experts and thought leaders to impact the decision-making and purchasing process of existing as well as new customers. The right content, available any time online, can influence purchases — even when you’re not actively marketing.

And because Inbound Marketing fosters ongoing customer relationships and conversations, you can actively “listen” to the marketplace and respond to industry trends and activities with new offers, promotions, and product/service upgrades to encourage both new and repeat sales.

More measurable metrics.

Unlike traditional marketing methodologies that have an indirect impact on a business, Inbound Marketing is highly measurable. It is a quality and quantity metrics-driven methodology. With Inbound marketing you can create a “marketing funnel” similar to a sales funnel and track the journey of visitors and prospects through it. The data it can provide will enable you to tweak your marketing campaigns to yield higher conversion rates and turn more leads into sales.

Your Inbound Marketing efforts can provide valuable data from a wide range of metrics including:

• Reach
• Leads generated
• Revenue
• Visit-to-lead percentage
• Lead-to-marketing qualified lead (MQL) percentage
• Leads presented-to-leads worked percentage
• Leads worked-to-leads connected percentage
• MQL-to-opportunity percentage
• Opportunity-to-customer percentage
• Lead-to-customer percentage
• Average deal size

Try getting all that from a traditional advertising campaign.

Achieve greater efficiency through automation.

All of this looks like a lot of work, right? Fortunately, there’s automation. Many of the Inbound Marketing steps and processes can be effectively implemented with marketing automation tools. For example, behavior-based lead scoring enables sales and marketing to identify which prospects are engaging the most. Based on their actions, automatic email-nurturing gives prospects the information they need when they need it since automation never sleeps. Automated user-engagement monitoring alerts your marketing and sales teams whenever social engagement occurs with your company, your content, or your competitors. Automation enables your team to focus on high-value, human-touch elements to improve the ROI of your marketing investment.

The most effective and cost-efficient sales and marketing solutions are both measurable and easily scalable to provide the best results and ROI. The Inbound Marketing methodology has been honed to a best-practices process that addresses the needs of the modern buyer, providing valuable, actionable information when, where, and how the buyer wants to receive it. Unlike traditional methods that push relatively inflexible, generic messages out to an apathetic audience, Inbound Marketing enables you to open a dialog with interested prospects who have found you based on online searches to address their wants and needs. In short, they are already predisposed to engage with you.

Just as important, Inbound Marketing provides you, as a decision-maker and stakeholder, with the ability to monitor, measure, and analyze marketing campaign results using data gathered from a wide range of metrics based on your specific requirements. The insights this kind of real-time information can provide are invaluable for driving business growth and profitability. As you as a CEO take your next step to research the impact of Inbound Marketing on businesses, please consider downloading the research report (The State of Inbound 2017) that provides insight into how businesses around the globe have gained benefit from Inbound.

Image Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo

Episode 89 of Landscape Digital Show reveals a content audit plan for closing the gaps in your content marketing process and closing more sales.

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We’ve talked about how to perform a content audit in episode 28. This is something every business should begin right now because depending on how long you’ve been in business it may take a while to complete.

What should happen next is implementing a content audit plan to make the best use of that content.

Your content is a body of work that attracts everything your business needs to thrive, provided it is put to work in the right places.

The common perception is that content sells. Some of it will but not in the way that many people think. For example, people don’t watch one YouTube video and then say, “I want to work with this landscaping company.”

There are only two types of content, conversion content and intermediary content. Conversion content converts to a sale and intermediary content accomplishes everything that leads up to that.

Your content has to attract the attention of buyers and move them along a prescribed path or journey, taking them all the way to the finish line, a sales conversion.

Unless you are converting 100% of your leads that that path or journey is a process that has gaps in it, but don’t worry about that because you can close them by organizing the content from your audit to work to fix that leaky boat.

Here’s how that works.

Organize Your Content by Intent

Every piece of content has a job to do and the more specific it is the better.

When companies think about SEO it is because they want to be discovered online, right? So, they seek to rank for keywords and often pay top dollar to make that happen.

The problem is they fail to consider the intent behind those keywords. And this is why they have trouble converting those leads into customers.

Let’s say your website ranks for lawn care services. You need to understand the intent of the people searching for those keywords, what they want to know so that your content delivers on that expectation.

This is why you want to study your analytics and test your content.

Think about the decisions buyers have to make throughout their journey to ultimately work with your company. Now organize your content to close the gaps along that journey to keep everything moving silky smoothly.

You can start by breaking your process into three phases, beginning, middle and ending or conversion. Within each phase there are specific needs your content must address, such as the following.

Phase I – Attraction

• Give people ideas
• List problems you solve
• Identify who is not right for you

Phase II – Engagement

• Show how you solve problems
• Asks for feedback
• Offer relevant suggestions

Phase III – Conversion

• Profile award-winning projects
• Explain why investing in quality now pays off later
• Highlight industry leadership

This is how you make your marketing, selling, service and even recruiting better.

You close the gaps in your process by putting a theme or purpose to all of your content so that it can be used where and when it’s needed, whether that is on or offline. Incidentally, these themes should be represented in your content marketing editorial calendar.

Hold Your Content Accountable

The value of content is its intent or purpose and you should hold it accountable to that by assigning it a job it can do well.

If the intent of your website it to convert buyers into customers, then you want to focus on putting your best converting content on it.

You will discover your non-converting or intermediary content is probably best distributed with a vehicle like a newsletter that gradually moves people along that buyer’s journey.

If you really want to get the most out of your content, especially what you already have now, get it organized so that it can be employed for its best use.

Your business hires the best talent and trains them to keep your customers happy.

Why not take that same approach to getting your content working together as a winning team too?

Call to Action

The call to action for this episode is to complete your content audit so that you will have your content organized for fulfilling its intent, what it does best.

Hold your content accountable to your customers just as you do your team members because both are part of the same winning team.

An uninformed and superficial review of the principles of “challenger®️ selling” might lead some people to conclude that it depends on introducing a problem or opportunity that our potential prospect has never previously given any active consideration to.

But even assuming that these projects don’t fall at the first hurdle and that we can turn them into an active opportunity, these “previously unconsidered initiative” projects – particularly if they are dependent on new budget being found – can often result in complex, lengthy and often ultimately unsuccessful sales cycles.

I’m not suggesting that such projects are always likely to end in failure – but they are far from the only way in which we can successfully challenge our customer’s current thinking. There are many other ways in which we can bring fresh perspectives to our prospects in a way that has a good chance of being rapidly accepted and implemented…

Some of the most obvious opportunities lie with prospects that are “trying but struggling”. They have already recognised that they need to deal with an identified issue or initiative. They have already allocated budget and resources to the programme. They have identified and are implementing a “solution”. It’s just that it isn’t yet delivering anything like the desired results, and they may be starting to wonder if a different approach might be necessary.

This is a perfect opportunity to constructively challenge the thinking that led them to try and solve the problem with the approach that they are currently struggling with. Clearly, we need to be cognizant of the egos and politics that led to the existing “solution” being chosen and adopted. But assuming we can find ways of navigating around them, we have a perfect opportunity to introduce our prospect to a fresh perspective.

OPENING THEIR MINDS

We can open our prospective customer’s minds to the implications and consequences of their existing situation that they may not have been aware of or taken into account when they made their initial choice. We can introduce new considerations that reflect the accumulated experiences of other organisations who are trying to deal with similar circumstances.

We can characterise the implications of our prospective customer’s current situation in a way that leads naturally towards the uniquely relevant capabilities of our solution without coming across as insensitive or overtly “salesy”. And we can progressively open their eyes to the limitations of the approach they are currently struggling to implement.

CHANGE IS HARD

Change is hard – and your customers understand this, often through bitter experience. They know that not all change initiatives succeed the first time around. But as long as their goals are important enough, they will usually be open to rethinking their position if (with our help) they recognise that their current approach is pointing in the wrong direction or not moving in the right direction anything like quickly enough.

We can help them to rationalise the need for a fresh approach. We can share our experiences of helping similar organisations to master the transition they they are currently struggling with. We can build their confidence that we are are the right partner with whom to achieve their goals. We can make it easy to segue from their current path to ours. And we can help them to position the need to change their approach in a constructive manner that is most likely to secure internal understanding and approval.

THEY ALREADY HAVE THE MONEY

Perhaps best of all, the budget already exists. It’s a matter of switching these existing funds from the current approach that they now acknowledge is failing them to our solution, in the confidence that this time they are more likely to achieve the desired results.

These sort of pivots can’t be finessed through anything that comes across as a naïve, confrontational, “you’re idiots for making a bad decision” sales approach. They require skilled and emotionally intelligent salespersonship that puts us in our customer’s shoes.

I’ve pointed out that change is hard – I’m sure you recognise this for yourselves. You might be surprised to realise how many “trying but struggling” projects there are out there. If you look carefully in the right places, you can probably identify the signs. When you do, I advise you to approach the subject in a respectful and constructive manner, and to challenge without confronting.

WHERE TO START LOOKING

Some of these opportunities are probably right under your nose. It’s always worth revisiting previous opportunities that either ended in a competitive win, or a decision to solve the problem in a completely different way.

A decision to develop a system using in-house IT resources is a classic opportunity for this sort of turn-around, as long as you can work out how to manage the complexities of the internal politics. These in-house IT developments almost inevitably end up taking longer, costing more and achieving less than the way there were originally specified, to the great and growing disadvantage of the user departments involved.

But you also need to be aware that your recent sales can get displaced, as well: if you’ve sold something that isn’t yet delivering on your promises, you too could be vulnerable to being displaced by an unhappy client. And if you sold them the wrong thing in the first place, no amount of customer success heroics are likely to rescue that baby, and your company is likely to end up losing far more than the notional profit on the deal.

Trying but struggling… take a look around your prospect base. Look for organisations that are pursuing important initiatives but are not making the progress they had hoped for. Work out a suitable angle. And then constructively challenge your prospective customer’s current thinking in a way that progressively leads them towards your approach.

Social media still matters as a discovery tool for B2B decision-makers, so it should certainly matter to demand marketers.

Research by CMI and SmartBrief found that social is a huge part of both how B2B buyers engage with brands, and how marketing organizations start conversations. In fact, the study showed that social media content is the most widely used B2B content marketing tactic, used by 83% of organizations. Perhaps this is because 8 out of 10 B2B buyers trust recommendations from peers and influencers more than original brand research (74%), eBooks (33%) and blogs (21%) – and social media supports such peer review.

B2B buyers want credible, tailored and research-driven content. Demand generation marketers who understand how best to leverage social media to distribute such content will benefit from significant pipeline growth.

4 Ways to Use Social Media in Demand Generation

Demand generation is a full-funnel approach to cultivating a desire for your products or services, using relevant content, leveraging a multi-channel customer engagement strategy and building authentic relationships. When used effectively, social media can greatly help with all three efforts.

Will McInnes, CMO at Brandwatch, writes that social isn’t just for distribution, it’s also valuable for, “researching and better understanding your industry’s current market landscape and consumers.”

The four most critical ways demand marketers should leverage social today involve much more than just lead generation, they also include research, listening and nurturing.

Role #1: Social Media for B2B Research

Jillian Ryan, Analyst at eMarketer writes B2B marketers need to “research to understand audience behaviors on social platforms to deliver targeted content to the right person, on the right network, at the right time in the buyer journey.”

These insights, according to Ryan, can be gleaned via social data mining and social listening.

Social media research is most valuable if it’s targeted deeper than just your existing social media analytics, like who’s engaging with your posts. These insights definitely have value, but they’re not nearly as deep as social intelligence can go.

Social research enables you to:

• Understand the influencer landscape
• Align your content with newly trending topics
• Assess your target audience and competitors
• Tap into the pain points that are driving discussions

When reshaped into questions, the types of insights B2B buyers gain include:

1. What are your personas talking about?
2. What types of content (asset categories, sources, topics) are they sharing?
3. Who are the influencers in your niche?
4. Where are these conversations taking place: on publications, influencer pages or in LinkedIn groups?
5. Who are the trusted sources of information in your industry?
6. Which platforms are actually most popular?
7. Which industry events are driving the most social conversations?
8. How often does your audience recommend B2B vendors? (CMI research reveals that, on average, just 5% make recommendations on social. )

You don’t need a data science team to discover trends.

Social data-mining tools can scale across huge audiences, and give you the intelligence you need – like the top five topics driving conversations among your target decision-makers. Use these insights to shape your personas, messaging and content strategy.

Keep in mind, however, that social research technologies are invaluable for macro-level insights, but they also don’t always reveal nuance. Social B2B marketers are wise to become active participants in places where conversations are happening on the ground, such as LinkedIn groups or Quora. When combined with social research data, these participants’ observations can reveal the whole picture.

Role #2: Social Media for Listening & Monitoring

Wait, social listening? Doesn’t our CRM already take care of that?

It’s true that modern CRM and MAP offer built-in social listening capabilities, to offer marketing and sales team members deeper insight into prospect and customer behaviors on social media. However, that’s not quite the same as social listening. A lot of social media activity happens outside the view of popular MarTech. RadiumOne research reports 84% of content sharing on social takes place on “dark social,” or private channels such as email or messages.

Social listening is more than just automated prospect and customer monitoring. It’s real-time reports, enabled by listening technologies, that allows you to understand factors like messaging-driven content share tracking, fast-rising influencers and breaking news stories. The difference between social listening and research is subtle, but listening is inherently real-time and behavioral-focused to enable B2B marketers to understand behaviors as they unfold.

Deeper social listening allows you to understand the full picture of your prospects, customers, competitors and influencers in your space, and can reveal:

1. Windows of opportunity to engage prospects
2. Deeper intelligence through lead scoring
3. Lead engagement with relevant topics, conversations or competitors

Tools for deeper social listening can reveal the full picture, including richer intent insight. By integrating social listening tools into your MarTech stack, you can also gain big-picture insights, like influencers who are rapidly gaining followers, topics that are gaining social media search, and the news stories and publications that are getting clicks.

Role #3: Social Media for Lead Generation

Regardless of how you’re using social media for lead generation – whether it’s owned or paid efforts, or both – your lead generation efforts are likely to be a lot more effective if they’re informed by social research and listening.

Lead generation on social is best when it’s informed by fresh data. When it comes to HOW to do it, there are quite a few ways to use social as a top-of-funnel lead source.

B2B marketers are driving success with a variety of campaigns, including:

1. Offers
2. Contests
3. Polls and surveys
4. Discount codes and loyalty programs
5. Gated content on social (enabled by social sign-on technology to capture lead data)
6. Real-time conversations, including socially hosted webinars and Twitter Chats
7. Paid social advertising

Role #4: Social Media for Lead Nurturing

What’s the product of social research, listening and lead generation?

It’s the next step, social lead nurturing. This isn’t quite the same as social selling – when sales personnel use social media to engage directly with prospects – but these two concepts are definitely adjacent, even overlapping.

Social intelligence technologies can reveal which prospects actively share your content, follow your competitors or post to LinkedIn about their pain points. These actions contribute to “intent” or behavioral data, which automation technologies can use to reassign these leads to a different lead nurturing track or convert marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

Social lead nurturing involves more than just gleaning social media insight into intent-to-buy, behavior and other insights. It means having the social media presence to join conversations that are taking place and engage directly with opportunities on social, including posting the right piece of content or an answer from a knowledgeable insider.

Social media is inherently social and taking a personal approach to lead nurturing when it’s warranted can set your brand apart and boost closed-won deals.

Using Paid Targeting for Social Lead Nurturing

While one-to-one targeting on social media isn’t quite yet a possibility, at least not technically, all major social media networks except for Snapchat offer built-in “advanced targeting” capabilities to offer finely tuned audience targeting.

With LinkedIn, marketers can target individuals by company name, job title, field of study, groups and age. With enough prospect insights, that’s enough targeting possibilities to make one-to-one content targeting a possibility. Within the context of some demand generation strategies or industries, such as an account-based marketing strategy or very narrow audience niche, near one-to-one content distribution may be a high-return tool for social lead nurturing.

Much More Than Lead Generation

Demand generation marketers are familiar with social media’s potential for both paid and organic lead generation, but social has a lot more potential. When used as a tool for research, listening and lead nurturing, it can help you understand your prospects and close deals.

That information and understanding reveals positive insights that will benefit your entire marketing plan.

“What does your customer journey look like?” “Is your current MarTech stack integrated enough, and are you missing any tools?” These are some of the hardest questions in B2B marketing today. To access a blueprint for evaluating how your demand generation processes and technology are working together, click here to download the Marketing Tech Blueprint Workbook.

Four Tools for a Winning Social Media Giveaway

Today I have some resources to help you create a social media contest giveaway that will grow your audience and sales. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.

One of the best ways to attract more leads is through valuable contests. In order to get the word out you need the best resources available to help manage and execute your campaigns. Would you like to attract more sales through social media? Take advantage of these four tools, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Drive more sales with coupons – Wishpond

People love to find and share great deals online and on social media. This is a great way to attract new Fans and followers and build more visibility for your brand. Wishpond allows you to quickly and easily create an offer on mobile and computer devices. The templates include a choice of graphics that stand out along with an optin box to capture your leads. Share to your blog, Facebook or Twitter — contests are responsive and easy to view.

2) Powerful promotion apps – TabSite

Driving visitors to your social networks can also help bring more visibility to your Facebook Fan Page. TabSite helps brands and businesses quickly play and share your videos, images, and contests. It’s quick and easy to add the app to any of your platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Choose from a long menu of different titles and customize your descriptions that will be sure to engage your audience.

3) Beautiful campaigns and contests – Woobox

How about making your products and services more pronounced on your blog and social media? Woobox is one of the best tools out there that allows you to create anything from online games to contests to sales pages. There is a long list of suggestions to choose from including hashtag contests, giveaways, coupons, polls, and more.

4) Give your Facebook Page a boost – 22Social

Create powerful promo pages right on Facebook that goes beyond the standard Fan Page. 22Social provides a smart app to maximize your audience reach — invite your social contacts from all of your networks to join in and spread the word. Instant visibility means more Fans, leads, traffic and conversions in addition to building your brand in an ever-changing platform.

Hopefully you will find these tools useful to your next social media giveaway campaign. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

Building your sales team looks easy on paper, but how do you cut through the noise of LinkedIn, job boards, and sites like AngelList to find the best candidates? If you’re having trouble, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your sourcing strategy. Here’s how to make your recruiting process as effective as your prospecting one.

Step 1: Pick a channel

Posting a job on your company website or a startup-specific jobs site generates inbound applicants. You’ll be able to attract solid candidates searching for sales roles in your area, industry, and/or niche. However, you’ll also draw in people who are looking because they’ve missed quota several quarters in a row or don’t work well with their team. Top performers are usually satisfied with their jobs and aren’t considering a move.

Which begs the question: How do you find the people who were at 150% of quota last quarter -- not 80%?

Step 2: Use LinkedIn (the right way)

LinkedIn is a great complement to your existing recruiting strategies because it lets you identify passive candidates.

Most team leads use LinkedIn to find connections in their network that would be a good fit for their sales roles. This is a good tactic for finding your first sales rep, but probably not your tenth. You’ll need to branch out quickly to scale the team. The solution? LinkedIn filters.

Filtering by title can help you find candidates who are high performers in another, related role. For example, if you are looking for an Account Executive, search for titles that generally lead to AE (Market Development Rep, Business Development Rep, Sales Development Rep, and so on). Next, you’ll want to add a filter for job tenure (or how long they’ve been in that role). According to The Bridge Group, BDRs are typically in their roles for 10 to 19 months -- depending on the product they’re selling -- before becoming an AE. Filtering your candidate search to BDRs with seven months of experience, then narrow down the list to candidates who have the skills you’re searching for (prospecting, qualifying, presenting, etc.) This should give you first crack at the best reps in the market.

Pro tip: LinkedIn also lets you filter by location. Some senior sales reps are interested in moving back home to settle down or be closer to their family. With this in mind, add a filter for users with sales titles who went universities near your office and currently work in a major market like San Francisco or New York City. Reach out and ask if they’d consider a move. This approach makes it possible to hire top tier sales professionals who would otherwise be out of your range.

Step 3: Reach out

Now that you have a long list of potential candidates, it’s time to filter them down. A 15-minute screening call can tell you so much about a candidate -- but how can you get time with candidates not looking for a new gig? The sales manager (whether that’s you or someone else) should reach out directly on LinkedIn. Say that you always like meeting folks with excellent skilling skills. Candidates often get unpersonalized, generic messages from recruiters, so taking the time to customize yours will pay off. Your note should include a few specific reasons this person jumped out at you. Finally, make sure you’re selling the call -- not the role.

Here’s an example:

“Hey, I'm Sean, sales leader at Company X. We're a tech company of 40 that closed a venture financing round last year ($20M) and are actively growing the team on the sales/marketing front.

You jumped out at me as someone with solid business development skills who knows the software space well. I'd love to hear more about your role on the business development and account management side and where you see yourself long-term, as well as share what we're doing here.

Think we could get 15 min to connect this Thursday?”

Step 4: Do a phone screen

This is it: You are on the phone. Spend the first part of this call learning more about the candidate. What do they want their title and role to be in two years? What do they like about their current position? Do they fit with the needs of your team? Here are some simple questions you can use to gauge their selling skills:

1. “What was the last new skill or thing you learned?”

Their answer tells you what they’re interested and how quickly they pick up new knowledge and abilities. You’ll need them to learn your market and product quickly, so look for people who can easily think of the last skill they picked up as well as how they applied it.

2. "Your prospect picks up the phone but says they aren’t interested. What do you say?"

This question is designed to test resiliency. A good salesperson will tell you they’d probe further, e.g. “Why not? Why do you have in place today? Are there other competitive priorities that you’re working on?”

3. “Would you rather be on a team that hits their goals but you miss your quota, or make 120% while the team misses?”

The “right” answer to this depends on your culture and hiring needs. Maybe you’re looking for a die-hard team player -- or maybe you’re looking for a hungry rep who will always be striving to beat their personal record.

4. “Describe the last time you got competitive.”

Sales is a competitive career. You want people who are willing to put in the work and eager to win. Most high-performing sales professionals will have no trouble giving you a recent example.

These questions will help you stack rank your candidates based on competitiveness, resiliency, ability to learn quickly, and team skills.

During the second part of the call, sell the candidate on the role. Describe what makes this an exciting opportunity for them.

What is life like at your company? On your team?

Every sales team has a unique dynamic. Do you give your reps autonomy to run their own plays? Are you targeting a new market or creating a brand-new one? Does the product sell itself? Tailor the overview to the candidate. If they want to be an enterprise AE, don’t spend all your time talking about the mid-market opportunity.

This sourcing process is highly effective. It takes some time, however, so begin as soon as you decide you need salespeople -- ideally, before that point.

Remember, the best folks aren’t looking for work -- they’re usually too busy beating quota at good companies. It’s your job to show them they could be beating quota at a great company.

We live in an era of data democratization. Today, customers have access to more options, and better information than ever before. Through social media pages, business websites and online reviews, buyers are developing a complete understanding of market offerings, long before they ever decide to engage with sales team members at any particular company.

With a multitude of touchpoints now available to the average customer, the process of creating a sales-ready lead becomes all the more difficult. According to B2B research firm Bright Funnel, the time between lead generations to conversion increased by 32% over the course of 2014 alone.

Enter Lead Nurturing

Recognizing that traditional outbound marketing is no longer effective, many businesses have begun to pivot their marketing strategies away from cold-calling and mass mailing, towards focused inbound lead generation powered by strong digital content.
But while these techniques are certainly effective for capturing and stimulating the interest of your target audience, they will by no means guarantee a prospect that’s ready to move towards a purchasing decision. In fact, a Hubspot study reveals that a full 79% of these leads never translate into sales at all, with the primary reason being poor lead nurturing.
To turn these warm leads into red hot conversions, businesses need to focus their marketing strategies on building relationships with these customers. So that when it does come time for them to buy, your products are the first that come to mind. With a good lead generation strategy in place, your business could see up to 50% more sales coming in at a far lower cost.

Lead Nurturing Emails

In 2017, email still remains one of the most effective methods for creating and sustaining customer attention. Few other marketing techniques allow you to customize the timing, content, and audience of your content to such a minute degree. Additionally thanks to your lead generation efforts, your email lists will already be populated by a self-selected group of interested prospects.

Just because these individuals and businesses have opened their doors to your marketing doesn’t mean you can blanket their inboxes with a deluge of generic promotional material in the hopes of forcing a sale. Nor should you expect a few standalone emails to do the job. Proper lead nurturing requires a focused, coherent strategy that aligns with your audience’s needs.

Here are some tactics you should definitely look to employ.

Personalize

In recent years, article after article has revealed that savvy millennial buyers are in search of personalized experiences over products. Any email marketing campaign must take these preferences into account to create tailored content for each particular recipient.
Any good marketing automation platform should provide plenty of opportunities to craft this sort of personalized marketing:

• It can be used to adjust the greeting on the email in accordance with the name given by the recipient
• By integrating a submission form into the sign-up process, you can gain valuable insights from your customers. Answers to questions like: “why did you sign up” or “what are you looking for from a business,” can be used to develop relevant email campaigns that target the buyer’s needs. They can be used to develop email lists based on which URLs users click most often.
• They can be used to develop email lists based on how active users have been on your website recently
• They can be used to send confirmation emails for purchases and trial subscriptions.
• They can be used to notify customers about upcoming events in their area.

Educate

Lead nurturing isn’t necessarily about creating direct responses, it’s a long-term strategy that must involve a certain amount of give and take. By offering consistent value to the customer, you can provide them with a greater understanding of your products and services even as you teach them helpful new skills.

These educational emails might contain: blogs, industry news, breaking statistics, testimonials and product how-tos. As mentioned above, make sure to tailor the specific content you send out on the basis of the prospect’s identified interests. End these emails with a single, CTA that links them to a relevant page on your website.

Make It Current

A great way to create personalized content is by tagging your emails to real life events. Holidays, and sales days like Black Friday are an obvious example of this strategy. In each case create customized designs that fit the occasion based on the special event you decide to target. Additionally, if you have any relevant product that could be tied into these email campaigns then make sure to promote them throughout the content with clearly marked CTAs.

If you don’t want to tie your emails to traditional celebrations, then another great way to maintain relevance is by jumping aboard current pop culture, or breaking news stories. To successfully execute this strategy, you need to make sure that the trends you choose to capitalize on are relevant to your target audience, and ensure that the content you choose to include is still of value. Otherwise you might end up looking gimmicky and out of touch.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on the Gong.io blog here.

What makes your top-performing reps so good at selling?

Maybe you assume they’re just naturally talented. That the best salespeople are born, not made — which is great news for them, but not so good for your B and C players (or for you, unless you have a never-ending pipeline of A players to hire.)

Maybe you think every great rep has something different going for him or her. One is fantastic at building rapport, while another is a skilled negotiator.

Both of those theories are popular among sales managers. However, neither are true.

There’s only one thing dividing your rainmakers from their less successful peers: Their sales conversations.

We used A.I. to analyze more than 1 million sales calls, and here’s what we found the best reps doing again and again.

1. Dictate the rhythm

It’s common wisdom in the sales world to “mirror” your prospect — in other words, subtly imitate their way of speaking, tone, and body language to make yourself seem similar, and thus, more trustworthy.

Yet it turns out the most persuasive salespeople actually use the opposite approach. Rather than copying their prospects’ talking speed, they get their prospects to copy theirs. Top salespeople get customers to adjust their rate by 13% on average, all within the first three minutes of the call.

Average performers, on the other hand, adjust their speed by 7% to meet the prospect, while the prospect barely changes.

The same trend holds for “sentiment” patterns (i.e., how positive or negative someone’s language is.) Top reps don’t become more or less positive to match their prospect’s sentiment. On the contrary, their prospects become more or less positive to align with them.

2. Dictate the agenda

When reps discuss certain topics, it can have a big impact on their win rates. Especially when it comes to pricing, which is often one of the most loaded parts of the sales call.

It turns out star reps all tend to bring up price at the same time: in the 38-46-minute window.

This makes sense  – waiting until you’ve established the value of your solution usually leads to more favorable terms.

3. Powerful language

Not all words are created equal. There are seven words that we’ve found high-performing reps use on call after call.

These words include:

• Imagine: This jumpstarts the prospect’s imagination and increases their desire for the product
• Successful: Who doesn’t want to succeed at their job or in life? This term is incredibly compelling to potential buyers.
• The prospect’s name: Everyone loves the sound of their own name — it makes them feel important and respected.
• Decisive language: Words like “definitely,” “certainly,” and “we can do that” demonstrate confidence and make the salesperson seem more authoritative.

Risk-reversal language – or statements that put prospects at ease like “We offer a 30-day no obligation trial — also improve win rates by 32%.

4. Therapist-grade listening skills

The truth is, selling is far more about listening than talking. Top performers boast a 46:54 talk-to-listen ratio, meaning they speak less than 50% of the time.

Average performers, by contrast, talk 68% of the time. And low performers speak even more — a mind-numbing 72% of the conversation.

By letting customers speak up more, and not jumping in as soon as they pause, reps discover valuable information, forge stronger connections, and avoid rambling or talking themselves out of a deal.

5. “Coffee shop conversations”

No one likes feeling like a suspect in an FBI investigation. Especially when they’re trying to evaluate a B2B solution.

The data backs this up. Top salespeople engage in back-and-forth conversations rather than throwing question after question at their prospects.

When reps and customers frequently take turns speaking, the chances of a second meeting increase.

6. Set landmines early

This data point might seem counterintuitive. If the competition is discussed early in the sales process (think the first 1-2 stages), the deal is 49% likelier to close than if the competition never came up at all.

This is because you’re winning the competitive war early on – while the prospect is still forming their conclusions.

The opposite effect occurs if the competition comes up in the middle or end of the sales cycle: the odds of closing go down.

That’s why the best salespeople make it a point to ask “Who else are you considering” early on, so they can get ahead of their competitors.

7. Team selling

Lone wolves don’t prosper in sales.

Deals that contain just one sales call with multiple participants from the selling organization are 258% more likely to close than deals where the rep flew solo during the entire sales cycle.

In other words, team selling works.

For that reason, top-performing salespeople are in the habit of recruiting their CEO, sales manager, sales engineer, or other relevant stakeholder to join them on their sales calls.

After all, this tells the prospect the rep is “all in” — and also lets them deepen their understanding of the product and vendor.

8. Talk business

The reps at the top of the leaderboard spend more time talking about business- and value-related subjects than average performers. A lot more – to the tune of 52% more time.

Subjects in this category include ROI, the prospect’s pain points and business environment, timeline and objectives, implementation, and benefits (vs. features.)

They also spend 39% less time talking about technical topics and features.

9. Keep your demos focused

If your reps are getting a ton of questions during their demos, that’s a very good signal. Top performers get nearly one-third more questions from buyers during product demos than middle of the pack performers.

And these reps also ask 30% fewer questions of their buyers during demos. Why? They’re giving prospects just enough information to spark their curiosity. Just enough to provoke questions.

Then prospects ask questions about what they’re interested in…which nicely focuses the conversation and guarantees they’re engaged.

This technique lets the best reps keep their demo hyper-focused to the topics each buyer cares about.

But Wait, There’s More…In Our New eBook

Well, there you have it: 9 secret elements of highly effective sales conversations.

Each of these nine elements actually has multiple data points supporting it further that go beyond the scope of a single blog post.

We couldn’t include everything here.

So we packed all of that fascinating data into an ebook that you can download for FREE.

Get your free copy to see the rest of the data here:

The post 9 Secret Elements of Highly Effective Sales Conversations appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Here’s a great resource for new sales reps including a sales quota definition and detailed explanations about all things related to sales targets.

LeadFuze has a goal to kill the cold call by enabling sales reps, managers, and small business owners to close more deals. Part of this process is laying out certain sales terms. Today, we’ll be targeting the sales quota definition.

We hope it provides new and hopeful reps with a solid foundation for their goals and sales managers with a place to send their new team members for quick reference.

Let’s dive in.

What is a Sales Quota?

In the most basic explanation possible, we define sales quota as this:

A target number of either a.) deals closed, or b.) revenue earned within a certain time period. Typically, the time period is a month. Other time periods tabulated include quarterly and yearly.

Sales quotas and targets are used by employers to gauge performance of their team as well as forecast revenue for the business.

Methods of Setting Sales Quota

There are three main types of sales quotas with examples (further down) that we’ll cover quickly.

• Top Down: This quota starts at the top and filters its way down to the sales rep. Usually, these numbers are based on market share, competitor data, and other factors.
• Territorial Sales: Sales teams are asked to estimate their likely sales performance to tabulate revenue for a certain time period.
• Past Performance: A number that is based off of previous years’ revenue and momentum in growth.

Note: Many companies use a mix of two, or even all three, methods to come up with sales quotas.

This is all part of something called sales quota planning. Once this process is done, those numbers will be broken down into monthly, quarterly, and annual timeframes and doled out to individual reps and teams.

The Importance of Sales Quotas

It’s as critical to understand both the importance of sales quotas and the sales quota definition itself. The objectives of sales quotas are to motivate reps and forecast income.

Individually, quotas are great for estimating your commission, income, and performance. For managers, targets help determine who is making it on your team — and who’s not. Small business owners can calculate revenue and forecast growth.

How to Calculate Sales Quota (for Employers)

You take the amount of expected revenue you believe is possible for the year in question. Next, tabulate how many new customers/deals are necessary to hit this goal by finding out your average revenue per customer. Finally, divide the number of new clients needed into the 12 months and again by the number of sales reps on your team.

Voila! Your quotas are set.

Example Template

• Revenue Last Year: $750,000
• Sales: 1000

= $750/sale

• Target Revenue for Current Year: $900,000 (20% Increase)
• Target Sales: 1200
• Sales/Mo: 100
• Sales Reps: 5

Quota = 20 sales/month per rep

How to Calculate Sales Quota (for Reps)

For reps, you’ll need to make a different kind of calculation and we’ll help you out, too. It begins with the number you have been given (aka, your quota). But you won’t be forecasting sales or looking at revenue per client. As a result, your calculations are entirely different.

Let’s look.

Example

• Sales Quota: Close 5 deals each month

In order to make this number of deals, you’ll need to find out how many deals you currently close and the number of leads it took you to get those deals.

If you’re currently closing an average of 4 deals per month, one more is a 25% increase. So, you’ll need at least 25% more qualified leads to average your quota. Let’s take a closer look at the math to help really get a feel for it.

• Currently Average: 4 Deals/Mo
• New Quota: 5 Deals/Mo
• Current Number of Leads Prospected/Mo: 200
• Calculation: 200 (leads) X 1.25 (for the 25% increase) = 250 leads

Once you have the number of leads you need, it’s a matter of reaching out and getting a conversation with sales qualified prospects.

And that’s where our promised resources come into play.

3 Resources to Help You Hit Your Sales Quota

The primary purpose of this post is to give a sales quota definition. But I feel it’s necessary to give reps a springboard toward meeting their sales targets. You can do this in two ways:

1. Improve your sales skills — Closing a higher percentage of the leads you typically obtain.
2. Increase the number of leads — Closing the same percent, but increasing the number of pitches.

There you have it. The most detailed sales quota definition we could muster. If you know someone who has recently started (or thinking about starting) a sales career — we’d appreciate a share.

And if you’re an experienced rep, please leave your best tip in the comments!

Technology is equipping sales professionals with more capabilities to source leads, but with more choices comes confusion. At the same time, more decision makers are entering the picture further complicating the prospecting process. The result: creating a targeted prospecting strategy is becoming a major challenge for sales professionals today.

This trend was a key finding in our 2018 Selling Challenges Study which included survey responses from hundreds of sales professionals across industries.

In our latest brief, Creating a Targeted Prospecting Strategy, we look at specific ways sales professionals can develop routines that ensure the resources needed to pursue a lead are allocated wisely. We cover strategies like:

• Asking a specific sequence of questions to determine the qualifications of a lead
• Why sales professionals who prepare a “need benefit” statement get the customer’s attention
• What to do when a hard-earned prospect disengages
• What questions to ask when outlining best practices

Check out the brief and jump-start your sales prospecting strategy today.

The post Selling Challenges Brief: Creating a Targeted Prospecting Strategy appeared first on Welcome to the Richardson Sales Blog.

It was once dismissed as a ‘buzzword’ and a ‘fad’. Today, it’s one of the most viable marketing tactics for growing brands.

I’m talking about influencer marketing, of course.

Influencer marketing is when you use people with a large following on social media to promote a product. The influencer shares the product with his audience, bringing you both validation and exposure.

The demand for influencer marketing services continues to grow. This article will help you start an influencer marketing campaign for yourself, or to offer it to your clients.

What is Influencer Marketing

Have you ever scrolled through your Instagram feed and noticed a celebrity promoting a promote, often with the ‘#sponsored’ tag?

An example of a sponsored post – or influencer marketing – on NatGeo Travel’s Instagram feed

This is essentially an example of influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is when an ‘influencer’ – anyone with some social clout or influence – promotes a product to their audience. This is usually in exchange for a fixed fee or tangible gift (such as the product itself).

The goal of influencer marketing is twofold:

• Validate the product by getting a public endorsement from a trusted public figure.
• Get exposure by promoting the product in front of a large audience.

Thus, both the size of the influencer’s audience and his/her trustworthiness matter a lot in influencer marketing. You don’t simply want influencers who have a lot of followers; you want influencers whose advice is trusted by their followers as well.

Why Use Influencer Marketing?

You might be wondering: why even bother with influencer marketing – for yourself or for your clients?

Although the term itself is new (“influencer marketing” barely registers any searches until 2013 onwards), the practice of paying a celebrity to promote a product is old hat in marketing. Everyone from sports brands to cooking equipment manufacturers have used celebrity endorsements to get validation as well as exposure for their products.

George Foreman Grill is a great example of the power of celebrity endorsements, even if the celebrity himself has no relation to the product being sold (Image source)

With social media, the domain of ‘celebrityhood’ is open to anyone. If you have even a few thousand followers who listen to your advice, you are essentially an ‘influencer’. This means that you can pitch ideas, products, or services to these followers.

And it works too.

70% of millennials in a survey said that they are influenced by their peers on social media when making purchase decisions.

This phenomenon is spread across social channels. 34.4% of men in the survey referenced above turn to blog reviews for their purchase decisions. 19% of Facebook users and 18% of YouTube users use these platforms for making decisions as well.

On Twitter, people tend to trust influencers almost as much as their friends – 49% of users rely on influencers while 56% rely on friends.

There is a distinct age bias in influencer marketing. For teenage YouTube users, YouTube stars have substantially more influence than traditional celebrities.

You can gauge the effectiveness of influencer marketing by the fact that a majority of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2018.

The total influencer marketing market itself is valued in the billions on Instagram alone.

If your clients have an audience that skews younger, this should definitely be a tactic in your marketing mix.

In the next two sections, I’ll discuss how to start with influencer marketing, including important metrics, platforms, and channels. I’ll also discuss how to sell influencer marketing services to your clients.

Getting Started with Influencer Marketing

The influencer marketing process can be broadly broken down into four steps:

1. Identifying your goals
2. Finding influencers across channels
3. Selecting influencers based on your marketing goals
4. Pitching influencers and tracking results

I’ll briefly cover each of these steps below.

Identifying Your Goals

What channels and influencers you target will depend greatly on your goals. Want to drive product awareness among female millennial customers? Focus on Instagram influencers. Want leads for a B2B product? Target influencers on LinkedIn instead.

Briefly, identify the following for your campaign:

• Goals: What do you seek to accomplish with the campaign – increase awareness, drive traffic, get clicks, capture emails, etc.?
• Product category: B2B or B2C? What is the exact vertical – clothing, software, food & beverages?
• Target audience: Broadly, what is your typical customer like? Define the gender, age, education-level, and other demographics.
• Audience interests: What other brands, products or media outlets does your target customer like? A well-defined buyer persona comes in handy here.

You don’t have to have all this information right at the start – you’ll get a chance to define things further as you develop the campaign. At the very least, however, you should know what your campaign goals are.

Be specific when defining these goals. If possible, use exact numbers. Summarize the goal in a single sentence, something like “Drive 100,000 visitors to sales page” or “Get 500,000 views to YouTube video”.

This goal will impact your choice of influencers, channels, and tracking metrics.

Finding Influencers

Once you have a clear understanding of your own goals, you can start the marketing process by making an initial shortlist of influencers.

This can be a difficult process because of the expansive nature of influencer marketing. From YouTube to blogs, there are thousands of influencers spread across multiple channels, all with varying degrees of influence and following. The signal to noise ratio in this category is large as well; fake metrics and bot followers abound.

Thus, there are a few things you should know when finding influencers

Mega, Macro, and Micro-Influencers

Influencers are routinely categorized on the scale of their following as “mega”, “macro”, or “micro” influencers.

Mega-Influencers

These are influencers with a massive following, often in excess of 1M on large channels such as Instagram. You can think of them as celebrities in their own right. Most people who are active in their industry would recognize them by name.

With over 3M followers and over 200k likes on each update, Casey Niestat is a mega-influencer with a highly engaged audience

The scale of these mega-influencers social following means that you’ll get a lot of exposure from a single sponsored post. On the downside, the higher scale means poor engagement rates – anything beyond 2-5% is difficult to achieve.

Choose mega-influencers if you:

• Want exposure instead of engagement or clicks
• Have a large budget
• Want to work with a limited number of influencers

Macro-Influencers

These are influencers with a substantial following but who aren’t brands in their own right. On a popular channel such as Instagram, macro-influencers might have anything from 20,000 to 500,000 followers.

With nearly 100k followers, lifestyle blogger Allen Walker is a macro-influencer.

Macro-influencers typically offer a good mix of exposure and engagement. As they tilt towards the mega-influencer category, however, engagement rates typically go down.

Choose macro-influencers if you:

• Want a healthy balance between exposure and engagement.
• Want an ongoing relationship or ambassadorship
• Have a healthy budget

Micro-Influencers

As the name suggests, these are influencers with very limited following. On Instagram, anyone with 5,000 to 20,000 followers can be placed in this category. Up and coming bloggers, social media personalities, small and independent artists, etc. usually come under micro-influencers.

With 11.4k followers and nearly 300+ likes on each update, Anoushka Probyn is an example of a micro-influencer with an engaged audience.

Micro-influencers offer limited reach but usually have high engagement rates. They’re also more affordable and easier to work with.

Work with micro-influencers if you:

• Have a small budget
• Prioritize engagement over exposure
• Can work with a large number of influencers

Keep in mind that the above figures are illustrative only. They’ll change from social media channel to channel. As a channel becomes more popular, what defines a “micro” or a “mega” influencer will change as well.

Besides the above, you also have “giga” influencers. These are usually traditional celebrities with millions of followers. Think of your average Kardashians and Biebers.

Influencer Marketing Channels

YouTube, blogs, Instagram, Facebook – any platform where someone can build a following is open to influencer marketing. The easier the platform is to access, and the larger its user base, the bigger the scale of the influencer’s following.

There are a few things you should consider when selecting your target channel:

• Scale: A large user base means that the top influencers will have a lot of followers as well. A million followers is par for the course for a popular influencer on Instagram. But a blog with even 10,000 email subscribers has a lot of influence.
• Audience demographics: Consider the channel’s core audience demographics. Snapchat, for instance, attracts younger users. Facebook’s audience is slightly older. Pinterest, on the other hand, skews female.
• Content focus: Some channels are more popular for certain content categories than others. For example, if you want to find influencers in the gaming niche, you’ll want to focus on Twitch instead of Pinterest. If you want to promote videos, your target should be YouTube, not Twitter.
• Fragmentation: How fragmented is the influencer presence on the channel? A lot of small influencers, i.e. high fragmentation, can make it difficult to access the market easily. On the other hand, low fragmentation can give top influencers an upper hand in setting their rates.
• Data availability: Consider how much data does the channel make available to its users for tracking a campaign’s performance. Facebook, for instance, gives advertisers a lot of tools to track how an outgoing link is performing.
• Authenticity: Lastly, consider the authenticity of any influencer’s claimed metrics. Some channels are notorious for fake followers. This can muddy the reported metrics and lessen the impact of your influencer marketing campaign.

In some campaigns, your choice of channel will be clear. If you’re promoting a B2B whitepaper, for instance, you’ll want to focus on LinkedIn. If you’re promoting shoes, you’ll pick Instagram.

In other cases, study the type of content that dominates the channel and its demographics. In brief:

• Pinterest’s demographics skew female and older.
• Instagram’s user base skews slightly female with 59% in the 18-29 age group.
• Facebook has slightly more men than women worldwide, though it’s the opposite in the US.

Facebook’s audience is more male than female globally

• YouTube’s audience is decidedly more male than female (62% male vs. 38% female)
• SnapChat’s audience is younger (71% is under 34 years old) and skews heavily female.

Keep these in mind when selecting a channel for your influencer marketing campaign.

Where to Find Influencers

The final piece of the puzzle is to actually find influencers.

You can use one of two options:

Manual search

The cheapest way to find influencers is to search for them manually. You can do this by looking up a keyword or a hashtag on your target channel, then make a list of all relevant influencers you find.

For example, if you wanted to find food bloggers on Instagram, you might search for #foodblogger. Make a list of all influencers you find that fall into your defining criteria (in terms of followers).

Influencer marketing platforms

An alternative to time-intensive manual search is to use an influencer marketing platform. These are usually two-sided marketplaces that connect influencers with advertisers. Most are self-serve, though plenty also offer managed services to run your campaign.

Some popular platforms are NeoReach, RevFluence, FameBit, and TapInfluence.

FameBit is YouTube’s own influencer marketing platform

Besides the above, you can also use agencies that specialize in influencer marketing.

Once you’ve made your initial list of influencers, it’s time to drill further and select people who can help you reach your campaign goals.

Selecting Influencers

From your initial shortlist, you’ll have the much more difficult task of selecting a target list of influencers for the final campaign.

This selection process should take multiple factors into consideration, such as:

Follower engagement rate

One of the most important factors in deciding which influencers to target is their engagement rate or follower loyalty.

This is a measure of the average number of interactions on their content vs. their total followers, expressed as a percentage. So if an influencer with 10,000 followers gets 1,000 likes on average, his engagement rate would be 10%.

For example, Kim Kardashian has 102M followers on Instagram and gets about 2-3M likes per post. That’s an engagement rate of approx. 2.5% – par for the course for a mega influencer like her.

A stronger engagement rate indicates that the influencer’s followers are actively interacting with the content instead of passively consuming it. Usually, smaller influencers have more engaged followers since they’re following them for the content, not because of their celebrity status.

How you measure engagement rate will vary from channel to channel. On Instagram, you might use a Followers-to-Likes ratio. On YouTube, you might use Subscribers-to-Views.

Also, keep in mind the quality of the engagement metric. A comment requires far more effort from the follower than simply liking a picture. If you see two influencers with similar number of likes but one has a higher average comment count per post, choose him instead.

Content quality and brand alignment

If you want to build a brand that’s known for quality products, you have to associate it with influencers who create quality content.

This is a largely subjective criteria, but an important one, especially for consumer brands that rely on branding. You want to work with influencers who are known for creating content that reflects your brand’s values.

Evaluate the influencer’s body of work, especially any content they created for other campaigns in the past. Ask yourself: is this content high-quality? Does it have the same standards that my brand adheres too?

A few things you should consider:

• Whether the influencer ‘curates’ other people’s work or shares his/her own?
• Does the influencer interact with followers in the comments, especially on sponsored posts?
• Does the influencer write descriptive captions?
• What content format does the influencer regularly promote – videos, pictures, selfies, etc.?
• What content-type does the influencer share – personal pictures, product pictures, photography, etc.?
• Is there an overarching theme in all of the influencer’s content? Does it align with your brand’s values?

This can be a disqualifying factor for a lot of ‘spammy’ influencers that simply share others’ work or fake their followers.

Audience alignment

Lastly, consider whether the influencer’s audience aligns with yours.

This can be difficult to measure, especially if the influencer doesn’t share content on any particular theme or topic. It’s easy to figure out that a food blogger’s audience would be interested in food, but how do you know what a lifestyle blogger like Logan Paul’s audience cares about?

The solution is subjective analysis. Go through the influencer’s content and comments left by followers. Ask the following questions:

• Is the content designed to appeal to a certain demographic?
• Does the influencer regularly create content on a certain topic? Is this reflected in the influencer’s bio?
• Are the comments on the influencer’s content in your target language?
• Are the top 10 comments on any of the influencer’s content from people of your target demographic?

What sort of influencer you work with will depend on your campaign goals. If you want to drive clicks or traffic, work with an influencer who focuses on your niche.

If you want exposure and branding, work with someone who creates content that reflects your brand’s values (even if there is no niche alignment).

For example, Mercedes tapped into Casey Niestat, a prominent YouTube influencer, to create a video on the Mercedes CLA.

Niestat’s content has little to do with cars, but it aligns with Mercedes’ brand values.

Accessibility

The final consideration in your influencer selection process should be their accessibility. How easy is it to contact them? Do they have a public facing email address listed in their bio? A website or blog? What are their rates for advertising? Are they available on any influencer marketing platform?

This Instagram influencer clearly identifies her email, Snapchat username, YouTube username, and blog URL in her bio.

Consider the kind of feedback and data they’ll give you for each campaign. Will they share metrics for the sponsored post? Will they write their own caption or ask you to supply one?

Also, consider the kind of campaigns they’ll run. Do you get a dedicated hashtag and CTA? Will they reshare/retweet the campaign on multiple platforms? Do they clearly identify sponsored content as such (i.e. with a ‘sponsored’ disclaimer)?

Keep all these factors into account to select your target influencers.

Pitch Influencers and Track Results

Once you’ve selected your influencers, start pitching them your campaign ideas.

There are a few things you should keep in mind when you reach out to influencers:

• Personalize emails, especially for influencers you want to work with in the long-term.
• Show interest in the influencer’s work by mentioning something they’ve done recently
• Be transparent about your campaign goals and product capabilities
• Clearly identify what kind of results you seek from the campaign, and what kind of creatives you have to share
• Focus on developing a partnership instead of pitching it as a “chance”
• Lastly, be professional and courteous

Think of influencers as important journalists. Be polite and treat them as partners. A generic email blast or rude behavior will not only turn away influencers, but can also invite backlash in case the influencer complains to his audience.

Track influencer marketing campaign results

There are a number of approaches you can use to track results from your influencer marketing campaign:

1. Set up custom URLs for each influencer

The first step in the tracking process is to use custom URLs for each influencer. This will tell you how many clicks, sign-ups, sales, etc. can be attributed to the influencer.

The quickest way to do this is through a URL shortener like Bit.ly. For better results, however, I recommend using Google’s Campaign URL Builder. This will help you track results right inside Google Analytics.

2. Track reach

Besides specific campaign goals (sign-ups, sales, etc.), the two things you should track for every influencer marketing campaign are a) reach, and b) engagement.

To track reach, set up a separate spreadsheet with a list of all influencers and their follower count. Next, track the traffic (or impressions) from each influencer. Measure the ‘reach rate’ by calculating the traffic amount vs. follower count, like this:

This will tell you which of the influencers are successful in sending you traffic.

3. Track engagement

Besides reach, you should also track engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares, etc.

Again, compare these against the follower count of the influencer to track the effectiveness of the campaign. Add these metrics to the spreadsheet you create earlier – see the example below:

4. Campaign goals and cost metrics

Besides the above, you can also track any campaign goals (such as sign-ups, sales, etc.). It’s also a good idea to track cost per engagement or campaign goal.

For example, if it cost $100 for a single sponsored post for an influencer with 10,000 followers, and that post drove 1,000 likes, the cost per like is $0.10. If this post also drove 200 visitors, the cost per visitor would be $0.50.

If out of these 200 visitors, 2 people became paying customers with a lifetime value (CLTV) of $100, your $100 in ad spend had a 100% ROI.

All this data will help you evaluate the success of your influencer marketing campaign.

This is pretty much all you need to run your first influencer marketing campaign – for yourself or for your agency.

Have you ever tried influencer marketing? What were your results? Share them with us in the comments below!

In Pixar’s WALL-E, oversized humans recline on levitating barcaloungers and are dressed, primped, polished, and served, entirely by robots. Fiction? Maybe not, at least according to a wave of media coverage pointing to a dizzying array of service innovations on the horizon.

Look no further than the public debut of Amazon Go, the company’s first cashierless store. Digital imaging technology monitors which items shoppers select from shelves, and when a customer leaves the store, the person’s online account is automatically charged. Down the road in Santa Clara, California, room service robots are being designed that can navigate a hotel’s floor plan and interact digitally with its elevator and phone systems to deliver towels and beverages to guests. Various Silicon Valley startups have deployed robots that make pizzas, craft salads, and assemble artistic bistro sandwiches. In Boston, a robot works with labor nurses to schedule baby deliveries. Waiterless restaurants in China permit customers to order and pay through the WeChat app and feature robot servers that dispatch trays of food to the appropriate tables. In Japan, a robot named “Pepper,” that was conceived in part as a companion for the elderly, has honed its skills in a variety of service roles, ranging from retail assistant, to waiter, to Buddhist priest.

Managers using these forms of automation and others cite customer satisfaction benefits from increased convenience and customization, and from giving customers more control over their own experiences. They also tout cost savings — a tempting proposition against a backdrop of rising labor costs.

So is the levitating Barcalounger inevitable? Hardly.

For starters, the economics of service automation aren’t universally rosy. When a nationwide retail bank introduced online banking, customers who adopted it increased their total transaction volume and began visiting and calling the bank more, increasing costs and decreasing overall profitability. Similar dynamics can be observed in health care. Patients who adopted e-visits, for example, actually began showing up at the doctor’s office twice as often. One explanation for this pattern is that current technology is functionally limited, requiring people to seek out in-person help in addition to using automated services. But as innovation progresses, functional limitations are bound to fall by the wayside.

Another explanation is that humans are inherently social creatures who get emotional value from seeing and interacting with one another. Research shows that taking away the opportunity for this kind of connection can undermine service performance. In one study, my colleagues and I found that when banking customers used the ATM more and the teller less, their overall level of satisfaction with the bank went down.

We think this is because the deck is stacked against automation in several important ways:

1. Service can be emotional; technology cannot. When we’re anxious about whether a check will clear or why our migraine won’t go away, we become advice-seeking. Even if it has the answers and can read the tone of our voice, or the expression on our face, people find the idea that technology “feels” and “senses” to be unnerving, and when a technology is deployed for such a purpose, the results can be unsettling. For example, customers who call MetLife to settle a death-related insurance claim are treated to digital condolences, delivered through an IVR system:

ROBOT VOICE: “We at Met Life want to express our sincere condolences for your loss.”

Automating sympathy is certainly cheaper than having a human employee comfort the bereaved, but the tradeoff can come across as disingenuous and is unlikely to be sustainable. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the public reception to Pepper’s funeral offerings — which cost $350, relative to $2,200 for a human priest — has been tepid to date.

2. We still prefer having people help solve our problems. In many ways, the capacity and computational power of technology far outstrips our own. Google has become our go-to for answers to a broad range of queries; machine learning determines which ads are shown to us online, which fulfillment centers our Amazon orders are shipped from, and which movies are recommended to us by Netflix. And research shows that we’re perfectly happy engaging through digital channels to look up information. Nevertheless, when we’re looking for creative solutions to service problems, we still seek out other humans. If we get stuck, if there’s ambiguity in the information, or if we need help making a purchase decision, we still opt for a person.

3. Less work for employees often means more work for customers. Scanning and bagging our own groceries, while circumventing cumbersome (though not wholly unwarranted) fraud-prevention measures, is actually harder for us than having an employee help us who is trained to do the work. Advances in technology like Amazon Go make the customer’s role objectively easier, but automated solutions may also give us the impression that the company is expending less effort on our behalf, which can make us wonder what, exactly, we’re paying for.

But if you think smart companies will use less service automation in the future, you’re wrong. Businesses will continue to seek new ways to use technology to improve the quality and efficiency of service. Some will do better than others. Based on what we know so far, successful innovations are likely to:

1. Automate transactional interactions, while facilitating human connections. Grab-and-go shopping, or giving customers the option of hailing an Uber or Lyft, reporting a pothole, or ordering a pizza from a mobile device, improves service quality by making transactions easier and faster to accomplish. However, companies shouldn’t strand customers in a digital transaction. When they need help, an instantaneous connection to a gracious and well-informed human should be a short stroll, click, or tap away. Although the Amazon Go store does not have cashiers, it has plenty of helpful humans ready to lend support or expertise. Making the pivot to a person simple allows customers and companies alike to achieve the convenience and efficiency benefits of automated service, while ensuring the customer feels supported. If designed correctly, automated interactions should improve satisfaction and loyalty, not erode them.

2. Support employees without getting in their way. There are many opportunities to create technologies that support employees’ efforts to create value for customers. The trick is how to design these solutions so that they don’t undermine the human connection that people are uniquely equipped to make. Existing solutions don’t yet meet the mark, prompting leaders of one rapidly growing coffee chain to delay the introduction of an automated point of sale system, finding it undermined the connection they wanted to make with their customers. Breaking eye contact with a customer to review an order on a screen, or to hunt frantically for the right combination of order-entry keys, can be as distracting to an interaction as pulling out your iPhone at the dinner table. If properly designed, technology should help craft an environment that enables employees to excel comfortably, without stress or angst, while not hindering the interaction.

3. Enhance customer and employee engagement. Service can be more efficient and satisfying when customers and employees are visible to one another. Rather than increasing the gap between customers and employees, technology can be used to enhance the connection. For example, customers who order pizza from Domino’s can use Domino’s Pizza Tracker to “see” the work employees are doing for them as they’re doing it. Customers can also send pre-specified messages back to the employees who are doing the work to express their appreciation. It’s a win for both sides. 

4. Engage customers in ways that won’t make human service providers cringe. If an action would be seen as annoying when performed by a person, chances are it will be annoying when performed by technology. Applying this simple heuristic will help managers avoid a broad array of common-sense technological transgressions. A customer’s time is valuable, so don’t crush them with unsolicited texts and emails. Don’t unleash auto-dialers to solicit responses for unappealing offers and digital surveys. Don’t lead customers on with an endless phone tree if there’s a very low probability they’ll actually reach a person.

Remember: the devil’s in the details of service design, but the best uses of technology are likely to make customers and employees feel more, rather than less, valuable to your organization. They’re also likely to make the service feel more, rather than less human.

Optimizing Demand Generation Performance with Funnel Diagnostics

When I first arrived on the scene as a demand marketer over a dozen years ago, I did so armed with a spreadsheet model for the funnel I was going to fill with leads and pipeline opportunities. As spreadsheets go, it was sexy; and it played well both with my CEO and the board I had to report to every month. I could show the output from our marketing activities, and how those leads converted into pipeline and closed won business. It allowed me to calculate a return on our marketing investment.

But that sexy spreadsheet didn’t make me a better marketer.

Being a better marketer means taking a critical eye to the programs and tactics you run within the context of the audience you are attempting to attract, engage, qualify and convert, to diagnose performance and identify and prioritize improvements for that audience-specific marketing effort. When you have just one funnel, you’re aggregating output from all your programs, for all the products you sell to a potentially wide and varied audience. So, as a singular construct, “the” funnel is useful for directional analysis only, and has limited value as a diagnostic.

If you accept that argument, and adopt a mindset to expand use of the funnel beyond modeling and measurement, to diagnostics and optimization, a new world of opportunity will open to you. You can isolate multiple funnels by audience-offering pairings, form Tiger Teams (a diversified group of experts brought together for a single project, need, or event assigned to investigate, solve, build, or recommend possible solutions to unique situations or problems) that look across all marketing and sales activities related to that audience-offering pairing, and adopt processes to continuously diagnose performance and institute changes to optimize performance. In some months, that may focus resources at the top of the funnel, but in others you may determine the resources are better applied deeper in the funnel.

This data-driven Renaissance in marketing places a far greater emphasis on measuring and optimizing for impact, and it’s characterized by constant experimentation. To see how powerful this can be for the B2B marketer, let’s consider this through the lens of a tried-and-true marketing tactic: content syndication.

The Basics: Content-Centric Programs

Let me lay out the most common scenario for content syndication. A campaign manager sources a white paper or other content asset from the product marketing organization and devises a plan to maximize the number of downloads for that asset at the lowest possible cost per unit. The campaign manager posts the asset to the company website, and may run advertising to draw attention to it. She will contract with syndication networks to negotiate a low CPL by marketing it to a broad audience. Because the asset is educational and has broad business appeal, it drives a lot of registrations, which are immediately delivered as leads to the SDR or sales organization for follow-up without much in the way of analysis or prioritization. Success is determined by the number of people who registered for the content, and the cost per lead (though I would argue these hardly constitute ‘leads’). The campaign manager does almost nothing beyond lead delivery to analyze program performance. In my experience, this high volume tactical execution of content marketing through syndication networks does little more than build a database of pseudo-qualified individuals who may not even match the buyer personas of people likely to have a need for your product. The program itself is independent of any funnel diagnostic, and originates from the asset being promoted. Its run as an always-on program, in a “set it and forget it” mode that completely under-utilizes the channel. Findings published in NetLine’s ‘2017 State of Content Consumption and Demand Report for B2B Marketers’ report confirm this practice. According to that study, 98% of marketers oriented their 2016/2017 content syndication strategy to top-of-funnel (ToFu) programs, largely ignoring how to leverage syndication programs for middle-of-funnel (MoFu) and bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) initiatives.

More Advanced: Audience-Specific Programs

A more strategic utilization of content syndication taps into immediate feedback loops for ongoing experimentation. Under this scenario, the organizing principle for the syndication program is the audience-offering pairing, and the specific revenue or pipeline goals associated with that pairing. Multiple such programs are run in parallel, each with distinct goals tied to advancing buying progression based on the needs of each specific audience. Campaign managers executing programs in this way are constantly experimenting, and discovering new insights that factor into their ongoing optimization efforts. Answering one question often leads to new questions and hypotheses, and that mindset leads to broad experimentation.

In practice, this takes on many forms. I spoke to one digital marketer recently who shared how he is experimenting through content syndication.

“We had done some preliminary message testing on Facebook to see what messages resonated with the audience we wanted. Based on our research, we came up with four different titles for an asset we were refreshing with our new branding. Out of the four, two did markedly better than the others. Even more interesting, one of the top two performers did markedly better with the C-level audience, whereas the second one performed better with the operator-level audience. And that was fascinating. It’s the exact same paper.”

That insight then led into additional questions about the C-level audience, and a specific ‘Benefactor’ program targeted specifically to them. He analyzed performance data in pivot tables, discovered patterns, and used those insights to design increasingly specific and targeted programs for each audience.

It doesn’t stop there, though. I’ve seen another company take an equally compelling strategic approach to leveraging content syndication channels. They started by defining several buyer personas in their target audience, and then mapped content to each persona for each buying stage. Rather than syndicate all content at once, though, they activated that content based on a diagnostic of the audience-offering funnel. When the volume of qualified leads at the top of the funnel was below forecast, they promoted the education-stage content. When the volume of leads hit a threshold target, they put more spend into promoting consideration and purchase stage content for that audience, trading volume for influence later in the buying cycle. This data-driven approach allows them to adapt their syndication programs with the changing shape of each audience-offering funnel.

What’s Next? Integrated Programs that Flex with your Funnel

If you think about this progression, solely through the lens of content syndication, you start with a program that centers on promoting a content asset to maximize the number of registrations or downloads. That’s often the status quo, and not terribly innovative or impactful. The first advance is to define the programs more narrowly, through the lens of a specific audience-offering pairing, and to use syndication to continuously test content assets and define narrower segments to target. The second advance is to adjust each targeted program by the real-time needs dictated by an audience-offering funnel diagnostic. Look at how the governing principle changes in each progression: first, it’s all about the content asset. In the second, it’s all about matching the asset to the right audience-offering pairing. And in the third, its triggering the right program mix based on the real-time needs of a funnel diagnostic.

Each iteration in grounded in experiment-based learning, and leads to further optimization. Now apply that mindset across a broader set of marketing tactics, and you quickly begin to see how this could apply across the full marketing mix, and evolve into integrated marketing programs that flex and adapt with the changing needs of your sales organization. All driven by the funnel diagnostic you are using to evaluate performance for each audience-offering pairing. In essence, this becomes a data-driven approach to optimizing marketing and sales activities that will yield the best results across all levels of the funnel based on what is needed at any given time.

Happy anniversary, dear martech readers. Ten years ago, I started chiefmartec.com, with my first post in February 2008 announcing “a blog for marketing technologists.”

It was shortly followed by a riff on martec being analogous to marcom, which is why my brand is chiefmartec.com — without the “h” at the end — instead of chiefmartech.com. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t one of my better ideas. “Martec” never caught on; “martech” did.

But looking back over 10 years, I’m surprised and gratified by how well some of the other ideas that emerged on this blog have fared. So in celebration of our first decade together, I thought I’d revisit the top 10 ideas from the first 10 years of chiefmartec.com.

1. Marketing technologists.

IN SHORT: Marketing technologists are hybrid professionals who blend marketing and technical skills. They bridge the worlds of marketing and IT. They work in, or closely with, marketing teams to leverage technology to improve marketing performance and deliver remarkable customer experiences.

One of my first blog posts was: who is a chief marketing technologist? Over a couple of years, the idea was refined, and my first presentation at a conference on it was Rise of the Marketing Technologist in April 2010. (That presentation was also where the proto marketing technology landscape first appeared.)

I had a little nerdy fun along the way with, “You might be a marketing technologist if…” and a more serious debate about “shadow marketing” being worse than “shadow IT”.

By 2013, the term was increasingly popular. I started keynoting events with presentations such as The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the Marketing Matrix.

The next year, Harvard Business Review (!!) invited me to write a feature article for their July-August 2014 issue, The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist, which I co-authored with Laura McLellan of Gartner.

(Laura was the first mainstream analyst to champion marketing technologists. She also made the famous prediction in 2012 that marketing would outspend IT in technology by 2017.)

Today, there are currently 4,122 jobs posted for marketing technologists on LinkedIn. 1,918 on Indeed. 577 on Glassdoor. Auto-complete for “marketing technologist” on Google leads you to thousands and thousands of articles.

Marketing technologists are a real and growing profession. We documented their work in our martech and modern marketing organizations study last year, and we just completed a marketing technology and operations salary survey (results will be published early next month).

Championing this profession from its inception to its modern-day maturity has been the most rewarding part of my work for these 10 years. I am awe-struck by all the amazing and talented individuals who have taken these roles on their career path.

2. Marketing technology landscape.

IN SHORT: Since 2011, I’ve produced an almost yearly slide that attempts to map the global marketing technology landscape: every vendor I can find who sells software to marketers. There are now more than 5,000.

This is the most loved and hated content I’ve ever created. The first version, with only around 150 vendors, inspired by Terry Kawaja’s original adtech LUMAscape, was merely intended as empirical support for why marketing teams should hire marketing technologists.

But as it experienced near exponential growth, year over year, this graphic took on a life of its own. It’s been downloaded millions of times and featured in thousands of presentations and articles. Andy Raskin recently declared it Tech’s 2017 Slide of the Year.

For over 7 years, I’ve been debating this growth with people who claimed it wasn’t possible:

• 2012: Is marketing technology consolidating or diversifying? (Both.)
• 2014: What if 1,000+ marketing technology vendors was the new normal? (It is.)
• 2015: What are the system dynamics of 2,000+ marketing technology vendors? (Complex.)
• 2017: If marketing technology never consolidated, could that be a good thing? (Yes.)

A couple of the more colorful ones I remember: arguing why marketing software will never be like ERP (it won’t) and rebutting AdAge’s claim that martech is boring (seriously?).

And in case you’re wondering, we’re working on the 2018 edition of the landscape now. (That’s not the editorial we. As the scale of this project has grown, Anand Thaker generously teamed up with me to co-produce it.) I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I wouldn’t bet on a dramatic reversal of the trend line just yet.

3. Marketing tech stacks & The Stackies.

IN SHORT: Marketers take advantage of all this martech innovation to create powerful, best-of-breed marketing tech stacks. Since 2015, The Stackies has been an annual awards program to learn and celebrate how these stacks are conceived and managed.

In October 2014, I led a session with marketing technology executives from nine Fortune 500 companies, and I was surprised by how large — and growing! — their marketing technology stacks were. The next spring, moderating a panel at a marketing innovation conference, I was startled by how fiercely passionate marketers were becoming about their stacks.

So the following month, I started a “contest” — The Stackies — inviting marketers to send in a single slide that illustrates how they conceive of their marketing tech stack. I was thrilled with the 21 marketing stack slides we received and published them freely to the community.

In 2016, 41 marketing tech stacks were submitted. In 2017, a whopping 57 marketing stacks were shared — including ones from major companies such as Microsoft and Cisco:

We also did an interesting variant of the contest last fall focusing on companies’ “org stacks”, including this great org stack from Dun & Bradstreet.

Each year, as an added incentive to encourage people to participate, we donated money to charities such as Girls Who Code on behalf of the entrants. In conjunction with the MarTech conference, we’ve donated $19,767 through this program to date.

The Stackies 2018: Marketing Tech Stack Awards program is currently open for entries through April 6, 2018. For each entry, we’ll donate $100 to Girls in Tech, up to $10,000. Maybe you will consider participating? We’d love to learn how you think about your marketing stack.

4. Martec’s Law.

IN SHORT: Most of the challenges in marketing today — and business in general — are the result of a simple but devastating truth: technology changes exponentially; organizations change logarithmically.

Since the first year of this blog, I’ve been fascinated by the effects of exponentials in marketing. But in 2013, I realized that it was the juxtaposition of fast-changing technology set against slow-changing organizations that presented a kind of a universal dilemma which was underlying the difficulties marketers faced with rapidly evolving marketing technology.

(I coined it “Martec’s Law” in reference to that struggle in the context of the martech community — not to name it after my blog. Accidental faux pax.)

I do believe that Martec’s Law is the greatest management challenge of the 21st century. While there aren’t any silver bullets to resolve this dilemma, I have seen three strategies to manage the gap — at least, hopefully, better than your competitors:

1. Choose strategically which changes you embrace — you can’t do it all.
2. Seek strategic inflection points to reset your organizational baseline.
3. Become a more agile organization to accelerate your adaptation to change.

That third one is the perfect segue to…

5. Agile marketing.

IN SHORT: Agile management practices, organized around fast, iterative, feedback cycles — which originated in the field of software development — have been successfully adapted by marketers as agile marketing.

One of the advantages of being perched at the intersection of marketing and technology has been seeing the cross-pollination of ideas between these two disciplines. The most exciting to me has been the migration of agile software development to agile marketing, because it truly makes marketers more effective with technology.

I wasn’t the first person to suggest agile marketing, but I became one of its earliest champions, starting in March 2010 with a proposal for an agile marketing manifesto. Over the next several years, I wrote numerous articles and delivered dozens of presentations on the topic, such as:

• 2010: Champions of agile marketing
• 2012: Everything is marketing, everyone must be agile
• 2012: 10 key principles of agile marketing
• 2013: Agile marketing for a world of constant change
• 2013: “Brand debt” and a gap in the agile marketing manifesto
• 2013: Debunking 3 myths of agile marketing
• 2014: Agile marketing? That would never work here

In 2015, Wiley approached me about writing a book on agile marketing, which I was delighted to do. But I wanted to frame it in the context of a larger theme…

6. Hacking marketing (marketing = software).

IN SHORT: Modern marketing has more in common with the software profession than it does with classic marketing management. As surprising as that sounds, it’s the natural result of the world going digital. When you understand that, you can use it to your advantage.

In 2010, I had an epiphany. Marketers: you are the software you use. It was hyperbole, but with an underlying truth — everything digital is controlled by software.

“That may seem obvious, but the implications of this are huge. In a digital age, it’s through software that marketing sees and touches the world. Software is marketing’s interface to reality. Our choice of software changes what we can see. Our choice of software changes what we can do.”

Traditionally, most people looked at IT as an efficiency play. While that is an important benefit, the real power of technology in marketing is creative: using — and even authoring — software to deliver remarkable customer experiences.

We see this in the striking parallels between marketing automation and software engineering. And it’s why marketers should learn how to program. (I got a lot of blowback for claiming that most marketing automation is really experience design, but it’s true.)

These parallels inspired my first “short story” ebook in 2014, A NEW BRAND OF MARKETING: The 7 Meta-Trends of Modern Marketing as a Technology-Powered Discipline, which is free to download.

But I was able to delve into my thesis that “in a digital world, marketing is software” much more deeply with the book Wiley published, Hacking Marketing: Rethinking Marketing Management in a Software World, in 2016.

About half of the book is dedicated to agile marketing. But it also covers a range of other software-inspired ideas for better marketing, such as running innovation pipelines, platform thinking, pace layering, unlocking the talent of 10X marketers, and applying the hacker ethos to marketing management.

7. Marketing apps & interactive content.

IN SHORT: Software has empowered marketers to create interactive content at speed and scale, delivering greater utility to prospects and customers and achieving greater engagement and data insights to drive marketing performance.

The year before starting this blog, ion interactive, the company I co-founded and served as CTO, launched a business for post-click marketing software. You could say it was simply a fancy approach to landing pages and microsites.

But there was something more there: a new kind of creative capability for marketing. Where marketing previously lived at the intersection of messages and media, it now had a powerful third dimension in its repertoire — mechanisms.

In 2014, we reframed ion’s product as a SaaS platform for marketing apps (which would soon become known as “interactive content”). We made it easier for marketers to produce engaging quizzes, assessments, calculators, solution finders, and more bespoke interactive content. I argued that this was The 4th Wave of Content Marketing.

Interactive content began to spread quickly, from Twitter polls as interactive micro-content to front-page interactive content on The New York Times. And I had fun with a Star Wars-themed article on the subject, Interactive Content Can Save Content Marketing From The Dark Side.

A subsequent innovation we pioneered for a sell-side view of interactive content opened the door to a qualitatively new approach to sales and marketing alignment through digital dialogues.

Ultimately, the growth of interactive content and our lead in the field resulted in ScribbleLive acquiring ion interactive in September 2017. After which, I joined HubSpot as VP platform ecosystem. It was a busy year.

8. Vertical competition in digital channels.

IN SHORT: Vertical competition happens between firms within a channel, vying for influence, control, and share-of-the-pie. This is currently playing out in digital channels, where martech and adtech providers, Internet services like Facebook and Google, and client devices, apps, and connectivity are competing intensely with each other.

A marketing professor of mine at MIT Sloan, Duncan Simester, taught me about vertical competition in traditional channels. It was one of the best concepts I learned, and it let me recognize that software was the new channel middleman in marketing.

Last year, I was fascinated with my trip for 72 hours in Shanghai in a parallel martech universe, witnessing the effects of vertical competition at a massive scale. A few months later, I learned that Amazon and Google now lead two key martech categories, as vertical competition heats up in the Western world.

I believe that vertical competition is one of the five major disruptions to marketing today. And I recently published an update on the disruptive effects of vertical competition on marketing. Its conclusion: this is rewriting the rules of digital strategy.

9. Data as a marketing channel.

IN SHORT: Data as a marketing channel is when marketing publishes data — initially through the semantic web, but today through APIs — as a way to increase visibility, grow relationships, create new revenue, and build a brand.

When I started this blog, the “semantic web” was a thing: publishing and linking data as a machine-consumable layer below the human-consumable web. It stirred my curiosity: what would marketing look like in the semantic web? How would branding work?

Over time, the semantic web movement faded, but I continued to explore data web marketing and how it could help shape a new generation of the web. I catalogued the range of business models for data on the web. And I advocated for the potential of data as a new marketing channel.

Now, eight years later, the opportunities for marketing through data are finally coming to fruition through APIs & microservices (also see my 2018 update on the subject).

10. MarTech Conference & Martech Manifesto.

IN SHORT: The once separate disciplines of marketing, technology, and management have converged, and the most exciting innovations in business are happening at that intersection. The MarTech conference uniquely covers the best ideas in marketing technology management in a 3-day educational program held twice a year.

In 2014, in collaboration with Third Door Media, we launched the MarTech conference to bring together the community of marketing executives and marketing technologists who are shaping the future of the marketing profession. Hundreds of world-class speakers and thousands of forward-thinking attendees have participated.

We’ve framed our mission through The Grand View of Martech: A Martech Manifesto.

Marketing, technology, and management were silos of the past. Marketing technology management — martech — is the fabric of the future.

That grand view expresses our guiding vision for the MarTech conference. We seek to cross-pollinate the very best ideas and the latest innovations across marketing, technology, and management. More importantly, we strive to reveal the beautiful entanglements between them.

Here’s to another 10 years on the martech frontier

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, the MarTech conference is offering a one-time, special discount of 10% for the next 10 days on our upcoming event in San Jose, April 23-25. Use the code “chiefmartec10years” when registering for an all-access pass and/or workshops. But this code expires on March 1.

What will the next 10 years in martech bring? There’s only one prediction I’m certain of.

Thank you for reading. I hope to see you in April.

The post A Decade of Martech: The top 10 ideas from 10 years of chiefmartec.com appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

29 Professional Voicemail Greetings to Help You Record the Perfect One

I have a confession to make: I haven‘t recorded a new voicemail greeting in nearly a decade. Since then, I’ve (hopefully) become more articulate, poised, and self-assured. But if you heard my voicemail recording, you'd think I was still new to the work world, a little unsure of myself — and probably not an authority.

Obviously, I need to update it. And if you haven‘t changed your voicemail greeting in over a year, you’re likely in the same boat. It boosts your credibility, makes you seem more competent, and encourages the listener to keep in touch. A relatively unprofessional one — like mine, for instance — does the opposite: It encourages prospects, recruiters, and potential connections to run in the other direction.

In this post, I’ll share what makes a good voicemail greeting — and the best voicemail greeting scripts you can use.

Tip: If you’re not sure how to leave a good voicemail, check out the most effective voicemail script ever and how to end a voicemail that keeps the sales conversation open.

Table of Contents

• What is a good voicemail greeting?
• Work Voicemail Greetings
• Short Voicemail Greetings
• Business Voicemail Greetings
• Funny Voicemail Greetings
• Vacation Voicemail Greetings
• Holiday Voicemail Greetings
• Sales Voicemail Greetings

What to Say in a Voicemail Greeting

Here’s what you should say in a professional voicemail greeting:

• A greeting.
• Your name.
• Your company.
• A simple explanation for missing the call (e.g., you’re away from the phone or are on holiday).
• A rough estimate of when you’ll get back to the person.
• An alternative person to reach out to (if you’re out of office).
• An alternative mode of communication (if you prefer email or text).
• A call-to-action such as “Leave a message” or “Send me an email at me@example.com.”

That’s the simple structure of a voicemail greeting. Overall, your greeting should be professional, but the wording can vary depending on the situation. Check out a sample below.

 

Voicemail Greeting Sample

“Hello, you‘ve reached [name] at [company]. I’m unable to come to the phone right now. Leave your name and number, and I‘ll return your call as soon as I’m free. Thank you.”

Easy, right? And yet, why is it so hard?

I’ve got you covered. I’ve compiled some of the best voicemail greetings you can use for virtually any situation you’ll come across.

Work Voicemail Greetings

These work voicemail greetings are for the work phone that you and only you use. They’re highly effective because they help you establish a relationship straight from the voicemail. Or, they help you share an important update in a simple, straightforward way.

1. Sales Results Voicemail Example

“Hi, you’ve reached [your name] at [your company]. I’m unavailable right now — probably helping [type of company] get [X results, e.g., ‘double their leads in 60 days,’ ‘hire the best and brightest engineers,’ ‘convert 40% more customers‘]. Leave your name and number, and we’ll discuss how your company can see similar results.”

If you‘re a salesperson, you can continue your lead nurturing process via your voicemail. In this voicemail script, you have the option to include a brief description of what you help customers do so that your callers don’t forget your value proposition. And even if it‘s not a sales prospect, it can help wrong callers understand whether they’ve reached the right person.

What I like: This voicemail uses the company name and allows you to share a bit about your role. I appreciate that the caller can learn a little bit about you in just a few seconds.

2. Email Option Voicemail Example

“Hi, you’ve reached [name] at [company]. If you need a quick response, please shoot me an email at [insert email address], and I’ll be in touch by EOD tomorrow. If it’s not urgent, leave me a message with your name and number. Have a great day.”

Prefer to be contacted via email? Make that clear in your voice memo so that listeners reach out to you through your email instead. This particular voicemail script makes email even more desirable by implying that it's a faster mode of communication.

What I like: When I leave a voicemail, I may wonder when (or if) I’ll hear back. This voicemail gives a specific timeline for when the caller will hear back.

3. Alternative Contact Voicemail Message

“Hey, this is [your name]. If you’re calling for [X reason], please [contact so-and-so] or [go to our website, send me an email]. For all other inquiries, leave your name and a brief message, and I’ll call you back within [one, two, three] business day[s].”

Receiving constant calls on behalf of another person or for routine inquiries can be a huge time waster. With this voicemail script, you can provide alternatives to the caller, especially if you get calls for a common reason that you're not responsible for.

What I like: When I make a call, I want to make sure I’m reaching the right person. This voicemail offers an extra layer of assurance.

4. Parental Leave Voicemail Script

“Hello, you’ve reached [your name and title]. I’m currently out on parental leave until [date]. In the meantime, please direct all phone calls to [alternate contact name] at [phone number] and emails to [email address]. Thanks, and I‘ll see you in [month you’ll be back in the office].”

Ah, the joy of welcoming a new family member! If you’ve received parental leave, consider using a voicemail script like the one above, which directs callers to another point of contact. You don’t have to be so formal — feel free to customize it as much as you'd like to show your personality.

What I like: As a caller, I don’t want to interrupt your time with your bundle of joy! I want to know who to contact instead. This voicemail is transparent and gives your caller instructions on who to contact instead.

5. Resignation Voicemail Message

“Hello, [Person’s name] is chasing new adventures and is no longer with [Company name]. Please forward all future requests to [New or interim person’s name] at [phone number]. Thank you!”

You or someone at your now-former company can use the voicemail script above to direct callers to the best current contact. I like that it includes a friendly note that you're “chasing new adventures” — you can use a similar phrase to convey excitement at your new opportunity.

What I like: Why aren’t you getting back to me? Oh, you have another job? Congratulations! As a caller, I know exactly what’s going on and don’t feel abandoned.

Short Voicemail Greetings

Your clients don’t have a lot of time, and neither do you. Use the following short voicemail greetings to get to the point quickly and invite them to leave a message.

6. Short Sales Voicemail Greeting

“Hi, this is [your name]. I’m either on a call or away from my desk. Please leave your name, number, and a brief message, and I’ll get back to you. Thank you.”

This short voicemail script is particularly apt for salespeople who are often on calls. But you can use it if you‘re a higher-level employee who’s often in and out of meetings and if you often miss calls for that reason.

What I like: Short, simple, and to the point — this voicemail gets to the gist fast.

7. Short Voicemail Script with Requested Reason

"Hello, this is [your name] at [company]. Thanks for calling. Please leave your name, number, and the reason you’d like to chat, and I’ll get back to you ASAP."

If you'd like your voicemail entries to be a little more specific, you can request that the caller mention the reason for their call. This is a great way to ensure you know why (or even if you should) reach back out to them. You can also use this example as a personal voicemail greeting by removing the “at [company].”

What I like: This voicemail is short but still conveys a sense of urgency. I feel like my call is important and know that I’ll hear back.

8. Short Classic Voicemail Greeting for Landlines

“Hi, you’ve reached [your name]. I’m unable to come to the phone right now. Leave your name, number, and a short message, and I’ll be sure to call back.”

This classic voicemail message simply states that you couldn’t come to the phone in time to pick up the call — which is particularly useful for landlines, which you don’t carry on your person. (If you’re creating a voicemail greeting for your cell phone, this one wouldn’t quite work because you usually have your phone on you.)

What I like: If you appreciate brevity, this voicemail will do the trick. I like that it's simple and to the point.

9. Short Classic Voicemail Message for Cell Phones

"Hey, this is [your name]. Thanks for reaching out. I’m busy at the moment, but if you leave your name, number, and message, I’ll return your call.”

Another classic voicemail script, but this time, it’s more device-agnostic. All it says is that you’re busy at the moment and asks the caller for their contact information and their message. Simple and easy.

What I like: You can use this voicemail message on any device. You also ask for all of the essentials you’ll need to return a call.

Business Voicemail Greetings

Are you creating a voicemail greeting for your entire company or team? These business voicemail greetings will do the trick.

10. Front Office Voicemail Script

“Hello, you’ve reached [X company]. We can’t take your call right now, but please leave your name, contact information, and reason for reaching out, and one of our team members will be in touch within 24 hours.”

This simple voicemail message is a good fit for most businesses. Whether you’re a local shop or an enterprise company, this script will courteously take messages if one of your employees doesn’t pick up the phone.

What I like: As a caller, this voicemail lets me know I contacted the right person and gives me reassurance that I’ll hear back.

11. Customer Service Voicemail Script

“Hi, you’ve reached customer service at [company]. Unfortunately, we’re currently unavailable. But we want to help — so please leave your name and number, as well as your reason for calling, and someone will call back ASAP.”

If many customers are calling your customer service department, it’s possible you might miss a few calls. (This is especially likely if you don’t have a call center or call center software.) This voicemail script is ideal for catching the few customers who might miss your team.

What I like: This voicemail has a friendly tone and reinforces that my call is important. I still feel valued as a customer.

12. Business Hours Voicemail Message

“Hi, you’ve reached [company]. We’re available by phone from [hour] to [hour] [time zone] Monday through Friday [optional: and from hour to hour on the weekends]. You can also contact us by going to our website, [URL], and live-chatting or emailing us. If you’d like us to call you back, please leave your name and number after the tone.”

You can get ahead of frequently asked questions, such as those about your business hours and website, by including that information in your voicemail greeting, like in the example above. This script also provides an alternative mode of communication for your team.

What I like: As a caller, I know exactly when I should call back to get my issue resolved. I also know how I can get help if my issue is urgent during off hours. I’m empowered to take matters into my own hands if needed.

13. “For More Information” Voicemail Script

“Hello, you’ve reached [company]. If you’re looking for information on [X], please check out our [Facebook page, company website, etc.] If you want to know more about [Y], take a look at [Z page on our site, our YouTube channel, etc.] Still have more questions or just want to chat with our team? Leave your name and number, and we'll return your call straight away.”

Like the previous example, this voicemail greeting gives the listener several pieces of information that are often requested from your team. That not only saves you time but also makes for a more comfortable and seamless experience for your callers.

What I like: Looking for a quick way to plug your social channels? This allows you to do so over the phone!

14. Sales Team Voicemail Greeting

“Hello, you’ve reached the Sales Department at [Company name]. All of our representatives are currently helping clients [insert goal, such as achieve 40% growth through streamlining HR operations] and are unable to take your call. Please leave your name, company, and phone number, and we’ll give you a call back ASAP. Thank you!”

I love this sales team voicemail script for two reasons: It once again repeats the company's value proposition, and it implies the team is busy with other clients, signaling that the product is coveted.

What I like: This voicemail allows you to reinforce your company mission, showing people that you are dedicated to helping your clients.

15. Promise to Get Back Voicemail Greeting

“Hi! Irene from Spylix is this. Send me an email if you’re hoping for a quick response, and I’ll make sure to get back to you as soon as possible tomorrow. But don’t worry if it’s not very urgent! Please leave your name and phone number, and I’ll get in contact with you as soon as I can. I hope today is fantastic for you!”

Irene Graham, co-founder of Spylix, an online phone tracker for parents, loves this voicemail greeting that she’s set for herself.

What I like: As a caller, I like how specific this message is. I know exactly what I can do to hear back quickly and when I can expect to hear back over the phone.

Featured Resource: Free Voicemail Greeting Templates

Download free templates to leave a better voicemail greeting.

Funny Voicemail Greetings

A word of warning: These greetings will not do you any favors if you’re in the midst of a job hunt or work in a conservative industry. Always remember your target personas. If there’s a chance they won't appreciate your sense of humor, opt for a straightforward greeting instead.

16. James Bond Funny Voicemail Greeting

“This is Bond. James Bond. Okay, it’s really [your last name]. [Your first name] [your last name]. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m done helping M16 save the world — which will probably be tomorrow at the latest. Have a good day.”

This one is self-explanatory — adapt James Bond’s famous greeting for your own use, and you’ve got a charming voicemail message that will get at least a smile out of your caller.

Pro tip: When using a funny voicemail message, make sure the contents are authentic. If you’re a James Bond fan and have a great sense of humor, this voicemail may be a great fit for you.

17. Star Wars Funny Voicemail Script

“May the voicemail be with you! You’ve reached the Rebel Alliance at [Your Name]’s base. If you’ve spotted any suspicious droids, encountered pesky Sith lords, or just want to discuss the best techniques for wielding a lightsaber, please leave a message after the R2-D2 beep.”

Recommended for Millennials and Gen Xers, this voicemail script references one of the most beloved science fiction series of all time. Plus, you’re bound to get some interesting answers from your callers.

Pro tip: I advise using this voicemail message for your personal devices or if you work in a field where pop culture references abound. If this message doesn’t align with your organization, you’ll want to skip it.

18. Chicken-and-Egg Funny Voicemail Message

“Hello! You’ve gotten the voicemail of [your name]. Leave your name, contact info, and the answer to the eternal question, ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ Anyone who gets it right will receive a call back.”

This cute voicemail greeting asks a classic question for listeners to answer: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? You may not get satisfactory answers — or, alternatively, you may get a long and elaborate explanation. Stay prepared.

What I like: In my opinion, this voicemail message strikes the right balance. It’s funny but doesn’t rely on specific references. Anyone can understand the joke.

Vacation Voicemail Greetings

Out of town? Your callers should know. Let them know with the following vacation voicemail greetings.

19. Classic Vacation Voicemail Greeting

“Hi, you’ve reached [your name]. I’m away from [date] to [date]. If you need help with [X] before then, please contact [name] at [phone number]. Everyone else, please leave your name and number, and I’ll return your call when I return. Thanks, and have a great day.”

There’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple. This voicemail greeting template can be adjusted for any sort of professional — even if you’re in a more “casual” environment, such as a startup.

What I like: This voicemail is clear about when you’ll be out of the office. If I want to reach you specifically, I know when to call back.

20. Adventurous Vacation Voicemail Message

“Hello, you’ve reached [your name]. I’m currently [exploring Asia, hiking through the jungle in Costa Rica, hanging out on the beach in Bermuda] — or more likely, [recovering from extreme jet lag, googling ‘Are red spiders poisonous,’ or looking for SPF 150 sunscreen] and won’t be back in the office until [date]. Leave your contact info and reason for calling, and I'll get in touch then.”

If you’d like to inject a bit of humor into your vacation voicemail message, you can customize the example above for that purpose. Share your adventures with the listener, and be sure to include your return date.

What I like: This voicemail message is friendly. I can get a little sense of your personality and where you like to travel, helping us build a better connection.

21. Short Vacation Voicemail Script

“Hey there, this is [your name] from [your company]. I’m out of the office until [date]. In the meantime, please direct your inquiries to [coworker’s name] at [email address]. They can also be reached at [phone number]. Thank you.”

This vacation voicemail message hits all the right notes: It introduces you, states your vacation dates, and provides an alternate point of contact (with two ways of reaching out!). Simple, easy, and polite.

What I like: This message is short and provides a second person to contact. If you get calls from people you don’t have a relationship with, this voicemail message works well.

Holiday Voicemail Greetings

No one should be calling during the holidays, and yet some people do. When you’re out for the holidays, create a voicemail greeting that communicates the cheerfulness of the season while still staying professional.

22. Office-Wide Holiday Voicemail Script

“Hello, you’ve reached [your name, the office of X company]. The team is currently out of the office, but we’ll be back on [date] stuffed with good food and eager to speak with you. Leave your name, number, and — if you're so inclined — your favorite [holiday dish, Thanksgiving tradition, etc.]”

This friendly office-wide voicemail script not only informs your listeners when you plan to return but also includes space for a holiday-specific prompt. A voicemail greeting can feel impersonal, but this one fosters some connection.

What I like: There’s a chance for your caller to share a bit of their personality and spread some holiday cheer.

23. Personal Holiday Voicemail Greeting

“Hi, you’ve reached [your name, the office of X company]. We’re closed until [date]. Please leave your name and phone number, and someone will return your call ASAP. Have a great [New Yea's, Fourth of July, etc.].”

Want to keep it brief? This individual voicemail greening can be used either by the front desk representative at your company or for your work phone.

What I like: This personal message shows both that your company is out of the office and that you’re away from your desk. I especially like the sign-off, which wishes the listener a happy holiday.

24. Emergency Contact Voicemail Message

“Happy holidays! [I’m/the team at X company is] away until [date]. We’ll make sure to call you back straight away when we return. If your request is urgent, email [emergency contact] at [email address]. Thanks, and have a wonderful day.”

Sometimes, you might want to provide a contact for callers to reach out to in case of an emergency. This voicemail script includes space to do just that and is courteous and friendly, too.

What I like: Emergencies can happen at any time. This voicemail acknowledges that urgency and provides a way for the caller to get the help they need.

25. Simple Holiday Voicemail Greeting

“Thank you for calling [company]. We’re closed for [holiday] from [date] until [date]. Please leave your message, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a happy holiday season!”

Want to keep it simple? This voicemail greeting script thanks the caller, informs them when the office will be closed, and wishes the listener a happy holiday. Can’t get much simpler than that.

What I like: This message is not tied to any specific holiday. You can easily adapt it to say “winter break,” so it’s inclusive of everyone.

26. One-Day Holiday Voicemail Message

“Hello! Thanks for reaching out to [company]. We’re closed today for the holiday and will reopen tomorrow. If you leave your name, number, and a brief message, we’ll give you a call when we're back in the office. Thanks again, and have a great day.”

Is your entire company or team taking a single day off for a holiday? This voicemail greeting script is perfect for one-offs such as Fourth of July, Memorial Day, or MLK Day.

What I like: You can use one voicemail for whatever holiday that you have on the docket, making the process simple.

Sales Voicemail Greetings

Leaving a voicemail to a lead? These greetings from experts might come in handy.

27. Timely Launch Voicemail Greeting

“Hey [Name], I saw an ad for your product launch coming up, and if you’re launching a new product, our studio can help you create an amazing video for it. This will grab the audience’s attention, and you’ll get at least a 20% jump in qualified leads after launching it.”

Andrew Cussens, owner of FilmFolk, a video and photography services agency, always tailors his message to the client’s particular needs for that project. He left the voicemail above for someone from a company that wanted a promotional video.

“Following this approach consistently has led to our voicemail follow-up percentage skyrocketing by 42%.”

What I like: This voicemail shows that you keep track of what your prospects are working on. This offers a personal touch that shows you’re invested.

28. Results-Oriented Voicemail

“Hey [Name], it’s Laviet here at TP-Link. I wanted to let you know how our new range can increase your network performance by 30%. Let’s talk more.”

Laviet Joaquin, marketing head for TP-Link, suggests keeping the voicemail short and full of value.

“These voicemails are successful because they respect the recipient’s time while giving them a good reason to contact them again. Every message is personalized to make the recipient feel at the top of the priority list, essential for building a good first impression.”

What I like: Using specific metrics shows that your team has a goal for its clients. As a user, I’m interested to hear how you plan to achieve those results.

29. Pain Point-Oriented Voicemail Greeting

“Hi [prospect’s name], this is [my name] from VEM Tools. I recently came across [their pain point and or challenge] that many businesses in your industry face. I have a one-in-a-million solution that could potentially [key benefit]. I will follow up in a few days, but feel free to call me back if you would like to discuss further.”

David Reid, sales director at VEM Tooling, highlights a relevant pain point and offers a solution in the same voicemail.

What I like: A pain point is quickly acknowledged in this brief message. As a prospect, I know the business cares about my specific needs.

Create a Professional Voicemail Greeting that Keeps the Conversation Going

Creating a voicemail greeting might not be fun, but with the scripts I’ve shared, you should have an easier time. No need to practice time and time again — simply plug in your name, company title, and other details, then read it out loud to your phone’s voicemail greeting recorder. With a professional greeting, you’ll continue nurturing prospects even if you don’t pick up the phone.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

 

Everybody wants a deal. Especially your prospects. And while you probably think giving 10% or 20% off isn’t a big deal, giving discounts just to win business can cost you more than money. It can kill your company.

Sure, you probably think I’m being dramatic. You’ve been giving discounts for ages and your revenue and customers are still growing. Right?  

The problem is, when your company culture is a discount culture you might win a few battles, but you’ve already lost the war.  

SaaS companies today don’t win on being cheap. They win on being valuable.

Let’s start off with the obvious: The SaaS landscape today is more crowded and competitive than ever. You know that when a prospect is talking to you, they’re also talking to your competition. And somewhere in the negotiation, that prospect is going to ask you for a discount.

And so you think “If this customer is willing to offer their solution at that price, I can too, or even a little lower. Just to win the business.” The problem is, once you start down this path, it’s almost impossible to get off it.

You’ve positioned your company as being the cheapest solution, rather than the most valuable.

Want to get better at handling discount requests and other objections? Get our free objection management template!

When you offer discounts, that’s all people think about your company. We’ve seen this exact situation happen in the consumer goods space. The market gets so crowded and undifferentiated that customers will only pick either the cheapest option or the brand they know and trust.

In SaaS, the only way to win on price is to be free. And you can’t build a company like that.

Instead, I truly believe the winning SaaS companies of today and tomorrow will win on value and they’ll win on brand. And you can’t have either if you’re just trying to be the cheapest.      

Discount culture creates a weak sales force (and a weak brand)

When you give discounts, you’re setting the wrong example for your team. Instead of going out and selling on your solution’s value and your brand, your salespeople will become transactional. They’ll just give the prospect information and then offer them whatever they want.

Worse than that, your sales team will start offering discounts without even being asked! I’ve seen this happen so many times at SaaS companies and it drives me crazy.

A sales rep is talking to a prospect, they qualify them, there's a match, they can really deliver value. And when the prospect asks about pricing, the sales rep preemptively goes: "Well, this is our price. But I would give you a good discount.”

Wait a minute. Nobody asked about a discount!

This is a weak sales culture. Your sales reps will always use the easiest tools available, and when they see discounts being given they’ll start to abuse them. They’ll start to think: "Everybody thinks everything is too expensive. Every buyer wants the cheapest, so before they ask, let me just tell them I'm going to give them a discount."

All of a sudden one of the most vocal voices of your brand—your salespeople—are weak. They’re cheap. And that’s going to reflect on your brand at the end of the day.

You can’t scale because you don’t know what a customer’s actually worth

The other huge issue with discounts is that they make your business completely unpredictable and unscalable.

Instead of a Basic, Pro, and Business plan where you know how much revenue you make for each, you’ve got Customer A with a 12% discount, Customer B with 14%, and Customer C with 2 free user accounts. Good luck trying to build models or forecast your future revenue or even figure out what’s going on with churn.

Those discounts are going to undermine your entire financial structure because you don’t know what a customer’s actually worth. If they remove or add seats, you have no idea what that means in true revenue or churn.

It’s going to cause problems for your support team, your success team, and your marketing team. Even your product people are going to get angry because they’ll have to build all these backend solutions to keep track of billing on all your different discount cases.  

You’ll piss off your customers when they find out you’re charging them more than others

Let’s say a slightly larger company aggressively negotiates a big discount. A few months later, a smaller company comes are your sales rep says “this is the best discount we can give. I can’t go any lower.” I guarantee at some point your customers are going to talk to each other. And when they do, the second customer is going to be pissed.

And rightfully so. You lied to them. You betrayed them. And they have every right to get loud and aggressive and drag your brand through the dirt and tell everyone they know about how terrible you are.

This doesn’t mean you can’t give discounts. You just have to do them right.

If you’re just giving our discounts willy nilly, you’re going to get burned. You’re going to destroy your brand, piss off your customers, and create more headaches than that little bit of extra business is worth.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t give out any discounts. You just have to make sure when you do, you do these two things.

First, make sure you’re getting something in return

The problem with discounts is they create abusive customer relationships. Your customer comes in, demands a bunch of things, and you give it to them just for a bit of business. Instead, you need to ask for something in return. This creates a healthy, reciprocal relationship.

In SaaS, that means asking for:

1. Prepayment: When a customer agrees to sign a long-term contract or prepays for an entire year, you can absolutely give them a discount. You get guaranteed income and predictable cashflow and they get a break on the monthly price. We offer customers of our inside sales CRM a 10% discount if they pay annually instead of monthly.   
2. Case Studies: Trading a bit of a discount for marketing materials is also a good deal. Feel free to offer a discount if a customer is willing to spend a few hours on the phone with your sales team to make a great case study and do some co-promotion.  
3. Referrals and reviews: You can also offer discounts for connections and leads. Ask for a positive review on a specific platform or give discounts if they connect you with other people in the industry who could be strong prospects.

Second, make sure your discounts are standardized

If you are giving out discounts, you can’t have any flexibility or offer customization. Your sales reps can’t just give them out however they want. You need to have set, predetermined discounts for each of the deals you’re offering.

For example, you could offer 10% for a case study, 15% for prepayment, and 20% for a referral that leads to a new customer. That’s it. There’s no 12% or free seats on offer.

But Steli, what do I do if a customer says they're not going to buy if I don't give them a bigger discount than I want to?

There’s always going to be someone who wants more. But you have to draw a line in the sand.

If they’re not willing to work with you, they’re most likely not your ideal customer. At Close.io, we’ve told thousands of businesses “No” when they asked for bigger discounts.

And you know what’s funny? They all get angry. They all scream and yell and tell you there’s no way in Hell they’re going to buy from you at that price. But in my experience, about 50% of the time, they become customers anyways.

It’s just the way they negotiate. They’re trying to get the best deal for their business and you have to respect that. If you have a strong brand and can show the value you provide, there’s a very good chance they’ll choose you anyways.

Of course, there’s one big exception to all of this: Enterprise

As you can tell, I’m sick of seeing discount culture in SaaS companies. But there is one big exception.

If you’re selling to enterprise clients, the way you handle discounts is going to be completely different. You can’t just give them a price and say “this is what it is,” because that’s just not how they work.

Most enterprise companies have a procurement department whose entire job is to get discounts. They have a discount quota to meet, and if you won’t play ball, they’re not even going to consider you.

That’s just the way their organization is built and you’re going to have to go with it if those are your ideal customers.

If you’re trying to win with discounts, you’ve already lost

If you don’t value your solution, your customers won’t either.

So, if you feel like you absolutely have to offer some sort of discount, make sure:

1. They’re standardized (and don’t budge!)
2. You’re getting something equally as valuable in return

Sell your prospects on value first and make the discount an added bonus. Not only will this give you a stronger brand, but it will set you down the right path for real, sustainable growth.

Want to learn more about handling discount requests and pricing objections? Get our free objection management document!

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Content marketing goes through numerous changes, but the biggest shifts occur when technology changes too. Think about voice search (which is going from strength to strength) and you’ll understand that these major shifts are exciting and obviously pointing the way forward.

What brands (and your clients) probably aren’t completely aware of is the potential of tools and platforms like Alexa. In an interesting (or weird, depends on how you look at it) way, Alexa is showing us two things.

Firstly, it’s showing us a brand new platform for content marketing, pure and simple. Secondly, it’s presenting a vision of the future, where even the objects in our homes can deliver high-quality content.

The Alexa Skill Phenomenon

Brands can now enable Alexa skills that allow users to access information, and carry out tasks, using their voice. When paired up with smart home technology (such as a smart security system), users can put into place a set of routines that are controlled by Alexa.

For example, the user can say ‘Alexa’ and then ask it to talk to other devices. That device could be the home security system or it could be the lighting. A number of routines can be in place.

The key area for content marketing purposes is the question and answer dynamic. Here, users (like they would with SIRI) ask a question and Alexa provides an answer. So weather reports can be brought up by Alexa. So can the news.

It’s when brands tap into the ability to find answers to questions they have some expertise in that Alexa really shows how content marketing can be a real possibility. In essence, it’s like searching using Google, or it should be, as Alexa and brands (or content providers) grow together.

How brands are using it

There’s a great example of how brands can use Alexa to amplify their voice and also provide content through the Ask Stubb skill. Stubb’s is a brand that creates barbecue sauce and it’s also a long-established brand in the USA. When users ask Alexa to ‘ask Stubb’ they receive a perfect piece of content marketing that really transforms the usage.

Here’s a short video that explains how it all works. We like this particular Alexa skill because it most closely mirrors the content marketing concept. Ask for advice and help and you get it from the expert, in other words. What’s really good about it though is the inclusion of Stubb’s voice. At first, it feels a little gimmicky but then you realise that this is the authority users want.

Putting Alexa and a brand together like this nearly hits the spot. As part of the first tentative steps the concept is taking, it provides the essence of content marketing (authority on demand) while also adding extra consumer trust by authenticating it with Stubb’s voice. Of course, it’s completely artificial and it depends on artificial constructs, but it works because it helps the users, and also reassures too.

Purina makes pet food, among a lot of other things, but they’re also a brand that has jumped on Alexa quickly. Pulling together a set of tips and pieces of insightful content around dogs and breeds of dogs in general, the Ask Purina skill is again close to what content marketing is all about.

The basic concept is an extension of a site, basically, or a section of a site. Users ask Purina about dog breeds and the best breed for their lifestyle. For example, an apartment owner may ask which breed is best suited to the smaller living space. And a family may ask which breed is best with children.

Ask Purina comes back with the answers. It’s not perfect, in that it doesn’t do much more than a web page can do, but it does illustrate the future role of content. By choosing to have a skill based around its expertise (like Stubbs), Purina is showing how the future could look.

So where are we headed? Are we looking at multiple devices being controlled by Alexa? Yes, that’s on the cards, and has been for some time. But the really exciting part is the possibility of asking devices for specific content that will help a user, and that’s where brands find the gap that needs filling.

How brands can work with Alexa and other emerging tech

Of course, Alexa isn’t the only player in the game. Siri and Cortana are both well-established. However, Alexa seems to be making a huge difference in the home. If brands want to master the voice assistant, they have to consider a few factors:

● That brand voice that you’ve been cultivating and strengthening for your clients has to be to the fore in voice assistant content. If you’re going to try and make an impact on users, it’s almost like going back to the days of radio advertising. No images are available, so your client’s content has to be perfect for audio. Music, and real human voices that sound helpful as well as authoritative are what is needed

● Search is moving towards voice and that means more conversational content needs creating. Think about what your audience will say, and how they will say it. And also how the brand will ‘talk’ to them

● The human brain has an issue with voice as well. At first glance, it seems a little terrifying. Humans can’t remember what they hear as well as they can what they see. So build on branded music, language and repetition of key points

It’s all new, but we can bet that every brand, as technology becomes even more orientated towards voice technology, will find itself having to work with that new technology. If your clients aren’t ready, you may want to start preparing now.

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When it comes to setting goals for your business, marketing with social media might fall low on the totem pole. Yet, marketing through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media avenues can help you connect with your audience and ultimately lead to a measurable return on your investment.

1 Use Social Media to Connect

Today more than ever business moves at a fast pace. Where communication between clients and customers might have taken place over a period of days, we now see messages rapidly exchanged within minutes and hours. News and updates also seem to travel at a seemingly new speed – an accelerated speed of life where a single day can bring greater challenges and opportunities than your business once witnessed over days and weeks. With this speed of life in mind, a company must daily evaluate their strategies and ask themselves, ‘how is our brand relevant on this day?’ Often times the answer comes from social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like are powerful tools that help you instantly connect your brand in infinite ways, from relating to global trends to speaking with customers (individually and as a whole).

2 Inspire Through Social Media

Yes, engaging in your company’s brand each day is critical, but there’s more to social media than being a timely communication tool. Over the course of days and weeks your Facebook and other profiles begin to tell a story that extends beyond the limited day and reaches across time to reveal the true value. It’s a tale of your company’s ups and downs, significant goals reached and still more on the horizon. Social media becomes a published testimony of your company’s brand and goals; the best part being that it’s ready and waiting for new customers to read through at all times! The result is a powerful way to inspire your users and clients while simultaneously inviting them to join the branding story.

3 Measurable Growth via Social Media

Incredibly, the fruit of your social media efforts is measurable. When you actively engage your brand on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram you will be able to analyze which content spoke to your audience. This translates into powerful market research that can help guide future content and goal setting. Remarkably, your company will also be able to evaluate its growth in terms of social media followers gained in relation to product and services sold. Did a thousand more people like your last campaign? Or, better yet, was that content shared via social media? If the answer is yes, then you’ll have achieved the ultimate prize.

Connecting, inspiring your existing customers and clients, and measuring results is key to remain relevant, but when those efforts are shared they generate free advertising and future leads to drive your business into tomorrow.

LONDON — Calculating national misery is a tricky business, but Bloomberg had a shot.

Its annual "Misery Index" combines countries' 2018 inflation and unemployment outlooks. It is based on the widely-held notion that countries with low employment and low inflation generally indicate a happy population, and vice versa.

While the global picture is generally positive, with 3.7% year-on-year growth forecast for the world in 2018, some countries are blighted by runaway inflation and growing unemployment.

So which combine the poorest unemployment and inflation prospects to rank as the most miserable in the world?

The scores below are based on annual averages of monthly or quartely data for 2017 and forecasts for 2018 from Bloomberg surveys, with an average inflation and unemployment rate for each country added together to form a single figure.

9. Brazil

Misery value: 15.8

2017 misery value: 16.3

Brazil suffers from high unemployment and inflation lies above 4%, but the picture is improving. Its jobless rate fell consistently in 2017 and ended the year at 11.8%, a 14-month low.

8. Spain

Misery value: 17.3

2017 misery value: 19.2

Spain has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the European Union, and continues to suffer the effects of 2008's global financial crash. Its prospects are improving: the jobless rate fell in 2017 from a year earlier, and economic growth continued to outstrip the European average despite political unrest in the northern region of Catalonia (pictured).

 

7. Ukraine

Misery value: 17.8

2017 misery value: 23.8

Ukraine remains ravaged by a war against Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country, as well as an AIDS epidemic, and high levels of unemployment. Its jobless rate was 9.5% in December, while inflation sat at 1.5%. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Today, I want to talk to you about a process that we’ve been using with our clients that is helping them close more deals. We’re using a buyers map to help unstick opportunities that are stuck in their pipelines. So, what …
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This is the year your email marketing strategies go from basic to killer. By leveling up your tactics, you can enjoy soaring engagement rates and truly connect with your audience using email.

In 2018, you can set goals to improve response rates, brand awareness, and revenue by using advanced email marketing techniques that connect with subscribers on a more personal level.

To help you get the best results possible, here are four email marketing tactics worth mastering this year.

1. Build customer personas through advanced tracking

To send emails that customers can’t ignore, you have to know your customers. That means going beyond what products they like to buy from you. You want to know everything you can about your audience. From their weekend hobbies, to work problems, the more specific information you know the more tailored your campaigns can be.

Data collection can’t be ignored in 2018. This year, your goal should be to collect and use data from your website, mobile apps, booking systems, and ecommerce platforms to compile comprehensive customer personas. This will help you understand each segment of your audience.

Here’s a look at a customer persona. Note how much detail this persona provides.

2. Upgrade segmentation to include behavioral triggers

Most marketers are segmenting their emails. Why? It’s because segmentation get results. In fact, 58% of revenue comes from segmented, targeted emails.

But, segmenting your list by demographic information (gender, location, age) is only a start. This year, step up your game and start segmenting your list by behaviors.

Using your personas, you can create emails that offer tailored message to each niche. Take the email below from Flight Centre, for example.

This email was sent to a small segment of subscribers who are interested in affordable Caribbean vacations. The link suggests air and hotel options, not cruises or bed and breakfasts because Flight Centre knows what this subscriber is interested in.

What if a customer’s interests change? With Campaign Monitor, segments are dynamic so subscribers can move in and out of lists based on their activities. That means you’re not constantly mining your analytics for trends and manually moving contacts. It’s all done for you.

3. Send emails based on a subscriber’s actions

To further tailor emails, keep track of how subscribers interact with your brand. What have they purchased in the past? How frequently are they buying? Are they browsing your site for a specific kind of product?

Use a subscriber’s actions to steer your email marketing campaigns. Here’s a look at emails you can send based on how a subscriber interacts with your brand:

Product recommendations

Customers love recommendations if they’re of interest. You can suggest products to customers based on past purchases or website history. If you incorporate this kind of data, subscribers receive suggestions that are relevant to their taste and lifestyle.

Here’s a great example of product suggestions from eBay. Based on a customer’s viewing and purchase history, this email was sent to the subscriber:

Abandoned cart emails

Customers abandon carts more frequently than you might think. Research suggests almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, according to Baymard Institute.

If a customer leaves items behind, let this action inspire an email campaign. Send an email that’s specifically designed to get the subscriber to make a purchase.

You can automate cart abandonment emails, so they’ll arrive in subscribers’ inboxes without much effort. When a cart is abandoned, it triggers an email that shows the subscriber the products they were interested in and gently nudges them toward the checkout.

You can send one reminder email or you can send a series. Research shows sending three emails when a cart is abandoned results in a 56% increase in revenue compared to sending just one, according to Experian.

Here’s an example of an abandoned cart email from Wayfair. The email’s subject line said, “The item you left behind sells out fast.” The email creates a sense of urgency while reminding the subscriber what the product looks like and costs.

This could be the first email in the series. Others could include a new price alert, a coupon, or an availability update.

VIP deals

Use your data to create a list of VIP customers. These might be customers that spend a certain amount of money with you monthly or have a certain purchase frequency. Once defined, you can send this group of loyal subscribers exclusive deals.

Take a look at how Sephora, a Campaign Monitor customer, segments its VIP customers. If a subscriber spends over $200 they’re considered a VIP and sent emails that differ from the rest of the group.

4. Automate drip campaigns

Are you following up with subscribers? This year, make it a priority through drip campaigns.
You don’t have to deploy a one-and-done strategy with your emails. Instead of sending one promotional coupon or one update about a new product, consider creating a series of emails that follow up with a customer and help them through a specific journey.

You can use drip campaigns to educate new subscribers, onboard committed customers, re-engaged lost buyers, or encourage customers to return to the cart they abandoned, which we just talked about.

If you were creating a re-engagement campaign, here’s what it might look like:

Email #1

The first email is an “I Miss You” email that invites the subscriber to check out a new product.

Email #2

If a subscriber clicks on a link in the email, it triggers another email that gives subscribers a discount on their purchase. If a subscriber ignores the message, it triggers an email that asks if the subscriber still wants to be part of your email list.

Email #3

A third email is sent to any subscriber who makes a purchase. The email includes a receipt and a personalized thank you note from the company owner.
The idea behind a drip campaigns is to understand where the customer is in their journey and create several emails that help them move to the next step.

Whether you want to bring them back into the sales fold, help them navigate your app, or educate them about the benefits of a new product, drip campaigns give you the ability to follow up with customers in digitally savvy way.

Wrap up

As a marketer, you’re used to setting goals. But, most of the time you’re setting micro-goals for specific campaigns, like planning to hit a certain conversion rate on your most recent promotional email. This time, take a macro approach and set goals to utilize advanced email techniques. To track your success, watch what kind of response rates you get when you use a technique you haven’t used in the past.

Welcome to “The Pipeline” — a weekly column from HubSpot, featuring actionable advice from real sales leaders. Want more content like this? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Nobody's perfect. Some of us miss trash day and have our apartments smell like swamp water for the rest of the week. Some of us forget our anniversaries and have to scramble to CVS to pick up those mediocre chocolates in heart-shaped boxes the day after (that do exactly nothing to remedy the situation) … and some of us work in sales and fall back on bad habits that undermine our credibility with prospects and undercut our broader productivity.

Lack of perfection is a fact of life — but if you fall into the last bucket I mentioned, that “lack of perfection” can be particularly detrimental. Luckily, a lot of those bad sales habits are easy to identify and straightforward to address with the right guidance.

So to help you out, we reached out to real sales leaders for their takes on bad habits they consistently see sales professionals run into and how to right the course with those issues. Let's see what they had to say.

9 Bad Sales Habits (and How to Break Them)

1. Only Having One-Way Conversations

Baidhurya Mani, Founder of SellCoursesOnline, says, “Bad salespeople only have one-way conversations. They often get so carried away talking too much that they monopolize the conversation and forget to listen to their customers. While it's important to articulate an excellent sales pitch, don't forget that sales is a two-way conversation first and foremost.”

“Veteran salespeople know to let the client do most of the talking. Your job as a salesperson is to listen actively and empathize with them, all while processing and analyzing the information you're drawing out from them. This is how you can get to know your customer and their pain points better, so you can position your pitch appropriately.”

2. Not Embracing Rejection as a Learning Opportunity

Joanne Demeireles, CXO of Oula Health, says, "Fearing rejection in a sales position is just setting yourself up for failure. Any sales job is over 90% rejection, no matter how good you really are at it. Rejection is inevitable, and the frame of mind you use to view that rejection is key to perseverance and success.

"Successful salespeople understand that it's simply a part of the process. Those who let the fear of rejection dictate their actions may avoid making cold calls, approaching potential clients, or asking for the sale, hindering their success.

“Overcoming this fear requires resilience, confidence, a positive mindset, and positive reinforcement. Salespeople must embrace rejection as a learning opportunity rather than a personal failure, making them better equipped as professionals to persevere, learn from setbacks, and ultimately achieve greater success in their sales careers.”

3. Not Maintaining a Conversational Tempo on Sales Calls

Justin Abrams, Founder and CEO of Aryo Consulting Group, says, "When I started my business, I had zero sales skills or success. My first sales calls were brutal! The biggest habit I needed to improve upon was my conversation and tempo.

“I approached these calls like a job interview, listing my resume and stammering through why I was qualified. Instead, remain relaxed and try to get the client to speak 80% of the time. Even if you want to close the client, appearing nonchalant adds an air of exclusivity. Trust me, you will see a vastly increased close rate.”

4. Being Too Attached to One Sale

Kalin Kassabov, Founder and CEO of ProTexting, says, "One trait that can limit the success of a salesperson is being too attached to making a particular sale. As you gain confidence, you understand that the best strategy is to focus your attention on prospects who are the best match for your product or service.

“If you are desperate to make every sale, you can fall into the habit of trying to be all things to all people. In the long run, this will make it harder to reach your best prospects. Instead, make your goal to identify people or organizations that you can help the most.”

5. Failing to Ask Meaningful Questions

Amy Tribe, Director at OGLF (Our Good Living Formula), "One thing that can hold back salespeople who aren‘t doing well is their failure to ask meaningful questions. How can you effectively address your clients’ needs if you‘re unaware of what they are? The more questions you ask, the more trustworthy you become as a salesperson because you’ll be in a better position to collaborate on solutions that benefit both parties.

"In my experience, around 70% of purchases are motivated by the client‘s need to solve a specific issue, so it’s crucial to know precisely what they are seeking. Asking thorough, detailed questions can help you gather more information to achieve this. It‘s also beneficial to have some questions prepared in advance to ensure you’ve covered everything.

“Keep your questions straightforward, follow a sensible sequence, avoid questions that result in simple 'yes' or 'no' answers, and don't hesitate to ask for more details or clarification when needed. Additionally, you should avoid jumping into sales pitches too early; these questions are intended to establish trust with the client, and pushing for a hard sell too soon can harm that trust.”

6. Relying Too Much on Scripts

Lilia Tovbin, Founder and CEO of BigMailer.io, says, "Over-reliance on scripts is a detrimental habit that can impede salespeople‘s success. Sales isn’t merely a transactional exchange but a personal connection between the salesperson and the client. Relying excessively on scripted pitches diminishes the authenticity and genuine connection that is vital in sales interactions.

“When salespeople stick rigidly to scripts, they risk sounding robotic and insincere, which can alienate potential clients. Moreover, scripted conversations lack flexibility and adaptability, making it difficult to address each client's unique needs.”

7. Being Too Slow to Respond to Leads

Balázs Keszthelyi, Founder and CEO of TechnoLynx, "The reluctance to immediately pick up the phone when a lead comes through another channel is a costly habit that prevents salespeople from closing more deals. When a salesperson calls within the first five minutes after a prospect has made an initial contact, they are far more likely to convert that prospect into a qualified lead.

"Not capitalizing on this ‘golden window’ of opportunity puts salespeople at a serious disadvantage, since it is those who get in first that are better positioned to shape the conversation and close the deal. Speedy response times also allow salespeople to build greater rapport and connect with prospects at the ideal time — when they are likely available to talk and already trying to find a solution to their problem.

“Rather than holding back for fear of seeming desperate, salespeople should strike while the iron is hot. Calling a prospect as soon as the lead comes through is the best way to build trust, make the most of lead inquiries, and drive conversions.”

8. Prioritizing Pitches Over Questions

Sai Blackbyrn, CEO of Coach Foundation, says, "In my 25 years of experience training and coaching sales teams, I've seen that one of the most common bad habits that holds salespeople back is failing to ask enough questions.

"Many sales reps are so eager to launch into their pitch that they don‘t take the time to truly understand the prospect’s needs or challenges. This ends up leading to misaligned solutions or wasted time talking about things the client doesn't care about. The most successful salespeople are consultative — they use questioning skills to diagnose before prescribing.

“Asking thoughtful questions shows the prospect that you care about solving their issues versus just making a sale. It builds trust and rapport. Simply put, if you don't understand what the client truly needs, you can't be as effective at tailoring your solution and convincing them it's right for them. Make asking questions a priority in every sales conversation, and you'll see your success and productivity skyrocket.”

9. Not Adapting to Modern Outreach Methods

Josh Ladick, President of GSA Focus, says, "I've learned that generic pitches and cold calling are becoming increasingly ineffective. In the realm of government contracting, where specificity and trust are paramount, these methods fall short.

“Emphasizing personalized approaches and leveraging digital platforms for outreach have proven far more effective. A key takeaway from our journey has been the importance of adapting to the evolving landscape, focusing on building meaningful connections rather than relying on volume-based tactics.”

Identifying and working through your bad habits is pretty mission-critical to your career development in virtually every field — and sales is definitely no exception. But if you remain self-aware, willing to learn, and ready to adapt, you'll set yourself up to soldier through rough patches and ultimately become a much more thoughtful, effective sales professional.