Time management is critical for salespeople. Yet many salespeople struggle because they want to be available to their clients. Here is how to think about managing your time in sales.

When you are in a sales call, you do not have your email open. You also aren’t monitoring your phone for incoming texts or emails or one of the many other forms of notifications that continually distract you throughout the day. You wouldn’t dream of offending the person you are sitting across from by being distracted by these things, nor would you want to waste the gift of their time. For some period between, say, sixty and ninety minutes, you give your attention to what’s most important, without any fear of negative consequences from some message you might miss. For many, however, outside of a sales meeting, it is impossible to find them without their inbox open and smartphone dominating their time.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Availability

There are very few negative consequences for being away from your email for ninety minutes at a time—and likely none for your absence over more extended periods. When the downside risk is extremely low and the upside so great it’s impossible to measure, there is no reason to allow false beliefs and bad habits to cause you to choose former over the latter.

“Wait,” you say. “Iannarino, what if I am away from my email when one of my clients sends me something important?” The question itself is an excuse and carries no weight in determining how you work unless you are willing to concede that it is also necessary to have your inbox open when you are meeting with a prospective client. Would you be willing to subject this hypothetical client who might email with an equally theoretical important message to looking at the top half of your face hovering over your laptop lid while you scanned your inbox for notes so important they prevented you from giving them your undivided attention? I suggest you would not.

“What if I am away when the dream client I have been working on for months calls me back,” you ask. Here, we must again refer to the paragraph above, as there is no difference from a message in the first communication medium and the second. If you are willing to miss the call because you are in a face-to-face meeting with a client or prospect without fear of losing an opportunity, then you have already lost the argument. In any of the cases above, you act as if the client sending the message would excuse your absence if you were in a face-to-face meeting, treating the same absence differently were giving your full attention and focus over to something else. Your hypothetical client doesn’t know that you are not in a face-to-face meeting.

The lie that you need to be available at every moment through your inbox or phone deprives you of the focused time and attention on the critical things you need to do to succeed in sales.

What You Believe Is Important

How you manage communication is evidence of your mindset and your priorities, two factors critical to success in any endeavor, but with heightened importance to salespeople (and sales managers) due to the nature of our goals and responsibilities.

It is not healthy to believe that you will experience a negative outcome, personally or professionally, by being unavailable throughout periods of the day. This belief indicates you think your role is something other than sales, that your position is that of an account manager or customer service rep or some role that might require you to be at your client’s beck and call. Even more, this mindset suggests you believe you are servile, subservient, and that you create so little value that your unavailability for a relatively short time would cause you harm.

More still, the belief that you can’t give something else your full focus and attention demonstrates your priorities. An unwillingness to close your inbox and silence your phone is an indication that you prefer to be reactive to being proactive. It proves that you are open to any distraction that might give you something to do now instead of the work you need to do.

In many cases, it means choosing what Present You wants over what Future You wants. Future You wants you to create the new opportunities necessary to reaching your goals. Future You also wants you to improve your results and your income. Present You wants to look busy, so it wants you to react to everything in real-time so it can tell the story about why you can’t do what Future You knows is necessary. Present You like things that look like work, but that does little to produce results. One of the behaviors that best demonstrates the conflict between your present actions and your future outcomes is the willingness to leave your inbox open, responding to email in real-time instead of prospecting, following up, and building a pipeline.

I will concede without argument that everything is important, including every email that shows up in your inbox, knowing that some significant percentage of those messages are not and very few are both urgent and important. I will ask you to concede that everything is not—and cannot be—most important. The Pareto principle suggests that eighty-percent of your results come from twenty percent of your actions. What, then, deserves your full focus and attention?

How to Live on Ninety Minutes

Give yourself over to some task or some project or some important outcome for ninety minutes. Close your inbox, silence your phone, and shut down any other potential distraction. At the end of those ninety minutes, open your email, scan it for anything that might be urgent and important, or substantial enough for you to act on it now. This strategy is no different from what you would do were you on a sales call, and should you decide to use that ninety minutes for prospecting, you will no doubt have many more periods of unavailability because you will have many more meetings.

An eight-hour workday is made up of four, two-hour blocks. You can use three blocks of ninety minutes for focused sales work, with thirty minutes after each block to respond to anything that needs your attention. If your role requires more time to respond to email and voicemail, you can use sixty minutes of your last hour for focused sales work and use the final hour of your day to fight the never-ending deluge of emails and message that pour into your inbox, most of which will do nothing to move you closer to your goals.

Do meaningful work that makes a difference for others and that moves you closer to your goals.

The post How Salespeople Must Manage Their Time and Availability appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Dealing with tough clients is a part and parcel of every agency business. Learn how to deal with difficult clients with 9 strategies in this article.

In agency hallways, conference rooms, and cafeterias, the stories abound. Sometimes shared in hushed tones, sometimes in boisterous tales at late afternoon lunches. Every agency veteran, it seems, has at least one to tell.

I’m talking, of course, about client horror stories.

Dealing with clients lies at the heart of the agency business. Whatever else you might offer, you at least need to be good at dealing with clients.

Unfortunately, being good with clients isn’t always a two-way street. Some clients can make you tear your hair out in frustration. Others can make you want to quit the business altogether.

How exactly do you deal with such clients? Do you simply rely on the old virtues of patience and people skills, or are there actual tactics you can use?

I’ll answer this all-important question in this article. You’ll learn how to identify difficult clients and how to develop a strategy to deal with them.

Not All Difficult Clients Are the Same

The brief for agencies in any agency-client relationship is simple – offer expertise, results, and good service.

Clients, however, don’t always know the part they have to play. They switch their decisions frequently, don’t respond to requests on time, and ask for too many changes too late in the project’s life cycle.

This behavior is rarely out of malice. Clients very seldom, if ever, intentionally treat agency reps (and the project as a whole) poorly.

Rather, they often act this way because:

• They don’t know any better
• Something in their personal/professional life is keeping them occupied
• They’ve been sold an unrealistic vision by the sales/marketing team

Which is why I like to say that not all difficult clients are the same, and your approach to dealing with them can’t be the same either.

You can broadly divide difficult clients into two camps: the clearly difficult, and the unintentionally difficult.

Clearly difficult clients are the kind you hear horror stories about. These are people who want too much work for too little money, who’ll withhold payments, and who’ll be rude to your team. You know them when you see them.

The vast majority, however, are unintentionally difficult clients. These are clients who don’t really know they’re being difficult. Think of clients who:

• Haven’t been educated enough about the service to make quick, informed decisions
• Haven’t been told clearly if something is out of scope
• Are constrained by their company’s policies (say, you want Net 30 payments but their employer only does Net 45 payments)
• Are burdened by professional or personal issues beyond their control
• Inherited a bad situation from an earlier stakeholder
• Were oversold by the sales team and entered the agency-client relationship with different expectations

In these situations, it’s easy to use a broad brush to paint such clients as “difficult”. But more often than not, their difficultness is a result of the agency’s failures. If the PM doesn’t communicate clearly enough, or the sales team sells them an unrealistic vision, is it really the client’s fault if they demand too much or struggle with decision-making?

This is why you can’t adopt the same approach when dealing with all difficult clients. Quarantine and control the clearly difficult clients, but for the unintentionally difficult ones, practice empathy and education instead.

Adopt this philosophy and you’ll find that dealing with hard clients becomes much easier.

9 Strategies for Handling Difficult Clients

A lot of advice online for dealing with difficult clients tends to focus on the customer service aspects of client work.

While a friendly smile and a chipper attitude definitely help, if you focus too much on these tactics, you tend to ignore deeper, more fundamental issues.

If you have a lot of difficult clients, you have to ask: why do you have difficult clients in the first place? Is there something you’re doing wrong?

That’s exactly what we’ll focus on in this section. Apart from specific tactics, we’ll look at some core strategies you need to adopt to handle tough clients.

1. Reorient your prices

Agency veterans will tell you that the more you compete on prices, the tougher clients you tend to get. It makes sense as well – a client on a tight budget will want to cross-check every invoice and demand more from your team.

How do you avoid these clients?

Simple: by reorienting how you sell your services, particularly in terms of pricing.

As we wrote in our earlier article on agency positioning, your client base tends to mirror your positioning. An agency that focuses on value pricing often attracts value-focused clients. If you sell yourself as a cheaper alternative, you’ll get clients who want cheaper work as well.

This essentially locks you in a situation where your work is valued in terms of its cost, not its performance.

It’s a vicious cycle – a “cheap” agency can’t hire top-tier talent, which means that your work remains mediocre, which also means that clients are never truly satisfied.

Pricing remains the second biggest reason for clients leaving ending an agency relationship (Source)

By repositioning yourself as a performance or quality-focused agency, you can avoid landing a lot of these deal-hunting clients. Once you do that, you’ll find that a lot of your client troubles tend to go away as well.

2. Simplify decision-making

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the menu was thicker than War & Peace and the list of cuisines ranged from Austrian to Vietnamese? If yes, did you ever struggle with deciding what to eat?

Clients act the same way when you confront them with too many choices. If you offer them 20 concepts for a logo, don’t be surprised when they take forever to approve a design.

Your goal as a project manager should be to aid the client’s decision making. You can do this by:

• Offering clients fewer options
• Offering tips and advice on making a choice

For example, instead of five, you might offer clients two different strategies for growing traffic. You might also tell them that “80% of our clients choose Option A” to help them decide.

Remember: clients don’t know the industry as well as you do. Client input matters, but it has to also be channeled and controlled. Don’t be afraid to guide them down a path that you know works better for them.

3. Make sure that your communication is watertight

One of the core symptoms of a difficult client is someone who doesn’t respond to requests, ignores deadlines, and doesn’t approve deliverables on time.

While it’s easy to blame these issues on the client, you have to ask: have you done your best to communicate your concerns?

Clients often miss deadlines and requests not because they want to, but because of countless other reasons such as:

• They were never made aware of the importance of the deadline. This is common in situations where missing deadlines in the past had no impact on the project.
• They never knew about the deadline in the first place.
• They weren’t given enough information to complete the request
• The platform you used to approve/reject deliverables was too difficult to use.

All these problems are fixable on your own end. If approving a particular deliverable on time is crucial for the project, it’s your prerogative as a project manager to make sure clients understand that.

So before you start blaming clients, make sure that you’ve covered all your bases as far as communication is concerned. A few simple tips such as using automated reminders and online proofing tools can make your job a lot easier.

In Workamajig, you can ask stakeholders to can review deliverables right from the same project dashboard.

4. Educate your clients

There are some clients who have years of experience working with agencies. They know exactly what is expected of them in this relationship.

Then there are clients who’ve never worked with an agency before. They have little idea what to do and when to do it.

The problem is particularly acute for digital agencies that sell services which aren’t easy to understand. A client might instinctively know what a TV ad campaign is, but something like “inbound marketing” or “digital PR” might be difficult to grasp, especially if you’re dealing with older stakeholders.

The solution to this problem is to invest in client education.

When you get a new client, evaluate:

• How well they understand your core service
• How much experience do they have working with agencies

Create a client education and communication plan based on this evaluation.

How you approach this depends entirely on your agency, your working style, and the contract. With a large client, you might want to invest in hands-on, 1-on-1 training/education. With smaller clients, you might create a drip email sequence to educate them about the service.

5. Understand the client’s situation

Or in fewer words: be empathetic.

The client might be going through a personal or professional issue that’s keeping her from focusing 100% on the project. Maybe they had some illness in the family. Maybe they had a horrible quarter and are expected to downsize. Or maybe the original sponsor left the company and the new one hasn’t had time to catch-up.

While these problems can’t necessarily justify poor client behavior, they can at least explain them. It also helps you discard the mentality of painting them as a “difficult” client.

Instead, you can see them for what they are: good clients stuck in a bad situation. This gives you room to handle the issue with more empathy and patience.

6. Review the promises you make to clients

The agency business is a tough one. By one measure, there are nearly 14,000 ad agencies in the US alone.

The total number of agencies in the US (Image source: Statistia)

This immense competition means that agencies often promise the world to clients. From parading their list of marquee clients to pitching astounding results, agencies are notorious for making exaggerated claims just to land the account.

And what happens when you can’t deliver on these claims?

Unhappy, difficult clients.

One of the first steps in dealing with difficult clients, thus, is to realign client expectations with reality. Review the promises your biz dev team makes to clients. Are you promising them results that you can’t guarantee? Are you passing off your best-case scenarios as the norm?

If clients enter the relationship expecting the extraordinary, delivering the merely good won’t suffice. So work with your biz dev team and get them to review their sales pitch. Try to get a PM to sit in on a meeting to drag things back to reality.

7. Establish standards early in the relationship

Some clients think that they’re the only clients you have and demand all your time. Some others ask for the impossible (and get angry when you can’t deliver).

Problems like these usually have the same origin: you didn’t establish standards and boundaries early in the relationship. If a panicked client called you up at 11 in the night about a mundane issue, and you didn’t tell them it was inappropriate, what’s stopping them from doing the same in the future?

Fix this issue by being clear and upfront about your standards. Clients should know exactly what is appropriate and what isn’t. They should also know everything that is included in your service and what isn’t.

If they want more than the original brief, make it clear to them that it will cost them more as well.

This isn’t easy to do of course – agencies are often scared of crossing clients – but the earlier you do it in the relationship, the happier you’ll be.

8. Keep a record of everything

Does the client ask for too many changes too late in the project stage? Do they argue about including extras that were not a part of the original agreement? Do they delay approving a deliverable, then deny that they ever received it?

All of these issues are avoidable by simply keeping a record of everything.

Managing change requests formally (instead of an informal “I’ll get it done”), for instance, can serve as an insurance against scope creep. It keeps clients in the loop about the changes they’ve requested and ensures that things don’t get too much out of hand.

52% of projects experience scope creep, according to PMI (Source)

Similarly, by keeping track of deliverables (even using a deliverable sign-off sheet [include link]) ensures that clients know the project is well on track.

Data is your friend against angry clients. Keep track of things so you have evidence to point to in case a client demands the impossible.

9. Don’t be afraid to cut your losses

Finally, you’ll sometimes come across clients who will just never be satisfied. No matter what you do, they’ll demand more.

Worse, they’ll be rude to your team and kill the morale across your entire organization.

With such clients, don’t be afraid to show them to the exit sign. Whatever money their account brings in isn’t worth destroying your sanity over. Especially if it affects your team as a whole.

Remember that agencies thrive on talent. Losing one client and retaining a happy, skilled team is always a good trade.

Over to You

Handling tough clients is part-and-parcel of the agency business. While patience and fortitude are definitely valuable virtues to have in such situations, a well-rounded strategy will serve you better. Follow the tips I shared above to make dealing with difficult clients easier.

One way of improving your client interactions is to use better project management software. Try Workamajig today to see how it can transform the way you deal with clients.

Are you growing faster than your competitors?  Have you started the year off blowing out your plan?  If you answer yes, congrats, you have a good “problem” on your hands.   What CEO doesn’t want to grow even faster? It gets the

In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

Learning From Failure
Sometimes failure can be the key to future success. Thanks for your thoughts, David Brock.

5 Ways To Reinvent The B2B Customer Experience To Boost Engagement
Some great advice or boosting your customer engagement. Thanks, Sam Makad.

How To Prepare For The Coming Recession
Insight on becoming an adaptive enterprise to survive the coming recession. Great article, J.P. Gownder.

4 Things CMOs Can Do to Prolong Their Tenure
Some things for CMOs to consider if they want to ensure their place in their company. Thanks for the tips, Steve Olenski.

The Phone Diet: How I cut back on my favorite technology — and why it made a big difference
Do you need help detoxing from your phone addiction? Here are some great ways. Thanks, Adam Schoenfeld.

How to Write a Creative Brief in 7 Simple Steps [Examples + Template]
Some awesome tips for writing creative briefs if you’re just starting out. Thanks for the advice, Pamela Bump.

Marketers Lack Confidence Measuring Content Impact
A closer look at measuring your content impact. Thanks for your insight, Jon Gingerich.

8 Unconventional Marketing Tactics Every CMO Should Take Advantage Of
Some marketing tactics you might want to check out if you’re looking to cut costs and see better results.Great tips, Adam Torkildson.

The Shift From Sales Reps to Trusted Advisors
Buyers today are more educated, and with that, their expectations of salespeople have also increased. Great article via Seismic.

The Books That Taught Me How to Sell
A look at some great sales books to check out. Thanks for your suggestions, Anthony Iannarino.

The post B2B Reads: Learning from Failure, Recession, and The Phone Diet appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

• There's no set way to sell a business successfully.
• We asked founders who have done it to share best practices and common pitfalls to avoid, and to provide best practices and war stories in exclusive conversations with Business Insider.
• For example, Jyoti Bansal, founder of AppDynamics and Harness, recommends selling a few shares instead of selling the whole company if you need the money but don't want to lose control.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Jyoti Bansal decided to sell AppDynamics to Cisco the day before the company was set to go public.

Cisco had offered $3.7 billion for AppDynamics, which was nearly twice what the app-analytics business was pricing its IPO at.

That meant many AppDynamics employees would fare very well financially. And for Bansal, who is now the CEO of Harness, an automated software deployment platform, his team's well-being was the deciding factor.

"We had at least 400 employees who would make more than $1 million if we sold," Bansal previously told Business Insider. "You have to do the right thing for them — $1 million is life changing."

Not every entrepreneur will find themselves torn between such appealing outcomes. But deciding to sell the company you've built from the ground up, and then finding the right partner, is rarely easy.

So Business Insider asked Bansal, plus other seasoned entrepreneurs and an academic director of entrepreneurship in exclusive interviews, to share some best practices around selling a startup — and the biggest pitfalls to avoid.

Our sources include:

• Marla Beck, the founder and CEO of luxury beauty retailer Bluemercury. She sold the company to Macy's for $210 million in 2015.
• Justin Kan, the founder and CEO of Atrium, a law firm for startups. He sold Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, to Amazon for $970 million in 2014.
• Jeanette Miller, director of the corporate innovation and entrepreneurship major at Penn State Smeal College of Business and associate director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
• Steve Martocci, the founder and CEO of music-creation platform Splice. He sold GroupMe, a group-messaging app, to Skype for $85 million in 2011.
• Marc Lore is the CEO of Walmart eCommerce US. He sold retail startup Quidsi to Amazon for over $500 million in 2011, and Jet.com to Walmart for $3 billion and stock in 2016.

Read on for a practical guide to selling your startup.

Don't build a company just to sell it

Miller, the Penn State professor, advises founders to have a potential exit strategy (like selling your company or taking it public) in place from day one.

You should keep that potential exit in mind during the fundraising process. Beck has learned through running Bluemercury that some venture capitalists want to see a return on their investment sooner rather than later, which means they may pressure you to sell or go public before you want to.

That said, building a company just to sell it can backfire.

As GroupMe and Splice founder Martocci previously told Business Insider, venture capitalists can "sniff out" founders who go in with the intention to sell. They'll be dissuaded from backing those founders, who don't seem truly committed to fulfilling the company's mission. Instead, those founders are prioritizing monetary gain.

Focus instead on making your business as successful as possible. A growing company will inevitably attract interest from potential buyers.

The right time to sell

Some founders wind up selling their company out of desperation. Maybe their company is losing money or growth is stagnant.

To be sure, it's hard to predict whether you'll wind up in those circumstances. But the best time to sell is when you don't need to.

That's according to Kan, the Twitch and Atrium founder, who wrote a blog post about selling a startup. In an interview with Business Insider, he added that you should ideally be in a position of leverage when you sell. Leverage could mean your company is growing rapidly or you have interest from other potential buyers. Twitch, for example, reportedly had acquisition offers from Google and Yahoo!.

"If you're running out of money, your company hasn't been growing, and you're desperate to sell it, then you don't have any leverage," Kan said. Partners aren't just looking for a proven record of success, they want to see the potential for continued success.

Consider alternatives to selling

Bansal sold some shares of AppDynamics when he declined an offer of $350 million, thinking he would continue to grow and try to achieve unicorn status.

He points out that any founder can do the same: sell some of your shares without giving up complete control of your company. That way, you can continue growing the business while also gaining some financial stability.

He said his wife wasn't happy that he was turning down the $350 million offer. "But selling a small amount of my stock made her very happy and supportive for continuing to do it in the longer term," he added.

Read more: Jugs of coffee, lots of Advil, and no sleep for 4 days: A startup founder reveals what it was like to sell his company for $3.7 billion

Think about what you want to accomplish before you negotiate with potential buyers

Do you want to scale? Do you need easier access to capital? Figure out what your ambitions are — and remember that they might not be the same as another founder's.

"People forget that entrepreneurship is really personal," Beck said. "You need to actually understand what you want and what you're trying to do and actually take some time to reflect."

Beck recently advised a founder who was evaluating multiple offers from potential buyers. The founder realized that none of the offers were exactly what she wanted. Beck told her to take a step back and figure out what was important to her, and then push for what she wanted if she wasn't getting it.

Be realistic about your company's valuation

It's hard to be objective when calculating your company's value. As Kan points out, the potential buyer is likely valuing your startup based on where it fits in with their short- or long-term strategy — and their number is likely lower than yours.

Miller's research suggests that new founders can be especially naive. "The first business is always the most challenging because you're usually relatively unrealistic," she said. "And the opportunity that is in front of you, everybody thinks it's going to be a billion dollar company."

It probably won't be.

One potential solution is to get an external party (i.e., a banker or a lawyer) to come in and value your company for you. "When you have a banker and someone you really trust or believe in," Beck said, "they're able to talk to all the parties and figure out what the right terms are and what's important to each party, so you come to an agreement."

Before selling Bluemercury to Macy's, Beck interviewed five different bankers before settling on one she trusted. She said too many founders make the mistake of hiring the first banker they meet and rushing to sign a contract, only to realize that the person or the terms aren't a good fit.

Read more: A CEO who sold his first startup for $1 billion explains how to build a company and stay happy at the same time

Set expectations with your partner upfront

Before you sign a term sheet, be clear with the acquiring company about your vision for the partnership.

When Beck was in conversation with Macy's about selling Bluemercury, she was clear that she wanted to continue scaling while still maintaining the company culture. She set those expectations with Macy's upfront. 

Beck recommends getting into the nitty-gritty as much as possible. For example, she said, you should decide how often you're going to meet with leadership at your parent company.

Beck, for her part, wanted to stay focused on growth and didn't want to be distracted by having to prepare for a weekly or monthly meeting with Macy's. "It was really important for me to have the mind space to continue to be a creator as well as a CEO scaling a company," she said.

Read more: The first-time founder's ultimate guide to navigating a term sheet and avoiding common pitfalls — with a sample from a major VC

Know whether an offer is legitimate

Approach every offer with a degree of skepticism. 

In his blog post, Kan shares a few ways to tell if an offer is "bulls---":

• It doesn't come with an expiration date or the promise of a term sheet to be delivered within 24 to 48 hours.
• The acquiring company isn't doggedly pursuing you to prevent you from looking elsewhere.
• They're offering to pay you $10 million and your startup already has a term sheet for a $15 million Series A round. (These are hypothetical numbers, but the point is to clarify valuation expectations as soon as possible.) 

Do some research upfront to make sure you don't waste your time on subpar offers.

Don't be afraid to negotiate or to see what else is out there

Kan urges founders not to be afraid to say no.

"A potential acquirer's first offer is rarely its best offer," he writes. "The potential acquirer isn't going anywhere." In fact, Kan writes that being willing to walk away gives you some leverage in the negotiation.

Another key negotiation strategy is initiating some competition, Kan writes. It's similar to the way a job candidate wants interest from multiple companies, to incentivize each firm to bump up their salary offer.

Bansal agreed. Once you've gotten an offer that piques your interest, he said, ask around and find out from other potential buyers what their terms would be.

Bansal admitted he didn't shop around after Cisco offered to buy AppDynamics. But, he said, "that's a common thing that a lot of companies should do." That way, you'll be more educated as to how appealing the first offer really is, and you'll be able to make the right decision for all your shareholders.

Consider important factors beyond money

Money may be the most readily quantifiable piece of an offer. But it's not the only important one. 

Bansal outlines three questions to think about when evaluating offers. 

1. Does the buyer's mission align with your company's? "You want to solve a particular problem," Bansal said. "How much does the acquiring company believe in that, and how much are they aligned with your mission and the vision that you had as a startup?"
2. Does the buyer's culture align with your company's? "As a founder, you are responsible for your employees, your team," Bansal said. "You don't want them to get into a culture where they would not enjoy it, or they would hate it, or they would say something like, 'This is not what I signed up for.'"
3.  Will the buyer's offer allow you to accelerate your company's mission? Maybe the most compelling thing is their sales force, or their capital. Focus on what your potential partner is bringing you.

Considering these factors will save you potential regret after an acquisition by making sure that the company you've built retains its mission and culture.

Read more: Founders and investors reveal the ultimate guide to scaling a startup — and common pitfalls to avoid

Understand what you're getting yourself out of

Once you've closed the deal and signed the papers, your role won't be the same. Even if you've agreed to stay at the company and keep your title, your responsibilities will undoubtedly shift.

Gabriel Shaoolia, who founded the digital agency Blue Fountain Media and sold it to Pactera, wrote for Entrepreneur that it's important to reconcile the differences you're about to step into (or out of). "It can be difficult to turn off the special connection you might feel with the company you worked so hard to get off the ground," he wrote. 

Shaoolia told founders to relish in their accomplishments, the company goals met, and the simple fact that the business you built is getting acquired. 

Be prepared to experience some regret or confusion

Some entrepreneurs who have sold their companies have expressed regret. Lore, for example, remembered selling Quidsi to Amazon as something of a let-down. "It was this really depressing sort of moment where we didn't even want to go out for a drink," he previously told Business Insider's Alyson Shontell. "It wasn't a celebration. It was sort of like mourning."

Even founders who are pleased with their decision should anticipate some feelings of confusion. 

"It probably would've been good to raise more money and keep going," Kan said. "But I can't really regret that."

Explain to your employees why the acquisition is a good thing

Whether or not they're losing their jobs, employees may find the acquisition news jarring. It's your job to help them understand why you made this decision and what their future looks like.

Entrepreneur and angel investor Brad Flora remembers telling the staff at his startup, Perfect Audience, that he'd sold the company.

In a Slate article, Flora writes, "When I shared the news, the team stared blankly at me, unsure if it was a good thing or a bad thing." He and his cofounder spent an hour answering employees' questions. Eventually, they realized it was a positive development, since most of the proceeds from the deal would go to employees.

Flora was able to tell his employees, who took risks to join the fledgling company, that they had earned "a big chunk" of cash and stock. He considered that the best part of the process. 

Keep your employees' best interests in mind

Your employees' careers are just as important as yours.

In periods of organizational change, Miller says there's a "huge uncertainty" among employees about what's going to happen to them. It's important to consider their perspective as well. 

That's why Bansal accepted Cisco's offer and declined to go public as planned. After all, how often can you deliver $1 million to 400 employees?

Read more: HOW TO START A BUSINESS: The ultimate guides for founders on launching a company, raising money, and becoming wildly successful

SEE ALSO: Building a company that sells for millions might sound like a dream — but for CEOs who do it, the next chapter can be just as hard

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You may not like what you get, and you may not like what you pay, but you will always get what you pay for.

If you don’t like what you get, you still paid for it. If you didn’t like it because it was less than you feel you should have received, it was exactly what you paid for. You think you invested enough, and the seller does as little as possible, reducing what they do to be able to give you the price you want. When you underinvest, you rarely get what you really wanted. This is why buyer’s feel cheated when they get the bargain they insist upon.

If you don’t like what you paid, you still got what you got. If you paid more than you wanted to and got less than expected, you got what you paid for. You again received what you paid for, even if you made a more substantial investment and expected much more. You invested enough, but the seller invested too little. This how sellers lose future sales, future clients, and receive poor word of mouth.

If you like what you got and you liked what you paid, you invested the right amount in the outcome you wanted, and the party that sold it to you invested enough to deliver it.

The idea that you get what you pay for is well recognized in some areas, but in other areas, it’s as if it’s a foreign concept.

Taking Money Out of Your Program

Some people are deeply committed to the belief that they can take money out of their solution and somehow make it better. Never in the history of all human history has taken money out of anything improved it. Yet, there are people, companies, and certain roles who operate from this belief. They get what they pay for, reducing their supplier’s prices, and much of the time, increasing their costs. This group insists on taking money out of their own program.

Others deeply believe you get what you pay for, ensuring they make the necessary investment to deliver. People who buy this way think that paying more means that they should expect more, and the seller should—and will be—accountable for the outcome. They get what they pay for, paying a higher price, and experiencing lower costs and better results. This group insists on a fair deal and the outcome of their investment.

The first category of buyers believes they can shrink themselves to greatness, removing more money from their programs, mistakenly believing they have taken the money from their supplier. Instead, they have reduced the investment in their own program, making it more difficult and less likely they get what they want and expecting it anyway.

The second category of buyers is not buying price. Instead, they are buying an outcome. And while they are always going to ask you for your best price, they are not going to try to extract so much of a price concession that it would cause you to fail them. They want to invest what is necessary to produce the result they need, not more, and not less.

As someone who sells, you want to acquire clients and customers in the second category, and as much as is possible, avoiding those who would expect more than they are willing to pay for.

The post Why You Always Get What You Pay For appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Email is dead—or at least that’s what the headlines claim. Sure, getting to “inbox zero” might be everyone’s focus today, but brands shouldn’t count out the power of a well-executed email campaign just yet.

Why Email Still Works

Marketers have argued about the viability of email campaigns ever since email became widely adopted as a marketing channel. And it’s true that email no longer has the insanely high open rates it used to. But consumers still open their email 20 times a day on average. That’s why effective modern marketers can continue to connect the dots from their email campaigns to quantitative ROI.

In fact, the proliferation of smartphones has made email more effective than ever. According to a recent study, about three of every five consumers check their email on the go. 75% of study participants said they use their smartphones most often to check email.

No matter what you sell, most of your qualified leads spend their days glued to their smartphones, where their email apps are just a tap away on their home screen. Sending high-quality content directly to prospects’ inboxes is one of the easiest ways to reach them—you just need to deliver a valuable enough message that they’re excited to open it.

Therein lies the problem, however. Attention. With so many emails flying around, people only open and act on emails from brands they trust. If prospects don’t trust your brand and don’t care about your message, they will—best case scenario—simply delete your email without a second thought. Worst case, you leave a negative brand impression. They’re annoyed by your persistent, irrelevant messages. They trash your brand to friends and maybe even on social media. Not good.

Email can be a high-stakes game if you play it in an obnoxious way. Email is a marketing medium that has plenty to offer but only to those who effectively put themselves in the shoes of their prospects.

Sending Emails People Actually Care About

Just like any great marketing strategy, smart email campaigns start with the buyer in mind. Your prospect in the awareness stage needs a different message from your buyer in the consideration phase. Optimizing your message for the right stage of your buyer’s journey drastically improves the performance of key metrics (like open and click-through rates) while ensuring your sales team is given leads who are actually ready to talk. The more specifically your emails are tailored to where a prospect is in your sales cycle—awareness, consideration, or decision—the better your email drip campaigns will perform.

To execute an automated email drip campaign that scales well and sets up your sales team for success, consider the following best practices:

1. Sales enablement takes priority

The point of investing in an email campaign is to generate revenue. It is a sales enablement tool. Keep this in mind from the beginning.

When you’re ready to write, start by choosing which part of the buyer journey to target. Are you talking to prospects aware of their problem yet? Are they starting to consider potential solutions to that problem? Are they ready to make a decision?

With that question answered, set goal KPIs and benchmark numbers to plot the course. And think about what tone will most quickly build trust with your buyers. Should your brand give off a casual and friendly vibe, or do you need to be seen as an all-knowing expert for your leads to trust you?

2. Hyper-specific audiences respond better

You could blast an email to everyone and their family pet. You could also throw money out the window and have a similar close rate.

Email drip campaigns depend on smart segmentation to succeed. Fewer, more tailored emails are better than the opposite. Take the time to get to know your target audience members ahead of time. What are their concerns? What are their pain points? What roles do they play in their organizations, and what solutions do they seek?

Separate into different pools the leads who may buy quickly from the leads who will take time to nurture to a decision. If you push for a purchase too early, you could permanently become spam in the eyes of your fledgling audience.

3. Automation should handle the heavy lifting

Rather than hire an intern to keep track of which emails get sent when, use your marketing automation solution to deliver fresh content at regular (but not intrusive) intervals. Automation is how you scale.

People in the awareness phase don’t need a ton of emails, so limit their communications to trigger-based outreach. When someone clicks a link or opens an email, take that as an invitation to keep the communication moving. As prospect activity picks up, accelerate the pace of communications.

Let the robots do their job. Spend your time developing engaging content that the members of your audience actually want to consume. If you’re doing it right, they should look forward to your emails. This requires a lot of relevant, high-quality content if you don’t want to hamstring your conversion rates.

Do you struggle to generate sales-ready leads? What do you think you could do better? Putting more effort into crafting valuable emails full of content your prospects care about could be the marketing strategy you are missing.

The post Email Isn’t Dead; You’re Just Doing It Wrong appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

When I built my first email list, I was ready to create email drip campaigns. But I didn’t know what to write. I felt like a salesperson with the perfect prospect, yet lacking the right words to craft a persuasive pitch.

Now a seasoned email marketer, I’ve created countless email drip campaigns that have yielded impressive results, especially when targeting leads who’ve already shown interest in my products.

What changed? I realized that writing drip emails is easy with the right strategy.

In this guide, I’ll share stunning email drip campaign examples to inspire you. I’ll also reveal some expert tips that helped me create click-worthy email sequences.

Table of Contents:

• What is an Email Drip Campaign?
• Types of Email Drip Campaigns
• Email Drip Campaign Best Practices
• Email Drip Campaign Templates
• Email Drip Campaign Examples

Say a lead downloads a white paper on customer management tips and shares their email address. I add them to my email list and send them a series of emails over a four-week period. In these emails, I include calls-to-action (CTAs) asking the lead to request a demo of our CRM software.

Types of Email Drip Campaigns

Even though it’s considered old, email marketing is my favorite way to maintain long-term relationships with customers. And that’s true for other marketers as well. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, 87% of marketers plan to increase their email marketing investment in 2024.

However, in my experience, investing in lead-nurturing email marketing campaigns is much better than sending out abrupt, single emails. The former helps build a strong relationship with potential customers, while the latter just looks sales-y and might drive leads away.

But drip email campaigns don’t just have to be about sales. I use them to reduce cart abandonment rates, convert blog visitors into buyers, re-engage customers, or simply welcome new subscribers.

D. Channing Muller, marketing consultant at DCM Communications, uses drip emails for event management.

She says, “Someone registers to attend an event, and they get an email confirmation. [...] You need to give them a reason to actually attend the event they registered for. This can all be done effectively with drip campaigns.”

There are no limits to the types of drip campaigns you can create, but most of them fit into these categories.

1. Onboarding Email Drip Campaign

Onboarding emails are emails sent to leads who have newly registered on a website. These automated emails are sent as soon as a lead creates a new account or provides their contact info.

My onboarding email campaigns typically include:

• A simplewelcome email.
• An email that introduces my products.
• An exclusive limited-time discount for new members.

Recent research reveals that welcome emails have a click-through rateof 14.34%, which is more than seven times higher than the click-through rateof 1.89% for a standard email.

Consider this onboarding email by Mailmodo.

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This is a good example of a welcome email. Along with onboarding the customer, it introduces them to the platform by giving quick links to the various resources they’ll need.

2. Retargeting Email Drip Campaign

A retargeting drip campaign targets people who’ve shown initial interest in a business but failed to convert. Say I have a prospect who clicked on a social media ad and visited my website but didn’t make a purchase. I can attempt to convert them using a nurturing drip email campaign.

My lead-nurturing emails usually include:

• A fillable workbook related to the ebook the lead downloaded.
• An email directly from a sales rep offering a one-on-one chat.
• A feedback request to learn about the lead’s experience.

Here’s the start of a good retargeting campaign by Litmus.

Litmus invites its subscribers to join an upcoming event on automating email development workflow. While this campaign may not directly contribute to sales, it gets the leads interested in the platform once again.

3. Post-Demo Email Drip Campaign

If I’m marketing a product that can be easily demonstrated, I make sure to run an email campaign with a CTA to request a one-on-one product demo. However, this doesn’t guarantee a sale.

Here are excellent content ideas for a post-demo campaign:

• Video testimonials from past clients.
• Access to an exclusive free trial offer.
• Tutorials on a feature the lead was particularly interested in.

One of my favorite post-demo emails is this one from Away.

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The luggage company sent written instructions on how to handle its product. This information might have already been provided in the demo, but the email re-emphasizes the value of the product, reminding the lead of its top features.

4. Post-Purchase Email Drip Campaign

While the cost of acquiring new customers has gone up by 222%, selling to existing customers has proven to be much cheaper and easier.

So, I strengthen existing customer relationships through post-purchase drip campaigns, which might include:

• A survey to help me gain insights into the customer’s experience.
• Related products they might like.
• A helpful resource related to the item purchased.
• An exclusive offer to encourage brand loyalty.

Here’s a good example of this. Harney & Sons, a tea company, sends a discount coupon for a customer’s next order in its post-purchase email.

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5. Cart Abandonment Email Drip Campaign

In 2024, 70.19% of ecommerce customers abandoned their shopping carts. However, I find that reminding customers of their abandoned carts increases my chances of making a sale. Many marketers, including me, achieve this by running abandoned cart emailcampaigns.

Here are some things I love to include:

• A notification about limited product quantity.
• A special offer such as free shipping or a discount.
• A reminder containing a preview of the customer’s cart.
• Request for feedback on why the customer abandoned their cart.

Check out this email drip campaign example by Rudy’s.

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This email includes the products in the customer’s abandoned cart, along with a request to complete the purchase. It also includes a discount code to motivate the buyer.

Pro tip: I recommend sending three cart abandonment emails: one immediately after the customer leaves your website with products in their cart, the second email the following day, and the third after three days — and this one should include an incentive.

6. Unsubscribe Email Drip Campaign

I send out unsubscribe drip campaigns when a subscriber opts out of my email list. There’s a slim chance of winning them back, so I try to understand their reasons for unsubscribing, as it helps me identify areas to improve my marketing strategy.

Here are email ideas for these campaigns:

• An email confirming their action and letting them know I’ll miss them.
• A short survey asking why they unsubscribed.
• A final email reassuring them I value their feedback.

In the final email, I include an easy way to resubscribe if they ever change their mind. I also send unsubscribe emails to subscribers who don’t open my emails. Here’s a really cool example from Framebridge.

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7. Promotional Email Drip Campaign

If you’re launching a new product, running a sale, or revamping your brand, promotional drip campaigns are a great way to attract both new and existing customers. During a product launch for one of my clients, I created a five-email drip campaign spread over four weeks.

Check out some things I included:

• The first three emails provided sneak peeks of the new product.
• The fourth email contained a fun riddle that customers could solve for a coupon code.
• The last email officially announced the launch of the new product, along with a direct link to make a purchase.

Polestar, a Swedish automotive manufacturer, sends out promotional emails to announce the launch of its new products.

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8. Feedback Email Drip Campaign

In my opinion, feedback email drip campaigns are one of the most important marketing emails — they tell me what I’m getting right and where I need to improve.

I typically request feedback from customers who:

• Viewed a demo.
• Abandoned their carts.
• Completed a purchase.
• Downloaded a free resource.
• Interacted with customer support.
• Attended a webinar or training program.

Consider this feedback email from Miro. It contains a five-minute survey asking customers to help improve the brand.

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Pro tip: Keep your feedback surveys short. A couple of questions or just a star rating is enough to collect the right data. If your feedback email is too long, it may discourage people from completing the survey.

9. Re-engagement Email Drip Campaign

Apart from new leads and existing customers, I also target old customers who’ve become inactive. Maybe it’s been a couple of years since their last purchase, or a once-regular email subscriber hasn’t opened my email for the past two months. I re-engage them with an email drip campaign to win back their hearts.

There are several ways I do this:

• I give a preview of the bestsellers in a new product range.
• I recommend products based on the customer’s purchase history.
• I build a newsletter series highlighting brand updates that might interest them.

Resy, a restaurant reservation website, uses emails to re-engage inactive subscribers.

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Apart from these, marketers also create drip email campaigns to ask for testimonials, launch their social media pages, or simply celebrate a milestone. There are endless possibilities for creatingdrip marketing campaigns. But, I like to stick to the nine types I mentioned above to avoid sending too many emails.

Email Drip Campaign Best Practices

Remember how I struggled to find the right words when creating my first campaign? It turns out it’s not just me. According to Litmus, 41% of marketers struggle with creating an email for their marketing strategy.

Concerning this, David Sneider, Sendbloom’s former head of growth, shares some crucial advice for new marketers.

“Introductory email messaging is the ‘tip of the spear’ for starting business relationships. The copy you write needs to be sharp yet sincere, showing that you can provide value without inundating them.”

But how do you create email drip campaigns that are empathetic yet compelling? I’ll share some of the best drip email marketing tips I’ve mastered over the years.

1. Choose a drip campaign software.

To automate and schedule drip emails, you’ll need a sales automation tool. While there are several such tools, I prefer HubSpot Sales Hub because it allows me to create and send email sequences on time.

The software easily integrates with my CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. I import data from these tools into Sales Hub and use it to refine my email marketing strategy.

I also use the numerous emailtemplates preloaded on the software and simply customize the content to suit my campaign. While there’s a slight learning curve for HubSpot Sales Hub, I find it quite easy to use once I’ve learned the ropes.

2. Know when to take someone out of the drip.

You want to ensure your leads receive timely and relevant content, so it’s crucial to monitor their activities. Once they take the desired action, it’s time to unenroll them from your drip.

Let’s say you enroll a prospect in your drip campaign with the goal of getting them to schedule a demo. If they schedule a demo on Monday and get another email on Friday asking them to schedule a demo, they’ll probably lose faith in your brand.

This happened to me recently. I got an email asking me to provide feedback about my experience with a brand’s support team. Naturally, I should have received a thank you email after submitting the form. Imagine my shock when I got another feedback request. It made me disappointed in the brand, and that’s not the kind of reaction you want from your prospects.

Knowing when to take someone out of your drip is a crucial part of your campaign. To ensure things flow smoothly, create a trigger that will unenroll a prospect once they complete a desired action.

3. Gather the required info early on.

I trigger email campaigns when a lead shows interest in my business, either by downloading a white paper, registering for an event, or creating an account. But I can only send the right emails if I have the right info.

So, I create ways for prospects to submit their email addresses and other relevant details early on. In exchange for this info, I offer them an incentive such as a new member discount or an exclusive report.

I also include a small checkbox so customers can confirm if they want to receive marketing emails from me.

4. Have clear CTAs.

It’s tempting to want to schedule a demo, offer a discount, and request a purchase — all in a single email. But that’s also the best way to discourage customers from taking action.

I’ve made the mistake of having too many CTAs in my emails. This only confused customers as they had no clue which action was the right one to take. That’s why I recommend sticking to a single CTA for each email.

Ask yourself which of the following goals aligns with yours:

• Generate revenue.
• Boost user engagement.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Gather customer feedback.
• Promote a new product or service.
• Drive registrations for an upcoming event.

Based on your answer, you can formulate appropriate calls-to-action to include in your emails.

5. Personalize your emails.

Customers stick with brands that genuinely care about them as individuals. A generic one-size-fits-all email might help you save time, but it only tells your customers you don’t value their individuality.

That’s why I personalizeevery email campaign based on the recipient.

Robert Catalano, digital marketing specialist at Toshiba, shares the same sentiment: “Personalization is key. Try to customize emails to your target audience’s industry and align your emails to provide the right information at the right time. This ensures that each email feels relevant and tailored to the recipient, enhancing overall engagement and conversion rates.”

If you’re new to email personalization, you’ll find that it consumes a lot of time. With a mailing list of thousands of subscribers, tailoring each email to the needs of each individual is next to impossible.

The solution? Creating customer segments. I separate my leads and customers into smaller groups based on their demographics and interests. Then, I craft a separate email for each segment and then use marketing automation to personalize the names in each email.

While my email may not cater to college-going Jane who loves everything K-Pop, it does resonate with a group of customers aged 18-25, who love new-age fashion. And this has got me good results in terms of open rates and CTR.

Most marketers create multiple versions of the same email to send to different customers. Nearly 44% of marketers stick to two to three versions, while 18% create four to six versions of an email.

6. Run A/B tests.

I also send these email versions to a select group of people to determine which one works best. For instance, I’d select two or three of the best versions of an email and send it to different customer groups for A/B testing. I predetermine a metric, such as the open rate, to compare the success of each email.

These tests help me understand the email type, frequency, and content each customer group prefers. Then, I further refine my email campaigns based on these key insights.

Pro tip: Change one element at a time. I either try out different subject lines or images while keeping everything else the same. This helps me pinpoint the exact change that made the campaign more successful.

7. Send your emails on Tuesdays.

There has been much debate on the best time and day to send emails. Look up “email frequency” or “email cadence” on Google, and you’ll see what I mean.

To bring an end to this debate, HubSpot surveyed 150+ marketing experts in the U.S., asking which day of the week their emails got the most engagement.

See the top picks:

• 27% said Tuesday.
• 19% said Monday.
• 17% chose Thursday.

While these findings can be a nice guidepost, I’ve found that my cadence ultimately depends on when my leads mostly interact with my emails. So, I closely monitor performance metrics to determine what drives results for my business.

8. Measure your success.

Even when I’m not testing, I still measure the success of each campaign. This serves as evergreen data I can use anytime I want to create a new email series.

Here are some email marketing metrics I track:

• Open rate. I divide the number of people who opened my email by the number of emails delivered.
• Click-through rate. This metric measures the percentage of people who click on a link in my email out of the total number of recipients.

• Response rate. If my email requires people to reply, I compare the number of replies received with the number of emails sent.
• Conversion rate. This is the number of leads I actually converted through the email campaign.
• Value per campaign. I compare the revenue generated from the campaign with the cost to determine the return on my investment.
• Unsubscribe rate. I also keep track of the number of people who unsubscribe from my mailing list after a campaign.

Since each metric tells me something different, I don’t rely on a single metric to measure the success of my drip campaigns. Instead, I compare all of them to gain insights into my performance and see areas where I need to improve.

There are some specific things to keep in mind when comparing these metrics. Greg Zakowicz, senior ecommerce expert at Omnisend, highlights them:

“If the unsubscribe rate for a drip campaign is significantly higher than scheduled campaigns, it is usually a good indication that something needs to be altered, such as the message timing or the content. One exception is a welcome message. Many times, a customer will sign up to receive a discount and then immediately unsubscribe.”

Email Drip Campaign Templates

Creating a compelling email drip campaign might be challenging. But you don’t have to start from scratch. I’ll share some customizable templates to help you kick off your campaign.

Email Drip Template 1

Hello [Prospect],

I’m [Name], and I’m the founder of [Company Name] — a brand that simplifies online payments. We work with popular payment gateways and card companies to make credit card payments accessible for all businesses.

We’ll help you process card-based transactions with minimal fees and also handle compliance issues for you. This gives you more time to focus on your business.

If this sounds good to you, could you spare 15 minutes to explore it further by booking a free demo?

[BOOK DEMO BUTTON]

Once you’ve booked a slot of your preference, our agent will reach out to you.

Regards,

[Name]

Why This Works:

• It’s personalized to include the name of the recipient.
• The value proposition is simple, direct, and concise — using only two to three sentences.
• There’s a clear, single CTA, so the recipient knows exactly how to proceed.
• The email also indicates when an agent will follow up, showing that the company is actively engaging its leads.

Email Drip Template 2

Hi [Prospect],

Hope you found value in our demo. Our software has dedicated features to handle international transactions, so you can seamlessly collect payments from your global clients.

If you want to learn more about these features, we’d love to set up a Zoom call with our sales manager, [Name]. When would be a good time to set this up?

Regards,

[Name]

Why This Works:

• The email highlights a feature that’s of interest to the prospect, showing that the company pays attention to its customers.
• There’s a clear point of contact in the email so prospects know who they’re talking to.
• The email isn’t sales-y. Instead, it gives prospects another opportunity to understand the product better.

Email Drip Template 3

Hello [Prospect],

We are offering a 25% discount on all our annual packages. This will help you get started with our product so you can solve all your payment issues.

Use this coupon code at checkout to claim your discount:

[Insert code]

Regards,

[Name]

Why This Works:

• The email offers an exclusive coupon, which makes the customer feel valued.
• The body of the email is short and straight to the point.
• It has a clear CTA.

I suggest sending each email two to three days after the customer takes a desired action because it gives them time to absorb the value of the previous interactions.

Email Drip Campaign Examples

If you’re ready to kickstart your campaign, here are some real-life examples of email sequences to inspire you.

1. Kay Unger’s Cart Abandonment Drip Campaign

Kay Unger is an American fashion brand with a 50-year-old legacy. Being a B2C brand, it has seen a good number of online customers adding products to their carts but leaving without making a purchase.

Its cart abandonment drip campaign targets these customers and encourages them to complete their purchases.

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The first email is simple. It reminds the customer of products in their cart and also displays related products they might be interested in.

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The second email goes out a couple of days later, again reminding the customer about their abandoned cart. Kay Unger offers a “Pay Later” option, motivating the customer to complete their purchase even if they don’t have enough funds.

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The third and final email warns the customer of their cart expiring. If they delay further, the products may be removed from their cart or may be out of stock.

Even though Kay Unger’s campaign is simple, it creates a sense of urgency and highlights solutions to possible reasons why a cart was abandoned.

2. Whistles’ Summer Promotional Drip Campaign

Whistles is another modern fashion brand that loves to unveil new collections every season. Here’s its promotional drip campaign to market new summer collections.

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The campaign contains a series of emails, all highlighting the best products from Whistles’ new collections. Customers directly receive the product catalog in their inboxes, so they can conveniently place an order.

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The final email announces an impressive sales discount, with up to 50% off. It also includes a direct link to the product catalog, so interested leads can click through to the website and start shopping immediately.

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I love how the emails highlight products the prospects might be interested in. It shows the company has spent time analyzing the prospect’s online activities enough to know their preferences.

3. RealSelf’s Lead-Nurturing Drip Campaign

RealSelf is a global online forum for people looking for advice on cosmetic procedures. While its resources are free, it has an exclusive community for its members.

The company uses drip campaigns to nurture leads and invite them to join its community. Here’s how the campaign goes.

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RealSelf sends a series of educational emails on trending cosmetic topics. These emails contain links leading to the company’s blog. After a few of these informative emails, RealSelf sends out an email asking leads to join its community.

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This email highlights the benefits of being in RealSelf’s community and also provides social links. By sending educational emails, the brand establishes its value among readers. Prospects are more likely to join the community if they find the free resources useful.

4. Winona’s Onboarding Drip Campaign

Winona is a wellness brand that helps women proactively manage their health. It offers several blog and video resources to guide women on their wellness journey.

The brand uses email drip campaigns to deliver these resources to its members’ inboxes and also to promote its products.

Here’s how Winona onboards new members.

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First, Winona assures clients they made the right move by reaching out. The “Quick Call” button helps recipients schedule a call with healthcare professionals and find answers to any questions they might have.

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This is followed by helpful resources encouraging women to prioritize their health and also try out Winona’s solutions.

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Winona’s onboarding campaign isn’t about making a sale. Rather, the goal is to assure new members that they’re in the right place. This helps the company to nurture leads for the long term and eventually turn them into prospects.

5. MitoQ’s Black Friday Drip Campaign

MitoQ is a unique wellness brand that creates dietary supplements for everyone from athletes to senior citizens.

The brand uses drip campaigns to promote its products and offers. Last Black Friday, it sent out an email series to advertise its sales discount.

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In the first email, MitoQ announces its upcoming Black Friday sale. It also encourages customers to sign up on its website for early access.

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MitoQ further sends more emails throughout the duration of the sale, motivating customers to visit its website.

6. Sprout Social’s Webinar Drip Campaign

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that caters to all businesses, from enterprises to SMBs. It holds regular webinars, discussions, and live sessions to educate customers on how to use social media for marketing.

Here’s how Sprout Social marketed one of its webinars using an email drip campaign.

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The first email explains the webinar in detail and includes a link for easy registration.

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The second email acts as a reminder for the webinar. I find that this is a smart move because some leads who are interested in the event might have missed the previous email.

7. Netflix’s Anniversary Drip Campaign

Netflix, the global streaming giant, is also known for its great marketing. The company crafts witty emails that always brighten up my inbox whenever they pop up. Netflix recently celebrated its 26th anniversary with a sitewide discount on all its merchandise.

Here’s what its email campaign looked like.

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The first email announced the official start of the sale — a whopping 26% discount for all Netflix fans.

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Then, Netflix sent out a series of emails reminding people to purchase their favorite goodies.

The final email included the exact time the sale would end, urging people to quickly grab the items they needed before the time elapsed.

8. Nomad’s Testimonial Drip Campaign

Nomad, a high-speed internet brand, kicked off a unique drip campaign called “Testimonial Tuesday.” The brand shares reviews and testimonials from customers every Tuesday, straight to subscribers’ inboxes.

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The first email in this campaign shares a testimonial from Sarah, a customer who’s happy with the brand’s services.

Here’s what the rest of the campaign looks like.

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I love this drip sequence for two reasons:

• It’s a great way to build trust and increase customer retention.
• It’s also a good way to promote the brand, encouraging prospects to sign up.

9. Sephora’s Membership Drip Campaign

Sephora, a leading beauty brand in the U.S., has its own loyalty program called Beauty Insider. Members enjoy perks such as extra discounts and redeemable points.

The brand promotes its membership program through drip email campaigns like.

Image Source

Sephora’s strategy to promote its exclusive membership program during sales discounts encourages more people to join the community.

Create Email Drip Campaigns That Convert Leads

Email drip campaigns might look difficult since you’ll need to craft several emails. But I speak from experience when I say that the right strategy and tools make it much easier to run successful campaigns.

To simplify the process for fellow marketers, I’ve shared some of the best email drip campaign examples that delivered excellent results. By following best practices and expert advice, you’ll create a campaign that truly converts.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Are you trying to figure out how your leads or Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) fit into an account-based strategy? You’re not alone – it’s one of the questions I hear most often.

Many marketers believe that making the switch to ABM means they have to sacrifice all of the traditional marketing metrics they’ve become accustomed to: form fills, leads, etc.

But ABM doesn’t have to be a “this or that” strategy – you can still incorporate leads into your account-based approach by simply adjusting a few things.

How Do Leads Fit Into Account Based Marketing?

It is a common misconception that leads are bad in an account-based strategy. Yes, bad leads are bad. But if you were to ask any salesperson if they want a good lead, the answer is probably yes. What you have to ask yourself is, “What is a good lead in modern B2B marketing?”

Is your definition of a lead simply a form fill? That might be too restrictive in today’s B2B space as there are many ways that people can engage with your brand – your new definition of a lead should reflect that. Did someone engage with you through chat, watch a video on your site, or read an ungated ebook?

Many of the tools you use today to host content, such as Vidyard or Uberflip, are able to send information back to your marketing automation system. This allows you to track known contact activity, add them to a campaign, and alert sales without using a form.

If someone did any of the items above and they’re from a good-fit account, you should think of them as the equivalent of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

Incorporating Leads Metrics Into Your ABM Program

Once your organization makes the switch to account-based marketing, you’re faced with the challenge of figuring out what to do with one of the most important metrics in traditional inbound marketing: leads.

For years, traditional businesses have been able to create very predictable pipelines based on lead metric targets; for example, by doing a historical analysis, a business could benchmark an average 5% conversion on leads becoming an MQL, and from there they could benchmark an average 50% conversion to SQL, and so on. This historical conversion data would allow them to build predictive pipeline reports.

While you’d always expect for there to be fluctuations based on seasonality, competitive pressure, or other outside forces, this kind of predictive modeling made it a bit easier for marketers to measure themselves based on their ability to make incremental gains in any of those lead-based metrics along the path to revenue (or a newly acquired customer).

It also gave sales the ability to easily scale hiring needs based on lead consumption rates and pipeline velocity.

But the problem with lead-based marketing is that, while the end result is predictable, you can also predict one other important thing: you’ll probably have to deal with a lot of unqualified or bad-fit leads.

Switching to account-based marketing filters out those bad-fit leads because you’ve narrowed your focus to your total addressable market and/or your ideal customer profile. This requires a mindset shift because you’re essentially asking your marketing team to either ignore or deprioritize the gross acquisition of leads, or severely discount their impact and learn to focus on entirely new metrics (like revenue). Scaling your sales team based on consuming bad-fit leads also makes the sales org more expensive without the same return on investment.

Tools like a marketing automation system can filter out incoming leads that don’t match your ICP, and because you’ve already done the legwork in advance to identify your ideal customer, when contacts from target accounts lean in and self-identify (via a web form, etc.), you can immediately move them into your marketing qualified lead bucket.

The benefit of ABM is that, in theory, you can “skip” the lead stage and move contacts into an MQL or SQL status. Because bad-fit leads shouldn’t be entering the pipe at all.

So where do traditional inbound metrics fit into account-based marketing? Essentially, you’re going to stop paying attention to the very top of the funnel – you just cut it out of the reporting. Instead, you’ll focus on marketing accepted leads or sales accepted leads, because that’s what ABM will help you drive more of.

Turning Anonymous Account Engagement into MQLs

Engagement is currently a big word in ABM and B2B marketing. Unfortunately, people sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to make it tangible, especially if they are still measured by leads or MQLs. Overall, we feel that measuring marketing’s success based off of engagement is far more valuable than MQLs, but we don’t want you to throw the baby out with the bathwater or suggest that someone transform their marketing measurement model before they are ready.

Just because marketing’s performance is measured by leads, doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of engagement. When you see that a good-fit account is engaging with your brand, you can add that account to a marketing program or campaign. You could create retargeting audiences based on good-fit account visits to your site. You could start proactively advertising to a whole department in an account that has visited your site. You could send a direct mail, invite them to an event, or create a personalized landing page. All these tactics will help you attract more high-quality leads.

Summary

It’s not only untrue that leads don’t fit into an account-based strategy, but it’s also pretentious and dangerous to continue evangelizing this notion. Not everyone is ready to completely transform their go-to-market teams from lead-based to account-based, and most organizations should never completely make that transition.

What is important is to evaluate how to transition your organization to start focusing on target account leads. Start slowly by showing the success of account-based strategies and proving the value of your ABM campaigns with small pilot programs. Then, if and when you’re prepared to make a larger transformation, you’ll be ready.

• 29 new places around the world have been added to UNESCO's World Heritage list.
• The stunning sites include islands filled with wildlife and ancient palaces, and many of them preserve what was left behind by early humans.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.

UNESCO has added 29 sites to its list of World Heritage sites around the world, from iconic American architecture, to an ancient city in Iraq, to some of the world's most stunning natural areas.

Sites are recognized for their cultural or historic significance, and gain new protections once they are added to the list.

The World Heritage Committee announced the new sites at a meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, this week. The list already included world-famous sites like the Grand Canyon and India's Taj Mahal.

These are the 29 new sites that have just been added:

French Austral Lands and Seas, France

UNESCO says that this region, made up of a series of islands in the Indian Ocean, "supports one of the highest concentrations of birds and marine mammals in the world."

It calls it a "oasis" in the middle of the ocean, covering more than 67 million hectares (670,000 square kilometers).

It has the "largest population of King Penguins and Yellow-nosed albatrosses in the world" and the fact that the islands are so far removed from humans means they are "extremely well-preserved showcases of biological evolution and a unique terrain for scientific research."

Paratyand Ilha Grande, Brazil

This area includes areas of Brazil's rainforest and one of Brazil's best-preserved coastal towns.

According to UNESCO, the area is "home to an impressive diversity of species, some of which are threatened" including jaguars and some species of monkey.

It used to serve as part of the route through which gold was shipped to Europe, and its port "also served as an entry point for tools and African slaves, sent to work in the mines."

Bagan, Myanmar

This sacred site contains temples, monasteries, and places of pilgrimage that show "an exceptional range of Buddhist art and architecture."

It also contains archaeological remains and sculptures. The "bears spectacular testimony to the peak of Bagan civilization," which ran from the 11th to 13th centuries and the Bagan site acted as the as the "capital of a regional empire."

Seowon, Korean Neo-Confucian Academies, South Korea

This site is made up of nine educational institutions called "seowon."

"Learning, veneration of scholars and interaction with the environment were the essential functions of the seowons, expressed in their design," UNESCO said.

Writing-on-Stone, Canada

This site, near the US border, contains engravings and paintings left by the native Blackfoot people. 

Archaeological remains date back to 1800 BC, and the "landscape is considered sacred to the Blackfoot people, and their centuries-old traditions are perpetuated through ceremonies and in enduring respect for the places."

Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the Coast of Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf of China, China

The site's mudflat system, which UNESCO said is "considered to be the largest in the world," means that it plays host to species of fish and crustaceans, and serves as an important area for migrating birds.

"Large gatherings of birds, including some of the world's most endangered species, depend on the coastline as a stopover to molt, rest, winter or nest."

Erzgebirge and Krušnohoří Mining Region, Czechia and Germany

This area contains a "wealth of several metals exploited through mining from the Middle Ages onward."

It was once the most important source of silver ore in Europe, and saw 800 years of continuous mining.

Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland

Taking up more than 14% of Iceland's territory, the Vatnajökull National Park is more than 1,400,000 hectares (14,000 square kilometers).

It contains two of Iceland's most active volcanoes, and the interaction between the volcanoes and the ice creates "spectacular" features, according to UNESCO. 

 

Jaipur City, Rajasthan, India

The walled city of Jaipur dates back to 1727 and is known for its public squares, ochre color, and grid shape.

Landscape for Breeding and Training of Ceremonial Carriage Horses at Kladruby nad Labem, Czechia

The imperial stud farm was founded in 1579, "at a time when horses played vital roles in transport, agriculture, military support and aristocratic representation."

The site is now "one of Europe's leading horse-breeding institutions."

Risco Caido and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria, Spain

The area contains proof of human life before Spanish settlers arrived in the 15th century, including temples that are "thought to be linked to a possible cult of the stars and 'Mother Earth.'"

It also contains stunning volcanic formations and cliffs.

 

Water Management System of Augsburg, Germany

The water management system in the German city of Augsburg dates back to the 14th century, though has it evolved since.

"The technological innovations generated by this water management system have helped establish Augsburg as a pioneer in hydraulic engineering," UNESCO said.

The 20th century architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, US

Eight buildings in the US designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright were added to the list, including the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Wisconsin and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

UNESCO noted how Lloyd Wright's work shows a "blurring of the boundaries between exterior and interior and the unprecedented use of materials such as steel and concrete" and that his work "had a strong impact on the development of modern architecture in Europe."

Krzemionki Prehistoric Striped Flint Mining Region, Poland

This site "features one of the most comprehensive prehistoric underground flint extraction and processing systems identified to date."

The flint gathered at the mines was mostly used to make axes, according to UNESCO.

"The site provides information about life and work in prehistoric settlements and bears witness to an extinct cultural tradition. It is an exceptional testimony of the importance of the prehistoric period and of flint mining for tool production in human history. "

Le Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene, Italy

This region in north-east Italy "includes part of the vine-growing landscape of the Prosecco wine production area.

Use of the area by humans since the 17th century has created a unique landscape that has a checkerboards shape "consisting of rows of vines parallel and vertical to the slopes."

Mounded Tombs of Ancient Japan, Japan

The site is made up of 49 burial mounds that served as tombs for the elite in ancient Japan.

The tombs were decorated with clay figures that took the form of everything from weapons to humans.

Plain of Jars, Laos

This area in central Laos has more than 2,100 jars that were used during the Iron Age.

The jars, stone disks, tombstones, and other stone objects "are the most prominent evidence of the Iron Age civilization that made and used them until it disappeared, around 500 CE," according to UNESCO.

Hyrcanian Forests, Iran

The history of these ancient forests along the edge of the Caspian city dates back 25 to 50 million years, according to UNESCO.

The area's "biodiversity is remarkable," and it is home to 180 species of bird and 58 species of mammals, including the Persian Leopard.

Royal Building of Mafra, Portugal

The site, near Portugal's capital Lisbon, was conceived by the king in 1711, and has two palaces, a royal chapel, a Franciscan monastery, and a library with 36,000 volumes.

UNESCO calls it an "an exceptional example of Italian Baroque" and says it "illustrates the power and reach of the Portuguese Empire" at the time it was built.

Dilmun Burial Mounds, Bahrain

UNESCO recognized a number of archaeological sites across Bahrain that together have around 11,774 burial mounds built between 2050 and 1750 BC. The mounds are unique in the world, according to UNESCO.

Ancient Ferrous Metallurgy Sites, Burkina Faso

Different areas across Burkina Faso contain furnaces and dwellings that date back to as early as 800 BC and serve as the "oldest evidence of the development of iron production found in Burkina Faso."

Babylon, Iraq

The site is made up of the ruins of the city of Babylon, which was the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 626 to 539 BC.

UNESCO says that the site is "a unique testimony to one of the most influential empires of the ancient world."

Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, Australia

The site, in an Aboriginal area, contains volcanoes, swamps, and marshes, and is "one of the largest and oldest aquaculture networks in the world."

The network of waterways can be used to trap eels, "which has provided the population with an economic and social base for six millennia."

Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City, China

The ruins of the city "are an outstanding example of early urban civilization expressed in earthen monuments, urban planning, a water conservation system and a social hierarchy expressed in differentiated burials in cemeteries within the property," according to UNESCO.

They date back to around 3300 to 2300 years BC.

Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of Sawahlunto, Indonesia

The site was built between the 19th and 20th centuries by The Netherlands' colonial government to extract and process coal in a previously inaccessible region.

Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte in Braga, Portugal

The sanctuary overlooking the Portuguese city of Braga "was developed over a period of more than 600 years."

Churches of the Pskov School of Architecture, Russia

A group of churches, cathedrals, monasteries that date from the 12th to 16th centuries in the Russian city of Pskov are recognized by UNESCO as the group that built them "informed the evolution of Russian architecture over five centuries."

Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK

Jodrell Bank is "one of the world's leading radio astronomy observatories," UNESCO said.

It has "substantial scientific impact in fields such as the study of meteors and the moon, the discovery of quasars, quantum optics, and the tracking of spacecraft."

Historic Centre of Sheki with the Khan’s Palace, Azerbaijan

UNESCO recognized the center of the historic city of Sheki for its traditional architecture and its location along "important historic trade routes." 

What if you could leave every discovery call knowing you have a deal?

After analyzing millions of discovery calls, we’re sharing insights on how top sales pros surface business pain, deliver value, and cultivate a truly meaningful conversation.

You’ll learn discovery tactics used by veterans that will increase your deal velocity and give you an unfair advantage over the competition.

The post 7 Proven Discovery Call Tactics That Great Salespeople Swear By appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Why telecom operators must reimagine the customer journey

I’ve recently started working closely with several multinational mobile network operators (MNOs) in different regions across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific that are all facing similar threats to their business.

Fierce pricing competition from new entrants and business models are eroding margins. These margin pressures have a dual effect of increasing the relative cost of traditional customer service and support channels (e.g. call centers and stores), and decreasing the lifetime value of fickle consumers ready to switch to aggressively priced new service options.

Ironically, network operators remain the largest revenue generators at the center of the tech industry’s value chain. The nature of their business also means that they have retained direct relationships with broad customer bases, and extensive proprietary data sets on customer behavior, location, and purchase history. These incumbent advantages imply that MNOs have an enormous opportunity to ‘fight back’ against industry trends, and most notably through building digitally-native customer journeys and experiences.

Telecom operators are not capturing the value of society’s digital transformation, despite their central role in the value chain that is creating it.

A 2017 study from the World Economic Forum and Accenture indicates that operators’ share of telecom industry profits have decreased from 58% in 2010 to an expected 40% this year.

The big winners have been content aggregators and distributors. This explains network-content consolidation plays like Comcast’s takeover of NBC Universal, Verizon’s acquisitive spree of AOL and Yahoo!, and AT&T’s recently approved bid for Time Warner. It also explains the surging profits and market value of content aggregation businesses like Facebook (Newsfeed), Amazon (Prime Video), Apple (iTunes), Netflix, and Google (YouTube).

New competition and business models are emerging from digitally-native tech companies.

At the same time, as industry profit share has flowed away from operators and towards content aggregation and distribution businesses, the most dominant of those same content players (i.e. the ones that managed to avoid being swallowed up by their network partners) have moved to aggressively integrate backwards up the value chain.

It may already be too late to fight back. Research from 2016 indicated that the majority of consumers were ready to switch their mobile network to one of their favorite tech companies if available, and that the proportion skews higher as you increase customer segment value. Whether it be Facebook’s Whatsapp, Google’s Hangouts, Microsoft’s Skype, or Apple’s Facetime, tech giants that have come to be trusted by consumers with delivering innovative, convenient digital experiences are eating up OTT voice and data services and commoditizing the networks which power them from below.

Reimagining the customer experience along a digital paradigm is the largest opportunity for operators to re-capture profit growth.

The convenience and cost of digital experiences has translated into a tight correlation between the prevalence and usage of digital channels, and higher levels of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. This relationship has been observed across industries from financial services (e.g. PayPal vs. wire transfer) to travel (e.g. Priceline vs. travel agent).

Telecom is no exception. 2016 studies by Cap Gemini and McKinsey & Co. both showed strong correlations between the proportion of customers that use digital channels for service and support and customer NPS. In an era increasingly defined by digital accessibility, it is simply cheaper, faster, and more convenient for consumers to transact and interact over digital.

The mobile experience is central to a cheaper, faster, and more convenient customer journey, and will play a critical role in redefining what it takes to open a new account, upgrade your data plan, or pay your phone bill.

In the U.S. market, Verizon can leverage real-time account balance and usage data from CRM and billing systems to trigger mobile notifications which offer up personalized recommendations based on historical consumption. In one example, a push notification can be used to alert subscribers who have exceeded their monthly data plan allowances and offer them alternatives that may better suit their historical usage patterns.

Rogers Communications, the largest telecommunications firm in Canada, has gone a step further. By using similar data on current and historical consumption patterns to forecast individual users’ likelihood to exceed their plan, Rogers can preemptively warn their customers that they are approaching their plan’s limit. By delivering a utility first with customer value in mind, Rogers can create a welcome touchpoint in their mobile customer journey which ultimately drives to higher rates of subscriber retention and sales.

Back in the U.S. market, Comcast, has been recognized by Accenture and the World Economic Forum for the innovative work they’ve done to capture customer data to deliver better services across their Xfinity X1 platform. Customer-level data captured across mobile, desktop, tablet, and OTT devices percolate throughout Xfinity customer communications to personalize and improve it’s offering. This drives higher levels of customer engagement, which ultimately increases the average subscriber’s lifetime value and volume of ad inventory that Comcast can monetize across its portfolio of media properties.

In Asia, mobile network operators like Telenor’s Malaysian subsidiary Digi can create new lifestyle brands by investing in their loyalty rewards programs. By providing unique location-based services and rewards as in the below example, Digi can make a strategic move to own the customer relationship on mobile, and build their position as an intermediary between the customer and loyalty program partners.

As a predominantly pre-paid mobile business, Digi can also leverage their mobile app to game-ify the new customer onboarding experience, and incentivize account credit top-ups and self-service discovery while promoting their loyalty rewards program. The commercial impact of such efforts are to reduce the cost of customer service while simultaneously increasing retention and customer satisfaction

These examples are representative of the ways in which the world’s largest operators are just beginning to reimagine the customer journey in digital terms. Looking forward, it’s becoming clear that we are moving towards a world where the services delivered by branches and call centers today are predominantly digital, and the integration of customer data across every touchpoint unlocks higher levels of relevancy and convenience.

“Use your words.”

It’s a good reminder when you’re angry or upset. But it’s also a good reminder when you’re emailing a prospect or on a call.

Why?

Because the wrong sales phrases — no matter how natural they seem — can kill a deal before it starts.

Why Some Sales Phrases Need to Go

Expectations of sales professionals have changed over time. With an unlimited choice of product options (thanks to the internet) and access to all the information they need at their fingertips, buyers have more leverage and higher expectations.

Having a good product – even the best product – isn’t enough to successfully engage and sell to the modern buyer. Year ago, buyers actually needed to engage with salespeople to become educated about functionality and the state of the market.

Crazy concept, I know.

But as market dynamics have shifted, salespeople must evolve to match buyer expectations. A big part of that is crisper communication.

To become and remain a successful seller in the modern age you need to communicate and engage in a meaningful way. In short, in today’s world, sellers just need to be better.

And today, we’re going to focus specifically on using your words — your sales phrases — better.

There are two types of bad sales phrases we’re going to discuss:

• Those formed from laziness
• Those that aren’t effective

It’s not a knock on the profession, because I’m guilty too. We don’t get the results we could (or should) because we’re using these lazy and ineffective sales phrases.

But that doesn’t change the fact: For salespeople everywhere, the pressure is on to cut through the noise and be memorable to potential buyers.

Here they are: 6 sales phrases you need to eliminate today and tips for what to say instead.

Lazy Sales Phrases

Salespeople have a lot of conversations, and pending the velocity of their sale cycle, the types of conversations can become very repetitive. When any human task becomes repetitive, consciously or unconsciously, we naturally look for ways to cut corners.

And that’s where lazy sales phrases are made, used, and become habits.

Ask yourself the last time you used any of the phrases below. If the answer is anytime in the past 12 months, then read on to nix them today.

RELATED: Do You Make These 13 Mistakes During Your Sales Conversations?

“Just Checking In”

This is notoriously known as the laziest and worst sales phrase on the planet. “Just checking in” is a zero value-add for your prospect, and therefore VERY easy to ignore.

Why are you checking in? This line is so lazy, it doesn’t even bother to say why. Your recipient has to spend time and energy opening the email, figuring out whether they’re missing something (surely you didn’t send an email for no reason, right?), then answer.

It’s too much work! Email ignored.

What you’re really trying to say is this: “Are there updates on ___ (that thing you care about)?”

Try this instead. Let’s say you’re waiting for an update on legal review.

Don’t: Hi Keith – Just checking in to see if you have any updates?

Do: Hi Keith – Are there any updates on the legal review process? Our team is on standby if you have any concerns.”

Or perhaps it’s been a few weeks since you talked to your prospect.

Don’t: Hi Myra – Just checking in. Do you have 30 minutes to meet?

Do: Hi Myra – Has timing aligned to regroup? When we last spoke, May was a better time to revisit how we can [insert value prop] for your team. Does it make sense to reconnect on Tuesday?

By asking if it makes sense to regroup, you spark a dialogue. You’re more likely to get the “why” behind the answers — positive or negative — because you’re not leading with an ask.

Remember, attention is short and you have limited words to burn, so use them wisely. Cut any and all filler words, and replace with context and value. Make it as easy as possible to respond to you.

And don’t even think of using, “touching base” in its place. “Touching base” is its ugly cousin. Hard pass.

“Any Questions?”

This lazy sales phrase plagues discovery calls and demos across sales floors everywhere. It makes me cringe.

I love to hate this question because, until recently, I also used it. Sellers think it’s a quick “out” to spark a dialogue, but it falls flat. Why?

What sellers and (most) buyers want is a conversation that is challenging, insightful, or simply interesting. Many sales leaders would call this “meaningful.”

There’s a time and a place to ensure questions are all answered, but “Any questions?” is the laziest of them all. Similar to “Just checking in,” you put the responsibility on your prospect to generate a topic of conversation.

When at a natural transition in your demo, try instead:

Taylor – what’s most interesting about this to you?

Now they’re on the spot to answer honestly, and therefore, meaningfully. This question will either surface

1. What they see as most valuable
2. A question about what you said/showed
3. Or they’ll say, “I don’t know,” or “nothing”

The last option is undesirable for them because it will make them seem socially uninteresting to you and their peer participants. So the former two answers are most often the result. And this gives you exactly what you want.

Plug and play this in your next conversation:

“What about this _____ (feature, product, story, use case) is most interesting to you?”

Then stop talking. After a short pause, you will get the conversation you so eagerly desire.

Use this on every call, and watch single-word answers disappear.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Talk Less, Listen More. Do You Know The Golden Talk vs Listening Ratio?

Ineffective Sales Phrases

Some sales phrases don’t need to be completely removed from your vocabulary. But they are ineffective the way they’re currently being used. They only need a bit of tweaking to make them useful.

Let’s take a look.

“List Price” or “Rack Rate”

Aside from making you sound like a used car salesperson who’s reading the sticker price off a used Nissan, when you use the phrase, “list price,” you completely negate the validity of your asking price.

You’re subliminally saying, “Here’s our starting point. It’s your turn to take a hack at it.”

Worse still, when you say any of these words — list price, typical price, or standard price — at any point in a deal, you can expect your sales cycle to extend 19% longer than when you don’t use these terms (Gong.io).

Fortunately, by slightly altering your word choice, you can drastically improve the beginning of your pricing talk track.

Don’t: list price

Do: approved pricing

The change is subtle but has a psychological impact.

RELATED: Reframing the Cost Question as a Sales Advantage

“Approved pricing” suggests the price is specific to the buyer’s scenario. It feels like there is thought behind the number, which gives it credibility.

I don’t expect this change to eradicate discounting requests or negotiation from your sales cycle, but at the very least will give you more confidence and a stronger pricing dialogue.

“Pick Your Brain”

This sales phrase is a big loser. I mean, think about it: Getting your brain picked sounds taxing and, frankly, unenjoyable. It also means the person doing the picking is getting value at the expense of the pickee.

The mistake is that salespeople try to preface an “ask” with an unattractive, one-sided dialogue:

Don’t: Hey Marie,

Just touching base following my last email. I’d like to pick your brain on your web optimization tactics and share best practices from our 2,000+ clients. Do you have 15 minutes tomorrow?

Why not “give” value instead?

Do: Hey Marie,

I’ve identified two key areas where we can impact your web optimization results, specifically following our work with other AI-based data labeling organizations.

What’s the best time for us to connect this Thursday to review?

Don’t mask a weak or cold ask with a “brain pick.” Instead, be direct with a give-first mentality, and watch your responses increase in volume and warmth.

“Just Wanted To”

This sales phrase doesn’t work on multiple levels: It feels passive. It’s casual. And it’s selfish by definition.

In speech, this phrase often goes unnoticed. We hear it as “simply confirming,” which isn’t terrible.

Via email, however, it has much more of a negative impact. People often read the first few words of an email via mobile notification or very quickly via desktop. Leading with “just wanted to” makes it sound like you’re setting up an ask or a task — and no one wants either.

Don’t: Hey Morgan – Just wanted to make sure you have the agreement. Did you get it?

Instead, be more direct and proactive.

Do: Hi Morgan – I’m reaching out to ensure you received the agreement. Can you please confirm?

You can be direct and still be polite in your ask, so instead of leading with what you want, start with why you’re reaching out.

Remember, the rule of thumb is to give first. With that approach, you’ll win your prospects’ trust (and earn their time). Don’t let self-interest guide your messaging.

Don’t Be Lazy with Your Sales Phrases

You’re not a lazy sales rep. You’re a successful sales professional who is constantly striving for improvement. (Like reading the best sales blogs.)

That being the case, you need to use your words effectively — not just when you’re speaking, but in email as well.

Use these updated sales phrases and techniques, and level-up your conversations.

The post 6 Sales Phrases That Are Killing Your Deals (& What to Say Instead) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

We all have buyers and future buyers who stop replying to us – for a myriad of reasons. Some of the biggest reasons are:

• They just don’t see enough value to spend time communicating

Small and mid-size businesses are constantly trying to keep up the pace in the rapidly transforming digital world. They are the first to test the newest lead generating tools or productivity hacks, but many of them neglect the vital part of any business – communication. According to stats, productivity improves by up to 25% in organizations with connected employees. In this article, we’ve selected some of the best communication tools designed with smaller companies in mind and helping you take your business to the next level.

Slack for Instant Communication

Slack is a handy software for clear and efficient communication inside your team. It helps to align sales, marketing, and other departments. It’s easy-to-use platform for instant chats, discussions and file sharing. As soon as you download Slack, you’ll need to create a team and invite your colleagues there. You can then create separate channels, public or private to discuss topics related to your project and share important announcements to the whole team. You are not limited to the number of channels and can easily integrate Slack with Gmail or Trello to receive notifications from these services right to your Slack account.

Price: free with basic features, extended features $6.67 per person monthly.

Google Hangouts for Productive Conference Calls

Google Hangouts is another free tool for scheduling audio and video calls for those companies, who have clients worldwide or have remote co-workers. If Google won’t kill the project in October, you can continue using this handy solution for effective cross-team communication and communication with clients.
Meet minimizes the hassle of joining video calls at the office. It works simply as that: you set up a meeting and share the link with its participants and they can join it without worrying about right accounts or plug-ins.

Price: free

Zoom for Webinars and Demos

Zoom is a necessary tool for every entrepreneur who wants to conduct live webinars, conference calls and trainings. Zoom is video communications company to help you organize demos for several people, share your knowledge and save these recordings. It can be easily integrated with apps your company already uses and give additional benefits to its participants. The participants don’t need a Zoom app to join the meeting: they can watch it from their phone, desktop, mobile or tablets.

Price: free basic plan for one-to-one meetings and group meetings for up to 100 participants. Unlimited plans start at $14.99 per month per host and come with admin tools, customization options, and additional integrations.

Skype for International Calls

Skype is a great tool for instant messaging, international calls, chats, and group calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches. Even if your wifi is not working, the Skype calls are five times cheaper than international calls from your mobile operator. Skype has multiple features that could be of great value to entrepreneurs:

• HD video calling: experience great quality of video calls and group meetings.
• Live subtitles: allows reading the words that are spoken during the live audio or video call.
• Screen sharing: allows you to share presentations, pics or files during a Skype call.
• Skype call recording: helps you capture Skype calls or record important meeting with colleagues.

Price: Free for chats, see the rates for international calls.

Trello for planning and organizing teamwork

The entrepreneur can get the company’s daily and weekly tasks organized with Trello. The interface of the app is pretty intuitive: you can create tasks for each team, make centralized team updates and keep information transparent. Trello is a great tool to visualize your daily routine and control what’s being done every day to make you closer to your business goals.

Price: free with basic features, from $10 per person annually for extended functionality.

Jira for time tracking

When you’re a team of only three people, you know what everyone’s been doing. But as your company grows, it’s getting harder to control everyone’s workflow and measure performance of every employee. You can see how much time your team invests in different tasks and how much is left for the task to be completed. With the help of Jira, you can visualize the whole workflow and split massive tasks into smaller ones.

Price: at least 10 users, starting from $10 flat rate for 10 users.

NetHunt CRM for organizing your workflow

NetHunt has been operating as a Gmail-based CRM software designed for small and middle-sized businesses. It’s a productivity tool inside Google Apps that cover a full set of features to manage leads, nurture customer relations, monitor sales progress, and close deals right in the inbox.

As soon as the team starts using а powerful CRM, their performance skyrockets. According to Salesforce, CRM may increase the company’s sales by up to 29%

What are the major benefits of CRM for entrepreneurs?

• Get their database of clients and leads organized;
• More often and quickly turn leads into clients;
• Synchronize Gmail activity with the sales processes;
• Provide excellent customer experience;
• Store and access every moment of customer interaction with the sales team;
• Schedule follow-ups and bulk email campaigns and more.

Price: free for up to 2 users, from $24 per person monthly

Download a comprehensive guide on how to choose the right CRM for your business needs here:

As we discussed in part 2 of this series, even the largest and oldest companies are facing a new B2B selling environment where “old school” marketing and sales just doesn’t work like it did. Companies that talk to their prospects instead of listening and working with changing customer requirements are starting to lose out.

Large B2B corporations are often filled with silos. Corporate marketing, product marketing, sales development, field sales and other groups may all be talking to prospects and customers without regard for the overall conversation. A lot of disjointed noise doesn’t make for a great customer experience and prospects are screening it out.

Companies that still think in terms of sales funnels are surprised when the expected opportunities don’t fall out the bottom. Often their response is to push marketing to pour more leads into the top.

What happens when the funnel starts drying up? Let’s take a look:

• Company X – let’s call them Acme – has always focused its marketing and sales efforts around “the funnel.” They see the world in terms of Marketing Leads, Sales Leads, Opportunities and Customers. Of course, Sales doesn’t always value Marketing Leads, and Marketing efforts aren’t always in tune with what Sales is trying to sell. But the execs look at the funnel metrics religiously to see how many leads are making it through. Recently the velocity has slowed, and more leads are falling to the floor. Naturally, marketing is pressured to make it rain and big campaigns are planned. But like many companies, Acme doesn’t have a way to measure effectiveness. Funnel results are their metric. How can they instead match their efforts and metrics to customer needs?

If Acme’s story sounds familiar, it’s because we all regularly engage with companies that have outmoded customer engagement models. Instead of thinking about what we the prospect might need, they toss leads into an artificial funnel or buying stage path and see what comes out the other side. These companies don’t realize that more isn’t always better. As customers, we’d all like to see fewer but more relevant emails and no obvious break in the conversation when marketing hands off to sales.

This scenario often occurs in mature companies struggling to evolve as their market changes. Tactics that used to work for them are showing signs of age. Newer technologies and tools are giving their competitors better ways to nurture and sell clients. They know they must integrate systems, data, and processes in order to enable a Revenue Marketing model that is based on continuous communication. But their funnel approach is familiar and change is hard.

Companies like Acme must refocus their efforts on the long-term versus the immediate sales need. Instead of spraying emails, marketing learns to nurture prospects with stage-appropriate offers based on their interactions – the right message at the right time in the right format and channel. Sales learns to engage at the right time, tailoring their approach based on activity history. Campaigns feature cross-functional plays and all customer touchpoints become orchestrated.

If your company is a bit too much like Acme, focusing on customer experience instead of the funnel will help you take customer relationships to a new level. As you move from one-sized-fits-all to personalized marketing, your customers will experience fewer disjointed communications, more relevant and timely information, and offers that enable their own growth and revenue. They will purchase, buy more, renew, and even advocate. You’ll see breakeven, profitability and maximum life-time value.

If your prospects are not fitting into your funnel, consider changing your model. Treat the customer journey as an infinite loop that results in more revenue and loyalty over time.

Do you agree or disagree with the title of this post? If you agree, it is probably because you see sales not as just a job but as a lifestyle. If, on the other hand, you disagree with the title or you have issues with it, it is probably because you view sales as taking advantage of others.

Video: Sales is Not a Job, Sales is a Lifestyle:

 

 

To me, sales is about making a significant impact on others. Your focus with each person you meet is to influence and impact them in a positive manner, and when you do, you are making a significant impact on them.

When you spend your time significantly impacting others, then sales is much more than a job, it truly is a lifestyle you live 24/7. When you view sales as a lifestyle, it is amazing the number of opportunities you will have. There are some who say great salespeople are just lucky because things have fallen in their lap. I say that’s not the case. I say they’re lucky because they’re living sales as a lifestyle, and as a result they see more opportunities.

I am going to challenge you to make the following item #1 on your goal list: ‘Be a person who significantly impacts others.’ My belief is that when you have this as your top goal, it will increase your ability to sell, because everything you do will be centered around impacting and influencing others.

Each day, count it a privilege to be able to have as your #1 goal to significantly impact others. Of the all activities you could be doing, sales is certainly one that allows you to focus 100% of your time significantly impacting others.

Who have you made a significant impact on this past week? Who will you make a significant impact on today? Your world is waiting for you, it’s your responsibility to make an impact.

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

The startup funding landscape is not the same for men and women. In fact, men entrepreneurs are almost twice as likely to raise at least $199k or more than women, according to a survey conducted by 99designs. And you will be surprised to know that $38.9 billion was invested in companies with a female founder that is just 17% of venture dollars founded globally, reports CrunchBase. So what are the challenges that female startup owners face and how can they overcome these challenges?

I have listed the four challenges that women entrepreneurs often face.

Let’s dive in:

1- Constant Battle to Prove Seriousness

Despite a strong wave of equality and woman empowerment, the world around us is still male-dominated. So it happens oftentimes that male-dominated society doesn’t want to accept women in a leadership role.

Women-led startups have to struggle many times to be taken seriously, let alone the matter of funding. How to overcome this challenge?

Well, my friend, this should not be a challenge in the first place because business acumen is gender-neutral. But we are not living in the perfect world. Gender-biased exists. And the only way to fight it is to build confidence and overcome self-negative talk.

Don’t let negative comments stop you from reaching your full potential. First, you need to consider yourself winner, the others will later join. If you develop a powerful business plan and financial model, make a list of key milestones, create a story that includes the problem your startup solves, write and practice your pitch, and draft an executive summary, you are more likely to attract the attention of investors.

2- Poor Networking

Needless to say, success in fundraising depends a lot on visibility and getting noticed by the right investors. Who knows you and whom you know play an important role in getting funded. One important reason why men-led startups score more than women-led startups in securing funding is men have solid networking. And despite many efforts, networking is still a big challenge for women. Why?

Vast networking opportunities are organized around male interests, according to Herminia Ibarra’s classic study. This makes networking a challenging task for women. How can you overcome this challenge and build a strong network?

My secret tip to networking is to collaborate with other women entrepreneurs and expand your reach. Make yourself easy to approach and be confident to approach others.

Also, you should not ignore the power of social media. LinkedIn is the best social media platform to network with the right people.

3- Limited Access to Funding

“Venture capitalists offer funding to those in their “tribe,” notes Bonnie Crater, the president and CEO of Full Circle Insights. And 89% of investors are male in the venture capital world. With that said, women-led startups have limited access to funding as compared to men-led startups. How women entrepreneurs can overcome this hurdle?

Following are some funding opportunities for women-led startups:

• Female-led funds – Many successful female entrepreneurs want to give back to up-and-coming women-led business
• Funding initiative for women entrepreneurs – Many funding options have been created with female entrepreneurs in the mind
• Winning entrepreneur competitions- Government and private sector organize competitions to encourage entrepreneurship
• Bank loans – Banks sometimes offer subsidized loans to startups that have unique products/services

In the super-connected world, your business will not suffer if you have unique products/services to offer.

Work on your visibility, make efforts to get noticed, try to connect with the right people, and be active on social media, especially on LinkedIn. This can open new doors for you to get funded.

4- Stereotypical Mindset of Investors

Women are not just entrepreneurs – they can have spouses, children, and other responsibilities. So some investors think that demand from professional and personal commitments can pressure a woman entrepreneur; and as a result, she cannot focus on business full heartedly. However, this is nothing but just a stereotypical mindset.

Don’t Arianna Huffington, Sheryl Sandberg, Debbie Fields, or Indra Nooyi have their personal commitments! Of course, they do. And their success is enough to bust the stereotype.

“Leadership knows no gender. As an entrepreneur, you will also think about your company’s interest first, whether you are male or female,” says Upasana Taku, the co-founder of MobiKwik.

Breaking stereotype is your fight. Some can help, but you should not expect anyone to fight for you.

Getting your basics right often helps in fighting stereotypical mindset – capture essentials, make a powerful business plan, do your investor research, learn the vocabulary. And most importantly, be confident

Final thoughts:

It is always difficult to find funding for a startup. For women-led startups, it becomes more difficult. But if you believe in yourself, nothing is impossible. If one door closes, open another door. Don’t let gender stereotyping come in the way of your dream.

Greg McDougall has long been an early adopter of new technologies. When Tesla’s electric vehicles first came out, the founder and CEO of Harbour Air Ltd. was an early buyer. McDougall got a Model 3 for his wife and a Model S for himself. His car has Tesla’s infamous “Ludicrous Mode.” (If you dare touch the icon on the dashboard screen marked “Ludicrous,” then tap “Yes, bring it on” instead of “No, I want my mommy,” the four-door sedan turns into the fastest-accelerating production car in the world.)

Some may think that McDougall, 63, has hit Harbour Air’s “Bring it on” button. Already North America’s largest seaplane operator and an eight-time member of Deloitte’s list of Best Managed Companies, the firm now has a disruptive plan to dramatically change the world of aviation. If the Richmond, B.C.-based company succeeds, Harbour will be the world’s first airline to fly a completely electric fleet. It means converting all of its 40 seaplanes into—as the company puts it—ePlanes.

Back on March 19, Harbour announced it was partnering with magniX, a research and development company with operations in the U.S. and Australia. MagniX was set up in 2009 to develop high-power-density electric motors for the aviation industry, a sector where the last significant development in propulsion systems was the first jet-powered plane in 1939.

Using technology from magniX, Harbour is currently converting one of its 1960s-era vintage de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver float planes. It’s switching out the six-passenger Beaver’s gas engine with a much lighter electric motor. Fuel tanks will be removed from the wings and replaced with lithium-ion battery packs, also installed elsewhere in the fuselage. In what would be a historic step for aviation, the prototype plane could be flown for testing as early as November 2019. With regulatory approval, the world’s first ever commercial flight of an electric plane with paying customers could happen in 2021, and the conversion of the rest of Harbour’s fleet would start after that.

A pilot since 1974, McDougall founded Harbour Air in 1982. He started with two small seaplanes, ferrying log buyers up and down B.C.’s mountainous rainforest coast. The operation expanded quickly into tours, charters and eventually scheduled service. It now flies some 500,000 passengers from around the world on a dozen routes in the Pacific Northwest.

Some may be skeptical of Harbour’s plans to go electric. But McDougall’s been talking enthusiastically about it with many Harbour employees (as many as 500 during high season) and his aviation buddies for years. His early-adopter instincts told him the idea of electric-powered passenger airplanes is actually “a no-brainer.”

Road transportation is already being revolutionized by companies like Tesla. Aviation, though a bigger challenge, is a logical next step. Billions of dollars, explains McDougall, are already being spent on electric propulsion and battery research for the aviation industry by major companies like Boeing, Airbus and Bell Helicopter. “Some of the smartest people in the world are working on this.”

Aside from McDougall’s burning vision to go electric, Harbour Air’s mission was aided by the fact that about 70 per cent of its 30,000 flights each year are under 30 minutes, travelling from Vancouver to Victoria, Seattle and Whistler. These short-haul distances lie in the sweet spot for the current capabilities of electric propulsion systems.

Route lengths were one reason magniX knocked on Harbour Air’s door with an offer to pay the costs of converting Harbour’s Beaver prototype. But they were not the only reason. Harbour has long had a deep desire to reduce the carbon footprint of its operations—a drive that fits in well with a core purpose of magniX’s technology. In 2007, Harbour Air was the first North American airline to go 100 per cent carbon neutral, matching the impact of emissions with a carbon-offsetting program.

The decision says much about Harbour Air’s penchant for being an early adopter of ideas. It also, says Randy Wright, the company’s president, suggests something about their management style. Offsetting emissions to be greener was an idea that bubbled up from frontline staff, not the executives.

If one were to distill down McDougall’s management ethos, he says, it would be “surround yourself with amazing people.” Wright expands on that. Harbour carefully nurtures a culture of employee autonomy and camaraderie. “We are not sitting in the boardroom in an ivory tower,” says Wright, referring to the executives. “We are on the ground communicating with our personnel. What’s really cool about Greg is this is a family business still, even though we have investors.”

McDougall plans to himself pilot the test flight of the first battery-powered Beaver in November. And, he says, Harbour’s employees are “super excited” about the challenge to be the world’s first all-electric airline. But will Harbour’s passengers be as stoked?

There might be a fear factor for a few, he concedes. But for most of Harbour’s passengers, that will be quelled by education, as electric planes take wing and evolve. And, adds the early adopter: “The world is going to change, no matter what. You can’t put your finger in the dike” of technologies and developments such as Uber.

“If I have to take some arrows in my back to be the first to do this, that’s fine. I’m willing to do that to be first.”

MORE ABOUT AIRLINES:

• Social media monitoring is a distant early warning system for brands
• China-Vancouver air travel is soaring, despite B.C.’s foreign homebuyers tax
• How Air Canada and WestJet stack up against the world’s best airlines
• Winners & Losers: Hasbro freezes out Mattel, Air Canada talks dirty

The post Harbour Air: The airline on the path to an all-electric, zero-emission fleet appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

• Travel + Leisure has released its annual "World's Best Awards" for 2019. 
• Hoi An, Vietnam, tops the list of the "World's Best Cities," and three of the top five destinations are located in Mexico.
• Two US cities — Charleston, South Carolina, and Santa Fe, New Mexico — ranked amongst the top 15 cities in the world.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.

With its canal-laden Ancient Town and famous Japanese Covered Bridge, Hoi An has been named the best city in the world.

Hoi An, located on Vietnam's central coast, topped Travel + Leisure's "World's Best Cities" 2019 list. San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, followed close behind at second on the list, while Chiang Mai, Thailand, took third.

Three of the top five places on Travel + Leisure's list are cities located in Mexico, while two US destinations — Charleston, South Carolina, and Santa Fe, New Mexico — ranked among the top 15 cities in the world.

Check out the full ranking of the world's best places to visit below.

15. As Thailand's capital and most populous city, Bangkok serves as a major cultural and business hub for the country.

14. Visitors to Santa Fe, New Mexico, can take in the city's signature Pueblo-style architecture and famous arts scene.

13. Seville, the capital of Spain's Andalusia region, is known for flamenco dancing and a number of iconic buildings, like the Plaza de España and the Catedral de Sevilla.

12. Charleston, South Carolina, is a stunning coastal city that has so much Southern charm it's been repeatedly named America's friendliest city.

Read more: 21 photos that show why Charleston is one of America's most popular destinations right now

11. Once the center of the Roman Empire, Rome remains Italy's capital and is full of relics including the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Pantheon.

Read more: The cheapest European city you can fly to, based on which US state you live in

10. Visitors to Udaipur, India, can explore the city's extravagant royal palaces situated on picturesque, man-made lakes.

9. The charming Tuscan city of Florence, Italy, is known as the birthplace of the Renaissance and is home to many of the world's best-known works of art.

8. Kyoto is a Japanese city on the island of Honshu that's full of gardens, palaces, wooden houses, and religious shrines.

7. One of the most populous cities in the world, Tokyo, Japan, is famous for its electronics, video games, manga, Anime, ramen, and much more.

6. From terraced rice paddies to Hindu temples and shrines, Ubud, Indonesia, is one of Bali's most popular destinations.

Read more: Visitors have discovered that a Bali tourist attraction popular with Instagram influencers is actually a fake photo op

5. Oaxaca, Mexico, is known for its colonial buildings and lively, bustling atmosphere. More than a third of its residents speak an indigenous language.

4. The most populous city in North America, Mexico's capital city of Mexico City is home to Templo Mayor, the baroque Catedral Metropolitana de México of the Spanish conquistadors, and the Palacio Nacional.

3. Located in a mountainous region in the north of Thailand, Chiang Mai is home to many extravagant Buddhist temples scattered throughout its rolling, green hills.

2. San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is known for baroque Spanish architecture and the iconic Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel.

1. Hoi An, Vietnam, tops the list of best cities with its canal-laden Ancient Town and famous Japanese Covered Bridge.

• Read more:
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• 22 photos that show what it's like to eat at the lavish Swiss restaurant voted the world's best by private jet fliers
• Take a look inside the 5 destinations that have just been named UNESCO world heritage sites
• 7 best girlfriends made a promise to retire together and spent $580,000 building their dream home years before they move in

• Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, or worlds beyond the solar system.
• In June, researchers announced they'd logged the 4,000th such planet into a NASA catalog. The first was found in 1992.
• Two artists have illustrated all of those discoveries in 60 seconds using an incredible animated map and timeline of the data. 
• Some of the exoplanets might be habitable to alien life.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Earth is not alone, and a stunning new animation created using NASA data beautifully illustrates that point.

There may be trillions of other planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way (which itself is one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe). But finding such extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, is not easy — even when they're relatively close by.

In fact, it takes more than four years for light to travel from the nearest star to our solar system. Meanwhile, exoplanets are both small and dim, and the Milky Way is a 100,000 light-year-wide haystack for astronomers to scour.

Despite their long odds, however, astronomers have logged thousands of exoplanets since a team confirmed the existence of the first one in October 1991. This June, in fact, marked a milestone: researchers logged the 4,000th discovery in an ever-growing NASA archive of exoplanets.

To celebrate the achievement, two artists pulled all of that data and compiled it into a short animated map and timeline called "4000 Exoplanets," shown below.

The animation was created by artist Matt Russo and scored by musician Andrew Santaguida, who both work with a science-art outreach project called System Sound. The short film was published to YouTube on Sunday and described on Wednesday by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) site.

What the animated exoplanet timeline shows

The video shows a flattened map of the 360-degree night sky as seen from Earth. The bright band of stars in the center is a cross-cut view of the Milky Way; it looks this way because our solar system drifts within the spiral galaxy.

Each circle that appears represents a confirmed exoplanet discovery. The main method used to find each world is shown as one of seven colors.

For example, purple circles show a planet found by its transit, or passage in front of a parent star; this is detectable because it causes periodic, subtle drops in the parent star's brightness level relative to Earth. Pink, meanwhile, shows distant worlds that were located because their gravitational pull was strong enough to make their star "wiggle" sufficiently for astronomers to detect.

Read more: Jupiter is so big it does not actually orbit the sun

The pace of discoveries in the 60-second timeline starts off slowly, with only about 70 extrasolar worlds located in the first decade of discoveries. That's because finding and confirming the existence of exoplanets was extraordinarily difficult without advanced tools and resources.

But as funding grows, techniques improve, more ground telescopes help with the search, and new space observatories launch into space, the rate at which exoplanets have been found has increased. The pace of discovery really exploded after 2009, when NASA launched its Kepler Space Telescope.

Kepler focused its search on a small patch of the sky and used the transit method of exoplanet detection on 150,000 stars. This is why, in the animation, a big purple blob suddenly begins to appear around 2010 (at top-left) and the exoplanet count skyrockets.

NASA deactivated Kepler in late 2018, but in April 2018, NASA launched a similar planet hunter called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS is expected to scan 200,000 nearby stars across 85% of the night sky, revealing thousands of additional planets. Below is an animation of TESS' planned survey.

Around 50 of the planets TESS detects should be Earth-size and potentially habitable, creating promising targets for more detailed observations by telescopes that can image objects much deeper in space.

The first pictures of Earth-like worlds may come from enormous ground-based observatories, including the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, which are poised to come online starting in the mid-2020s. Astronomers hope such telescopes can take raw exoplanet discoveries a step further by picking up light from their atmospheres — and potentially "sniffing" out biosignatures that may indicate the presence of alien life.

SEE ALSO: Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth. A new study explains why we haven't found them yet.

DON'T MISS: NASA has Googled the stars — and found new rocky planets in a 'major discovery'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What planets would look like if they were closer to Earth

Lindsay Bayuk (VP of Product Marketing) and Porntepp Ungvichian (VP, Head of Strategy & Business Operations) are the B2B SaaS leaders behind Pluralsight’s pricing overhaul. They went public last year, serve 70% of Fortune 500 companies and have customers in over 150 countries. Get ready for some serious note-taking on how they built a process around pricing changes and the importance of having the right infrastructure to make it all happen.



Prefer to listen on iTunes? Click here.

The post Behind the Scenes of Pluralsight’s Pricing Rebuild [Podcast] appeared first on OpenView.

Email marketing is a crucial facet of an effective digital marketing strategy, with 80% of retail professionals indicating that email is their most important contributor to customer retention. In order to use email marketing most effectively to boost conversion rates and increase your ROI, you must use a combination of the three most common kinds of emails:

• Promotional
• Relational
• Transactional

Here is a guide to help you understand what these categories entail and why you should invest in them, as well as a few bonus tips on how to use them effectively.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails are one of the most important types of email marketing to increase ROI.

When imagining an email marketing campaign, promotional emails are probably the first type to come to your mind. As the name would imply, these emails are all about self-promotion of your brand. They contain a distinct call to action with the intention of converting your potential customer into a paying client.

The most important tip for crafting effective promotional emails is to personalize the content of the email as much as possible. This is a key tactic to use in all kinds of email marketing, but personalized emails receive 6x higher transaction rates, so it is a particularly vital strategy to use in promotional emails.

Here are a few of the most common kinds of promotional email marketing messages and why they are important:

1. Sales, discounts and freebies. These kinds of emails encourage potential customers to purchase your product or service through the promise of a deal. The hook for this email is a lower price or free item. You want to format these emails so they communicate your call to action quickly and concisely because many subscribers only give promotional emails a passing glance. To increase their effectiveness, these deals can also be used in combination with other types of promotional emails.

2. Email Exclusives. This is a particularly effective email marketing tactic because people love feeling like they are a part of a special group with opportunities others do not have. By sending your subscribers exclusive deals, invites and information, you show them why being a subscriber is valuable, while also increasing the likelihood that they will make a purchase.

3. Limited time offers. Emails containing limited time offers work on a similar logic to email exclusives because they capitalize on fear of missing out (FOMO), a psychological phenomenon that makes humans averse to loss. This impacts consumer behavior because you are more likely to purchase something that is available for a limited time out of fear that you will regret your decision not to purchase it in the future.

4. Brand announcements. These emails just announce a new product, service or event. The first step for getting any consumer to purchase your product or service is to make them aware of its existence, and these email marketing announcements help maximize the number of consumers aware of your brand’s offerings.

Conversion rates are further increased because many consumers like the idea of being the first to purchase a new product. This type of email can be paired with an “email exclusive” tactic to make it even more appealing to potential buyers. For example, your email recipients could get a “sneak peek” of a new product or event prior to its release to the general public, along with an exclusive coupon code sent to your most loyal subscribers.

Relational Emails

Relational emails are crucial to a successful email marketing strategy because they strengthen your relationship with your audience.

The second major category of email marketing is relational emails. Rather than directly encouraging a purchase, these emails deliver value up front with free content and information.

These emails are intended to strengthen the relationship between your business and your audience and reinforce the value in being your subscriber. This helps build brand awareness and allows your subscribers to connect with your brand in a more meaningful way, increasing brand loyalty and, indirectly, your ROI.

Here are a few of the most common kinds of relational emails:

1. A Newsletter. This is probably the most common relational email used in email marketing campaigns. Often, newsletters will contain promotional content, such as brand announcements and upcoming offers, but their primary purpose is to keep subscribers connected and engaged in the company.

Subsequently, newsletters also contain more general information about what your business has been up to, as well as some content that is purely of value to the reader. This valuable content may be in the form of product- or service-related advice, blog posts your business has published, or simply a link to an article you think your readers would find interesting. Creating a well-rounded newsletter will help build a relationship between your brand and your subscribers, keeping them invested in your future emails and more likely to increase your ROI.

2. Surveys. Sending your subscribers surveys is incredibly informative and often underutilized in email marketing campaigns. One of the most important tips for success is to personalize your emails as much as you can. What better way to get information about your potential customers than to simply ask?

Send your new subscribers a survey so that they can tell you a little bit about themselves. You don’t want to pry too deeply, but feel free to ask some general information such as their birthday, interests, what kinds of products or services they are looking for, what they hope to get out of their subscription, how they heard about your business, etc. This information can be super useful in generating personalized email content, which is more likely to result in a conversion. It also shows your subscribers that you want to get to know them and consider their preferences. Just remember: like most things in marketing, it is important to keep surveys short and sweet so that they are convenient and hassle-free for responders.

3. The Birthday Email. One great way to personalize your email marketing campaign using the information you collect in a survey is by sending a birthday email. Birthday emails feel very personal and help consumers build a deeper connection with your brand, plus they’re easy to automate using a third-party email marketing provider like MailChimp. These emails are most effective at increasing conversion rates when they give the receiver some sort of “gift.” This could be in the form of a discount code, access to an exclusive item or a freebie.

4. Re-engagement emails. Inevitably, you are going to end up with inactive subscribers who have not opened your emails for over six months. Figuring out who these subscribers are is why reviewing analytics is one of the most important tips for a successful email marketing campaign, and it’s also something you can set up in a system like MailChimp. For these subscribers, you want to send emails that address and try to solve their lack of engagement.

There are quite a few ways that you could go about this.

• You could ask your subscribers why they have been inactive and what you could do differently to get them engaged
• Offer them some sort of deal or freebie
• Highlight everything they’ve missed recently (and in doing so emphasize the benefits of paying attention to your emails)

You could also try a series of emails and utilize different strategies to see which is effective for that particular subscriber. Regardless of how you try to re-engage an inactive subscriber, it is important to know when to call it quits and remove them from your email list.

Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are often deprioritized in email marketing campaigns, but they can be a valuable marketing tool.

The third and final category that is key to a successful email marketing strategy is the transactional email. These are automated emails sent in response to some sort of interaction the consumer has had with your brand. Transactional emails are often undervalued in the goal of building brand loyalty and increasing ROI, but if used correctly they can help give a voice to your brand and be great builders of business-to-customer (B2C) relationships.

Here are a few of the most important types of transactional emails:

1. The Welcome Email. Welcome emails do a multitude of beneficial things for your email marketing campaign. They can be used to:

• Confirm that someone successfully subscribed to your emails.
• Give new subscribers their first taste of what the subscription entails by explaining how frequently they should expect emails and what kinds of emails they will receive.
• Highlight the value of your email subscription.
• Encourage your audience to connect with you on social media.
• Send new subscribers a survey so you can really get to know your audience. This will help you develop more personalized and subsequently more effective marketing emails in the future.
• Thank subscribers for signing up and give you the opportunity to give them a little gift for doing so!

Including all of this in one email might be a little bit overwhelming, so it is often a good idea to send a series of welcome emails that give and gather all of this information.

2. Order confirmations, purchase receipts, and shipping information. These transactional emails are automatically sent in response to the purchase of a good or service. While these are not prime emails to further your email marketing campaign, they are still great opportunities to showcase your brand and maintain a good relationship with your customers.

In addition to the necessary information, these emails could include a personal touch. For example, you could add a little note stating that you hope the buyer likes their new product. Personalizing these kinds of transactional messages help to maintain the relationship between you and your buyer. This encourages further engagement with your brand and may result in a repeat customer.

3. Follow up emails. These emails are automatically sent after a product has been delivered or service completed. Generally, follow up emails are simply used to ask your customers how they liked their purchase and gather testimonials. This aids your email marketing strategy because testimonials are some of the best marketing material available to businesses.

Follow up emails also give you the opportunity to encourage buyers to connect with you on social media and post about their experience with your business. Finally, they can be used to send buyers recommendations for additional products or services they may like based on their previous purchase.

Because follow up emails can be used in so many ways, a series of emails may be the most effective to avoid overwhelming the recipient. All of these strategies help to strengthen the relationship with the customer, increasing the likelihood that they will become a repeat customer and ultimately boosting your ROI.

By implementing and combining these different categories of emails, you can run an incredibly successful email marketing campaign that’s ideal for your brand.

If there was ever a time when selling was easy, now is not it.

Selling into the b-to-b marketplace is becoming increasingly difficult because today’s buyers are digitally educated and socially connected.

Instead of relying on sellers for information on products and services, buyers turn to the Internet and their professional networks to educate themselves throughout the purchasing process.

In recent years companies experienced a drop in sellers hitting quota.

Although sales results are dropping, we’re living in a world where CEOs and board members demand growth – failing to meet quota isn’t an option. It should come as no surprise that organizations are looking for ways to combat the sales performance challenges plaguing today’s b-to-b marketplace.

World-class enterprises are turning to sales enablement to help sellers stay competitive, and CSO Insights research shows it’s working…

Firms with a sales enablement function see a 10.2% higher revenue performance than firms lacking this function.

Consider a scenario where your company is worth $100M but is low performing and lacks a sales enablement structure. If upon the implementation of a sales enablement program your company could meet the average performance level of companies with this function, you’d see a $19.5 M jump in revenue. We’re talking real money here.

Top performing organizations understand the importance of sales enablement and are seeing a high ROI on these investments. But developing a successful sales enablement strategy doesn’t happen overnight – it takes thoughtful planning, dedicated resources, and considerable time.

Here are 10 tips to develop a world-class sales enablement organization:

1. Start with the End in Mind

Before you start buying, hiring, or building, develop a holistic sales enablement strategy aligned to your overall business objectives. Once you’ve assessed your pain points and outlined your objectives, then it’s time to consider the technology you need to support these initiatives. In most companies, sales enablement can be defined as “random acts of sales enablement,” better known as death by a thousand systems. Technology matters, but it’s not a silver bullet. Without a really good grasp of what you need to accomplish, it’s difficult to select the right technology.

2. Create Dedicated Sales Enablement Roles

Sales, marketing, training, and sales operations have different functions but work together to create powerful sales enablement programs. To ensure teams are tracking together, it’s important to define who’s handing what sales enablement roles and responsibilities. A sales enablement program needs teams to be responsible for delivering strategies and tactics to overcome sales performance challenges, and defining who does what can accelerate success. Increasingly, sales enablement is becoming a dedicated organization – but programs can start with dedicated roles and responsibilities.

3. Give Sales Enablement Responsibilities an Owner

After establishing a sales enablement team, appoint a single owner who oversees the various components of the sales enablement strategy. This leader should have a broad view of the overall sales enablement plan and be able to tie these objectives back to overarching business initiatives within the company. Having a singular person working on this bigger vision prevents the team from viewing isolated issues through a parochial or departmental lens.

4. Establish a Governance Committee

Sales enablement programs have a lot of moving parts and require collaboration between sales, marketing, product marketing, sales ops, training, and learning and development. To make sure everyone is trekking toward the same goals, establish a governance committee with representatives from each cross-functional team. This will give each team a view into what’s working and what’s not working, and keep everyone aligned with direct feedback from the field.

5. Make Content Easy to Find

Don’t make sellers search for content; it must be delivered in where sellers live – in CRM and on mobile devices and tablets. CSO Insights believes, “Newer solutions provide a sales-specific, taxonomy driven business layer that allows organizations to structure, manage, present, filter, provide and analyze content in EXACTLY the way sellers and customers need it.” You can’t expect sellers to know what exists and go out looking for it – content needs to find the seller.

6. Reinforce in Context

Training reinforcement in context of the sales cycle is mission critical. The old model of training is very difficult, where you’re pulling sellers out of the field to conduct training. Sellers are typically living in such a complex environment that it’s virtually impossible for them to take training once and then recall that information in the field when they are in the situation. 87% of new skills learned by sellers are lost within 30 days if they are not systematically coached and reinforced. For training to resonate, it needs to be easily accessible and reinforced in sellers’ daily workflows.

7. A Single Pane of Glass

Drive a simplified user experience by packaging up content in the format sellers need and in the systems they are already working. Instead of expecting sellers to sift through large chunks of content, break it down and serve it up in easily digestible playbooks or guided selling scripts. Prescribe bite-sized chunks of nicely packaged content in the context of the CRM opportunity to increase the adoption of your sales content and tools.

8. Gain Visibility into What’s Working

To have a full understanding of what is working and what isn’t working, implement a single source for both content (internal and external), training, and messaging. This allows you to be able to provide accurate and comprehensive ROI to identify how often, and how recently, content is used. Review old content with low consumption rates to assess whether it should be updated or removed.

9. Start Small and Learn as You Go

Sales enablement is a lofty job, and getting your arms around sales content can be a daunting task as well. Fortunately, you don’t need to do a complete overhaul or have the perfect content in place before you invest in a solution. Start with a small set of content and upload it into your sales enablement software that you can start to review and analyze. Once you can differentiate between the resources that are being used and those that are going to waste, perform a content cleanse and leverage these insights to determine next steps.

10. Set, Track, and Expand Goals

The primary reason companies develop a sales enablement program is to increase sales efficiency*. However, it’s not only about efficiency and giving reps back more time – it’s about what sellers are doing with that time and how can they be more effective when meeting with customers and prospects. Determine how much time is spent searching for content, creating presentations, etc. and periodically assess what’s working and what isn’t. Once you have enabled your sellers to be more efficient, you can expand your focus onto more strategic initiatives like larger deal sizes and higher seller performance.

When you see “thought leadership” content out in the B2B content marketing landscape, the quality and substance of the ideas often run the gamut from “oh, wow!” to “oh, dear…”. When not executed strategically, thought leadership content may just seem like another box companies are covering on B2B Marketing Buzzword Bingo.

Even though the thought leadership content landscape has been flooded with sub-par execution and obvious ideas, the trend picked up steam for a reason. When executed effectively, it bolsters content marketing efforts and ultimately your lead generation.

With the goal of lead generation in mind, take a look at some of the best ways to ensure that your thought leadership content is valuable to your target audience and drives sales.

What is Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership content is top-tier content, whether it be white papers, blog posts, videos or any form of content that derives itself from thought leaders. Regardless of form, thought leadership pieces are always well-researched, relevant to your particular industry and provide a unique voice on the topic. These markers of excellent thought leadership content increase the likelihood that your company will be recognized as an authority in your industry.

Thought leadership benefits your company in two main ways:

Establish credibility

Positioning yourself as a thought leader increases customer trust, both in your content and in your company. If people within your industry recognize you as a trusted source for content, then they’ll be more likely to trust your products or services, the sales and customer service teams that they communicate with and your business overall.

As author and keynote speaker Andrew Davis said:

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”

Thought leadership content is focused on building connections and introducing new perspectives to existing problems, which helps fortify the relationship between you and your target audience.

Support and shape your content marketing

Just like any form of marketing, thought leadership requires strategy—meaning strong guidelines, voice and focus around your longer term lead generation goals.

Determining key areas you want to be a leader in is essential for creating this focus. Later on, we’ll highlight some of the steps you can take to help organize your thought leadership strategy so it also supports your overarching content marketing strategy.

Core Components of Thought Leadership

Innovation

In order to truly stand out as a thought leader, there needs to be a certain level of new and inventive thinking. Rather than reiterating ideas your target audience is already familiar with, you’ll need to think critically about the topics prevalent in your industry and provide a forward-thinking lens for your readers to examine their most pressing issues. Every industry is changing and facing new challenges or obstacles, so it’s essential that your readers view you as someone who’s going to guide them through these transitions with a fresh perspective and insight to what lies ahead.

Expertise

To be a thought leader, you have to know your subject matter really, really well. So well, in fact, that you would be considered an expert. No organization is likely to be the single, ultimate authority on a topic, but using a wide variety of credible sources, facts and reasoning to support your thought leadership content will support your reputation as a knowledgeable leader in your industry.

Expertise can also be honed from the thought leaders that you choose to highlight. These leading voices will already have a wealth of experience to draw from, so it’s to your benefit to leverage their knowledge for your content as much as you can.

Time

The biggest roadblock to getting your thought leadership marketing up and running is how long it can take for your organization to be recognized as a thought leader. Like any good relationship, trust takes time to build. While you may be creating great thought leadership content on a weekly basis and sharing it on social and with clients regularly, your readership and audience will need time to find and consume the content and start to recognize that you are a trusted authority in your industry.

Each piece of content you create isn’t going to scream “This is thought leadership!” Instead, it will be a subtle note that builds over time within each of your pieces.

How to Build Thought Leadership for Your Organization

Understand what your customers are looking for

Before diving into a thought leadership strategy, you need to remember who you’re creating this thought leadership for: your customers. While becoming a leader in your field can be a real ego boost, you’re gaining this exposure and trust so that you can reach a larger audience—and the right audience.

Knowing what your customers are looking for means doing some important initial research. Keyword research, particularly through Google, can be integral to crafting your content. If you know what your customers are searching for, you can know what answers to provide.

Another great place to do some research is on social media. A lot of thought leadership takes place on social media, since most thought leaders know that this is where their audience is spending a good portion of their time. Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins and Christy Wright are examples of some of the thought leaders who employ social media to regularly communicate with their audience on the platforms they already engage with.

Pinpoint the voices you want to highlight

Social media brings us to another important point: the saturated thought leadership market. On one hand, we’re fortunate to have many strong voices discussing important topics, whether it be through social media, blog posts or speaking events. While the number of thought leaders can feel daunting, it can also be a valuable resource for research. Use those other thought leaders in your industry as a point for comparison. It’s not about taking anyone’s ideas, but instead lending your unique voice, research and perspective to the topics that are already being discussed.

A great place to find your unique voice is to look at the voices that are already talking in your organization. Whether it’s your CEO, CTO or Marketing Manager, there are leaders within your organization from which you can pull great ideas, experiences and content inspiration from. Sitting down to have an interview with some of these key players and then turning that interview into content can be a great place to start. Your customers will love to hear directly from your thought leaders and get some insight into the kind of company culture at play within your organization.

How Thought Leadership Supports Lead Generation and Content Marketing

Valuable content leads to valuable leads

So how can thought leadership spur the lead generation returns your sales team is always wanting more of? By positioning yourself as a leader in your industry, you’ll experience greater exposure. In fact, from blogs alone, HubSpot found that companies that blog versus those that don’t have 434% more indexed pages, creating stronger SEO. While this will initially pull in lots of traffic overall, there’s a good chance that a large portion of that traffic will not be your ideal audience.

However, the thoughtful, researched and insightful aspect of your content is what will help keep around those leads looking for real value. If you’re creating thought leadership content that truly resonates, your ideal audience will gravitate towards it and seek you out for not only their content needs, but also their product and business needs.

Ultimately, what you’re really looking for is not a ton of low-quality leads that go nowhere, but instead a select group of quality leads that will result in improved customer longevity and continued partnerships.

Content ready to share

Your sales team will also benefit from having top-quality content readily accessible. With a variety of blog posts, white papers, videos and other thought leadership content in their arsenal, they can easily provide the content that is most relevant to individual prospects.

The content can also be shared by your thought leaders. Those key voices we discussed earlier should have active social channels that they can share the content on, allowing your pieces to reach a larger audience and align those thought leaders with the content itself.

Thought leadership is a valuable tool to utilize as content marketers, but it’s also an important device to leverage for your lead generation efforts. The great and insightful content that marketers create sets off a chain reaction within your organization, as the content bounces between different teams and eventually cascades into the bottom of your funnel for sales to scoop up and take to the finish line. Do yourself, your organization and your customers a favor by strengthening the voice and resolve of your content marketing through thought leadership.

Sales and marketing alignment unifies the macro perspectives of marketers and the direct relationships that sales teams have with customers and prospects. When alignment is solid, marketing and sales processes are positively influenced, with outcomes that include a shared understanding of the expectations and responsibilities of each group throughout the buyer’s journey, continual innovation and collaboration, healthier cultures overall and ultimately, a positive influence on the bottom line.

With B2B leaders everywhere striving for sales and marketing alignment in their organizations, one may wonder how sales and marketing teams become so misaligned in the first place. To investigate and address this common conundrum, we posed four questions to our own sales and marketing alignment experts: Launch Marketing CEO Christa Tuttle, Executive Director of Client Engagements Jeff Raymond and Executive Director of Accounts and Operations Shawna Boyce.

1. What are the main causes of sales and marketing misalignment in B2B organizations?

Shawna: First, a lack of communication can be a big issue. As a specific example, everyone needs to understand what defines a qualified lead and when the lead should be passed off through the different funnel stages. If that criteria isn’t defined and people don’t understand how to handle leads, then the teams won’t work well together.

Jeff: In some ways, sales and marketing are set up to be misaligned because they are typically separate departments, with separate leaders, and often separate individual goals that receive more focus and energy than shared goals. Sales is looking to advance their pipeline and close deals. Marketing, on the other hand, may be focusing on MQL goals and related metrics. Ironically, the two groups often don’t realize just how vital they are to each other.

Christa: Exactly. Most organizations don’t consider how synergistic these two teams can be. When they simply communicate more about what each other is doing, they realize that they’re in this together. So, the misalignment is not unexpected, it’s just that often, as leaders, we may let it happen organically, when it is something that should be actively addressed.

2. How can leaders create common criteria and metrics for their sales processes?

Jeff: Common criteria is a good phrase, because how one organization or individual may define a marketing qualified lead or sales qualified lead may be different from how others view them. These varying views are OK, so long as everyone in your organization is on the same page. If we have a subjective opinion from sales that says “you’re not getting us enough leads,” marketing may argue that “you’re not following up properly on the leads we’re giving you.” That brings emotion into the mix and can further foster misalignment. But, if you have commonly understood criteria and well-defined responsibilities, it eliminates a lot of that emotion and promotes collaboration.

Shawna: I agree. Getting people in a room together and having them really think about what makes a lead “qualified” and understanding what information is needed or important to your organization is vital. This isn’t something that you can just look up online and find the perfect answer for because every organization is different.

Christa: I’ll just add that it’s important to ensure that not only is there agreement on what makes a lead a lead and at what stage of the funnel they should be at based on certain activities, but also in making sure that sales understands why they’re getting passed a marketing qualified lead. Continually communicating about what is and isn’t working helps organizations refine their criteria and processes to create a stronger business development engine.

3. What role does sales and marketing technology play in the alignment process?

Christa: I’d say technology supports the process by being an unemotional tool that can move things along. It’s important, however, that sales and marketing technology be set up and implemented properly to support the process. Technology should support your process, but your process should not be dictated by technology. I’ve seen organizations add sales and marketing technology and adopt the default off-the-shelf settings, rather than taking the time to tailor it to their business.

Jeff: I agree. Most platforms can be customized, whether it be CRM, marketing automation or something else and can be extremely helpful with things such as reminding someone when a lead to be acted on or simply noting milestones that have been reached. Technology also “mitigates manual.” If an opportunity’s been created, that should automatically trigger follow-up communications that are appropriate to where that lead is in the buyer journey. In short, sales and marketing technology should efficiently operate in the background, guiding teams and leads harmoniously through the funnel.

Shawna: Technology also helps protect us from bias or opinion-based actions because it operates purely on rules. With well-defined workflows and approaches such as lead scoring, leads are passed on objectively versus someone just manually calculating things and assessing when it’s time for a lead to be moved to a different stage. Technology also gives you greater visibility into what’s working and what’s not.

4. How do organizations sustain sales and marketing alignment once they initially achieve it?

Shawna: I think this goes back to the importance and discipline of regular communication. Just because you’ve defined the ideal funnel and know at every stage what’s going to happen and who’s going to do what, that doesn’t mean it’s going to always work exactly right. In time, you may discover things like MQLs being passed on a bit too early or technical issues holding things up at certain points. If communication isn’t happening and people continue to keep working as they were, processes and alignment slips.

Jeff: Many organizations adopt Service Level Agreements between sales and marketing that document lead stage criteria and individual responsibilities at each stage. And to Shawna’s point, markets evolve. So these SLAs need to commensurately evolve and the only way that happens is through regular communication and calibration. Even if things are going well, you might want to use that time to consider how things could be even better. How can you bring even more value to your customers and continue to shorten sales cycles?

Christa: I couldn’t agree more. Communication is your number one goal, and your number two goal should be “see goal number one.” Unfortunately, most organizations don’t address sales and marketing alignment until it’s bad, so even when times are good or seemingly good, you need to communicate in preparation for what lies ahead.

Your sales team is working harder than ever to differentiate your product or service and close new business. Reps need to prospect, sell, and close — and that doesn’t always leave a lot of time for administrative or big-picture work.

Enter, the sales operations manager.

Sales operations exists to help teams use technology effectively, implement training exercises, align sales and marketing, set territories, evaluate compensation plans, and more. Duties and titles vary by company, but we’ve gathered a few of the most common roles to help you decide which one will be the right addition to your team.

Sales Operations Jobs

1. Sales Operations Administrator

When you see a sales ops role with “administrator” in the title, you can expect the position to involve a lot of … well … administrative work.

Job Description

This person might oversee CRM performance and engagement across the team, onboard new salespeople, strategize on process improvements, and coordinate team and executive meetings.

This role is usually an entry or mid-level position that requires little to moderate experience (~2-3+ years). Experience working with a CRM, excellent organizational and communication skills, and customer or sales experience will all be preferred.

Salary

The average salary of a sales operations administrator is $68,877 USD per year and can expect an average of ~$1,200 in commission.

2. Sales Operations Specialist

A common phrase you’ll see in sales ops positions, regardless of title, will be, "... is responsible for supporting all stages of the sales cycle.”

A sales ops specialist will do just that. This role often has a focus on data and forecasting, so experience in these two areas will be crucial.

Salary

The average salary for a sales ops specialist is $60,700 USD and can expect an average of ~$4,000 in commission.

3. Sales Operations Coordinator

The sales operations coordinator is the most junior of the sales ops positions we’re reviewing in this post.

Job Description

This role serves as an administrator and gatekeeper for your sales team. Their duties might include general office management, individual administrative support for reps, data entry, and answering phones.

This is usually an entry-level position with fewer than one year of experience required, but previous customer service, support, or administrative experience is preferable. 

Salary

LinkedIn reports that the average salary for a sales operations coordinator is $50,000 USD, with an average compensation bonus of ~$1,600 per year. 

4. Sales Operations Analyst

This is another role that’s heavily involved in forecasting and data analysis.

The right candidate for your sales analyst opening will work with your sales and finance teams on sales-order entry, manage the team’s CRM, handle reporting, and calculate commissions. You want someone who will be able to evolve or reinforce existing sales processes and implement new ones.

This position usually requires at least five years of management or sales ops experience and proven analytical skills, familiarity with a CRM, and order management experience.

According to LinkedIn, here is the salary information for a sales ops analyst: 

5. Director of Sales Operations

The most senior of these roles is the sales operations director. Let's discuss their responsibilities.

Job Description

This person often manages the sales ops team, coordinates organizational planning processes, partners with sales management to ensure process and technological efficiency, and leads sales forecasting.

The role is heavily involved in go-to-market strategies, liaises with executives and organizational leadership, and ensures quotas are appropriate and well-allocated.

Experience is usually a minimum of 10 years with demonstrated leadership skills, sales operations strategy, and excellent understanding of reporting and forecasting best practices, territory management, and compensation management.

Salary

The average salary for a director of sales operations is $131,000 USD per year with annual bonuses, commission, RSUs, and stock options that can total up to another $65,000.

So, which of the above roles is right for your team? Assess their different job duties, and make sure you have the correct support for your business.

Want more on sales ops? Check out this piece on sales operations managers or this one on sales and operations planning.

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