As digital marketing recruiters, we see far too many executives in the C-suite make common mistakes that need to be avoided if your organization is going to be successful. Unfortunately, these preventable mistakes have long-lasting negative impacts on your business and your bottom line.

C-level executives, especially CMOs, face many challenges as the pace of change and development of new technology in digital marketing is driving the need for new strategy, better leadership and an entirely new team to execute your digital strategy. However, with the transformation of digital, the CMO also has the opportunity to be the leader and pioneer for their organization.

Common (and Dangerous) CMO Mistakes to Avoid in Your Next Digital Marketing Executive Search

As a marketing executive search firm, we know the CMO role isn’t an easy one to take on. In fact, CMOs have the shortest average tenure in the C-suite of around 4.1 years.

We have been marketing executive recruiters for over 20 years and have seen first hand the changing responsibilities expected from the CMO. With the rapid rise of innovative technology, it’s primarily the CMO’s duty to ensure their team is able to thrive in the new digital age and produce results. Ultimately, the CMO is accountable for setting the direction of a brand’s marketing and leading their team in succeeding as marketing evolves.

The CMO faces the dynamic environment as we no longer have marketing and digital marketing, it is all just marketing again and you need to be able to drive results with revenue and a brand resting on your shoulders. Consequently, an ineffective or weak CMO can bring down an entire organization. To combat the strenuous challenges marketing leaders may encounter, we’ve compiled a list of missteps CMOs should be careful to steer clear of.

Lack of Proper Attribution

Top CMOs today can attribute investment. No excuses, no exceptions. The growing mass of data and devices makes it increasingly difficult to clearly attribute which channels and touch points lead to a conversion, or how much credit each channel should get. CMO’s at the top of the field have this figured out.

When looking at the buyer’s journey, customers go through multiple touch points – and it’s critical CMOs are able to lead their teams in assigning credit to a specific touch point along the journey.

The ultimate goal of attribution is to understand the value of each touch point to scale successes effectively. In order to calculate true ROI, CMOs must be able to understand how much spend and credit of a sale can be attributed to any single marketing touch point or effort.

In the midst of a digital world, this is where big data becomes highly useful. CMOs need to understand how to leverage the right tools and properly interpret data so attribution can drive better decisions. The data itself is not the answer, knowing what to do with and how to interpret the data is.

As we go forward, CMOs should also pay closer attention to AI. Many sophisticated AI tools are now equipped to better handle attribution, and can be used to calculate specific KPIs such as the likeliness of a visitor making a purchase based on their profile and behavior. This type of insight allows brands to serve truly personalized messages that convert.

Uncertain Organizational Structure

Is your marketing organization structure properly built from the changes that occurred over the past few years in marketing?

In digital marketing executive search, we see that many organizations don’t have the right level of digital marketing talent top to bottom for optimal success. While the organizational structure of a marketing department may depend on the particular size of the company and its budget, putting the proper structure in place helps teams clearly understand their roles and responsibilities.

In today’s space, there’s no strict division between digital marketing and marketing. The penetration of technology in the marketing landscape has blurred the lines between the traditional and newer channels. Thus, the CMO that thrives in the digital world will be one who adopts a digital-first mindset to ensure their team and organization are at the forefront of innovation. Over 80% of the marketing org charts we see today have not fully integrated digital best practices.

Inefficient Use of Investment in Marketing Technology

Brands are becoming more dependent on technology to better optimize processes and serve value to their audiences. And the rapid development of marketing technology is what truly drives the demand for CMOs that are digitally savvy.

A lack of urgency can significantly hinder your organization’s road to digital innovation. Martech has become a crucial piece in driving bottom line growth, and marketing executives will need to be capable of identifying not only the right tools, but the right human intelligence to support them.

As new technologies emerge, it’s crucial that CMOs lead their teams and organizations to understand the true impact martech has on marketing efforts. As digital marketing recruiters we encourage organizations to pursue marketing talent (from top to bottom) that possesses key skillsets to succeed in the martech landscape. You need both the right strategy and the right talent to implement.

Failing to Create a Culture Within Your Team

As marketing executive recruiters we know that most of the time talent does not change jobs for money. The right leadership and culture is what keeps top of the line marketers in your organization.

With such a high demand in skilled marketing talent, it’s essential that C-level leaders, especially CMOs, continuously work toward improving their organizational culture. Culture does not only have an impact on employees internally, but significantly impacts the long-term growth of a business.

As a CMO, one must have the ability to update best practices and encourage an environment of continual learning. Among continual learning, respect and strong leadership is key in fostering an excellent organizational culture.

Closing Words

Success in the CMO role is different today than it was five years ago and will change again in the next five years. As a CMO you need to lead your team by example in continual learning. It is most critical to be successful in your own role.

As the leading digital marketing executive search firm, we pursue leaders who not only possess critical, cutting-edge skills, but those that are able to clearly communicate them through their leadership. The CMOs that possess innovative marketing skills and influential leadership qualities are in high demand and are the ones that will make a true difference in tomorrow’s world of marketing.

I am sitting in the audience waiting to speak at a sales kickoff meeting. Right now, a couple of their clients are on the stage, and they have been asked what makes someone a good strategic partner. Almost everything they say is something that would require a confident salesperson who is willing to “go there.”

First, they talk about how to handle a failure. They want the salespeople from the company to tell them what happened, to be transparent, and tell them what they need to do on their end while the failure is being resolved. They also say that they expect challenges and they want to have conversations about how to prepare for the unimaginable event, the Black Swan. They don’t understand why no one is willing to have that conversation with them. Salespeople mistakenly believe that talking about negative issues will cause them to lose credibility and so they avoid these conversations.

Second, they say that there is no way a salesperson is going to move their proposed initiative into the one or two spot as it pertains to their priorities. Both of the speakers agree that the systemic challenges they are dealing with have much larger price tags and success there would outweigh even a multimillion-dollar ROI. They both suggest that you could make it the number three on the priority board if it is something truly valuable and that that might get it funded. This is another conversation that can help you grow trust and credibility.

Perhaps the most interesting thing either of the speakers disclosed is the fact that they make decisions very slowly, much slower than they want to—and slower than they need to. The company’s client said “We move very slowly until we decide, and then we need you to move fast. If you can help us move faster by providing us with resources, you need to come and tell us what we can do.” There are probably ten conversations you could have with your clients right now to get them ready to move faster—if you frame it as wanting to help them go fast when they decide.

If you want to know what clients think, ask them. If you ask them what they want, they’ll tell you—and the answer will provide you a key to creating value and establishing a relationship as a strategic partner.

The post Help Your Client Move Faster appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Not a day goes by without news about advancements in the artificial intelligence (AI) field.

Growing adoption of AI technologies like Machine Learning based on Neural networks, Natural Language Processing etc., has created new markets like that of smart assistants from Google and Amazon.

However, artificial intelligence applications are more far reaching.

There are numerous use-cases, ranging from self driving cars to fraud prediction in finance. But implementation of AI isn’t limited only tech giants.

These advances are accompanied by continuous debate on possible implications of AI, and its impact on society at large. Opinions vary from outright alarmist as expressed by Elon Musk, to highly optimistic— consider the vision of the Technical Singularity by scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Musk believes that powerful AI-driven machines controlled by monopoly-like businesses will take over. Kurzweil believes that humanity will greatly benefit from human-machine symbiosis.

It is no wonder that opposite thoughts of opinion leaders and overall hype have contributed to a distorted perception AI in the eyes of laypeople. In the recent years, AI has been in the spotlight, but topic coverage concentrated mostly on recent innovations, creating a sense that AI research is a new trend in computer science. In this article, we’ll look at the decades-long, complicated history of AI to help dispel myths that this powerful technology has burst into existence ready to take over the world.

Who Started Artificial Intelligence?

The history of the AI is somewhat of a myth for a significant part of the population. Once in a while I run into people who think that the concept of AI appeared, shortly after they filmed Terminator. In fact, the beginning of AI research dates back to the 1950s. In fact, in 2006, Dartmouth University hosted a 50th Anniversary Conference on AI. The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, who was math professor at the University of Dartmouth at that time. He was applying for a grant to fund his research, known as “The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” His goal for the project was:

“To proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”— John McCarthy

The Imitation Game

However, a full 6 years before that, mathematician Alan Turing, also known as “father of computer science” introduced a concept that is now known as Turing Test. It is described in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Turing posed the question: “Can machines think?” However, instead of getting caught up in defining “machine” and “intelligence,” he proposed an experiment known as the “Imitation Game.”

The Imitation Game consists of three parties: an interrogator, a human, and a machine. The interrogator engages in dialogue (question-answer) with both human and machine in written format during a set amount of time. If the interrogator is unable to differentiate between the replies of human and machine based on their answers, it is concluded that the machine has passed the test.

Turing’s test is remarkable because it offers a practical method and meaningful framework of measuring what Turing considered the computer’s capability to think. The test has its flaws, but to this day no computer has passed it when engaging in lasting conversation. It ultimately fails with responses becoming random blabber at some point.

What does this test mean for the current state of AI?

Obviously, there’s a lot of room for improvement in various subsets of AI, before the test can be passed. Critically, however, passing the Turing Test is not the sole purpose of AI research. This paper from the University of Washington on the history of artificial intelligence provides great a explanation of Turing’s test basics and other concepts crucial to understanding development of AI research.

AI Research Ups and Downs: AI Winters

Importantly, the history of artificial intelligence is marked by intermittent periods of interest and increased funding with stages of financial cutbacks, known as “AI Winters.” AI historians identify 2 “winters:” one in the 1970s and the latest between 1987 and 1993. During AI Winters, technological limitations such as the lack of computing power slow down research while more pessimistic views gradually replace high expectations.

Does this mean that the current hype precedes the next interval of disenchantment with AI?

Andrew Ng, ex-chief scientist at Baidu and professor at Stanford University, specializing in Machine Learning is optimistic:

“Multiple [hardware vendors] have been kind enough to share their roadmaps. . . I feel very confident that they are credible and we will get more computational power and faster networks in the next several years.”— Andrew Ng

Investment statistics provided by McKinsey Global Institute confirms that tech giants are serious about AI and its advancement. McKinsey estimates that in 2016 Google and Baidu spent around $20 to $30 billion on funding their internal R&D and acquiring startups in the field. Companies focused on Machine Learning received 60% of external investments by tech giants, with Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing in second and third place respectively.
Large tech companies are leading the way to incorporation of Machine Learning and related technologies in their consumer-facing products, but even smaller businesses are already able to receive measurable benefit from embracing certain aspects of AI. Think of chatbots that will continue to be a trend in 2018, after proving their value for brands that want to amplify consumer experience and stay in touch with audience. At the same time, training such bots requires time and sufficient availability of data. Other use-cases include already existing Machine Learning implementations in cybersecurity and healthcare (IBM’s Watson helps to suggest treatment and establish diagnosis).

Further Reading on the History of AI

Like any other science field, AI research has had many challenges on the way from a purely academic discipline to the real-life application. Current progress is based on a solid foundation that has been building up for decades.

If this short overview got you interested in more detailed accounts, check out details from the Harvard blog and this AI timeline posted in Carnegie Mellon University. The University of Washington paper cited above is another great resource you should consider. Finally, chapter 9 of Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research is dedicated to AI development and the role US government agencies have played in the process.

What aspect of AI is most interesting for you?

Within weeks, the taps could run dry in Cape Town, one of Southern Africa’s wealthiest and most attractive cities. Its residents have been told the water supply in their homes will be switched off on April 12, as the City is short of water following a lengthy period without rain. These are not idle threats — the reservoirs really are running dry and a water crisis is looming.

Water scarcity is going to become an increasingly widespread problem in coming decades, driven by sharp rises in population, gentrification and industrialization. Richer people use more water, and industrial thirst can lead to rivers and aquifers running dry. Indeed, last year there were protests against Coca-Cola in India, arguing it was unsustainable for a drought-hit region such as Tamil Nadu to have a factory there that used 400 litres of water to make one litre of fizzy drink.

The issue looks likely to escalate. The United Nations has calculated that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, with two thirds of the world’s population likely to be living under water-stressed conditions. From Cape Town to Asia to the south-western United States, there are already significant signs of severe water stress. Large rises in population are also expected to happen in already water-stressed areas such as the Middle East and Africa, which is likely to exacerbate the issue.

Water is undoubtedly the most valuable commodity there is. Without a drink, a typical human being will die within four days. However, water is not yet traded on a traditional commodity exchange — unlike oil, natural gas or copper — so its real value is often underestimated. But current demographic trends and climate change are likely to increase the value of this commodity significantly over time – and this provides an opportunity for investors.

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Managing the world’s water resources is going to be increasingly important over the next few decades — and there is likely to be substantial investment in infrastructure and technology. Money will come from governments, private organizations and charities, with companies making major technological advances likely to become very valuable indeed. It’s important to spot these investment megatrends early, particularly as an eight-year bull market has now made equity valuations in general appear quite high. Luckily, the rise of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has made it much easier to turn thematic ideas into real investments.

There are thousands of ETFs all playing general themes —  and often these funds are a good place to start researching the main players in the industry. Water-focused ETFs include the iShares Global Water ETF (IH2O) and the Lyxor World Water ETF (WATL), which invest in a basket of shares that are exposed to all aspects of the water industry. These low-cost funds can be an ideal way to play a theme, but they can also be a good starting point for an investor willing to dig a little deeper.

For example, the iShares ETF invests in lots of industrial companies that could show great upside over the longer term, but 45 per cent of the fund’s money is invested in relatively defensive utilities. This includes 3.85 per cent of the fund invested in United Utilities, 3.59 per cent in Severn Trent and 2.3 per cent in Pennon. With almost 10 per cent of the fund invested in U.K. water businesses, the ETF could also easily overlap with some of the other holdings in your portfolio, skewing its overall sector weightings. It is also arguably not quite as exciting an investment as the water scarcity megatrend would suggest.

However, these passive funds are very transparent. It is easy to see their entire holdings on their website, something that a more expensive fund run by an active fund manager will not do. This means they are brilliant research tools for investors looking to drill down into an investment theme and make more targeted investments.

For example, there has been a renaissance in desalination technology. French infrastructure giant Veolia is generally regarded as a waste and rubbish disposal company in the U.K., but is actually a global leader in seawater desalination technology. It has built more than 1,950 desalination systems in 85 countries during the last four decades, and it is for this reason that it is included in the iShares ETF as its fourth-largest holding. The ETF’s list of other investments include companies such as Olin Corp, which makes water treatment chemicals; irrigation equipment maker Aalberts Industries; flow-measuring equipment maker Badger Meter; Mueller Water, which is making products to tackle leakage from old water pipes such as are found in the U.K. – and many, many others. About 41 per cent of the fund’s money is deployed in industrial businesses such as these that are making the architectures of the world’s future water management systems.

Investment trends can sometimes be difficult to identify, but ones that involve population demographics such as water demand, healthcare development, ageing populations, rising demand for food and agriculture equipment, and so on, are pretty obvious. The rise of ETFs has given investors diverse, low-cost investments to themes to shove in their ISAs or self-invested personal pensions (SIPPs) that play an identified investment theme. They are a very welcome addition to an investor’s toolkit. But their transparency provides also a great window into an investment theme for those interested in delving deeper.

Garry White is chief investment commentator at wealth manager Charles Stanley

In a world that it’s harder and harder to get in contact with people, what is the role of cold lead marketing in cold email, cold calling and cold social media to connect.

In this post will explore these cold contact development strategies and see what the place for these are in this world we operate in. We all need ways to connect with new prospects in meaningful ways, but what pitfalls and challenges exist in these media?

Cold Emailing

Call emailing, or purchasing email lists, scraping, or sending random blast emails to unknown contacts is a dangerous strategy. I’m not totally advocating against it – simply wanting to raise awareness of some of the challenges in using it and its legal implications.

In some cases it’s a viable strategy for growth, although a low return activity. The opportunities to use this are good when you’re trying to enter new markets or simply need to reach a very large volume of contacts about a particular product or service.

The challenges of cold email involve simply that we live in a permission-based email society. Meaning that if you are not given someone’s email address explicitly for marketing, simply emailing them in a cold context offers very low return or could even been considered SPAM. Additionally it may not be the type of brand marketing you want to embrace for your company. If you value relationships and advising/consulting – this typically is not the best foot to start out on, due to the lack of authenticity of cold email.

Cold Calling

Cold calling has been around for decades. It’s the most dreaded of the sales tactics by most salesman. Some salesman are pros at cold calling, some would rather stab their eyes out. Either way you look at it it is a viable tactic for reaching people. It’s more time-consuming than a mass or cold email would be yet it mitigates some of the risk that a cold email presents in terms of lack of personalization and lack of authenticity.

The cons are well spoken of in other places; but the pros can really make this a viable strategy. Especially when you couple cold calling with an email automation sequence that follows up the communication. I would suggest that cold calling stays in the mix for any sales driven organization, yet you might want to consider a more targeted effort on a particular vertical or industry niche as you move forward to limit your salesman fatigue.

Cold Networking

Cold networking, or maybe simply just called blind networking, would be defined as those “meat market” opportunities such as business card exchanges and business club mixers that offer a limited opportunity and have a “shark in the waters” vibe. In my experience these are rarely the best place to spend your time.

You can make good connections with others who might have your clients as their clients, but it would be rare to find an actual client at these events.

Cold Social Media

Cold social media would be defined as trying to make contacts or connections with folks online that you have no previous exposure to more context.

This happens a lot especially on networks like LinkedIn. People attempt to connect with you without any real context and come off as increasingly “sales-y” without any real value proposition. The key to doing cold networking on social media is going to be context and relevance. Without some sort of context or relevance your attempt to connect is going to be perceived as one sided.

The first question on your mind should be, “why should I connect with you?” Answering this question would put the value of the relationship in context of the person you are trying to connect with. What value would this connect be for the prospect? The answer should really be about value to them, not value for you.

The second question is, “who do I know that knows you?” Sometimes simply mentioning or drawing a line of connection in a personal network can help make the world a little smaller and bring some openness to your requset to connect. Both of these tactics together increase your relevance to the prospect and can go along way in helping your efforts.

Lastly, the next step once you’ve made the social connection is to move the conversation to additional channels such as a in person meeting or an email address so you could then follow up in additional context. Additionally having a conversation over link in messenger is a definite option in a sales nurturing context.

Starting a small business is a monumental task. It seems like there are a million things you have to take care of before you can make your first dollar. You need to register your business, set up your website, work out your budget, figure out your marketing plan, test your products, and establish good relationships with your manufacturers and suppliers.

You also need to create your business plan and your business model. So much to do.

You know what a business plan is. It’s your step-by-step guide on how your business will achieve its objectives. What you might not fully understand is you business model.

A business model is simply a design for the successful operation of a business. It’s how you create value for yourself (e.g. make money) while delivering products or services to your customers.

There are numerous types of business models, and they can all be mapped onto physical chart called the “business model canvas”.

The business model canvas and was developed by Alex Osterwalder, and if you don’t have a business model canvas it’s a great tool to use to improve the focus and clarity of what your business is trying to achieve.

It eliminates all of the fluff from the traditional business plan and lets you zero in on what’s important.

The Business Model Canvas Explained

The business model canvas is broken into nine building blocks for your customers. We’ll break down each of those segments so you can get a better understanding of what each of them means for your company.

#1 – Value Propositions

The first section is about your value proposition. Your value proposition is what your company is making and who they’re making it for. It’s not about your specific idea or product, it’s about solving a problem or filling a need. It’s also about who you are solving that problem for.

Once you know what problem your solving and who you’re solving it for, you can get into what exactly your product or service is. This is where you list all the benefits and features of your product and what they do to solve the problem.

#2 – Customer Segments

Perhaps the most important part of your canvas is the customer segments. If you don’t know who your business is catering to you’ll never be able to sell to them. You need to figure out who your customers are and why they would buy from you. You want to get very specific and figure out where your customer lives, what their social habits are, how old they are, if they’re male or female, etc. You want to be so detailed that you could draw a picture of your customer, put it on a wall, and have it detail their exact persona. On day one this is nothing but a hypothesis, but as you start testing and selling your products, you will be able to change this accordingly.

#3 – Channels

Your channels are what you use to deliver your product from your company to your customer. In the old days you really only had one channel and that was the physical channel. You had a storefront and your goal was to get people to visit your store.

With the rise of technology, a storefront is no longer necessary. Now many people use the internet and mobile devices as their channels. Even if you have a physical channel setup, you’re most likely still going to have a web presence. You need to decide which outlet or outlets are best for you to get your product to the customer.

#4 – Customer Relationships

Your customer relationships are the fourth piece in your business model canvas. This section is about how you get your customers, how you keep your customers, and how you grow your customer. The channel you choose to distribute your product will also help determine your customer relationships.

A physical store will acquire its customers differently than an online store. If you’re using a website as your main channel, you need to figure out how to get them to your website, how to get them to buy once they are there, and how to get them to hang around and buy more of your products. Just like previous steps this is only a hypothesis on day one and will be figured out as your business grows.

#5 – Revenue Streams

Your revenue streams are how you will actually make your money from your value proposition. What value is your customer paying for and how are you going to capture that value?

Depending on your company it could be a direct sales model, a freemium model, a subscription model, or a licensing model. Again, the model you choose depends on your business, and your business could use multiple revenue models. Your revenue streams aren’t about the actual pricing of your product, it’s just your way of capturing revenue.

#6 – Resources

The next section of your business model canvas deals with is your resources. This is what you need to sell your product, the assets that are required for you to be successful.

The most important resource for many new companies is financing. Do you have enough cash on hand to fund your business? WIll you need funding or a line of credit? There are also physical needs like a store, manufacturing plant, or delivery trucks. You might need intellectual properties as patents and customer lists. You might also need a good, strong workforce of salesmen, programmers and manufacturers.

#7 – Key Partners

Your key partners are the people and companies who are going to help you grow your business. There are some things you aren’t going to be able to do and some you just won’t want to do on your own, so you’ll want to partner with people that can do them for you. Two of the most common partnerships are suppliers and buyers.

The two main questions you need to ask yourself before forming a partnership is what you’re going to get from them and what activities they are going to perform. If you have a one man startup, your partnerships will likely be different than the partnerships a larger company has.

In your first year you might choose to do everything yourself just to save money. As your business grows, you will be able to invest in partnerships that can save you time and help grow profits.

#8 – Key Activities

Your key activities are the most important things your business must do to make your business model work. If you’re in the production business you’ll be making products. Maybe you’re a consultant and you’re in the business of solving problems. You could also be in sales and be responsible for getting people to buy various products.

Whatever it is that your business does, your key activities are what you need to become an expert in for your business to be successful.

#9 – Cost Structure

Your cost structure is what it’s going to cost you to keep the business running. You have to think beyond the obvious costs like your payroll, rent, and materials and be sure you are including everything.

You need to know what the most important costs are, what your most expensive resources are, and how much your activities and partnerships cost. Then you will need to ask the typical accounting questions like what your fixed and variable costs are, and any economies of scale. Anything that is going to cost you money to keep your business operational needs to be included here.

The Lean Business Model Canvas

Something that has become increasingly popular over the last few years is the “lean business” or “lean startup.” The lean business is essentially a business method that gets you from idea to business as fast as possible.

In a lean business you put out what is called your “minimum viable product”. This is your product in its most basic form with none of the extra bells and whistles. You put that product out to a select group of people to see if they like it. If they like it you can move on with that product, if they don’t you either pivot or scrap the idea all together.

The lean model allows you to get to market as fast and as cheaply as possible. The lean business model canvas was made in the spirit of the lean business. It’s more actionable and entrepreneur based and focuses on the way time can affect the revenue stream of a business. When the lean business model canvas was created, four more elements were added.

#1 – Problem

A problem box was created because many businesses spend a lot of time and money on a product that isn’t needed or doesn’t solve a problem. It’s important to know what problem you are solving before you do anything else.

#2 – Solution

Once you know what problem you are solving, it’s time to work on your solution. This is where you would describe your MVP (minimum viable product).

#3 – Key Metrics

Your key metrics are the range of products or services you want to provide. It is key to choose the right metrics because choosing wrong could lead to disaster for your business.

#4 – Unfair Advantage

Your unfair advantage is just that – any unfair advantage you might have over your competitors. It is very important to know if you have any unfair advantages over your competitors, or if they have any over you.

To truly make it the “lean” canvas, they had to remove the elements they didn’t think were necessary. They removed:

• Key activities
• Key resources
• Key partnerships
• Customer relationships.

They were removed because they were either a waste of time to a lean startup, covered in another element, or they were more outside focused and not focused directly on the business.

Conclusion

Whether you’re an established business or just getting started, a business model canvas is an amazing tool to help you reach your goals. It provides you with a one page document that cuts out the fluff lays everything out right in front of you. It’s easily editable so as your business changes you can change your canvas to match. And if you’re creating a lean startup, there is a business model canvas made just for you.

For decades, the basic approach to B2B marketing and sales has been to identify a prospect’s “pain points,” and then demonstrate how your product or service can alleviate the pain. New research now suggests that many buyers look beyond immediate pain and take a more strategic approach to B2B buying.

A recent study by the Aberdeen Group (in collaboration with PJA Advertising and Marketing) indicates that B2B buyers are looking for vendors who can help them achieve strategic company goals, improve competitive differentiation, and identify new growth opportunities. The What Do B2B Buyers Want? report is based on a survey of over 250 B2B buyers from a range of industries and company sizes.

When survey participants were asked to select two factors (from a list of nine) that play a role in their buying decisions, the three most frequently chosen factors were:

1. Total cost of ownership (45% of respondents)
2. How the vendor/solution supports our company’s goals (42%)
3. Efficiency gains (ROI) (40%)

When survey participants were asked what other factors they consider when they make buying decisions, 68.2% of respondents said the vendor can help sharpen our competitive differentiation, and over half (55.7%) said the vendor can help me identify new possibilities and avenues for revenue.

Viewed together, these survey responses make two points. First, B2B buyers are still focused on cost and ROI, and those economic factors remain at the core of B2B buying decisions. And second, many of the buyers in this survey panel appear to be taking a more strategic approach to buying decisions, once basic financial criteria are satisfied.

It’s noteworthy that when survey participants were asked how they usually know when they need to buy something, over two-thirds (67.2%) of the respondents said, “When our business strategy calls for it.”

The Aberdeen study also found that B2B buyers are looking for vendors who can help them think through the business issues they are facing, and who are willing to challenge their current business practices. When survey participants were asked if they are more likely to work with a vendor who challenges the way they currently do business, almost two-thirds (65.4%) of the respondents answered, “Yes.” So, the Aberdeen research provides support for the approach to B2B marketing and sales advocated by CEB in The Challenger Sale.

The Aberdeen study could be good news for B2B marketing and sales professionals, if the survey findings reflect the attitudes of a significant number of B2B buyers. The traditional “pain-solution” approach has a serious limitation because, at any given point in time, most potential buyers are not experiencing enough pain to take action. The Aberdeen research indicates that some business buyers are willing to look beyond the absence of immediate pain and consider longer-term strategic issues.

Image courtesy of Naval Surface Warriors via Flickr CC.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been a long-standing advocate of establishing repeatable sales processes, but please bear with me while I take what might appear to be a contradictory position: In today’s typical complex B2B sales environments, there is no such thing as a universal “one best way” of handling every sales opportunity.

There is simply too much variation from one opportunity to the next in both our prospect’s particular circumstances and in the specific competitive environment for a fixed and unyielding formula to work every time. The same is true of sales methodologies: there is no one universally applicable “best” sales methodology.

Every one of the commercially available sales methodologies has both areas of strength and potential “blind spots”. Each is in practice more suited to certain sales environments and situations than others. There is no such thing as a universally efficacious sales methodology, even within a single sales organisation.

Given this, what are sales leaders to do: give in to anarchy, and let every sales person work it out for themselves? Abandon attempts to establish replicable processes and methodologies? There is (as you are probably hoping) an effective alternative approach…

I’ve observed two critical behaviours in the sales organisations that have managed to master this conundrum:

Firstly, they are adopting a blended approach to both sales process and sales methodology, taking the best ideas from multiple sources and customising them to meet their specific business circumstances – and then they are implementing them in a way that gives their sales people the freedom and flexibility to adapt their approach to different circumstances. In giving their sales people systems to follow, they are creating flexible skeletons, rather than rigid cages.

Secondly, when recruiting salespeople (and when developing their existing staff), they are emphasizing qualities like curiosity, adaptability, lifelong learning and emotional intelligence – the essential foundations of situational awareness.

This combination of implementing adaptable systems and encouraging situational awareness is giving a new generation of flexibly-minded sales organizations a powerful and growing competitive advantage.

CUSTOMISABLE, ADAPTABLE SYSTEMS

Our sales processes need to both guide salespeople in proven best practices and winning habits and accommodate the fact that (for example) selling a renewal to an existing customer is a very different and typically far less complicated exercise that winning our first piece of business with a brand-new client – and that there are usually multiple levels of complexity between these two extremes.

There are other factors that we need to take into account when guiding our sales people in what they need to think and do – for example the phase in the prospect’s buying journey when we first became aware of an opportunity. We clearly need to act in a very different way if we are with an opportunity from the start as opposed to receiving an unexpected RFP that demands an immediate response.

There are, clearly, a handful of common things that experience and best practice tells us we need to know and do with every potential sales opportunity – but there are far more examples where our behavior needs to be guided by our tactical and strategic appreciation of the specific circumstances of each individual opportunity.

If we ignore these variations and are over-prescriptive in our expectations of our sales people, our best salespeople will ignore them (and we will probably be inclined to accommodate them) and our less intelligent salespeople will probably be inclined to follow the process because they have been told to and deliver frustratingly inconsistent (usually bad) performance as a result.

SITUATIONALLY AWARE SALESPEOPLE

None of the above will help if we don’t get the right foundation in place by employing intelligent sales people. I can think of very few circumstances where the long-term performance of a new sales hire isn’t going to be far more strongly influenced by their attitude, aptitude and intellect than the recent experience they bring to the role.

And when we look at our existing sales people, it ought to be clear that those with the strongest intellect combined with the necessary attitudes and aptitudes are going to be far more capable of embracing and coping with change. Apologies if you think the following is message is a little too direct, but the obvious conclusion must surely be (1) don’t hire insufficiently intelligent sales people, no matter how good their CV looks, and (2) get rid of any insufficiently intelligent sales people that you’ve somehow managed to accommodate up until now within your sales organisation.

So how can we help salespeople that do have these necessary attributes to further develop and enhance their situational awareness? The discovery process is one phase that has a particularly important impact on the potential success of an opportunity. We need to coach and equip our salespeople to stick with the problem, rather than racing in to pitch their solution at the first faint whiff of a potential need.

We need to encourage them to drill into the need behind the need and to fully explore the implications and consequences of a potential problem and to identify everyone else who might be affected. We need them to establish a clear value gap between their prospect’s current situation and their potential future destination.

We need to coach them to identify all the potential stakeholders within the prospect organization and to understand where the centers of power and influence lie. We need to help them to assess whether their initial contact is a decision-maker, an influencer, or a powerless functionary.

We need to ensure that they are aware of the current phase of their prospect’s buying decision journey and are able to anticipate and relate to what the prospect’s priorities are likely to be at each stage. We need to coach them (and put systems in place, if necessary) to be very wary of investing any time on unexpected RFPs unless we have a real chance of reshaping the prospect’s agenda.

We need to develop their questioning skills and conversational fluency and (perhaps most important of all) to coach them to think about what their prospect has just said, and to seek to understand why they said it.

A POWERFUL COMBINATION

Systems that reflect an intelligent blend of appropriate processes and methodologies, customizable to an organization’s particular business environment and adaptable to the unique circumstances of each individual opportunity, when combined with a sales organization that has a highly developed sense of situational awareness can have a transformative effect on sales performance.

Long gone are the days when B2B buyers were forced to rely just on information provided by you… the salesperson. Buyers have access to information like never before.

Consider this:

• The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) found that buyers are 57% of the way through the purchasing process before they engage with sales professionals.
• Forrester found that 74% of modern buyers conduct more than half of their research online before they speak with a salesperson.
• IDC found that 75% of B2B buyers use social media to learn about potential vendors.

The internet changed the game. Buyers have the power to research your company, your products and services, your executives, your competition, and you!

As we start 2018, here are 5 opportunities for salespeople to use LinkedIn to win new customers and deepen relationships with existing ones:

1. By sharing content on a regular cadence, you can continually put yourself front of mind with buyers in your network and position yourself as a trusted advisor. By doing so, you will be the first person they contact when ready to engage.
2. Share content on LinkedIn to educate your network on how you and your company have helped companies achieve their goals. The ideal outcome is for a buyer in your network to see your content, happen to be in buying mode, and engage directly. The alternative—and this is the amplification effect of social media—is that your content will be shared by someone in your network, perhaps by a friend, client, colleague or family member. The amplification effect moves your content into that person’s feed and your message out to buyers in that person’s network.
3. Showcase the right mix of content. You will seem salesy if you only share content about your company. Roughly 50% of what you share can be about your company. Another 25% should be about the industry that you serve, trends, useful information that would benefit buyers—but importantly should not be specific to your company. The final 25% should be content on a topic that you are passionate about. This humanizes you on social media. Remember, people buy from people they trust and can relate to.
4. Follow potential buyers on social media to understand what’s important to them in business and life, and tailor your message accordingly. Social media allows salespeople to identify when prospects are showing buying intent. Insert yourself into their buying cycle earlier to influence the decision making process. People never forget how you made them feel. Social media provides life events such as birthdays, work anniversaries, and job changes. Slowing down to acknowledge what are likely important moments for that buyer, and not trying to sell or start a business conversation in the process, goes a long way in building relationships. Be human.
5. Search LinkedIn to find buyers, leverage social insights to identify what is likely important to them on both a business and human level, and determine the best path to a meeting. Oftentimes this is through a warm introduction from a trusted contact in your network. To amplify the opportunity for warm introductions to buyers, get into a cadence of connecting daily on LinkedIn with every single person with whom you have a meaningful business or personal interaction that day.

In my next article, I will share best practices to build a professional profile on LinkedIn that educates, differentiates, builds trust, and motivates buyers to connect with you.

Events tend to make up a large portion of marketing spend – after all, they’re a quick and efficient way to get face time with a large audience in a short period of time. What’s more, in the eyes of traditional demand gen, it was easy to measure. Booth scans and business cards generally indicated success or failure.

However, in an Account Based Marketing world, quality matters more than quantity, and booth scans are no longer enough. To get the most ROI out of your events, drive more qualified prospects, and support account based approach you must change your strategy.

In this post, we’ll cover how your ABM team can be most effective before, during, and after events. We’ll share event strategies that ensure greater pipeline, shorter sales cycles and ultimately, more for your bottom line.

Pre-Event Strategy: Planning for Success

The success of your event is largely determined by the work that you do leading up to the it. This is where it all begins.

Set the right metrics

The first step in a killer pre-show plan is to set accountability metrics. Your objective isn’t to have the best-looking booth or prize at the trade show, it’s to do business. That booth had better look good, and your giveaways better be eye-catching, but these are means to an end. Set accountability for business results first and foremost, before any other event-planning decisions.

“That’s the difference between brand marketers who are myopically focused on protecting the brand and those who are managing the brand towards and with a business outcome in mind.”

• Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing

When Engagio prepares for events as a team, we set a meeting goal for both net new and existing opportunities, as well as opportunities generated from the event. These two goals drive and inform our decisions around everything else we do. To make sure we’re doing the right things, this is the lens through which we base future decisions on.

• Should we sponsor a party at Dreamforce? Only if there’s a direct line of sight to generating more meetings and opportunities.
• Should we have T-shirts as our swag giveaway? Only if there’s a direct line of sight to generating more meetings and opportunities.
• Should we do a raffle off an iWatch? Only if there’s a direct line of sight to generating more meetings and opportunities.

You get the idea.

Assign roles

Once you’re in agreement of your goals, align your sales and marketing organizations around what roles they’ll play leading up to the event: Here’s an example:

Marketing begins with compiling a list of attendees and crafting messaging specifically to that audience. Sales Development takes that list and cross-references it with their target accounts to orchestrate Account Based Plays against. Sales starts looking at their open opportunities and running plays of their own. Customer Success looks at their current user based to find opportunities for advocacy and customer marketing (testimonials, case studies, etc).

ABM is about quality, not quantity, which means being more strategic in how you approach events. The question changes from “how do we get in front of as many people as possible?” to “how do we get in front of the right people?”

Intra-Event Strategy: Spend Time Wisely

If you’ve been in marketing or sales for any amount of time, chances are you’ve been on both sides of the booth at an event, as both an attendee and a sponsor. How we spend our time, and how we approach conversations at these shows is critical.

As an attendee, there’s no doubt that you’ve talked to a rep for 5+ minutes and still walked away asking yourself, “what the heck do they do? As a sponsor, your job is to make sure attendees you speak with don’t walk away with that same question.

As a sponsor at a booth, there’s no doubt that you’ve talked to a person for 5+ minutes only to have them reveal that they’re not a prospect, and just wanted to talk. While sponsoring, your job is to make sure you don’t waste your time with these tire-kickers.

Ideally, your team has set up meetings ahead of each show with target accounts who you know are attending. These meetings are worth their weight in gold as they afford you critical face-time, and save you from wasting time with non-relevant prospects who may stop by the booth. To avoid wasting time with tire-kickers, having a process in place will be helpful.

Here is a five-part strategy to give your team regarding net-new conversations:

1. Give a high-level value proposition – This should only be two or three sentences (or 10 seconds). The goal is to set the frame of the conversation and deliver a hook. An example would be, “Engagio is an Account Based Marketing and Sales platform that delivers engagement insights into your target accounts. We then let you orchestrate multi-channel, multi-player human outreach at scale.”
2. Qualify – Just like a phone conversation, you have to qualify every prospect. After you deliver the value proposition, ask your first qualifying question. It’s often something like “Are you currently doing ABM?” You won’t be able to do a full discovery and qualification here, but you’ll want your baseline at the very least. Aim for 3-4 questions.
3. Give a quick demo – Again, you probably don’t have the time for an in-depth demo (nor is it the appropriate time/place for that,) but make sure you have a talk track and click track prepared to show off the sexiest parts of your product. Don’t go longer than 3-5 minutes. If the booth traffic is heavy or you’re short on time, skip the demo and move to the next step.
4. Get a commitment – Ideally, the goal is to schedule your next time to speak right there on the spot. Get their commitment so you can do a full discovery and demo. However, if all you get is their business card, getting a smaller commitment is key. For example, “I’ll follow up with you so we can schedule a time. Generally, what day of the week is best for you?”
   
5. Take notes – Whether it’s in the scanning device or on the back of a business card, jot down the important pieces of info you need to know to follow up properly. It’s a common mistake to think that you’ll remember when following up, but after you have hundreds of conversations, they all start to blur.

Go outbound.

The way I think of events is the same way I think of demand in general: there’s inbound and outbound. These types of conversations is akin to your inbound strategy – people who find you. However, there’s a huge opportunity to go outbound. These are all of the activities that you do away from your booth. Whether it’s lunchtime or after exhibit hall hours, encourage your team to treat each day at the event as they do outbound prospecting.

Here are some tips to give your team regarding going outbound at events:

• During slow traffic time, don’t just sit and chat with the other exhibitors – get out the exhibit hall and start conversations with attendees.
• During lunch, don’t sit with you colleagues – sit at tables with people you don’t know.
• Find all of the after-hour parties. Don’t just pitch your product. Ask them about their experience at the event, what their company does and what their role is. Inevitably, they’ll ask you in return.

Post-Event Strategy: Don’t Fail the Follow Up

Now that you have your list of high-quality prospects, it’s time to continue the conversations. That’s why it’s imperative to take notes after each discussion.

Just like inbound response time, the quicker you follow up with a prospect after an event, the better. Ideally, your team follow up that same day. Go back to your hotel room, pull out the business cards you selected and start emailing them!

Your message is simple. Here’s what you should include:

• A personalized intro: “It’s always great to talk with other CU alum – Go buffs!”
• Next Steps: “Looking forward to diving deeper next Tuesday at 2pm” or “Per your request, I’ll follow up again with you in a few days to schedule a time to see if we can help you [solve their stated challenge].”

That’s it!

Here are the biggest mistakes teams make with their post-event strategy:

• Not taking good notes of the conversations you have – If your communication after the event isn’t personalized and relevant, it’s just as good (or bad) as cold outreach. Remember, your leads have had dozens of conversations too, so you’ll have to refresh them on what you talked about – and why they should care.
• Sending generic one-size-fits-all follow up – If your message is generic, it will get lost in the cacophony of vendor follow up, as every sponsor will be emailing attendee lists and giving their leads to SDRs for appointment-setting. You have to stand out, and the best way to do that is by sending a human email.
• Waiting too long to follow up – As soon as your prospect get back from the conference, they’re in work mode again. Furthermore, they have to get caught up with everything from when they were out. Even if they seemed excited about your product or service during the event, you’ll have to re-ignite that excitement in your follow up. The sooner you can do that, the better your chances are. Every extra minute that passes, they get cooler and cooler.
• Not following up at all – Obviously, this is the most egregious error. You might as well be flushing money down the drain. Your company paid good money to be there, and you spent valuable time out of office, so don’t waste the opportunity by going back to the office and back to business as usual. Encourage your team to block off time on your calendar for follow up BEFORE the event.

Used wisely, events can be a huge driver of new business. If you don’t prioritize and use them properly, you’re better off spending that budget on other marketing programs.

Marketing is one of those subjects that, considering what it is not (namely, a religion), sometimes is overinflated with opinions.

However, marketing deals with numbers, and numbers validate a procedure.

Opinions can’t be considered a reliable marketing guide given that the marketplace isn’t a democracy. Either you do what works, or you are out.

Those opinions generally follow a trend (like in fashion), and nowadays the course of this trend is represented by

1. Creativity

2. Humor

3. Virality

4. Influencers

I have already talked about how creativity can work only within a set of methodological procedures that can be replicated during the time to bring results on a consistent basis.

Creativity for itself—from a sales point of view—is just a meaningless piece of contemporary art.

Funny is the adjective that usually sticks together with the attribute of “CREATIVITY,” and it is associated with the new educational trend of learning by doing what you love.

However, as I suppose you are an entrepreneur, doing what you love isn’t necessary at all.

There are plenty of procedures that you need to implement within your company to make it as efficient as possible and that require your ability to sustain and deal with frustration.

The third new trend is represented by VIRALITY. Today, if you do not go viral you are not a good marketer. Growth must be quick in order to make millions (of viewers, of course) tomorrow. The marketing industry has invented the label “growth hacking” to address this need.

Although there are a few things that growth marketers should consider:

1. There is no growth hacking in brand building.

2. Virality is almost always associated with what is laughable or dramatic (in PR we call it Black PR).

3. Virality (when positive) is associated with impressive video commercials that direct the attention of the audience to the beauty of the video commercial rather than to the attributes that distinguish your positioning.

4. There is no need to go viral when 99% of those who will see the viral material aren’t potential customers.

Marketing isn’t about the number of likes, comments, and shares.

Marketing is about increasing the sales of your service and products.

Operating within the marketing industry but keeping some distance from it allows me to be detached enough to make my own conclusion by analysing patterns and numbers.

Among those patterns there is a fourth new trend in the marketing industry, and that is the rise of influencers.

I do not have any problems with influencers, although they have always existed.

And I do believe they can help you sell under specific conditions that marketing departments seem to usually either underestimate or ignore.

Let’s go back to the basics.

Who is the influencer of Tesla?

The CEO of the company, Elon Musk.

Who is the influencer of Amazon?

The CEO of the company, Jeff Bezos.

Who is the influencer of Facebook?

The CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg.

Thus, who should be the influencer your company must rely upon?

The CEO of your company: YOU.

What those three people have in common are three well defined traits:

1. they all have a clear vision on what direction the world should follow;

2. they are role models;

3. they are always featured in the media.

On the basis of what the most influential people do, the question changes from “What influencer should I reach to get some traction?” to “How can I become an influencer myself?”

This is how you gain pre-eminence in your industry.

What is pre-eminence?

According to the definition given by Jay Abraham,

«Preeminence is a multifaced approach like an integrated fabric. It’s a strategic mindset.

You get preeminence by subordinating your needs and totally focusing on the other side

– the side of the client or the customer»

But let’s say that you are on the way to becoming the influencer of your own company and you need some assistance to level you up, and you team up with some other influential figure.

This is correct: you associate yourself with some influential people to raise the value perception of yourself and your influence as well.

The problem starts when you think of using influencers as an additional distribution channel to sell your own products/services.

There is a good way and a bad way to do it.

I will paint a picture for you of how not to reach out to influencers.

A couple of months after the release of my bestselling book BRAND TO SELL: Ignite your Influence and Build Your Brand with Broadcast PR, an Italian financial consultant with a core base of five thousands members in his Facebook group shared it on his own profile, as he was mentioned in it as a role model on how to build your personal brand from scratch.

The news is that, although my sales were exponential in the UK, in December I didn’t sell a single copy in Italy, in spite of this considerable endorsement.

WHY IS THAT, YOU MAY ASK?

It’s very simple. And you should never forget this rule when planning to reach out to some influencer while widening the number of distribution channels your company relies on.

People belong to his group because they want to gather financial information, not branding education.

It would have been considerably different if a marketing authority had suggested my book as mandatory reading for his own following.

This conclusion leads us to explain a better way to sell through an influencer.

To facilitate the comprehension of this dynamic, I have conceptualised what I define as THE LAW OF COHERENCE.

The LAW OF COHERENCE says that

you can leverage the attachment and the bond of trust a community has with the “influencer” only when your product/service is coherent with what the influencer is recognised for.

If an influencer is a mere entertainer whose job is to make people laugh, I would highly recommend you ignore him/her. But if the influencer is recognised as a person with a particular expertise in a determined field where he/she entertains by educating, and that field/category is complementary to yours, than you can go all in.

What sets sales leaders apart from everyday reps? Why are some salespeople more effective at closing deals? And how do some reps skyrocket their career growth? The answer is simple: Business acumen.

It's a term often thrown around boardrooms and blog posts, but today, I'm breaking down exactly what it is, why it's important, and how you can develop it.

Business acumen goes beyond just "having a head for business." It describes a strategic outlook that creates business advantaged. At its core, business acumen is the ability to combine experience, knowledge, perspective, and awareness to make sound business decisions.

The development of this ability leads to better judgment and allows you to view organizational needs in a holistic, long-term way.

Put simply, business acumen is when you make decisions that don't just benefit your company today, but also months or even years in the future. It means you can think strategically about an interconnected landscape and implement activities to leverage that knowledge for present and future success.

Why Do Salespeople Need Business Acumen?

It makes you a better internal collaborator.

In today's hyper-connected world, the "lone-gunslinger" model of sales is no longer effective. Salespeople need to work within the context of their organization as a whole. In other words, you've got to do your job well today, while considering how to benefit your company in the future.

For example, if you close new business by regularly offering heavy discounts, you might hit your sales number and impress your manager, but it puts your finance department in a difficult position.

Similarly, I see many salespeople over-promise features. The salesperson wins because they've closed the deal, but the implementation and customer success teams then struggle to deliver on those promises.

Make sure your actions positively impact and support your coworkers. It's good for your career and great for the business.

It helps you understand complex prospect situations.

If they want to learn about product features, service packages, and business benefits, your clients can visit your website. What they need from you is guidance and assistance. So, as technology infiltrates more of the selling process, it's important for salespeople to be consultative.

To be consultative, you must understand your prospect's business from their perspective. You have to understand how it solves the pain points of everyone involved in the buying decision.

If your champion is sold but needs manager approval, ask, "What are your manager's goals this quarter?" or "How is your manager measured on success?"

Ask questions about office culture, upcoming initiatives, and budgetary restrictions to get a holistic view of roadblocks your champion might face.

It trains you to think beyond the block-and-tackle.

Many salespeople take a "block-and-tackle" approach to selling. They're good at reacting and responding to day-to-day tasks and challenges but struggle to look or act beyond the immediate scope of their job.

This is fine if you are a salesperson who wants to stay in your role forever, but to avoid being pigeonholed, you need to move past a reactive approach to selling.

If you often receive the objection, "You've said your customer service team responds to client issues within three days, but we're really looking for a company offering same-day issue resolution," find out what your customer service team is already doing to address this objection, and bring your own ideas and strategies to the conversation.

Make sure to do this in a positive, collaborative way. If you're busy pissing off other departments, you'll make enemies instead of allies, and your good ideas will be worth very little.

1. Assessment

You should be able to look at a business situation and easily identify what factors are at play and how each fit into the bigger picture.

For example, if you're experiencing a high customer churn rate, the knee-jerk response is to solve for how this issue affects you and your commission. That's a start, but also identify when churn increased and what might have contributed to the rise.

Did your company recently change the pricing structure or product/service offering? Are you churning the right customers? Has your customer profile shifted? Is there a disconnect between customer expectation and reality?

Assess these situations and recommend strategies for moving forward. Want to take things a step further? Identify and solve for company challenges before they become a problem.

2. Long-term vision and discipline

Think beyond daily outreach goals and quarterly numbers. Consider your company's yearly and long-term goals, and align your actions and behaviors to support those goals.

If your company's goal is to attract a smaller group of more qualified, high-end customers, align your goals.

Challenge yourself to read three books about enterprise sales, find a mentor experienced in selling to high-end clientele, and take someone in your sales organization's leadership out to coffee to better understand the company's decision. Give yourself milestones and a deadline -- and stick to it.

3. Emotional intelligence

Business acumen is not only about meeting your own needs, but meeting the needs of your clients, your boss, and your company as well. If your sales organization has an administrative assistant who helps with paperwork, HR, or scheduling, find out how you can make their job easier.

Don't ungratefully shovel work to them or ignore their requests for assistance. Engage with administrative staff regularly, understand their goals, and help them achieve those goals.

Likewise, understand the administrative teams at your prospects' organizations often have a great deal of influence. Take a generous approach with clients and coworkers alike, and you'll see an improvement in your work relationships and career prospects.

4. Experience

Experience isn't just about … well, experiencing things. It's about learning from each experience and translating those lessons into concrete steps forward in your career.

If you fail, identify why you failed and what you learned from it. Take the 50,000-foot view, and let it change how you make business decisions in the future.

Miss your quota this month? Whining never endeared a salesperson to leadership. Instead, document why it happened, what you need to do to ensure it doesn't happen again, and what your next steps are. Share this analysis with your sales manager and impress them with your proactive approach.

5. Learning organizational processes

When a salesperson understands the systems that make a business run, the rules that govern them, and the work they can do to influence those processes -- that's business acumen.

If your sales organization shifts focus from medium-sized companies to attracting enterprise-level business, you might feel frustrated your pipeline is initially lighter.

Instead of worrying how you'll make quota, step back, work with sales leadership to understand the decision, and develop a plan for how you'll influence those business decisions for the better.

1. Pay attention.

It's important for salespeople to develop situational awareness. Instead of only keeping your head down and doing a good job, pay attention to how things work at your company. What patterns emerge? What challenges do you or your colleagues face repeatedly? Identifying and solving for these situations is what will set you apart.

Is your company repeatedly losing business to a competitor because they have an integration you don't? Reach out to vendors offering this integration and facilitate a partnership. Pay attention to business challenges and be the first one to present a solution.

2. Find a mentor.

Don't expect to find one mentor who's good at everything. Instead identify several mentors, each an expert in a certain area.

Know someone who has a sales career you'd like to emulate? Ask them to mentor you on next steps in your job. Is there someone in your organization who expertly closes enterprise deals? Ask them to work with you on your selling. Surround yourself with supportive mentors and improve several career areas at once.

3. Network beyond the sales department.

To make good decisions, there will be times when you need to call on experts for advice and help. From marketing and accounting to HR and legal -- having contacts in each of these fields will be illuminating and helpful when you need their expertise.

Working with a prospect facing difficult marketing challenges? Think beyond the sale and ask your outside marketing contact for perspective on your prospect's situation. If you bring construction ideas and solutions to the table -- you'll definitely stand out from your competitors.

4. Study.

A salesperson who doesn't read, listen to podcasts, or read industry material isn't going anywhere. You should have a steady pulse on trends, influencers, and education in your field.

But don't limit yourself to sales material. Read books on other areas of business, psychology, or economics. The lessons you learn from these subjects can be just as impactful on your work as the latest business book. Always be learning and your career will never stop advancing.

5. Learn from your clients.

Rely on your client relationships to gain insight into the company's operations. They know their business inside and out and are often happy to share information with you. Here are a few questions you can use to start the conversation:

• How do you find qualified candidates to hire for X position/department?
• What are the key elements that contribute to your excellent customer service?
• How does your business adjust its financial strategy if there are budget concerns?
• Are there any essential attributes you look for in a successful manager or leader at your company?

Not only will you further develop your business acumen, you'll also be building rapport and strengthening the relationship between you and the client.

6. Learn about different management styles.

Each company uses different styles of management and you'll have a better grasp of its operations if you understand the management processes the business relies on. There's more than one way to solve a problem, and you'll learn the different approaches management can take when faced with a business challenge.

Take a deeper look into how various management styles tackle planning, decision making, and performance measurement -- and think about which styles would work best for your business and sales team.

7. Understand your thought process and decision-making strategy.

How do you analyze situations? What's your go-to problem-solving strategy? Having a clear sense of how you think about a challenge, whether it be a business or personal dilemma, will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses in critical thinking and reasoning.

For example, are you reflective when presented with a problem? Or do you analyze the issue and make decisions quickly? See how your style fits with people who might use a different process identify and pick solutions. Reflecting on your own thought process will give you a better understanding of interpersonal dynamics, both with co-workers and prospects.

Business acumen is the end result of hard work, dedication, and persistence. It's what happens when you have grit, show up consistently, and do the work. It's the byproduct of self-aware activity, and it's available for anyone willing to put in the effort.

Want to learn more? Read about becoming the ultimate dealmaker next.

Your reps spend more than 25 hours out of a 40-hour week on non-sales generating activities. At least, that’s if they mirror the average sales associate’s work profile.

This statistic is based on a study of over 200 sales reps. It showed that NON-revenue generating tasks take up on average 63.4 percent of a rep’s time. Even worse, the study included both field and inside salespeople and concluded that phone agents were on the low end of the spectrum. Field reps outperform them in revenue-generating time by 17.5 percent.

So, what are salespeople doing with their time?

A few of the activities that eat up more than their fair share of time and that reps also consider to be least effective in helping to generate sales are administrative tasks, dealing with corporate policies and researching accounts and contacts. These activities are consuming time that reps would like to spend on account planning, sales follow up, forecasting and pipeline management, all of which they believe are effective in sales generation.

This research suggests it’s time for managers to find ways to reduce administrative responsibilities, streamline corporate policies and facilitate efficient prospect research. Here are some inside sales time management tips to consider.

1. Minimize Admin Tasks
   • Use Email Templates

     Email has become an increasingly important tool for inside salespeople. While it’s important to personalize these communications, that doesn’t mean reps should start from scratch every time. So create a series of email templates for use in different situations, such as responding to new leads or following up on phone calls. Reps can select from these messages and customize them as necessary to create a personal touch.

   • Leverage Marketing Automation

     Marketing automation puts information at reps’ fingertips, providing access to a central marketing database and insights on how people are interacting with your organization. It also takes the busy work out of conducting phone, email and other marketing campaigns. Finally, because marketing automation empowers you to track and test campaigns, you can continually optimize them for increased efficiency.

   • Do CRM Right

     A customer relationship management (CRM) solution can be powerful, but there’s no guarantee. Salespeople only spend 18 percentof their time in CRM and report that it is the most frustrating system they use. That’s likely because solutions are often jam-packed with features, but are not easy to use. To encourage reps to engage with CRM systems, usability is essential. Data entry should be intuitive and the reports you require to manage your system should be easily accessible. To get the most out of your CRM solution, you should have it integrated with your marketing automation system. By joining these systems, you can avoid miscommunication and ensure consistent messaging. Reps need to have a holistic view of a contact or customer in one place. Otherwise, you’ll find them assembling spreadsheets to manage information.

   • Don’t Make Reps Dial the Phone

     It should go without saying that you need an auto-dialer. However, since it’s so important, I had to mention it. This technology rapidly dials phone numbers and connects reps when a person or voicemail answers. Reps waste no time dialing. Plus, because there’s no stalling between calls, it keeps the momentum going. This tool alone can double or triple productivity, but it needs to be used properly and only when appropriate.

2. Make Prospect Research Easier
   
   While reps can gain insights by seeking information via Google and LinkedIn, there are more efficient ways to tackle foundational prospect research. Take advantage of market intelligence software, which has already done much of the legwork. It holds a treasure trove of information on markets, companies and their associates. If you need business data by categories such as industry or location, a business directory such as Hoover’s is useful. You’ll find company names, key personnel, number of employees and phone numbers.
3. Review Your Internal Policies
   
   Internal policies are essential to ensure that reps comply with the way you want to do business. They can, however, slow down your sales processes. So review them periodically and make sure that they are necessary or to discover whether you can manage policies more efficiently.

Increased productivity will not happen overnight. Instead, it takes a commitment to continuous improvement in inside sales time management. So talk to your reps to discover how they are using their time and what frustrates them on the job. Then prioritize what to tackle first, looking at the most significant time wasters, greatest frustrations and the low hanging fruit. Makes sure you explore administrative tasks that consume too much time, how long it takes to research prospects and if any internal policies are becoming bottlenecks in your sales process.

Also consider outsourcing all or part of your inside sales activities to a company that specializes in telemarketing and inside sales services. This can not only provide a higher return on investment, but also increased sales and an optimized sales process.

Working in online learning, I’ve found that every year around this time there’s a burst of sign-ups from workers seeking new skills. Perhaps it’s a matter of New Year’s resolutions, or a reaction to seeing their friends and colleagues make big career changes each January.

Unfortunately, the initial commitment to learning all too often fizzles out. Studies have found that 40% to 80% of students drop out of online classes.

Those who give up miss out. In one survey of more than 50,000 learners who completed MOOCs on Coursera, 72% reported career benefits such as doing their current job more effectively, finding a new job, or receiving a raise.

Having worked in HR at a large banking corporation and in strategic HR consulting, I’ve seen the effects of learning and development on career mobility — and what leads people to let it fall by the wayside. Over time, working with users as well as learning experts, I’ve found that four crucial habits can make a tremendous difference.

Focus on emerging skills. With so many learning options available these days, people are often tempted to simply go to Google, type in some general search terms, and start one of the first courses that pops up. That’s a waste of time.

Job requirements are quickly evolving. To ensure relevance, you need to focus on learning the latest emerging skills. You can do this in a couple of ways.

First, track what skills the leaders in your industry are hiring for. Look at recent job postings from the top companies, and see which qualifications keep popping up. Second, reach out to people in your network or on LinkedIn who have the job you want. If you want to know what sales skills and technologies are becoming most important, talk to some high-level salespeople. Ask them what they’re having to learn to keep succeeding at their work and what skills they think someone needs to acquire in order to become a viable candidate.

You may feel intimidated about reaching out. But I’ve found that most of the time, people are happy to share this information. They want to see more and more capable candidates filling jobs and staying on top of trends.

As you get a sense of the most important skills to learn, ask these experts whether they can recommend specific online courses with practical value. Also take a close look at course descriptions to find content that will be useful on the job rather than provide mostly academic insight. For instance, you might seek out instructors who are leading experts in your industry or content created in conjunction with companies that you admire.

Get synchronous. In this era, micro-learning — engaging with online learning tools when and where it’s convenient — is becoming a much larger part of the training and development scene. This has its benefits, including freedom, convenience, and digestible content.

But there’s also a downside. These asynchronous experiences are often solitary. And without at least some real-time interaction, whether in person or online, many students lose motivation. Researchers have found that “the sense of isolation” for some online learners “may make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful online learning environment.” They call for more synchronous experiences. Others have also identified interaction and collaboration as critical factors in fruitful learning.

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Are you considering outsourcing demand generation in 2018? If so, you’re not alone.

Few B2B marketing organizations rely solely on in-house resources to plan and execute their demand generation strategies. Most use a combination of internal staff and external partner resources. This makes complete sense when you consider the breadth of demand gen activities required to meet growth goals, including: integrated program planning, content creation, design, content syndication and more.

At Integrate, we work with hundreds of mid-sized and enterprise B2B marketing teams to understand their demand generation strategies and challenges. In addition to things like data quality issues and lack of performance insights, one of the biggest limitations to scaling demand marketing contributions is often a lack of internal resources.

We’ve worked to distill the experiences of our clients as they navigate their options and review demand generation agencies to handle various aspects of their strategies. Here are some tips to help you evaluate potential demand generation agency partners based on their success records, communication, industry experience and other key criteria.

6 Ways to Vet Demand Generation Agencies

Here’s the good news: outsourcing demand generation isn’t an all-or-nothing, permanent commitment. You don’t have to choose between fully outsourcing and fully managing demand gen efforts in-house. And, when you do choose an approach, it doesn’t have to be a lifetime decision.

Increasingly, brands choose to outsource certain parts of demand generation, usually to fill in skill and talent gaps in their in-house team. Other organizations benefit from consulting, while still completing the bulk of the heavy lifting internally. Still, others still are tapping into the fast-growing contractor economy to flexibly leverage highly-skilled contractors on a per-project basis.

If you do choose to hire a third-party partner, screening and vetting are critical. We recommend the following actions prior to signing a contract to have the best possible experience.

1. Understand How They Communicate

The most productive agency interview conversations may start off with a simple question: What is your communications process?

Needless to say, it’s a warning sign if they lack standardized processes for communicating with clients. In general, proactive and responsive communication leads to healthier agency-client relationships, but communication styles vary significantly.

Some demand generation agencies like to develop a plan with clients, then go heads down for days or weeks at a time to execute that plan. Other agencies like to communicate with the client every step along the way. And unfortunately, some agencies simply don’t communicate clearly about anything, and always make it a struggle to get any answers.

If you like to be kept in the loop about everything, you know not to hire a heads-down agency. If you don’t have the time to attend multiple meetings every week, and you want to trust the agency to be experts and get stuff done, you don’t want to hire a meetings-oriented team.

Understanding your culture and availability, as well as the communications expectations from your agency, you can get a better idea what the relationship will be like. And, you can hire and plan accordingly.

2. Check Customer Reviews

There is no one more honest about an agency’s performance than current and former clients. Check out the reputation of service providers through case studies and, if possible, online review sources before signing an agreement. Remember to take online reviews with a grain of salt. And take steps to ensure that the review site is reputable. Nefarious agencies and brands have been known to create entire review websites specifically to put their brand at the top in every category.

Interviews with the agency’s current clients can validate an agency faster than any other method. This isn’t always possible, but if you can get the opportunity to speak with a current customer, we encourage you to take it.

3. Set Clear Goals and KPI’s

Demand generation must use a data-driven methodology.

If a prospective vendor is hesitant to set performance targets, you may not be able to rely on positive results. Ideally, the right vendor will work with you to establish growth targets and full-funnel KPIs that are both aggressive and achievable.

They should also support your need for full-funnel analysis and responsive improvement by demonstrating how they apply marketing analytics to their customers’ strategies.

4. Prepare to Educate Your Vendor

The client onboarding process is a time for mutual education. Prepare to get your vendor up to speed on your industry, business and brand. Ideally, the agency you select should have a standardized onboarding process to simplify this as much as possible.

Your vendor should also provide value and education to your team as well. In most cases, third-parties are hired to bring a special skill set or expertise to the table. If that’s what you pay for, you don’t want a team of task-monkeys just following orders. You want them to provide insights and training on how to make the most of the partnership.

5. Steer Clear of “Lock-In” Contracts

Demand generation success requires dynamic methods and tactics. You may need to scale your services agreement up or down to meet targets or budget constraints. Flexible contracts, and better yet, KPI-dependent work agreements are a sign of a partnership that’s focused on your success.

Be wary of constraining contracts that don’t offer a way out. If a partner falls short on delivering results, it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to sever the relationship.

6. Fast-Track Industry Experience

Many B2B demand generation agencies claim to have on-the-ground expertise in paid distribution and retargeting. Tactical experience is helpful, but it’s often just as important to make sure they have proven success in your industry.

Evaluating their results for other organizations in your veritcal is crucial if you’re operating in a highly-regulated business, such as financial services or FinTech. In complex industries, there’s no substitute for direct knowledge when it comes to driving marketing that resonates with your target audience.

Do I Really Need to Evaluate Demand Generation Agencies?

For some brands, outsourcing is the simplest way to overcome common challenges such as a lack of internal resources or difficulty hiring full-stack marketing talent.

However, outsourcing isn’t the right decision for everyone.

Even if your company does need help generating demand, you may not be ready to outsource. If your team is drowning in inefficiencies, you may not have the resources to manage an agency relationships. If for instance, you’re spending hours each week manually formatting or validating lead data so it can be uploaded into your CRM, technologies for automating data validation and lead processing could be a better immediate investment than an agency relationship.

By understanding how to carefully research demand generation agency options, and considering whether your brand actually needs to reshape your processes or invest in smarter MarTech, you can ensure you start 2018 on the right path.

Still not sure if you should outsource demand generation or implement additional automation so your marketing team can manage more in-house? Check out the B2B Demand Marketing Assessment Guide & Orchestration Workbook to get an accurate benchmark of your current strategy.

Agencies overestimate the importance of reputation and underestimate the importance of cost/value when pitching brands, according to recent research from Vennli. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Is hiring qualified candidates top of mind for your company? Are your current hiring efforts producing lackluster results? Having a top-notch Glassdoor profile can certainly help boost your employer brand.

In an age where consumers vet everything from new car purchases to toothbrushes, Glassdoor is like Amazon for jobseekers. The site features thousands of reviews that add credibility, or concern, to a jobseeker’s evaluations of the companies they are considering. And with 48% of jobseekers consulting Glassdoor, you can be certain that your target candidates are typing your company’s name into Glassdoor and relying heavily on the results. Here are 7 action steps to create a killer Glassdoor employer profile to attract prospective candidates.

1. Demonstrate what it’s actually like to work for your company as much as possible

Appeal to employees and candidates as much as possible by speaking in employee friendly, personable, and engaging language when completing your profile and when responding to posts. Avoid jargon, and other language that an applicant coming from another industry would not be able to comprehend.

In the same vein, open positions on Glassdoor should be as descriptive as possible, so that prospects and new hires know what a position entails. When it comes to job expectations, new hires aren’t looking to be surprised.

Also, post company awards and updates to give users a feel for your company’s unique strengths, and emphasize your principles and core values. This will allow applicants to self-select themselves as a good fit for your firm, eliminating wasted time interviewing the wrong people.

2. Use willing and eager employees as brand ambassadors

Employee generated content receives 5-10x the amplification as brand-shared content, so whether your profile is brand new or has been available for a while, has negative, positive, or no reviews, encouraging current employees to write reviews of your company is a smart move. Employee-generated reviews of your company will likely generate an influx of positive, recent reviews, which is exactly what applicants will look for when vetting your company. Plus, adding new reviews is also a great way to move older negative reviews further down on your profile page.

Just as you’d be more comfortable purchasing a product that has many positive reviews than a “wildcard” with no reviews, candidates vetting your business will be more comfortable after hearing from authentic happy employees.

Although Glassdoor forbids incentivizing employees to write reviews, they provide a template here for soliciting reviews from current employees.

3. Pay close attention to reviews of compensation and benefits

Research has shown that compensation and benefits matter most to job seekers, so it’s vital to make sure that your compensation packages are on par with competitors. Additionally, when positive reviews mention salaries or benefits, it’s a good idea to bolster these reviews by replying and emphasizing these as company priorities.

4. Respond to the good, the bad and the ugly

Positive reviews can act as invitations to reiterate key benefits that you’d like readers to remember. If an employee takes the time to write a positive review, pick out one or two positives from the review to dive into and explain a bit more in your response. Also, be sure to thank the reviewer for taking the time to share their experiences. Highlighting positive aspects can help to focus reader attention on the areas of your choice and can help to balance out negative reviews.

Speaking of negative reviews, more likely than not, you’ll stumble upon a negative review at some point. Dealing with these reviews is extremely important; several good reads on how to do so can be found here, here, and here. The key aspects are:

• Fix what’s broken. Are multiple negative reviews complaining about one thing in particular, such as benefits? Take a look at your competitors’ offerings and see what you might do to bolster your company’s package and fix the problem for your current and future employees. Was there a recent company merger that compromised morale? Perhaps the issue has been resolved, and a candid review explaining the situation will suffice to put out the fire. Addressing the root of the problem not only dissuades more negative reviews, but can also increase the tenure of current and future employees. Oftentimes several bad reviews in one area stem from an internal miscommunication. Try to isolate the offending area and make a plan for better communication and expectation setting for new hires.
• Be transparent and authentic. Job seekers value honesty and good faith effort, and reading a candid and heartfelt reply to a negative review can put readers at ease. Take responsibility and ownership, apologize for the negative experience, and reaffirm that concerns in the given area are important to your company and being looked into or dealt with. Reaffirming that company culture and morale is important to leadership and expressing genuine concern might be all that’s needed to put applicants at ease.
• Don’t let the fire spread. If a negative review is caught and responded to early on, others will feel less inclined to post the same negative feedback. Plus, applicants might even gain respect for your company’s ability to hear employee concerns and make time to address them.

5. Have C-suite executives respond to reviews

No matter how tempting it might be to relegate your Glassdoor profile management to an intern or the HR department, it’s absolutely essential that reviews warranting a response be attended to by someone from upper management—ideally the president. This shows that your senior management is concerned and involved with employee needs and company culture.

6. Integrate and cross-promote your Glassdoor profile with other social media platforms

Finally, once you have a profile to be proud of—complete with recent employee reviews, good information available on benefits and salaries, and plenty of detail on what it’s like to work at your company—it’s time to link your Glassdoor profile with other social media channels. Paste your Glassdoor link next to other social media links throughout your website, social media and elsewhere. Glassdoor should embody your firm’s brand and be an integrated part of your employer marketing. Link social media platforms to your Glassdoor profile, and strengthen your employer brand by having employees post video testimonials and blog posts on your website and social media. Be sure that your Glassdoor profile is branded and consistent in voice to your other communications channels.

7. Monitor your profile closely

Treat your reputation on Glassdoor like you would any social media outlet. Set up alerts that notify you when someone posts something new, and ask employees to keep an eye out for any comments that may need follow up.

Stakes are high. 84% of job seekers would change jobs for a company with a better reputation. And 69% would not take a job from a company with a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed. Clearly, establishing yourself as a quality employer is essential for attracting top talent. The average job seeker looks at 7-8 sources in order to form an opinion about a company, so a powerful Glassdoor profile will not only add your firm to the consideration sets of top talent, it will act as an additional source for job seekers to validate their perceptions while considering your company. As a bonus, strengthening your employer brand with a strong Glassdoor profile is a great move in the eyes of your investors, as Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work outperformed the S&P 500 by 122%.

As 2018 begins, we know the one question on everyone’s mind is “what will this new year bring?” Well, we have some good news for all you marketers! In this blog, we have summed up eMarketer’s article about the digital landscape and predictions in the new year.

Prediction #1: Social advertising transparency will become a big deal

Due to Russia’s meddling with the 2016 US election using both Facebook and Twitter ads, the two social platforms are taking steps to make it easier to find out who the advertiser is, how much they are spending and how the ads are targeted.

Facebook said it will let anyone see what ads a page is running, even if they are not being targeted by the ads. When it comes to political ads, the information will be deeper: showing the amount spent, number of impressions and the ways the ads were targeted. Twitter will be creating an “ad transparency center,” showing all ads currently running, how long they have been running and targeting information.

Now Facebook and Twitter must actually start to implement what they are planning/talking about, proving to be no easy task – given the volume of advertising and complicated technologies like dynamic ads. This full transparency they speak of might not be so easy to achieve.

Prediction #2: Voice search will become widespread

Voice search is becoming a standard operating system in most households. Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home devices are growing in popularity and being installed in more homes than ever before.

eMarketer estimates the number of US voice-enabled digital assistant users will rise by 14.1% (to 69.0 million) next year, while the number of voice-enabled speaker users will climb 27.6% (to 45.4 million). With more users relying on voice to search, marketers need to adjust their SEO and content strategies. Marketers must consider content that fits in with conversational language, while knowing that the first result will only matter as voice search engines only serve voice searchers with one answer rather than a list of options.

Prediction #3: Augmented reality will become mainstream

Augmented reality has something that virtual reality doesn’t — it can be run on mobile devices people already have. Nothing additional like headsets needs to be purchased. Both Apple and Google are encouraging mobile experimentation, potentially making AR available to many smartphone users. Ikea recently introduced an AR-driven furniture placement app, Place. This is a great example of how AR can be a part of everyday use.

Prediction #4: Big Tech’s image will become dirty

Things are changing for tech giants due to damaging news reports. “Facebook as conduit for Russian meddling in elections, Google as heavily fined violator of European antitrust law, Apple as international iMaster of tax avoidance, and so on.” All of these stories will start to shift the way consumers view these companies, and create an environment for lawmakers to assert more control and squeeze more tax revenues from them. eMarketer predicts there will be even more blood in the water as these tech companies resist.

Prediction #5: People will recognize Amazon’s role in the advertising marketplace

All of us are familiar with one of the largest retailers, Amazon, but not all know that Amazon is becoming a “digital advertising powerhouse.” eMarketer expects Amazon’s net US digital ad revenues will increase by 42% in 2018, reaching $2.35 billion.

Amazon’s strength as an ad platform is because of search and display. With search, brands with an Amazon presence are increasing their spend into highly effective cost-per-click placements, ensuring they get consumers’ attention. On the display side, the Amazon Advertising Platform has targeting capabilities that allow marketers to see users’ interest based on their Amazon searching, browsing and buying.

Already in July 2017, a ClickZ Intelligence and Catalyst survey of business-to-consumer marketers in North America found that early two-thirds planned to increase ad spending on Amazon in the next 12 months — higher than other platforms like Google and Facebook.

Prediction #6: Hacks and breaches will change the privacy landscape

Security hacks from Target to Equifax have made the news, and left consumers with fear of identity theft. A 2017 survey of internet users worldwide by Accenture found that just 14% of respondents were confident that their personal online data is safe. However, very few companies have stepped up their efforts when it comes to security practices, and consumers continue to shop online and share more data about themselves. This continues a vicious cycle of data collections and breaches.

2018 is the year the landscape will begin to change, partly due to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This legislation will require companies doing business with EU citizens to follow strict data-protection requirements. Failure to do so will result in heavy fines.

The GDPR will better protect organizations from cyberattacks and consumers from having their identity stolen. Companies will need to find ways to protect consumers’ information and perhaps decrease the amount of data they collect. Regardless, digital privacy environment will change significantly.

Prediction #7: Taking advantage of Blockchain

For marketers, Blockchain will change pieces of the digital advertising landscape. Some ad firms will begin to use Blockchain to fight ad fraud, while making the digital ad supply chain more efficient. Blockchain as a reliable ledger would mean that brands could be sure that what they thought they were buying really was what they were buying, and ultimately to trace the course of dollars put into digital advertising. According to eMarketer, this would allow advertisers to pinpoint and eliminate fraud and to make the digital media buys more efficient. “Tracing where ad spending goes – and how much of it ends up with each ad tech firm rather than with publishers – would put pressure on those programmatic players to prove they add value.”

Prediction #8: Digital video will go big and small

Digital video is concentrated now in two areas — mobile and connected devices — and there is a continuing increase in the amount of time adults spend viewing digital video. The viewership trend will encourage spending in mobile video and connected TV.

Connected TV platforms faces many obstacles, including lacking the scale advertisers are used to finding on network and pay TV, and lacking programmatic advertising. According to eMarketer, these obstacles won’t disappear overnight, but will take a leap forward in 2018. Ad spending will catch up with consumer behavior.

Prediction #9: Gains in online-to-offline data will lead to more localized mobile advertising

Improved online-to-offline data will add another layer of understanding about mobile behavior and advertising performance, which should make advertising more personalized and localized.

Location data has been available to mobile marketers for years. Facebook and Google have used this data to their advantage. Google has local inventory ads and map ads and Facebook has local awareness ads. Both companies give advertisers tools to attribute offline sales and store traffic to online ads.

Mobile advertisers have also discovered that the real “gold” in location data is in patterns of movement over time, helping to better understand their customers. For example, if you go to the batting cage every Saturday, odds are you may be interested in baseball gear and equipment. Dynamically localized ads to reflect customer behaviors and patterns on platforms like Facebook and Google is where advertisers’ mobile ad dollars should go.

Prediction #10: Marketing world’s attention shifts to Gen-Zers

Marketers started obsessing over Millennials before many of them had money to spend. All the while, they ignored Boomers and Gen-Xers who actually had money to spare. Buzz around Gen Z in the past year suggests some ill-advised marketers may start to concentrate on them. It doesn’t make sense to ignore Millennials now that they are advancing in their careers and are becoming heads of households. Gen-Zers will eventually become the “consumer powerhouse,” but that day is very far away. Marketers should be paying attention to today’s main consumers.

What digital media trends do you expect to see this year? Share with us in the comments below!

Pricing experts are in wide agreement that the best approach to pricing is value-based. In value-based pricing you understand your economic and emotional differentiation and use this understanding to segment your market, target prices and design pricing. For a good summary of the value-based approach see Dr. Thomas Nagle's article for the Professional Pricing Society "Price Versus Value Management - Know the Difference." 

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This is all well and good, but how do you go about creating differentiated value?

Differentiated value is value that a potential customer cares about, and is willing to pay for, that the customer cannot easily get from another source. There are two main categories of value driver, emotional and economic, both are important.

Emotional Value Drivers

At Ibbaka we structure emotional value drivers using Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs. Mapping these to B2B buying processes, these are as follows.

Self Actualization: The buyer or company are able to realize their vision or mission.

Self Esteem: The buyer or company are able to feel that they are achieving their goals and succeeding.

Belonging: The buyer or company are able to feel that they are a valued and accepted part of their business or industry.

Security: The buyer or company is confident that they are managing risks appropriately and that they are secure.

Baseline: The basic functions of the business are working smoothly and effectively.

Economic Value Drivers

The focus on B2B is generally on economic value drivers. This is understandable. In business delivering financial results is fundamental. In value-based pricing, the price reflects the economic value provided to the customer relative to their next best competitive alternative. Pricing is based on the impact of the offer on the customer's business model. Think about how the customer's profit and loss statement or balance sheet will be improved by the offer.

There are six basic categories of economic value driver and many sub categories.

Increased Revenue: Grow market share, access new markets, grow the overall market, improve pipeline metrics, and so on.

Reduced Expenses: Lower costs, more efficient workflows or processes, more effective workflows or processes, less rework or waste.

Reduced Operating Capital: Faster inventory turns, faster collections, lower inventory.

Reduced Capital Investment: Defer capital investment, reduce the cost of capital investment, get higher returns on assets.

Reduced Risk: Compliance, legal, financial, cost volatility.

Increased Options: Avoid lock in, preserve choice.

The latter two, reduced risk and increased options are often used as emotional value drivers, but in businesses such as finance, insurance, energy and certain parts of healthcare the economic impact can be quantified.

How to Increase Differentiation

There are basically three ways to drive differentiation: improve an existing value driver, find a new value driver, apply an existing value driver to a new market segment. The type of differentiation will have a big impact on marketing strategy.

Improve an Existing Value Driver

This is the most common way of improving differentiation. One takes a well known and understood value driver and improves on it for the existing set of customers. This is what Clayton Christensen would call Sustaining Innovation. It probably represents 80% of the work we do at Ibbaka. From a pricing perspective, there are several key things to be done:

• Validate the extent of the improvement
• See who cares most about the improvement (from an emotional and economic perspective)
• Find a better way to track the value metric (the unit of consumption by which the buyer gets value) with the pricing metric (the unit in which the price is set)
• Design a better pricing architecture, to capture more of the value being created

Find a new Value Driver

This is what is more commonly thought of as innovation, but it is in fact relatively rare. A new way of improving the customer's business is discovered and delivered. This is difficult. Most of your customer's have been in business for years and they know, or think they know, their business well. Discovering, developing and then communicating a new value driver is not easy, but when it can be done, the results are often transformative leading to the development of whole new industries.

Sometimes, when one has a new value driver, it is worth going beyond the current set of customers to their customers, to see how the new value driver will impact the whole value chain and what opportunities open up. In a way, that is that Uber and Lyft have done to the taxi industry (and are threatening to do the logistics) or what AirBnB has done to the hotel industry. We sometimes call this disintermediation, a long word for the simple act of cutting out the middleman and making value chains more efficient.

Find a New Market

Sometimes the best way to go to market is to compete against non consumption. This idea is at the heart of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. In his view, which is not without controversy (see for example this issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review), In disruptive innovation, the new technology often underperforms on well established value drivers but offers a new value driver that is relevant to some underserved market. One sees this a lot these days in B2B SaaS and Internet of Things offers. Let's take pricing software as an example. Traditionally, the large pricing platforms have been very expensive and most relevant to companies that have many SKUs (stock keeping units) and transactions. The vast majority of small and innovative companies could not access these services as (i) they could not afford the six or even seven figure price tags and (ii) they did not have enough transactions for these complex applications to get traction. We expect this to change rapidly over the next decade as new approaches to pricing based on data mining and predictive analytics become available. 

Your pricing strategy and the work leading up to it will be very different depending on which of these value creation strategies you pursue.

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Many believed that, with the rise of social media, email marketing would die. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. According to some recent studies, 80% of business owners emphasize this form of marketing as the major customer retention booster.

But, if most of your competitors are using email marketing, how can you possibly rise above such a noise and make your customers notice you?

This is one of the most common problems businesses face, compromising both their open rates and customer conversions. Here are a few tips that will help you prevent this on time and set yourself apart.

It All Starts with a Catchy Subject Line

Your potential customers will receive hundreds of similar promotional emails every day. So, it’s sometimes not enough for you to craft a perfect pitch to hook their attention. To do so, you first need to get them to choose to open your email.

That’s where a subject line steps in. This element may significantly influence your open rates. Namely, 69% of email recipients mark emails as spam based on their subject line alone.

In light of statistics like these, it’s obvious that writing an authentic subject line to attract your customers’ attention is a must. Here is how to do so:

• State what’s in for them. You should clearly highlight the benefits of completing the desired action.
• Keep it short. No one wants to read The Brothers Karamazov before even clicking on your mail. If your subject line is too long, it will get cut off. To make sure your recipients are able to scan it from beginning to end, go with the one with fewer than 50 characters.
• Mind your tone. The way you express yourself says how professional you are. For example, all caps scream “spam alert!” Worse yet, this indicates that you’re yelling at your reader. Dude, that’s really rude!
• Be concise. Even though words denoting urgency or exclusivity may boost your open rate by 20%, you shouldn’t stuff your subject line with them. Your readers frown upon too fluffy subject lines and I can almost hear them hitting the “move to trash” and “mark as spam”

Optimize for Mobile Users

With more than 4.77 billion mobile users in 2017, it’s time to admit that we’re living in a mobile-first era. This heavily impacts every aspect of your digital marketing campaign, especially your email marketing strategy. Namely, surveys highlight that 48% of all emails are opened via mobile devices, while 69% of users delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile.

So, to stay relevant and reach out to your mobile users more effectively, you should:

• Resize your images according to the screen proportion.
• Reduce the size of your image without compromising its quality.
• Make your CTA button larger and easier to tap.
• Invest in a responsive grid system.
• Go with single column formatting.

Offer a Highly Personalized User Experience

In today’s hyperconnected era, it has never been simpler to collect the data about your target audience and gain an invaluable insight into their location, buying habits, preferences, etc. In layman’s terms, that’s called delivering a personalized user experience and it plays a fundamental role in your email marketing campaign.

Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of businesses still don’t understand how important delivering data-oriented user experience is. Namely, even though 94% of companies believe that personalization is vital to their current success, only 5% of them have managed to personalize their content effectively. However, this shouldn’t discourage you. Personalizing your email marketing strategy is relatively simple, if you know how to execute it properly.

• Ask the right questions. Ask your customers why they visited your site or subscribed to your email. Their answers may provide you with the amazing data that can help you send more targeted mails and drive more quality traffic.
• Build customer personas to be able to market the right content to the right people.
• Humanize your brand. Your emails should look like they were written by a real person. Use pronouns like “I” or “we,” add your photo, and insert your signature and your open rates will jump.
• Do some A/B testing and find the optimal time to send your emails. Pay special attention to your recipients’ location and time zones.
• Take advantage of automated behavioral triggered emails. These emails are your reactions to the way your customers use your products. For instance, when LinkedIn sends you a message telling you that you haven’t logged for a week, that’s a behavioral triggered email. This form of mails may have a 152% higher open rate compared to traditional emails.

  

Have a Powerful CTA

You should never assume that your customers will perform the desired action on their own. You need to inspire them to do so and that’s why you need to have a well-optimized CTA. It will keep them on the right track and guide them to making a purchase.

To harness all the power of this tiny button, you should avoid generic options like “Open” or “Submit.” Your CTA needs to emphasize your proposition value and clearly state the benefits of clicking on it. To boost conversions, use timing and action words, like “try,” “now,” etc.

Also, invest in its design. Make sure it looks clickable- make it big, use a rectangle shape, have clear borders, leave white space around it, and use colors that stand out.

Use Visual Content

The text-based content is dead. Your users live in the era of augmented reality and they expect you to offer nothing less than that. No wonder why the number of marketers investing in visual content is on a steady rise. Namely, 51% of B2B marketers prioritized creating visual content in 2016.

• Explainer videos. People are more eager to watch a video about a product than to read a lengthy article about it. This is why using the term “video” in a subject line enhances open rates by 19% and CTR by 65%.
• We’re visual beings and we’re likely to memorize just 10% of the information we come across. Still, if this information is paired with the relevant image, your users will retain more than 65% of it.
• Infographics help you present mountains of boring statistics and difficult concepts in an easy-to-digest way. Researchers support this statement, showing that users following instructions containing illustrations do 323% better than those reading directions without images.
• GIFs are highly engaging and interactive form of content. If they make sense for your email marketing campaign, you should definitely use them. A prime example of how GIFs may boost conversions is Dell, which skyrocketed their revenue 109% via a GIF-oriented campaign.

To Wrap It Up

Even though there is no one-size-fits-all email marketing strategy, I believe every email marketer struggling with user engagement and conversions may find these tips useful.

No matter if you want to create a spotless CTA or to optimize your emails for mobile users, you need to start implementing these changes as soon as possible to see the improvement in your CTR and open rates.

Most importantly, when everything starts working exceptionally well, don’t forget to measure your email performance to see how to polish your tactics up.

MONTREAL _ The NAFTA train remains on track _ for now. The U.S. trade czar Robert Lighthizer says enough progress has been made over the past week to warrant moving forward with a fresh round of talks in Mexico, but he’s also making it clear that more work needs to be done in the coming weeks. Lighthizer is unsatisfied with Canadian proposals aimed at breaking a logjam on autos, and levelled multiple complaints about Canadian behaviour, including a wide-ranging complaint to the World Trade Organization he described as a “massive attack” on the American trading system. On balance, he sounded like a man willing to give NAFTA a chance. “Some real headway was made here,” Lighthizer said after a week-long round of talks concluded Monday. “The United States views NAFTA as a very important agreement. We’re committed to moving forward. I am hopeful progress will accelerate soon. We’ll work very hard between now and the beginning of the next round _ and we hope for major breakthroughs in that period. We will engage both Mexico and Canada urgently, and we will go where these negotiations take us.” Lighthizer’s long-awaited verdict on the sixth round of marathon talks in Montreal came at a public event alongside Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and Ildefonso Guajardo of Mexico. The three held a series of face-to-face bilateral meetings before their final closed-door, three-way huddle. It was the first such group appearance since the trio’s memorably tense encounter in the fall. Numerous participants in the Montreal round were sounding cautiously optimistic in the lead-up to Monday’s closing statements, calling the latest talks less negative and more constructive than recent ones, with the first true dialogue on serious sticking points _ autos, dispute resolution and a five-year review clause in particular. But Lighthizer sounded multiple alarm bells. He panned Canada’s proposal on autos, saying it would do the reverse of what was intended, and would lead to more Asian content in North America. He called a Canadian proposal on services trade a poison pill, blasted Canada’s international trade complaint, and demanded a rebalancing of the trade deficit in goods. Freeland and Lighthizer went to great lengths to dispel the notion that the two don’t actually like each other, an impression created by frosty body language and rhetoric that last time the two shared the NAFTA stage last fall. Lighthizer offered smiles and fond memories of vacationing in the Montreal area with his family in the past. Freeland was asked whether her relations with her U.S. counterpart might derail the talks and offered a one-word reply: “No.” “Without being overly optimistic, I am heartened by the progress,” Freeland said, citing the closing of an anti-corruption chapter and other constructive conversations. With just eight weeks left in the current schedule of talks _ and with U.S. President Donald Trump frequently threatening to blow up the deal _ all eyes were indeed on Lighthizer. One prominent stakeholder described Lighthizer’s remarks as purely tactical. “I think he’s a good negotiator,” said Flavio Volpe of the Canadian Auto Parts Manufacturers Association. “I don’t really take a lot of the stuff at face value. But it’s important for us to understand the sentiment. And the sentiment is, ‘We’re not satisfied, we’re not going to put our guard down, and we’ll see you in four weeks.”’ Dave Reichert, an American lawmaker who spoke with Lighthizer, said he sounded hopeful. But Reichert warned not to expect too much enthusiasm given the U.S. trade representative’s famously gruff style. Important decisions about NAFTA’s future are now in the hands of Trump’s administration. American negotiators passed the baton on Sunday to political decision-makers how to major discussions about autos, dispute resolution and a five-year review clause. The Montreal round represented a new phase for the negotiations. It included a first significant back-and-forth dialogue on autos and other major sticking points. Sources say there were three hours of talks over two days about the autos proposal. Earlier rounds had effectively hit a roadblock because of scant engagement on the most serious files. After the U.S. made proposals that shocked Canada and Mexico, they responded by insulting the U.S. ideas and even devoted one round to describing reasons why the American proposal on cars was so impractical.

The post NAFTA: latest talks made ‘headway,’ but need to pick up pace, says Lighthizer appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

When you work primarily with high-tech clients, you learn to cope with a great deal of short-term thinking. Tech companies have short-term horizons for a number of reasons:

* Many are private and depend on short term results to prove viability and therefore ensure their ongoing funding

* Many are competing in early stage markets and need to get in front of their competitors quickly before consolidation and attrition take their toll

* Technology changes rapidly, and tech companies often have windows of opportunity to realize revenue from products or services before they become obsolete.

Inevitably, this short-term outlook trickles down to a company’s demand generation strategy. I talk regularly to marketing execs who feel they don’t have the luxury to build a customer base over the long term, so instead of cultivating and nurturing prospects, they focus instead on sales-driven, tactical marketing programs designed to seek out “hot leads”.

The problem is that programs designed exclusively to uncover highly qualified leads in a very short time frame tend to be 1) challenging and 2) expensive. Here’s why:

* Many tech products are first of breed solutions and/or of a complexity that demands a more long-term, consultative selling process. Prospects may simply not be ready to engage with sales because either 1) they don’t know such a solution exists, or 2) they may not be aware they have the problem in the first place.

* Focusing on only the most qualified prospects leaves many potential (albeit, more long term) deals on the table. A potential customer might have precisely the problem that a particular product or service solves and are anxious to solve that problem, yet may not feel as though they’re ready to buy and so fail to respond to the campaign.

* Similarly, even if less qualified prospects do respond to the campaign, they’ll likely be ignored by sales reps focused exclusively on meeting a monthly or quarterly quota and who therefore don’t want to spend the time cultivating more long-term opportunities.

* Response rates from tactical, sales-driven campaigns are likely to be lower (because they only attract highly qualified, late stage leads), so companies need to spend more money to generate relatively few opportunities.

* Lastly, because the campaigns weed out all but those prospects in active purchase mode, it leaves the sales pipeline empty once those deals have been either closed or lost. This requires a constant re-loading of the sales funnel with new, expensive leads.

Look, I get it. I understand that your CEO, the board, and your VCs want results, and they want them now. Or that you need to fill the pipeline with qualified opportunities quickly, so that your sales team can close that business before year-end. But here’s the reality: most demand generation is a long-term process. And you’ll generate more qualified leads, at a lower cost, if you adopt a longer-term approach.

An effective demand generation strategy is one that not only captures hot sales leads but also maximizes the value of more long-term prospects. Such a strategy requires:

* Casting a wider net to include those prospects who meet your demographic criteria (right person at right company) but who may not be in active purchase mode

* Building a marketing database of both short- and long-term prospects that at minimum meet specific demographic or target account criteria

* Focusing campaigns, content, and resources on BOTH generating net new leads but also nurturing existing prospects

Over time, such a long-term approach reduces the demand for expensive, tactical campaigns because more and more qualified leads will be generated through lead nurturing, from prospects that have been educated, cultivated, and are finally ready to engage with sales.

Adapted from the Spear white paper: “Lead Recycling: A More Cost-Effective Approach to Demand Generation for High-Technology Companies”.

Photo by Armando Ascorve Morales on Unsplash

As regular readers will know, I’ve been a long-standing advocate of establishing repeatable sales processes, but please bear with me while I take what might appear to be a contradictory position: In today’s typical complex B2B sales environments, there is no such thing as a universal “one best way” of handling every sales opportunity.

There is simply too much variation from one opportunity to the next in both our prospect’s particular circumstances and in the specific competitive environment for a fixed and unyielding formula to work every time. The same is true of sales methodologies: there is no one universally applicable “best” sales methodology.

Every one of the commercially available sales methodologies has both areas of strength and potential “blind spots”. Each is in practice more suited to certain sales environments and situations than others. There is no such thing as a universally efficacious sales methodology, even within a single sales organisation.

Given this, what are sales leaders to do: give in to anarchy, and let every sales person work it out for themselves? Abandon attempts to establish replicable processes and methodologies? There is (as you are probably hoping) an effective alternative approach…

I’ve observed two critical behaviours in the sales organisations that have managed to master this conundrum:

Firstly, they are adopting a blended approach to both sales process and sales methodology, taking the best ideas from multiple sources and customising them to meet their specific business circumstances - and then they are implementing them in a way that gives their sales people the freedom and flexibility to adapt their approach to different circumstances. In giving their sales people systems to follow, they are creating flexible skeletons, rather than rigid cages.

Secondly, when recruiting sales people (and when developing their existing staff), they are emphasising qualities like curiosity, adaptability, lifelong learning and emotional intelligence - the essential foundations of situational awareness.

This combination of implementing adaptable systems and encouraging situational awareness is giving a new generation of flexibly-minded sales organisations a powerful and growing competitive advantage.

CUSTOMISABLE, ADAPTABLE SYSTEMS

Our sales processes need to both guide sales people in proven best practices and winning habits and accommodate the fact that (for example) selling a renewal to an existing customer is a very different and typically far less complicated exercise that winning our first piece of business with a brand-new client - and that there are usually multiple levels of complexity between these two extremes.

There are other factors that we need to take into account when guiding our sales people in what they need to think and do - for example the phase in the prospect’s buying journey when we first became aware of an opportunity. We clearly need to act in a very different way if we are with an opportunity from the start as opposed to receiving an unexpected RFP that demands an immediate response.

There are, clearly, a handful of common things that experience and best practice tells us we need to know and do with every potential sales opportunity - but there are far more examples where our behaviour needs to be guided by our tactical and strategic appreciation of the specific circumstances of each individual opportunity.

If we ignore these variations and are over-prescriptive in our expectations of our sales people, our best sales people will ignore them (and we will probably be inclined to accommodate them) and our less intelligent sales people will probably be inclined to follow the process because they have been told to and deliver frustratingly inconsistent (usually bad) performance as a result.

That is why I designed our Value Selling System® to accommodate an intelligent blend of appropriate processes and methodologies, customisable to an organisation’s particular business environment and adaptable to the unique circumstances of each individual opportunity.

SITUATIONALLY AWARE SALESPEOPLE

None of the above will help if we don’t get the right foundation in place by employing intelligent sales people. I can think of very few circumstances where the long-term performance of a new sales hire isn’t going to be far more strongly influenced by their attitude, aptitude and intellect than the recent experience they bring to the role.

And when we look at our existing sales people, it ought to be clear that those with the strongest intellect combined with the necessary attitudes and aptitudes are going to be far more capable of embracing and coping with change. Apologies if you think the following is message is a little too direct, but the obvious conclusion must surely be (1) don’t hire insufficiently intelligent sales people, no matter how good their CV looks, and (2) get rid of any insufficiently intelligent sales people that you’ve somehow managed to accommodate up until now within your sales organisation.

So how can we help sales people that do have these necessary attributes to further develop and enhance their situational awareness? The discovery process is one phase that has a particularly important impact on the potential success of an opportunity. We need to coach and equip our sales people to stick with the problem, rather than racing in to pitch their solution at the first faint whiff of a potential need.

We need to encourage them to drill into the need behind the need, and to fully explore the implications and consequences of a potential problem, and to identify everyone else who might be affected. We need them to establish a clear value gap between their prospect’s current situation and their potential future destination.

We need to coach them to identify all the potential stakeholders within the prospect organisation, and to understand where the centres of power and influence lie. We need to help them to assess whether their initial contact is a decision-maker, an influencer, or a powerless functionary.

We need to ensure that they are aware of the current phase of their prospect’s buying decision journey and are able to anticipate and relate to what the prospect’s priorities are likely to be at each stage. We need to coach them (and put systems in place, if necessary) to be very wary of investing any time on unexpected RFPs unless we have a real chance of reshaping the prospect’s agenda.

We need to develop their questioning skills and conversational fluency and (perhaps most important of all) to coach them to think about what their prospect has just said, and to seek to understand why they said it.

A POWERFUL COMBINATION

Systems that reflect an intelligent blend of appropriate processes and methodologies, customisable to an organisation’s particular business environment and adaptable to the unique circumstances of each individual opportunity, when combined with a sales organisation that has a highly developed sense of situational awareness can have a transformative effect on sales performance.

It's one reason why we chose to implement the Value Selling System® framework in Membrain CRM - we found their approach to be the perfect platform for creating the sort of environment that I’ve just described. And it’s now available to salesforce.com users as an easily installed plug-in, as well.

Which leaves me just a couple of closing questions: are you satisfied with the level of situational awareness that you currently observe in your sales teams? And are you confident that the systems you have currently in place are capable of supporting this critical skill? 

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WEBINAR: Selling in the Breakthrough Zone

DOWNLOAD: Our Guide to the Value Selling System

DOWNLOAD: 12-Point Value Selling Self-Assessment

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

In this blueprint, we provide insights on how to structure your sales organization. The changes in SaaS require that we no longer look at salespeople as individual contributors, but rather a team that crosses disciplines, not just within sales but also across other parts of the organization such as marketing and product. The Winning By Design Blueprint Series provides practical advice for every part of a SaaS sales organization.

CASE IN POINT: Over the past decades, B2B sales people were referred to as individual contributors.

Reps were hired, trained and compensated to perform as an individual to hit a quota. This comes from a time when enterprise sales people left the office on a Monday to return to base on Friday with signed purchase orders, submit expenses, update the funnel, etc.

In today’s world, this may sound like something from a movie; however, most structures in the sales organizations never have been updated since these days.

Traditional vs Modern Sales Organizational Structure

Traditional Sales Organizations – Growth of headcount in sales was structured around revenue per individual contributor (IC). The model used a waterfall-like model that ramps up over the course of a year, in which an individual contributor brings in $2M/IC per year.

To hit $8M, a VP of Sales would hand out $10M in quota @ $2M/IC. This would mean five ICs were needed. Each IC would be assigned to a region. The regions were based on ZIP codes calculated to represent approximately to have the same amount of potential.

With the increase of quota, simply the amount of sales people were added to reflect the increase in quota.( e.g. $2M per person, and handing out ~20% more quota vs. what the real goal was.)

The root cause of today’s challenges can be traced back to the use of this outdated model based on low volume of deals at a higher price.

Modern Sales Organizations – Due to lower deal value (ACV), ongoing renewals are required to achieve the same profit. This may take >24 months.

Due to the lower price, it also requires a higher volume of deals to attain a similar kind of growth. What complicates this model is the high-velocity it operates on; many clients commit within 90 days or faster. This high-velocity creates a “manufacturing line” approach.

CASE IN POINT:

Acquisition needs: To grow revenue annually, SDRs need to find business for AEs who attain clients, commitment and help them on-board to the point they can use the service.

Recurring needs: Today it is obvious that a company no longer can just send in an annual renewal, but through the use of CSMs and AMs, they need to ensure clients are using this AND identifying new opportunities within the account.

• MDR: Market Development Rep – Follows up on inbound leads, setup a meeting w/ AE.
• SDR: Sales Development Rep – Starts a conversation with a client through outbound actions such as emails/calls.
• AE: Account Executive – Develops SQLs through a series of meetings.
• ONB: Onboarder –  Onboards/Integrates a client and achieves first use.
• CSM: Customer Success Manager – Achieves recurring use of the service.
• AM: Account Manager – Creates increased profit developing upsell opportunities.

The Sales POD

By grouping specialized team members, a self–contained unit is created, also known as a POD. The self–contained unit can operate in a specialized area; such as a market, a region, or a segment. It can do so for the entire time, or rotate through a series of segments (we call these sprints), or address a specific event such as a trade show.

How a POD works:

A 2×2 POD is depicted in which a MDR/SDR is partnered with 2 AEs.

The MDR/SDR combo sets up 40-60 meetings for the AEs each month.  

From these meetings, the AEs close 6-8 deals per month with an ACV of $18,000.  

POD Modeling

Historically, the efficiency of these PODs were not considered an issue due to the extreme focus on winning logos.

However starting in 2014, the tides turned as the number of SQLs/SDR dropped from 20-30 to low 10s.

The annual on target earning (OTE) of this POD should not exceed 40% of annual revenue.

Scaling Your Revenue Growth

Scaling of the revenue now occurs by scaling the PODs. In the example below, you will notice how at first our teams operate unstructured.

A group of SDRs creates SQLs and they are randomly assigned to a group of AEs.

To grow, the company needs to structure its resources into two initiatives; SMB and MidMarket, each requiring a different approach.

As the business grows, new markets are discovered, and new PODs are launched to call on these markets.  

A few metrics to keep in mind for most B2B Sales organizations:

• It takes three months to ramp a POD to 100%.
• PODs should operate between 80-120% of quota. Do not keep raising quota – it is designed for a number.
• Once a POD operates efficiently, do not add AEs to it. This messes up the balance.

Use of PODs To Identify Markets

One of the key advantages of PODs is the realization that you can focus the resources. This is very important during the early days of scaling revenue.

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In the example below, you will notice the specialization of Government vs. Commercial. You will also see each POD then going through sub-segments to heat-check markets. This allows each POD to train only on the needed use-cases/value proposition for each sprint. The sprints can vary in length, anywhere from 30 to 90 days.

Example of how to structure a sprint over time:

• Week 1: Train the team on use-cases and role play a variety of scenarios.
• Week 2: Pursue B-leads first. 
• Week 3: Market and organize an event, pursue your A-leads.
• Week 4: Pursue A-leads.
• Week 5: Wrap-up and start next sprints.

Use of PODs with Different Business Models

You can apply PODs for different business models. The most common application is to land Platform sales, in which the team closes a deal for a CRM/ERP system, etc.

When the deal closes there is not a lot of upsell. Think of a workflow platform; in the initial sales it may be sold for eight users in business unit X.

A year later, there are 10 users in business unit X and maybe another two seats in a new business unit.

However in consumption sales, the POD can be deployed post close. The figure above depicts use of a POD in a free sign-up model.

In this model, CSMs identify those who have high consumption potential, the ADR develops the leads and the AM upsells. In this model, you may see 2000% growth in an account.

Scale the Recruiting

We have found that PODs also allow you to scale your recruiting. A new POD can be launched by promoting the top performer of an existing POD (AE of POD 1) to become the new POD leader of POD2. The team leader of POD 1 can backfill the position within the POD and hire a new MDR.

The post How To Structure Your Sales Organization For Maximum Efficiency appeared first on Sales Hacker.

When we began 2018, we all heard the same clichéd New Year’s resolution: “New Year, new me,” a chance to correct bad habits, reach personal goals, and improve overall quality of life. But why do so many fail to reach the objectives they set for themselves? Whether you’re an individual determined to make 2018 a year for personal growth or a business looking to increase sales, it all starts with a plan.

As marketers, our objective this year is simple: attract more leads for sales to convert into new business (aka revenue!) than we did in 2017. Although this goal may be straightforward, the task is never as easy as it sounds, particularly when marketing spend must be justified and ROI is difficult to track in today’s multi-channel digital world. So what can you do differently this year to achieve this goal? Leverage call analytics in your marketing strategy.

Approaching inbound calls with a data-driven mindset will help you realize stronger marketing ROI, gather critical consumer insights, and ultimately drive sales. By following the steps below, you can transform your marketing approach and fulfill your 2018 resolution:

Step 1: Make it Easy for Consumers to Call

With over 93% of US website traffic coming from mobile, it’s critical to ensure your website is optimized to drive inbound calls, particularly on mobile. And with calls expected to influence over $1 trillion in US consumer spending this year, phone calls cannot be ignored. To improve opportunities for a consumer to initiate a call, it’s important to include your company’s phone number in calls-to-action (CTAs) on paid, social, and display ads.

Step 2: Connect Calls to Your Marketing

In today’s consumer-driven world, as behavior changes, so do marketing best practices. Having insights into how your media ad spend and website generate inbound calls and customers provides a tremendous competitive advantage. Using a call analytics solution that provides trackable phone numbers with dynamic number insertion (DNI) technology, you can automatically capture the channels, ads, search keywords, and website interactions that drove each call to your business.

Step 3: Personalize the Caller Experience

Getting consumers to call you is only half the battle, but it is just as important that they have the right caller experience to convert to a customer. There are several strategies marketers are using to personalize the caller experience.

You can use an interactive voice response (IVR) to automatically assist and qualify callers and ensure they are routed to their desired location. You can also use the data you are capturing in Step 2 as signals to determine how to route each caller in real time. For example, you can route callers differently based on the marketing source of the call, their geographic location, time of the call, caller history, and more. Connecting callers in conversation with the best location or agent right away can be the difference between winning and losing a customer.

Step 4: Analyze What Happens on Your Calls

Was the call answered, what was said on the call, and did it convert? These are all important questions for marketers to have answers to. Having this knowledge gives you power to make informed decisions about advertising choices that are positively affecting your business. It can also help you work with your sales team or business locations to make sure they are converting calls at high rates. The right call analytics solution provides marketers with conversation analytics technology backed by AI that can provide those insights for you.

Step 5: Optimize Your Marketing to Drive Sales

With the insights on inbound calls, you’re able to optimize your marketing strategy for the campaigns, keywords, and caller experiences that generate the biggest impact on your business. It’s a great way to help you reach your marketing resolutions in 2018.

 

Although it may seem like you might be able to simply market your business as you go along, successful and effective marketing begins with a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is a document which helps to define business goals and then allows you to develop the activities required in order to achieve them. As specialists in content marketing – along with both email and social media marketing – we know exactly how useful it is to have a plan in place when it comes to marketing your business, so that’s why we have put together this handy guide to help you write your own marketing strategy!

First of all, before we start writing your marketing strategy, it’s important to find out exactly what it aims to do. After all, if you don’t fully understand what it does, you can’t write it effectively! Briefly, here are a few of the comprising sections:

• Describes your business, and explains its products or services.
• Explains where your products or services are positioned within the overall market.
• Describes your customers and your competition.
• Explains exactly what tactics you aim to use in your marketing.

So that’s what’s included within the marketing strategy, but why should you write one? What benefits does it have to your business? Below are some statistics that show exactly why marketing is such an important aspect of your company, and thus why it requires a specific document to help further it:

Now let us move on to the creation of the document. In order to make things easy for you, we’ve condensed this seemingly-overwhelming document into five simple steps. Follow these, and you’ll have your marketing strategy complete in no time at all!

Perform a situation analysis

This may sound like a grand task, but it helps to define exactly what your business’s situation is right now. We’ve broken it down into the different elements contained within a situation analysis so that you can answer them as you go:

• What am I selling?
• Who are my main competitors? What are their advantages?
• How do I deliver my product?
• What kind of environmental factors can impact my business?
• What are my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? This is known as a SWOT analysis, and will enable you to really find out exactly what current opportunities are available and what threats may affect your business.

Discover your target audience

Write one paragraph profiling your potential customers. Ask yourself who will be buying your products or your services and fully research them as individuals, along with as a market. Individually, it is worth looking at demographics, such as age, gender, family type, earnings, and geographic location. Market-wise, you need to look at its size, growth, and social trends. Completely develop this area so that you know exactly who you are selling to!

List your marketing goals

What do you wish to achieve from this marketing plan? Write down a short list of measurable, reachable goals that you’d like to attain. Would you like to increase your sales by a small percentage within a certain amount of time? Would you like to increase your conversion rate by a certain number? Would you like to reach the top of Google’s search page? We wouldn’t blame you, as 33% of traffic from Google’s organic search results go to the first item listed.

Detail your marketing tactics

This is perhaps the most important part of your marketing strategy. Here, you will outline exactly what you will do in order to reach the goals you set out in the previous section. Are you going to use email, social media, or both? Will you improve your current website? Will you update your blog more regularly, or aim to actually create one if you don’t already have one? Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without; how’s that for motivation! Perhaps you’ll combine a few different marketing tactics to reach a large portion of the prospects researched previously, but it is extremely beneficial to ensure that you send out tailored, or even personalised, content rather than that which may seem like spam.

Set a budget

Finally, it’s vital to understand that marketing doesn’t come free! The channels you use may be free, but you’ll need to devote a percentage of your budget to marketing. Costs may include hiring a marketing manager, or promoting certain posts so that they reach more prospects. If you want to be effective in your tactics, you must be prepared to pay. However, once you have established your marketing tactics and have reaped the rewards, you won’t even notice the money leaving; it’ll be such a small amount in comparison! However, if you find that you can’t afford certain tactics, adjust your budget until you can.

So as you have discovered, writing a marketing strategy really isn’t that difficult. The only thing it takes is a little bit of effort to fully understand exactly where you are at the moment, and where you would like to be in terms of your business, your product/service, and your prospects. In fact, it’s worthwhile taking a look at the Marketing Mix, which shows the 7 ‘P’s you must combine in order to fully take advantage of the benefits of a marketing strategy.

Image Credit – Professional Academy

The bottom line is that a marketing strategy is a must-have for any small business and, once it has been created, can help to significantly improve your prospects, your leads, and your conversion rate.

Lead nurturing requires a personal touch. Like Josh says, it is not about adding the first name and last name over and over again.

You have attracted good leads.

Now, you have to keep these leads happy while at the same time, gently push them through the buyer’s journey and create conversions. When your sales cycle is long (which happens in most B2B cases), it is not always that easy.

You cannot afford to dish out anything to your leads and expect them to be convinced. In a longer sales cycle, you need relevant marketing messages that align with your leads’ interests and needs. It is more about knowing your leads real-time and accordingly nurturing them.

Hence, capturing lead information like name, social profiles, demographics, and firmographics has become so important.

Once you have built a buyer’s person (a semi-fictional replica of your actual customer outlining the possible interests and needs), you need automated behaviour-based drip marketing campaigns for an effective lead nurturing process.

What Are Drip Marketing Campaigns?

Drip marketing campaigns refer to a series of marketing messages that are triggered by pre-set behavioural actions of your leads. These are highly personalized and trigger maximum engagement.

Typically, a drip campaign refers to a series of marketing messages sent out to a list of subscribers.

However, lead nurturing requires a more personalized effort. It is not about sending a series of marketing messages; it is about understanding whether a lead will benefit from your marketing message and whether that message will trigger engagement.

Advanced lead nurturing campaigns include automated drip campaigns, but these campaigns are triggered based on lead behavior and dynamic segmentation.

Quick Word:

Dynamic segmentation refers to segmenting leads based on their behavior.

A lead behavior continues to change throughout the buyer’s cycle. To understand which lead is moving down the marketing funnel, you can assign lead scores.

However, you can have a scenario where two leads exhibit similar total scores, but they will not engage with the same type of marketing message. To understand the difference, you need to look at the browsing pathway.

It can be that one of the two leads spent a majority time browsing your pricing page and feature pages. The other lead may have just browsed through all the pages, leading to a similar total score. But it is evident that the former lead is closer to getting converted than the latter.

Lead nurturing practices require a lot of monitoring and tracking accompanied with efficient lead management. Each lead takes up a different path and reacts differently to your marketing efforts. So, the typical drip marketing has now evolved into behaviour-based lead nurturing drip marketing.

Automated Drip Campaigns for Better Lead Nurturing and Conversions

Drip campaigns designed for lead nurturing are highly personalised. Leads are segmented based on their demographics, firmographics, in-app and website behaviour, and stages of the buyer’s cycle. Based on these factors (and more), drip campaigns are automatically triggered.

It is wrong to believe that drip campaigns benefit only the marketers. It is equally beneficial for the sales team. I can say this because the whole thing goes back to the “mandatory” marketing-sales alignment concept even before you start thinking about implementing automation.

Drip Email Marketing Campaigns

It is a fact that not all leads engage in the same way.

Some are pretty active, while others are too reluctant to take note of your emails. Whatever it is, email campaigns continue to be the most preferred communication channel. Although marketers are adopting multi-channel marketing, emails still take the limelight. Hence, automated email drips are a mandate to nurture leads.

1. Welcome Drips

When you sign up or subscribe to a platform, immediately you receive a welcome email. It consists of your first name (which is now very common in almost any email campaign), a short welcome message, an overview of the kind of experience you will have with the brand, and a small milestone to begin with.

The email will mostly be signed off either by the CEO/founder or maybe the marketing person. Whoever it is, you will instantly know it is a real person. This helps in building a bond with the brand.

You keep receiving emails from this same person which creates an online-relationship. Later, when this person actually gives you a call, you can instantly relate.

Below is one such welcome email from Smart Insights that one of my colleagues had received.

If you look closely, it instantly tells you how Smart Insights will help you in ‘improving your digital marketing capabilities’.

To get things rolling, Smart Insights offers a customized recommendation and also an “alternative”. Everyone wants to know their competitive ranking, which is why the green CTA with “See how you compare” words strikes the perfect chord.

2. Onboarding Emails

Welcome emails are usually followed by onboarding emails.

Onboarding email drips are designed to help you get acquainted with the brand and its various resources. These emails are based on behaviour-tracking, because often you might receive emails helping you pick up from the exact point where you got stuck while using the product/services. Check this onboarding email from Dropbox.

This email can also be tagged as a re-engagement email. It tries to nudge users to download the desktop version of Dropbox while simultaneously telling the benefits of doing so. The clean design template of Dropbox is my favourite kind here.

Another favourite is this email from Canva, a designing platform. I received this email while I was designing wedding cards for my own wedding. I continuously looked for wedding card templates and kept editing quite a few number of them. And then I woke up to this email that clearly tracked my activities and sent me some handy tips.

My friends say it’s simply because it was wedding season around; I prefer to be logical!

3. Promotional Drip Campaigns

This is fairly popular. I’m sure you have tons of emails announcing various promo codes and seasonal offers. Owing to the Christmas spirit, I’m sure you have already received multiple Halloween, Black-Friday, Christmas, and New Year promotional offers.

PS: Many find promotional emails annoying. I hated it when I received discounts after I upgraded to a premium plan of a particular landing page building tool. It was annoying. Also, emails that are clustered with images and bright colours hurt eyes.

Pro Tip: Ensure you are sending your promo emails to people who will engage with the same. It makes no point to send a huge discount offer to someone who has already paid for that same service/product.

Also, nicely designed emails aligning to your brand proposition and the season work well. For instance, look at this email from Urban Ladder. Oh! That lovely way of saying a Christmas Story. The story is about how ‘Grinch’ stole Urban Ladder’s furniture and what happened next.

Read the full story here.

This is by far the best Christmas Promotional Email I have received. It may be long, but emails like this make you read the whole story and also check the offers (which is the main purpose of this email). Yet, look at the way they connect with the Christmas Spirit.

Few More Email Drip Campaigns That Trigger Higher Conversions

Educational and Awareness Drip Email Campaigns

These emails are solely targeted towards educating and creating a brand awareness after a visitor subscribes or signs up (usually designed for bulk sending). However, certain lead behaviour is taken into consideration while segmenting leads for these emails.

Some leads might require basic educational information about the brand, while others might engage with a more narrowed down content piece. For instance, when you sign up with a brand, you receive emails on overall industry aspects.

Slowly as you start engaging, your email content narrows down as per your interests. As more time passes and you start using the brand/upgrade to a premium version, you get emails that are industry related and are also concentrated on how better you can use that tool/services for better results.

Re-Engagement Campaigns

You must have some leads that were once very active, but suddenly stopped engaging? To trigger engagement, you need to know why they stopped being active in the first place.

Maybe they did not get what they expected. Or maybe the content in your last email was not aligned to their interests.

In such cases, creating a re-engagement drip campaign often helps in rekindling old connections in a smarter way. You can conduct an A/B test with a handful of leads before you send to the entire list.

Transactional Emails (Majorly for B2C Brands)

Imagine you opt for a premium plan of an automation tool. Your payment is done, your amount is deducted from your account, but you still haven’t received an email confirmation about the same. Yep, it’s frustrating and your anxiety will soar up high in no time.

Transactional emails based on lead activity help in relieving your leads from these anxieties. Although I don’t see this as a marketing drip campaign, many-a-times, you need to have these emails scheduled properly.

Welcome to Cross Drip Marketing!

I’m sure you will agree that whenever someone talks or writes about drip marketing, the entire focus is concentrated over drip email campaigns. Well, I am not against it, but there is another kind of drip marketing that people talk less or discuss separately. I am talking about push drip campaigns.

What Are Push Campaigns?

Push notification campaigns are my favourite. I agree that emails have a great one-to-one communication feeling, but push notifications are much more personalized. It sits silently without disturbing you or forcing you to take a look.

Yet, thanks to the prevalent use of dynamic content in these notification campaigns, push messages are highly eye-catching. These are short and crisp, accompanied by a short link that will not require you to visit the website or launch the app.

When you haven’t viewed your notifications on phone, they silently keep adding up over your app icon. Something like this:

Push Drip Campaigns

If you have built a drip campaign on Aritic PinPoint or other platforms, you will know how easy it is to build a drip campaign.

You can create cross drip campaigns as well. Aritic PinPoint offers multi-channel marketing. You can run an email drip, push drip, and an SMS campaign together. Based on lead behaviour, score, and activities from each campaign, you can trigger another campaign.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it?

Let’s say you create a drip email campaign for leads that upgrade to a premium plan from free trial. When they finish the purchase, you send an email. If they leave mid-way, you automatically bucket these leads for two campaigns — you send a push notification urging them to opt for the premium plan and avail certain benefits instantly.

You provide a link directly for completing the process. This message is followed by another email after two days urging for the same action but in a more elaborate way.

This way, you can cross drip multiple campaigns across many channels.

Like I said, using dynamic content within push messages has increased the credibility of this marketing channel. You can choose to turn off all push notifications on your phone or from your browser settings. By using dynamic content, you can show your leads same message in various ways.

For instance, multiple language support helps in showing your message in local language based on your lead’s location. Or, the same offer is shown to two leads in two different ways based on buying pattern.

Behaviour-Based Campaigns Are the Key to Higher Conversions

Consumers are pretty conscious these days.

You cannot feed them any random information and expect them to engage. Your leads have ample information at hand, all thanks to the internet that’s a gamut of information. Hence, centering all marketing strategies on lead behaviour and lead engagement is the root to getting more conversions.

If you are not tracking and connecting with your leads on a emotional level, they will ditch you in no time. By emotional connection, I am not saying you start exchanging poems over SMS (one of my colleagues did think this to be a viable way!!!). Every brand has a unique proposition that solves a particular pain point.

All you need to do is grasp that painful chord and suggest an easy solution for the same.

When you know what your leads want, it becomes easier to draft marketing messages. And with the right kind of message, your lead nurturing drip campaigns will stir engagement and create higher conversions.

What are some strategies you use for lead nurturing? Let us know in the comments!