Rnordman

It isn’t easy to be a failure. Failing isn’t an identity. However, it is quite possible to fail, and in some cases, failure is the likely outcome. Here are nine things that might cause to fail when success is possible.

1. No Goal: The very first way you might fail is by not having a goal or an outcome you are pursuing. There is no greater failure than failing to reach your full potential, something no one has achieved, regardless of their level of success. Not having goals means failing even to try. The first way you might fail is to failing to decide what you want.
2. No Plan: A goal without a plan to achieve it isn’t much better than not having a goal. A goal is a sort of destination, the outcome you are pursuing. Most people that fail to reach their goal do so as a result of not having developed a plan for achieving it. These first two ways you can fail, No Goal and No Plan, are tightly intertwined and difficult to tease apart. One is impotent without the other.
3. No Effort: You will fail if you don’t execute your plan. Without putting forth the effort, taking action in pursuit of your goal or dream or outcome, you will fail. Success is in large part due to disciplined action over time, and almost always more effort than what you believed necessary, and always a longer time than you imagined or planned.
4. No Focus: Ideas are easy. Focus is difficult. It requires that you give yourself over to something to the exclusion of everything else. The fox that chases two rabbits fails to catch either. It is almost a certainty you fail when you allow your attention to drift and whose you are distracted by every good idea that shows up as an enticing shiny object.
5. No Persistence: Much failure is the result of giving up too soon. There is an old saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” The saying is precisely backward. It should read, “When the going gets tough, the tough gut it out for as long as it takes.” They aren’t going anywhere. The reason people fail is that when the going gets tough, those who fail give up. If you want to something, the way to get it is to persist.
6. No Resourcefulness: The key to not giving up too soon and persisting over a long time it resourcefulness, the ability to try something new, something different, to be creative, and to figure things out. If you only have a Plan A, you increase your odds of failing. You need a Plan B, a Plan C, and as many variations as is necessary. When something doesn’t work, success requires you to change your strategy, change your approach, and make adjustments.
7. No Growth: Competency. When you start something, you may lack the necessary skills to achieve your goal. However, over time, you can improve those skills and gain the competency. Almost any goal you can think if likely to cause you to grow in some way—at least the big meaningful goals that cause you to be more, do more, have more, and contribute more.
8. No Intestinal Fortitude: The words “intestinal fortitude” means the courage to continue in the face of adversity. In pursuit of your goals and dreams, you will face obstacles that appear to be insurmountable. You will have moments of doubt, and the desire to give up will be overwhelming. Your rationalizing mind will give you a list of reasons quitting makes sense. Avoiding failure means having the intestinal fortitude to continue.
9. Listening to Others: There will people who share with you their beliefs that you should give up, choose a different goal, compromise on what you want from your own life, and share with you how they did the same. Listening to these voices causes people to fail. The only voices you need listen to is the voice of your inner coach and all the people who support you in your pursuit.

If you are struggling to achieve your goal or generate a specific outcome, you will discover that one or more of these nine ways you can fail is to blame. Success is possible, but it requires you to reverse the causes listed here.

The post The 9 Ways You Can Fail When Success is Possible appeared first on The Sales Blog.

One of the use cases that has eluded cryptocurrencies to date is “means of exchange” (something you would spend).

I wrote about this a couple years ago and showed this transaction in that blog post:

That was a payment I made to a caddie named Kris after he carried my bags one morning six years ago.

We played today and he was carrying a friend’s bag and I asked him if he still had that Bitcoin and he smiled and said “absolutely.”.

That made me feel good but the truth is nobody should be paying for anything, including caddying services, with something that can appreciate 123x. That’s just not rationale behavior.

Which is why stablecoins, cryptocurrencies which have price stability built in to them, are one of the important sectors in crypto right now.

There is the “dollar pegged” approach, like Tether (which may not actually be dollar pegged) and USDC (which is actually dollar pegged). One of the issuers of USDC is Coinbase, a USV portfolio company.

There is the Libra cryptocurrency, which USV is involved with as a Founding Member of the Libra Association. Libra will not be pegged to a specific fiat currency, but will have a reserve made up of many fiat currencies so it will have price stability.

And then there are stablecoins that are asset backed but not fiat backed like Dai.

Finally there are stablecoins that attempt to deliver price stability programmatically. I am not confident that approach will work.

I am confident that one way or another consumers will adopt cryptocurrencies that are price stabilized and when they do they will start transacting in them. And that will unlock a lot of utility that has so far been elusive.

I had brain surgery 90 days before I went back to working in my family’s business. At the time, I was not allowed to drive, a difficult obstacle to overcome when you have to book sales meetings—or if you need a few things from the grocery store. My younger brother would chauffeur me to appointments until the time I was frustrated by with the realization that my doctors would never release me to drive, even though I only ever had one seizure.

While I had always been a reader, during my recovery, I started reading a book a day. I told my neurologist that I was sure my brain was making new neural pathways and that it was on fire. He listened patiently and then told me there was no evidence that my theory was accurate and that it was more likely I was compensating for losing a significant part of my brain. We didn’t yet fully understand neuroplasticity, and it turns out both of us may have been correct.

At some point, I started picking up books on sales and business. The first book I stumbled upon was SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. If you heard my story behind my book, The Lost Art of Closing, it was the three pages where Rackham described “the advance” as a key to success in sales. Once I understood I needed a commitment for another meeting, selling got quite a bit easier. I wrote a list of questions for each part of the SPIN model and started to work towards Implications (clumsily, I might add) and needed payoffs.

The book was so helpful that I picked up Major Account Sales Strategy, Rackham’s second book—and in some ways, his better book. I had been winning large accounts in California, but I didn’t have a very strategic view or a process. Mostly I just called on people who spent a lot of money in my category. Major Account Sales Strategy provided me with frameworks for thinking about big deals. I eventually read everything Rackham wrote and multiple times.

One book I picked up appeared to be new, but it was quite old at the time I picked it up. The book was Consultative Selling by Mack Hanan. Parts of the book were difficult for me, but what I learned that was useful was Hanan’s idea that you shift the conversation away from price to the increased profit the client will make by adopting your solution. The application of this idea made it easier for me to start sharing the soft costs my clients were not calculating in their overall costs.

The Miller Heiman books were both beneficial, The New Strategic Selling and The New Conceptual Sale. The first had me looking at stakeholders differently, even though the evolution of my thought here shows up very differently in Eat Their Lunch, which you might expect since 34 years have passed since they first published Strategic Selling. I don’t remember New Conceptual as well, but I remember it caused me to take sales calls seriously enough to plan them.

I read all of Stephen Covey’s work before my brain surgery, and even those books were not on sales, they caused me to recognize I had to improve who I was before I could improve my sales results. They also led me to read a lot more books on business improvement.

Some books that were not sales-related on their face were valuable to me. One of those books was Tom Peter’s Circle of Innovation, a book that made me think deeply about differentiation and allowed me to put technological solutions long before my larger competitors could do so, grabbing a competitive advantage in big deals. Another was Michael Hammer’s The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade. From this work, I took the idea that my business existed to take care of its customers. I started to present how what I did for my clients helped them serve their customers. Pondering that idea for a while is an excellent way to get better at selling.

One of the more useful and transformative books I read was Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa. The ideas and the dialogue in this book massively improved my ability to have conversations about the changes the customer would have to make to produce the results they needed.

There were hundreds of other books on sales and business I read, all of which had some value, even if I didn’t recognize it right away. These few were core to my development and the ones I remember as changing my sales results.

The post The Books That Taught Me How to Sell appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Measuring salesman productivity has always been an important activity for sales managers. Now that businesses are more data-driven, it is even more crucial for every sales team to have effective productivity tracking practices.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be hard to implement measures that show where your reps are wasting time, and where they should put more energy to get the most out of every minute they spend selling.

Let’s dive into five ways for measuring salesman productivity that are backed by sales experts — individuals with years of sales experience including sales authors, strategists, CEOs, coaches, and founders.

Measure the number and quality of customer interactions

Review Activity Reports in your CRM

While many reps may go through the motions of talking with lots of prospects (e.g., high dials), are your reps having enough meaningful conversations that will lead to a sale?

According to Wendy Weiss, president of ColdCallingResults.com, “The metrics that are important to measure for telephone prospecting are: Dials, Conversations (with a qualified prospect) and Appointments. Many sales professionals will track their number of Appointments, some will track their Dials and Appointments, but very few track the number of conversations they’re having with qualified prospects. Without that middle number, it’s impossible to know how you’re doing.”

You also need to monitor the quality of each potential customer conversation. Numbers are meaningless if you’re not building relationships and driving sales. “To me, quality is my most important productivity tool,” says author, speaker, and strategist Jill Konrath. She adds, “I want to have maximum impact with every client interaction, keeping my prospect moving forward. If that didn’t happen, I need to revisit my planning, knowledge, strategy, approach, messaging and more.”

Productivity measures: Track calls, emails, and meeting metrics in your CRM. Sell generates reports based on these activities. For example, you can see the number of calls, call duration, call length vs. time of days, as well as call outcomes — important to know if calls are high quality and effective. If you’re a sales manager, you can sort this info by sales rep. Some reps might have better call outcomes than others. Pair these reps with the ones who are struggling.

Pay attention to sales pipeline progress

Check opportunities in each stage of the sales pipeline.

If your reps only have a general idea of pipeline opportunities, that’s not a good productivity sign. The number of opportunities should be carefully monitored as each stage indicates what revenue you’ll have at the end of the quarter. Tracking the progress of sales stages also highlights what skills reps need to improve.

As Lori Richardson, founder and CEO of Score More Sales, explains “A productivity metric every salesperson should be paying attention to is number of opportunities prospected to qualified to closure. That’s really three metrics, but I want to see what a rep started with (to know if they have enough of the right activity while prospecting), what they move through as “qualified” in the pipeline (so I know if they are spending time in the right places), and then of those qualified, how many came to closure – so that I can tell if they are working the right opportunities or if there are other issues, such as lack of urgency or poor messaging.”

This productivity tip goes back to creating a quality sales pipeline. It might go without saying, but your reps need to generate enough quality leads early on to increase the chance of closing more deals. “If you are not making contact with new people constantly, I don’t care how good you are at asking for the sale, overcoming objections, questioning or anything else,” sales, marketing and business coach Butch Bellah says, “You’re not going to have anyone to talk to.”

Productivity measures: Review the number of opportunities at each stage of the sales pipeline to check for any bottlenecks and to make improvements, if needed. Ensure that reps are generating enough leads to move through the pipeline. Also, check if these leads match with buyer personas. For example, if certain reps have a large number of prospects, but are failing to move them to the Qualified stage, you might need to revisit your customer qualification requirements. Deal loss reason, average lead response time, closing ratio, and customer acquisition cost are four pipeline metrics to keep a close eye on.

Evaluate whether you’re meeting your sales forecast

Sell’s CRM “Forecasted Sales” report

Sales forecasting assists with more than just estimating final numbers — it provides a baseline for reps to see if they’re on track to meet goals and if their skills need improving.

As Jeff Sheehan, coauthor of “Hired! Paths to Employment in the Social Media Era,” explains, “No matter how you might want to slice and dice it, the number one measure for sales is the amount of revenue which is generated versus that forecasted. Is the salesperson meeting his or her plan? If so, at what percentage to plan? Any deviations need to be thoroughly explained and corrective actions taken to ensure that the person gets back on track during the upcoming month, quarter, or other reporting period.”

Work backward from your sales forecasts to determine if you or your reps are on track to meet their quota. “Reflect upon how many sales are required, the most likely candidates who will purchase, and the prospecting required to keep the pipeline filled at all times,” says Elinor Stutz, CEO, Smooth Sale. “Come to terms with the number of contacts required, and dedicate yourself to the task in order to make the ultimate sales reality.”

Productivity measures: Review your sales forecasting reports. What is your forecasted revenue at the end of the quarter? How many deals will you need to close to meet this goal? For example, maybe you determine that you have a quota of 25 deals to close at the end of the quarter and must win at least 50% of deals in your pipeline to reach that number. Your CRM should show if these goals are being met. If not, break down the numbers to understand what activities you or your reps need to complete to meet the quota long before the end of the quarter.

Track your thank-you notes

Productivity is not just about the hard numbers. It’s also about how reps are nurturing the relationships with prospects. A handwritten note is one way to approach customer nurturing (and a great way to stand out from other reps who only send emails). Compose personal notes that show your appreciation for the prospect or customer.

According to Craig Wortmann, founder & CEO, Sales Engine,“I closely track how many thank-you notes I write to people, because for me that’s a lagging indicator of productivity. If I’m generating leads and pushing those leads into the sales process, chances are that I’ve now got someone to thank. And as I’ve said a million times, a “thank-you” is only a thank-you if it’s done properly. An email will not suffice. So I use tags to measure how many notes I’ve written and mailed in a given month.”

Productivity measures: Keep up with the number of thank-you notes written by the month. This could be a thank-you note after a sales meeting, a close, or a customer referral. Categorize notes by sales stage or by customer type. If you’re a sales manager, review how many notes your reps are sending and how many deals/relationships this translates to.

Prioritize your selling tasks

Prioritize your sales tasks through your CRM.

Jumping from one sales activity to the next can be deceiving — it might look productive, but in reality, your reps could just be spinning their wheels without actually moving high-quality prospects forward. Prioritization can help with this problem.

“When it comes to my own productivity, I focus on results,” says Jim Keenan, founder, A Sales Guy Consulting, “I find measuring time and productivity to be counterproductive. Measuring individual productivity takes me away from what I should be doing. With that said, to ensure I’m being productive, I prioritize my tasks and initiatives to make sure I know what is most important and only work on those things.”

Productivity measures: Use your CRM to organize sales activities, conversations, and calendar. For example, with Sell, you can input tasks and sort by different filters such as due date to know which tasks to focus on. If you’re a sales manager, you can track the tasks of your sales rep by owner. If you want to know what customer conversations to prioritize, head to the Communication Center. For example, with emails, you can refine results by “Hot Deals.”

Effectively measuring salesman productivity

If you’re unsure how productive your sales team actually is, take our productivity quiz to find out. Once you have solid productivity processes in place, use the above measures to understand what activities you need to focus on, as well as provide clear objectives for your sales reps. As you improve measuring salesman productivity and the process, you increase the chance of higher sales!

 

Running a website, marketing your company, and managing a business are not small tasks, and if you’re doing more than one of these at a time, or actually doing it all yourself, it can seem like you are working two (or more!) full-time jobs simultaneously.

And when new leads express interest in what you do, there’s an urgency in acting fast, and contacting them quickly, so you can convert leads into sales and establish new working relationships. If someone signs up for your emails, or wants to hear more from you, the ball is in your court, and it’s up to you to make the next move.

This is where an already established evergreen email series can make a huge difference in your to-do list, as well as your ability to convert leads into sales. Here’s how it’s done:

What’s an Evergreen Email Series?

Like evergreen trees that are always green and sprouting new needles for years and years, evergreen emails are always ready to send to new leads, inviting them to do business with you, and are not tied to particular promotions, or dates, or to a time of year.

An evergreen email series, or “evergreen funnel” can be used over and over again. It’s an automated chain series of emails that allows you to contact new leads without ever having to hit “Send.” Whenever someone signs up for your email list, they receive this pre-established chain of emails without you ever having to be actively involved in the process. And the best part about these evergreen emails? If you format them correctly, you can use them for months, or even years, without having to do much updating.

Evergreen content should be timeless, That means you want to avoid the following:

• Numerical facts and hard data that are subject to change and become out of date
• Seasonal or temporary “trends,” including holidays or fashion trends
• News reports that will quickly become dated

Instead, think about answering FAQs, educating the reader on a certain aspect of your industry or your business, and developing a relationship with them. This can include:

• How-to articles or advice and industry tips
• Explaining common concepts
• Testimonials or reviews

Why Should You Set Up an Evergreen Email Funnel?

The bottom line? Email marketing works. Email marketing campaigns have a huge return on investment. In fact, it’s been found that for every dollar spent on email marketing, there is an average return-on-investment (ROI) of $38, and for 20% of companies, that ROI can be as much as $70 or beyond for every dollar spent. With a well-written email series, you can also begin to establish value in your company, create emotional ties to your brand, and turn leads into sales. It pays off, majorly.

But this doesn’t mean that you should be frantically writing new emails weekly to keep things current or respond to each new lead. There just isn’t the time. And this is where the importance of evergreen content can truly save your valuable time while still reaching out to new leads.

How Many Emails? And How Far Apart?

It can be tough deciding just how many emails you should send to new leads, and just how far apart those emails should be sent. You don’t want to bombard or overload your new leads, but you also want to make yourself relevant and meaningful.

So what’s the magic number of emails you should send to provide new leads with relevant information, introduce them to your company’s tone, and convert them into paying customers? Generally, an evergreen email series can include around 4-5 emails, but over the course of how many days? It depends on the scale of your product.

Price of Your Product	Number of Days
Less that $500	3-5 Days
$500-$1000	5-10 Days
$1000 +	10-20 Days

The more they are spending, the more you want to give new leads the space-time to think through a larger purchase, but not so much time that they forget all the positive aspects that come with working with your company, so be sure to think carefully about how many days there should be between each message when setting up your email series.

What Should Each Email Do?

When building an evergreen email series, it can be hard to distinguish one email from the next. What is the most important thing you can do with your first few emails, and how does that differ from the very last email? Here’s a starting point for a series of 5 emails that can be tailored to fit the number and tone of the emails you send.

Emails 1 and 2: Emails one and two are a great introduction to your company. They should be informative in nature and should match the tone and form of the rest of your website. It’s all about educating your new leads on the amazing things your company does, and about what it would be like to work with your business; your company climate.

Perhaps you’ve given your email address to a company or signed up for an email subscription online and received an email like this:

“Thank you for signing up for more information! We’ve received your email, and you should start to receive emails soon.”

What a missed opportunity! Your first contact is also your first impression and should start to really inform the reader about the value of your product; educating and establishing a need. It should also match your company’s personality.

Email 3: Email #3 can continue to educate your new leads on what it is your company does best and continuing to establish a need, but this time, you can also start to shift to sales as well. This email can continue to add value while transitioning to more persuasive language and the idea of buying your product.

Email 4 and 5: Your last two emails (in a hypothetical series of 5 emails) should focus primarily on sales. Your leads have read your emails thus far, which means they are clearly interested in your company and your product, so now you can begin to focus on sales. There are lots of techniques you can use to write dynamic, effective sales emails, and this is the time to really hone in on why your readers should use your product and your business.

Think of these last emails as your conversion sequence: Your plan of attack to convert interested readers into buyers. You’ve nurtured your readers and developed a relationship with them, so now’s the time to get them to take action.

With an evergreen email sequence, you are working both marketing and sales, each doing what they do best, to build customer relationships and boost sales. It saves time, gains clients, and grows your business, all while spreading the word about the value of working with your company. It’s a win for your new leads who are getting the information and the product they seek, and a definite win for you.

The keyboard and mouse are dead! Or maybe, like the old man in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they’re not quite dead yet.

But without a doubt, we are finally seeing the long-expected shift in how we interact with computing devices and resources. And we are all spending a lot less time using our fingers to tell a computer what to do.

Computing Interfaces Are Evolving

The rise of smart speakers and devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, along with smartphone-based assistants like Apple’s Siri, has led to voice commands quickly becoming a primary way to interface with computing. And while this seems commonplace now, just ten years ago few would have expected this shift in computing interfaces to become this ubiquitous this fast.

Along with voice, there are other innovations and changes that are coming quickly to radically change the nature of computing interfaces. And many of these changes fit within the highly fluid (meaning, heavily hyped and hard to define) category of ambient computing.

Joining voice in these innovations is using our hands but not actually touching anything. New technologies like Google’s Project Soli and Intel’s ambient PCs are making it possible to use hand gestures in the air to tell a computing device what to do.

So instead of touching a screen to scroll down or zoom in or to do many other tasks, a user can simply wave their hands over a sensor to do the same things. When tied to augmented reality systems, especially delivered over smart glasses, we can quickly see a change in computing interfaces much like those seen in movies and shows like Minority Report or Westworld.

But when can we expect to see these advancements and the benefits they bring to be tangible?

The Future is Already Here (Well, Almost)

Believe it or not, some of these changes are already happening, especially in areas like repair and in-field service. While field service may not often seem like a sexy, cutting-edge technology arena, it has historically been a testing ground for many innovative technologies such as mobile video, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality.

Of course, this is just simple good sense, as technicians in the field are able to see immediate benefits from these new technologies. Imagine being a tech trying to repair complex machinery where you need both of your hands. Being able to talk to a device, to use glasses to see live IoT driven telemetry in an augmented reality view, and being able to just wave your hand instead of picking up a tablet or laptop — all of these can save time that technicians would otherwise spend focusing on repairs and not on how they are going to balance their tablet.

Some may think these new computing interfaces may be far off, or not applicable — many said the same thing about voice controls and now they spend most of their computing time talking to a digital assistant.

So expect to see continued changes in computing interfaces and expect them to come sooner rather than later. But don’t expect the keyboard and mouse to go away anytime in the near future.

While we may be using them less to interface with a computer or scroll through web content, they are still the best way to write anything longer than a sentence or two. And since content is still one of the biggest drivers of today’s Internet, keyboards will still be clacking away for some time.

Long live the keyboard and mouse!

What does co-creation with customers really mean?

Co-creation means letting your customers in on the ground floor of innovation and creating new products, services, and customer journeys in sometimes real time with them. Customers become partners and advisors, not just end users.

And it isn’t limited to just customers. Organizations can also co-create with vendors, suppliers, resellers and specific groups of employees.

Co-creation also means finding ways to include customers where they haven’t been invited in the past. The voice of the customer is “heard” in the process earlier than the typical process of waiting on survey results. Customers benefit from being included in ways that help them feel heard and part of the community.

It’s great to actually reward customers for participating, too, through simple things like company swag or more complicated reward systems based on participation “points.” Customers often participate because they want to help create an experience they want, with a brand they already like.

---

With your customers’ input, you can create the actual experience they want before developing the supporting processes and systems required to deliver it.

---

Here are a few ideas to get you thinking of ways to include your customers in ways that will serve both them and your organization.

1. Co-Create Your Customer Journey Map

It’s amazing we have to say this, but customers are often not included in customer journey mapping.

Invite customers to participate in innovation sessions around key parts of the journey or invite them to help you build your map from the ground up. There is a wide range of how to include them, based on the size and scope of your organization and your mapping goals. Co-creation can be as simple as inviting in a customer cohort to a workshop or asking for feedback directly along the way.

Create an “ideal state” journey map or innovate around a new process with your customers. This can lead to the first layer of your service blueprint. With their input, they can help you create the actual experience they want before developing the supporting processes and systems required to deliver it.

2. Follow Up Directly on Suggestions

Negative reviews — at least those that include suggestions — on social media channels or review sites are coming from customers who care. They took the time to not just complain, but to say “here’s the way I think it should work.”

Business leaders are still likely to ignore customer complaints. We know that 62% of companies flat out ignore customer service emails!

These customer complainers-with-a-purpose are actually TRYING to work together, so why not let them? Follow up with these customers and discuss their suggestions. Keep them informed as you roll out improvements aligned with their original complaints.

Customers often have great ideas. Let them know you appreciate them.

3. Speed Up Your Research and Development

With today’s technologies, customers can co-create from around the world. Research is time-consuming, but including customers via online focus groups, digital communities, and moderated forums helps research teams determine if more research is required or not.

Methods like virtual focus groups leverage artificial intelligence to avoid the classic focus group issues of not hearing from everyone and herd mentality. In real-time, a specific group of customers can share their insights in a safe and easy environment, then up-vote or down-vote the best answers from the group.

Customers can then be included throughout the research process. They can share insights along the way instead of just reacting to what is eventually developed.

4. Think Like a Non-Profit

Some of the best co-creation comes from the non-profit world. Constant fundraising means constant collaboration with donors. No Kid Hungry, a campaign dedicated to ending child hunger, invites web visitors very directly to co-create solutions with them.

“Whatever your strength, there’s a way you can share it to help kids and create child hunger solutions.” This quote from the “Ways You Can Help” page is a direct invitation to co-create solutions. Most non-profit organizations do this to create a community of action with their donors.

Co-creating ideas with donors could be inviting ideas around events, fundraising opportunities or socially-driven peer challenge campaigns like the amazingly successful Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS funds a few years ago.

We probably all remember participating by dumping buckets of ice water on our heads or others and challenging our friends to do the same, all in an effort to raise money for research. A recent report showed that Ice Bucket Challenge campaign increased funding for ALS by a whopping 187%! That was a form of co-creation, as the actual ALS Association was hands-off in the execution of the challenge.

Your company can do this, too. Invite your customers to share their strengths with you.

---

A recent report showed that Ice Bucket Challenge campaign increased funding for ALS by a whopping 187%. And thinking like a non-profit can help your organization too.

---

5. Ask Customers To Share Ideas Directly

One of the most well-known and successful examples of co-creation with customers is the incredibly robust Lego Ideas program. Customers can submit their own Lego set ideas to the site, then other customers vote these ideas up or down. Lego picks winners to produce based on popularity and other factors.

As of the writing of this blog, ideas included a full set to build the International Space Station alongside a 30th-Anniversary special Seinfeld apartment set, complete with Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer figures.

Starbucks has also enjoyed success in similar co-creation fashion with customer ideas on everything from new drinks to loyalty perks. The original format included ways to vote and comment on submitted ideas, but now the brand relies on suggestions from social media and a form to submit directly, sans community.

Starbucks has credited its hugely popular pumpkin spice flavor and several parts of its loyalty program to customer ideas. The return on those co-creation investments seems to be paying off.

When was the last time you really invited your customers into the process of creation? It’s ironic, but most of us don’t include customers until it’s time for them to give our products and experiences a thumbs up or down. Why not get those ratings earlier in the process to produce what they really want?

All of this is easier said than done, of course. To co-create effectively, leaders need discipline around prioritization, closed-loop processes, and efficient customer communications. But taking just one idea from a customer could mean the next success of your business. Pumpkin spice latte, anyone?

The Plant-Based Runner. Jonathan Cairns. 2019.   A short diary of one man’s growth in ability to run marathons and ultra marathons.  It is quite inspirational and follows his path. The plant based aspect is important to the author and you may find it. If you have any desire to be healthier and run more, than this book may get you off the couch.  The suggestions for food etc all seem to align with other plant based guides.

Dark Horse. Achieving success through the pursuit of fulfillment. Todd Rose & Ogi Ogas. 2018. ISBN 9780062683649.  These are stories of dark horses, people who found their happiness and calling through often convoluted and  non standard paths. As well it is an analysis of the failings of our society to accommodate/ give people real choices and paths to fulfillment vs having standardized one size fits all programming for success.  This is a very important book that will cause you to rethink much that you have accepted about pathways to success/fulfillment.  It also reflects the growing drive for self actualization among today’s young people.

Recently, someone made a comment saying, “It’s interesting to see cold calling coming back into style…..”

The comment startled me, and I can see where the speaker was coming from, but I couldn’t have disagreed more.

The reality is cold calling has never gone out of style. As you look at the performance of consistent top sales performers, you see they always have held themselves accountable for making sure they generated a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve their goals, quarter after quarter, year after year.

These top performers realized they needed to find these opportunities, hunting for them. They never relied on inbound or others to find those opportunities, instead thinking of them as incremental to what they generated.

Unfortunately, there has been too much noise, there have been too many claims by those who want to sell an alternative to cold calling, too much wishful thinking on the part of mediocre salespeople.

These people have wanted cold calling to die. Salespeople who don’t want to do the hard work. These salespeople would also prefer most of the rest of the sales process would die as well, leaving them to take orders.

There are those who have a vested interest in convincing you that cold calling has died, because they have something they want you to buy. Yet, most data I’ve seen indicates these alternatives fail to consistently generate the volume of opportunities necessary to achieve our goals.

I’m not suggesting we not expand our methods of generating new opportunities. We need to leverage everything we can. Marketing must look for new ways of generating awareness and interest. Customers will increasingly look for information and insight in different places. We have to be present in those places.

Cold calling is important. It’s not just important to fill our pipelines, but it’s important because it enables us to capture customers in a different space, creating more value than we might through all our other demand generation.

Think about those customers that don’t recognize they have a problem or the opportunity to change. They are overwhelmed with just getting things done on a day to day basis. Our awareness and demand generation programs will never reach them. Our SEO optimization is meaningless because they aren’t searching, they aren’t looking to change.

Top performers have long recognized this. They realize their greatest opportunity to create value and differentiation is to incite customers to change, to help them imagine new possibilities.

Waiting for the customer to determine they have a need, waiting to intercept them on their search, or when they may a query, is often too late. When we get visibility to their “interest” they are already late in their problem-solving cycle and, perhaps, very far through their buying cycle (depending on the research you believe, 57-92%). Intercepting them there decreases our opportunity to differentiate and maximize our value creation.

Top performers have always recognized these things. Cold calling has never gone out of style to them, it’s their competitive differentiation.

For everyone else, well, I think it’s actually tougher to sell and differentiate by waiting for the customer. I’ve never seen a salesperson consistently make their numbers by waiting. And it’s harder to stand out. But go ahead and wait. It makes it easier for those that don’t.

Afterword: Please don’t get into a semantic debate of “cold,” versus “warm” or anything else. That’s just a diversion. Top performers know every cold call is a researched, prepared call.

The term Revenue Operations (“RevOps” for short) is all the rage lately. In fact, it’s one of the fastest growing titles in tech.

Even more telling, a LinkedIn search for roles using the keywords “Revenue Operations” yielded over 22,000 open jobs today.

But RevOps is a relatively new role in the sales environment, so there’s a lot of confusion about what it is and how it’s different from Sales Ops. If that’s you, keep reading.

In this post, I’ll explain what RevOps is, why it is suddenly so popular, and how it will impact the future of sales.

1. What is RevOps?
2. What does RevOps do?
3. Why is RevOps booming right now?

What is RevOps?

If you’ve been wondering, What is revenue operations? or How is it different from Sales Ops? Here’s the answer you’ve been looking for.

Traditionally, each division within a company has its own operations team, each of them reporting to the functions they serve.

So Sales Operations owns all sales systems and reports to the Head of Sales. Marketing Operations owns all marketing systems and reports to the Head of Marketing. You get the idea.

RELATED: Sales Ops vs Marketing Ops vs Business Ops: What’s the Difference?

In each of these cases, the teams’ priorities are set by their respective leaders. And for the most part, this works.

Except when it doesn’t.

The challenge is that, with this approach, each function is siloed. Each operations specialist has different priorities, goals, and incentives.

You see, coordination becomes challenging when operations teams aren’t tightly aligned around a single mission. Siloed teams often spend more time cleaning up unexpected messes that result from poor communication than they do building a strong operational infrastructure to support client-facing teams.

Worst of all, with siloed operations, small issues can spin out of control because the organization lacks a single person with deep operations experience and a clear view of how the various systems and processes work together.

RevOps was developed as the solution to this problem.

So what is RevOps, exactly?

It’s a centralized function that consolidates these historically-siloed operations teams. It is a single team that serves all revenue-generating business units, including:

• Sales Operations
• Marketing Operations
• Customer Success Operations
• Systems

What Does RevOps Do?

The RevOps function is responsible for the processes, systems, and data that their client functions use every day.

While much of this work revolves around tool implementation and administration, it also involves process design and documentation. Essentially, the operations team is responsible for building the tracks and keeping the trains running on time.

Unlike traditional operations teams, RevOps is intentionally separated from the teams they serve. RevOps reports into the organization’s senior leadership — generally a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Operating Officer.

Why Is RevOps Booming Right Now?

Companies are starting to embrace RevOps because the old approach of siloed operations teams isn’t working anymore. There are two trends that are quickly making the old style of separate sales, marketing, and CS operations obsolete:

1. The sales and marketing funnel is changing
2. Teams share tools and data sources like never before

The traditional sales and marketing funnel — which included clean handoffs between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success — has been replaced by a funnel where all client-facing teams have responsibilities throughout the funnel.

I like to call this the “revenue funnel” because it grew out of companies embracing account-based sales and marketing strategies. Client-facing teams work together like never before.

Here are a few examples of this shift:

Tools: Today, tools are shared between teams more than ever before. 6Sense, Engagio, Outreach, and DiscoverOrg are just a few examples of tools that serve multiple client-facing teams.

SDRs: The sales development function once belonged exclusively to the sales team, but the past few years have seen this changing quickly. In 2018, only 65% of SDR teams reported to sales, according to the Bridge Group’s 2018 SDR Metrics & Comp Report.

CROs: According to Salesforce, Chief Revenue Officer is a new title that began appearing about five years ago. This trend speaks to the pressure companies feel to take a holistic approach to generating revenue.

“Over the last 7 years I’ve seen organizations evolve from a fragmented customer lifecycle that was individually defined by each customer facing team to a comprehensive approach where teams collaborate throughout the sales, marketing, and CS funnel.”

-Kate Gollogly, Director of CS, DocSend

The aforementioned shift in the sales, marketing, and CS tools market is a direct response to this new paradigm. Companies are utilizing more tools, including data providers, than ever before. Many of these tools are cross-functional.

Now that teams share multiple tools and sources of prospect data, implementing and maintaining those systems and associated processes requires careful coordination. When one team owns a system used by many teams, problems can happen.

Most CS and marketing folks who use a CRM know exactly what I mean.

“I have worked in marketing operations for the past six years. The biggest change I’ve seen in that time is the emphasis on Account-Based Everything. Sales needs to understand where leads are coming from, what marketing has done to convert them into MQLs, and which target accounts are most ready to buy. It is more important than ever to keep your CRM and Marketing Automation systems aligned. Every change you make needs to be accounted for in both systems, collaboration between marketing and sales is critical.”

–Sam Lee, Marketing Operations Manager, HouseCanary

How Will RevOps Affect the Future of Sales?

Strong, centralized operations functions will have a profound effect on sales teams in the coming years. Well-run RevOps will be a competitive advantage for early adopters for three important reasons: focus, coordination, and incentives.

Focus

Every minute client-facing teams spend trying to use poorly built systems or hack solutions to process gaps is a minute that they’re not focused on winning market share.

Today most teams struggle with relatively simple operational tasks. De-duplicating, uploading, and assigning event attendees lists can take days. Closing an opportunity can feel like a trip to the DMV for Account Executives and Account Managers.

By providing centralized oversight, RevOps can provide better system and deeper solutions.

Coordination

Offloading Ops projects to a centralized team means the work will be handled by specialists with a birds-eye view of all client-facing teams’ systems and processes.

Coordinating operations work between marketing, sales, and CS operations is much easier when everyone involved has the same priorities and goals. Well-coordinated projects mean less time spent fixing unexpected issues and more time handling new projects.

Incentives

Traditional Operations teams are rarely in a position to make unbiased decisions that are best for the company. Instead, they have strong incentives to do whatever is best for their respective functions.

RevOps teams limit conflicts of interest that exist when operations specialists report into the teams whose KPIs and commissions they calculate.

The result? Cost savings and more efficiency across the company.

RevOps = Competitive Advantage

The companies that invest in a quality RevOps function first will have a massive advantage. For some, that means hiring a strong leader and qualified internal specialists.

For those that don’t have the budget or bandwidth to build an internal RevOps function, it will mean finding a qualified outside provider to bridge the gap until they are ready for a full team.

The post What Is RevOps? (And Why You Need it for Real Sales Success) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Getting leads through your website and other marketing efforts can be hard. Only good content and a compelling message are enough to breakthrough the litany of ads and competing marketing to resonate with a potential client. Good quality leads that are generated through customer referrals, website traffic, and external marketing are hard enough to get in the first place, you don’t want to lose any potential sales to poor follow up.

You have a CRM…. USE IT

Using a CRM system to ensure that leads generated have an account person assigned to them is key to ensuring that every lead generated through your website will be vetted and pushed through your sales funnel appropriately. Having all leads flow through your CRM system also ensures that your sales process doesn’t have a single point of failure. Someone being out sick, being on vacation, maternity/paternity, or leaving the company can potentially create a gap that can leave quality leads without anyone to follow up on them. So, the first thing that needs to be done is that your website needs good forms that capture enough information on your leads for you to know something meaningful about them for your follow up conversation. Depending on the size of your sales team, you might also ask for regional information or company size. Some of those metrics can be used by your CRM system to automatically deliver regional or company size specific leads directly to the appropriate contact person without human intervention.

Another thing that you might want to consider when setting up a lead flow funnel from website leads is an automation system. Almost any modern CRM system that you can buy on the market today gives you the option to set up lead flow systems. Many of the most basic lead flow automations consist of something very simple like a bounce back email after someone submits a form requesting information from you website that just confirms receipt to the client and ensures that someone will be in contact with them soon. More in-depth forms of automation are also beneficial, as well, especially if your company puts out an assortment of whitepapers or case studies on a regular basis. It can help to keep colder leads inside of your funnel for longer and to continue to prove the benefits that your company can provide.

Let Your CRM Do Some of the Heavy Lifting

Once your leads have filled out forms on your website and have been captured by an automation cycle, now is the time to set your sales team up for some success. One of the most important things to do when starting a lead conversion process is to create a contact and company for the lead if your CRM system doesn’t already do that for you. The next step is to create activities to research the company briefly to know what kind of business that they are in to have some kind of familiarity on the call. After that you should create an activity to call that person at your soonest convenience. There is a good chance that if a potential customer found you through Google that they are also checking out your competitors, as well. So, initiating contact as soon as possible is always a great approach.

After you have made some kind of contact and maybe scheduled a conference call or some form of next steps an opportunity for that customer needs to be created for that customer in your CRM with a realistic odds of closing and a proposed close date. Being realistic really does matter in this situation because many CRMs like Salesforce, Connectwise, and more take those closing odds and dates into consideration when using their sales forecasting tools.

One other important tool to take advantage of in your CRM to keep lead follow up on track is your activity tracking system. Every open lead that has an opportunity associated with it needs to have an open activity for a salesperson to follow up on. Whether that activity is internal or external communication it needs to be documented in the system. The way that I have always said it is that your CRM needs to be the key to continued success for whoever should take over for you after you are promoted within the company. It creates for easy handoff and also keeps things from falling through the cracks.

As I said before, it is hard enough to generate quality sales leads that you can’t risk losing them with poor organization and follow up. You might also have an automation system in place that you aren’t using to the full extent that can help to keep leads in your funnel longer and facilitate easier follow up in some cases. Take advantage of all the tools that you have in your arsenal to make the most out of the leads that come through your website.

(This blog post is a brief summary of our more detailed eBook, 5 Tips for Setting Measurable Social Media Goals)

A robust social media strategy is now fundamental for an effective business strategy and marketing efforts. A report released by Zenith Media estimates that social media marketing spending will increase by $28 Bn USD by 2020, over 67% of adspend growth. However, almost 50% of these marketers struggle to show the impact of social on their business. With all this focus on spending, setting measurable goals and executing on them becomes a vital part of a marketing organization’s function.  

Today’s monitoring and analytics tools make it possible to demonstrate success through social channels. Defining success in social media participation begins with appropriate goal-setting, backed by benchmarking, tracking, analysis and reporting. 

But not all results generated through social media can or should be measured in monetary terms. Improvements to qualitative metrics such as awareness, reach, and sentiment are equally valid outcomes. We’ve pulled together five practical tips which will guide you in creating and executing on measurable, actionable, and meaningful social media goals that define success in your own organization. 

 Define Your Scope 

Blindly jumping into social media is a great way to bury your brand in an ocean of competitors and data, wasting money and manpower in the process. Identifying clear, and ideally measurable, goals will help keep your strategy focused and give your social conversation a clear voice centered on your brand. Social media goals generally fall into one of these four buckets:  

•  Brand Awareness 
•  New Sales 
•  Customer Retention 
•  Reducing Costs  

 Be S.M.A.R.T. 

The scenery may be different on social media, but the time-tested marketing practices that make social effective are not. Goals need to be well defined with a Specific result in mind. I.e. instead of saying “attract more web traffic” say “attract 20% more visitors to our company home page”. Be sure to also make your result Measurable; using a benchmark metric to establish what 20% traffic increase to your homepage actually looks like. Knowing both of these things means you’re able to establish Achievable and Realistic growth.  

Make sure 20% of your existing web traffic is not just a reachable figure, but is that 20% traffic increase something your sales can reasonably follow up on? And finally, make your goals Timed. Set a beginning and ending date. This will allow you to make comparisons with previous and subsequent efforts and will also allow you to set milestones during your campaign to monitor progress.  

Include a Call To Action 

Participation in social media may very well lead to increased sales, more satisfied customers and decreased costs, but without a specific call-to-action (CTA) you won’t be able to track which social activity or channel contributed to which business or marketing goal.  

CTAs generally urge people to respond to your content in a certain way, either but downloading, sharing, or clicking through links, all of which should provide value to the customer, be clear and specific, create a sense of urgency and be visible and prominent. Your CTA should be minimalist; don’t crowd your page with lots of action points, and they should be consistent in long-term message.  

Download the full eBook to see some great examples of highly effective CTAs. 

Know Where Your Leads Come From 

To measure success, you will need a mechanism to follow responses as they travel from your social channels to your landing page and on to your marketing automation tool and sales CRM system. This can generally be achieved with a campaign-specific tracking code.  

 Get Alignment and Set Expectations  

Social media strategy implicates more areas of an organization than just marketing. Advertising, PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Sales, IT, Finance, and Product Development just to name a few. The larger the organization, the more challenging this coordination will be. To set goals successfully and implement the tactics required to achieve them requires alignment and transparency.  

 Start but assessing start and end points and agree on an overall strategy. From here you can identify roles and responsibilities to more effectively and efficiently identify, engage and rapidly respond to social opportunities, issues and crises as well as report on results. A strong social strategy begins with a solid foundation of research and relies on consistent monitoring and active engagement. Utilizing a social tool like Meltwater can aggregate all of this information and give you insights before, during, and after a campaign to evaluate and report on progress.  

 The Bottom Line: 

While social media offers an unequalled opportunity to extend brand presence and drive revenue, the same type of accountability must be applied to participation on social channels as it is to traditional marketing channels.  

That means defining specific, measurable goals and outcomes, understanding the business actions needed to achieve them, aligning workflows throughout your organization to capture opportunities, and regularly measuring and reporting on results.  

To learn more about how you can achieve this, download a copy of our full eBook: 5 Tips for Setting Measurable Social Media Goals 

 

 

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Customer expectations continue to rise. Products should be more durable, easier to use, and less expensive. And the experience from the very start should be perfect. Unfortunately, all of this is not always the case.

When anything from minor confusion to utter failure occurs, the customer will be looking for answers. They search online, they send email, they pick up the phone. They connect with customer service. And their customer service experience better not only put them back on track, but also be flawless in delivery. The stakes are high.

The good news is this challenging execution can be easy–with the right processes and tools in place. Current customer service platforms can serve up modern (and in some cases cutting edge) customer service that not only addresses customer needs but also focuses on improving the customer experience. A typical customer service scenario like the following can easily be delivered:

1. Get to the ‘net – most customers today will start their search for a solution online. It might begin from a search engine, directly in the customer service area of a company’s website, or initiated from a mobile app.
2. Offer the options – self-service can take many forms to best fit the needs of customers and the solution: steps to follow in a knowledge base article, ideas from fellow customers or experts in communities, or solutions delivered via backend workflow. A search should encompass all these channels, and when in doubt, customers should also have the option to…
3. Get chatty – more and more companies are adopting chatbots in customer service, and the reason is understandable. With a conversational interface, a chatbot–with structured and defined conversations, backed by machine learning and natural language understanding–can triage a situation efficiently and help connect customers with solutions. But when the chatbot doesn’t have an answer, it’s time to…
4. Hand-off seamlessly – like a trusted assistant, a good chatbot has all the details of their conversation with the customer: what the problem is and what was suggested and didn’t resolve it. Passing this information over to a customer service agent, they can go to work.
5. Call a friend – sometimes, for a customer service agent, work can be a lot like a trivia game: they think they know the answer, but some validation or additional ideas would be good. This is where machine learning once again comes into play, displaying similar cases created by fellow agents that might hold a clue. But when a viable solution isn’t available, it’s necessary to…
6. Slow the traffic – from the details that have been collected by a customer service agent, one click from them should capture the relevant details and initiate a workflow to fully document the problem in a knowledge base article accessible to fellow agents as well as customers, stemming the tide while the team is…
7. Zeroing in on the problem – most customers aren’t alone when they encounter a problem. Over time, as more chats (and calls and emails…) roll into the contact center, this problem blip gets larger on the analytics radar. Analytics can also help to identify the common thread in these cases (if only certain customer segments are impacted).
8. Servicing proactively – with the most likely-affected customers determined, customer service can keep customers informed of progress towards a solution. These periodic updates save customers time and effort, as well as reduces the flow of calls, emails, and chats into the contact center. Meanwhile, behind the scenes…
9. Teaming up – customer service has the cases and contact volume to substantiate the nature of the issue. Analytics breaks down the cost per interaction and helps build the case for action. Workflow empowers customer service to collaborate with the departments responsible for identifying the root cause of the issue and delivering a fix, with timelines and accountability built into the process until a resolution is found.
10. Delivering the solution – with an answer now available, it can be delivered to affected customers. The knowledge base article created in step 6 above is updated to reflect the solution. With the root cause addressed, future customers will not be impacted by the issue–and the overall customer experience improves.

This hypothetical scenario is not the ideal, it is the new normal. Customers demand the best possible experience. When a problem occurs and they need assistance, they expect fast service: if they aren’t notified of a problem and its solution in advance, they want to go online to quickly find the answer themselves. If a solution is not immediately available, their effort to find an answer should be minimized through proactive communications until the problem is solved–and not just a workaround, but a permanent solution delivered by departments outside customer service.

Maintaining a smooth customer experience–despite the inevitable problems–should be every company’s goal. It takes the right processes and tools to deliver on this. Only the most advanced customer service platforms can provide this seamless end-to-end experience not just to customers but also to the customer service agents and departments they work with. If your organization struggles to deliver this level of customer service, it’s time for an upgrade.

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.

The healthcare industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Costs are skyrocketing, consumer demand for more accessible care is growing rapidly, and healthcare companies are unable to keep up. 

Health organizations are increasingly turning to tech companies to facilitate this transformation in care delivery and lower health expenditures. The potential for tech-led digital health initiatives to help healthcare providers and insurers deliver safer, more efficient, and cost-effective care is significant. For healthcare organizations of all types, the collection, analyses, and application of patient data can minimize avoidable service use, improve health outcomes, and promote patient independence, which can assuage swelling costs.

For their part, the "Big Four" tech companies — Google-parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft — see an opportunity to tap into the lucrative health market. These same players are accelerating their efforts to reshape healthcare by developing and collaborating on new tools for consumers, medical professionals, and insurers.

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence explores the key strengths and offerings the Big Four will bring to the healthcare industry, as well as their approaches into the market. We'll then explore how these services and solutions are creating opportunities for health systems and insurers. Finally, the report will outline the barriers that are inhibiting the adoption and usage of the Big Four tech companies’ offerings and how these barriers can be circumvented.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Tech companies’ expertise in data management and analysis, along with their significant compute power, can help support healthcare payers, health systems, and consumers by providing a broader overview of how health is accessed and delivered.

• Each of the Big Four tech companies — vying for a piece of the lucrative healthcare market — is leaning on their specific field of expertise to develop tools and solutions for consumers, providers, and payers.
• Alphabet is focused on leveraging its dominance in data storage and analytics to become the leader in population health.
• Amazon is leaning on its experience as a distribution platform for medical supplies, and developing its AI-assistant Alexa as an in-home health concierge.
• Apple is actively turning its consumer products into patient health hubs.
• Microsoft is focusing on cloud storage and analytics to tap into precision medicine.

• Health organizations can further tap into the opportunity presented by tech’s entry into healthcare by collaborating with tech giants to realize cost savings and bolster their top lines. But understanding how each tech giant is approaching healthcare is crucial.

 In full, the report:

• Pinpoints the key themes and industry-wide shifts that are driving the transformation of healthcare in the US.
• Defines the main healthcare businesses and strategies of the Big Four tech companies.
• Highlights the biggest potential impacts of each of the Big Four’s healthcare strategies for health systems and insurers.
• Discusses the potential barriers that will challenge the adoption of the Big Four tech companies’ initiatives and how these hurdles can be overcome.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

I’ve been commissioned by the International Journal of Sales Transformation to write a series of articles comparing and contrasting today’s most popular sales methodologies, and I plan to share them with you as they are published.

In my first article I turn the spotlight onto Sandler Selling. Introduced by David Sandler in 1967 as an antidote to conventional product-centric, hard-selling tactics, the approach aims to achieve a more equitable balance of power between the buyer and the seller.

By emphasising rapport-building and empathy, and by focusing on the prospective customer’s pains, rather than the vendor’s solutions, Sandler’s methodology seeks to establish the foundation for honest dialogue between the buyer and the seller...

Putting sales people in their prospect’s shoes

Sandler challenged sales people to put themselves in their prospect’s shoes, to work out where gaps existed between the prospect’s current situation and their desired future state, and to understand how the prospect wanted to buy.

There’s a lot of reverse psychology in the methodology, which draws some of its inspiration from the transactional analysis movement of the late 1960s. It gives sales people the confidence to walk away from situations where they have little chance of winning and supports their self-esteem.

Sandler’s approach is utterly (and thankfully) at odds with the hard-nosed ‘always be closing’ image of selling promoted by films like Glengarry Glen Ross. It gives sales people the right and the confidence to ‘go for a no’ if they cannot get a yes, rather than continuing a lengthy prospect-sales person dance that is destined to go nowhere.

The Dummy Curve, Reversing and Upfront Contracts

Sandler techniques like the the ‘Dummy Curve’, ‘Reversing’ and ‘Upfront Contracts’ are powerfully applicable whatever other core sales methodology sales people may choose to use.

The dummy curve encourages sales people to ‘play dumb’ rather respond immediately to every request from the buyer - and to avoid the temptation to show how much they know (particularly about their products). Sandler recommends the use of phrases such as “I don’t understand ...”, “help me with ...” “did you mean ...” and so on to get the prospective customer to reveal more about what they are really thinking. It’s a simple but highly effective technique.

The same is true of reversing. Rather than always answering the prospect directly, Sandler coaches sales people to respond - where appropriate - instead with a question that helps to clarify what was really behind the prospect’s initial question. The sales person might, for example, say something like “that’s an interesting question - why do you ask?”

Reversing is an incredibly powerful tactic. It helps sales people to demonstrate their interest, to avoid jumping to unjustified conclusions, to uncover the real under-the-surface issue, to gather more information and to avoid answering unasked questions. It’s also a highly effective way of helping to control the conversation. But beware: if the prospect asks exactly the same question twice, stop reversing and answer it.

Negative reversing is in many ways even more powerful. Most prospects expect sales people to give it the hard sell. But negative reversing upsets that equation. It encourages the buyer to convince themselves of going ahead with the vendor. For example, if a prospect makes a positive comment, instead of jumping in with the expected hard close, the sales person might respond by saying something like “You know, based on what you have told me so far, I would not have expected you to be so interested. What did I miss?”

Upfront contracts are something that every sales person can and should use. It’s a technique for agreeing a future outcome in advance of a sales event. For example, at the start of an important meeting with a client, the sales person might say something like “So - we’ve agreed that our goals for this meeting are (agreed goals) and that we need to finish by (agreed timeframe). We’ve agreed that we need to cover (agreed agenda). If - as I believe we will - we succeed in achieving these objectives, would it make sense to agree upfront that our next step should be to (sales person's desired next step)?”

But you also need to make it easy for your customer to say “no” if there really isn’t a good fit. So you probably want to conclude by saying something like “...but if either of us feels that this isn’t right for them, let’s also agree that we can simply decide not to proceed any further” Giving your prospective customer (and yourself!) an “out” helps to avoid simply continuing a dialogue that has no real purpose.

I’ve lost count of the number of post-meeting debriefs I’ve had with sales people who report that they had a “very successful meeting” - and yet where they cannot point to a single tangible thing that the prospect had agreed to as a result. Can you imagine how much more productive these meetings could have been if the sales person had established an upfront contract (I actually prefer the term “upfront agreement”) at the start of the meeting, rather than waiting to the end to talk about next steps?

The Sandler Submarine

I’m less enthusiastic about the ‘Sandler Submarine’ - at least as it applies to complex B2B sales with multiple stakeholders. The Sandler Submarine defines a series of steps that a sale must go though before an order can be achieved.

These steps are: Bonding and Rapport, Up-Front Contract, Pain, Budget, Decision, Fulfilment and Post-Sale. The submarine metaphor suggests that each is a watertight compartment that must be closed and cannot be re-entered in the progression to achieve a sale.

These steps are all relevant, and I think it’s possible that these steps can be managed in this way in relatively simple transactions that involve a simple buyer. But I think we all now recognise that complex B2B sales are inherently non-linear.

If the customer’s decision is strategic and involves multiple stakeholders, it’s almost inevitable that some (maybe many) customers will end up revisiting previous aspects of their buying decision journey, and our sales process needs to reflect this.

For this reason, I think a simplistic implementation of the submarine is inappropriate to complex B2B sales.

Continuous reinforcement

Most traditional sales training programmes think in terms of content delivery and completely ignore reinforcement. This is another area in which Sandler offered a breakthrough approach.

The Sandler Selling System is based on the concept of regular, pre-planned reinforcement programmes that last for months or even years. Most training providers would now acknowledge that training without reinforcement rarely delivers the expected results, but Sandler was the first (as far as I am aware) to make this a core part of their delivery method.

Is Sandler effective?

I have a number of clients who are enthusiastic fans of the Sandler approach. They are particularly keen on the techniques for emotionally engaging prospective customers - such as reversing and upfront contracts.

They also appreciate the idea of continuous reinforcement, and have seen progressive improvements in the performance of sales people who have engaged in these programmes. The tools and tactics are also very suitable for integration into role plays.

When it comes to complex B2B sales, they also recognise that Sandler by itself is not necessarily a complete answer. Many have successfully blended the buyer psychology tools of Sandler with elements of other methodologies: SPIN® for questioning technique, Miller-Heiman® for understanding decision groups, and Challenger® for constructively challenging the customer’s perception of what they need.

Should you consider Sandler?

If you want your sales people to solve problems rather than promoting products, if you expect them to establish rapport with their customers, and if you want them to engage with their prospects in a way that is distinctively and refreshingly different from traditional sales approaches, you should seriously consider Sandler as part of your methodology.

Subscribing to the International Journal of Sales Transformation

As a founding contributor you can probably accuse me of bias, but I believe that the International Journal of Sales Transformation is the equivalent of the Harvard Business Review or the McKinsey Quarterly for the sales profession. You can subscribe here. I strongly recommend that you do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, a member of the Sales Enablement Society, a founding contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the Sales Experts Channel and the founder of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading UK-based B2B value-selling experts.

Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and market leaders, Bob is now relishing his role as a pro-active advisor, coach and trainer to high-potential B2B-focused sales organisations, systematically enabling them to transform their sales effectiveness by adopting the proven principles of value-based selling.

Survey reporting isn’t a prescribed formula. You need a way to present your findings in a meaningful way that caters to the audience at hand. To do so, many marketers create a presentation and a report.

A presentation can provide need-to-know insights in a quick, informative way. Meanwhile, a report can provide a deep-dive of statistics, methodology, and executable actions. In this article, we’ll give you some tips to create both a presentation and a report.

How to create a survey presentation

Your survey presentation should deliver need-to-know information in an engaging and informative way. Think of your presentation as the CliffsNotes version of your report. To accomplish this, here are some tips:

Start with a headline

After conducting a survey, it’s easy to get wrapped up in data sets and percentages. However, the purpose of survey reporting via a presentation is to get to the point, fast.

What’s the most important piece of information you want people to know about your survey findings? That’s where you start. Now, trim that statement down into a newspaper-like headline so it’s short and succinct.

You may have several headline-worthy points to make, and that’s OK, just prioritize them. Each headline represents its own slide, which you’ll add data and visuals to.

Present insights, not data

People listening to your presentation are less interested in statistics and more interested in what the statistics mean.

Let’s say, for example, a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey shows 72% of customers love the new coat your company created, but supporting data shows customers also think it’s overpriced compared to similar coats on the market. You investigate pricing and see most comparable products are $10 less than yours, but your coat keeps customers warmer in lower temperatures.

Rather than presenting the statistics and research data, focus on the insight instead. In this case, your presentation explains a new marketing initiative that focuses on the coat’s ability to keep customers warmer, which differentiates it from competitors and justifies the additional cost to customers. That’s the insight that stemmed from the survey results.

You can use supporting data, but the punchline should be the action resulting from the data.

Get visual

While insights are the main course of the meal, data are still an important side dish.

A presentation full of numbers and charts is a snoozefest, so share the insight and provide supporting data visually. Yes, a bar graph is technically visual, but consider taking it up a notch by adding motion to your graphs and charts. Maybe each bar rises as you talk about it, for example.

You can also use product images, infographics, memes, short videos—you name it. If you’re using a survey tool, the survey results are presented with visuals, like the one below, so you can easily borrow them for your presentation.

Keep it short

Informative yet quick—that’s solid survey reporting. Presentations help showcase results but remember to focus on the most important insights and takeaways. Your report will provide more in-depth information.

Tips to create a survey report

For the most effective survey reporting, you need to present your findings in a more official, detailed way. Your colleagues will reference the report after your presentation to get a better handle on data collected, methodology, and resulting actions. Here are some tips to create a must-read report:

Start with a structured plan

Survey reporting can be cumbersome, but it’s your job to break it down into useable pieces of information. To start, figure out how you’ll structure your report.

Many reports follow this structure:

1. Title page: Provide the survey title, date, and quick description.
2. Table of contents: Give a list of everything that’s in the report.
3. Executive summary: Summarize the report and its findings. Make sure it’s polished. Some people only read the summary.
4. Background: Explain why you launched the survey and what you plan to do with results.
5. Survey method: Explain who was included in the study, target audience, contact method, etc.
6. Survey results: This is the main body, which provides important statistics and actions that should be taken.
7. Appendices: Provides supporting material including the actual survey and glossary of terms.

Prioritize and visualize

Your report will include a lot of statistics, but it’s important to prioritize them. You want the most important ones listed first.

Once you have a ranked list of findings, you need a way to visualize them. If you created a presentation, you can likely reuse some of the visuals from it in your report. However, since your report presents more data, you’ll likely create more visuals to keep your audience engaged.

Create visuals with delivery in mind. In other words, if the report is being delivered digitally, you can include interactive graphs and or short videos. If the report is being printed, stick with charts and graphs.

Provide actionable intel for each department

While your presentation provides an overview of actions inspired by the survey results, your report should include specific actions for specific departments.

For example, if the survey examined customer satisfaction with ticket resolutions, the results could impact customer service, marketing, and IT. Let’s say the results encouraged the company to launch a live chat feature on their website. The change requires training for customer service representatives, customer education via the marketing department, and website integration assistance from the IT department.

If survey results impact a certain department, spell it out in the results section.

Proofread and tighten

A survey report is beefy. Before you release it, make sure you proof it. Check it for grammar and punctuation, and have at least two other people proof it too.

In addition to reviewing the report for basic errors, look for places where you can tighten up the language. It’s easy to get wordy when survey reporting. Don’t use five words when three will do. Go through the report and make sure each data set and explanation is as succinct as possible.

Closing the loop on survey reporting

Surveys provide a wealth of decision-making information, but the results must be presented to the right people in the right format. Survey reporting is meant to arm your company with actionable intel that improves the customer experience, and ultimately, drives revenue. The tips above will help any company organize their survey results, present them professionally, and provide direction for improvement.

Learn how GetFeedback can help you exceed customers’ expectations—start your free trial today.

This is Part 3 of a series of four posts on pricing a solution portfolio.

Part 1 - How Pricing Changes Over Time

Part 2 - Setting Goals

Part 3 - Looking for Interactions (This Post)

Part 4 - An Integrative Solution

Please take our survey Value, Innovation & Pricing Insights from CEOs

This series is focussed on the challenges of pricing a portfolio of offers. In the first two posts, we looked at how pricing changes over time and how to set goals for a portfolio of offers. Now, we move on to the most difficult part of pricing a solution portfolio. Working out how to make the interactions between different offers work in your favour. We also look at some of the pitfalls.

There are three key things to consider in building a portfolio: framing, paths, combinations (packaging and bundling). Using these together is the key to successful portfolio pricing.

Framing the portfolio

Behavioural economics and prospect theory have taught us the importance of framing perception and decision making. Each offer in your portfolio frames the others and one has to plan how potential buyers will compare offers to each other. The sequence by which this comparison is made will also shape willingness to pay (WTP).

Which part of your portfolio provides an anchor, relative to which other offers are compared? This is one of the critical decisions to make. If you leave this to chance, you will lose control over how your pricing is perceived. There are several strategies possible here. Take the example of two restaurant chains. One is positioned as a family restaurant offering great value for price. The menu is designed to call people’s attention to the top right offer, which is designed to have a low price point but to lead the customer to add-ons needed to fill out the meal. The customer enters the buying process with the framing that ‘this restaurant offers great value.’ Another restaurant, right across the street, is positioned more up market. It wants to attract people who are giving themselves a bit of a treat, perhaps celebrating a life event. Its menu has a very different design. There is no low priced special. There are specials, but they are priced higher than the daily fare and positioned as being something special or in season. The goal is to frame a high price so that the rest of the menu seems reasonably priced. When we analysed spending for each business the average was about the same, but for the family restaurant the median was lower than the mean (the distribution had a negative skew) and for the destination restaurant there was a positive skew. Speaking with the owners (who asked not to be identified) it was clear that this was a strategy and that each was aware of what the other was doing.

Never make a pricing decision based on averages without checking the skew of the distribution.

A full understanding of framing and its effect on decision making requires a good understanding of behavioural economics, something we will dig into in future posts.

Paths through the portfolio

In most cases, there will be a defined set of paths that you want customers to take through your portfolio. Designing these paths and the pricing that supports them is a key part of portfolio pricing design. These paths are also known, in sales, as upsell and cross sell. Ideally, upsell occurs as a customer becomes more and more able to take advantage of advanced functions to get more value. Cross sell is most successful when the combination of two or more offers, each of which provide value independent of the other, provide even more value when used together.

One way to think through paths through a portfolio is using the concept of a maturity model. These models are popular in many contexts and smart companies are developing maturity models that guide upsell. The basic idea is to have an offer for each stage of the maturity model and a well supported path to get from one phase to the next. Below is an example of a Customer Communication Maturity Model from GMC software. This makes the upsell paths clear. The pricing challenge is to capture more revenue as one moves up the maturity model while not putting in any barriers that discourage customers from using your solutions to get to higher and higher levels of maturity.

There are other ways to think about paths, especially in the context of the technology adoption lifecycle. (see Pricing strategy changes across the technology lifecycle). Paths are especially important when the market is transitioning from one phase of the lifecycle to another, but not all parts of the market are changing at the same time. For example, at the end of life one will want to have well defined paths that lead customers to the next generation of your solution.

Combining parts of the portfolio

The other consideration in portfolio pricing is understanding how different offers will be bundled to appeal to different parts of the market. To do this well you need to have a well thought out value-based market segmentation (see Why good pricing strategy starts with market segmentation). Bundles should be designed for each target segment. Take a holistic approach to bundling. In today’s world, a bundle usually includes products (often priced using subscriptions), professional services and access to data. Your pricing model has to be able to integrate each part of your offer in a way that helps to communicate value and that will make sense to your customer.

Here are five questions that can help you find the interactions between different parts of your portfolio and design an effective portfolio pricing strategy.

1. What is your value-based market segmentation and what segments are you trying to target?

2. Are the segments independent or do they interact with each other? (One segment may act as a reference for another, or there could be great markets.)

3. How do offers frame other offers, within a segment and across segments? (Framing needs to be designed to align with your strategy and positioning, think of the two restaurants described above, who used very different farming strategies.)

4. What paths do you expect customers to follow through your portfolio as you cross sell and upsell?

5. How will you combine offers (including professional services and data) to provide exceptional differentiated value for your customers? (Differentiated value is the value that you provide that it is very hard to get from a competitive alternative. It is the source of your pricing power.)

Permalink

The Long-Tail Economy is defined by the ability of marketing to reach a small, but highly engaged and passionate target market or customer segment with a customized product or service.

The Head Economy-Old Marketplace

In the old marketplace, the only way to sell a product was through either through a brick and mortar retail establishment such as a department store or via catalog sales. Bound by the physical limits of a retail store or the number of pages in a catalog, businesses were forced to focus only on the best sellers. Customer acquisition options were also limited primarily to mass media sources like TV, Radio, and newspapers.

Limits on retail shelf space and the lack of being able to target specific market segments meant that if you wanted to make money, you had no real option but to use mass media and sell mass-market products or services.

As a business owner, unless you had a product or service that you could sell to millions of people, there simply was no cost-effective way in the old economy to find and attract new customers. That meant that if you had an idea for a business to help, say single-mothers with a Down-syndrome child, while there might be more than enough potential customers to support this type of business in a specific geographic area, there was no way to effectively market to them so they would become aware of your offering.

Customer acquisition in the old marketplace meant that you had to pay for a ton of impressions in the hope that over time, a sufficient number of impressions would create enough brand awareness within your specific customer segment to get a prospect to know your business existed. This was a highly inefficient marketing process that drove up the costs of niche products.

The basic limits of retail shelf-space and marketing channels of the old marketplace restricted companies to producing only products or offering services that appealed to a large percentage of the general population and discouraged niche product or service offerings.

Long-Tail Economy – New Marketplace

Today, our economy has shifted from a few mass markets to millions of small niche markets. Technology such as the internet and sophisticated search engines has made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products. Moreover, microtargeting,which is the ability to filter prospects by demographic, psychographic, and even by their behaviors has allowed businesses to focus their marketing efforts on potential buyers that are very likely to be interested in what their company has to offer.

Those millions of niche products have created what Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, called the “Long-Tail of Retail.” Until the advent of the internet, the sale of custom or niche products had been largely neglected.

Today, online retailers are no longer restricted to delivering only physical products. Digital downloads enable retailers like Amazon and iTunes to stock virtually everything with almost no space restrictions. Literally, millions of songs and eBooks can be stored on a single server.

With the advent of 3D printing, electronic instructions can be sent from a server to a local 3D printer to produce physical products. Moreover, distribution centers with their high ceilings and automated item-picker robots, are located in remote and low-cost areas of the country. When combined with next-day, and even same-day delivery options in some areas, this makes it possible to have inventories for all kinds of niche products.

In the past, traditional retail stores only stocked items that appealed to mass markets because shelf space was limited and retail space was expensive. In today’s Long-Tail Economy, the nearly infinite shelf-space of online retailers, new distribution mechanisms (e.g., digital downloads) and peer-to-peer markets (e.g., eBay and Uber), has virtually eliminated the bottleneck of distribution.

According to Chris Anderson, the Long-Tail Economy is rooted in the theory that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve, and toward a huge number of niche products in the tail.

As the costs of customer acquisition, production, and distribution fall- especially for online products- there is now less need to lump products and consumers into a one-size-fits-all container. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be just as economically attractive as mainstream ones.

Three economic triggers have given rise to the Long-Tail Economy:

1. Falling technology costs give individuals access to tools that were formerly too expensive.
2. The internet has created channels that lower transaction costs, opening up markets for niche products.
3. Powerful search engines allow potential buyers of niche products to search, while recommendation engines and user ratings have made it easier for buyers to locate products.

How does the “Long-Tail of Retail” affect your industry?

When it comes to navigating the digital noise in today’s competitive ecommerce landscape, many businesses are finding frustrations with their current digital marketing tactics to convert prospects.

Now is the time to focus on inbound marketing strategies and we’ve curated a list of the top four hacks to boost your brand’s engagement and conversions.

1. Harness the power of SEO

For every business looking to increase sales and reach more prospects, SEO is one of the best bets.

Reasons:

• If done in-house, it can save you a great deal of money
• Opens another channel for your prospects to reach your brand
• You can also guide your organic visitors to your social media handles to better your social media following and engagement

  This helps you keep your prospects close and can boost conversions through your social media channels.

To leverage the full potential of SEO, it’s best to improvise in the following areas.

• Understand Google Rankbrain: Every Google search results page is the product of a number of codes working in sync based on machine learning.

  This Google algorithm is known as Google Rankbrain.

  The aim is to understand how it works, so, you can upgrade your SEO strategy in compliance with the algorithms.

• Create epic content pieces:The average content length of top 10 Google search results is 1890 words.

  It’s always better to create content that is rich with information, covering all the important topics around the main title.

• Work on your CTR:While you are doing everything to produce lasting results using SEO, it’s crucial to understand that SEO won’t always get you better CTRs.

  In fact, better CTRs will help you with SEO.

  So, for every epic blog post that you write, also write an epic meta with an actionable title.

• Stay updated with new/upcoming SEO trends:Most marketers with minimal SEO knowledge know about SEO tactics like building backlinks. improving page speed, uploading sitemaps and creating easy to go through navigation menus,

  Which is why reading and writing about the same every time won’t make sense.

  Instead, keep yourself updated with new SEO trends with these recommended SEO blogs, SEO Roundtable and Search Engine Journal.

  Marketers-cum-bloggers like Neil Patel and Brian Dean also are incredibly useful when SEO and marketing are concerned.

This is how Colorwhistle successfully boosted organic traffic by 450%. Focusing on long-tail keywords. Refining on-page SEO elements. Optimizing their site architecture for mobile users. And building links that mattered.

Source: ColorWhistle

2. Improve social media marketing strategies

Another way you can game up your inbound marketing strategy is by ensuring the efficiency of your social media marketing campaigns.

What you can do is focus on social media platforms where your audience is active. For example, there’s a number of B2B businesses neglecting social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, even when their audience is active there.

Now, even if they are enjoying good results from SEO or through Google Adwords, neglecting a whole realm of marketing opportunities will keep pulling them down.

Don’t let that happen to your brand. Increase your brand’s channels on the internet. Create content for all social media platforms whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.

This strategy of running cross-channel campaigns has been benefiting big brands for long. Like this one time when Dollar Shave Club came up with their humorous #RazorBurn campaign.

Source: Dollar Shave Club

Using their own wit and welcoming the same from their audience earned them a 6% increase in their social following. A 24% rise in social media mentions, and a 31% boost in Twitter engagement.

This campaign was a take on the companies that claim their blades can be used for over a month.

3. Explore more referral strategies

One great way of selling your products is by making others sell it with you.

The big e-commerce giants like Amazon, eBay and Walmart all employ a referral marketing strategy.

Offering a part of the sales revenue to the individuals or businesses bringing in leads helps businesses sell more, without increasing their marketing efforts.

Take Dropbox for example. With PPC going out of their budget at a time and long-tail search terms being too competitive, they took the referral route.

Source: Dropbox

By providing extra storage space to both referrer and the referred member, they succeeded in increasing sign-ups by almost 60%, enjoying more than 2.8 million direct referral invites within the first 18 months.

This worked so well that 35% of all sign-ups now come through referrals.

Apparently, the internet in 2019 is a sea of opportunities. This has given rise to a number of influencers and referral marketers who’d be willing to promote your product on their media channels for fairly generous compensation.

All you need to do is find the right people and ensure an air-tight implementation of the marketing tactics.

4. Fine tune the bottom of your conversion funnel

The last step in most conversion funnels is of converting leads into customers. This is where your sales team comes into play.

Basically, you have gotten your prospects a long way down your funnel. At this point, they may need further convincing. Or a better offer. So, the best you can do is to give them what they want.

For example, Booking.com brilliantly uses pressure inducing messages on their website to boost their conversions.

Source: Booking.com

In high demand now! Booked 51 times in the last 24 hours. Only 1 room left on our site!

These are all pressure inducing messages that are working wonders for Booking.com. The reason is, these messages really make the prospects feel the need for hurrying up before they miss out on the opportunity.

Companies need to work on it and see how they can push their prospects through this last-minute resistance. Also, it’s important to understand what can work the best for you. The thought-process matters a great deal here.

Instead of trying to personalize because everyone else is, start thinking on the level of, how you can help your prospects at this conversion hurdle?

Free trials. Demos and exclusive discounts are only the beginning, you can provide way better offers than these alone.

And then you can monitor results against these offers. This will help you improvise your future offers.

Marketing your product or service adequately will always be one of your organization’s top concerns. To make sure things are being done right, it’s important to know the right tactics.

Twice in as many months, I have had a reader email me to ask me how they can get a job in sales. In both cases, hiring managers were resistant to hiring the person emailing me because their backgrounds were technical, meaning they weren’t in a role that would have required they create and win new opportunities. The prospective employers were interested but desired to keep them in a technical position.

Both of these readers have reached out to inform me they now work in a sales role after following my very straightforward, and very simple advice. If you want to work in sales, there is one thing that you can do to guarantee you get the job. However, first, let’s look at what makes it easy for those who want a sales role.

You Didn’t Really Apply for the Position

You can click an apply button on any of the job boards and have an electronic version of your cover letter (if you have one) and your resume sent to the hiring company. Because the job board’s strategy is to make it easy for a company to acquire a bunch of resumes, you were probably sent an email asking you to click to submit yours to anything in the pay range you entered when you signed up on their platform. But you didn’t apply. Instead, you merely forwarded your electronic resume—just like 300 other people.

Your resume looks a lot like the other 299 resumes the hiring person that flooded into their inbox. There was nothing different about your approach, and if you did this, you decided that the relationship is transactional. If you were a salesperson, this approach would be the same as emailing your dream client a PDF of a sell sheet and waiting for them to call you to invite you in for a meeting or place an order.

I would love to tell you that none of this is your fault, that you are absolved of the responsibility for the poor approach because the technology drives the process. However, if you are a salesperson, you have to choose what is effective, not what is easy.

How to Apply for a Sales Position

If you spend your time on the social channels, you may be infected with the idea that cold calling no longer works and is no longer necessary, an idea my friends and I have combatted for the last few years. That war was fought and won, and no serious person who writes or works in or around sales believes cold calling is dead.

The person you are going to be working for, should you be hired, is going to expect you to make cold calls. They want to hire someone willing and able to pick up the phone, call a stranger, and successfully pitch them on why they should agree to a meeting. You are applying to be a salesperson, and prospecting is what salespeople do. The process of getting hired is also prospecting.

Of the 300 people who clicked a button and sent an email, approximately 0.0% of those people will have done any more than that to obtain the open role. It’s easy to stand out in a crowd of people who won’t act in their interest.

If you want to a sales job, call the sales manager or Vice President of Sales and ask them for an interview.

Proving You Are the Right Candidate

When someone is hiring to fill an open position, they are trying to solve a problem. They need a solution, which means they need someone to have a conversation where they can explore the change they need, what the right solution looks like, and who might be the best partner to work with them in producing those results.

When you call the sales manager or Vice President of Sales, you need only say, “I am calling you to ask you for an interview, and if you end up hiring me, I will call your dream clients and ask them directly for a meeting, just like I am doing now.” By making this call, you make it very difficult for the person on the other end of the phone to reject your request for an interview, as you will be a category of precisely one. You are also demonstrating the willingness to engage in the one activity that they wish they had more of, namely outbound prospecting.

No hiring manager, sales manager, or Vice President of Sales has any real idea how well a newly-hired salesperson is going to perform, but they will worry about whether or not they are going to prospect and create new opportunities. Your call will resolve that concern in your favor—provided you’ve got the chops when you sit down for an interview.

The post The Easy Way to Get a Job In Sales Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When you think B2B sales, do you find you suddenly needing a nap? Does it bore you silly? I know it does me!

That doesn’t bode well for the future of sales!

I mean, think about it. The sales process today is about as exciting as standing in line at the post office:

• Pick up the phone
• Say your pitch
• Have your objections prepared
• Convince the potential customer they need your service or product

Maybe after a follow-up call or two, you close the sale. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you meet them for coffee or swap pleasantries at a conference. Either way, it’s always the same.

I just can’t get behind this any longer.

We need to couple new, modern sales tactics with the basics that made us the highest earners in organizations worldwide.

We need to reject the idea that only younger, newer generations can keep up and adapt to changing technology.

We need to think of ways the entire community can revolutionize the future of selling.

We need to think about what the new virtual handshake will look like and how buyers will want to buy tomorrow.

Keep reading to learn why the old virtual handshake has run its course, the #1 thing you can do to turn things around, and a simple way to start getting real results now.

The Old Virtual Handshake Isn’t Enough

2014 saw the rise of marketing automation. It’s the year mail sequences became the new norm for sales teams across the entire tech community.

And for a short time, it worked!

Email felt like the answer to all of our problems. We hacked the system and created a new tool for shaking people’s hands — 100% virtual and automated.

What we didn’t realize, though, was the expiration date — all good things must come to an end. The future of sales can’t rely on technology or channels.

Email is the perfect example of what I’m saying. We’ve pummeled it as a channel, forgotten how to call people and build rapport, and worked backward to the same top-of-funnel metrics we were getting 15 years ago.

Email and automation haven’t made us more human. They’ve taken the human out of the sales equation. And they’ve hurt our ability to sell.

The sacred pitch simply can’t be automated to that extent.

But there’s more going on than just “channel overload.” We need to adapt the sales flow for the modern buyer journey, so it’s more relevant to:

• The way people buy today
• How much shorter their attention spans are
• How much more Informed they are

When you look at where we’re at today, email open rates are at an all-time low. (Yeah, it’s not just you. Everyone’s struggling with this.) Human interactions aren’t really happening. Couple that with the level of automation necessary to make any type of contact, and… well… sales has become hard!

Here’s just some of what I’m seeing…

Some sellers have done so much automation, they’ve forgotten how to communicate authentically. They’ve become reliant on systems that let you automate 3–4 emails and grab the attention of a single buyer. They don’t even know how to engage with anyone on a personal basis anymore.

Other sellers have been left behind. They’ve never truly adapted to the digital age.

For those that have, they’re all using the same hacks. LinkedIn is a good example of this: direct messages have turned into spam.

Looking at all of this, it’s easy to think we’re in trouble.

But I’m not here to rag on what’s not working. It’s just that we sometimes need to take an honest look at what’s going on in the industry. And I want to assure you, it’s not all bad. There’s plenty of hope in sight.

The Pendulum Swing

We’re seeing a huge pendulum shift back to the basics…

Away from automation overload and towards more human-to-human (H2H) interaction.

In fact, human-to-human interaction is standing out as THE solution to everything I’ve outlined above. It’s where sales began, and it’s definitely the future of sales.

It’s a simple way to cut through the noise of bots and trigger points — and one of the few ways that actually works. Even more important, social media is bringing a level of authenticity that salespeople and brands alike have never experienced before.

But I say all this with an important caveat…

It’s tempting to take what’s working now — in this case, human interaction and social media — and try to systematize it so you can do it at scale.

But that’s a sure way to overload yet another channel like we’ve done with email. The point is to be human, not to create a system out of human-esque channels. It’s important to approach everything we do differently, so we can get better results.

For one, research is crucial.

By this, I’m not talking about just reading a company’s annual report. I’m talking about knowing your landscape… and let’s face it, it’s becoming increasingly complex. You need to know as much as the buyer does, which means research on your competitive landscape is more important than ever.

G2 will be the lens by which the buyer views your company for the next 4–5 years, so get smart.

Second, in the age of bots and artificial intelligence, it’s critical that we come off as human.

Be human and build your network on social channels. It’s your best shot at coming off as NOT automated.

Show value and build an audience of your future buyers that you can activate over the years. Share opinions and insights that they can’t get elsewhere. That’s the reason you used to work with your local mortgage broker or agent — they knew something you didn’t.

Through social media, you can build a global network that all relies on you for its insights.

The Future of Sales: A New Virtual Handshake

Okay, so you’ve heard my thoughts now on the future of sales: What’s been working isn’t anymore. And the #1 way to fix that is to become genuinely human.

Now, let’s get tactical.

How do you, as a human salesperson, make sure you come off as human? Isn’t that a given?

Believe it or not, no. To be human, you need to be personal and relevant. You need to sound like you’re talking face to face with someone, even if you’re working from a keyboard and even if you’re sending bulk emails that were written by your marketing department.

So how do you do that? How can you scale your efforts and still be human? Let’s take a look.

Be a Human

My advice to salespeople: Pick up the phone and tap into your interpersonal skills (EQ).

According to a DiscoverOrg survey, 55% of high-growth companies — those who experienced a minimum of 40% growth over the previous three years — stated that cold calling is very much alive.

Cut through the noise. Don’t shy away from cold calls.

In addition to that, be a student of people. Review your people skills and commit to improving them.

A simple way to do that: Review your calls. Just as pro athletes review game tapes, you need to listen to yourself talking to prospects. That’s the only way you’re going to identify areas for improvement.

And remember, 93% of all interactions are nonverbal, so over the phone, it’s more about your tone and reactions. You need to sound empathetic and energetic.

• Avoid sounding like you’re reading from a script.
• Have a reason for calling that matters, and make sure you sound like you care.
• Don’t be afraid to deviate from the script if it will help you build a better human connection.

Which brings me to my next point…

Be Social

You need to be active on social media.

There, you can use your expertise and industry knowledge to restore (or should I say, start building?) people’s trust in salespeople everywhere.

Don’t give information that someone could google in 30 seconds or less. Instead, offer real value and expertise.

Use LinkedIn every day to find your buyers and interact with them before you even try to pitch your product. Remember, LinkedIn isn’t the new channel for spamming people with cold pitches. It’s a networking channel, so use it for that purpose.

You may think you aren’t an expert, that you don’t have value to add. But you do. You most likely know more about your little specific niche than most buyers. Share your insights as an insider in your world.

Here how I do this:

• I connect with someone in LinkedIn.
• Meanwhile, I post 1–2 times a day like clockwork.
• Then, after they’ve had a chance to get to know me, I send relevant voicemails and videos to my new connection’s LinkedIn inbox.

Yes, you can do this now. And yes, you can do it without it coming off as spam.

Many times my posts are based on a specific conversation I’ve had with a CEO or sales rep. I post my insights on the topic in order to add a little color to the topic.

You can do the same thing, sharing stories from your interactions with people, then adding your insights. Those insights, if they’re well thought out, can help other people get to know you. They also have the potential to help people solve similar problems in their own world.

Bam! Now you’re an influencer, and that makes you a welcome guest in someone’s message box.

Tying It All Together

My friends, it has never been a more exciting time to be in sales than right now. But you have to change.

You have to understand that technology is only valuable if it improves efficiency and effectiveness.

Automation is efficient, sure, but is it effective? That’s all that matters.

You can create a sales organization (and a sales machine) that is both efficient and effective when you:

• Harness technology to make information more accessible to your buyers
• Give them relevant content that aids with their decision making
• Really connect with them as a human and build trust in a successful potential partnership

The human element of sales is alive and kicking, but we have to figure out the right time and way to let technology handle certain activities. We humans should handle the rest.

It’s not either/or. It’s both.

Bottom Line

If you fear automation, technology, and robots taking your job, make yourself irreplaceable. Cut out the parts of your job a bot could do and start offering real human value to your buyers.

In turn, you’ll sell more and you’ll have nothing to fear. We’ve taken automation too far. Let’s get back to basics.

The post The New Virtual Handshake and How to Get It Right (Hint: It’s the Future of Sales) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Editor’s Note: This is Part 4 of a 5-part series to assist you in hitting your goals during the slow summer months. You can catch up on Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Fewer sales during the summer slump mean fewer customers to onboard. But, it’s important not to forget your current customers and making them as successful as possible. We outlined resources to help you not only onboard new customers, but help current customers thrive.

Intercom on How Product Education Plays a Critical Role in the Customer Journey
Intercom’s key focus is on creating happy customers – a focus that has allowed them to have massive success. Their Senior Manager of Product Education explains why they built a Product Education team and strategies for creating your own.

Customer Success Plan: Key for Adoption and Expansion
A Customer Success Plan is critical for efficient adoption and effective ongoing expansion of your customers. Learn the importance of creating this plan for your organization and how to implement it here.

Customer Churn is Everyone’s Problem: Here’s Why You Should give Your CS Team a Break
30% of SaaS companies report having unacceptable levels of churn and it’s tempting to point fingers at the customer success team for these issues. Retention should be everyone’s KPI – here’s why.

Why Does Customer Success Fear Revenue?
The topic of Customer Success owning revenue is a consistently debated topic. Both sides of the debate are outlined and the key to solving these challenges.

Podcasts

How Typeform Leveraged Customer Success to Scale to Over 3M Users
Typeform leaders knew it was important to invest in customer success during the early stages of the business. David Apple, VP of CS, breaks down the team structure that has helped scale the business to over 3M users. Learn where to draw the line when it comes to segmenting customers who warrant a dedicated CS resource vs. purely self-service experience and the leading indicators associated with the success of the team.

How Dropbox Scaled with Customer Success as Their Secret Weapon [Podcast]
Dropbox sees Customer Success as a lot more than just churn prevention. Find out the key metrics they track, the importance of becoming a trusted advisor to users and educating them on using the product in new ways.

Appcues’ Jonathan Kim on the Art of Onboarding [Podcast]
Co-founder & CEO, Jonathan Kim, explains how to master the art of a meaningful onboarding experience through personalization and humanization. Listen to learn about their definition of product led growth, where they’ve seen sales add the most value and what he sees for the future of UX. You’ll also find out how to maximize impact if you’re designing onboarding for the first time.

The post Summer Slump Series: Resources to Thrive in Customer Success appeared first on OpenView.

• Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard are all drawing up plans to move huge chunks of production out of China, Nikkei Asian Review reports.
• For Google, Amazon, and Microsoft the main areas of concern are games consoles, e-readers, and smart speakers. For Dell and HP, notebooks are where they're looking to shift production.
• It follows the Nikkei Asian Review also reporting that Apple wants to reduce its exposure to China because of ongoing uncertainty around the trade war.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

US tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard are all gearing up to start shifting production away from China amid the trade war, Nikkei Asian Review reports.

Citing multiple sources, Nikkei reports that all five companies have been scouting various other Asian countries as potential new homes for electronics production.

This is the latest chapter in the tech cold war which has snowballed substantially amid President Donald Trump's trade war with China.

Nikkei reported last month that Apple was seriously considering moving 15% to 30% of its iPhone production out of China, in an early sign that US companies want to reduce their exposure to the country as uncertainty continues.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft

Games consoles and smart speakers are the primary concern for Silicon Valley giants Google, Amazon, and Microsoft — along with Sony and Nintendo.

Amazon is looking at moving production of its e-readers and Echo smart speakers to Vietnam, Nikkei said. Microsoft is weighing up Thailand and Indonesia, presumably for production of the Xbox, as well as its less well-known Cortana speaker.

Read more: Here are the US states that could be hit hardest by the "tech cold war"

Nikkei gave no details about where Google might consider moving production of its Google Home smart speakers.

Trump's tariffs pose a major existential threat to video game consoles. Last week, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo wrote a joint letter to the US government asking to be exempted from the tariffs because of the "disproportionate harm" they would cause to US consumers and business.

Dell and HP

For Dell and HP, notebook computers are the main area where the companies are looking to move production. The two companies shipped a combined 70 million notebook devices last year, according to Nikkei, most of which were made in China.

Dell is already trialling notebook production in Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, according to two people familiar with the plan.

Two sources said HP is looking to shift 20% to 30% of production out of the country, and is eyeing up Thailand and Taiwan as potential alternatives. One source said the changes could begin as early as late July, but were still liable to change.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, and HP were not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

SEE ALSO: THE TECH COLD WAR: Everything that's happened in the new China-US tech conflict involving Google, Huawei, Apple, and Trump

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Google finally revealed Stadia pricing, games, and release date

B2C marketing always takes the credit for being emotionally evocative, creative, and envelope-pushing. B2B marketing, on the other hand, has tended to lean in favor of a more rational approach to marketing. With a more stern, business-like attitude, B2B marketers attempt to appeal to buyers based on business value.

Several years ago, Google teamed up with CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council to conduct a survey eliciting feedback from 3,000 purchasers of 36 B2B brands across multiple industries. If you’re not familiar with the survey, the results may surprise you.

They shouldn’t.

In short, B2B buyers are far more emotionally connected to their vendors than are consumers to B2C brands. And why wouldn’t that make sense? Most consumer purchases are a low-risk proposition; a person wants something and they buy it. If it doesn’t meet their needs or they are unhappy, they return it.

But B2B purchases involve a lot of risk—potentially millions of dollars involving multiple parties and people and outcomes are at stake.

Of course B2B buyers are emotionally connected. There’s no purchase without the emotional connection in place to help overcome the risk hurdle.

B2B Marketing: Quick Look at the Numbers

The Google-CEB survey had some titillating findings:

• Most B2C brands haven emotional connections with somewhere between 10% and 40% of customers. On the B2B side? Seven out of nine of the B2B brands had emotional connections with more than 50% of their customers.
• From a buyer’s perspective, B2B buyers are nearly 50% more apt to make a purchase where they can see personal value (e.g., it poses an opportunity for career advancement)
• B2B buyers are eight times more likely to pay a premium where they feel this personal value is present.
• Only 14% of B2B businesses affirmatively answered that they could “see a real difference between suppliers and value the difference enough to pay for it”

So for B2B businesses trying to sell based on business value alone, this should shift your sense of reality.

Factors that Add to Complexity

There are quite a few reasons that the B2B marketing differs from B2C marketing. Most notably, the aim of B2B buyers is to procure solutions that satisfy logic, utility and ROI. Consumers, on the other hand, tend to be drawn to emotionalism, materialism, and a little bit of logic.

Digging deeper into the details, B2B marketing requires understanding and consideration of the following speed bumps on the path to purchase:

• purchasing committees
• third-party buying consultants
• corporate procurement processes
• Long, complex purchase process
• High transaction cost
• Long-term commitment
• Potentially long-term impacts to purchase decisions (reputation, performance, ROI)
• Results and business value are highly prioritized in decision-making

In looking at this list of purchasing motivations and challenges, it’s clear that corporate pressure exists to “get it right” or perhaps more importantly to not get it wrong. And this is absolutely a true sentiment. But it shouldn’t negate a marketing strategy that can evoke the right emotions to get buyers to play ball. In fact, those two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive at all.

Three T’s and a C

I’ve read articles that say that even when trying to elicit emotional responses in B2B, there are certain things that are off-limits. Some say that things like nostalgia or humor will bring about the wrong types of emotional responses or even cause a disconnect between you and your B2B buyers.

I disagree.

We humans are complex, and while it seems logical that we can separate out our emotions one by one, the reality is that it is much more complicated than that. For some people, humor may invoke more feelings of trust than anything else. For another, that may not be the case.

I think where the real focus needs to be is in crafting a meaningful story around your brand, product, and service that presents business value with a healthy dose of humanity in order to inspire what I call the “Three T’s and a C”:

• Trust
• Transparency
• Teamwork
• Credibility

These are the elements that B2B buyers crave when looking for potential vendors: a credible partner that can be trusted to provide a solution in an honest, upfront manner. In order to evoke those feelings, B2B marketers must break the traditional marketing mold and cozy up to the idea that emotional connection can surmount many obstacles on the path to purchase.

Of course, understanding the modern B2B customer path to purchase and aligning your content marketing strategy accordingly is important. But the content you create and distribute as part of that strategy must be geared toward the Three Ts & a C to inspire meaningful action that moves prospects closer to a sale.

How to Inspire Emotional Connection With Your B2B Brand

Forging an emotional connection with B2B buyers requires careful research and consideration. For starters, you better have a solid grasp on your buyer or audience persona. You need to understand who you are creating content for and the main issues and pain points they face. Armed with a problem to solve, you can begin to look at how you frame that up to compel further consideration of your company.

Embrace Humanity

B2B buyers are doing a significant amount of research prior to purchase and sifting through what is likely boring, uninspired content. To stand out, businesses must create content that appeals to humans—not just businesses or titles.

To do this, you must put yourself in your decision maker’s shoes and consider what personal roadblocks or ramifications they face because of the “big picture” pain point. Perhaps it’s aggravation at a process that isn’t streamlined. Or maybe it’s confusion due to lack of the appropriate insights they need to do their job well. Whatever it may be, hone in on it and build a story around it.

Be Genuine

Embrace your business—the good and the not so good. Authenticity and sincerity can go a long way with an audience that is used to digesting nothing more than marketing hype. Add a little brand personality and don’t shy away from talking about missteps or outright failures—if they can help your audience.

When a business opts to be genuine rather than put on the marketing mask of “For the past 20 years, we’ve been awesome at…”, it inspires trust. You don’t have to be self-denigrating, but don’t be afraid to paint an honest picture about your business, even if it includes some hiccups you encountered along the way.

Stop Self-Censoring

Often times, B2B marketers are driven to strip any sense of vulnerability out of the process. This self-censoring can tear away any shred of meaningfulness out of marketing collateral and turn it into dry, dull, stale content.

More importantly, a little bit of vulnerability goes a long way in building credibility. Exposing the real side of your business—and the people and personalities that make up your organization—puts a face to the logo and inspires connection with the people to whom you’re trying to sell.

Conclusion

Don’t fall into the stern, authoritative sandtrap. Think outside the box when it comes to your B2B marketing strategy and push the boundaries of the traditional marketing framework. The data clearly highlights that B2B buyers are looking for emotional connection and that sparking that connection can have a real impact on your bottom line.

Don’t shy away from presenting a true (and perhaps slightly imperfect) picture of what your business is, stands for, and does. You’re either building trust with your audience or fading into the online sea of white noise. Be original. Be a little weird. Just keep it real.

This post originally appeared on the Content Rewired blog.

This is such a true statement. If you successfully launch your tool, you can get a high number of visitors to your site. These visitors can become daily users and accelerate your revenue goal.

Even in our own team, we didn’t know this at first. We wanted to move our startup further along and find ways to shout about our SEO tool to a broader audience. As we brainstormed, we also came up with the idea of ​​launching the tool at Product Hunt. Finally, we tagged this idea with a lower priority and postponed it. Later, we got back to it, prepared it properly, and the final results surprised us pleasantly. Thanks to PH, we have received positive feedback on the tool, along with many new registered or paying customers.

Product Hunt is full of people who are passionate about technology, designers, marketers and developers in need to make their work or life easier by using better applications. Whatever your application is, launch it on Product Hunt!

Spotibo is a specific tool that can’t be used by everyone. It’s an SEO analyzer that can only be used by a person who has his own website or by a consultant helping a client with search engine optimization. This is the reason why we were surprised by the feedback and reach we achieved.

So, I am happy to share our results and strategy with you.

What are the main goals of a PH campaign?

To get traffic and new customers. I won’t tell you how to turn traffic into buyers, but I’ll tell you how to get traffic to your site from Product Hunt. To get the maximum results, try to be in the top 5. If your product makes it to the top of the list, all Product Hunt email subscribers will receive a newsletter a day later, where your tool will shine and you will get even more traffic.

Top hunts during our launch day. Our profile on PH here.

What web traffic to expect?

The answer to this question is very subjective. If you prepare everything for the launch in the best possible way, then you can expect traffic to be numerous times higher than you are used to on a regular basis.

In our case, we added 1,596% more new users during the launch day compared with the previous day. The traffic kept coming during the next two days in high numbers, too.

And what about online attention and backlinks?

We received dozens of tweets on Twitter, so the attention was big! But what was more interesting to us were backlinks.

We love backlinks. We are SEO specialists, so we know how domain authority is important, and that backlinks can help us to get better rankings. We also know how hard it is to get them.

After the launch, people started writing about the tool spontaneously, and for free! They published reviews and guides on how to analyze SEO, and they published it not only in English but also in different languages.

How to prepare for the launch:

When I was preparing the Product Hunt checklist for my team, I got inspired by this checklist from SpreadShare. In their checklist, there are tons of cool tips to not forget any single step throughout the process of preparation, submission, outreach and follow-up. I created a short version of the checklist according to the needs of our own working plan, and we followed these 20 steps one by one.

There are several guides on how to run a Product Hunt campaign on the web, and I don’t want to repeat the same “tips” all over again. Instead, I will try to skip to the questions that came to my mind during the preparation itself and for which we were unable to find answers.

Do we need a product hunter?

When you look at the products on PH, you’ll see that some were submitted by the creator, and some were created by another person — by a product hunter. What is better? Honestly, I don’t know. Internet opinions vary. While someone explicitly recommends reaching out to a product hunter who would be willing to launch the product and support it in front of his PH followers, some say it is nonsense to annoy people who may have nothing to do with the success of the tool.

In the beginning, I went the first way, and I was looking for a product hunter who would be interested in our tool and could consider it a quality one. There is a list of the top 50 hunters where I approached three users via LinkedIn, and I have not received any answers.

So, I chose another strategy. I opened previously submitted products that were similar to our tool (some kind of competition). I rummaged among the users who supported, commented or submitted the products and started to outreach them. Finally, Nivas Ravichandran, who also wrote the article How to generate leads on Product Hunt, said yes! Although he is not in the top 50, the launch of the tool was smooth, and I think his support helped us.

Can I change product information submitted by a hunter?

Cool, I found someone who will do the job. But what if I need to change information about the tool later on? Can I do that?

Yes. Hunter tagged me and our CEO as makers, giving us the right to make any changes. In addition, we could also add a comment under the product to describe our story and the problem we are trying to solve with our product.

When is the best time for launching?

The answer is simple – 00:01 Pacific time (PT). At that time, a new day starts on Product Hunt. The sooner you get to the list of products, the more time you will have for promoting it and to succeed.

After launching our tool, I noticed that other products popped up in similar time. During the day, more projects had been added, but only a few. This lowered their chances of getting a larger number of upvotes — a lot!

It was so important that our product hunter knew that our product needed to be posted during that time. He wouldn’t have done that if it was 3 a.m. and he had been sleeping. We were lucky because it was 9 a.m. for us in Europe, 2 p.m. for our hunter and midnight in Pacific time.

What promo materials do I need to prepare?

All these promo materials are needed:

• Screenshots of the tool
• Logo
• Title
• Short description
• Creator comment

Be sure to be as creative as possible in this section of preparation. Design and fun play a big part on Product Hunt.

We tried to play with the logo (for which we eventually created the gif), title, keywords and emoticons. On the other hand, we didn’t prepare a breathtaking video, and our picture materials could have also needed the touch of a graphic designer.

Do I need to support my website?

Yes, you do. Although we received 1,300 sessions, our tool was a bit overloaded, and unfortunately, we had some blackouts. Throughout the day, our developers were ready to act immediately.

Should I create a landing page?

We were also thinking if we should create a landing page specifically for PH. Some makers create a landing page that contains some graphics edits. Some of them also provided discount code. Some makers don’t adjust the landing page at all.

We decided to add a simple banner with a discount to the top bar. I think it was a good decision. Users of Product Hunt who clicked through our site saw that they were in the right place. In addition, I consider it more professional if the launch is ready on all fronts.

The discount prompted several users to buy our tool, which was a good outcome.

What we had forgotten and what we considered to be important after the fact was the preparation of this landing page for indexing on Google. Our PH optimized landing page was duplicate (https://spotibo.com/seo-analyzer?ref=producthunt to https://spotibo.com/seo-analyzer). After we got increased traffic, mentions from Twitter and a few backlinks, Google started indexing this page, and we really didn’t want that.

Therefore, when creating a new landing page for PH, do not forget to place a canonical tag in the header of the page. That should ensure Google understands which URL is unique and which one is duplicate.

Can I promote it?

Yes and no.

Upvote requesting is not officially allowed. Be aware that you can’t ask friends or users for upvoting. Although, you should absolutely tell your clients or followers that it’s a big thing for you and they should check it out.

During our launch, we were constantly monitoring the development of upvotes, along with the comments we were answering. At the beginning of the day, the tool remained at fourth or fifth place. After a few hours, another product took over. Suddenly, we were in the sixth position. I was surprised. and I was also worried we would stay in sixth place and thus we would not get to the top 5 products of the day. But the more I observed the product that took over ours, the more I began to suspect the unfair practices they used to get more upvotes and comments. The numbers grew rapidly, and the users who were involved were mostly newly-established accounts.

A few hours later, the product with a higher number of upvotes fell to a position under Spotibo. The team at PH probably judged that they were using unauthorized promo and manually moved them down.

The lesson is clear — don’t push hard, because you can get into trouble and you will not get to the top 5. Upvotes must look as natural as possible; and shouldn’t be received only from new accounts or users from one country.

My final advice is — do not hesitate and launch as soon as your product is ready; it’s worth it.

Increasing online sales is the number one goal of every business out there no matter its size. The reason for this is very simple – there can be no growth or profit increase without the increase in sales figures.

Grabbing your potential customers’ attention and engaging them on your website are some of the first – but also crucial – steps on the journey to higher sales. Your website is the most valuable marketing asset you possess and so it needs to be your primary marketing weapon.

Therefore, you have to do everything you can to optimize it for sales. However, this process is definitely not easy. That is why we are going to break down the whole process into a few segments:

·        website design

·        video marketing

·        content marketing

·        converting sales page

Website Design

Your business is only as strong as your website. If visitors get poor design and slow load speeds, this will only increase your bounce rate. In other words, they will leave really fast, before they had a chance to even think about doing something that would be beneficial to your business.

Visuals

It takes much longer to load a website with data-intensive graphics and photos than a sleek, clean, simply designed website with minimal graphics. That is why using simple visuals can result in better user experience and quicker load speeds.

Throwing in a few minimal, brand-specific graphic elements such as your logo, along with the artful and intentional use of color can go a long way. On top of that, it will be a true pleasure to navigate through the website.

Themes and plugins

Website themes and plugins often greatly affect the user experience. For example, a website theme can either make or break a website created in WordPress. That is exactly why you should look for WordPress themes that are aesthetically pleasing as well as responsive.

Also, you should be careful with the WordPress plugins you choose, since some of them are not up to standard, as they can significantly slow down your website. So, instead of installing dozens of plugins and slowing down your website that way, keep it simple and stick to a few of the essential ones.

Mobile-friendly

It was back in 2016 that mobile devices became a more popular way to access the internet than desktop computers. However, it seems that many entrepreneurs still don’t realize that.

It is crucial to optimize your website for mobile access since more and more people browse the internet using their mobile devices.

In order to make your website mobile-friendly, you should include tappable elements and make the navigation easy, but also avoid using large images and flash video. In a word, functionality has to be the top priority when optimizing for mobile devices.

Speaking of mobile, did you know that SMS marketing is one of the less-known ways to increase sales? With a reliable SMS API, this channel can do wonders for your sales and marketing results.

Video Marketing

Nothing can tell a story like an engaging video. Or two. Video marketing is gradually becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools and that is why including video content on your website is a must.

Video marketing allows you to tell a story about your business and engage your potential customers in a unique way, bringing your services and products to life. Of course, great photos and effective descriptions will do the trick, but in a video, you can demonstrate all of the benefits and features of your products in a much more effective way.

Through video marketing, you can show what you have to offer, use humor, tell a story, or even add music. With all this being said, it is really no surprise that you can considerably increase sales with video marketing.

Video testimonials

Photo by CoWomen from Pexels

Video testimonials are part of video marketing. They combine two great elements of digital marketing – video and customer feedback.

In video testimonials, people can see a real customer talking about the benefits of a product or service. This has proved to be quite an effective way to drive sales, but not many businesses have implemented it yet. Taking this to your advantage and creating video testimonials is a great way to make your business stand out in your industry.

The best thing of all is that video testimonials allow you to communicate through gestures and tone, and thus impact your customers’ emotions. In a video clip, you can use the entire spectrum of human communication to convey your message to the viewer, and that means that you have a chance to engage your visitors better.

Content Marketing

With content marketing, you create and promote valuable and relevant content to attract and retain your target audience. This is a tried-and-true way to generate sales leads since it allows your leads to find you more easily.

Content marketing has become quite popular over the years and that is hardly a surprise. It gets 3 times more leads per dollar spent when compared to paid search and it’s right there at the top when it comes to efficiency. In addition, content marketing produces 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Finally, your content can take many forms that can be shared on social media or through email newsletter, but running a blog is generally the most common way. So, consider including a helpful and informative blog on your website, as this can be a great strategy for bringing in more leads and ultimately driving more sales.

Great Sales Page

The sales page on your website is there to drive sales conversions and that is why it is one of the most important pages on the website. By coming up with a converting sales page, you will boost your revenue and profit.

Understand your audience

There can be no great sales copy without understanding the individuals you are addressing. Figure out who your audience is and what they are looking for when they consider making a purchase.

Create a buyer persona and get to know every single detail about them. The buyer persona represents your ideal customer and it’s based on real data from customer surveys, web analytics, and social media analytics.

When you figure out who your ideal customer is, you will understand your prospect’s demographics and psychographics, pain points, challenges, and motivations. Only then will you be able to come up with a copy that resonates with the right people.

Value proposition

Once you’ve figured out who your customers are, you will be able to articulate your value proposition. That is a statement of the benefit you can provide and the problem you can solve for the customer.

This should be a single sentence or a short phrase that will guide the rest of your copy. Luckily, if you just do an online search, you can find a number of tips to create an effective value proposition.

The right price

Ask yourself how much the product you are offering costs. This question should come before you sit down to write your sales page.

Know that for many customers, the price is a crucial factor. And that is why you need to get it right. Also, you may want to offer more than one pricing plan and label them with descriptive names to help users select the best option for them.

Bonus Tip: Live Chat

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Finally, consider adding the live chat feature to your website to allow the visitors to instantly connect to a customer service representative.

Through live chat, they can get answers to their questions or address a complaint. And it can also be used to help complete a purchase. The bottom line is that live chat improves customer service and customer service can determine whether you will drive more sales or not.

It may not seem like much, but the live chat feature can really do wonders when it comes to driving more sales.

About the author

Duran Inci is an Internet technology executive and digital marketing keynote speaker 15+ years of experience in e-business, e-commerce systems, integrations, custom programming, SaaS and digital marketing including content marketing, paid search and client acquisition/lead generation.

Featured Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

For the last decade or more, it’s been an accepted principle – almost a key tenet – of B2B demand generation that business buyers don’t want to talk to a sales rep until the last possible moment.

It’s why, for example, we marketers have assumed control for more and more of the lead funnel. There was once a time when we would generate a lead and our job would be done. Now that lead has to be nurtured, educated, scored, enriched, appended and qualified before we would dare hand it off to sales.

Well, that very basic assumption, that business buyers prefer to be anonymous and self-directed, and uninterested in engaging with sales until they’re absolutely ready to buy, may be in question.

Last week, the folks at Demand Gen Report released their “2019 B2B Buyers Survey Report,” and one of their key findings, supported by multiple data points, was this:

“Buyers are accelerating the time to engage with sales reps so they can make decisions as quickly – or as slowly – as desired.”

For example, 42% of the executives surveyed in the report said that they spoke to and engaged with reps in the first month, compared to only 33% just 12 months earlier.

---

If this finding is true, and genuinely indicative of a larger trend, it could have major ramifications for the way in which B2B demand marketers manage leads. Now, I’m not about to advocate that we all dismantle our lead nurturing programs and hand off leads to sales at the first opportunity, but there are more incremental steps that companies can take to ensure – if buyers are indeed ready to engage earlier in the process – that they have the opportunity to do so. For example:

* Lead Scoring. How well does your current lead scoring program identify prospects exhibiting signs of buyer intent? Are you capturing Web behavior such as visits to high-value pages? Are you integrating third-party intent data? A highly tuned lead scoring program will help ensure that motivated buyers receive the appropriate attention and don’t fall through the proverbial cracks.

* Sales Alerts. How well does your current lead management process alert reps – be they BDRs or field reps – to high-intent behavior? If sales is alerted to virtually any sign of interest on the part of a prospect (say, an email click), those alerts quickly become worthless and duly ignored. Re-evaluate your current system to ensure that there’s a hierarchy of alerts – from emails to assigned tasks – that properly align with different types of prospect behavior. For example, at our agency, we use Slack channels to alert specific sales execs when a prospect requests to “contact sales.”

* Gated & Secondary Offers. There’s a trend in our business towards ungated offers and “reducing friction” in the demand generation process, but I’ve always argued that gating offers – even in a nurture stream where you already know who the individual is – provides a valuable opportunity to drive additional engagement by serving up what I call “secondary offers.”

Secondary offers are calls to action – usually placed on a thank you page or in a fulfillment email – related to the action the prospect just took – as in: thank you for downloading our white paper, here’s a recorded Webinar you might like. The notion that prospects are ready to engage more quickly also suggests that late stage offers – ROI calculators, demos, product data sheets, case studies – should be introduced, or at least presented, earlier in the process for those prospects who might be ready to take the next step.

* Conversational Marketing. I wrote very recently in this space about the huge potential for integrating chatbots, and what is being referred to as “conversational marketing,” into the demand generation process. Indeed, one of the primary use cases for chatbots is increasing the rate at which Web visitors and other prospects engage with sales. If this buyer behavior trend is true, there’s an even stronger case for including chatbots on thank you pages, for example, where they can help to identify more highly motivated prospects, and connect them with a sales rep immediately.

Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

Call email old school, but it works.

According to a study by technalysis research, “old-school” methods of communication and collaboration like email, phone calls, and text account for a whopping 75 percent of all communications.

Besides utility, research also shows that email is a big driver of revenue when it comes to commerce: email was responsible for a whopping 24 percent of sales generated during the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday period.

While this generation and the coming generation is likely to be very reliant on social media, and the power of social networks like Instagram and Snapchat to drive commerce is being continually demonstrated, email isn’t dead yet – and if currently available data is anything to go by, you will be smart to integrate your email and social media marketing efforts.

Here are some tips for you:

Use Social Media to Enhance Your Email List Growth

Take a look at the following very interesting chart:

The above chart, courtesy of Convince & Convert, shows two things very clearly:

1. Organic Facebook reach is continuing to rapidly decline.
2. The decline in organic Facebook reach correlates with an increase in Facebook stock price.

This makes one thing clear: It is in Facebook’s best business interest to make it increasingly difficult for publishers to reach their fans on Facebook’s platform. It is the same for other social networks.

While declining organic reach is good news for Facebook and its investors, it is bad news for brands with a Facebook page — and organic reach on social media will continue to decline for as long as it makes business sense to these social networks.

As you grow your social media presence, it is important to channel much of that growing social media attention towards growing your email list as well. You can do this in a series of ways:

• Introduce an option to subscribe to your newsletter directly from your Facebook page by using Facebook’s custom tabs option.
• Use Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards to drive sign ups to your newsletter.
• Run social media contests and giveaways with the aim of boosting signups to your newsletter.
• Regularly remind your social media followers to sign up to your newsletter.
• Use your social media bio and pinned status updates to create more awareness for your newsletter.

Make it Take the Email Conversation to Social Media

One advantage social media has, and will always have, over email is its inherent viral nature: it is much easier for content to spread on social media than in email, and this can be used to your advantage.

Most people simply write their emails, end with a conclusion, and then leave it at that. By doing this, a lot of potential to create more awareness about your newsletter and grow it is being wasted.

You can integrate your email and social media marketing by making it easy to carry on the conversation from your newsletter to social media: whether it is simply sharing that particular email (which helps social media users preview your content and possibly opt in to your newsletter for more), highlight key sections of your email and have readers share it, or encourage readers to carry on the conversation to top social networks like Twitter and Facebook, most email marketing services automate this and make it easy to integrate your email service with your social account, automating the process of sharing your entire emails or sharing key sections of your emails — a feature you should be sure to take advantage of.

Leverage Your Email Data to Enhance Your Social Media Campaigns

 

A sweet spot of email/social integration is using your email database to enhance the quality of your social media campaigns.

Most social media sites will allow you to create a super targeted audience that share similar characteristics with your actual audience. Facebook calls this a “lookalike audience.” LinkedIn, on the other hand, calls it “Matched Audiences.” The idea is simple: by uploading a sample database of your audience, the social media site can use this data to create a database of similar audience on their platform and allow you to target them.

Targeting lookalike audiences is one of the best ways to get the best bang for your social ad buck. In fact, research by Google found that lookalike audiences generally result in 60 percent more impressions, 48 percent more clicks, and 41 percent more conversions for advertisers. It generally costs less, too.

To get started, create a database of your most responsive email subscribers: Facebook allows you to upload a list of up to 50,000 people for a start. This list will then be used to create an audience with similar interests to those you created, and that you can target.

Some tips:

• Facebook allows you to upload a list of up to 50,000 people for a start. It’s not all about quantity though, but the quality of the subscribers you’re uploading.
• If you can, don’t create a lookalike audience simply based on all your email subscribers; create a lookalike audience based on your most active subscribers (such as based on paying customers or the average order value of a customer).
• It is important to note that you can create different audience segments from the same email data or by uploading different segments of your list.

Conclusion

While social media is the preferred communications method of the future, email isn’t dead, and it isn’t dying yet. As you continue to grow your social media presence, it is wise to leverage it to grow your email list as well. Integrating your email and social media efforts won’t only protect you from organic social reach decline, it will also result in maximum ROI for you.

Recently, someone made a comment saying, “It’s interesting to see cold calling coming back into style…..”

The comment startled me, and I can see where the speaker was coming from, but I couldn’t have disagreed more.

The reality is cold calling has never gone out of style. As you look at the performance of consistent top sales performers, you see they always have held themselves accountable for making sure they generated a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve their goals, quarter after quarter, year after year.

These top performers realized they needed to find these opportunities, hunting for them. They never relied on inbound or others to find those opportunities, instead thinking of them as incremental to what they generated.

Unfortunately, there has been too much noise, there have been too many claims by those who want to sell an alternative to cold calling, too much wishful thinking on the part of mediocre sales people.

These people have wanted cold calling to die. Sales people who don’t want to do the hard work. These sales people would also prefer most of the rest of the sales process would die as well, leaving them to take orders.

There are those who have a vested interest in convincing you that cold calling has died, because they have something they want you to buy. Yet, most data I’ve seen indicates these alternatives fail to consistently generate the volume of opportunities necessary to achieve our goals.

I’m not suggesting we not expand our methods of generating new opportunities. We need to leverage everything we can. Marketing must look for new ways of generating awareness and interest. Customers will increasingly look for information and insight in different places. We have to be present in those places.

Cold calling is important. It’s not just important to fill our pipelines, but it’s important because it enables us to capture customers in a different space, creating more value than we might through all our other demand generation.

Think about those customers that don’t recognize they have a problem or the opportunity to change. They are overwhelmed with just getting things done on a day to day basis. Our awareness and demand generation programs will never reach them. Our SEO optimization is meaningless because they aren’t searching, they aren’t looking to change.

Top performers have long recognized this. They realize their greatest opportunity to create value and differentiation is to incite customers to change, to help them imagine new possibilities.

Waiting for the customer to determine they have a need, waiting to intercept them on their search, or when they may a query, is often too late. When we get visibility to their “interest” they are already late in their problem solving cycle and, perhaps, very far through their buying cycle (depending on the research you believe, 57-92%). Intercepting them there decreases our opportunity to differentiate and maximize our value creation.

Top performers have always recognized these things. Cold calling has never gone out of style to them, it’s their competitive differentiation.

For everyone else, well, I think it’s actually tougher to sell and differentiate by waiting for the customer. I’ve never seen a sales person consistently make their numbers by waiting. And it’s harder to stand out. But go ahead and wait. It makes it easier for those that don’t.

Afterword: Please don’t get into a semantic debate of “cold,” versus “warm” or anything else. That’s just a diversion. Top performers know every cold call is a researched, prepared call.