Say you’re an ecommerce store owner who enjoys regular sales. What percentage of your customers have bought from you more than once?

If you’re like most owners, that number hovers right around “not enough” percent.

Me neither, Oprah!

And if you’re like virtually all ecommerce store owners, you’d like to see that number shoot up to 100%. After all, you probably know the old saying, “80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.”

There IS a way to bring buyers back for more, and it all starts in their inboxes.

Once their first purchase is complete, send your brand-new customers a welcome email or email series. Or, if you want to get fancy: a “post-purchase follow-up campaign”.

Let’s dig into what those emails should look like.

What’s a welcome email?

Now, when I talk about “welcome emails” and “welcome email series for ecommerce,” I’m NOT talking about transactional emails like receipts and shipping notifications. (Though there are plenty of ways to get repeat customers from receipt emails, too. It’s basically the whole reason Conversio was founded.)

I’m talking about the emails you send after the purchase cycle is complete. These are the emails that build your relationship with a first-time buyer, who’s just trusted you with his cash and his home address.

Creating a designated welcome email or series is a great way to ease first-time buyers into your email list, let them know what to expect, and let them reaffirm that they want to be there.

NOTE: At minimum, you should send at least one welcome email to new buyers before you roll them into your regular newsletter sending schedule. You can add more to the series later.

YET ANOTHER NOTE: Your post-purchase welcome email might well be the same as your “new signup email” (the one you send to subscribers, not necessarily buyers, who sign up to hear from you on your site).

That’s perfectly fine! But in the interest of increasing return buyers, we’re going to focus on the welcome email as a post-purchase follow-up today.

4 ways to build momentum toward the next purchase in your welcome email

1. Welcome customers to a community
2. Recommend other products they might like
3. Offer a discount
4. Introduce the makers or tell your origin story

1. Welcome customers to a community

The psychology of belonging has been widely researched. Let me sum it up for you: People like to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.

And while you probably won’t build a whole new religion based around your products, you CAN build a community of repeat customers with the right welcome email.

There are a few ways to make your welcome emails feel more, well, welcoming.

One excellent thing to do? Tell the customer what they can expect in future emails, and when to expect those emails.

Purple, a mattress company, sends an upbeat email that celebrates new subscribers and previews the content they’ll be sending out:

When your customer reads language like “What can you expect in return?” they subconsciously make a choice. They can decide to unsubscribe now, if they don’t see the value in what you’re promising. Or they can decide to stay on your list.

You can also bring new customers more deeply into the fold by inviting them to like, follow, and interact on social media.

Not only does this open up more avenues to engage with customers and retarget them, it ensures that your products stay in front of them even when you AREN’T shelling out on ads.

Here’s how Girlfriend Collective invites deeper engagement:

Why not go add an invitation to follow your store on social to your welcome email right now?

2. Recommend other products

Want to turn a one-time buyer into a repeat buyer? Dangle something else he’ll like right in front of his face. This is an easy opportunity to temporarily turn your customer’s inbox into a pop-up version of your store, so don’t overlook it!

You might already recommend additional products in your receipt email.

To maximize the effectiveness of your product recommendations, don’t forget to include tantalizing images.

Lush wastes no time welcoming new users and showing them a handful of other tantalizing products:

Fab, minus that itty bitty typo…

You’ll also want to make sure you’re segmenting your list and targeting/personalizing your recommendations by segment.

Recommending products in your email campaigns isn’t just an easy way to bump up your repeat sales — it can also be a valuable source of customer data.

Paying attention to which subscribers open or click inside your welcome email(s) can help you tailor future marketing strategy and campaigns.

For example, if you segment your list by “clicked in Welcome Email #1,” and “Didn’t Click in Welcome Email #1,” you might decide to spend a little more effort on nurturing the clickers toward a sale, since they’ve already shown interest.

Just getting started with product recommendations? Don’t worry too much about personalizing right now. Instead, feature your most popular products.

3. Offer a discount

Subscribe to enough ecommerce mailing lists, and you’ll notice a pattern in their welcome emails. Yep, that’s right: many of them offer a discount right off the bat.

Assuming you can take the hit to your margins, a discount code can be a quick, effective way to bring first-time buyers back to your store for a second round of shopping.

Pajama/underthings maker Sleepy Jones does a lovely job both welcoming users, and offering a 15% discount:

And so does Levi’s:

Psst — if your user doesn’t take advantage of the discount, go ahead and remind them to use it about 24 hours before it expires.

4. Show how your products are made, or introduce the makers

If your products are handcrafted or your store’s got an interesting origin story, share that info with your buyers in the welcome email!

Knowing how your products are made helps customers enjoy and value your products even more. It also helps create more buy-in between them and your store.

I love how watchmaker Shinola tells its store-y (sorry):

Reminds me of that song: “Getting to know you… Getting to like you…”

Sorry in advance for the earworm.

Repeat customers: Achievement unlocked

You might choose to use a combination of these four strategies in your welcome email, or go a totally different way. It’s up to you!

The only hard and fast rule of welcome emails is to keep in mind what your customers will find most valuable, and try to give it to them.

So just be helpful, and you’ll see your first-time buyers turn into loyal return customers.

How Private Label Sellers Can Get More Amazon Product Reviews (Legally)!

There are two types of reviews (feedback) on Amazon:

1. Product reviews – These can be found on the product listings page. They should be solely focused on the product itself.
2. Seller feedback – These can be found on the seller’s profile. This is where the buyer rates your seller performance (shipping, response time, etc.).

This blog will focus on product reviews but if you want to learn more about seller feedback, check out our previous post.

Why are Product Reviews Important?

According to a study by BrightLocal in 2016, 79% of us trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 91% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses.

Imagine, you’re shopping for a new slow cooker on Amazon and you see two products priced similarly. Product A has 50 reviews while Product B has 500 reviews. Both products are rated 4.2 out of 5 stars.

Which are you more likely to purchase?

Answer: Product B.

This is why product reviews are so vital for private label sellers—they are a silent force that help drive sales and increase conversion rates. Positive product reviews provide social proof and build consumer trust—potential buyers can see that you’re selling a quality product which people are happy with. They’ll also help improve your product visibility, making it easier for buyers to find your products. To learn more about how to rank your products higher on Amazon, check out this article.

How to Generate More Product Reviews

Firstly, as I’m sure many of you are aware, it is against Amazon’s terms of service to offer incentives for product reviews. Don’t do it, it’s not worth it. If you get caught, and you will, eventually, you’ll lose your selling privileges.

In Amazon’s words, “You may not intentionally manipulate your products’ rankings, including by offering an excessive number of free or discounted products, in exchange for a review.” Amazon encourages you to request reviews but any attempt to manipulate reviews is prohibited. This includes asking for a positive review or providing incentives for reviews.

Getting product reviews on Amazon can take a long time. For every 100 orders, a typical response rate is 1 or 2 product reviews.

However, by using the professional templates within FeedbackExpress, sellers are typically seeing a much higher level of engagement and ultimately more product reviews… Yay!

Here’s our four-step process for getting more product reviews on Amazon:

• Sell a high-quality product.
• Have an outstanding product detail page that clearly details what the product is.
• Provide a great customer experience.
• Use reputable automated product review software such as FeedbackExpress to increase engagement levels.

If you’ve achieved the first three steps, then all you need to do is ask for a review in the right way and at the right time, and make the review process simple.

Here’s a funny one for a t-shirt with three wolves on it.

When to Ask for Product Reviews

With reviews, timing is everything! Within FeedbackExpress, you can decide when you want to ask for a review. This includes: sending your review request X days after the item has been delivered or when a buyer has left seller feedback. Those buyers who do leave positive seller feedback are more likely to take the time to leave a product review as well— so ensure you follow up with these customers.

A popular strategy among FeedbackExpress users is to send a number of emails at different points that add value and build rapport with customers. You should make your emails as personal as you can.

For example, here’s a two-step process which can be easily automated within our software.

Email 1: Customer service – Product has been shipped.

“Thank you for your order. I just wanted to let you know your item has been shipped.

Here are some top tips on how to use your new product.”

This a good time to introduce your brand (always include your logo) and offer tips on using your product, if relevant. It’s also an opportunity to prevent negative feedback by including your customer service details so buyers can get in touch if they have any issues with their order, instead of getting frustrated and posting a negative review. This demonstrates that customer satisfaction is important to you. The added benefit of sending a customer service email first, besides improving brand awareness and reducing negative feedback, is that it increases your product review count. When you ask for a review at a later date, buyers already know about you, they remember that you offered them tips on how to use the product and they’re more receptive to posting a product review because of that.

Email 2: Product review request – One week after delivery.

“Have you had a chance to try out [product name]? If so, what do you think? Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.”

Inform sellers that you’re a small business that highly values customer satisfaction and feedback. If the buyer asks a question, answer it as soon as you can—even after the purchase. The timing of when to ask for a product review (after an order has been delivered) will largely depend on the product. This could range from a day or two for a phone charger to a few weeks for a health and beauty product that needs to be tested first. But, don’t ask for a review before you know the product has been delivered safely.

Also, don’t be shy about sending follow-up emails, but don’t bombard buyers. People are busy and for whatever reason, don’t open all their emails. A great feature in FeedbackExpress is the ability to resend a product review request if the buyer didn’t open the first email, typically 3-4 days after the initial one. This is, without question, one feature that helps to increase your product review count.

How to Ask for a Product Review

When you send an email, you should customize your content and add value. Here are seven tips to help you create a great product review request process.

• Personalize your emails and include a logo.
• Add value by giving tips on how to use the product.
• Always be polite and professional.
• Ask open-ended questions such as, “How did you find?”
• Don’t offer incentives!
• Include a link to the product review page to make it easier for buyers to comment directly. Don’t include links to external sites!
• Remind buyers that you’re happy to address any concerns they may have.

Need help? Check out this great free template for requesting Amazon product reviews.

How to Deal with Negative Product Reviews

Negative product reviews are the Achilles heel of every private label seller. Amazon will not remove a product review unless it is against their guidelines. For example, if the product review is seller feedback, and contains nothing about the product itself. Amazon will also consider removing a review that contains unsuitable content, abhorrent speech, violent content or promotes illegitimate conduct.

If you find a comment which you think may warrant removal, click on the “Report abuse” link, then enter the reason why you find the content inappropriate. You can also contact Seller Support for any reviews which infringe on Amazon’s guidelines.

If your request is successful, you’ll receive this message from Amazon:

If you receive a valid product review, respond to the customer as soon as you can and try to find out what happened. Show the customer that you value customer service. Amazon doesn’t edit reviews but buyers can change their product review at any time. However, sellers are not allowed to pressure buyers into removing reviews.

If there was a genuine issue with the product then you may want to consider sending a replacement or offering a partial or full refund. Alternatively, you could offer a coupon for a future purchase. If there was a misunderstanding about the product, this is a good opportunity for you to give your side of the story. When communicating with the customer, empathize and show that you are interested in helping to resolve their issue. In some cases you might want to respond publicly to the comment to demonstrate that you value customer service and product quality. However, when you’re responding, try not to come across as defensive.

When you communicate with customers – whether manually or using automated software – you should abide by Amazon’s guidelines. The two main mistakes sellers make are offering incentives and including links in their messaging. The only link you are permitted to include is a link for a customer to leave a review for a purchase.

Can bad reviews be good for your business?

Well, in a way they can, as long as the majority of reviews remain positive. For example, a bad review could help you improve your product or listings. If you receive a number of bad product reviews highlighting the same issue, then you should take action to eradicate that issue with your product, making it better for future buyers.

Also, a study undertaken by Reevoo revealed that 95% of customers suspect fake or censored reviews when bad scores aren’t present. So, a bad review could actually be beneficial by making your business appear more credible.

How to Avoid Negative Product Reviews on Amazon

Despite the positives that negative feedback can bring, it’s advisable to prevent it from happening if you can.

So, here are six quick tips to help you avoid negative product reviews.

1. Provide accurate and detailed product descriptions.
2. Include images of the product from different angles.
3. Consider using images with a 360-degree view or video for higher value items.
4. Evaluate the reasons for why negative product reviews are left.
5. Check that the product matches the order before you ship.
6. Try to give some context for the size of the product—many negative product reviews relate to the product being much smaller than anticipated.

This seller provides a customer service number to proactively prevent negative feedback:

Conclusion

For any seller who creates their own listings, whether it’s a one-off product, a bundle, or a private label product line, having a way to increase product reviews without breaking Amazon’s terms of service is critical to their business.

Product review software like FeedbackExpress makes the process of gathering reviews so much easier through automation and is fully compliant with Amazon’s terms of service. You can customize templates written by professional copywriters proven to increase customer engagement.

Many sellers are taking advantage of the Free 30-day trial and seeing the benefits it can bring to their Amazon business. After 30 days you can decide if the software is worth the investment.

cherylholt / Pixabay

The scary decline of trust in all facets of our society has created a new challenge for brands: how can brands overcome the growing skepticism and lack of credibility caused by this distrust to authentically relate to their customers? These trends have led to a rise of cynicism, where most Americans trust news or feedback more from “people like themselves” rather than the government, media, or big businesses and brands. Appealing to these distrustful customers who lack confidence and motivation has become a top priority. The answer will involve a new type of marketing, values-based branding, which will be focused more on identifying, relating to, and engaging these customers’ values and ethics.

The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer report recorded the lowest level of trust ever for government, business, media, and NGOs–an average of only 44%. Post-election results showed a further decline for trust in media (down 5% to 35%) and government (down 3% to 37%). Without trust, this report indicated that 57% believe our overall system is failing, and in people’s minds there is a “sense of injustice, a lack of hope and confidence, and a desire for change in our basic institutions.”

This continued decline of trust has also spread to concerns over how our social values are eroding. As many as 67% are concerned, and 36% even fearful, that:

• “the values that made our country great are disappearing” and
• “society is changing too quickly and not in ways that benefit people like me”

A key driver of the velocity of change is the exponential growth of technology, especially social media, and globalization. Another important dynamic is the political climate today, which has caused more polarization and skepticism than ever. These factors have led average consumers to ask where and how companies or brands stand on many of these social issues. In response, CEOs are now more focused on whether/how their brand values can better resonate with customers.

Traditionally, every brand is created around a set of values that relate to its customers’ and define a brand’s personality, purpose, and distinctive appeal. As a company brand, these values define its culture, ethics, and how it conducts itself. As Starbucks‘ CEO, Howard Schultz stated, “if people believe they share the values with a company, they will stay loyal to that brand.”

However most companies claim very similar, fundamental values–e.g. “integrity, respect, diversity, inclusion, etc.” A brand is essentially a promise that is intended to develop and sustain a bond with its customers. But when many companies pronounce the same generic set of values, and even more important, when such promises are not delivered, people become more cynical and distrustful. For example, Audi aired an appealing ad on gender equality during the Super Bowl, but its brand credibility and reputation were badly damaged when news spread online about its poor record of promoting women in leadership.

Under these trying circumstances, companies must work harder to convince customers that their brand is different and authentic, and importantly to credibly validate that its values resonate with its customer base. People not only want to know what a brand stands for these days, but they also want proof that its promises are real. The answer for brands is to become more involved with issues that mirror their values, which means taking credible, meaningful action that shows it is serious and can be trusted.

A common problem with many large companies is that their message on values is designed not to offend any of their multiple customer segments, and the approval process goes through many levels, so the final brand position on values can be rather lame and not compelling. On the other hand, a good if not controversial example of a company demonstrably delivering on a particular promise of diversity, an important value today, is Starbucks. Earlier this year it announced the addition of three new directors to its board, an African-American woman, an Indian-American, and a Dane, making it one of the most diverse corporate boards in the nation.

Companies must become more aware of the brand reputation risks in today’s tempestuous world. A business cannot just say what it stands for; it must actually take action to convince such doubting customers. Prudent executives must also be prepared for these possible attacks by activists, have a response ready, and even better, take the initiative with visible action to demonstrate the authenticity of their brand promises. A proactive values-based branding strategy can definitely strengthen a brand and overcome these problems of credibility and trust.

Hans / Pixabay

I have to start this post with a story. I’m an obsessed reader. At least once a week, I have to sign into Amazon to feed my reading habit. On logging in, I’m immediately fed suggestions of books I should buy. Always, they’re in similar categories: The latest in sale/marketing/leadership, biographies, history. Yes, there are also the mystery/spy novels (Daniel Silva, Lee Childs, Vince Flynn, John LeCarre, and so forth).

This selection of recommended books makes sense. 70% of the time, the books I buy are in one of those categories. But every once in a while, go to Amazon, without providing any clue of who I am. I use a private browser, I make sure there are no cookies, I don’t sign on. What happens then is absolutely amazing. I get fed a completely different set of recommendations. Books in categories I don’t normally peruse. Inevitably, I find wonderful books that broaden my horizons and give me completely different perspectives.

In reality, recently, I’ve started my searches anonymously, because sometimes the Amazon recommendations get in the way of helping me learn things I should be learning, but didn’t realize it.

Moving to the point of this article, I think much of our use of web and other analytics creates a similar problem for our customers and how we engage them. Increasingly, the best marketing organizations are using very sophisticated analytics to understand the interests of prospects and customers, constantly serving up the content they are most likely to want.

For example, I may download certain white papers, I may go to certain parts of the web site, I may look at certain articles at the site. All the time, my activity is being tracked. Based on that activity, I am being served up content that’s aligned with my journey and search. It’s exactly like Amazon serving up recommendations based on past purchases.

It makes a huge amount of sense. We want to get the right content to our prospects and customers. We want to make sure it is easy for them to find the things they are most likely to be interested in.

But there’s a huge risk to this. All of this is based on an assumption about the digital search habits of our customers.

The assumption is, they know what they should be looking for.

But the challenge is, at least very early in their buying cycles, they don’t know what they don’t know. As a result, they may be missing very important things in their digital journeys. Their searches are constrained by what they think they should be looking for, and what they think their problem may be. But they are constrained by what they don’t know.

In trying to be helpful and responsive to our customers, in trying to engage them, we feed them content based on what they want and what they are looking for. As a result, however well intended, we actually may be leading them astray. We may not be helping them understand the questions they should be asking but aren’t, the things they should be researching, but were simply unaware of.

It’s the root of insight, helping our customers learn things they should know/need to know, but simply didn’t know they should be looking for those things.

As sales people, we immediately recognize this problem. We recognize when customers are missing something really important about the problem they are trying to solve. We engage the customer with things like, “Have you ever considered looking at things in a slightly different way?” or “Most organizations addressing similar problems have found these issues to be important, have you considered how they might impact you?”

Leveraging CEB’s mantra, we need to “teach, tailor, take control.”

We need to engage our customers in their digital journeys in a similar fashion. We absolutely need to provide the content and information they are looking for. But we also need to find ways to serve up the information they should be looking for, but aren’t, simply because they didn’t know.

We can track their digital footprints and we can make recommendations. We can serve up content they wouldn’t normally have looked for because they didn’t know. We can say, “Other customers have found this to be very useful, in addition to the other things you are looking at.”

The same tools we use to personalize customers’ digital buying journeys can be leveraged to help them expand their journeys, teaching them things they need to know, but didn’t know they needed to know.

By doing this, we create greater value and enhance their digital buying journeys.

How to Optimize your email opt-in form

The holidays do more than ring your cash registers constantly – they also can be a rich vein of new subscribers made up of shoppers who are either coming to your site and converting for the first time or visiting you again after previous holiday seasons.

These shoppers are highly motivated, interested and engaged. Capitalizing on that energy can keep them coming back to your site often than once a year.

Your focus, naturally, is on converting your visitors into paying customers. But, while you’re at it, make it enticing to join your email list with compelling value and easy-to-use sign-up forms.

• If you haven’t updated your email opt-in form in a year or longer, now is a good time to tune up and test-drive your opt-in process.
• Use the first few weeks of the all-important fourth quarter to test and learn what works.

1. Remake your email opt-in form for mobile.

We still see way too many email opt-in forms designed for navigation by tab key or mouse instead of the finger. Here’s how can you capture more of your mobile customers (and, by extension, make opting in even easier for your desktop/laptop shoppers). Bonus: Each tip comes with something to test to see what works best for your brand and site:

• Start with the email address and ask for more later. Full name, city, preferences and ZIP code are a lot to ask of anybody, especially someone on a smartphone. Test question: Does asking for a first name help or hinder opting in?
• Get noticed quickly. Use an icon to call attention to your email field. Don’t lever it in at the bottom of your homepage with the rest of your contact data. Test question: Which locations yield the most opt-ins?
• Communicate value. Don’t just ask for an email. Answer the “what’s in it for me?” question in terms your customers will appreciate.

2. Add an interactive email opt-in form – carefully.

You’ve seen them everywhere – an email opt-in form that launches as soon as you hit a website, or the instant you move your cursor to close a page. They’re called pop-overs, popunders, modal windows and interstitials, among other terms.

They’re better than old-style pop-ups, which most browsers block, because they are part of the web page, not a separate page. But they get your attention because they interrupt what you’re doing.

These tips can help you collect more valid emails and reduce the annoyance factor:

• Find the best time to serve the form. Format your form to launch a certain number of seconds after arrival or when the page detects movement to exit. Test question: What’s the optimal point to collect the most valid opt-ins?
• Don’t force people to respond. This happens when a form blocks access to the entire page or requires visitors to click a button (either an opt-in or a “no thanks” button) to make it go away. It’s a common B2B tactic (show us the test results on that, please). We can’t imagine time-pressed shoppers would welcome a progress-blocker like this.
• Use the space in the form to sell the program. Add artwork and a well-chosen value statement to sell your email program.

This “formus interruptus” is attention-getting, but is it effective? A 2016 consumer study by email service provider Adestra suggests that annoying subscribers with can backfire.

In the study, 57% of respondents said they would do something else besides give up a real email address. Leading contenders for alternative behavior included leaving the site (39%), giving an old email address (12%) or giving a fake one (5%).

These concerns shouldn’t stop you from trying an interstitial, especially on mobile. It’s easier to find than a simple opt-in field and gives you space to brand and promote the value of opting in.

3. Validate, validate, validate.

No matter which form you use – pop-over, static, multiple locations – add code to validate the email address in real time to reduce your exposure to misspelled, malformed, phony or outdated email addresses. Even double opt-in isn’t enough to keep potential harmful addresses out of your database, and it won’t correct inadvertent mistakes.

Next steps

These three tips will help you persuade more shoppers to sign up for your emails. That, of course, is just the start. Keep watching the blog for tips on how to keep your subscribers engaged with your emails after the holiday madness subsides.

geralt / Pixabay

Influencer marketing has been on the rise over the last couple of years, replacing organic search as the fastest growing online customer acquisition method. Using top social media influencers, such as bloggers, vloggers and those with large followings on Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms has grown exponentially with the greater adoption of those platforms. Word-of-mouth and connecting people based on interests has always been an effective way of marketing, and digital capabilities are a natural extension of those tactics.

What is a Micro-Influencer?

Within the influencer realm, there are many types of social influence. One type is the micro-influencer, who is defined as someone with social followings that range between 1,000 to 100,000. Such users are especially effective to brands because of their specific interests and appeal to niche audiences. In addition, they have managed to find a “sweet spot” in terms of engagement.

Studies have shown that once web influencers have surpassed a certain number of followers (greater than 10,000), they tend to see a decrease in overall engagement rates. Comments, likes—everything goes down once more and more followers are amassed. Those with around 1,000 followers or less are likely to still receive interaction from at least 8% of their fans.

Along with their higher engagement rate, micro-influencers are usually less expensive for brands than their more well-known counterparts. Keep in mind that 82% of consumers are highly likely to follow recommendations made by a micro-influencer compared to 73% based on recommendations from average people.

Micro-influencers have become champions for everyday products and services that people wouldn’t necessarily discuss in length with friends or family. They have 22.2 times more “buying conversations” than the average consumer every week, and their recommendations are more direct and specific to the interests of those already following them. In many ways, they are the top influencers, and not because of inflated followers.

3 Micro-Influencer Characteristics to Consider

Before jumping into the influencer market, there are a few things your brand should consider. First and foremost, why does your brand want to use influencers in the first place? Sales may be the ultimate end goal but it’s important to have realistic expectations and specific goals.

Perhaps you’re a new company wanting to build brand awareness, or have a product in need of reviews and testimonials to bolster credibility. Or maybe you want to move specific pieces of product fast, and would like to go the route of promotional codes and discounts? Whatever the reason may be, have a specific goal in mind that you can measure against when judging campaign success.

When beginning to search through an influencer network, look at the context of each influencer. Do they create photos that speak to the feel of your brand? Is their voice a reflection of the lifestyle and ideals your brand hopes to represent to its audience? This influencer will essentially be an advocate and representative of your brand, so make sure the niche they speak to would build a connection between their followers and your business.

Reach and accountability are two other aspects to consider when evaluating micro-influencers. With regards to reach, you’ll want to gauge their klout, and how active they are – not just with their own followers, but other brands and influencers on the platform. Actionability is a result of how much influence they actually have over their followers.

People choose to follow these individuals, and they’ll continue to follow if they perceive enough value in doing so. Browse through comments to get a feel for whether individuals are regularly asking for more information or insight into where they can purchase items the micro-influencer is touting.

How to Find the Right Micro-Influencers for Your Brand

Turn to the Fans

Finding Instagram influencers that best speak to your brand’s goals from a business perspective can seem like a daunting task with the sheer number of individuals to choose from. If you’re not already utilizing a CRM system to help aggregate all this information, consider doing so. Using a tool to gather information on your audience will help when trying to grow that audience to new heights.

Your current fan base is a great place to start since you already know a connection exists. They’ve shown interest in your brand, so why not turn to lookalike audiences and additional related interests to help draw connections among others just like them?

Browse through fans’ liked pages on social media, and use common interests to help shape audience personas to target. If any of your existing fans and followers themselves have large followings on social channels, consider it an added bonus.

Reach out to them personally and begin by suggesting an exchange of product for a social post or review. From there, you can build out a more robust program should the relationship prove mutually beneficial.

Hello, Hashtags

Hashtags exist for the sole purpose of making content on social networks searchable and accessible. Using free Instagram analytics tools can help simplify your micro-influencer search process. Use keywords relevant to your business to help pinpoint conversations that will lead you to your target audience.

When choosing a hashtag to research, make sure it’s specific enough to reveal actionable results. For example, if you’re a plus size clothing brand, a hashtag search around #plussizefashion would likely yield better material than just #fashion alone. Running this kind of search on Google will yield results from many sources, including Twitter and Instagram. Searching directly on those platforms or through platform-specific third party tools can be more efficient.

Connect With Local Bloggers

Networks like Instagram have essentially become blogging platforms for those looking to curate content. These networks also serve as add-ons to further promote and bring blog content to life. Bloggers in your geographic area can be a great resource for local businesses.

Specific keyword searches that include location are a good starting point. Following the previous example, instead of “fashion bloggers in LA”, a more specific search like “plus size fashion bloggers in LA” would yield the desired niche results. There are free tools available to measure SEO for each blog, which is an important indicator if visibility and engagement. In addition to these techniques, you can turn to platforms designed to help you find the right influencers for your brand.

When used effectively, influencer marketing provides authentic, trusted, far-reaching, and affordable brand advocates who can help connect your products to the customers most likely to purchase.

Be selective when looking for people best suited to speaking on behalf of your brand and remember these words from Jay Baer, “True influence drives action and not just awareness.”

Today when we talk about business “clusters,” we’re usually talking about the technology industry in Silicon Valley, the financial sector in London or New York, or automakers in southern Germany.

But clusters go back much further than these examples. “Businesses have clustered into networks of various sorts throughout history,” writes the U.S. National Commission on Entrepreneurship. “The medieval guild system was a primitive networking exercise.”

The most successful, enduring clusters are not stagnant. A look back at long-lasting clusters highlights the importance of adaptation to keeping a cluster vibrant, and the catalysts that keep it moving forward.

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator,” stated Francis Bacon. Nowadays, when a multitude of businesses are confronted with the leap from “dumb” products to creating smart, connected ones, and cities and regions are trying to make the leap from manufacturing to services, relying too heavily on past successes will only lock those clusters in the past.

An example of a cluster that has avoided what I call this “lock-in syndrome” is Bologna, Italy, one of the most remarkable and long-lasting clusters of history. Though many people know it for its packaging machinery cluster, they may not realize the deep historical roots of this industry, or how much it has evolved over time.

As with many clusters, a university sits at its center: founded in AD 1088, the Studium of Bologna was the major educational innovation of Europe’s second millennium. Europe’s first academic university was the epicenter of the guilds of wandering students (clerici vagantes). Spanning geographical barriers and shrinking the world of education, the resulting exchange of ideas between students and professors in a climate of freedom generated interactive spaces for knowledge creation, dissemination, and sharing. Those spaces were reservoirs rich in memories from which lessons for cluster formation would be extracted later.

About two hundred years later, towards the end of the thirteenth century, we start to see the first Bolognese silk mills, which became a major industry.  The major innovation lay in an extraordinary machine already in use in Lucca, about 150 kilometers southwest of Bologna. This round, mechanical spinning machine was capable of twisting dozens and dozens of threads at the same time. The innovation of the Bolognese silk makers was to operate the Lucca machine with a hydraulic wheel, instead of by hand. Thanks to this technological innovation—made possible by Bologna’s canals and ample supply of water—by the 15^th century, Bolognese mills had expanded from small-scale production to busy factories that took up three or four floors. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Bologna used this combination of hydraulic power and technology to bring silkworm farming to Europe at scale. Bolognese yarns were sold to the doges of Venice or exchanged for spices and salt, and they were also exported to the large international markets, to France, Germany, England and even to the East.

But when Industrial Revolution did arrive, it shook the Bolognese silk industry. In Bologna at the end of the 18th century, changing consumer tastes, labor costs, and production technologies all led to the contraction of the industry. The result was a deep and prolonged recession.

Nonetheless, today, the Bolognese “Packaging Valley” stands out internationally for its ability to meet the specialized needs of manufacturers throughout the world. Firms in the cluster design, manufacture, and assemble packaging machinery for a wide range of products, such as baked goods, confectionery, beverages, tea, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. They are known for demonstrating a special sensitivity to the market needs of the specialized manufacturers who use their services. Systems and machines are tailor-made to fit the specific needs of their customers, using innovative techniques and new packaging materials.

How did the city make the leap? Scholars and historians trace it back to several vital turning points. One key moment came when two pro-business academics—Giovanni Aldini, professor of Experimental Philosophy in the University of Bologna, and Luigi Valeriani, professor of Public Economy in the same University, visited the new technical and professional schools in France, Great Britain, Germany, and Belgium, learning the best practices of the new technical education and training on offer in Europe. The fruit of their travel was first the gestation and then, around 1844, the foundation of a technical school named after them. They advocated a mix of in-company “learning by doing” training and formal training, and offered new mechanical qualifications. The Aldini-Valeriani School thus acted as the incubator of a number of new firms, with a good number of students who subsequently choosing to start their own packaging companies.

Several of the graduates of the school went to work for ACMA (Anonima Costruzioni Macchine Automatiche), a packaging company founded by accountant Gaetano Barbieri in 1924. Their first major customer was Gazzoni, a local pharmaceutical company that made a powder called Idrolitina, which added sparkle to drinking water. Dextrous female workers measured the powder by hand, before stuffing it into individual paper packets. In the early 1920s, as a result of a growing market for Idrolitina, Gazzoni decided to automate the packaging process. From 1927 onwards, ACMA’s Bruto Carpigiani designed the  packaging machines, one of many mechanical inventions he created. ACMA and Carpigiani are today both viewed as instrumental in the development of Bologna’s packaging machinery sector, and in the 1930s, a number of other additional machine packaging firms were founded by ACMA-influenced workers, technicians, and machinists.

This story shows that while clustering is an organic process involving a self-organized, self-sustaining, and self-reinforcing formation of interconnected businesses, this process does not start without a catalyst of some kind. That catalyst is what starts the “cluster reaction.” The catalyst might be a handful of skilled individuals, local entrepreneurial pioneers, or academic excellence—in different situations, all of these have acted as catalysts. In the case of the packaging machinery cluster in Bologna, all three played a role.

But the catalyst won’t have much impact without a hospitable environment. In Bologna, an informal community of knowledge-sharing supported the “cluster reaction.” Blue-collar workers and technicians were used to meeting in cafés where, playing cards at small tables, they engaged passionately with each other in discussions on technical advancements and the new business models that could be adopted in their companies. These interactions gave birth to new companies in new market niches.

Moreover, a cluster can never be static. It was the novel innovations of silk machines and tertiary education that gave rise to Bologna’s local excellence in mechanical engineering, but as the world changed, Bologna also had to adapt. Today, with the rise of smart, connected machinery, Bologna’s packaging machinery cluster is changing again, this time from “industrial” to “cognitive”—its future again hinges on inventive entrepreneurs and educators responsible for new innovations. And again, both entrepreneurs and educators will have to share the responsibility. As argued by William Baumol, the education of the incremental innovator leads to mastery of the already available paths of scientific knowledge and methods. Breakthrough inventiveness requires unorthodox approach to education that favors the freewheeling exercise of the imagination.

That in itself will take a certain kind of breakthrough. In Baumol’s words, “We know little about training for the critical task of breakthrough innovation.” This is a time for reinventing learning with the full involvement of Renaissance thinkers, as Steven Shapin, historian and sociologist of science at Harvard University, has defined those people who conceive of innovative ways of understanding education, breaking revolutionary paths, and moving away from dominant teaching orthodoxies.

Vibrant cities rely on clusters that can adapt; and cluster adaptability in turn hinges on learner-centered education, an “idea space” where the ideation process leads to useful knowledge both in business and society. Value is created in the crucible of dialogue, through interactions between interdependent people whose adjacent ideas give rise to related entrepreneurial activities.

Dynamic clusters might seem to spring up by a happy accident meeting a prepared mind. The role we all have to play in keeping cluster dynamics alive is in preparing the mind to look forward.

Salespeople who don’t work for the low-cost provider in their arena often struggle with losing deals based on price. Prospects are only human, and no one likes to pay more when they could pay less. That's why pricing in sales is one of the biggest barriers to purchase and a roadblock for many reps.

This roadblock is particularly difficult to overcome in the world of high-ticket sales. 

What Are High-Ticket Sales?

A high-ticket sale is the sale of an expensive product or service. Because of price resistance, closing a sale of a high-value but high-cost item often results in a longer sales cycle and requires a great deal of sales skill.

While there are certainly steps you can take to win against a low-cost provider, you’ll never come out on top with a poor product. If your product is only marginally better than your competitor’s — but costs significantly more — you’re going to lose deals. It’s just that simple.

However, if your product’s price reflects significant points of differentiation, you can come out on top. Here are nine tips for convincing the customer to buy a more expensive product.

1. Understand your buyer persona.

Your product likely solves a specific pain or problem your ideal buyer is experiencing. It's not enough to talk nuts and bolts, features and pricing... especially in high-ticket sales. 

You'll need to identify your prospect's motivations, pains, and triggering events — perhaps before they even pick up the phone. To do that, create a buyer persona of your ideal customer and explore why they'd consider a premium solution for their situation. 

The information can give you an edge while building rapport, and you'll have a profile to compare against as you qualify prospects. 

2. Use a high-ticket sales script. 

Your conversation will take you in a number of directions, so it's okay to rely on your knowledge of the product/service and competitors during your sales calls. However, to sharpen your sales process, you should have a sales script for the primary stages of each deal: 

Intro:

The goal of the intro is to, of course, introduce yourself but also get their attention as quickly as possible.

"Hello [Prospect Name]. I'm [Your Name], and I help [Their Title] like you [What Your Product/Service Solves]."

Then, you'll lead into the conversation with an open-ended question. For example:

"Hello, [Prospect Name]. My name is [Your Name], and I help hiring managers like you reduce the time it takes to interview, hire, and onboard new talent in 50% less time than the industry average. How many new hires do you have planned for the year?"

If they do not want to continue the conversation, you can ask to schedule a meeting. If they say yes, continue on by providing more information and opening up a dialogue.

"We offer [Product/Service] because we've noticed that other [Their Title](s) have been experiencing issues with [Pains]. Are any of those areas you are concerned about?"

The Pitch:

Here is where you discuss your product/service, the pains that it solves, and how it does it differently than similar solutions.

For example: "We know that you have issues with [Pains], so we aim to solve that by [Solution Description]. This goes beyond other solutions on the market because [Value Proposition], resulting in [Concrete Case Study Details]."

The Close:

The close finishes the current conversation by asking them to take the next step. In order to have a great close, you must have the stages of the sales process mapped out. This is particularly important with high-ticket sales because many premium products and services have too long a sales cycle to finish the sale on the first call. You might wrap up with:

• "I don't want to take up more of your time today, but I want to continue learning more about your goals and strategies. How would you feel about a 30-minute conversation next Tuesday?"
• "I'd love to share more information about this product. Do you have time to hop on a call for a quick demo?"
• "You've asked some good questions, and I think the best way to give you answers is by giving you a quick preview of the platform. Would you be interested in a free trial?"

We've also included some sample sales tactics throughout the rest of this article, so read on for more ideas to include in your script.

3. Help them envision what success looks like. 

You know that the prospect has a problem they need to get solved. That manifests as a gap between where they are and where they need to be. From a practical standpoint, you should be explaining how your product/service fills that gap. 

But don't stop there. Paint the picture of what success looks like, what their life will be like if their problem no longer affects them. This will indicate to them that you know the stakes, and it will strengthen the emotional association with the conversation.

4. Ask about the competition early.

Reps typically wait too long before asking about the competition. Especially if you’re selling a premium offering, you want to ask buyers about what other vendors they’re considering early and often.

But questions such as “What do you like about Company X?” won’t garner you valuable information. Instead, probe into the following areas:

• “Which vendor is winning as we stand today?” Get the buyer used to thinking in terms of “winning” and “losing.” This will reveal which provider they ultimately prefer — regardless of price. Remember: Prospects will never buy from your company unless they like you more than the competition. If you’re not “winning,” price becomes a moot point. If you are winning, you can work on the price.
• “Where are you in the buying process with competitor X?” Make sure you’re keeping pace with the competitor’s sales process. Alternatively, this can alert you to situations where you’re being used as a last-minute entry to justify the decision.
• “Who is the internal champion for competitor X?” In order to neutralize objections to your product from stakeholders, you have to be aware of them in real time. Discover who’s rooting for your competition, and reach out to them directly.

5. Eliminate low-quality competitors

Let’s say you’re in an RFP process with two other vendors. Vendor A is a low-cost, low-quality product. You rarely lose deals to Vendor A. On the other hand, Vendor B is a competitor you bump up with quite frequently, and have lost deals to in the past.

In a three-way heat, you want to help your buyer eliminate one option as quickly as possible. Which would you ax?

Most reps would say Vendor B because they have a greater likelihood of winning against Vendor A. But this is actually the wrong answer — I would rather stand with Vendor B. Why? Because you then put yourself in what buyers consider the pool of quality.

If you can convince your customer to get rid of poor quality options early on, you’ll find you strengthen your sales argument later in the process — and you won’t be faced with struggling to match crazy low prices.

6. Get the number.

As the buying processes progresses, you might be asked to talk discounts. There are a number of proven tactics to justify a higher price — calculating ROI, emphasizing value, etc. But when push comes to shove, sales reps need to get buyers to say the number they’re looking for instead of blindly throwing out prices.

First things first: I never offer a discount unless I know for sure that my company is “winning” in the buyer’s mind. Once I have the prospect’s assurance that I’m in the lead, we can talk price.

Prospects often try to play vendors against each other on price, saying things like, “Well, we like you guys better but Competitor X costs 25% less. If you can match that price, the business is yours.” As soon as they hear a sentence like this, most sales reps go running for their manager’s approval.

But this isn’t the only way. Here’s what I would recommend instead:

Buyer: “Well, we like you guys better but Competitor X costs 25% less. If you can match that price, the business is yours.”

Sales rep: “How did you get that 25% number?”

Buyer: “That’s what Competitor X told us was their price.”

Sales rep: “Well, you know we’re not going to match that price, so what’s the real number you want to see from us?”

Think about it this way: Mercedes isn’t going to compete with Honda on price. Similarly, you shouldn’t compete on price with a clearly inferior product.

So before you start negotiating, you must prevent the buyer from using the competitor’s price as a baseline, and get them to commit to a realistic number. After all, there’s no comparison between the two products — and that holds for price as well. Make this crystal clear to the buyer, and negotiate from there.

And here's a helpful article if they have pricing questions for you first.

7. Surface stories of how low-cost products let the company down.

If a decision maker buys a product based on price alone, it’s safe to say that’s not a very good choice. There’s a reason why low-cost providers are cheap — they also tend to be inferior to other products.

Early on in the sales process, get your champion to tell you stories of when decisions made solely based on a low price tag negatively impacted the company.

Everyone’s bound to have a few. Then, when the sales process is wrapping up, you can remind the buyer — with their own words — that choices made to save money often end up costing money. They can’t argue with themselves.

8. Use examples of customers who regretted their choice.

Along similar lines, a story about a buyer who opted for another vendor and wished they hadn't is extremely powerful. Suddenly, it's not your word against your competitor's — it's the word of someone who's tried both products and found yours favorable.

For example, imagine you frequently lose deals to Thunder Tifflin, a paper supply company whose product is half the cost of yours... and one-third the quality.

At least once per quarter, a former Thunder Tifflin customer calls you and says, "Yeah, the paper weight is sturdy enough and our ink keeps bleeding through. I wish we'd gone with you guys in the first place; we're out [large amount], and we have a bunch of paper we can't use."

Next time your prospect is also considering Thunder Tifflin, tell them, "I understand Thunder is the budget-friendly choice, and I think it's wise you evaluate their company. However, I have to warn you that we frequently hear about their quality issues. The paper costs less but is ultimately more expensive because it goes to waste after falling apart."

This soundbite first praises the buyer's decision to consider Thunder Tifflin — an important step if you don't want them to get defensive — before raising a legitimate concern. Bring it home by offering to connect them with one of your customers who made the switch:

"If you're interested in hearing more, I can intro you to Cam Deesly, who decided to use us after picking Thunder just six months earlier."

The vast majority of prospects will be persuaded by this and won't even require the reference.

9. Use the trial close.

Prospects often want to talk discounts before they’re ready to sign a contract. But the rep who starts the discounting conversation too soon often opens a can of worms.

Whenever a prospect brings up discounting with me, I present a trial close. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Prospect: “I’d like to talk about discounts. What can you give me?”

Sales rep: “Well, Prospect, if you and I can come up with a price that works for both of us on this phone call, I’d be happy to send over a purchase order today.”

At this point, the buyer usually backs off:

Prospect: “Oh. Well … I don’t think that would work right now.”

Sales rep: “Understood. Well know that I am open to the conversation, and the moment you’re ready to buy, we’ll talk discounts.”

By saying this, the rep makes it clear they’re not going to negotiate unless the buyer is ready to close right then and there. This prevents you from discounting twice with different stakeholders and ensures you only discount when a buyer is 100% ready to buy.

10. Close for the technical win.

The technical win is something we always go for in sales. It allows us to discover who’s best in a competitive situation. But if you’re selling a high-priced product, you’re actually closing for the technology, not the features or add-ons you offer.

In high-priced sales scenarios, you’ve got to ask the prospect, “Are we the best product technology you’ve seen today?” If they say, “Well, it’s more than just products and features …” stop them and reply, “But are we the best technology?” You have to close for this or you have no right to ask your buyer for a higher price over a competitor.

11. Learn stakeholders’ buying histories.

Ask your champion about the buying history of everyone involved in final decision making. If someone is actively involved in this sale, you want to ensure they have experience buying highly priced solutions from other vendors. If you learn everyone has experience buying an expensive solution — that’s encouraging.

If you find several decision makers lack experience with expensive solutions, your likelihood of closing is lower. There’s no tactful way to inquire after this. Just come right out and ask your champion who has experience in this area. This is not a time to play games, as the answers you receive will have a major impact on your ability to close the deal.

12. Formally close for a champion.

If you’re the highest-priced offering in a competitive situation, the price objections from non-champions will be fierce. They’re going to be in your main buyer’s ear saying, “Why would you pay 50K for this when you could get it for 30K?” In these cases, it’s crucial to have a champion firmly advocating on your behalf.

If you strike out at each of these tactics — move on. Some companies will be impossible to close. It’s important not to waste too much time on them. Remember: buying history is more important than budget. Closing for the technical win is more important than getting your buyer to trial. And closing a champion is more important than closing for expanding your audience.

Using these tactics, you can help your buyer justify spending a little more for a lot more quality. With these tricks up your sleeve, you’ll never use “my product just costs too much” as a reason for a lost deal again.

Want more from Jeff? Check out his upcoming sales webinars.

Data empowers sellers to stay ahead of their future competitors.

Walmart sellers face a relatively small amount of competition — the marketplace hosts thousands of sellers today, while Amazon hosts over 2 million sellers — and using data is critical to their success. Sellers who use metrics now can establish themselves as strong merchants before the marketplace gets big. By building a large customer base early on, they’ll have a major competitive advantage over the majority of sellers once the marketplace becomes larger.

To help Walmart sellers get started, we’ve created a guide to tracking and applying data on the marketplace for better growth. Walmart sellers who monitor their metrics and apply their insights to improve their performance will be set up to grow their business.

Merchants who use data to encourage returning and new customers to make purchases will have a competitive advantage — not only in the short-term, but also in the future when Walmart’s marketplace has expanded.

How data impacts growth on Walmart

When customers visit Walmart’s online store, the likelihood of them buying your product depends on your:

• product ranking: the point at which the product appears in search results
• Buy Box placement: whether the seller’s product made the Buy Box or not
• product reviews and seller ratings: how many product reviews and seller ratings the merchant has and how positive or negative this feedback is.

These factors are heavily shaped by seller account metrics. We cover where to find these metrics in more detail down below.

By understanding how data affects each factor, sellers can attract the attention of more customers and build relationships with repeat customers.

Product ranking

A buyer is much more likely to buy your product if it is listed as one of the first few search results on Walmart.

When you search for an item on Walmart, the marketplace automatically shows the “Best Match” results.

Walmart has not disclosed which metrics determine the “Best Match” search rankings. The marketplace only states that using SEO can affect how your listing appears in Walmart search results.

However, the other search filters buyers can choose are impacted by seller metrics. For example, the “Best Seller” filter depends, of course, on the merchant’s number of sales, or total unit sales.

Sellers who want to rank high on the Best Seller filter should also check their conversion rate, which indicates the percentage of traffic that resulted in sales. Knowing whether visitors are purchasing an item helps sellers understand whether and how their total unit sales rate should be increased. Likewise, merchants should check their traffic, or item page views rate. Products that receive high amounts of traffic are more likely to be purchased if pricing and other factors are also set appropriately.

Another product search filter that depends on metrics is the “Highest Rating” filter.

The “Highest Rating” filter depends on the average rating of your product as well as the average product ratings of your competitors.

Need a quick review? Here are the metrics we covered in this section:

• Total unit sales
• Conversion rate
• Item page views
• Average product rating

Buy Box placement

When Walmart sellers share a listing with merchants offering the same product, winning the sale is all about securing the Buy Box.

The Buy Box is the first available price option on a shared Walmart listing.

Winning the Buy Box is critical for making sales. It is the first, most prominent price option, so buyers are most likely to purchase the product from the Buy Box.

Winning the Buy Box depends on two factors: price (item price and shipping price combined) and availability. Sellers can check their price competitiveness by checking the Buy Box item price and Buy Box shipping price of the winning item. Sellers who aren’t the Buy Box winner should lower their item and shipping price to match the Buy Box winner’s rates.

To check availability, sellers can check the Inventory count of their item.

Need a quick review? Here are the metrics we covered in this section:

• Buy Box item price
• Buy Box shipping price
• Inventory count

Product reviews and seller ranking

Walmart customers can’t interact with sellers in-person. Like other online shoppers, these buyers rely on product reviews and seller ratings to make purchase decisions. Merchants who are able to collect a lot of positive feedback on their products and seller profile will have the advantage of a strong, established reputation once Walmart’s marketplace has grown with more competition.

Feedback encourages purchases when it is positive and when it is plentiful. One hundred positive reviews on a product is much more convincing than a single five-star rating.

The amount of positive customer feedback a seller collects depends on the number of orders they have. Merchants have a higher chance of collecting positive feedback if they have more buyers to leave a rating or review.

Sellers should check their conversion rate, total unit sales, and item page views to understand how they can win more sales and in turn, collect more feedback. By assessing their conversion rate, merchants can determine whether they need more traffic or simply need more sales to boost orders.

Merchants who want to feel confident about receiving positive feedback from buyers should also check their seller performance metrics: order defect rate, on-time shipment rate, and valid tracking. These metrics reflect the seller’s customer service and indicate whether buyers are likely to leave positive or negative feedback.

Sellers should also monitor their reviews count, average product ratings, and seller rating to assess how buyers are currently perceiving their performance and determine where there’s room for improvement.

Need a quick review? Here are the metrics we covered in this section:

• conversion rate
• total unit sales
• item page views
• reviews count
• average product rating
• seller rating
• performance metrics
  • order defect rate
  • on-time shipment rate
  • valid tracking

Let’s start tracking data.

Tracking data and adhering to benchmarks

Merchants who want to use data to improve their customer retention and acquisition efforts need to know where to find these metrics in Walmart’s seller features.

This data can be found in several types of Walmart reporting:

• Key Performers and Conversion Funnel reports
  • total unit sales
  • item page views
  • conversion rate
• Buy Box report
  • Buy Box item price
  • Buy Box shipping price
• Item report
  • Average rating of product
  • reviews count
  • Inventory count
  • Buy Box item price
  • Buy Box shipping price
• Seller Scorecard report
  • performance metrics:
    • order defect rate
    • on-time shipment rate
    • valid tracking
  • Seller rating

We’ll explain where to find these reports and metrics, and identify healthy benchmarks for this data to help sellers win new customers and keep repeat buyers loyal.

Key performers and conversion funnel reports

The Key Performers and Conversion Funnel reporting provides sellers with key data insights on their orders. Merchants can access these reports by logging in to Seller Center, and clicking Summary Reports under the Insights and Analytics section in the left navigation pane. Merchants can change reports by using the tabs at the top of the Summary Reports page.

There are two types of Key Performers reporting:

• the Top Selling Items report
• the Lowest Converting Items report

Top Selling covers metrics for the top 500 selling items and Lowest Converting covers metrics for the lowest 500 converting items.

Sellers can view an item’s conversion rate, units sold amount, and item page views amount from both reports. Merchants can also view these metrics for all top selling items or all lowest converting items.

Sellers can also use the Conversion Funnel report to view these metrics for entire product categories.

Healthy benchmarks for conversion rates, units sold amounts, and item page views are difficult to pinpoint since each metric is relative. The main guideline is having conversion, sales, and traffic rates that ensure you’re making a profit, but these amounts are going to be different for every seller depending on their type of business.

A good starting point is figuring out a profitable conversion rate. Determine how much you earn per conversion, and then use that amount to calculate how many conversions you need to make a profit. Sellers can also use their average conversion rate in product categories or overall as a benchmark for individual item conversion rates.

Once merchants have determined whether their conversion rate needs to be improved, they should check their unit sales rate and item page views. By using the conversion rate formula, sellers can determine how much each factor needs to be increased to achieve their profitable conversion rate.

All three metrics should be viewed over long periods of time to determine whether each value has decreased and can be improved upon.

Need a quick review? Here are the benchmarks we covered in this section:

• Total unit sales: no benchmark; relative to the product and seller circumstances
• Item page views: no benchmark; relative to the product and seller circumstances
• Conversion rate: sellers should determine benchmark by figuring out their profitable conversion rate or by using their average conversion rate as a benchmark

Buy Box report

Sellers can use the Buy Box report to understand which merchants won and see the pricing of competing sellers. The Buy Box report can be downloaded by logging in to the Seller Center and clicking the Manage Items page. From there, sellers can click the Download icon and select Download Buy Box Report.

Once Merchants have downloaded the Buy Box report, they can view which seller (possibly themselves) won the Buy Box, in addition to the item price and shipping price of each competing seller.

[Source]

If a seller isn’t the Buy Box winner, they should use the item and shipping price of the winner as a benchmark. Let’s say the seller and the Buy Box winner have the same item price, but the Buy Box winner has a lower shipping price. The other seller then knows that they will need to decrease their shipping price in order to win.

Need a quick review? Here are the benchmarks we covered in this section:

• Item price: should be equal to or lower than the Buy Box winner’s item price
• Shipping price: should be equal to or lower than the Buy Box winner’s shipping price

Item reports

The item reports contain a variety of useful metrics, such as tracking inventory and feedback, for sellers’ individual products. This report can be accessed by logging in to the Seller Center, visiting the Manage Items page, clicking the Download icon, and selecting Download Catalog.

The report may take a while to download depending on the number of items you have. Once it has finished downloading, a .zip file will be saved to your computer. Its file name will start with “ItemReport.” Here is an example of an Item Report below:

[Source]

The Item report indicates each product’s average rating, reviews count, and inventory count. It also indicates the item price and shipping price of the product that won the Buy Box for sellers who don’t want to download the Buy Box report.

Walmart does not list a formal benchmark for product ratings and review amounts, but generally it’s good practice to maintain 4 stars or above on each item. In terms of reviews count, aim to have 50 or more reviews for each item. 50 or more reviews per product can result in a 4.6% increase in its conversion rate, according to stats from Reevoo.

Each item’s inventory count should never fall to zero as being out-of-stock delays orders and prevents sellers from winning the Buy Box. Pick an inventory count number higher than zero that signals when you should restock your inventory of that item. You should pick an amount that gives you enough time replenish your inventory before it drops to zero.

The Buy Box item and shipping prices should be used as benchmarks for the seller if they are not the Buy Box winner. They should match or lower their own item’s price and shipping price to beat the current Buy Box winner and secure it in the future.

Need a quick review? Here are the benchmarks we covered in this section:

• Average product rating: four stars or more
• Reviews count: 50 or more product reviews
• Inventory count: should stay well above zero; pick an inventory count higher than zero to signal when you need to restock your item
• Buy Box item price: should be matched or make your item price lower than the winner’s price
• Buy Box shipping price: should be matched or make your shipping price lower than the winner’s price

Seller Scorecard report

The Seller Scorecard report indicates key performance metrics as well as a merchant’s average seller rating. This report can be accessed by logging in to Seller Central, clicking Seller Scorecard under the Insights and Analytics section, and scrolling through the page to find each metrics section.

The Order Defect Rate is displayed first in both chart and graph formats.

[Source]

The ODR reporting is followed by the other two performance metrics: the on-time shipment rate and valid tracking rate.

[Source]

After these two rates, the average seller rating and each review are posted.

Walmart provides recommended benchmarks for the three performance metrics:

• 90-day order defect rate = 0-2%
• On-time shipment rate > 99%
• Valid tracking rate > 95% (excluding items shipped via the “Freight” method)

The marketplace does not provide a benchmark for your average seller rating, but merchants are advised to keep their average rating at 4 stars or above to convey a positive image of their business.

Need a quick review? Here are the benchmarks we covered in this section:

• 90-day order defect rate: 0-2%
• On-time shipment rate: > 99%
• Valid tracking rate: >95%
• Average seller rating: four or more stars

Say you’re not meeting these benchmarks…

If you’re not meeting the benchmarks for these metrics, there are steps you can take to improve your stats for greater customer engagement and acquisition.

Low conversion rate

When your conversion rate is low, it often means your sales are too low. Here are a few tips to boost your number of orders.

• Evaluate your pricing. You may need to lower your price in order to win the Buy Box more frequently and increase your sales. Review your competitors’ rates to see how your prices compare and whether they need to be decreased.
• Consider offering free shipping. Offering free shipping makes you more likely to win the Buy Box since it reduces your overall item cost. Buyers are also more attracted to free shipping and will be more likely to buy your product if you offer it.

A low conversion rate could also mean your traffic isn’t high enough. Your number of orders is more likely to drop with the fewer visitors you have. Here are a few tips to increase your listing traffic:

• Use SEO keywords. Including highly-searched terms and phrases in your listing titles and descriptions will drive traffic to your item pages. Walmart recommends these SEO practices for creating listings.
• Use clear, high-quality product images. When buyers scroll through product search results, they won’t click on your item if your product photo is blurry and unattractive. Use clear, high-quality images to encourage customers to click and purchase your product.
• Use advertising. Promote your Walmart listing with Google AdWords or Facebook ads for increased traffic to your item page.

Boosting your conversion rate to a profitable level, whether it’s through increasing sales or traffic, is a critical way of growing your Walmart business.

Weak Buy Box item and ship pricing

If you can’t afford to match or beat the Buy Box winner’s item and shipping prices, you need to reevaluate your budget. Here are a few tips for bringing your item and ship pricing down to competitive Buy Box levels.

• Determine how much your costs would need to be lowered to make a profit at the Buy Box winner’s item and shipping prices.
• Figure out where you can cut costs in your budget to afford winning the Buy Box. Can you switch to a less pricey supplier? Can you start using drop-shipping to reduce storage costs? Figure out which business practices aren’t necessary and cut costs to make winning the Buy Box affordable.

Both returning and new buyers are drawn to the Buy Box, so it’s worth reconfiguring your budget to win the spot and increase your sales.

Low product and seller ratings

If your average product and seller ratings are below four stars, buyers will be less likely to trust your business and purchase your items. Here are a few tips for raising your product and seller ratings.

• Address concerns that buyers mention in low-rated reviews. Customers may consider buying from you again if you’re able to resolve the issue that they had with your item.
• Plan to avoid these buyer-related issues in the future. Take note of the problems customers had with your products. Consider how you can change your seller practices to avoid these issues in the future so that you receive less negative feedback and keep your customers happy.
• Consider if a low review is eligible for removal. In some cases, negative product reviews and seller ratings are eligible for removal. Review Walmart’s guidelines on removal to see if any negative feedback you received could be taken off your listing or seller page.

Keeping your product and seller ratings high gives you peace-of-mind in knowing that you’re keeping customers happy and encouraging them to continue engaging with your business.

Low product review count

Without a high amount of reviews (>50), customers might feel uneasy about your business and won’t be motivated to purchase your product. Here are a few tips for collecting more product reviews:

• Get more sales. Review the low conversion rate tips above for strategies on increasing sales.
• Don’t ask customers for reviews or send them sample products to incentivize reviews. Walmart prohibits both of these practices, so sellers can only rely on Walmart’s messages to buyers that prompt them to leave reviews.

By increasing their number of sales and respecting Walmart’s feedback practices, sellers can gain a higher amount of product reviews that encourages new and old buyers to purchase their items.

Poor performance metrics

Poor performance metrics are a pretty clear sign of unhappy customers — which means they also signal oncoming negative product and seller reviews. Avoid these damaging ratings by keeping your performance metrics healthy with these tips:

Lower a high order defect rate by:

• Describing the product accurately. Indicate whether the product is damaged, used, or any other defining qualities that will matter to customers. Otherwise, the order could result in a return or cancellation that increases your order defect rate.
• Ensure on-time deliveries. Have an inventory management plan that ensures products are in-stock, ready to ship, and will be delivered on-time. Items that are delivered after the expected delivery date can increase your order defect rate.

Decrease a high on-time shipment rate and valid tracking rate by:

• Ensure on-time deliveries by having items in-stock and ready to ship. Merchants should consider using tools, like Sellbrite, if they are unsure about their inventory management planning. Sellers should also ensure that they are proving valid tracking info by following these guidelines from Walmart.

Sellers who use these strategies for maintaining healthy performance metric levels will feel confident in their excellent customer service that should encourage positive buyer feedback.

Low inventory count

If your items’ inventory count is constantly hitting zero before you’ve restocked, you need to improve your inventory management plan. When items aren’t available, they’re not going to win the Buy Box and they cause order delays for customers.

Inventory management is the responsibility of the seller, not Walmart. Sellers who are unsure of their inventory management abilities should consider using a tool like Sellbrite.

[Source]

Our program helps sellers avoid inventory management issues, such as overselling, with our channel syncing feature and allows sellers to customize their inventory rules by channel.

Metrics and benchmarks wrap-up

Can’t remember each metric and benchmark? Here’s a wrap-up to help you out.

Using numbers to grow your Walmart business

Walmart merchants deal with a relatively small amount of competition as the marketplace is still growing. While Walmart is emerging, it’s critical that sellers take advantage of data for improving their customer engagement and acquisition efforts.

Merchants who track and act on metrics are able to encourage both old and new customers to make purchases. Securing and growing this business, these sellers will have strong, well-established businesses on the marketplace once it has grown and there is more competition. Walmart merchants who continuously monitor their data and iterate on their engagement and acquisition efforts as the marketplace changes will stay successful on the marketplace.

A couple years ago, I took a job as a sales development representative (SDR) at TechValidate Software, a division of SurveyMonkey. I worked on a team of recent UC Berkeley and Stanford grads, all of whom were and still are amazingly gifted at selling, and who will doubtless become pinnacle sales leaders in Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, a huge part of our job involved making 500 phone calls each week to marketing executives at large software companies. That level of expectation week after week will wear your nerves to pieces in a very short amount of time. I hit and exceeded my quota on a regular basis, but I may have prematurely aged myself in the process.

After about six months of this, I decided to put the phone down and start sending emails instead.

Within five days, I had booked 26 qualified meetings, using only email. The typical number on any given week was about eight meetings booked. Needless to say, those 26 meetings set a record, as you can see in the following screenshot of SFDC meetings booked:  

Not only had I set a new record at the company, I did it in a way that was considered unconventional. Our marketing team sent emails on the sales team’s behalf each week, supplementing our cold calls, but those messages were rarely more than unnecessary pleasantries with weak calls to action. They certainly didn’t do much in the way of booking meetings with qualified leads.

I’m not writing this to start the mundane and pointless “cold email versus cold calling” debate, which is about as useful as arguing the merits of thin-crust versus deep-dish pizza. Cold calling works in many scenarios. Think of a restaurant owner, who’s on their feet for a large portion of the day and probably checks email less frequently than, say, a VP of digital marketing.

Before you say that I’m just terrible on the phone, take a look at a real review given to me by one of my peers:

I just hated calling people.

Cold calling became a wildly inefficient way to do business. I’d spend most of the day navigating automated phone systems, waiting for the ringing to stop so I could leave a voicemail that usually wasn’t returned. That repetitive slog started to put noticeably more strain on me each week, and I knew I had to make a change—one that would let me sell in a way that was efficient for both me and my would-be clients.

The trouble is, a lot of companies don’t teach their employees how to write a truly effective cold email. That was where I found myself at TechValidate, when I knew I needed a better way to book meetings. So, to free myself from a life spent chained to the telephone, I learned how to write a cold email that would up my open rates and get actual responses.

Prospects on my list received emails that were short and to the point while explaining a business problem TechValidate could solve. The messages always utilized a piece of quantifiable evidence or social proof, then finished with a clear and concise call to action.

So what does it take to write the perfect cold email?

First, plan on keeping your message between three and five sentences. You also need to choose a subject line that will convince people to open the email, though bear in mind that email open rates are really just a vanity metric. The obvious goal of a cold email is to get a response that’s relevant to your business and what you’re trying to accomplish. I could write a 99-page treatise on what’s wrong with most email subject lines, but to save time, here’s a link to this mini-crash course on subject lines.

There’s no one magic format for cold email. It will really depend on the client you’re writing to. In the case of the following email below, I chose to tell a story about an existing customer, which is often a strong way to send an initial cold email:

Name,

<<company>>’s marketing team was always the bottleneck when the sales team needed fresh content to close a deal.

Using our software, they were able to create content on demand using real data from their satisfied clients.

As a result, the bandwidth bottleneck between sales and marketing was eliminated, allowing more deals to close faster.

Would you be open to speaking to hear more about how our software could help increase bandwidth on your team?

Thanks,

John

A good narrative style mimics the way we talk in real life (or should, at any rate), and it’s much more subtle and tactful than saying something like, “Don’t become a failure like <<company>>’s marketing team . . .” Using a third-party story lets you describe another person or company’s so-called failures without sounding accusatory.

I was astounded at first when I started getting responses from people like the CMO of General Electric and other senior executives. By the time that 26th meeting was booked, though, I realized that people are motivated to respond to cold emails when they’re thoughtful, well-written, and, most important, to the point.

The result didn’t drastically change the way we did business; cold calling remained the main form of Business Development. But it did show the sales team that there are options out there besides the phone, and that learning how to be personable over cold email is entirely possible if you put in the work.

At the end of the day, treat the email as if you’re writing to yourself.

If you got your own email, would you read it?

The post How I Booked 26 Qualified Sales Meetings in One Week Using Only Cold Email appeared first on Salesfolk.

Pexels / Pixabay

Trying to track too many metrics has become common measurement mistake.

“The biggest misconception is the perceived need to capture and measure everything and anything,” said Janneke van Geuns, Google’s head of insights & analytics. “A common belief is that if you capture every type of metric, it will tell you magically what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, that is not how we get to insights, and would be comparable to having to find a needle in a haystack.”

Comments from a Google executive may attract attention, but other PR and marketing measurement experts have offered similar advice.

“More data is always a good thing right? More data means more information and more accurate decisions. More data means we’ll be able to build our business faster,” says Lars Lofgren, KISSmetrics marketing analyst. “Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.”

Substantial Time & Effort to Analyze

Too many metrics may be worse than no metrics. They require large amounts of resources to track and produce reams data that call for substantial time and effort to analyze. A large amount of data can create the impression of knowledge, but is useless if it doesn’t lead meaningful insights and actionable recommendations.

“Chances are good that, if you’ve been measuring your results for a while, then your reports contain at least a few broken, meaningless metrics that just aren’t helping your program anymore,” says PR measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing. Metrics may be old, outdated, or obsolete. Other metrics may be easily obtainable but short of producing useable information. “In any case, your measurement is weighed down by the baggage,” Paine says. A common mistake is to choose metrics that reveal little or no meaningful information. Some traditional metrics are no longer viewed as useful. In the early days of digital publishing, commercial organizations applied metrics from traditional print publications to the digital realm. But those metrics don’t apply to online media.

PR measurement experts like Paine recommend periodically reviewing PR metrics to jettison useless metrics.

Selecting the Best Metrics

Here are five strategies to determine meaningful metrics:

First define your goals. The ideal metrics indicate how PR supports the organization’s goals. If market share is your goal, then you have to measure market share. Ask yourself: What were you hired to do? What are the expectations? What are the organization’s major goals?

Seek benchmarks. Organizations typically compare progress to the last month. For more insights, look at the past 13 months and compare your performance to peers and competitors.

Determine what matters most to C-suite executives. “There’s nothing worse than blindly tracking for an extended period of time just to find out the results you are reporting are not what your clients or C-suite are looking for,” writes Kevin Volz for the PRSA.

Report only what matters, Volz advises. Share just 30 percent of what you originally planned to report. Three slides will influence executives more than 10 slides.

Determine how to measure social. “A metric can’t be overrated if it is important to assess how social media is contributing to business results,” van Geuns says. Use social metrics that connect to your organization’s goals. Did the social media activities produce sales leads or improve brand reputation? Did it improve sentiment among influencers? For a non-profit, did it increase fund-raising or number of new volunteers?

Bottom Line: Tracking too many metrics is one of the most common PR and marketing measurement errors. While many metrics can lead to large amounts of data, they require substantial resources to track and analyze the data. Too often, they don’t produce insights that improve business outcomes. Focusing on a handful of key metrics produces more meaningful results that lead to worthwhile insights about the impact of PR and social media activities on the business.

This article was originally published on the Glean.info blog.

Sign-up for a free demo of Glean.info media monitoring & measurement dashboard.

freeGraphicToday / Pixabay

Here’s a real life example how I got in front of a hard to reach prospect for a tough sell.

How long does it take you to get ahold of a prospect for a really tough sell? 4 calls? 6 emails? Months?

Did you know that it takes on average 8 to 12 attempts to reach a prospect by phone, however most salespeople give up after 2 attempts?

How many calls would you make to reach an unreachable lead? Would you persevere for 2 years?

Ask most salespeople and they will say the hardest part of sales is prospecting. You have to have a well thought out game plan, a ton of patience, and the ability to get over rejection pretty quickly.

Not to mention a lot of time. Studies show that salespeople spend about 17% of their business day prospecting and researching leads.

Perhaps you are one of the chosen few who has it all together — a very targeted buyer profile, a marketing department feeding you qualified leads and time set aside to focus on prospecting. But you still are struggling to connect. Maybe you just know your list of prospects is ideal… if only you could get ahold of them…

Let me tell you a story about a friend who was on the receiving end of this prospecting relationship. He was the unreachable prospect that finally answered the phone after 2 years!

The Initial Contact

About 24 months ago, a friend of mine, who works in Business Systems, received a call from a B2B salesperson looking to sell him a software solution for his org. The stars must have aligned that day for him to even answer the phone.

But he did and accepted her request for a quick demo to learn more about the product she was selling.

For him, he wasn’t really interested in doing the demo, but was feeling nice that day. The product she was pitching was solid. She knew it was a great solution for his company.

His response was that it just wasn’t the right time. And so began the tough sell.

When a salesperson initially connects with a prospect, they have to be able to gage very quickly where they stand on the “timing, fit and budget” spectrum. If you’re receiving qualified leads, then theoretically your product and/or service should align with their fit and budget.

A stellar prospecting process begins with building out a buyer profile, and then only targeting leads that fit into that persona. With all the market research and data out there, you can pre-assess a lead based on their overall company revenue (can they fit you into their budget) and pain points (are you a good fit for their needs). So, the only piece that is left out is timing.

A requirement for a tough sell is perseverance and this is where it comes in.

The Chase

This sales rep knew all the signs to look for if a lead was a hot lead. She was steadfast that my friend was a great prospect, and time was the only thing that stood in her way.

After that initial connection and short demo, she was told to “try back in 6 months or so”. A tough sell indeed.

Like any good salesperson, she then immediately put a note in her calendar to call him back 6 months to the date. In those next 6 months, she continued to track the progress of his company, virtually scoping out any new pain points they may have, and keeping an eye on any big changes. In today’s world, all you need is Google and LinkedIn to keep you up to date on all of this.

6 months later, right on queue, she was in his inbox with a follow-up message referring to the demo, her product’s benefits, and how she still believes it’s an ideal fit for his company. My guess is that she was using a Proactive CRM that helped her stay on top of who to call, and when, so no deals slipped through the cracks.

She asked in her email if the timing had changed for him. Was he ready to re-evaluate?

Dead silence.

Another email.

No response.

A few phone calls.

Nothing.

For the next 18 months, she continued to reach out every 6-8 weeks, but received no feedback.

She was being ghosted.

Now, I’m sure if you’re in sales, you’ve definitely been ghosted, even if you didn’t know there was a term for it. Getting ghosted by a prospect is when you get a sign that things are going well, you’re feeling good, and then they disappear without a trace.

There are few things that typically run through a salesperson’s mind at this point… Like, “I bet they just forgot they voicemail password and can’t retrieve the messages I’ve left. Perhaps I should just call once more?”

But in reality, you are most likely getting ignored because it’s a timing, fit, or budget issue. In my personal opinion, I’d rather get a definite “No” from a prospect than silence. Silence leaves a door open. This sales rep saw that door and wasn’t going to let it shut unless it was slammed in her face.

She tried everything during this ghosting period to reach my buddy, including:

• The “lost email” ploy, where you say “hey, my email must have got lost in your inbox…”
• A guilt-inducing voicemail that mentions your manager breathing down your neck.
• Using a “negative close” tone to push the onus back on them to get in touch.

This sales rep was determined! She was going to push past the silence and get a yes or a no from my friend.

And that’s when she came up with a brilliant idea to reach the unreachable prospect.

The Catch That Worked

Two years after that initial contact, my Business Systems friend received a package on his desk. It was a hard copy sports book, with a handwritten note inside from this persistent sales rep saying that she thought he may enjoy this.

Now, what did this book about the life of Muhammad Ali have to do with the SaaS she was hoping to sell to this company? Absolutely nothing. But it was just one more creative way to get noticed.

He put the book aside on his already cluttered desk and went off to his next meeting.

The following morning he receives an email from the rep. She had the shipment of the book tracked, so was alerted when it was delivered. This way, she was able to follow up with a note referencing the book’s confirmed arrival and hoping that he likes it.

Oh, and also, can we get that meeting on the calendar? Wondering if timing is now good for you guys…

This time, he responded. Yes, he’d take the meeting, and even pulled in two other key players that would possibly benefit from her product.

He figured, hey, if she was going to believe strongly enough that her product was right for them, and he was worth the effort, then maybe she knew more than him… Maybe the timing, fit and budget finally were right.

So, did she close the deal?

It’s to be determined. The meeting was set, all attended, and it looks like there is a very promising opportunity in her pipeline for about $150,000 next quarter.

Going to show that no prospect is unreachable, and persistence does pay off.

Had a tough sell? How about a sales opportunity that was seemingly impossible to get a hold of? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!

SnapwireSnaps / Pixabay

Marketing illuminates the path to solving a problem. Not just any path―your path. This is somewhat academic in low-consideration consumer products, but the lifeblood to high-consideration B2B products and services. To get prospects to follow your path, you must lead.

These high-consideration products and services are often mission―and career―critical. There is an element of trust that sits on the prospects’ shoulders during the consideration journey. To earn that trust you must do more than mark the trail with colored stones and leave treats along the way. Demonstrate authority, leadership, and humanity to prove your competitive advantage is differentiating. It gives prospects a strong reason to believe.

Teach Them to Fish: Five Leadership Qualities of B2B Lead Generation

1. The B2B lead generation marketing leader takes the time to understand prospects as both executives and people, with both personal and corporate goals and responsibilities, which sometimes conflict. The prospect persona process provides remarkable insight and how these individuals come together to make a decision. This quality is essential. Recognizing and embracing humanity leads to empathy, which is the basis of all effective communication. Everything starts here. Or stops.
2. “Speak,” whether in print or in person, with ethics, morality, and a crystal-clear vision of what is and what isn’t. A key component of honesty is respect for your prospects and their corporate culture. Don’t embellish your capabilities or denigrate the competition. Layout, in terminology that prospects can understand, how your product or service can address their concerns, that success is a journey and not a slam dunk, and how you, as a leader in the lead generation process, can bring a value-add.
3. It is critically important that your prospect knows you are committed to their success and not just to selling your product. Your commitment to the marketplace emits the confidence that your solution is not just viable, but superlative. Let your prospects see you with your sleeves rolled up and your fingernails dirty. Admit problems and setbacks. If an aspect is particularly gnarly, fess up. Bring your team of leaders into the conversation.
4. You are here for the long-haul and provide the tools and insights necessary for success, which may include ongoing training, troubleshooting, and the instillation of positive energy. The consideration journey is rarely straight and narrow. Put your arm around your prospect. Show authority and guidance. Use creativity, and sometimes humor, to make your point.
5. Your prospects are very serious about the steps they must take and the answers they must find while considering potential solutions. A leader must understand how the prospect measures success and configures their own measurement system to coincide and complement. It may be uncomfortable, but it communicates seriousness, underscores the other qualities, and provides the basis for continuous improvement.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive Lead Generation

We are all aware of the conclusion of various studies that the “sales process” is disappearing. Depending on which study you reference, about 60% to 70% of the consideration process takes place prior to engagement with the selling entity. Placidly accepting these results during the lead generation process breeds reactive positioning. They don’t want to talk with our reps, so we can hide behind the curtain. That is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once you take the first step with the prospect persona process, you are on your own road to leadership which by definition is proactive. Which not only gives prospects a reason to believe, it gives them a reason to engage.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

There is a lot of discussion around the role of technology in sales, advances in AI (you decide what the A stands for), and its impact on the role of and future of sales people.  There is no doubt that technology will continue to change the process of revenue generation, maintenance and growth, but that’s nothing new.  In any given decade as technology is introduced, the sales tribe is the first to adopt.  We are the ones who figure out how to leverage new tech to make more money, sales ops figure out how to take cost out of the cycle, driving even greater margins.

But any conversation about “sales” and technology, should really be framed not as discussion of sales, but revenue.  Revenue, across the entire “client life cycle”, in that context, sales, or specifically, the act of selling, is but one small part of the cycle.  Selling here is defined as the initial point of persuading someone who is not doing business with you, to do business with you.  A small part of the larger revenue cycle, a crucial one, one that enables the flow of revenue, but it is a small part in the context of the “client life cycle”.  That front piece is different than the rest of the rest of the cycle.

This why once the client has been persuaded, in most instances, the client managed by a different set of people with different skills.  This is even more pronounced in today’s “disintermediated” sales environment, or as some would like to call it, “sales specialization”.  No matter the label, the reality is that the person with making the initial sale, is not the one tasked with ensuring “customer experience”, fulfilment and support, “account management”, or growth, or renewal.  Taken as a whole, it’s all sales, but we all know it is a hockey team, yes, it’s all the Habs, but no one looks for the goalie to score, or a centre to stand between the pipes.

Which brings us to tech’s impact on sales, more specifically the discussion of “salespeople” being displaced by tech.  I would argue that if we took the “client life cycle”, the continuing revenue cycle, some parts are much more vulnerable to being out done by tech and replaced by tech.  In fact, the further you are in the process, the more at risk you are to being “Amazoned”.

The critical point, is the ability to persuade someone to change what they are doing now, and buy your offering or service from you, the thing hunters do.  While tools and tech can help score leads, nurture them, even get them to the point of engagement.  This may be easy for that small part of the market that is actively looking, ready to buy, and are just looking for the right vendor.  But when it comes to that 70% plus part of the market that is in Status Quo, not interacting with the market.  It takes real skill to engage with someone who has not given any thought to engaging, changing or buying.  This is the very reason that closed opportunities are handed off to people with other skills, and out of the hands of hunters, and given to people with different skills; skills I would argue easily replace by automation, which will likely do it more efficiently.

So, if you are a hunter, with the unique EQ, IQ, and skills to lead and persuade, you need not worry about displaced.  If you are downstream from the signature, Alexa has your number.

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.

The post What’s My Future In Sales? appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Learn the best practices for landing page optimization to help generate quality leads for SaaS

Landing pages are the heart of any inbound marketing campaign, mainly because they have the unique ability to convert complete strangers into qualified leads. Surprisingly, 44% of B2B companies direct visitors to their website's homepage rather than to a specific landing page.

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Perhaps this can explain why according to the latest State of Inbound 2017 report, the majority of marketers still struggle with generating new leads for their businesses.

Building a well-designed and optimized landing page is one viable way to help your SaaS business overcome this marketing challenge.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a specially designed page where you direct your visitors to collect their information in exchange for an offer like an ebook, free trial, online course, or even ROI calculators. It is one of the pillar components of inbound marketing because this is where you can generate new leads for your business.

Landing page optimization tips

No matter how beautiful your landing page may be, if it is not optimized correctly, you will not fully benefit from its lead generation capability for your SaaS business.

Here are ten simple landing age optimization tips you can do on your site's landing pages to increase your lead generation ratio.

If you want more tips and examples of perfect landing pages, check out Dave Chaffey's perfect landing page examples.

1. Understand your customer

Inbound marketing focuses on your customer. So it follows that you need to make sure that the layout design, content, and offer on your landing page is something that your customer will find educational, engaging, and helpful. Some ways that you can do this include:

• Developing a clear buyer persona.
• Using surveys and feedback forms.
• Studying your competitors' landing pages.

2. Have a compelling headline

According to Kissmetrics, you only have 8 seconds to make a lasting impression, and convince a visitor to enter their information in your lead capture form.

Some ways to craft your headline so that it catches your visitor's attention in time:

• Answer the question, “What will visitors who convert receive?”
• Highlight the most significant benefit your visitor will get.
• Perform the Blink Test on your heading

3. KISS your copy

KISS stands for "Keep It Short and Simple." Make sure your visitors can skim and scan the copy of your landing page. Some ways to do that are:

• Highlight key takeaways with bullet points.
• Add white space.
• Use short, simple words.

GrapeVine Logic's landing page offering a whitepaper is an excellent example of this:

4. Make your landing page SEO-friendly

While Google and other search engines are now giving more preference to quality, SEO still plays a huge role regarding page ranking. If you want your target audience to find your landing page, you need to apply some SEO best practices:

• Research long-tail keywords to use for your landing page.
• Make sure to include your keyword in your landing page’s title, headers, URL path, and content.
• Include alt tags for your images.
• Google and search engines love pages that are shared a lot, so don't forget to add social share buttons.

5. Stay ‘above-the-fold’

Above-the-fold is a term first used back in the day to refer to content found on the top half of newspapers. Today, this term is used to refer to content that is located above the bottom of your browser window as soon as the page loads.

People do not scroll down a page unless you give them a good reason. That is why it is essential to put all of the valuable information above the fold, specifically:

• Landing page copy
• Lead capture form
• Call-to-Action button

Invest Feed does a great job in keeping all the essential details of the landing page above the fold as we can see below:

6. Ask the right questions in your lead capture form

Keep in mind that your visitors are very protective when it comes to giving out their personal information, especially if they are first-time visitors. You can ease the apprehension by:

• Evaluate the value of your offer. The more valuable it is, the more information you can ask.
• Ask your sales team to find out what information they need to guide your leads through the funnel.
• Avoid asking for sensitive information.
• Include a link to your privacy policy to put them at ease.

7. Create a compelling offer

Your lead capture form may be the most critical part of your landing page when it comes to generating new leads. However, if you are not offering something that will catch your audience's attention, it will not do you any good.

Before you create the offer for your landing page, ask the following questions:

• What problem do you want to solve?
• What stage of the buyer’s journey is this for?
• How will this benefit my target audience?
• What format should be used for the offer? (e.g., Ebook, webinar, audio recording, email course)

8. Tapping into the Power of One

An optimized landing page is laser focused. It contains only one offer, one headline, one solid message, and one call-to-action. Giving your visitors options will just distract and confuse your visitors, and there's a very good chance that your visitor will end up not choosing either one.

9. Test your landing page

Believe it or not, 61% of companies run less than five tests on their websites each month

Even though you are using a landing page layout and design that worked well for you in the past, that does not mean that you will get the same results the second time around. The fact is that there is no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to inbound marketing because buying behaviours change.

Running an A/B test (otherwise known as a Split Test) on your landing page is, by far, the best way help you optimize your landing page so that it generates the highest number of leads possible. Among the things you need to test are:

• Layout design
• Landing page color scheme
• Headline
• Lead capture form
• Size, color, and text of your CTA button

When doing a Split Test, make sure that you only change one variable each time you run the test. Doing this will help you come up with a landing page design that’s eye-catching, aesthetically-pleasing, and above all, converting.

10. Don’t forget the ‘Thank You’ Page

As its name suggests, a ‘Thank You’ page is where you thank your new leads for giving you their information. At the same time, it gives them the next steps to get the offer that you promised.

Some things to remember when creating your ‘Thank You’ page:

• Provide specific details how your new leads can get the offer you promised.
• Add social sharing links and buttons.
• Invite your new leads to follow you in social media by adding social follow links.

Landing page optimization is just one of the many lead generation strategies you can use for your SaaS business. Apply any one or all of these tips will help you get more qualified leads that you can now hand over to your sales team to slowly convert into customers.

A while ago, I heard about an apocryphal (I hope at least) email strategy around sending marketing emails geared toward women during football games on Sundays. The idea being that while these prospects might be watching football, they may not be all that interested and therefore checking devices and phones, browsing emails.

My first thought was: “That’s dumb and pretty assuming, because there are a lot of women who really like watching football.”

But it got me thinking about emailing on the weekends in general (and my own email-opening habits). For me, I open work email seven days a week–and Sundays are typically a relaxed day where I’m spending a chunk of time either on the computer or looking around on my smartphone.

At some point in the day, I check my different email accounts, and even though I don’t respond to work-related messages until I’m back in the office, marketing messages sometimes catch my eye.

It turns out: I’m not alone in these habits. Data shows that 75% of Americans check their work email on weekends. What’s more: Only 20% of high earners (making more than $100K per year) will not open work email on weekends.

So what are the implications for the B2B market?

Sending B2B Promotion On the Weekend

It turns out that the weekends might be for more than just football.

Data from Smart Insights shows that entrepreneurs (and workaholics, self included, I guess) tend to open and click on B2B emails more during Saturday and Sunday. Take a look at the chart below to see just how significant the jump in engagement rate is over the weekend:

This indicates an important reality for B2B marketers: Even though the target audience may not be in the office over the weekend, they’re still mentally “plugged in” to work-related issues – meaning that the emails you send during this window don’t go unnoticed.

Plus: Since many other B2B companies are sending during the week, sending over the weekend presents an opportunity to capture a less distracted audience. When you’re the only one popping up in the inbox (or when you’re at least part of a smaller group), you have a better chance of standing out in this otherwise noisy and crowded environment.

Ultimately, we need to remember that although it’s business-to-business marketing, in reality, there are people behind those businesses that are making decisions.

So when we think about creating a strategy to reach that audience, people are still at the core of those efforts. And, the data doesn’t lie: People are still engaging their work brains on the weekends (whether that’s entirely healthy or not.)

From here, let’s look at some examples of effective weekend B2B marketing materials so you can get some ideas on what your next campaign might look like.

Examples and Ideas: B2B Marketing Over the Weekend

When it comes to weekend marketing efforts, things are a whole lot simpler thanks to marketing automation tools.

Even if you’re sending an email campaign on a Sunday, you don’t need to be at your computer during the weekend to launch it. Using tools like automated email means you can schedule those campaigns to go live at the specified date and time.

You can even capitalize on the weekend context of sporting events within these campaigns. It adds a bit of a tie-in for your message and takes a more relaxed tone (compared to a formal, business-centric marketing message). In the two examples below from B2B software company Citrix, we can see how they did just that.

Image source

In this interactive assessment for their GoToMeeting product, Citrix puts an engaging experience in a low-stakes environment using a quiz format. During the assessment, the user gets to participate and learn more about his/her company meetings, while on the back end, Citrix learns more about their audience from the responses submitted through the assessment.

You could easily build out a similar assessment and promote it within an email campaign that’s scheduled to send on a Sunday.

Citrix created another fun piece of engaging weekend content (this time a video) and used the sports context to add a relatable human element to their marketing message. As viewers watch the video, they can identify who fills the different personas outlined within their office.

This video was even televised nationally and linked to the meeting MVP assessment.

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Now, does your weekend campaign have to be sports-related? No. There are many things happening on the weekends that you can capitalize on within a marketing message. Think holidays. Think week-ahead prep. The possibilities are endless.

The main thing to remember is: Weekends are not off limits.

B2B Social Media Strategies for the Weekend

Let’s talk a bit more about weekend posting strategies for B2B companies.

Maybe you’re wondering, “What all should our company post during weekends? Is a different overall approach needed?”

First, the frequency and nuts and bolts of the posting strategy for B2B marketing on the weekends. Two specific platforms to cover with large, engaged audiences are Facebook and Twitter.

CoSchedule data shows that weekends are a peak time for engagement on Facebook, with the optimal posting times being 9 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm. On both Saturday and Sunday, engagement is 32% higher on average. You wouldn’t want to miss out on this high-activity period, would you? No, of course not.

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SocialPilot found that on Twitter, the hours between 12 pm-6 pm perform best in regard to engagement across all days of the week (that means Saturday and Sunday, too.)

After several weeks of keeping our eyes on B2B companies’ weekend posting habits, we found that many B2B companies post anywhere from one to five times per weekend day on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

That’s a key number in terms not too much, not too little. While some don’t post on the weekends at all, the median was around two a day.

Now, these data points aren’t hard and fast guidelines, but they do provide a jumping off point for testing. Your unique B2B audience might follow different patterns, but it’s a good idea to start working within these parameters when you begin experimenting with a weekend posting strategy.

Now, let’s look at an example from a company that already has a weekend social media strategy and see how their approach is different during the weekdays vs. weekends.

Wista: Weekends vs. Weekdays

During the week, Wistia, a video hosting service for business, posts on social media with actionable how-tos, like we can see in this example from Twitter. In this tweet, they’re teaching how to improve sound quality in video recordings.

We also see teaching in this weekday example posted on Facebook. Here, they’re sharing some time-saving secrets for video editing, which is again relevant to their video-loving audience.

On the weekends, however, we can see Wistia’s strategy shift a bit. Rather than trying to educate or work on moving their audience members down the sales funnel, they share more story-based content that talks about company values, brand culture, etc.

We can see this in a tweet they shared on a Saturday that talks about company culture and making family time a priority for employees.

What we can notice about this B2B social media approach is this: Weekdays when potential leads are in the office and thinking about the business are for more educational content. Weekends are more for laid-back, story-driven content that doesn’t always employ a hard sell.

It’s an interesting approach that lets the B2B brand stay top-of-mind with leads seven days a week, but without always blatantly trying to push sales or lead gen efforts. This strategy is worth considering as you develop your own weekend posting approach.

You may wonder, “LinkedIn?”. Good thought.

LinkedIn can be seen in a similar fashion in terms of weekday v. weekend. People are constantly popping on LinkedIn due to groups they belong to, article mentions, or just connection requests.

The mere fact that a potential buyer could be hopping on the network for a bit on Saturday should be incentive enough for your brand to also be present. Again, though, it’s a balance. Will someone want to pour over research about scalability and ROI? Maybe. But, also, probably not.

Would they want to read about an interview on a current, lighter industry topic? Watch a two-minute video introducing a new concept? That seems warmer. Maybe post an upcoming industry event that’s attention grabbing? Also warmer.

Best Practices

What else do you need to consider when creating a weekend marketing plan?

Let’s quickly review a few of the best practices for B2B marketing…just for a quick reminder.

• Personalization is important. When you integrate data from your CRM (even a first name helps!), you create a more customized experience.
• Short is good. On weekends, people are often scanning and moving quickly from one piece of content to the next. Design for consumability and keep messages/experiences brief.
• Include a CTA. At the end of your message, ask the reader to do something, like to sign up for an event. This captures the forward momentum you just built up.
• Try a relaxed tone. Weekends are an opportunity for you to test a more relaxed, friendly tone with your audience. If you haven’t tried this before, this might be the right setting for experimentation.

Also keep in mind that each audience is unique, and so it’s best to approach this strategy in a testing mindframe when you’re getting started. You may find that for your B2B demographic, the weekends just don’t translate. But you may also be surprised to find that the weekends are a great time for your campaigns. Unless you test it, you’ll never really know.

Weekend Marketing: Worth Testing

As you and your team start thinking about how you can tap into the weekend, remember the best practices that you’ve found work well for your past messages and incorporate them here, too. During your experiments with things like interactive assessments, videos, and experience-based messages, make notes of which formats convert best. Let the numbers be your guide.

Customer Success teams interact with many cross-functional departments, building and maintaining relationships from Support to Account Management. But few relationships have more impact on future customer success than the one between Customer Success and Sales. At no time is coordination and collaboration between these two teams more critical than immediately following a sale, when Customer Success is tasked with making the vision sold a reality.

A clearly defined handoff process allows Customer Success to immediately start delivering on the value Sales presented to the customer.

The vast majority of Account Executives (AEs) want the customers they sign up to be successful, but they might be a bit hazy about what Customer Success teams actually do. As a result, it’s easy for an AE to forget to share critical information with a Customer Success Manager (CSM). For Success teams, this leads to a feeling that “Sales throws us customers over the wall after a deal is signed” – as a colleague once put it. For customers, this leads to a feeling that they’re wasting time repeating the same conversations they had during the sales process with a CSM who hasn’t been given any context.

Customer Success teams need to work with Sales to create a handoff process that captures the knowledge an Account Executive gathered during the sales process. Success teams should use this information to define roles and goals with stakeholders and expand relationships. Having a clear post-sales handoff process increases your chances of customer success by reducing the time it takes for customers to see value. Customer Success and Sales teams who work together as part of an established post-sales process provide a better customer experience, are better able to meet customer goals and have more opportunities to expand customer relationships.

Step 1: Transferring Knowledge

The Account Executive has spent weeks or months digging into the customer’s needs and building a convincing argument for why your product is the best solution. The customer’s enthusiasm and motivation are at an all-time high and they’re excited to get started. A sloppy transition from Sales to Customer Success can slow things down and create barriers to success before the ink on the contract has dried.

AEs need to quickly bring CSMs up to speed on the details of each new deal. Considering that the average sales cycle might include as many as 30 touch points, there’s usually a lot to catch up on. For this reason, it’s helpful to create a knowledge transfer framework that standardizes the process and ensures no major details are overlooked or forgotten. I’ve created a separate post that outlines the main questions and topics that should be discussed as part of this knowledge transfer. These questions draw heavily from my experience over the years- some topics have led to unexpected insights, while others can help identify hidden red-flags. Similar to the way you customize your onboarding experience to fit the nuances of your product and your customer’s goals, you should also tailor these questions to capture information that’s key to your business.

When your company is still in the early stages of growth this information might be shared anecdotally over a cup of coffee. As you expand, it makes sense to document customer information in a product that integrates this data into a simplified day-to-day workflow.

Step 2: Defining Roles and Goals

Now that the CSM has been brought up to speed, it’s time to introduce them to the customer in a kickoff call.

The first objective of this call is to define what role stakeholders will play moving forward. One important takeaway from this conversation is who will be assigned the role of product owner. The product owner is not necessarily the person who signed the contract. In fact, unless the customer is very small, it is better if this isn’t the decision maker who the AE worked with to sign the deal. CSMs need a product owner who is accessible, engaged, and, perhaps most importantly, accountable for the success of this product internally. Everyone should agree on when and how the AE, the decision maker, and other interested parties will be kept up to date by the CSM and product owner moving forward.

The second objective of this call is to understand the customer’s goals for your product and discuss what metrics they will be using to measure success. “Many times customers have seen great demos and the salesperson set high expectations about what is possible. It’s now the CSMs job to set expectations about what is realistic and practical within given time frames” – Jason Whitehead. Having the AE and the decision maker on this call allows the CSM to address any disconnect between what was conveyed during the sales process and what is realistic. As a final step, goals should be formalized and signed off by stakeholders on both sides.

Step 3: Expanding Relationships

Unless your business is transactional in nature, expanding your relationships with customers should be an ongoing priority. Companies built on recurring revenue can’t afford to treat customers like they’re disposable. Nothing makes a customer feel more unimportant right off the bat than to have the AE they worked with during the sales process permanently disappear the moment the deal is signed. Instead, establish a process that encourages AEs to be invested in the post-sales handoff and ongoing customer success- which has the added benefit of increasing the AE’s chances of winning future business.

In practice, opportunities to expand your company’s relationship with a customer might include signing additional teams, buying access to additional features, or agreeing to a longer-term contract. But the two requirements for healthy expansion are: 1) the customer currently sees value in your product and 2) expanding your relationship will bring the customer even more value in the future. When expansion is approached this way, Customer Success teams can help Sales bring in more revenue by identifying sales opportunities among successful customers.

Not only does a disconnect in the post-sales process lead to a poor customer experience, it increases the time it takes for a customer to start seeing value and increases the risk that your company won’t be able to deliver customer success. A seamless post-sales process between Customer Success and Sales creates happier, more successful, and more profitable customers.

The best digital marketing research across marketing channels - including SEO, PPC, CRO, social, mobile, martech, email, e-commerce, and UX - to help inform your 2019 marketing strategy Because the state of digital marketing is always evolving, it is important …..

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Email marketing has been popular since the days of dial-up, but much like how the Internet has changed, so has how we market to customers. The key to steady conversion is a newsletter template that engages your subscribers and leads them back to your products. If you’ve noticed your email marketing isn’t working like in the past, then you probably need to update your newsletter template for today’s savvy customer.

Building a Newsletter Template

There are a handful of great email softwares on the market including Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and AWeber. Each of these options has their own unique pros and cons – user experience, features, price, etc. There’s also a handful of great newsletter template designs you can download or pay for from sources like Themeforest and Litmus.

Whether you are just getting started with your newsletter or you are looking to get better results from the one you have, you’ll need to know some important factors that ensure more opens and clicks. Here are the important newsletter template best practices to ensure email marketing success.

Narrow Your Focus

Many businesses try to cram every aspect of their business into their newsletter. You’ll have sales information next to an article about an industry trend, along with product information. The newsletter feels cramped and disjointed. If you want a newsletter that converts, then narrow your focus. You don’t need to sell an entire store in a single newsletter. Put the focus on a single sale and why your customers need to take advantage of it. You can have an article about an industry trend and connect it products or services.

Don’t Focus on Sales

The last thing customers want is for their inboxes to be inundated with product offers. They want to be entertained and educated. When your newsletter is filled with nothing but products and prices, they get turned off. They’ll either ignore most of the email or not open it all. You need to give them a reason to open your email. If you focus your newsletter on quality content, then the sales will follow naturally. Provide articles that educate them on your business or products, but don’t make it a sales pitch.

If It’s Not Responsive, It’s Not Opened

When most people check their personal email, it’s not on a desktop at home. It’s on their phone in the subway train on the way to work or in the doctor’s office waiting room. When they hear the notification sound or see the icon on their phone screen, their first instinct is to check what it is. If your email newsletter looks great on a desktop, but not on a smartphone, you’re wasting your money. A responsive newsletter template makes sure your newsletter looks good on a smartphone, tablet and desktop. A newsletter can’t convert if customers are confused at what they’re seeing. It’s important that any graphics are resized appropriately and calls to action, headers and footers look good too.

Design for the Skimmer

We all like to think that when our email arrives, customers spend hours looking at every article and word, but in today’s digital world, you’re lucky to get 30 seconds of their time. Most people will skim emails for items they’re interested in, and you need to prepare for that. Use colors and type face to emphasize the important aspects of the newsletter. Use images with bright colors, bold, important words in the text, and make sure your call to action is attention grabbing. You only have a few seconds to make a sale before your customers move on to the next email.

First Impressions: The Subject Line

You can spend hours and thousands of dollars on a gorgeous email newsletter template, but if your subject line is drab and boring, then customers may never get to see it. The eye-catching subject line is an artform and the Achilles heel of many business owners. First, you need to know your audience and the tone of your newsletter. If your newsletter is more business-oriented, then the subject line should match the tone, but still be creative. If the newsletter is fun and lighthearted, then do the same with your subject line. You can even include emojis in the subject line to really grab attention.

Don’t Forget Your Call to Action

Just like when writing an advertorial, every newsletter should have a call to action. This is the button, link or phrase that leads them to the next stage of the buying process. It could be a link to a product, blog post, or specially created landing page. You can have multiple CTAs in a newsletter, but there should be one primary. It’s the one you want everyone to use. Put it in a place of prominence and make sure it stands out with a bright contrasting color. Be creative with the CTA just like the subject line. The goal is to grab their attention and get them to click to the next area of the sales funnel.

Are your customers ignoring your emails or newsletter templates just not converting? Leave your thoughts and comments below and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for weekly digital marketing insights!

Speech analytics is at the forefront of the corporate push to make intelligence gained from Big Data not only valuable but actionable in real-time. Speech analytics offers the ability to create meaningful voice data and interaction trends to help companies improve services, reduce costs, and grow revenue in their contact center and other business areas.

Originally called audio-mining, in which audio files were converted to text to enable searches of specific words or phrases, speech analytics now involves in-depth searches based on phonetics with the ability to detect certain emotions expressed on a phone call as well as trends within a call, such as hold times, silent patches, or agents talking over a caller. With new technologies, such as real-time speech analytics, emotional analytics and AI, contact centers can create better customer experiences. According to an Opus Research Survey, an overwhelming 72% companies believe that speech analytics can lead to improved customer experience, 68% regard it as a cost saving mechanism, 52% respondents trust that speech analytics deployment can lead to revenue enhancement.

Research by DMG Consulting indicates that speech analytics in call centers pays for itself in less than one year, and Techtarget reports that it pays for itself in as little as three months. So it’s no surprise that businesses are adopting speech analytics at a healthy rate. In fact, the market has grown from a mere 24 customers in 2003 to more than 3.5 million in 2015—around 20% of businesses that have contact centers. And adoption is increasing as technology improves, with up to 36% of businesses that do not use speech analytics saying they plan to implement it in the near future.

Benefits of Speech Analytics Contact Centers

Speech analytics is particularly relevant and useful to businesses operating call centers because they enable them to extract crucial information out of unstructured data from customer interactions, identify patterns and take action to improve what they are selling or the way they are selling it.

Improve the Customer Experience

Improving the customer experience is one of the main reasons companies deploy speech analytics technology in the first place. Speech analytics software helps mine and analyze audio data, detecting things like emotion, tone and stress in a customer’s voice; the reason for the call; satisfaction; the products mentioned; and more. Speech analytics tools can also identify if a customer is getting upset or frustrated. Users can quickly identify a customer’s needs, wants and expectations, and gauge how to best address any issues.

Cost Savings

Broadly speaking, speech analytics projects can deliver return on investment via a variety of contributions that reduce costs and increase revenue. ContactBabel has listed the following in their ‘The Inner Circle Guide to Speech Analytics’:

• Reduction in headcount from automation of call monitoring and compliance checking.
• Avoidance of fines and damages for non-compliance.
• Reduction in call volumes after understanding why customers are calling, and acting to optimize any broken processes elsewhere in the organization (e.g. website, marketing, distribution, etc.) that are causing these calls.
• Reduction in cost of unnecessary callbacks after improving first-call resolution rates.
• Avoidance of live calls that can be handled by better IVR or website self-service.
• Reduced cost of quality assurance and monitoring.
• Lower cost per call through shortened handle times and fewer transfers.
• Lower new staff attrition rates and recruitment costs through early identification of specific training requirements.

Revenue Enhancement – Identify Upsell/Cross-Sell Opportunities

Another benefit to delivering immediate feedback is that it can provide agents with a distinct advantage in cross and up-sell efforts. As outlined in the Aberdeen research, agents can “leverage customer data captured during a call to identify a specific product or service they can offer to the same client during the call, which allows them to deliver the right product to the right customer at the right time.” By analyzing which conversations lead to more sales and what makes your top sellers so successful, it is possible to find the most effective patterns to close a deal and develop a coaching program to improve your agents’ selling techniques as well as reduce missed opportunities.

It helps in increase in revenue through:

• Increase in sales conversion rates and values based on dissemination of best practice.
• Increase in promise-to-pay ratios (debt collection).
• Optimized marketing messages through instant customer evaluation.
• Reduced customer churn through dynamic screen-pop and real-time analytics tailoring calls to the customer.
• Quicker response to new competitor and pricing information.

Improvement in Operations

It brings improvements in the operating performance of a department, reduced Average Handle Time, call deflection, first call resolution, transfers, etc. Implementing an analytics system can actually help to reinvigorate stagnant operations through an emphasis on improved performance.

Speech analytics truly represents a revolution in the field of quality monitoring for contact centers. It improves upon all areas of manual monitoring, particularly those that carry with them inherent deficiencies. Analytics evaluators review all calls against a well-defined set of employee skills, producing unbiased actionable information that management and Quality Management teams can then use to identify opportunities where overall performance can be improved to produce higher customer satisfaction rates and significant as well as near-immediate revenue increases.

Promoting Customer Loyalty & Retention

Identifying and reducing the number of at-risk customers. Speech analytics can detect trends based on programmed key words, phrases, requests, even emotions, in real time or by sifting through a library of past calls. It can tell you which agents are talking over the customers, thereby not really listening to the customer, and it can tell you – frequently in real time – what issues are popping up in the call center. But as far as listening to the customer, you can go back and search all those calls for certain words, products, services, locations, discussions of price, discussions of quality – you can literally hear what your customers are saying about the topics that you need actionable business intelligence on.

Speech analytics truly represents a revolution in the field of quality monitoring for contact centers. It improves upon all areas of manual monitoring, particularly those that carry with them inherent deficiencies. Analytics evaluators review all calls against a well-defined set of employee skills, producing unbiased actionable information that management and Quality Management teams can then use to identify opportunities where overall performance can be improved to produce higher customer satisfaction rates and significant as well as near-immediate revenue increases.

Promoting Customer Loyalty & Retention

Identifying and reducing the number of at-risk customers. Speech analytics can detect trends based on programmed key words, phrases, requests, even emotions, in real time or by sifting through a library of past calls. It can tell you which agents are talking over the customers, thereby not really listening to the customer, and it can tell you – frequently in real time – what issues are popping up in the call center. But as far as listening to the customer, you can go back and search all those calls for certain words, products, services, locations, discussions of price, discussions of quality – you can literally hear what your customers are saying about the topics that you need actionable business intelligence on.

Identify Compliance & Risk Issues

Speech Analytics can automatically score every single call against your compliance criteria in real time and can analyse and score all calls for selling opportunities achieved and missed. It also allows for greater learning opportunities for your agents as immediate feedback can be requested following a flagged call for poor performance or compliance risk. Speech Analytics can reduce compliance costs significantly by focusing your compliance team on the high risk or low quality calls in the business rather than spending time looking for those needles in haystacks. Because you subscribe to high ethical standards and understand the value of customer relationships, in all likelihood your business rules and training procedures are already in compliance with federal laws and regulations. However, that does not mean that there won’t be individual transgressions. Individual agents, under pressure to meet productivity goals or inattention to training sessions, may inadvertently fail to make necessary disclosures or reveal protected private information. Violations can be costly. Beyond financial penalties damaged corporate reputations may result in longer lasting harm. Speech Analytics will identify calls that may represent potential violations. You will then listen to these calls to identify specific issues. The results will be used as training tools to help assure that agents are completely familiar with requirements, fine-tune scripts so they are easier to recite over the phone, and program your e-learning system to provide prompts to help assure that agents provide the required disclosures.

For example, in the Asset Recovery Market (ARM), during debt collection calls agents are required to read a “mini Miranda” paragraph to called parties or voice messaging systems. Failure to do so can result in fines and lawsuits. With Speech Analytics, companies can now listen to all calls for compliance and aggregate that data in an analytics environment.

KPIs That Can Be Improved Using Speech Analytics Data

Speech Analytics impacts Key Performance Indicators in the contact center by recognizing patterns that might lead to best practices. It helps answer the overarching question, “Where is the real intelligence coming from?” On every call, there are key moments for key content, regardless of the length of each call. By searching content at those special moments, Speech Analytics helps achieve true “Customer Insight.

Average Handle Time

Average handle time is the time from when an agent answers a call until the agent disconnects. It is one of the most commonly analyzed KPIs in the call center industry as it is directly related to caller satisfaction. Long calls can add to costs in the contact center. If they are justified, such as when agents with typically longer calls produce higher revenue per call, that is fine. However, sometimes longer calls result from agents having poor attitudes or perhaps lacking sufficient knowledge. Similarly, short AHTs also might indicate agents are more concerned with handling calls quickly and are not taking the time to handle the transaction properly or solve the customer’s issue, which has a direct impact on the Customer Experience. Speech Analytics can also determine if a proliferation of calls with short AHTs might be a result of customers calling in with simple requests or transactions that might be better served through a self-service option. In essence, Speech Analytics categorizes each type of call, and through root-cause analysis, can determine what a reasonable length of time might be for each call category. Speech Analytics also can compare current call durations to those that have taken place historically, thus identifying salient issues and reasons for disparities. Ultimately, the calls that are resolved in an efficient manner and timeframe might provide the training department with examples of best practice.

Check and Mend Service Level

This metric is crucial for effectively managing your call center and to deliver good customer experience. It is defined as the percentage of calls answered within a specified number of seconds. Call center managers should ensure that they track this call center KPI very closely as it measures how well you let the customers get in to your contact center and how you handle him/her so that it leads to long-lasting customer satisfaction and loyalty. The automation and acceleration of the process of scanning recorded call content (100 percent of calls can be quickly mined and relevant information extracted), is a key benefit. Many executives are looking for just such a solution that enables them to manage an often daunting influx of data while extracting key insights and intelligence from the data onrush. Using the right technology, companies can access the hidden intelligence and insights from large volumes of data, find critical areas of agent performance issues, and tap into the “actual voice” of their customers. Speech analytics help organizations to identify the reason behind customer’s dissatisfaction and to utilize the opportunity to make necessary changes for improving the repeat customer rate. Also, the improved service quality will result in happy customers giving them fewer reasons for defection.

First-Call Resolution

Speech Analytics also has helped ascertain that wherever organizations have identified repeat calls as a problem, being more specific with customers can help agents bring about better results. For example, if analysis uncovers an issue originating in the back office, agents can take that information and help decrease the number of call-backs by establishing the proper expectations with customers. Or perhaps an automated message could be added to an IVR that helps reduce the number of calls coming to agents in the first place. Through the identification of repeat callers, and the subsequent resolution of the triggers to those calls, First-Call Resolution can be improved. Many companies that incorporated speech analytics as part of their FCR strategies have reported improvements of 8 to 10 percent simply by correcting how their agents respond. In fact, just the awareness of speech analytics can change agent behavior. Prior to deployment, one organization’s customer callback rate was nearly 8 percent. Once agents knew that all their interactions were being monitored and evaluated through speech analytics, the rate dropped closer to 3 percent.

Contact Quality

It is usually measured by recording and monitoring the calls answered by the agents. Call center managers evaluate the calls on the quality of interaction an agent had with the customer. It basically checks:

• If the agent greeted the customer properly
• How courteous or professional the agent was during the call
• If the agent captured key customer data
• If the customer was provided with correct and relevant information

Script Compliance or Improvement

One business objective that speech analytics provides insights for is ensuring script compliance. Especially in highly regulated industries, call center agents must be very meticulous and adhere to the approved script when dealing with sensitive information. By utilizing a speech analytics solution, managers are able to mine calls to ensure that agents are properly following the script and performing at a high level.

While ensuring script compliance is often a top priority, call center managers can take it one step further and use the data to also improve call center scripts.

Reduced Repeat Calls

Speech analytics help in reducing costs by giving organizations the insight to reduce repeat call volume. Reducing repeat calls not only reduces overall call volume but at the same time leads to greater customer satisfaction. Through speech analytics, the data captured can be used towards providing first call resolution. With this, the total count of repeat callers will decrease leading to improvement in efficiency levels and reduction in cost per call.

Effective Training Program

Call center managers can use speech analytics to monitor the conversation between customers and call center agents. Speech analytics is a powerful tool to unlock insights as it allows managers to understand the behaviour of top performers to the laggards. The insights can be used in building strategies for coaching agents towards providing first call resolution with improved levels of satisfaction.

Seamless Customer Journey

The data gathered through speech analytics can be utilized to derive specific conclusions regarding customers’ feelings and the required actions to be taken at the time of call. Also routing customers to the right department is one of the major factors behind customer retention as the chances of getting resolution in the first call increases. These real-time triggers can help the contact center run more efficiently and improve information workflows.

Conclusion

According to industry experts, speech analytics is one of the fastest growing areas of the contact centre technology market, and with good reasons. Right now, recorded phone conversation is probably the #1 Most Underused Resource companies have in studying the customer experience and using what they learn to improve customer loyalty. Using speech analytics, you can zero in on your top business concerns, find out what customers’ top concerns are, what’s making them mad, what’s causing them to leave, and do something about it. In an extremely competitive world, the future doesn’t necessarily belong to the businesses shouting loudest, but perhaps to those that can truly listen to their customers and learn from it to deliver outstanding service. Entering its second technology generation, speech analytics is the most mature of the analytical applications used in contact centers. It is helping enterprise leaders appreciate the value that contact centers bring to the entire organization. Companies that have put in place processes that enable them to apply the findings from speech analytics on a timely basis are realizing great returns.

Ultra high-net worth individuals are turning their attention away from sports cars, yachts and designer clobber, and are instead focusing on acquiring the latest status symbol among the super wealthy: passports.

Citizenship by investment programmes (CIPs) are a concept that -began in 1984, when the two-island Caribbean nation of St Kitts and Nevis came up with the idea to encourage wealthy individuals to pump money into its economy in exchange for a passport, which gives holders visa-free access to 132 countries worldwide.

For millionaires in countries that have politically problematic or restrictive passports, such as China and some regions in the Middle East, the ability to buy a passport that offers visa-free access to a huge number of countries around the world is priceless.

A passenger holds a Canadian passport before boarding a flight in Ottawa on Jan 23, 2007.

Two dozen countries now offer CIPs to those willing to invest in the countries’ businesses, real estate or government bonds, including Cyprus, Portugal, Moldova and Malta, while Montenegro is in the process of launching its own programme.

Cyprus’s CIP is one of the most popular, – giving investors visa-free travel to more than 150 countries in exchange for a CAD$3 million investment in either real estate or government bonds. A $151,000 donation to Saint Lucia’s National Economic Fund, however, will yield visa-free access to more than 120 countries.

Even Canada, the US and the UK -offer citizenship by investment programmes, but the path to citizenship in these countries is typically more difficult and expensive.

Back in 2010, Sean Ellis and Andrew Chen popularized the term “growth hacker” to describe a hybrid coder and marketer who eschewed traditional marketing for what is testable, trackable and shareable.

Growth hacking was less about branding than pursuing users and growth. A prime tenet of growth hacking is productizing your marketing, which offloads much of the marketing function to the product. The practice traces its roots to 1996 when Hotmail forwent billboard advertising and instead included the line “Get your free email at Hotmail” at the bottom of every user’s email message.

Since 2010 the market has changed a lot. Smartphones were still pretty new then and mobile marketing wasn’t nearly as a big a deal as it is now. Over the past seven years, the principles of growth hacking have also become popularized, so you might assume that they are so widely used that they’re no longer as effective. You’d be wrong though. Case in point: Slack. Slack’s rise offers a blueprint for growth hacking, 2017 style. What the company did proves that these techniques still work remarkably well in our current environment.

A product focus

In four years, office chat app Slack has gone from zero to 4 million active daily users and a $4 billion valuation. At this writing, 77% of the Fortune 100 are using Slack. How did they do it?

Though Slack has done some traditional advertising, its main marketing focus has been generating word of mouth. It helped then that founder Stewart Butterfield was well-known in Silicon Valley since he was a cofounder of Flickr. Leveraging press interest, Butterfield was able to get 8,000 people to try Slack on the first day it was publicly available in August 2013.

That’s not a huge number. If you launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign, 8,000 signups wouldn’t be anything to brag about. But Slack’s rise was less about using external messaging to get people to try Slack and more about making the product so useful that fans became advocates.

How? First, though there were already messaging apps on the market, including HipChat, Skype and Campfire, the category was still under-served. According to Butterfield, some 70-80% of the target customers weren’t using anything for internal communication, or rather they were using a patchwork of ad hoc solutions.

Second, Slack was easy to try. The free version of the app has robust functionality. The signup process is easy and the interface is simple. It works just as well for small groups within a company as it does company-wide, so IT directors can try it out with a few employees at a time before committing to it.

Third, Slack’s team considered the first iteration of the app a minimum viable product, or work in progress, that would evolve based on user feedback. Prior to the launch, Slack had seeded its software to some tech firms (including Rdio and Cozy). The Slack team paid close attention to how those companies were using it and ditched ignored or buggy features. They first chose to focus on search, synchronization and file sharing.

Savvy search and social media moves

In addition to savvy product development, the Slack team took some measures to ensure visibility. For instance, Slack is integrated with tools like Google Drive, Wunderlist and Trello. As a result, Slack’s App Directory page shows up high in organic searches for those items.

Here are some other clever Slack hacks, which Chris Von Wilpert summarized in this epic post:

• Slack uses its Medium-based blog as its help page, including items like “Set your status in Slack.” More than 50% of Slack’s Medium traffic comes from Medium itself; articles often make Medium’s “Popular on Medium” section and its “Medium Daily Digest” email newsletter.

• Slack uses Facebook as a means to draw traffic and send it elsewhere, including to its podcast.

• It uses a call-to-action for its YouTube videos that doesn’t mention what Slack does, prompting curious viewers to click to solve the mystery.

• It runs a Twitter account, @SlackLoveTweets that feature raves about the product, aiding positive word of mouth.

• Slack doesn’t oversell customers into trading up from the free to the paid product with follow-up emails. Slack also gives you your money back if no one uses it for 14 days.

Some Takeaways

Critics might argue that Slack’s isn’t really a rags-to-riches story because its founder was already a known entity. While it’s true that not every founder has Stewart Butterfield’s pedigree, Butterfield’s venture right before Slack, gaming company Glitch, didn’t survive. Notoriety will only get you so far.

Instead, Slack’s rise provides a blueprint for any startup. If you find the right market niche, offer a well-designed product that fills a real need and you make it easy to try and share, then you have a fighting chance. Easier said than done, I know. But Slack’s success shows that the growth hacker model can still work tremendously well.

The post Growth Hacking, 2017 Style: How Slack Did It appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The unexpected sales calls you make to buyers as a part of your job are not the same as the annoying calls you get at home.

Most sellers try to relate to what the buyer may be feeling about their call. But it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.

You have likely checked out the Google reviews of a restaurant, store, or business before making a purchase or visit. If so, you already understand how important these reviews are. These firsthand stories and opinions shared by customers, whether they’re positive or negative, will provide you the make-or-break information you need to make an informed purchasing decision.

Google offers one of the most useful review tools for consumers. Since most people look to Google for researching a business or product, having Google reviews populate with your results is a huge value-add to the searcher. What’s even more important, these business reviews cataloged by Google offer the added value of bolstering your local SEO rankings. According to a BrightLocal consumer review, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

That’s a stat to take seriously.

Simply put, you should include Google reviews in your digital marketing strategy. Let’s explore how you can earn those reviews, as well as what you can do with the results.

Getting Started With Google Reviews

Today, this tool is called Google My Business, though it was formerly known as Google Places. This platform is integrated into Google Plus and maintains a central presence for your business that groups maps, information, and reviews in one location.

You can provide your phone number or address online for potential customers, but you’ll have a much harder time aggregating the sort of authentic and verified reviews that help people make purchase decisions. You can’t really provide that service by yourself. If you don’t already have a Google My Business account, you can create one here now.

You should pay attention to your business’s presence on any social network, of course. Google is just of paramount importance because it maintains the market share of online search traffic. Whether you’re a five or four-star business, your untapped audience cares about the things that others have to say about you. Star ratings alongside your reviews can increase your clickthrough rate by as much as 20%.

Google

Ask And You Shall Receive

If you currently do not have any Google reviews in your search results, the best first step is to tap into your existing customer and client base. Simply asking your top and most reliable clients for this favor will not only pay off in the form of Google reviews, but also gives you a chance to practice great customer service. (Your reviewers will need Google accounts in order to help you out).

Time your ask for the right moment. That sweet spot comes when your customer has had enough time to reflect on their experience and form opinions, but before they might have forgotten about their interactions with your product or business. Doubtful? Don’t be. According to SearchEngineLand.com, 70% of consumers will leave reviews for a business when they’re asked. For best results, ask simply and ask often. Provide links and guidance so that customers don’t have to do too much extra work, and consider asking in your outbound email marketing campaigns.

Speaking of simple, you can automate part of the process. Here’s how.

Create Quick Links To Your Google Reviews

It can be tough to ask your clients to review your business. It can typically be a confusing and annoying task to ask of them. Luckily, there’s a way to provide your clients and customers with a quick link that leads them straight to a Google reviews form. Here’s how to get that link…

1. Search for your business by name on Google

2. Click “Write a review” and copy the URL once the panel loads.

3. You’ll see a Google reviews box has popped up. Copy the URL in the address bar.

This will provide you a URL that ends something like this …0x89c6c8f2bf604d05:0x1fe706436a408dac,3,
What we want to focus on, though, is the last digit. The 3. This is what allows the popup to appear.

There’s a quick trick that helps you get the best reviews from all of your clients. If you add a 5 after the final comma, so the end of the URL looks something like …0x89c6c8f2bf604d05:0x1fe706436a408dac,3,5 this will not only open the review box, but it will also highlight 5 stars! All your client needs to do now, is add the words for their review.

Alexsander-777 / Pixabay

Invest In Yourself

If you’ve been listening to my podcast or reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a huge advocate of investing in yourself. That means training. That means hiring coaches, getting programs, reading books, going to conferences, doing all of those things. Continually investing in yourself, so you can grow yourself and ultimately grow your business.

Let me ask you a question. Are you growing your business from what you’re learning? I have a couple more questions. Number one: Do you have books sitting on a shelf that you’ve never read? That you’ve paid for? People give me books all the time. I read them when I can, but there are books or audiobooks that I paid for that I’ve never listened to. Why? Because we haven’t prioritized those. I’ll get to that.

The second question is: Do you have training programs or courses, or anything that you purchased that is sitting on your hard drive, that you’ve never opened? Same question: Why? Because you haven’t prioritized it.

Getting Started

Really, what you’ve got to do is start to make a plan about how to consume and execute the things that you’ve purchased. Now if you’ve never purchased anything, okay you don’t need this. But I suggest you do. I suggest you start getting some books and start learning. I have a great podcast about five books that I recommend, including two of my own at the end, a little shameless self-promotion, but still. Those five books are going to help you. I guarantee you if you’re in business, and you read those, they’re going to help.

Here’s what I suggest you do. If you have purchased books, if you have purchased programs or training or any of those kinds of things, or if you’ve gone to a webinar and at the end you said, “I really need this,” then put it down on a piece of paper. What I want you to do is take an inventory of all the books that you have that you have not read, of all the training programs that you purchased that you have not done anything with, and make a list of them.

The next thing you’re going to do is prioritize them based on where you’re at, because you and your business may be in a completely different place than when you purchased these particular books or programs. They may be less relevant, they may be more relevant. They may be something that you really really need to jump on now. The bottom line is to make a list and start adding numbers to rank them. One being the most important, ten, twenty thirty — hopefully, you don’t have that many, as those are the least important. Put them in order and that will give you a list of what you need to work on.

The next thing you have to do is schedule it. Make time in your busy work schedule to say, this is my training time. This is my reading time. This is the time that I’m going to invest in myself.

Make A Plan

Let me reiterate and give you five steps to start growing yourself and growing your business through learning. Step number one we just covered and that is, make a plan. Now you can easily say that every Tuesday from 10 AM til 11 AM is my training time. You could do it from 5 AM in the morning to 6 AM if you’re an early riser, maybe 9 PM to 10 PM, whatever it is. Have it scheduled and execute it. Make sure that you’re doing it on a regular basis. Have a plan to consume what it is that you purchased.

If you haven’t purchased anything, if your list is empty, then go to Amazon. Drop $10, $20 and find a book that’s going to help you grow yourself and grow your business. I’m not saying you have to spend thousands on training, but sometimes that’s necessary. It depends. If you spend a dollar, you should make three. If you’ve heard me talk about this before, that’s kind of my value proposition. So you invest $20 bucks, can you make $60 bucks off of reading that book in the time it’s going to take you to do it? Say it takes you three hours to read it and you charge $100 an hour. Will that book make you $320, $620, $1000? That’s the goal with it. Make a plan as to what you want to consume and when you want to consume it, then stick to the plan.

Take Action

The next thing is, get it done. Take the training. Make sure that you’re going from the beginning, taking notes, making sure that this is something that you can implement, and finish it. Then go back and look at the notes that you took. Is this relevant to what I’m doing right now? Maybe you just file it away in your memory bank and say “You know what, I’ve got to come back to this another time.” But if you take good notes you can go back and say “Okay, this is what I should be doing, this is how I can implement it and this is what’s important to me in my business.”

Review

The next thing you want to do is review what you’ve learned. What I mean by that is, for example, from a book that I love, The E Myth Revisited, what I learned is that there are three different kinds of people that are in business. The technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. Maybe what I do is I sit down and say okay, out of my 40 hours, 20 hours, whatever it is that I work, how much time do I spend as a technician? How much time do I spend as a manager? A manager is somebody who helps other people get things done. An entrepreneur is somebody who dreams. How much I time should I be spending on each one of those? How do I implement them into my business?

Relevancy

The next part is to ask, is what I’ve learned relevant today? If not, then what I have to do is sit down and make some notes and make a list, and ask if these are the things that I need to look to do. If you are a technician, can you hire somebody else to do some of the technical stuff so you can be more of a manager? Then you can manage the technical people. Maybe you need more time to be an entrepreneur, to envision where your business is going and what it’s going to look like in two, three, five, ten years, whatever it is.

Implement

Then the final piece of this puzzle is, how am I going to implement it? That means you have to write down the steps necessary to get it done to make those changes, to increase your business. Let’s say I’m a technician. As a technician I maybe make, let’s just use a random number, $100 an hour. As an entrepreneur maybe I make $250 an hour. Maybe I can hire somebody at $50 an hour who can actually do what I’m doing quicker.

I need to sit down and look at the time, the income, the expense, and the overall impact that’s going to have on my business, and that long-term plan that I talked about, the three to five-year plan, or whatever it is that you want to do. How am I going to implement those changes? What does it mean financially? What does it mean time-wise? What does it mean organizationally? If you do have people working for you, are there people that can help you do things that maybe you haven’t relied on before? Maybe your receptionist can be trained to do your social media for you. Maybe your technicians can take better pictures and actually bring them back to the office for the social media. You have to look at all that stuff.

Final Thoughts

The final thing that you want to do is continually measure the results to see how it’s working.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this subject. Comment below and share your thoughts and ideas on these steps to invest in yourself. How have these helped you and your business? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

Anemone123 / Pixabay

Hiring developers used to be pretty straightforward: Hire back-end developers to handle your server-side software and business logic; hire front-end developers to design and create the user interface and interactivity; then hire product managers to keep it all on track. The tiered, monolithic architectures of decades past made partitioning out roles and responsibilities cut and dry—but they also created more dependencies.

As the traditional software stack changes, everything is tilting toward a more distributed model: software, the way software is developed, and development teams’ structures. This has had a direct effect on the way companies source and hire developers—and what they’re looking for in those developers.

The success of componentized software leans on more diverse teams and an innovative, entrepreneurial spirit. Put simply, software is less cut and dry, and the same can be said for the culture and competencies of the developers building it.

Here’s a look at six ways you can successfully build your engineering team in response to this shift and how a few top companies are doing it.

1. Microservices are “loosely coupled but tightly aligned”—but distributed teams can too easily become misaligned.

More and more companies are moving away from a monolithic, tiered approach to building software to a more distributed, component-based architecture. In these microservice-based ecosystems, software is broken out and encapsulated into services. These work in tandem to contribute to the app’s functionality as a whole, but they can be updated and launched independent of one another.

Distributed teams didn’t come about solely because of distributed software, but they are serendipitously well suited for one another if well managed. They’ve become more common as remote work architectures have replaced the old way of doing things.

“The distributed team is an innovative way to get things done with remote talent around the world. Companies who are tapping into the growing freelance economy are getting work done with greater efficiency and more flexibility. As a result, team structures are beginning to look a lot different.” – What is a Distributed Team & Is it a Good Fit for Your Company?

However, this alignment is something many companies have struggled with when it comes to teams. Microservices don’t necessarily encourage alignment—and as Upwork CTO Han Yuan emphasizes, “the fact that everything is so micro creates high probability of misalignment.” That’s why it’s up to leaders to ensure teams don’t get too separated. Han adds, “Alignment for microservices therefore is not a technical problem, it’s a people and process problem.”

Strive to keep teams more aligned and working toward the same goal.

2. Keep teams focused, small, and nimble.

Microservices can have their own, unique stacks—containerized systems that run their own languages and frameworks without relying on a large, tiered infrastructure. While these teams should not be siloed, it’s important to keep them small. Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI says, “Engineers are people. People work better in small groups. So we’ve divided our team into several functional units, inspired by Spotify’s pods. We’re much smaller, so we’ve adapted their ideas to meet our needs, while maintaining the core principle that each team has the resources they need to implement a feature across the stack.”

At the DIY website building platform Wix, chief architect Yoav Abrahami explains, “For us, a microservice is a single application deployed as a process with one clear responsibility… That team has to be able to describe the microservice responsibility in one clear sentence.”

For smaller organizations, this is more manageable. But it can quickly become a theory that’s hard to put into practice, especially when ecosystems get massive (think: Uber-sized).

That’s why, even when encouraging teams to be independent, “you still need some central governance in terms of how you centrally monitor and page for these stack,” says Han. Ensure that your teams—even while fully “owning” certain components—are still interconnected.

3. Create cross-functional teams when appropriate.

Here’s where the “loosely coupled but tightly aligned” mission comes into play. As focused as services and teams are, they should also seamlessly weave into the bigger picture—and that often means playing a cross-functional role.

For companies building microservice-style software, this approach to structuring teams has been a no-brainer, and it’s also informed some decisions about culture.

Dan Pupius, head of engineering at Medium, writes, “We operate in cross-functional, mission-driven teams, so while some people specialize, everyone should feel able to touch any part of the stack. We believe that exposure to different disciplines makes you a stronger engineer.”

Wix takes a unique tack. Their 400+ engineers are organized into “companies” within its engineering team and “guilds.” Guilds are tech-focused units, while companies are product-focused and pull engineers from guilds. This encourages a more connected, multifaceted department. The same goes for Spotify’s now-famous tribes, squads, guilds, and chapters. Squads deliver product and chapters group engineers by competency, with heavy communication between them.

Whether you choose to adopt one of these strategies or not, the takeaway is clear: There’s rarely a benefit in completely siloing teams and engineers.

4. Encourage an “entrepreneurial spirit” for more effective, innovative teams.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) inherently means that the many parts must seamlessly contribute to the software as a whole—but the more keyed in teams are to how their work plays into the bigger picture, the better they’ll be. As Alex Zirbel, an engineer at Opendoor.com, explains, there’s “a very entrepreneurial, pragmatic culture: Engineers here typically talk with customers, understand their needs, and take the initiative on projects. We’re big on ownership and empowering others.”

That communication with the end user—while not always possible (or necessary) for all organizations—can definitely help foster a more entrepreneurial spirit by educating developers about how their work contributes to the success of the business. For smaller businesses, this might mean gathering your team and sharing some key insights about customers and your overall business goals. It doesn’t have to be overkill, but that point of view can be excellent insight and much-needed encouragement.

HotelTonight values an innovative “DIY” culture and encourages developers to not only come up with their own ideas but also to take initiative and build those ideas out to prove they “have legs.” Director of platform Jatinder Singh says, “Everyone has an opportunity to make an impact.”

Make ideas and constant improvement a part of your mission, and talk about what that looks like with your development team from day one—you can even make it a part of your interview process.

5. Stay flexible. Like microservices, teams and how they communicate will always be evolving.

The lines of communication between microservices are what make it all possible—and the same goes for the teams working on them. It’s crucial to keep everyone on the same page working toward the same goal.

At Opendoor, Zirbel says, “As we grow, the lines between teams often get blurry, so we expect that the structure will always be evolving. It’s common for engineers to move between teams, including between the product and data science teams.”

Paul Liu, a DevOps developer at online photography app 500px, explains, “Teams are highly cross-functional and boundaries are fairly loose, so engineers wind up moving around a lot between teams to work on specific projects. This helps us spread knowledge and prevent siloing. There is also a very tight communications loop between engineering, product, design, and the customer excellence teams, which helps to keep us honest, agile, and focused on delivering the right things.”

To increase visibility and reduce complexity, 500px uses a Slack bot, BMO, that they created to keep everyone on the same page. Liu writes, “Anyone at 500px can easily deploy the site or a microservice with a simple chat message like ‘bmo deploy <this thing>.’ BMO goes out, deploys the thing, and then posts a log back into the chat.”

There are plenty of collaboration tools teams can use (and tailor) to their workflows to keep everyone on the same page. Find a combination that works for your team and be open to feedback and adjustments.

6. Hire multifaceted developers who are interested in being involved outside of their singular roles.

At Upwork, a long-standing tip we suggest for interviewing a freelance developer is to ask questions that give you a sense of a developer’s motivation and passion for what they do. When it comes to augmenting your team, looking for that entrepreneurial spirit can really shape your engineering culture—even if you only have a handful of developers. Whether you’re a large enterprise organization or a smaller company with 10+ team members, hiring multifaceted developers interested in touching different parts of the business is increasingly important—especially with an SOA.

Event organizing platform Eventbrite knows the value of front-end engineers with diverse skill sets. While they’ll hire back-end engineers and a handful of “pure” front-end engineers, they often look for engineers who can marry skills the way their product marries services—say, a front-end engineer who has strong data visualization skills, two things that directly shape their product.

In conclusion

It’s an evolving narrative that will look different in nearly every scenario, but you can apply these principles to your software development team in a way that works for your needs—and those needs will often change.

Look for developers who are engaged, motivated, and care about the broader impact of their work beyond their own tasks. When interviewing, ask questions that give them an opportunity to demonstrate how they’ve worked on cross-functional teams in the past, or stepped outside their lane to lend their expertise or perspective to another team. And finally, as easy as it is to throw work over the fence, try and establish a culture of collaboration and regularly regroup to bring everyone up to speed. This will give everyone a common focus that will guide their work back on the front lines.

There are salespeople who are exceedingly effective at prospecting, particularly cold calls. They can schedule the appointments they need with little trouble, and they require far fewer calls than their peers. They can do in 20 calls what another person might do in 80 or 100 calls.

Some salespeople have shockingly fast rapport skills. They immediately connect with people, and not just their prospective clients. They generate likability and trust faster than most, but especially with people with slow rapport skills. People with low rapport skills take longer to warm up to, even if they eventually create lifelong relationships.

Hunters love to win new business, and many times, they aren’t so great at maintaining those relationships because they prefer to move onto the next deal. Farmers, who also create opportunities, tend to prefer maintaining relationships rather than creating new ones. They prefer to manage a book of business rather than create new opportunities.

If you have more than one child, and you treat both of them the same, you are abusing one (or both) of them.

To believe that all salespeople need to do the same amount of prospecting to generate the result they need is to mistakenly believe that they are all equally competent. Choosing an activity quota can drive the right activity, but some percentage of your team should likely be doing much more than the number that you are comfortable dictating, and a few others can reach their goals with less. The dial is not an outcome; it is simply an activity.

The ability to generate the relationships that create and move opportunities quickly and effectively through the pipeline also varies. Some people can develop trust quickly, and they can leverage the same insight as someone else to greater effect faster. Even though we desperately want sales to be a repeatable process, these variations in intangibles exist. What you expect from one person may be too much to expect from another.

Putting a hunter in a farmer role is to misuse their primary talents, and it is likely to frustrate them to no end. Asking a farmer to go into white space and create opportunities is asking too much of them. In both cases, you are not asking someone to do something they cannot do, you are asking them to be something that they are not.

Maximizing your results as a leader means making sure you have the right people in the right roles, that you have the goals and objectives aligned with what they are capable of producing, and managing them as individuals. To do less than this is to refuse to believe the variations that exist, even if you find them inconvenient.

The post What Is Right for One Salesperson appeared first on The Sales Blog.

If you’re looking for a crystal ball to see what your business will look like in a year from now, there are few things as powerful as accurate sales forecasting.

Yes. I know that doesn’t sound as exciting as an actual crystal ball, but we’re talking about business here. Not magic.

However, if you think about it, sales forecasting is basically like sprinkling a little fairy dust on your sales plan (ok, I promise that’s the end of the magic metaphor). With a sales forecast, you get a detailed prediction of what an individual salesperson, sales team, or your entire organization, will sell in a given time period—weekly, monthly, or annually. It gives you a picture of a future you can then build off of.  

Want to know if you’ll have enough sales to back that new product development or marketing plan? Check the sales forecast. Want to get investors excited and take on additional funding to fuel your growth? You got it. Check your sales forecast.

In fact, according to research from the Aberdeen Group, companies with accurate sales forecasts are 10% more likely to grow their revenue year-over-year and twice as likely to be at the top of their field.  

Want help growing your revenue? Download this free sales strategy template!

Let’s say that one more time: Sales forecasting isn’t just about checking off the boxes, filling out spreadsheets, and keeping investors happy. Sure, you can learn the basics from the best sales books out there on the subject, but in the end, sales forecasting is all about having the right information and foresight to drive continuous growth. 

It’s also an important metric to make sure you’re not falling off track. Let’s say you see your team is off-target from your forecast by a significant amount mid-quarter. Your forecast lets you identify that issue and course correct before it becomes an issue that’s out of your hands.

Before you get scared off, remember that anyone can put together a sales forecast.

You don’t need a degree in mathematics or accounting to put together your sales forecast. When it comes down to it, sales forecasting is really just educated guessing. And as a business owner or sales leader, you’re in the best position to make that guess.

So, let’s bring a little magic back into this seemingly dry topic and discuss the realities of sales forecasting, different methods you can use, and which one is right to kick your company into growth mode.

Which resources and tools do you need in order to accurately forecast sales?

Making good business decisions depends on good data. So to start forecasting, you’ll need to gather the right assets.

Start with these: 

• Individual and team sales goals: What does ‘success’ mean to you and your team? Start by defining realistic goals that work with your overall sales strategy.
• Your detailed sales process: What are the repeatable steps you can take to move a potential customer from prospect to client? How long does it typically take? How often does it work? You can’t experiment and grow if you don’t start with a solid foundational sales process.

• Standardized definitions of leads, opportunities, and closes: This might seem obvious, but the complexity of your business might mean there’s some confusion around when a lead is a lead, opportunity, or prospect. Nail down these terms so everyone’s on the same page when they’re reporting.

• A powerful and flexible CRM: Reps need a way to track and update you on sales, closes, or potential issues, and a CRM gives them all that and more. That same study from the Aberdeen Group showed that sales reps who rely heavily on their CRM hit their quotas 82% of the time versus 65% for non-CRM power users. (We might be a little biased, but we think Close.io can’t be beat for giving you a clear picture of your current and future sales.) 
• Info on product costs, expenses, and potential market or price fluctuations: Again, it depends on what you’re selling, but know the costs of doing business and keep your ear to the ground when it comes to the market. Your forecast is an educated guess, remember? Keep sharp!
• ‘Show me the money!’ data: Knowing where money is coming from and where it’s going is central to an accurate and successful sales forecast. If you have any concerns about this, take time now to get your data in order. 

On top of all these, you’ll want to make sure you keep an eye on internal factors that could drastically change your forecast, like adding or removing salespeople from your team, or changing policies that will affect the way your sales team works (like changing your incentive programs or upping commission on certain sales). 

There are also external factors you need to be aware of, such as changing economic conditions, competitor advances (which might impact your bottom line), legislation, or even the seasonality of what you’re selling.

A basic rule of thumb is when there are changes to your sales team, update your forecast.  

7 sales forecasting strategies (and which one is right for your company):

Alright, now that you have data-in-hand, it’s time to get dirty.

There are many different ways to look at your sales and come up with a forecast, and each method will depend on the info you have, the results you want to know, and how confident you are in the information you have. 

Let’s break down a few different modern methods of sales forecasting, explaining which situation they’re best used for so you can choose the one that’s best for you.

1. Lead-driven forecasting

What it is: Relationships are the heart and soul of sales, and the lead-driven method relies on understanding the relationship your leads have with your company, and what they’re likely to do based on that relationship. In essence, you’re analyzing each lead source and assigning a value to that source based on what similar leads have done in the past.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Leads per month from the previous sales cycle
• Lead to customer conversion rate by lead source
• Average sale price by source

Who it’s for: If you’ve got some data to work off of and a steady stream of inbound leads, the lead-driven model is a great starting point. However, it’s susceptible to changing sales cycles, marketing efforts, or changes to the market. 

If you don’t have clear data already on your lead sources or historical acquisition data, you’ll have a hard time creating an accurate forecast with this method.

2. Length of sales cycle forecasting

What it is: This method uses data on how long a lead typically takes to close to forecast an individual rep's sales. Here’s how: Let’s say your average time-to-close is four months and a rep has been working a potential client for three months, your forecast might suggest they have a 75% chance of closing the deal. What’s great about this method is that it’s completely objective. Meaning your sales rep’s ‘gut’ is out of the picture and your forecast isn’t hanging on the fact that they ‘feel good’ about this prospect, but rather on how long it has taken similar ones in the past to close. 

What’s even more beneficial is that the length of sales cycle method can be applied to a multitude of sales cycles, depending on the source. So, if a referral client typically takes two weeks, while a trade show source takes six months, you can group these deal types by their source and still have an accurate picture. 

Who it’s for: If you’re carefully and accurately tracking when and how a prospect enters your sales pipeline, this is a great option. It means a tight integration between your sales and marketing efforts, however. So if you’re not at a stage where this information is easily accessible to both teams, or your CRM doesn’t integrate with your marketing software, your reps are going to be bogged down in manually entering information and not out there closing.

3. Opportunity stage forecasting

What it is: The opportunity stage method takes your sales pipeline, chops it up, and assigns a percentage value to each one based on how likely a lead is to close. So, a new prospect might have a 10% potential close rate, whereas someone who has gone through a product demo might be at 80%. 

Then, you pick a forecasting period—monthly, quarterly, yearly—and multiply each deal’s potential value by where it is in your pipeline. So, a $2,500 deal that’s gone through a product demo is worth $2,000 ($2,500 x 80%).

Who it’s for: Again, you’ll need a good set of historical data in order to use this method accurately, so if you’re starting out it’s probably not the right one. The opportunity stage method also doesn’t take into account the age of a lead, and assigns the same value to a prospect that’s been humming and hawing for five months as it does to a hot, new lead. 

So, while it’s relatively easy to set up and will give you a quick picture, it probably won’t give you anything too close to a bullseye.  

4. Intuitive forecasting

What it is: When you want to know about sales, who do you talk to? Why not your own sales team, who spend day-in, day-out in the trenches hustling up leads and closing sales? The intuitive method is based on trusting that your salespeople are your best resource for accurately forecasting their own sales, and starts by asking each one how confident they are that their sale will close, and when.

Now, I’m sure you already see the downside. First off, the answer is completely subjective, and coming from someone whose best interest is to give you an optimistic and positive answer. No sales rep wants to sit there and tell their boss, “That lead I’ve been working for the last three months? Yeah, it could be a waste of time.” There’s also no scalable way to verify this information, as you’d need to literally be in the head of your sales team in order to know whether what they’re saying is on the mark or not. 

Who it’s for: While there are definitely some downsides, this is one of the few sales forecasting methods that is great for early stage startups or companies without a plethora of historic data. So, while you use it at your own risk, it’s a great way to get started on building a forecast before you have past sales to go by.

5. Test-market analysis forecasting

What it is: The test-market analysis method is great if you’re rolling out a new product or service and want to get an idea of what your sales might look like. As the name implies, this method involves doing a limited launch of your product or service and then analyzing the response. Using that number as a base, you can then make an accurate forecast on the response of a full rollout.  

Who it’s for: If you’re a large company rolling out a new product without any concrete market research, or a startup doing a soft launch to gauge interest in your offering, this is a good way to get a read on the market through real sales. However, launches are notoriously expensive, so it doesn’t come cheap. Plus, not all markets are the same, and what happens in one territory might not be what happens elsewhere.

6. Historical forecasting

What it is: As the name implies, this method takes historical sales data and assumes you’ll grow year-on-year. If you sold $15,000 in November last year, this model assumes you’ll sell at least $15,000 in November of this year. Add in your average or projected growth rate and you’ll get an even better picture. So, if you grow an average of 5% year-on-year, you can expect $15,750 in sales.

Who it’s for: It’s quick. It’s dirty. And it’s completely isolated from what’s going on elsewhere in the market. It’s like looking at a weather app and packing your bag for vacation next year, assuming the weather will be the same. Anything out of the ordinary and you’ll end up soaked, or worse. Ultimately, there’s still value in looking at your historical data (if you have it), but it should be used as a benchmark, not the fundamentals of your sales forecast.

7. Multivariable analysis

What it is: As you can probably tell by now, the previous methods have their own pros and cons. The multivariable analysis method, however, takes the best parts of all these forecasting methods, and puts them together into one complex, analytics-driven system.

Here’s an example using data from the lead-driven, opportunity stage, and sales cycle methods we discussed earlier:

Let’s say you’ve got two sales reps hustling the same or a similar account. The first one is working a $10,000 deal and has just finished a successful product demo. Based on your rep’s individual win rate for this stage of the deal, your multivariable analysis says he’s 40% likely to close the deal this quarter, giving you a sales forecast of $4,000.

Your second rep is selling a smaller, $2,000 deal and is earlier in the process, yet their win rate is through the roof, also giving them a 40% chance of closing the deal this quarter and a forecast of $800. Your total sales forecast at this point for the quarter would be $4,800.  

Who it’s for: While the example I used was incredibly simple, in real life the numbers rarely work out like that. Accurate forecasts based on multivariable analysis involve an advanced analytics setup that might not be in the cards for startups with a smaller sales budget. Also, you need clean data. So, if you don’t have sales reps who are diligent about tracking their deal progress and activities, this won’t work.

Just starting out? You still need a sales forecast

Yes, I can hear you groaning already.

You’ve just started your company and while you understand the value of sales forecasting, so many of these methods rely on historic data to get up and running. I won’t lie, it helps to have benchmarks to work off of, but if you don’t, it’s not an excuse to just go running out there blindly.

Sales forecasts are what will help you keep your startup alive and know you have the resources to go after big leads or take on new team members. So start where you can. Even if that’s just asking your sales team what’s in their pipeline and whether or not they think they’ll close. It might not be accurate, but it will get the ball rolling.

Like all aspects of your sales strategy, your forecast will constantly change and evolve. Revisit it regularly as you grow or the market changes and you’ll be ready to take advantage of whatever the world throws at you.

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It’s October, and as focused as you may be trying to make sure you finish the year strong and hit your sales goals, it’s incumbent upon you to carve out some time to thoughtfully plan your strategy and budget for next year.

After all, the Time Square ball drops in about 10 weeks and there are two holidays between now and then.

If you’re like most B2B marketers, you are well aware by now how important content is to your marketing mix. In fact, 88% of marketers say content marketing is important to their organization’s marketing program, according to the 2017 Content Marketing Trends report recently published by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

What I found staggering in this report was that despite the majority echoing the importance of content, there are conflicting stats about what they are willing to invest in content creation:

• Only 22% of organizations are “extremely committed” to content marketing, with 41% being “very committed”
• 22% of companies surveyed are extremely or very successful with their overall approach to content marketing
• 55% of content is being created by small teams (or a team of one!)
• 53% of companies believe their overall approach to content marketing is moderately successful
• 80% of companies’ content marketing goals are to drive more qualified sales leads, yet only 57% of companies have said it’s helped increase sales

According to this report, less than one-third of marketing budgets are spent on content marketing, with almost 50% the companies planning to keep their budgets the same as last year.

So, I am trying to make sense of this. Marketers are in agreement that content is important, yet they aren’t putting the same significance on the amount of resources and budget needed to drive the desired sales results.

So what needs to change?

Your marketing budget needs to match your expectations.

If you want to see results from your content marketing and lead-gen strategy, then you need to allocate the appropriate amount of resources. According to the Wall Street Journal, companies on average spend 7.5% of total revenue on marketing.

No matter what percent of your overall budget you decide to spend, this is a roadmap will help you segment your marketing budget:

Content: (25-30%)

This is the biggest budget bucket needed to drive inbound marketing results. Content is what fuels the inbound engine, they say. Content comes in many forms, shapes, and sizes.

It’s much more than written blog posts. Content marketing success relies on understanding what your audience needs and where and how they can access it. It’s video, infographics, reports, calculators, podcasts, webinars, newsletters, etc. Content is also what you need to drive results from your social media channels.

The amount of content needed is contingent on what your goals are. Typically, goals fall into one of two areas – awareness and conversion. All of this takes time, which means if your company has a content team of one, then adding more resources is essential.

Video: (20-25%)

The days of thinking about video as a “nice to have” rather than a “must have” are gone.

Video is the connecting force between a brand and their customers. It allows a raw and authentic connection. They want to know you and the company in a way that feels personal.

Videos are effective for driving conversions on landing pages and blogs and are changing conversion strategies across existing and emerging social media platforms.

Because video is driving ROI, unlike other forms of content, marketers who use video are seeing growth in revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

Social Media: (10%)

The adoption of social media has further blurred the lines between personal and professional.

According to the State of Inbound 2017 report, 74% of marketers surveyed use Facebook professionally and 78% use LinkedIn. C-level executives are the most active on various social channels for professional purposes.

What may surprise you is that almost 25% of businesses today have no social media strategy.

In this rapidly changing social media landscape of new innovations like messenger apps and bots, investing in resources to help your organization stay relevant and connected to your customers is essential.

And don’t forget about Facebook advertising. Currently, Facebook is testing an algorithm that gives no organic reach to Business Pages. ZERO. While the results of this experiment remain to be seen, the Facebook advertising platform is robust and not just for B2C.

By utilizing features like the Facebook pixel and Lookalike Audiences, this tactic is a viable option for the majority of businesses.

Marketing Automation Platform/Strategy: (25%)

Converting leads into customers tops the list for both marketing challenges and future goals for most companies.

Having marketing automation tools in place as well as the right team (internal or external) to manage the software and create and execute the strategy will be a priority.

Only 61% of C-level executives feel their strategy is effective. That suggests there is a lot of work to do in improving the outcomes of your inbound marketing strategy.

Marketing Automation Platforms 2017 (via Chief Marketing Technologist)

Search Marketing/SEO: (5-10%)

Organic traffic is unbeatable for creating long-term sustainable SEO results. However, having a budget to promote your content is often just what is needed to increase conversion as digital integration continues to rise.

Forrester predicts that search marketing will capture the greatest share of online spend in the next few years. Creating an effective search marketing strategy could mean investing in training, hiring a consultant, or creating an in-house position.

Conclusion

Every brand is unique and we all have different goals, objectives, and timelines to support the growth of our businesses.

We all need to invest in tools, technology, and resources. We need to be strategic with our marketing spend and be willing to embrace forward-thinking ideas.

Given that the desired goal is that 88% of marketers have to derive results from content and inbound marketing, it’s essential to match your priorities with your pocketbook. Remember, a flat budget may mean flat results!