Upstart financial technology companies may be nipping at the heels of the world’s big banks, but new research from global consultant McKinsey & Company suggests established “platform” players such as Google and Amazon are emerging as the real threat to the incumbent financial firms’ healthy margins.
“Seventy-three percent of U.S. millennials say they would be more excited about a new offering in financial services from Google, Amazon, Paypal or Square than from their bank — and one in three believe they will not need a bank at all,” declares McKinsey’s latest annual global banking review, released Wednesday.
Asheet Mehta, co-leader of the global banking practice at McKinsey and one of the lead authors of the report, says the edge the platform companies have is that they are creating entire digital ecosystems with a range of “intuitive and pleasing” goods and services that are available through a single access gateway.
“In quite a few markets, platform companies have already begun attacking banking revenues,” Mehta said. “And there is no reason to think this trend will not spread to other markets.”
Lest anyone think Canada is exempt, the McKinsey report quotes Dave McKay, the chief executive of the country’s largest bank, Royal Bank of Canada, acknowledging the situation facing the banks. McKay, who has long accepted the challenge from the platform players, says the banks’ best defense — at least in the short term — is the trust clients have in them to provide secure services and protect sensitive financial data.
“Trust and security are key assets,” the report quotes McKay as saying. “They buy us time.”
The CEO of Royal Bank has been warning of a “collision course” with the likes of Google Inc. and Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc. since early 2015, just months after assuming the top job. At conference for investors in New York in March of that year, McKay said banks and large tech and e-commerce companies could work together to offer some financial services — like the Apple Pay mobile wallet — but he warned that such collaboration could result in new players getting in the middle of the important relationship between banks and their customers.
Fast-forward a little more than a year, and all of Canada’s major banks had begun offering ApplePay to their clients. Meanwhile, partnerships are being forged with smaller fintech firms as those relationships have become less adversarial.
“The greatest threat to banks from digital competitors no longer comes from fintechs, which have often struggled to scale and have entered into partnerships with banks,” says McKinsey’s Mehta.
Back in 2015, McKay said RBC was looking for alternatives where the bank could remain at the top of the ecosystem, a strategy reinforced by this week’s McKinsey report.
The goal for banks around the world is to create their own basic “ecosystem” strategy, one that includes building partnerships and monetizing data.
First, the consultant says, the banks must be committed to providing fully digital products and services to retail clients, in addition to digitizing marketing strategies and data collection and analysis. Only then could they be in a position to compete with Amazon, Alibaba, and other platform giants that are “reshaping one industry after another, blurring sector boundaries as they seek to be all things to all people,” the McKinsey report says.
“Banks that can go further and create their own platforms might capture a small share of some non-banking markets,” says the report, which suggests that embracing a digital and data-driven future isn’t just the key to competing with the platform players. It could also be profitable.
“If most of the industry were to do this, and not compete too much of it away, we estimate that banks would add about $350 billion to their collective bottom line.”
Chris Voss served as a hostage negotiator at the FBI for close to a quarter of a century. During a portion of the time, he was the Bureau’s lead international hostage negotiator. Voss had an epiphany of sorts upon leaving the Bureau; he realized that several of the skills he’d learned and honed ‘in the wild’ during hostage negotiations were directly relevant – and essential – to the business arena.
Negotiation is a need-to-have skill in business. We negotiate with customers in an effort to maximize deal sizes. We negotiate with suppliers to attempt to obtain the best prices. And we negotiate with other colleagues to handle disputes and push initiatives forward. Regrettably, far too many of us lack effective negotiation skills. We resort to cutthroat tactics that tend to alienate our counterpart.
What makes Voss’ negotiation methodology so impactful is that it is grounded in emotional intelligence – rather than classic approaches based on logic and reason. This mindset transforms the negotiation process from a zero-sum game into a joint-decision making session. The result is that both parties are more likely to walk away feeling satisfied instead of feeling stressed, taken advantage of, and/or party to a dysfunctional relationship.
Here are five core tactics underpinning Voss’ methodology:
1. Mirroring
Mirroring involves the repetition of three to five keywords from your counterpart’s previous statement, in the form of a question. If a customer says…
“We can’t renew our subscription because of budget cuts”
Mirroring involves a retort along the lines of:
“You can’t commit because of budget cuts?”
Mirroring has two positive upshots.
For one, it enables the negotiator to quickly establish rapport by giving the counterpart confidence that he/she is being listened to and heard.
Also, the tactic inevitably results in the other side repeating words previously spoken.
The repetition results in a natural urge to clarify what what’s been said, with the result that more information is provided in the process – information that will allow you to better understand their desired outcomes, and information that can be leveraged as the negotiation progresses.
2. Emotional Labeling
Labeling is, in a sense, mirroring on steroids. Rather than merely repeating words, labeling involves proactively labeling your counterpart’s emotions – especially fears. It entails careful and proactive listening skills.
For example, if a sales manager senses a customer is concerned about the security features associated with a product, an effective negotiator will label this state of being:
“It sounds like you are afraid of a lack of security features”
or
“It looks like you’re concerned about security.”
Voss recommends using phrases such as “It seems like,” “It sounds like,” and “It looks like”.
By assigning your counterpart’s feelings a label, you demonstrate an understanding of how he/she feels. This goes a long way in terms of demonstrating empathy.
3. Getting to “No”
Many business leaders embark on negotiations with the goal of securing a “yes” from the other party. This strategy can do more harm than good.
Voss explains that being pushed towards saying “yes” can make people feel defensive. They feel like they are being cornered into making some sort of a commitment.
In contrast, getting the other side to say “no” makes them feel safe and secure. If you’re selling a product/service ask, for example:
“Do you think it’s a bad idea to invest in a platform that can help you (insert the value proposition of your product/service here)?
Have you given up looking for new ways to (insert value proposition here)?”
When you empower the other side to say “no,” they feel more comfortable that they aren’t being pushed into a commitment and more willing to entertain your ideas.
4. Triggering “That’s right.”
Voss contends that the single biggest breakthrough moment of a negotiation is getting the other side to say “that’s right.”
To achieve this breakthrough, negotiators must actively listen to the other side and effectively summarize how they feel and what they hope to achieve.
If you’re selling a software product to a CIO and he/she expresses concerns about low user adoption rates, respond with:
“It sounds like you need a solution that is compatible with users’ workflows and will not require a steep learning curve.”
The key here is to convince the other party that you understand the issue at hand by reaffirming what they’ve already told you.
Getting the other party to say “that’s right” triggers an assurance that you empathize with them and understand their wants and needs. It evokes a mutual understanding and increases the likelihood that your proposition will be considered.
5. Asking Calibrated Questions
The best negotiators will transform negotiations into cooperative joint problem-solving sessions. Rather than focusing on negotiation, they’ll focus on discovery – on truly understanding a counterpart’s wants and desired outcomes.
To do this, Voss recommends the use of calibrated questions. These are open-ended questions that generally start with “what” or “how.”
As compared to closed-ended questions (which typically include verbs such as “is,” “can,” or “does” and lead to yes/no responses), they evoke more expansive and revealing information from the other side.
Voss has a couple of favorites, including
“What’s the biggest challenge you face?”
and…
“What about this is important to you?”
Calibrated questions are potent because they cause the other side to expand on thoughts, giving counterparts the illusion of control . When a counterpart thinks he/she has all the answers (and thus all of the power), the likelihood of feeling alienated is minimized.
Today’s businesses have tended not to value negotiation skills the same way the FBI has. The sense of urgency involved in negotiating the release of hostages from armed fugitives should be applied to business negotiations. Far too often, we alienate the other side and lose the opportunity to arrive at a solution.
For businesses, this can result in disastrous effects – to the tune of unrealized revenue, lost sales, impaired relations, and more. According to one study, businesses lose ~ £9M (~$12M USD) per hour due to poor negotiating skills.
Negotiation doesn’t need to involve white-knuckle terror. It doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game. The best sales leaders will use the tactics outlined above and appeal to their counterparts’ emotions. Successful negotiation skills have far-reaching implications in terms of improving supplier relationships, managing conflicts, and realizing key business objectives.
Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to dominate the news, as companies race to create and adopt solutions to increase speed and efficiency as well as improve the customer experience. Last week, ServiceNow followed up on announcements made at the Knowledge17 user conference by formally introducing Agent Intelligence. This blog post provides details.
Two pieces of research were also released with this announcement. The first, a survey of 500 CIOs in 11 countries on three continents and across 25 industries conducted in conjunction with Oxford Economics, revealed:
Nearly 90% of CIOs are using or plan to use ML
The number of CIOs that will make at least some investment in ML will almost double (from 35% in 2017 to 63% in 2020)
More than half of CIOs (52%) say they are already automating more complex decisions
In terms of the value expected from decision automation over the next three years, 83% cited speed of decision, 87% said accuracy of decisions, and 69% believe it will drive top-line growth
The second piece of research was a report by Accenture. In it, they identify some of the challenges facing customer service (such as agents challenged to select from hundreds of categories and assignment options for high case volumes) and how ML and AI can improve the accuracy and speed of this type of work. Using those figures, they also conservatively estimate the real financial benefits of deploying Agent Intelligence for customer service.
So what does it all mean for customer service? For one thing, that ML and AI are becoming more mainstream and easier to adopt. For another, companies that fail to take advantage of them will not only continue to struggle to keep up with customer service work, but they might also be at a competitive disadvantage. If you have not yet made the move to ML and AI in customer service–or elsewhere in your business–allow me to summarize the advice found in the research cited. (But don’t let that be an excuse to not review them when you have a chance.)
Identify Automation Opportunities
The Accenture report demonstrates the business value of ML and AI is there, but today only in certain circumstances. Unstructured, redundant, and mundane tasks are the works patterns that typically benefit from automation. The increases in productivity and time savings then allow humans to focus on higher value work.
Agent Intelligence, for example, focuses on the categorization, prioritization, and assignment of customer cases–a high-volume, arduous activity that can be slow and fraught with errors. Not only can Agent Intelligence improve the speed and accuracy, but it can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction by preventing such delays to resolution.
Start With And Maintain High-Quality Data
Your data is the basis upon which your ML is founded, and serves as the foundational knowledge AI will use to perform its duties. That being the case, what is capable of automation will be highly dependent upon your data quality. Companies must evaluate if their processes have been digitized to the extent they can capture the correct data to build and improve ML algorithms. It is also worth investigating if there is data obtainable from outside your company that could further enhance the quality of your ML efforts.
Measure And Report
It is critical to continuously measure outcomes to reinforce the value ML and AI brings to your organization. The same metrics for volume, productivity, and efficiency are great initially to compare ML and AI to human efforts, but new metrics are also necessary.
A capability like Agent Intelligence that employs both ML and AI means measuring both sides of that coin: the percentage of ML recommendations accepted as correct and put into productive use as well as the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of the AI component. This will aid in continuous improvement efforts.
Empowering Your Customer Service With ML and AI
As ML and AI continue to improve, the limits of what’s possible will further erode while it also becomes easier for companies to adopt and expand automation throughout their business. ServiceNow’s Agent Intelligence is but one example of automating the mundane, daily work in customer service thanks to ML and AI that doesn’t rely on data scientists. As you plan or even expand your investment in this area, look around the marketplace: you now have the option of selecting a platform that provides strong customer service capabilities with a growing arsenal of ML and AI capabilities.
Content comes in many forms, including social media messages, blog posts, video, and more. But video is largely ignored with only 30% of B2B marketers believing video will be critical to their content marketing success.
Considering video accounts for 74% of all internet traffic your brand cannot ignore video marketing. With audience’s having an average attention span of only eight seconds it’s one of the best ways to hold attention and increase audience engagement. This is especially true for long-form video—videos that are roughly 10 minutes in length or longer. In fact, audiences engage in more long-form videos accounting for 63% off all time spent watching videos across devices. Long-form video is a proven and effective way of capturing and engaging audiences, but where do you begin?
To help inspire your own long-form video content ideas and drive audience engagement, we gathered seven leading examples from leading B2C and B2B brands.
#1 – Patagonia
Core to Patagonia’s mission is to use their business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. One of the ways they do this is by encouraging their own customers to hang on to their clothing for as long as they can and to pass them on to loved ones. It’s a message you wouldn’t expect to hear from a clothing brand, but Patagonia is passionate about the environment and created a special program that enables customers to purchase recycled and reused Patagonia gear. To generate awareness for the program and discourage throwing away clothes, they created the short film, “Worn Wear.”
In “Worn Wear,” Patagonia shares the story of several Patagonia customers and the stories of their clothes. Ranging from 11 to 30+ years old, each vignette features a well-loved, well-worn Patagonia item and the experiences the clothes have held. Patagonia’s message is clear throughout the film, saying, “The most responsible thing you can do is buy used clothes.” It’s an inspirational thought that resonated with their audience, collecting over 800,000 YouTube views to date and climbing. But most impressive of all is how the video has changed their audience’s perception of clothes with comments like, “I truly believe this film has influenced the way I look at clothing specifically, material goods, and what is actually necessity. Thank you!”
The Final Take: Use your company’s mission or purpose to drive long-form video content and connect with audiences on a personal level.
#2 – Chevrolet
As a car company, Chevrolet helps you get from point A to point B. On a deeper level, cars help you get to where you want to go and help you achieve the goals you’ve set your sights on. That’s the message Chevy wants to instill on their customers, but with strong competition and a recovering American car industry it was going to take more than a mission statement.
To illustrate the importance of reaching your dreams, overcoming challenges, and rising to new heights, Chevrolet created a documentary highlighting baseball superstar Mo’ne Davis. Mo’ne was the first female pitcher to have a shutout game in the Little League World Series, an accomplishment that would make her the first female baseball pitcher to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Chevrolet’s documentary interviews Mo’ne, her family, and friends to share what makes her unique both as a daughter of America and as a person in general. The end result is an emotional film that leaves the audience inspired to accomplish the impossible.
The Final Take: Evoke emotion within your audience by showcasing inspirational people and life stories.
#3 – GE
General Electric (GE) has a wide range of products and services, making it a challenge to market them effectively. And given the name, many people may assume that GE is simply a power company. In reality, GE has segments in aviation, healthcare, lighting, transportation, and more. So how can they educate the masses that they’re more than a power plant?
To educate their audience on how GE powers everything from cities to jet engines, GE created a video series “Into the Wild.” The series follows former Mythbuster Adam Savage as he endeavors to understand the mechanics behind GE’s many products and services. Through expert interviews, animations, and easy to understand explanations, Adam (and the audience) learn just how GE helps power the world.
The Final Take: Long-form video is a great opportunity to educate your audience with visual learning tools like in-person interviews, demonstrations, diagrams, and more.
#4 – Cisco
Cisco, one of the world’s largest networking giants, is well aware that cyber security is one of the most important things they can offer in today’s hyperconnected world. Without a strong and secure network, businesses, markets, and people’s personal information is at risk. Recognizing this, Cisco created Ransomware Defense to keep hackers at bay.
To generate awareness for their new security product, but also for ransomware itself, Cisco made a video that highlights exactly how a hacker completes ransomware. The video itself is very informative, but what makes it so effective is the suspense they created. By creating a mini-movie that follows a hacker performing a successful ransomware attack, the audience is left feeling vulnerable and in need of protection or further information. Given this feeling, it’s no wonder that it is one of Cisco’s most watched YouTube videos to date.
The Final Take: Grab your audience’s attention through a suspenseful storyline that leaves the audience needing more.
#5 – REI
REI stores are rooted in community given their status as the nation’s largest consumer cooperative. Starting as a group of 23 mountain climbers, the brand quickly grew to become a community of active people who love the outdoors—it’s part of what makes REI a unique brand. To highlight their unique communities and the camaraderie that can be found in the outdoors, REI turned to video content.
The most powerful piece of video from REI is their documentary titled “Paul’s Boots.” After hearing about the death of Paul, a man whose greatest dream was to hike the Appalachian Trail, REI and their partner The Dirtbag Diaries reached out to 400 hikers and asked them to carry Paul’s boots the entire length of the AT. This documentary follows Paul’s pair of boots through the eyes of each hiker that offered to carry them, showing how one community came together to help Paul achieve his dream.
The Final Take: The most incredible stories can come from right under your nose. Take inspiration from your customers—do something special for them and share their story with the world.
#6 – IBM
IBM is all about innovation. And one thing they realize is that it is the people who work at IBM that power innovation. To help them recruit leading minds and progressive thinkers, IBM decided to highlight the teams that are behind groundbreaking innovations. Not only would the video showcase their incredible work, but it would also showcase the makeup of the team.
Through exploring the team that created their most recent breakthrough in polymer bonds, IBM showed how a strong team bond with a diverse background can power innovation. And by focusing on the people and allowing them to share their backgrounds, it humanized IBM while establishing their credibility.
The Final Take: Humanize your company and show your expertise by highlighting the personalities that make your brand exciting to work for.
#7 – BMW
Believe it or not, BMW has been making films since 2001. A pioneer of long-form video content, BMW has been using online video to engage audiences in their brand and foster brand loyalty since before the creation of YouTube. The original films follow actor Clive Owen as a driver for hire who encounters several unique challenges while on the job, showing off the capabilities of the car along the way.
Most recently, BMW Films released “The Escape,” a new short that revisits their original Clive Owen film series. Not only does the film showcase the performance of their new 5 series sedan, but it also embodies their tagline “The Ultimate Driving Machine” with Clive Owen using speed, torque, agility, and wit to escape his pursuers.
The Final Take: While the production value of these films are obviously high, the real reason they captivate audiences is the action-packed story that breaks the norm. Don’t be afraid to get creative with an exciting narrative that showcases your brand, values, or products as well.
Form Meaningful Connections With Your Audience
Long-form video is an enormous opportunity for content marketers to connect with audiences on a new level. Find out how to get started in video content marketing with our own video tips or check out our interview with comedic genius and Cisco Creative Director of Marketing, Tim Washer.
We’ve all been subjected to high pressure selling tactics. We see various forms of these high pressure or manipulative tactics, whether it’s the high pressure sales person focused on pitching products, the sales person that keeps moving the focus back to them and what they want to achieve, incentives to “buy now,” whether they are offered in forms of scarcity or a disappearing discount, and the list of tactics can go on and on.
As customers, we resent those techniques used on us. Our customers resent it when they perceive pressure from sales people trying to convince them to buy.
We, also, know these tactics don’t work very well. Yes, some customers respond–particularly to discounting, but they probably were going to buy anyway, so they are just taking advantage of our desperation by getting what they already wanted at a cheaper price.
Most customers protect themselves from these techniques simply by not responding, doing everything they can to avoid a sales person’s call. They will seek every alternative to learn and educate themselves (often making serious mistakes in their buying), engaging sales people in the very last part of their buying journey.
It’s a terribly vicious circle. Sales people get more aggressive and obnoxious in their tactics, customers do everything they can to avoid sales people, in frustration sales people ratchet up these terrible approaches….. and we continue to drive bigger wedges between us and the customer.
Suspending your judgement about these tactics, when you look at it, it’s really a lot of hard work. It isn’t easy to continue to do these high pressure approaches at ever escalating volumes. It takes huge amounts of time/effort and really thick skin for a pretty bad return on that effort.
As you think about it, these approaches don’t make much sense, particularly when there are easier approaches to accelerating the customer commitment and decision making process. Approaches that, in fact, make customers wildly enthusiastic.
Since it seems to be fashionable to put labels to these things, rather than High Pressure Selling, what if we considered the idea of High Urgency Buying?
High Urgency Buying is simply working with the customer to create a high sense of urgency and commitment within the buying group to solve their problem as quickly as possible.
There are all sorts of things that create a compelling sense of urgency to buy. Some of the obvious ones are Trigger Events. Things like Y2K, or regulatory/compliance requirements create a date by which the customer must have a solution in place. These are typically external and imposed on the customer. But they don’t come around that often. And I’m really not hanging around until Y3K.
There are other things that compel a customer to take action. They may need to make choices about a new product or new manufacturing capability to produce products for the Christmas Shopping Season. If they miss critical deadlines, they miss a year of selling/revenue. These are often called “Windows Of Opportunity.” Missing them is generally irrecoverable.
There are so many ways to create high urgency with the customer. Identify opportunities they may be missing, opportunities to improve their own internal operations, opportunities to better serve their customers, opportunities to grow, things that may threaten their ability to grow or compete.
At the individual level, there are many opportunities to create high urgency with the customer. Opportunities to succeed and get noticed, to get a promotion/raise/recognition, to free up time so they can focus on other things–maybe their families, to simplify and reduce overload/overwhelm.
High Urgency Buying is all about the customer. If the customer feels any pressure at all, it’s self imposed by the desire to move forward as quickly as possible. Once you and the customer have identified a compelling need to change, the process becomes much easier and the customer, rather than avoiding us, looks to us for leadership and help in addressing these opportunities.
It’s such an easy shift, one wonders why we continue to be so focused on high pressure approaches.
Animated explainer videos are the go-to promotion tool for start-ups. They’re very effective at selling a product and increasing conversion rates. This is exactly why companies from all over the world like them: They work and they look awesome on websites and Kickstarter pages.
Explainer videos are the opposite of long sales pages — shorter explainer videos tend to work better than longer ones. Snappy, concise explainer videos (< 60 seconds long) have a 77% retention rate on average. The longer a video is, the more it moves out of the average viewer’s attention span. More viewers will stop watching without having seen all that the video offers. In other words, explainer videos should be short and packed with value proposition.
To produce an explainer video that gets you a real bump in your sales, follow the specific steps that this post will guide you through. Let’s go to the first step:
Picking the Right Company
Choosing an explainer video production company to make your explainer videos can be a challenging task because a premium price alone can’t guarantee a good result.
PRO TIP: A higher price doesn’t guarantee great quality, and a lower price doesn’t always translate to poor quality.
You can base your judgment on several elements of a good explainer video company.
First, you need to find a company that understands how they’ll approach a problem just from reading the initial brief you give them. Knowing how they are going to handle a project from the start is an indication of a positive experience to come since it means that they’ve likely done this process frequently.
Second, look for a company that’s really trying to get a deep understanding of your company and its target customers. An explainer video is a type of content that’s targeted to a specific set of potential users. If the production company you work with has no ideas about who will be watching the video, it’ll be a near-guaranteed flop.
Third, choose an explainer video company that won’t just rubber-stamp all of your requests. They should have a strong foundation of their own styles and values. An explainer video company is a creative company at heart, and a good one knows how they want to do things.
Last, but not least, they should be easy to work with, both on- and off-project. This isn’t a PR or customer service consideration. It’s more about finding the company that you can share your vision with, and as a result, align goals better.
Starting the Project: Writing the Script
Preparing Calls to Action
PRO TIP: Although calls to action are typically presented at the end of videos, you need to decide on this video’s call to action before anything else.
Writing an explainer video script requires an understanding of what action you want viewers to take after watching the video and what they’ll get in return for taking that action.
Calling for actions is easier when you offer the means, whether your product or service, to resolve specific issues. This means that you need to conduct thorough research to know your target market and their problems that your products can solve.
Writing the Initial Draft
PRO TIP: Most explainer video companies include scriptwriting services in their pricings. However, it’s much better for you to come up with the script concept.
Why? Simple: Nobody knows a company’s target audience better than the company itself. Don’t worry about creating Shakespeare-quality writing, because the production company will help you polish everything before it moves to the next phase.
Here’s how your script should flow:
Presenting your product as the solution immediately after pointing out problems will help viewers associate the two together, and make your brand’s name stick in their minds better.
Explaining to viewers how the problem-solving process works shows that you have the real solution your viewers need.
Time to Get Creative
The production company you hire is the creative team responsible for the development process, so you can sit back and spend more time thinking about your marketing strategy after the explainer is done.
PRO TIP: The creative development process requires your involvement to unleash its true potential, not in the visual creation, but in giving feedback. Don’t hold anything back.
Storyboarding
In the early stages of an explainer video’s development, visuals don’t matter much since they’re rough sketches. In later stages, visuals should match your company’s branding guidelines and appeal to your target customers. This process is a group effort between you and the creative team.
Illustrations and Animation
To make the illustration and animation process smoother, prepare the assets you want to be presented in the video (e.g., screenshots, company logo, data tables). Hand them over to the creative team. It’ll save some time and give the creative team guidelines to work with.
Putting the Video to Good Use
The explainer video you just made may look awesome, but you still need to make good use of it. You can do this by placing it in a prime spot and optimizing the page where it’s published.
PRO TIP: Test and measure an explainer video’s performance by considering where you actually put it.
Placing the Video
Where you place a video in a page can entirely change the results you get. “Above the fold” is considered the best place for your video. (FYI: “above the fold” means at the top of a page.)
As visual content, your explainer video should be the first thing showcased before everything else.
The logic behind placing a video above the fold is simple: For your video to reach its maximum potential, you have to present it to as many people as possible, and the top of the page is best for that.
Optimizing for Landing Pages
Landing pages are the best place to put your videos, because videos on landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 86% (research by EyeView). Combined with above-the-fold placement, your video will be really hard to miss.
One reason why landing page videos are good for conversion rate optimization (CRO) is because they replace the function of copywriting on your landing page, allowing you to clear out excessive amounts of text.
DesignBoost implemented shorter copy on their landing page back in 2012 when their website was brand-new. They generated a 13% increase in their sign-up rate.
Testing the Video
Explainer videos are not all equals, so your judgment of whether or not it did the job may vary. Try A/B testing the performance of your website with and without an explainer video.
You can also utilize analytics provided by your video hosting site to dive deeper into your viewership data. Free video hosting sites like YouTube provide adequate analytics, but a business-oriented hosting platform like Wistia will likely serve you better.
After crunching all the numbers, you’ll see what works and what doesn’t from your own point of view. You can use the data as a comparison for your next changes.
Explainer videos have several purposes. One is a tool to boost sales. What you need to start now is to gather information about your customer and their pain points that you can solve.
What do you think about the use of explainer videos for a company’s growth? Let me know!
Let’s face it — there’s not one salesperson who has not struggled with this issue. You’re thinking, “If I just discount the price, I will be able to close the deal.” Does this hit home with you? I suspect it does, as it’s one of the most common issues thrown at me when I’m speaking […]
6 emerging email and marketing automation trends to help inform your 2018 email marketing communications strategy Email marketing continues to be a vital communications channel with the DMAs latest Email tracker showing that email receives 30 times return on investment on …..
When I started in B2B sales and my real phone sales prospecting journey began, I quickly realized I was lost.
I was overwhelmed with the process of identifying the right industries, customer profiles, and decision-makers — not to mention finding the best phone number and email addresses to reach the prospect. I knew prospecting was a non-negotiable in sales, but I needed clarity and structure to guide me.
So, I created a sales prospecting plan centered on personalized emails, sales video messages, and targeted research for effective phone prospecting. This plan helped me find a groove that worked for me, and not only to hit quota but also to remain productive.
In this post, I’ll walk you through the exact plan I used, how I approached it, and I’ll share my sales prospecting tips so you can build a rhythm that works for you.
As a sales coach, I talk to my students a lot about prospecting and why it matters. Here is the main point I share with them first:
The goal of prospecting is to engage with the customer. You are initially not trying to make the sale; you are engaging first to earn the right to sell.
Once I learned that, I was able to get creative in the ways I could engage with the prospect.
Here are some of the things I did that I’ll go into in detail later on in the post:
I created a plan to send out sales video messages through social selling.
I personalized emails to increase my sales email response rates.
I conducted targeted industry research to enhance my cold-calling phone prospecting.
One important thing to note is that sales prospecting varies across all industries. This is because each industry deals with a different customer, and you must tailor your prospecting to that ideal customer profile (ICP).
I’m going to go into a little more detail on this, and then I’ll get to my tips.
What Sales Prospecting Looks Like in Different Industries
B2B, Tech, and SaaS Sales
The B2B, tech, and SaaS sales prospect foundation is set on consistency. Efficient B2B prospecting ensures a consistently filled sales pipeline, an accelerated sales cycle, and optimized outreach campaigns.
Pro tip: In B2B sales, I knew my prospecting plan had to yield consistency over results. The results of hitting and maintaining quota are essential, but to achieve that, your foundation must be set to manage your metrics effectively. Having a prospecting plan does just that.
Healthcare and Non-Profit Sales
In emotionally sensitive industries like these, prospecting requires empathy, curiosity, and genuine listening. Emotional intelligence helps you build rapport with leads.
Pro tip: I don’t have experience in these industries, but I have developed my emotional intelligence in sales. My advice is to ensure that all prospecting channels focus on the customer's needs, allowing you to personalize outreach with care and build rapport at the first touchpoint.
Finance and Insurance Sales
Prospecting in highly regulated or skeptical industries like these often results in more rejections. It is essential to establish that you are a genuine individual and not someone seeking to make false claims. Your prospect has to know, like, and trust you.
Pro tip: I worked in banking; personalized video follow-up messages after a phone call were always the white-glove service that allowed me to further connect with customers, earning their trust in the business.
Enterprise and Consultative Sales
Sales prospecting in the enterprise and consulting industries resembles creating a curiosity-driven learning experience. Enterprise buyers expect sellers to know their business.
Effective prospecting is essential here to rely on research, business acumen, and strategic curiosity. Curiosity-driven selling is a thing for a reason, and according to the Global Risk Community, studies show it leads to stronger relationships.
Pro tip: While I was working in consultative sales, phone prospecting was crucial because it enabled me to dive deeper into the conversation with the customer. Coming from a consultative approach allowed me to ask the right questions from a curious standpoint, and it made me appear more knowledgeable about the product I was selling. I didn’t come across as salesy, but rather full of worthwhile suggestions based on the questions I asked, and that alone positioned me as the expert.
My Top Sales Prospecting Tips
Regardless of which industry you’re selling in, I’ve learned the best practice is to create a prospecting plan to enforce consistency in your approach. The following four tactics were ones I kept in my toolbox and used regularly. Read on for details and tips.
Tip 1: Master the art of personalized emails.
Email prospecting involves sending personalized or templated cold emails to potential prospects to establish a relationship, schedule a meeting, or spark interest.
In my sales role, I wanted email prospecting to be my go-to outreach strategy because I excel at forming emotional connections through words, and I enjoy writing. I also felt prospects would open up an email before picking up a cold call.
So, I would set aside time every week to conduct thorough research on the prospect to highlight in my personalized emails, and it worked. I would also automate my template emails to have those sent out behind the scenes while I worked on the customized emails.
The results? I consistently booked meetings through email prospecting.
How to Implement This Tip
Create your prospecting plan, whether that be daily or weekly, and decide how you want to structure your email strategy for outreach.
Determine how many personalized emails you want to send versus how many template emails you wish to send. (I set a goal of sending out 10 personalized research emails daily.)
Hone the aesthetics of your prospecting email, including the subject line, introduction, value proposition, invitation, closing signature, and other key elements.
What to Track
To monitor your email prospecting, here is what I recommend:
Track key metrics such as open rates, response rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Then, identify areas for improvement or areas that can be doubled down on.
Tip 2: Create a sustainable plan for phone prospecting.
Phone prospecting is making cold calls to identify, qualify, and engage with potential clients or customers. Since phone prospecting accounts for the majority of sales activity, you want to be intentional about the calls you decide to make in your prospecting plan.
The rate that made a significant impact on my performance was the connection rate. Instead of worrying about the calls I made, I was trained to focus on the number of prospects I connected with daily. That shifted focus increased my call confidence, allowing me to see the big picture.
How to Implement This Tip
Set up a daily phone prospecting plan to determine the number of cold calls you would like to make each day. Choose a number that is achievable and not extreme.
Set a schedule and number of dials that work for you (my number was 50 a day), taking into account your energy level, and adjust as needed.
Once you reach your goal number of dials, you will have the space to call more without feeling the pressure of meeting an unrealistic target that is difficult to manage daily.
Pro tip: With my cold calling, I would base it on the Eat That Frog concept of “doing the hardest thing first.” If you prefer morning dials, make that your time block; if you prefer evening dials, make that your call block.
What to Track
To monitor your phone prospecting, track key metrics such as call volume, connections, and conversion rate.
Tip 3: Use social selling to build trust before the pitch.
Social selling utilizes social media channels to build awareness, foster relationships, and attract prospects, enabling connections and generating leads.
Social selling is powerful when done right. In fact, 92% of financial professionals who use social media for business say that it has helped them gain new clients.
Still, social selling faces significant resistance as social media can be challenging to stay consistent with. Sales representatives who utilize social selling typically have an existing following, are extroverted, and are willing to develop their brand to attract prospects and buyers.
It was challenging for me at first, but I started social selling very slowly by sharing the value of the industry I was selling in. I would share articles, tips, and expert advice, and include my takeaways to present myself as knowledgeable and aware of my industry.
How to Implement This Tip
My advice for your social selling prospecting plan is to choose a platform that suits your personality and start small, gradually building up your presence.
Share what works for you and don’t force it to be like others' posts on social media.
Create a content calendar of posts you want to share for the week and adjust accordingly. You could create article research posts on your industry, as I shared what worked for me, or you can create posts based on your point of view and expertise as a sales representative in your industry.
Pro tip: The key to social selling is that you must commit to the long haul; you won't receive prospects as soon as you make a post, nor should you expect your posts to go viral. Social selling takes time, but it can be effective in the long run.
What to Track
To monitor your social selling track key metrics such as engagement rates, inbound leads, and connection rate.
Tip 4: Leverage video to turn cold prospects into warm leads.
Video prospecting utilizes video as a strategic outreach tool to connect, engage, or educate prospects. I don’t think video prospecting is discussed enough as an effective sales outreach strategy. Like social selling, it can be intimidating, but it’s also extremely valuable.
In my career, I wanted to excel at video prospecting because it allowed me to be creative and effectively showcase my personality, unlike other outreach methods. I learned about video prospecting through Vidyard.
I watched several tutorials on Vidyard to learn how to develop sales video messages and took action by incorporating them into my prospecting plan. I would send out five videos a day using the Vidyard platform.
Another async video communicator you could use is the platform Loom. Creating videos utilizing Loom can work best in social selling because you can share the link directly within direct messaging.
How to Implement This Tip
When creating your video prospecting plan, determine how many videos you would like to send on a daily or weekly basis.
Create practice videos to become comfortable talking in front of the camera. Start with a few videos to get started, and increase the number as your comfort level improves.
Additionally, consider the time it takes to create these videos and how long you want them to be in your messaging. My videos were no longer than two minutes. Keep it short and straightforward; there's a lot you can say in little time, and the point of the video is to connect and engage.
What to Track
To monitor your video prospecting, track key metrics such as watch time, engagement, and click-through rates.
What Works in Prospecting Today
Phone prospecting is the most effective outreach strategy, and it remains undefeated when you lead with clarity and care. I regularly used all the tips and tactics I shared with you here, and they all worked for me in their own way.
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to prospecting. But what does work is being intentional and human across every channel, and showing up consistently with a plan in place.
When you incorporate these sales prospecting tips into your sales workflow, you will build trust and foster relationships, ultimately driving sales.
The unknown can be intimidating. You come across a business, you think it’s interesting, but you’re not 100% sure how it can help you so you move on.
Maybe you do run a great business with loyal customers who love you. Maybe they’re constantly suggesting new features, spreading positive word of mouth and purchasing more and more of your product.
These customers should be able to communicate how awesome your business is – otherwise other, potential customers are going to wonder what could be wrong with you (even if there’s nothing wrong at all!)
These days, the positive ripple effect of reviews can’t be ignored. Reviews are more than an attention grabber – readers can understand what it’s like to use your product in just a few sentences.
Yet as business owners and marketers, we want all or nothing. We want to see glowing, 5-star reviews, especially on third-party sites. Yet those honest 3 and 4 star reviews are what gets read and what is being listened to and taken seriously.
Nudging the fence sitters
With so many potential and current customers seeking out information about a product or a company’s strengths and weaknesses, it is important to know how to use those customer-generated reviews to your advantage.
For example, in Helprace you can get a snapshot of customer satisfaction by simply allowing customers to leave praise right on your website.
Online reviews are one of the most important and effective digital marketing techniques in your company’s toolbox. As with any of your marketing efforts, it is equally important to know the benefits as well as the costs of your online marketing activities.
Why customers care about online reviews
Those who come across your company seek out up-to-date, unbiased information about what it’s like to use your product. Existing customers offer a source of value that are prospective customers seek – unbiased and realistic. But how does that influence the behavior of potential customers?
The Incyte research discovered that there are six fundamental buying behaviors that showcase the importance of customer reviews.
Some of us ask for help. Others take initiative.
28% of all customers read reviews while the other 28% are willing to write them – that is regardless of product, industry or customer type.
Aside from listening and sharing, we are also judgmental.
Over 50% of consumers judge businesses based on reviews and others’ experiences. They do it before or without ever reading further into the company.
People seek out reviews every single day.
Over 60% of people actively search for reviews online. This number is even higher in the hospitality industry – people prefer to read reviews before they visit a restaurant, hotel or attraction.
Most effective ratings are 4, 3, 5 and then 2.
Not only that, over 30% of users assume reviews are fake if there are no negative reviews. Customers are interested in user experiences that point out product shortcomings.
People prefer to interact with one another in an open environment.
This can be on a company’s website. If a company doesn’t offer this, customers will seek out other social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, Quora, and Reddit.
After reading a review, people immediately go to the company’s website.
This isn’t surprising – after getting objective information, customers are intrigued to find out more, particularly product capabilities/offerings they may have missed.
At the very least, reviews add credibility to a brand. Most of the time, this type of credibility is difficult to establish without a stream of authentic feedback in your support funnel. This is where a review gathering or “fishing” strategy becomes important. Here’s why you might want to implement:
Asking for reviews is relationship-building and shows trust.
Essentially, you’re telling customers “I trust you to speak your mind and say whatever you want about me”. Regardless of whether it’s good or bad.
You don’t need a lot of reviews to start sounding credible.
An average of 5 reviews are necessary for people to believe that they can trust a business. Others need a few more reviews, but buyer confidence does not increase as the number of reviews rise.
Reviews lessen your support burden.
User reviews deflect support tickets and chat queries. Incentivizing reviews takes the weight off your online marketing efforts.
How online reviews help with SEO
Google weighs in external discussions about your product or site when coming up with search results. So the more text there is about your business, the higher it will be ranked on Google, Yahoo, etc. This means more organic traffic to your business website.
Quantity
More is definitely better when standing out from your competitors is the goal. More mentions on high-authority review sites means more importance placed on your site by search engines.
Quality
Customers want to know as much about you, your product and customers service as possible. They want to know how your product performs under different conditions. They’re also learning to spot fake reviews (search engines are getting a hang of this, too).
Diversity
When you list both good and bad reviews, your profile becomes more honest. And to avoid looking suspicious in the eyes of your customers (and Google’s evolving algorithms), you need to encourage everyone to leave their two cents.
What about collecting reviews?
Here are three foolproof ways to gather more customer reviews:
Cold call your customers asking them politely to send a review, follow up with an email. Remember, most customers you contact will leave a review if asked!
Email customers asking them to leave a review. Offer them a discount or give them a freebie for leaving a review – lots of thank you ideas you could use from our earlier blog post.
Link to reviews on your website, app dashboard, in-app notifications or billing page with tracking links.
What happens when you get a bad review?
Sometimes there’s absolutely nothing you can do about a bad review. For every ten happy customers, you’ll always have someone with something negative to say about you. At the same time, a bad review can be a rare window into the customer’s perspective and point of view.
A bad review can uncover customer obstacles and objections to your product. It can uncover reasons why it couldn’t live up to their expectations. It can also present an opportunity for dialogue to rectify the problem.
If you engage in a public discussion to turn a negative experience around, that’s not just one customer retained – that’s dozens of people who think favorably of your business, and an infinite possibility of potential customers.
This post was originally published on the Helprace Blog.
It seems like positioning your brand so that messaging and sales efforts speak directly to the target audience is kind of a no-brainer, right?
You want your ads and sales tools to, well, sell.
But missing the mark happens more often than you’d think — and big brands aren’t exempt from the occasional failure, either.
Here’s an example: Remember when Levi’s ran its “Hotness comes in all shapes and sizes” campaign? Despite the inclusive message, most of the images that accompanied the copy were of skinny, non-curvy models.
Not only did the campaign miss the mark, but it also created negative press for the brand (and it likely caused them to lose some customers, too).
We can also look at Song Airlines, a subsidiary company of Delta. Song was positioned as a low-cost air carrier for “hip, professional women”—complete with attendants wearing Kate Spade-designed uniforms, organic meals, and an in-flight exercise program. Marketing dollars were invested into TV and print ads that reinforced the lifestyle branding as well as publicity events in New York City’s shopping and nightlife districts.
Despite these efforts, Song ultimately discovered that although the marketing message was unique and interesting, it struggled to connect with the target audience and to drive bookings—and sales suffered. By 2006, Delta absorbed Song Airlines.
In both situations, it begs a question: Were these just advertising gaffes, or do they indicate a larger problem…like that these brands had a complete misunderstanding of the target audience?
It’s hard to say for sure without knowing the nuts and bolts that went into formulating failed campaigns. However, we can view them as warnings as to what can happen when audiences aren’t fully understood during a major marketing campaign launch.
This also holds true within the B2B setting. Examples like these illustrate the necessity for a deep understanding of who your ideal buyer/company is.
In this post, we’ll dive into how B2B companies can pin down the right audience, tools that help this discovery process, and building out profiles that help inform smarter marketing and sales materials.
Research Tips: Looking for Trends in Your Customer Base
Let’s start by talking about research.
When you’re getting started with the research process that will define your ideal audience, your mind might go straight to building buyer personas (AKA semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer). In fact, maybe you already have those. Let’s look a bit beyond those, though.
Instead, let’s look at some broader indicators that will help you examine some key factors that define the B2B markets you’re going to target.
1. Find the dominant industry
Start by looking at your existing client data to find out which specific industry stands out as the most dominant. If the most common industry represented by your current client base is different from the one you’ve been targeting in past marketing and sales materials, make a note. That likely needs to change.
2. Find out what size the average target company is
Use this same data set to find out what the average size is (as in, number of employees, revenue generated, etc.) for the clients you have within that industry.
Are they small businesses with fewer than 50 employees? Or are they large corporations generating >$1M in revenue each year? Somewhere in between? Outline these types of data points to get a clear profile of the businesses you’re targeting moving forward.
3. Find the common tech tools your audience already has
Next, you’ll want to start looking into what tech tools your target audience already has (and uses on a regular basis.) To gather this data, you may need to conduct focus groups, to send out surveys, or to leverage interactive assessments with this demographic to find out these details. Here’s an example of how scheduling tool HotSchedules did this with an interactive assessment:
Notice how the assessment educates the user on potential gaps in service and/or areas for improvement, but it also provides insight on the back end for the company.
The answers from this assessment help the brand better understand the common methodology, processes, and tools their demographic is currently using (for scheduling, in this instance).
4. Do some data-mining to find patterns and pain points
Once you’ve worked through your own data to this point, it’s time to start looking externally for clues into what your target audience wants and needs. You can do this by:
Looking at review sites like G2 Crowd for patterns and pain points around similar brands or product/service offerings
Working with a market research firm to conduct in-depth studies on the audience you’re targeting
Looking at data from credit card companies that illustrate the product/service buying habits of your target audience
Try to think creatively about where else you might find sources of valuable data. Are there complementary businesses you can partner with to pool resources and learn about your audiences together so that both parties benefit?
Additionally: Are there places online where the target demographic spends time (like forums, Twitter chats, etc.)? Spending time in these spaces can help you get a better grasp on the pain points your audience is facing.
Discovering Who Is Using vs. Purchasing Your Solution or Product
Once you’ve gathered information about the general audience your sales and marketing efforts should be pointed at, it’s time to find out who will be using the product within this group and who will be the purchaser.
Often times, these two are at different levels within the business, so you need to have messaging for both.
This is where buyer personas can be more useful. By thinking about where these two different people are in the purchase journey, you can create dynamic content that not only speaks to their different needs and concerns, but that’s also tailored to where he/she is in the sales funnel.
Let’s start with the first part.
Knowing the needs/concerns of the user and purchaser
Say you are a B2B SaaS company selling CRM software. The businesses you’re targeting are mid-sized with 50-150 employees, largely within the e-commerce industry.
The user of your software:
Is a customer service representative, 25-32 years old
Needs it to be easy to use
Needs features like quick access to a customer’s past orders
Needs it to be easy to export data for quick sharing across departments
The buyer of your software:
Is in upper management, 40-55 years old
Wants a tool that’s not too expensive and loaded with bells and whistles
Needs to see how it will improve the company’s bottom line
Needs to know what benefits there are to it, such as efficiency improvements or how it relates to customer retention
Creating content for these two audiences
The content you’d want to create for these two sub-audiences are different because they are looking for very different pieces of information.
While an interactive video demonstrating how to use the simple tools within the CRM might be valuable to the user, the buyer would probably be more interested in something like a case study demonstrating success via hard numbers and outcomes from a similar business that implemented the CRM.
You also need to consider where these two types of people might be within the overall sales funnel. Are they brand new to learning about your product? Or are they just about ready to buy and need a little more convincing to make that final conversion?
Keeping all of these elements straight can get confusing. However, multi-dimensional persona maps can help you better wrap your mind around who needs what type of content and when:
With a table like this one, you can even map out automated sequences that deliver these different types of content via email to different personas at just the right moment.
These tables also add some clarity and direction to the content distribution plan for deeper understanding of the strategy across departments and at all levels of the organization. This means more buy-in, because each department sees and understands what you’re all collectively working toward. It may also lead to more idea-sharing as departments can better grasp what data points may make these efforts more successful overall.
Know Your Target Audience, Deliver the Right Content
Overall, it’s important to keep in mind that even though you’re in the B2B market, B2B buyers are real people with needs, concerns, and obstacles just like everyone else.
When you know exactly to whom you’re speaking with marketing and sales materials as well as what they want and need, you can deliver highly relevant, personalized content that drives conversions.
The bottom line: Missing the mark with your messaging can mean lost time, financial resources, and overall slower growth for your business. Be sure to get this aspect right from the beginning and take the time to develop a thorough strategy around marketing to your target audience.
In the beginning companies sold products. And then they sold services. In recent years, the fashionable suggestion has been that companies sell experiences and solutions, solving the needs and aspirations of customers.
Companies, indeed, do all of these things. But increasingly, what companies sell are projects. To understand the difference, think of an athletic shoe company, such as Nike or Adidas. A focus on products means a focus on selling running shoes. A focus on experiences might mean they sell you a membership to a local running club. A focus on solutions might mean they figure out how to help you reach your goal weight. While these clearly offer more value than simply selling you a pair of shoes, they also have limitations. Selling products limits the revenues you can make from clients: Unless you are innovating and continually updating your product offering, customer attrition tends to be high, and incentivizing repurchases can be hard. Selling experiences provides intangible benefits that are hard to quantify and measure, often focusing on meeting the needs of one single customer, preventing any mass production. Selling solutions became popular in the early 2000s when customers didn’t know how to solve their problems. But today, in the internet age, people can do their own research and define the solutions for themselves.
A focus on selling projects would mean helping someone do something more specific, such as running the Boston Marathon. Nike could provide you with its traditional sports gear, but in addition it could include a training program, a dietary plan, a coach, and a monitoring system to help you achieve your dream. The project would have a clear goal (finish the marathon) and a clear start and end date.
And that is just one type of project. More so than products, the possibilities with projects are endless.
From Products to Projects at Philips
Consider the evolution of Philips. Founded in Eindhoven, in the south of The Netherlands, in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik, it began by producing carbon-filament lamps. Its success was achieved by a culture of innovation and the speedy introduction of new products. Over more than a century of profitable existence, the range of products offered by the company has mushroomed. Today, Philips produces everything from automated external defibrillators to energy-efficient lighting for entire cities. It even applies its smart sensor technology to teeth brushing.
This profusion of products means that Philips is cash-rich, yet sales have stagnated in the last decade, and concerns about the company have been reflected in its stock price. Faced with this changing reality, Philips took a long, hard look at itself. It identified the absence of focus and lack of strategy implementation capabilities as crucial elements that needed addressing. Five years ago, with intensifying competition, the Philips board split the organization into three different companies: Consumer Health, Lighting, and Healthcare.
It then went on to launch “Accelerate,” a program aimed at accelerating growth by transforming each new independent company into a focused organization. At the heart of the changes brought about by the Accelerate program are projects.
Over the years, Philips had become an intricate, blurred matrix. Accountabilities and responsibilities were shared between products, segments, countries, regions, functions, and headquarters. It set out to simplify this convoluted and archaic organization structure.
To do so, Philips put projects center stage. Projects were identified as the best management structure to break up silos and encourage teams to work transversally (end-to-end) in the organization.
As part of this, Philips Health Tech was divided into just three divisions. Essential to making this happen was a substantial increase in the work executed through projects. The shift was from selling customers a few products every year to creating an engaged relationship over decades.
One of the biggest challenges facing Philips Health Tech is that the life expectancy of its products is becoming shorter and shorter. Soon after launch, products are copied by the competition, which means they must be priced more cheaply. Soon, they become a commodity. This removes any opportunity for steady, high margins over the long term. Philips has experienced this even with its high-end health care products. Shifting its emphasis to selling projects rather than products was a strategic response to this problem.
For example, Philips sells high-tech medical devices. In the past it sold them simply as products (and it still does). But now Philips seeks out the projects in which its products will be used. If a new health care center is being considered, Philips will seek to become a partner from the very beginning of the project, including the running and the maintenance of the new center.
Among the results of this project focus at Philips is a partnership with Westchester Medical Center Health Network aimed at improving health care for millions of patients across New York’s Hudson Valley. Through this long-term partnership Philips provides WMC Health with a comprehensive range of clinical and business consulting projects, as well as advanced medical technologies such as imaging systems, patient monitoring, telehealth, and clinical informatics solutions.
In similar long-term partnerships with Philips, hospitals have been able to significantly improve radiology volumes and cut MRI waiting times in half. These organizations are seeing a 35% reduction in technology spending while improving clinical quality.
The Project Revolution
Philips is not alone in using an increased focus on selling projects as a means of disruptive transformation. At Microsoft, the company’s entire focus has shifted to Cloud services, most of which are offered as projects. It now has around 10,000 operating projects. Airbnb, valued this year at $30 billion, recently announced that it will start selling “experiences” — small tourism projects — as a way to create new revenue streams and address the increased regulatory scrutiny in some of its bigger markets. The biopharmaceutical industry is also seeking to work with governments and other purchasers on focused treatment programs, rather than simply offering individual drugs.
Clearly, the shift to becoming a project-driven organization and selling projects rather than products or services presents sizeable challenges to corporations and their business models. Working in projects throughout my career, I have identified these as the important ones:
Revenue streams. Revenues will be generated progressively over long periods of time, instead of right after the sale of a product. This will affect the way revenues are recognized, as well as accounting policies and the overall company valuation.
Pricing model. New pricing models will need to be developed. It is easier to price a product, for which most of the fixed and variable costs are known, than a project, which is influenced by many external factors.
Quality control. Delivering quality products will not be enough to meet customer expectations. Implementation and post-implementation services will also have to be of the highest possible quality to ensure that clients continue to buy projects.
Branding and marketing. Traditional marketing has focused on short-term immediate benefits. Marketing teams will need to promote the long-term benefits of the projects sold by the organization.
Sales force. The buyer of the project will no longer be the procurement department of an organization. Sales will be pitched to leaders of the business, so the sales force and sales skills will have to be upgraded with strategy and project management competencies.
Stop for a moment and consider what your organization is selling. Is it a project? Increasingly, the answer is clear and affirmative. If not, beware, your products might soon become part of a project sold by someone else.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is more than just a buzzword, especially within the B2B marketing community. Why? Because the B2B buying process has changed due to the power of digital content which means:
Buyers are well informed
And the number of stakeholders involved in purchase decisions has increased
This creates a challenge, who do you reach out to? Sales? Marketing? Finance? HR?
Businesses still operate with marketing and sales teams working in a silo, with zero collaboration or transparency. You need to step away from this approach and align the two together to target key accounts.
The Definition
Enter Account-Based Marketing. ABM in my eyes is ‘Zero Waste Marketing’, where sales and marketing work together to target key personnel in your key targeted accounts, rather than individuals. This allows for the overall focus being on having full visibility about your buyer needs and building with specifically targeted accounts. This is my definition but below is a textbook definition of ABM provided by SiriusDecisions:
“Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach marketers use to support a defined universe of accounts, including strategic accounts and named accounts. It also includes support for the post-sale customer lifecycle using marketing’s toolkit to contribute to the overall customer experience. ABM provides guidance on how to deliver the insights, goal setting, strategy and planning, integrated marketing execution, and sales alignment required to support growth, retention, and loyalty objectives. It also provides guidance on how to measure marketing’s impact beyond demand creation within defined groups of prospect and customer accounts. ABM helps to evolve the role of marketing to reflect a stronger alignment with sales objectives and customer needs to deliver better execution and revenue outcomes.”
The Process
ABM allows you to engage with all influencers in the decision-making process and aligns sales with marketing. How?
You do your research first. Identify the key accounts you want to go after. These accounts should be suitable in terms of offering and size.
Data is key. Dig deep and use various tools (data fox, datanyze, linkedin etc) to find your key accounts and the contacts that are key to the decision making process.
Content is king. Start to create your content in various formats and tones to appeal to your targeted accounts and influencers.
Position yourself (sales), and brand as thought leaders, experts, the go-to people for real insight, advice within that specific industry.
Get in front of them, use various channels both off and online to get your message across and create brand awareness.
Make sure your messaging and perception stays consistent across every channel, platform and touch point used.
Keep things moving. Momentum is key and you want to use every opportunity to stay front of mind, keep the targeted touch points coming.
Through the roughly outlined steps above, you will hopefully start to capture leads (form fill or direct approach etc.) This is where sales and marketing need to align to work together. Once a lead has been captured it’s down to sales to nurture that lead and down to marketing to help support sales. Marketing needs to step in and engage with all the other influencers associated to the account through the various channels. This raises brand awareness, aids the sales without interrupting their sales process.
The Benefits
ABM, if executed correctly, is an effective strategy that can help businesses create and sustain growth and profitability with both new and existing clients. Research from ITSMA found that over 80% of marketers who measure ROI say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments. Below I’ve listed 5 of the key benefits ABM can offer:
ROI
ABM delivers the highest ROI of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic according to ITSMA. As mentioned, I like to think of ABM as ‘Zero Waste Marketing’ as it’s targeted, precise, personalized and accurate. Which makes it easier to measure ROI.
Personal
75% of customers prefer personalized offers according to Aberdeen. ABM takes this on board and allows you to map personalized messages and content to your buyer personas at the different stages.
Correct Channels
Convenience is key and engaging with your targeted accounts on the correct channels by giving them relevant and valuable content is perfect. You need to understand which channels are relevant to your target audience and focus on optimising your content for these identified channels.
Shorten Sales Cycle
With ABM you remove unqualified leads which shortens the sales cycle and allows you to focus on the accounts most likely to purchase from you.
Deal Size
You can identify which accounts generated the most revenue and use this as a profile to target other accounts and fill up your ABM funnel. You ideally want to look at purchase history, sales feedback, account profiles and buyer behavior to name a few.
Final Word
ABM provides an excellent opportunity for your sales and marketing teams to focus on the same goals. The synergy created can help boost sales and grow your company.
SMBs in the U.S. have quadrupled their spending on SaaS subscriptions in the past two years.
There's a lot of competition in the SaaS market today. And it's increasingly more difficult to attract new customers—startups release cheap versions of SaaS products every day.
This is where my latest book, SaaS Sales for Startup Founders, comes in. One thing I’m really good at is helping people get paying customers for their startups. Even if you’re not a “salesy” person.
In the early days of Close.io, I used to give sales office hours. I can’t really do that anymore—I just don’t have the time to speak 1:1 with all of you.
Which is why my team and I created this book.
You’ll get practical advice on:
Quickly validating your idea before you build a product (and company)
Building a sales funnel and striking the right balance between self-service and high-touch sales
Developing an ideal customer profile
Finding quality leads
Selling to small businesses, large corporations, and government agencies
Transitioning customers from monthly plans to annual contracts
Converting free trial users into paying customers
Increasing CLTV (there is SO much potential for MRR growth in this, yet very few startups actually do all of these five things)
And much more
To get your free copy of SaaS Sales for Startup Founders, click the button below:
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LinkedIn may begin creating or acquiring original video content for its platform, according to comments from the company’s CEO Jeff Weiner covered by International Business Times and The Information.
The comments from Weiner come amid an overall push from the professional networking platform to become more video-centric — it recently rolled out native video uploading and video ads.
Certain shows make sense on LinkedIn — the company could focus on programming that caters to its career-minded user base. Weiner added that Shark Tank, a TV series where individuals seeking funding pitch their businesses to prospective investors, would do well with LinkedIn’s audience. Fifty percent of college-educated adult web users in the US are on LinkedIn, according to Pew.
LinkedIn’s push into original video could benefit the company in two ways:
It could help it retain and grow users. LinkedIn users averaged just two minutes per day on the platform, which is much lower than the 30 and 50 minutes Snapchat and Facebook users spend per day on each platform, respectively. Original content gives LinkedIn users another way to remain engaged after applying for jobs on the platform, for example, potentially boosting their overall time spent on average. Additionally, the platform could attract new users, as video content would make LinkedIn more of a media platform, and not just oriented towards networking and job-searching.
It could generate more revenue from video ads on the original content. Boosting ad revenue is important as advertising historically been a small driver of overall revenue. In Q3 2016, the company’s ad revenue stood at $175 million, or 18% of total revenue, while Talent Solutions (which provides products for recruiters) accounted for 65%. Moreover, original content represents premium ad inventory, as it is unique content that can’t be found elsewhere, which LinkedIn could leverage to advertisers to further boost ad spend.
LinkedIn would join a host of other prominent social platforms in creating original content. Facebook has pledged to spend $1 billion on original content over the next year and recently rolled out its platform Watch for TV-like content. Snap recently announced its plans to create a digital content studio with NBCUniversal, while Twitter has over a dozen TV-like shows slated to stream this year. Though LinkedIn would be entering a crowded market of original content offerings, it could still differentiate itself by orienting its programming towards its career-oriented user base.
Today, adults spend on average of over two hours a day on social media and 94% have an account on at least one social media platform.
Its never easier than ever for brands to reach and engage directly with consumers. As a result, there has been a reawakening of who controls the brand. At one time, brands owned the relationships, today that is no longer the case.
The consumer owns your brand message.
Social media and social networking have upended brand dynamics. They have changed the way we communicate, interacted and transformed the online purchasing journey.
Within the last ten years, consumers have been enabled to research, compare and interact with brands. This opens up new opportunities for brands along with management challenges.
The way we consume news and the source for news has changed dramatically as a result of social media.
The Social Consumer
88% of internet users has an account with Facebook on at least one of their social platforms. Facebook remains the most popular social platform.
As a result of changing consumer habits, to have an effective presence on social media, brands need to develop an in-depth understanding of their target audience.
Start by asking yourself a few fundamental questions:
What social platform(s) are my audience using?
Are they part of any online communities?
How do I engage with them without selling to them?
Can I bring value to the conversation?
How do I define what value is, in this context?
What content and format should be used?
70% of Facebook user log on daily, including 43% who do so several times a day. This makes Facebook the most engaged social media platform. (Pew Research Center, 2015)
Many brands fail to realize or capture the impact that Facebook has on their brand. This demonstrates the need for brands to do a much more in-depth dive into which social media platform your target audience is using and why.
The time invested in this effort will help you align your customers with your marketing goals.
Today, brands need to be audience-centric. This means utilizing data to deliver and ROI when using social media.
An excellent example of an audience-centric brand is L’Oréal. Using data to identify where their audience was online, they realized that a large segment of their target audience was using YouTube to interact with and follow beauty vloggers and influencers.
As a result, L’Oréal turned its focus to YouTube. Using 61 videos in 39 different countries. L’Oréal embraced a more targeted approach to social media and rapidly became the most watch beauty brand on YouTube in 2016.
The Social Consumer Journey
Knowing where your audience is, isn’t enough. You need to produce relevant, engaging content to drive consumer engagement. The social platform chosen will influence the chosen medium.
For example, Pinterest is image-driven, as is Instagram, to a point. Over 50% of Facebook users watch video on the platform.
46% of consumers made a purchase as a result of watching a brand video on a social network, according to Brightcove.
Social media plays a role in the customer journey, today, 40% of 16-24 year-olds are using social as a critical research channel. This creates opportunities for brands from awareness to purchase.
Brands need to know where and when to place a message that drives consumer actions. This depends on the needs of your audience and where they are in the sales funnel.
Analyzing consumer data and when to deliver a brand message is a must today. This can be as simple as a video tutorial for people researching a product or how to solve a problem is critical. As consumers are in the consideration phase, using retargeting ads to gently encourage them to make a purchase.
Capitalize on Micro-Moments Opportunities
Today, marketers need to be aware of the immense and economic value that is in dissecting the exact moment when someone uses their device with the intent to learn something, do something or buy something. These micro-moments are the keys to success – the ability to know the correct moment to provide the right content to drive consumer actions.
Delivering the right content at the right time on the right channel allows brands to capitalize on the acute consumer.
Having a front line seat to actively listen and engage with consumers is the power of social media.
The ability to garner insights about what and how consumers feel about your brand is invaluable. As is, what frustrates, pleases, or experiences with your brand, in addition to what they like or are unhappy or complaining about.
Its one thing to listen on social media, this information needs to be turned into action from incorporating feedback into product design as well as creating detailed customer journey maps and content that meets the needs of your audience.
Social media opens up the opportunity to capture a wealth of data at your fingertips. This data assists to map tout the consumer journey and improve touch-points that matter.
Today four out of 10 consumers follow their favorite brands on social media. With 25% who follow brands that they are contemplating purchasing from. This opens up ample opportunity to engage with and build a personal relationship with your audience.
The potential of social media marketing is potent, its time to make the investment and get it right.
Life had been a straight line for me: lived in same house for 12 years. Went to good college. Went to graduate school.
My therapist doesn’t agree with me: but I think my parents loved me.
My one bad thing: I didn’t fit in with any group. And I hated myself. But not honest enough to admit it.
I tried to write a novel about someone who fit in, who was the type of person I wanted to be.
So my first four novels were awful and unpublished. I was 22, 23, 24, and then 25.
Then my life changed.
I started work at HBO and came up with an idea called “3am” which involved me interviewing people at 3 in the morning.
I started to see a scarier side of life. I started to meet people who were beyond hope, beyond help.
One person raped and abused so badly she would never be able to fit into normal “day” society.
Another boy so racked with Tourettes and bipolar and no family he was young and homeless and addict and out of the system.
Another girl ruined by her pimp, forced to stand at the busstop all night long that was the only stop for prisoners being released from Ryker’s Island prison.
I watched and did nothing while her pimp punched her to the ground after she (maybe only 16 years old) tried to talk to me.
Undercover police were everywhere but did nothing.
One common thing I learned at three in the morning: everyone lied to survive. Truth is a luxury we day-people take for granted.
All I could do was listen. And write about them.
And then I lost a lot of money and got scared I couldn’t feed my kids. And then I lost my father. And a home. And, to some extent, my children. My family.
I was ashamed.
And I lost again and again. Only one day I finally asked, “why?
Life became very sad for me. Which is why I still rank high if you search, “I Want to Die” on Google.
I saw people die on the verge of success. Because stress will kill you. And life is short. And they had killed their present in the hope for a future that never came.
I was becoming one of those people. I was sick. I was degenerate. I was desperate. I hid.
I wrote some books about finance. I was glad to get it out of my way – “I wrote a book!” but they weren’t yet real books – books that I viewed as works of art. Things I wanted to say.
Then I got honest. I simply told the truth.
If the truth is a luxury then give it to people because it will stand out. Give them all of your luxuries.
Replace “Christ” with “Art” in Phillipians: “I have given up all lies, discarded them as garbage, so I could finally achieve Art,
Eventually I wrote a book, “Choose Yourself!” that is now getting close to one million copies sold.
It made me happy to write that book. Everything I write now, I try to ask myself, “Is this true?” And truth has finally set me free (cliche but it works).
So I wrote more like it. And I wrote a children’s book. And one small novella. And five more books.
BUT…
This is the first year since 2003 I am not writing at least one book. I have 18 books written. Altogether almost two million copies sold.
This year I’ve been focusing on another obsessive interest of mine, which is comedy. Comedy is pain converted into art. Is sadness converted into laughter.
Next year I’ll write a book.
In 2012 I wrote “everyone should write a book”.
I said, “books are the new business card” and I’ve now seen other people say this.
My good friend, Ryan Holiday wrote an excellent article recently, “Please don’t write any more books”. He’s correct also. Too many people now are writing books as “business cards”.
But let them. Everyone has a story to tell. Trust me on this.
At the very least, you have one or two readers: write a story your great-great grandchildren are going to want to read.
Why deny them your wonderful story?
Books have been around for thousands of years. Tweets for ten years. Books will be around thousands of years from now.
So write. Find the darkness inside you. Find where you reached for love and either succeeded or failed.
Tell your great-great grandchildren that story. You have that book inside of you. And everyone should write one.
And that book could be a love story, a business story, a how-to, a book about trivia, or a horror novel.
But if it’s about the 99.999% of the world that’s dark, and you find that one rare strain of love, then it will be a good book.
There’s a lot of advice about how to write a book. Writing a book is not hard. Maybe writing a masterpiece is. But that’s subjective. Who knows what a masterpiece is.
The only way to get better at anything is to DO IT. DO IT DO IT DO IT.
That’s it.
So ignore most book writing advice. A lot of people give difficult advice to follow. If I had followed any of that advice it would not have worked for me.
Don’t even follow my advice. It’s just what I did.
But write a book. And then write two.
Here’s how I wrote 18 books. And will maybe write 18 more.
Don’t know what to write? Write a list of ten bad ideas. Write about everything you value more than your work. Write one thing about each person you love.
Write the ten worst things that have happened in your life.
Write for ten minutes without picking your pen up about anything at all even if it’s just “blah blah blah blah” for ten minutes.
You MUST practice writing every day. Even if it’s garbage.
Write one horrible page a day. Don’t skip.
3) THE WORST THING.
Pick the worst thing in your life.
Start at the worst moment of the worst thing. (e.g. “And then I was caught!” or… “And then I figured out the right way to kill myself.”)
The worst thing in your life, this year, this month. Today.
Ask someone with a heart attack, “Why did you get a heart attack?”
They never say, “Clogged arteries”. Never. 100%.
They say, “My wife left me.” Or, “Work has gotten more stressful”. Or, “I’m unhappy with my friends.”
The body is connected to your story. Writing heals the body.
The “worst thing” is the clogged artery of your soul.
4) WRITE POORLY. YOU HAVE PERMISSION.
Don’t worry about flow. Anytime you are stuck here’s what you do: Write three dots. (‘….”) hit the paragraph return, and start with something new.
That’s how the best books ever are written. It’s a form of diversification. Diversification of story.
5) THE 1-2% RULE
For non-fiction books, write down as many chapter titles as possible. Don’t worry if they have anything to do with the subject. This is your outline.
Your book has no subject anyway. Nobody cares. Even the best readers only remember 1-2% of a book.
6) THE FINISH RULE.
Finish with an impactful story.
People remember the beginning, the end, and make one chapter in the middle in that order. Make those three points painful.
Kill yourself in the beginning. Kill yourself in the middle. Kill yourself in the end.
Even if it’s a book about botany or space aliens or a children’s book.
7) ARC OF THE HERO IN ONE LINE:
The arc of the here in one line:
hero gets call to action, is in pain so is forced to take that all, goes on a journey, is incompetent at first, then meets more and more people who will help him, is at mercy of the antagonist once or twice (more intensely the second time) around 2/3 or 3/4 of the way in, and then must make his way back, new and improved.
And that’s the plot of Star Wars, the Bible, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Wizard of Oz, The Great Gatsby, The Firm, On the Road, and 50 Shades of Grey and any great textbook.
The arc of the hero is a fractal. It occurs in a book. In a chapter. In a paragraph. In a tweet.
Don’t even open up your mouth if you aren’t about to say the arc of the hero in a sentence.
Else…listen.
8) DARKNESS + A SPECK OF LOVE = TRUTH
For any plot: find something intensely dark and sad and find the one vein of love in it.
This is good for both non-fiction and fiction. This is good for a one page article.
9) THE STAPLER RULE
Write 30 separate articles. Write about 30 things nobody has ever said. See “worst thing” above.
Staple them together. That’s your first draft. Rewrite at least ten times.
I’ve written 100% of my books that way and altogether that equals almost 2 million copies sold.
10. WRITE SECOND BOOK
Because it’s fun. Because you still have many more things to say.
Because I love you and want to learn more about you.
While I may take a two or three yoga classes per week, I am no expert. Left to my own devices, my poses disintegrate into half a pose far too soon and the sequence that seems ever so important becomes a jumbled mess where my breathing sounds labored rather than even, deep and continuous.
So, as you budget for 2018, I want to encourage you — CEOs, business owners, marketers, recruiters, sales professionals and entrepreneurs, to not only consider ten reasons why you need to include LinkedIn coaching and training as part of your 2018 training or professional development program but to answer the questions below. The answer to these questions will inform how you move forward and celebrate you and your team’s good work.
Review your executive leadership team’s LinkedIn profiles (CEO or business owner included) with the following in mind:
If your largest client’s CEO reviewed your leadership team’s profiles, would they be impressed?
Would your client understand how your company serves their clients?
Does their profile look like their resume?
Do they have an up to date professional photo?
Do they have few connections?
Review your sales team’s LinkedIn profiles with the following in mind:
Would their clients and prospects understand how your salespeople help solve problems, provide a superior product or service, and add value?
Do their profiles look like resumes of quota-crushing salespeople who are going to “sell” as soon as they talk to someone?
Do they have an up to date professional photo?
Are they connecting with the right people (clients, prospects, centers of influence etc.)?
Are they sharing the content your marketing team is creating, (assuming you are creating original blogs, white papers, ebooks, and videos)?
Review your hiring and talent acquisition team’s LinkedIn profiles with the following in mind:
Are they leveraging their LinkedIn profiles to talk about why your company is a preferred employer?
Are they creating a potential bench of candidates for your company?
Does their LinkedIn profile and network include a company description or value proposition?
Do they have an up to date professional network?
Over and over, people tell me they use LinkedIn every day. In fact, I was working with a group last week where well over 75% of the group said they were on LinkedIn everyday and felt rather confident with using LinkedIn. When I asked them to check their Social Selling Index score, which is based on their professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships only one person had a score of more than 50.
Why use the Social Selling Index score as a barometer to determine how effective someone is on LinkedIn? It’s objective. It’s not my opinion but LinkedIn’s algorithm at work. It level sets an individual or team quickly and focuses people’s activity so they can become more effective. I talk with people every day who think their profile is perfectly acceptable until they begin to understand how their profile could look. It’s all relative.
Controlling your story and building your brand and network, whether one individual or a company of 10,000, requires ongoing insight, coaching and training. Don’t let another year slip by without thinking strategically about how you and your team can increase your sales and recruiting funnels through LinkedIn.
“How is Lean (sales process excellence) different from other sales process methodologies (e.g. QBS, Forum), in that many salespeople will quickly discard and revert if they don’t easily perceive results?”
Lean (a well known variant is known as the Toyota Production System) is a management system that enables relentless increases in business productivity. This doesn’t just mean eliminating waste. It also means increasing the value perceived by the customer. Lean thinking begins with what the customer wants, and works backwards from there. Four characteristics distinguish a Lean process approach to sales and marketing from traditional approaches:
Lean is Collaborative – Not a Canned Program
Traditional “sales consulting” artfully delivers a “canned” program for your salespeople. These approaches are about the training (or the CRM software), not about your business. In most cases, it takes a while to find out how much of the supplier’s content doesn’t really apply to you. (By the way, that’s why CRM vendors prefer to sell you their vanilla system “to start out.”)
The best approach – the Lean approach – begins by uncovering evidence and data around your prospect’s and customer’s and their problems. Then, it identifies the best means at your disposal of helping them realize, prioritize, and solve their problems.
This requires a good plan for how your employees and channel partners will get them to take the actions you want them to take. Your people are the only ones who can fulfill your company’s promises, so they must develop the plan. They only want what works and makes their job easier. Not things that don’t apply or make their job harder.
Lean is About Data and Evidence – Not Opinion and Anecdotes
Traditional approaches to sales management do not offer a means of measuring cause and effect. Lean process excellence energizes your team by creating operating definitions of their key terms (such as “qualified prospect,” and “customer”). They identify the customer’s journey. They define the observable characteristics that make them more or less likely to buy from you. How do you get them to distinguish work that creates value from work that is wasted in sales and marketing?
Simple: If the customer takes an action you wanted them to take, value is created. Successful companies enable their team to create home-grown interactions that help prospects and customers move along their customer’s journey. The best minds in your business (your team) work out respectful agreement for how to get the customer to realize, prioritize, and solve their problems with you. The Lean approach guarantees buy-in from salespeople, because salespeople who can get customers to respond are in the driver’s seat.
Lean Deployment is Hands On – Not “Step Back and Watch” or “Wait and See”
Rather than stepping back to wait for results, a Lean approach requires the senior executive to participate in events where sales processes are designed and improved. They closely follow what works and doesn’t work in the field so they can clear the way for adjustments and improvements. Are prospects responding to the lead-generation offers? Is forecast accuracy increasing? Are decision makers responding to value propositions? Why, or why not? Curiosity and participation of the company’s leaders is the only way to ensure problems get surfaced – and dealt with.
Presidents or General Managers not interested leading and supporting this effort (in cooperation with the Sales VP, of course) shouldn’t bother with a Lean sales approach.
Lean Takes A Team – Superheroes are Welcome, Not Required
Traditional sales consulting approaches change nothing inside the company. They ask salespeople to do extra work (some of which might pay off occasionally). Swimming against the current is hard. Only superheroes can keep doing it for long. No wonder salespeople take what they like and leave the rest behind.
In contrast, Lean aims a team of marketers, sellers, technicians, and servicers at a specific class of prospects and customers. It asks them to learn how to help these prospects and customers to realize, prioritize, and solve their problems more quickly. Super-human efforts may be required occasionally, but not all the time. That’s because the point is to change something every day to make it easier on the inside – and more compelling on the outside for prospects and customers to want to work with you.
Lean endures in manufacturing because it incorporates the kind of management practices required to improve results and sustain the gains. Over time, organizational silos diminish in a Lean environment. The daily work of your customer teams generates data around the high-impact, common problems preventing them from achieving their goals, so management knows where to focus and invest. Best of all, your company becomes known as a great place to work, so you can attract better talent and keep them happy.
With a Lean process excellence approach doesn’t say you don’t need things like sales training, or CRM software. It says without evidence and data showing exactly how you will create value for your customers, you may be shooing in the dark.
Why Consider a Lean Sales Approach?
As you can see, Lean sales process excellence is not typical. Typical business people think they need a process, which they try to get from sales training or CRM software. Yet these are one-size fits all, and can become obsolete within a week. What business people really need is not a process, but a means of improving their process and their results. They need to make sure the way they are going to market is efficient and effective. They need to know their people can detect evidence of market changes and respond in the correctly short as well as the long term.
If your goal is to create the next sales dynasty in your business, and if sales and marketing is a determining factor in your success, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better way.
What would you like to know about implementing a management system like this in your organization? Please respond in the comments section below.
The majority of Americans share in economic growth through the wages they receive for their labor, rather than through investment income. Unfortunately, many of these workers have fared poorly in recent decades. Since the early 1970s, the hourly inflation-adjusted wages received by the typical worker have barely risen, growing only 0.2% per year. In other words, though the economy has been growing, the primary way most people benefit from that growth has almost completely stalled.
Understanding how and why this stagnation occurred is not just an academic question — it is essential to redesigning public policies so that more Americans share in the benefits of economic growth. In a recent Hamilton Project at Brookings report, we highlight what we believe are some of the most critical developments over the last few decades and consider what is necessary for the typical American to get a raise.
For wages to grow on a sustained basis, workers’ productivity must rise, meaning they must steadily produce more per hour, often with the help of new technology or capital. Further, workers must receive a consistent share of those productivity gains, rather than seeing their share decline. Finally, for the typical worker to see a raise, it is important that workers’ gains are spread across the income distribution. If wages are rising but the increases are all going to the best-paid workers, the typical worker doesn’t see a gain. Two of these conditions have not been met, which explains the fact that productivity has risen while the median wage has barely changed.
In a notable shift from earlier decades, labor’s share of income is no longer constant, but has fallen from nearly 65% in the mid-1970s to below 57% in 2017. Though some of this decline reflects measurement limitations, much of the decline is plausibly due to shifts in technology and market structure that have disadvantaged workers. Even as the share of income channeled to labor has declined, the distribution of income has become more unequal. Since the late 1970s, large wage gains have accrued to workers at the top of the distribution, and wages have been declining or stagnant for the bottom half of the income distribution.
Assigning relative responsibility to the policies and economic forces that underlie rising inequality or declining labor share is a challenge. International trade and technological progress have played significant roles, putting downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled workers. For example, as imports from low-wage countries made inroads into the manufacturing sector, job losses in the United States were substantial in some areas. At the same time, U.S. manufacturing has learned to produce more with fewer workers. Both developments generated widely shared benefits in the form of new products and lower prices, but also led to dislocation of some workers and downward pressure on less-skilled workers’ wages.
We also know that educated workers have fared better; the wages received by those who finished their education with a four-year college degree grew from 134% of high school graduates’ wages to 168%. While increasing educational attainment has helped to raise wages for many workers, it remains the case that the majority of Americans have not completed a four-year degree.
Domestic policy choices have mattered, too, especially because they have affected workers’ bargaining power and the allocation of wages across different workers. For example, the deteriorating value of the inflation-adjusted minimum wage, along with declining union membership, have lowered wages for many in the bottom and middle of the wage distribution.
The wage stagnation of the past 40 years is also linked to some developments that may have suppressed productivity growth, which has slowed since 1973, with an exception of a surge from 1995 to 2004. Some of the most disturbing trends can be loosely grouped under the heading of declining “dynamism.” Workers are less likely to move across states than they once were (fewer than 2% of workers do so today, as compared with about 3% who did 40 years ago). They are also less likely to switch jobs than they once were. These changes may reflect a diminished ability to find the places and jobs that are most conducive to upward mobility.
Business dynamism also fell. In the late 1970s, 14% of firms were under a year old; that figure has fallen to 8% in the most recent data. Because young, fast-expanding firms have historically been an important driver of wage growth, the increasing age of firms may be contributing to lackluster worker gains.
Since the global financial crisis, wage growth (without adjusting for inflation) has continued to be slow. In part, this represents low inflation — real wage growth in recent years has actually surpassed the rates in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but is still low — and it may also represent the hangover from a severe recession. Labor market slack has been one reason for low wage growth earlier in the recovery and may still have some impact recently; the more available workers are out there, the less ability workers have to demand higher wages. The reintegration of unemployed or new workers into the workforce after a recession can also lead to slower wage growth, given that their wages are generally lower than those of already-employed workers. However, particularly slow productivity growth in the last decade, combined with the long-run forces mentioned above, is also crucial to explaining sluggish wage growth.
It took many factors — some the result of deliberate policy choices, some the outcome of broad economic processes — to produce decades of wage stagnation for the typical worker. Similarly, it will take many incremental reforms and new policies to reestablish the conditions that support robust, broadly shared wage growth. There is no single wage growth panacea, but many policies would help, including: raising the minimum wage; increasing worker bargaining power (including by reducing noncompete contracts or collusion among firms); ensuring adequate labor demand through looser fiscal or monetary policy; increasing dynamism through pro-mobility or entrepreneurship policies; and making broad improvements to education or productivity policies. Given the longstanding trends and limited improvements in living standards for many workers, taking action to increase wage growth is one of the most important policy imperatives we face.
By any metric, opioid-related overdoses in the United States have reached epidemic proportions. Many intertwined causes have led to this crisis, from reduced access to substance-abuse treatment, to increased unemployment spurring use of prescription opioids, to online pharmacies that illegally supply prescription opioids to patients.
But health care providers are also widely held responsible for overprescribing prescription opioids. While research testing this hypothesis is mixed, it’s clear that efforts to curb the epidemic need to involve physicians and hospitals. The adoption of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) is one such effort that holds promise, though it must be made more effective.
Are Doctors to Blame?
It is often argued that growing advocacy for the systematic measurement of patient pain in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as pay-for-performance measurement of provider quality based on their ability to relieve patients’ pain (among other things), spurred overprescribing.
How leading providers are delivering value for patients.
But whether opioids are truly overprescribed is difficult to tease out, because pain is hard to objectively quantify, as is the amount of pain relief that patients may receive from opioids. Patients and doctors have recently raised concerns over pain being undertreated due to greater scrutiny causing a decline in opioid prescriptions.
Nevertheless, rates of prescribing are still very high, and opioid-related overdose deaths continue to rise. By some estimates, more than 50% of opioid pills are unused by the patients who are prescribed them after surgery, which suggests significant overprescribing exists.
Enormous variation exists across providers’ opioid-prescribing habits. In our own research, for example, we have found that U.S. hospitals vary by nearly twofold in the prescribing of opioids after hospital discharge. In particular, rates of prescribing opioids upon hospital discharge range from 10% to 20% of discharged patients, depending on the hospital, with factors such as a high ratio of nurses per bed, rural location, government ownership, and high performance on inpatient pain-assessment scores all modestly associated with higher rates of opioid prescribing.
Patients may also seek pain relief from multiple providers, with each provider being potentially unaware of opioid prescriptions written by others. We found that among a sample of 1.2 million Medicare beneficiaries who filled at least two opioid prescriptions in 2011, 34% received prescriptions from two providers, 14% from three providers, and 12% from four or more providers. We found that the more providers a patient received prescriptions from, the greater the likelihood the patient would suffer an adverse event related to an opioid such as respiratory arrest.
Our research also found that among similar patients treated in the same emergency department, rates of opioid prescribing varied by nearly threefold, ranging from 7% of an emergency physician’s patients being prescribed an opioid upon discharge to over 20% of an emergency physician’s patients. But patients treated by emergency physicians who prescribed fewer opioids were no more likely to return to the emergency department with pain-related conditions.
Can Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Help?
Efforts to get physicians and hospitals to reduce opioid prescribing have seen limited success. The most notable effort to date has been the widespread development of PDMPs, which are now in place in 49 U.S. states. These state-level programs collect data on prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances that any provider can access online, theoretically allowing providers to identify any suspicious patterns of opioid use. For example, the system would let a doctor see if a patient was obtaining prescriptions from multiple physicians within a short time span.
But the utilization of PDMPs by physicians has been low, largely because most states do not mandate that physicians check the PDMP before prescribing an opioid. In addition, use of PDMPs by physicians is time-intensive and poorly integrated into a physician’s daily workflow (for example, most PDMPs are not embedded within the electronic health records that physicians use in their daily practice).
Mandating the use of PDMPs and making them easier to use could make a big difference. The best available evidence by the economists Thomas Buchmueller and Colleen Carey suggest that PDMPs significantly reduce prescription opioid misuse, but only when use of the PDMP by physicians is mandated, which now occurs in approximately one-fifth of all states. For instance, implementation of a PDMP with a provider mandate for use is associated with substantive reductions in misuse — for example, an 8% relative reduction in the percentage of Medicare beneficiaries who obtain prescriptions from five or more providers and a 15% reduction in the percentage obtaining prescriptions from five or more pharmacies.
However, PDMPs are not a panacea. While they can be useful, their ability to stem opioid overprescribing is inherently limited by the specific form of misuse that the programs aim to address. They primarily focus on identifying aberrant use of prescription opioids. Although this is important to consider, it’s likely that the vast majority of prescriptions reflecting clinical overuse do not meet the criteria that would flag identification by a PDMP. For example, much routine opioid prescribing can be clinically inappropriate and lead to long-term opioid dependence, but it wouldn’t be flagged by a PDMP.
Accurately identifying and targeting interventions toward physicians, physician groups, and hospitals that prescribe opioids inappropriately — either in terms of frequency, dose, or duration — is critical to reducing prescription opioid overuse. This requires investments in data infrastructure and health information technology to measure real-time opioid prescribing patterns. For example, PDMPs can and should be integrated into electronic health records so that physicians prescribing an opioid can immediately observe a patient’s opioid utilization history at the time of prescribing.
PDMP data could also be used to rapidly evaluate the effectiveness of new interventions or policies. For instance, it was recently demonstrated that “peer comparison” letters, which compare a physician’s prescribing rates with other physicians to try to increase uniformity in prescribing, that Medicare sends to potential overprescribers of controlled substances had no effect on prescribing rates of these harmful medications. This differed from prior studies that showed peer comparisons can help influence physician prescribing behavior when it comes to other medications and suggested that peer comparisons alone, without higher-powered incentives to modify physicians’ prescribing behavior, are unlikely to influence opioid-prescribing behavior.
Other interventions that target individual physicians or hospitals may be effective in reducing opioid overprescribing. They include public reporting of opioid prescribing rates, pay-for-performance incentives that take opioid prescribing into account, mandatory prescriber education with repeat requirements for continual high-frequency opioid prescribers, and a specific standardized curriculum on opioid prescribing provided to medical students and resident physicians. All of these would require rigorous design and evaluation.
The opioid crisis has myriad economic and societal impacts, including declining labor-force participation of working-age men and women, increasing costs in the criminal justice system, and growing health care spending on substance-abuse treatment. But the most profound societal impact stems from the staggering loss of life itself and its inestimable toll on victims’ families and loved ones.
Ultimately, battling this epidemic requires flexible, carefully designed, and rapidly evaluated policies — and a focus on provider-prescribing behavior, while important, is only one lever. Without productive collaborations across the public and private sectors, we may lose precious time and lives in our efforts to slow the opioid epidemic.
In industries being disrupted by new entrants with distinct business models, incumbents often have an important advantage: entrenched regulatory and legal barriers. These have forced AirBnB, Tesla, and Uber to make costly concessions to their operating practices or to exit certain markets altogether. How can new firms overcome the regulations that protect incumbents? Lobbying for policy reform isn’t much of an answer, because incumbents generally have the benefit of long-term relationships with government agencies built up over many years.
Our research finds that some insurgent firms have prevailed on the regulatory front by using a strategy straight out of the playbook of environmental activists – mobilizing stakeholders to become political advocates. Organized demonstrations of support by stakeholder groups can send a powerful signal to policymakers. We find that firms mobilize their customers – one important stakeholder group – in three primary ways:
Online petitions
Uber has used petitions to demonstrate consumer—and voter—support in at least 10 cities, mostly in North America and Europe, where it has met resistance from local taxi companies. In Toronto, to cite just one example, Uber amassed more than 90,000 signatures in support of ride-sharing. The petition was seen as instrumental in getting the city council to adopt new regulations which permitted Uber to operate legally. And after regulators in London announced they would rescind Uber’s license to operate, a petition that quickly gained more than 850,000 signatures supporting Uber led the mayor to backtrack on his opposition to the firm.
Similarly, in Ontario, Canada, where for 90 years beer was sold primarily by a government-licensed monopoly retail chain owned by a consortium of major global brewers, the grocery and convenience stores had long lobbied the government for alcohol retail deregulation. What helped persuade the government to concede – despite fierce resistance from the global brewers and the chain’s labor union – was a massive online petition and consumer campaign organized by the retail store sector. The “Free Our Beer” petition gained more than 400,000 signatures in 2014, equivalent to nearly 4% of the province’s adult population. In early 2015 the government announced its intention to auction 450 beer licenses to grocery stores, citing Ontarian’s demands as the motivating factor.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs have also effectively deployed online petitions. In Minnesota, a baker named Shelley Erickson mobilized customer support through two petitions on Change.org to challenge “cottage laws” that prohibited the sale of food made by independent bakers in their homes. State regulations – favored by grocery stores and restaurants – required baked goods to be made in separate, licensed commercial kitchens subject to inspection, a costly barrier for small entrepreneurs. Shelley Erickson’s petitions, which gained more than 2,300 signatures in 2015, encouraged state legislators to introduce and enact new legislation that lifted various restrictions on home bakers. And food truck owners in Philadelphia successfully defeated a council proposal to restrict their business around Drexel University through a petition that gained widespread local support and media visibility. The proposal, which would have benefited on-campus restaurants, stalled in council after the scale of consumer resistance became apparent.
But petitions can be risky and firms need to be confident in their level of customer support. Uber learned this lesson the hard way in its bid to enter Calgary in October 2015 when its petition reached 14,000 signatures – only 1.2% of Calgary’s population, and one of the lowest shares and amounts for an Uber campaign. This shouldn’t have been a surprise: Public polling had found exceptionally high levels of resident support for the existing taxi industry. As expected, Calgary’s city council voted overwhelmingly against Uber in February 2016, forcing the firm to leave the city temporarily. (Uber did ultimately overcome council’s skepticism in late 2016, but only after it conceded to costly terms, and its entry was permitted only for a trial period of 12 months.)
Partner organizations
Another way for new entrants to turn customers into advocates is by seeking support from existing consumer organizations whose goals align with those of the firm. We’re seeing this phenomenon in the medical cannabis industry, where new firms are fighting state-by-state battles to gain regulatory approval for broad cannabis usage in the treatment of various diseases – against opposition from pharmaceutical companies whose sales of traditional pain-killers and opioid medications are threatened. In Illinois, where medical cannabis usage was highly restricted, small producers and dispensaries rallied support through the Cannabis Patient Advocacy Coalition (CPAC), which organized patient rallies in Chicago, letter writing campaigns to legislators, and a Change.org petition in support of expansion of medical cannabis programs. The petition gathered over 64,000 signatures. Within six months of the launch of CPAC’s campaign, the state legislature had approved a significant expansion to the medical cannabis program that made it less restrictive and allowed for many more conditions to be covered.
In other contexts, new entrants have developed partnerships with reputable charities with shared interests, leveraging their public legitimacy in advocacy efforts. In the U.S., Uber has partnered with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to undertake studies on the impact of ride-sharing on the incidence of impaired driving. The positive impact of ride-sharing has been cited in Uber’s lobbying efforts in many markets, and in some cities official representatives of MADD have publicly supported ride-sharing companies during municipal hearings, helping to convince local governments to reform transportation regulations.
Consumer clubs
A powerful way for firms to build a foundation of enduring consumer support – particularly for firms with large customer bases – is to sponsor firm-specific clubs that connect a brand’s consumers with each other, and to encourage clubs to engage in advocacy activities. Airbnb has funded “home-sharing clubs” for Airbnb hosts in 100 cities around the world, employing local “mobilizers” to organize them. The benefits include collaborating on such needs as group laundry contracts. Clubs also provide an opportunity for AirBnb to educate hosts about regulatory and political challenges, and to facilitate meetings with politicians, letter-writing campaigns, media interviews, and public rallies.
There is some evidence that AirBnb’s investment in its clubs is paying off. In late 2015, a San Francisco ballot initative proposed new restrictions on short-term rentals. To counter the proposition, Airbnb spent $8 million mobilizing its home-sharing clubs, which orchestrated a campaign that engaged over 2,000 local businesses and knocked on 285,000 residents’ doors in the weeks leading up to the vote. Airbnb had 138,000 users and hosts in San Francisco, a sizeable block when compared to the city’s 447,000 registered voters. The proposition was defeated, with much credit going to Airbnb’s host club campaign.
Tesla has supported the creation of local clubs through the Tesla Owner’s Club Program, which builds on a long tradition of enthusiast clubs in the automobile sector. In return for providing access to Tesla stores for club events and discounted merchandise, Tesla requires owner clubs to support local legislative efforts and to assist with survey groups and new software tests. In 2014 the Tesla Owners Club in Washington state played a role in the passage of legislation that ultimately permitted Tesla to expand its direct consumer sales model in the state.
While the opportunity to mobilize consumers and gain political traction naturally varies among industries and firms, these examples illustrate that it can be an effective way for new entrants to overcome barriers that protect entrenched interests. In fact, surveys have found that politicians are much more likely to respond to stakeholder or grassroots actions than to corporate lobbying and PAC financial contributions. Executives often tend to focus on consumers as a source of financial sales value, but consumers can also have significant political value when collectively organized – which may be just as critical for firms when entering new markets.
Modern sales teams need competent professionals with a variety of talents, skills and abilities. But in a hyper changing landscape, which are the most crucial sales skills and traits that reps must possess (or develop) in order to exceed targets and deliver consistent sales success? We’ve done our research and compiled the top 30 sales skills you need to master if you want to achieve complete sales enlightenment.
While technology delivers a positive impact, talent remains the primary and most valuable asset of any sales organization. From sales reps to sales coaches, talent ultimately keeps pipelines humming and revenues coming in.
Many agree on a few indispensable skills but otherwise recommend disparate skill sets and desirable qualities.
While we have some generalized notion of “selling,” contemporary sales organizations have grown in complexity and have evolved into a roster of functions — such as business development, closing, account management, and customer success — that require different specialized skill sets for their respective teams.
To set the tone for the forthcoming ultimate list of sales skills, check out this pro tip from Jeffrey Gitomer:
The Complete List of Sales Skills & Traits (Over 30+ Examples)
To make things more organized, we’ve classified the most in-demand qualities of sales professionals into the following categories:
Sales Skills – these are learned and applied abilities.
Soft Skills – these are informal abilities that are learned over a person’s lifetime and usually relate to the person’s aptitude in performing common tasks and connecting with other people.
Hard Skills – these are often formal and technical abilities learned from academic institutions, workplaces, seminars, mentorships, and training courses.
Role-critical Skills – these are hard skills that are specialized for a specific function or role.
Sales Traits – these broadly refer to a person’s mindset, attitude, and personal/behavioral tendencies.
While the boundaries between skills and traits sometimes become hazy, we try to avoid these cases to maintain clarity. Here are the top skills we believe tomorrow’s sales professionals need to excel in their fields and outperform competition.
Soft Skills For Sales Professionals
Relationship-building
The ability to positively engage other people, build long-term relationships, and form mutually beneficial networks will find frequent use in any salesperson’s workflow. From meeting clients and gathering referrals to soliciting advice and achieving team objectives, relationship-building skills enable a salesperson to accomplish tasks easier and make better-informed decisions. Relationship-building involves trust, rapport, and a genuine desire to help other people. Relationship-building leads to relationship selling, so don’t think it’s just a bunch of fluff. This creates opportunities if you play your cards right!
Listening
That’s right. Shut up and listen! Listening is the best method to understand where clients are coming from, what their pain points are, and how you can effectively provide solutions for their challenges. Without listening skills, a sales professional risks compromising other stages in the sales process such as lead qualification and customer-solution matching.
Time Management
While selling involves money, something a lot more precious gets exchanged and utilized along the way — time. Your client’s time is important. So is yours. A salesperson’s ability to optimize time improves productivity and cost efficiency, creating the environment needed for high performance. This soft skill coupled with software automation, analytics and other technologies delivers significant ROI for any business.
Pro Tip: Become a Google Chrome powerhouse by learning how to use these Chrome Extensions to maximize sales productivity and efficiency!
Communication/Storytelling
Selling not only requires showing the features of your product but also convincing customers that these features will solve their problems or will benefit them in some significant way. In most cases, you need to articulate your message by telling a story that deeply resonates with your target audience. A lack of baseline communication skills is a glaring red flag for anyone planning to enter the world of sales.
Research/Information Gathering
Accurate information about clients, market trends, rival solutions and other business intelligence enables a salesperson to make better decisions, engage the right customers better, and close high value deals while shortening the sales cycle. Your CRM, competitive analysis tools, rival websites, and social media are great places where you can start your research.
Critical Thinking/Problem Solving
Having an ocean of data is hardly enough to get you anywhere, however. You still need critical thinking skills to process information, analyze disparate data, and sift through the heap for relevant bits of information that will help you formulate solutions for problems your prospects or your team are experiencing.
Affinity with Technology
Tomorrow’s sales professionals must at least be comfortable around digital devices. This makes it easier to adapt to emerging technological advances in AI, big data, and other fields that will transform the way organizations run businesses and the way brands engage audiences.
Collaboration
Sales teams rarely operate as a one-person army. Hence, the ability to align one’s personal goals, workflows, and schedule with those of others is an important skill for sales professionals. Sales teams follow a game plan that assigns different roles and require different outcomes from members. Most of these roles and outcomes are dependent on each other for collective success. That means the lack of teamwork and flat leadership will likely lead to unwanted outcomes and missed objectives.
Hard Skills For Sales Professionals
Product Knowledge
Inadequate product knowledge is unacceptable in the world of selling. Any sales professional who go to the field without having an intimate knowledge of the features, benefits, and weaknesses of their product will have a hard time creating effective pitches and connecting customer needs to the best solutions available. Deep and extensive product knowledge is a prerequisite to high sales performance. In addition, demonstrating that you are a subject matter expert generates trust among your customers.
Strong Knowledge of Common Business Software & Sales Enablement Solutions
Technology — through products such as CRMs, document management software, and workplace productivity apps — makes selling easier and more profitable. Sales professionals should learn how to use the software, platforms and other tools their organizations use to run operations and engage customers.
Business Communication
Your talent at engaging prospects during the sales conversation or articulating a concept can still be honed for the business landscape. It is imperative that sales professionals learn the best practices in both oral (e.g., phone calls, presentations, pitches, etc.) and written (e.g., proposals, memos, referral requests, etc) communications. This will help you become more effective at connecting with clients and making a positive impact in how they perceive your brand.
Client Engagement
Getting along with people and having good communication skills are baseline traits. For high-performing sales professionals, there is a science and a method for establishing and maintaining excellent client engagement. For example, there are sales call techniques that can help you build rapport with a prospect, research methods that will help you glean valuable information about a customer, and communication techniques that will allow you to nurture long term relationships with clients.
Active Listening
There are different levels of listening but you need to operate at full throttle when it comes to your customers. Active listening in sales requires focus as well as occasional/follow-up queries. These allow you not only to glean complete and clear information from your clients but also to build rapport and demonstrate that you genuinely care about their concerns.
Conflict Management and Resolution
In sales, expect to encounter regular episodes of complaints, conflicts and rejections. These incidents may involve just about anyone, including clients, peers, management and other parties. Because these can occur at any time, sales professionals need to learn and practice how to proactively handle objections and manage conflicts. High-performing salespeople have been known to use these incidents as a platform for converting new leads or an avenue for demonstrating a workplace solution to management.
Sales Presentations & Sales Demos
In the beginning, there was PowerPoint. Now you have Prezi, Keynote, and other presentation software. Whatever tool you use, being good at presenting and public speaking is a great skill to have in the world of selling. Excellent sales demos & presentations convey subject mastery and build trust around your brand. For B2B sellers, conducting a lively and compelling demo is also a requisite skill.
Social Media & Social Selling
Because social has become a major part of our digital lives, many companies now employ social media managers to oversee their brand’s online presence. You need not be as technically adept as these specialists but you need to know your way around social media. For B2B sellers, knowing the best practices and tricks for engaging prospects on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other networks will help bolster your lead generation and conversion efforts.
Role-Critical Skills For Sales Professionals
Prospecting
Prospecting helps you fill your customer pipeline with entities that may be interested in your product. The selling process practically starts at this stage. This skill is a staple across all roles but is critically important for sales reps.
Lead Qualification
This skill allows sellers to gather and analyze information about a prospect that will show them which available solutions or product features directly addresses a prospect’s pain points. It may also indicate whether there’s a mismatch between your product and the prospect, allowing sellers to save time by referring the prospect to other solutions providers and focusing on the next lead.
Contract Negotiation
Selling is easily the art of negotiation. Because of its relevance to any field, negotiation skills may as well be classified in any of the categories we listed. However, contract negotiation is specially important for closers, account executives and managers. Contract negotiation involves establishing a climate where your company and your prospect can set mutual expectations and benefits.
Policy Knowledge
Sales directors, managers and other leaders are required to be extensively aware of their organization’s governance and policy issues. Policies are tied with a company’s vision and its strategic goals, serving as standards within which sales teams operate.
Referral Marketing
Collecting qualified referrals is one excellent way of keeping your pipeline humming with new leads. This skill is specially important for sales reps.
Closing Skills
This skill may well represent the essence of selling, encapsulating the moment when a prospect finally realizes, accepts and buys (literally) the rationale behind your product. Closing sales deals should be a staple across the sales organization but the task of closing is often assigned to more senior sales reps and account executives in larger companies.
Client Nurturing AKA Customer Success
Many businesses realize that making a sale doesn’t necessarily terminate the buyer journey. Depending on your product or service, you can still offer additional value and generate more business with existing customers. The trick is to provide VIP treatment and excellent customer service to your paying customers. While separate customer success departments handle much of the heavy lifting, some smart sales organizations assign post-sale relationship management tasks to account managers or customer success leaders.
Top Traits for Sales Professionals
Self-Motivated/Ambitious
Call it grit or toughness, self-motivated and ambitious sellers can work under pressure, take rejections gracefully, then bounce back and still beat expectations compared to less motivated peers.
Trainable, Coachable, Open to New Ideas
Sales is evolving and sellers who refuse to relinquish outmoded practices will fall by the wayside. Salespeople must embrace change and be willing to learn new ways of doing things in order to succeed in the business landscapes of tomorrow.
Adaptable
Adaptability is a survival mechanism not only in nature but also in the world of sales. Tools have changed and so have customer demographics. There are new engagement channels to explore. Smart sales professionals know they need to sail the currents of change to get to their destinations.
Sociable
Gone are the days when lone wolves ruled. The workplaces and the sales deals of tomorrow will be driven by teamwork and collaboration. Smart sellers need to be sociable at all levels.
Responsible
Top sellers own their mistakes and hold themselves responsible for their performance. They never make excuses nor point fingers when things don’t happen as expected.
Goal-Oriented
Excellent sales professionals are motivated by the notion that:
There’s an ambitious goal to be reached.
It is an attainable goal.
Achieving it feels incredible.
There’s a reward at the finish line.
Given this mindset, these sellers will exert all effort to meet or surpass targets.
Top notch sales leadership is the driving force behind building highly motivated, goal oriented sales reps.
Empathic
Successful sellers are almost always buyer-centric. They might be proud of their products but they’re more concerned about helping customers solve problems. These sellers have well developed empathy that enables them to understand where clients are coming from and determine their pain points.
Passionate About Selling
Even more potent than grit or ambition, a passion for selling may well be the top trait for sales professionals. Doing what you love will simply compel you to excel in your field and achieve success consistently.
Master These Sales Skills & Get Ahead of The Competition
Sales is a highly competitive field where rival brands try to outshine each other in the eyes of their consumers. In sales organizations, professionals also compete as teams or as individuals. With gamification becoming more fun and performance metrics becoming more accurate, sellers can better assess their strengths and deficiencies and make remedial measures to bolster their credentials.
You can identify which skills you need to learn or train to get to the next level. The right skills will advance your career and get you to the next success milestone.
There are many ways to learn new skills. You can check your organization’s knowledge base or inquire whether any of the upcoming training programs are good for you. There might even be a mentor willing to coach you into shape. You can also take an online course or enroll in a brick-and-mortar college.
Any which way you choose, the bottom line is this: never stop learning!
Brands and small businesses invest time and money into content creation because they know that it has myriad benefits—including increased brand awareness, boosted website traffic, and higher conversion rates.
But of course, not every piece of content has the intended effect.
In fact, some content can actually be counterproductive—turning off your readers and failing to move the sales needle in any meaningful way at all.
In this post, we’re going to list a few content archetypes that are guaranteed to fall flat—content FAILs to avoid at all cost.
Content That’s Guaranteed to FAIL
Boring Content
We’re not saying you have to turn every company blog post into the great American novel, but there should be some semblance of a story—a theme, hook, or angle to make readers interested. Here it’s important to remind you that you’re always creating content for human readers, not for search algorithms exclusively; if you wouldn’t find the content to be interesting and readable, no one else will, either.
Brand-centric Content
It’s not about you! It’s about your readers. Make sure your content focuses on what’s in it for them—benefits, value, actionable takeaways that they can draw from your content.
Content That’s Written to Nobody in Particular
When you write content, you should always have an audience in mind—a specific demographic you’re trying to target, based on internal data or buyer personas. The content should be tailored to address your audience’s needs, problems, and values; generic content, written with no specific audience in mind, will always fail to offer clear and specific benefits, and should be avoided.
Content That’s Written for Robots
Are SEO tricks and gimmicks making your content unreadable to actual human beings? If so, then you might as well not bother. People matter, and Google will see right through your tricks.
Salesy Content
Your content can obviously be written to build trust, to increase brand awareness, and ultimately to sell, but it shouldn’t just be straight-up advertising. On the contrary, content that is aggressively salesy and interruptive will peter out pretty fast, as readers just aren’t going to want to engage with it, share it, or link back to it.
Your Content is Hard to Read
Paragraph breaks, short sentences, bullet points, section subheadings—all of these things are important for making your content easy to skim and to digest. Poor formatting will leave your content basically useless and unread.
I was recently conducting research for a Webinar I conducted on social selling. It was the typical “Social Selling 101” session that it seems everyone in this space conducts, but I wanted to beef it up with statistics from this world.
I found a lot of statistics. I mean… a lot.
While I figure that having so many stats out there about social selling is a good thing—it means people are talking about it—it can be overwhelming to boil it all down to just a few numbers that really prove social selling is much more than just being the new flavor in sales.
With that in mind, I’ve chosen three sets of statistics that speak to the success of social selling, and why I believe it is well-worth adding to an already well-rounded sales methodology. I’ll also give you the sources of the stats, so you can confirm them for yourself.
Referrals: The Potential King Makers
Many of us have asked family and friends for referrals; I recently asked a neighbor who re-roofed his house so I could contact the company, as he was very satisfied with the results. It’s the same kind of process with social selling, except you can take things one step further by asking to be introduced to people in your 1st-degree connections’ networks. (This is assuming that you already have great relationships with the people already in your network.)
Here are the stats:
84% of B2B buyers are now using referrals to start their company’s procurement process
More than 90% of all B2B buying decisions are now being influenced by peer recommendations
While most everyone we know is using social to some degree, some questions still linger about the B2B buyer being there and if they’re ready to buy. These figures should answer those queries:
46% of B2B-purchasing decision makers are now aged 18-34, which is also the largest social media-using demographic
84% of B2B executives use social media to research purchase decisions, while 72% of B2B buyers use social media to research specific solutions
75% of B2B buyers are “significantly influenced” by social media
Here are the two stats I love the most and speak to the need for salespeople to be on social to engage with prospects:
Buyers’ social media connections with potential solutions providers have risen by 57%
92% of B2B buyers use social media to engage with sales industry thought leaders (this is especially big)
(Source: Datanyze. The sources used by Datanyze are in the article I linked to.)
Your Competitors Are Already Using Social
If the first two sets of stats don’t convince you, the old “my competitors are already doing it” way of thinking should. In fact, 90% of top salespeople are using social selling tools, while just 71% of “overall” salespeople use them. This means if you desire to be on “top,” you’ll want to tap into the power of social selling.
Here are some other statistics for your number crunching pleasure:
68.9% of salespeople use social selling tools for lead development
64.5% use these tools use them for account research
60.3% use social selling tools for call preparation
You can also use these tools for “reduced account/contact research time;” that’s what 39% of your fellow salespeople use them for.
And just in case you’re looking for the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) factor for individual salespeople:
78% of reps who use social selling practices outsell their peers
63.4% of those reps who use social selling reported an increase in corporate revenue; that’s compared to 41.2% of people who didn’t use it
23% of social sellers were more likely to exceed quota, while just 10% of non-social sellers expected to go above quota
To me, it all boils down to one idea: social selling is starting to gain maturity in both sales-related circles and within companies (especially larger enterprises).
When I’m training the employees of our client companies, I always tell them as they’re starting out, doing all of these social selling-related activities our platform reinforces them to do seems like “separate” work. That feeling goes away, though; and soon enough, all of those “social selling” activities will become just plain ol’ selling activities in their minds.
What’s more, this mind shift happens quicker than you might think, especially when you’re seeing success from what you’re doing.
Big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are all the rage these days. They are sure to be a popular topic of hallway conversations at this October's Professional Pricing Society Fall Conference in San Diego (Oct. 24 to 27, 2017). The theme for the conference is 'Data, Change Management, and the Profit Landscape' and there are a number of interesting sessions on these themes on the agenda.
Ibbaka is conducting its own research and development on applications of AI to pricing topics. As we believe that good pricing is built on a value-based market segmentation, we are beginning with finding ways to use AI to work more effectively and efficiently and to move towards dynamic market segmentation. More on this later.
The term 'AI' is used in many different ways these days, so it may help to have a simple taxonomy of what we mean when we use the term. Basically, AI is a family of loosely related techniques to build computers (hardware and software) that can reason about information, identify new patterns that were not programmed in, and recommend actions. The larger vision for AI (strong AI), around creating machines that reason and behave in ways that imitate and then surpass humans is perhaps too large a vision for the day-to-day work of understanding how to create value, set prices and to get those prices in a competitive marketplace. People engaged in pricing work are more concerned with weak AI, which has more modest ambitions.
There are a number of different techniques being used in AI: symbolic AI (concerned with the manipulation of symbols), evolutionary computing (where the codebase evolves), probabilistic (including the use of Bayesian models of causality), and machine learning (neural networks applying deep learning). The latter, deep learning, is the flavor of the week (or more accurately the flavor of the decade) and many of the applications getting press apply some version of deep learning. Popular open source platforms like TensorFlow are implementations of deep learning and are a very good place to start one's own learning of these techniques.
In the pricing world, we deal with complex, fast-evolving problems. AI is going to be an important part of how we address future challenges.
Of course, the big tech companies are all very active in this space, through their own offerings, investments, and partnerships. A good snapshot of where things are as of October 2017 can be found in this CB Insights article on Big Tech in AI.
Ibbaka is focussed on the pricing of Industrial Internet of Things solutions and B2B SaaS. This colors our thinking.
The first question - What applications?
The first question one may have about the application of AI to pricing is "Where shall we apply these new techniques first?" "What are the low hanging fruit?" The steps you need to take to find the places you should be exploring AI are straightforward.
Map your current pricing methodology.
Look for places where you use or could use data.
See where do you need to discover patterns.
Ask "What do you want to predict?"
Ibbaka is often dealing with early-stage innovation, where there is not a huge amount of transactional data to leverage. Our current process is as follows (it is not quite as linear as this suggest, but you get the idea):
Hypothesize value drivers (emotional, economic, social, clinical)
Conduct surveys and interviews to test these value drivers, discover new ones, discard those that do not resonate
Define a set of value drivers and buying processes
Build a test set of potential customers (this is not the current customers, one wants to consider a much larger potential set)
Generate multiple segmentation axes, built alternative segmentation frames, test these against the test set of potential customers
Estimate LTV and CAC for each segment (these are two of the key SaaS metrics, LTV is the Lifetime Value of a Customer and CAC are the Customer Acquisition Costs)
Generate pricing metrics that map to one or more of the value metrics (your pricing metric is how you price your offer; your value metric is the unit of consumption by which the user gets value)
Use the pricing metrics and value metrics to build the pricing architecture
Define the role of each part of your pricing architecture
Design the data models that will track usage, value and pricing
Set the initial prices
Track market response and ask (i) Is each part of the pricing architecture playing its intended role, (ii) how is the market responding (track the funnel), (iii) what actions are competitors taking
Develop predictive analytics based on the interactions of the usage, value and pricing models
All of this is done in the context of the company's strategy and financing options. Pricing models need to support general go-to-market strategies and be able to deliver the target SaaS metrics.
At Ibbaka, our initial explorations of AI are focussed on market segmentation. Market segmentation is the foundation of all pricing strategy, it is data dependent, and the underlying patterns can be hard for humans to discern.
Other companies, focussed more on transactional data, will concentrate on price optimization or demand forecasting.
Eventually, these come together as the connections between value, use and price become clear. This will be a huge opportunity for AI and will be the foundation of a predictive science.
The second question - What data?
All AI solutions, and especially modern deep learning solutions, depend on data. Preferably lots of data. What data is needed to explore AI? The honest answer is 'nobody knows yet.' A wide range of different internal and external data could be relevant and there is no general rule that will answer this question for you.
Cast a wide net.
Internally, gather as much data as possible about use, from the pipeline and from your customer support applications. All of this data may be relevant and help you find critical patterns or make predictions.
Externally, gather as much data as you can about how your potential customers (all your potential customers, not just your current customers or even prospects), how they create value for their customers, and the input factors that determine their decisions.
Yes, this is a lot of data, and it will be hard to gather and organize. But at least it will be cheap to store in today's world.
The more data you gather the more likely you are to find the patterns that will give you insights.
The third question - What data rights are needed?
Any time we start talking about data, we need to think about data rights. This is a murky subject today. Most companies have preferred to ignore it or to bury it in obscure language deep in subscription or license agreements. This will not fly in the future. Start building a data rights model that makes it clear what rights you have to collect and use data and how you will inform users about the data you are using.
Companies that fail to do this are inviting legal problems and will find that they are limiting their opportunities to develop new data-based monetization strategies. Pricing needs a seat on your data and privacy council. In many cases, pricing people will lead need to lead the discussion as we have the most insight into the value that the data can create.
Data rights even apply to data you collect on usage of your own applications. This data is critical to your future pricing technologies. Smart companies will lead and not be pushed by regulators or customers.
The fourth question - What skills will be needed?
The new world of AI, deep learning, big data and predictive analytics is going to require new skill sets for pricing experts. All of us will need to develop a working understanding of these concepts. It is a lot to learn.
We will also need to become experts on data rights. This is too important a topic to leave to lawyers and data privacy officers. One can begin by familiarizing oneself with frameworks like Creative Commons. Something like this will emerge to cover data rights over the next decade.
Pessimists may think this will take the joy and creativity out of pricing work and reduce it to a subsector of data science. I doubt this. It will rather open new avenues for pricing innovation. Pricing experts will need to embrace innovation methodologies like design thinking (see "Don't Set Prices. Design Pricing.").
Ibbaka's affiliate TeamFit did some research into the skills of the members of the Professional Pricing Society Group on LinkedIn (if you are not a member of this group we recommend joining). See the blog post "Skills in the LinkedIn Professional Pricing Society Group."
There is cause for concern. Based on a random sample of 400 members of this 15,000 person group, there is a real lack of the critical skills needed to develop AI-based solutions for pricing. Foundational skills needed here include data modeling, statistics, linear algebra, probability theory and so on. Languages used include R and Python. Common platforms are TensorFlow, Theano, Infer.net and so on. This area is evolving rapidly and now is the time to invest in learning.
An invitation from Ibbaka
Ibbaka is looking for a few companies who want to work with us on dynamic market segmentation. You will need to provide us with datasets that we can work from. We will provide you with proposed market segmentations and recommendations on how to price for each segment. What kind of data? We can begin with your current customers and prospects and see what new insights we can provide from this. There is a participation fee of US$19,700 which we will waive for the first three participants. If you are an early-stage company contact us. We want to support early-stage innovation and we will find an arrangement that is a win-win for both parties. Contact karen@ibbaka at (415) 799-8326 or steven@ibbaka.com.
For a long time, it was commonplace to hear people say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But that truism has given way to a new one in the B2B world: everything has changed. It has done so profoundly and quickly—and will only continue in that vein.
At the Marketing Nation Roadshow in Boston on October 3, Marketo’s CEO, Steve Lucas, shared a vision for how modern marketers can capitalize on this new reality.
In this blog, I’ll cover how marketers can use personalization at scale to foster deeper engagement with their customers.
Marketers Must Adapt to Survive
By now, it’s widely accepted that today’s buyers are in charge. They dictate their journeys and experiences and set the tone for interactions and engagement with brands. But are you aware of just how radically their expectations have shifted?
Consider these stats:
79% of buyers only consider brands that understand and care about them (Wunderman)
70% of buying experiences are based on how customers feel they’re being understood (McKinsey)
66% of customers expect their interactions with brands to be personalized (Marketo)
What does this mean to marketers? It means buyers want companies to respect (and align with) their values, and they do not make purchases based on logic alone. It means marketing to inboxes and selling to smartphones won’t cut it. It means a personalization strategy for your brand is as important as a personalization strategy for your content.
It’s Time For a New Personalization Strategy
As you develop that brand personalization strategy, it’s essential to consider the law of supply and demand because it governs us all. In the context of marketing, this means just because you can infinitely appeal to prospective buyers, doesn’t mean you should. In other words, using today’s technology to relentlessly reach out isn’t the best way to engage today’s buyers.
Because, while those infinitely powerful technologies empower us marketers in ways we could once only imagine, they can overwhelm and irritate prospective customers with too much information and unwanted offers. Simply put, while marketers have seemingly limitless demand drivers, prospects and customers have finite attention…and that attention span is declining. In response to marketers who fail to respect this attention scarcity, buyers push back, opt out, and relegate email to marketing purgatory (i.e., junk mail).
Embrace Precise Engagement
It’s tough resisting the temptation to keep pressing the accelerator on the “infinite demand drivers.” But it’s time to accept the fact that it’s a losing proposition to swamp buyers in a flood of content and information. It’s simply not strategic—or realistic—to hope the right message will find its way through at the right time as buyers traverse their non-linear, multi-channel journey. Knowing that you need to engage at every point in the buyer journey and customer experience, the question becomes how you do that at scale.
This is the perfect time to step back and make a thoughtful decision: Are you going to keep prioritizing volume or will value finally win the day? Hopefully, you chose the latter because value trumps volume in the Engagement Economy. The good news is that you can use today’s incredibly advanced technologies imbued with artificial intelligence to focus your marketing on value-laden tactics and actions. While it may seem counterintuitive, by narrowing in and engaging in a more limited—but relevant—fashion, you boost your value to buyers and earn their trust. That’s because—unlike so many other marketers—you are respecting the buyer’s time. The next piece of the puzzle is figuring out how to make that limited engagement as relevant and meaningful as possible.
Underpin Your Strategy with the Right Approach and Platform
Here’s a formula for getting this right: Listen, learn and engage.
Listen. Continually listen to your customers via every channel possible (email, social media, customer support, sales transcripts, etc.) to discern what it is they value most.
Learn. Analyze all the data you collect from prospects and customers to surface insights and understand their preferences, interests, expectations and more.
Engage. React in real time using Artificial Intelligence (AI) by engaging potential and existing customers in the right way, in the right moment.
While this sounds simple enough, it requires careful and sophisticated orchestration of many elements and moving parts. But you as a marketer need all this to be handled and executed as simply as possible.
Through a combination of automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) uniquely built to serve marketers, you can make sense of all your customer data in the moment to deliver relevant content and enable value-based experiences.
With these near superhero powers, you will be able to:
Predict the right marketing programs, content, and offers for the right people based on a deep and accurate understanding of their interests and wants.
Personalize with confidence, at scale, delivering the right interactions, experiences, and content at the right moment in the right channel for each person you’re engaging.
Perform at previously unattainable levels. Backed by machine-driven predictions and personalization, you can optimize campaigns and experiences at an unprecedented rate to drive 1:1 engagement in the moment. You’ll engage better, convert faster, and do it all economically.
The Future of AI is the Marketer + the Machine—And It’s Here
While all the elements described above are essential to engaging at scale, it’s worth highlighting the role of AI built for marketers. This is the machine intelligence that makes it possible to identify your audience, understand your existing content, and execute your campaigns in unprecedented ways.
It may sound like we’re painting a future vision, but this is available to you today through products like Marketo ContentAI. An artificial intelligence-powered solution that empowers marketers to achieve one-to-one engagement at scale without adding significantly more resources is important to move your business from volume to value.
To be an AI empowered marketer, look for a solution that can:
Automatically discover and catalog your content
Predict the best-performing content for each audience to guide content planning and improve campaign results
Automatically insert the content most likely to engage and convert each recipient
Serve up audience insights for every content asset, so you can better understand who your content attracts
Provide key metrics showcasing top content views, conversions, and more so you can measure the business impact of each content asset
AI can do all of this making it possible to deliver hyper-relevant content to each buyer while leaving you in control over what is delivered through each channel.
What potential do you see for personalization now that AI built for marketers exists? I’d love to hear your future visions in the comments.
On balance, all this technology is probably making our lives better. But there’s a downside, too: The stuff often malfunctions. Unlike the 30-year-old mixer on your kitchen counter that refuses to die, new technology—especially the smart devices with fancy, embedded electronics—breaks more quickly. That trend, confirmed by a recent study by the German government, applies not just to delicate products like smartphones and tablets but also to equipment we would expect to last for a long time—like televisions, washing machines, and even tractors.
Manufacturers would prefer to sell you their latest models rather than repair your old electronics, so they work to make fixing their products too expensive or too impractical. It’s a global problem because the marketplace for technology is global, and people everywhere are affected. With so many people throwing out so much broken stuff, it should come as no surprise that e-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream, with tens of millions of tons discarded annually around the world.
Tossing things out instead of fixing them has far-reaching consequences—for consumers, for the economy, and for the environment. Indeed, a future in which nothing ever gets repaired isn’t bright for anyone except the people trying to sell you new products. And many of us are not prepared to accept that future without a fight.
In 2013, a group of concerned consumers, recyclers, refurbishers, environmentalists, digital-rights advocates, and repair specialists in the United States teamed up to found Repair.org, of which one of us (Gordon-Byrne) is executive director and the other (Wiens) is chairman of the board. We’re working to make sure that when something breaks, U.S. consumers can easily find the information and parts they need to repair it, or else have it repaired by whomever they choose.
Over the past few years, this battle has been heating up. In 2017, twelve states introduced “right to repair” legislation that would make it easier for consumers to fix broken digital equipment. With grassroots support, Repair.org is leading the charge to turn these bills into laws. Not surprisingly, we’ve encountered significant resistance, not from lawmakers but from lobbyists hired by large tech companies to kill right-to-repair bills behind closed doors.
You might think that these legislative battles are inconsequential or don’t have too much to do with you personally. But if you believe that when you buy something you actually own it, you should pay attention as we explain why that may not be the case and give the history of how we got to today’s very odd situation.
Photo: The Voorhes
People have been fixing electronic devices for as long as they have existed. You know the drill: When something breaks, you troubleshoot the problem, take the thing apart, fix or replace the failed component or subassembly, and turn the machine back on. If it works, great. If not, try again. It’s as simple as that.
The trouble with repairing computerized products—a category that just keeps growing and includes pretty much anything you plug into the wall or run off a battery these days—is that the path to repair isn’t always so straightforward. Sometimes it’s easy to see that a connection has come loose or that a capacitor has gone bad, but for the most part identifying and correcting the underlying problem requires sophisticated diagnostic tools and detailed service documentation. If the manufacturer refuses to provide those things, repair is still possible, but it’s a lot more difficult. Every repair becomes an R&D project.
In past decades, companies that made electronic equipment typically provided the information needed for repair—and usually free of charge. Computers came with schematic diagrams showing how the various components on the circuit boards were connected. Even Apple, now one of the most repair-unfriendly gadget makers in the business, sent a free, exhaustive manual—complete with schematics—to owners of the Apple II. It was expected that many owners would repair and maybe even tinker with their equipment.
But as the years went on, this kind of information became scarcer. It’s ironic. We live in the age of information. And yet, at the very moment when information about how to repair electronics should be easiest for owners to get their hands on, it has dried up.
That scarcity is by design. Manufacturers don’t want you to fix that broken microwave or air conditioner; they want you to buy a new one. Some even send cease-and-desist letters to people who post repair information online. Back in 2012, Toshiba told laptop repair tech Tim Hicks that he needed to remove 300 PDFs of Toshiba’s official repair manuals from his website, where he was offering the information for free. To avoid being sued, Hicks complied, and now fewer people have the guidance they need to repair Toshiba laptops.
Toshiba isn’t the only guilty party. Go to Apple’s website and try to find a repair manual for a MacBook Pro. It’s not there. Go to Samsung’s website and look for ways to fix your flat-screen TV. You’ll come away empty-handed. Same for your Keurig. Or your Kindle. Or your GoPro. Or your Lexmark printer that’s always broken. You’ll probably find user manuals and perhaps a few other online resources created by people who figured out how to fix the broken product on their own. But manufacturers by and large remain silent on the topic of repair.
Instead, they put official service information and diagnostic tools behind passwords and paywalls, limiting the distribution of repair information to a select few “authorized” providers. Without access to repair instructions, customers are forced to use these authorized service centers, which can charge high prices because there are no alternatives—except perhaps buying a new device.
That’s why one of us (Wiens) created iFixit, a company that takes apart popular models of consumer electronics to reverse-engineer repair instructions and then posts the information for free online. The instructions come from iFixit, not the manufacturer, so iFixit can’t be sued for disseminating proprietary repair information.
E-Waste Outstrips Population
Source:
The Global E-Waste Monitor 2014, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability/United Nations University
Even if you happen to find repair instructions on iFixit’s website or elsewhere, you still have to locate replacement parts. In some cases, parts are so difficult to get from the manufacturer that people instead extract them from junked equipment, as if they were harvesting organs from the recently deceased. Things are even harder for small repair shops, which struggle to find reliable sources of high-quality replacement parts.
The lack of service parts is an especially big impediment when it comes to repairing smartphones, tablets, and gaming devices. Together, those products number in the billions, and yet many models have no independent sources for fragile items like glass. That’s crazy because glass, of course, breaks frequently. Fixing it is a big business for phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung, which are fighting vigorously to protect their monopolies on repair. As of September 2014, gadget insurance company SquareTrade estimated that Americans had spent US $10.7 billion on iPhone repairs since the phone’s 2007 introduction.
Apple may be the worst offender when it comes to refusing to sell service parts or provide repair information to anyone but its authorized service providers. The company doesn’t even provide such information for equipment that Apple won’t repair anymore (Apple has a long list of “vintage and obsolete” devices it no longer supports) or for repairs that its “Geniuses” aren’t skilled enough to do, like fixing a computer’s motherboard.
In 2015, the company went even further—remotely disabling iPhones whose screens had been repaired outside of Apple’s authorized network. One of those dead devices belonged to Antonio Olmos, a photographer for The Guardian. He broke his screen while covering the refugee crisis in the Balkans. There’s no Apple store in Macedonia, so Olmos had a local repair shop replace the broken screen with an aftermarket part. It worked great. Months later, though, after a routine software update, Olmos’s phone stopped working simply because of that screen.
At first, Apple defended “error 53” (as the problem was identified) as a security measure. The company blamed unauthorized repair shops: “When an iPhone is serviced by an unauthorised repair provider, faulty screens or other invalid components that affect the touch ID sensor could cause the check to fail if the pairing cannot be validated. With a subsequent update or restore, additional security checks result in an ‘error 53’ being displayed,” an Apple spokesperson told The Guardian.
But that explanation didn’t fly with owners. Independent repair shops didn’t break these phones; Apple did. And the aftermarket screens hadn’t been faulty; they just hadn’t been made by the original equipment manufacturer—because Apple refuses to sell OEM screens to independent repair shops.
Bowing to public pressure, Apple apologized and fixed the broken phones with a new update. But a precedent had been set. Previously, Apple had made it difficult for people to fix its products by restricting access to parts and service information. Now, to those owners who dared to repair their equipment without the company’s blessing, Apple could dole out punishment—with software.
Photos: iFixit
No Serviceable Parts: Or so manufacturers would have people believe when it comes to electronic devices such as smart watches and mobile phones. But repair is often possible, using replacement parts and instructions from other sources.
In 2011, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen quipped in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that “software is eating the world”—meaning that it’s now in pretty much everything: phones, microwave ovens, coffeemakers, sewing machines, even Barbies. And it’s threatening to gobble up repair with it.
All computerized equipment comes with embedded software—code that tells the machine what to do and how its components should function together. Without that code, our coffee doesn’t brew, our cars don’t shift gears, and our sewing machines can’t stitch.
When you buy such a machine, the hardware becomes yours. But if you ask manufacturers, they’ll say that the software inside still belongs to them. It’s copyrighted, and most manufacturers don’t want you to touch it, even if the thing is broken. And thanks to a controversial U.S. law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [PDF], manufacturers are allowed to put digital locks on the code to stop people from meddling with (or even looking at) it. The European Union’s Copyright Directive has similar provisions. Originally, these sorts of laws were designed to prevent pirates from copying movies and music. But, increasingly, manufacturers use them to maintain control of the products they sell to you.
Lexmark famously used the DMCA to sue Static Control Components, which was making chips that allowed other companies to refill Lexmark toner cartridges and sell them again. Recently, HP went so far as remotely disabling unlicensed cartridges installed in its printers. Even John Deere deploys digital locks to make sure that only its own technicians can fix anything software-related on its agricultural machines.
When asked why it was standing in the way of farmers who want to fix their own tractors, the company replied that farmers didn’t really own their tractors. According to John Deere [PDF], farmers have only “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle,” and farmers (or their mechanics) aren’t allowed to fiddle with the software to effect a repair.
Naturally, that position upset a lot of farmers, who assumed that when they plopped down $75,000 or more for a new tractor, they were buying the whole thing. They felt they should be able to fix their tractors on their own terms. And it turns out that the farmers were right.
Authorities in the U.S. Copyright Office—who presumably have a deeper knowledge of U.S. copyright law than John Deere does—have generally sided with consumers when it comes to repair. In 2015, copyright officials told John Deere that owners do have the right to repair their own tractors and other equipment. And, in December 2016, the copyright office concluded a yearlong study [PDF] on copyright law, repair, and embedded software that solidly confirms that repair is legal under copyright law. The same study argues that federal copyright law can’t be used as an excuse to prevent repair.
But that hasn’t stopped some manufacturers from continuing to try. For example, as part of John Deere’s 2016 End User Licensing Agreement, the buyer agrees to give up all control over the electronics within the machine—including sensors, actuators, and computing units, as well as data, documentation, and diagnostics. What’s more, the buyer is assumed to have agreed to the contract simply by switching on the machine [PDF]. There is no discussion. No negotiation. No signature requirement. Just turn the key and you waive your right to own critical parts of the machine you just bought.
So how can people in the United States preserve their right to repair electronics? The answer is now apparent: through right-to-repair legislation enacted at the state level.
Popular support on this issue has been clear since 2012, when 86 percent of the voters in Massachusetts endorsed a ballot initiative that would “[require] motor vehicle manufacturers to allow vehicle owners and independent repair facilities in Massachusetts to have access to the same vehicle diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturers’ Massachusetts dealers and authorized repair facilities.”
Carmakers howled in protest, but after the law passed, they decided not to fight independent repair. Indeed, in January 2014 they entered into a national memorandum of understanding [PDF], voluntarily extending the terms of the Massachusetts law to the entire country. The commercial vehicle industry followed suit in October 2015.
Now we need right-to-repair legislation for other kinds of equipment, too, particularly electronic equipment, which is the focus of “digital right to repair” initiatives in many states.
Similar to the Massachusetts legislation for automobiles, these digital-right-to-repair proposals would require manufacturers to provide access to service documentation, tools, firmware, and diagnostic programs. They also would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair facilities at reasonable prices.
The bills introduced this year in a dozen states have some variations. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming, for example, are limited to farm equipment. The one most likely to be adopted soon is in Massachusetts, which seeks to outlaw the monopoly on repair parts and information within the state. If it passes, electronics manufacturers will probably change their practices nationwide.
Consumers would then have more choices when something breaks. The next time your smartphone screen cracks, your microwave oven gets busted, or your TV dies, you may be able to get it fixed quickly, affordably, and fairly. And you, not the manufacturer, would decide where your equipment is repaired: at home, with the manufacturer, or at a local repair shop that you trust.
The right to repair electronics isn’t just about repair or even about technology—it’s about ownership. You bought the thing, and therefore you own it—and not just part of it but all of it. And that means you should be able to fix it or get it fixed by whomever you choose. The terms of ownership shouldn’t change just because the product has a chip in it.
This article appears in the November 2017 print issue as “The Fight to Fix It.”
About the Author
Kyle Wiens is cofounder and CEO of iFixit. Gay Gordon-Byrne is executive director of Repair.org.
A growing number of businesses of all sizes — from small startups to large enterprises — are tapping their workforce to extend their social media footprint. When this strategy is done correctly, the rewards and ROI are considerable. For example:
Content shared by employees generate 800 percent more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source: Social Media Today).
Leads generated through employee social marketing convert 700 percent more frequently than other leads (Source: IBM).
Brand messages posted or shared by employees are re-shared 24 times more frequently than brand messages posted or shared by businesses (Source: MSLGroup).
Extending your brand standards and voice with employee social reach strengthens your brand recognition.
Most employees who associate themselves with the company on their social media accounts ( such as listing their place of employment or posting photos of the company softball team) are doing so with a positive attitude. So you will find that there are employees who would love to be trained and asked to “share the company love”. Before you can reap the benefits of an extended social media footprint, you do need to set some clear boundaries for employees. The first step in setting the boundaries is creating employee social media policies.
The key types of employee social media policies to consider are:
General Employees – If your business does not already have a social media policy in place for all employees, you should create one. The NLRB has laid out strict rules on what can and cannot be said in a social media policy, so reading through these before creating (or updating) a general employee social media policy is critical.
Executives – While the PR or Marketing Department often handles social media for executives, it is important to have an executive social media program in place. This way executives understand how the PR department will be using their social accounts and won’t need to monitor every tweet that is sent out. If an executive wants to handle their own social media (which is preferable for an authentic voice), they should have basic training and guidelines from a corporate policy. Because they have higher influence and more notoriety, there should be a clear social media policy for company executives.
Social Media Managers – Whether your social media managers are working on social media governance or social media marketing, there should be a separate policy for handling corporate accounts. With strong governance training social media managers can better manage the brand standards, brand voice, and (most importantly) the risks associated with being a social business. This team also needs to be trained not only on policies, but governance procedures should a risk event occur.
Social Media Employee Ambassadors – Though it may seem obvious, social media ambassadors need their own social media policy that is separate from the general employee policy. By creating a program that does include formal training and highlights monitoring procedures, employees can use their own social accounts and promote the company with accuracy and reduced risk.
Social Customer Service and Sales – In order to help customers and leads, many corporate businesses create customer service and sales social media accounts to facilitate real-time interactions. Therefore your company should train customer service and sales representatives on how to use social media on these corporate-owned accounts, and actively practice challenging customer scenarios. If you are having your sales team use their personal social media accounts, there should be a separate policy that looks more like an Ambassador program, but focuses on sales activities and tracking conversions.
For each type of social employee, clear policies are the key to successful corporate social media usage. However, transforming a workforce into a virtual army of brand advocates and ambassadors is not without risks, and that is why training employees on social media policies and governance is essential. To that end, here are 8 best practices to keep in mind:
Comprehensively document all employee training processes for consistency.
Reference the location of all employee training materials in the social media governance plan (i.e. identify where workflows, protocols, procedures and other information tools are on the corporate network).
Establish training goals and metrics to measure effectiveness (e.g. “certify 50% of employees as brand ambassadors”).
Create a distinct training protocol for each social employee types (e.g. social governance team, social sales team, social customer service team, etc.).
Identify the optimal training methods and tools to cover policies, compliance and procedures (e.g. webinars, on-site training, certification programs, etc.).
Make necessary adjustments for different social employee types at various learning stages.
Create training that includes brand standards, brand voice, content library access or ideas, risk scenarios with escalation process for help, and general governance items.
Clearly inform employees if/how their personal accounts will be monitored as part of the social media governance plan.
With strong policies and training, your Social Media Governance Plan will be a very effective guide to help build your brand and manage the risks to your corporation.
Learn More
Employee social media training is just one important part of a business’ social media governance plan. To learn more about the twelve steps it takes to create a solid governance plan for your company, download our eBook “The Social Media Governance Plan”. Through reading this eBook, you’ll learn about the audit process for corporate, employee and partner accounts while discovering which monitoring procedures you should implement to stay on top of your governance.
This post was originally published on the Brandle Blog and has been syndicated with permission.
They’re not really sure where they should focus their attention. Should they focus on local business listings, reviews or leads? What about content, social media and call tracking – how much attention do they dedicate to those channels and tactics?
Local clients want the most bang for their buck, but most of the time, they don’t have a plan. They definitely don’t know which local marketing tactics will produce the results they want.
The worst part?
What works for one local business, may not work well for another.
There’s confusion about what works best for local marketing
Experts recommend a variety of different tactics.
“Focus on your local listings. No, no, no, you should be investing in Facebook Ads. If you’re focused on content marketing and SEO you’ll have lots of free traffic.”
The suggestions are typically very broad, incredibly vague and focused on the wrong things. Nine times out of 10, the advice from these “experts” misses the mark. This leads to a tangent of unfocused ideas that suck up a client’s time and budget, but fails to produce results.
Why?
Your clients are listening to the wrong people.
Listen to bad advice and your local marketing campaigns will fail
There’s a problem here.
What is bad advice? Where does bad advice come from?
A better question would be to ask where great advice comes from. The answer is simple and obvious. It comes from your client’s customers.
Does this mean their customers are experts?
No.
It means you’re able to listen to what your client’s customers say and you’re able to watch what they do. This is how you determine what matters most for your local marketing campaigns.
That doesn’t sound right, does it?
How are your client’s customers the best source for information? They’re typically the least knowledgeable group you can draw data from. Why would asking them for advice work?
Your client’s customers know what they want
They don’t have to be experts on your industry, business, product or service. They just need to know (a.) what they want and (b.) how they buy.
There’s a lot packed into that simple statement, what does that mean exactly?
It means you know your target audience / ideal customer. These are the customers who are both willing and able to buy. These are the people your clients want to turn into long term customers. Your job as an agency or consultant is to learn everything you can about their customers.
This means you know…
1. The demographics and psychographics of their target audience.
2. Where to find customers that match the demographics and psychographics above.
3. Know the books they read, shows they watch, brands they buy/follow, etc.
4. Their fears – in the form of frustrations, problems, and objections.
5. Their buying process – what they want, what they look for, where they go to find answers, etc.
6. The authority figures they trust, follow or listen to.
Do these details matter all that much from a client standpoint?
Any experienced agency professional or consultant will tell you they understand the importance of these details. Here’s the surprising part about these details.
Most small businesses (and many medium-sized businesses) don’t have this data.
Most of the time, clients believe they already know the answers to these questions. Often times your clients are able to rattle off comprehensive details about their customers.
But, are they right?
The bad news about their data? It falls apart under close scrutiny. Their customer personas are often based on imaginary or non-existent data, they don’t have answers for their customer fears, and their buying process isn’t in line with what customers actually do.
Most businesses don’t know what their customers want
That’s a pretty bold statement to make. The bad news is that it’s true.
How do we know?
Research from CB Insights, found that most startups / small businesses failed because of “the lack of a market need for their product.” This is the number one reason, cited by 42 percent of the startups in their study, for business failure.
That’s sobering and all, but I thought this was about local marketing. How does this apply to local businesses?
Local businesses are in the same boat. Most of your clients don’t understand their customers. They don’t know what their customers want, so they’re likely to get everything else – market need for their product, pricing and even marketing – wrong.
Your clients are the centers of their own universe.
The bad news? Your clients won’t listen to you
Sure, you know you’re telling the truth, but they don’t know that. You could be the helpful agency that’s looking out for them, or, the greedy agency trying to pad your pockets.
Truth is, they need to listen to you.
The information you get from listening to their customers, that’s the data they need to determine (with a reasonable degree of certainty) what matters most, in local marketing, for them.
The vast majority of local marketing priorities can be broken down by:
1. Process, e.g. the research, analysis, development and promotion phases of a campaign. Each phase of the campaign gives you a clear indication of the resources and platforms you’ll need to focus your attention on.
2. Purpose refers to the specific goals of a client’s campaign.
Process is, for the most part, fairly straightforward. It’s systems and procedures you use in your agency to get the job done.
What about purpose?
Purpose is a bit more complicated. With local marketing, you may be focused on more than one goal (e.g. customer feedback, driving traffic, generating leads, etc.). It’s important to focus your attention on the strategies and tactics that matter most.
Want to better understand your client’s customers?
Use industry specific and general reviews to identify the desires, goals, fears and frustrations of your customer.
Use reviews on both ends to engage with and learn from customers. Ask customers for reviews (both good and bad) then, engage with customers when they share their feedback.
Use social media to interact with potential customers one-on-one. Use social listening tools like HootSuite, Mention or Socedo to find and start conversations with prospects on social media platforms.
Looking to help customers find your clients?
Claim and complete the local listings on general and industry specific review sites. If you’re an attorney, that means you should be active on Avvo, your GMB listings should be complete, you’re active on Yelp, etc.
Purchase advertising on the local and social media platforms your customers are already using. If your customers are using Google Maps for generic searches, use Google AdWords to ensure your listing is always present.
Claim and complete your listings on search engines and social media profiles. Be consistent with your branding, content, image and tone.
Serve your customers anywhere. If they’re on LinkedIn, create strong profiles for the employees listed on your website and complete your company page. Begin engaging with prospects via LinkedIn groups, posts and more. If your customers are on forums, participate. If they consume content on YouTube or Vimeo, create content they’ll enjoy. Are they active in Facebook Groups? Join the discussion and share.
Looking to qualify potential leads for your client?
Create lead magnets that qualify/disqualify potential leads. A beginners guide could be used to segment traffic if you’re looking for inexperienced customers. Advanced info could be used to gauge a customer’s budget and level of sophistication.
Use positive 5-star reviews to defuse objections from potential customers, giving them the answers they need from a trustworthy 3rd party.
Working to educate, inform and attract incoming clients?
Use local-friendly platforms like Facebook Ads and Google AdWords to drive cold traffic to your content. Your content could be in the form of video (via YouTube), guest posts, reviews (e.g. 10,000 5-star reviews on Amazon), local events, news stories focused on offline activity, user generated content and more.
Combine your incentive, lead magnet or irresistible offer with a remarketing campaign to attract the target audience your clients want.
Use social media to distribute, syndicate and promote content. Drive cold traffic to content pieces, then provide visitors/prospects with a compelling lead magnet or offer to warm them up.
Use a remarketing + click-to-call campaign to convert warm leads to hot prospects, leading with another compelling offer (and a sense of urgency) to close the sale.
Engaging one-on-one with prospects?
Focus your attention on the social media platform customers are already using. If they’re spending a significant amount of time on Facebook, engage them there.
Use click-to-call with hot prospects to engage with them one-on-one. Focus your time and attention on warm/hot prospects who are (a.) willing and able to buy and (b.) familiar and interested in your client’s product or service.
Use positive reviews to close prospects who are on the fence and need a bit of encouragement.
Did you notice a theme?
There’s a lot of overlap with these strategies and tactics. Reviews, for example, can be used to attract customer attention, convert customers on the fence, defuse objections and more.
Here’s the thing with each of these strategies.
They require investment and they take time to mature. Often times it can take as long as six months to a year to fully realize a positive return on investment. That’s discouraging for many businesses, at first.
Many don’t feel it’s worth it to wait that long.
But the opposite is true. These strategies and tactics, once fully implemented require maintenance and ongoing support, but they come with significant benefits.
The upfront cost starts high, but decreases dramatically over time. The returns start low and slow, growing dramatically over time.
It’s something your clients look for…
Because your clients and their customers decide what’s most important.
Your clients won’t be able to get the results they’re looking for unless they:
1. Understand their goals (e.g. lead gen, education, closing sales, etc.)
2. Understand their customers (who they are, what they want, how they want it, etc.)
Understanding is the key to a successful local marketing campaign. The more your clients know about their customers and their business, the easier it is to prioritize local marketing.
A lack of understanding leads to marketing confusion
Are your clients confused about local marketing? If so, it’s a good indication that they’re missing an important piece of the puzzle.
Most clients are confused.
They’re not really sure where they should focus their attention. Your clients don’t have to deal with confusion. With the right strategy and tactics, they’ll know which parts of their local marketing campaign matters most.
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