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When your sales team goes from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2, sales training is easy.

Your new hire gets to work alongside you and absorb the sales process, see how you handle objections, and where you find leads. Lead by example with your sales training and you’ll have a strong Number Two willing to follow you into battle.

But once you start to scale your startup, you can kiss those carefree days goodbye.

Without fail, you’ll be taken away by other tasks, and the sales training for new team members will be pushed over someone else in the company.

As a sales manager, director, or founder, it’s your job to give your sales team the tools they need to be successful. Without effective sales training processes and techniques in place, you’re basically playing a big game of telephone with your values and strategies. What you taught to your first hires might get passed on correctly. Or it might not.

And the next round of hires? Before you know it, your vision has been completely thrown to the side and your sales department has devolved into a free-for-all.

The right sales training resources let you download all of your knowledge, experience, tricks, and sales strategies into an easily digestible format for new hires. It’s like Neo getting plugged into the Matrix and learning Kung-fu in a matter of seconds.

Sign up for our free sales training course right now!

Now, unfortunately, we can’t expect those kinds of instantaneous kick-ass results. But you can look at proven sales training best practices to help make sure that your team is set up for real success.

Your sales training can cover everything from onboarding new hires to developing their skills, setting up criteria by which they’ll change and adapt with the market. If you can do all this, you’ll be putting together the building blocks for an unstoppable sales machine.

This is no small task. So let’s take this one step at a time, starting with assessing your own team, finding the right methods for delivering your sales training, and then end with the 10 pieces of sales training your team needs to succeed.

Assess your team (or your own) strengths and weaknesses

Whether you’re a team of 1 or 100, your sales team will have its own unique strengths and weaknesses. When you’re starting to put together your sales training process you need to know these inside out.

But what questions should you be asking to really dig into the details?

When CEO consultant Melissa Raffoni spoke with 50 top CEOs of companies with teams of 10 to 1000, she found these eight questions coming up over and over when assessing the quality of a sales team:

1. What’s your value proposition? Sounds simple, but it’s surprising how hard it is for some companies to clearly explain why a customer should choose them over a competitor. And if your sales team can’t do this, they don’t have a chance.
2. Do you have a clear sales process in place? If you do (and you should), is it working as well as it should be? If you put more resources on it, will it grow or break from the pressure? If you need help putting together a sales process, check out our 8-step guide to building a sales process that gets results.
3. Do you think your cost of sales is where it should be? Are your sales sucking your profits dry? What makes you think your costs are acceptable? Are you comparing to an industry standard or mapping to projected sales?
4. What key measures are you using to track sales effectiveness? Are you measuring what needs to be measured? And are those numbers easily accessible on a dashboard to make sure you’re on the right track? You can’t really optimize if you don’t know which lever you want to pull.
5. What are you doing to increase your sales funnel and/or increase your close ratio? Do you have a clear plan for sales growth? Do you know where to go for new leads when the well runs dry? Or experiments you want to take to increase the amount of sales that are closing?
6. Is sales compensation driving the right behaviors? We know compensation is a powerful motivator for sales teams, but is your bonus structure driving the right actions? Is there enough value to make it worthwhile for your sales team to push to hit their sales goals?
7. How are you taking advantage of changes to the market? It’s a changing world out there with new competitors and solutions coming out every month. What are you doing to experiment? Do you have a culture of failing fast or are you slow to take advantage of new sales channels?
8. Do you have the right people? Your team should be your greatest strength. Are they? If not, why? Is it the people, the culture, or the training?

Going deep on these questions will give you a great overview of how your team functions, where you’re killing it, and where things are falling apart. From this information you can start to craft the basics of your sales training.

But asking these questions once and then moving on is a recipe for disaster. Sales training, like all parts of your sales efforts, will constantly evolve as your team and product changes and adapts to the real world. So it’s smart to revisit these questions at least annually to see where you might want to switch things up.

Choose the right format for your sales training

With the raw materials in place from your assessment, you’ll want to go in and look at the different ways you can implement your sales training.

There’s a huge range of options on the table, and no single one is right for every company or every team. Instead, you’ll want to experiment with what is getting the best engagement and results and what works with your team’s structure.

For example, if you’re an early-stage startup with a small sales team, putting together some short courses or conducting in-person workshops can be a great way to build your team’s skills while coming together as a group.

As you scale and grow, it might make sense to bring in an outside consultant or send key members of your sales team off to larger conferences to see what’s coming up and adapt your sales training appropriately.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common formats for delivering sales training:

Courses

No, we’re not talking about sending your sales team back to college. But the typical course format, either in-person or online, is a great way to transfer your sales knowledge to teammates. Also, the course format can allow your salespeople to do their training on a schedule that works for them while allowing you to keep track of their progress.   

In-person workshops

Short in-person workshops for your sales team break up the work day and can be a great way to build excitement around your sales training. If you can handle the whole team taking a few hours off it’s worth it to close up shop and bring everyone together.

Hiring outside consultants

When your team gets too big or you can’t deliver effective in-house training, it might be time to look at hiring an outside consultant to come in. It might seem awkward to bring in someone outside of your team, but a good consultant brings tons of value in everything from customized sales tools, a wealth of experience and valuable market information. It can also help you get buy-in with your team faster by bringing in an ‘expert’.  

Conferences

Not only are conferences fantastic for networking, but they allow your team to learn from proven leaders and get a pulse on what’s coming up in your market. And remember the Roman philosopher Seneca’s words, “while we teach, we learn.” Make sure to put the added pressure of bringing back value to the company not just to make sure your entire team gets the benefit of the chosen few attending a conference, but to help those who went solidify what they heard.

Internal team testing

Sometimes the best way to learn is to be thrown into the deep end. Conducting an audit of past sales cycles, both successful and unsuccessful, as a team is a great way to train your sales team about the real-world applications of what you’re teaching them.  

Databases and wikis

While not necessarily a sales training technique like the others, having self-serve resources available for your team teaches them to always be learning. Set up a wiki or a Trello board with processes and resources for commonly asked questions. And when your team asks you specific things, point them in this direction. It might come across as a bit cold, but you’re essentially training them to help themselves.

Right, so we’ve got all the main channels by which you can deliver sales training to your team, now it’s time to talk about what exactly your sales training will need to cover—so that you can evaluate all of the options on the table for your organization.

The 10 sales training essentials your team needs to succeed

Effective sales training can cover everything from how to create a sales plan to getting over your fears of rejection, staying motivated every day, and more.

The goal here is that each individual component of your sales training helps your team grow and progress, so that nobody feels like they’ve hit a ceiling in their career.

If you need some inspiration on what to include in your own sales training program, or want to make sure you choose the right facilitator, here are 10 essential pieces of sales training you should bring to your team:

1. How to become an effective listener

As the Greek philosopher Epictetus so succinctly explains, “You have two ears and one mouth—you should be using them in that proportion.”

In the rush to explain features and benefits of what you’re selling, it’s easy to talk over your prospect. This is a common mistake many inside sales rookies make. And the problem is, the second someone thinks you’re not listening, you’ve lost them.

Active listening is truly the silent skill of sales. Throughout the sales cycle, prospects will drop hints about what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling, or problems they need solved. Addressing these can make or break your sale. But you’ll miss them if you’re not listening.

Here are a few tips to incorporate into your sales training that’ll help your team team to listen more intently:

• Practice active listening: This means listening to what your prospect is saying, understanding it, and then responding with a brief summary of what they’re saying. Doing this not only shows that you’re listening and respect what they’re saying, but also will help you zone in on the clues you need to close the sale.

• Mentally echo what a prospect is saying: One of the barriers to good listening is getting excited and starting to formulate a response before the other person has stopped talking. And of course, as soon as you’re thinking about what they’ve said, you’re now tuning out the rest of what they’re saying. To combat this, try echoing what they’re saying in your head as they talk and wait a few seconds after they finish speaking before responding.

• Summarize what they’ve said: Once they’re finished speaking, take a moment to summarize and repeat back what they’ve said. For example, “It sounds like you’re happy with your current CRM but would like something a bit more user friendly for new teammates.” This will help clarify any misunderstandings on the spot and is a great technique for getting more insight from your prospect as they’ll usually go one step deeper now that they know you’re listening.

2. Using empathy and training yourself to think like a problem-solver

It’s probably a pretty safe bet that robots aren’t taking your sales job any time soon. That’s because working in sales requires constant problem solving, empathy, and the ability to think fast and act accordingly. To instil these qualities in your team, they need to adopt a problem-solving mentality—which can thankfully be done through proper sales training.

This one starts with empathy, seeing the world through the eyes of your prospect. Listening only goes so far and you should always assume the problem your prospect communicates isn’t necessarily the real issue they need solved. Look at the bigger picture.

Great salespeople go beyond simply solving their customers’ problems and actually find the problems their customers are unaware of.

As Daniel Pink, author of To Sell is Human, said in a recent interview: “If customers know precisely what the problem is, they can find a solution. Where you’re more valuable is when they don’t know what the problem is, or they’re wrong about the problem, and you can identify a problem they don’t realize they have. Or you can look down the road and say ‘Here is a problem you’re going to confront. You’d better get ready for it now’.”

To do this, you need to develop both a problem-solving and problem-finding mentality that, when combined with empathy, will let you find the problems your customers really need solved. Start by asking a few simple questions:

• What are the problems my customer is not yet aware of?
• How can I solve them?
• How can I sell the solution?

Take your time and be creative.

Solving these invisible problems your prospects have is a powerful tool in getting the sale. Reiterate the importance of keeping these questions top of mind throughout your sales training process.

3. Crafting scripts to deal with the most common objections

Knowledge is power. And the best salespeople always have a solid foundation to work from.

Use your sales training to get your team ready for identifying objections that come up time and time again. You can collaboratively craft scripts to help them deal with these issues. Now, the idea of using scripts is a contentious one in the sales community. No one wants to sound like a robot, and this isn’t what you should be advocating for here. Instead, these scripts should help you assay client fears and move onto the real issues more quickly.

Think of it like a basketball team. They spend hours upon hours practicing the basics—dribbling, shooting, defending, rebounding—so that when it comes to game day, they don’t have to think about it and can focus on adapting to the team they’re playing.

In the same way, scripts help your sales team get past common objections quickly and move onto creative ways to close the sale. Not only that, but you’ll have a template you can share across your team and help them level up their sales game quickly.

As part of your sales training, have your team:

• Come up with a list of common objections they hear from prospects (like ‘it’s too expensive’ or ‘we’re happy with our current service’)
• Brainstorm solutions or questions to respond to these objections
• Come up with short scripts based on these answers on how to move past the objections

4. Identifying the red flags of bad customers

Time wasted chasing after the wrong prospects can crush your sales efforts and even your company. Large accounts can sometimes take 6–18 months to close. But that’s only if they do close. And sometimes a bad client can be even worse than a lost sale, wasting your time, asking for refunds and generally speaking poorly about your company.

Your team needs to know what to look out for to make sure they’re going in the right direction—which is where good sales training comes into play. And as someone experienced in selling your product or service, you’ve seen first hand the signs that led to a sale, and the ones that made you get off the phone as quickly as possible.

Here’s a few key red flags you should be using sales training to teach your team what to look out for:

• Prospects who get nasty during the sales process: When a prospect hasn’t signed on the dotted line, there’s generally no reason for them to not be on their best behavior. So if you see signs of a bad attitude early on, you can be sure they’re not going to get any better once they’ve put money on the table and closed the deal.
• No respect for boundaries: Call me now. Need to speak right away. Emergency. If you’re getting emails with subjects like this at any time of the day (especially at night or on weekends) from a prospect you’re talking to, they’re probably not worth the trouble.

• The guarantee-er: Unless you specifically have some form of guarantee, you can’t commit to hitting goals for a prospect. And if they’re trying to get you to say you will, they either don’t trust you or don’t know the complexity of their own problem. Either way, you’re headed for trouble.

• The quick to close: This might seem counterintuitive, but a prospect willing to jump into bed with you before the first sales call is even over can turn into a nightmare. These impulsive buyers usually don’t have a full understanding of what they’re getting into or what you’re offering, and will after you (even though they’re at fault). Here you might want to slow down the process and suggest another call or spend extra time explaining everything (in writing if you can).   

5. The basics of cold emailing

If you’re using cold outreach over email as one of your main sales strategies, you’ll want to have some form of training on the basics of how you connect with prospects over email.

First off, why email? Well, despite doomsayers spouting off about social selling killing email, email is 40X more effective at getting new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.  We put together a collection of 17 sales email tips that work you can check out, but here are the main pieces you should be covering in your training:

How to write subject lines that get opened: It might be just one line, but it’s the one that matters the most. Write like a human, avoid slogans, use lowercase text, and include your recipient's name if you can.  

How to write effective email copy: Don’t waste your prospect’s time. Be brief. Give context. And end with a clear call to action. Each sentence needs to show your value props and push your prospect closer to the next step.

Unusual ways to make your emails stand out: We all have overflowing inboxes. So to stand out, try a few tricks like: Adding value in your signature by including recent blog posts, news, or videos; include a personal note or some company humblebrag in the P.S.; and use formatting to your advantage by bolding important information and using bulleted lists.

Email experiments to run: Even the best email templates go stale. Start by deciding what you want to test: open rate or response rate/action. Then, try a few experiments like A/B testing subject lines, changing the ‘From name’, using personalization, or sending at a different time.

How to follow up properly: If your cold prospects aren’t responding, implement this follow-up formula into your sales training process:

• 1 day after your cold email at a different time: Follow-up 1. A modified version of your original email.

• 2 days after you send your second email: Follow-up 2. Restate your call to action only.

• 4-5 days after your third email: Follow-up 3. Say goodbye to the prospect (this is betting on their loss aversion and that they’ll feel compelled to respond).

6. The basics of cold calling

If your salespeople are picking up the phone, you’ll for sure want to be training them on what to do when their prospect answers.

Your cold calling strategy should start with a funnel that looks something like this:

• Dial phone numbers
• Reach prospects
• Qualify prospects
• Demo the prospects
• Close the deal

To help your team get the most success from this funnel, you’ll want to provide them with some simple tools and training around lead sourcing, sales call scripts, and how to handle objections.

Remember to incorporate teaching your team to keep it simple and focus on one step at a time throughout your sales training.

Can you reach one person? Qualify that person? Demo a prospect? Close a deal? The training should focus on pushing through and getting each prospect to the next step. So don’t worry if the conversion numbers are bad to start.

7. How to clearly articulate value to prospects

Nothing kills a sale faster then not being able to tell someone why they need what you’re selling. People buy results, not just products or services.

Your salespeople need to know how to clearly articulate the value that your product or service will provide for the prospect. They need to be educators and storytellers, explaining why what you’re selling is so great and then getting the prospect to imagine themselves in a better life because of you.

Start by going through your customer profiles. Why are they good prospects for what you’re selling? How can you show them the value you’re providing? Do you have case studies or testimonials you can use?

Role play and get your team to practice articulating the value of your product until they can do it without even thinking.

8. Dealing with fear in cold sales

If you’re dealing with sales training for new or less experienced salespeople, you’ll want to train them not only on how to sell, but how to feel good about doing it.

Calling up or emailing strangers and asking them to buy what you’re selling isn’t something we normally do. And fear is only natural when you’re put into an unfamiliar place. Taking the time to train your team about how to handle that fear will make them more confident, friendly, and ultimately happier.

Start by looking at all the places in your sales process where your team might be feeling anxiety or fear and how to address it:

• Fear of rejection: When cold calling or emailing, it’s natural to be afraid of rejection. But hearing ‘no’ is no small part of selling. Don’t ignore or squash this fear. Instead, embrace it, verbalize it, and instead of trying to avoid failure, have your salesperson aim for failure and get motivated to push past the rejections. Give them the liberty to fail spectacularly a few times and get comfortable in that space. Those few lost leads are worth it in the long run.
• Fear of presentation: If you’re scared of getting in front of a group and pitching solutions, you might think you’re not cut out for sales. But getting over this fear of performance isn’t as hard as you might think. Try coming up with a hard script so that there’s no room for error. It might come across as robotic the first few times, but once your salesperson feels comfortable their fear will disappear and the presentation will loosen up.

• Fear of asking for the sale: Some salespeople are great at small talk, but can’t bring themselves to ask for the sale. This goes back to the fear of rejection, but if you’ve come this far you don’t want to just toss away the sale. Instead, give them a few textbook techniques for closing the sale. Once they feel comfortable with the basics, upgrade to more advanced tricks.  

9. How, when, and the frequency of following-up

Most people might assume there’s no interest in what they’re selling if they don’t get a response. But the follow-up is your key to higher conversion rates, and without it you’re not likely to close many deals in the long run.

Steli, the CEO of Close.io here, follows a simple follow-up philosophy: Reach out as many times as necessary until you get a response. If a prospect says they’re busy for two weeks, he sets a reminder for 14 days.

Now, your own follow-up philosophy will come from your values and sales process, but the key here is that you need to have something your team can follow. Decide what frequency you’re going to follow up, how you’re going to track your messages, and which medium you’re going to use. Then, teach your team to use their judgement and experiment.  

10. Ways to ask for the close

One of the most important pieces of sales training your team needs is how to close the deal.

Without providing guidelines and processes for asking for the close, you’re basically giving your team liberty to ask whenever they want. And unfortunately, too many salespeople wait until that nonexistent ‘perfect moment’ to ask.

Here are a couple techniques you can try adding to your sales training:

The virtual close: As soon as you’ve qualified your lead and given them your pitch, ask for the sale. At this point, you basically know they’re going to say no. So follow up by asking, "What’s the process we need to go through in order to get you ready to buy?" With this simple question, you’re getting them to draw you a roadmap to the sale you’ll eventually get.

Take the sale away: When objections arrive at the 11th hour, it’s easy to get desperate and make promises you can’t keep. Instead, teach your salespeople to "take the sale away" by being decisive on pricing, emphasizing that you’re building a long-term relationship, and imposing a break in the conversation. By using this technique, you’re not only pushing people to close, but showing them that you value the service or product you’re selling.

The learning never stops

Sales training never really ends.

There are always new techniques, better scripts, new objections to overcome, new issues to address, another competitor entering the market that you and your team will need to learn how to combat.

The best salespeople have a drive to learn and be the best, and your sales training will help them get there. Invest in it early on and you’ll have a team that can’t be beat.

Want to see how we do sales training? Sign up for our free sales training email course with video lessons and more!

Sign up for the sales training course

The world’s first floating offshore wind farm started delivering electricity to the grid in the north of Scotland.

The Hywind project, built by Norwegian oil company Statoil ASA and Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co., has five turbines floating 25 kilometres off the coast of Peterhead, near Aberdeen. The project has a capacity of 30 megawatts and cost about $263 million U.S. to construct.

“This marks an exciting development for renewable energy in Scotland,” said First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. “Hywind will provide clean energy to over twenty thousand homes and will help us meet our ambitious climate change targets.”

Wind turbines have been installed on seabeds since the 1990s. Taking them offshore typically increases wind speeds and reduces complaints from neighbours, but it has also been limited to relatively shallow seas. Floating turbines are expected to open the industry up to new markets like Japan, the U.S. west coast and Mediterranean, where seabeds drop off steeply from the coast.

“Hywind can be used for water depths up to 800 metres, thus opening up areas that so far have been inaccessible for offshore wind,” said Irene Rummelhoff, executive vice president of the New Energy Solutions business area at Statoil.

Batteries

Some of the energy generated by the turbines in the sea will be stored in batteries. Statoil has installed one of its Batwind lithium devices, which can store 1 megawatt-hour of power. This will help steady the flow of power generated by the wind farm.

The cost of conventional offshore wind farms has been plummeting in recent years. The U.K.’s latest renewable energy auction saw prices drop to 57.50 pounds per megawatt-hour, less than a third the cost of new nuclear in the U.K. Rummelhoff expects floating offshore wind to follow a similar trajectory.

“Statoil has an ambition to reduce the costs of energy from the Hywind floating wind farm to 40 to 60 euros per megawatt-hour by 2030,” she said in a statement. “Knowing that up to 80 percent of the offshore wind resources are in deep waters where traditional bottom fixed installations are not suitable, floating offshore wind is expected to play a significant role in the growth of offshore wind going forward.”

The Hywind project receives government support in the form of renewable obligation certificates. It gets 3.5 ROCs, which currently adds up to about 140 pounds per megawatt-hour, according to Statoil spokeswoman Elin Isaksen. This is on top of the U.K.’s wholesale power price which has averaged 48.75 pounds per megawatt-hour over the past year.

Rule 28. A sales meeting is your sales presentation. Master the skills that support a great sales meeting. Here's the bottom line, we want our sales meetings to be great, and we know they're not. And sometimes they're not because we're running from one meeting, we thought we had about a 30-minute window to get ourselves ready for a sales meeting which turns into a three-minute window and so we show up unprepared.

President Xi Jinping warned of severe challenges while laying out a road map to turn China into a leading global power by 2050, as he kicked off a twice-a-decade party gathering expected to cement his influence into the next decade.

Although his wide-ranging address made clear there were no plans for political reform, Xi said China’s development had entered a “new era”, using the phrase 36 times in a speech that ran nearly 3-1/2 hours.

“With decades of hard work, socialism with Chinese characteristics has crossed the threshold into a new era,” Xi said.

The twice-a-decade event, a weeklong, mostly closed-door conclave, will culminate in the selection of a new Politburo Standing Committee to rule China’s 1.4 billion people for the next five years, with Xi expected to consolidate his control and potentially retain power beyond 2022, when the next congress takes place.

The 64-year-old Xi, widely regarded as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, spoke to more than 2,000 delegates in Beijing’s cavernous, red-carpeted Great Hall of the People, including 91-year-old former president Jiang Zemin. Security was tight on a rainy, smoggy day in the capital.

As expected, the speech was heavy on aspiration and short on specific plans.

Xi also laid out an ambitious plan to make China a “great modern socialist country” in the following 30 years — part of what he has called the “Chinese dream.” By 2050, he said, the party would be near the goal of achieving a “beautiful China” with the rule of law, innovative companies, a clean environment, an expanding middle class, adequate public transportation and reduced disparities between urban and rural areas.

“Chinese people will enjoy greater happiness and well-being, and the Chinese nation will stand taller and firmer in the world,” Xi said of his vision for 2050.

Xi painted China’s governance system as a unique development model while hailing signature policies such as his Belt-and-Road infrastructure initiative and anti-corruption campaign, which has ensnared some 1 million officials since 2012 and sidelined many of his would-be rivals.

Xi affirmed the Communist Party’s supremacy and said that China shouldn’t copy the political systems of foreign nations, repeatedly emphasizing that the country had entered a “new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” He called for the rejection of the “Cold War mentality” in addressing global challenges, and said China would never seek global hegemony.

Xi said the Communist Party will strive to fully transform the People’s Liberation Army into one the world’s top militaries by 2050, and emphasized the need to modernize its combat capability.

“A military is built to fight,” he said.

Investors are watching to see whether Xi will push through tough reforms as the world’s second largest economy faces structural challenges over the next five years. At the same time, he’s seeking to boost China’s global clout with infrastructure spending while avoiding a conflict with U.S. President Donald Trump over North Korea.

“We have a fairly clear blueprint of Xi Jinping’s political economy, with incredibly robust, strengthened state-owned sector playing a large role in propping up growth,” said Jude Blanchette, engagement director at the Conference Board’s China Center.

“We’re moving into a sort of China Inc. 2.0, a real upgraded version that, sure, has markets and they’re going to play a really important role in this, but this is all within a bird-caged economy.”

While economic growth has surprised on the upside in recent quarters, inefficient state-owned enterprises and ballooning corporate debt pose threats to stability. Last year, China saw its slowest full-year growth in about a quarter century, and S&P Global Ratings last month cut China’s sovereign rating for the first time since 1999.

The Communist Party has been adept at changing course and finding ways for its citizens to make money, according to Fraser Howie, co-author of the books “Red Capitalism” and “Privatizing China.”

“The bargain certainly in the past 25 years plus has been: forget political freedoms, we will allow you to get rich,” Howie said. “Keeping power has been of absolute paramount importance to the party, and that’s the focus of what these meetings are about.”

Throughout the week, more than 2,000 delegates to 19th Party Congress will discuss and approve Xi’s report and revisions to the party charter. They will also appoint a new Central Committee, which will elect the party’s Politburo and its Standing Committee — China’s most powerful body — the day after the congress ends on Oct. 24.

Xi is set to emerge as one of the country’s top three leaders. He’ll be looking to secure a majority of allies on the new Standing Committee, which may potentially include possible successors who could rule until 2032.

With files from Reuters

You might not be the biggest fish in the pond, but you can still act like you are. Here are a few ways to make it look like you’re at the helm of a global enterprise!

 

1. Get everything branded and personalized.

Instead of buying generic letterhead, notepads and envelopes, make sure every piece of paper that leaves your office carries your business name, logo and slogan. You can even order personalized cheques bearing your company logo.

Your branded office materials should also include your street address, phone number and website so clients and prospective clients can find your contact information easily. This is an easy and affordable way to make sure that every communication from your company looks polished and professional. It’s also one of the most direct forms of advertising you can find and it won’t break your budget.

 

2. Focus on the details. 

You know it’s true: people judge a book by its cover. If you’ve spent weeks preparing a report or presentation, make sure it shows that you’re putting your best foot forward. Consider binding your report with hard- or soft-cover coil binding, or fold it in booklet form—this really takes it to the next level.

If your presentation includes images, consider enlarging and laminating or mounting them on foam core for extra impact.

 

3. Spread the word.

Gift certificates are a great way to spread the word about your services, and businesses of all sizes can use them. Consider providing a discount certificate to a preferred customer (like 10% off or a cash discount on a large order), or allow your customers to purchase them in set amounts to give as gifts. These can be especially useful for businesses like hair and nail salons, massage therapy or boutique specialty shops.

 

4. Stay secure.

Keeping your information secure is more important than ever. Even small companies should be aware of online threats and identity theft. One way to stay secure is by safely disposing of sensitive documents through shredding. If it’s more than you can handle yourself, consider using a shredding service.

They’re safe, secure, and cost-effective. Plus, a shredding service can shred large amounts of paper quickly (instead of one sheet at a time like personal shredders) and can even process file folders, envelopes, thick paper, rubber bands, staples—even paper clips. Plus, it’s environmentally sound because shredding services recycle materials to minimize waste.

 

To find more ways to grow your small business, visit Bureau en Gros’ Print & Marketing Services or visit your local Bureau en Gros store.

The post Simple Tips for Running Your Business Like a Pro appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Back in 2014, gamification as a strategy for improving sales productivity was the trend – not that it was a new breakthrough idea then.

The

Gamification pertains to the use of gaming principles and design in non-game contexts. Prior the buzz and the “gamification” buzzword, select elements of gaming were already being employed in education, scientific visualization and, yes, business. It has since been used by the big guns of industry, such as Paypal, SAP and Comcast, to improve customer engagement and employee performance.

For start-ups and businesses with experience under their belt alike, sales gamification is something to seriously consider if the goal is to improve sales performance.

Jared Haleck of InsideSales.com restates an often-used reason why sales gamification works: “Sales reps are competitive by nature, but too often that competitive energy doesn’t get utilized on the sales floor. Gamification harnesses that energy by systematically placing them in direct competition with one another. As they are recognized and rewarded for their accomplishments, they become even more motivated to work harder.”

The Case for Sales Gamification

The concept of winning as a reward in itself is not new to many sales managers. They know that money alone will not motivate their best salespeople. According to research conducted by the Tas Group, almost all sales practitioners look beyond financial gain for motivation. 40 percent of them say that they are encouraged when they “make progress or win.”

This fact is supported by observed gains when sales gamification strategies are adopted by businesses:

Increased Sales Performance

Bob Marsh of LevelEleven, a CRM and sales gamification solutions company, says that more than 90 percent of businesses with gamification initiatives have successfully improved the performance of their sales team. Of these, 71 percent see increased sales productivity from 11 percent to 50 percent.

Better CRM Usage

Today’s leading CRM systems come packed with several features and functions that are often not effectively used. With sales gamification, managers have had to revisit these features and functions in order to focus on the top behaviors they want from their sales team.

It could be something as simple as updating client information on their CRM system. Or, it could be actions that have direct bearing on sales performance, such as improved response time or faster issue resolution.

Making a game out of these key behaviors has helped 84 percent of surveyed businesses improve the use of their CRM system.

Reinforced Desired Behaviors

It is not just the use of CRM that’s reinforced with sales gamification. Other desired behaviors can also be encouraged.

Marsh says: “When you take those critical sales behaviors and launch contests and leaderboards around them, you can watch your sales team’s competitive side kick into high gear and they’ll be excited to do it. But the key is that the goal isn’t ‘adoption,’ it’s motivating the right sales behaviors that will help you sell more and grow faster.”

The use of sales gamification is a reliable way of pointing sales teams towards behaviors deemed valuable to the bottom line. It is a fun way to teach and encourage.

According to Brian Burke of Gartner: “Gamification can be used to nudge salespeople to enter client information, assess the quality of sales leads, and follow-up after sales meetings. Following these steps leads to a more effective sales process, benefiting both the salesperson and the company.”

Consistent Motivation

A survey by CSO Insights has found that half of its respondent organizations run contests for its sales teams several times a year. These competitions are consistently implemented, regardless of difficulties in managing them. The shared reason why management keeps on doing this is because it works. Games can motivate teams into working their best to win.

When these same companies switched from manually managing contests to using enterprise gamification software, 73 percent of them claim to run more sales contests than ever, with 51 percent running at least two contests per month.

Easy Progress Monitoring

Another plus with gamification is that it also encourages sales managers to be better in their monitoring and assessment functions. Tools, like CRM and gamification apps, track a gamut of data, which are sometimes taken for granted by managers. Gamification forces them to consistently monitor important metrics. Not only does this go into determining contest winners – it also improves their decision-making capabilities.

Reinforced Sense of Individual Responsibility

CoachSimple.net’s Greg Ausley says: “Creating small challenges with a simple leaderboard made available to the team either in real-time, nightly or weekly combined with small prizes and bragging rights during the sales meetings can provide that extra shorter term motivation which will lead to more sales and a higher participation rates in your achiever awards and success trips.”

Whether the competition is between individuals or teams, games remind salespeople of the importance of everything that they do to achieve goals. Their actions could be towards achieving quotas; or, these might be their contribution towards group goals. In any case, their sense of responsibility is reinforced and, in a way, monitored. Their work – or lack of – is measured and visible to the rest of the team.

The Case Against It

Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo has described gamification as: “an ugly neologism that has seen terrific hype and terrific backlash in Silicon Valley over the past few years.”

The gist of his critique is that gamification seems poised to killing flexibility and creativity within the workplace. Instead of careers/ jobs being crafts that people work to excel in, they become games wherein each condoned action earns points. Points – instead of excellence – become the goal.

Sales Gamification: Aligning Expectations

And surely, there are risks in implementing sales gamification for the sake of gamification alone. It has to exist alongside an organizational mindset that also takes into account real returns on investment. This goes beyond points and badges, and looks at the progress made by the organization and its team members:

Is the team learning through the competitions you implement?

Has the sales process become more efficient and effective?

Are team members becoming better salespeople?

Is the competitive boost reflected in sales returns?

Sales gamification can be a strategic aspect of business operations, as long as expectations are aligned with what it can really offer.

Gamification does not instantly stoke competitiveness.

Harnessing the competitiveness of salespeople is one of the main selling points of sales gamification. That’s well and good if all members of the team are competitive by nature. Research claims the contrary.

In reality, competition through gamification is only an extrinsic short-term motivator. What motivates in the long run is the feeling of having done a good job. The better sales gamification apps take this into consideration.

Gamification is not the same as cash rewards.

When it comes to motivational strategies, gamification offers something more than cash bonuses. It stokes a person’s drive to lead and move ahead of the rest. It is never equivalent to handing out cash rewards. It’s been found that more money often does not translate to getting more done and may actually backfire.

Gamification can improve employee engagement.

Between gamification software that targets consumers and those intended for business teams, study shows that gamification apps for employees work almost 100 percent of the time. It has been observed to improve employee performance through real-time objectives and feedback.

Gamification does not always need a platform.

Sales gamification using a platform only works if the platform is well-designed. It means choosing one that goes beyond badges and points, and actually encourages actions that lead to better sales performance and real life skills improvement.

When choosing sales gamification apps, see how well it integrates with current sales processes and existing systems, especially your CRM software. The reality is that some gamification apps provide little improvement to implementing games manually. In these cases, it might be better to forego sales apps and do manually administered competitions with the help of your CRM and other available tools.

Gamify Your Sales with These Apps

However, if having a sales gamification software is strategic to your sales process, here are some of the best apps around.

Fantasy Sales Team: Think of it as fantasy football but with less wannabe quarterbacks and more wins. Fantasy Sales Team puts together the fun elements of fantasy football and has applied it in sales. It dubs itself as a gamification app that’s made by sales teams for sales teams – so expectations are high.

Fantasy Sales Team (now Microsoft Dynamics 365) is a SaaS app and can be easily integrated into most CRM systems. The metrics it keeps track of can be specified for each player and team. It provides you with an easy way to implement and manage individual and team competitions.

Badgeville: Badgeville is available as a SaaS application, designed to provide your team with advanced digital-based motivational tools. It is focused of making the most use of your CRM system, which makes sense. When you make the most of CRM’s management and assessment tools, you can empower your salespeople to stay focused on what’s important, and reach their personal and team goals.

GamEffective: GamEffective offers a flexible gamification platform that’s customizable for different-sized organizations. You get rich game narratives that employ a variety of mechanics and game play. Their emphasis is on working towards job mastery through progressing team and individual challenges.

Xactly Express: With Xactly Express, your team knows exactly how much commission they’ve earned while doing the app’s pre-set or customized goals. Aside from real-time metrics visibility, Xactly integrates easily with most CRM systems.

Q-Stream: If you prefer quiz-based game shows, then Q-Stream is the gamification app for your team. It broadcasts questions on sales, your products and common customer issues through ready-made or customized courses. Points are made, but teams and individuals can always catch up during “lightning rounds.”

The advantage of Q-Stream is that not only does it encourage friendly competition, it also requires mastery of your product and organizational content.

MindTickle: This SaaS platform gamification app is designed to fastforward your sales and customer readiness. It employs user-friendly interface, easy mobile integration and social features. It focuses on measuring salesperson activity, sales and customer readiness and pitch testing.

PARKA Simulation Games: PARKA offer SaaS platform games that are designed to improve your team’s selling capabilities, customer service and problem-solving skills. There are pre-set simulations that are supposed to improve your team’s response to tech issues, and other customer concerns. PARKA is popular among top companies, such as JP Morgan Chase, NBC and Pitney Bowes.

Monitae: Having several language options is one of the key features of Monitae, which makes it the perfect gamification app for companies with global sales operations. Monitae easily integrates with several ERP and CRM platforms. It encourages CRM adoption, and sales’ and operational best practices.

MySalesGame: MySalesGame is designed to improve the adoption of your business tools, such as CRM and training apps, and encourages ideal sales behaviors. It also integrates with MySalesSherpa, which provides a steady flow of sales advice. It employs missions that earn points and badges, which are rewarded prizes in real life.

The app is developed by CallidusCloud, with your sales team’s engagement in self and sales process improvements. Sales goals are shared but still drive competition between your team members.

CRMGamified: GRMGamified offers top-of-the-line graphics that take your corporate competition to the next level. You get features and functions for engaging and measuring your team’s performance. It also integrates with all MS Dynamics CRM software.

Agile CRM Gamification Software: As its name suggests, Agile CRM Gamification easily integrates with your CRM system, in order for you to run friendly competition and collaboration between team members. The focus is on your numbers, which are made visible through custom leaderboards, advanced sales metrics and real-time alerts.

Apparound CPQ: Apparound centers on missions that improve your team’s surveying, upselling and product bundling skills, among others. It easily integrates with your product catalog, CRM and sales process.

“If you do it with a template today, a machine does it without you tomorrow.”

That’s what Chris Penn told a room full of 900+ marketers last Wednesday at the B2B Forum put on by MarketingProfs. [Full disclosure: I am a former employee of MarketingProfs and was comped a ticket to the event.]

Chris’s presentation served both as an overview of what is happening in the broad realm of artificial intelligence (AI) today and as a shot across the bow to marketers who ignore developments in this field at their peril.

In example after example, Chris illustrated how AI-enhanced capabilities can be applied to everything from content creation and keyword analysis to interactive advertising and, well, diagnosing cancer. He then laid out how individuals can prepare their careers for a new, AI-driven marketing world in which “fewer humans” will be needed. Finally, he described what companies need to do in order to harness the mind-boggling power of these evolving technologies.

His ultimate message to marketing professionals was, “Either you will manage the machines or the machines will manage you.”

Is the AI-Empowered End Nigh?

I must admit that Chris’s presentation left me a bit shook.

While I have been aware for a some time that a diverse array of enterprise software solutions now incorporate (or at least claim to incorporate) AI and, more specifically, machine learning capabilities, Chris highlighted a number of use cases and instance of which I was not yet aware. I wanted to learn more.

For this reason I chose later that morning to attend Raviv Turner‘s presentation, “A Scientific Look at B2B Buying in the Age of AI.” I was glad I did.

In the wake of Chris’s shock-and-awe approach, Raviv’s offered at least a modicum of relief. Yes, he said, AI will have a major impact on marketing. However, he added, “No robots are going to be running your campaigns anytime soon.”

To put that last sentence in perspective, Raviv used the following slide focused on “Amara‘s Law.”

As Raviv explained, we have not yet advanced particularly far when it comes to real world deployments of AI. Indeed, we have barely begun to fully exploit machine learning to augment and amplify human intelligence. Nevertheless, as you can see, the future awaits.

What Stands in the Way of the Future?

Present levels of deployment notwithstanding, Raviv did discuss what most organizations need to do before such a future becomes a living reality.

Above all, he said, companies are going to need to get their data house in order. Chris had said during his presentation, “Data is the new oil.” Raviv echoed this by insisting, “If you are not good at data, you are not ready for AI.”

There were two main points Raviv made about getting good at data. First, he said that companies need to understand “The Data Science Hierarchy of Needs.”

Before AI or even simple machine learning algorithms can do anything with data, data needs to be consistently collected and appropriately prepared.

There are two things that stand in the way of this endeavor for most organizations. The first is that organizations are challenged with the integration of “structured” data (the firmographic information that we associate with data colloquially. for example) and unstructured data (all the relevant things that people might share on social media, for example).

No matter how much social listening you are doing or how industriously you are logging chats between customers and your support team, if you can’t access and leverage that data as easily as you might current customer spend or date of last sales contact, it’s just not useful.

The other challenge has to do with data silos.

Every customer-facing department has its own particular data needs and uses its own unique technology stack to collect that data. In the absence of meaningful technical integration, that data stays where it is. This may be fine for the purposes of each individual department, but it does not serve the overall needs of the business and, more critically, the needs of the customer.

To give one simple example of this, consider the case of opening up a customer support ticket and then, before the issue has been resolved, receiving an email from a sales rep looking to upsell you. This is annoying, for sure, but it also reveals a technological breakdown on the part of the vendor. Their systems are obviously not talking to each other. In other words, you get a one-two punch of bad customer experience. in which bad feelings on the part of the customer get combined with a bad impression of your brand. Sad.

The Promise of AI in Marketing

So, we may have a long way to go as an industry before fully automated, AI-driven marketing begins to influence purchases through hyper-focused targeting informed by a highly refined “persona of one.”

On the other hand, Raviv did share how the platform his company (CaliberMind) offers can begin to deliver on the promise AI in marketing:

As he described it, proper application of AI can help boost conversion rates from MQLs to SQLs in several ways. It can improve lead scoring. It can more effectively segment leads based on observed behavior. It can improve targeting based on specific account data. And, it can provide “journey orchestration.”

This last element deserves some special attention. Raviv told me that, when trying to explain to his grandmother what CaliberMind does, he came up with this succinct description, “We tell marketers what to do next.”

This is what “journey orchestration” is all about and embodies the real promise of AI in marketing.

Marketers perpetually dream of providing prospects with the right content and the right message at the right time in order to move them through the funnel. Figuring out what constitutes the right content or the right message or even the right time is not easy. As a result, marketers rely on guesswork, playing the odds (by sending out a lot of stuff to a lot of people all the time), or relatively primitive testing.

AI is on the verge of changing all that. When fueled by high quantities of high quality data, AI should (and most likely will) be able to fine tune the process so that marketing actually guides the buyer through the journey, rather than simply serving as stuff the buyer stumbles across along the way.

As Raviv made clear, we are not there yet. At the same time, we have reached a stage where marketing at that level is not only conceivable, but foreseeable.

And the fact of the matter is, you probably aren’t ready for that future state. The question is, will you be when it arrives?

Featured Image Source (Creative Commons): Michael Cordedda. All screenshots are from Raviv’s presentation.

When done right, account-based marketing results in a significantly higher ROI than other marketing strategies, and B2B organizations are taking note. Despite the promise of ABM, however, organizations are struggling to find success on their first attempt. In fact, only 40% of companies that have attempted ABM have continued beyond their initial pilot.

So, what’s going on here?

We reached out to Lenati, a consulting firm specializing in ABM, to get their real-world perspective. In this two-part series, the Lenati team shares the six most common ABM pilot pitfalls they’ve come across and provide insight on how organizations can avoid them.

Pitfall #1: Not Creating the Right Partnership with Sales

Everyone knows that participation from sales is essential to ABM success. But many marketing organizations don’t set the relationship up correctly from the start, often leading to frustrations and subpar results that could have been avoided. Common missteps are:

1. Not getting buy-in from a high enough level within the sales org

We’ve seen this story play out too many times – the excited marketing director convinces the forward-thinking sales director to pilot ABM. But, when it comes time to allocate resources, they don’t have the power or control they need. As a result, even the most well-designed plans can’t move forward.

2. Not getting a commitment from sales to properly support or resource the pilot

On the flipside, we’ve also seen marketing leaders do a great job of selling sales leadership on the concept, but then fail because they didn’t properly outline the full pilot requirements to them up front. Then, when it comes time to pony up resources or headcount, sales balks and the initiative stalls out.

3. Trying to get consensus and alignment with the full sales leadership team

We’ve sometimes seen marketing struggle to get things off the ground simply because they’re too focused on getting every sales leader to buy into the idea. In large organizations, full team buy-in is unlikely to happen. Just think of the last time your entire marketing team agreed on something. It’s not about how many people you persuade, but about whom you persuade.

The best approach here is to find one or two sales champions who have decision-making power, understand the commitment, and are willing to co-invest in the initiative.

Pitfall #2: No Rules of Engagement

Getting sales to participate and commit resources is one thing, but getting agreement on how to work together is something entirely different. This is where many pilots break down. Here’s an illustrative example:

Marketing says, “We are going drive leads for your accounts, and we need the sellers to properly follow up by doing X, Y, and Z.”

Sales responds, “We know how to properly follow up. Throw the leads over when you get them.”

Marketing then executes the play and throws the leads over the fence.

Sales put the leads in their queue and treats them the same way they treat every other lead.

This is a huge problem! Without clear guidelines and agreement on how sales should treat these leads differently, there is little reason to believe that there will be any lift in the results. Most ABM plays have specific requirements for personalization and timing in order to be effective. These expectations should be discussed and agreed upon between sales and marketing upfront or else there is little difference between the ABM pilot and traditional marketing and sales engagement.

Pitfall #3: Trying to Boil the Ocean

When we get to the part of the pilot design in which we are identifying target accounts and goals, we frequently see Sales throw over a list of accounts with which they need help. While their intentions are good, there are often significant differences in the accounts (e.g., life stages) that require different ABM treatments. We’ve seen some marketing organizations try to run multiple plays in different accounts in the same pilot, and this typically doesn’t end well. The increased complexity and operational requirements are not worth the potential value of proving ABM across different scenarios.

Another big misstep is trying to include too many accounts in the first pilot. There is no tried and true benchmark for how many accounts to include in a pilot, in part due to the variance in possible ABM treatments — for example, employing all digital plays versus more human touchpoints. To determine how many accounts to include in their first pilot, organizations should take stock of the effort required to execute well and compare that to their available resources.

Waiting for an invoice to get paid is one of the most frustrating and stressful aspects of being a small business owner — it’s even worse when a client doesn’t pay the invoice on-time. Well, no, it’s worse when a friend doesn’t pay their invoice on time. But, you see what I mean.

Did you know that there’s a way to make some quick cash off of those unpaid invoices?

It’s called invoice factoring. If your curiosity is piqued, I’ve put together a brief overview of invoice factoring. More importantly you’ll know the “rights” and “wrongs” of using invoice factoring.

An Overview of Invoice Factoring

What is invoice factoring and how does it work?

Invoice factoring is simply where you sell unpaid invoices at a discount. The factoring company gives you cash to secure working capital to meet your expenses. You can cover payroll, or expand sales, or whatever.

The factoring company then takes over the invoice and gets paid whenever they collect the debt from your customers. This usually takes anywhere from 30 to 90 days. It depends on the terms that you and your clients have agreed-on.

In most cases, you’ll receive 80 percent of the invoice amount now and 20 percent (minus fees) when the invoice is paid-in-full. But, this can vary from factoring company to factoring company.

For example, you sent out an invoice for $5,000, and you can’t wait 30 days for the client to pay it in full. Let’s say you need payroll now so you turn to an invoice factoring company.

They’ll purchase the invoice and give you $4,000 upfront, which is 80% of the invoice. They send you the remaining 20% after the invoice has been paid.

Keep in mind, however, that since they’re charging you a 3% factoring fee, they’re going to keep a $150 for themselves. But, hey, you have to do what you have to do.

Invoice factoring pros and cons.

The Pros:

• Immediate working capital to help cover any funding caps that have been caused by clients who don’t pay on-time.
• Improved cash flow for your business.
• Invoice factoring often provides an easier to obtain capital. You don’t have to worry about your credit score, collateral, or limited operating history.

The Cons:

• Invoice factoring can get expensive due to hidden fees. These fees include application fees, processing fees for each invoice you finance and credit check fees. Many charge late fees if the client stays past due on a payment.
• Since the invoice factoring company is collecting the invoices directly, you don’t have control over your billing anymore. Make sure that the factoring company is being ethical and fair when dealing with your customers.
• Factoring companies verify the creditworthiness of your clients. This means if they have bad credit, you may not be approved.

The Right Way to Use Invoice Factoring

Unlike cash advances, loans, lines of credit, the funds acquired through factoring are pretty identical to your regular income.

This means that it should be used just like the way you would use the cash that’s flowing into your business. You’ll want to pay employees, repair equipment, or replenish the supplies.

If you have some extra money left over, you could put it towards expanding your business by introducing new products or services. But use the factoring money for actual expenses, not taking 200 to lunch or an impromptu event.

Launching a new marketing campaign, or relocating to a larger workspace may be considered, if it was already in the works. Some businesses have gotten in real financial trouble thinking of factoring monies as a bonus.

Josh Smith from Alpha Capital explains this perfectly in a LinkedIn post, “Invoice factoring is meant to grow your company. Plainly put, that means investing your cash infusion into the chain of production so that you can expand your revenues and profits.”

For example, a manufacturer would use the money from invoice factoring to increase “the quantity and/or quality of raw materials and assemblies used to create finished products.” Merchandisers could “spend the cash on additional product orders and perhaps expanding the types and quality of the products you sell.”

The Wrong Way to Use Invoice Factoring

The wrong way to use factoring is to use it for financing your company. Smith has an example of a widget maker who diverted the $200,000 he acquired from factoring towards a fleet of trucks, as opposed to the materials required to increase widget production. “Now he has a shiny new truck fleet but no increase in output.”

While funds from factoring are easier to obtain, they tend to be more expensive than traditional bank loans. For example, the APR from a SBA loan is 10%, while the APR from a factoring company can range anywhere from 17% to 64%.

In short, factoring is a better option for strong businesses that need a short-term cash injection to cover their essential business needs. If your business is weak, factoring can actually prevent your business from growing because of how much it costs you to work with a factoring company in the first place, or because you used the funds incorrectly.

Invoice Factoring Mistakes to Avoid

If you believe that you can use factoring the “right” way, then make sure that take into consideration the following:

• Ask, “How much upfront?” A fair advance is 70-90% of the face value of the invoice.
• Look for transparent rates and fees. BlueVine has put together this handy guide for deciphering invoice factoring rates and tricks.
• Don’t sign long-term contracts. You’re probably only going to need factoring occasionally, so you don’t want to get trapped in paying something that you never use.
• Direct payments to the factoring company. Once you hand over an invoice, the payment must be made to the factoring company. Inform your clients so that they aren’t sending you the payment. If you’re concerned about your customer’s confidentiality, use factoring companies that uses “non-notification factoring.”
• Submitting a purchase order. You can not submit purchase orders since they only represent services or products have yet to be delivered.
• Forgetting about paperwork. While funds are available quickly, factoring still involves some time-consuming paperwork.
• Financing vs. Factoring. You may be better off using an invoice financing company where invoices are used as collateral.
• Shop and compare. Factoring Explorer easily allows you to shop and compare 140 factoring companies by industry and location. You can also use the site to get a quote.

I speak with many B2B CMOs who tell me online marketing isn’t relevant when it comes to B2B. Such companies stick to traditional methods such as trade shows, cold calling and god forbid – traditional media such as billboards or even TV. SaaS marketers don’t have the privilege of disregarding online marketing as a core platform for generating customers.

By the inherent online SaaS nature, SaaS marketers are “forced” to hack their way to growth online. So, what do most SaaS CMOs do? They spend money on media, sending traffic to salesy landing pages that rarely convert visitors to leads (and even when converting, those leads almost never become customers). After a while they realize that’s not the way to go and start searching for solutions. The purpose of this post is to help you avoid wasting your investors’ money, and tackle SaaS marketing like a pro.

First things first – who are you selling to?

A good starting point to learning your target audience is to learn all you can about your current customers.

Evaluate the following: who are those people whose problem you’re solving? How old are they? What’s their professional background? What challenges are they dealing with and how do you help them solve those challenges?

Understanding your buyer personas is the foundation of an effective SaaS marketing strategy. Without that, you’re working in the dark.

Understand your prospect’s buyers journey

Once you’ve mapped out who your ideal buyers are, it’s time to put yourself in their shoes and understand the journey they go through leading up to a purchase. First, I’ll tell what their journey isn’t (though wouldn’t everyone’s life be easier if it where) :

a dream buyer’s journey

I’m surprised by the number of B2B marketers who still think that by interrupting their target audience with ads intended to sell them something they’re not ready to buy, from a company they don’t trust – can actually generate positive ROI. The brutal reality is that interrupting will not get you far. Selling to people who don’t trust you and aren’t ready to buy is annoying, spammy and a waste of your money. Here’s what a realistic buyer’s journey looks like:

A typical buyer’s journey includes 3 stages:

1. Awareness – the prospect realized and expressed symptoms of a potential problem. For example “how do I drive the right kind of traffic to my website”
2. Consideration – the prospect clearly defined and gave a name to their problem and is now committed to researching and understanding all available approaches to solving their problem. For example, a prospect whose problem is driving the right kind of traffic might research “how to do Inbound Marketing” or “what you should look out for when outsourcing Inbound Marketing”
3. Decision – the prospect defined their solution strategy and is now comparing vendors.

Many companies are trying to sell to prospects at early stages of the buyer’s journey when in fact what they should be focusing on is adding value and positioning themselves as experts in their fields. The secret lies in distributing valuable content, building trust and creating lasting relationships. Turning visitors to customers will happen on your visitors’ terms. Just as you can’t force a social relationship, you can’t force a business one. The days of salesmen knocking on doors (both online and offline) asking for a glass of water and then pitching to death (or closed deal) are gone. We’re in an era of value. By placing the right content at the right place and the right time, you’ll be amazed at the quality of leads you’ll be generating. Those leads will be called inbound leads and the method – inbound marketing.

Convinced? Let’s get practical

1. Make sure you have a company blog, and keep your eye on the goal – adding value, helping and educating. The blog isn’t an extended sales deck, it’s your chance to position your company as professionals.
2. Align your blog content with the buyer’s journey. Awareness blog posts should be about high level challenges your buyer personas are experiencing. Consideration stage posts should tap into possible solutions, including yours of course. Decision stage content is the time to start selling. This is the time to convince your prospects why you’re the best choice, and it shouldn’t be too difficult since they already trust you and have gained value from your educational content.

   

3. With respect to awareness stage posts, make sure to conduct a keywords research and to include relevant keywords in your blog post titles and content. This is important – you need to make sure your prospects will find your content when searching for solutions at the awareness stage of their journey. You can learn more about how to optimize your content here.
4. In order to progress prospects down the buyer’s journey, use calls to action at the end of each blog post inviting them to download gated content that is most relevant to their stage of the journey. Technically speaking, these calls to action should lead to landing pages where they’ll be invited to provide their email and further info in order to receive the content. Once they do that a magic moment occurs – those visitors have now become leads. Don’t make the mistake of transferring those leads to sale just yet. Make sure to nurture them and to keep building their trust. Email them consideration stage content, invite them do download more gated content and nurture the relationship with them all the way down to the decision stage.

   
   Only once you’ve seen the leads have engaged with your content at a suffice level (subjective per company and product), transfer them over to sales. This way, instead of the regular complaints you’re hearing from them, they’ll suddenly thank you as they’ll be receiving leads who actually want to hear from them and don’t experience them as intrusive.

Wrapping up

By adopting a marketing strategy that revolves around adding value instead of interrupting, you can start generating customers from your online marketing efforts. Learn who your buyer personas are, understand their buyers journey and tailor content specifically for them and their challenges. Now you understand inbound marketing in a nutshell. Time to learn more and step up your efforts to market your SaaS product.

Good luck!

P.S. If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting inbound marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an inbound marketing strategy.

Business Intelligence (BI) is all about the data. The ability to consume data in a digestible format empowers teams to understand their business better than ever before. New insights acquired through a BI tool can shine a spotlight on challenges that previously seemed ambiguous and difficult to pinpoint, let alone resolve. Businesses using BI technology understand how to make changes to inefficient processes that result in significant positive impacts to their company’s bottom line.

Successful results from an initial BI project typically spur the creation of additional projects. With an increasing number of projects comes additional requirements. One common request is for real time data. This is a crucial need when you are making important business decisions based on the data you’re pulling. You need to be certain it is the most accurate data available.

On the surface, it seems obvious that having real time data is essential for every project, but adding that requirement also adds significant expense. The truth is, there are many cases where real-time data is not necessary. It’s important to think through the logic of when and where you really need real-time data before setting up new projects. Let’s look at a few examples:

Retail Companies – an eCommerce provider may need 24/7 access to inventory data to update their online store with current data to ensure customers are not ordering merchandise that’s out-of-stock or has an extended back-order.

Manufacturing Companies – production line data needs continual refreshing, but only during production line hours. It isn’t needed when the line is shut down for lunch or in the evenings when workers have gone home for the night.

Finance and Accounting Departments – payroll data may only need to be updated once a week to calculate billable hours for employees that week.

These scenarios are a few of the limitless number of projects you may decide to implement. The point is that there’s a difference between needing to have the data available all the time, and needing to have it updated all the time. Certain data doesn’t need to be refreshed every minute around the clock, so requiring real time on all data connections, all the time, would significantly raise your costs without adding value.

The resolution to this challenge is what we call ‘anytime data.’ That means you decide, based on business requirements, how often you want your data updated. The frequency you select can be specified down to the week, day or minute.

With the ClicData TEAM plan, the frequency of your data pulls is completely dictated by your business needs. You will be empowered to customize every single connection with exactly when the data is pulled down, and each refresh will update tables and graphs in your dashboard accordingly. You can be confident that your data is refreshed at the right time and at a competitive price.

If you’ve ever been pregnant, lived with a woman who’s pregnant or even just been around a pregnant woman, you can guess it is not smart to lie to a woman who’s pregnant about food.

Well that’s how I felt today. 6 months along and in arrives a marketing email with the subject line: “[Infographic] Good Marketing starts with good snacks.” Yes, I understand, I’m not literally going to get any food out of this, but I expect to see some mouth-watering graphics upon opening the email. Nope.

Instead I found food references in the copy like “Are you giving your prospects nourishing snacks or asking them to bite off more than they can chew?” and “Make your content highly snackable”. Still, this email teased me enough to click on the CTA to the infographic: Surely within it food will reside!

The infographic was 100% unrelated to food. This is what I call an unfulfilled promise.

As content creators, it’s our job to catch our audience’s attention. Check, done. But it is also our jobs to pay off what we’ve promised the audience within our content.

So, today, my promise – like my headline, title tag and meta description state – is to fill your senses with mouth-watering case studies of money-making campaigns. In following best practices, like delivering on a promise, this content has been able to drive outstanding results, bringing home the bacon for brands. Oh, and I might include some tasty food pics. I mean, “mouth-watering” and “bacon” are in my headline.

Paid-First Digital Marketing Strategy Drove Impressive ROI in Month One

The Strategy:

A new client came to TopRank Marketing recently craving customers – FAST. Sound familiar? But seriously, this B2B startup needed to see ROI as the first course – not dessert – in order to be able to keep investing. In addition, they were looking for support in SEO, developing landing pages in the short-term and gathering the insights needed to create a long-term organic content strategy.

We used AdWords to drive leads quickly and to test keyword viability for the landing page content and to help inform the upcoming organic content plan.

The Results:

Just four weeks after launch, we had driven 18 leads with an average CPL of $192. For this client, a single lead has the average value of $5,000-$20,000 (and sometimes up to $100,000) in revenue. In talking with the client, we were able to uncover that within one month we had driven roughly $10,000-$75,000 in ROI. 

Takeaway for Marketers:

Don’t get discouraged by tight timelines. Hyper focus on your core marketing objectives and pivot to tactics that you know can fulfill them – even if it seems out of order. Just be sure to set expectations with your leadership team as to why you’re making a shift, what your hypothesis is and what results you anticipate.

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Focus on core marketing objectives and pivot tactics that you know can fulfill them.
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Interactive, Multi-Channel Campaign Resulted in 4% Lift in Market Share, 12M Media Impressions

The Strategy:

By now you’ve heard about and likely drank at least one can of Coca Cola that held the “Share a Coke” campaign branding. Did you know the campaign started in Australia? The challenge was Coke had lost its relevance among Australians leaving sales in a not so happy place.

Coca Cola added the 150 most popular names to their cans and bottles, changing their biggest piece of advertising real estate. Supporting tactics from traditional to digital platforms rolled out from there: #ShareACoke hashtag, apps, an interactive website, outdoor billboards, interactive kiosks in top city centers and more.

Customers fueled digital content for the #ShareACoke campaign.

The Results:

From the initial campaign, in Australia alone, Coke earned 12 million media impressions, a 7% increase in young adult consumption and a 4% increase in sales across the category. With this success, Coca Cola has pushed it out to nearly 60 markets since their 2011 launch and have continued to add additional tactics. One of the more recent additions aimed to turn the enthusiasm for the campaign into even more revenue and earned advertising. To achieve this, Coke has begun selling personalized bottles and gear.

Takeaway for Marketers:

B2B or B2C – A truly impactful campaign integrates with the entire customer experience. Just because your packaging department is in a different building or state from your digital advertising or SEO departments doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t work together. Put your heads together across disciplines to unlock potential you never saw before.

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A truly impactful marketing campaign integrates with the entire customer experience.
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Consistent Publishing and Strategic Partnerships Drove 15.5% Increase in Revenue

The Strategy:

When this B2B and B2C eCommerce company came to TopRank Marketing wanting to drive sales, we knew a breadth of integrated tactics would be the way to reach their lofty revenue goals. And, we saw a huge opportunity to leverage co-created content with influencers and other brands as a way to drive stronger brand awareness. To reach their objectives, we deployed a strong marketing mix of weekly blogs, co-created influencer content, SEO, organic social, paid social and AdWords.

The Results:

In just under one year, we were able to drive a 14.4% increase in organic traffic, and 7.7% overall. The even more appetizing part of the story is these traffic spikes resulted in a 23.7% increase in organic revenue year over year; 15.5% increase in overall website revenue year over year!

Takeaway for Marketers:

A consistent cadence of relevant, SEO-driven blog content set the foundation for success for this client. And, what really made the difference was our strategic partnerships with influencers and other brands. The co-created content bolstered brand awareness in a way this brand had never before seen.

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Use SEO & content to set the foundation and form strategic partnerships with influencers.
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Are You Bringing Home the Bacon?

Hopefully, you just read all of that and thought, “I know. I already do all of that. I eat unlimited bacon!” If that’s you – fantastic! Are you looking for a job? We’re always open to strengthening our team!

But all joking aside, a wise marketer knows there is always more to learn. Keep up on the latest digital marketing trends and tactics by following our blog, or if you’re interested in learning what TopRank Marketing can do to help your business bring home the bacon, please, reach out today.

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2017. | 3 Mouth-Watering Content Marketing Case Studies That Bring Home the Bacon | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post 3 Mouth-Watering Content Marketing Case Studies That Bring Home the Bacon appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

I’m a high school and college dropout. I’ve also started two successful companies, and currently serve as co-founder and CEO of AdStage, a platform that connects marketers to their data across paid search and social, web analytics, and custom business metrics. 

Above all, I’m a salesman.

I’ve always been selling. In elementary school, my family moved to São Paulo, Brazil. I knew I needed to make new friends. I also knew the Pokémon craze hadn’t made it there from the states yet. So I started a Pokémon trading card ring, and before long, I had two bouncers and all the best cards.

I understood how to get the better end of a deal -- a skill I still have today. Part of sales is positioning yourself for a good outcome, whether you’re trading Pokémon cards on the playground or selling an analytics platform to digital marketers that lets them gain insight into campaign performance.

A few months ago, my company was at a crossroads. Our head of sales stepped away from the company, leaving me with two choices: Hire a replacement or tackle the role myself.

To position ourselves for a good outcome, I chose to lead the sales team. Here’s what I learned.

The Good

1) Improving Sales Conversations

An exceptional salesperson has great conversations. When you think about having an interesting dinner with someone, it’s usually because the conversation flowed well. I believe a confident and persuasive pitch is no different. It’s all about finding and maintaining the right cadence. I needed my sales team to take the same approach to conversations with prospects.

Whether you’re a CEO or simply hold a sales leadership position, it’s important to coach your reps on having great conversations with their prospects. Immediately after joining the team, I scheduled a bunch of sales calls for myself and sat in on many as well.

I knew we could do better. I dissected what we were doing and took time to work with each of our reps on the human aspect of a sale, not simply on how to close business. Getting a deal done is a byproduct of a great conversation with an appropriate value exchange (i.e., software for money).

I also wrote a new fleet of scripts and a sales deck everyone started learning from scratch. We saw an immediate change in our calls. Prospects became excited about what we were selling because we were excited about what we were selling.

We were having great conversations born out of newfound confidence, which brings me to my next point.

2) Gaining Confidence

To be successful in sales, you have to be confident in what you’re selling. That was something our team was missing. There’s the good, the bad, and the ugly in every product. Our sales team was caught up on the ugly, and that showed up in every demo.

When I joined the team, my priority was to raise our confidence. I started by getting rid of the ugly -- shuttering products that had been weighing us down for years.

As CEO, I was uniquely positioned to advocate to our management team and make this call. If you’re a sales leader, but not the CEO, there are several ways you can lobby your point of view.

First, share a presentation with decision makers and outline the "why" and "how" behind adjusting your processes or product line. Second, mentor and train your reps to focus on the best parts of your product. This decreases your surface area for failure or misalignment with prospects.

Third, be confident in expressing your opinions and educating others. And finally, make sure you have the data to back up your points. Don’t take the easy route of critiquing without any suggested solutions.

When we eliminated the “ugly,” we were left with a product we were proud to sell. Not only did our confidence skyrocket, but we could justify raising our prices substantially.

3) Getting Visibility into the Business

As CEO, it’s easy to lose track of the daily inner workings of your business. When I joined the sales team, I had to learn how to use our CRM. I learned how contracts worked at a billing level. Hell, I even learned how to put together a contract the right way.

Having this level of clarity into the company uncovered inefficiencies that needed to be addressed. It also taught me how to position our company better when speaking to potential investors or board members.

Leading sales calls every day gives me insight and feedback from our prospects and clients. That’s something I hadn’t been getting from the occasional testimonial or new deal announcement sliding down Slack.

4) Saving Money

The good thing about a CEO running the sales team is that they’ll do anything (legal and positive) to ensure the company’s success. And, usually, they won’t put themselves on the comp plan.

If we had hired a new head of sales, we would have paid their salary in addition to paying out their bonus structure. As CEO, I accepted the role without adjusting my pay or taking commission on deals I close.

These are the decisions that make your board happy and show investors you’re willing to do whatever it takes to make your company lean and healthy.

There will be a day when it’s no longer the smart or economical decision for me to remain as head of sales. However, we’re not there yet, and the learning opportunity is too large to pass up.

The Bad

1) Adapting to Change

It was important for me to be adaptable when I joined the team. I needed to walk the line of shaking things up and doubling down on what was already working. That was tough for me to get a handle on.

For example, our previous head of sales had implemented a set of really strong processes. As we were making massive changes to our product and how we sold that product, it was easy to want to throw out some of those processes -- even when they were working.

For example, we had a great commission plan that was serving the team well. My initial reaction was that we needed to implement a new plan to accompany our new approach to selling. In reality, the compensation plan was working just fine, and our time and resources were better spent elsewhere.

It was a lesson to me that I needed to adapt to successful existing sales processes like our reps were adapting to my new sales strategy.

2) Knowing When to Hold Back

Similarly, as a CEO, I tend to want to impose my ideals on other people. A huge challenge for me -- and one that I’m better because of -- was knowing when to assert my opinion and when to yield or activate others to solve the problem.

When I composed and implemented our new scripts, I was really into the details of each call track. But it was important that our sales team put their own spin on the scripts.

That was a moment where I had to pause and make sure I was promoting individuality while keeping the way we talk about the product cohesive.

3) Managing My Time

In addition to leading our sales team, I maintain the normal duties of a CEO at a high-growth startup. It’s hard to balance those responsibilities, but I think most salespeople are hyper-competitive and thrive off a good challenge.

Some days it’s difficult to assess the personalities and career goals of my direct sales reports and those in different departments and prep for a meeting with potential investors or partners.

On those days, it would be easy for me to have someone else log the deal I just closed. As CEO, those are liberties I could take. But I’ve been careful not to cross that line.

It’s important to lead by example. The rest of the team notices how I handle my workload, so I make it a priority not to cut corners. For me, nothing beats hard work.

The Surprising

I’ve noticed when I’m excited about the day-to-day of our company, so is everyone else. Leading the sales team as CEO allows me to share that enthusiasm with my team and the company.

Taking over sales also gave me a renewed obsession with the business. There were so many places where I wondered, “Why weren’t we doing this earlier?” This wasn’t a knock on the team before me. It was a revelation that, “We can be doing even better.”

It’s not without its challenges, but at AdStage, being the CEO and head of sales has truly enabled us to provide a best-in-class product and customer experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term that strikes fear into the hearts of many a salesperson. The concern over this advanced technology is whether or not AI has the ability to take over your job. Or at least make most human components of the sales process as we know it obsolete.

What most people don’t realize is that AI is one of the most powerful and underutilized sales tools available today. In fact, Gartner, a renowned research firm, estimates that only 5-10% of businesses are taking advantage of this insanely beneficial technology.

If you’re still skeptical of AI, the good news is that your nightmare scenario will never happen – artificial intelligence, regardless of its IQ, will never be an effective substitute for real relationship building.

There is, however, a lot to be gained from adding artificial intelligence to your sales strategy. As such, companies that plan on leveraging the benefits of AI will need to take a step back and make a few adjustments to the way that they manage sales performance on a daily basis.

Greater Data Focus

The cornerstone of any effective AI program is data. AI can take the guesswork out of sales, but only if the CRM program you use for data storage and collection has achieved a high adoption rate within your department.

AI will impact the sales function by requiring sales teams to pay greater attention to the data they’re collecting. Not just any data will do – you’ll need high volume and high quality to take full advantage of these programs. Focusing on the quality and quantity of your data is helpful for artificial intelligence programs because it helps their insights to be as accurate as humanly (or robot-ly) possible.

We recently discussed the types of data that often get overlooked when updating your records. For example, tracking how quickly a client moves from one stage of the sales funnel to another isn’t something that most sales reps track, but they really should. The benefits of including details like this include some impressive feats, like visual stage duration reporting, which is the kind of advantage only top-notch, data-focused CRMs can provide.

Actionable Recommendations

AI is best known for its ability to provide predictive analytics. The main purpose of predictive analytics is to provide sales models based on historical information that anticipate, with significant probability, the outcome of many given scenarios faced by your sales team.

The next generation of sales intelligence is called prescriptive insights. Prescriptive sales insights prescribe the exact actions that a sales team can take to achieve a desired outcome. Whether you’re behind on your quarterly goals or unclear on how to best use the talents of your sales team, AI can provide you with an actionable recommendation as to what levers to pull to achieve a particular goal.

Knowing that the path to 10% greater contract value is faster time to outreach, or that the way to achieve $20k more revenue this quarter is to provide reps with more training around a certain vertical, saves a lot of time and energy from manually digging into sales metrics and running what-if scenarios. These insightful recommendations provide sales teams with the power to make inherently smarter, repeatable and scalable sales decisions.

Enhanced Productivity

Another way that AI can impact salespeople’s jobs is by enabling them to shift focus from number crunching and important yet time consuming tasks to building relationships and closing deals. For example, technology like machine learning and natural language processing powers email sentiment analysis, which scans reps’ emails for negative keywords and then alerts them of deals in potential danger.

Your AI can also help save you time and better prioritize your to do list with lead scoring. It does so by taking a comprehensive look at your sales history and scoring leads based on criteria found in common between your won and lost deals. This criteria can include industry, company size, content downloads, website visits and much, much more.

This kind of data analysis can also provide win rate prediction for better quality forecasting so you can pinpoint which clients to focus on. With the help of AI, you’ll be able to track your expected number of sales compared to your actual progress as well as your total pipeline worth in seconds.

Fear Not

Contrary to popular belief, when used in these three ways, artificial intelligence has the potential to make sales reps better at their jobs – not take their jobs. To learn more about how AI is improving sales, download this free resource: Beyond Predictive Analytics: Why the Future of AI in Sales Is Prescriptive.

More and now.

These are two words heavily embedded in the mind of anyone in business. For new companies, it’s “how fast can we get more customers?” and “how fast can we grow now?”. Countless articles and publications praise companies that have been able to grow quickly. Their ability to accomplish more, now, is revered. Rightly so.

The problem is that when we focus solely on growth, we tend to overestimate the stability of our infrastructure and underestimate the adaptations needed to support new business. We assume our current team and systems are sufficient (and efficient) because they’ve supported previous demand. We neglect to properly plan ahead.

One consistently overlooked area is the state and scalability of our human capital – our employees. When companies grow, added pressure is put on the existing team. Not only must they maintain the same level of performance on their current project, but also be prepared to guide new team members and support multiple projects. How can this be done effectively?

Challenge your team to do things more efficiently in periods between growth.

As leaders, we need to encourage our team to pause, review, and improve. It’s our job to make sure they are prepared and not overwhelmed when things heat up. This is not a call to stop all quests for growth! It’s a suggestion that business leaders balance periods of growth with periods of reflection. During this pause, we are able to strengthen our internal base, in order to better support customers in the long term.

So, where do we start?

Let’s break down what we really need: team knowledge and a means to maximize it. Whether for training or process improvement, preparing your human capital comes down to leveraging the expertise you already have. Since this important know-how is stored in the minds of your employees, it’s a leader’s responsibility to make sure this can be easily accessed and shared.

This may feel daunting, but a systematic approach can lighten the load. Below, I’ve outlined the high-level process we use with our clients here at Lessonly.

Define your universe. What people, positions, or processes are you interested in focusing on? This can include:

• People: Who are your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)? Where are the knowledge silos? If they left today, would your department or company fall apart?

• Positions: What positions will you be hiring for? What are your ramp-up expectations? What training would best support that ramp?

• Processes: Where do you see duplicate effort in your organization? Where is there uncertainty? What is costing you money, and where are issues coming from? Ask your employees for their input and ideas.

Prioritize your focus. Once you’ve defined your universe, look at where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck. What will have the greatest impact on your business. This will not only help you focus your efforts, but understand what type of online training software you’ll need to allow this training and content to be created, managed, and maintained. This type of work prioritization has been on the rise in the form of Agile. Primarily used by software development teams, Agile is a practice that helps teams decide what projects are most important to accomplishing the overall goal. The same approach needs to be applied to company content creation. Is a lesson about how to use the office coffeemaker as important as a lesson about product pricing and positioning? Probably not.

Ownership and Timeline. Now that you have identified your priorities, it’s time to decide who will create that content, and by when. In a democratized LMS like Lessonly, SMEs create content for the subjects they know so well. This allows more content to be created, and for more dynamic content to stay up-to-date.

This LMS ‘philosophy’ is supported by research that suggests learners relate better to user-generated content. First-hand employee experiences are more useful to new hires and can help them get up-to-speed and contribute to the team faster.

Communicating the impact. With your plan in hand, it’s important to communicate with your team and get their buy-in. This includes sharing:

• Areas of focus, and the reasons behind that focus
• The desired impact, and the KPIs of that impact
• The plan to realize these changes
• Expectations for their role in the project

Once you’ve gained commitment from your team, you can tie these responsibilities to individual annual performance goals as they align with your company initiatives. Since joining Lessonly, I’ve found our marketing team is invaluable for helping enable our sales and CX teams to clearly communicate Lessonly’s value to customers. Between new product launches and lessons built around how to better sell Lessonly, these types of enablement lessons go beyond simply notifying us that a new feature is available. Instead they provide context as to why it was developed, the value it brings or problem it solves, and why our role in supporting it is important. The end result is that it fills us with purpose and we are motivated to do a great job.

After communicating the project and getting your team onboard, follow the plan you established and presented. Have quarterly check-ins to discuss progress and make any tweaks to ensure the plan is still aligned with your organization’s needs.

Following this process allows you to approach growth intentionally and ensure your foundation from which to build is solid. As existing processes are optimized and knowledge silos are eliminated, your employees will become more efficient and your new team members will have the training they need to get up to speed, perform at high levels, and ultimately support your goals.

Remember: Don’t forget the power of pause!

The post How Patience Powers Long-Term Growth: Optimizing the In Between appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Sales is evolving. The days of fast-talking, railroading salespeople is gone. Today’s buyers won’t stand for being bullied into a deal.

That’s where the empathy statement comes in. If your idea of empathy is throwing an “uh-huh” or “I see” into your conversations every few minutes, think again.

Below, I’ve rounded up a few empathetic statements every salesperson should use. They’ll show your prospects you’re more invested in their interests than closing a deal -- and that’s what will set you apart in today’s competitive sales landscape.

21 Examples of Empathy Statements in Sales

1. “Thank you for staying so positive.”

Every deal has ups and downs. Your prospect may work with someone who’s championing another company. Or their budget may have been reallocated, leaving them struggling to cover the price of your product/service.

When these situations arise, thank your prospect for staying positive -- even if they’re having a hard time doing so. They’ll appreciate you’ve noticed the difficult position they’re in, and you’ll encourage them to continue dealing with it constructively.

2. “You’ve been with [Company] for [# of years]. That’s a long time.”

Leaving a longtime vendor relationship can be tough. Show your prospect you understand and are honored to be considered as a replacement. You can also use this approach when their tenure with another company is only a few months.

Say something like, “You’ve been with [Company] for [# of months]. I know you’re not shopping again because you love talking to salespeople. Tell me more about what prompted this search for a new product/service.”

If they’re looking for a new vendor so soon, your prospect is probably dealing with some fallout on their end, so a little humor will be appreciated before you get serious about what their needs are.

3. “If I were in your position, I bet I’d have the same concerns.”

It can be tough to stay positive when you hear the same objections repeatedly or are hearing your fifth objection of the day. But step into your prospect’s shoes for a moment.

Remember they’re considering your product/service for the first time, and show them you understand where they’re coming from. By validating their concerns before giving a well-worn rebuttal or solution, you’ll build trust and rapport.

4. “That would be frustrating to me too.”

If your prospect is frustrated with your product/service or with the sales process itself, start by understanding where they’re coming from. Validate their frustration before telling them what you’re going to do about it.

For example, if your product experienced a bug during the prospect’s free trial and they’re frustrated about it, respond with, “That would frustrate me too. (Pause) Let me tell you why this happened and what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again.”

5. “I think you might find [feature, offer, or content] helpful in this situation.”

When your prospect is facing a roadblock -- in their work, with your product/service, or in the sales process -- don’t just be empathetic, offer a solution.

For example, if your prospect is expressing concern that a competitor offers a feature you don’t, reply with, “You’re right, we don’t have X feature. But I think you might find Y feature serves a similar purpose and also does A, B, and C. A lot of our customers prefer Y feature over [competitor]’s X feature.”

You’ve affirmed that your prospect is right, and you’ve presented a solution. Avoid the temptation to get defensive and lash out with, “Well actually our Y feature does pretty much the same thing as their X feature, and our clients think it’s way better.”

6. “If I can make a suggestion …”

When you’ve been selling for a few years and hear similar objections and feedback every day, it’s easy to steamroll ahead of client concerns with solutions or canned replies.

Before you share that response you’ve given 50 times this week, pause and say, “Uh-huh, that’s a great point. If I can make a suggestion, you might find this article on our blog helpful. I’ll send it to you after our call.”

Your response instantly feels personalized to their concerns and you’ve shown that you really listened to their question.

7. “How can I make this process easier for you?”

This is a question you should be asking at every stage of the sales process. Close your discovery call with it, ask it in your presentation, and make sure to include it as you’re working on the contract.

Buying a product/service is usually a lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive process. Do everything you can to make your prospect feel supported through it all.

8. “What’s the best-case scenario for your company?”

This is a great question to ask in the discovery call. When you’re determining your prospect’s needs, wants, and business goals, slip this question in. It demonstrates you’re thinking about long-term success for their company beyond meeting two or three key needs.

9. “How am I doing so far? Am I meeting your needs?”

This is another question to ask often throughout the sales process. Once you finish making a key point about what sets your service apart from the competition or demonstrating a technical portion of your product, pause and check in with your prospect to make sure they’re following.

To really make this question impactful, also ask them if you’re providing value to them. It’ll surprise and delight your prospect and serve as an indicator of success for you.

10. “Is our product/service meeting your needs so far?”

The most important goal of selling is to ensure that your product/service is going to meet your prospect’s needs. Throughout the sales process, say to your prospect, “I’ve given you a lot of information about Harvey’s Moving Company. Are we still ticking off all the boxes for you? Are there any gaps?”

This protects you from being blindsided by their concerns later in the process, and it ensures your offering is still giving your prospect what they require.

11. “So, if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying …”

You should work this phrase into every conversation you have with a prospect. Too often, salespeople hear important questions, assume they’ve understood, and forge ahead with an answer that may or may not be giving your prospect the information they need.

Don’t risk alienating your prospect or making them feel unheard. Instead, clarify their question with, “So what I’m hearing is this: [Restate their question]. Is that correct?“

12. “I can help with that.”

Show you’re ready and willing to help when your prospect needs it most. If they have a question about the block of customer service hours they’re allotted each month, or if they’re having trouble logging into your product during their trial, reply with a friendly, “I can help with that.”

Even if you have to take their question or issue to someone else on your team, you should remain their advocate and main point of contact. This ensures they get the answers they need quickly and offers them a sneak peek of the customer service they can look forward to with your company.

13. “Hold on one second while I check that for you.”

Does your prospect have a problem you can help them with immediately?

Let them know that. If a prospect says they can’t find the complete list of tiered service packages you sent, tell them, “Hold on one second while I send another link right over.” If you can assist them in the moment, do it. Your attentiveness and sense of urgency will stand out.

14. “I really want to help here. Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

You’ve probably been in this scenario: A prospect asks you a question and you either don’t know the answer or don’t quite understand what their question is.

Instead of saying “I don’t understand” or “I’m not following,” tell them “I really want to help here. Can I ask you a few more questions about the problem you’re facing?” Your prospect will feel heard, and you’ll feel relieved when you finally understand what they’re asking.

15. “If I skip anything important, please stop me and let me know.”

Prospects can feel uncomfortable or rude interrupting to say they don’t understand or you’re not answering their question.

To save you both time and discomfort, set expectations before you begin a phone conversation or in-person demonstration. Let them know their interruptions are welcome and encouraged, and you’ll enjoy an open and honest conversation with your prospect.

16) “Here’s what I’m going to do to get this answer for you.”

There are some situations in which it might take days or even weeks to find an answer to a prospect’s question. In these situations, clearly communicate what you’re doing to get them the information they’ve asked for.

End your initial conversation with, “Here are the steps I’m going to take to find an answer for you.” Then, check in every few days with an update of: “Here’s what I’ve been doing to find an answer to your question about our update timeline for X feature.”

You’ll appear organized and on top of things. And you’ll let the customer know their question is a priority.

17) “I’m glad to hear that.”

When a prospect expresses that either you or your product/service is doing something right it’s easy to humbly say “Thanks” and quickly move the conversation along.

Stop and acknowledge the praise they’ve given you with “I’m glad to hear that” or “I’m so glad we’ve met X need with Y service.” You want to make your prospect feel heard and acknowledged, and that doesn’t stop when they’re complimenting you.

18. “Thanks for giving me a moment of your time, [name].”

You already know your prospect’s time is valuable, so don’t forget to thank them for it. Instead of closing with “I’ll be in touch” or “I’ll follow up with an email of next steps,” make sure the last thing you say to your prospect is how thankful you are for the valuable time they’ve given you.

19. "I appreciate the points your making, but would you mind if we got back to the subject at hand?"

Every meeting you hold should have an agenda, but you've probably experienced a rogue attendee who hijacks the conversation with inconsequential questions or concerns. This is a delicate position to be in, but it's your responsibility to get things back on track. 

You don't want to offend the rogue attendee, but you should be firm. Interject with, "I'm happy to speak to these concerns after the meeting, but, to be respectful of everyone's time and expectations, we should get back to our agenda items."

20. "Is [product/solution] is meeting your needs? How can I help?"

Your work doesn't end once you've closed the deal. Check in with your new customers a few weeks after they've implemented your solution and make sure it's meeting their needs/expectations. Now is also the perfect time to proactively offer your help. If they're experiencing a problem, do your best to solve it on the spot or put them in touch with someone who can. This is the best way to win renewals and upsells. 

21. "I appreciate your time."

You'll hear arguments against saying this, because, "Your time is just as valuable as your prospects." But, if you ask me, thanking busy prospects for carving out time in their day to meet with a salesperson is just good manners.

To move a deal forward you have to create an emotional connection with your prospect. One of the easiest ways to build that connection is with empathy statements. Try a few in your next call or meeting, and see what they do to forge stronger bonds.

Many marketers understand the power of implementing automated drip campaigns to turn leads into customers by moving them through the sales cycle. Truly successful marketers know the best bang for your marketing buck comes from using drip campaigns to nurture existing customers.

Why?

Smart marketers know that it’s easier and more cost effective to sell to existing customers than it is to cultivate new leads. How much easier and more effective? According to the authors of Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% while the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.

That’s math anyone can understand and it’s a process that begins with onboarding new customers.

Of course, successful customer drip campaigns start with a content marketing strategy that guides your efforts and keeps you focused on what you want to accomplish with your drip. Beginning with a well-defined strategy allows you to create drip campaigns that respond to the specific needs and interests of specific customers.

In this blog, I’ll give a deeper dive into how to create a drip campaign with your existing customers in mind. 

Begin With the End in Mind

When creating drip campaigns set expectations from the very beginning and provide additional value from the start of what should be a long and valuable relationship.

• Welcome Email
  A well-crafted welcome email should give customers exactly what they’re looking for–plus a little something extra that acts as a “thank you” for becoming a customer. Provide them with all the information they need to get started then offer a link to supporting content or access to educational content such as a white paper or ebook. Sometimes all you need to add is information on how to contact support if the customer needs help or has questions. Another way to welcome and thank new customers is to provide an offer or discount on future purchases. However, don’t underestimate the power and value of simply providing useful content.
• Blogs
  Welcome emails are also a great way to introduce new customers to your blog.  Provide new clients with a link to a sample blog post that is relevant to them. That blog post should contain links to other posts on the same or similar topics. Evergreen blog posts should be part of your overall strategy because they can be used in multiple ways to help current and potential customers. A great evergreen post can drive valuable traffic to your site for years—both through SEO and in your email nurture program.
• Segment and Set Rules
  Content segmentation allows you to personalize and tailor campaigns to specific audiences. Use your marketing automation platform to set rules and triggers to ensure you proactively deliver relevant, specific content that matches your customers’ viewing and search behaviors while they are on your website. Serving your customers relevant content can help move them closer to another sale.

Offer Solutions and Establish Thought Leadership

Drip campaigns are excellent for promoting useful content that establishes you as a valued thought leader. Build trust and deepen relationships with well-planned nurtures. Here are a few helpful tips to get you started.

• Don’t Sell
  If you want to establish long and profitable relationships with your customers, create helpful drip campaigns that educate and inform them on topics, industry issues, and solutions to their problems. By providing valuable information, you’ll reinforce the importance of your relationship and greatly increase the odds that your customer will return.
• Exclusive Content
  By offering exclusive client-only content, you kill two birds with one stone by taking advantage of the most powerful tools of influence: scarcity and reciprocation. Recipients are more likely to open exclusive content. The fact that it is exclusive suggests the content is extremely valuable. Exclusive content also plays into your customers’ egos. By offering them special, “for-your-eyes-only” content, you’ve made them feel unique and valued. This special offer can increase the odds of reciprocation by your customers through new and purchases or return visits to your site.
• Link to Important Blog Posts
  Knowledge is power. Providing customers with links to helpful blog posts is one of the easiest ways to give them access to information that can help them succeed. Make no mistake about it, in the eyes of the customer, you haven’t just given them a post, you’ve given them a gift. A simple link gives your customer access to a no-strings-attached gift that helps them and builds goodwill with your brand.

It’s A New Dawn, It’s A New Day, and Your Email’s Feeling Good

Feel-good emails are a great tool for building rapport, trust, and confidence with your customers. What’s a feel-good email? Here are examples of just four proven emails that make your customer feel appreciated and top-of-mind.

• Anniversary Emails
  Emails celebrating anniversaries and other milestones are great for increasing engagement. The secret to successful anniversary-style emails is to make sure they’re all about celebrating the customer, not your company, product, or service. Done correctly, anniversary emails make the customer feel important, appreciated, and part of the family.
• Holiday Emails
  The problem with most holiday emails is they just seem to be celebrating Spam Day. Great holiday emails know how to break through the noise by connecting emotionally with the spirit of the holiday. Don’t make your email about just another sale. Make it exclusive to your customer’s preferences through segmentation. Whether you’re offering an exclusive discount, a free gift or unique content, donating proceeds to a charity, or simply seasons greeting, holiday emails should be about the spirit of the holiday and not commercialization.
• Industry-Related Event Reminders
  Event reminders are thoughtful, useful, and an easy way to get a big relationship return on almost no investment. They provide valuable information that can benefit your customer and let them know you think of them as part of a bigger family. Even if they don’t attend the event, this is one of those emails where it’s the thought that counts.
• Client Newsletters
  Newsletters are a lot like magicians: most are bad, uninteresting, and intrusive. But the great ones are nothing short of amazing. You can find a lot of examples of great newsletters online. Here are three solid rules of thumb to get you started:
  1. Your subject line is the most import content in your newsletter. The subject is often the determining factor for whether a recipient opens it or not. Spend as much time on your subject line as you do on your content.
  2. 90% of your newsletter should be useful, relevant content, and only 10% should be an offer or company specific.
  3. Make your opt-out easy or all of your content will start looking like spam.

The Write Stuff

Remember: it’s far more cost effective to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, so customer drip campaigns are not the place to “fake it ‘til you make it.”

Your success relies on providing real, valuable content. Anything less will set off your customers’ insincerity meter and risk creating the perception that all of your content belongs in the junk folder. Give content the short stick and your clients will likely do the same for you.

How have you utilized drip campaigns with your existing customers? What successes have you seen with this engagement strategy? Tell me about your experiences below in the comments.

 

The post How to Use Drip Campaigns to Nurture Existing Customers appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Last night Amy and I hosted an event at our house for the ACLU and Earthjustice, two organizations we are significant supporters of. If you told me 20 years ago that I’d be spending a lot of my philanthropic energy supporting lawyers, I would have aggressively rejected the notion. But if you had described what is going on in the US right now, I would have also aggressively rejected the notion.

Since the election, Amy has had a great tagline for me.

Action is the antidote.

She’s amazing and the energy she puts behind this is unwavering. I’m extremely fortunate to have her as my life partner – it buoys me up regularly, especially around things that I might otherwise just ignore.

Last night’s event was great. We heard from David Cole (the ACLU Legal Director) and Patrice Simms (the Earthjustice VP of Litigation). Like me, they are each long-term optimists so their perspective is not just about tomorrow (although much of their focus is on today and tomorrow).

In the middle of the discussion. David mentioned a quote that he attributed to Cornel West and Roberto Unger from their 1998 book titled  The Future of American Progressivism. The quote, which is the title of this post, is “Hope is the consequence of action.” I believe, but am not certain, that it comes from this passage:

“Change requires neither saintliness nor genius. What it does require is the conviction of the incomparable value of life. Nothing should matter more to us than the attempt to grasp our life while we have it, and to awaken from the slumber of routine, of compromise and prostration, so that we may die only once. Hope is not the condition or cause of action. Hope is the consequence of action. And those who fail in hope should act, practically or conceptually, so that they may hope.”

David deconstructed this to explain that action doesn’t come from hope, but hope comes from action. Chew on that for a bit – it’s important in every context, not just politics. Apply it to any situation – work or personal; exogenous or endogenous; positive or negative. Take action, which will generate hope, rather than use your hope to generate action.

When I think about my life and my work, it applies. I take action all the time, and that’s what creates hope and makes me optimistic.

If you are inspired by this, I’ll leave you with a recent Cornel West talk at the most recent Harvard Divinity School’s Convocation address.

The post Hope Is The Consequence of Action appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Psychology research that will help you subtly convince your leads

Ever wanted to get into the minds of your customers and figure out how they think? Ever wanted to know the best methods to convince someone to do something?

As the study of the human mind and behavior, psychology has answers to what you're looking for. Psychology is applicable to a wide range of fields, from daily life to counseling to human resources. But what you're probably more concerned about is the intersection of psychology and marketing

1. Relate to your customer

Goldstein, Cialdini, and Griskevicius (2008) conducted a study on Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels. In particular, they tried to determine what kind of message would get hotel guests to reuse their towels. They used three variations, paraphrased below:

• Standard message: 'help save the environment'
• 75% of hotel guests in this hotel reuse their towels
• 75% of hotel guests in this room reuse their towels

Messages that related to the participant - other guests reuses towels - increased participants reusing them by 10-15%.

How does this apply to marketing?

This phenomenon where people tend to view others who are similar to them more favorably is called in-group favoritism.

All in all, the best way to motivate your customers to do something is to say that customers in their situation have done so. Try to find common ground and draw similarities among your customers as well as between your company and your customers.

2. Start small

This is commonly known as the foot-in-the-door technique.

Freedman and Fraser (1966) knocked on doors asking if residents could do something small, such as sign a petition or put a sticker on their windows. For their control group, they skipped some houses and didn't speak to them at all.

Sometime later, Freedman and Fraser went to the exact same houses with a larger request, such as putting a large sign on their lawn, which was either related to the same issue as the previous request or related to a different issue.

They found that people whom they had already approached were much more willing to agree to their large request, nearly 3 times more willing if the request pertained to a different issue and more than 4 times more willing if the request pertained to the same issue!

How does this apply to marketing?

Starting small and then gradually scaling up your requests is one way to convince your customers to do something. We see examples of this everywhere. First, a non-profit organization simply asks for your email address. Next, they keep you updated regarding their events and progress. Before you know it, they're asking you to donate.

The opposite of the foot-in-the-door technique is the door-in-the-face technique, where instead of starting small, you start big. You make a large request from the get-go, maybe something ridiculous that the customer unsurprisingly turns down. Then, you make a smaller request. In this case, the customer is more likely to agree to your smaller request since it's much less ridiculous than the large request you started off with.

3. Use random reward schedules

You know those stamp cards that some restaurants and coffee shops give you that allow you to get a free drink on the 10th time you come? Actually, although those cards can be effective, they're not the most effective way of incentivizing customers to come back. Instead of having a fixed ratio reinforcement schedule, where customers get rewarded every 10th time they come, you should have variable reinforcement, where customers get rewarded randomly.

This draws on a concept called operant conditioning in psychology, where we learn to associate our behaviors with events, for example, associating going back to a restaurant with getting a free drink. Operant conditioning commonly involves rewarding a behavior to get more of that behavior.

Skinner showed this by rewarding a mouse with food in two different ways:

• rewarding every 5th time it pressed a bar (fixed ratio scheduled)
• rewarding randomly (variable reinforcement).

He found that the second option was more long-lasting and required less reinforcement (less food)!

How does this apply to marketing?

Although humans and animals are very different, we are also very similar. Imagine if a restaurant didn't tell us when they're going to give us a free drink. We'd probably be going back as much as we could to maximize our chances of getting that free drink! Cereal brands and Willy Wonka's chocolate factory take advantage of variable reinforcement by putting golden tickets in some of their cereal boxes or candy bars, spurring us to want to buy more for a shot to win!

4. Frame your sales pitches in an appealing way

Consider two different situations below.

The original price of the outdoor jacket is $125; $23 for the tripod. There are two different ways to pitch this:

• £113.50 for the outdoor jacket; $23 for the tripod
• $125 for the jacket; 50% OFF. $11.50 for the tripod

Which one would you be more willing to buy if you had to drive 20 minutes to the store?

This adapted example is based on Kahneman and Tversky's (1984) study. They found that 68% of respondents were willing to buy the tripod whereas only 29% were willing to buy the jacket. You might've realized that in both cases, consumers are saving the same amount: $11.50!

The point is that consumers think about gains and losses in relative terms, not absolute terms. In other words, they think in percentages, not dollars. A discount of $11.50 for the tripod is a larger percentage than a discount of $11.50 for the jacket.

When coming up with your sales pitches and marketing messages, be sure to take this into account! Think of more appealing ways of framing your messages - even if your messages are describing the same thing!

5. Appeal to your customers' senses

Sight

Sight comes first because it's probably the most important and effective sense for us. Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, and Oliva (2008) conducted an experiment where they flashed images of objects to participants. The images below are examples of ones that they flashed.

After flashing a certain number of images, the researchers then presented 2 similar images to participants. One image was an actual image that was flashed but the other was one that looked similar to the actual image that was flashed. They then asked participants, of the two images below, which was the one that you actually saw?

They found that participants were shockingly accurate at identifying the images that were actually flashed and were not fooled by images that were incredibly similar. In other words, they remembered the visual details of the images that were flashed and could distinguish subtle differences between the images that were flashed and the images that looked similar but were not actually flashed. In fact, for 2,500 images that were flashed, the accuracy was around a whopping 90%!

Participants' responses were also very accurate when considering the number of items that appeared between the actual item and its match.

How does this apply to marketing?

What does this mean for your marketing? USE VISUALS! A lot of them! Make all of your marketing material (ads, brochures, flyers, websites, emails, blog posts, social media, etc.) visually appealing and colorful. Don't just overwhelm your audience with tons of text! Include images, videos, and other multimedia to spice things up whenever possible.

Sound

Commercial ads are great at creating jingles and sound content to get you remember the brand.

Take for instance comparison site Go Compare - their ads were featuring an irritating opera singer was the most complained about ad in 2012, yet we all find ourselves remembering the song 'Go compare':

Another example:

1-877-KARS-4-KIDS

K-A-R-S Kars4Kids

1-877-KARS-4-KIDS

Donate your car today.

I bet you sang those jingles in your head just now. How can we still remember it now?

All thanks to great marketing!

On top of that, the famous experiment with Pavlov's dogs highlighted the phenomenon of classical conditioning. Pavlov rang a bell, served his dog with meat, measured the amount of salivation, and repeated this. After several trials, he found that even if he rang a bell and didn't serve his dog with meat, his dog would still salivate. His dog had created a learned association between the bell ringing and being served meat.

We, as humans, can be classically conditioned too. If you, as a marketer, can create a jingle that gets stuck in everyone's heads for very long and creates a learned association between the jingle and your brand, then you're golden. Think about the McDonald's jingle!

6. Capture your audience's attention

Castel, Vendetti, and Holyoak (2012) surveyed employees in a building. Although the average time that the employees had worked in the building was 4.5 years, only 1 in 4 people knew where the nearest fire extinguisher was. Not devoting attention to these sorts of things could be very dangerous!

How does this apply to marketing?

Make sure to capture and direct your audience's attention. If you're writing a blog and want your audience to pay attention to an important call to action, image, video, or link, be sure to call your audience's attention to that, maybe by mentioning it explicitly in your writing or by making it stand out on the screen.

Also, don't clutter your webpages! I think we've all been victim to webpages with lots of ads and content, which can be incredibly overwhelming and make it difficult to find what exactly to focus on. In these scenarios, if I'm reading an article, for example, I find myself scrolling past and ignoring anything other than the text. But sometimes, I find out that there was an image or table I missed that was actually relevant to the article. You don't want this to happen with the amazing content you've created! Especially in this age of information overload, which has resulted in short attention spans. Strive to engage your audience and capture their undivided attention. Appealing to the senses works here as well!

7. Use eye contact

How should you use eye contact in marketing without creeping out your customers?

If you're pitching to a customer or investor, be sure to make eye contact with them. Try to incorporate eye contact into your ads and marketing material. Ever wonder why the Trix bunny and the Cap'n Crunch captain are looking down? To make eye contact with the kids who want the cereal!

8. Throw your customers an anchor

Customers that many not be knowledgeable in your field or product price range may scamble for a reference point or anchor to go off of, and if this is provided in the question, you immediately seize it and base/pivot your thinking off of that.

In psychology, this phenomenon, "activating particular representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task," is called priming, which is one way to explain anchoring. The effort of adjustment also explains the small adjustments around the anchor.

But how is this related to marketing? As shocking as this is in terms of the ethics of deciding on a criminal sentence, you can still use this in an ethical way to maximize your revenues. Let's pretend that you're on the phone with a potential customer. Let's also say that this customer might not be very knowledgeable of a suitable price range for your product. Maybe he/she doesn't know much about the pricing of competing products or the prospective value of your product. With an email, your customer would have time to do some research and think through the pricing more, but when he/she is on the phone in the hot seat, time is constrained, and he/she needs to think and respond quickly on the spot.

This would be an ideal situation for you to use anchoring. What's the best thing for you to do here? Maybe start off by suggesting a relatively high price (but not absurdly high) that sets an anchor for your customer to base off of. With little prior knowledge, he/she would use this as his/her single data point. Further thinking and discussion will likely be clustered around this reference point.

This overlaps with the door-in-the-face technique mentioned above, where you start high and then potentially negotiate a bit lower later on.

A word of caution: Be very careful in gauging whether or not your customer is knowledgeable about the field. You don't want to risk angering a knowledgeable customer by assuming he/she wasn't knowledgeable and offering a price that he/she knows is too high compared to competing products. Some knowledgeable customers might take it well, but others might not. Ultimately, starting with a relatively high price is merely a suggestion. Anchoring is backed up with empirical evidence, and you can feel free to keep it in mind and use your judgment to decide how best to adapt and apply it to your specific situations.

9. Put your audience to work

If you want someone to remember something longer, Craik and Tulving (1975) showed that you need to get them to work and put in more effort. In other words, the depth of processing is key.

Craik and Tulving showed subjects a list of words and asked them to do a task for each word. Then, they asked subjects to recall as many words as they could.

Press button 'a' if the word is in caps 'b' if not (15%), press button 'a' if word rhymes with train, 'b' if not (47%) and press button 'a' if word makes sense in "he saw a ____ in the street" (81%).

As you can see, the more work the subjects had to put into their thinking (the greater their depth of processing), the more words they remembered.

So how can you put your audience to work, but not in a dreadful way? Think about the content in your Facebook or Twitter feed that piques your interest the most. Is it the ads that are mixed into the photos of puppies on your feed? Or is it the BuzzFeed quizzes such as "Which Disney Princess Are You?"

Probably the latter! That said, think about how to incorporate similar quizzes and activities into your marketing campaigns. If you work for a laptop company, maybe you could create a quiz, "Which Laptop Are You?" In fact, if you're at any company that sells a range of products, you can create a quiz that determines "Which _____ Are You?" to help customers with their buying decisions.

Another way to apply this psychology study is to ask your audience rhetorical questions. Why are rhetorical questions so effective in ads, presentations, and more? Because they get your audience actively thinking rather than passively observing. It increases the depth of processing.

Dale's Cone of Experience summarizes this idea nicely in a visual.

The moral of the story is that making something more engaging and hands-on is more effective in getting someone to remember it. Remember: Dale's cone of experience, Strive to effectively engage your audience.

10. Invite your friends

In terms of marketing, why do you think so many marketing campaigns are founded on "Invite your friends"? The truth is that your friends have a lot of influence on you. Think about all those times you tried something new just because your friends did it and encouraged you to do it too!

Harness the power of social groups in your marketing, and you can drive the next trend.

11. Ask your customers to pay in advance

Think back to your favorite band 5 years ago. What is the maximum amount you'd pay to see them now?

Now think about your current favorite band. What is the maximum amount you'd pay to see them in 5 years?

What you're realizing now is that you probably answered a higher amount for the second question than the first, even though it doesn't really make sense rationally. Well, you're in the same boat as the subjects in a study conducted by Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson (2013).

The mean for the first question was $80 and for the second question $129.

They concluded that “participants substantially overpaid for a future opportunity to indulge a current preference.”

You could potentially take advantage of this by asking your customers to pay in advance for what they want before they have time to change their preferences!

Now, time to put the theory to practice and apply psychology to YOUR marketing!

Today, the advent of the Internet of Things and the development of AI technology has simplified implementation of big data solutions to the degree that even medium to small-scale businesses are benefiting from it. Using big data analytics, businesses can make informed decisions and better their operational efficiency in a number of ways.

Without professional expertise that will turn cutting-edge technology into actionable insights, Big Data is nothing. Today, a lot more organizations and institutions in the financial sector as well, are opening up their doors to big data and unlocking its power, thus increasing the value of a data scientist who knows how to drive the value of a large amount of information that already exists inside an institution.

Last year, McKinsey estimated that big data initiatives in the US healthcare system “could account for $300 billion to $450 billion in reduced health-care spending or 12 to 17 percent of the $2.6 trillion baselines in US health-care costs”. This is enough news to attract business owners to make use of the value that they already have.

Here is the list of 8 ways Data Science can help your business:

1. Empowers management to make better decisions

   Big data analytics acts as a trusted advisor for an organization’s strategic planning. It helps your management and staff in enhancing their analytical abilities and thereby improving their overall decision-making skills. Measuring, recording and tracking performance metrics then allow the upper management to set new goals.

2. Helps identify trends to stay competitive

   As mentioned earlier in this post, one of data analytics’ primary objectives is to determine patterns within large data sets. This is particularly useful for identifying new and emerging market trends. Once identified, these trends could become the key to gaining a competitive advantage by introducing new products and services.

3. Increases the efficiency and commitment of staff in handling core tasks and issue

   By making employees aware of benefits of using the organization’s analytics product, data science can make them more efficient at their jobs. Working with a greater insight into company goals, these employees will be able to drive more action towards core tasks and issues at every stage. Hence, improving the overall operational efficiency of your business.

4. Identifies and acts upon opportunities

   Data science is all about constantly looking for areas of improvement in the organizational workings. Also, by discovering inconsistencies with the help of Elasticsearch in the organizational processes and existing analytical systems, data scientists can introduce new ways of doing things. This, in turn, can drive innovation and allow new product development, opening profitable avenues for your company.

5. Promotes low-risk data-driven action plans

   Big data analytics has made it possible for small and big businesses to take actions based on quantifiable, data-driven evidence. Such a strategy can save a business from unnecessary tasks and sometimes foreshadow risks.

6. Validates decisions

   Apart from allowing your business to base decisions on data, analytics also helps you test these decisions by introducing variable factors, to check for flexibility and scalability. Using data science and big data solutions, you can introduce favorable changes in your organizational structure and function.

7. Helps in selecting target audience

   One of the key value props of big data analytics is how you can shape customer data to provide more insight into consumer preference and expectations. A deeper analysis of customer data can help companies in identifying and targeting audience with utmost precision using tailor-made products and services.

8. Facilitates sensible recruitment of talent

   Human resource departments are constantly at work in companies to find talent that fits the prescribed criteria. Big data has made their task simpler by providing comprehensive data profiles on individuals by merging social media, corporate profiles, and job search databases. Now your HR Department can process CVs much faster and recruit the right talent quickly and without compromises.

The above are just a few ways we think big data can help companies grow. We are living in a digital age, and having data provides you with a plan to make more money from your business. Data science will be a must for companies in a few years, who want to achieve aggressive growth in business.

Moreover, big data is also resonating with government and public-sector agencies, which is a good sign for businesses all around the world as this will help deepen the public-private collaboration in a range of fields.

Improve user retention, boost app engagement metrics and improve your bottom line.

Simply put – mobile app engagement is providing your users with a reason to keep coming back to your mobile app or open your mobile app and perform the desired action.

You must create an engagement strategy that boasts high-quality communication.

As well as this you must use the data, analytics, and insights from your users to help you to learn which part of your app engagement strategy is working the best.

App engagement is all about putting the user needs first. There’s no quick fix. It involves defining your key app KPIs. Then creating an app communication strategy that is relevant to your mobile audience.

What are the most common mobile app engagement metrics and KPIs?

If you’re looking at how to improve your mobile app engagement then you’ll be looking at improving these specific mobile application metrics.

• Active users
• Retention rate
• Session length
• Screen views per visit

In general, the more time your active users spend in your app and the more screens that they interact with, the more engaged your mobile users are.

That’s why focusing on experience, rather than just individual features is key. Let’s look at how you can increase these key app metrics.

Push notifications

Push notifications are one of the most effective ways to engage your app users. But, if misused, they are one of the quickest methods to app deletion. The truth is that many mobile apps seeking to engage their users to fall into the second category.

So how often should you send push notifications to your users?

With push notifications, it’s about providing the most value to your app audience. If your mobile users are getting value from your app then they are going to be more engaged.

That sounds obvious, yet so many app engagement strategies fail to take it into consideration. There are so many push notification services that claim that quantity is key to boosting engagement. But, this will very quickly have a negative effect if you don’t consider personalization and relevancy in your push notification strategy.

It’s also important to understand push notification statistics when trying to engage your audience.

So, let’s look at how you can engage your mobile app users by building a push notification strategy.

Only send push notifications when it’s relevant to do so

If you look at your phone right now, you’ll probably see a huge list of notifications sitting there, unanswered. Never swiped and hardly even read. If you want to engage your mobile app users you need to create a positive impression of your app in the minds of your users.

Spamming your users with push notifications isn’t the way to engage your users. You need your users to enjoy reading that notification when it comes. You need to provide them with value.

Content is key

The first step is really thinking about the content. Just because it’s the latest app feature your team created, doesn’t mean that your app users will engage with countless notifications about it.

You need to think like an app user. What do app users engage with? What do you, as an app user engage with most? Which apps on your phone are doing this best? If you can think like your users then you’ll start to get on track with your app engagement strategy.

This involves clearly defining the instance in which your mobile audience wants you to speak to them. This may involve in-app analytics and feedback, but we’ll get onto that in good time, don’t worry.

If you have a recipe app, for example. Why would you send them notifications when they are in the bank. Why would you remind them to make dinner at 11 pm at night? Why would you ask them to choose their perfect recipes when they are on holiday?

Highly targeted push notifications can increase response rates by up to 7x and will dramatically increase your app engagement rates.

But how do you control how, when why and what push notifications your mobile app users receive?

Location-based push notifications

That’s right, get yourself a platform or a service that lets you control when your users receive push notifications.

It’s simple – if your users are in highly relevant _moments _ then send them highly relevant communication. That’s it.

Let’s look at the example from above. What a difference it would make to have a recipe app that suggested you make a saved recipe when you were in the store, and lacking recipe inspiration.

That’s what your app was supposed to do, yet you aren’t giving it the change to help users in the right moment.

This is where location comes in. By predefining a number of supermarkets using a simple online platform, you can ensure that push notifications are only delivered at relevant times.

The application applies to all apps looking to implement a successful mobile app engagement strategy. Define the optimal moment for your mobile users to use your app. Send them optimal notifications ONLY in these moments. Improve engagement. Get insights and use this to inform your engagement strategy and fine-tune.

What makes a good push notification?

Let’s look at some examples of good push notifications that will keep your app users engaged.

For this, I’ve imagined some generic apps rather than real ones. Although we’d be happy to give you a specific demo for your own mobile app.

App with a physical location or venue

If your app has a real-world counterpart that was supposed to benefit from your app. Then location-based push is perfect. You probably have a good idea of how your audience uses your products or services.

A good engagement boosting example for this kind of app would be:

Of course in this example, the user receives the notification just as they enter the restaurant.

Stand-alone discovery apps

Okay, so you don’t have a retail store, just an app. That’s fine. You might need to spend some time learning how your users get the most value from your app. But that’s fine, that’s one of the most important aspects of this kind of engagement strategy (again more on that in a short while)

In this example, you’ll need to understand what engages your users best, look at the data and then rinse and repeat. An example:

In this case the micro-moment could be as they are leaving another nightlife venue. Thus avoiding spamming all the users that have decided to spend a Friday night in.

Apps with a specific function

What if your app provides a vital function? Location-based notifications can help to engage users by bringing this function to them at the best possible moment.

Here the user would be notified when they land at an airport. Those eagle-eyed amongst you might ask – how would you ensure that the user doesn’t get the notification on outbound part of the trip? Well, triggers can be based on complex location signals, in this case the second time they are seen inside the airport within a certain period.

Some homework (spoiler – it’s much easier with insights)

• What micro-moment should trigger notification delivery?
• What is the best way that you can personalize the notification based on this micro-moment?
• What is the desired goal of the push notification?
• What are the key engagement KPIs that this campaign should improve?

Re-engaging your mobile app users

One of the most effective ways that apps can improve their user retention rate is to re-engage and retain their mobile app users.

Often many apps neglect the customers that they have spent countless mobile app marketing dollars on acquiring.

After 24 hours an apps retention rate falls to 21%. By day 10 this figure drops to 7.5%. After 90 days, it’s a measly 1.89%.

Therefore a significant increase in retention rate can be the most important strategy for app owners. Rather than placing your entire budget into acquiring new users, you should be focusing on re-engaging your users. Just a small rise in app retention rates can have a huge effect on your bottom line.

Fixing your app on-boarding process

You need to ensure that the basics are in place for you to keep engaging your app audience. This means that your on-boarding process should be seamless, provide value and explain exactly what it is that your app does.

Think of these as the perfect blocks to build your app user experience. The engagement strategy is the cement that fine-tunes it and links it all together.

For a more detailed list of app on-boarding best practices check out this.

Deep linking from push to relevant in-app location

So you crafted the perfect notification. Congratulations. Your users clicked it. And it directed them to…

The app home screen.

Again it seems obvious but many apps get this completely wrong. Choose a push notification service that lets you link to highly relevant app experiences.

They probably exist in your app. So make sure you are improving the mobile app experience by allowing your users to get to it quickly.

If you want to improve app re-engagement then getting your users to notice your app is just the beginning. You’ll want to ensure that your personalised notification takes the user to the right place.

With many location-based push notification services, it’s possible to deep link to the right content based on the user’s current location.

That could be the most recent content to keep delivering your users a fresh experience and keep them engaged.

Think about your app experience

A note on personalization – ultimately your app engagement metrics will improve if you place personalization at the heart of your app engagement strategy.

This means that you need to think of the user at every point in the user journey. If you want to take your app engagement to new heights then you’ll have to personalise the user experience, clearly define your app’s KPIs and learn how your users want to engage with your app.

But that’s only the first part. How do you keep learning what your app users are engaging with and what parts of your strategy in performing best? Well, that leads me nicely onto…

In-app analytics and insights

None of the above will matter if you don’t commit to learning what works best with your users. Every app is different with different app engagement KPIs.

Analyzing your engagement data is key to building an effective app engagement strategy.

Push notifications give you valuable insights around your users. If you want to know how to improve your app user engagement then you need to understand mobile app analytics.

The feedback from your push campaigns helps you to understand what engages your mobile users.

I’m not just talking about the age, time, gender and device type of your users. Although those can sometimes be helpful.

I’m talking about understanding in which micro-moment your users are most likely to engage with your app.

Understand your app’s micro-moments

This is such valuable information. Many apps have an idea of what this moment might be. But often, their idea of what this is is quite different to what the insights say. Data should be everything for your mobile engagement strategy. And it’s time to take this data to the next level.

When you send a push notification to users and you know that your users are opening them in a certain context, this is valuable information.

These insights even go beyond your app engagement. They can help fundamentally to inform everything to do with your app growth strategy. From most important new app features to UX and monetization.

If you know that more of your users are engaging with your notifications in a certain location then you get a better idea of your app audience. You can understand them better, and hypothesize the specifics that will help to improve app engagement.

Location-based insights

In a world with over a million apps, it’s important that you leverage every piece of data that you can around app engagement. You need to make data your best friend if you want to keep developing your app engagement strategy.

If you can get data around your app users that the majority of apps can’t get access to then your onto a winner.

The truth is that many app engagement strategies fail to understand where their users go and how they behave.

Beyond basic engagement insights

For example, you might get feedback around how your users are opening your push notification, using specific in-app features, or even just opening the app.

These insights might be based on time of day, or maybe you can even get a breakdown of this data based on audience type (depending on which service you use).

But what if you could get a better insight into the mind of your user at that time? Basic insights are great, but it doesn’t always paint the perfect picture. You need to get as much data as possible if you are going to keep engaging your app users.

Location insights around app users can help drive mobile app engagement KPIs. If you can understand exactly where your users go and how they behave then you can create a better idea of how to engage them.

Engagement data that retains users

For example, let’s say you have a sports app and you might send a re-engagement notification that performs reasonably well. You look at the data available to you and you see that a sizeable chunk of these notifications were opened between 12-3pm. Now that is a great insight, but what if you could learn more?

If you layer location insights around that data you might see a more useful pattern emerge. You could see that the majority of these notifications are opened in bars, and even more specifically sports bars.

Now you can really begin to hypothesize and fine tune your value proposition. You can see that the majority of your users are using your scores app whilst they are watching a game in a bar or sports venue.

This all links back to your app engagement strategy. You have a better idea of how and where your users get the most value from your mobile app, and this helps you to develop your app engagement strategy.

By understanding your user’s behaviour you are much better placed to say which factors are most likely to boosts your app engagement KPIs.

Make sure you choose the right app engagement platform

Choose a mobile app analytics and communication platform that works for your app. You need a mobile engagement platform that allows you to reach your app users in the best possible moment and understand how your users respond and behave.

Conclusion

• Think about which app engagement metric is most important to you.
• Clearly define which aspects of your app engage your users.
• Place the user first. Think about providing value to your users rather than communicating with them for the sake of it.
• Use highly personalized notification to engage your users in the best in-app micro-moment.
• Re-engagement can be the most effective way to improve your app revenue or bottom line.
• Take a data centric approach to engagement.
• Always be ready to hypothesize and learn from your engagement data.

Follow these rules and you’ll be well on your way to creating a mobile app engagement strategy that works for your app.

Mistakes are being made. One of the biggest is the substitution of technology for the things that produce real results. This substitution, or more accurately, the replacement of mind sets and skill sets is a factor that is causing sales results to decline—even though the intention is quite the opposite.

Some are collapsing mind set and skill set into tool kits, and in doing so, they are reversing John Boyd’s axiom, “People. Ideas. Technology. In that order.” They are putting technology first, believe that technology is the idea, that automation is what is needed. This is to confuse efficiency with effectiveness, preferring things that can be counted over what cannot, what is objective over what is subjective, mostly because it can be quantified.

• The CRM is not a replacement for the relationships that are supposed to exist between the client and the person who owns that record in the CRM.
• A list of generated leads is not a substitute for a well-defined list of target accounts, or what I call dream clients, who would perceive what you do as compelling, differentiated value. Nor is it a replacement for knowing the people inside those dream clients and nurturing them.
• A slide deck put together by marketing to provide insights is not the same as a salesperson with real business acumen and situational knowledge. That slide deck is not going to be a trusted advisor, a title that is only available to those who have both trust and advice, the proof of which is determined only by the client’s experience and opinion of working with that individual.
• The social tools are not a substitute for prospecting. If anything, they are simply a tool that provides some value above the funnel, especially as it pertains to shaping mindshare if you have the content to do so. It doesn’t replace referrals, nor does it replace the need to call your dream clients to create new opportunities.
• The web demo is not a substitute for value creation, the catch-all concept for serving the client’s needs, having an excellent sales process, or knowing what commitments your dream client needs to make. The demo may remove the barrier that is physical distance but it does nothing to remove the barriers to change.

All of these technologies are important. They all have the potential to create efficiencies. None of them, however, improve effectiveness. If there is a gap in sales performance, you are not likely to find the answer in technology. That gap is a competency issue that lives inside a salesperson or salespeople, and that gap is not going to be addressed without helping the individual or individuals improve what they do and how they do it.

The post Technology Is No Substitute for Building Better Salespeople appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Before we make the decision to buy, we all go through a particular process. Marketers call that process the “sales funnel,” and it looks something like this:

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It’s essentially a simplified customer journey: the steps consumers take while deciding what to buy and from whom. At the top of the funnel are people who are yet to be exposed to your brand. At the bottom are people who are ready to buy; they just need convincing that they should buy from you.

Every stage of the funnel is important, but it’s towards the bottom of the funnel where things get really interesting. To maximize leads we need to target the top stages of the funnel, but our end goal – generating sales and revenue – only happens when we get those leads to the bottom of the funnel.

To do this, we have to nurture those leads. There are a number of ways you could do this but arguably the easiest, most effective, and most cost-effective is email. Email sequences, to be exact.

In fact, according to stats reported by HubSpot, leads nurtured with targeted content result in more than a 20% uplift in sales opportunities.

In a moment, we’re going to go through a tried-and-tested process for nurturing leads and driving bottom-of-funnel results from your blog; but first, let’s touch on one of the most important factors in creating blog content that converts:

Creating Better Content

Your ability to generate and nurture leads is dependent in large part on the quality of your content. After all, if your readers aren’t getting value from your content, why would they want anything else from you?

This means that if your content isn’t up to scratch, improving it is the first step in driving bottom-of-funnel results from your blog.

So what constitutes “better content”?

It should be long-form

Long-form content is more detailed than short-form, and, consequently, offers more value to the reader. There’s also more content for search engines to read and analyze, which typically translates to better rankings and more traffic.

While there’s no hard-and-fast rule as to what constitutes long-form content, most marketers agree that 1500 words and up is a good figure to aim for.

It should include images

They help illustrate points and break up text, making it easier to read. Use them.

It should feature examples

Simplify difficult processes with screenshots, or, failing that, easy-to-follow bullet point or numbered lists.

It should be actionable

Explain to readers how they can put the suggestions you make into practice.

It should feature new ideas

Be as original as you can. Try to avoid focusing on ideas and strategies that your target audience has heard 1000 times already.

The points it includes should be proven

Legitimize your points and arguments with real-world examples and case studies.

It should be personal and tell a story

Why have you written this content? Why should people listen to what you have to say on this subject? Personalize your content by framing it in the context of your story.

Once your content’s ticking all the boxes above, you should be ready to start using it to drive bottom-of-funnel results from your blog. Let’s talk about how.

Using Your Blog as a Lead Generation Tool

Before you can nurture a lead, you have to capture it. Your blog is doing the grunt work for you – it’s either driving people to the site, or engaging those that are already on it. Your next challenge is to learn a little bit more about those visitors by getting them to hand over their details.

1. VIP demos

This tool is designed specifically to drive leads from bottom-of-funnel blog content. By this I mean content aimed at potential customers that are seriously considering buying from you.

To capture those bottom-of-funnel visitors, you need to enhance your content with CTAs (which might sit above, below or in the sidebar of the content, or in a pop-up) that invite the visitor to sign up for a one-on-one VIP product demo.

This CTA should take the user to a short form. Exactly what that form contains is up to you but in this context it makes sense to ask for the prospect’s name, email address, and industry.

Anyone who completes that form gets placed in a segmented email list which will trigger an email sequence designed to set up a date and time for the demo.

1. Blog subscriptions

This tool can be used to drive leads at all stages of the funnel, although its effectiveness increases as prospects move down the funnel and become more familiar with your company and content.

Simply put, offering blog subscriptions as a lead generation tool works because readers will subscribe to get more of what they want.

As with the VIP demo tool, place CTAs above, below, in the sidebar of the content, or in a popup (or a combination of all four).

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A short signup form should be contained within that CTA. All you really need is the subscriber’s email address, but for the purpose of lead nurturing it helps to get their first name, too. That said, if in doubt remember that shorter is always better.

“Every field you ask them to fill increases friction. The best thing you can do to improve conversions is to get rid of as many fields as possible.” Peep Laja, ConversionXL

Again, once a visitor completes the form they will be placed in a segmented email list and a sequence of targeted emails will follow.

3.Content upgrades

Content upgrades are an article-specific lead generation tool. By that I mean that each content upgrade is tied to the article it appears on. It’s especially effective when tied to in-depth content (or 10x content) and listicles.

Brian Dean explains in detail what a content upgrade is and how they work here; however, in short, they are a piece of paywall-hidden content that accompanies and enhances the article it’s linked to.

The upgrade itself could simply be the article in a downloadable PDF. Alternatively, it might be a downloadable checklist or “bonus” points or tips.

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Exactly what the upgrade is doesn’t really matter, so long as it genuinely adds value to the user. What does matter is that it’s being used correctly to capture that user’s details so they can be placed in the relevant email list, and the email sequence can begin.

The CTA itself is best placed within the article itself, like so:

Alternatively (or additionally) it can be placed below or in the sidebar of the content, or in a pop-up (just make sure to give the user a chance to read a good chunk of the content before pushing the upgrade on them). Once again, limit the barrier to entry by asking only for the prospect’s first name and email address.

Nurturing Leads through Segmented Email Campaigns

Using your blog as a lead-generation tool is only the first step in driving bottom-of-funnel results from it. Very few of those leads will be ready to buy, so you need to nurture them until they’re ready to make a purchase.

Segmenting leads

We already know that new leads should get placed in segmented email lists. There are lots of ways you might segment your email lists, but there are two we’re going to focus on here.

Leads segmented according to interest, and leads segmented according to industry.

Leads segmented by interest

The majority of leads will be segmented by interest only.

How do we know what a lead’s interested in?

We could ask them, but we know we need to keep our sign-up forms as short as possible. With this in mind, their “interest” would be dictated by the subject of the content they converted on.

For example, we can assume that someone who converted on an article about using Facebook in marketing is interested in social media marketing. They would then be placed in a list that ensures they are exclusively (at least initially) sent emails and content about social media.

Leads segmented by industry

When a prospect converts on a bottom-of-funnel content piece – like the VIP demo mentioned just above – we’re ideally going to want to segment them according to their industry. This is because you’re going to want to nurture them with emails that align the features of your product with pain points that are typical of their industry.

It will also help your sales team understand the prospect’s needs, so they can sell to them more effectively.

Unfortunately, to get this information, you’re going to have to ask for it. That probably means adding a third box to the signup form.

Nurturing leads

Once you’re successfully segmenting leads into appropriate email lists, you’re going to want to create the email sequences that will nurture them, and push them towards converting.

Let’s run through the email sequences you might create to nurture leads coming from each of the lead generation tools discussed just above.

VIP demo leads

Anyone who’s filled out a form asking for a product demo is either very near to, or at the bottom of the sales funnel. In this case specifically, the lead has stated outright that they would like a product demo.

This means your first email would ask the prospect when they would like the demo to take place (you can see a template for this and all email subject lines in the sequence just below).

Bonus tip: you can streamline the booking process by providing a link to a calendar that they book themselves straight into.

Needless to say, if the prospect converts as a result of that email, the sequence ends.

If they don’t, they should receive a follow-up email a few days later. You may want to personalize the follow up, in accordance with the prospect’s interests or industry.

Again, if the prospect converts, the sequence ends.

If they don’t, a third and final email should be received, again a few days later. You’ll probably want to personalize this one, too, with the prospect’s interest or industry. Another good trick is to begin the subject line “Re:” as a reminder that they have initiated the conversation by asking to arrange the demo.

Blog subscription leads

The first email a blog subscription lead should receive is a simple “thank you for subscribing” email. That’s all the subject line of this email needs to be, but again, you can see the template for this and subsequent email subject lines in the sequence just below.

Bonus tip: ensure whoever sends this email sends all of the emails.The sequence might be automated, but this goes a long way toward personalizing the interaction.

Email two sends the subscriber a piece of content that’s relevant to their interest, and that also demonstrates your product’s link to this and how it can help resolve the prospect’s (assumed) pain points.

This will subtly help funnel subscribers towards your product.

Email three should be a sales email, similar to the first email you might send to a VIP demo lead. You’re simply asking if they have time to talk that week about their subject of interest.

If they convert at this point, the sequence ends. If they don’t, they receive a fourth email.

Email four should be a case study that highlights the value your business can add to them.

Email five is sent regardless of whether or not the lead clicked through to the case study. This email should offer a discount. It should also offer a demo or call of some kind.

If the lead converts, then great. If not, they get sent to the general newsletter segment.

Content upgrade leads

The first email a content upgrade lead should receive is the content upgrade itself. This should be delivered the moment they request it (once again, you can see subject line templates for all emails in the sequence just below).

Email two should be an example article – similar to what you would send a blog subscription lead.

Email three should be a sales email – again similar to what you would send a demo or blog subscriber lead.

If they convert at this point, the sequence ends. If not, they receive a fourth email.

Email four should be a case study. It needs to demonstrate how your business might add value to the lead.

Email five should offer the subscriber free access to an on-demand resource like a webinar, video, or podcast – something with your voice on it, or better yet, your face. The idea here is to further the relationship the lead has with you before they receive the next sales email.

Email six should be another resource that helps educate the customer on your product’s link to their interests and pain points – for example, something like “proven strategies for success in [their interest].”

Bonus tip: the resource should highlight your product’s features and benefits through product pictures or (if it’s a tool) screenshots of it in action.

Email seven is a sales email – a discount or coupon. Add urgency with a time limit (seven days is fair). It’s also a good idea to send a reminder email 24 hours or so before the discount or coupon expires (assuming, of course, that the lead hasn’t converted).

Once again, if the lead converts, great. If not, they get sent to the general newsletter segment.

Bear in mind that all the suggestions above are just that – suggestions. Use this strategy as a guide for effective email nurturing, but remember that what you include in your email sequences, and how many emails you send, is totally up to you.

Do you already nurture leads using email sequences? Does your strategy differ from what we’ve outlined here? It’d be great if you could share your secrets and let us know how effective they’ve been – comments are below.

Not everyone is ready to buy your product or service the first time they visit your site – no sweat, that’s the norm. The B2B sales cycle is long. So, before a prospect is ready to become a sales-ready lead, it pays off to build trust while they make their way through the buyer’s journey. But unlike our B2C marketing counterparts, a simple abandon cart won’t cut it. B2B buyers are sophisticated and their marketing should be too.

B2B marketers love to generate leads, but without a successful nurture campaign, they’re not maximizing each lead’s potential. A recent study showed that effective lead nurturing generates 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. And, it’s valuable to sales, marketing, and customer service teams.

I love stats, but I hate this one: 65% of B2B marketers aren’t executing lead nurture tactics. Don’t let this be you. Stop leaving leads on the table and add them to your funnel instead.

First, define your goal

Like any marketing initiative, start with your objective and define the role you want lead nurture to play in your larger marketing strategy. You can have many nurture campaigns in market at any given time, but each should have a unique goal.

Is your goal to engage with prospects? Start with a welcome campaign that ensures your brand is a happy addition to any inbox. Looking to educate instead? Nurture leads by building trust through informative content like eBooks, webinars, and blog posts. Hoping to close a client in the decision-making process? Product-demos or promotional drips are sure-fire ways to close more clients. Have retention in mind? Get an onboarding campaign in market or work with your customer service team on developing client-friendly content.

Keep the buyer’s journey in mind when building your lead nurture funnel by aligning lead nurture activities with the stages of the buyer’s journey. By following the buyer’s journey, you’ll construct a well-thought-out flow that will push leads through the sales funnel in a more thoughtful way.

Next, Segment

The more personalized your content the better. So, the more information you have on a prospect the better. Think beyond the buyer’s journey and get personal with your prospects.

For example, we may segment our nurture flows by industry, job title, or marketing interest. Armed with this info, we could send personalized content to a marketing manager at medical device manufacturer who is struggling with getting digital campaigns in market.

Let the data show you where to invest

I wasn’t lying when I said that I love data. I extra love it when it gives you insights into your customers and your marketing. The data that you collect from your lead nurture campaigns will give your team a deeper understanding of your customer. You’ll learn what messaging resonates best and what nurture tactics lead to conversion. Lead nurture data will also close gaps between marketing and sales teams by giving valuable sales-focused insights – think close ratios, sales cycle length, pipeline data, and retention numbers.

Dive into the data and analyze the success of each of your campaigns. Get started by asking yourself:

• What campaigns are the most/least successful?
• What do successful campaigns have in common?
• What content types are the most/least successful?
• What segments convert rapidly?
• What segments drive the most ROI?

Now, get started

Get planning! Start mapping out your campaign goals and segmenting your prospects. If it’s your first lead nurture campaign, start small with a welcome campaign that introduces leads to your brand and your content. As your campaign progresses, start with small asks to get more personalization data. Before you know it, you’ll be your sales teams’ favorite marketer.

New research reveals what influences B2B buying decisions and explains why the B2B buying process is getting longer.

Earlier this fall, Demand Gen Report published the findings of the 2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey. The 2017 research was based on a survey of 283 C-level executives, VPs, and Directors across several B2B industries. Each respondent in this study was qualified to have been involved in a B2B purchase decision within the 12 months preceding the survey.

The 2017 survey findings reveal that B2B buyers’ journeys are becoming longer and more complex. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said the length of their purchase cycle has increased compared to a year earlier, while only 10% said the length has decreased.

Other findings explain why the buying cycle has gotten longer.

• 52% of respondents said the number of buying group members has increased significantly.
• 77% agreed that they conduct a more detailed ROI analysis before making a purchase decision.
• 78% agreed that they “spend more time researching purchases.”
• 75% agreed that they “use more sources to research and evaluate purchases.”

The 2017 study also found that content continues to play a vital role in B2B buying decisions. When surveyed buyers were asked why they selected the winning vendor over others, 75% said the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact on their choice, and 89% said the winning vendor “provided content that made it easier to show ROI and/or build a business case for the purchase.”

The Demand Gen survey also asked participants to rate how important eleven factors became once they were at the point of evaluating a set list of possible vendors. The table below shows the percentage of respondents who rated each factor as very important.

Research regarding the attitudes and behaviors of business buyers can be extremely valuable to B2B marketing and sales professionals. However, it’s always important to examine the details of any research study and ask how applicable the findings are to your business.

For example, the respondents to the Demand Gen survey represented a variety of industries and a mix of company sizes. However, more than half (53%) of the purchase decisions those respondents participated in involved computer software, and another 16% involved IT hardware. So, this study is particularly relevant for companies that sell software solutions and other technology products, but some of the specific findings may be less relevant if your company sells other types of products or services.

Guest posting is a part of the hustle that many startups use to generate a small audience early on in their business. It can be an effective method to get your first few customers in the bootstrap stage. Typically, it’s used to get traffic and then that traffic is contacted and pitched.

But what about using it as a method to break the ice with your ideal buyers?

Most have never guest posted at all. In the B2B space, it’s not necessarily a top priority on the things-to-do list. The ROI isn’t clear and there are other ways to get traffic to a website and leads on a list.

I get it.

But, when done correctly, you can have a near 100% response rate to your cold emails. Most of those being really good conversations.

In this post, we’ll cover:

1. Why guest posting should be a part of your overall sales process.
2. How to find all the opportunities you could ever want.
3. Our crafted 4-email sequence to help you break the ice and get responses.

Let’s get started.

So, Why Guest Posting?

There are three primary benefits to guest posting (see image below). We’ll go over each, focusing in on lead generation as the primary benefit.

Benefit One: Leads

Arguably the most important metric to any B2B. The number of qualified leads that you’re able to nurture and pitch into becoming clients.

One thing LeadFuze has discovered by sending thousands upon thousands of emails can be summed up in one phrase:

The offer you send in your cold emails should not be what your company offers.

Typical sales email (that doesn’t get answered): “Hey, we’re the best at [insert product/service here] and you should use us!”

Instead, we’ve found it’s best to give something of interest and value to the lead and use it as a way to compel them to converse with us. It works. The thing is, you have to think of or create something that they genuinely want.

This is where guest posting is valuable.

Everyone understands the need for blogging and creating content that attracts buyers. Most also have a huge issue creating their own content and often have very outdated blogs and are desperate to get new words on the page.

If they’re in your target market, you can speak to their needs and the needs of their buyers — right?

Offer to write a guest post for them, and if they want, an exchange to get in front of your audience. Even though they need content for their site, they’ll likely want to write one for your blog due to take advantage of this opportunity.

Benefit Two: Partnership Opportunities

Depending on your industry and the target markets that you’re going after — partnerships could be available.

Not the documented, hand-shaking types. But smaller, even temporary arrangements. Even a guest post exchange is a partnership in and of itself. Which makes it all the more valuable. We’ll show our hand a bit and give a real example.

We are an automated lead generation platform. Our blog focuses on helping B2Bs generate, contact, qualify, and close those leads.

Marketing agencies often help other businesses do the same thing (albeit differently). We love exchanging guest posts with marketers. Their audience is businesses (so is ours). Not only can the marketing agency become a client, but we can add value to their current readership. And vice versa.

It’s like a quadruple win.

But think of where else it can go. Affiliate partnership, co-op webinars, the possibilities are staggering. And that’s just with agencies. Think about CRMs, SaaS products, etc…

Now, who can you reach out to that’s mutually beneficial and has more potential than just a post exchange?

Benefit Three: Link to the Company Site

While this one is the least glamorous, it’s a long-term play.

The more you reach out to leads in a given industry (that you’re targeting), the more links you’ll get. Then, you can start targeting some of those awesome keywords and have the clout with Google to get organic traffic coming to your blog (presumably full of sweet guest posts).

We try to have a guest post go live both on and off of our site each week. It’s no small feat, but our traffic keeps going higher and rankings keep improving.

P.S. If you’re interested in writing for the LF blog, check out our guidelines here.

Finding Opportunities (They’re Everywhere)

There are three primary ways that we use to generate guest posting opportunities. And we generally have enough to average about one post going live somewhere each week.

The contributors to our blog have been a bit slower. But that’s because we recently started doing it and we really only want quality content from people who fit our audience. Very soon, we’ll be hitting our goal of one a week.

Anyhoo. How do we do it?

Tactic Number One: Social Mentions

We have notifications now, but I used to search the Twittersphere looking for anyone sharing our stuff. Once I did, it was an easy pitch.

I’ve screenshot one such email to give you another template (other than the ones below).

BTW. This image, along with a detailed breakdown of our social guest posting strategies were featured (in a guest post) that you can find right here.

What if I don’t have traction or traffic on my blog?

No mentions, no problem. Just search (or get notified) for certain topics and keywords. For instance, we’d search Twitter for “generate leads” and such.

Tactic Number Two: Use a Pre-Created List of Opportunities (or make your own)

There are lists of guest blogging opps and then there’s THE list. It was created by Lilach Bullock (who’s guest posted for us :).

Here’s the link to it.

You can also create your own by Google searching for “keyword + guest post” or “keyword + contributor guidelines”. Things like that.

Bonus Tip: Don’t be afraid of the competition. We’ve had several posts from what would be considered competitors in some form or another. Like this one and this one. But, there’s value to be had in this.

 

Tactic Number Three: Use Your Leads

The best part about selling to B2Bs is that you understand their basic struggles that go beyond their products/services. You’re trying to grow your business (so are they). You want good content for your website (they probably do too).

It’s hard to imagine a niche without an opportunity to guest post in any B2B. Part of understanding your customers is understanding their customers.

This means that you should be able to speak to their customers’ needs. Use it as a way to start the conversation.

It’s a whole lot easier to transition into how you can help them via your product if you start off by telling them you want to help them by swapping guest posts.

A Word On Writing the Post

If you’ve made it this far, you may have the question: “How will I write this post?”

Could be timing, or lack of practice writing, or a few other issues. Here’s the thing. You don’t have to write it.

Just ask them what they want you to write about and give those details (along with your input) to a ghost writer. Go to Upwork, or PeoplePerHour and find someone with good reviews and a fair price.

Writing is one of the “get what you pay for” things. You can get 1000 words for 10 bucks, but you won’t be able to read it. In 2017, it should cost you around 5-10 cents per word for decent quality.

But if you get an opportunity to be on a big-time blog, better spend more than that. If it’s bad, they won’t publish it.

Ready for the Templates?

If you want to experiment with cold email, this strategy could be the best. Why? Simple response rate math.

Asking for a guest posting exchange is usually an innocent request that doesn’t bear the resemblance to a sales call. It’s likely that you can send out a few dozen emails and get a very high response rate. This is especially true if your blog looks decent.

I urge you to send out a few and would love to hear about how it works out. Now, onto the templates.

Happy hunting.

Guest Post Email Sequence Templates

Email 1 – Guest post exchange {{.CompanyName}} (((MyCompany)))

>Hi {{.FirstName}},

I love what you’ve been doing on the {{.CompanyName}} blog. I wanted to see if you’d be up for a guest post exchange?

You can write one for our blog and we’ll do one for you.

It’ll get you in front of our 15,000 email subscribers and we’ll be promoting it through social channels as well.

I can send over the writing guidelines if you’d like, {{.FirstName}}?

(((Email Signature)))

P.S. Not the person to talk to? Let me know! Don’t want me to follow-up with you? You can let me know that too!

Email 2 – Re: Guest post exchange {{.CompanyName}} (((MyCompany)))

Hi {{.FirstName}},

Even if you don’t want to contribute to our blog, I’d love to do one for your blog. You’ll get a fresh piece of content, and we’ll promote it to our 15,000 email subscribers as well as our social channels.

Can I send you some topic ideas?

(((Email Signature)))

P.S. Let me know if you think it’s best I talk with someone else on your team to share my guest blog ideas!

Email 3 – Re: Guest post exchange {{.CompanyName}} (((MyCompany)))

Hi {{.FirstName}},

Do you think I should I speak with {{.CustomData.reference}} about working out a guest post exchange instead?

(((Email Signature)))

P.S. For quick reference, here is a link to our blog to see the quality of content we produce.

Email 4 – Re: Guest post exchange {{.CompanyName}} (((MyCompany)))

Hi {{.FirstName}},

I assume you don’t want a fresh piece of content on your blog.

If things change in the future, and you’d like to have us contribute a piece — let me know!

(((Email Signature)))

P.S. If you’d ever like to discuss some different blog post ideas, you can grab a time with me here.

According to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), buyers are 57% through their buying process (gathering information and determining specifications and requirements) before reaching out to suppliers. The remaining 43% of the buyers’ time is devoted to the RFP process, selecting the supplier, and haggling over price. The underlying assumption is that all suppliers are alike and all solutions are similar. So, the only issue is which supplier will provide the good or service at the lowest possible price. That is haggling.

Here is the problem: sourcing managers and selling teams buy into the assumption that they are haggling when in fact they should be negotiating.

There is a critical distinction between negotiating and haggling.

Haggling: If you are a Monty Python fan, there is a funny haggling scene in the Life of Brian in which a bazaar stall owner tries to teach the buyer how to bargain for a fake beard. Bargaining is great for one-off transactions because the buyer feels s/he has made an advantageous purchase at less than the usual cost.

Negotiating: When people negotiate they’ve come to an agreement. In anything but a one-off transaction, and especially in complex sales, negotiating is far more effective than haggling because it encompasses more than just the price.

The CEB noted that buyers want to be engaged in a more meaningful conversation about their needs, and are eager to learn how they can improve their gross profitability. But here is the irony. I know buyers who are irritated by salespeople who want to sell to them. So, why is there a disconnect?

Salespeople are buying into the price only conversation and engaging in a haggling conversation. Haggling is a poor substitution to a robust conversation about what a customer can and should do to increase gross profitability.

According to Professor Henke, Oakland University, there is a casual and statistical relationship between good customer-supplier relationships and a 40% increase in customer gross profitability. There are two factors that contribute to improved gross profitability.

• Price concessions
• Non-economic value

Good relationships lay the foundation for meaningful price concessions. More importantly, good relationships also pave the way for other non-tangible benefits such as innovation, new technology, better customer service etc.

The strength of long-term relationships depends on an equal balance of power.Negotiating, not bargaining or haggling, creates a level playing field in which parties can discuss price concessions and non-economic factors that can improve customer profitability. Haggling limits the conversation to a tug-of-war over price only.

The next time you talk to your sourcing or sales team, encourage them to negotiate with their long-term partners and avoid bargaining or haggling to meet their needs. They will not only meet the customer’s stated financial goals on cost, but they will also find creative ways to increase customer profitability.

The Internet — it is the Wild Wild West of information. As anyone who has spent time on the Internet knowns, there are statements delivered as facts that circle the World Wide Web all the time that contain no real facts behind them. People get suckered into believing these statements all the time. We’re all guilty of it.

Over the past year, my colleagues and I have noticed a number of myths present in B2B sales and marketing discussions. Some of them are spread across LinkedIn, others on blog posts. Here are some common B2B sales myths that many people believe in. These are myths that have been pushed by experts in the field and I’d like to analyze them more closely.

Myth #1: Salespeople need to make 70 phone calls to book one meeting

True or False?

Not true, at least in most European countries. Here at Vainu, we have collected data from tens of thousands of phone calls and in most of the countries the number is somewhere between 10 and 20. In the U.S., the number is higher, but it varies a lot between different industries and products/services being sold. Smart salespeople understand that it’s easier to reach a manager of a medium-sized company than a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Because of these differences, it’s somewhat misleading to state a certain number as a universal fact or average.

Myth #2: Almost 80% of all deals require at least five follow-up conversations, but most people give up a lot earlier in the process

True or False?

Difficult to say whether this is true or not, but this statement is often used in the wrong context. It doesn’t mean that a salesperson should get six “no thanks” messages from a prospect before understanding there is no need for his/her product or service. If the sentence is describing the the average number of discussions before a sale, it would be highly beneficial to include some information and context. What are the products and services being sold, in which markets, and who are the buyers? Some products can be sold completely without human interaction, some products are typically sold in the first meeting and some larger deals might require tens of discussions and meetings.

Myth #3: Cold calling is dead

True or False?

Everyone seems to have an opinion about cold calling. It’s a widely used sales method and there are lot of organizations that deliver strong results with this approach. With technology, many of these calls can be less cold because salespeople can easily gather important background information and insights on prospects’ current needs. If cold calling means all those sales interactions where a salesperson makes the first contact attempt, this statement if completely untrue.

Many fast growing companies have built effective inside sales teams that proactively go after new prospects without waiting for some sort of engagement with website content. Even the companies that promote inbound methodology, including Hubspot, use outbound methods to maximize their growth. For example, this fall Hubspot posted several “Business Development Representative” job openings where they describe the role with responsibilities including “generate new interest through calls, emails and social media messaging”, “high volume prospecting” and “make between 40-60 calls per day.” In my opinion, Hubspot is a good example of a company that relies on data-driven “smartbound” prospecting, a method that combines the best parts of inbound and outbound sales.

Myth #4: B2B sales has changed in the past 5 years more than in the past 50 years

True or False?

I don’t have a detailed understanding of how a typical day for a salesperson was in 1967, but common sense suggests that a typical day for a salesperson five years ago was much closer to today’s routines than those of the late sixties. In 1967, there was no internet, email, cellphones, powerpoint/keynote presentations. Furthermore, decision-making processes must have been quite different back then. In 2012, however, we already had social media, marketing automation, SaaS-based CRMs and it was easy to find blog posts covering solution selling, value-based selling and the importance of building thought leadership in sales.

It’s also worth noting that technology is advancing lot faster than the basic human principles in sales. In 1936, Dale Carnegie published his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is one of the best sales books ever written.

Myth #5: 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before sales becomes involved

True or False?

False. This is a good example of a statistic that many people have shared without paying too much attention to the research behind that “fact”. This insightful blog post studies this statistic in detail and finds it at least problematic. It’s based on a study by CEO.com and Domo where the actual respondent size came in at only 22 large B2B organizations in 10 industries. The original report was 41 pages long and the 57% stat was mentioned only once on page 2. The report, however, stated a disclaimer that “this research may not satisfy the information needs of all readers.”

There are other variations of this myth. Sometimes the number is 67%, and that seems to be based on a study made by the company Sirius Decisions. That same company wrote a blog post “Three Myths of the ‘67 Percent’ Statistic” that highlighted some of the common misunderstandings about the statistic.

Myth #6: If you want succeed in sales, you need to be active in social media

True or False?

False. For example, here at Vainu, we have many successful sales people and some of them are active in social media while others are not. That’s also the message we hear from our customers. Social media can definitely be a valuable channel, but it is not mandatory for a successful B2B sales person to be active.

Myth #7: All buyers are on social media

True or False?

False. According to research from CEO.com and Domo, 60 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no social media presence whatsoever. And while Facebook and YouTube have 1 billion or more monthly active users, many other platforms are far behind. LinkedIn has slightly over 100 million active monthly users and Twitter and Pinterest both have a little bit over 300 million.

For sure, there are a lot of people on social media, but not everyone is an active user. And if you start counting B2B buyers who actively use many platforms on a daily basis, the numbers start to look very different.

Who is creating these false myths about B2B sales?

Most of the people share these statistics with good intentions. They might want to provide a wake-up call for the audience about the importance of a certain topic or phenomenon. Generalization can be a powerful way to increase the impact of those messages.

But without providing enough information or context, these statements are in many cases not true. The world is not that black and white, and the same holds true for B2B sales. It’s important to interpret trends and see what implications and opportunities they have on your business. But it’s also important that we know how to analyze all these statistics and one-liner statements that are floating around on social media. Take it all with a grain of salt, so to speak.

I wanted to leave you with one statement based on hundreds of discussions with different type of sales organizations. I think we can all agree this is a universal truth in B2B sales:

Sales teams that work most systematically are the ones that often deliver the best results.

Have you been attracted to headlines like these?

• 50 Tips to Help You Get 50,000 Email Subscribers for Your List
• 20 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Get More Email Subscribers
• How to Build an Email Marketing List as Quickly as Possible
• 10 Irresistible Incentives That Will Grow Your Email List—Fast

Of course you have, and I understand why: For us content marketers, eyeballs are everything. The more people we have reading, listening to, and watching our content, the better.

But what if the best way to grow a loyal audience for your content is to let your subscribers go, or even to shove them out the door? I learned the hard way that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to email lists. Now, I want to share how to pare your list to make it more effective for your business – and your target audience.

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Bigger isn’t always better when it comes to #email lists, says @renwripress.
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Let’s begin.

Backstory

I’m the co-publisher of Renegade Writer Press. We’ve published books for years, but only started getting serious about the business this year.

When my business partner, Diana Burrell, and I sat down to talk numbers, we had over 7,000 subscribers on our MailChimp mailing list, but our open rate was only 20 to 25%, which was much lower than the 32% average open rate across industries. Our click-through rate was a piddling 2 to 4.5%.

I had just talked with another professional in our industry who said she racked up an over 50% open rate. How did she do it? She only kept people on her list who wanted to be there.

My business partner and I quickly created and downloaded a segment of subscribers who hadn’t opened any of our emails in the past couple of months, and then unsubscribed those members. We then wrote an email to those inactive subscribers letting them know that in the interest of not cluttering their inboxes, we had unsubscribed them from our mailing list. (We sent this email via our business Gmail account.) Finally, we provided a link where those readers could quickly re-subscribe if they wanted. 

Our email list dropped from more than 7,000 subscribers to around 1,200 – and our open rate jumped from between 20 and 25% to between 55 and 60%. The click-through rate on our last newsletter was 7.1%.

Did we lose some people who didn’t want to unsubscribe? Probably, because MailChimp’s reporting isn’t perfect. If those subscribers really wanted to be there, they would notice the missing emails and re-subscribe. That’s how hardcore we were about only wanting subscribers who want to read our content.

Even better, our book sales have been increasing steadily since we kicked off subscribers who were less than passionate about our content and our products. We’ve made other changes to our business that may account for the increase in sales, but the point is that our sales did not decline.

Why smaller is better

Keeping people on your list who truly don’t want to read your content or buy from you hurts your business in several ways, including:

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Keeping people on your #email list who aren’t interested in your #content hurts your business. @renwripress
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• Having a load of subscribers who aren’t really interested in your content and offerings skews your analyses. When you survey your subscribers, the replies are not necessarily from people interested in ever buying from you.
• Creating content for a diverse and numerous audience weakens your success because you’re writing for a lot of people who just don’t care.
• Paying for inactive subscribers is an unnecessary cost. When we reduced our list to 1,200 dedicated readers, we saved the $75 per month we were paying for hosting of a list of 7,000-plus unengaged subscribers.

Are you convinced that bigger isn’t always better, and that not all subscribers are equal? Good. Then you’re ready for the five ways to encourage – directly and indirectly – your less-enthused subscribers to leave.

1. Create content for the people who love you

If you aren’t worried about retaining every last one of your subscribers, you can better understand who your ideal subscribers are and target your content to them. You may tick off some subscribers, but that’s the point. If they don’t like your content and the products or services you offer, then wave bye-bye.

2. Make it easy to unsubscribe

One of the biggest scams targeting consumers is marketers who make it difficult to unsubscribe from their brand’s mailing lists. Follow these tips:

• Make the unsubscribe link visible and easy to find. Stop hiding a tiny link in the footer, camouflaged in a color that’s barely distinguishable from the background.
• Allow for one-click unsubscribes. Don’t ask soon-to-be former subscribers to click to confirm that they really, really want to leave – or worse, ask them to click even more times to be 100%, absolutely sure.

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Don’t ask soon-to-be former subscribers to click to confirm they really, really want to leave. @renwripress
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• Don’t take “up to 10 days for the changes to take effect.” You can add new subscribers to your list instantly and you can process a purchase instantly. You should be able to unsubscribe someone instantly, too. At a minimum, don’t use the 10 days – as I suspect some companies do – to put the wannabe unsubscriber into a re-engagement campaign.
• Don’t require wannabe unsubscribers to enter a password or to use Captcha authentication. Evil hackers are not unsubscribing people without their knowledge or consent. This level of verification is unnecessary.
• Invite subscribers to leave. Once in a while (if not every time), note near the top of an email that if a subscriber is no longer interested in your content, or doesn’t have time to read your content because they’re overwhelmed by their overflowing inboxes, they can unsubscribe with a single click (and be sure to include the link). Let them know you’ll miss them and hope they’ll be back – and move on.

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Occasionally invite your #email subscribers to leave & make it easy, says @renwripress.
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3. Make prospective subscribers work for it

What if, instead of begging people to join your mailing list, you make it difficult to join? What if you create a situation where your ideal audience self-selects for your mailing list?

This idea stems from a recommendation in Cal Newport’s book Deep Work to reduce email distraction by creating a filter – in other words, by requiring the sender to take another step before emailing you.

A more radical step to be sure. But what if your brand required potential subscribers to read an FAQ before subscribing, or to wait for a letter in the mail from your brand to confirm their interest? When you set up filters like this, you can be assured that the person really, really wants to connect with your brand.

4. Stop giving away the cow

“Join our list and we’ll send you a free report!”

“Stay on our list and we’ll shower you with goodies!”

Those are great ways to keep people on your mailing list – and leave your team catering to hordes of subscribers who are only on your list for the freebies (including content freebies), and ignoring your ideal audience in the meantime.

Stop offering freebies and hosting contests to entice more people to give you their email address. Once you’ve culled the list, it’s OK to send out offers to your smaller audience because you know they really want to be connected to your brand. In our book publishing business, we now use our smaller list to search for beta readers, who will of course receive a free book, because we’re confident now that our subscribers aren’t just looking for handouts.

5. Keep it clean

Every six months or so, segment the subscribers who haven’t opened your last certain number of emails (that threshold is up to you). Send these inactive subscribers an email to let them know you plan to remove them in 30 days. Want to get even more hardcore? Do what Diana and I did: Simply unsubscribe them and send them a re-subscribe link in case they want to get back on.

You will probably, as we did, get apologetic responses from people saying something like, “So sorry, I’ve been really busy lately and would like to stay.” That’s great because those are engaged subscribers – and you shouldn’t remove them from the list.

Also, don’t be afraid to unsubscribe people who you know, way down deep in your soul, are not good for your business. That subscriber who responds to every email with a complaint? Bye. The one who emailed asking for a $1 refund after buying your $3 gateway product, because he saw your dollar-off promotion two months later? See ya. The reader who pings you after every email to say they wish they could afford your products but simply can’t? Sayonara.

This isn’t to say that people who ask for discounts or refunds, send in complaints, or can’t afford your products shouldn’t be welcome on your mailing list. After all, we also write content because we want to entertain, inform, and educate readers. Engaged readers – even if they are not buyers – are welcome to keep reading our content. However, when it costs us more time and money than it’s worth to keep these subscribers happy, it’s time to say goodbye.

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We write #content to entertain, inform, and educate readers, says @renwripress.
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Make your emails work for you – and your readers

If you employ any of these tips, you’ll gradually see your subscriber base narrowing to an audience of engaged, devoted readers. What I’m suggesting can be risky if you’re dependent on reporting big numbers to impress management, or if you do it carelessly and turn off the wrong people. But if you want to cultivate an email list that’s truly valuable to your business – and to your targeted readers – keeping your mailing list smaller is better for your business.

Want to add a professionally relevant email to your inbox every day? Or prefer a once-a-week digest? You pick the options that best serve your content marketing education needs. Subscribe today.  

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute.

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