Everyone who subscribes to this newsletter – and I mean everyone – has to give presentations from time to time as part of their job.

Here are two tips to help you give better presentations:

1. 1. Don’t “give” presentations

   2. Don’t “present”

Huh? Seems counterintuitive?

Sure it does. But it’s valuable advice.

Let’s start from this premise: When audiences are in “receptive mode,” they are less engaged and more judgmental. So, let’s not let them be in receptive mode. Let’s keep them in “engagement mode.”

Instead of giving presentations, conduct them.

To “give” implies that the information flow is one-way. Human communication is much more effective when it two-way instead of a one-way. Even better, create a multi-dimensional exchange by having your audience members interact with each other, within a structure you create. That’s really engaging.

Your job when you are in front of an audience is to facilitate communication, not to dump information. Conduct an information exchange, not a deluge of words.

To do this, think conversation, not presentation.

Turn every presentation into a conversation.

This morning I was the keynote speaker at a conference. As I was being introduced I looked out at the full ballroom and gave myself one piece of direction: “Remember to make this a conversation, not a presentation.”

Even though my job today was to teach and impart information, I was very focused on having a thorough conversation with the audience, not a one-way barrage. I asked them lots of questions. I left time for them to ponder after I made a point. What I did wasn’t difficult, or novel. It was just normal … normal human communication.

Was the conversation effective?  As I looked around the room it struck me that nobody had their nose buried in their cell phones.

So the next time you get yourself ready for a presentation, remember these two important tips:

1. Don’t give the presentation, conduct it.

2. And don’t think of it as a presentation. See it for what it is: A conversation between you and your audience.

Don't end an email with "thank you in advance." Many people find this phrase rude; after all, you're assuming they're going to do whatever you've requested -- essentially taking away their right to say no.

And it can also seem like you can't bother to follow up with a "thank you" after they've obliged you, so you're just going to say it now.

Thank You for Your Attention

A better way to communicate a similar sentiment without assuming they'll do what you want? Try "Thanks for your attention." This thanks your reader for giving your request their time and energy -- even for a minute, and even if they choose or are unable to help you out. 

And, yes, there are a few scenarios where "Thank you in advance" might be appropriate, such as:

1. If you're working with a colleague with whom you collaborate often
2. If stakeholders have already agreed to offer their help and you're simply following up with action items and next steps
3. If you're offering information or an assignment your recipient requested

The one thing each of these scenarios has in common? Familiarity. Reserve "Thank you in advance" for working relationships you've already established. 

For everything else, instead of writing "Thanks in advance," "Thank you for your consideration," or "Thank you in advance for your help," try these 19 other ways to say it.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Whether you're writing to a colleague or direct report, use these "thanks in advance" alternatives to thank them for their consideration.

1. "Thank you ... "

For a simple, gracious close that won't offend anyone, sign off with "Thank you."

2. "Thank you for any help you can offer ... "

Show appreciation for your recipient's time and energy with this ending. It translates to "Even if you can't help, I appreciate your effort."

3. "Gratefully, [your name] ... "

Use this alternative when your ask is slightly out-of-the-ordinary: You're giving the person less time than ideal, increasing the scope of your original request, or pulling them into a project they're not a part of.

4. "Thanks for considering this ... "

With this sign-off, you say, "Hey, it means something you're even thinking of doing this." Revealing a little humility can help you win the other person to your cause.

5. "In any case, thanks for your help ... "

After you've made your request, end with this tactful line. You're essentially telling the other person, "Whether you agree or not, I value your consideration."

6. "Many thanks ... "

This variation on the classic "thank you" is a bit more formal, making it feel more authentic.

Below is a sample email using one of these alternatives. It clearly states the request, and thanks the recipient for their consideration.

Thank you in advance for your help.

These "thank you in advance" alternatives can be used when you're requesting help or previously requested assistance from the recipient.

7. "Let me know if this isn't feasible by [date], and I'll see what I can do ... "

I'd recommend saving this sign-off for a direct report. It's clear your recipient can't really say no to whatever you've asked -- at most, you'll let them negotiate the deadline. And you're suggesting even that option isn't ideal.

Why is this better than "Thanks in advance"? Because it's straightforward and direct, while "thanks in advance" feels inauthentic and/or passive-aggressive.

8. "I hope this is possible ... "

#8 is an alternative to #7, but for someone who's your peer or superior. It's softer and leaves more room for pushback.

9. "Really appreciate your time here ... "

Are you telling, not asking? When the other person doesn't have a choice in the matter, you want to avoid closes that make them sound like they can opt out. This close is a polite but firm way to say "You have to do this" that won't annoy them.

10. "In the meantime, thanks for your time ... "

Let your recipient know you recognize their attention.

11. "Thank you for doing X ... "

Explicitly acknowledge the help they're providing, whether that's "thanks for meeting with me," "thanks for reviewing this proposal," "thanks for introducing me to so-and-so," or "thanks for answering these questions."

12. "Looking forward to [discussing the results, talking about what you find, learning more about X] ... "

When you're asking someone to do some work on your behalf, this close comes in handy. You're showing your interest in the project -- validating that it's worth their effort.

13. "I'd be grateful if you could finish X by [date] ... "

Tactfully give the person a timeline with this sign-off.

14. "You're the best ... "

When you're emailing a close colleague who's doing you a favor, use this heartfelt closing line. (Just make sure you save it for special occasions, or you'll seem fake.)

15. "Thanks again ... "

Did you already thank your recipient once? No harm in reiterating the sentiment.

16. "Thank you for your understanding ... "

Sometimes, it's necessary to appeal to your recipient's compassionate side. Maybe you're asking for something you know they're not thrilled about -- or giving them the heads up you can't follow through on their request.

They'll have a harder time denying you after you've expressly said thanks for their patience.

17. "I appreciate your extra time here ... "

Don't we all just want to be appreciated? Sometimes, all it takes to move someone to action is to let them know you notice them and their efforts and to thank them for spending their time on you.

18. "I know your time is valuable and I appreciate your attention ... "

Again, letting your prospect know you realize they're carving out time especially for you is always appreciated. They don't have to help you out, and it's a good idea to recognize that.

19. "Let me know if I can help ... "

Is there something you could do to make this ask easier for your prospect? Try to take these actions proactively, and always let them know you're happy to step in and shoulder some of the work.

Here's an example email using a "thanks in advance" alternative.

With these many options, there's no need to end emails with "thank you in advance." Make these swaps ASAP to sound more courteous (and increase the odds of a positive reply!)

Looking for more ways to improve your emails? Check out these ASAP alternatives next.

The post Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats appeared first on ProBlogger.

While having lots of page views, sessions, fans, followers and even email subscribers may feel good, they don’t actually tell you anything about the health of your blog.

At a previous ProBlogger Mastermind, I shared a slide that seemed to hit a nerve with the group.

I included this in my Mastermind session after having several conversations with bloggers that all started something like this: “Traffic is growing, and so is my social following and email list. But I’m not making any money”.

For many, the monetization emptiness came from focusing on certain results and metrics (such as those I just mentioned) that sounded great, but had very little bearing on actual monetary return.

Vanity over actionable metrics isn’t a new thing.

The idea of measuring the metrics that matter has been around for a while. People like Neil Patel have made their names and built successful companies through challenging us to think more deeply about the ‘Why?’ behind our numbers. Today, action-driven data is available to everyone doing business online – including bloggers – so there’s no excuse for not using it.

But rather than leaping into the depth of data, I recommend you begin with small steps.

Define your North Star Metric, and what might influence it

Time is the enemy of most bloggers just starting out, and so focus is critical. A North Star Metric gives you one thing to care about above everything else.

“To uncover your North Star Metric you must understand the value your most loyal customers get from using your product. Then you should try to quantify this value in a single metric.” – Sean Ellis

Your North Star Metric should be a metric that will directly improve the health and prosperity of your blog.

Start asking better questions

It’s time to start ignoring what Google Analytics thinks you want to know. Instead, think about the real value you’re trying to give a reader (your North Star), and what observable actions they might take that will show how good a job you’re doing getting them there.

For example, if your blog teaches others how to run a successful blog, what short- and long-term behaviors would you expect to see from someone you’re actually teaching?

They could be basic things such as, how does someone…

•   Find you (first time visit)
•   Come back again (repeat visit)
•   Engage (comment on a post, or follow you on a social platform)
•   Give you their email address (subscribe)
•   Buy or subscribe to a product (purchase)
•   Buy or subscribe to a second product (purchase again)

Thanks to free services such as Google Analytics, we take comfort in very basic but often misleading blog metrics. After all, who has the time (or the energy) to dive into the numbers? But if think about the questions you need to answer before you start worrying about how to measure them, you’ll quickly change your mindset.

And once you’ve got this down, you’ll be ready to get your numerical nerd on.

Understanding cohorts and segmentation

Statistics and mathematics are probably the last things you want me to talk about. But segmentation and cohorts are important terms that you need to understand.

So what are they?

Segmentation and cohorts are techniques used to collate data into meaningful groups. They let you compare different groups in various ways, as well as over different time periods, and ask questions like, “Are my current first-time visitors behaving differently from the first-time visitors I had a year ago?”

While Google Analytics lets you do some basic cohorts, you’ll quickly find the level of detail Google gives you for free quite limiting.

But when you look at your data through cohorts and segmentation, you can identify specific strengths and opportunities to improve.

What is a cohort?

In statistics, marketing and demography, a cohort is a group of subjects who share a defining characteristic.

For example, you might notice over time that people who find your blog through search are less inclined to arrive at your North Star than someone coming from a different source. By using research, data, and experimentation you can get a better understanding of the situation, and create a plan to improve the experience of these first-time SEO arrivals.

For example, you may need to:

• create a stronger CTA in your post to help casual SEO arrivals learn more about you
• find better ways to get readers to check out a second post, or give you their email address
• spend time building more traffic from those lower volume but higher value-per-visitor channels.

Whatever the answer is, you’ll find it in your experiments and metrics.

And from there you can look at your most recent cohorts to see what impact your new approach is having.

Congratulations. You’re now taking meaningful steps to grow the prosperity of your blog.

The theories are nice, but what about in practice?

At 99designs, we began reflecting on our blog’s performance by asking deeper questions about the impact we were having on our readers.

Some of the results were hard to read.

Do people read our content?

We knew how many people started reading our content. But we had no idea if they were consuming all those wonderful words we’d put so much effort in creating. We could make some guesstimates based on ‘time on site,’ but that was too general. So we produced two reports – time engaged with the page, and how far people were scrolling down the page.

The results were hard to read at first. “What do you mean, ‘Only 5% get to the end’?” But with visibility, we’ve managed to improve this percentage significantly in the past year.

What do people do after they finish reading (or abandon) a post?

We’d tried cobbling together an answer using sign-up rates and other things such as page views per user. But those were meaningless aggregate results.

So we created a report on what people do after reading (or not reading) a post.

What’s driving growth – our old (evergreen) content or our new content?

We assumed our new content was fuelling growth. But it was actually a combination of the two.

But wait, there’s more

These graphs are interesting. But when you start to segment things become more insightful. We can look at this graph by channel, post category, author and more to find patterns in what’s being read and what’s providing value to our readers. These insights are now intrinsic to our growth plans for our blog.

Upping the ante for key transitional pages

Our blog is what we call a top-of-funnel page type – one that’s consumed early in a relationship we hope to build with our readers.

As people progress through our funnel, we’ve identified key transitional pages that signal a significant potential shift in the relationship from reader to customer.

One example is our logo design page.

On this page, a reader or visitor is deciding whether to pursue getting a logo with us — an obvious turning point. While we have great tracking measures on our blog, we track ten times as many events on our logo design page to learn even more about our transitional pages. And we use this extensive data to continually improve the page with changes both large and small.

The dangers of misinterpretation

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with some brilliant people who see numbers in a way I sometimes struggle to comprehend. And there have been some less than inspiring moments where I’ve been shown how quite clearly how ‘wrong’ I’m interpreting the data — publicly and privately.

As you get access to more data and learn how to use it, you’ll undoubtedly face the same  challenge. While you may be tempted to scurry back to a comforting world of vanity metrics and intuition, try looking your data critics in the eye and asking them to help you do better. Chances are your first blog post wasn’t very good. Why would your first analytical endeavor be any different?

That said, here’s how to avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made:

1. Become a student of data interpretation

There are a lot of resources, books and courses that can be really helpful. I’m currently doing a Data Science course on the very subject to help me lift my analytical game.

General Assembly, Skillshare, Udemy, Lynda and Udacity all have data- and analytics-related courses you can subscribe to.

2. Don’t go it alone

Collaborating with someone on your analysis — even if it’s just talking through your data and what you’ve learned — helps you find not only mistakes in your logic, but also any subconscious biases that may have crept into your analysis.

3. Find your devil’s advocate

This one is hard, but super important. Find and work with someone who will tell you you’re wrong more often than right. The secret to making the most of this critical view on your decisions is learning when to listen to them and when to ignore them.

Now, how do you set all this up?

The point of this post is to challenge you to step outside ] your data comfort zone. While tools such as Google Analytics can take you some of the way, you might need to look for data in other places.

At 99designs we have a pretty complicated data configuration. You won’t need anything near this level, — but here are some basic tools that can help take your analytics beyond Google.

Segment

We use Segment as the central point for collecting events and distributing them to the various tools that use them.

Indicative

We then use Indicative as our reporting tool for all that wonderful event data. But it’s not cheap, and alternatives such as Mixpanel offer better entry-level plans.

Setting up your new analytics might feel impossible at first. But try not to get too bogged down. A specialist can help set it all up for you.

Instead, focus on figuring out the questions that are important to your business. Start with your North Star Metric and work downward. Once you can describe the questions you are trying to answer with confidence, it’s easy and affordable to get help setting up the analytics you need.

Love over metrics? Nope, love and metrics.

During the Mastermind event, I was fortunate to spend some time chatting with one of the most authentic community builders online, Jadah Sellner. Her session was titled “Love Over Metrics,” which proposed a slightly different direction than the one I was heading at the event.

But as Jadah and I chatted I realised that although we started at different places, we had common middle ground. We both believe that while meaningfulness is in the value you give to your audience, it’s also important to align how you measure yourself to these goals. Results driven from loving your readers can live right next to a love of data.

This post doesn’t have all the answers. But I hope it helps you understand that there’s a life beyond those headline stats we’ve clung to for so long.

Mastering these measures may not give you schoolyard bragging rights with big headline numbers. But it will give you a better chance of building that profitable blog you always dreamed you could.

 

This article was first published on 15 September 2017 and updated 14 April 2022.

The post Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats appeared first on ProBlogger.

Sales is changing – and fast. The tools and tactics that got the job done just ten years ago don’t stand a fighting chance of enabling sales or closing deals today. That’s why we’re introducing an agile sales management framework to help you deal with the ferociously evolving world of sales. But first… 

Consider these three major market shifts that are reshaping sales across the 3 P’s of modern sales leadership – People. Process. Platforms.

• Millennials in the Workforce
• Account-Based Selling
• Data-Driven Decision Making

Despite these seismic changes, many sales teams are still being managed using the same decades-old framework. Waterfall Management – if you will.

Image Source Link

Agile vs. Waterfall Methodologies

In a sense, every sales organization is working on the same project – hitting quota. Time constraint is the only variable.

For hypothetical purposes, let’s say that your project is hitting Q3 quota.

Here are 3 side-by-side comparisons of waterfall and agile methodologies being used to accomplish that goal.

1. Performance Analytics: Weekly Excel Reports vs Real-Time Dashboards.
2. Outbound Messaging: Ironclad Call / Email Scripts vs Collaborative / Flexible Cadences.
3. Training & Development: Monthly Performance Review vs Live Scorecards and Feedback

Looks different, right? Congratulations – you are now looking at the world through the lens of agile sales management.

An Introduction to Agile Sales Management

In the IT world – where agile management has gone from outlier to industry standard in half a decade – the success rate has been astounding.

According to a recent agile survey, 87% of respondents agreed that agile methodology is improving the quality of work life for their teams.

Attribution – agilemethodology.org

The defining ethos of agile management is rapid, data-driven optimization – a resonant ideal for B2B sales leaders dealing with complex, dynamic processes and buyers. So why hasn’t agile sales management happened yet?

There is one obvious reason the agile sales management movement has yet to catch on in sales: The IT department and sales department are like oil and water in most organizations.

Tactics sprints, scrum and iterative development make sense for software, project management and even marketing teams. But managing an IT department does not even remotely align with managing a sales force, right? Take a closer look.

How Agile Applies to Modern Sales Management

Let’s apply a few agile methodologies to industry research and best practice espoused by 3 elite sales management experts.

Sprints and Milestones: In Harvard Business Review, Jason Jordan shares critical research on the importance of zeroing sales management focus on activity versus objectives and goals.

Scrum and Stand-Up: Sandler Sales Management trainer Marcus Cauchi advises starting each day with a quick team huddle, where everyone shares their top 3-4 behavioral goals.

Iteration: Aaron Ross subscribes to using a systematic, feedback-driven process for successful outbound prospecting – or iterative development.

As it turns out – the best salespeople, teams and organizations are inherently agile. They think quickly, communicate efficiently and often, and make hair-trigger adjustments every single day – in overcoming buyer objections, engaging prospects at the perfect time, or tailoring their sales process to better serve your market.

In fact, the opposite of agile sales management looks a lot like the discombobulated chaos we see in many sales organizations today:

Image Source Link

Agile sales management solves for all these. It gives every corner of your organization a synthesized framework and straightforward processes. It enables flexibility and iteration in both strategy and execution.

It gives sales leaders the discretion and insight they need to implement sound plans of action, baseline standards, and checks for quality control at massive scale.

Last but not least, it uses data analysis to chart the path toward continuous revenue growth for your organization and for your individual contributors.

The Ultimate Guide to Agile Sales Management

Your people, processes and platforms do not operate in a vacuum. They all affect and influence one another – for better or for worse.

Agile sales management gives you the micro and macro-perspectives to organize these pieces so that they fit together coherently, the strategies to ensure they complement one another and the overarching philosophy to create long-term success.

Best of all – the leadership teams from Ambition, Base, LeadGenius and LearnCore have partnered to publish the first eBook outlining the concept in its entirety: The Ultimate Guide to Agile Sales Management.

Source: learnagilesales.com

Get the core tactics and strategies that define elite, modern-day sales leadership packaged into a single philosophy. Download this agile sales management ebook and stay vigilant for the approaching industry move to agile sales management.

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Agile Sales Management appeared first on Sales Hacker.

La-Z-Boy sells a lot of recliners. I don’t believe they win a lot of design awards, but then again their customers likely put a low priority on being fashion-forward in the family room. The recliner buyers wants to be comfortable and those big cushy chairs can indeed deliver comfort.

That might be fine at home—but on the job comfort can wreck your marketing messages and growth plans. Too often I see internal teams running on auto-pilot in the ways they deal with customers and prospects. On the external side, you can be sure that competitors are trying to make your customers a little uncomfortable. And we have to make prospects similarly uncomfortable in order for them to consider doing business with us.

Marketing Messages and Sales Have a Comfort Cycle

Much of marketing messages and sales success come with creating a cycle of “de-comforting” and “re-comforting.” Let’s say you are on the hunt for net-new customers. Those prospects have some level of comfort with their status quo (after all, they likely had a hand in producing it). The challenge is to make them uncomfortable enough with the way things are to at least seriously consider a change.

Sometimes the need for change comes from an obvious external force (e.g., a disruptive technology in the industry, new regulations, or a scary new competitor). Yet many times the marketer must make the case for change, using insights and examples. Once there is a little discomfort on the part of the prospect, you can help that prospect feel most comfortable with your providing the best path to resolving their issues.

If you are more focused on customer retention and cross-selling rather than on finding new customers, your team still cannot afford to get too comfortable. It’s easy to repeat the same marketing messages and tell the same stories to the same people in your accounts. Sales people, recruiters, development officers, and others responsible for growth can fall into the trap. Are your teams consistently good at offering new ideas and insights in their customer conversations? Are they continually expanding the conversation to include people in executive, technical, and financial roles within your customer accounts? Let’s not allow competitors to do the de-comforting within your valuable customer base.

How to Provoke the Right Level of Discomfort

What are some good practices to follow in de-comforting?

• Don’t attack a customer’s past decisions. That will likely lead them to justify what they are doing and dig in their heels. Instead, focus on their situation and its potential risks.
• Don’t slam competitors or talk about yourself too much; focus on the customer’s reality.
• Make sure the customer knows they aren’t the only ones in a messed-up status quo. After all, if they believe the problem is uniquely theirs, then they might assume they’re a lost cause.
• Do point out the common problems in the status quo for them and peer organizations, or how traditional approaches diverge from practices you know would work better.
• Do your homework and ask questions so that you understand the pain points produced by the status quo. Don’t just ask a prospect what their pain points are.
• Don’t start proposing solutions (which is part of re-comforting) before you have explored and understood the de-comforting. This is where many sales and service professionals go astray.

How to Make Customers and Prospects Comfortable Again

Effective re-comforting practices include:

• Create with your customer or prospect a shared vision of what that “better tomorrow” looks like.
• After you have established that future vision, you can effectively talk about your differentiators and expertise.
• Use stories, examples, and marketing messages that feel relevant to the customer. Some companies put together case studies in a way that unfortunately fails to connect.

There’s nothing wrong with a little comfort in your marketing messages along the way. We just don’t want that recliner to dominate the room.

It starts with an email. Well, not really an email from you, but an email from marketing made to look like it was from you. That email ended up in a spam filter, and your prospective client deleted it, along with a few more that looked a lot like it. This is the starting point of the experience, and it offers no real chance for the establishing of a relationship.

It continues with another email. Like the email before it, there are links, the clicking of which is alleged to provide an indication of honest to goodness interest in you and your company. So far, the experience hasn’t been too great for you or your prospective client.

In an act of desperation, you call your prospective client, and you leave a message asking them to call you back and leaving your phone number. For some reason, you have decided to give the task of connecting with you to the person you are actually trying to sell. No one understands why they should have to return a salesperson’s call, and your client, unmoved, deletes your voice mail.

Back to email. Nothing. Back to voice mail. Nothing. Then, an answered telephone. Yes!

You ask your prospective client if you can stop by, introduce yourself, and share all the ways that your company helps their clients, along with the story about how they hung both the Sun and the Moon in the sky. Your prospective client, with the slightest bit of interest, agrees to a meeting.

You show up prepared. You have your slide deck, and you have your talking points. You also have questions you intend to use to elicit your prospective client’s needs. She says, “Tell me a little about you and your company.” You launch PowerPoint, and you begin at the beginning, history, buildings, locations, logos . . . your client, stifling a yawn, feigns interest. Then, you ask, “So, what keeps you up at night?”

Fortunately, your prospective client has real issues, and she hopes you can help. So she lays out all of her challenges. Lacking an SME, you take meticulous notes, promising to get back to your prospective client with some answers, and you promise to schedule an appointment to bring someone with you to your next meeting. Your client asks, “Can you send me a proposal and some pricing?” You, anxiously agree.

You send the pricing and the proposal by email, as requested. Your client gives it a very quick glance, and she leaves it in her inbox. She’s not sure she likes it. She’s not sure she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t know if she wants to show it to the rest of her team, or the leadership team who would need to approve any decision to buy from you.

So, not hearing anything, you take the bold move of sending an email to follow up.

This is a cautionary tale. There are good reasons for you to control the sales process, and chief among them is the buyer’s experience buying from you.

The post The Buyer’s Experience Buying From You appeared first on The Sales Blog.

A recent poll out of the UK showed just how healthy the landscape for influencer marketing is. About two-thirds saw “the prices influencers charge for posts go up in the past 12 months.” And with posts by a social media celebrity costing on average $87,731 each, price-hikes are nothing to sneeze at.

And yet, only 3% of marketers said they would cut back on influencer marketing, while 75% said they plan to spend even more!

If you haven’t decided to become internet famous yet, now’s the time!

So why are marketers so ready to rain cash down on their influencer marketing channel? Well, it comes down to the 4 T’s.

Trust.

Traditional online advertising has been hit hard with trust issues. Pop-up ads, pop-under windows, spam emails, annoying display ads; the public has lost their faith in these types of ads. This is also why ad blocking software is devastating the industry; it’s an easy solution.

Influencers are the opposite ends of the spectrum. To be an influencer, you need to be able to have people (many people!) trust you, which comes from opening up your life to them. As Experticity writes:

Consumer’s purchasing habits are largely based upon what products they see their friends, family and social networks buying and endorsing…. Recommendations of what restaurant to eat at, what shoes or clothes to buy, along with many other product categories, that comes from someone a consumer regularly interacts with is the most likely reason a purchase was made, not the ad they saw.”

Having someone people trust endorse your product confers that trust to your business. It’s a powerful branding tool, especially in the realm of micro-influencers who are seen as experts in their particular space.

Trend.

There are two way to parse the benefit of the word “trend.” The first is that influencers can get your business trending on social media. After all, that’s what they do best.

Please stop.

A business that hasn’t had much luck trending can hire an influencer to grease the wheels. And the way they do this is through the other meaning of this T-word: trendy. The influencer makes it cool.

You know what’s not very cool? Dixie Cups. And yet, they utilized an influencer push that showed a 100x return on the original campaign forecast!

A good influencer marketing campaign can get you trending and trendy if you work with the right influencer(s). Let them leverage their social cache with the help of your creative team for potentially amazing results like this.

Track.

According to a survey by Rakuten Marketing, “38% of marketers say they are unable to tell whether influencer activity actually drives sales.” While the MarketingWeek article paints this as a negative, note that this is a minority. The majority of marketers seems to understand how to track influencer marketing, which is a great thing (and not hard!).

Social media influencers by definition use social media, and tracking whether their posts lead to sales shouldn’t really be a mystery. Every post should have a unique link or coupon code associated to measure conversions and traffic. Not only that, almost all the major social platforms are rich with features that make it simple to track. For example, Instagram’s “comment to buy” feature allows followers to convert right from the app.

And at the very least, all you need to do is watch your analytics and see if there is a spike in traffic after your influencer posts something. Do you see the line go up unusually high? Then yes, at least on a broad level, you can see that the campaign had some influence.

The beauty and benefit of influencer, referral, and affiliate marketing is your ability to track leads and conversions back to where they originated. If you’re unsure whether it’s working, you’re doing it wrong.

Transactions.

At the end of the day, marketers are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on influencers because it works.

The chart above from Duval Union Consulting agrees. Also, a study by Tomoson showed an ROI of $6.50 for every $1 spent. And lest we forget, the market is booming at the moment.

At the end of the day, brand awareness is great, gaining followers is awesome; but if you don’t see any boost to your sales and bottom-line, it’s a waste. At least for right now, influencers are worth their weight in Tweets. Sure, the online winds may change in the future, but it’s their moment in the sun and savvy businesses that work with the right influencers can really supercharge their business.

Do you work with influencers? How are your 4 T’s?

As a business owner and one of the salespeople for my company, I am busy. Just like you, I have to run my business and sell, and it doesn’t seem like I can get it all done. We all need to juggle many priorities, and one of the most important is lead generation. We have to be sure that among all the other work we do, we keep the leads flowing. The minute we stop, it’s disastrous.

Never Stop Prospecting

We have to get connected and stay connected with clients.  We need to keep them happy so we can grow their account and get them to refer us. We have to build relationships with prospects. We have to stay in touch with the people who can give us strategic introductions to prospects. It’s a lot to do. We can spend a lot of time on the phone, sending emails, and attending events and I do but for me, one of the most productive ways to interact with people is online.

Be More Productive

We all have the same 24 hours to prioritize, plan, schedule and get the important things done. In person, at a networking event, I can only effectively connect and have conversations with about five new people. In an hour on the phone, I might be able to have a meaningful conversation with two to four people. For me, networking online can be so much more efficient and just as effective. That’s where LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat work best. In one hour, I can connect with at least twenty people in a variety of different ways.

I know you think you don’t have an hour every day for social media, and you may see it as a time suck. Think about it instead as a necessary business activity.  It’s a way to learn about the people and the brands you need to know.

It’s About Routine

You have to be very organized to use social media for business, just like you are when you use the phone or email for prospecting. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Schedule time on your calendar
2. Have your list of customers and prospects ready
3. Know which platforms they spend time on
4. Know what is important to them
5. Interact with them

Right now you may not feel like you have an hour a day to spend on this, but once you start getting results, you may find that an hour isn’t enough.

For now, I know you can start with 15 minutes a day. Here are a few things you can do in just 15 minutes. Choose one or two of these things to do daily.

15 Minutes a Day Goes a Long Way

• Post an activity: Share an upcoming event, a quote, a photo or a link to an article. The content can be from your company, one of your clients or industry related.
• Click like, comment or share: Look through the activity feed and see what others are up to and click like, comment or share. Have your list of customers and prospects handy and be sure to look to see what their companies have posted. See what individuals you follow have posted so you can interact. You can probably do twenty or so a day. This works on every platform. Some have a like feature, and some have a heart. It’s just a quick way to keep in touch.
• Check LinkedIn and Facebook groups: If you are in groups with your customers and prospects, check those groups to see what activity is important. Find people to connect with there. Share an interesting article, video or idea.
• Check messages: Respond to messages from customers and prospects and leave the rest for another day if you run out of time. If they are spammy sales messages, delete them and maybe disconnect from that person.
• Accept Invites: Look to see who wants to connect and research before you reject. If you don’t know the person, read their profile, see what they post and check their website. If they could be a prospect or referral source accept the connection. Then send them a message to get a conversation started. Only connect to people you are willing to develop a business relationship with; otherwise, there is no point. (There are some who will disagree with me on this point.) It’s quality, not quantity that matters.
• Send connection requests or follow: Be sure you are connected to or following your coworkers, former coworkers, clients, colleagues, and classmates. If you meet people at events, find them online and follow or connect with them.
• Send a private message: Find key people you want to interact with and send them a quick note, a link to an article or an event they will find interesting. You can do this on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat. The private message is for people you are already connected with.

Those are some things you can do in 15 minutes. These are all easy to do from a mobile device. If you need a reminder, I created a free infographic for you! Click the button below.

Schedule time on your calendar stay in touch with customers and prospects and use these platforms to learn, research and stay current.

I don’t do all of these activities every time I get on the internet, but throughout the week, I will do all of them.

Get Results

For me doing this has paid off in several ways:

1. I get business this way. I build relationships that lead to conversations that lead to sales.
2. The people I am connected with get to know me, like me, trust me. They are willing to make an introduction when I ask or respond when I reach out to them.
3. I have gotten to know people who I probably never would have otherwise, and some of them have become clients or referred prospects to me.
4. I have been able to help my clients and friends with valuable contacts that have given them information, employees, resources, and jobs.

If this seems daunting, please schedule a time to talk with me and my team to help you build your brand online to generate leads and close more deals. AND if you need some great basic social selling training, check out Vengreso’s Social Selling Boot Camp!

The post How an Hour a Day on Social Media Can Grow Your Sales appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Sales automation may just be the answer to all your selling woes. No, really.

Have you ever:

• Lost a deal because you forgot to follow up?
• Spent precious minutes adding opportunities or leads to your CRM?
• Overlooked an issue in your sales process for a dangerously long time?
• Called leads in alphabetical order rather than best fit?
• Went back and forth with a prospect figuring out a good time to meet?
• Wasted half an hour digging through your files to find the specific deck or customer testimonial you needed?

If you can relate to any — or all — of the above, you need sales automation. This guide will walk you through sales automation and the different sales automation tools that might benefit your team.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is the mechanization of manual, time-consuming sales tasks using software, artificial intelligence (AI), and other digital tools. It aims to manage or own responsibilities that sales reps and managers do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Sales automation benefits your business, sales team, and bottom line in multiple ways. Sales automation ...

• ... increases the productivity and performance of your sales reps.
• ... turbocharges your efficiency.
• ... improves the accuracy and accelerates your sales process.
• ... ensures your sales leads don't fall through the cracks.
• ... streamlines the quality of your sales tasks.
• ... reduces response time which can increase customer satisfaction.
• ... keeps sales data consistent across your sales organization.
• ... allows efficient use of otherwise scarce resources (like a small sales team or budget).

The Danger of Sales Automation

But, like anything, sales automation can become too much of a good thing. You never want to automate every aspect of your sales process — because then it will feel completely robotic and soulless to prospects. As a human, you add critical and irreplaceable elements to your deals.

So, if you’re blasting out automated emails by the thousands or using an autodialer, you’ve crossed over to the dark side.

And beware, prospects don’t take kindly to being pushed through this type of machine. You’ll never get high conversion rates with these tactics, and worse, your company will earn an undesirable reputation.

Your team's sales process is an important asset. You've established it so that you have an iterative process for everyone to follow. A sales process also makes it easy for you to identify gaps to improve upon. Sales automation software only make your sales process more solid by streamlining the quality of certain tasks and freeing up time and energy to spend prospecting and nurturing leads.

Sales Automation CRM

However, one type of sales automation software is particularly important: your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. (You'll see in the sections below just how many sales automation tasks your CRM helps automate.)

Your CRM tool is a critical piece of your sales automation puzzle. It's analogous to the center of a wheel — a wheel's center is what supports and moves the spokes so the wheel itself moves in the right direction. Without a robust CRM, many of your sales automation responsibilities can fall flat.

The HubSpot free CRM is everything your sales organization needs for customer relationship management and sales automation. With the HubSpot CRM, you can easily organize, track, and nurture your leads and customers. The CRM itself has automation tasks — such as logging prospect activity, rep outreach, and contact data and information.

It also feeds data into the other sales automation tools and software your reps and managers use.

Sales Automation Software for Reps

Sales reps have a multitude of daily responsibilities. These aspects of sales automation will particularly help reps perform better.

Prospecting

Are you consistently running the same searches on LinkedIn? There’s a better way. If you have a LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator account, you can set up a custom filter using your combination of criteria (for example, “CMO AND San Francisco”).

Choose to get email alerts every day, week, or month. Now you’ll receive a prequalified list of prospects on a recurring basis without lifting a finger. (LinkedIn only sends you new profiles, so don’t worry about seeing the same names again and again.)

Using an insights tool that lives in your email will also free up a ton of time. The Inbox Profiles tool in HubSpot Sales pulls details from your prospect’s CRM records, social media profiles, and company so you can see everything you need to send the perfect email at a single glance. Now there’s no need to open up a million tabs to discover what they tweet about, their job title, or even the last page they converted on.

Lead Enrichment

Knowledge is power. The more information you have about your prospect’s company size, industry, and solutions, as well as their responsibilities, social media presence, current vendors, and so forth, the easier it will be to successfully connect with them and earn their trust.

That’s where lead enrichment tools like LeadSpace and LeadGenius come in. These gather information from hundreds or thousands of data sources to give you an up-to-date, comprehensive profile of your prospect.

Contact and Deal Creation

If you’re still adding new contacts and opportunities to your CRM by hand, I’ve got great news: There’s a much better way.

First, set up workflows with your marketing software to automatically create and edit records for leads who meet a certain criteria. For instance, maybe you want to define a lead as “Qualified” if they have X title or Y role and have watched a product video or visited your pricing page.

Second, make sure you’re integrating your various lead sources with your CRM. That might be webinar participants, survey respondents, new email subscribers, event attendees, Facebook Lead Ads respondents, and so forth. If a native integration isn’t available, use Zapier (a third party tool that seamlessly connects your apps).

Email Templates

Prospecting, meeting confirmation, and follow-up emails usually do not and should not vary much. To increase response rates, personalize 30-50% of the content but no more. (Our data actually shows there are diminishing returns beyond this point.)

Avoid copying and pasting messages — or even less efficiently, typing out the same basic sentences over and over — by creating email templates. Simply write master versions of the emails you regularly send to prospects, then save them as templates.

You can quickly customize them to the specific recipient and situation before sending them off. The Templates feature in HubSpot Sales even lets you add personalization tokens so details like the prospect’s name, company, and job title are filled in automatically.

Sales Email Automation

What if you want to send multiple emails to a prospect in a row, assuming they don’t answer the first one? The Sequences feature in HubSpot Sales lets you do exactly that. Tee up an email campaign personalized to the prospect, choose when they’ll send, add personalization tokens for company and contact details, and finish off with some unique details to make your messages seem human.

Then, choose to have the messages stop when the prospect responds.

Meeting Scheduling

The process of scheduling a conversation with a prospect can feel like a tennis rally: You send over one date and time, they return with a different date and time, you send over another ... not only does this back-and-forth kill your deal’s momentum, but it’s also inefficient.

With an appointment and meeting scheduling tool, you can go right from “Want to see a demo?” to getting a slot on the calendar. Simply shoot the prospect a link to your schedule. They can choose any open time that works for them.

HubSpot Meetings is a great option for this, since it automatically creates a record for new contacts in your CRM when a prospect books a meeting.

However, there are other options out there if you’re looking for a stand-alone tool, like Calendly or Arrangr.

Sales Calls

Self-reflection is an important part of leveling up, but let’s be honest: Given the choice between listening to and reviewing your last call and getting on another one, you’re always going to choose the latter. Thanks to new conversation intelligence tools, you can quickly see summaries of all your calls — both transcribed and analyzed.

Platforms like Gong, Wingman, Avoma, and Chorus pull out key pieces of your conversations (like which topics you covered, the action items you discussed, and which competitors came up) and even give you AI-powered insights about the opportunity.

Deal Management Automation

Get a prospect’s voicemail — log the attempt in your CRM. Call two days later and reach them — log the conversation in your CRM. Send them a follow-up email — log the message in your CRM.

You’re probably getting tired just reading that. Automating deal-related activity is a no-brainer; look for a tool that will record your calls, meetings, and emails for you. HubSpot Sales can help with this and even record when prospects open your email, click on the links you sent, or download the documents you attached to the message.

Proposals

There’s no need to draft a proposal or quote by copying and pasting the relevant details from your emails, notes, and CRM. Tools like PandaDoc and ClientPoint integrate with your CRM so that when you create a quote, key details like customer information, product details, and price are automatically transferred.

You can usually set up timed reminders as well. That way, you won’t have to pester prospects to sign — your tool will do it for you.

Want to make sure your manager or legal team reviews the contract first? Set up an automated internal workflow in your CRM so the right stakeholders can sign off before it’s sent to the buyer.

Sales Automation for Managers

Sales managers have a completely different set of sales responsibilities then reps. Let's take a look at what those manager responsibilities look like in terms of sales automation.

Reporting

If you lead a sales team, you might be spending an hour (or more) per day manually creating reports and then screenshotting or attaching them to emails.

There’s a much easier way to keep your team informed motivated. Use your CRM to create automated email reports. For example, you could send a daily stack ranking to your salespeople and a weekly revenue report to the director of sales. You can also use a reporting automation tool like QuarterOne.

Lead Rotation

Manually assigning leads takes up precious time and bandwidth. You have better things to do; plus, there’s the danger a lead will slip through the cracks, which definitely won’t help your team hit quota.

Use an auto-rotator — or your CRM — to assign leads by geographic territory, company size, vertical, or a combination of criteria. If it’s a free-for-all, use a round robin style.

Lead Scoring

Want to keep your reps laser-focused on the best opportunities? Use an automated lead scoring system. Lead scoring software uses demographic and behavioral data to determine how qualified a lead is, so salespeople know exactly which prospects to prioritize.

There are a few things to consider before investing in this kind of tool. You need enough leads to score in the first place — meaning that if your reps are always asking for more leads, it’s probably better to focus on lead generation.

Having enough information is crucial as well. And it needs to be the right information. From lead capture forms and data enrichment tools to online behavior and email and social engagement, there are a ton of sources to pull from.

Ready, Set, Automate!

With sales automation on your side, you can accomplish more on a "meh" day than you used to on your best days. Implement these tools, and let the results speak for themselves.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

“Our research shows that inside sales roles are growing 15X faster than outside sales.” — Mary Shea of Forrester Research.

If you’re managing B2B sales, you’re likely either expanding your in-house sales team or seeking to grow it by outsourcing some or all of the function. Much of the tremendous growth spurt of the inside sales function is due to technology which has enabled reps to be productive without the cost of face-to-face meetings. So, whether you’re using internal or external resources, understanding the technologies that provide the foundation for success is essential.

As a telemarketing company that serves B2B organizations, we know the ins and outs of technology. After all, our success depends on it. So to save you some time when assembling your technology stack, here’s an inside look at what works for us.

• Marketing Automation — Act-On

  Marketing comes with a sea of data and a glut of repetitive tasks. Yet keeping that data organized and mining it for insights can provide a competitive edge in the market. And those day-to-day tasks aren’t going anywhere.
  Rising to the challenge are marketing automation solutions which can provide you with a central marketing database and information on how leads and prospects are interacting with your company. They also empower you to automate marketing processes, magically handling the busy work so that reps can spend more time interacting with prospects.
  While many confuse marketing automation with email marketing, it goes a lot further, enabling you to track, orchestrate and optimize all campaigns whether they are on the phone, direct mail, email or via social media.
  Because it’s cost effective and easy to use, we chose Act-On as our marketing automation solution. Also, it allows us to use some techniques essential for optimizing marketing initiatives, such as drip campaigns, segmentation, lead scoring and A/B testing. Finally, it integrates well with Salesforce.com.

• Customer Relationship Management — Salesforce.com

  You need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage customer data as well as your interactions with each client on the phone, live chat, social media or via your website. By having all the information about customers in one place, you can conduct relevant conversations, provide seamless service and drive sales growth.
  For CRM, we like Salesforce. It provides excellent visibility into all contacts, enables you to streamline your sales process and thus close sales more rapidly. Because it’s cloud-based, business development reps (BDRs), field sales people and other sales personnel can all access the same information at the same time. Plus, you can customize the dashboard to run reports that help with opportunity management, sales forecasting and more.

• Market Intelligence — InsideView

  Market intelligence software provides information on markets, the companies within them and the people who work for them. It allows you to approach prospects armed with the insights you need to connect with the right people and have relevant conversations.

  InsideView makes it easy to stay on top of what’s happening with prospects and customers. All you have to do is set up a Watchlist, and you’ll find out about their stock information, speaking engagements, news releases and more. Plus, it’s perfect for building lists of contacts within target companies.
  And, of course, it integrates well with Salesforce.com.

• Business Directory — Hoover’s

  Business directories are a must-have tool for inside sales because they list companies within various categories such as industry, location and size. They include pertinent data, including business names, addresses, phone numbers, the number of employees and more.
  Hoover’s is useful when you need the details — what a company does, the revenues they generate and other financial data, phone numbers and addresses and, of course, key contacts. Also, it provides business news to keep you up to date.

• Automatic Dialing

  Auto-dialing is a fundamental tool for increasing inside sales’ efficiency by increasing productive time on the phone. The dialler does the busy work (dialing numbers), and when voicemail or a live person answers, it connects the call with one of your reps.
  This technology eliminates dialing time, wasted time on calls where no person or machine answers and dead time between calls. As a result, reps spend up to 40 or 50 minutes an hour talking on the phone. How does this compare to manual calling? When reps dial the phone themselves, they only spend 10 to 15 minutes an hour talking to leads, prospects and customers, making auto-diallers a no-brainer for inside sales departments.

• Local Dialing SIP Providers

  SIP trunking enables you to operate your business phone system over an internet connection. It costs less, is easier to scale up and is more reliable than traditional phone lines. Also, there’s one other reason we use SIP providers. If you’re calling another country, there’s no way for the call recipient to determine on Caller ID that it’s an international call. Thus, it gives a local feel to international calls.

• Virtual Conferencing — Join.me

  Virtual conferencing has changed the face of sales today. It has empowered salespeople to connect and communicate with people around the globe, sharing their computer screen so all participants can view the same presentation, website or documents. Inside sales reps can now do demos from their desks, saving time, money and making it easy to set up meetings with prospects.
  We use Join.me because it’s easy to use. It seems to work well with any browser or operating system. If you don’t want to waste time on technical issues, that’s a huge advantage. Meeting participants just call a phone number or log in via their computers and they’re ready to collaborate. Also, it’s reliable, allows us to conduct unlimited international virtual conferences, and gives us 5GB of cloud storage.

• Online Learning Management — TalentLMS

  Training inside sales people is an ongoing challenge for organizations, but online learning platforms make it easier by allowing you to set up an e-learning portal quickly.
  We chose TalentLMS for online learning because its course builder is simple to use, and you can present classes in a visually appealing way. Even if you have no instructional design experience, you’ll find it to be a powerful tool. Also, your reps will find it to be user-friendly and straightforward to navigate.

To set up an efficient and successful inside sales force, you need to empower them with technology. That should include marketing automation software, a customer relationship management system, solutions for doing research on markets and businesses, auto-dialling, virtual conferencing and, last but not least, online learning management.

You may have noticed a recurring theme in the inside sales technologies we chose — they are easy to use. With so many solutions necessary, you can’t afford a long learning curve for each of them. If you follow that guideline and fill all the technology buckets above, your inside sales reps will have the tools they need to do their jobs successfully.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

On Monday, I posted about understanding and knowing the very next thing that needs to happen if a specific opportunity is to move forward to becoming a client.  Because I wanted to focus on a specific question, I glossed over the question I am sure many had as I set out a scenario, specifically when we ask sellers:

“Who is your best prospect?”

Talk about a loaded question inviting interpretation and misinterpretations.  If you do this with a group, you will get all kind of answers, about the only thing most have in common is the overload of subjectivity most have.  Once they finish describing the opportunity, ask:

“Why did you pick or go with that prospect or opportunity?”  To which I hear:

“It is the largest opportunity in my pipeline” (Be that dollars, units, etc.)

“They are the furthest down the pipe”

“I have been chasing them so long that…”

“They were a customer once, then they left”

Here is a challenge for you, what is the most bizarre response you get to that question.

At first glance you may put this off to different companies, but I got the above from people on the same team.

For the moment, it really does not matter which I, or anyone else, thinks is right or wrong.  What’s scary right off the top, is that there are multiple definitions of what is a “best” or a good prospect.  What I found that unless you get a uniform answer to that question, you can bet that they don’t even know what a prospect is.

That lack of definition is rarely the reps’ fault.  If based on your process and onboarding, and related training, there is still a divergence around this core issue, you need to stop, step back and plug this hole.

Not knowing what a prospect is, is a common problem, and it not only leads to pipeline full of crap instead of opportunities, that crap drowns out the few viable opportunities that do exist.  Definitions are important, they are not like some like to say, limiting, they help you utilize your time in the best possible way.

I was taught early that we need to call things what they are, and if I referred to someone or an opportunity as “Prospect”, it clearly stated that the “Prospect” was fully engaged, and if they were fully engaged, my manager should be able to see a clear Next Step relating to the opportunity in CRM.  Next Steps also need to be defined, you can see mine here, but to summarize, they need to be clearly agreed on by both you and the buyer(s), needs to move the opportunity forward, and be tied to a specific time.  I continue to be amazed at how many sales people have things at various stages of their pipeline without any clear next step, or in some cases plan.  Even worse, these are the things that go into your forecast, an opportunity sitting at 60% communicates something to the manager, sales leadership, finance and the entire organization.  So when a rep has something sitting at 50%, all because they had a good phone call, and the buyer told him to call back after vacation, what’s that going to do to you quarter, especially since they have not called them back yet.  I had a pipeline review with a rep once, he had 42 opportunities coming in.  Before getting to the nitty gritty, I asked which of these there were formal next steps with, only 2.  I know this is an extreme, but you need to go through your pipeline and ask how much an extreme, how many opportunities do you have a proposal stage without a next step?

This lack of definition why sales people’s time is consumed creating a narrative for their pipeline, rather than working their pipeline, especially when a manager’s idea of a pipeline review is having a story for their review with their superior. This is why many managers, never trained in finance, become experts at factoring.  When your time is spent adjusting forecasts up or down based on past experience with a rep, forcing you to live in your spreadsheet rather than that expensive CRM, you are not leading from the front or adding value to your team, just revaluing worthless numbers and forecasts.

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

Join Now!

The post Who Is Your Best Prospect? appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

It’s safe to say that the world is a little on edge right now. Thanks to the uncertainty caused by both Brexit negotiations and the Donald Trump presidency, Canada’s traditional export partners look less and less like sure bets. “There’s definitely been a Trump effect,” says Miroslav Wicha, CEO of Montreal-based Haivision (2017 PROFIT 500: No. 458), which provides secure video streaming solutions. “Things are at a bit of a standstill in the U.S.” Thank goodness, then, that the company has other options. Haivision has been working to diversify its export markets since 2013, when a U.S. budgetary sequestration triggered a wave of spending cuts. It has since invested heavily to develop clientele in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, and is getting enough traction that the uncertainty south of the 49th parallel isn’t a liability. Economists have long extolled the potential of so-called emerging markets—developing countries such as the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China)—but many Canadian companies have been slow to act, comfortable focusing their international business on the massive, and relatively easily served, U.S. and European markets. The volatility of the past 18 months has disrupted that comfort zone, prompting many of Canada’s savvier exporters to pursue emerging markets in order to diversify and establish a more global customer base—including several businesses on the 2017 PROFIT 500 ranking of Canada’s Fastest Growing Businesses. They have learned what works—and what doesn’t—when exporting products and services off the beaten path, and their practices are instructive for any business that doesn’t want to leave its international affairs vulnerable to the unpredictable tweets of a global leader.

Do your homework

For Manon Hogue, CEO of Diagnostics Biochem Canada (No. 247), breaking into new markets always starts with detailed, multifaceted research. The company manufactures diagnostic kits with a niche specialization in endocrinology, and while the business is based in London, Ont., its products are sold around the world. When targeting a non-traditional market, Hogue’s team gathers information from every branch of local government, and studies key competitors, the regulatory environment and tax rules. The team has learned to start the process early; securing the right permits can be a lengthy and time-consuming process. (In China, for instance, it can take two years to get the go-ahead to sell.) Hogue’s scientists also study the illnesses specific to a new place, and tailor their offerings accordingly. For example, in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, where both men and women tend to cover up in public, Vitamin D deficiencies are common. Then there’s price sensitivity: emerging markets can rarely bear the costs charged in Canada. Diagnostics Biochem Canada has therefore learned to alter what clients get for their money depending on local needs. In Brazil, for instance, the company adapted its kits to come in at a lower price point. That homework has allowed Diagnostics Biochem Canada to gain a first-mover advantage in growing economies; Hogue says that getting one client in a new country often leads to 10. “An established market is much more competitive,” she reports.

Leverage local partners

When moving into emerging markets, cultural differences can be significant. And as Boisbriand, Que.-based robotics firm Kinova Robotics (No. 91) has learned, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to mastering the nuances. “In China, you need to work with Chinese individuals and learn Chinese ways,” says Francois Boucher, the company’s executive vice-president. The most effective way to do that, he adds, is by working with other firms based on the ground; Kinova leverages a network of distributors around the world to better convey its brand message, conducts business according to local customs and—crucially—does it all in local languages. Partnering is the most efficient way to develop credibility, Boucher says: “The depth of your business will go with the depth of your relationships and level of trust.” To that end, Kinova has also developed research partnerships with over 300 universities in almost 40 countries. “Visibility can be key in emerging markets, where potential partners might be less familiar with your offerings,” Boucher explains. Kinova’s breakthrough in India, for instance, came after one global player saw the company’s robots at a university. “We’ve developed a giant global R&D department spread all over the world,” says Boucher. “It helps us develop license and IP agreements, build relationships, and grow our own technology and development faster.”

Court influencers

In going global, Damir Slogar, CEO of London, Ont.-based mobile gaming company Big Blue Bubble (No. 112), has used social media attention to court avid followings in multiple emerging markets around the world, including Russia and Brazil. The secret, says Slogar, is to identify and encourage superfans who can help build buzz. When the company’s most popular game, My Singing Monsters, first appeared in the Brazilian market, the gaming company partnered with an up-and-coming Brazilian YouTuber named T3ddy (whose 5.5 million subscribers are overwhelmingly in the target demo). The strategy very quickly accelerated brand awareness and built a local fan base.

Look to the feds

Many PROFIT 500 exporters have found government agencies to be useful allies in their bids to expand into new countries. Slogar, for instance, has leaned on the federal government’s Trade Commissioner Service to help find reputable partners, something that can be more challenging in places where competitors haven’t already staked out well-worn paths. “They’ve been great, from organizing meetings and helping us attend trade shows to even lining up translators,” he says. There are myriad services, many of them free, specifically tailored to deepen Canadian companies’ presence in emerging markets—something Todd Winterhalt, vice-president and managing director of global trade for Export Development Canada (EDC), feels is important in order to change the fact that 70% of Canadian exporters sell primarily to the U.S. “Diversification of trade is a good thing,” he says. “We can offer that critical first contact, and can help explain the tax regime or offer a list of local law firms and accountants that might be helpful.”

Hedge your bets

Of course, moving into lesser-known and still-developing markets can be a riskier (and more costly) proposition; it’s wise to exercise some caution. At Haivision, Wicha builds slowly, first hiring locals to manage the region and then securing strategic partnerships—in China, for example, with such giants as Alibaba—before gradually expanding market share. Slogar, too, dips his toes in the water. Big Blue Bubble’s games are initially launched through Apple and Google app stores, so early KPIs can be measured before deciding on both marketing budget and approach. At Diagnostics Biochem Canada, Hogue requests prepayment or a third-party guarantee from new customers, and expects its partners to bear the costs of registering any products with relevant regulatory bodies. It’s smart to take a clear view of the risks, says EDC’s Winterhalt. (To that end, his agency offers credit insurance for exporters, a lending program for prospective buyers of Canadian products and political risk insurance.) But, he adds, if handled smartly, the risks of emerging markets are manageable. “We want Canadian companies to feel more comfortable taking the plunge.”

The post How to grow your exports beyond the usual-suspect countries appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

It’s after midnight in Barranquilla, a city on the coast of Colombia. A bucket truck lifts Sean Bourquin six metres above an eight-lane highway to inspect a malfunctioning solar light. Sweating from the heat, Bourquin pokes around, looking for the problem. This is 2009, and he’s just quit a job servicing LED lighting products to launch First Light Technologies, then a two-man consulting outfit. He’s got no medical coverage. No travel insurance. Nothing but his brain, his new business partner, Justin Taverna—a fellow defector from B.C.-based Carmanah Technologies—and his broken Spanish to communicate with locals. “Justin is measuring a grid down on the road, and we’re testing light levels, and cars are going up and down the highway,” Bourquin recalls. “We’re looking at each other like, man, this could go sideways so quickly.” But it didn’t. They fixed the problem—a contractor had installed the solar panel at the wrong angle to the sun—and, as a result of their efforts, bagged another contract. This is how Bourquin rolls: always figuring out a better way. It’s what drove him to take the leap and start a business in the first place; after years of repairing lights, he and Taverna (now CEO and vice-president of business development, respectively) felt compelled to build a product that, simply put, required less fixing. “We started our business with a singular focus,” says Bourquin. That pursuit of a better solution has become ingrained in First Light Technologies, and has fuelled its growth; sales increased 341% from 2011 to 2016, earning the firm the No. 190 spot on the 2017 PROFIT 500 ranking of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies. Bourquin and Taverna started the business as a consultancy, travelling widely—Morocco, Trinidad, the Bahamas and that highway in Colombia—to fix solar lighting systems designed by other manufacturers. It gave them priceless intel about the pain points of other producers. When First Light began producing its own solar LED lighting systems a year after its founding, the products were meticulously designed to avoid every glitch the founders saw in the field. Used in spots like parking lots and roadways, First Light’s products are built around core technology that allows them to learn: whether it’s situated in Seattle or Saudi Arabia, each light can measure the conditions of its location, then optimize its performance. Plenty of hands-on research has gone into the development of these lights. Last June, for instance, Bourquin and his operations manager carried a ladder more than two kilometres across the Mojave Desert, servicing 250 lights along a trail. But the refinements are also driven by client input. Bourquin and Taverna are known to ask probing questions—to U.S. municipalities, to the Moroccan air force, to the Venezuelan government—to find out what customers really want. They then take that information back to First Light’s bright Victoria production facility (a former furniture factory), where their team of 13 discusses how to translate the feedback into a better product. It’s a constant cycle of learning and application in a quest to make the simplest, most intelligent light possible. And it starts at the top: Every time a flaw raises its head, Bourquin—an engineer by trade—is right there with his intellectual mallet, ready to beat it down and make sure the same problem never surfaces again. Not only does Bourquin’s nature compel him to ask questions of his customers, he also routinely seeks guidance from others to help him run a better business. “I view business no different than sport,” he says, recalling his days as a competitive soccer player. “You win by becoming better, and that’s where you need coaching. You need insight from people outside the business to help you learn to be better.” It’s telling that First Light’s first investor was entrepreneur and scientist David Green, who founded Carmanah Technologies in 1996 to produce solar LED lighting for the marine industry and now focuses on investing in tech businesses. Bourquin first met Green as a co-op student at Carmanah in 2000. After two senior engineers left to pursue the dot-com boom, Bourquin stepped up to help build and test a big job for the U.S. Coast Guard. The kid’s work ethic and approach to problem-solving impressed Green. So when Bourquin and Taverna approached their former boss for investment to ramp up First Light’s production, Green—who had since left Carmanah—was happy to help. Green likens Bourquin’s approach, and that of his young team, to the ethos of Yamaha—a company that came to dominate the outboard boat engine market by consistent, incremental improvements. “It’s a tough environment for outboard engines, and it’s the same for a solar light in Palm Desert,” says Green, who now serves a director and adviser at First Light. “You have to stick at it and get all the little details right.” Bourquin, Taverna and Green share ownership, meeting formally every quarter to discuss the big picture. In addition, Bourquin keeps a standing monthly lunch date with Green, which he treats as an opportunity to learn from his mentor. Bourquin has started to delegate—he now hands off hard-wiring to others, and has brought in senior staff to oversee operations management and product development—in large part due to Green’s guidance. When Carmanah was rocketing through its explosive growth arc in the early 2000s, Green hired a CEO to replace himself. “I had a lot of respect that he was able to put the ego aside and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to bring someone in to work with me and help. I’m going to focus on the things I think I’m good at,’ ” Bourquin says. Seeking advice from others is something entrepreneurs often struggle with, says Toronto-based business consultant Mark Satov, but it’s essential if a business is to grow sustainably. “CEOs are generally successful people who are very driven, very confident and heavily laden with ego,” he says. That can be a good thing, Satov adds. But when that confidence leads to arrogance—the sense that no one could possibly understand the business or offer useful advice—it can blind to opportunities. Bourquin defaults the other way. He and Taverna recently joined a support group for tech CEOs specifically to learn from their peer group, and it’s already helping them. For instance, at one meeting, a fellow member suggested First Light adopt a core framework to map its growth strategy for the coming years, which will enable the business to scale even more quickly. “These are not hard problems, they’re just hard for us,” says Bourquin. “We need to find these answers.” Knowing Bourquin, he won’t stop asking questions and applying what he learns. Then making sure the solution is perfect. And then asking again.

The post How First Light Technologies taps its customers to make a better product appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

It’s easy to overlook branding efforts in any business, but especially B2B. After all, leads are easy to measure, and they contribute directly to the bottom line. What does branding really have to offer?

Branding builds loyalty, allows you to charge a premium, and reduces perceived risk in the eyes of your buyers. If they are familiar with your brand, buyers will be more likely to purchase from you as opposed to a competitor who is less well-known. They want to believe that you will be around for the long-term, because a B2B purchase is typically larger and on a longer timeline than its B2C counterparts. In fact, many decision makers say that brand is just as important as sales efforts when it comes to convincing them to make a purchase.

Often, your product’s features will be very similar to those of your competitors’. You likely have a few key distinguishing features that set you apart, but overall the laundry list of “we can do this, this and this for you” approach will likely numb the senses of your prospects, if only because they’ve heard the majority of it before. And that’s where your brand comes in: no competitor can copy your brand, no matter how hard they may try.

Brands are also laden with emotion, which affects B2B buyers the same way as B2C. When evaluating what product or service to purchase, decision makers will, of course, compare features and price points. But they will also trust their instincts, to some extent. And if your brand has developed an emotional connection to them, these instincts will point them in your direction.

Here are some tips for building a successful B2B brand:

• Focus on trust at all times. Your customers need to trust that you will be there for them when they need you. This is the cornerstone of any great B2B brand.
• Keep it simple. Your brand should be easy to understand, whether by a new or existing customer. Too many attributes, and the core ideas of what your brand is will become diluted.
• Be consistent. Branding is an “always on” activity, so you must make sure that all of your marketing, sales and other material is aligned.
• Know your audience. Your brand should clearly speak to the needs and pain points of your target audience. And remember: your audience is not just your customer. This includes your employees, suppliers and vendors and community partners.
• Build an emotional connection. The relationship your business has with its customers will be largely defined by their emotional connection to your brand, so be sure to focus on building it up.

Customer or market research and intelligence are essential to fact-based decision-making. Here are six best-practices for conducting research and reasons for considering external resources to help you avoid costly mistakes. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

In the category of things that shouldn't have to be said but obviously need to be said…

Sellers: do not set appointments or meetings unless you are ready, willing and able to keep them.

This includes these three non-negotiables if you are truly a professional.

Aligning security with your organization’s greater business needs is becoming increasingly important, but how do you actually do it? What it comes down to is being able to map security to business objectives. Done right, security can be a major business driver. Today, everyone from finance to DevOps to sales and engineering has security top of mind, at least if they know what’s good for them.

In this post, we’ll offer several ways to bridge the gap between security and the rest of the business, allowing you to successfully bring it into the organization in order to meet any number of business objectives.

Align Security With Profit

Almost any pyramid of business values is topped by profitability, and profitability is enabled by having a competitive advantage, which, in many cases, is a matter of being able to ship products to market fast (and securely).

As we’ve talked about before, it’s not about being the most secure company, it’s about being more secure than the rest. To stay ahead of the competition and close customers who value security, you need security embedded into every process — in a way that will accelerate things instead of slowing them down

If you can automatically scan code before it goes to production, detect intrusions in real time, and receive alerts that are packed with context so you can act on them immediately, you will enable your entire team to build and operate faster. That means faster time-to-market, more revenue faster, and less customer churn due to fewer issues.

So how do you convince the rest of the organization that good security equals higher profits? The basic equation is as follows:

If you can achieve results faster — faster than before, or better yet, faster than the competition — you can be more profitable.

You should be prepared to explain how your plan to integrate security into every process will achieve speed, which translates into profitability. Get specific, such as how much time will be saved per team, how much faster you can ship products and features, and how much less downtime and cleanup you’ll experience with automated security at the helm.

Know Your Risks

The security threats each of your departments faces may be slightly different. While one department may be guilty of using weak passwords, thus opening them up to email and account breaches, another may be all too eager to publish files or code before scanning for potential vulnerabilities.

A useful and easy exercise you can do is to outline the top risks each of your teams face. No need to list every nitty gritty detail, but focus on the top threats that could pose a larger risk to your organization. With this list in hand, you can begin to pinpoint which teams need which types of education and protection, so you can bring it in gradually and strategically.

It’s also useful during this exercise to list any particular users (e.g., your CEO, CFO, or even external vendors) who may have a higher risk of being hacked or phished, so they get proper training ASAP. Along the same lines, know what assets (files, servers, etc.) hold the most valuable information so you can be sure they’re securely locked down. Of course, running a configuration audit can help you baseline a lot of this — and quickly. This is all in an effort to support each and every team getting their job done without any security hiccups.

Support Business Growth at Scale

As we touched on earlier, security can also support the velocity of your entire operation. When you embed security at the host layer of your company’s infrastructure (a best practice we highly recommend), you gain deep visibility into user, file, and server behavior. This is especially important as your company grows.

Oftentimes we speak with leadership teams who feel that, after their companies reach a certain size, they lose control and visibility:

Knowing what files were touched by whom and when can help safeguard sensitive documents. Knowing that no line of code is pushed to production without being automatically reviewed for security issues is reassuring. And knowing that everything is being monitored for malicious activity 24/365, no matter how many employers, servers, and files you have, allows you to focus on more proactive measures like responding to threats and developing a solid internal security training program.

Getting it done the right way the first time around will save you a lot of time and hassle, as well as revenue and your reputation. So, whether your team is growing fast, you have an increasing number of servers to manage, or the amount of data you store and process is multiplying, security can grow right alongside it so you never lose touch, and are always in-the-know.

Secure Doesn’t Have to Equal Slow

Gone are the days when security was a roadblock to innovation and speed. Today, it’s a matter of finding out the best ways to build sustainable security programs that balance protection with the needs of the business. Embedding security deep within the organization allows everyone to focus on their jobs without the need for manual checks and balances that can slow productivity to a crawl, or, just as bad — lead to “shadow IT.”

Final Words . . .

There are many more business benefits to improving your security posture, and specific ways you can pitch this to your executive team, which is why we recently released a new eBook on how to move securely to the cloud. Even if you’re already on the cloud, it’s a good resource to help you bring security to other teams and processes.

To find out more, download your free copy of Your Guide to Planning a Secure and Frictionless Cloud Migration.

Marketing is more competitive than ever, and that genie is not going back in the bottle no matter how hard you push. The real reason most marketing fails is that most marketing is not relevant enough. Relevancy is a value exchange. Customers and prospects are trading their attention for your information. If they refuse to do so, it’s because your information does not matter to them enough sufficiently for them to trade attention for that information.

The key to being more relevant isn’t hard—it just takes time. The key to being more relevant is to understand your customers better.

I’ve been in marketing a very long while and when I started, we spent a lot of time around customers, learning about them and their pains. Today, we don’t do that much. Instead, we run reports. We look at spreadsheets. We examine analytics. The truth is that most modern marketers don’t actually interact with customers very much anymore, and that robs us of a really important success ingredient: insights.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Smart marketers take the time to get out from behind their desks and actually interact with customers in person, or via phone, or even via email. In most companies, marketers don’t really understand customers because they almost never see customers.

The people in your company who understand customers are in sales and customer service, period. Let’s change that. Marketers have to know customers better to create marketing that is relevant enough to succeed.

My friend Sterling Ball is a master at this. He’s a modern marketer that acts like an old-school marketer. Sterling owns two companies: the Ernie Ball guitar company, and Big Poppa Smokers, which is a purveyor of barbecue equipment and supplies.

Sterling has a saying that he wants to “be so close to his customers that he can smell them.”

That sounds a little gross, but it’s a fantastic metaphorical standard to try to meet. Sterling does it through forums and communities. He has tremendously detailed and rich online communities for all of his businesses, and he uses these platforms to spend time interacting with his customers to better understand who they really are, and what they really need.

He invests the time to know them. Every marketer can benefit from greater customer understanding, if they choose to do so.

Almost no great marketing happens behind your desk. Great marketing occurs when you actually take the time to spend time with your customers and learn what they really need and what they’re really all about.

The outstanding training firm Pragmatic Marketing lives this principle. Their marketing team is required to routinely leave the office and spend time with customers offsite. It’s called the NIHITO program (Nothing Important Happens In the Office). The result of these interactions? Greater relevancy.

If you want your marketing to succeed more than it succeeds today, you must know your customers better, and that’s not going to happen looking at a laptop in your office.

The post The Real Reason Most of Your Marketing Fails appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

Investors are looking for places they can eke out a profit amid the looming "retail apocalypse" — and AllianceBernstein thinks it’s found some.

The firm is initiating research coverage of 10 retail stocks, with a bullish outlook for many specialty shops.

“We initiate coverage with a bullish outlook on apparel, which feels controversial in a time when investors assume Amazon will take over the world,” according to analyst Jamie Merriman. “Simply, we believe that worries that consumers just don't buy clothing anymore are overdone and that strong brands and a few channel winners are not only investable, but given the current skepticism in the market, are also very attractively valued ... We believe there are compelling value opportunities in specialty retail."

Specifically, Merriman rates TJX, Ross, Nike, L Brands and Coach as outperform, with an eye towards consumers looking for discounts and solid brand-names.

“Within the apparel sector, there have been major share shifts across retail channels over the last decade, with department stores the biggest share donors and e-commerce and off-price retail (gaining 4pts of share) being the biggest beneficiaries,” Merriman wrote. “We believe consumers have sought out off-price retailers for their value credentials and see nothing in the current environment that suggests the chaos or share loss in department stores has or will change in the medium term.”

Most of the so-called retail apocalypse fears are fueled by Amazon’s rapid ascension and subsequent acquisition of many retail brands, but the Seattle e-commerce giant still only accounts for 15% of the total US apparel market.

AllianceBernstein estimates this market share will increase to 40% by 2040.

“Compared to other categories, consumers are much more likely to go to a specific branded apparel website compared to a third party website or Amazon, suggesting that strong brands will see direct traffic to their own websites,” according to the firm.

Walmart, which is locked in an online arms race with Amazon, seems to realize this point as well. The retail mammoth has snapped up many niche brands recently, like Modcloth, Bonobos, and Moosejaw. Amazon, on the other hand, had a big get with Zappos in 2009.

To be sure, however, brands are having a tougher time gaining traction with consumers than retailers. Convenience is trumping brand-recognition so much that a startup selling “brandless” household goods has raised $50 million in venture capital funding so far.

“There is nothing in the data to suggest that sales of apparel are declining on an absolute basis,” AllianceBernstein wrote. “Recent data actually suggests apparel sales may be at an inflection point after slowing since 2014.”

Join the conversation about this story »

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Humanity has an urgent need to fight climate change, and businesses can play a key role in doing so. But we recognize that, in many businesses, resources are often allocated according to short-term, bottom-line pressures. We thus wanted to figure out a way to help executives quantify the financial benefits of reducing their firm’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

We chose Brazil’s beef industry as the location of our case study, both for the size and complexity of the industry and for its impact on the planet. We found that sustainable and deforestation-free practices created significant financial benefits for all players in the industry’s value chain.

Specifically, our analysis found that the net benefits to ranchers ranged from $18 million to $34 million (12% to 23% of revenues) in net present value projected over 10 years. For slaughterhouses and retailers (Brazilian operations), we also projected positive benefits: $20 million to $120 million (0.01% to 0.1% of revenues) and $13 million to $62 million (0.01% to 0.7% of revenues). These ranges were wide due to the relative size of the different players in the supply chain (for example, a company that has higher revenues will realize greater benefits than a smaller firm). Nonetheless, the case study demonstrates that measuring the value of sustainable business can be done, and that sustainable business itself can be cost-effective. We hope this will serve as a powerful motivator to improve leaders’ decision making and bring sustainable business practices further into the mainstream.

Brazil’s Beef Industry

Brazil is the world’s biggest beef exporter, with 19.6% of the world market, and the second-largest beef producer and consumer. The industry makes up approximately 6% of Brazil’s GDP. But the impact of the industry on Brazil’s natural resources — and global GHG emissions — has been intense. From 1993 to 2013 the cattle herd in the Brazilian Amazon rain forest — covering most of country’s northern region — expanded by nearly 200%, to more than 60 million head. During this period, over 300,000 sq km of forest (an area about the size of Italy) was cleared, much of it for ranching. Deforestation causes up to 10% of global GHG emissions (trees store carbon, which reduces GHG emissions, and release carbon when they are cut or burned), and reducing deforestation is one of the cheaper and easier ways to tackle global climate change goals.

Nearly 450 companies around the world have committed to reducing or eliminating deforestation from their supply chains, including many in the beef industry. We set about investigating the financial costs and benefits of the uptake of sustainable and deforestation-free beef by ranchers, slaughterhouses, and retailers in Brazil. Quantifying sustainability efforts is often viewed as challenging, given limited data availability, the time and costs involved to conduct credible analysis, and the lack of widespread experience with this approach. Our research has found that embedded sustainability drives financial performance through mediating factors such as innovation, operational efficiency, risk reduction, employee recruitment, engagement and retention, customer and supplier loyalty, competitive advantage, reduced cost of capital, and improved marketing and sales. These values can be estimated credibly and cost-effectively, and we set about applying them to the Brazilian beef sector.

To do so, we worked with AT Kearney, who led the piloting of our methodology; retailers McDonald’s and Carrefour; slaughterhouses JBS (the largest beef producer in Brazil) and Mafrig; Brazilian cattle ranchers, Antea Group, and partner NGOs The Nature Conservancy, Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV) and Imaflora. The Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation provided partial funding for the research.

A Note on the Brazilian Beef Scandal

Since 2010 the Brazilian government, slaughterhouses, retailers, and NGOs have made a concerted effort to reduce deforestation, with public authorities responsible for satellite monitoring of the rain forest. The government agricultural agency teamed up with NGOs to work with ranchers on sustainable agriculture practices, which focused on no deforestation, more cattle per hectare, reforestation, managing water, biodiversity, soil conservation, reducing waste, and helping to improve the welfare of workers and animals.

Measuring Sustainability’s Impact Across the Value Chain

Our team worked with the value chain actors listed above to assess the financial benefits of sustainable and deforestation-free practices through research, data analysis, and interviews conducted over a four-month timeframe.

The main finding from our study is that sustainability practices lead to improved profitability across the value chain. The uptake of sustainable agricultural practices provided the most financial benefit, while the uptake of deforestation-free commitments reduced risk.

Ranchers, who invested the most in adopting new practices, reaped the most benefits as a percentage of total income in our model — between $18 million and $34 million (12% and 23% of revenues) net present value over 10 years. Ranches in the Amazon currently have fewer than one cow per hectare on average; sustainable intensification methods can increase that to three or more by using fencing, rotation, and other methods to increase the number of cows while decreasing the land use impacts. In addition, the cattle raised under this system are larger and higher quality than animals raised using standard practices, and can command a higher price at the slaughterhouse. These and other benefits translate into better cost management, agricultural innovation, and increased land productivity and quality.

Novo Campo, a program launched in 2012 by ICV, helps local ranchers produce sustainable and deforestation-free beef. For our study, we focused in detail on 10 ranches participating in the Novo Campo program and on Fazenda São Marcelo, a large ranch that has been Rainforest Alliance certified since 2012, working with the Brazilian NGO Imaflora.

“There is no price premium for sustainability alone, only for quality,” as one Novo Campo rancher told us. “But when we implemented sustainable practices, our quality immediately increased. Now 70% of beef is sold with quality premium, up from 0% in two years,” referring to the extra $0.11 per kilo of beef Novo Campo producers are paid for meat that meets quality standards. Sustainable practices allowed producers to increase the share of quality beef from 0% to 70%, resulting in $425,000 in additional revenue.

Cost-wise, the ranchers are: (1) reducing the costs of inputs such as fertilizers through better management; (2) reducing the cost per kg produced through better agricultural techniques such as pasture recuperation, water distribution, fencing and rotation of pasture; and (3) eliminating the need to lease additional land for production through sustainable intensification (more cattle per hectare). For example, the total cost per head produced in Novo Campo was 39% lower than on conventional ranches: $283 per head versus $460.

All of these changes led to big gains for ranchers, who experienced an increase in productivity of 2.3x per kg of beef per hectare. Profitability was up by 6.8x. GHG emissions were reduced up to 20%. Morale also improved, as ranchers saw these improvements in quality and productivity as a source of pride, stability, and competitive advantage.

For slaughterhouses JBS and Marfrig, most financial benefits came from enhanced revenues and margins from marketing higher-quality and deforestation-free beef, and reduced risks (particularly reputational, regulatory, and supply continuity) — between $20 million and $120 million (0.01% and 0.1% of revenues) in expected net present value over 10 years. Beef labeled as premium quality can be priced 20% to 30% above average-quality beef in supermarkets, bringing better margins to slaughterhouses.

According to our calculations, JBS stands to gain between $17.8 and $103.1 million net over 10 years — between 0.02% and 0.09% of its revenue. Marfrig stands to gain between $1.3 million and $16.5 million net over 10 years, between 0.01% and 0.13% of its revenue. Both are positioned to benefit through revenue increases, risk reduction, reduced cost of capital, and talent enhancement (better retention, engagement, and recruitment).

If more productivity is the biggest gain to the ranchers, and higher margins are the biggest benefit to the slaughterhouses, beef retailers like McDonald’s and Carrefour find themselves in a very different position. Consumer-facing brands such as these are the most vulnerable to reputational risk. Social media makes supply chains transparent, and consumers will hold the retailers responsible more than ranchers or slaughterhouses. Therefore, retailers are requiring their suppliers to demonstrate compliance with deforestation-free commitments.

“McDonald’s standards in beef sourcing are among the highest in the world; even if our mass consumer is not willing to pay premiums for sustainability, we still have to maintain them,” says Daniel Boer, McDonald’s Director of Protein Supply for Latin America.

Retailers must be willing to pay for sustainability simply because the risk is too great not to — even if there’s a cost to their bottom line. “In 2009, after Greenpeace’s report on beef and Amazon deforestation, we had to reduce our supply base to as few as six different suppliers, which is not an ideal position to be in, in terms of price and volume negotiations,” Paulo Pianez, the Sustainability Director of Carrefour, told us.

Despite these strictures, the Brazilian operations of McDonald’s and Carrefour reaped similar types of benefits as the slaughterhouses — $12.5 to $62.1 million (0.01% to 0.6% of revenues) in expected net present value over 10 years, due to reduced risk and higher quality. According to our calculations, McDonald’s Brazil stands to gain between $5.7 million and $22.2 million net over 10 years — between 0.13% and 0.5% of its revenue. Carrefour Brazil stands to gain between $6.8 million and $39.9 million net over 10 years, between 0.01% and 0.05% of its revenue.

Sustainability’s Link to Financial Performance

This case study found that, in the case of beef production in the Amazon, embedded sustainability does improve financial performance through mediating factors such as innovation, operational efficiency, risk reduction, employee recruitment, engagement and retention, customer and supplier loyalty, competitive advantage, reduced cost of capital, and improved marketing and sales.

Methodology

In particular, we found that deforestation-free commitments reduce risk, and sustainable agriculture practices create financial opportunity for all value chain actors. It also appears that investments in deforestation-free traceability and other legal requirements can be paid for with the financial gains from adopting sustainable agriculture practices.

We believe that this methodology can be adapted for any industry or value chain by: (1) analyzing the drivers of improved performance (using the mediating factors in our model); (2) identifying key benefits; and (3) quantifying the benefits in financial terms.

The methodology and its application in this case study demonstrate that these financial improvements can be quantified and monetized in a credible and cost-effective manner, and have the potential to serve as a powerful tool with business decision makers.

Authors’ note: For more information on quantifying the financial impact of your sustainability efforts, you can download the Excel spreadsheets we used to calculate the numbers for this article.

There are certain website pages that are more or less standard. Every company website has a home page, for example. Most have an About page, and perhaps a page for Products and/or Services. A Contact Us page is also commonplace.

And then we come to the FAQ. While this is not a requirement for your business website, it is by no means uncommon, either. But would your company website be improved by an FAQ page? And if so, how can you write one effectively?

Do You Really Need an FAQ Page?

We’ll note from the get-go that not every company website needs to have a page for frequently asked questions. The Grammar Chic, Inc. site does not currently have one, for example. However, there are a few good reasons why you might consider adding an FAQ:

• You actually do receive a lot of common or repeat questions, and wish to provide your customers with a quick and convenient resource.
• You have a product or service that is a bit unusual or unfamiliar, and wish to build confidence and trust.
• You believe there are some specific things that set your company apart from the competition, and want to articulate those in an FAQ. (For example, having a “how much does it cost?” section can be beneficial if you know your business bests all the competitor’s prices.)
• You simply want to create a page that includes a lot of content/topics/keywords for SEO purposes—an FAQ can certainly be a good place to put a big bunch of content.

Again, the FAQ page is not for everyone—but if any of these bullet points resonate with you, perhaps it’s time to consider drafting one.

Writing a Good FAQ Page

The next question is, how do you write effective FAQ content? Here are some pointers.

• Remember that—as with all of your online content—it’s not really about you. It’s about your readers and your customers. Make sure you’re writing an FAQ that’s actually helpful and value-adding—or else, don’t write one at all.
• Going back through customer comments and emails to find real questions or areas of interest/concern is the best way to ensure your FAQ is relevant.
• Be concise; offer the necessary information, but no fluff.
• Remember to format for easy skimming, as most people aren’t just going to read an FAQ from top to bottom. Numbered lists and bullet points are key.
• Remember that a good FAQ page will build trust, so avoid your sales pitch or marketing spiel here. The point of this content is to help the reader feel more at ease, not like you’re hammering them with your talking points.

Salespeople sometimes find the buying patterns of buyers to be quite baffling. Why all these questions? Why not make a decision? Everything sounded so positive … what went wrong?

Having spent a good part of my career in purchasing and in sales, I’ve learned that buyers do not think the same way salespeople think; they have different agendas, different concerns, and different motivators. And, just as good salespeople have a system for selling, good buyers have a system for buying.

Let’s take a look at the buyer mentality — a better understanding of it will help you conduct your sales calls more comfortably and effectively.

The View from Behind the Buyer’s Desk

Buyers tend to be overworked. A lot of their day-to-day activity is spent on detail work, putting out fires, and cleaning up other people’s messes. A typical day involves activities such as:

• For accounts payable, reconciling a price difference between a quote and an invoice on a particular line item
• And the operations manager, expediting a delivery of a manufacturing item with the vendor and the vendor’s freight company, to prevent a production line from shutting down
• For the director of purchasing, updating a report on inventory turns for 500 post-production inventory items
• Finally, the warehouse manager, working with a vendor to change the number of boxes on a pallet to improve storage efficiency

Multiply this type of work by about 10, and you have a typical day in the life of a buyer. What sorts of things can we conclude from this?

Buyer Priorities and How to Respond

There are three important conclusions we can draw about buying patterns that I’d like to bring to your attention.

Please keep in mind that throughout this article, we’re dealing in general terms; not all buyers are alike, just as not all salespeople are alike.

1. Buyers do not have a lot of time to waste

When they have other people breathing down their neck (often higher-ups) for answers, they have little patience for unreturned phone calls, confusing emails, and dealing with peripheral issues.

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The takeaways for salespeople here: Be efficient, be prompt and be relevant.

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If you can’t offer a good reason why a buyer should talk to you now, don’t be surprised if your attempts to pursue a sale stall out.

Furthermore, don’t take it personally if a buyer puts you off. It isn’t personal. The buyer is probably too busy to focus on what you’re trying to propose.

A good solution to the problem is suggesting a time to meet or talk during off hours — before work, at lunch, after work. The buyer will then be able to focus, and may appreciate a chance to relax and deal with a big-picture issue.

2. Buyers are risk-averse

I think this is partly or largely due to on-the-job conditioning — anything that happens out of the ordinary usually causes disruption and problems they have to fix. Because of this attitude, any new salesperson who enters the scene will be viewed not only as a distraction, but also as a potential headache.

From the buyer’s point of view, the distraction and headache are very real, but whatever value proposition the seller is making seems abstract and distant. In response to this, salespeople must combine persistence with patience.

It’s going to take buyers some time to get comfortable with you and whatever it is you’re selling. Push too hard and you’ll push them away. Of course, if you don’t push at all, you’ll never sell anything.

To overcome risk aversion, start the sales process with details that speak to your credibility — how your product/service helped a company in the same industry, how many years you’ve spent selling to the same industry, awards and recognition your company has received, etc.

3. Buyers are extremely detail oriented

This is really important for sellers to appreciate because salespeople tend not to be detail oriented. What buyers infer from a seller’s sweeping statements is this: The seller cannot be relied upon to take care of the details, or the seller doesn’t understand the details. And the buyer thinks, “If the seller doesn’t know the details or care about the details, why am I talking to this person?”

There are several ways a salesperson must respond to this attitude.

First, consider bringing a technical expert from your organization to the sales call. The buyer may be far more eager to talk to someone he or she perceives as a detail person.

Second, demand training on the details if you haven’t received it.

Third, never, ever let details slip through the cracks during the course of your sales effort. The smallest oversight may seem like a huge issue from the buyer’s point of view.

Buying Patterns (How Buyers Buy)

Once you have the sales ball rolling, you may encounter situations that are easily misinterpreted. While buying patterns sometimes seems perplexing or frustrating to salespeople, there is often a good reason behind it. Let’s consider a few common issues.

Slow decision-making

When buyers draw out the sales process, when they ask for a lot of information that seems like overkill, it could be the buyer is testing you. The buyer may want to know how well you follow up, how accurate your information is, how able you are to make good on your promises.

Whether you realize it or not, you are in the midst of an audition, and instead of getting a role in a movie, you’re auditioning for a role in the buyer’s organization as a vendor.

Focus on price

Sellers often complain that buyers are totally focused on price, when they should be concerned about overall value and ROI. Two very important things to keep in mind here.

First, buyers are often compensated on how much they spend and how much they save; like all people, buyers do what they’re paid to do.

Second, if buyers appreciate your overall value and ROI potential (and they probably do), they will still focus on price because they’re trying to get the best deal possible. If buyers admit that your product or service is worth the asking price, it works against them in the negotiation.

In addition, you can safely assume buyers will not tell the truth if you ask them what they are currently paying for a product or service. They don’t do this because they are dishonest or dislike you — it’s Negotiating 101. Thus, asking a buyer what they are currently paying is a bad question. Instead, ask:

• If my price for “X” is “Y,” would you place an order?
• At what price would you order my product/service?

These questions are actually more comfortable for a buyer to answer — although you can assume the answer is on the low side of what he or she would actually be willing to pay.

Objections from out of the blue

A sales effort can be sailing along, and suddenly the buyer confronts you with an unexpected objection or outright “no.” This is quite discouraging, and often happens because the seller does not realize how decisions are made within the buyer’s organization.

Usually, buyers have authorization to buy on their own authority up to a certain point, with restrictions based on the type of product/service and/or dollar amount. In larger organizations, adding a new vendor may require multiple sign-offs regardless of product and dollar amount.

From a negotiation standpoint, a buyer may not be forthcoming in explaining the internal buying process because it weakens their position. Therefore, salespeople must be sure to understand these buying dynamics early in the sales process. Good questions that get at this include:

• Can you walk me through the process of adding a vendor at your company?
• Is there anyone else involved with making a decision to buy this product/service?
• Anyone else here I should talk to about this product/service?
• Is there anything production/quality control/warehousing needs to know about this product or service?

Relationships Matter

Although buyers like to focus on price during a negotiation, they understand the importance of a strong business relationship.

Normally, buyers are very protective of the vendor relationships they have in place. If a buyer has a vendor that performs well, and especially if this vendor has people enjoyable to work with, the buyer will be very reluctant to jeopardize the relationship — and also very reluctant to tell you so.

Thus, in the same way buyers want the negotiation to focus on price, the seller wants to bring relationship issues to the forefront, but very carefully. Questions that help ferret out relationship issues:

• How would you rate your current vendor on a scale of 1-10? Why that number?
• Where does your current vendor really perform well? Where do you think performance could be better?
• What do you like most about your current vendor?
• What can I tell you about me or my organization that will give you confidence that we can do the job for you?

The answers to these questions should give you a feel for whether you are up against a vendor with a weak or strong relationship to the buyer.

If the relationship is weak, you may be much closer to a sale than the buyer is leading you to believe. If the relationship is strong, don’t give up.

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A persistent yet patient approach may win over a buyer in time.

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Content Courtesy: Straight North

Selling to the chief information officer can be a daunting task, especially if you’re an unproven startup. The challenges CIOs face are complex, affecting every aspect of a company’s business. These people have a lot of responsibility, so they tend to be cautious and deliberate when making decisions about technology. What do you need to say to help them see your product’s value and take a chance on it?

There’s no silver bullet answer to that question, but it definitely helps to have some insider insight. That’s just what I gained during a recent conversation with seven-time CIO Mark Settle. Mark has worked in many industries including information services, enterprise software, consumer products, and more. He’s currently the CIO at Okta, the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, serving a wide range of brands including Experian, 20th Century Fox, LinkedIn, and Adobe.

Mark identified three top challenges that are always on the minds of CIOs: collaboration tools, cloud operations, and security.

“Everybody is frustrated with collaboration tools because there’s such a wide variety, and — in most cases — very little governance or standardization,” Mark says. “Cloud operations are an ongoing challenge – while most companies have some kind of footprint on Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, they’re still learning how to make use of those resources in the most productive and cost-effective way.”

As for security, Mark sees that as not only a top priority, but also as one that’s never going away. “It’s terribly difficult to find the right balance between tools and processes so that you can continually respond to threats as they become more esoteric and complex,” he says. “You can invest a ton of time and money in building security safeguards and yet never get a sense of satisfaction that you’ve resolved all (or even most) of your security risks.”

So, if you’re a startup serving in one of these three areas, and you haven’t yet made your mark on the map, how do you get a CIO to consider your product and take a leap of faith with your unproven solution? A good start is to understand how a CIO will be assessing your pitch.

CIO Buying Considerations

Business Risk

The first thing any CIO is going to be thinking about is the risk that accompanies any new application.

“CIOs will be very, very cautious about implementing any new business-critical application, especially one that can potentially impact revenue,” Mark says. “For example, if a new tool or application is going to interact with a revenue-generating website or a customer targeting app employed by your marketing group, the CIO will want to know all about how your product works and will probably require a lot of testing.” For these kinds of applications, the CIO will often point out that they already have something that’s working and question why they’d want to switch to a different solution. To help them get beyond the “devil you know” mindset, it’s useful to have a very solid case for change.

On the other hand, applications for less critical functions usually have fewer hoops to jump through. “If your application is going to help the internal service desk become more efficient or track new hire applicants, the CIO will be more willing to accept a little more business risk,” Mark explains. “Business isn’t going to shut down completely if something goes wrong.”

Product Maturity

Another element the CIO will always consider is not only how the product’s maturity might affect performance, but also how much time might be spent providing product feedback.

“The tough thing with an immature product is that you can get locked into playing the role of a user acceptance testing organization as new releases come out or new capabilities are put in place,” Mark says, talking from personal experience. “You have to remember that if you’re going to adopt a product from a seed company or a Series A (and even sometimes an early stage B), you’re probably going to burn some calories providing feedback to the vendor and tripping over some holes and shortcomings that weren’t detected during the initial product screening process.”

Provider Size

The CIO will also likely consider the size of the vendor in terms of what it means for future service levels and availability.

“A lot of the time, small organizations don’t have separate engineering and customer support functions. I’ve dealt with emerging vendors where the people who developed the code also functioned as part time members of the vendor’s professional services and customer support teams,” Mark says. “If you encounter technical problems with products from small startup companies, you end up chasing a very precious and limited resource when you’re trying to get your problems resolved.”

Implementation

Implementation and the potential consequences are topics that Mark believes are too often glossed over by IT buyers.

“It’s a chronic failing of most IT professionals that they fail to focus on product implementation and support issues until the very last stages of the product evaluation process,” Mark says. “They need to ask tough questions regarding implementation problems encountered by other customers; how the product will interact with other apps or tools; what kind of long-term technical or administrative support will be required to maintain and actually use the product; etc. Furthermore, CIOs need to know what types of support resources the vendor can supply if they get in a bind. These are all super-important considerations, but they always get left to the tail end of the process, after the buyer has already fallen in love with the product.”

Cost vs. Productivity

Finally, the CIO is obviously going to look at any new application from a cost perspective. How that perspective influences the decision depends in part on the category of software.

“In the collaboration space, a lot of the tools are freeware, so it’s often less of a cost pressure and more of a productivity issue,” says Mark. Sometimes, the conversation is almost more philosophical than tactical. “Some might argue that if two people stumbled upon a tool that made them more productive, they should just use it. But, in a larger company, other people might make a case for having guidelines and preferred tools for various tasks like video conferencing, file sharing, texting, and so forth to promote enterprise-wide collaboration.”

Security is on the other end of the scale. “With security apps, there are definite cost issues,” Mark says. “There’s a proliferation of tools, many of which seem uniquely niche-focused to tackle a specific problem. It’s tempting to throw a lot of technology at security issues, so there are always opportunities for either a roll-up or more of a platform play in these areas — something that would get you out of a best-of-breed approach.” Mark doesn’t discount the best-of-breed approach, but notes that it does drive a costlier end state.

And, for cloud operations, Mark thinks cost optimization is an important area of consideration for both CIOs and vendors. “I would encourage the people who are thinking about the ‘next big problem’ to spend some time on cost optimization,” he says. “Will you move workloads back and forth between your on-premise data center and the cloud, and — if so — how will you then make the most cost-effective use of those cloud resources?”

Tactical Tips for Making the CIO Sale

Once you’ve got your head around the kinds of buying considerations that are top-of-mind for CIOs, you can start thinking about which specific tactics you can use to sell into enterprise companies. Mark has two recommendations.

“I’ve served as an advisor to small companies of fewer than 100 or even 50 people. At that stage of development, my advice is to find the killer use case (or the two killer use cases) and sell the hell out of that. You have to be very disciplined in finding use cases that effectively demonstrate your value proposition and allow you to lock down your product development plans and sales strategies.”

Mark warns against inadvertently trying to become all things to all people, but he understands how tempting it can be when multiple clients are asking for different features. “The poor sales guys are bringing back all this market intelligence, and the product guys end up getting pulled in all these different directions, and the long and short of it is you can’t go anywhere because you’re not focused enough,” Mark says. “That’s definitely a problem.

The other tactical tip Mark has to offer is simple, “Sell as much as you can through references and the professional peers of your initial customers. That’s why those first few customers are so important. You’re going to want to use them as references going forward.”

The post What Startups Need to Know About Selling to the CIO: Tips from 7-Time CIO Mark Settle appeared first on OpenView Labs.

According to a recent Gartner study of 700 buyers across the US, EMEA, Brazil, India, and China, consumers spend only 32% of their purchasing journey interacting with supplier-side content or sales people. The majority of their time is devoted to internal assessments, peer discussion and listening to the recommendations of external experts.

Why? Because there is too much noise out there.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember when it was exciting to receive an email; now you likely ignore more than eighty percent of them. As consumers, we’re feeling so overwhelmed by the volume of content that we’re turning to other trusted sources.

Many small businesses are adopting content or inbound marketing strategies to attract potential customers; in itself, a good strategy. However, creating content without a clear idea of how it adds value, helps educate and build trust during the purchasing process is a waste of time, and money.

Therefore it is essential to understand the journey a customer typically follows when making a decision to purchase your product.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing recently interviewed Adele Revella from Buyer Person Institute on his podcast. During the interview, they talked about the need to move upstream in the buying process. As John put it, “somewhere between, I need to go home earlier, and I need an outsourced printing service”.

Most prospects don’t immediately know they need your businesses product or service. They have a problem or a challenge that they need to solve. In this case, the need to go home earlier.

Your goal is to uncover the marketing sweet spot –– that point when a buyer identifies a problem or discovers a need, and you do this by creating buyer personas.

Unfortunately, the mistake most people make is taking a rather simplistic view of how to develop buyer personas. Typically, instead of speaking to customers, we look inward – interviewing sales staff, customer support professionals, and the executive team. No doubt, these people have valuable insight, but the most important interview is with the client.

When it comes to interviewing clients, Revella suggests abandoning the scripted approach and starting with one simple statement:

“Take me back to the day your company first decided they needed a printing solution.”

Keep in mind your aim is to uncover what triggered the buying process and understand how your customer arrived a the decision to purchase your product or service. Listen to their story; the highs and lows of the decision making process; the obstacles they had to navigate in selecting your company; the challenges in making sense of all the information they found along the way.

Revella suggests you can only do this by asking open-ended questions, listening, and probing throughout the interview. Doing this will help you uncover what you did to win their business, and what you need to do in the future to accelerate the process.

Your customer will tell you exactly how they made their purchasing decision, from the moment they identified a need to signing the purchase order. Once complete, for sales and marketing teams, having buyer personas can be like having the answers before the exam.

Another tip, interview at least 8-10 customers, and not just your favourite ones. Often it’s the prospects you didn’t win that can offer the best insights.

If you want to learn more about buyer personas and the buyer’s journey, download a copy of our Digital Distillation Plan.

If you’re really excited about automating your business but you don’t have a big budget to invest in expensive tools out there, this article is for you.

Marketing automation is evolving very fast. According to a recent Clickz survey, “59% of Fortune 500 companies now use marketing automation along with 95% of SaaS-based companies.” About 26% of businesses extensively use marketing automation software to manage lead generation.

The truth is, automation is powerful enough to help you streamline your processes. It doesn’t matter your business model, once you’re able to implement it properly, you’ll acquire more leads, increase your sales, and boost your revenue.

You don’t have to manually do the same task over and over again. Don’t you think there’s an affordable and helpful tool for automating that task?

And you don’t have to break the bank either. In order to save money and still get the best out of automation efforts, here are 5 proven steps you need to employ right away:

1). Have clear success metrics from the start

What are success metrics?

They are clear statements about a desired or expected outcome which helps to determine when a business or personal goal is met.

Metrics help you to verify whether or not a project was successful or not. Once the success metric is reached, the project is considered a success.

“Irrespective of the scope of a project, the advantage of determining, and deciding on, the measurement of success in advance should be obvious,” says Rick Harrison.

Here, we’re talking about getting the best marketing automation tool.

Before choosing a particular tool, you want to clearly know what you’re looking for— you want to know what features and functions you expect from your ideal automation tool.

This is important because if you don’t know what you’re looking for in the first place, you won’t be able to identify it when it arrives.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What price range is ideal for you?
• Do you need a tool that offers a one-time payment, or a monthly subscription option?
• What specific features are you looking for?
• Do you need an all-in-one marketing automation tool or one that can perform just a single task like email marketing?
• Will you rather use a full cloud/web based automation tool compared to installable software?

All the questions are meant for you to answer as they will help you to determine exactly what to expect.

2). Start with a basic marketing automation program

After you’ve determined what you’re looking for in a marketing automation tool, the next thing will be to pick one that best suits your specific need.

Here’s a good example automated system for an ecommerce store that wants to bring back shopping cart abandoners:

However, it’s advisable you go for a basic program in the beginning. You don’t want to complicate things by using a more robust and advanced program that will require a lot of learning from your side.

Also, starting with a basic program will enable you to master everything about automation, and further prepare you for the more advanced ones.

SmartBear Software, a company that develops, tests, and deploys tools for cloud mobile software solutions started with a basic automation tool, and increased lead volume by 200% and acquired 80% of global leads through automated trial downloads.

For example, if you’re looking for an email marketing tool, there are lots of options in the market from the basic ones (like GetResponse, Aweber, and Mailerlite), to the more advanced programs like (Ontraport, Infusionsoft, and Active Campaign).

However, it’ll be wise to start with any of the basic ones like GetResponse. At $15/month for your first 1,000 subscribers, this tool will give you everything you need in a user-friendly dashboard.

3). Create customer personas

Do you know who your ideal customer is?

With only about 6% of senior executives saying that their companies immensely understand their customer’s needs, when they are only making assumptions, this has made customer acquisition and retention a hard nut to crack.

Similarly, Responsys recently surveyed over 2,000 adults in the U.S. to figure out how they feel about their relationships with various brands. Interestingly, 34% said, “they have stopped interacting with a brand that sends irrelevant, poor, or disruptive marketing messages.”

Customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers. Personas help us all—in sales, marketing, product, and services. Having a profound understanding of your customer persona(s) is critical to creating compelling content that grows your business.

Edelman’s consumer marketing study surveyed 11,000 people across eight different countries who have participated in one or more brand engaging activities (like following a brand on social media) in the past year.

The study discovered that 51% of respondents feel brands are underperforming when it comes to finding out what their needs are, and only about 10% said brands are doing well.

Finally, customer personas can give your organization a tremendous insight on how best to serve and reach your customers with your marketing automation tool.

4). Review automation tools based on your budget

At the end of the day, the automation program you’re going to choose for your business will totally depend on your budget.

You don’t want to go for a program that will make you break the bank. If you’re just starting out and your business is not yet generating a substantial amount to invest in some of the advanced programs out there, the smart thing to do is to invest in an automation program that will get the job done.

The good thing is most of the marketing automation tools on the internet that is considered cheap or basic can still carry out most of the functions the more advanced ones boast of (although with some limitations). Agile CRM is a good example; it’s free for 10 users.

Also, if you don’t have money to invest in an automation tool at the moment, you can still get some tools that offer limited free subscription. For example, you can use Mailerlite or Mailchimp email marketing program free for your first 2,000 subscribers and then upgrade later.

5). Design programs to be measurable

“Measurement is the first step to control and, eventually, to improvement.”

— James Harrington

If you want the marketing automation journey to be fun and result-driven, you’ll need to have systems in place for effective measurement or tracking.

The perfect marketing plans are often created with measurements in mind even before the program starts. And yes, all your lead generation programs are measurable—though some channels might be difficult to measure initially, it becomes easier later on.

For example, do you want to improve your brand influence?

How about measuring things like shares and likes? The point is—whatever your metrics are, figure out what they are early in the planning stage.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are you going to measure?
• When are you going to measure it?
• How will you measure it?

A good automation program will help you to truly track your campaigns and tie them to revenue, and also tie programs to opportunities, and pipeline created.

Below are two metrics you can measure with marketing automation:

• Program analysis: Proves the efficacy of your programs and to know what delivers the most return on investment (ROI).
• Reporting: Create your own custom reports that can measure return on investment by channel, pipeline generated per program, revenue per program, etc.

By leveraging the reporting feature within your marketing automation program, you can generate more accurate numbers.

While choosing an automation tool, go with one that will enable you to measure every step of your marketing campaign.

Conclusion

A good marketing automation software will help increase your company’s operational efficiency and also grow your revenue.

You don’t really need to waste time looking for the perfect automation tool, just follow this guide and pick one based on your budget. The major thing is to start using one to automate your business as soon as possible.

A Report from IDC found the global market for marketing automation will continue to grow—from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015.

Selling was an early impulse of mine. I went door to door propositioning people for empty soda cans when I was six years old.

I would cash in the cans and share the profits with participating neighbors.

But it wasn’t until I saw my dad reinvent his career at 50, as a salesperson, that I began to think of sales as something I could pursue. He had spent decades in a corporate job, and selling finally gave him the autonomy and freedom he’d been searching for.

Getting Started in Sales

I started my sales career in financial services, one of the few industries where entry-level salespeople have full ownership of their book almost from day one. It gave me a lot of growth opportunity right away, and I immediately developed a passion for lead generation. But not the kind I was seeing from my coworkers.

They would rip a sheet out of the white pages and dial every number. Or they’d get a list of BMW owners and call with special coverage offers. I knew there had to be a better way.

I started using my own money to buy leads. I set up alerts for when new leads would come in, so even if it was two o’clock in the morning, I’d call them. This worked, but I could tell the leads were grimy and companies were using questionable tactics to get them.

That’s when I started researching different lead generation strategies -- which is how I found HubSpot. It put lead generation in my own hands. I loved it. I wanted to learn everything about becoming a more effective seller and making my job more enjoyable.

Joining HubSpot

So, how did I do it? How did I go from HubSpot account executive to senior sales manager and then director of sales in under five years?

Here’s the key: It wasn’t by doing my job.

A lot of individual contributors in sales believe you should advance your career by exceeding your number, being the best salesperson at your company, and waiting in line for the next management position.

That’s definitely one way to get promoted, but it’s a pretty ordinary path that will give you ordinary career growth. I took a different path.

When I joined HubSpot in 2012, the company was focused on inbound marketing. But early on, I attended a company meeting where our founders talked about the goal of becoming a multi-product company that included sales software.

If that was where the company was headed, I knew there would be a lot of needs along the way. And I knew those needs would include a marketing site, new leads, and a sales process. So I got ahead of it.

The Nights-and-Weekends Project

I continued doing great work at my day job, but I spent my nights and weekends building the first marketing site for HubSpot Sales. I branded it, did my own inbound marketing, and began generating leads.

Three months in, the website was receiving thousands of monthly visitors and hundreds of monthly leads. I was happy with the progress, so I sent my website project to our CEO, Brian Halligan.

Was I nervous to share my work with the CEO of the company? Not really. I’d read an article Halligan wrote for Inc. encouraging employees to start nights-and-weekends projects. If those projects were successful, Halligan was happy to implement them at HubSpot. I wasn’t nervous to share my work with Brian. I was nervous that my peers would think I was kissing some major ass.

But I knew I needed to take steps that would grow my career and test my skills. If I could prove to myself that I could be successful at inbound marketing and at HubSpot, I knew I would have the freedom and skillset to start my own company and work for myself at any time.

The Pay Cut

Sharing my project with Brian got me an introduction to the gentleman who was building HubSpot Sales, Christopher O’Donnell. He and I hit it off immediately. I think a big reason why was because I was and am a builder: I get excited about working on things outside my daily to-do list. That’s the kind of person you want to bring into meetings and bounce ideas off.

In 2014, I became part of his team. It wasn’t planned (on my end, at least). Christopher came over to my desk one morning and told me to pack up my stuff because I was joining the product team. This new position paid less than my role as an account executive, but I went with it. I never complained. I invested every single thing I had in learning and growing the business and finding new avenues for growth.

It was me, six software engineers, and a product manager. Over the next few months, we built the HubSpot Sales product.

The Promotion

The product we had at the time was called “Signals.” It showed you who opened your emails and clicked on your links. But it wasn’t bringing in revenue. Our goal was to reach $1 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) by December 2014. I worked with the team to push product limits and source new users. We doubled our goal.

In 2015, Mark Roberge, our CRO at the time, was tasked with growing the HubSpot Sales business. Roberge told me he needed someone to hire and manage the new salespeople. He said, “I’ll let you take it and scale it, but as soon as it breaks down, you’re done. I’ll let you go with it as far as you can take it.” Ultimately, I hired and managed a team of 40 sales, support, and customer success reps. I also took the organization to more than $10 million ARR.

In 2016, Brian Halligan asked me what I wanted from HubSpot. I said, “I don’t want any more money. I just want to be director of sales. How do I get there?” He told me if I continued to grow the business through June 2016, he would promote me to director.

The middle of June passed, and I hadn’t heard anything. At HubSpot’s annual anniversary party, I ran into Christopher O’Donnell, and he told me he had a surprise. Halligan came around the corner and gave me a stack of business cards with my new title, “Director of Sales,” right on the front.

Do More Than Your Job

Advancing your career is about more than doing a good job and waiting in line for the next opportunity. It’s about understanding where your company is growing and identifying how to serve the needs of the business before those needs become problems or major initiatives.

That’s how you become someone people are excited to work with, and that’s how you achieve exponential career growth.

This type of growth won’t always feel like progress. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes you’ll feel lost. And you may have to take a few perceived steps backward to take a massive step forward in your career. It’s worth it.

Do the work. Be exceptional at more than just your job. And don’t be afraid of being uncomfortable. That’s how you get better -- fast.

Social media has entirely reshaped the way the world communicates. Instead of relying on celebrities, large news corporations and the television for world news and information, people are able to freely share, communicate and engage amongst themselves. And B2B social media marketing is part of that.

We’ve already seen huge success amongst B2C marketers, with brands consolidating a name for themselves in their target audience. However, B2B social media marketing can feel a lot more difficult to get right. When you’re targeting other businesses, negotiating a world of engagement, followers and likes can feel impossible.

Sure — B2B social media marketing does differ to marketing directly to consumers, but it nevertheless can be an extremely effective tool for your business. Effective social media marketing for B2B companies can:

• Establish your company as an authority
• Grow a dedicated, engage audience (remember, those companies you are targeting are made up of real people)
• Drive traffic and conversions.

Getting Started With B2B Social Media Marketing

First things first: you need to get onto the right social networks.

The rule of thumb here is to find a balance between establishing your business on more than one platform, but not spreading yourself so thin that you can’t really focus.

While LinkedIn remains the most popular platform for B2B marketers according to Content Marketing’s 2016 statistics, it is by no means the only platform you should be using.

B2B companies are consistently showing the impact they can have on a range of social media platforms provided they’re sharing content that resonates with their audience. A great example here is Novartis, a pharmaceutical company that has generated a large following on Instagram by sharing posts on the humane side of their work. It’s creating a genuine connection with its audience that has massively boosted the relatability of the brand.

To establish the best platforms for your company to use, take a look at your competitors’ social media accounts. As you’re in the same industry, what works for them is often what will also work for you. If you see that your competitors have managed to grow a huge audience via YouTube or Twitter, these platforms may be the best places for you to target first, because you know there’s an interested audience waiting.

Your Profiles

Your profile needs to instantly reflect your company’s brand on every social media network, and needs to be immediately recognisable.

That means using the same profile picture — ideally your logo — across all platforms, and using a consistent tone of voice. Remember: social media is where businesses can show their less corporate side, and provide content users can relate to. Keep your profile descriptions professional, but remember you’re writing to connect with people, not to sell them your CV.

Know Your Audience

Your profiles need to be created with the your target audience in mind. By this point, your company should know its values, mission statement, and the type of customers it wants to attract.

Build your profile around this aim. If you are going for a target audience of, for example, entrepreneurial-minded men in their 30s and 40s, build profiles that are designed to entice people from this pool.

Tracking

Most social media platforms provide the option to switch to a business account – for any company this is a must. This option is typically completely free, but will provide analytics to track things like:

• Engagement
• Clicks
• Followers and unfollowers.

Explore your social network settings and management dashboards to find these useful free resources.

Another key tool to use for tracking your clicks is Google Analytics. This will show you how much of your website traffic comes from social media and — more specifically — which platforms are referring visitors. Google Analytics is a must-have tool for gaining a valuable insight into your site traffic, referrals, acquisition and more.

Hiring a Social Media Manager

Successful B2B social media marketing takes knowledge, research, and commitment. It is not enough to establish yourself on a few platforms and wait for people to follow your profiles – you need to be posting fresh, interesting content that is relevant to your audience, and you need to be doing so consistently.

For many companies, this means hiring a social media manager to take charge of your accounts and strategy. You can use an existing employee for this, but remember that a successful social media strategy does take time and effort, and isn’t just a small task to add on to someone’s already busy list of responsibilities.

Content is King

Many B2B companies fail with social media because they think one of two things:

1. “Social media is another opportunity for more leads”
2. “Our industry is too boring for social media”.

Both of these are total myths. Any B2B company can and will be successful on social media with a proper strategy and content that actually engages your audience.

A company that constantly posts nothing but calls-to-action and links to services isn’t going to build a large following very easily. IBM’s Twitter account is a great example of how sharing content that interests your audience can be extremely effective — more so than broadcasting your services continuously.

The company’s strategy is to:

• Sharing news relating to its industry
• Share news stories involving IBM
• Interest the audience and encourage them to share, retweet and engage.

This is far more effective than constant posts linking back to IBM’s services. B2B social media marketing is about building a brand – not about driving sales.

This is the most important thing to keep in mind when planning a social media strategy. You don’t want to appear to be a faceless corporation doing nothing but trying to sell services to other companies. Social media is your chance to give your company a personality, to connect with your target audience, and to establish yourself as a known name within your industry.

So, how to do this?

By creating quality content that interests your target audience.

When creating content, think WIIFM? Your target readers will only click a link if there is something in it for them. Aim to create an emotional connection with posts that benefit your reader, not your company.

Your target audience isn’t a large corporation. It’s a business owner. A real person who wants to save money, boost productivity, and make his or her office a better space for employees to work in. Consider hiring a professional business blogger to improve the clarity of the blog posts that you’re linking to and really promote the benefits of your brand to your key audience.

Long-form vs Short-form

There are varying opinions when it comes to long-form vs short-form content. When it comes to blog posts, typically the longer and more informative a post is, the better it’s going to do on SEO and with readers actively searching for answers.

However, when it comes to B2B social media marketing, keeping your posts short and snappy is more effective. This comes down to the basic principle of readability. Use copy that is ambiguous enough to intrigue your audience to click your links, or that is going to stand-out in their news-feed. While long-form blog posts are ultimately more useful to your audience, paragraphs of text isn’t always welcome on their social media feeds.

Humour

Social media is the ‘behind the scenes’ area for many companies. This is the space where you can let your hair down and be far more social with your audience than you are on your website. Don’t be afraid to share jokes and humour with your audience. Often, these types of posts do best in terms of engagement, and make your company appear far more human to readers.

Be sure to establish guidelines when it comes to sharing humour on social media, however. There’s a fine line between sharing jokes that connect with your readers on a personal level, and sharing ‘humour’ that some could find offensive. That could harm your company in the future.

When to Share

Social media is not as simple as posting as and when you can – but you know that by now! A consistent and planned schedule to target your audience when they are at their most active and engaged is key.

It’s for this reason that automation tools are absolutely essential for any company on social media. Some of the most popular automation tools for B2B companies include:

• Hootsuite
• Edgar
• BuzzSumo
• Buffer.

Many of these tools offer free plans that micro-businesses can use to get started. Once you start earning ROI from your social media accounts, you can ramp up to paid plans if you need to.

Scheduling Blog Posts

Automating your blog post schedule is also a great way to help your social media marketing strategy run smoothly. Adhering to a consistent posting strategy — whether that’s twice a week, fortnightly, or monthly — will provide a stable calendar around which you can focus your social media strategy.

Keep an eye on what is popular on social media, and consider scheduling a well-timed blog post to share with your followers and drive traffic. If you hit the right nerve at the right time, your post could even go viral, which is a prize well worth persuing.

Can B2Bs Go Viral Like B2Cs?

Creating viral content as a B2B company is, admittedly, more difficult than it is for B2C companies. That’s because rather than targeting the general population, you have a more specific audience with more specific needs.

As Marketing Gizmo states, viral content is a combination of the following things:

• Luck
• Content that creates emotion
• High-Quality
• Easy to Share

Going viral isn’t an easy task, and it can often just be take an extra dose of luck for one post to take off when others don’t. The key thing to remember is to aim to connect with the people behind the businesses you want to target. Creating a human connection with your audience is what will encourage people to share and engage with your content.

When to Post

Check out this great infographic from HubSpot for the best times to post on social media. The best times to post vary depending on the platform you are using, the timezone you’re in, and even what day of the week it is. Using Hubspot’s guidance as a starting point:

• Facebook: 9am, 1pm, and 3pm.
• Twitter: 12pm, 3pm, and 5-6pm
• LinkedIn: 7-8am, 12pm, 5-6pm
• Instagram: 2am, 8-9am, 5pm.

In any B2B social media marketing project, measurement is key, and you will start to get a feel for the best times to post after a few weeks.

Interacting with Your Followers

At this point, we’ve covered the importance of using social media to show the relatable, personable side of your B2B company. A key part of this idea is then interacting and engaging with your followers, adding to the authenticity of your online brand.

Make sure you:

• Respond to all comments you receive on your blog and social media platforms (good and bad!)
• Monitor your feeds for related content and responding. A great example of this is when companies respond to one person’s viral story by offering them a free service in response – a great PR opportunity for the savvy brand!

Staying Consistent

It’s important to maintain a consistent tone on your social media platforms. It’s here where having one person assigned to manage your social media accounts is particularly useful – if multiple people are responding to comments on social media, your readers will notice.

Setting brand guidelines is a great way to establish what tone of voice you want your company to have, and making sure that all accounts reflect this voice. A good aim is to be friendly and relatable, but to still maintain a professional approach. It’s important to remember that your business account is not a personal space to express your own opinions.

Handling Feedback

A big fear for both B2B and B2C companies is that a customer will use social media to try to damage your reputation with bad reviews. While this can and does happen, it’s important that you have a strategy in place for dealing with such situations.

Do:

• Address all bad feedback
• Maintain a polite and professional tone
• Acknowledge your customer’s dissatisfaction and try to find a remedy.

Don’t:

• Publically accuse a customer of lying or being wrong
• Take conversations private if you need more details
• Ignore all bad reviews
• Engage in arguments on social media.

Growing Your Audience

Social media – particularly LinkedIn and Twitter – works best when users are all connecting with each other. That means following the right people to help grow your audience.

Think about the people you want to target, and the people that will be interest in your content. These two groups should be almost identical. Find them online. Connect with them, and they should follow you back.

Once you’ve built up a good number of connections, you will have boosted your chances of your content being shared by your audience.

Be careful not to be drawn into a ‘follow-unfollow’ strategy as a business, where you follow influencers and unfollow the ones that don’t reciprocate. Although this used to be a recommended tactic, you’re better off making carefully selected connections and letting your content and engagement speak for itself.

Replicate Successes

When looking to grow your audience using B2B social media marketing, one of the best places to look is at your competitors. Check out their social media accounts and see what type of content has been successful for them.

Of course, you don’t want to mimic another company and certainly want to keep the authenticity of your brand, but popular content is popular for a reason. If infographics, for example, prove particularly popular with your industry’s audience, focus on creating the best version of those infographics available.

Measuring Progress

When you are investing time and money into your social media marketing strategy, measuring your progress is essential. This is particularly important if you are going to be paying for ads on Facebook – which can be hugely successful, but can also waste a lot of money if you aren’t focused.

So how do you achieve this?

Know Your Goals

Before beginning a marketing campaign such as Facebook Ads, define clear goals that you intend to hit in your B2B social media marketing campaign. These can be things such as:

• Increasing your followings
• Increasing click-throughs to your website
• Growing your brand awareness or engagement.

Defining these goals beforehand ensure your campaign is tailored specifically to hit that mark, instead of simply hoping for undefined results.

Analyse Your Achievements and Failures

Once a B2B social media marketing campaign has run its course, be sure to analyse everything that was successful and that failed throughout the campaign. If the campaign hit your goals and beyond, you’ll know how to replicate that success in future.

Likewise, if the campaign completely missed the mark, you’ll know to reevaluate your strategy to avoid wasting money and time on similar ad campaigns in the future.

Find Leads

Leads should not always be the immediate focus of a B2B social media marketing campaign, but they are a could way to monitor your progress in the long-term. Analytics that can measure clicks, engagement and social media leads will be able to show you how much your social media campaigns have helped your business.

Social Mentions

Finally, a good way to measure and monitor your growth on social media is by using tools to track mentions, shares and backlinks to your company.

Tools for this include Mention and Google Alerts. Simply set up a Google Alert so that you will be made aware of any sites mentioning your company or your company’s social media accounts online. This is a great way of interacting with your followers, and potentially sharing outside content that positively reflects your brand.

Final Thoughts: Outsourcing B2B Social Media Marketing

A successful social media strategy can have enormous benefits for your company in terms of popularity, brand awareness and audience growth. For the best chance of success, you need to be able to commit time and some serious planning to your strategy, which is why outsourcing to a social media manager is often a better strategy for B2B companies than trying to manage your social media yourself.

Social media managers have the previous experience to set up your profiles and immediately start marketing your brand effectively – saving your company the frustrating first months trying to find the right voice for your brand and profiles.

What’s more, social media managers ensure your marketing efforts have a consolidated, clear goal. Many B2B companies assign social media to admin departments as an extra task, meaning campaigns can often be forgotten, and social media posts having a mix of messages due to multiple employees managing the accounts.

When you buy something in a store, what you see is what you get. You can inspect the item for yourself, make sure it works, and have a chat with the salesperson before you make your purchase. You know exactly what you’re going to walk out of the store with.

That’s not true when people buy online. Buyers can’t see items before they buy, so they have to take the merchant’s word for it. But how does a buyer know they can trust the merchant?

For Amazon sellers, it can be tricky to establish this level of trust because they can’t meet their customers face-to-face. Instead, they have to rely on online review systems and their digital customer service to establish the level of trust that makes strangers willing to buy from them.

Curating your seller image like this is no less important than any of the Amazon merchant’s other tasks. Prioritizing your relationship with online buyers is critical because it ensures that you retain your customers and encourage new ones to purchase.

Having said that, the nitty-gritty of building your online reputation isn’t always intuitive. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a buyer’s impression of a merchant.

Diagram made using Gliffy.

To help you get started, here are 7 tips for boosting your merchant reputation on Amazon.

Solicit product reviews

According to a study by YouGov, 78% of consumers read reviews before deciding whether to buy a product. Buyers listen to product reviews because they serve as a form of social proof, indicating how others feel about a product.

The buyer assumes that these feelings are correct since they’re held by so many people. As a result, they adopt the same feelings about the product.

Given the powerful influence of product reviews over buyers, it’s critical that you solicit large numbers of high ratings for your products—otherwise, buyers won’t trust you as a seller.

Up until last October, sellers were able to solicit positive product reviews by sending potential reviewers their products for free, but Amazon banned this practice to keep reviews honest.

To incentivize leaving reviews today, sellers can use Amazon’s Early Reviewer Rewards program. Customers are asked by Amazon to write an honest review in exchange for a small Amazon gift card from $1 to $3. Amazon does charge sellers a fee for each product in this program, but for many sellers the cost is worth enhancing their reputation with more reviews.

Beyond this program, sellers can also solicit reviews by:

• requesting feedback through their seller account
• by leaving messaging on their product’s packing slip.

These methods offer buyers no incentive, but they’re still worth trying since they could lead to additional reviews. Here’s an example note for feedback requests and packing slip messages that Amazon recommends.

“Thank you for purchasing our products on Amazon.com. We strive to offer you the best value and service possible. Please take a moment to rate us as a seller on the Amazon.com website.”

Your solicitation methods won’t necessarily bring positive reviews with Amazon’s new restrictions, but they will encourage more reviews. If this feedback is positive (which it should be if you’re a decent seller), buyers will be impressed by your higher number of reviews and find you more trustworthy.

Respond to customers quickly

When a buyer sends you a message or email about your products, it’s an opportunity to enhance your seller reputation.

These buyers are most likely contacting you with a question or problem that they have with your product. The quicker you can respond with a solution, the happier the buyer will be. Customers remember when you make them feel great like this, so your efforts will leave them with a positive impression.

If you have trouble keeping track of customer messages, start a daily habit of checking your buyer messages under the Performance box of your seller account home page.

Amazon’s research indicates that messages that receive a response within 24 hours are 50% less likely to result in negative feedback. To help sellers avoid a low rating, the Performance box notes the number of messages responded to under and over this time target.

Sellers who are constantly on-the-go may also want to consider downloading the Amazon Seller app, which allows sellers to quickly message customers from their smartphone.

By promptly replying to buyers and resolving their problems, you’ll leave a positive impression on them and strengthen your seller reputation.

Let FBA handle order fulfillment

A buyer might have a seamless experience placing their Amazon order, but that positive experience will go to waste if the delivery of the product goes poorly. Did the product arrive on time? Was it packaged properly?

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Buyers care about these questions and will form a negative impression of the seller if their product delivery goes terribly.

To avoid risking their reputation with shipping errors, many Amazon sellers opt to register for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). For a fee, Amazon stores FBA sellers’ inventory, packs and ships their orders, and handles customer service for these orders. By putting these responsibilities in the hands of Amazon, sellers can rest easy knowing that their customers’ orders will be fulfilled successfully, maintaining their positive reputation as a seller.

Amazon is a trusted brand, but even the corporate giant can make mistakes in fulfilling FBA orders. If their error leads to negative seller feedback, the feedback won’t hurt your seller rating — Amazon leaves a strikethrough line through the negative feedback and includes the following message:

This item was fulfilled by Amazon, and we take responsibility for this fulfillment experience.

With this fallback, registering for Amazon FBA is an easy way for sellers to ensure that their reputation isn’t hurt by order fulfillment.

Double-check product listings for accuracy

Inaccurate product listings confuse and disappoint buyers by creating expectations that won’t be met.

Avoid hurting your seller reputation with misleading listings by ensuring that your product information is correct.

When sellers create a product listing, they enter the SKU product identification number, the product quality (if the product is used), the available quantity, the price, and the shipping method. Other than product quality, these fields require objective information that should be easy for the seller to fill out. Double check the information you enter, particularly the long chain of SKU numbers, to make sure that your product listing is entirely correct.

For product quality, be honest about the condition of your used product. You might consider stretching the truth here to boost sales, but listing used products inaccurately only hurts the seller by upsetting the customer.

For example, a buyer is going to be annoyed and angry if they receive a “high-quality” used product that is actually quite worn. Listing products inaccurately to push inventory will backfire when customers return the product and leave negative reviews. It’s a net negative effect on your merchant success.

Accurate product listings are a basic expectation of the Amazon experience. Protect your seller reputation by making sure your product listings are accurate.

Jump on negative feedback

When you receive negative seller feedback, don’t dismiss the unhappy customer as a lost cause. Treat the negative rating as an opportunity to make the customer happy and restore their trust in you by resolving their issue as quickly as possible.

Send the buyer a message that includes a brief, but sincere apology and your plan to fix their problem. Take the time to clearly understand their issue so that you can address the problem correctly. The best way to send this response is by following these “Resolving Feedback” steps on your seller account.

If you’re worried about this negative feedback lowering your seller rating and hurting your reputation, here’s the great news — Amazon gives buyers the power to remove their negative seller feedback. All the buyer has to do is log into their Amazon.com account and visit their ‘Your Submitted Feedback’ page to find the feedback and remove it.

If the buyer responds to your message, follow up with a polite request for removing the negative feedback. Solve the customer’s issue before making this request so that they have a great reason to remove their negative feedback. Buyers are only given 60 days after leaving their feedback to remove it, so make sure that you send your initial message shortly after receiving the feedback.

There’s no guarantee that your request will result in feedback removal, but hopefully your success in solving their problem will make the buyer happy to fulfill your request. At the very least, your prompt response and resolution of the buyer’s issue will repair their impression of you and encourage them to buy from you again.

Make your customer service transparent

If a buyer leaves a negative seller review, the seller will send them a message in hopes of resolving their problem. But there’s always the possibility that the buyer will never respond or remove their feedback, preventing the seller from repairing their reputation with that customer.

In this situation, you can still maintain a positive reputation within the Amazon community by leaving a direct response to the feedback on Amazon’s site. This way, another buyer who sees the negative feedback will also see that you made the effort to fix that customer’s problem.

To leave a response to feedback, sellers should select View Current Feedback on their Feedback Manager page and click Respond to submit their comment.

By showing that you’ve listened to and worked on a buyer’s problem, you’ll leave the Amazon community with a positive impression of your customer service.

Track your progress

Achieving a high feedback rating and positive messages from buyers isn’t enough to maintain your reputation as a seller. To sustain your buyer’s positive impression of you, you’ll also need to track your reputation management efforts to determine which actions are leading to positive results.

To help you iterate on your reputation maintenance efforts, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Which of my review solicitation efforts are resulting in the most feedback?
• Does customized or generic messaging to buyers lead to more engagement?
• How many days after an order should I solicit for reviews?

Answering questions like these will help you figure out where you should devote your energy to improve your reputation the most.

Another great way to begin monitoring your reputation is by checking out the Performance box on your seller account home page.

This box provides sellers quick access to insights, like the customer feedback rating and account health description, which signals whether the seller is leaving a positive impression on customers.

Customer behavior is constantly changing, so what enhances your seller reputation today might not be as effective a few months from now. Consistently track your reputation management efforts to determine which are leading to positive results.

Building a trustworthy image

Buyers’ purchase decisions are always influenced by their impression of the merchant. On Amazon, customers can’t interact with sellers face-to-face, so their impressions of them are influenced by other shopping experience factors. This is why the merchant’s overall feedback rating can make or break their success. Sellers who are mindful of the factors that influence this rating will know how they need to adapt to maintain an image that inspires trust in new customers and encourages customer loyalty.

As a business owner, it’s exciting to see your business expand into new countries. On the flip side, international expansion can bring an array of new challenges.

Often small businesses wander into global growth by accident. The result of an opportunistic deal in another country. The deal went smoothly, the sales process was similar, and now the sales team is excited by the prospect of expanding into a new market.

You hear comments like:
“Our local market is highly competitive. There’s an opportunity to expand into the US. Let’s divert some of our lead generation efforts in that direction.”

But, for any major undertaking, it’s always important, to begin with, a sense of purpose. Is entering a new market part of your long term strategy? Can you afford to commit resources to this endeavour? Are your operations prepared for geographical expansion?

Before diverting resources toward a global marketing strategy, here are some things to consider:

Do you have a solid domestic market?

Ahead of transcending the borders of your home country, perfect your local business model. Refine your marketing process, your sales process, and your operations. Once you are “effective and fluid” on your home turf, it will be easier to expand internationally.

What can you learn from existing prospects?

Inbound marketing techniques lend themselves toward international expansion. You may find that thirty percent of your lead generation brings prospects from outside the UK. Rather than these leads, use the data to assess the viability of entering new regions, looking at things like:

• The current traffic metrics by state or region;
• Which content tends to be the most popular;
• Are the leads coming from a particular vertical;
• Can you identify the role of the prospect;
• Research market pricing in that area;
• Consider options for working with a channel.

Markets are fundamentally different

Markets with similar business cultures, buying cycles, and decision-making processes can be fundamentally different. Change the language and culture and those differences grow exponentially.

The US sales process is very different to the UK sales process. In the US, buyers prefer to deal with an American company; they are used to a well-defined sales process; and, selling in America is part of the culture. However, the US is also more comfortable doing deals despite never meeting face-to-face. In Britain, face-to-face relationship building is key to the selling process.

Identify a beachhead

You can’t sell everywhere successfully. Use the data you having been collecting to identify a beachhead market. A location with a target audience similar to your domestic audience; a market with a similar sales process; and, a place with the potential for expansion.

Keep in mind the fundamentals. Create buyer personas which capture the nature of the buyers and the buying process in your new target market. And if you are considering a channel strategy, develop partner personas.

Taking on global marketing can seem like a daunting undertaking, but it’s manageable if you set clear goals and think about one country at a time. Start taking advantage of some of the tips and resources above, and share them with your team members to begin weaving them into your current activities.