Your organization needs an effective sales hiring strategy to survive. The average annual turnover for sales teams is around 27%, meaning that if you have 10 reps, you could lose three of them within the year.

The only way to maintain — and, ideally, to increase — sales performance is to hire often and well.

In this guide, you’ll learn the ins and outs of a successful sales hiring process.

1. Build a hiring profile.

Different salespeople are successful in different environments. Just like you target specific prospects who are the best fit for your product, you should identify the type of reps who have the ideal skills, experience, and background for your company — and pursue them aggressively.

To figure out what your optimal salesperson looks like, study the top-performing ones on your team. Which traits do they have in common? Which industries do they come from? What are their trademark selling styles? What motivates them?

When Mark Roberge, former SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services at HubSpot, began scaling our sales team, he prioritized five traits of the most successful salespeople.

1. Coachable: Can absorb and apply feedback
2. Curious: Interested in learning more about prospects; willing to ask probing questions
3. Intelligent: Able to master a subject
4. Hard-working: Put in the time and energy
5. Previously successful: Has a track record of success, whether in sales or sports, school, another job, etc.

If you have a few (or several) different selling functions, do this exercise for each role. For example, your ideal Business Development Rep (BDR) profile will look different than your ideal Account Executive (AE) profile. The former should probably have 0-2 years of sales experience, while the latter will have 3-5 years.

You should also identify salary for this role. This is a function of your budget, market rate, the role and how much revenue it should produce, and the non-monetary aspects you can offer.

For example, if your competitors are offering salespeople $160,000 OTE (on-target earnings), you may want to offer a comparable (or higher) salary to attract the top salespeople. If you’re willing to take a risk on less proven candidates (maybe someone who has the right personality but little or zero selling experience), you can justifiably provide a lower salary.

The larger your annual contract value (ACV) and yearly quota, the higher annual compensation should be. For example, if your ACV is $50,000, and you expect reps to close $700,000 in new business per year, their OTE should be around $126,000 — assuming compensation is split 50/50 between base and commission. (Learn more about how much you should pay your salespeople.)

You may want to consider including salary information in your job description. Not only will it filter out the candidates who want more than you can reasonably pay, but it can also increase your percentage of applications by 30%. Salespeople are also traditionally motivated by money, so you’ll be playing to your audience.

2. Develop questions and techniques.

Once you’ve built a comprehensive profile of your ideal salesperson, come up with interview strategies to measure each trait in your candidates.

Let’s say that, like Roberge, you want to hire highly coachable salespeople. Roberge factored this into his interviewing process with a role play. He would run through a standard role play with the prospective hire, ask them to assess their performance, give them some recommendations, and then do the role play again. Accurately diagnosing their performance, as well as incorporating Roberge’s feedback, was a strong sign they were highly coachable.

Roleplaying is always a handy technique, but it’s not the only one available. You can also use:

• Interview questions: Prompts like “Tell me about a time when …” or “How would you handle X situation?” help you get a read on a candidate.
• References: Ask for specific examples of how the candidate exhibited a particular trait, like resourcefulness.
• Resume: Look for objective markers of success, like a promotion or membership on a sports team.

3. Write a job description.

Now it’s time to translate your ideal hiring profile into a job description. Take the time to craft an engaging, well-written job description that accurately describes the role and sells your company.

Remember, your job descriptions influence both the quantity and quality of your applicants. So, let's cover some common mistakes you may be making while writing yours.

You're cobbling together pieces of job descriptions from other companies.

You might save time copying and pasting snippets from other job descriptions, but the finished product will be generic and boring. You can look at your competitors’ job descriptions to see how they’re describing similar roles, their company culture, and benefits, but always write the actual description yourself.

You're writing out a wishlist of desired skills and experiences that ends up being unrealistic.

Are you describing your dream candidate? You’ll probably scare applicants off; after all, the “perfect’ salesperson probably isn’t out there (and if they are, they’ll likely want more money than you’re willing to pay).

Sort your requirements into several buckets: Required, preferred, and bonus. Label them as such in your job description. This will ensure people who meet 60% or more of your requirements will apply — which is exactly the percentage you’re shooting for.

You're using vague terms and jargon (such as “motivated”, “strong business acumen”, “self-starter,” etc.).

These adjectives are so overused they’re essentially meaningless. Be as specific as possible; for example, if your sales team is driven by friendly competition, say you’re looking for salespeople who “love to win.” It’s simple, straightforward, and, most importantly, honest.

You're neglecting to make the role sound desirable.

Don’t forget — you’re trying to win over in-demand salespeople. Make sure to include several reasons why this role is a great opportunity. That might be your company culture, perks, the chance to get in on the ground floor of a hot company, an established career path, a competitive salary, access to coaching and training, or some combination of the above.

You're being misleading.

Never misrepresent the job. Maybe entry-level sales hires usually spend their first year calling prospects and booking appointments for closing reps. If you don’t mention that in the job description, you’ll end up with interviewees who aren’t interested in the position you’re hiring for — or worse, new employees who will quickly quit when they realize the reality of their job.

The best way to prevent this? Provide a brief summary of a typical day. Giving candidates a preview of their daily routine will help them decide if it’s a good fit.

Here’s a breakdown of a strong job description:

Notice:

• It lists the salary.
• It begins with a compelling description of the company and the role.
• It describes what the first months and overall responsibilities will be like without using jargon.

Notice:

• It targets a specific personality.
• It separates requirements into “what we’re looking for” and “Bonus skills.”

Notice:

• It highlights both traditional benefits (“competitive salary,” “equity”) and more unique/culture benefits (“dog-friendly,” “flexible hours and vacation.”)

4. Build your pipeline.

Planning on writing up a quick job description, posting it on 10 job boards, and waiting for the applications to roll in? Although you might hit your quantity objective, the quality will probably be disappointing. Quality sales hiring starts with intentionally building your pipeline.

There are many different channels for recruiting salespeople. I recommend trying several to see which ones are most effective.

Traditional Job Boards

Monster.com, Indeed, and Glassdoor are some of the most well-known job boards.

Pros: They’re easy and quick to use.

Cons: Most candidates probably won’t be qualified (Staff.com chief of Staff Rob Rawson estimates most employers receive “dozens or hundreds of applicants with 95-100% not qualified or adequately skilled”.)

Niche Job Boards

Use these to target your specific industry and/or sales function. For example, candidates browsing AngelList are looking for startup jobs, while those on MedReps.com want to work in pharmaceutical sales.

Pros: You have less competition. A much greater percentage of applicants will be potential fits.

Cons: There might not be an ideal job board for your niche. Plus, you might not receive enough applicants to justify the price of a job listing.

LinkedIn

Look for users that fit your ideal profile, then reach out to see if they’re interested in a career change.

Pros: The best salespeople often aren’t actively looking for a new job. You can pre-qualify people to ensure they’re good fits. This option is also free (unless you want to pay for $1,200 per year for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, which gives you 30 InMails per month, advanced search options, and suggested candidates based on your searches).

Cons: This method is time-consuming and hard to scale. Since you’re reaching out to passive candidates, it usually means a longer time-to-hire — first, you have to convince them to apply, then you have to actually interview them.

Social Media

Ask your sales managers and/or salespeople to share the job description on their social media accounts. (Consider offering a referral bonus as an incentive.)

Pros: This is a lightweight way to get referral candidates, who are hired more frequently and in less time than applicants through other channels. Almost half of the referrals stay at their jobs for three-plus years, compared to 14% of employees hired from job boards.

Cons: You may not get enough volume to satisfy your needs.

Referrals

Along similar lines, tap your network for potential good fits. Send an email to your professional connections asking if they know anyone who fits X criteria and would be interested in Y job.

Pros: Again, referrals are highly desirable hires. You know they’re trustworthy, qualified, and hardworking.

Cons: If no one in your network knows the right person for the job, you won’t have any candidates. It’s also probably not wise to tap everyone you know every time you have an open req, so this method needs to be used selectively.

Sales Managers

Encourage them to consistently take high-performing salespeople at other companies out for coffee — not to pressure them to leave their jobs, but to give them feedback and advice. When the time comes that they’re ready to make a move, your company will be on their shortlist.

Pros: You can attract top candidates by giving them specialized attention.

Cons: Your sales managers are already busy — this adds another non-revenue generating activity to their plate. Additionally, it might take six months to two years of coffee meetings for a salesperson to be ready to switch (assuming they make the leap at all, which is far from guaranteed). And if you try to woo multiple salespeople from a single employer, you may get a reputation for poaching.

Recruiters

Hire a staffing agency to find and vet candidates for you.

Pros: If you need to hire salespeople ASAP, an agency could be the solution. You don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting.

Cons: This option will cost you — firms will usually request 20-30% of the new hire’s first-year salary. Plus, recruiters aren’t company employees, so they don’t truly know what your culture is like.

5. Screen applicants.

The pre-interview screen can save you a great deal of time later in the interview process. You can do a phone or virtual screening interview, which will last around 10 minutes, or a written screen, i.e. an assignment that lets you gauge the candidate’s skills.

Each form has unique benefits. Phone/virtual screens give you the chance to see whether potential hires are good at building rapport, thinking on their feet, and speaking effectively — all critical abilities in sales.

However, written screens test candidates’ written communication skills (also important in sales), as well as their commitment to being hired.

Peter Kazanjy, cofounder of TalentBin (acquired by Monster Worldwide), explains, “(The written screen) puts the time cost on the candidate and gives you a better sense of their abilities.”

He recommends sending them around 12 “lighthearted and pithy” open-ended questions, such as:

• Document for me a deal (either sales or recruiting) that went terribly. Be totally honest.
• What do you think about Google Glass?

“Written screens allow me to take an off-ramp as soon as it's clear someone isn't making the cut,” Kazanjy also notes. “Contrast this to the standard approach of setting up a 15-30 minute phone call that requires aligning calendars. Plus, it's much more difficult to end a call early when it’s clear it’s a bad fit than to stop reading a written response.”

6. Have applicants do a mock demo.

At some point in the interview process, determine how well the candidate can present. Having excellent presentation skills is less important for junior salespeople, as you can teach these. But it’s a red flag if an experienced salesperson can’t effectively run a demo. And in both cases, you can judge how much effort the rep put into preparing.

That’s why a mock presentation or demo should take place in between the screen and on-site interview. (You can also incorporate into the on-site interview, but keep in mind your candidate may get tired or overwhelmed if you’re also scheduling several face-to-face meetings with different members of your team.)

Give your hire a product to sell that your organization would feasibly buy (or has bought already). You’re a prospect who has agreed to a demo. They should treat this like they would in a real sales role — from sending a calendar invitation and setting up a Zoom, Google Hangouts, or WebEx meeting to closing.

Here’s what to look for:

• An invite sent in advance with all the details you need (time, date, brief agenda, meeting link)
• Confirmation and/or reminder email before the meeting
• An agenda at the top of the call
• Clear knowledge of you and your business
• Periodic questions to make sure you’re following along
• Probing questions
• Check-in questions to see if you’re confused or need additional information
• Attempts to surface objections
• Good objection-handling skills
• Confidence
• Personalized content for your company and use case
• A strong close
• A follow-up email sent the same day as the demo (or early the next day) with a proposal

While it’s rare for one candidate to check every single box, a promising hire will meet most of them.

 

7. Interview applicants.

Humans are inherently biased and emotional — meaning their ability to predict a person’s fit during an interview isn’t great. Research shows the validity of a typical unstructured interview is approximately 20%. In other words, only one in five interviews actually help employers identify candidates that will be successful.

To improve your odds, standardize your interviews. Use a scorecard and uniform set of questions during every interview. If more than one person on your team is interviewing candidates, they should all use the same scorecards and individual set of questions as well. This removes subjectivity and bias from the process; plus, it’s easier to compare your impressions with your coworkers.

For example, maybe your sales enablement manager is interviewing candidates to help you identify people who will use marketing collateral and take advantage of your company’s resources. She should ask every single candidate some variation on the same 10 questions, which will allow her to develop a baseline and spot great responses.

Your scorecard should reflect the hallmarks of your best reps. Let’s say one of the traits you’re looking for is a desire to learn. Each interviewer should rate the candidate’s desire to learn on a scale of 10, allowing you to develop an average score.

(Of course, you don’t need to use a 1-10 scale — figure out a grading convention that works for you and your team.)

The scorecard should also have a section for an overall recommendation: Strong Yes, Yes, No, Strong No.

Sales Interview Questions

If you’re interviewing for an entry-level sales position, prompts like “Tell me about a time when …” and “Describe your usual process for X” aren’t very helpful because chances are the candidate has little to none traditional sales experience.

Instead, opt for hypothetical questions. Here are a few examples:

• “What would you do if …?”
• “Imagine you’re in X situation. How do you react?”

However, if you’re interviewing a candidate who’s held a selling role in the past, you should ask a mixture of hypothetical and real questions.

To give you an idea, you might ask, “Describe a time your prospect went dark. What did you do?” , followed by, “If you got on a call with a prospect and there were three people on the line whom you weren’t expecting and had never met before, what would you do?”

This gives you a chance to gauge both their experience and innate abilities.

Your questions should cover the following:

• Selling skills (qualifying, asking questions, objection-handling, presenting, negotiating, etc.)
• Behavior and personality
• Motivation

And if you have specific requirements — like technical knowledge, familiarity with a certain industry or product type, relationships with a given set of people — make sure to dig into these during the interview as well.

Be prepared to answer questions about your company, the role, and your product as well. Good salespeople will want to know:

• What your sales process is like
• How territories are allocated
• How you approach training
• What the ramp-up period is like
• Which tools your team uses
• Which challenges new and veteran salespeople face
• What distinguishes your top performers from your average ones
• If there’s a clear promotion path
• Which metrics they’ll be measured on
• What a typical day in the office is like
• Which personality types are most successful
• How salary and commissions work

Make sure everyone on your interview team knows the answers to these (and that you’re all saying the same things).

8. Make an offer.

After you’ve progressed several candidates to the final stage, hold a roundtable discussion with every member of the interview process.

Because the only thing more time-consuming and expensive than hiring someone is firing them and finding a replacement, your team should take this decision very seriously. Listen to everyone’s opinions, encourage them to express their reservations, and default to “no”.

Most employers extend the offer over the phone first. If the candidate verbally accepts, they send a formal offer letter. This saves you from spending time writing the offer only to have the candidate say they don’t want the job.

If the candidate wants a few days to consider your offer, give them the time. You should also let them know you’re happy to answer any of their questions.

Once you send the letter, they may attempt to negotiate salary or other terms. It’s up to you whether you negotiate or not — most sales organizations pay the same base/variable salary to all the salespeople in that role. It’s then up to the reps to over-perform if they want to make more money.

Of course, the ability to negotiate is a key part of a salesperson’s job … so it may be a positive sign when a candidate comes back with several requests.

Are you in the enviable position of having more salespeople you want to hire than open positions? Don’t reject them and forget they ever existed. A few months down the line, you’ll probably be hiring again.

When you give them the news, make it clear you were impressed with their application and would love to have them on your team. Request to stay in touch with future opportunities. Every three months or so, shoot them an email asking them how they’re doing — and when you do have an open slot, ask them personally to apply.

9. Measure and tweak.

Keep track of every aspect of your hiring process. Double down on what’s working, and experiment with the less successful components.

What does that look like in practice? Let’s say you implemented a formal hiring process eight months ago. Most of the highest-performing reps from the first cohort came from a recruiting firm. With that in mind, you should decrease your investment in other channels and ramp up your budget with the agency.

You also notice that it takes roughly one week longer to hire salespeople when you have an intro screening call before the first in-person interview, but the interview-to-offer ratio is three times higher. In other words, adding seven days is probably worth it because you end up filtering out lots of poor fits that will otherwise suck up interviewing time.

Master Your Sales Hiring Process

Master the sales hiring process, and you'll have a competitive advantage. Follow these tips to get top candidates that stick around and help your business grow.

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

This is a guest post written by Syed Balkhi, CEO at OptinMonster. OptinMonster builds software that grows your business by converting abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers. Are you tired of low conversion rates from your email pop up forms and landing pages? Are you looking for effective new ways to grow your email list and build sign up forms on your WordPress blog? According to The Radicati Group, over 3.7 billion people around the world use email. So, why does your email list still only have a few hundred subscribers? It may be that you haven’t implemented the right strategies to get subscribers to hit the subscribe button. And if this is the case, your website can get flooded with thousands of visitors per day, but still fail to convert those visitors into subscribers. But there are quite a few proven strategies you can try to get more subscribers from your Wordpress blog. In this post, we've collected six of our favorites. Keep reading to learn about them and turn your site into an email conversion machine.

1. Run a giveaway contest

Giving away free ebooks for subscribers is an effective way to convert visitors into subscribers. But, people may respond better when there’s a sense of competition involved like a contest or giveaway. Kissmetrics featured a case study where a freelance writer and programmer was able to increase his email list by 3,418 percent in less than two weeks by using a giveaway. That’s why running giveaways can do wonders to grow your email list. It could be something as simple as giving away an Amazon gift card or a free subscription to an online service. Rafflecopter makes it easy to run giveaway competitions on your WordPress blog since you can easily embed a Rafflecopter entry form on your blog. Then, site visitors enter your contest by submitting their email address. Here’s an example of a Rafflecopter giveaway in action: Remember when running giveaways on your blog to let subscribers know what they can expect to receive from you when they enter their email address.

2. Embed opt-in forms inside your blog posts

Instead of driving your visitors to a landing page to convert them into subscribers, try embedding your opt-in forms right inside your blog posts. Readers are likely to notice these opt-in forms since they’re already reading the content on the page. This is also the ideal time to promote your lead magnet, like a free ebook or exclusive offer! Here’s an example of how Michelle MacConnell uses a sign up form within her blog post: WPForms is a great form-building plugin you can use to embed a form in a blog post. It’s a WordPress plugin that comes with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor for designing beautiful opt-in forms, and it also easily integrates with AWeber for collecting emails.

3. Offer content upgrades

A content upgrade is a bonus piece of content you can offer to compliment and delve deeper into the information in your blog post. For example, if you're an online marketing consultant, you could write a blog post about the most effective channels to market your business. Within the blog post, you could promote a content upgrade download of a checklist for setting up your first ad in Facebook. To get the content upgrade, visitors just need to sign up through your opt-in form. You can also turn a blog post into a short ebook or an MP3 audio file, and use it as a content upgrade in the post. This works because visitors don’t always have time to read lengthy blog posts, so they prefer to save great posts for later or even listen to them while they’re on the road. This gives you the perfect opportunity to not only get more subscribers, but get more visitors to actually gain value from your blog post. Beacon is a free tool you can use to instantly turn your blog posts into ebooks. It also has the capability to use a text-to-speech engine to convert your text into audio files to offer as a content upgrade.

4. Split test your opt-in forms

One simple way to get more subscribers is to improve your pop-up forms’ conversion rates through split testing. This will help you find the most successful variation. You can find out what works best by conducting A/B split tests of your email opt-in forms and pop-up messages. With these tests, you can try changing the colors, copy, images and more to figure out which opt-in form works the best for your audience. Another test you can try is showing your pop-up message later in the experience instead of showing it as soon as the page loads. This gives visitors more time to realize the value of subscribing to your blog. Clickz managed to grow their email conversion rate by 30 percent after a very simple A/B split test. (And you can too!) Here’s an example from the OptinMonster website of a split test on a call-to-action button: To conduct your A/B split tests, you can use an email opt-in plugin like OptinMonster, which allows you to test variations of your opt-in forms in many different ways.

5. Use a fixed widget in your sidebar

Another simple way to increase your sign up form conversions is to add an opt-in form to your WordPress website sidebar. But often, the widgets on your sidebar disappear when a user scrolls down on a blog post. A simple solution to make sure users see the opt-in form at all times is to create a fixed widget that sticks to the top of your page no matter how far a user scrolls down. Check out this example of a sticky sign up form widget from a Kissmetrics blog post: You can turn any ordinary widget into a fixed or sticky widget with the Q2W3 WordPress plugin. Once installed, this plugin will show a small checkbox in all your widgets to let you choose whether to make it stick or not. 

6. Team up with other bloggers

Networking with other bloggers can also be a great way to grow your email list. You can collaborate with other established bloggers in your niche and form mutually beneficial partnerships to help grow each others’ blogs. Before reaching out, make sure to think about what value you can give them and their audience. For example, if you’re successfully building a loyal audience on a particular social media platform, you can offer to promote your partner’s blog to your own audience. In exchange, you can ask for a mention in their newsletter. It’s a win-win scenario since you'll both get in front of new audiences. And many bloggers are responsive to opportunities like this if you explain how it’ll benefit them or their audience. All you have to do is ask.

Use these tips to get more email subscribers

You can implement these strategies today on your WordPress blog and grow your email list more quickly and effectively. With help from the right tools, plugins and incentives, you’ll be building your audience in no time. Want to learn more about email list growth? Craft the perfect sign up form and lead magnet to convert visitors into subscribers with the free Email List Growth Blueprint video course.

The post 6 Ways to Get More Email Subscribers from Your WordPress Blog appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Status quo bias—or our natural preference for avoiding change—is the biggest threat to your success. After all, more than 60 percent of qualified pipeline deals fizzle out in “no decision,” according to Sales Benchmark Index.

This runs counter to the common idea that it’s the competitors in your industry you need to outperform and topple. In reality, when you’re trying to acquire a new customer, what you’re really battling against is your prospects’ preference for inaction. That’s your real enemy. The mindset that favors the supposed comfort of the status over a different and better alternative is what you need to disrupt.

Disrupting the status quo is such a daunting challenge for B2B marketers and salespeople because four main causes of status quo bias stand in your way. In this eBook, Tim Riesterer, co-author of The Three Value Conversations, is among nine featured industry experts who discuss how to disrupt the status quo bias and drive more revenue with your demand generation programs. In Tim’s section, you’ll get a crash course on the forces you need to overcome to defeat status quo bias and convince prospects to change to you.

Get the eBook: 9 Experts on Rethinking Demand Generation

The post How Do You Disrupt Your Buyer’s Status Quo Mindset? appeared first on Corporate Visions.

 

The Key Considerations that Determine Your Annual Sales Meeting’s Structure, Theme, Agenda, and Location

 

Because your sales kickoff is the only annual gathering of the entire worldwide sales force, you want everyone to leave the meeting confidant about the company’s direction, trained on your new products, well-versed about the competition, and re-energized to get back into the field. After keynoting hundreds of sales kickoffs and sales meetings, I’d like to share 5 critical success factors to consider when planning your annual sales conference. 

 

1. The Stage of Your Sales Organization

Sales organizations can be classified according to their maturity. Every sales organization can be classified based upon whether it is in a build, compete, maintain, extend, or cull stage. The build stage is when the sales organization is first establishing itself. If successful, it will proceed to a high-growth compete stage, and then to maintain stage that is contingent upon stable, predictable success. As the sales organization ages, it will either extend its prior success and enjoy longevity or suffer decline and be forced into the cull stage where it must reduce its size. The figure below shows the interrelationship between the sales organization stages, the challenges at each stage, and the company life cycle.

 

 

 

Because each stage encounters a unique set of challenges, the sales kickoff meeting goals, structure, and outcomes are completely different as well. The top sales challenge in the build stage is creating sufficient sales coverage and establishing a working sales model. Therefore, the focus of the sales kickoff is on learning the ever-evolving corporate presentation, studying the products, and building the organization’s sales intuition through extensive sharing of what’s working in the field. Most likely, this meeting will be conducted “assembly” style as one contiguous group and held the company headquarters or close nearby.

Conversely, a sales kickoff for a maintain stage company is quite different. The focus shifts from scaling the organization to maximizing sales productivity by lowering the cost of sales and increasing the average sales price.  The sales organization is fully staffed with more tenured salespeople. They are segmented by the size of the company they call upon and industry vertical sales specialists cover finance, government, retail, distribution, healthcare, and so on. As a result, the sales kickoff should be structured to meet the needs of each segment and add value from the standpoint of the senior salesperson. As a result, this meeting will utilize breakout sessions and be held at a desirable location most likely far from headquarters.

 

2. Your Competitive Position in the Marketplace

In most industries, a single company controls the market. Compared to their competitors, they have a much larger marketshare, top-of-the-line products, greater marketing budget and reach, and more company caché. For salespeople who have to compete against these industry giants, life can be very intimidating indeed.

However, a B2B Buyer Persona Study I recently conducted provides some good news in this regard. Buyers aren’t necessarily fixated on the market leader and are more than willing to select second-tier competitors than one might expect. In fact, only 33% of participants indicated they prefer the most prestigious, best-known brand with the highest functionality and cost. Conversely, 63% said they would select a fairly well-known brand with 85% of the functionality at 80% of the cost. However, only 5% would select a relatively unknown brand with 75% of the functionality at 60% of the cost of the best-known brand as shown in the figure below.

The “push” versus “pull’ market characteristics that separate Product 3 from Product 1 dictate that completely different sales kickoffs be held. For example, Product 3’s  salespeople must push themselves into new accounts by introducing their solution and its benefits to skeptical risk-adverse buyers (this requires extensive training and real-world knowledge transfer such as salesperson best practices panels). Conversely, Product 1 is such a well-known company their salespeople are pulled into new opportunities because of their market position.

 

3. The Deficiencies of Your Salespeople Across the Organization

Every sales organization has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, when B2B Buyer Persona Study participants were asked to evaluate the salespeople they met over the past year, only 54% could clearly explain how their solution positively impacted their business, only 31% are able to converse effectively with the senior executives of their company, and only 18% would be classified as trusted advisers whom they respect.

The sales kickoff presents a great opportunity to focus on your organization’s specific weaknesses in order to improve overall team performance. Unfortunately, some sales organizations haven’t truly identified their weaknesses accurately or quantified them with precision. As a result, an opportunity is lost. That’s one of the reasons I like to conduct extensive pre-meeting research, sales rep interviews, and online surveys of the sales organization before I keynote a company’s sales kickoff.

 

4. The Behavior of Your Buyers

In the final analysis, it is the quality of the salesperson that should be considered the deciding factor that determines which vendor wins the business. Because the salesperson sets the tone for the relationship with the prospective buyer. The buyer can think of a salesperson as someone who is trying to sell something, a supplier with whom they do business, a strategic partner who is of significant importance to their business, or a trusted advisor whose opinions on business and personal matters are sought out and listened to. Obviously, a trusted advisor enjoys significant advantages over the competing salespeople.

The missing agenda item at most every sales kickoff is an in-depth analysis of how B2B evaluators think and what’s really on their minds. What are their perceptions of the salespeople they meet and how do they ultimately choose between them? What are the dynamics of evaluation committee politics and group decision making? What are underlying psychological and behavioral tendencies of lower level evaluators versus c-suite decision makers? How do the different company departments (IT, finance, procurement, etc.) and vertical industries make their buying decisions? What are the circumstances that determine which vendor will be selected? This is the knowledge the sales teams crave.

 

5. Your Sales Organization’s Morale

I published a fascinating research report on The Gap Between High-performing and Under-performing Sales Organizations which confirmed that high-growth sales organizations have a higher level of morale. Fifty-six percent of high-performing team members indicated that their sales organization’s morale was higher than most sales organizations’ compared to only 11 percent of average and 21 percent of underperforming sales team members. Conversely, 35 percent of underperforming sales team members and 27 percent of average team members indicated that their sales organization’s morale was lower than most organizations’ as shown below.

 

 

What’s the level of your sales organization’s morale? Once again, the sales kickoff meeting provides a unique opportunity to make an immediate improvement. More than team building exercises or playing games, improving morale is a strategic initiative that consists of a series of planned messages and coordinated actions. The meeting location, theme, agenda, giveaways, and every presenter is a part of the morale improvement strategy. Please read my 2018 Sales Kickoff Planning Guide for more information, ideas, and best practices to help improve your team’s morale.

 

After keynoting hundreds of sales kickoffs and sales meetings, I’ve created a Sales Kickoff Meeting Planning Guide to help you conduct the perfect annual sales meeting.

2018 SALES KICKOFF PLANNING GUIDE

 

About the Author:

Steve W. Martin is the foremost expert on “Sales Linguistics,” the study of how customers use language during the complex decision-making process. His “Heavy Hitter” series of books on the human nature of complex sales has helped over 100,000 salespeople become top revenue producers. His latest book is titled Heavy Hitter I.T. Sales Strategy: Competitive Insights from Interviews with 1,000+ Key Information Technology Decision Makers and Top Technology Salespeople. Steve is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and teaches at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business MBA Program. You can learn more about Steve at www.stevewmartin.com.

 

 

 

It wasn’t too long ago that marketers were learning about retargeting. Now there’s a new sibling in the advertising family named ‘pretargeting’. So what’s the diff?

Pretargeting is an online advertising technique where marketers target individual buyers based on profile, past behavior or both. It’s pre- and not re- because your ads get shown before your targets have ever been to your website. To my mind, pretargeting is a refinement of the age old advertising demographic; it is much more personal, down to named individuals.

How might a marketer use pretargeting? You could place your ad in front of all people who have visited your competitor’s website. A ski manufacturer could place ads in front of those who have checked the ski report in the past month. Or you could display your ad to people with a specific title, or who work for a given company. The idea is to get in front of likely buyers even if they have never heard of you, which is of course the aim of most advertising, but this new technique is, uh, more targeted.

Pretargeting works using cookies. These cookies track all kinds of information about your online life, and combined with information about you and your profile from other sources, creates what is known as audience data. This data can then be used to create very specific audiences who can be shown ads on most major platforms – Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. You can work with one of these vendors, create your own advertising data management platform, or work with a service like Terminus to target specific buyers. With so much data available, the possibilities for creating custom audiences are almost endless.

I personally am very excited about all the possible applications of pretargeting. I also love how the innovation in martech is changing the language we use – marketing neologisms spun up like never before. Seems like only yesterday I was learning what a retargeting burn pixel is. Now I find myself in strategy sessions deciding on my pretargeting vs. retargeting spend. What’s next?

Tornadoes, whiteout, hurricanes… we can usually see signs of their appending arrival, but even so, we are never quite prepared for the effects they bring. One day, we see a well-known and understood landscape, and next, everything has changed and we must learn how to navigate a new territory.

Thus was the fintech revolution.

But while this shift of the financial landscape may have seemed sudden, there were signs. Once the financial meltdown removed the guarantee of banks being a stable financial choice, the idea of alternatives to the traditional banking model suddenly became a viable option. And with the technological boom, digitalization of finance operations was a logical business innovation. Disruptive and transformative, a wave of financial technology (fintech) startups formed from these two coinciding developments. While new B2B fintech business models targeted several different facets of the financial world, the majority have focused in on payment and lending. These startups brought the finance industry into an age of technological innovation by infusing automation, real-time payments, and better loan offerings through peer-to-peer lending platforms into the financial ecosystem.

From this, the finance world got much more snug. Suddenly, banks’ dominance of financial markets wasn’t a given, and the financial industry was overrun with competition. The status-quo was no more. But the fintech revolution didn’t stop there. This revolution has undergone an evolution. And competition was just the first step in an evolving chain of transformations that allows not only fintechs to benefit, but banks and clientele as well.

Competition: fintech vs. banks

The recent boom in the fintech industry reaches across the globe as people become more comfortable managing their money and business online. These B2B fintech startups are offering tech-enabled payments, currency exchange, crowdfunding, online lending, and wealth management services. These companies are competing and beating out traditional banks and financial services firms. Why?

The digitization of businesses has heightened B2B customers’ expectations of deliverables. Fintechs offer companies agility, speed, transparency, and integrations that banks have only ever offered businesses on a superficial level. According to Business Insider, 82% of customers said that a primary value proposition of these products is that they are easy to use, 81% said faster service, and 80% said good customer experiences.

There is a large frustration with big banks which allows fintech companies to fill the demand. Goldman Sachs estimates that fintech start-ups could steal up to $4.7 trillion in annual banking revenue, and $470 billion in profit, from established financial services companies.

But competition isn’t solely a worry for banks. Other fintechs also face their own competitors. Like any disruptive business innovation, disruption of industry standards only get you so far. Fintech startups are flooding the industry, and because of this banks won’t be the only ones who disappear in the coming years. And while these FinTech startups may have changed the financial structure for good, when the dust settles, and the new landscape is set, the financial world is going to get much more hostile for these pioneers. This is especially true for fintechs that only have a niche offering and lack the long-standing experience and insight many investors are looking for. But don’t get me wrong, the fintech industry is still growing. Accenture, a leading global professional services company found that, just in 2014, Fin-tech grew by 201% globally. So what does this mean overall? While the fintech industry has amazing potential to overtake banks, it also has its own challenges from within. With fintech lacking the long-term success and wider offerings needed to dominate the financial market and banks lacking the agility to compete head-to-head against fintechs, the realization has occurred that continued survival does not lie in competition, but rather collaboration.

Collaboration: acceptance and integration of digitalization

As fintechs grew in abundance banks tried to compete, but their established internal structure lacked automation, was restricted by regulations, and couldn’t adopt anything that would come close to the agility of fintechs’ SaaS products. On the other side, fintechs found it extremely difficult to garner industry respect and trust without the historical experience that banks have. In this way, fintechs and banks have become two halves of a whole, and thus came about the inspired idea of collaboration.

So it’s settled, fintechs and banks collaborate to create disruptive new offers. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that. How to go about designing a beneficial partnership requires more thought. This hang-up is felt throughout the industry. In fact, according to Business Insider, 46% of banks plan to collaborate with fintechs, but only 13% believe their core systems can handle the technical demands of partnerships. The financial industry believes partnering with these companies is the best way to stay afloat. This makes sense since banks are set up to maximize security and minimize their costs, not to innovate. Reliance on fintech companies for innovation will be critical. And for fintechs, to gain expertise in regulatory matters and create stronger offerings they need to be able to set up an equal partnership with banks. But in order to do this, it is crucial that fintechs and banks find a way to automate and scale this type collaboration. Thus enters automated referral partner programs.

Referral partner programs: Aligning banks and fintech companies

Fintechs and banks both have different strengths that allow them to accomplish a certain level of success, but they each also have challenges that hold them back from growing further. A partnership removes the need for either to have to overcome these challenges internally. But in order to create long-term sustainable partnerships, banks and fintechs need to be able to automate that relationship. Referral partner programs does this by facilitating a seamless referral partnership that is low friction. Referral partnerships are at the core of many fintechs’ success. On-Deck, Funding Circle, and Lending Club and TSYS are just a few that have developed referral partner programs in order to establish greater trust, provide a wider offering and reach new customers. This is because referral partner programs can create deep partnerships with banks and fintechs that fill offering gaps to increase the value they can provide customers. Referral partners understand the pains of target customer and can extend the trust they have previously developed to encompass the referred company.

Fintech and banks can go about referral partner programs in three different ways:

1. A company can build a referral partner program for their many different individual partners, small businesses and agencies. These will usually be for unmanaged partners.

2. A company has a major partner entity, for which they create a dedicated referral program. This type of referral partner program would be based off a deeply integrated offering on the technological side and the ideological side. One example of this type of referral partner program is Funding Circle and H&R Block. In this referral partnership, H&R Block made Funding Circle the preferred lender for all their small business customers.

3. A company builds a program for one or many major partner entities and their sales teams. This is a more advanced and requires the ability for partner entities to have the ability to keep track of, manage, and increase their advocate pool while having greater capabilities to incentivize and manage partner activity. OnDeck has found great success at using a more advanced referral partner program to increase customer acquisition.

As the financial landscape changes, think about how you can overcome your internal challenges and generate more high-quality leads, especially from your smaller partner. To discover what kind of benefits a referral partner programs and referral software could provide, download the benchmark study, The State of Business Partner Referral Programs – Annual report, to better understand referral partner activity, behavior, sales involvement, rewards and the relative conversion rates.

Selling is tedious.

When you’re dealing with an unsophisticated customer it can be tough. They don’t know what they don’t know, they’re not sure which questions they should ask, and they don’t know what they need.

They’re relying on you to flesh that out for them ahead of time, which is where industry specific review sites come in. Industry specific sites tend to attract customers who are more sophisticated.

These sites reward customers in turn with information that goes above and beyond the traditional review site.

Most of the time, customers expect you to do the vast majority of the work, up front. What’s worse, if you’re an experienced marketer you know what it’s like to nurture and cultivate prospects, to spend a lot of time educating them only for them to turn around and choose a competitor.

It’s a frustrating problem with an obvious solution.

It’s obvious, you need sales-ready prospects

---

You need sophisticated customers who have done a significant portion of the work up front, on their own. That’s significant because in the long run, these prospects are far better for your business.

Why?

Aren’t all leads the same? I mean sure, you have your cold, warm and hot leads, but they’re all the same, right? What makes these prospects so “effective?”

Sales-ready prospects aren’t the same as your average prospect. They exhibit a very different set of behaviors.

1. These prospects are conscientious. They’ve taken the time to learn about their desires, goals, fears and frustrations. They typically have a general to specific idea of what they need and when they’ll need it. Their project is important to them. They’ve taken the time to figure things out.

2. They’re invested in the outcome. If a key influencer or decision maker has taken the time to research, plan and prepare, they have buy-in. That buy-in means these prospects are less likely to fight with, ignore or harass you. They have skin in the game so they’re less likely to disappear.

3. Sales-ready prospects recognize value. They understand the value of the products and services you bring to the table. They’re typically aware of the difference you can make for them, so they’re less focused on arguing a particular point and more focused on getting things done.

4. They’re ready to buy, quick to act. Sales ready prospects have done the upfront legwork they need to make an informed decision so the sales cycle is typically much shorter. That means your prospect is more willing to take risks, less focused on objections, and less fearful.

5. They’re aware and confident.Inexperienced prospects have lots of questions. How much will it cost, can I get my money back, what am I getting for my money, etc. A large part of the sales process is filled with can I, will you and what ifs.

This all sounds great, doesn’t it?

Just one problem. Where are you supposed to find these sales-ready prospects?

Go where the sales-ready prospects are

---

Where do sales-ready prospects spend their time? On industry specific review sites! Here’s why industry specific sites are so helpful.

Sales-ready prospects are sophisticated and they’re often looking for answers to very specific questions.

Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Girl & the Goat

---

The Girl & the Goat is a casual dining restaurant in Chicago, IL. They’ve received rave reviews from more than 19,003 customers. Is there a way to differentiate between average and sales-ready customers?

Absolutely.

Take a look at their Yelp reviews.

Jeff S. left a five star review. It’s an excellent review that briefly offers prospective customers insight into his experience. His review is helpful but it’s also fairly standard. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Now, let’s look at a review on Zomato, an industry specific restaurant website.

Can you see the differences between these reviews? They almost jump out at you, don’t they?

DineoutGal, shares very specific information showing that she’s a sophisticated customer whose standards are higher than the average customers.

• “Waters were always filled, dishes changed and food was at a good pace.”
• “Brioche was dry and the butter was just ok.”
• “Super thin sliced and tasted very clean and had such a great vinaigrette that just complimented it.”
• “A refreshing cocktail that was very balanced.”

She sounds like an amateur food critic, doesn’t she? This demonstrates the point though – sophisticated customers tend to frequent industry specific review sites. What’s also interesting is their approach. They’re looking for very different things.

Does this mean sophisticated customers don’t use general review sites?

Not at all.

Let’s look at another example:

2. Smart House Remodeling

---

Smart House Remodeling offers custom bathrooms,kitchens, basements and full home renovations. They state their projects are always on time and backed up by warranty.

Let’s look at the differences between their customers.

First, let’s take a look at their Yelp reviews.

Kelli O wrote Smart Home Remodeling a glowing review. It seems customers reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Kelli seems to be very pleased with the quality of their work.

Nice!

Now let’s look at a customer review on Thumbtack.

Can you see the difference?

Nicholas T. goes into an incredible amount of detail in his review. His glowing testimonial goes on and on and on. There are some incredibly detailed specifics he leaves in his review.

• He’s an engineer so he’s detail oriented.
• The project included recessed lighting, HVAC vent installations, drywall work, soundproofing and plumbing – this customer is very knowledgeable.
• Yosif is willing to redo work that’s not done to the customer’s satisfaction, that’s unheard of these days.
• Nicholas trusts Yosif completely, allowing him to be in his home alone.
• The job site is left clean and tidy.

The detail in this review is astonishing. What’s more astonishing is the fact that this customer was so pleased with Smart House Remodeling he decided to leave his review on multiple review sites! This clearly demonstrates the sophistication sales-ready customers bring with them.

What about the healthcare industry?

3. Michigan Avenue Primary Care

---

“Michigan Avenue Primary Care offers compassionate, cost-effective, and convenient care in the Loop of downtown Chicago.”

The reviews they’ve received have been overwhelmingly positive, due to the excellent care they provide and their outstanding bedside manner.

Let’s look at their Yelp reviews first.

Rachel shared her incredible and very specific story in her review. It was detailed, well thought out and even included specifics on her roommate’s skin condition. So, what are reviews like on an industry specific site like ZocDoc?

Let’s take a look at Raina’s review.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of difference in depth between these two reviews, what gives?

The problem is education.

Specialized industries – accountants, attorneys, physicians – these are highly specialized, highly regulated industries that require a significant amount of education. What does this mean?

The vast majority of your customers will be unsophisticated.

These customers don’t have the ability to invest in the education required to acquire the level of sophistication they’d need to be a sales-ready prospect.

Does that mean industry specific review sites are worthless?

---

Not at all.

It’s fairly common for industry specific review sites to provide expert reviews on their sites. Take Avvo.com for example. It’s a review site that’s specifically geared around attorneys.

How do they account for the lack of education?

They fill in the blanks. They share customer reviews, but they realize that these reviews may not be as helpful due to the gaps in a customer’s education. So, they add in their Avvo rating, they share details on an individual attorney’s practice areas and current standing.

What about agencies?

Same thing. They provide details on the company size, the number of clients, services and client mix – the general information prospects need to determine whether they should reach out and request a proposal.

These industry specific review sites do the educating for you. It’s a great way to attract the kind of knowledgeable, sales-ready prospects you need.

Attracting sales-ready prospects comes at a price

---

Average prospects are more easily impressed. They’re easier to mold, guide and direct for one simple reason. They don’t know anything.

With industry specific review sites, their biggest advantage is also their biggest downside.

These customers are sophisticated and far more knowledgeable than the average customer. That’s wonderful if you’re actually the capable and knowledgeable expert they believe you to be. If you’re not, these prospects will notice, and they’ll walk away immediately.

Their newfound education means they have higher standards.

Selling doesn’t have to be tedious

---

As we’ve seen, industry specific sites can deliver the sophisticated, knowledgeable, sales-ready customers you need. When you’re dealing with an unsophisticated customer it can be tough.

These amazing prospects do the vast majority of the work, up front. They see the value in your products and services. They’re well aware of the value, the results you can provide. They only downside? They expect more, much more from the organizations they work with.

The good news? You can deliver.

Direct your happy and satisfied customers to these industry specific sites. Ask them to share the specifics and details of their situation. Dig deeper, looking for ways to extract value from their interactions with you. Send a steady flow of happy customers to these industry specific review sites, and they’ll send sales-ready prospects to you in return, qualified customers without the tedious selling.

If you’re looking for one of the most rewarding careers in the world, professional sales may be for you. The ability to determine your own worth through hard work, self-sacrifice and consistent effort nearly always pays off for those who walk this rugged road. But earning a living in sales isn’t a Sunday stroll either – far from it. In fact, many would argue that it’s right up there as one of the most stressful and demanding occupations in existence.

In some cases, sales success is black and white. You’re either cut out for its rigors, or you’re not. However, unlike professional athletes or musicians (who are often born with a certain level of pure natural ability), there has never been a natural born salesperson. Selling is an art form nurtured over character building experiences and social skillset development. You don’t need to be seven feet tall with cat like reflexes, have an arm like a cannon, or blessed with the voice of an angel to succeed in the sales universe.

Excelling in sales requires two primary attributes: a can-do attitude and major self-discipline. The confidence and killer phone game will come in time. But due to the “trial and error” nature of some sales lessons, all too often some well-worn excuses can creep into the minds of the modern sales pro. And it’s these excuses that frequently hold those pros back from their true sales potential.

The four common excuses below are excuses I have been guilty of making during my sales career. But the good news is each one of them is very beatable – and I’d like to show you how to do it.

Excuse #1: “I can’t reach the decision-maker”

Generating new business leads is the fuel for every sales team’s engine in the world. And the only thing more difficult (and frustrating!) than persuading a high priority prospect to take a “next steps” meeting is……getting them on the phone in the first place. These big fish prospects love to make it known that they have a million better things to do than spend two quick minutes talking to you. This is why these decision-makers delegate fending off sales wolves to their trusted administrative personnel. If you’re like many early-stage sales pros, it’s easy to lose hope of ever reaching the head honcho when you’re constantly blocked by tough gatekeepers.

An article from the Entrepreneur Middle East, The Six Worst Sales Excuses You’ll Ever Hear by Karl Hougaard, paints the picture quite nicely with respect to how many people in business development roles call it quits after the first or second outreach. Hougaard references insight from marketing guru and founder of Marketing Wizdom, Robert Clay. Clay states that 44% of salespeople give up after one negative response, 22% after two negative responses, 14% after three, and 12% after four. The statistic that might be the most eye-opening, though, was that 80% of prospects say no four times before agreeing to a sale.

If you apply that knowledge to your approach with gatekeepers, you’ll see that persistence will almost certainly pay off. The “sale” with these individuals is getting them to let you through to the prospect. Don’t quit when all the other sales pros are quitting – set yourself apart and keep looking for ways to win them over. The statistics say you’ll be glad you did.

Excuse #2: “Nobody calls me back”

Perhaps the most defeated feeling a sales pro experiences is the feeling that you’ve done everything you can to provide value to a prospect, and you still end up in the “send me an email and if we are interested we’ll reach back out” zone. It’s gut wrenching. The conversation flows smoothly, the prospect is clearly interested, but they simply won’t agree to any concrete next steps. We may never understand why these prospects eventually turn into ghosts, but instead of letting it sap your initiative and morale, try putting yourself in their shoes for a moment.

I recently read Selling to Big Companies, by Jill Konrath and inside, Jill helps readers understand the truth behind why we never hear back from these sought-after prospects.

The very first chapter in Konrath’s book is titled, “Why Nobody Calls You Back” where she references some of her personal experiences with this rough element of professional sales.

Some of her key points around the daily struggle sales pros face are worth remembering:

Arranging sales meetings with decision-makers at big companies is very difficult.

It’s no secret, and it’s certainly not in our imagination. The frustration and struggle of getting through to a key decision maker at a big company is not, and never has been, easy.

Decision-makers are under the gun. Don’t even think of wasting their time.

Konrath notes that big decision-makers are dealing with constant change and are overwhelmed with what they already have on their plate.

You have to make your value clear from the outset.

Far too often, salespeople appear as if they are only concerned about personal gain instead of focusing on the pain their solution mitigates. Boasting about how great your product is and showcasing your own product knowledge is not nearly as valuable to them as providing a potential solution to a problem they may be facing right now.

This key thought really highlights things well:

Corporate decision-makers want you to bring them ideas, make them think and expand their perspectives on what it takes to run their firms successfully.

If you’re letting the “nobody calls me back” blues consume your thoughts, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Observe the bigger picture, put yourself in your prospects shoes, and adjust your sails to run in a better direction – one that your prospects will be interested in traveling with you.

Excuse #3: “It’s the holidays – don’t even bother”

Of the four common excuses listed in this article, I was guilty of making this excuse right up until a recent Christmas holiday season. As I was going through the motions on my call list, getting directed to about 95% of my prospect’s voicemails, I received one of the most eye-opening responses I had ever heard from a prospect. Dialing yet another number I expected to result in a dead end, I finally got a “Hello this is Dave” on the other end of the line. I immediately fixed my posture in my chair, sat up straight and scrambled for my call opening. Trying to build some rapport, I commented “Cheers to you for picking up the phone today, you’re one of very few!” Dave then replied, “Someone has to put presents under the tree, am I right?”

I didn’t end up advancing a sale with Dave that day. But we had a strong conversation and he was very polite. My solution just wasn’t quite a suitable fit for what he needed. However, hearing his initial response had a deeper meaning than the simplicity to the words that were spoken. That call made me realize it’s hard-working people like Dave who make companies successful. The people working tirelessly in the hours nobody else has the fire to put in. And if you’re lucky, you just might find your golden goose who admires a professional grinding out sales prospecting calls during non-traditional work times (such as holiday season).

Many other successful tech leaders share Dave’s beliefs. In an article posted on Salesforce.com titled 7 Advantages to Selling During the Holidays, by Mark Hunter, I came across some other applicable points that might make you think twice before sandbagging your sales efforts in the next holiday period.

Point #1: “It’s the end of the year for a lot of companies, and that means residual budgets need to be spent.”

If you detect pain that your solution addresses, get cracking and make it clear that this could be something worth considering before an annual budget resets.

Point #2: “The gatekeepers are often the people with the most vacation time to use up in December, meaning your calls to the person you can’t reach at other times of the year may just get through.”

When going after those big fish, there is no better time to call then when the gatekeepers are more likely to be out. This may allow you to connect directly to the prospect or another colleague who could point you in the right direction, rather than deferring you to a sticky note message never read by the prospect.

Excuse #4: “I forgot to follow up”

Arguably the most important aspect of a sales professional’s role is following up. At times, following up may feel like you’re simply pestering the prospect. However, in many cases, it opens entirely different doors. A follow up is no longer a cold call – that fact alone should make it infinitely more appealing. Although you should always recap your initial conversation, an extensive introduction and qualification is not necessary when following up with a good prospect. Since you aren’t exactly a stranger anymore, this outreach gives you an opportunity to showcase your attentiveness and punctuality. If you’re able to effectively recap the previous conversation and you’re timely, the prospect should gain an appreciation for your professional dedication.

In the early stages of my sales career, following up with important prospects was something missing from my sales repertoire. Once I discovered the beauty of how well these conversations flowed and how good it felt when a prospect acknowledged your persistence, I decided to re-think my approach and incorporate this key element into my game plan.

This revamped approach to staying persistent is largely credited to one of the most influential books I have ever read and strongly recommend to everyone in any profession: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey.

I found that the most applicable of Covey’s seven habits for follow-ups (and sales, in general) was his first: Be Proactive. Covey emphasizes the notion that life doesn’t just “happen” and that the forecast of our lives are carefully designed by us.

Covey breaks down these schools of thought into two distinct categories—Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern.

The Circle of Concern categorizes individuals as ‘reactive’ people. Reactive people tend to spend too much time on things in which they possess little to no control (weather, traffic, political issues, etc.). In relative terms to a sales development role, a reactive individual spends too much time worrying about matters such as:

• Nobody is picking up the phone
• Nobody replies to my emails
• My territory is weak
• I keep getting “ghosted” on lead calls

Although each of these issues can be improved upon through proactive habits, you ultimately cannot ensure 100% certainty about any of them.

You have no true idea when it’s the perfect time to get a prospect on the line. There is no email drip in the world that has a 100% open and response rate. Not every single company needs your solution and some simply can’t afford it. Finally, there is no magic button that fully guarantees a prospect will hop on the conference line, no matter how many times you confirm things.

The Circle of Influence highlights the contrary belief. This construct identifies individuals that are more ‘proactive’ people. Proactive people maintain their focus on things that are controlled by them only (eating habits, sleep schedule, spouse choice, etc.). In relative terms to a sales role, someone with a proactive mindset focuses their efforts on things such as:

• Being punctual and focused every day
• Methodically completing homework and research
• Maximizing dialing outreach time
• Following-up with prospects religiously

There are most certainly influential factors as a sales pro that can make these habitual efforts more difficult, but it is ultimately up to you on whether you choose to maintain self-discipline in the areas you can control.

The early bird really does get the worm. Being the first one in the office and the last one to leave every day builds character and dedication to your craft (and as a bonus, the right people will notice your efforts). A cold call won’t seem so cold on the other end if you are able to offer some key nuggets of info that are highly relevant to your prospects.

Reactive or proactive – it’s your choice how you want to proceed, but it’s not hard to figure out which category the best sales pros in the world fall in to.

Don’t Imagine the Wall, Imagine a Way Around It

At the end of the day it’s easy to justify why you did or didn’t meet your daily, monthly, or yearly expectations. And to be certain, many sales pros face headwinds that are out of their control in many ways. But a strong sales pro will fight hard to not let a few tough circumstances lead to imaginary barriers that make them give up too easily. If you control these four common excuses and develop a mindset that these are very solvable issues, you’ll be far more successful in the long run.

Company blogs are an essential part of modern day marketing and brand journalism. I think most organizations realize this by now, but what remains a perpetual challenge is knowing how your company can generate the most impact from content creation efforts. Have you heard the saying, “garbage in is garbage out”? Content for the sake of content is really just noise.

As an inbound marketing consultant, I spend a great deal of time meeting with teams who are seeking better ways to drive inbound marketing leads. We spend a considerable amount of time breaking down content strategy (or lack thereof), because good content is the foundation of successful lead generation results.

If we can help improve upon what and how they publish, not only will you see a difference in the number of leads your website is driving but the quality of leads. Here are some of the biggest blogging blunders I see:

• Undefined audience of focus
• Lack of understanding of keywords and SEO best practices
• Inconsistency of publishing content
• Salesy and uninteresting content
• Missed opportunities to build ongoing relationships
• Non-existent distribution plan

Let’s break down the impact each of these and the impact they have on driving results.

Know your Target Audience

We recently hosted a webinar on “How to Create Buyer Personas That You Will Actually Use” and it was surprising how many attendees were part of marketing teams either didn’t have buyer personas created or had them but admitted they just sat on a shelf and were never looked at. Understanding who your blog is being written for has to be the first step in creating your content plan.

Having well-defined buyer personas will not only give you the road map to your company conversations with your audience but also help you to prioritize how much content to create for each of your most important audiences.

If your company has out-dated personas that you haven’t updated in over a year, or if you are creating content today without having developed them, I encourage you to spend 45 minutes listening to this webinar where you will learn how to get your marketing and leadership teams aligned so you can build your content road map successfully.

Understand SEO Best Practices

This is a huge conversation with many ever-changing layers. If your primary reason for having a blog is to increase your organic traffic and create more awareness around your products or services, then you have to know how search engines are going to deem your content to be relevant. You don’t need to have the depth of Rand Fishkin, founder of SEO Moz (few people do), but you do need to understand SEO mechanics so that your content can be found by those you are hoping to attract. There are a lot of ways to educate yourself on SEO and keyword best practice. Don’t waste your time publishing one more blog post until you know that you have optimized it for search.

Create a Content Calendar

Like anything else in our lives, if we don’t live with intention and have a plan, we probably don’t get the results we desire. It’s rare in my conversations with small to mid-sized marketing teams to come across organizations that have a well-documented content creation process — which shows up in their lack of consistency of published blog posts. One way to address this is to assign someone in your organization the responsibility of content ownership. This doesn’t mean that they need to write all of your company articles, but they need to create a calendar and process for your writers to follow, as well as hold team members accountable to meet deadlines. Here are some things to include in your process to streamline the quality of your writing and publication process:

• Identify topics with targeted keywords
• Due dates for draft submission
• Topics with keywords
• Persona identification
• Publish dates

It’s also really important to have a documented process for review and turnaround times as well as a company-wide goal for how many blogs you plan to publish per week.

At StoryTeller, we’ve offered incentives to help encourage our employees to write content consistently. We’ve done several different incentives to keep employees engaged and excited. Here are a few things you can try:

• Qualify for half-day Fridays in the summer
• Receive a free catered lunch for your whole department if everyone contributes a blog in a given month
• Earn your way to a training course, industry conference or event
• Get a monetary bonus after you reach a certain number of blogs
• Give rewards for the blogs with the highest number of views/shares/new leads, etc.

It’s really important to keep your team motivated to keep blogging, so make sure to recognize successes in company meetings, email communication, or — if nothing else — send a celebratory .gif on Slack!

PRO TIP: A lot of companies (or individuals) worry about their ability to write a great blog post. But there are lots of ways to create great content. Consider allowing certain subject matter experts to contribute via audio interview, video blog, Q&A post, infographic, or other content types if they are not comfortable writing.

Write Interesting Content

We have a saying in our organization, “if they’re not interested, you’re not interesting.” This saying can apply to the videos you publish that have no views or the blog posts you write that have no engagement. With over 3 million blog posts published every single day, making sure your content is seen by your target audience starts with writing authentic, thought-provoking, and interesting information.

At StoryTeller, these are the key questions we ask about content:

• Does your audience really care about this?
• Is this unique and does it have a point of view?
• Does this solve the problem of what my reader came looking for?

As consumers, we are tired of companies selling to us. If your content is not being consumed, perhaps it’s because your writing can’t pass the sales “sniff test.” It’s not about you, it’s about solving for the customer. Or perhaps your content is missing the mark because you’re writing about what you think people want to hear rather than your own personal experiences.

I recently worked with an agency that is struggling to drive results from their blog. It didn’t take me long to realize why… besides the fact that they had no level of consistency to their publishing frequency, their content had no depth. They were writing about topics that were relevant to their target audience, marketers, but they had no first-hand experience with the topics they were writing about. They wrote about what they thought they should write about rather than what they actually knew about. And because of that, their posts were not unique, different or interesting. They were simply regurgitating content from other blog posts with no unique perspective or compelling information — and the internet treated it that way.

Create Relationships With Your Reader

Your well-written blog post can accomplish so much for your organization. At the heart of it, your blog post can be a conduit for meaningful relationships, a place for you to really help real people who need real solutions.

Think of your article or blog as the side door to your company website. A well-written and search-optimized post can bring someone to your website that hasn’t heard from you before. If you don’t have ways to engage this reader and continue to educate them, then you are missing out on fostering what could be an awesome connection, and who knows, some day a new customer! Here are some ways to move your reader from awareness to interest:

• Make sure you have a way for your reader to subscribe to your blog. This way, all new posts you publish will automatically be emailed, staying on top of your reader’s mind.
• Reference other blog posts, website pages and interesting downloads you have published about similar topics. Make it easy for your readers to find relevant content and continue to explore your website.
• Create more content conversion opportunities. Can you create additional resources your reader may find helpful? Ebooks, calculators, and templates are just a few ways you can strengthen your relationship with your interested reader.

Amplify Your Content

You have spent a lot of time figuring out what to write about, to whom it’s intended for, and how to engage the reader to take the next step, so spend an equal amount of time developing a process for distributing your blog content. Here are some suggestions to make sure your content gets “found”:

• Send an invitation: Send an email to your company database letting them know that you have thought-provoking resources they can subscribe to. Create an easy way for them to opt-in to your blog content. Ideally, let them pick the frequency for how often they receive content from you (daily, weekly, monthly) to increase open rates.
• Leverage your sales team: Make sure your sales team is aware of the content that is being created and encourage them to use blog articles in meaningful ways to connect with prospects.
• Share on social media: Get into the habit of publishing your blog posts across the social media platforms
• Syndicate your blog posts: Leverage other publishing platforms and syndication sites to maximize the reach each blog post gets.
• Consider social media boosts: Getting organic reach on social media can be tough. Allocate some budget each month to target your best blogs to your relevant audiences on social media.

Some final thoughts… publishing content today is an essential component of modern marketing. Your customers and your prospects expect you to have a voice, a point of view and an interest in being helpful. Ideally, publishing content becomes an organizational initiative with contributors across all aspects of the company from customer service, human resources, sales, marketing and the C-suite. Plan your content strategy and work your plan and you will be delighted with the results.

Previous research has shown that individuals’ self-serving responses to information may arise when payoff information is subjective or uncertain. This study by Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler, in the context of charitable giving, shows that individuals’ ability to respond to payoff information in a self-serving way even includes situations when information is complete and certain.

The sales methodology is like a set of rules for how you sell your products or services to customers. You need to define your methodology before anything else, including the sales process. Otherwise, your sales process will be applied differently by each rep on the team.

The methodology you choose also needs to fit your customers and your market, so it’s crucial to choose the right one!

But where to start?

There are so many trademarked methodologies from so-called experts, and many of them sound similar. There’s SPIN Selling, The Challenger Sale, SNAP Selling, Conceptual Selling, Consultative Selling…

The list goes on.

But before we dive into how to choose the right one for your business, I think it makes sense to first start by defining what a sales methodology is.

What is a Sales Methodology?

A sales methodology is a set of guiding principles that define how a business sells its products or services to customers.  Unlike a sales process, which focuses on defining the steps or stages on the path to purchase, a sales methodology offers a framework for how sales reps can approach each of those stages to win the deal.

Most of the most popular sales methodologies are trademarked and were created by sales consultants and trainers, who wanted to define their own signature approach. Unfortunately, this means many of the methodologies you’ve heard of are really products being sold to you.

It doesn’t mean they aren’t useful, it just means you should be wary of trusting what you hear about any specific one.

Next, I’ll quickly summarize some of the most popular sales methodologies, then walk you through how you should choose the right one for your business.

The 14 Most Popular Sales Methodologies

There are many more than this, but the most popular sales methodologies are:

1. The Challenger Sale
2. Command of the Sale
3. Conceptual Selling
4. Consultative Selling
5. Customer-Centric Selling
6. Inbound Selling
7. MEDDIC
8. NEAT Selling
9. SNAP Selling
10. Solution Selling
11. SPIN Selling
12. Target Account Selling
13. The Sandler Selling Method
14. Value Selling

1. The Challenger Sale

The Challenger Sale methodology originated in 2011, when a book authored by CEB’s Matthew Dixon categorized sales professionals into five classes:

• Relationship builders
• Hard workers
• Lone wolves
• Reactive problem solvers
• Challengers

The book claimed that challenger-type sellers are the most successful group, especially in the B2B enterprise market. To be a Challenger, sellers make customers aware of the potentially game-changing challenges and opportunities in their respective industries, then offering effective, tailored solutions. Challengers use the “teach-tailor-take” tactic to close a deal.    

2. Command of the Sale

This methodology was conceptualized and offered as a service by GrowthPlay. The idea at the core of this methodology is that you should customize your company’s sales enablement tools and activities based on solutions that are already in place. Then, you can spend more energy on qualifying leads and perfecting messaging about your value.

3. Conceptual Selling

Developed by Stephen Heiman and Robert Miller, this method reframes sales as a process where a seller persuades a buyer to purchase a concept (their desired outcome), not a product. The seller’s goal — achieved through empathy, active listening, and asking questions — is to uncover the buyer’s ideal end-state. The seller can then tie their solution to that end goal.

4. Consultative Selling

This method has its roots in solution selling, leveraging a veteran salesperson’s expertise, industry knowledge and reputation. Under this dynamic, customers make a purchase because they “trust” the seller and expect the purported benefits and results to be realized.     

5. Customer-Centric Selling

The name says it all: this method focuses on the challenges, goals, and convenience of the customer.

The objective here is for the salesperson to become warm and trusted advisors to the client.

Sales processes and activities are modified to suit the client’s schedule, objectives, and situation.

Instead of making presentations, reps hold relevant conversations about how the solution can be modified to better match the client’s requirements.      

6. Inbound Selling

This is a relatively new methodology, having matured with the development of the Internet.

In inbound selling, marketing techniques get tightly meshed with the processes and goals of sales.

So instead of directly pushing sales-y scripts to their prospects, inbound sellers attract customers by setting up messaging opportunities where customers can actively or contextually engage the seller’s brand or product.

Because buyers are now more empowered and informed when it comes to purchasing decisions, inbound sellers use data and analytics to hyper-personalize their messaging to pull customers towards the desired action.

Note: As opposed to inbound selling, outbound selling encapsulates many of the traditional selling techniques where sellers initiate and guide a sales engagement with a prospective customer. The engagement can take the form of a cold or warm call, a chat session over social media, or an email outreach.       

7. MEDDIC

MEDDIC stands for:

• Metrics
• Economic Buyer
• Decision Criteria
• Decision Process
• Identify Pain
• Champion

This methodology is characterized by a highly disciplined, tech-driven and tightly controlled approach to the sales process.

Using metrics and other relevant data, MEDDIC sets quantitative standards for lead qualification and requires the search and nurturing of a “champion” in the prospect organization who will advocate for the seller’s brand/solution.

8. N.E.A.T. Selling

N.E.A.T. stands for:

• Need
• Economic Impact
• Access to Authority
• Timeline

Developed by the Harris Consulting Group and Sales Hacker Inc., this methodology was designed to turn BANT (budget, need, access/authority, timing) on its head. Instead of qualifying customers based on the needs of the salesperson (qualifications for purchase), NEAT selling asks the salesperson to qualify how much they can help the prospect. For example, it requires sellers to achieve the following milestones.

1. Identify “core” needs by probing deep into their customers’ challenges.
2. Articulate the value or economic benefit of the solution in terms of ROI.
3. Engage contacts who can influence decision makers when direct engagement is not possible.
4. Set a compelling timeline within which a buyer must make a decision.    

9. SNAP Selling

Launched by Jill Konrath in 2012, SNAP stands for:

• Simple
• iNvaluable
• Aligned
• Priority
  

As its acronym implies, this method aims to quicken the sales process with the assumption that prospective buyers will generally be busy and distracted.

10. Solution Selling

Solution selling eschews the product-centric approach and focuses instead on the benefits, impact, and relevance of a tailored solution.

Solution-sellers dive deep into customers’ unique situations to identify their pain points and establish an agreed-upon set of criteria that characterize an acceptable resolution. Introduced in the late 1980s, solution selling evolved over the years to adapt its techniques to changes in buyer maturity and business environment.

11. SPIN Selling

SPIN stands for four types of questions sellers should ask their prospects:

• Situation. What is the situation for the prospect right now, as it pertains to your solution?
• Problem. More specifically, how does that situation cause a pain point? Where is the situation broken?
• Implication. What are the results of that problem?
• Need-Payoff. What happens when the problem is solved? What would that look like?

These questions help sellers assess their customers’ real situations, isolate the core problems that need to be solved, and lay out the consequences of not solving the problems. Then, they are set up to guide buyers into reframing the situation, and imagining how the problem could be solved with their solution.

12. Target Account Selling  

This methodology requires sellers to break down large deals into smaller, more manageable components. The goal is to reduce the impact of buyer-side politics on the sales process. Target Account selling can also be automated using a CRM, making it a good fit for many organizations.

13. The Sandler Selling System

Sandler Training was founded in 1967 and is almost a household name in the world of B2B sales. This methodology reframes the role of sellers into trusted advisors who are as invested as customers in the success of a proposed or purchased solution. The Sandler Selling System emphasizes relationship building, lead qualification, and deal closing.

With an accurate analysis of a customer’s situation and their needs, sellers should forego further engagement when the solution doesn’t exactly match the problem. On the other hand, transactional roles will be upended in an ideal scenario, with customers trying to convince sellers to sell.

14. Value Selling Framework

This methodology focuses on lead qualification and lead value assessment, enabling sellers to close deals faster and engage only leads with significant impact on their portfolio. Value Selling encourages sales professionals to ask the right questions, articulate the value of a product to the customer’s business, and demonstrate flexibility in formulating a mutually beneficial solution.

How to Choose the Right Sales Methodology

Your sales methodology should match your product, customer, and market. Any mismatch will feel unnatural to both the sales rep and the customer.

For example: if you sell a product that costs $100,000 per year, it might make sense to apply 6 months of consultative sales effort to get the sale. You wouldn’t want to do the same if your product costs $10/month.

On the other hand, you also can’t expect to win a $1M deal spending only $5 to support the sales effort! This indicates there are different B2B sales methods.

Despite all the fancy names of sales methodologies listed above, B2B sales is really only governed by five methodologies.

1. DIY Self Service: A complete end-to-end web experience where clients educate themselves and complete the purchase online. For example, Atlassian made waves by growing to a huge size using a very low-touch sales model.

2. Transactional selling: Helping customers buy the solution they picked themselves, often through online research. These customers often are in a hurry and ready to buy.

3. Solution selling: Customers already understand their problem and want sales to address specific issues with products and services. Customers buy in days to weeks.

4. Consultative selling: The customer does not fully understand the problem. Sales has to diagnose the customer’s situation to determine the right solution. Sales can take 6-18 months.

5. Provocative selling: Sales experts can identify clients who will face a problem before the client himself knows. They provoke an executive client into action. Often applied to innovative solutions, this B2B sales methodology takes anywhere between 3 to 9 months.

 

Figure 1. Different selling processes that govern B2B sales

Notice that these aren’t branded or trademarked! They’re just descriptions of how sellers sell, and how buyers buy. That’s what makes this framework so useful! It cuts out all the sensational nonsense and focuses on the core of the issue: what is the best way to sell?

In this blueprint, we will focus on Transactional, Solution, Consultative and Provocative selling.

Transactional Selling

The transactional sales methodology is reactionary. Customers know what they want, and they are price shopping for lead times. They may be willing to forfeit a specific feature if it can save them a lot of money.

In transaction selling, clients don’t value the role salespeople perform, and usually prefer that salespeople are excluded from the process altogether. Sometimes, buyers like to see sellers replaced by web-based conversations and text/chat, through which they get direct and short answers.

Figure 2. Transactional Selling in which clients do most of the education on their own

When should you use transactional selling? It’s best used in high volume, high velocity, inbound, low-cost sales. Usually, ACV (average contract value) is less than $1,000, the sales cycle is less than 30 days, and each AE is selling more than 20 deals per month.

Solution Selling

The solution sales process is a reactionary process. A customer understands the problem and has a pretty good idea of what solution they are looking for. They are not quite price shopping (which would make it transactional), but they are looking for specific features that they are willing to pay more for. They may have narrowed it down to 2 or 3 providers by the time they reach out to you.

Figure 3. Solution Selling often follows an Inbound Lead

When should you use Solution Selling? Use it in medium volume, high velocity, inbound sales. It’s a fit when your ACV is about $5,000, you have a 30-day sales cycle, and each AE is cutting 5-10 deals per month.

Consultative Selling

In consultative selling, you invest in educating the client on what is important based on what you have seen in the market. You help them understand the real problem, and teach them how to look for the right solution.

Your experience guides the client to be specific about requirements for features and functionality. You may help them write the RFP/RFQ. This kind of deal is often earmarked with a Proof Of Concept, making the consultative sale significantly longer. During the consultative sales process, we gradually ramp up the quality of resources used as we navigate through the client’s organization.

Figure 4. Consultative Selling often follows Outbound Lead Generation/Development

When does Consultative Selling make the most sense? Use it when you are selling platform-like solutions involving a number of decision makers. It would make sense if, for example, you were selling a Sales Engagement platform for $20-100k ACV, with a 6-18 month sales cycle, and each AE closed about 1-3 deals per quarter.

Provocative Selling

When you are representing an innovative solution that challenges the status quo, you cannot rely on the consultative process because most clients do not realize there is a problem lurking. In particular, you cannot trust an RFP/RFQ which is designed to flush out lowest price/minimal spec. Thus, you have to rely on Provocative Selling, which has gained popularity through a methodology called the Challenger sale.

Figure 5. Provocative Selling Only recommended to deploy on specific accounts

When should you use it? Provocative selling is best used when you’re selling innovative solutions that address a CEO’s top issue. Think of a revolutionary way to do ERP, with a 6-9 month sales cycle, and just one or two deals per month per AE, averaging a contract value of $250k.

Final Tips for Choosing a Sales Methodology

Too many people choose a sales methodology based on what sounds new, convincing, or flashy. That’s the wrong way to go about it.

Choose a sales methodology that is too simple for your solution, and you lose deals when your customer expects a little more help through their shopping process.

Choose a methodology that’s too complex, and you increase the cost of acquisition, spending too much on lower-value customers. Say goodbye to profits!

It can be tricky to strike the balance between spending enough time and too much, but you can start by taking note of your average deal size, sales cycle, and number of deals per rep each month. Given those pieces of information, you can calculate your average cost of acquiring a customer, and choose a methodology that protects your margins while maintaining healthy close rates.

If you want to read more about Sales metrics, especially those specific to SaaS, check out this other article I wrote.

The SaaS Metrics Blueprint: How to Define, Measure & Display What Actually Matters

The post The Sales Methodology Blueprint: How To Choose The Right One For Your Business appeared first on Sales Hacker.

“So what’s your plan after graduation?” This is arguably the most dreaded question a person can ask a college student. Roughly 80% of students change their major throughout school, either due to disinterest, competitiveness, or difficulty. I changed my major twice; Nursing when I applied to school, then Economics the first week, and then finally History when I realized I wanted to study my passion. The only issue with not having a plan after graduation, or majoring in one of your passions, is that you have to find it within yourself to pave your pathway to success.

As most first-time LinkedIn users, I began using my LinkedIn profile to scan businesses and job opportunities, as well as expanding my network to friends and family. Transitioning my role from LinkedIn user to LinkedIn utilizer, I am now using the site to benefit business growth for my clients. As our company slogan states, LinkedIn is business, not social.

Since I began work at Intero as LinkedIn Coach and Lead Generation Specialist, I have viewed over 2,000 profiles, sent hundreds of messages and have spent over 150 hours on LinkedIn, learning something new each day. It’s fascinating how much power one website has, and how much it can constantly be changing to become something better.

During these searches, I have developed my own list of tips that all LinkedIn beginners and long-time members should know. Whether you’re brand new to LinkedIn, or have been using the site for years, make sure you’ve covered all of these bases.

1. Profile pictures:

It may seem obvious to include profile pictures on this list, but having an appropriate profile picture is so important. We have written about this one before, but it can never be written too much. When someone searches for you on LinkedIn, the first thing they see is your profile picture. When you meet someone for the first time, first impressions are everything, right? Same goes for LinkedIn. When I source potential leads, I may skip over certain people simply because they have an unprofessional profile picture. Please, don’t post a selfie, a family photo, a beach vacation photo, a mirror picture, or a picture of you with a beer in your hand. Invest in a quality, professional headshot. My first LinkedIn profile picture was taken right outside my office using a digital camera. Just make sure the lighting is right, you’re wearing an appropriate shirt and smile!

2. Summary:

Your summary is a statement about who you are and what your purpose is; write about what you do and why you do it. You can also include what you enjoy and how that helps you progress in your career. Include your passions and how those support your decisions in your career and in life. But always, always remember to keep your summary up to date and relevant towards your jobs and experiences. Your summary is a necessary component of your profile, read more about these Helpful Tools to Update Your LinkedIn Profile.

3. Sharing content:

Sharing content is very important because it will move your profile up in searches. This means that when someone is searching for a professional with your expertise, you will appear higher on the search results list because of your presence on LinkedIn. Share content that is relevant to you and your career and passions. And remember that quantity does not equate to quality – keeping your shares to 1-2 informative or valuable posts per day is a better strategy than over sharing. Consistency is key. If you recently got a job promotion, make a status update and share that exciting news with your connections. Always interact with your connections through the posts that they share as well. Whether you’re commenting, liking, or sharing, being active through the content on LinkedIn can add value to your LinkedIn profile. Check out this post on how to publish if you’re unfamiliar with this process.

4. Staying connected:

Again, quality over quantity. You may have heard the more connections you have, the better. Though having tons of connections will make you appear higher in searches, having quality connections is very important because you want to have the ability to reach out to your connections. Reaching out to those connections can connect you with 2nd and 3rd level connections, further expanding your network and presence on LinkedIn. Make sure you’re expanding your network with users you know, or users who send you a message with their connection request. Writing a personalized message in your connection request makes the request more personal, heightening the chances the user will accept. Want to learn more about how to expand your network? Click here to read more.

5. Logging in and staying up to date:

This is arguably the most important tip. Remember to log into your LinkedIn account as frequently as possible. Ideally, you should be logging in daily to stay up to date with your connections and content. Check your messages and connection requests. All you need is 5 minutes to scroll through your newsfeed and notifications.

*Side note: If you switch jobs, update your profile so people know you’re not the Manager, COO, and Account Executive at 3 different corporations.

You might read these tips and think, “Well of course I do all of those things!” but you’d be surprised by the vast majority of people whose profiles don’t have the proper profile photo, have an outdated summary, show as working in 5 different positions, and have 12 connections. Always stay connected, stay up to date, and interact with your LinkedIn community! To make all of this easier, download the mobile app so you can access your account while you’re on the go.

A few weeks back I wrote A Definitive Guide To Growth Hacking for Huffington Post. It’s a baseline guide that will help you understand what Growth Hacking is, what a Growth Hacker looks like, how growth teams are structured and what sort of technology is used by this new breed of marketers. It’s a great place to start, but after you do you’ll probably ask yourself this question: so, what tactics can I use to kick start my first growth campaign?

Well, if you’re looking for tactics you’ve come to the right place! In the infographic below I’ve highlighted six Growth Hacking tactics that are tried and tested to deliver results. I’ve focused on B2B particularly, but many of these could be adapted to work in a B2C ecosystem as well. Hack two for example originated in the B2C space, leverage was one of the earliest hacks documented back in 1996 when Hotmail added the tagline, “P.S. I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” at the end of every outgoing email. This simple tactic skyrocketed growth, growing their user base from 20,000 to more than 1 million users within a 6 month period. Not bad by a strategy that essentially cost Hotmail nothing.

There are some quick wins listed in the infographic below, and also a few long term plays. Something to consider when planning your B2B Start-Ups marketing strategy is that growth is a compound effect – it is often a series of efforts that drives long term, sustainable growth for your company.

If you’re looking for more tactics, it’s always good to learn from the best. Some of the biggest companies you know have used Growth Hackers or Growth Agencies to help them acquire millions of customers in a short space of time. Besides the Hotmail example listed above, below are some of my favourite case studies:

Paypal’s Friend Referral Bounty

By paying $10 cash to each new customer and $10 to the customer who referred them, Paypal was able to hack early growth to tens of millions of users before no longer offering the bonus.

Airbnb’s Craigslist Integration

By reverse engineering the Craigslist posting process and automating it to the point where it became second nature to crosspost your Airbnb listing to Craigslist, Airbnb was able to hack early growth to tens of millions of users.

Dropbox Incentivized Referral Program

Roughly based on Paypal’s invite system, Dropbox allows users to invite their friends in exchange for more storage space. This helped Dropbox to grow from 100,000 users to 4,000,000 in under two years.

Twitter’s Suggested Followers On-Boarding

After Twitter found that new users who followed more than 30 people were most likely to become active, they optimized the user experience to encourage this behaviour.

Competing in Google Shopping is tough—there’s no denying it. When you consider that Google Shopping spend has overtaken spend on the search network in the US, accounting for 56 percent of spend by retailers and 46 percent of clicks, it is now more important than ever for retailers to have a solid, well thought-out Google Shopping strategy. Below are seven highly effective, advanced strategies for maximizing your performance on the Google Shopping platform.

1. Segment by Search Query

First, segment your products depending on the type of search query. Performance varies significantly depending on the type of search query. For example, if somebody is searching for “Nike trainers,” you might want to bid more than if somebody was simply searching for “trainers,” because Nike trainers are generally more expensive a well-known brand, so shoppers are more likely to convert.

This can be done by creating two separate Google Shopping campaigns containing “trainers” and then adding branded terms as negative keywords in one. This will then become your non-branded campaign where you want to reduce bids. The other will then become your Nike branded campaign, where you will want to increase your bids.

2. Keep Pricing Competitive

A second key factor to success on the Google Shopping network is the pricing of your products. The message from Google is clear: If you overprice your products in comparison to your competitors, your ads won’t show as often. Asics learned this when they made their pricing more competitive and saw a 231 percent increase in impressions simply by changing the prices of their products.

3. Test Your Bids

Bidding on the Google Search network is pretty straightforward: Increase your bids by a small amount, and you will see a small increase in impressions and conversions. The Google Shopping platform, however, is much more volatile. Increasing your bids by a small percentage can lead to significant increases in revenue and profit. To capitalize on this, it is key that you are continually testing bids to find the best balance.

---

Increasing your Google Shopping bids by small percentages can lead to significant increases in profit.
Click To Tweet

---

4. Place Keywords Strategically

Google Shopping has no keywords, so it is fundamental that you optimize your product feed so that Google knows when to show your products in search. One of the most important places to include keywords is within the product title. If you want your Google Shopping ads to show up when shoppers search for “party dresses,” they you should place that keyword within the product title.

When Lispsy London did this, they saw the number of impressions for that term jump from 419 to 4023. Interestingly, they also saw an increase in the number of impressions for other relevant products too.

5. Segment by Product ID

The fifth optimization tactic is segmenting products by product ID. Placing each product within its own ad group allows you to set bids for each individual product.

Products vary significantly in price and profit margin, so you will want to bid more on higher profit margin products and lower on low profit margin products to maximize performance. If you are currently using the “All products” bucket, then you could see conversions increase by as much as 280 percent and CPA decrease by as much as 85 percent by implementing this strategy.

Splitting hundreds of products out into their own ad groups is time consuming, especially if you have a large product catalog, but it is well worth it. If you want to save time, you might want to use a tool such as Optmyzr or Camto that allows you to do this automatically at scale.

6. Refresh Your Bids Once per Hour

The sixth tactic is changing your bids 24 hours per day. Conversion rates vary depending on a huge number of factors, such as device, gender, age, time of the day, and hour of the week. One of the limitations of Adwords is that it only gives you six different windows per day to set bid modifiers, but conversion rates vary hourly. To compensate for this, use an Adwords Script (such as this one by Optmyz) that allows you to get around this and change bids 24 times per day (once per hour).

7. Use Remarketing for Your Ads

Finally, as most of you know, users that have previously visited your website are more likely to purchase from you than people who are visiting for the first time. (This is why remarketing works so well.) So why not use remarketing for Google Shopping ads? RLSA can be applied to your Google Shopping campaigns and have been shown to increase click through rates and conversion rates by as much as 4X.

To get the best performance, segment your remarketing audiences depending on what pages they have visited on your website. For instance, if they have visited your category page, you might want to increase bids by 10 percent. If they have visited your product pages, then they are likely to be further down the buying cycle and know which products that they want to purchase, so you might want to increase bids by 20 percent. Cart abandoners are the second most likely people to purchase, so you should increase your bids by more, possibly 30 percent. Existing customers are the most likely to purchase from you, so you will want to bid the highest for them—a bid modifier of 40 percent, perhaps.

By implementing these seven advanced Google Shopping strategies, you should see a significant increase in performance in terms of conversion rate, revenue, and profit. If you do nothing else today, implement tactic number four and segment out your product feed by product ID, as this will give you the most bang for your buck, with increases in conversions by as much as 290 percent.

This infographic was first published on Clicteq and has been republished with permission.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from Jay Baer at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

The post 7 Advanced Strategies for Google Shopping appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

Concessions planning is a part of advanced planning for the sales meeting, and it is a critical element of any preparation. Concessions are the changes you are willing to make in the sales meeting to the sales proposal. Reaching a successful deal often involves altering the proposal to better suit the needs and wants of your prospect. It is a negotiation process that must be studied based on what you are selling and your companies profit margins.

Think of concessions as developing a bottom line, when you clearly define your bottom line you are giving yourself a great anchor point for your negotiation. Before you enter into this discussion you should know how low you can go in price or how you can alter the proposal and remain within your companies desired profit margin. You need to determine much of a discount can be granted in different situations. These situations differ vastly depending on the service or product you sell. Products may involve different volumes that create price breaks and services might entail how many additional hours can be put into a project.

Offering an avid fisherman or sportsman a weekend at the corporate luxury cabin may be a way to generate a sale if you can’t go lower on price or there are no additional discounts to be offered.

If you haven’t thought these types of scenarios out in advance, the simple concession that could have solidified the deal is never offered.

One of the worst things to do in a concession is to simply throw out a number. Most salespeople have been in a meeting where the buyer asks for a 20% deduction on the cost of the other order, and the sales rep replied that he or she could offer 10%. By automatically complying and, “meeting in the middle”, the sales rep has set the price lower, perhaps lower than where the buyer was aiming to take the deal.

A better option would be to suggest a smaller amount of a discount than half of what was requested. Perhaps offer a discount of an additional 2% over the next five orders or some other creative and compelling alternative. Another method would be to offer additional services/products that you would benefit the customer and your company can produce for a low-cost. This gives the customer something else to consider and also builds in the opportunity for additional sales at a small percentage that is well above your bottom line.

 

Without having clearly defined concessions in place, any sales rep can get caught up in the excitement of making a big sale and make a serious error in judgment. This can cause serious financial problems for your company that you will be held accountable for. You are the sales rep and this is your opportunity to responsibly develop profitable business for your organization. Your sales team leader will think of you as a go to when big deals come across the board if you can responsibly handle concessions.

Remember, this is a negotiation, and to negotiate both parties at the table must have the authority to make a decision that creates a desired win-win outcome.

If the sales rep doesn’t have a bottom line or doesn’t know what can be offered, the common solution is to call the sales manager. However, having to meet several times or make phone calls during a meeting distract from the flow of your sales process. This is a waste of time and can make you look dull to a point that could cause you to lose the sale. The buyer may think that if you don’t know enough about your product or service to negotiate than you aren’t taking your job or business seriously.

In the case that you don’t have the authority and can’t give an accurate and honest answer, it is best, to be honest. Tell your prospect that you cannot give him an accurate answer and you need to discuss the offer with one of your colleagues. Make it a point at this moment to take out your notepad or tablet and write the exact offer down and discuss it to the best of your ability to avoid going back and forth another time.

When you know your bottom line or the concessions you create opportunities the buyer may have not otherwise considered. This is another way to create a win-win based on your knowledge of the person across the table.

The ability to define and negotiate concessions is critical to successful sales negotiation. Without it, your ability to meet your quota will falter and you will miss out on sales opportunities that otherwise would have closed. Clearly defining concessions on the spot requires authority and superior knowledge of your products/services and cost/pricing structure. Sometimes it is necessary to go back and forth to ensure both parties are winning and your client feels fully serviced. Clearly defined concessions will help you negotiate with more power and will ultimately align the goals of your customers and your company.

As a leader, building a high performing team of talented individuals can be quite challenging. But what’s more challenging than that is building a high performing leadership team. A leadership team comprises of not only highly talented and skilled individuals, but mainly well established and accomplished thinkers, leaders and influencers. What you can expect is a table of egos that’s struggling to develop the necessary synergies to help the organization succeed. In fact, the resultant of constant bickering and random skirmishes will be no less than catastrophic for the organization.

You must be wondering if it’s so destructive, why build a high performing leadership team in the first place, right? Well, if you’re able to do it correctly, such a team can be a vital catalyst boosting an organization’s ability to be innovative, creative and a unique competitor in the industry. However, to do this you need to avoid these common mistakes leaders make when forming a high performing leadership team. Here are a few tips that can help you build a stronger and effective leadership team.

1. Selection Criteria

Most leadership team members are selected based on their individual leadership skills, their professional competencies or their achievements. While these parameters are great identifiers of individual ability and performance, they don’t speak much about their ability to perform in a team. What often occurs is that the leadership team (being so accomplished) tunes out to suggestions and ideas from anyone else, because they feel they’re too competent to hear any other views. To build an effective leadership team you’ll need to assess its members based on their ability to be constructive team players and how their leadership style compliments others in the team.

2. Make it a “Real” Team

Quite often leadership teams aren’t recognized as a serious and “real” team because most members are chosen based on the CEO’s preference (i.e. political reasons), or because they’ve been with the organization for so long that they fall into it. The problem isn’t the leadership team, but the main ideology behind it. If CEOs are simply going to induct anyone into the team – even if they don’t really belong in it – then you’re going to end up diluting its purpose. Unfortunately, that’s what some CEOs do to avoid confrontation. Alternatively, if you were to develop a leadership team with members who really should be there, who’re motivated, skilled and will add value then you’re going to have a powerful team working for you.

3. Define the Purpose

Leadership teams often get caught up with operational concerns that take up most of their time and effort. It’s great to resolve real-life and current problems, no doubt, however, this really is just firefighting. To really add value and be an effective leadership team you need to step away from operational matters and look at things more strategically – the bigger picture! Discussions should revolve around the overall objective, the purpose of the organization and how you are aiming to achieve it, the development of capacity, innovative and all those meaningful hard discussions that build a stronger, sustainable future for the organization. Think big – after all, this is the leadership team!

4. Represent Your Organization

Most leadership teams comprise of functional heads who bring to the table expertise and knowledge of their domain. While you’re no doubt knowledgeable in your domain (and no one’s challenging that) remember why you’re part of this team. And that’s to help the organization achieve even more success. By simply representing your function alone you’re restricting your contributions and vision. As leaders, your main role is to lead and make the best decisions for the entire organization and not just your function alone.

5. Synergize

A healthy and harmonious relationship between all members of the leadership team is vital for its success and effectiveness. This is probably the most important aspect that many CEOs overlook. I’m not suggesting that everyone’s agreeing with each other and there’s no conflict. To produce excellence you need healthy and constructive conflict. However, it’s important that members of the team are aligned to a common ideology and purpose. That’s where the CEO needs to play their role as the bridge that connects people of different thoughts. You’ll need to invest time and effort in your members and guide them to be exceptionally good.

Building a leadership team for the sake of it is easy. However, building a high performing, effective and exceptional leadership team takes effort and commitment. The results of such a team, of course, are beyond beneficial for the organization and its employees.

Confession… I HATE being called a Millennial. Instead of being a factual, demographical term used to describe those born between 1982 and 2002, and currently ages 18-35, it has somehow become a term laced with judgment, disdain, and misunderstanding. My favorite misconception? That Millennials are such a foreign creature that they no longer want normal workplaces. Instead, they want a nap room, place for their furry friend to tag along and Kegs in the kitchen.

Correction: Most of us just want to find purpose-driven careers, working for awesome leaders in a collaborative, empowered environment. And we don’t nap. EVER.

I sat down with a fellow Millennial, and fellow business owner, Julia Wells, founder of Conscious Compass, who shares my concerns about the gross misconceptions surrounding our age group. Here’s what we had to say about the hot-button issue…

Carrie: Julia, I absolutely loved your Facebook post the other day that said: “What would be possible in the world if older generations stopped writing off millennials as lazy/entitled/easily bored and instead embraced the fact that we CARE deeply, we dedicate our time, money and energy to working on things that matter to us, and we refuse to settle for mediocrity?” I don’t know if you know this about me but I absolutely DETEST the stereotypes surrounding Millennials and take great offense to being called a Millennial because of the negativity surrounding that term. What prompted you to write this post? Was there a specific incident?

Julia: ‘Gotta love the power of a good Facebook post! So, the post came from a mix of things. I had been listening to an episode of “Pod Save The World” talking about how Millennials ARE so driven to make a difference once they find something they care about, and then seeing a post with someone complaining about Millennials. I am constantly surrounded by the most incredible women who are up to amazing things and I get really frustrated when we get lumped in to this lazy Millennial group. Do we present a certain challenge to older generations that might not be able to relate or have a different value system? Sure. But we need to stop making that a bad thing. Companies, communities and the planet have huge unrealized opportunities and it’s time to learn how to create an environment and attitude that encourages our generation to tackle the very real challenges we face (and celebrate the work already being done, because there’s a ton).

Carrie: I couldn’t agree more. For some reason the sweeping belief seems to be that Millennials as a whole are contributing to the demise of all things believed to be sacred—like the sanctity of the nuclear family, the notion of paying your dues before climbing the corporate ladder or the beauty of having dinner at a restaurant sans smartphone. But I’ve long believed that behavior is not influenced by a single generation but rather that individual’s unique experiences, core values and belief systems. I can tell you for a fact that I can have many a dinner conversation that doesn’t involve a cell phone, and I don’t need a nap room at work to keep me happy!

I don’t know about you but over the years I’ve found I fight ferociously to keep my age in the workplace under wraps (29). I’ll laugh about ‘80s pop culture references even though as a child born in 1987 most references escape me. I overthink everything I wear, wondering if that one shirt will be a dead giveaway that I am still in my 20s. Because, dare my age get out, I am horrified to think that the perception my employees have of me would change if they knew I fall into the Millennial generation. And that’s a real shame when we know there are powerhouse Millennials out there.

Julia: Even if we are contributing to the demise of certain traditions (getting married, having kids, buying a home), I think it’s also a cool opportunity to see what else is possible when we have different values and visions. AND, how the two can co-exist. The thing I love about Millennials is that we tend to be extremely open minded and curious about how we can always make things better. We tend to consider a broader, more diverse audience—groups that have often been passed over. There are so many amazing Millennial run businesses serving minority populations that traditional big business has skipped over in the past. I LOVE this! So what if we need a nap while changing the world? The phone at the table is an entirely different conversation though. I have my own frustrations with the lack of face-to-face communication skills these days and what it means for connection and community in the world.

As for the age thing, I can totally relate! At 19 I was running a $9 million retail store with 100+ employees. One day an employee found out my age and told me she shouldn’t have to listen to me since I was younger. My manager was just a little bit older than me and I know she worked really hard not to let anyone see her age in fear that they might lose respect. For me, I learned this lesson young and it served me so well when I went in to the corporate world and was managing groups and teams with people much older than me, some who had worked there 30-plus years.

My personal philosophy is that honesty and communication need to be present for there to be a solid foundation. Whenever we are working to hide/prove/overcome something, we are never as present as we can be when we just own it and have an honest conversation. For me, that definitely took practice, but by the end of my time in the corporate world, it was something that both employees, peers and superiors all commended me for doing an exceptional job at. I think it’s time we start celebrating what we’re accomplishing at such young ages and having open and honest dialogue about the challenges from both the leadership perspective and the being led perspective.

Carrie: I can relate to managing people older than yourself. I held my first management role at 25 and since then I have rarely had people younger than me working for me. I’ve also always been the youngest on my company’s leadership team, often sitting alongside 40 and 50-year-olds with decades of experiencing managing. There was a time when I used to feel uncomfortable with this… wondering if I was as worthy as others. Worried that others were judging my place in the company. But then a great mentor reminded me: “No one thought Mark Zuckerberg was too young to start Facebook.” She was right. He was just a trailblazer who believed in himself enough to build an empire.

My hope for Millennials—and all generations—is that we stop apologizing for success, especially women. I have spent so much time in my career making excuses for my success (“I was in the right place at the right time” or “I got lucky to know so-and-so”) versus leaning into my unique talents, experience and creativity that got me to where I am. And leaning in doesn’t mean you are entitled. It means you are celebrating your wins along the way, hopefully staying grounded about all you still have to learn, but recognizing your unique gifts and contributions to society.

I read this interesting article in the Boston Globe the other day titled “Millennials ruining everything? It’s an age-old accusation.” The article contends that “Millennial bashing” has actually been occurring in literature for hundreds of years. “There’s [always been] rampant worry that society, as we knew it, was crumbling,” says Boston College professor Eric Weiskott. “And that the people to blame for that were the youngest generation.” In other words, are we just getting blamed and typecast because we happened to be the disrupters, just as the women’s rights activists were in the 1800s? Are we just the inevitable victims of aging societies?

Julia: Sounds like it! Wouldn’t it be awesome to finally break that pattern? I guess it’s kind of true, even with the next generation coming up, I already hear my friends complaining that they lack social skills, motivation, work ethic, etc. So we’re already repeating that pattern instead of teaching them to embrace what’s unique about their generation. I think a lot of it also comes from competition mindset and scarcity and being worried that there’s not enough for all of us. Which simply isn’t true.

The world has SO many unique challenges that need solving, companies and organizations that need leading, causes that need champions, etc. We have to start embracing what does make us unique and amazing AND how to cultivate even more of that. When people are working in their respective strength roles that energize them and allow them to do their best work, amazing results are produced. I personally feel like this is something I’m still learning, but I’ve been lucky to have coaches and mentors teach me how to identify and explore these strengths. A couple of my favorite assessments have been the Stand Out Report, StrengthsFinder, and MBTI test. I think you mentioned that you’ve used at least one of these for yourself and your teams…

Carrie: I am a huge fan of StrengthsFinder. I took it two years ago when I was with my previous company, along with the rest of our leadership team and it gave me great insight into my natural tendencies. When we know more about ourselves—our strengths, our social style, our personality type—we can lead and collaborate more authentically. And, in so doing, people can see us for who we are individually, as opposed to the generation in which we fall. I’m curious, as someone who works largely with Millennials and coaches them, where do you see our generation struggling the most? Conversely, where are we dominating?

Julia: One of the huge things I focus on and have so many clients struggling with is caring about what we think people think. This isn’t exclusive to our generation by any means, but it’s what holds us back in everything we do. While the fears feel very real and uncomfortable, they are often things we make up ourselves. The reality is, most people are so worried about themselves that they aren’t even thinking about what you’re doing. But it keeps us from going after our big scary dreams and playing full out which leads to a lot of self judgment, resentment, worry and procrastination.

On the flip side, I think we are doing a phenomenal job at living a really values-centric life. We are learning to vote with our dollars, support purpose-driven businesses (and start them), and forcing companies to care. Just selling the cheapest product isn’t enough for us. We care about quality and purpose and it’s shaping how we live, work, and lead.

Carrie: I love that you say living a “values-centric life.” I completely agree that this is an incredibly passionate, fierce and caring age group. But one thing I have noticed is we appear to be a generation with perhaps the largest professional divide yet. Because our group is more entrepreneurial than past generations (with Millennials “discovering entrepreneurship significantly earlier than boomers did” according to the 2016 BNP Paribas Global Entrepreneur Report), you have this interesting mix of Millennials who are holding CEO or C-suite positions, juxtaposed with other Millennials who are still entry-level roles. I’ve seen that it can create a “not good enough mentality” in some Millennials, who can’t quite figure out how to carve their own path. I have some friends that lament the corporate ladder, while others believe there is no ladder and that their dreams are possible.

Julia: I think for me the opportunity within all of it is that we can bring this entrepreneurial mindset to anything we do to make it even better. Whether we want to run our own company and hold high level positions or we are OK working our way up the ladder, there is increasingly more space and need for this mindset. Innovation is key to solving the big problems we face and I think our generation does really well at this when given the right freedom, tools, and empowerment. We’ve seen more and more companies start in house incubators and spend a lot of resources to foster this mindset which is really cool! Sometimes it spins in to someone starting their own business and other times it leads to an in-house change or expansion.

Carrie: Totally agree. So I know we could go on-and-on with this discussion (so much to discuss!), but to wrap up, what is the one piece of advice you would give to our generation?

Julia: Learn and leverage your strengths! Go beyond just what you’re good at and look at what energizes you. It doesn’t matter if this is inside a company or for yourself. This is what will give you the energy to work hard and create massive impact. Find people, environments, and opportunities to foster and deepen these strengths every chance you get. What about you? What would your piece of advice be?

Carrie: Don’t hide your talents. I struggled with this when I first started out in my career, concerned about ostracizing myself from my peers or being viewed as “the teacher’s pet” with my boss. But hiding your talent means not giving your organization, family, friends and the world your best—and everyone deserves your best! As I wrote in a previous blog post: Don’t ever hide—or apologize—for being talented and earning recognition. The minute you apologize for your talent is the day you resign to not living to your fullest potential. Instead, be fierce, be talented and be humble.

An email from one reader asked what research he might do that would allow him to gain the commitment of time from his prospects. This is to overestimate the value of researching, and it is to misunderstand what it takes to gain a commitment for a first meeting (which is covered in greater detail in The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales).

The Limits of Research

There is very little that you can learn about your prospective client through research that will cause you to gain an appointment with your prospective client.

You may want to look at their work history to discern what they’ve done in the past, which may help you understand what kind of roles they’ve had in the past, and you may also find things they are proud of having done. You can look at their education, and you might be able to find some connection, like the fact that your prospective client went to the same university as your brother in law. On LinkedIn, you can see what groups someone belongs to, you can see what they found valuable enough to post, and you can see what their interests are, none of which is very helpful when it comes to gaining a commitment for a meeting.

What comes next is going to be painful for some of you:

You are researching your client because you have call reluctance. You have call reluctance because you don’t know what to say to gain an appointment, and you are searching for some way to make it easier. But if you already don’t know what to say, then saying, “You went to the same University as my brother in law,” is only going to make things worse for you.

The key to gaining a commitment is having something worth trading time to acquire.

What Are You Trading for Time?

When you are asking for an appointment, what you know about your client specifically is not as important as what you know about them generally. Your dream client isn’t likely to meet with you because you stalked their social media to learn things about them personally. They’re going to meet with you because you have something of value to trade for that meeting.

To gain the commitment of time, it’s much easier to trade what you can teach your prospective client about their business, about their opportunities, about their challenges, and about the decisions they are going to need to make in the not too distant future.

Later, Do Your Research

When you are prospecting, you need to do the minimal viable amount of research about your prospect, and the maximum research necessary to have a commanding disparity when it comes to business acumen and situational knowledge. Once that appointment is scheduled, however, you need to do more research, the kind of research that gives you some greater clues as to who you are meeting with before you have that meeting.

The post Your Research is Mostly Call Reluctance appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The 5 Secrets of Motivating Your Sales Team

by Mike Brooks, http://mrinsidesales.com/

 

Having trouble motivating your team? You’re not alone. 

Every member of your team has different skill levels, interest levels, and different ways of learning. Because of this, not everyone will respond the same way to your methods of managing and motivating, and that means you need different ways of motivating, mentoring, counseling, or even some babysitting.  Sound familiar? 

Let’s face it: true motivation comes from within. In some way, each member of your team is already motivated. The secret (or five secrets) is to build on each team member’s internal motivation and learn to maximize it. 

Here are five things you can do today to get the most out of your team -- 

#1) Make your monthly revenue goal, and each rep’s part of that goal, crystal clear. I'm sure you have a monthly revenue goal, but does each member of your sales team know what their specific part of that goal is? (Hint -- it's not all equal). Recognize that some reps will produce much more of the overall goal than others, but also make sure each person is clear on what their part of that overall goal is. And then coach to that. 

#2) Make bonuses or prizes specific to each team member. The problem with most bonus programs is that as soon as they are released, over half of the sales team knows they can't win so they are more discouraged than encouraged to produce. Instead, spend some time learning what each person would really want, and then customize each rep’s bonus and tie it to their individual production goal. 

If a rep hits their goal, then they win something that is meaningful to them. This also makes each rep responsible for hitting their own goal.

#3) Get out of your own comfort zone and close some deals. Most managers are way too busy in meetings, or reporting, or just plain hiding out to be really effective. Remember one thing -- as the manager, you are the leader. And leaders lead by example. 

Want to motivate your team, make your numbers, and create real value for yourself? Go onto the floor and close business for some of your sales reps and help them make their revenue goals. This is the most important thing you can do not only for your bottom line, but for your team’s motivation as well. 

#4) Invest $100 in a couple of trophies. This will be the best money you'll ever spend -- make one a “Week’s most improved," or “Best effort," and hand it out each Monday morning. 

Each winner gets to keep it on their desk that week. The other trophy can be either “Most deals," or “Most new clients." or whatever other category everyone has a chance to win (as long as it is revenue related). Again, hand it out in your Monday morning sales meeting and each week the winner gets to keep it on their desk. 

Remember rule #1 in motivating: recognition among peers is almost always more important than money. 

#5) Have some fun! Go to a toy store and buy one of those beanbag tosses, and after lunch on Friday make some teams and have some fun playing as a team. Tack on $50 for good measure and watch the competition and fun build your team and dissolve stress.  This works – try it! 

So there you have it. Inexpensive, proven techniques to build morale, motivate and make more money. 

Want a bonus? Invest in and give each member of your team a copy of my new book: Power Phone Scripts.” See it here. In it, they’ll find scripts, techniques, email templates, voice mail scripts, and so much more that they can use to help motivate themselves. 

Invest in them to help them invest in themselves. Now there’s a proven way to motivate your sales team!

 

Mike has been voted one of the most Influential Inside Sales Professionals for the past seven years by The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, and just won the 2017 Service Provider Award for training and development from the AA-ISP. Mike is hired by business owners to implement proven sales processes that help them immediately scale and grow Multi-Million Dollar Inside Sales Teams.  For more information, you can visit his website: www.MrInsideSales.com

 

 

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on the Control blog here.

There’s no doubt that a subscription-based business needs to keep a close eye on its churn rate. But is it necessary to track both Customer Churn and Revenue Churn? And if your business decides to only track one churn metric, should it concern itself with Customer Churn Rate or Revenue Churn Rate?

To answer this question, we must properly understand each term and its purpose.

Customer Churn Rate = # of customers lost in a period / total # of customers at beginning of period
Revenue Churn Rate = revenue lost in a period / total revenue at beginning of period

Let’s dig a bit deeper into these terms with a couple of examples.

Only Using Customer Churn Rate

Imagine that you run a SaaS business with 1,000 subscribers. 90% of your customers are subscribed to your Blue service, while 10% are subscribed to your Red service.

Simple enough, right? But here’s where it gets interesting. Imagine that BLUE customers pay significantly less than your RED customers.

Based on this new paradigm, the total revenue distribution would look like this:

It’s a simple example that drives home an important idea: the idea that focusing only on Customers or only on Revenue can be very misleading.

Let’s say your business is only monitoring Customer Churn Rate. One month you notice that you have lost 10 customers. You feel comfortable with this number, though, as during that same time period you gained 25 new subscribers.

But what if all 10 of those customers were RED subscribers, and 24 of the 25 newcomers opted for BLUE? This might be indicative of a major problem with your RED subscription level. It will also have a significant effect on your company’s monthly revenue:

• Before: $9,000 from BLUE and $20,000 from RED.
• Total = $29,000.

• After: With 24 new customers, you have $9,240 from BLUE.
• With 9 fewer customers you have $18,200 from RED.
• Total = $27,440.

Perhaps your customers are not receiving the value they expected. Or perhaps a competitor has released a new service that your users are migrating to. Whatever the case, you will not be able to consider this problem if you are only concerning yourself with Customer Churn Rate.

Before you think that the solution to all your problems is only using Revenue Churn Rate, let us take a look at the other side of the coin.

Only Using Revenue Churn Rate

Let us keep the same scenario as our previous section. RED still makes up the majority of your revenue, but BLUE makes up the majority of your customers.

Using the Revenue Churn Rate we would certainly be made aware of a large drop in RED subscribers, as described in the previous section of this post. But what if there was a significant decrease in BLUE subscribers?

What if in a single month, BLUE subscribers dropped by 105? Remember, BLUE subscribers only pay $10 a month.

But that’s over 10% of your entire customer base leaving — an alarming statistic by any measure.

But with the Revenue Churn Rate model, it’s more difficult to notice the significance of this drop. Imagine if 105 BLUE subscribers left, but at the same time 5 new RED subscribers arrived:

• Before: $9,000 from BLUE and $20,000 from RED.
• Total = $29,000.

• After: With 105 fewer BLUE customers, you have $7,950.
• With 5 more RED customers you have $21,000
• Total = $28,950.

Based on the Revenue Churn Rate model there is little cause for concern — the two figures are almost equal. Now we would hope that a small-business owner has a good enough sense of his or her business to notice a dramatic loss in total customers. Or perhaps the shift from BLUE to RED is actually part of a larger business plan to phase out BLUE entirely and focus on higher value customers.

However, it is also possible that it’s indicative of a major pain-point facing BLUE subscribers, that your service has not properly addressed. Those BLUE subscribers, over time, could have become loyal customers who eventually upgraded to the RED level. You will never have the chance to see how this scenario plays out, though, if you are only watching the Revenue Churn Rate.

Is There a Clear Winner?

There is no clear winner in the debate of Customer Churn versus Revenue Churn. There are plausible scenarios in which each is significantly more valuable than the other when it comes to monitoring the health of your company — whether you are a SaaS company like Control, or something else entirely.

If you are swamped with metrics, and you are looking to follow only one metric, we would recommend Customer Churn. There are two reasons for this: the first is that Revenue is usually tracked closer by other metrics; the second is that customer churn may be indicative of a problem with your product or service, regardless of whether the customers who have left are low or high spenders. As a general rule of thumb regarding the health of your company, it is critical to properly track the customers who are coming and going.

The post Battle of the Churns: Customer Churn vs Revenue Churn appeared first on OpenView Labs.

At every turn, we’re flooded with stories. Scrolling through social media, browsing the web, driving down our streets and walking through retail environments function as dozens of blank pages for brands to tell their stories. With countless others striving to do the same with a distinct voice and message, we have to remember one crucial characteristic when we approach storytelling, copywriting and content creation. It’s empathy.

Empathy: noun

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Chances are, we’ve all heard this before. Though it’s become a buzzword within the marketing and advertising spheres, empathy goes beyond a mere writing trend. It’s the idea that getting down to the heart of what your customer thinks, feels, wants, is of dire importance. It’s not just good strategy; empathy forces us to consider people, not profit, first.

Why empathy in writing matters

For mediums as impersonal as online, we have to let people know they’re valuable and understood. Any other product, service or brand out there can tell you all about what they offer and urge someone to buy. But putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and considering the value that your brand can add to their life, offers a more relatable conversation. It puts the audience first. It means we consider the reason why someone is looking for a new internet provider, or a treatment facility for themselves or a loved one, or the reason why they should choose one home builder over another. We understand their need, and offer an empathetic solution.

In turn, it builds trust. People are smart. And most can spot insincerity from a mile away. By being authentically tuned in to someone’s inclinations and needs, and then offering a considerate and intentional offer, trust begins to build. That trust from your audience can ensure they relate, know and feel comfortable with your brand.

Now, let’s talk about emotion. We’re not talking about getting mushy here, but there’s proof in the fact that people are empowered to take action when there’s a tug on their heartstrings. According to researchers, an ad’s messaging is deemed three times more successful if audiences have an emotional response. This kind of emotion is key, because it adds value to your brand story. If there isn’t an authentic connection, there’s no value in someone considering you and your brand as beneficial.

How to do it

It seems simple, right? Just have more empathy, and your brand’s story will outshine other narratives competing to win your audience. But there’s some practical and intentional ways we can start writing with empathy before we even begin to type out a line of copy or brainstorm for a new piece of content.

Understand your audience

First things first — get to know your people. Demographic information and research is important to find out ages, life stages, locations, gender, ethnicity, online behaviors, and so on. This will help you get a gauge for your voice and tone when creating messaging for them. Does your audience skew older and more established? You’re likely going to speak differently than you would to a young adult in college.

Back it up

Now that you have some concrete stats on who your audience is, it’s time to dive a little deeper. Stakeholder interviews can help give you more context around your industry and gain more insight into your targeted demographics. Focus groups can also give you a sort of “test run” to see how people who closely reflect your audience take in your narrative and approach. You’ll also hear honest feedback on what they felt when encountering your message and content.

Write like a human

I’ll go even further than that: write like a friend. When you sit down to write or are reviewing work from a hired writer, there’s no room for jargon or $20 words. We have to speak casually, but not sloppy. Simple, but not dumbed-down. When we know who our audiences are, and what they need, we can be that friend who can offer a heartfelt solution that skips over flashy features and hands over real and effective benefits.

The post The Art of Storytelling: Writing with Empathy appeared first on LaneTerralever.

Our hyper-connected digital world is defined by an overabundance of data. Everything’s measurable, trackable, and quantifiable. Want to know how many people died on screen in your favorite movie? Or how much ice cream the average American eats per year? The data’s at your fingertips. The ready availability of data is great for marketers. It helps us optimize performance, personalize content, and prove our value to the business. But data in a vacuum isn’t informative or useful. It’s not about the facts and figures themselves; it’s about how we shape that data into compelling stories. As an Analytics Advocate at Google, Adam Singer has years of experience finding and revealing the meaningful narrative in datasets. His presentation at Content Marketing World 2017 was all about how to create clean, informative, compelling data visualizations. Here’s a quick visual summary of his entire presentation, courtesy of Kingman Ink: My favorite part is the lizard that represents your limbic brain. Visuals cut straight to that reflexive part of your brain, making a point quicker than listing facts and drawing conclusions. Here’s how Adam suggests creating data-based visuals that speak directly to our inner lizards.

#1:  Prepare Data for Analysis

Great data visualization starts with...well...data. More than that, it starts with a meaningful and manageable data set. The data you choose to include should be tailored to both the story you want to tell and the audience that’s going to receive it. For an example, when pulling internal data, your CEO might just want to know whether marketing is contributing to revenue. By contrast, your CMO will want revenue, engagement, and sales enablement data. Adam recommends these three steps for data analysis:

1. Filtering: Make sure you’re getting high quality data. For example, in your website analytics, exclude bot and spam traffic from your traffic reports.
2. Sorting: Use the sorting that makes the most business sense. In most cases, a combined and weighted sort will be the most useful, organizing data along two variables.
3. Grouping: In Google Analytics, you can group data into categories. This can help you create more specific, focused visualizations.

#2: Tell Your Data Story

With the data in hand, you can create a visualization. Aim to create an image so simple, specific, and clean that it’s readable at a glance. In other words, the opposite of this:  Notice how your eyes flick back and forth between the legend and the chart, trying to make sense of it all. Compare that chart to this one: There’s a mountain of data behind that visualization, but you can instantly grasp the point: vaccines eliminate diseases. Such a stunning visual doesn’t happen by accident. It takes careful planning. Adam recommends “storyboarding” your visualizations before you even pull the data in. Nail down who you’re talking to, what questions you’re answering, and the story you’re telling before you create a single chart.

#3: Best Practices for Compelling Data Reporting

As with any kind of storytelling, the best way to visualize your data depends on your audience and your story. But there are some consistent best practices to follow. Adam recommends following these guidelines for visualizations in your internal reporting, regardless of audience or intent:

1. Keep charts and graphs simple. Don’t graph every data point--just enough to show the trend. Focus on what matters most to your story.
2. Tell the user what the point is. Your audience shouldn’t have to guess at the conclusion you want them to draw: Put it right in the title of your visualization.
3. Don’t spin the data. Ever. The point of data visualization is to get at the facts, not obscure them. Don’t abuse your audience’s trust with misleading visuals.
4. Make reporting part of your process. It’s easy to think of reporting as something tacked on to the end of a campaign, a final housekeeping task. Better to see reporting as vital to our ongoing marketing efforts and approach it with dedication and enthusiasm.
5. Use the right data for the right stakeholder. Make sure you personalize your reports for different audiences, sticking with only the most relevant data for each.
6. Be creative and have fun. Solutions like Google Data Studio make it easy to pull in data and play with visualizations. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Data Points

When done properly, a single chart or graph can convey paragraphs of information at a single glance. Choose your data carefully, keep your visualizations simple and purposeful, and you can create a report far more compelling than a list of stats and figures could ever be. Speaking of beautiful data visualization, have you seen our interactive influencer marketing infographic?  

The post How to Find the Stories in Your Data for Compelling Reporting appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

New startups are delicate things.

So it's not surprising that the path to establishing a fledgling business can sometimes feel fraught with peril.

No one appreciates this more than the founders of stock trading app Robinhood. Before they got their product off the ground, they struck out on 75 investor pitches. Nowadays, two million people use the app, which is valued at $1.3 billion.

Vlad Tenev, the app's cofounder and co-CEO, told Business Insider there's a mistake that can kill your early-stage startup: focusing on anything but the product.

One such distraction is money, said Tenev. Some founders strive to obtain funding at the expense of everything else.

"They get wrapped up in going to conferences and going to fancy mixers and giving talks," Tenev said. "They don't realize that funding is a means to an end."

Or, as Tenev has experienced firsthand with his Robinhood cofounder, Baiju Bhatt, founders can get distracted by features. He said his and Bhatt's initial mobile app was completely overloaded with features — user profiles, private messages, stock ratings, and more.

"All of that made the value proposition a little bit murky," Tenev said. "Customers were confused about what to use the app for."

The sheer number of features made it hard for their small team to ensure that every aspect was high quality, he explained. Robinhood was born when they stripped the idea down and created an easier-to-use product.

"The initial product was very simple, very understandable," Tenev said. "People got it right away. We were able to build off that as time went on."

Getting distracted by money, by features, or even by the pursuit of success can lead to anything but.

"I wouldn't focus so much on being successful in and of itself, but rather on the process of becoming better every single day," Tenev said. "Become a better planner, become a better thinker, become better at setting goals, and better at executing. And if you can do that for the next five to ten years, you'll be in good shape to create a good business."

DON'T MISS: A 27-year-old CEO says too many company founders get a key element of leadership all wrong

SEE ALSO: The founders of Robinhood, a no-fee stock-trading app, were initially rejected by 75 venture capitalists — now their startup is worth $1.3 billion

Join the conversation about this story »

Offering a trial when a prospect is deep in the sales cycle seems like a logical way to push your sale along. You already know the value of your product. Giving a prospect the chance to take your product for a test run and experience the benefits themselves sounds like a sure way to seal the deal.

TOPO’s latest benchmark report noted that 54% of deals that went through a trial resulted in a Closed Won opportunity. So based off the research, offering trials to advance opportunities to the end of the sales journey does help to close deals.

But successful trials don’t stem from hands-off tactics, they require you to pay close attention to how the prospect adopts your product during the trial.

By maintaining an active trial process, where you check in and guide your prospect’s adoption of your product, you have more control over their experience, which increases your chances of success. Here are a few tips on how to manage trial adoption so your prospect experiences the product’s value and is encouraged to buy.

Adopt a Time Based Approach

The first step of any trial should be to set a time limit. With a time limit in place you create a sense of urgency — your buyer has a fixed amount of time to test the product. That urgency spurs the buyer to act and engage in the trial.

The length of your trial will vary depending on your business. While it may make sense to put a 14 or 30 day trial in place across the board, consider the companies you are working with. If you sell to small businesses, a seven day trial may be enough time to deploy and try out your product. However, if you work with larger companies, a 30 day trial may be necessary to implement your product across users and teams.

No matter how long the trial is set for, stay actively engaged with the prospect during this time. Even a seven day trial can go astray if you do not take the time to check in. Using SalesLoft you can easily create a cadence for trials and automatically schedule a series of emails to send to your potential buyers. Consistently communicating with trial accounts allows you to stay on top of trial adoption and decreases the risk of opportunities becoming lost.

Aim for Adoption

Making sure the product actually gets put into practice is key to a successful trial run. If the product is not implemented successfully, the prospect could fail to see the value of your product, and reject the sale. By taking a hands on approach you can make sure the trial runs smoothly and is adopted by anyone involved in the sale.

Let’s be realistic though, you don’t have a ton of time to devote to fully train every trial account. If bandwidth (or deal size) allow for it, see if you can involve your customer service or implementation team to quickly train prospects on correct product use.

Aside from formal training sessions, provide any training guides, best practices, or additional content to your trial accounts. You’re already going to use a cadence to consistently check in on the trial. Stretch that cadence even further by using templates that educate your prospect as you check in.

You can even use templates to quickly respond to questions that may arise during a trial. To maximize group adoption, email templated responses to your primary contact and then CC or BCC any members on their team. This way everyone receives the necessary information to get the entire group up and running.

Get the Seal of Approval

A successful trial requires more than making sure the prospect adopts your product. They need to understand the inherent value of incorporating your product into their daily routine. Once they see the value and accept the product, they will be a lot more likely to follow through on the sale.

Gaining acceptance requires two steps on your part. First, set expectations on the front end of the trial with clearly defined milestones. The idea is to show your prospect what the product will do for them in the long term in the confines of their trial period. Milestones can mimic the long term goals the prospect wants to accomplish. Consider challenges the company is facing or pain points and build your milestones as resolutions to those issues.

Once the trial is over, being able to attribute a positive change to your product is a huge win. Before the end of the trial, gather the necessary data so your prospect can explicitly see the milestones were met and make future projections. These steps provide a clear picture of the success your prospect can accomplish with your product moving forward.

As the sales rep, a hands-on trial is the best approach to optimize your prospect’s trial adoption. You create the business need when you guide prospects to fully adopt your product within a set time limit. But the trial is more than timely execution. You show your buyer the value of your product, which will make them a quality customer before the deal is complete.

 

---

Download a copy of the eBook today and take your account executive team into the modern sales era.

The post Successfully Manage Trial Adoption With a Hands-On Approach appeared first on SalesLoft.

If you are in the NYC, chances are high that you have either visited or have at least heard about the Annual holiday market at Union Square or in Grand Central Station. These pop-up stores have a large number of shoppers looking for the best bargains to fill up their gift quota for Christmas. And that’s the reason why these pop-up stores have been generating annual revenues in the range of $45-$50 billion. Imagine the amount of traffic these stores can drive into their physical store, if the buyers spot the right deals and offer at the right time! Well, thankfully we now have an in-store marketing technology that is cheap and provides amazing positive ROI even for SMEs – Beacon

Marketing strategies for SMEs have evolved with time

When it comes to marketing for any business, there have always been many channels to get your message across and attract current and new customers. These ways have certainly evolved over the years. It started with town criers who shouted out offers, which eventually got replaced by pamphlets and newspapers, and later radio and television broadcasts.

A decade ago, small businesses would set up a table displaying their wares and engage with passersby in the hopes of making a sale. Since then, the evolution of technology has widened the reach of SMEs and the quality of information sharing – Be it social media or business listing websites.

With technologies advancing in this space, small and medium enterprise businesses have now shifted focus to something new and exciting – Proximity marketing with beacons.

What are beacons? How do they function?

Beacons are low-cost, low-powered transmitters equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE (also called Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart) that can be used to deliver proximity-based, context-aware messages.

A beacon transmits signals which allow another device to determine its proximity to the broadcaster. In a store, a beacon lets a customer’s app determine that it’s close to a particular aisle, or in a particular department.

Why is beacon the best marketing strategy for small and medium businesses?

Small and medium businesses have often been bashed by lack of financial power and hammered by online shopping. Why go to stores when deals and personalized shopping are found so easily online?

But that game is now changing with the Beacon technology!

1. Convenient to your customers to find you

The golden rule for any business to flourish is to understand and adapt your marketing strategy to what your customers are habituated with. Now here are few numbers you might want to look at – 84% of customers use their smartphone while shopping. So, for any small or medium sized business, instead of spending dollars on Facebook and other social media campaigns, or printing in-store posters, take your chances using beacon technology – which is a more natural and convenient way of communication with the customers.

With beacons, you can send instant notifications of any relevant information directly to a customer’s smartphone when they are near your location. The customer doesn’t have to do anything, they simply are doing what they normally do – using their phone for finding routes, offers online, information about a product etc. That’s when they get a message from you, promoting an exclusive offer or new item that they are interested in.

2. Enhance in-store shopping experience

Enhancing in-store experience not only impresses your customer one time but also wins him for the longest time. Needless to say, it only contributes more to your sale numbers! Here are few things you could do to boost up the in-store shopping experience –

1. Send offers and discounts to a customer when near a product or a certain shelf
2. Offer coupons to customers after a purchase to share with their friends
3. Offer rewards for completing tasks – maybe take a picture with a new product and share socially
4. Make mannequins interactive by pushing notification when customers are near them

3. Leverage beacons to out-tech the competition

Beacons are a revolutionary way of competing with the large retailers. Typically, technologies like beacon are something only larger retailers could afford or at least that is what the perception is today. Your ability to use them helps level the playing field.

4. Cost effective marketing strategy

The beacon transmitters are very inexpensive, retailing around $49 (cloud platform & hardware rolled into one). The cost associated with getting set up to use beacon technology is small compared to the potential for revenue it offers. Location-based technology allows businesses to learn more about their customers’ spending habits and send more targeted and customized messages. These messages get pushed directly to their smartphone, so they are guaranteed to see it, unlike a social media post, mailer, or mass email.

5. A lot of customer intelligence data to optimize your business

A Beaconstac dashboard lets you centrally manage your fleet of beacons, run campaigns and gather a lot of analytics – all in one place. Analytics let you understand customer’s spending habits and product preferences, enabling you to create more personalized, targeted offers. Here are a few things you should be tracking for small and medium businesses –

1. Track data about slow days and full days to optimize flow and service
2. Track shopping habits and preferences to know your shoppers well
3. Track heat maps and zone to zone conversion metrics to improve in-store product placement

Local businesses that have already deployed beacons

There are few SMEs just like you, who have adopted the beacon technology to boost their sales and engagement.

1. A Chinese quick service food outlet “Yummie House” automated check-ins on mobile phones using beacons. The beacon campaign increased the in-store engagement by 30%.
2. For our London readers, you can check out the iBeacon experience at restaurants such as; Ping Pong, Spaghetti House, Villandry, Oxo Tower, Thai Square and STK London. The beacons are being used to send offers and menus to potential diners.
3. London’s Regent Street shopping lane has announced plans to incorporate Beacons along its mile long stretch of shops. Pop-up stores like Anthropology, along with 100 or so other shops, have begun installing iBeacons near their entrances in an effort to better engage shoppers and potential shoppers.

To wrap up

Small and medium businesses face a huge competition from their big-box counterparts as well as other main street businesses. And Beacons can truly be the cutting edge marketing strategy for them, given how cost-effective it is and still gives the wide reach that other technologies can possibly give.

This blog was originally published on Beaconstac

Let’s be honest: if you’re in sales, you’re no stranger to clunky software solutions. From legacy platforms with countless tables and fields, to the inability to function across mobile devices, many CRM and SFA systems have their fair share of shortcomings.

But what you might not realize is that, while your team is busy avoiding your CRM and finding workarounds in Excel or Google Sheets, there is another team that simply can’t escape the madness. If you’ve found your CRM lacking and felt the cold shoulder from your IT team lately, it may be time to band together and start thinking of an alternate solution. Here are three ways that your CRM may be hurting them just as much as it’s hurting you.

Implementation

Many CRM companies, like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, don’t offer in-house implementation services. This means that your company either has to shell out an hourly fee for third-party assistance, or have your IT team manage the implementation internally.

While doing a quick Google search for “average CRM implementation time” yields results ranging from one week to six months, no two CRM or SFA implementations are alike. Truly, the time to go-live will be determined by the number of employees that will be using the system, as well as the complexity of your sales process and required customizations. Not to mention, if you are moving from an existing platform to a new system, data migration can also take up a pretty hefty chunk of time.

Rather than making implementation seamless for your team, many sales solutions require tons of custom coding upfront to configure the system in the way that your business needs. Of course, you know what that means: each time you would like to optimize your sales process or pipeline, IT will have to get involved to help with re-configuration.

Support

Similar to implementation, many sales platform vendors fail to provide live support for their customers without the purchase of pricey premium support packages. Rather than pay the cost and risk having to rely on a vendor to provide sales teams’ with assistance, many companies turn to their own IT teams.

If something breaks, it is now IT’s responsibility to dig through vendor documentation in an attempt to solve the issue in a timely fashion. Given all the idiosyncrasies of legacy sales platforms, this can be a time-consuming and altogether unpleasant endeavor, especially for team members without pre-existing knowledge of the system. Suddenly, your IT team’s time is being wasted troubleshooting system glitches, rather than innovating solutions for your business.

Integration

With data acting as the official currency of the digital world, integrating CRMs with other business systems like marketing automation platforms, helpdesk software and quoting and billing solutions is growing increasingly common and necessary. The greater visibility that sales has into the full customer journey, and the more prospect/customer data it has, the smarter, more strategic decisions it can make.

Unfortunately, not many sales platform vendors make this process easy. Case in point? Salesforce has a 48-page “quick” guide of API limitations that developers must be aware of before building any new connections. One can only wonder what the “long” guide looks like…

This is why companies like Peritus Digital are choosing sales platforms with flexible, well-documented APIs built to power business connections. After building an invoicing system called Paycove on top of Base for one of its clients, Peritus’ CTO Rich Hankinson said, “Base’s API is extremely well-documented and easy to work with. We love that Base doesn’t heavily restrict API calls, so we were able to rapidly test the Paycove integration without hitting any limits.”

Don’t be the 63%

With 63% of CRM initiatives failing, it’s time for sales and IT to band together and find a CRM that the whole team can get behind. For help in your search, try downloading our CRM Buyer’s Kit, which features an RFP template, self-assessment and other materials to help ensure that your team gets the sales solution it needs to succeed.

As your business grows, manually keeping track of your prospects and customers with spreadsheets and random notes in different places becomes near impossible.

Not only is this type of system time- and energy-consuming to manage, but things also start slipping through the cracks at an alarming rate. This only serves to exhaust your team and disappoint to your customers.

You don't want this to happen to you, do you? No. That's why you need a CRM.

There are four main advantages of using a CRM.

Benefits of CRM

1. Better Customer Experience

It’s much easier to provide a positive buying experience when you know a lot about your prospect. Seeing at a single glance every blog post, email, and ebook they’ve opened and/or read, as well as key details like their company’s size, location, and vertical, gives you a major leg up.

You can personalize your messaging and provide more value from the start.

2. Higher Productivity

With a CRM, you can automate tasks like call and activity logging, reporting, deal creation, and more.

The less time reps are spending on administrative work, the greater number of hours they have to get in front of prospects. Your revenue will increase proportionally.

3. Increased Collaboration

A sales manager can instantly see how and when her salespeople are reaching out to and following up with buyers. An account executive (AE) can quickly fill himself in on an opportunity his sales development rep (SDR) has prospected and qualified for him.

Salespeople on the same team can learn more about each other’s best practices and pinch-hit for each other whenever someone goes on vacation or gets sick.

Essentially, a CRM boosts rep collaboration and efficiency.

4. Greater Insights

Stop wondering how your salespeople are doing. A CRM will give you both a high-level and on-the-ground picture of rep performance, including team-wide and individual conversion rates by deal stage, average deal size, deal velocity — and that’s just scratching the surface.

Imagine what you could do with this data-backed understanding of what’s working and what could be improved.

CRM Terms to Know

Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of using a CRM, you should be familiar with several key terms.

Contact

A contact is an individual person. Most CRMs will record their first and last name and email address. You can also keep track of details like their job title, company name, annual company revenue — the possibilities are nearly endless.

Lead

A lead has indicated an interest in your product. They might be a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), meaning they’ve somehow interacted with your marketing content (for instance, downloaded an ebook), or a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), meaning your reps have identified them as a good fit.

Deal

Also known as an opportunity, a deal is a potential sale. A deal should move through the various stages of your sales process.

Link contacts to deals. If you’re working with CMO Jane Doe and Marketing Director John Smith on a single purchase, they should both be associated with that deal record.

Company

If you’re selling to businesses, you also want to keep track of which contacts and deals are linked to which organizations. The typical CRM puts the “company” record at the top of the hierarchy.

For example, you might associate 10 different contacts and three different deals to a single company.

Source

Your leads come from a variety of different sources. That might include trade shows, referrals, forms on your website, webinar attendees, etc. Keeping track of conversions by source and deals won by source lets you hone in on your most effective prospecting channels.

Activity

Any action by your salespeople or prospects typically falls under the activity umbrella, including calls, emails, voicemails, demos, a new contact record, an updated field, etc.

Deal Stage

Each step in your sales process should be represented by a deal stage. To give you an idea, your reps probably have an exploratory call with almost 100% of the prospects who buy.

So “exploratory call” might be the first deal stage in your CRM.

Pipeline

Deal stages are organized into pipelines. Every salesperson should have their own pipeline in the CRM so they can track which opportunities are currently in progress.

As a deal gets closer to the close, it should move from the left to the right.

Essentially, a CRM strategy keeps your organization focused on its goals. As we defined above, there are a lot of valuable tools and features that make up a CRM. But just because they're available doesn't mean they should be put to use just yet.

Many businesses stop using a CRM because they get overwhelmed. It's understandable but avoidable — if you create a CRM strategy upfront.

First, chat with your team to understand your goals. Sure, you want to better manage your customer relationships, but how? Why? What specific customer behaviors and interactions mean the most to your business? Jot these down as they will dictate how you'll fashion your CRM settings and reports.

Secondly, define your ideal customer(s), perhaps in the form of buyer personas. This information is not only valuable to Marketing and Sales, but it will also understand what types of customers should be added to your CRM down the line — and what types you shouldn't add.

Lastly, map your customer journey. How do your customer's typically "meet" your business? On average, how many touchpoints do customers needs before they subscribe to your newsletter, become a customer, and return for more? As your customer base grows and buyer personas split off into more detailed profiles, this customer journey will start to vary. Your CRM can help you keep track of that.

Now, let's dig into how to use your CRM.

How to Use a CRM

Once you've developed your CRM, it's time to put it to work.

1. Add your salespeople.

The sooner you can get all the reps on your team using your CRM, the more comprehensive and accurate your data will be.

That’s why the very first step in a CRM implementation should be adding users. But make sure you’ve explained the value of a CRM — specifically, how it will help your salespeople bring in more business — and gotten their buy in. If reps aren’t sold on the CRM, adoption will be extremely low.

(I recommend recruiting one of your top salespeople to act as an advocate. If she’s successfully using the CRM, her peers will naturally follow suit.)

2. Customize your settings.

Your CRM should reflect your sales process. That means it accurately maps to the stages a customer goes through from “lead,” to “opportunity,” to “customer.”

Of course, that requires knowing those stages in the first place. If you have no idea what your sales process looks like, take several weeks to observe and measure the way prospects buy your product or service.

What differentiates those who buy from those who opt for a competitor — or make no decision? How long does it take from initial contact with a salesperson to signed agreement, and what are the discrete steps in between?

Let’s say your sales process is divided into “Connect,” “Qualify,” “Demo,” and “Close.” Create deal stages in your CRM pipeline for each one. Now, you’ve standardized the sales process for your reps.

Next, create custom properties for store your data. Your CRM will have default “properties” or fill-in-the-blank details about your prospect. For example, HubSpot CRM comes with fields for phone number, email address, create date (the day they entered your system), city, and so on.

Most businesses have unique properties they want to track. To give you an idea, maybe you want to add a field for “Billing ID,” “Time zone,” “Product purchased,” or “Global office address.” Create those custom properties now before you import any existing data to your CRM.

Finally, if you’re using a different currency than your CRM’s pre-set currency, adjust that as well.

3. Import your contact, companies, and deals.

Chances are, you’re currently using a different CRM or spreadsheets to keep track of your prospects and opportunities.

Almost every CRM will let you bring in this information by uploading a CSV file. Each column in your spreadsheet should match a contact property in the CRM, so your data will flow seamlessly between your old and new systems.

4. Integrate your other tools.

Marketing, sales, and customer success information should be centralized in your CRM. This gives you a 360-view of your prospects and customers and cuts down on manual data entry.

Here’s an example of an inefficient process using several tools:

• Collect leads using a form builder →
• Put those leads into your email tool so Marketing can nurture them →
• Export qualified leads to your CRM

Imagine this process if you’re using the HubSpot CRM with HubSpot Marketing and Sales. Leads who filled out a form, started a conversation with a rep via chat, or performed key actions on your site will be added to your CRM. If they’re highly qualified, they can be routed to a salesperson. If the lead needs more time, the marketing team can nurture them with educational content. The entire process is seamless -- and far more efficient.

Not using HubSpot? I suggest picking tools that already integrate with your CRM of choice (check out your CRM’s integration partners) or connecting them using Zapier. For instance, you might set up a Zap so Google Form submissions are automatically transferred to your CRM.

5. Set up your dashboard.

You should have a crystal-clear overview of your team’s performance so you can keep them aligned and give the right coaching and direction. That’s why a CRM dashboard is so handy: It’s like a control panel that you can customize to fit your specific needs.

Choose which statistics appear on your dashboard based on your sales objectives and process. For instance, if your team is supposed to sell more of X product this month, you might want to see a breakdown of units of X product sold versus Y product. Or if you set activity metrics for your reps, you may want to have a section for the day’s “completed activities.”

6. Enable reports.

As a sales manager, you’re spending a lot of time looking at data. But your reps should be spending as much time as possible selling. That’s why it’s a great idea to create daily, weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly email reports.

For instance, reps at HubSpot receive a stack ranking each morning via email showing how each member of the team is doing that month: New business, upsell and cross-sell revenue, and net revenue. This daily digest encourages friendly competition and gives salespeople an incentive to keep working even after they’ve hit quota.

Consider sending out an email for activities added and/or completed by rep, emails sent and/or received by rep, calls made by rep, deals won by rep (displayed by count or value), and/or retention rate by rep.

Your CRM Is the Key

This guide is only scratching the surface of what you can accomplish with a CRM. And the sooner you get started, the better — it’s really never too early to use a CRM.

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

LinkedIn is one of the most effective social networks for selling. 

You might connect with a prospect on Thursday, book them for a call the following Tuesday, give them a demo that Friday, and close before the weekend.

But, you won't get those results without a stellar LinkedIn social selling strategy. Not to fear — to help you boost your effectiveness, I spoke to sales experts and asked them for their best tips for social selling on LinkedIn. Read on to learn their advice.

Table of Contents 

• Social Selling on LinkedIn
• How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Sales
• How to Prospect on LinkedIn
• How to Research on LinkedIn
• How to Sell on LinkedIn
• Social Selling on LinkedIn: Examples
• How to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn
• LinkedIn FAQ

 

LinkedIn Profile Tips for Salespeople

Because you’re in sales, you’re targeting a completely different audience than most professionals. You want to appeal to prospects, not hiring managers and recruiters.

To do so, you'll need a professional profile.

That means your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t show off how great you are at selling. Do you think customers care that you went to President’s Club or broke the team record for upsell revenue?

Not in the slightest. In fact, these details only remind them you’re a sales rep — which makes them suspicious about your motives.

So what do they care about? One thing: How you helped customers similar to them.

LinkedIn Headline

There’s a simple formula for creating a memorable, eye-catching LinkedIn headline:

"[Title]: helping [prospects] do X."

For instance, you might use "BDR: Helping SMBs adopt inbound marketing," or "Senior Sales Manager: Helping fitness studios go digital."

LinkedIn Summary

Your LinkedIn summary should be one paragraph — two at the max. Prospects usually skim your profile, so anything longer won’t be read.

Describe your role, your unique value proposition, and why you’re passionate about the job. And don’t be afraid to give your summary a little personality. You want readers to feel like they know you already.

Here’s a sample summary:

"As a senior account executive for Briton Foods, I get to work with corporations to reinvent their food and beverage programs and make them healthier, tastier, and cost-effective. I studied nutrition in college and am passionate about healthy food. But I’ll be real, I eat almost as much chocolate as quinoa. Connect with me to learn how your company can start offering nutritious and delicious food to your employees."

If you’re feeling stuck, check out these LinkedIn summary examples for salespeople.

LinkedIn Role Descriptions

Under your current position, you might write:

• Work with businesses in X, Y, and Z industries to reduce manufacturing defects by 3% on average

• Help customers reduce costs by $500,000

• Achieve 100% passing rate for safety standards for customers

These accomplishments tell a potential buyer, "I can have a positive impact on your business." Once they believe that, they’ll almost always accept your connection request, respond to your InMail, or agree to a call.

LinkedIn Profile Picture

According to LinkedIn’s data, simply having a picture — any picture — makes your profile 14 times more likely to be viewed.

This makes sense to me — if you have a generic icon, you look like a spammer.

But not all photos are created equal. Yours should represent you in the best light possible, meaning it looks like you, focuses on your face, has good lighting, and doesn’t have a distracting background.

If you can afford it, I recommend hiring a professional photographer to take a headshot. It can cost a few hundred dollars upfront, but it’s a rewarding investment for a professional profile. 

Alternatively, call in a favor with someone who’s good with a camera.

Once you’ve chosen a final contender, my tip is to ask those around you (manager, peers, trusted friends, etc) to look at your profile picture and give you their first impression. Do you seem friendly and open? Or unapproachable and unprofessional? Getting feedback from multiple sources will reveal if your picture will help or hurt you. 

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can create an AI-generated headshot. My teammate Caroline Forsey recently tested Media.io, and you can read about it here. 

Final Tips for Your LinkedIn Profile

The more fleshed out your profile is, the more credible and legitimate you’ll seem. You can add your X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram profiles (if you use them professionally) for added social proof and linking. Your email and phone number should be visible as well, along with your company website.

How to Prospect on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a lead generation goldmine. There are several strategies for finding prospects. Let’s discuss each, ranked from most common to least.

Search

Thanks to LinkedIn’s vast user base, ability to see mutual connections, and wide variety of filters, search is the most powerful and well-known way to identify potential customers.

If you have a free version, you can look for prospects with the following qualifiers:

• Connections: You can choose whether you want to find first-, second-, or third-degree connections. Here’s the difference between the three types.
• Connections of: This option lets you find a prospect who’s connected to one of your current connections. This is a great way to find potential common areas that you can use to start a conversation.
• Locations: You can find the prospects nearest to you or in your target geographical area.

• Current Company: Use this filter to find prospects at target businesses.

• Past Company: Use this filter to find prospects who might share common ground with you. For instance, if they worked at one of your former employers, you can use this information to open up the conversation.

• School: Another handy feature to find common ground. You can use this filter to find alumni from your college who might be good prospects.

• Industry: This filter lets you find prospects in target verticals.

• Profile Language: You can use this filter to find prospects outside of your country if your company is planning to expand internationally. Just be sure you can speak their language.

• Open To: You likely won’t use this filter. It lets you look for users who are open to pro bono consulting and joining nonprofit boards.
• Service Categories: This lets you find prospects who are offering consulting services in a variety of industries. If you target freelancers in your prospecting strategy, this may be a good filter to use.
• Keywords: This filter allows you to search by first name, last name, title, company, and school all at once.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator (Paid)

I recommend investing in LinkedIn Sales Navigator if you do a fair amount of prospecting on the platform. Not only can LinkedIn Sales Navigator users run very specific searches, but they can also save leads and accounts to the HubSpot CRM with a single click.

Image Source

There are various tiers you can sign up for:

• Sales Navigator Core: You get 50 InMail messages per month and advanced filters. Best for individuals.
• Sales Navigator Advanced: You get 50 InMail messages per month, advanced filters, and administrative tools. Best for teams.
• Sales Navigator Enterprise: You get 50 InMail messages per month, advanced filters, and CRM integrations. Best for enterprise teams.

Check out all features and pricing here. There are two features that will be particularly useful for prospecting: Advanced Search Filters and Saved Search.

Advanced Search Filters

LinkedIn Sales Navigator users can use 40+ advanced search filters that help you find the exact and most qualified prospects. Once you find them, you can prioritize those with the most connections as a means of building rapport, and it surfaces the right signals to help you engage at the right time. 

Saved Search

Let’s say your ideal customer is a product marketer at a medium-sized consumer goods company in the Pacific Northwest. Rather than periodically running a search for that type of prospect, set up a saved search. Then, depending on your timing preference (daily, weekly, or monthly), LinkedIn will send you email alerts with new search results. Essentially, you’re getting a steady stream of pre-qualified prospects right in your inbox.

"People Also Viewed" Sidebar

Once you’ve found a prospect, navigate to their profile and find the "People Also Viewed" box in the right-hand column of their profile. As they say, "The friend of my prospect is another prospect."

Your Customers’ Connections

Looking for referrals? After you’ve closed a deal, look out for status updates and posts from the customer stakeholders — especially your champion. When other LinkedIn users comment or like their content, investigate them to see if they’re a qualified prospect. Then ask your current customer for an introduction or simply contact them directly (don’t forget to mention your mutual connection).

Notifications

LinkedIn sends notifications when a connection changes their profile. (Prospects must individually opt-in to allow their connections to receive notifications of profile updates, so I recommend using this tactic in tandem with another one.) Every job change is a potential opportunity. Perhaps a current customer is transitioning to a different company — they’ll probably be eager to implement a tool they already know. Or maybe your champion just made a lateral move. Could their new department benefit from your product like their old one did?

To see when people in your network have been promoted, changed jobs, or moved to a new company, periodically scroll through your Notifications section.

Lead Gen Forms 

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms come recommended by LinkedIn’s own VP of Marketing, Jim Habig.

He spoke to my colleague and called the native tool one of its most powerful lead-generation tools. He told her, “LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms streamline lead generation by auto-populating users' LinkedIn profile information when they click on your ad. This simplifies the process for users, allowing them to submit their information with ease and boosting lead generation efficiency. Furthermore, the collected data can be effortlessly synchronized with your CRM system."

I recommend using this tool in partnership with your marketing efforts. If you’re putting out an ad on LinkedIn, use Lead Gen Form to capture information from anyone who interacts with your ad. Once you have their information, you have what you need for future nurturing opportunities.

LinkedIn Articles

To reach hundreds and potentially thousands of prospects, publish a LinkedIn Article (formerly LinkedIn Pulse) with advice or insights on a common pain point your customers face. You can tag coworkers, business acquaintances, and/or customers in the comments to encourage some debate and make the post more visible.

Then, wait for prospects to begin commenting. Since you’re discussing an issue that directly concerns them, there’s a good chance most of the participants will have a need for your product, and you can begin forging relationships. 

Social Selling Index Score

Find out how well you’re doing by checking your official Social Selling Index (SSI) score on LinkedIn (be sure to be logged in before clicking the link). This tells you how well you’ve established your professional brand, found the right people, engaged with insights, and built relationships.

Here’s a screenshot of my social selling index just to give you an idea of what it looks like. (Please don’t use my score as a reference…aim much higher than 23!)

How to Research on LinkedIn

Your prospect’s LinkedIn profile tells you basic but essential facts like their title and company, primary responsibilities, job tenure, location, and industry.

It also gives you insight into their personalities, interests, and preferred communication styles. After skimming their LinkedIn summary and recommendations, try to gauge their character. How do others describe them? How do they describe themselves?

Take a look at former HubSpot executive Dan Tyre’s recommendations:

Terms like "enthusiastic," "high energy," and "passionate" come up again and again. A rep selling to Tyre should strive to match his ebullience and optimism.

You should also review the highlights, featured, activity, and interests sections of your prospect’s profile.

Highlights

“Highlights” shows you any existing mutual connections and employment overlap. This is valuable fodder for building rapport; in your outreach email or InMail, you can mention something along the lines of, "I see you also did a stint at Dunder Mifflin," or "I’m a friend of Pam Halpert’s."

Featured

“Featured” shows your prospect’s content in chronological order. You can see which posts they’ve liked, commented on, and/or published themselves.

Activity

Next is the “Activity” section. This section gives you a feel for their personal and professional interests. Did they comment on a thought leadership piece about nutrition in the workplace? That could be a great jumping-off point for your first conversation. Did they like an excerpt from a book about leadership? Ask them for reading recommendations in your email.

Interests

Finally, check out the Interests section. The companies, groups, influencers, and schools they follow or belong to will show up here. Get a quick overview of their role models, professional communities, and more.

Can you sell products on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, unlike other social networks, has a targeted focus on networking and careers. Users who frequent the platform are serious about discussing topics in their industry, cultivating their professional connections, and bettering themselves as professionals along their career trajectory.

This means that the network is primed for sales conversations that solve a professional need. Therefore, your best sales tool on LinkedIn is the meaningful connections you make and the helpful interactions you have along the way. 

If your product or service is best sold as an impulse buy form a carousel shopping ad, I’d recommend focusing on another network for your social selling efforts. However, if your product or service solves a problem, fits a need, or transforms an industry, LinkedIn is a great choice. 

Now that your profile is up to par and you know how to look up and connect with leads on LinkedIn, I’ll go over how to use the platform to land the sale.

Barrett J. King, Sr. Director of Revenue at New Breed, says, “First, let’s recognize that social selling is everywhere now — whether it’s individuals building personal brands or companies empowering their people to become go-to-market ambassadors on social. Because it’s so common (especially on LinkedIn), you’ll see exceptional social selling techniques right up alongside the noise.” 

As I mentioned above, salespeople say social media is one of the most effective channels for selling. They also say it offers the highest quality leads, and high-performing salespeople are 12% more likely to use it when selling. So, how are they achieving that success? 

I asked sales experts to share some of their best tips for social selling on LinkedIn, and you can leverage their advice to join the ranks of high-powered sellers.

1. Share valuable content.

First and foremost, you should be sharing valuable, engaging content that is relevant to your ideal customer. Valuable content is content that is most relevant to your target audience and their pain points, because otherwise, you risk speaking into the void. 

Tyler Meckes, Growth Strategist at Impulse Creative, told me, “With social selling, being too generic will leave your true value diluted, and will not be as effective in converting to meetings or business. Instead of broadcasting broad messages, today’s sophisticated, research-oriented buyers will see more value if the content you share strategically aligns with solving their specific pain points.” 

My recommendation is sharing original content you (or your company) create, relevant insights from thought leaders in your target customer’s industry, or a combination of both. 

Your overall goal should be to share information that speaks to the main challenge or problem your prospects are looking to overcome because, when prospects come across this content, they can feel more inclined to engage. It also helps build trust and rapport as you prime contacts for a potential sale.

2. Join LinkedIn groups that serve your target audience.

By joining LinkedIn groups, you can expand your potential reach and LinkedIn network, making it possible for those in the group to connect with you and view your profile even if you don’t have any mutual connections.

Don’t limit yourself by only joining groups relevant to your industry. Seek out groups your ideal customers belong to and be an active, engaged member of the groups you join. If you actively engage in the groups you use, potential customers can come across your content and recognize you as a source of valuable information. 

A bonus is that groups help you learn more about your audience. You can read through posts and comment threads to learn what prospects are interested in and talking about, jump in and add helpful information, or even use what you’ve learned as a starting point to send a private message and initiate the conversation.

3. Personalize connection requests.

When sending connection requests to prospects or individuals you don’t know personally, including a personalized message is critical. By sending a personalized request, you provide the necessary context, telling this individual why they should add you to their network, and it can help you stand out in a sea of generic requests.

To add a personalized note, make sure you click the "Add a Note" button when prompted before sending your connection request.

The note doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed, but it should provide some context for your connection. Here’s an example:

If you’re feeling stuck, here are some points you could choose to include:

• A personalized greeting using their name.
• Mutual connections (if applicable).
• Mutual groups (if applicable).
• A piece of content they engaged with.
• Experience on their profile that stuck out to you.

4. Facilitate meaningful conversations.

Once you connect with a prospect on LinkedIn, keep the conversation going. The personalized message you send when making your connection request can serve as a good conversation starter, but it’s probably not ideal to go in for the sale right away, and Meckes agrees. He says, “Another major issue I see [with social selling] is the all-too-familiar ‘connect-and-pitch.’”

Instead of asking for a meeting immediately in your initial request, you’ll want to stay in touch, remain on their radar, and nurture your relationship before giving an ask. 

Meckes’ shared his favorite cold-prospecting process with me: 

1. Connect without any asks
2. Follow the prospect’s account to keep track of what they post
3. Engage with their posts and share content with them that they may be interested in to provide value, and, when appropriate, keep the conversation going by commenting on their posts. 
4. Use a timely and relevant trigger from something they’ve said to introduce how you’ve helped others similar to them. 
5. Use an interest-based call-to-action to determine if it is a big enough pain that is worth solving.

He says, “Only after you’ve built rapport – and a relationship – have you earned the opportunity for your own ‘ask.’”

5. Take conversations offline.

After spending some time building rapport, don’t be afraid to take the conversation offline. When you feel the prospect is ready to begin having more serious sales conversations, offer to set up a phone call or meeting time to learn more about their concerns and offer solutions on behalf of your company.

Social Selling on LinkedIn: Examples

How do you begin social selling straight from your profile? Let’s take a look at examples from top companies and salespeople on LinkedIn.

1. The Hypothetical Question

Image Source

What better way to generate engagement on one of your posts than by asking a question?

Better yet, why not ask a question that directly addresses your target buyer?

In this example from our very own LinkedIn page, we ask, “You’re hired as a CMO and tasked with doubling your company’s brand awareness. Where do you start?”

I find this post to be effective because:

• CMOs are one of our target personas.
• We get to understand their challenges with this question.
• It prompts thought — it’s not a question that can be answered by a simple yes or no.

In the same way, I recommend asking questions that target the type of people you’d like to sell to. Once you receive comments, be sure to respond, continue the conversation, and connect. 

2. The Listicle

Yes, listicles still work. The best part? They’re fairly easy to write, and they can touch upon topics your prospect will likely relate to.

In this example, a sales leader shares which sales tactics annoy him. You don’t have to write such a pointed listicle. Instead, you can touch upon common pain points that your prospects face. In that way, they can chime in and air their frustrations — and you can begin to position your product as the solution.

Listicles that are short and to the point align with King’s tip on simplicity: “Longer posts aren’t better posts,” he says. “If you can get it across in 15 words, do it.” 

3. The Thought Leadership Post

In this example, a representative from a software outsourcing company touches upon what one should look for when hiring a software engineer. He effectively touches upon his target prospect’s core desire: Outsourcing software labor so that they can grow their business.

Part of being a thought leader on LinkedIn means bringing your prospects a fresh, new perspective about what they want and need, and King says you can do so by being creative. He says, “Don’t copy other sellers and thought leaders. Be bold. Consider your experience and perspective, and meet audiences where they are.” 

Meckes gives a similar tip based on the mistakes he’s observed in other social sellers: “One of the biggest mistakes I see in social selling is also one of the biggest pitfalls of traditional selling — that is being too generic, casting too wide of a net, and ultimately not having any type of strategic approach to social outreach.” 

4. The Resource Pitch

Oh, yes, you can pitch directly on your posts — but you have to be strategic about it.

In this example, the poster begins by asking about a common pain point. She then outlines some steps her prospects could take to resolve the pain points and ends the post by inviting the users to comment “CLOCKWORK” to get a resource.

To me, that’s the key: offering a resource. By giving your prospects something for free, you can automatically begin a conversation once you send the resource to their inbox. 

5. The Inspirational Story

Share a quick narrative with a lesson learned, and you’ll be sure to engage prospects who feel the same way.

In this example, a TV professional shares a conversation she had about why she posts on LinkedIn. She ends the story with a positive takeaway, then invites users to follow her hashtag.

While it seems like inspirational stories are all over LinkedIn lately, there’s nothing wrong with them — in fact, a bit of positivity can do a lot to brighten up your prospects’ day. It’s especially effective if the takeaway connects to your prospects’ pain points.

How to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

A personal brand is the reputation you’re known by. It can usually be summarized in three to eight words. Jeff Bezos’s personal brand, for example, might be "Driven, passionate, hyper-intelligent, and business-minded." Tina Fey’s could be "Funny, strong, self-deprecating, quirky, and brave."

Your personal brand isn’t necessarily positive. If you’re overly pushy with prospects, "aggressive" will become part of your brand. If you’re manipulative or dishonest, "untrustworthy" will define you.

Luckily, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for intentionally shaping and promoting an appealing personal brand.

First, identify the adjectives you want prospects and customers to know you for. These should be realistic but slightly aspirational. To give you an idea, you might pick "event marketing expert" even if you’re still building your event marketing knowledge.

Then, figure out what content you can create to showcase those traits.

Here are the main areas of your profile that reflect your personal brand:

• Your summary
• The recommendations you’ve received
• Your posts

I recommend creating “themes” that run throughout your profile. For example, my summary might mention my passion and expertise in event marketing. Then, I’d ask a coworker to recommend me and mention how valuable my events marketing strategy advice is to customers. I’d also write a few posts about events marketing — how to get started, best practices, and so on. 

Then, when a prospect looks at my profile, they’ll quickly see I’m well-versed and a credible resource in events marketing. 

LinkedIn FAQ

• What is LinkedIn Sales Insights?
• How to Avoid LinkedIn's Commercial Use Limit
• How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile For Sales [Visual Template]

Use LinkedIn the right way, and it can be one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. So what are you waiting for? Flesh out your strategy, optimize your profile, and start connecting with buyers.

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

 

When implemented correctly, content marketing offers a lot of value to potential clients in the way of education and tools to be better at their jobs.

The benefits to companies who execute a well-crafted B2B content marketing strategy are a proliferation of new client leads, tools to nurture leads throughout the sales process, and building up the thought leadership and credibility of the company. Many firms in the B2B space understand the value of content marketing, but don’t understand what makes content valuable to the end user – the prospect or client. However, there are a handful of B2B firms across various industries that are really nailing content marketing.

Here are 7 B2B companies that are really rocking their content marketing efforts (and their target market loves them for it).

MarketingProfs

All it takes is one look at the online marketing resources of MarketingProfs, a B2B marketing education and training company, to see how much work they put into their content marketing. They don’t just blog. They also have podcasts, online seminars, tutorials, guides, reports, and a variety of other accessible tools.

Education is at the core of their business, but you don’t have to pay for everything. The folks behind MarketingProfs understand the power of giving away quality content to nurture leads that may not be in a buying stage yet. Through their commitment to content marketing, MarketingProfs has established itself as the go-to resource for all things marketing.

Salesforce

When you think of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, Salesforce likely comes to mind. Why? Well, yes, they have been around for a long time, but they also actively push out quality content in a variety of formats to help current customers use their CRM, help sales professionals get better at their jobs, and educate potential clients on how to best utilize their CRM data.

Take a look at the Salesforce blog. It’s not so much simply a blog as it is a resource hub for all their content marketing efforts. The blog hosts recent articles enables visitors to sign up for their newsletter, showcases recent reports, and is home to a ton of interactive content.

Oracle

As a B2B firm, Oracle has their hands in so many different things. Due to this wide ranging product and service offerings, they have a variety of target markets. While their overall B2B content marketing strategy may be complex and intricate, their online content resources are easy to navigate. Trust me, this takes a lot of thought, testing, and smart people to do. It’s easy to make things complex, but much more challenging to make it seamless for the user.

Take their Supply Chain Management resource library. It’s a clean, easy to navigate online resource that houses carefully organized survey reports, infographics, videos, briefs, and more. All the educational information a supply chain professional needs, in the format they prefer it in, is available all in one spot. They are rocking this thing called B2B content marketing.

QuickBooks

QuickBooks – they do accounting and payroll software, right? This is likely an issue they have faced from potential clients, being seen as a fairly one-dimensional software platform. How do they solve that problem? Educate prospects with content marketing (and a strong search engine optimization strategy).

Now, you may thing account software really only has one benefit, to help you track your books. The content marketing for QuickBooks tells a very different story (hence why they are rocking B2B content marketing in our book). They have a ton of articles for small business that cover all sorts of tips from managing inventory, to reducing costs, to case studies on successful businesses. QuickBooks has also created guides, tools, and videos for business professionals to use to streamline their operations and better manage their internal resources. They key to their content is that rather than focusing on how the software works, they share tips on how to put the software to work for a business to save costs, increase revenue, and streamline operations – all things that matter to a prospect or customer.

Zenefits

If you are an entrepreneur, you may be familiar with Zenefits. It’s an HR software platform that manages a bunch of different functions like payroll, benefits, compliance, and time tracking. Are they the only HR software out there? Nope. So, what sets them apart from the other HR software providers? Their content marketing resources. They offer everything from webinars to guides to blog posts to events.

When you look at the B2B content marketing resources, you can see that they focus on how to use the Zenefits software or the various features of the platform. Instead, the resources focus on things that HR managers or those managing HR duties care about: compliance, commuter benefits, 401ks, casual work cultures, employee productivity, and more. The content they are putting out there is valuable to HR professionals because it explains how to be compliant with new legislations or how to accommodate various types of employees – things that help them be successful at their jobs.

MailChimp

“Need advice on new marketing channels? Want to understand the mystery of segmentation? You’ve come to the right place.” – MailChimp.

This is the very first thing you see when you navigate to the content marketing resources on the MailChimp website. Keep in mind these resources are available to anyone, not just MailChimp customers. MailChimp makes money on their email marketing software, so why are they talking about new marketing channels and sharing tips on segmentation? Because their target audience cares about those things.

The cool thing about MailChimp’s B2B content marketing strategy is the accessibility of the content. They likely have a range of target markets from mom and pop shops to multi-million dollar organizations, however, they manage to keep a consistent, accessible tone to all of their content. When you get into topics like list segmentation, remarketing, social paid advertising, it’s easy to slip into a ton of tech talk. They avoid this in all their content making it valuable for all members of their audience. This is one of their value propositions that shines through in how they deliver content.

MavenLink

If you don’t use project management software, you may not be familiar with MavenLink. In the project management software space, there are a lot of competitors. What does MavenLink do to differentiate themselves in a competitive market? They focus on providing helpful best practices, tips, and resources for project management professionals.

What we like about their B2B content marketing is not only that they giving away great tips for project managers, they are transparent about it. Their resource library states, “Discover how to deliver projects more predictably and profitably with efficiency tips and greater visibility into your work day.” What project manager doesn’t need that? It’s clear that MavenLink is focused on helping their target market become better performers (and not just because they say so). Their ebooks, case studies, webinars, videos, and blogs all share actionable advice for project managers. They are literally giving away their knowledge. Even their pop-ups on the website are giving away knowledge.

The Secret to Great B2B Content Marketing

Now, all these examples are well and good, but what’s the takeaway here? What can you gain from all these great resources who are rocking content marketing so hard? Well, there is a common theme amongst them all. Their content is focused on education, not sales. They aren’t talking about the features and benefits of their products or services. They are sharing helpful information to help current and potential prospects work smarter, be better at their jobs, and/or save time or money. Their content is VALUABLE to their target audience. The secret to great B2B content marketing is to create valuable content that your prospects and clients love and make them come back for more.