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By Rashaqa Rahman

Understanding how a product or service offering creates differentiated value for the customer is the foundation of value-based pricing.  Prices should align with the value the customer receives, thus ensuring the seller is maximizing returns from and targeting  customers that derive the most value from the offering. These are the customers that will be happiest and most successful, the kind of customers you want to build a business on. For pricing to be effective, it should track the value metric. This is the unit by which the product or service offering is consumed that best reflects how the customer gets value.

Let’s look at an example of how identifying the right value metric can impact pricing, and a company’s immediate and long-term profitability.

Context:

In April 2016, Starbucks introduced their newly revamped Rewards Program which shifted away from customers earning stars "per visit" irrespective of dollar amount spent, to stars earned "per $1 spent." Customers now earn 2 stars per $1 spent and must collect 125 stars (equivalent to $62.5 spent) to receive a reward. Previously, only 12 stars (equivalent to 12 visits) was required to earn a free drink, irrespective of dollar amount spent.

Predictably, this shift in pricing for the Rewards Program, based on the per dollar spent value metric, was initially met with overwhelming customer backlash. However, by June 2016, the Starbucks Rewards Program boasted 12 million active loyalty members in the US, up 16% from the previous year. In fact, the customers spending the most money were the ones getting the most value, and the ones that Starbucks most wanted.

Here are the key takeaways from the new Rewards Program pricing that is relevant across all organizations types, irrespective of whether B2B or B2C.

1. The right value metric FOR the RIGHT (target) segment

In Starbucks' case, the small spenders who ordered the cheapest (lowest margin) item on the menu to collect rewards were outraged, but they were also the segment that had the highest cost-to-serve. Therefore, dis-incentivizing or losing this customer segment to churn was more profitable for Starbucks in the long-term.

In order for the value metric to make sense, the customer must understand how a product or service offering creates value that is differentiated from the seller's next best competitive alternative. Starbucks' target segment is not interested in basic drip coffee at the cheapest possible price. They are there for the customized frills-that is Starbucks’ value proposition, which come at a higher price point.

Tracking the right value metric to determine rewards points meant that Starbucks’ target customer base, the big spenders now derived more value from the Rewards Program. They could earn their rewards faster than before. So, in this case, spend tracks the right value metric for the right customer segment.

2. Communicate & re-emphasize the perceived fairness of your           pricing

The seller should take every opportunity to emphasize the perceived fairness of their product or service offering in the minds of the customer. This gives the seller pricing power and the ability to change prices if needed without facing too much customer push back. For more on pricing and fairness see Steven Forth's post for OpenView Labs: Psychology says make your pricing appear fair.

Starbucks addressed the customer backlash head-on and communicated how it would be easier to earn rewards faster based on the new value metric. If one spent $5 or more per visit, one could earn a reward in under 12 visits. Starbucks also communicated how purchasing specific food items with beverages could earn buyers stars faster - items that are not necessarily expensive for the customer, but higher margin for the seller. 

Uninformed customers have a lower willingness-to-pay. Good pricing should be mutually beneficial to both buyer and seller, and communicating that to the customer is key. So, the Rewards Program was reframed as more fair from the perspective of the customers that count -  the target base.

3. The right value metric drives usage

The right value metric should incentivize use. Starbucks' new “per $1 spent” metric incentivizes customer usage in a manner that is beneficial to the company’s top and bottom line, by dis-incentivizing free-loaders who have a high cost-to serve and incentivizing those that have a higher “willingness-to-pay.”

Also, the pricing is simple for the customer - spend a dollar, earn 2 stars. So it isn't a surprise that  loyalty members pay three times more than non-loyalty members and help push up profits. The simplicity of Starbucks’ Rewards Program encourages use and  makes the purchase decision easy for customers who already have a higher willingness-to-pay.

Also paying with the physical Starbucks Rewards Card itself encourages usage. Because, for the customers the perceived cost is lower as it feels less like an "out of-pocket" expense.

4. The value metric should align with LONG-TERM strategy

According to Marketwatch  in 2016, 41% of North American customers used a Starbucks Card , while 24% paid with the mobile app. Between February (when the changes were announced) and April 2016,  five hundred thousand new members signed up for the Rewards Program. The popularity of the Rewards Program has helped boost mobile sales, which as of 2016 accounted for more than $6 million orders per month in the US.

Starbucks was able to leverage the right value metric that serves as the foundation to their overall long-term, digital strategy. Mobile sales has improved in-store efficiency, speed of service  and improved customer satisfaction, resulting in increased revenue and decreased operating costs. 

So, for all organization types, whether B2B or B2C, understanding customer value creation and usage model is the the cornerstone to an effective pricing strategy. Identifying the right value metric will ensure fair pricing that is beneficial to both buyer and seller. It is important to remember that pricing is an iterative process because  customer usage informs price, and price in turn drives customer usage. So within dynamic markets, the seller must constantly assess the effectiveness of their pricing and the underlying value metric, and not be afraid to make changes as required.

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By the year 2025, approximately 75% of the global workforce will be comprised of millennials, according to a study conducted by Deloitte. This is a very significant measurement because it identifies who human resource managers will need to recruit and retain now and into the future. To gain a better understanding of millennials and their significance in the workforce, it is essential to review general characteristics that represent most millennials.

Millennial Characteristics

Millennials were born between the early 1980’s to the late 1990’s and currently represent about 38% of the global workforce and will soon represent a far larger amount. Millennials are technologically driven as they grew up with widespread use of the internet, cell phones, social media and more digital technology. Technology has played a significant role in how millennials have communicated throughout their lives so millennials expect constant communication through email, text and social media which many companies have catered to and embraced effectively. Millennials are resourceful and like to make use of technology to conduct research quickly and make decisions based on their findings. Millennials are less interested in repetitious tasks than previous generations as they seek to create, innovate and leave their mark wherever they go. Millennials want to feel valued in the workplace and prefer to be appropriately praised for their achievements.

Millennials have gained a reputation as job-hoppers, and the data supports the claim since approximately 60% of millennials are open to new employment opportunities according to a study conducted by Gallup. The reasoning behind that reveals that millennials place a high emphasis on the value that their careers are providing and if they feel as though they can get a better value elsewhere, they aren’t afraid to make a move. Millennials won’t budge on important considerations such as work-life balance, flexible scheduling, opportunities for career advancement, as well as competitive wage and benefits. These are important for human resource managers to consider to emphasize in their recruitment material to millennials as well as consideration when discussing employee retention efforts.

Millennial Study

During a Store Operations Management Internship that I completed with Wegmans Food Markets, I studied this topic and drew some conclusions about millennials in the workplace. By surveying a group of 66 millennials employees as well as 35 human resources representatives, my study revealed that millennials generally do enjoy working for Wegmans as the company matches all of the criteria that the millennials indicated that they seemed to want in the workplace. The millennial employees and human resource representatives both identified flexible scheduling, opportunity for advancement and wages to be the top 3 most important things for millennials in the workplace.

The human resource representatives indicated that attending career fairs, engaging with school career centers, making use of job search engines and social media for recruiting are effective ways to recruit millennials. In general, the millennial employees enjoyed working in a team, non-repetitive tasks, flexible scheduling, diversity in the workplace and eco-friendly practices. In fact, many studies have concluded that eco-friendly practices are among one of the most significant factors for millennials and that about 80% prefer to work for employers that implement eco-friendly practices. This is an area that recruiters can use to effectively market opportunities within a company that has implemented eco-friendly practices. Recruiters should focus on marketing the flexibility to learn and grow within a position or company which should attract millennials.

During my project, I created and staffed a career information booth where I was able to highlight current job openings, speak to potential applicants about why Wegmans is a great place to work and answer their questions about the application process. This helped the potential applicants to feel more comfortable throughout the job posting process. The booth was cost effective, had a simple setup and was inbound to the Wegmans brand reputation. It was also less competitive than a typical job fair booth because it was hosted within the store. I also ran a Facebook paid advertisement that reached 8,000 local millennials which contributed to a decrease in job vacancies throughout the campaign with a majority of the new employees hired being millennials.

Conclusion

With United States unemployment being as low as it has been since 2001, it has created a highly competitive job market and soon millennials will represent a majority of the workforce. In the interest of saving money and resources by effectively hiring and retaining millennials, human resource managers will need to take into consideration the preferences of the changing workforce and insure that their recruiting practices and retention efforts will be effective.

Human resource managers can start by identifying what has attracted their current employees and what would make them more satisfied with their role (as I did via an anonymous survey of the millennial employees). By using that information in a promotional function for recruitment, it will help human resource managers to recruit employees who will want to stay with the company which should help to increase retention. In addition, the comments that the employees made can later be presented when discussing how retention could be improved by making appropriate changes based on the employee recommendations.

Regarding recruitment, social media is a tool that many recruiters have effectively leveraged to attract active as well as passive job seekers for their help needs. Millennials tend to conduct research online and many prefer to view updates via social media. As a digital marketer, I would recommend LinkedIn and Facebook for increasing awareness of job vacancies. LinkedIn is well known as the most popular professional social network and provides recruiters with an incredible amount of options as they target applicants for vacancies. However, Facebook also has a relatively new job function that is more adapted toward usage for small businesses. Other popular social networks among millennials such as Instagram and Snapchat are image-driven and allow employers to visually show off their company culture. Social media marketing and recruiting should work cooperatively and should be coordinated to enhance marketing and staffing together.

In conclusion, millennials need to be met where they are and companies that can effectively leverage social media to showcase the benefits of why they are an ideal employer, will have an edge in the increasingly competitive job market.

To view the original article, click here.

You are not being rejected. You are being told no. These two things are very different.

If you are dating someone for years, and you believe that your relationship is going to continue, and the person you love refuses your marriage proposal, you have been rejected. It’s personal. The person to whom you proposed has made a decision that you are absolutely not the kind of person with whom they want to spend the rest of their life. See, they know you well enough to reject you.

When you call someone to ask them for their time, your request is being rejected, but you are not personally being rejected. Your dream client doesn’t know you well enough to reject you personally. They are simply telling you no.

The no you hear isn’t personal. It is simply feedback. The no answer to your request means your dream client does not believe that the time you are asking for isn’t what you offered in trade (see The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales for more on Trading Value). Because they didn’t hear a strong enough value proposition, they are refusing your offer.

Improving your approach means paying attention to this feedback that the no provides you so you can sharpen your message and try again. This is something that you will not do if you sit and wallow in your sorrow because you feel that you were personally rejected. Listen, you don’t have the kind of relationship with a prospect that makes a no to a meeting request a rejection, so don’t be so sensitive.

Later on, after you’ve won some clients, you’ll get to feel rejection when your client decides to work with your competitor because they feel that you have been complacent and believed you were impossible to replace. Your client will feel a little something when they inform you that they’ve gone with your competitor, and it will feel a lot more like rejection, but know that this too is just a form of feedback.

The post How to Think About Rejection appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Chart the evolution of Text Messaging and see how businesses learned to harness this technology.

While SMS messaging is ubiquitous in our daily lives, it was a ground breaking technology when it was first envisioned 31 years ago. The simple SMS has evolved over time, and revolutionised the way in which we communicate. From messaging for personal use to messaging for marketing, SMS messaging is used in a variety of manners.

The first text message was sent in 1992, between two developers at Sema Group Telecoms and simply read ‘Merry Christmas’. What started as a small technology became one of the most widely used communication tools of modern day. Mobile phones were text enabled in 1993, but it wasn’t until 1999 when SMS messages could be exchanged between different networks that the technology soared.

One of the finest endorsements for the power of text came from then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008, when the presidential candidate used a bulk text messaging system to announce Joe Biden as his running mate. Obama famously created a 'grass roots' campaign, using bulk messaging as one of the many tools which won him the Whitehouse.

So why has SMS messaging flourished, particularly in the context of business? Almost all (90%) of mobile users who participated in an SMS loyalty program felt they had gained value from it, and SMS Marketing coupons are 10x more likely to be redeemed than mail or newspaper coupons. While many fear using SMS for business can be harmful to their brand, customers love them, and SMS Marketing campaigns are opted out less than 5% of the time.

This infographic from Neon SMS charts the evolution of the text message, from the original concept, to the first SMS message, to multimedia messaging and beyond the infographic demonstrates just how individuals and businesses have harnessed this technology.

In a recent piece published on this site, I posited that while Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key component to measure growth, it is not the be all end all. NPS should be used in concert with other indicators to determine a complete picture of growth and improve upon it.

I also discussed that in order to improve NPS, segmenting customers into promoter, passive, and detractor classes wasn’t enough, but a deep dive into each class was a better approach.

To review, at it’s most basic level, NPS places customers into three classifications based on their response to the question, “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” With the following segments:

• Promoters (9-10): Highly likely to recommend your company
• Passives (7-8): Less likely to recommend
• Detractors (0-6): Least likely to recommend

While this is a start, it’s not the end of the story.

Unfortunately, many companies segment customers at this level without digging deeper and leave it at that. This is the wrong approach. For starters, it generates inaccuracies about your organization’s health.

For instance, take Detractors. It is a mistake to treat the customer who gave you a 0 the same as the one who gave you a 6. Even though they are both detractors, they are at opposite ends of the the detractor spectrum – one could be a detractor today and passive or promoter tomorrow, and the other may be a candidate for churn.

Another example is Promoters. Does the fact that a customer gave you a 9 or 10 immediately imply that they are candidates for your Advocacy program? Probably not.

Or how about Passives? Are there meaningful differences between a 7 and an 8?

Deeper insights can be found by asking respondents the follow-up question: Why did you select the score that you did?

Looking at the main follow-up question and others that dive deeper still will help you go beyond the number and into the mindset of the respondent to really focus on the reasons your customers responded the way they did.

You’ll be motivated to figure out the whys, whats, whens, wheres, whos and hows, which will help you improve your overall NPS and customer experience.

Digging deeper will help you understand the NPS classes better and to develop micro-segments from each main class. It will also help you determine the feasibility of upgrading customers between the main classes and to create strategies to best go about this.

For instance, not all promoters, passives and detractors are created equal. Going further, it’s important to note that just because a detractor may have a lower “likelihood to recommend” rating, it does not mean that they would trash the brand. Also, companies can use these better micro-segments to target each group with specific marketing, sales and customer experience initiatives more effectively to improve overall customer loyalty.

Using NPS segmentation can actually improve the customer experience, according to Omer Minkara, Vice President and Principal Analyst, at Aberdeen Group, who notes:

“It can point to potential problem areas or strengths. For example, knowing customers using a specific service have a higher NPS than customers of a similar service might help determine what makes the former group unique to replicate success in that category with other services if and when applicable. This might help improve measures such as CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).”

Minkara agrees that using NPS as the only measure of customer experience is not recommended. “It should be complemented with other metrics that relate to the business. This will provide insight into what is working for the business and what needs to be adjusted to achieve desired outcomes” he adds.

In an article discussing these thoughts, Minkara goes on to say that taking NPS at face value might make a company assume that promoters are actually satisfied and will promote the brand, and detractors will spread negative word-of-mouth.

But is this really the case?

Based on the research Minkara conducted for the article, he noted that 71% of customers surveyed who identify themselves as promoters don’t actually promote the business.

Equally shocking was that 24% of the respondents didn’t know or didn’t measure the annual change in customer satisfaction results.

Two key insights of the research are:

1. Better and deeper segmentation than the three NPS buckets must occur to get an accurate picture.

2. If customers want to improve satisfaction, they can’t just measure NPS once, they need to measure regularly so they know the trends and what’s behind them so they can implement changes to produce desired outcomes.

So, the question is, what do we need to do to better segment customers using NPS data?

First, after you segment customers into the three main classes, segment customers within each class.

Some ways to segment customers by each class include:

• Answers provided to follow up questions
• Company size – for instance, startup, small-to-medium size businesses, or enterprise
• Location
• Sector the business operates in (financial, tech, retail, etc.)
• Product/service
• Pricing plan
• Revenue amount
• Account age
• Customer persona
• Profile info such as role within the company
• Point the customer is in in the customer lifecycle
• Different channels the customer uses
• User activity
• Frequency of service calls
• Customer feedback

It is important to be careful in making assumptions that all promoters, passives and detractors are the same. Digging deeper to determine what makes up each class will help you to prioritize segments and develop better strategies for each value segment.

There are a myriad of ways to segment based on NPS. Let your NPS data help guide you.

Second, determine the most valuable segments in each class.

There is a lot of information out there that says you should try to convert your detractors to promoters. While the sentiment is great, the act is often easier said than done. First, it takes gradual steps to move between classes and secondly, it isn’t realistic that all detractors will become passives and then promoters.

Prioritizing segments will help you determine your value customer segments. And these are the segments you want to focus on. The customers in these segments are the ones that you want to encourage feedback and engagement from, address issues, and help to improve their experience.

Once you prioritize segments, determine marketing, sales and service strategies to improve loyalty and overall customer experience.

Prioritizing your segments will help you determine your value customers and what they need/want to improve their experience. These insights will help you determine the sales, marketing and service strategies and activities that will improve engagement, help them be more successful and improve overall customer loyalty and experience.

Finally, ensure you are measuring NPS and other indicators regularly.

Companies should regularly take the NPS pulse of their customers as well as measuring other indicators. NPS and other metric analyses should never be done in a vacuum.

There is a right time to ask the “likelihood” and any follow up questions and knowing the right frequency of the ask. This gives the customer the opportunity to provide valuable feedback.

Developing relationships throughout the NPS process is key. Once you ask the question and its follow-ups, continue to build the relationship with the customer. Focus on building the relationship and turning the customer into an engaged one. Engaged customers will provide you with valuable insights you can take action on.

Each time you analyze NPS data will require you to audit and make changes to your customer segments. Doing this on a regular basis will help you improve engagement, and analyze trends and segments to gain even deeper actionable insights so that you can fine-tune strategies to deliver even more value and a better experience to your customers. This process may even help you do some preventative work of moving would-be passives and detractors to promoters in addition to upgrading detractors and passives, as well as turning promoters into true brand advocates.

Customer Experience drives corporate growth. NPS is one of the tools at your disposal. Digging deeper to find out what your NPS data really means and how you can leverage actionable insights from the data to help your customers will help you drive engagement, value and an overall better customer experience.

The post How to Improve Customer Experience through NPS Segmentation appeared first on OpenView Labs.

I’m sure you’ll agree…

There are way too many bloggers out there who publish blog after blog, with the hopes of pulling torrents of traffic in order to win the rat race of ranking highly on the web.

They *think* that publishing new content frequently will make their clients stick to their blog like super glue and earn them a top slot on SERPs.

If only it were that easy.

Around 2 million blog posts are created every day. But how many actually rank high on the SERPS? How many are powerful enough to engage their audiences and make them subscribe?

Not many!

So if you’re serious about creating and publishing high-quality, engaging and entertaining marketing blogs that your clients will actually read, you’ll need to get acquainted with the SEO copywriting hacks that industry leaders use to write their marketing blogs.

I’m sure you’re already wondering, ‘Okay, smart guy. Where do I find these magical copywriting hacks?’

Well, the answer is down below where I’ve outlined five simple SEO copywriting hacks that almost guarantee high search engine rankings and a diverse readership for every marketing blog you publish.

Hack #1: Take advantage of the APP intro formula

Let’s kickstart our list of SEO copywriting hacks with the amazing APP intro formula.

APP stands for ‘Agree’, ‘Promise’ and ‘Preview’.

Let’s break down each word in this acronym.

Agree: If you want to your SEO copy to rank higher on the web, you’ll need to make your visitors agree with you.

In other words, start your SEO copy’s introduction with something that visitors to your site will agree with.

This will help you set up a connection with them.

Here’s an example:

This is something that will win you the approval of most avid readers of your content.

Now that you’ve got your visitors to agree with you, it’s time to make them a promise.

Promise: Here, you’ll need to promise your visitors a solution for the problem they are facing.

Here’s an example of how:

Now that you’ve promised your visitors a solution, it’s time to show them a preview of that solution.

Preview: Here, you need to show your visitors what your SEO copy is going to offer them.

So, there you have it – a perfect APP intro method that will make visitors swarm to your blog, and contain information that Google spiders will find credible and worth ranking.

Hack # 2: Add ‘Bucket Brigades’ into your blogs

So here’s the deal…

The more time someone spends reading your blog, the better your site will rank on SERPs and the better the odds will be of a conversion. But making people spend more time on your site reading your marketing blogs is no mean feat!

So how do you make both skimmers and more serious readers fall in love with your blog and spend actual time reading it?

Here’s the answer: you need to make your marketing blogs both readable and scannable in equal measures.

You can do this the smart way by adding ‘Bucket Brigades’ to your blogs.

Bucket brigades are short phrases that act as conversational points to your SEO copy. They add a curiosity quotient to your content, making your readers want to read more and spend more time on your site.

Let me show you using an example:

The phrase ‘Here’s the proof’ acts as the bucket brigade. Now, this particular bucket brigade makes visitors wonder what’s going to come next. But the objective behind any bucket brigade is to keep your visitors engaged with your blog for as long as humanly possible.

There is no strict rule of thumb to developing bucket brigades, and you can easily coin a few phrases that you believe will work well for your site then pepper them into your SEO copy.

In case you’re looking for a couple of ready-made ones, here’s are a few classics:

• Here’s the deal!
• Let us spill the beans here…
• What’s the bottom line?
• Here’s the kicker…
• We’re sure you’re wondering…
• It gets worse/better…

Now that you know how to make your SEO copy more readable, it’s time to move on to the next hack on the list.

Hack # 3: Write an action-orientated title and meta description

You may be surprised when I tell you there are many marketing blogs that rank higher on SERPs but don’t really attract torrents of traffic.

This is because these blogs usually make the mistake of not having an action-oriented title and meta description.

Remember, though no longer a critical ranking factor, your blog’s meta description and title can fundamentally influence the number of clicks received through SERPs.

Use action-oriented verbs in your title and meta description to encourage your visitors to take action. Amalgamate your title and description with keywords that your readers actually search for. But don’t stuff too many keywords into it, or you might end up having your site penalized by Google for spamming.

Aim to start your descriptions with action verbs such as ‘download’, ‘learn’ or ‘discover’, and follow them up with your blog’s value proposition. Let your readers know why they should click on your link and read your content.

If you are able to do this effectively, you can expect to get more traffic, more clicks, and more conversions.

Hack #4: Create attention-grabbing headlines

It’s no secret that sites like BuzzFeed and ViralNova are wildly popular.

This is because they use fun, and attention-grabbing headlines for clickbait. Their headlines offer an emotional promise. They hook, they entertain and, above all, they spark curiosity.

I’m sure you’re wondering why it’s so important to create headlines that are attention-grabbing and click-worthy.

Here’s the deal: Moz reveals that 8 out of 10 people read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the entire article on average. Additionally, tests also reveal that traffic to content at a site can widely vary depending on the quality of the headline.

It’s not rocket science to see why you must aim to create headlines that tantalize readers in such a way so that they can’t help but click to see what’s on the other side.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Make sure that your headlines are unique and pique curiosity
• Always lead with lists and numbers
• Highlight the value of clicking through
• Use emotionally compelling language
• Keep your headlines under 70 characters
• Don’t forget to add SEO keywords to your headlines.

Remember, you’ll need to break conventions to create headlines that can grab more views and get you more clicks.

Image Source: Buzzfeed

Hack #5: Highlight your value proposition in subheadings

Now that you know how to create interesting headlines, you’re ready to move onto the next step.

It’s one thing to get someone to read your blog post because of the catchy headline, and quite another to get them to continue reading it past the first paragraph.

If you’re serious about making your clients take the time to read your marketing blogs, you’ll need to complement your headlines with engaging subheadings.

Authoritative and interesting subheadings help make your article readable, and keep your readers engaged and entertained.

Highlight the value proposition of your content in your subheadings. Don’t forget to tie them back to your headline.

Check out this example below to see what makes a good subheading:

By making your subheads useful, short and specific, you’ll lure more traffic and help readers navigate your content more quickly without losing their focus.

Wrapping up

These are easily some of the most powerful SEO copywriting hacks out there… and now it’s over to you.

Try incorporating a few (or all!) of them into your marketing blogs to create content your clients will love and, better yet, actually read.

Let me know how you go, and which tips have been an eye-opener for you in the comments section.

Best of luck!

Episode 173 is a special episode. I joined up with two of my co-founders at Vengreso on a recorded Zoom video call to discuss podcasting. When you listen to the podcast above or watch the video below you’ll meet Phil Gerbyshak, Chief Digital Officer at Vengreso, and Mario Martinez, Jr., CEO at Vengreso. Phil and Mario both host their own podcast. Essentially, the Vengreso team has three podcasts. On this episode, we explain what they are, how each is unique, and frankly why we think you might care. You’ll also hear why we podcast and how having one helps to build your credibility and influence.

Selling With Social

Mario launched Selling With Social in January 2017. He features sales leaders sharing their sales strategies. His listeners are sales leaders, sales enablers, and those in sales operations. Anyone supporting sales will see benefit from tuning into his podcast episodes. The sales strategies his guests reveal can help those responsible for client acquisition and retention to grow revenue, sales, and relationships.

Conversations with Phil

Conversations with Phil features thought leaders and sales practitioners. Phil’s guests discuss thought leadership, sales mindset, sales culture, and the practical and tactical aspects of sales. The focus is on looking at where you are and getting to where you want to be.

Social Business Engine

If you’re new to the Social Business Engine Podcast, my show features marketing leaders. In the 170 plus episodes, I’ve featured authors, analysts, and practitioners of social and digital strategy discussing their results. The topics covered include marketing technology, content marketing, employee advocacy, social selling, artificial intelligence, and more. Listeners learn actionable takeaways to apply to their own digital strategies.

Podcasting as a Medium

Podcasts are both educational and entertaining, through listening you learn new ideas that support growth. It’s a medium that’s gaining popularity, and overall not many people are doing it, yet. Podcasting serves as an opportunity to be in an area where our competitors are not. It’s easier to consume podcasts during everyday life than a wordy blog post or video. People listen to podcasts during their commutes, while working out, while walking the dog, etc.

Mario says he started his podcast in part because he doesn’t like to write. He also pointed out how with zero advertising spend our podcasts have gone from a few to thousands of listeners. The ability to learn alongside the listener is Phil’s draw to podcasting. He says listening to conversations is an intimate experience. It brings up new ideas and adds a sense of relatability to the podcaster and their guest. Having a podcast allows you to influence people.

Being a podcaster helps me get smarter and improve my game. @PhilGerb #GoVengresoClick To Tweet

Personally, I podcast for the relationship building and to keep a finger on the pulse of what businesses are doing. The credibility gained through podcasting also brings about sponsorship opportunities. When selectively chosen, these partnerships can add significant value for your listener. Mario remarked that it’s all about growing the mindset. “If you can develop and grow your mindset and skillset, it will help you to leverage the right toolset to advance and grow your sales.”

Featured On This Episode:

• Mario Martinez, Jr. on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Phil Gerbyshak on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Selling With Social Podcast
• Conversations with Phil Podcast
• Get your free subscription to Selling Power Magazine!
• Visit the Vengreso website
• Follow Vengreso on Twitter
• Social Media Strategies Summit’s website – Use the code SBENYC for 15% off of the 2017 New York event!
• Discover how to boost your sales through the Vengreso Social Selling Virtual Boot Camp
• Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
• Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine

 

Personalized content—everyone is doing it: 74% of marketers say that personalized content increases engagement and can generate up to six times the revenue per email.

Using email personalization is a great way to resonate with your subscribers. When you send your customers content that matters to them, you build trust, boost sales and increase your ROI. It makes sense that everyone is doing it these days.

But in an oversaturated inbox, how can you ensure that your emails go beyond {firstname-fix!}?

One word: data.

How data helps drive personalization

Data exists to help you make better informed decisions when it comes to your email marketing. By looking at the behavioral and demographic patterns of your customers, you unlock valuable insights that allow you to connect with them on a much more personal level.

And with so many ways to collect information on your customers (hint: it starts with your sign up form), there’s a massive opportunity for email marketers to engage their customers with better targeted and relevant communications.

How to use data to personalize your email content

Send personalized content recommendations

Using data from past purchases to influence future decision-making is a great way to provide consistent value to your customers. Take this email from Netflix for example:

(Image via Really Good Emails)

By sending personalized content recommendations based on their browsing history, you can make smarter predictions about what they’ll buy in the future—and entice them to keep paying for your products or service.

Don’t think that you need a subscription-based business to take this approach. It works just as well for retail brands (take Amazon, for example), and can totally apply to digital marketing materials as well (think ebooks, courses or webinars).

Use automated emails to motivate activation

Nearly 60% of users who sign up for a free trial or service will use it once and never come back.

Activation is one of the most important steps in getting new customers to start seeing the value of your products. Personalizing the onboarding experience to reduce the amount of friction it takes to get set up can make a world of difference.

Let’s take a look at this example from Meetup:

(Image via Really Good Emails)

The user clearly intended to utilize the service—they went through the steps to create an account and input their information, but never followed through. Maybe they got stuck somewhere in the process. Or perhaps there were too many steps and they planned to finish it “later”.

Sending a personalized note can help motivate users to finish the setup process. Good support is key to improving activation and building trust with your new customers. This is a great opportunity to invite questions and conversation that can help improve your activation process.

Implementing a personalized life cycle sequence, based on actions that your customers take, can be a huge step forward to improve your activation rate and increase ROI.

Step up your subject line game

Emails with personalized subject lines have 26% higher unique open rates than non-personalized emails.

But that doesn’t mean you have to keep things on a first name basis—a great personalization tactic is to tailor your subject line to include other demographic information, like location or birthday. You can use this information to send relevant messaging, like location-specific offers, news or exclusive deals.

Your subject line isn’t the place to go crazy on the personalization. A light touch helps to show your subscribers that you know them beyond their email address and could help improve your open rates.

Start sending better emails

Each of your customers is unique and interacts with your brand in many different ways. Great personalization starts with understanding who they are and what makes them tick.

Take a page from The Behavioral Marketing Playbook and learn how to use behavioral marketing to track your customer’s interactions with your brand, from recently browsed items to products added to their shopping cart—you’ll even find examples of how to bring these ideas to life! Download the eBook here.

The post What is a Complex Sale? (The Answer, Ironically, is Complex) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Note from Alice: Want to know one of my secrets? I use Twitter lists to keep up with clients, prospects, and colleagues, and keep current on the trends in sales and marketing. There are SO many ways you can use your social media platforms and Twitter lists are one I love! Sabra Rubinstein, who was our Social Media Marketing Manager for 3 years, wrote this great article on how to use Twitter lists. She even made a video for you!

Use the comment section to let me know how you currently use Twitter lists and if you never have, let me know if you make one. If you want to see all my Twitter lists go to Twitter and find me @aliceheiman and click on lists. 

It’s Noisy Out There

Are you using Twitter in your social selling strategy? Three-quarters of business-to-business buyers and 84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions, according to the International Data Corporation. So, why not use Twitter to make sure you are part of that decision? Twitter is a wonderful tool for prospecting, networking, connecting and keeping up with trends. It allows you to interact quickly and easily, without coming off too “salesy.

The problem is that it’s noisy out there—and I mean really noisy. If you follow hundreds of people on Twitter, the chances of you seeing every tweet from every person are slim to none. So, how can you break through the noise to listen to your prospects and customers and follow the trends? The answer is Twitter lists.

Break Through the Noise

I use lists to focus my time on Twitter. Instead of signing in and going to a news feed that displays a new tweet every second or so, I go to my Twitter lists.

So Exactly What is a Twitter List?

According to Twitter, “A list is a curated group of Twitter users. You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others. Viewing a list timeline will show you a stream of tweets from only the users on that list.”

In other words, you get to filter your newsfeed and organize your activity by grouping people into a list. It silences all other users except the ones in your lists and neatly puts them into one stream. To sum it up here are a few points:

• Lists can be public or private
• You can add people to as many lists as you like
• You can subscribe to other users (public) lists
  • Click here to subscribe to Alice’s List of Top Sales Experts
• Other Twitter users can subscribe to your lists
• You don’t have to follow someone to add them to a list

Public or Private?

There are two kinds of lists, public and private. Private Twitter lists are for your eyes only, and will not notify the people added to the list. Public Twitter lists are the same idea, but the people who you add can see you listed them in a group. The names of these groups can be flattering, such as “Top Sales Bloggers,” or something more generic, such as “People Who ReTweet Me”.

For the point of this article, we will be talking about private Twitter lists, which can help you maintain great relationships with customers and build relationships with prospects.

How Does This Help Me With Customers and Prospects?

You can use Twitter to guide you by creating 3 private lists:

1

Client List

Add all of your clients to one list to stay current on what they post. By creating this list, you can easily share articles, retweet, interact and add value to your relationship. Having a client Twitter list will keep you better informed of your clients’ activities and help you engage with the posts that really matter. Most importantly, remember to share their posts and interact with them by favoriting their tweets or replying to their comment or question.

2

Prospects List

When you add all of your prospects to one list, you can easily interact with them. Look for what they are tweeting about. Are they pushing out their own blogs? If so, retweet them and add a comment to that retweet. Also, be sure to send them content that is relevant and useful to them. This list can also be a valuable source of information about your prospects to help further your relationship with them.

3

Competitors List

A list of competitors gives you a place to see exactly they are doing. You can see what’s working for them on Twitter and how they are promoting their business.

Eliminate the Noise

Twitter lists eliminate the noise and let you hone in on what really matters, whether that is engaging with your current clients, building a relationship with your prospects, or keeping an eye on your competitors. Twitter lists are crucial to making the most of your time on Twitter.

But how do I make a Twitter list?

In case you haven’t made one before, here is a quick video I made that might help you:

P.S. It’s easier to add to your twitter list from the Twitter app on your smartphone.

---

Thanks, Sabra! You can follow Sabra’s musings at @sabraRubinstein @avantpage

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter @aliceheiman and see which of my lists you’d like to follow. Tweet at me and tell me how you currently use Twitter lists and if you never have, let me know if you decide to make one.

The post A Twitter Secret You Need to Know appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

We don’t have to look far to find examples of innovation, whether it’s in the technology sector, consumer goods or manufacturing.

Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Southwest Airlines, General Electric, Pfizer, Nike and others make the short list of the most innovative companies year after year. While pioneering a unique product or service is certainly part of the equation, what allows these companies to sustain that success over time really comes down to flexible agile leadership.

Leadership agility is the ability to effectively balance three factors that drive organizational performance – people, processes and innovation.

For a closer look at agile leadership in practice, let’s examine how three of America’s most innovative companies have adapted to a changing marketplace to rise above the competition time after time.

Amazon: Advancing Adaptation and Efficiency Simultaneously

From books and electronics to cloud computing and artificial intelligence, Amazon has its hand in just about everything. Amazon Web Services is a multi-billion dollar provider of cloud-based services, and the company’s Alexa AI assistant service is being built into everything from refrigerators to vehicles.

Amazon’s success is largely a credit to CEO Jeff Bezos’ obsession with customer loyalty, efficiency and adaptation. It could have stuck to its core competency of selling books online, but as e-commerce evolved, Bezos made sure its offerings did, too. The company also made sure that as it made changes, efficiency and customer service would remain a priority. Many companies have made the mistake of focusing so much on technological advances at the expense of keeping their products efficient to produce and use and are cost-effective. Ford Motor Co. is just one example of a company that made this mistake, and it came at a substantial cost. Bezos refused to let Amazon fall into this trap, opting to focus on advancing innovation and efficiency simultaneously. He pushed his team to find new ways to use technology to improve delivery times. As a result, Amazon has invested heavily in its own fleet of drones to be able to deliver products in less than two hours.

Amazon has also announced plans to invest in a fuel-cell manufacturer that will allow the electric vehicles in its warehouses to charge faster, improving delivery efficiency while also meeting sustainability goals.

Amazon has shown it’s possible to balance two seemingly conflicting priorities. The key is to take a systems view of the organization in order to understand how these areas are related and affect each other and put forth a dedicated effort toward each. One way to achieve this is by assigning a different individual or team to take the lead on each effort and hold them accountable for communicating and coordinating their efforts.

Tesla Motors: Making Innovation More Efficient

The automotive industry is constantly evolving, driven by advances in technology and growing consumer expectations. However, it can be difficult for manufacturing giants to implement change quickly because of the complexity of their products.

Fortunately, Tesla owner Elon Musk had the foresight to recognize the trend toward automating the driving experience early on and did something to set the company up to stay ahead of the curve: It installed the hardware to allow for semi-autonomous functionality. Instead of adding new features with each technological advancement, it can simply update its software to roll them out. In 2016, it added autopilot parking, and full self-driving capability isn’t far behind.

In this way, Tesla is able to maintain an efficient manufacturing process that enables them to introduce new features while managing cost. Like Bezos, Musk also recognized the importance of finding ways to advance innovation and efficiency at the same time.

Facebook: Balancing Innovation with Product Reliability

With more than 2 billion users, it would seem Facebook has earned the right to sit back and let the money roll in. In 2016, it generated more than $26 billion in revenue, about 80 percent of it from mobile ads. It would never have achieved this profitability if CEO Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t had the vision to monetize the platform while ensuring the user experience continues to be highly reliable and engaging. Maintaining that balance requires constantly introducing new features and testing them relentlessly. It has recently rolled out new mobile ad formats, including 360-degree video, interactive carousel ads and the ability for users to buy tickets to concerts, cruises and more directly from their newsfeeds. They are keeping up with the latest technological advances while also ensuring they don’t jeopardize the customer experience. To keep users engaged, it has introduced new features such as Facebook Live and Stories, which mirrors the user experience of Snapchat.

Innovation is crucial to staying ahead of the competition, but as we’ve seen in the past few decades, it can have a negative impact on a company’s people and processes.

The most successful leaders keep a close eye on the marketplace and invest in innovation while ensuring it doesn’t come at the expense of either employee engagement and motivation or product reliability and process efficiency.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a tech giant or a leading automotive manufacturer to achieve this balance. Flexible agile leadership is a skill that can be developed. To learn more about the skills and characteristics of flexible agile leaders and how to develop them in your company’s leaders, check out a free preview chapter of my book, Flexible Leadership: Creating Value by Balancing Multiple Challenges and Choices.

Face it. Business has but one purpose: moving visitors toward conversion and ensuring they become loyal advocates for the brand. Period. That’s it.

Whether the consumer visits your brick and mortar store or the one you host online, your job is to move them down the conversion funnel until they become brand evangelists. Although the concept is simple and straightforward, implementation is challenging. That’s because moving visitors toward conversion involves so many activities, often controlled within different functional areas (not just marketing) and, often, managers in those areas have different goals.

While we could go off in many different areas with this, mentioning the importance of managing human capital, having great customer service, and creating an atmosphere that is a good fit for your target market, today I’d like to focus on the role of content in moving visitors toward conversion.

Moving visitors toward conversion: Overview

Obviously, the more visitors you move down the marketing or conversion funnel (also called the sales funnel) to higher your ROI. Which is a good thing.

First, though, let’s take a look at the conversion funnel.

Here’s the typical conversion funnel, just so we all know what our goals look like:

Image courtesy of MarketingProfs

But, we know it isn’t quite that simple. So, let’s add some complexity to our model of conversion.

1. This funnel is leaky. Not everyone who starts at the top of the funnel-awareness-will flow through to conversion and not everyone who buys will return or recommend your brand.
2. This isn’t a linear process. Visitors cycle through various stages rather than moving straight down the funnel.
3. Retaining customers is super important. Relationship marketing tells us that it’s 5X more expensive to replace a dissatisfied customer than to keep them.
4. Flow-through to conversion is too low.
5. Not all conversion is created equal. Some visitors are “better” than others.

An alternative model is the one below on content layering (which I love because, well, who doesn’t love cake). It fixes a few problems mentioned above. But, let’s dig a little deeper and figure out how to fix all the problems above so we optimize our market returns. Since my focus is on digital, the discussion will primarily relate to online retailing.

Image courtesy of i-Scoop

Problem 1: Leaky funnel

The shape of both models of moving visitors toward conversion inherently reflect the leakiness of the funnel. In reality, the average conversion rate for landing pages is a little over 2%, while the highest performing landing pages convert over 11% of visitors [cite]. It’s a little better for brick and mortar retailers, at around 20%, but that rate includes higher costs and, often, lower rates of visitors [cite]. Neither one is all that great.

Fixing the problem

Image courtesy of Coast Digital

The first step in fixing the problem is to monitor conversion rates. Online, that seems easy: you track the number of visits and divide by the number who purchased. And, while this seems like a no-brainer, many online retailers can’t even give you this number. So, start there.

Now, look at the visits that didn’t result in a conversion. Where did visitors drop off the radar? Google Analytics offers “funnel visualization” to show you exactly where visitors went when they dropped off your page. This is very crude, but it’s a good start. Now, look at the pages involved in the process.

Now, look at the pages involved in the process. What did you say on the page? Did you provide answers to concerns visitors might have about buying from you? For instance, Zappos recognized that consumers were leery about buying shoes online. They fixed that problem by offering free returns on shoes that didn’t fit or that didn’t look good on your foot. So, you have no risk buying shoes from them and only lose a little time, as they provide return shipping labels, so all you have to do is slap the new label on the box and off they go. But, having that policy isn’t any good unless visitors know about it, so make it abundantly clear in all your messaging and hard to miss on your website.

Problem 2: Nonlinear process

Customers don’t move down the funnel in a linear fashion. Instead, they might visit the website, check out reviews, ask some friends for feedback, look at the company’s Facebook page, forget about buying the product or decide to postpone purchase, return because they saw an ad for your product show up in search …

Fixing the problem

A first step in the process is to know what the process looks like and what content contributes to increased conversion. That’s hard without some way to know what the process looks like for individual visitors. And, that probably involves getting them to login, which might be counterproductive and create more leakage.

Image courtesy of Occam’s Razor

A better option might be multi-channel attribution modeling, which involves apportioning the value of a conversion across the various channels involved in the conversion. So, you would assign a value to your landing page, to Facebook, and to Adwords if the process looked like the one described above. Now, you use this information to

Now, use this information to decide how to apportion your budget; spending the most money on the channels representing the highest value in moving visitors toward conversion.

Problem 3: Importance of loyal customers

I already mentioned that a loyal customer is worth a lot. That’s because it costs 5x more to attract a new customer than retain an existing one [cite]. Across multiple clients, I consistently find that repeat visitors also buy more, thus increasing their value to a firm.

Are you doing a good job of retaining customers?

Fixing the problem

Image courtesy of Data Mentors

First, find out how effective you are in retaining existing customers. Again, using Google Analytics, you can track what proportion of your visitors visit once, twice … You can even run other reports using segmentation based on the number of visits. This tells you how much value there is in retaining customers over time.

Next, let’s talk about ways to retain the customers. You should have a mailing list (email) with customers designated in some way. Craft specific messages thanking them and rewarding them for their loyalty. For instance, I am a Lenox member. I routinely get emails offering special discounts or special shopping opportunities only open to members. Sending messages on birthdays and anniversaries is another way to show customers they are important.

Some companies invite customers to share their opinions and participate in decision-making for the firm. For instance, asking for input on new products, new logos, etc makes customers feel invested in the firm and increase loyalty rates.

Problem 4: Flow-through to conversion low

Moving visitors toward conversion requires a sustained and cohesive communication strategy at all 3 stages of the conversion process.

We commonly divide the conversion funnel into 3 stages:

1. Top of funnel: Awareness
2. Middle of funnel: Consideration and Intention
3. Bottom of funnel: Conversion

We find businesses put too much emphasis on bottom of funnel activities and not enough on the top of the funnel. But, the middle of the funnel is often almost totally ignored in content development [cite].

As I mentioned earlier, conversion rates are only around 2%.

Fixing the problem

Create content for each stage in the conversion process and focus on a cohesive communication strategy for moving visitors toward conversion, recognizing that a small improvement at the top of the funnel generates a much bigger improvement in conversions.

Content aimed at awareness should focus on how your product fixes problems faced by consumers and it should be optimized for search since you’re casting a wide net in search of customers how need your product. That means you need research to identify the hot buttons for your target audience and how they frame queries online.

Content aimed at the consideration stage should go into more depth, providing social proof and presenting independent evidence to support your superiority.

Content aimed at the intention stage should address problem customers encounter in fulfilling their desire for your product. At this stage, you want to create content demonstrating the affordability of your product, offer discounts, identify financing options, and address other problems they might have. For instance, recognizing that customers in apartments face the problem of having deliveries stolen, Amazon opened pop-up stores, lockers, and physical stores to accept delivery and make it easy for customers to retrieve their purchases.

Problem 5: Not all visitors are the same

You probably already know this, but not all your visitors are the same. Some purchase in higher volume (average order size), some purchase more frequently, and some influence the purchases of others. You need content and strategies to attract and retain the most valuable visitors; one that highly targets them and offers something not available to lower value consumers.

This is the notion of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). For instance, I own dogs, or, rather, they own me. Between my 2 dogs, I have 200 lbs of dog. That makes inherently more valuable to a dog food company because big dogs eat more than little dogs. So, dog food manufacturers create content to make me identify with their brand by picturing big dogs on the packaging, advertising, and websites. Expensive brands know I can’t afford them to feed my big dogs, so they focus on small breeds that make up their market.

Fixing the problem

Obviously, you need to understand how various demographic, geographic, and lifestyle groups contribute to your bottom line. Develop a clear understanding how what motivates, and what demotivates, this segment. Use this understanding to create content that resonates with them.

What is a Target Account?

Simply put, target accounts are companies that you want to turn into customers.

When you’re doing account-based marketing (ABM), you focus the bulk of your energy and resources on best-fit accounts that have the highest revenue potential for your business. These target accounts require focused outreach from your sales and marketing teams in order to turn them into lifelong customers and advocates for your business.

So, how can you decide what companies to target, which to prioritize, and how many resources you’ll dedicate to moving them through the sales cycle?

How to Identify Your Target Accounts for Account-Based Marketing

Identifying your target accounts is a little like looking for Waldo. It’s not an easy task as is, but if you don’t know what Waldo looks like, it’s downright impossible.

Seriously…where’s Waldo?

Before you identify your target accounts, you have to know who it is you’re looking for. The best way to do this is to develop an ideal customer profile, or ICP.

An ideal customer profile is a description of the company — not the individual buyer or end user — that’s a perfect fit for your solution. Use the Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile Worksheet to clearly articulate what your best-fit customer accounts look like.

After you know what “Waldo” looks like, it’s time to start searching for him! With the help of technology and some manual sleuthing, you can identify a master list of target accounts that you want to turn into customers.

5 Ways to Identify Target Accounts for ABM

1. Leverage your ABM tech stack.
Use any of the identification tools in the Terminus Cloud for ABM to discover accounts that match your ICP. You can also use predictive tools to determine which accounts are in-market and when they’re likely to make a purchase.

2. Mine your database.
Your CRM and marketing automation platform are full of undiscovered insights! Leverage the data you already have at your fingertips to find prospects, opportunities, and even current customers that offer the best revenue potential.

3. Look at your competitors’ customers.
You can automate this process using tools like iDatalabs or HG Data, or you can do manual research using LinkedIn groups, review sites, and other online communities.

4. …and your customers’ competitors.
Business insights platforms like Owler can give you a great overview of any business, including a list of their top competitors. Take a look at your best customer accounts’ profiles, and mine their list of competitors for accounts that fit your ICP. Then, you can reach out to these competitors to highlight benefits of your solution that they are missing out on.

5. Set up job alerts.
If you sell to an emerging category, keep an eye out for potential new business by subscribing to job alerts using your buyer personas’ titles and other keywords. That way, you’ll know when a company is likely to be in-market for your solution.

How to Tier Your Target Accounts

Okay, you’ve got a list of target accounts. Now what?

Tiering your list of dream accounts allows you to prioritize your audience based on the campaign you’re running. Chances are, you won’t engage all of your target accounts in the same campaign. In fact, you shouldn’t because it can overwhelm your sales reps, water down your messaging, and funnel too many resources to the wrong accounts.

Account tiering refers to using technology, data points, and good old-fashioned research to prioritize your dream accounts. Most B2B companies find that a 3-tiered system works best. In this system:

• Tier 1 accounts are perfect ICP fits, similar to your highest value customers. Tier 1 also includes logos with strategic value.
• Tier 2 accounts are strong ICP fits but have a lower lifetime value.
• Tier 3 accounts fit most, but not all, ICP criteria. They’re worth pursuing but typically not worth investing significant resources to win their business.

Not all accounts are created equal. You should allocate more resources to accounts that have the potential to drive the most revenue and/or strategic value for your business.

Real-World Example: How Invoca Tiered 4,500 Target Accounts

Let’s look at a real-life example of account tiering. Invoca is a call intelligence platform whose marketing team, headed up by VP of Marketing, Julia Stead, takes a programmatic approach to ABM. In other words, they use MarTech to target and engage a large number of accounts that fit their ICP. Read on to learn how.

Selecting Their Target Accounts Using Marketing Technology

Julia explains, “We started off using a combination of different tools that allow you to come up with great lists of accounts based on different filters like company size, industry, all kinds of different data points.”

In addition to firmographic data, the Invoca team layered on other data points that matter to their business, such as:

• How much is each account spending on paid search?
• How much web traffic versus mobile traffic does each account get?

Tools Invoca used to identify and tier their target accounts include:

• Datanyze – The leader in technographics, offering real-time insights based on a company’s technology choices and buying signals
• SimilarWeb – A digital market intelligence company offering competitive intel, targeted list building, and more
• InsideView – A market intelligence platform that helps identify target accounts and key decision-makers at those companies
• EverString – A self-service AI platform that identifies companies based on firmographic and technographic data, keywords, lookalike data, and more
• LinkedIn – Great for validating information from third-party providers because of the self-reported nature of LinkedIn data

Tiering Their Master List of Target Accounts

Technology was instrumental in identifying Invoca’s target accounts, but prioritizing them required some manual work.

“Given the nature of our business,” Julia shares, “we felt that a human touch was needed to really identify our top tier of accounts. Just because they have this technology profile does not necessarily mean they’re a good fit for Invoca. A really key piece for us is, do they care about phone calls? Do they have a 1-800 phone number on their website? Do they have a call center? These are all attributes which aren’t necessarily available to us through predictive tools and different data filters.”

She continues, “We had a special ops team that included leadership from marketing and sales go through and handpick our Tier 1 accounts. For the rest — our Tier 2 and Tier 3 — we relied on the automated data and bucketed them based on how many of our target attributes the account had. From there, we passed these lists on to our sales reps and had them pick ten or 20 focus accounts.”

With a master list of approximately 4,500 target accounts, Invoca
divided their accounts into three tiers based on priority

Turn Your Target Accounts into Customers

You’ve identified and tiered your target accounts. Now it’s time to engage them! Get resources for kicking the buying process into high gear (including more worksheets and real-world examples) in the Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing Campaigns. Download the e-book now.

 

• The lottery provides a wonderful real life test for how the cognitive bias of regret avoidance impacts our decision making.
• The Powerball jackpot rose to $700 million at the time the above video was first published — the current Powerball jackpot has reached over $620 million.
• Meanwhile, the Mega Millions jackpot has reached $1.6 billion, putting the combined jackpot at $2.2 billion. 
• When making decisions, we can anticipate future regret and incorporate the weight of that into our decision making.
• Business Insider's Sara Silverstein tested this bias by offering to buy people's lottery tickets for more than they paid for them.

The current Powerball jackpot has reached over $620 million. We used this opportunity to test a cognitive bias known as regret avoidance.

 

We constantly have to make decisions without perfect information — like choosing an investment, picking a new job or deciding to buy a lottery ticket. We consider the possible outcomes and the probability of each and make the best choice with the information we have.

If new information becomes available after we have made a decision we sometimes experience regret — like feeling buyer's remorse after deciding to purchase an expensive item that goes on sale after your purchase.

When making decisions, we can anticipate future regret and incorporate the weight of that into our decision making. Lotteries provide a wonderful real life test for how regret avoidance impacts our decision making.

We have an office lottery pool which over 50 people participated in. We polled the participants and found that 86% of them joined the pool because they would be miserable if their colleagues won and they were left out. For many, It's an easy decision to pay $2 to avoid the possibility of feeling so much regret. That is regret avoidance.

But to really test this, let's make one choice clearly superior. We went outside and tried to buy lottery tickets from people for more than they paid. The rational choice, in this case, would always be to sell your ticket and buy more tickets or pocket the extra cash and replace your tickets. But people aren't known to be rational.

Most people refused to sell us their tickets for twice what they paid. They were worried that they might be selling a winning ticket and that decision would be too much to bear.

Join the conversation about this story »

More likely than not, customers joined your referral program because they love your product and the incentives offered. While not all referral programs yield the same results, there are some steps you can take to set your brand’s program up for success. In essence, your aim is to help your customers help you. Here are five best practices you can share with members of your referral program so they can effectively engage their networks and send more sales your way.

1. “Be comfortable engaging with your networks”

As a brand, the last thing you want to do is get pushy with your customers. Within any referral program, there are consumers who are comfortable broadcasting their love for your brand by posting their referral code or link multiple times for everyone to see, and there are other people who may only want to share their referral with close friends or family who they specifically think would enjoy your product. Let customers cater to their own level of comfort by participating at different levels, and make it clear to customers that no expectations about referral traffic or results are attached to their membership in the program.

2. “Tailor the referral language to make it your own”

In fact, customizing the stock language that comes with most referral emails is one of the best things your customer can do. While your brand may provide a great blurb that explains what your products are about and what your company values, nothing compares to the testimonial that a satisfied customer can write. Given that statistics have shown that 82% of Americans seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase, it’s hard to underscore the impact of a genuine, personalized endorsement from a happy customer.

3. “Be transparent about incentives and referral benefits”

It’s up to brands to be transparent with customers about what they will get in return for referring others to the brand. Customers should also know what their referred friends will receive, if anything. When it comes to incentives, you can’t be too clear about the details. You earn the trust of your customers by establishing clear guidelines and following through on them, and this trust and satisfaction is integral to the overall wellness of your program.

4. “Give your feedback about the referral program”

Brands shouldn’t determine the success of a referral program by its mere existence. While you can analyze some metrics internally, it’s important to also reach out to customers to ask how they view the referral program. What aspects do they like? Are there aspects that they dislike? What has been their general experience? How, in their view, could the program be improved? Depending on how much you value the information, your brand may even consider adding an incentive for those who take the survey addressing these questions.

5. “Don’t be scared to ask for more opportunities”

If you have customers who want to engage beyond the standard referral program, make them aware of any opportunities you have for brand ambassadorship or micro-influencer marketing. Referral programs bring enthusiastic customers right to your door, and if you don’t have a program for your most loyal customers to do even more, it’s worth considering it.

By understanding the best practices for referral program members before you launch a program, you set your brand up to succeed with the help of your most dedicated customers. Above all, showing your customers that they are valued drives a positive overall brand experience while benefiting your bottom line.

Quora has roughly 200 million monthly users worldwide -- almost double the number of users they had during the same time last year. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of prospecting potential.

So what is Quora?

Quora is a Q&A platform where users post questions and source answers from other community members. Good answers get “upvotes” that give them more visibility and authority. Sound a lot like Reddit? There are some important differences that make Quora more attractive for professional outreach.

First, Reddit is used primarily to share news and entertainment, while Quora is used for knowledge sharing around career growth, job questions, and life advice.

Second, Reddit lets users be anonymous, which encourages some of the NSFW subreddits (a.k.a. forums) it’s infamous for. In contrast, most Quora users link their profiles with their Google, Facebook, and/or Twitter accounts. This creates a level of accountability for its users and contributes to Quora’s reputation as a source for business networking.

So, how do you use Quora for sales prospecting? Here are eight steps to get started.

Get Started Sales Prospecting on Quora

1) Create an Account

Start by creating an account. Quora will ask you to sign in using either Facebook, Google, or an email address. I recommend signing up with your company email so you receive prospecting-related notifications in your work inbox. After you’ve chosen your preferred method of sign in, click “continue.”

2) Follow Relevant Interest Channels

Next, you’ll be prompted to “follow” at least 10 interests. Choose those related to your ideal customer, industry, and professional expertise. If you’re a sales rep for HubSpot, you might choose interests like SaaS, Sales, Web Marketing, and Business.

Once you’ve followed several interests, add the interest homepage URLs to your RSS feed or Feedly account to be notified anytime a user posts a question you can answer.

3) Add Your Areas of Expertise

Quora will also ask you to list your areas of expertise. This allows them to instantly populate a feed with questions they think you can answer. It’s an immediate funnel full of prospects, so choose your interests honestly and carefully.

4) Follow Other Users

Curious to know how your competition is responding to questions? Want to see what buyers are asking? During this step, follow other salespeople in your space and buyers you’re currently working with. This makes it easy to view the questions they’re asking about your industry and beyond.

5) Flesh Out Your Profile

Build out your profile with a professional photo and some details about yourself. Be open and authentic about who you are and what you do. Once your profile is finished, you can respond to questions.

Source: Quora

6) Respond to Relevant Questions

Your “Read” page is filled with questions related to your interests. Start by scrolling through this thread. Answer questions and upvote helpful comments to build rapport and authority in the community.

You can also head to the “Answer” tab of your homepage, which Quora populates with user questions that your expertise should allow you to answer.

Here are a few best practices for answering questions on Quora:

1. Provide value first. Let’s say you’re answering a question about which brand of widget works best for solving Y problem. Start by validating the question (“Hey Jane, this is a great question”) and providing some non-widget related solutions to their problem. Be open about your affiliation with Widgets-R-Us (“Full disclosure: I work for Widgets-R-Us”), and never try to make a sale in your conversation-opening answer.
2. Never be overtly salesy, spammy, or repetitive. If you have a canned response that you copy and paste into any relevant question you come upon, you’re going to get called out and downvoted into oblivion. Make each response unique, targeted, and relevant, and you’ll build trust and recognition on Quora.
3. Share links sparingly. Don’t be the person who links to content, or your company’s pricing page, with every answer. Offer advice first. If the conversation continues, you can put forth a link to your company or relevant content. But only if the Quora user has expressed interest.

7) Ask Your Prospects Question

Want to start a conversation around a topic that’s not currently active or didn’t exist in the first place? Pose a question you know your prospects are knowledgeable about and let them answer to open a conversation.

And don’t forget to upvote great responses. The more active and engaged you are in the Quora community, the more visible and reputable your advice will be.

8) Reach Out Using Quora Messaging

If a conversation is going particularly well and you want to connect with the person privately, you may be able to use Quora Messaging.

Source: Quora

Quora’s default message setting is that users only receive messages from people they follow. Messaging settings are customizable, however, so some users may turn messaging off completely, while others allow messages from anyone.

If you visit someone’s profile and do not see the message button (featured in the drop-down menu below), you may want to reach out to them on another platform like LinkedIn or email.

Quora can be a great way to build rapport with prospects. Be smart and respectful with the platform, and you’ll attract prospects who actually seek you out for solutions they know you can provide.

You cannot form solid connections without a firm foundation of trust. Trust brings buyers and sellers together and keeps them together. A lack of trust inhibits buyers, and a breach in trust shuts them down completely. Trust is vital to forming buyer/seller connections.

When I first started selling, I'd experience the following scenario all the time:

I'd leave a meeting thinking I nailed it -- only for the prospect to go dark after my attempts to follow up.

What the heck was I doing wrong?

It turns out that in many cases, I stopped hearing back because the prospect hadn’t bought into making a change to solve their business pain.

They'd bought into having pain and were even sold on my solution, but they hadn’t taken the crucial last step of deciding to change anything about it.

I had assumed they wanted to change but ultimately lost the deal because they decided to do nothing. Even when your buyers realize your solution’s value, it’s still easier to stick with the status quo.

I'd made a classic error: I'd failed to uncover my prospect’s hidden objection -- a reluctance to take action.

The takeaway? Unless you dig for obections, it's easy to overlook them. It’s hard for prospects to fully define their reservations and anxities, so you’ll have to uncover what they are. There's also social stigma associated with rejecting people, and your prospects don't want to feel bad about themselves. So they take the path of least resistance: They go dark, and tell you the real story later (or never at all).

However, there are ways to move a deal forward.

One tactic to overcome inertia is simply asking questions. A few of my favorites are:

1) Do you want to change this?

It sounds simple, but reps rarely ask this.

2) Would this change be in line with your company’s goals?

If the company isn't behind the change, you'll have to do some extra work to move the deal forward.

3) Where does making this change fall on your priority list?

Get specific. Are you in their top three or bottom three? Is there something that’s more important or blocking your deal?

On the flip side, you can use these other priorities to your advantage -- it’s possible your solution will help achieve other goals, but your prospect isn’t aware of that fact.

4) How committed are you to changing this in the next [time period]?

Assuming you're on their priority list, your prospect’s answer will give you a sense of how quickly you can close and start implementation.

These questions sound basic, but surprisingly few salespeople ask them because it’s easy to assume you know what your buyer’s thinking. But that just makes it easy for your buyers to keep the whole truth from you and simply go dark. It’s crucial to hear the whole story so you can focus on overcoming your prospects’ core objections.

Here’s what such a conversation looks like in action:

Prospect: "This is great! I can see exactly how I can use your product."

Rep:"Awesome. Would you want to change from your current process to implement this one?"

Prospect:"Definitely."

Rep:"When do you expect to make a change?"

Prospect:"Maybe in the next year or so."

Rep:"So this isn't really a big priority for you then, is it?"

Prospect:"It is, but we need to redesign our website first, and budgets don’t get allocated until May."

By digging deeper, you're starting to uncover real objections, so you can face them head on. If you had stopped qualifying after your prospect’s first answer, you’d proceed through the sales process with a false sense of security.

Even if you find that your product isn’t a high priority right now, you'll at least know what’s standing in the way and when it makes sense to check back in. That way, you can focus on the deals where you're closer to the money.

If you find that you're high on their priority list, you've just gotten yourself some further buy-in, which will make closing much easier.

When a prospect answers each of these seemingly basic questions in the affirmative, there's a subtle compliance tactic in play. Each small buy-in makes it easier to get to the next larger "yes." Plus, you now can hold your prospect accountable -- we all like to be consistent with what we say.

This is called the “Change Buy-In.” It’s designed to make the “change” step of the Buy-In Method, displayed below, more explicit by asking questions that build on one another.

This is just one of eight buy-in strategies you can use throughout your sales process. By asking strategic questions during each step of the process, you’ll be able to more thoroughly qualify your prospect and make sure they’re willing to commit to each step (and eventually the sale). To get more of these questions, check out the free course on this method here.

If you’ve been following our latest posts on engagement and marketing, you know that marketers need to change the way they engage prospects and customers. We have entered the Engagement Economy, and to survive and thrive, organizations must evolve their marketing strategies and tactics accordingly. Simply put, we must stop saying that what we have been doing is “engaging” buyers. And instead, we must take steps to truly engage.

What most marketers have done with all the new digital tools at their disposal is put a new spin on traditional tactics of marketing to their audience. What’s needed is a wholesale change. It starts with truly understanding what it means to engage with today’s buyers.

I’m not blaming marketers. But I am advocating for a shake-up—starting with the mindset and going all the way down to the tactics—at most organizations.

To validate that marketing leaders need to adopt and execute new strategies and approaches, Marketo undertook the first-ever engagement focused study. Surveying more than 2,000 global consumers and marketers in order to surface valuable insights, the results should serve as a guidepost for marketers intent on succeeding.

Marketers Are Missing the Mark

The survey data revealed significant gaps between consumer expectations and marketers’ abilities to satisfy them. Consider this: the vast majority (82%) of marketers believe they deeply understand how their buyers want to be engaged. But half of buyers disagree.

A key reason for buyer dissatisfaction? Receiving irrelevant content from brands. In fact, this is the top reason consumers say they choose not to engage with vendors.

Part of the problem is likely due to the fact that the majority of consumer engagements with a brand are primarily transactional in nature. But it’s virtually impossible to deeply understand and build a relationship with someone purely through transactions.

It also doesn’t help that marketers are struggling to best use the tools available to them. It’s no small feat trying to unite data from the multiple—and often disconnected—point solutions used to manage engagement across different channels. In fact, it’s the biggest barrier to successful engagement, according to the marketers we surveyed.

And They’re Lacking Executive Support

The misalignment between marketers’ perceptions and buyer experiences is troubling. But what may be even more disturbing is the lack of critical support available to forward-thinking marketers. Those marketers that recognize the need to better align with buyer expectations are not getting essential executive sponsorship. In my experience, I know it’s nearly impossible to shift organizational priorities and strategies without support from the powers that be. As marketing leads the charge in defining true engagement for buyers, it’s more critical than ever that their executive team buys in.

It’s Time to Close the Gap

Ultimately the survey data indicates that marketers who make a priority of keeping the pulse of consumer expectations and interests will be the marketers who truly stand out, offer value, and engage to win in the Engagement Economy. The key to succeeding just may lie in moving beyond single-purpose tools to technologies, solutions, or platforms that facilitate the seamless flow of data across the marketing stack.

Marketers around the world agree that a top challenge is demonstrating return on their technology investments. It stands to reason that if their current tools are falling short in enabling the engagement that buyers expect, they are unable to deliver on their organizations’ core strategic goals. Executive leadership tends to reserve their support for initiatives that are driving a measurable impact.

With the right technology, marketers can satisfy consumer expectations, leading to better engagement, which in turn yields a higher return on marketing investments. This paves the way for executive support—and continued success.

Download The State of Engagement report for many more insights into what it means to truly engage consumers, employees and partners in the Engagement Economy.

The post Introducing The State of Engagement appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Unless you’re a business that is specifically marketed to older adults, chances are that you want and crave the attention of Millennials.

The reason is simple: Millennials are among the most active and motivated buyers of products and services in the U.S.

But it’s no easy task to target this group, because Millennials also tend to shift their allegiances rather quickly, seeking new and exciting experiences.

So how do you aim your marketing darts to hit this moving target? Here are some strategies you can use to capture your share of this young and sought-after demographic.

1. Embrace Human-Centered Marketing

Millennials are a generation that is much more socially active and socially conscious, which means that if you target this group, you better be ready to speak their language.

And more and more, that language is all about how your products and services will make their lives better or more convenient, or how using your products and services is good for the community at large.

So how do you tap into that language?

You can personalize emails based on prior customer preferences, so that you’re not just offering general products, but rather products tailored to match previous customer interest.

You can also offer insight into your brand by posting videos of your team members’ expressing your company’s culture and ‘fun’ in easy to understand sound bites that humanize your business and make it relatable.

Millennials are a ‘touch-feely’ generation that respond to emotion and honesty; so the more peeks you give them into why your company exists, the more likely you are to draw their interest.

2. Use Social Media To Find Millennial Influencers

Millennials are driven more by how a product or service makes them feel than the actual function of the product or service.

And when they find something that is cool and interesting, they tell others about it.

Therefore, you must engage Millennial influencers on social media and make them feel like a valued part of your company.

Because when they feel connected to your company, they will become powerful brand ambassadors.

But turning admirers into ambassadors takes work.

This means sending out personal tweets, interacting with them on Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, and soliciting their opinions on upcoming products and services.

If you don’t have a social media manager, you should think about finding someone on your team who will consistently engage with your biggest fans on social media.

Millennials love social media precisely because it offers them a powerful platform of instant communication, where they can share experiences.

Go where they gather and reward them for liking what you’re offering by cultivating their interest and making them feel like an integral part of your company’s present and future success.

3. Go Mobile

Studies have found that a majority of people now accesses the Internet via mobile devices rather than desktop computers.

And a large percentage of mobile users are Millennials who have forever transformed where people consume content and make purchases.

Mobile is the new frontier, so here’s the big question: Is your business mobile ready?

Have you optimized your website for mobile use so that navigation is easy, CTA buttons are large and distinct, and your checkout process is quick and easy?

Have you created content that has a strong visual component? By and large, Millennials will not respond to white papers and long blog articles.

They respond to short, concise content that is visual, easy to understand and entertaining.

That means your mobile content should rely heavily on videos, vlogs and live streaming events that will attract young users.

Millennials Are An Ongoing Puzzle

Implementing these three strategies can help you grab your share of that all-important Millennial audience, boost your marketing returns, and improve brand awareness.

Just don’t forget that Millennial trends are ever-changing, so you may have to adjust your strategy in the future based on the vagaries of this fickle market.

 

Change is at the center of selling — period! No change, no sale. I’m on the record of saying this a thousand times. There will be no sale without a motivation to change. Therefore to understand selling and to sell better you have to understand your buyer’s motivation to change.  People need a reason to move, to change and you need to know it.

As a salesperson, if you want to sell better, get better at finding and understanding your buyer’s motives. Why do they want to change?

Every person has their motivations for buying and for creating change and the best sales people get good at finding the motivation.

Even though everyone has their unique motives for change, when it comes to sales you can put them into three buckets, financial, emotional, political.

• Financial – financial motives are those steeped in financial gain. Buyers want to save money or make money. It’s that simple. Money is the primary motivator for change. How your solution or product affects their financial situation will be the key determining factor in their decision making.
•  Emotional – Emotional motives are unique; they are the soft drivers for decision making. It can be argued, and I do argue this, the emotions are motives in every sale. For this definition, emotion is the pain associated with the current solution.  How bad does the current environment hurt? How much pain is it causing the buyer?  How frustrating, painful, irritating, etc. is the current situation? Freeing themselves from that pain can be a huge motivator.
• Political – What are the political implications to change?  Is there a promotion in it for the buyer or the influencer?  Is there a demotion lurking in the wings? Is there political capital to be gained?  Is there simply a genuine desire to do the right thing, which strengthens the buyers status in the organization.  Motives can be political as we succeed or fail in an organization, and there can be a tremendous impact on careers and our overall happiness as a result.

 

These three buckets are powerful in helping categorize motives, but to get better at selling, understanding these broad motive buckets isn’t enough. You need to go deeper. To get better at selling you have to get to each and every individual buyer’s, influencer’s, and blocker’s motivation. You have to be specific and measurable.

Lesson 4 – Understand their motivation

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you’re gonna get this comparison.  (If not, I apologize in advance [for you not being a Game of Thrones fan LOL] and for the example). Little Finger, why is he so successful?  How is it that he is still in the thick of everything that’s going on? How is it that he hasn’t had his head put on a stick yet?  Everyone knows he’s snake. He has no family name. He’s not real nobility, yet he’s still smack dab in the middle of everything, executing his next move in his ascension to the Iron Throne.  Why is he able to hang around?  He’s a master at understanding peoples motives. Little Finger knows what everyone wants and what motives them, and he plays to those desires and motives. And if you want to get better at sales you need to do the same thing (minus the slimy, seedy shit he does ).

To get better at sales you need to spend considerable time evaluating what it is that’s motivating the participants in the buying process. If you believe CEB and the book Challenger Customer, that’s 5.4 people. Five point four people are participating in the buying process, and each of them has their motives to adopt or not adopt the change you are proposing.

Yes, you are proposing a change, that can’t be forgotten.  You have to understand what is motivating or will motivate your buyers to change.

The best path to understanding a buyers motivation is asking subjective, feeling questions.

“How does it make you feel when you think about the new solution?”

“It appears this is an uncomfortable position to be in, how does that feel?”

“This is exciting, do you agree?”

“How do you feel about that decision?”

“Are you comfortable with what’s happening?”

“It seems you’re struggling with certain aspects of this, could you share?”

These type of subjective feeling questions can provide a path to unlock your buyer motives.  In many cases after asking the questions consider following up by asking “why is that?.” This solicits further clarification to their feelings, and it’s often where the motives lie. Although these are fantastic questions to help get to a buyer’s motives, my experience has shown that few salespeople are comfortable with asking them, yet when done correctly, they can provide invaluable insights.

Getting to a buyer’s motive can be hard.  Often buyers aren’t’ consciously aware themselves or haven’t given them much thought. However, sales person’s ability to understand them and influence them is critical to getting better at selling.

Take the time to figure out what’s motivating your buyers.  What is it that they want to happen? What’s their vision for the future and why do they want that vision to come to fruition?  What’s motivating them to change?

There is no change without a desire to change, and desire requires motivation.

Know your buyer’s motivation.

—————-

How To Sell Better is an on going series tackling the challenges and issues sales people need to focus on to get better. I don’t know how long the series will be or how many I’ll write, but feel free to check past lessons here.

The post How to Sell Better: Lesson 4 – Understand Their Motivation appeared first on A Sales Guy.

What do you think of when you hear the term “customer acquisition”? If you’re like most people, your mind probably goes straight to cold calling or landing pages: tactics typically used to discover and attract brand new leads.

However, what people tend to forget is that “customer acquisition” includes the ability to convert prospects already in contact with your business. In other words, acquisition only begins when a lead enters your pipeline!

To complete the acquisition process requires not only an amazing sales team and top notch sales platform, but also the ability to provide these prospects with quality experiences. McKinsey reports, “Optimizing the customer experience typically achieve[s] revenue growth of 5-10% . . . in just two to three years.”

It’s indisputable that two of the teams with the heaviest influence on customer experience are sales + support. So what are the strategies that sales and support can use to work better together to improve the customer experience and ultimately drive acquisition?

Zero in on Trial-Period Tickets

Does your business offer a free-trial period for your product or service? If so, this is the perfect opportunity for support to make a major impact on acquisition rates.

Recent research from NewVoiceMedia estimates that US companies lose $41 billion a year due to poor customer service experiences, which is why it’s critical to provide your support team with a fast and easy way to identify tickets submitted by free-trial users with open opportunities.

Not only is this your chance to show prospects the type of world-class experience that they would receive as customers, but it also lets support reps know that now is the time to point out certain features or functionality that may only be available in the full, paid version of your offering.

Similarly, having information around tickets submitted by free-trial users available for reps to see in their CRM can make for a smoother purchasing process. Armed with the challenges a prospect had during his or her free trial, a sales rep can proactively address any concerns and elaborate on additional features that may be helpful once it’s time to buy.

Utilize a Two-Pronged Sales Process

If your product or service is a bit on the more technical side, this one’s for you. It’s not uncommon that sales reps will loop in the support team to help answer the more technical and involved questions that arise during the sales process.

This a great strategy! Not only does it allow your sales team to focus on what they do best, but it also introduces an unbiased third-party into the sales process to provide consultative support.

However, where it tends to fall apart is when a sales rep loses visibility into the conversations that support is having with his or her prospects. When this happens, the rep is basically left with two equally terrible options:

1) Waste time by tracking down support and requesting a play-by-play of prospect interactions
2) Muddle the customer experience either by missing out on these critical pieces of the sales process, or forcing the customer to play telephone between sales and support

Fortunately, integrating your sales platform and helpdesk solution can help mitigate this difficult situation by providing reps with insight into both open and closed support tickets: context, questions, conversations and even internal notes. Rather than going in blind or having to ask for a recap, reps can simply follow along with the discussion and access this information at any time during the sales process.

A Match Made in Heaven

By integrating sales + support tools like Base and Zendesk, companies make it possible for their customer service and sales teams to work together like never before. The ability for these teams to quickly and easily view key cross-functional data points powers truly delightful customer experiences that drive acquisition.

There’s no question that inside sales can be a challenge.

But once you get it, and know how it works, you’ll realize that the struggles you deal with are the same struggles that other inside sales reps have dealt with and ultimately overcome.

Like people in just about every profession, the majority of inside sales reps will struggle at some point with some aspect of their job. In today’s world, there are a number of forces making it more challenging to be a successful inside sales rep—but there are also free sales tools that can help you get through those challenges.

Today I’m going to share with you five common struggles as well as tools and strategies to help you conquer them. I’ll also give you some clear examples of how you can get your prospects’ attention, plus other tips that will help you succeed as an inside sales rep.

Want even more sales tips? Get a FREE copy of Your Growth Hacks Aren't Working, Steli's latest cold calling guide! 

Let’s get to it.

Struggle 1: Fighting an increased level of competition

It’s easier than ever to start a business. As a result, we’re seeing a plethora of new brands coming on the scene and competing with one another—and with existing brands.

For an example of the explosion that is taking place in the world, you don’t have to look much further than the recent growth and fragmentation of SaaS products. This is what that growth has looked like in the martech space over the last few years:

Crazy, right?

And that’s just one industry.

So, given this kind of growth across so many sectors, inside sales reps are met with constant questions about competition and feature differentiation. In fact, your customers are spending more time looking at competitors’ products than ever before. Conversations with customers who are shopping around can be difficult to have, but at the end of the day, it’s on you as the sales rep to understand the core value of what you’re offering and what your competitors are offering.

Yes, that’s right: You need to understand what your competitors are claiming as their competitive advantage. That’s why we recommend taking the time to actually learn what your competitors are selling and then pitch it back to your target customers.

Here’s what we mean:

That’s just one approach.

If the idea intimidates you, another effective tactic is simply picking up the phone and calling competitors. Position yourself as a potential customer, conduct market research, gain insight into how they onboard prospects and learn the ins and outs of their business.

Struggle 2: Overcoming outreach fatigue

While automation can work wonders for an inside sales rep, prospects are starting to see through—and become weary of—the personalized *First Name*.

Rather than constantly sending out generic emails, we recommend that you take the time to personalize your emails to show that you’ve done a bit of research. At the very least, take the time to compile data that allows you to customize your outreach a bit more than the recipient's first name.

When setting up emails in Close.io, you can customize your email templates using tags, including organization name, title, phone number, URL, city, state and my favorite, custom fields. A custom field allows you to get creative with your personalization and add details that are specific to your outreach. Here’s a sample of what a personalized sales email could look like:

Struggle 3: Getting through to key decision makers

It's far from easy to get to a decision maker as an inside sales rep. More often than not, you're initially met with a gatekeeper, who only seems to slow down your chances to close. So what can you do to get by the gatekeeper and in front of the decision maker?

Here are a few ideas:

• Stop calling them gatekeepers. Seriously—the term needs to die. I don’t even want to have a moment of silence for the term because it’s so bad. The folks you meet along the path to the key decision maker should be seen as allies and opportunities. You can learn from them. You can get intros from them. You can turn them into internal cheerleaders for you and your brand.

• Be personal all the way through. Whether you’re talking to an intern or a C-suite executive, keep in mind that you’re talking to another person. Don’t do outreach with an email that says “To whom it may concern,” and always make the person you’re talking to feel like they’re your No. 1 contact.

• Understand how to manage objections. We’ve already talked about how to manage a prospect’s objections relating to your competition. You’ll also need to manage price-related objections and learn how to sell against the industry incumbent.

• Don’t do it all behind your computer screen. You understand that it’s a digital world and that people are obsessed with email, but so do your competitors. If you want to break from the norm and be remembered, try something different. Tools like Close.io allow you to not only make calls from the CRM but also to send text messages to prospects.

Struggle 4: Finding the time to get it all done

If there’s one thing that I hear time and time again from sales reps it’s this:

There’s not enough time in a day.

Between nurturing leads, following up with prospects, scheduling meetings and making cold calls, the days go by quick and the quarters go by quicker. Unfortunately, I can’t give you any tricks that will slow time down, but I can give you some pointers on what you can do to be more effective with your time.

First and foremost, I recommend that when you’re plugged in and working, you turn off social media notifications on your cellphone.

No Facebook. No Twitter. No Snapchat. No Instagram.

For that period of time, it needs to be just you, your CRM system and your prospects. No distractions from your personal life fluttering in to disrupt the nonstop calling, emailing, texting and following up that needs to happen so you can meet quota. It’s why we’ve built our inside sales CRM as the one workspace that unifies ALL your sales communications.

My second tip for maximizing your productivity is to ensure that you’re in an environment that gives you a chance to execute. If you’re in a loud office but do your best work with quiet surroundings, invest in a pair of noise-canceling headphones. If you’re a remote inside sales rep working from home but get energized around people, find a co-working space. Strive to create an environment in which you can thrive rather than a place that you’re struggling to survive.

Struggle 5: Ensuring that leads are high quality

One big mistake that inside sales reps make (especially early in their careers) is thinking that leads are solely the responsibility of marketing. In reality, you play a role in the quality of the leads, and it starts with alignment between sales and marketing.

Sales and marketing have to be on the same page when it comes to who you’re trying to connect with and their needs. If you’re in a large organization, this may need to be a larger discussion within your company, but don’t be afraid to bring it up.

Take the initiative to share your concerns with your manager and request that marketing and sales spend some time together to better communicate which types of leads are converting and which are not.

Wrapping things up

I really hope that these ideas will help you when you’re feeling the strain. We know firsthand that inside sales isn’t easy—but it’s not impossible. We think that with the right technologies and the right training, anyone can become a great inside sales professional.

It just takes work.

The fact that you’re reading this article shows that you’re willing to take that step. So I’m going to give you one more thing: I want you to check out the latest book from Steli on cold calling for founders. Whether you’re an inside sales rep or the founder of your own business, the book is filled with sales gold.

Check out Your Growth Hacks Aren't Working, my latest book on how to win with cold calling today! Click below for your free copy:

Download "Your Growth Hacks Aren't Working" Free

IT companies put a lot of effort in marketing their products and services for a diverse range of uses. They primarily depend on email and good old fashioned cold-calling to reach out to potential clients. One good reason is that these channels are just too darn effective.

Email, for one, secures and maintains conversion rates higher than what social media offers. With that, it’s safe to assume that email marketing is the best way to do a lot of outreach. But even if you do have a target audience in mind, knowing where exactly to get them is one matter that you need to address.

For IT companies that are all too concerned about acquiring large numbers of sales leads faster, they have two options on the table: They can either go for creating opt-in lists from scratch or buying lists from a service provider.

Without a doubt, these companies will go for the first option, which is to generate their own database of names and addresses. Moreover, they can tell you a lot about buying email lists, most of which aren’t really pretty.

So, what makes email lists from a service provider so unappealing? Well, we have these reasons:

#1. Unreliability.

Much of the contacts are just plain bad and may as well hurt your email deliverability, increase bounce rates, and cost you a lot in terms of missed opportunities.

#2. Good contacts are not for sale.

Some service providers will give out lists with contacts that are sub par while keeping the good ones reserved for the highest bidder.

#3. A high chance of getting flagged as spam.

And we’re not talking about cans of deliciously preserved meat. Sending emails to invalid email addresses or, worse, to people who wouldn’t want to opt in in the first place can get your messages a one-way ticket to spamville.

We can go on with more horror stories related to purchasing email lists. But these only fail to understand the actual advantages that such lists have over generating one yourself.

It’s true that creating your own list from opt-ins sounds like a good idea. But you can always see something as advantageous in getting one from a lead provider. It all depends on the enterprise that provides you with these lists. Choosing the best provider can give you the following benefits:

#1. Saves you a lot of money and time.

Let’s face it, list building is one thing you cannot master overnight. A good lead generation company would spend a considerable amount of resources in creating a list just for you, saving you the trouble of you would normally from building a list yourself.

#2. Technical expertise.

Again, list building requires a LOT of skill. And we’re not just talking about looking for names just to fill the call quota. A highly capable lead generation company has exactly the expertise to manage your contacts.

#3. Quality leads.

Sure, purchasing leads gets a bad rap from the IT sector, but only when they are provided by a company that doesn’t have the capacity in data validation. To be sure about the lead quality, you only need to look towards companies that have a steadfast system for filtering out unwanted data.

We are all familiar with algorithms that establish a quantitative measure (score) regarding the qualification of a particular lead so it can be handed to the sales team by transferring over the respective contact data to a CRM. When pursuing an ABM strategy, however, you are signing up to use appropriate metrics to drive revenue based on accounts, not leads.

With that in mind, consider instituting a scoring model driven by Buyer Group rather than individual lead to better gauge the level of interest and intent demonstrated by target accounts. Let’s discuss how to form a new algorithm that reflects the reality of Buyer Groups.

Buyer Group Scoring Model

Working with your list of target accounts, you want to be sure you’re reaching the entire buyer group (demand unit) and not just anyone at a company’s IP address. Are you reaching the actual user(s), researcher(s) and decision maker(s) or are you yet to get past the obvious gatekeepers? And what is the percentage of accounts engaged within your Total Addressable Market (TAM)?

Combine data regarding the level of responsibility (Job Title, Function Affinity, Span of Control) of Buyer Group members with data showing their respective level of intent (engagement frequency, intensity and how recent) to create an overall Buyer Group score for that account. While there may be a wealth of activity-based metrics that can be tracked, establishing a consistent scoring algorithm based on these factors will help you provide a more accurate picture of a Marketing Qualified Account (MQA).

Record the number of Buyer Group members that have engaged with your brand over a set period of time and capture the time each contact has spent engaging with your brand. You can calculate an average time spent, over a set period of time, for members that are considered either an executive in the account or at a lower level of responsibility.

It’s important to account for the fact that, based on the size of the target company, the same Job Titles likely to be part of a Buyer Group might have different levels of decision making responsibility. The level of decision-making responsibility should be quantified using a weighted factor that influences the scoring algorithm. Interactions between prospects and your sales can be used to verify your assumptions regarding the composition of Buyer Groups.

There are also previously untapped sources of intent that can be mined and used as input to the account score. For example, call analytics is an excellent way to evaluate intent during any phone conversation conducted with a member of a Buyer Group. And keep in mind that any Buyer Group Score is a snapshot in time. So use this score to optimize marketing decisions that move accounts, over time, from a relatively low score to a higher one.

Buyer Group Engagement Detail

Intent assessment might include the type of content accessed, number of page views, and length of time spent on each page. Is this time increasing or decreasing and how far back in time (or how recent) was the last touch point you logged with that contact? Which personas should you speak to in order to increase the likelihood of more engagement and, eventually, a purchase?

Since we are now dealing with a “collection of leads” instead of just one, determine how many individuals within a Buyer Group need to engage before the entire Buyer Group can be considered engaged. Decide if your nurturing campaign should target all members of the Buyer Group or only those members who have engaged to that point in time? The type of content matters too, because you want the key people (based on their level of responsibility) to access your most influential bottom-of-funnel content.

In B2B, a larger deal size usually means a longer sales cycle and, with a longer sales cycle, comes the need for metrics to understand what’s going on as it progresses. By tracking (through MQA) how the right contacts at an account engage with your brand, instead of tracking just anyone (through MQL), marketers have a better way of understanding how their nurturing efforts are bearing fruit.

This article was originally published on InsideUp.com.

Great fintech content is essential to any fintech inbound campaign. You need content assets that are high-quality, value-adding pieces to attract quality leads. But lead generation shouldn’t necessarily be the only goal of your content marketing.

In a recent blog post, I talked about the erosion of trust within the finserv and fintech spaces. That erosion, along with a lack of clarity and the complex nature of many fintech businesses, can cause hiccups throughout the customer lifecycle beyond acquisition. This is where solid fintech content can step in and save the day, when done well.

The point here is that fintech marketers need to consider how content impacts people at every stage in the game – from unqualified leads to qualified leads to sales-qualified leads to customers to former customers.

One of the most overlooked areas for content is retention. Instead, retention’s best friend acquisition gets all the attention. This makes sense. For many fintech startups in the growth stage (and well-established businesses— hell, all businesses), acquisition/sales is the name of the game. But it’s important not to overlook the retention aspect.

Content marketing for growth and scaling does not have to be rocket science. Finding a way to generate buzz around an exciting new product is fairly straightforward. Here’s the thing – that same buzz can be used to keep current customers excited and engaged with the product and brand.

So what’s the next step in creating fintech content for retention? Take an inventory.

Content Auditing 101: How to Create and Analyze a Dashboard for Content Data

The best place to start in creating content for retention is by taking stock of your current content assets. Completing a content audit can provide the 360-degree view you need to take your content marketing to the next level. Best practice is to do a content audit every 6 months or so, depending on how frequently you’re making updates to your site and publishing new content.

There’s no separate content audit to identify where you can improve your retention-specific content. It’s easiest (and most beneficial) to just run a full content audit on your site and take notes on all areas for improvement. In the process, you’ll also be able to magnify gaps and optimization opportunities within your retention content.

Completing a content audit can be as simple or complex as you choose to make it. For the sake of this article, we’ve shaved it down to the essential steps to streamline the process. You can add in pretty much anything you deem relevant, but what we’ve outlined below is a solid foundation for identifying strengths as well as key areas for improvement.

List Content

Run a Screaming Frog crawl (free up to 500 URLs) of all indexable content and export the “Internal All” file. In combination with a tool like URL profiler (paid/free trial), this should provide a solid base to your content audit. You can get expanded instructions on the best way to do this here.

Integrate Important Metrics

Add in any additional metrics. URL profiler offers a lot of options for appending data, but ultimately, it’s up to you as to what you find important for proper analysis and decision-making. Consider the following:

• Publish Date
• Author
• Conversions
• Organic Traffic
• Time on site for URLs
• # of Social Shares
• General Topic
• Type of Content (web page, blog post, product page, landing page, infographic, etc)

Map Content to Funnel and Audience

Get a little more granular by adding in columns titled “Persona/Audience” and “Funnel Stage”. Filling in these columns for each content row will be a manual process, but it can be helpful to get a more comprehensive view of the content you have and what role it plays.

Make The Dashboard Actionable

This can be as simple as organizing all the information you collected in steps 1 & 2 and adding a few more columns. One of those columns should be “Action” and another should be “Notes” or “Instructions”. Add filters to make it easy to sort.

Analyze & Add Insights

You now have all the information regarding your content at your disposal. The next step is to walk through your dashboard and look for areas for improvement:

• Are there content gaps in your funnel? We’re concerned with retention/satisfaction, so be sure to mark where there are gaps here.
• Is some content too thin? Mark these pieces as “Improve” in the Action column and make a note to flesh out/update/redefine.
• Have you written about one topic too much (or not enough)? Even things out and see where you can transform existing but repetitive pieces of content into something more valuable.
• Are you only catering to one audience (or no audience at all)? Be sure you’re reaching all parties you intend to with your content. Perhaps you have products/services/memberships for both B2B and B2C. Are you producing enough content for both? Take note where there are gaps and see where small improvements/adjustments to existing pieces can re-frame in an appropriate way for your target audience.

The steps above can help drive your overall content marketing strategy and can be expounded upon to infinity and beyond. Let’s snap back into retention-mode for now, though, since that’s our focus here.

Chances are, the content audit above identified some weaknesses in your retention-stage content. Perhaps you don’t have any, you don’t have enough, or the retention content you have isn’t resonating with people. The good news is that you’ve identified the gaps. Next, you’ll want to start brainstorming a content plan that helps close those gaps. Start with a simple list of topics on which you can blog about, then expand from there to include social media promotion, email drip sequences, videos, and more. If you’re at a loss for where to begin, keep reading.

Creating Retention Stage Fintech Content – Be Service-Oriented

So how do you help current customers/clients get jazzed up about something they’ve already signed up for? The key with retention stage content is to be service-oriented and customer centric. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself what you would need to make your experience that much better. Then you will have scratched the surface in terms of using content to improve the experience of and retain customers. Other ideas include:

Be helpful

This is particularly important if you have a complex product or service. Help people get the most out of it. Are there shortcuts, tips, and tricks or other product/service features you can highlight? Customers find these things especially useful right after they sign on, so considering using an email drip sequence to nurture new customers with need-to-know information.

Be interesting

Never underestimate the power of being interesting. Perhaps you have an exciting backstory as to how your service or product was developed. Or maybe your path from concept to launch is hilarious. Share this with your customers. It personalizes your brand and helps prospects and customers alike relate to what you’re doing. This sort of information can call many different places home: A linkable blurb on the home page, the About Us page, the Blog, or even an email drip sequence.

Be Supportive

Let your customers know how to get in touch with you if they need help, have questions or concerns, or need to cancel/request a refund. Great customer service is the touchstone of excellent retention numbers. Clearly communicate (on your website, invoices, receipts, and billing descriptors) how customers can reach you. When they do, be sure you have well-trained and adequate staff prepared to answer questions and take requests. You might be wondering what this has to do with content, and the answer is a lot. You should frequently audit customer emails to look for common threads in questions or concerns and whip those into FAQs pages, “How To” email, blogs, and other pieces of content that streamline the customer experience.

Get creative. The goal here is to create brand advocates as it opens up new opportunities. There may be room to upsell or cross-sell existing customers, and there is always a chance to turn customers into influential brand evangelists. The best marketing is when one of your happy customers tells friends, family, and acquaintances of their positive experience with your business. Producing the right kind of content will streamline the process of taking people from prospects to powerful brand advocates.

The retention stage shouldn’t be underestimated for fintech businesses — or fintech content. With fast-moving technology in a competitive space that requires a lot of user education, having brand advocates and evangelists can make or break growth. Additionally, the feedback received from users, customers and clients can be extraordinarily useful in enhancing your product or service.

The original post on creating Fintech Content for Retention appeared on the Content Rewired blog.

Your sales funnel – also known as your revenue funnel or sales process – leads prospective customers through their buying journey.

A well designed and properly executed sales funnel has four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. And it helps a business to convert their leads into paying customers.

It’s important – and not easy – to build a great funnel. One that helps you identify the right buyer early, and makes buying your product a happy experience.

If you’re about to create your first sales funnel, this post will help you understand the different steps of building a sales funnel.

Image courtesy: Shane Barker

How to build the best sales funnel

#1. Know Your Target Audience

You need to understand your target audience before you begin to create your sales funnel. Base your research on the following points:

• The problems they’re seeking solutions for
• The social media channels they use
• Things that interest them the most
• Things they find the most annoying about online shopping

#2. Build Your Buyer Personas

You can build different buyer personas targeting your marketing campaigns for the various segments of your customers. You can derive different and accurate buyer personas from research based on these questions:

• Why will they buy your product?
• What are the things that influence them into buying a product?
• How are they going to use the product after purchasing it?

#3. Plan on Generating Traffic

If people are not aware of the products you sell, there will be no sale. Therefore, you need to adopt different lead generation strategies to drive users to your website. You can adopt the following measures for this purpose:

• PPC campaigns
• SEO
• Landing page optimization
• Influencer marketing
• Guest posting
• Social media marketing

#4. Plan on Engaging Your Audience

Your lead generation efforts won’t be enough on their own if you fail to engage your audience. They need to learn about your product and services, and this goal can be achieved with the help of the following strategies:

• Creating engaging and high-quality blogs
• Creating interesting videos
• Involving influencers and requesting that they review and offer tutorials of your products
• Promoting your content on social media platforms
• Conducting email marketing campaigns to promote your latest blog posts and sending newsletters

#5. Convert Your Leads

Lead conversion is the final stage of the process during which the visitors convert into paying customers. Ensure that completing a purchase does not take too long by:

• Minimizing the number of form fields
• Lesser number of steps for completing a purchase
• One-click options for sign-in and sign up

If you want to learn more about creating sales funnels, have a look at the gifographic above, which explains it in more detail.

As a content marketing agency, it’s safe to say that we’d never write a blog that slams our industry or profession. We believe content marketing to be a powerful tool, and that’s why we do what we do. However, while we at Southerly are totally convinced, we understand that other people may not yet be content marketing converts.

We need statistics, facts, and research to support what we already know.

There are numerous studies that highlight the genuine value of content marketing

Well, luckily for you – and us – there are numerous studies that highlight the genuine value of content marketing. When done properly, it has the ability to transform a business, and can go a long way to ensuring you stand out when compared to your competitors. And that’s always a good thing, right?

We think so.

1. Traffic

Aberdeen Group, a technology and services company, recently released a report concluding that companies who become authorities based on their content output receive 7.8 times more traffic than those who don’t.

Would you rather be seen as the thought leader, or the impersonator?

This is a quite staggering statistic, but it makes perfect sense. For those companies that take the time to create unique content, and refrain from just producing work that echoes something that has been written elsewhere, there are significant long-term benefits to be had. Would you rather be seen as the thought leader, or the impersonator?

2. Social

What about social media marketing? Are you doing everything you can do to harness the power of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? If not, then perhaps it’s time to give those channels a bit more attention. Social Media Examiner spoke to over 3,700 marketers to discover how influential social media can be, and found that 81% of those questioned said increased traffic occurred ‘with as little as six hours per week invested in social media marketing’. That’s a little over an hour of work each day, which really isn’t much.

3. Blog

If you’re serious about being creative and giving your clients added value, then make sure that attitude is represented in absolutely everything you do. If you’re producing a blog – which you really should be – spend time seeking out topics or issues that have yet to be covered, and then present your content in a way that is at once up-to-date, necessary, and reflects your brand and tone of voice.

Blogging works; I can personally vouch for that. We’ve won two blog awards in the last two years, and on the back of those triumphs we’ve taken on new business and managed to make incredibly valuable contacts and industry friends. It’s also the art of blogging that managed to get you, dear reader, onto this page, so it’s clearly something that can attract audiences.

According to research by Hubspot, B2C companies that blog 11 or more times each month get four times as many leads as those that blog around once a week. If that’s not an incentive to get blogging, we don’t know what is.

4. A personal touch

Did you know that around 71% of consumers say they prefer personalised content? Or that 44% of people are willing to give up personal information so as to get more personalised advertising? Well, according to research by Adlucent, that’s the case.

And the value of the personal touch has been noted by other respected researchers. Demand Metric research has found that 78% of consumers perceive a relationship between themselves and a company that uses custom content. That’s almost four in every five people. Demand Metric also states that 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content, while 70% feel closer to a company as a direct result of content marketing.

People want to read content that appeals directly to them. If you know exactly who you’d like to target, and understand how those people can be reached, you’re a long way down the road to content marketing success.

People want to read content that appeals directly to them

If you can’t yet comprehensively identify your audience, you probably need a more targeted approach. If that’s the case, try designing personas. It’s a marketing strategy we endorse, because we know it works.

5. Leads

If you’re producing content, then you want it to create leads that you can then exploit. And, according to Curata, that’s exactly what’s likely to happen if you’re writing long-form pieces.

Long-form content – generally considered to be posts that are at least 800 words in length – give the writer more room with which to bulk out their opinion, and gives the reader a more complete picture of what is being discussed. It should go without saying that when content is educational and in-depth, it’s more valuable.

It should go without saying that when content is educational and in-depth, it’s more valuable.

If a potential consumer can see that you are an expert in your field, and are convinced that you fully understand the state of the industry, they’ll trust you. And that trust can very often result in a fruitful business relationship.

6. Costs

It’s all well and good producing long-form content in a bid to enhance your online visibility and increase your business’ reputation, but what’s it going to cost you? For small companies especially, keeping costs to a minimum is absolutely essential.

Luckily, content marketing is an approach that won’t break the bank. In fact, research published by Demand Metric has found that content marketing costs approximately 62% less than traditional marketing. The same study also found that per dollar spent, content marketing generates around three times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Content marketing is an approach that won’t break the bank

There aren’t many things in this world that can make you money while also saving you money, but when done right, content marketing certainly falls into that category.

7. Sales

For many businesses, this is what it all comes down to. If the work you’re doing isn’t generating sales, then either it’s time to up your game, or it’s time to try something else. Well, according to a Demand Gen Report study, content marketing could be just what you need to boost sales and increase the number of customers attracted to your business.

If the work you’re doing isn’t generating sales, then either it’s time to up your game, or it’s time to try something else

The company’s report claims that more than half (51%) of B2B buyers rely on content to research buying decisions, while 47% of people say they view between three and five pieces of content prior to communicating with a sales representative.

Content marketing can not only show people that you are a trusted expert, but it can encourage them to commit to a purchase. If you are giving the customer added value, while at the same time reassuring them that the procurement of a product will benefit them, then your content can be regarded as a crucial sales tool.

Most buzzwords normally induce sighs and eye-rolling, but that’s no longer the case when people talk about “engagement.” Once a meaningless word with no clear definition, it’s more recently become an important part of the discussion around what business-to-business clients want and how sellers interact with them.

Jon Miller, CEO and co-founder of Engagio, will tell you it’s simply “the time a buyer or customer spends with you, and that more time spent together leads to a stronger and more meaningful the relationship.”

But there’s an extra step nowadays: that engagement has to be extremely relevant to the potential customer’s needs and wants. Otherwise, it’s useless.

This, according to Miller, is where “Account Based Marketing” (otherwise known as “ABM”) comes in.

The concept simply means that sales and marketing collaborate on reaching very specific customers instead of throwing out a net and taking any lead that swims by. Miller likens it to “fishing with a spear” as opposed to a net.

“In Account Based Marketing, engagement is the ultimate goal, the output of what we do, the thing that every sales and marketing team is trying to achieve,” he says. Miller believes that companies nowadays need this targeted approach to deepen their customer relationships and grow revenue. It can also help them stand out from the competition in our inboxes and on our screens.

In order to use ABM to scale your business, companies need these three essential elements:

1. The entire company gets involved in a sale.

In account based selling, multiple branches across the entire company source a deal and close the account.

Think of this setup as you would a football team. Multiple people from one team (your company) have to interact with multiple people from another (the target account). Marketing orchestrates who does what throughout the process, and when:

• Executive Management provides the overall vision and, at some point, holds high-level talks with the potential customer.
• Marketing finds and researches each account and creates content specific to that customer.
• Frontline sales representatives kickstart the conversation.
• Members of the sales team create and show a demo of the product or service on the table.
• More senior salespeople negotiate and close the business.
• Customer Success onboards and trains accounts.

Depending on the size of your company, people may have very specific jobs or they might wear multiple hats, and that’s okay. What’s more important is making sure every single part of your brand works together to provide the same kind of attention to the same client or potential client.

2. Every interaction should be personalized and relevant.

To close more and bigger deals nowadays, you must provide the highest-quality interactions possible with potential customers. Remember, the Spam button is very easy to hit, so sending generic mass emails via an automation tool has zero value when it comes to reaching valuable accounts. In fact, automation can often hurt your chances of closing a deal, since it pretends to be personal. By definition, automation is not personal, and therefore not effective for building the kind of trust and rapport needed in a strong sales relationship.

Instead, Miller suggests using interactions that are personal, relevant, and timely. When you do this, you lower the natural skepticism most recipients have when they open a cold email. As the seller, you must demonstrate an understanding of that person’s world. This could include helpful advice and best practices, offering to talk about current pain points, examining how similar companies attack the same problem, and offering “expert” views of a given trend or industry.

Finding this information and getting it to the right people is considerably easier when everyone in the company knows exactly what their job is, when to do it, and how it fits into the overall deal.

3. Understand when and when not to use automation.

Automated tools now play a major role in sales and marketing. But as far as Miller is concerned, sales spam is still spam, and these tools mostly just automate terrible emails by the thousands and leave our inboxes crammed with junk.

To stand out from that barrage, all content and messaging needs to be grounded in human interaction. Instead of relying on automation to do the job, let the team work together to personalize every message with relevant details. (This is where marketing really gets to shine, since they’re the ones doing the research.) You might reference a hot trend in that company’s market or some recent funding or personnel moves. If you can highlight you and your company’s relationship to the recipient, even better.

That’s not to say automation is altogether useless. Miller says that Engagio uses a combination of personal touches and automation when working with different companies. He has labeled this “marketing orchestration.”

But remember, you can’t automate engagement, and you can’t create it simply by sending more unwanted sales emails. How much of it you use depends on your business and your chosen targets.