Rnordman

Deciding to sell your business is a big step. Whether you built it from the ground up or acquired it and grew it into something bigger, a business can feel like part of the family. Determining a fair valuation and then finding a qualified buyer who can make the financial investment, and possesses the business acumen to keep the business going, can be difficult. That’s where due diligence comes in.

When we talk about due diligence, it commonly refers to the buyer’s side of the transaction. Certainly, buyers need to ask the right questions to ensure finances are in order, infrastructure is up to standard, and inventory records are correct. However, sell-side due diligence is often overlooked, but equally important.

Why sell-side due diligence matters

A seller needs to determine if the buyer can afford the acquisition and if he or she has the experience to run the company. Many sellers, especially those who have built a business from scratch, want to know that the buyer shares their vision for the future of the company. Sellers also need to look internally at their business, its valuation, and its potential future under new leadership. Ultimately, successful sell-side due diligence can reduce risk and accelerate the time to close.

The key to a successful due diligence process is for both sides to be honest and cooperative with each other. The sale of a business is as much about emotions as it is about finances, so you can’t let tensions boil over. Here’s how to conduct thorough sell-side due diligence.

Ask the right questions

Sellers need to ask questions of the buyer and of themselves during the due diligence process. Here are a few of the big ones:

• What’s my valuation? You’ll probably work with a business broker or investment banker to answer this question, but it’s critically important. Randomly slapping a number on your business isn’t going to work. You need to look carefully at your revenue, capital expenditure, and other financials to determine a fair business valuation that will withstand the buyer’s due diligence process.

• Why am I selling? This question will pop-up multiple times during the sales process, but you need a good answer, both for yourself and your buyer. Maybe you’re retiring or maybe you think you’ve taken the business as far as you can and a new leader can take it to the next level. Buyers won’t want to hear that you’re tired of arguing with employees and investors over the future of the company or that you no longer think your business is competitive in the market.

• Can the business run successfully without me? If you’re looking for a total exit, buyers won’t want to find that your expertise and leadership is critical to the future of the company. You need to prove that new leadership can find success in the business you’ve built.

• Can the buyer finance the acquisition? Once you’ve tentatively agreed to a sale, you need to ensure the prospective buyer can afford the acquisition. Lots of deals have crumbled because the buyer simply didn’t have the cash or couldn’t obtain the financing. If you’re comfortable with seller financing, that’s one option, but it’s important to make sure the buyer can afford the payments.

• What’s the buyer’s vision for the future? Some sellers will have little interest in asking this question. In some cases, you’ll simply want to sell and be on your way. In other cases, sharing a vision for the future of the business will be the most significant question you ask. You might even accept a lower offer based on the answer. If it’s important to you, have an open and honest discussion with prospective buyers about what their plans are for the future of your business.

This list is a great starting point for a successful sell-side due diligence process. In most cases, you’ll want a team in place that can help you ask and answer these types of questions. At the very least that team will include an attorney and a business broker, but depending on the size of your business it might include accountants and investment bankers. Being prepared and knowing who you need on your selling team will help ensure the best outcome for the sale of your business.

The post How To Generate MASSIVE Leads by Writing Blog Posts! appeared first on Sales Hacker.

In a recent article for dmnews.com, Mike Colombo, the CMO of Cloudwords, argued that many CMOs aren’t ready for a seat at the C-suite table. According to Mr. Colombo, many CMOs aren’t winning a seat at the “grown-up” table because they’re still relying on performance metrics that are inconsequential to company leaders.

Recent research has confirmed that many marketers aren’t doing a great job of communicating the value that marketing contributes to the business. In the 2017 Marketing Performance Management (MPM) Benchmark Study by VisionEdge Marketing, Hive9, and Valid USA, only 23% of survey respondents said their CEO would give marketing a grade of “A” (90 or more on a 100-point scale) on its ability to measure and demonstrate its value and contribution to the business.

A disconnect between marketing and the rest of the C-suite can exist if CMOs don’t clearly communicate the relationship between marketing programs and the business outcomes that matter to other senior executives. Most marketing leaders tend to focus on the programs they’re running and the direct results of those programs (response rates, downloads, pageviews, etc.). The problem arises when these direct program results aren’t linked to the high-level objectives that C-level executives really care about. In other words, the problem occurs when marketing leaders fail to “connect the dots.”

The ultimate mission of marketing is to drive revenue growth. Virtually all companies have a revenue growth goal as one of their top-line strategic business objectives. Many companies also have specific goals for new customer acquisition, customer retention and growth, and market share, but these objectives are all directly related to revenue growth. Therefore, every marketing activity is (or should be) designed to generate (or contribute to the production of) revenue.

To effectively communicate the connection between marketing activities and revenue, marketing leaders must develop a revenue growth strategy, which, at its most basic level, is a hypothesis that describes how the company will grow revenue. A revenue growth strategy is essentially a big if-then statement that says, “If we execute these specific marketing programs, then we will meet our revenue growth objectives.”

However, many marketing activities don’t directly produce revenue. Some marketing activities are several steps removed from the realization of revenue, but they are essential components of the revenue generation process. Therefore, a revenue growth strategy is a set of if-then statements, each of which describes a specific marketing activity and the anticipated results of that activity. These individual if-then statements are then combined to create chains of cause-and-effect relationships that connect individual marketing activities to the realization of revenue.

A simplified version of one of these cause-and-effect chains might look something like this:

• If we publish a blog that offers readers access to compelling content resources, then more potential buyers will identify themselves and consume our content.
• If more potential buyers identify themselves and consume our content, then we will generate more qualified sales leads.
• If we generate more qualified sales leads, then we will create more legitimate sales opportunities.
• If we increase the number of legitimate sales opportunities, then we will close more sales, and that will help us reach our revenue growth objectives.

These cause-and-effect chains not only make the logic of a company’s revenue growth strategy clear, they can also enable marketers to develop a set of marketing performance metrics that will be meaningful to company leaders.

The primary objective of the VisionEdge research mentioned above was to identify the attributes and practices of marketing organizations that excel at measuring and demonstrating marketing’s value and contribution to the business. VisionEdge and its research partners found that best-in-class marketing organizations have marketing performance management systems that include five key components, one of which is metrics chains. The study defines a metrics chain as a sequence of metrics that links marketing activities to strategic business outcomes.

The linked cause-and-effect relationships that form the basis of your revenue growth strategy also dictate what metrics should be included in your metrics chains. And, the combination of a sound revenue growth strategy and related metrics chains will enable marketers to clearly demonstrate the value of marketing to the C-suite.

Note: You can obtain a copy of the 2017 Marketing Performance Management (MPM) Benchmark Study report from VisionEdge Marketing.

By Nathaniel Popper

Hackers have discovered that one of the most central elements of online security — the mobile phone number — is also one of the easiest to steal.

In a growing number of online attacks, hackers have been calling up Verizon, T-Mobile U.S., Sprint and AT&T and asking them to transfer control of a victim’s phone number to a device under the control of the hackers.

Once they get control of the phone number, they can reset the passwords on every account that uses the phone number as a security backup — as services like Google, Twitter and Facebook suggest.

“My iPad restarted, my phone restarted and my computer restarted, and that’s when I got the cold sweat and was like, ‘OK, this is really serious,'” said Chris Burniske, a virtual currency investor who lost control of his phone number late last year.

A wide array of people have complained about being successfully targeted by this sort of attack, including a Black Lives Matter activist and the chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. The commission’s own data shows that the number of phone hijackings has been rising. In January 2013, there were 1,038 such incidents reported; by January 2016, that number had increased to 2,658.

But a particularly concentrated wave of attacks has hit those with the most obviously valuable online accounts: virtual currency fanatics like Burniske.

Within minutes of getting control of Burniske’s phone, his attackers had changed the password on his virtual currency wallet and drained the contents — some US$150,000 at today’s values.

Most victims of these attacks in the virtual currency community have not wanted to acknowledge it publicly for fear of provoking their adversaries. But in interviews, dozens of prominent people in the industry acknowledged that they had been victimized in recent months.

“Everybody I know in the cryptocurrency space has gotten their phone number stolen,” said Joby Weeks, a bitcoin entrepreneur.

Weeks lost his phone number and about $1 million worth of virtual currency late last year, despite having asked his mobile phone provider for additional security after his wife and parents lost control of their phone numbers.

The attackers appear to be focusing on anyone who talks on social media about owning virtual currencies or anyone who is known to invest in virtual currency companies, such as venture capitalists. And virtual currency transactions are designed to be irreversible.

Accounts with banks and brokerage firms and the like are not as vulnerable to these attacks because these institutions can usually reverse unintended or malicious transactions if they are caught within a few days.

But the attacks are exposing a vulnerability that could be exploited against almost anyone with valuable emails or other digital files — including politicians, activists and journalists.

Last year, hackers took over the Twitter account of DeRay Mckesson, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, by first getting his phone number.

In a number of cases involving digital money aficionados, the attackers have held email files for ransom — threatening to release naked pictures in one case, and details of a victim’s sexual fetishes in another.

The vulnerability of even sophisticated programmers and security experts to these attacks sets an unsettling precedent for when the assailants go after less technologically savvy victims. Security experts worry that these types of attacks will become more widespread if mobile phone operators do not make significant changes to their security procedures.

“It’s really highlighting the insecurity of using any kind of telephone-based security,” said Michael Perklin, chief information security officer at the virtual currency exchange ShapeShift, which has seen many of its employees and customers attacked.

Mobile phone carriers have said they are taking steps to head off the attacks by making it possible to add more complex personal identification numbers, or PINs, to accounts, among other steps.

But these measures have not been enough to stop the spread and success of the culprits.

After a first wave of phone porting attacks on the virtual currency community last winter, which was reported by Forbes, their frequency appears to have ticked up, Perklin and other security experts said.

In several recent cases, the hackers have commandeered phone numbers even when the victims knew they were under attack and alerted their cellphone provider.

Adam Pokornicky, a managing partner at Cryptochain Capital, asked Verizon to put extra security measures on his account after he learned that an attacker had called in 13 times trying to move his number to a new phone.

But just a day later, he said, the attacker persuaded a different Verizon agent to change Pokornicky’s number without requiring the new PIN.

A spokesman for Verizon, Richard Young, said that the company could not comment on specific cases, but that phone porting was not common.

“While we work diligently to ensure customer accounts remain secure, on occasion there are instances where automated processes or human performance falls short,” he said. “We strive to correct these issues quickly and look for additional ways to improve security.”

Perklin, who worked at a Canadian mobile phone operator before joining ShapeShift, said most phone companies would write down any additional security requests in the notes of a customer account.

But agents can generally act on their own, he said, regardless of what is in the notes, and can easily miss what is in the notes.

The vulnerability of phone numbers is the unintended consequence of a broad push in the security industry to institute a practice, known as two-factor authentication, that is supposed to help make accounts more secure.

Many email providers and financial firms require customers to tie their online accounts to phone numbers, to verify their identity. But this system also generally allows someone with the phone number to reset the passwords on these accounts without knowing the original passwords. A hacker just hits “forgot password?” and has a new code sent to the commandeered phone.

Pokornicky was online at the time his phone number was taken, and he watched as his assailants seized all his major online accounts within a few minutes.

“It felt like they were one step ahead of me the whole time,” he said.

The speed with which the attackers move has convinced people who are investigating the hacks that the attacks are generally run by groups of hackers working together.

Danny Yang, founder of the virtual currency security firm BlockSeer, said he had traced several attacks to internet addresses in the Philippines, though other attacks have been tracked to computers in Turkey and the United States.

Perklin and other people who have investigated recent hacks said the assailants generally succeeded by delivering sob stories about an emergency that required the phone number to be moved to a new device — and by trying multiple times until a gullible agent was found.

“These guys will sit and call 600 times before they get through and get an agent on the line that’s an idiot,” Weeks said.

Coinbase, one of the most widely used bitcoin wallets, has encouraged customers to disconnect their mobile phones from their Coinbase accounts.

But some customers who have lost money have said the companies need to take more steps by doing things like delaying transfers from accounts on which the password was recently changed.

“Coinbase looks like a bank, stores millions of dollars like a bank, but you don’t realize how weak its default protections are until you are robbed of thousands of dollars in minutes,” said Cody Brown, a virtual reality developer who was hacked in May.

Brown wrote a widely circulated post about his experience, in which he lost around $8,000 worth of virtual currency from his Coinbase account, all as he sat online and watched, getting no response from the customer service at either Coinbase or Verizon.

A spokesman for Coinbase said the company “has invested significant resources to build internal tools to help protect our customers against hackers and account takeovers, including compromise through phone porting.”

The irreversibility of bitcoin transactions has often been lauded as one of the most important qualities of virtual currency because it makes it harder for banks and governments to intervene in transactions.

But Pokornicky said the virtual currency industry needed to alert new users to the added risk that comes with the new features of the technology.

“It’s powerful to be able to control your money and move things without any permission,” he said. “But that privilege requires a clear understanding of the downside.”

While buying something new can be exciting, it can also be scary. And as salespeople, we can get so caught up in the excitement part, we forget just how scared our prospects can be. And that’s dangerous for us. Because if a prospect is too scared, they won’t buy. What exactly are buyers afraid of? […]

We need to make assumptions in life; we would never move forward without them.  However, we need to periodically check, or even change, them because unquestioned assumptions can appear as facts. Proof of this is found in the unlikeliest of places:  the tomato, a plant once so feared people called it the “poison apple.”

Those living in the 1700s frequently became sick after eating tomatoes. Many died. People believed that it was so dangerous that it was classified in a family of plant species carrying the name “deadly nightshade.”

Yet, the tomato they feared was identical to the one we enjoy today. So, why were people terrified of tomatoes? The answer lies in their assumptions.

Many Europeans at the time ate from plates made of pewter, an alloy high in lead. The acidity in tomatoes is strong enough to leach this lead from the surface. For 200 years, they assumed the tomato was to blame.

Even the most faulty assumptions can persist for centuries.

The story of the tomato serves as a reminder of how assumptions can mislead and cause bad decision making — two big threats for people in sales. Pursuing an opportunity or growing an account has a lot to do with making frequent strategic and tactical decisions. If those pursuit decisions are based on faulty information — due to assumptions versus facts — the path chosen can lead to loss or no decision.

As sellers prepare for meetings with buyers, they need to make assumptions. But, after that, they need to seek to clarify, correct, and change their assumptions through the pursuit of facts.  Facts can be the reality of what is happening in a buyer’s organization, as well as what a buyer perceives to be true.  Both are important to know to ensure that a seller’s assumptions are corrected or validated.

Sellers can do this by digging deeper and re-examining their long-held assumptions.  The process begins by acknowledging our tendency to cling too firmly to the first bit of information we encounter — a phenomenon known as anchoring. We are prone to this cognitive bias because moving beyond assumptions is difficult. It requires the work of going deeper to reveal the facts. Effective sellers do this by asking more questions and sharing ideas to deepen a dialogue.

This concept of distilling facts through questioning is the foundation of a consultative selling approach that widens the purview of both parties. Without an accurate diagnosis of the problem, sellers can never form their solution positioning strategy.

However, questioning alone is not enough. The strongest sellers leverage better questions by adhering to a few key techniques:

Move Away from Obvious Questions

Avoid the questions that simple, preliminary research will answer.  Instead, ask questions with range and depth. This approach is intimidating because deeper questions may reveal business challenges that the seller is unequipped to solve. Despite this, the answers to these questions almost always reveal at least one “in” for the seller. Additionally, incisive questions illustrate the seller’s customer-focused approach that is lacking in today’s rushed world.

Leading Questions Kill 

Effective sellers don’t design questions with the intent to elicit a specific response. Instead, they ask questions that will uncover hidden truths about the business need at hand. Leading questions appear manipulative. Customers feel that they’re being pushed into a corner. Have the confidence that your product will connect to at least some of the answers.

Aim for Quality — Not Quantity — with Your Questions

The customer’s time is limited. Patience runs thin in a world of instant gratification. Therefore, sellers today need to cull their list of questions. Doing so means allowing room for drill-down questions. These are the questions that ask why in response to the customer’s last answer. This approach is critical because, often, the first few responses only offer surface-level detail. The connection between the product and the solution is hiding in the drill-down questions. This strategy takes time. However, by narrowing the focus, it ultimately saves time.

Objections Can Lead to Opportunities

Sellers face immense pressure daily. Quotas loom large. As a result, too many sellers respond to a customer’s objection by attempting to justify. However, strong sellers take the opportunity to understand why the customer has the concern. This kind of question reveals the underlying hesitation. Many times, this information is useful because it guides the seller to clarify a characteristic of the solution or capability unknown to the customer.

Connect the Dots

Now more than ever, selling means facing many decision makers. In fact, a Harvard Business Review study revealed that an average of 5.4 people are involved in every purchasing decision. Sellers must take this constellation of data to build a dimensional, composite picture of the business needs. Navigating more stakeholders might appear intimidating. However, the underlying truth is that it’s an advantage. With more customers at the table, the seller can benefit from a larger cache of information.

These practices effectively uproot assumptions. The result:  sellers abandon long-held misunderstandings that would otherwise lead their efforts astray. The path to the sale is in the customer’s responses. Listen carefully.

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Learn more about how to get to the facts that will help you make the sale. Download our White Paper: Elevate Your Consultative Selling Approach to Compete Today to learn more.

The post Facts, Assumptions and 200 Years of the Poison Apple appeared first on Richardson Sales Training & Enablement Blog.

The INSIDER Summary:

• Popular sites and apps like KAYAK and Hopper can save you a ton of money on flights.
• To find the best deals available, you should also check out some lesser-known tools.
• ITA Matrix is a simple but powerful search engine, The Flight Deal curates the best deals available, and Skiplagged helps you find loopholes in airline pricing.
• In addition, Scott's Cheap Flights sends you a newsletter of the best international deals, curated by a travel expert.

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These days, you can travel the world for a lot less than you may think. After all, it's easier than ever to find great deals on everything from luxury hotel rooms to international flights.

By now, you probably know how to set up price alerts on KAYAK, or find cheap airline fares via Hopper, but there are also some lesser-known sites that can help you save a ton of money on flights.

In addition to the three best websites you should use to find cheap flights, here are three under-the-radar tools that you should take advantage of:

First, ITA Matrix is a simple but powerful search engine that helps you find the cheapest flights.

The basics: At first glance, ITA Matrix is kind of underwhelming, but what the site lacks in flash, it makes up for in efficiency. Developed by a group of MIT computer scientists and acquired by Google in 2010, ITA Matrix is the same software that powers travel search engines like KAYAK and Google Flights.

To search for flights, just enter your origin, destination, and desired length of stay. Also, make sure you select "See calendar of lowest fares" instead of "Search exact dates," so you can easily see and compare itineraries. For example, if you have some wiggle room in your travel dates, you might be able to save a ton of money just by leaving on a Wednesday instead of a Friday.

When you find a price you like, just click on it, and you'll be given detailed information that you can use to book the flight via the airline, a travel agent, or another booking service.

Helpful tips: If you have some time to spare, and you're dedicated to finding the cheapest flight possible, you should try playing around with ITA Matrix's advanced routing and extension codes. These codes help you narrow down your search and make it easy to find cheap but complex itineraries.

To use these codes, click "Advanced controls" and then click the blue question mark icon. A yellow glossary will pop up that shows you examples of routing and extension codes you can use to filter your search. For example, if you type in X: NYC, your search will only show you flights with a connection point in New York City.

In addition, since booking multiple one-way flights can be cheaper than booking a round-trip ticket, don't forget to try ITA Matrix's multi-city search option. Just click the tab that says "Multi-city" at the top of the page, and enter your travel details.

Second, The Flight Deal is a curated collection of the best deals currently available.

The basics: The Flight Deal's team only publishes fares that are $0.06 per mile or less, which means "a nonstop round-trip from New York to Barcelona should never be more than $425." Just browse through the site and click on a deal when you find one you're interested in. In addition to details about fare availability, you'll also see detailed instructions for how to find the flight on ITA Matrix.

Helpful tip: The Flight Deal also specializes in finding mistake fares, or price glitches, that you can book for a short time before airlines fix the error. Perfect for adventurous travelers, these deals let you see the world and take spontaneous trips for a lot less. Just make sure you follow The Flight Deal on Facebook and Twitter to hear about these mistake fares right away.

Finally, Skiplagged helps you take advantage of loopholes in airline pricing.

The basics: Typically, flights to popular destinations such as New York City are more expensive than those to less popular destinations such as Hoboken, New Jersey. A throwaway ticket — also known as "hidden city ticketing" — is a flight you book to an unpopular destination with a layover in a popular destination. Then, instead of getting back on the plane after your layover, you just stay in that city.

It's worth mentioning, however, that Skiplagged was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz in 2014 for helping customers find these loopholes in airline pricing. Although the case was thrown out, and exploiting hidden city ticketing isn't technically illegal, you may still face some consequences if you're caught abusing throwaway tickets by a major airline. While you'll avoid a fraud charge by coming clean, you may still "receive a written warning [...] be denied boarding, have [your] ticket confiscated," or be fined for the difference between what you paid and the "lowest applicable fare."

Helpful tip: Make sure you don't book round-trip flights in an attempt to exploit hidden city ticketing. When you skip a leg of a round-trip itinerary, the airline cancels the rest of your trip. You also won't be able to check any bags since they'll arrive in the throwaway city and not your desired destination. 

Bonus: Scott's Cheap Flights sends you a newsletter of the best international deals, curated by an expert at finding cheap flights. 

The basics: Scott Keyes is a travel expert who once booked a world trip that spanned 13 countries, all for free. His website, Scott's Cheap Flights, helps you find the cheapest international flights available. All you have to do is enter your email and let Keyes and his team do the heavy lifting. Once you receive the newsletter, you can use the information provided to find the same deals on Google Flights.

Helpful tip: While Scott's Cheap Flights is pretty straightforward, you can also upgrade to a premium newsletter for $39 a year. The subscription service gives you access to more deals and lets you customize your newsletter so you only see flights from select airports.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The biggest mistake everyone makes when eating steak, according to Andrew Zimmern

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Indian consumers are increasingly turning to Amazon, with 80% shopping with the US-based titan between February and March of this year, and only 65% shopping with market leader Flipkart, according to recent survey of 2,000 urban Indian consumers by Forrester reported by the Times of India.

Amazon overtook Flipkart in customer preference for the first time last year, when the number of consumers shopping at Amazon hit 75%, but stood at only 70% for the Indian e-commerce company.

Amazon Prime’s benefits are a huge value proposition to customers in India:

• Factors like fast and cheap shipping, low-cost products, and a good return policy are crucial factors to Indian consumers when choosing an online retailer. So, the perks of a Prime membership — such as free shipping and exclusive deals — resonate strongly with these customers.
• Moreover, Prime Video is especially valuable in India, where 90% of households have only one television and mobile devices are often used for individual entertainment. This makes the video streaming service in Amazon’s app a huge draw for customers and Prime's fee of 499 rupees ($7.79) per year a better deal.

Amazon is also closing the gap with Flipkart on mobile — a key indicator of overall engagement in India. Amazon accounted for 30.3% of mobile e-commerce users in March, up 46% year-over-year (YoY), and putting it on track to overtake Flipkart, at 30.7%, in the near term. Mobile devices are the primary source of internet for most Indians, and mobile accounts for 79% of all web traffic, meaning almost all customer engagement will take place on a mobile device.

As Flipkart struggles to drive growth, it is likely that Amazon will lead in market share soon.The US company has made immense progress in the country — the number of products ordered through Prime in India has grown 70% since it debuted a year ago, while unique purchasers increased 113% YoY in Q1 2017. Meanwhile, Prime Day in India was a huge success this year, as its 23,000 sellers saw their sales volumes double from 2016’s edition. Amazon is now poised to outgrow Flipkart in its own market, and with a $5 billion capital infusion promised to its efforts in India, it's likely to take the lead sooner rather than later.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are caught on the wrong side of the digital shift in retail, with many stuck in a dangerous cycle of falling foot traffic, declining comparable-store sales, and increasing store closures. Over 8,600 retail stores could close this year in the US — more than the previous two years combined, brokerage firm Credit Suisse said in a recent report. Meanwhile, e-commerce pureplays are riding the rise of digital commerce to success — none more so than Amazon, which accounted for 53% of online sales growth in the US last year, according to Slice Intelligence. 

In response, many brick-and-mortar retailers have started to use omnichannel fulfillment methods that leverage their store locations and in-store inventory in order to better compete in e-commerce. These omnichannel services, including ship-from-store and click-and-collect, can help retailers manage the transition to digital by:

• Increasing online sales by offering cheaper, more convenient delivery options for online shoppers.
• Limiting the growth of shipping costs as online sales volumes increase by leveraging store networks for delivery.
• Keeping stores relevant by turning them into fulfillment centers that pull customers in to pick up online orders.

However, few retailers have mastered these new fulfillment services. While these companies have spent years optimizing their supply chain and logistics networks for delivering goods to their stores or directly to customers’ doorsteps, most have yet to figure out how to profitably bring their store locations into the e-commerce delivery process.

Jonathan Camhi, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has laid out the case for why retailers must transition to an omnichannel fulfillment model, and the challenges complicating that transition for most companies. This omnichannel fulfillment report also detail the benefits and difficulties involved with specific omnichannel fulfillment services like click-and-collect, ship-to-store, and ship-from-store, providing examples of retailers that have experienced success and struggles with these methods. Lastly, it walks through the steps retailers need to take to optimize omnichannel fulfillment for lower costs and faster delivery times. 

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Brick-and-mortar retailers must cut delivery times and costs to meet online shoppers’ expectations of free and fast shipping.
• Omnichannel fulfillment services can help retailers achieve that goal while also keeping their stores relevant. 
• However, few retailers have mastered these services, which has led to increasing shipping costs eating into their profit margins.
• In order to optimize costs and realize the full benefits of these omnichannel services, retailers must undertake costly and time-consuming transformations of their logistics, inventory, and store systems and operations.

 In full, the report:

• Details the benefits of omnichannel services like click-and-collect and ship-from-store, including lowering delivery times and costs, and driving in-store traffic and sales.
• Provides examples of the successes and struggles various retailers have experienced with omnichannel delivery.
• Explains why retailers are having trouble managing costs with their omnichannel fulfillment efforts, which are eating into their profits.
• Lays out what steps retailers need to take to optimize costs for their omnichannel operations by placing inventory where it best meets customer demand.

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SiriusDecisions defines account-based models as representations of a strategic approach that align resources against a set of defined accounts and goals in a way that is relevant and valuable to those accounts and to sales/partners. But account-based selling requires organizational commitment that goes far beyond sales.

In our latest webinar, Mark Levinson, VP & Group Director of Sales & Channel Services of SiriusDecisions, and Mark Kopcha, CEO of Revegy, came together to discuss the necessity of account-based models to achieve customer centricity. We’ve outlined the top 5 account management best practices to get your team moving in the right direction.

Organizational Alignment

A successful strategy begins with effective collaboration and transparency:

• Account-based marketing ready to engage and support the initiative
• Executive sponsorship and engagement of supplier and partners lined up
• A clearly defined organizational structure, rules of engagement and governance mechanisms
• Overall agreement on goals, process metrics, reporting mechanism and sales management cadence
• Feedback mechanism-input into business planning process and product roadmap

Key Account Selection

Well-defined selection criteria that combine qualitative analysis with sales judgement and insight aid in the development of lasting relationships with strategic customers that will contribute to the growth of an organization. Examining multiple factors like an account’s current value, future potential and strategic fit enable companies to execute focused plans based on building a long-term partnership with a client.

Global Account Management

Technology enabled global relationship management is critical to long term sales success. Growing revenues in global accounts presents a unique set of challenges. To successfully grow your global account revenue, you must be able to collaborate across regions and geographies. To improve your GRM program, you should rely on visualization, organizational alignment, coordination and collaboration, and metrics designed to leverage customer intelligence. You cannot take the one-size-fits all, CRM approach to managing global accounts – GRM technology must be specifically designed to manage scale and complexity of global dispersed accounts.

Strategic Account Planning

Taking advantage of account planning to grow strategic accounts is crucial to sales success, performance and growth, allowing you to invest sales resources in the most effective ways. A strategically developed plan should contain these elements:

• Standard account planning template (e.g. methodology) in all regions
• Participation by the full account team, functional support areas (e.g. service and support, marketing, sales engineering, product specialists) and partners in the account plan development process
• Account plans and activities integrated into a SFA platform
• Quarterly account reviews included in management plan

Infrastructure

Businesses should rely on internal infrastructure for all aspects of operations to drive collaboration amongst large teams that support the account. Without an intuitive, consistent way to consume and communicate customer intelligence, companies continue to miss out on the opportunity to deliver value at every stage of the lifecycle. Driving consistency and having a centralized, single view of the customer is key to sales success.

 

If I had the ability to fix corporate sales training and in particular new employee sales training, I would (for the record, I’m not talking about 3rd party sales training, I’m referring to the corporate training companies give to their new sales hires and salespeople). Most new employee sales training misses the mark and sets sales teams off in the wrong direction which many of them never return.

The problem with most corporate sales training is it focuses on the product. Most training today starts with the organization’s value proposition and what the product can do. It starts with highlighting the problem or need the product solves, and then the remainder of the training revolves around how the product solves the problem, shoving every feature the product has down sales peoples throats.

Sales people are expected to understand the product inside and out, what each feature does, and why it matters, etc. If a customer has this problem, then this feature. If a prospect has this issue, then this feature, etc.  There is little expectation to understand the client and their world. The majority of the training is designed to teach salespeople about the product, and this is the wrong approach.

Companies need to stop teaching their sales team about their product and instead spend more time teaching about their customers business.

Lesson 3 – Learn their Business

If you want to get better at selling, devote more time understanding your customer’s business.  I don’t mean the entire business. I mean the functional, line of business where your product or solution makes a difference.  Spend as much time as possible trying to learn all you can about:

• Their current process and how they do what they do today, that your solution can affect
• What their KPI’s or success measures are
• Who their customers are (internal or external) and how they buy
• How they manage the processes they have
• What the common challenges are
• How they do their job and who reports to them
  • How do they carry out their work?
• What external forces or issues affect them

 

The objective to these questions and more is to understand what it’s like to be in their shoes. You want to see the world from their perspective. You need to know what they’re struggling with every day, where they put their time and most importantly, what do they view as the things that keep them from being successful.

To get better at sales means you must take the time to understand your customers business and their motivational drivers. You need to know their world inside and out.

The best way to do this is to make a list of the all the stakeholders you will sell to directly or indirectly and create a dossier or description of their job, including the things above. What processes do they manage, how do they measure success, what challenges do they struggle with often, etc.? Make the list thorough and complete. You want to know as much about them as possible.

If you don’t know, ask people. Ask someone in the role. Ask a customer, ask a LinkedIn contact, but ask someone. Read, take the time to read as many books, blog posts and more on the space, or role that you sell to. Don’t leave anything unturned. Become the expert.

Here’s a litmus test to determine if you’ve made it. Do you know enough about the role or space that you could be hired as a consultant? Could you provide business direction or guidance to one of your prospects based on the depth of knowledge you have?

That’s the level of depth I’m talking about here. You have to know so much about the space, the function, the role, the area of the business that you will be impacting that a prospect or customer would be willing to hire you as a consultant for your knowledge alone.

If you want to sell better, don’t waste another second on your product, dedicate as much of your time as possible focusing on HOW your target customer or prospect manages their business.  When you have a deep and comprehensive understanding of your buyer’s world, you will be unstoppable. Any product knowledge or insight will just fall into place. The product will make more sense, and you will see the world from an entirely different perspective.

Leading with an understanding of your buyer’s world is the key. It opens up entirely new possibilities and opportunities. Your product and the selling process will never look the same again.

Lesson #3 is crucial. Don’t skimp on this one. If you want to sell better, start mind-melding with your buyers, that’s where the win is.

 

The post How to Sell Better: Lesson 3 – Learn THEIR Business appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Customer experience is on the precipice of rapid change. Once viewed as a “nice-to-have”, a personalized, always-on customer experience is now considered a key differentiator and growth opportunity across all industries.

The technologies needed to create this personalized experience at scale, such as machine-learning and artificial intelligence, will advance rapidly in the next five years. Pair that with naturally shifting consumer behavior and expectations, and the way businesses and customers interact in 2022 looks very different than it does today.

Companies who act early can lay a foundation for change among executives and teammates, allocate time and resources toward areas that will grow in importance, and stand out from the competitive pack. Take a look at the customer experience strategies analysts predict will rise in importance in the coming years as inspiration to start planning.

1. Sensors and smart devices will collect and act on feedback

Our devices, be they phones, TVs, wearables, you name it, are getting “smarter.” Connected devices collect feedback on the world around them using sensors, then initiate or inform an action based on that data. The ever-growing mountains of data these devices collect provide businesses potentially unlimited ways to understand and influence customer behavior. It’s no surprise that customer interactions initiated by a connected device is expected to increase twentyfold by 2022.

There are numerous ways sensors can benefit both brands and customers. One of example of this is in shipping and logistics, where companies are using sensors to track and alert customers of the whereabouts of packages. Not only does this assure customers their package is en route, it also puts companies in the position to be proactive with support or a special offer if, say, a storm delays shipments or a package becomes damaged. This is just one of the many ways sensors will be used to enhance the customer experience in the future.

2. Chatbots will be your new teammates

Thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, questions that once only a human could answer can now be answered automatically by a chatbot or virtual customer assistant. These tools will only get smarter in time as they are re-built with machine-learning. In fact, by 2022, it’s expected that the answers chatbots, virtual customer assistants, and search tools surface will be 80 percent accurate.

Chatbots will take a load off of support agents’ shoulders, but the two will continue to work hand-in-hand on just over one-fifth of customer interactions. We’ll see more conversations starting with a chatbot, which is likely to categorize the type of issue and understand the problem, then a human agent will take over to use intuition or complex problem-solving to reach an answer. Ultimately chatbots are a win-win for customer experience; customers get help instantly, and customer support teams have more time and resources to grow the team or solve strategic problems.

3. Knowledge centers aren’t going anywhere

This year marks the first time that more customers will self-service than reach out to a human for a support. This will, in large part, be due to the rise of chatbots, but it’s important to note that our tried-and-true knowledge centers will continue to play a significant role in customer experience strategy (and power the brains of our new bot teammates).

Today as well as tomorrow, frequently asked questions pages, help centers, and other self-serve knowledge bases will be favored by customers and brands alike. Customers can get their questions answered accurately and on their watch, while support organizations have an ever-growing base of collective knowledge that gets smarter in time. Even when a customer chooses not to self-serve, their first interaction will likely be with a chatbot. And where does a chatbot get the answers to customer questions? That company’s knowledge base, of course. The information added to knowledge bases today will continue to find life whether it’s being accessed by a bot or a customer.

4. Chat and messaging are the new social

Millennials are notorious for ignoring phone calls and opting instead to send quick messages via WhatsApp, WeChat or one of the other six messaging apps among the ten most used apps around the world. These messages aren’t just between friends either. By 2019, more requests for customer support will come in through consumer messaging apps than social media.

Businesses who are on the other side of the screen ready to help will see happier customers for a few reasons. First, messaging apps offer customers an unrestricted communication option. Unlike SMS, messaging apps don’t incur charges, so customers can reach out without the worry that they will be charged for seeking help. Second, messaging apps give customers the option to reach out and solve their issue privately. Having this option decreases the likelihood of public complaints and lets customers exchange sensitive information away from the eyes of social onlookers. Any customer inquiry that comes in the form of the message can also be automatically answered by our new chatbot friends, freeing up agent time for other tasks.

This summer marks 50 years since the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State and its quick rise to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. The book was one of the rare instances where an economist was able to capture public imagination and focus debate on big-picture economic issues. We have only rarely seen its like since — although Thomas Piketty gave it a great go in 2014, with Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Galbraith’s book is worth revisiting, since its subject is back in the news. Like many people today, he was worried about unchecked corporate power. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, we can see his worries were largely wrong. And therein lies a lesson for economists and policy makers today.

Of course, you would be hard-pressed to find an economist today who has read the book, and you might even find some who have never heard of Galbraith. I’m not one of them. As an undergraduate in Australia, I was exposed to a nonstandard economic curriculum that introduced writers like Galbraith to me early. He had a crisp way of theorizing and took on issues that, let’s face it, seemed far more interesting than the standard textbook fare. I wanted to grow up to be like him. It took four years of graduate school to socialize me out of that aspiration. And so when I recalled this anniversary, I decided to crack open Galbraith’s most famous book with the intention of explaining just how wrong he got it.

What I found was not some laughable tome but a well-argued, if somewhat polemic, work. It was “big think” book, positing a grand theory, and while one could easily nitpick the evidence, that didn’t make it any less thought-provoking. Galbraith theorized that without governmental check, large corporations would end up controlling the U.S. economy and polity. That check never came, but neither did the outcome that Galbraith’s theory predicted. Yet his theory was so neatly laid out that I wondered why it had failed.

You actually don’t have to read The New Industrial State to understand its story. Galbraith observed, as others had done before him, that the 20th-century U.S. economy did not look like the economy before. For large swaths of economic activity, there was no dog-eat-dog competitive world that dominate Economics 101 textbooks both then and today. Instead, key industries were dominated by few very large firms — and sometimes even just one. And if you landed from outer space in 1967, those large firms looked like the planned bureaucracies on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Why were those firms so large? Galbraith’s answer was that they needed to be so because technology required large amounts of capital to be deployed — think your large auto assembly, oil refineries, and chemical plants.

What did that mean? First, the owner-manager firms were not possible. Instead, firm ownership was distributed and were divorced from firm managers who had the incentives and skills of bureaucrats, and so created bureaucracy. Second, none of these people liked risk. So, unlike the bold entrepreneur who invested with guile and accepted risk for the promise of a high return, our manager-bureaucrats poured their efforts into risk reduction. They shied away from bold moves with large upside and saw rigidity as a potential goal rather than a problem.

Third, because managers were not incentivized to maximize profits, they looked for easier ways to get enough return to cover their costs. That mostly involved finding new ways to ensure demand for existing products, rather than inventing new ones. For some firms, that meant cozying up to government for big contracts available in the postwar era. For others, that meant utilizing newfound tools in marketing and persuasion to create demand from consumers. For all of them, it meant being supportive of active Keynesian-style demand management by government that kept the economy ticking along.

The implication of all this was clear: The ordinary American’s say in the economy was being hijacked by modern marketing, and their say in the democracy was being supplanted by large corporate needs.

It is a good theory. To be sure, it is built on a few assumptions that could easily be disputed. But the theory itself holds together. Unlike much of modern economics, it’s wonderfully simple to understand, and has sweeping implications. And I am sure some will have read to this point and wonder whether it didn’t actually all come true. The answer is that it didn’t, and let me explain why.

First of all, it was supposed to be the large corporations of 1967 that continued to dominate. By market value, the top 10 corporations 50 years ago were AT&T, General Motors, Standard Oil, IBM, Texaco, DuPont, Sears, General Electric, Gulf Oil, and Kodak. Today, they are Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, Exxon Mobil, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. That is quite a change, even though AT&T and General Electric are still on the list. Suffice it to say, the dominant corporations of 1967 did not have quite the control over their destinies that Galbraith was convinced of. His theory predicted that the most valuable companies would be those with the most revenue to spend on large capital investments and workforces. That turned out not to be the case. The winners today aren’t Galbraithian.

Second, in terms of the entire corporate sector, in real terms (and adjusted for economic growth), the most valuable corporations today are no more valuable than their 1967 counterparts. We have not seen corporations grow in dominance as Galbraith predicted.

Thus the very foundation of The New Industrial State did not hold. But why? Here is my own conjecture: In 1967 the scale of the large, centrally planned U.S. corporation had largely reached its limit. After that point, growth required more than finding additional demand. Indeed, there is only so much you can get from modern marketing (although government demand may be another matter). Eventually, further growth became more expensive, cutting into corporate profits.

For Galbraith, that was not supposed to be a concern because the owners of capital were fragmented and powerless and would just have to put up with low returns. Somewhat ironically, Galbraith missed a big countereffect: Capital organized and aggregated itself. Today large funds (like BlackRock and Vanguard) dominate the stock market. Private equity firms bought up common stock and intervened in management (one of those being Berkshire Hathaway, now on the top 10 valuable companies list). The effect of that was to break up the bureaucracy through outsourcing (facilitated by globalization). Capital requirements were managed. Sales growth stalled. In other words, Big Capital became a counterweight to Big Corporate. That Galbraith missed this is somewhat ironic because it was perfectly consistent with his worldview as espoused in an earlier book: American Capitalism. That book described how big groups of large firms and large unions managed the economy. It would not have taken much of a leap to see the rise of Big Capital.

One of the reasons Big Capital emerged was competition. As it turned out, technology that supposedly fueled the large corporation also fueled competitors. The competition came from outside the U.S. — first, notably, Japan, and now many others. It also came from new technologies, most recently the internet.

The New Industrial State as laid out by Galbraith was disrupted. But what we have in its place isn’t exactly anti-Galbraithian. For starters, the companies that do require large capital investments seem to still have quite a close relationship with government. Consider Wisconsin’s deals with Foxconn to underwrite its investment for perhaps two decades in the hope of local job creation. If Galbraith was writing today, that would be a prominent chapter in any updated edition.

Second, in 1967 future Nobel laureate Robert Solow (the economist’s economist — both then and now) savaged Galbraith on his underlying assumptions that consumer demand could be easily created through advertising. But two companies in the top 10 today (Google and Facebook) earn virtually all their revenues through advertising. Economists can argue that all this advertising is zero-sum, and not adding much to the economy, but the fact that so many businesses continue spending money on it should cause some doubt.

Finally, the big tech companies are Galbraithian in their way. Contrary to Galbraith, they are able to create large amounts of profit off very little capital expenditure. Yet each and every one of them has been berated for not acting in the interests of shareholders and instead pursuing the personal ambitions of their founders. The formula for a cozy and autonomous corporate life turned out to be not size and demand management but low cost and comfortable revenue sources.

In the end, we may not have a U.S. economy dominated by corporate technocrats, as Galbraith imagined. Instead, we have one dominated by the wealthy individuals who align themselves with Big Capital. If Galbraith were alive, he’d undoubtedly be concerned by this concentration of power. And this time his critic Robert Solow might share his worry.

One critical component of Account Based Marketing is to reach the right senior executives. However, you can’t maintain a conversation at this level with generic messages. Programs that win include personalized emails, reports and content that use everything you know about the company to prove you understand their most pressing challenges and needs.

Before we go on, I want to draw a small distinction that makes a huge difference:

Customization is NOT Personalization

Saying “Hi Suzy” is customization. You can swap out that name for any other.

Saying “It was great bumping into you at SiriusDecisions – let’s continue our conversation about balancing personalization with automation over coffee next week” is personalization. You cannot send that message to anyone else.

3 Executive-Level Conversation Starters:

1. Seeing a relevant article and popping it in the mail with a post-it note pointing out its relevance is a quick way to establish contact and credibility.
2. For an account expansion play, a great piece of content might be a case study showing how another division or group within the same company is using your solution.
3. Mentioning your connection to the prospect is a strong opener for ABM conversations, especially if you can make the connection relevant. “Bob Apollo mentioned you in a conversation about XYZ yesterday…”

This kind of interaction will often out-perform your more automated marketing, even when it is personalized.

The Content Personalization Spectrum

One of the biggest challenges of ABM is balancing personalization with automation. Automation is great because it lets you scale your efforts. However, you lose the human element, which is essential for building relationships and closing deals in B2B. On the flip side, you can’t rely only on personalization because that doesn’t scale.

At Engagio, we advise having a balanced mix of content, with each piece falling somewhere on the content personalization spectrum:

(Click to view full size)

“If something reads like it could have been sent out to 100 other [people], then chances are that’s exactly what has happened.”
-Adam New-Waterson, RevJet

Getting Practical with Simple Personalization

You can turn a relevant but broad piece of content into a super-relevant piece with some simple tweaks, including:

• Targeted title or subtitle
• Imagery that reflects the target industry
• Case studies from the target market
• Tweaked introduction and conclusion
• A targeted landing page and email

This allows you to scale up your content personalization efforts without breaking the bank.

Getting Up-Close and Friendly with Super-Personalization

Content prepared “just for you” can be the most compelling of all. Consider using your company’s unique expertise, resources or assets to produce a special report specifically on the target account and its key challenges.

For example, OpenDNS created a custom visualization of the network for each target account and used that in their campaign. If you were a network security company, you may get meetings by scanning a client’s network, finding vulnerabilities, highlighting some of them and asking for a meeting to go over the rest.

Other vendors make highly personalized Annual Reports for each major account (especially powerful for existing customers). While this might be labor-intensive exercises, you may also find an automated approach. For years, Hubspot’s Website Grader was a top-performing content asset that auto-generated a report from the target’s website URL.

However you create it, a custom report is often an irresistible offer: “Based off of information I know about you/your company, here are some specific recommendations. Can we set up a 15 minute call to discuss the rest of the report I put together?”

Building a Digital Relationship

There are more and more platforms and technologies that can help you personalize digital content at scale.

• Dynamic content providers can deliver highly personalized message flows that adapt as the audience interacts.
• Vendors like Vidyard can insert a person and company name into videos.
• MarcomCentral lets you personalize marketing assets like postcards and signage.
• Many digital print vendors can create cross-media campaigns that personalize across print, email and landing pages, at scale.
• PDF documents like eBooks can be personalized from a file of target profile data
• Personalized landing pages are a great way to pay off personalized emails or direct mail.
• Content curation platforms make it easy to assemble an entire content hub targeted at a single account.

“The same kind of predictive analytics you used in your account selection can guide your personalization for emails, advertising and content. It’s about the intimate understanding of a persona.”
– Doug Bewsher, LeadSpace

If you want to dive deeper into this topic, I’m presenting on a webinar with Elle Woulfe, LookBookHQ’s VP of Marketing on Thursday, August 24th at 11am PT. Register here.

Are you ready to run simple, or super-personalized activity within your Account Based strategy?

Our small electric plane, which uses light and powerful batteries and motors, is less costly than its gasoline-engine rivals

Knowing how to measure content marketing ROI, like measuring optimization ROI, is hard.

And complicated.

Or is it?

Andy Crestodina, founder of Orbit Media Studios, and I did some digging to figure out the easiest way to measure content returns.

Here’s what we found: Measuring content ROI is really as simple as knowing your conversion rate.

That is, you need to know which channels cause clicks to which articles, which articles convert visitors into leads, and which leads convert into customers.

And knowing that information is pretty simple. You can do it with nothing more than Google Analytics, a spreadsheet, and some simple math.

First, let’s define ROI

Different companies with different goals have different ideas of ROI. Therefore, definition of ROI changes depending on your personal content marketing KPIs.

Specifically, these are the KPIs you should pay attention to:

• Website traffic
• Leads generated
• Conversion rate
• Direct sales

Which KPI you value the most depends on your stage in content marketing.

If you’re just starting out, there’s an argument to be made for only paying attention to traffic. Without traffic, your other measurables aren’t reliable. A 10% conversion rate on a blog post with 500 visitors could drop to 1% at 10,000 visitors. It’s just not enough data with which to make decisions.

But you should still track that data.

Andy Crestodina told me he believes it’s still worth tracking all your data, even at low traffic, because it can give you clues as to which topics and marketing channels are working for your blog.

Once you do have a significant amount of traffic coming in (the number can vary, but a good ball park is when you hit 10k visits per month), then you can move on to the other metrics – like leads, conversion rate, and revenue. Until then, put your efforts into promoting your content.

Keep in mind, however, that there are other, more complicated ways content provides an ROI:

• Better customer retention
• Increased customer lifetime value
• Brand awareness
• Potential links from large publications
• Stronger relationships with influencers and thought leaders
• Higher search rankings

I’m mentioning this because your content will almost always provide a greater ROI than the number you’ll come up with at the end of this post, regardless of the KPIs you use.

Now, let’s talk about how to actually measure your content ROI, step-by-step.

How to Measure Content Marketing ROI In 4 Practical Steps

To understand ROI you must understand your conversion rate per piece of content or URL. To do that, all you need is Google Analytics.

Note: What you’re about to learn assumes that 1) you have conversion goals set up to all your lead magnet landing pages and 2) your visitors can become subscribers from any of your blog posts, and they lead to those lead magnet landing pages. If not, you won’t be able to follow this guide to track your content ROI (though you can still track ROI, just by other means).

Now, let’s take the first step:

1. Download your reverse goal path data

Hat tip to Andy Crestodina for providing this tip, which he outlines in his post on blog optimization.

Basically, it works like this:

• Go to your analytics dashboard. Set the date range for at least a year.
• Go to Conversions -> Goals -> Reverse Goal Path.
• Add a filter like “/blog” so only blog posts show up.
• Sort by Goal Completions.

You’ll now see which posts have driven the most conversions.

However, we don’t want raw conversion numbers – we want conversion rates. That way, we know which pieces of content are performing and which aren’t.

So download this data as a CSV, and move on to step 2.

2. Download your page view data

We need to know pageviews to determine conversion rate. To do this:

• Go to Content > Site Content > All Pages.
• Filter with “/blog” to get only blog posts.

Now download the data as a spreadsheet and enter it into a new column in your original spreadsheet from step one.

3. Get your conversion rate

Divide the data in the “conversions” column by the number in the “unique pageviews” column. This will give you your conversion rate per blog post.

It should look like this:

Now you can see at a glance what your best performing pieces of content are, and which aren’t doing anything for you.

Armed with that knowledge, you can determine which topics tend to perform the best, try optimizing low-performing posts and/or lead magnets for conversions, and then prioritize promoting the high-converting content articles.

Pro Tip: If you have pages that are over a year old and aren’t getting any traffic or conversions, consider unpublishing, no-indexing, or updating them. This has been shown to improve SEO.

As for actually deciphering the ROI, you have to see how many of those leads have converted to give you an exact income amount.

4. Calculate content marketing ROI based on lead conversions

This is where things start to get a little trickier. To do this, you need to be able to put tags on your leads based on which content they came from.

The easiest way to do that is with UTM parameters. However, it’s also easy to do with tags, if your email marketing platform allows it.

For example, ConvertKit lets you automatically tag any leads who come through a certain form. If that form is attached to a single blog post, you know that any leads with that tag came from that blog post.

Send custom URLs in your emails, like “?ref=emailcampaign”, so you know the sale came from your email. Then just track back one step further using the tags.

Alternatively, you can connect your leads with a CRM, such as HubSpot, SalesForce, or PipeDrive, to track this automatically. All you need to do is integrate them with your analytics and email marketing platform. (Most CRMs have these features built in, but you can also create your own integrations with Zapier.)

Once you’re finished – voilà. You now have a full understanding of your content marketing ROI!

Now, there’s also a software solution that can give you a bit of a shortcut in terms of measurement and ROI…

A Content Marketing Measurement Shortcut

Doing all this is time-consuming. And it has to be redone every time you want to see your results.

What if you want to check this out weekly – or even daily? Going through all these steps every day would be a pain.

There’s an easier way. You’ll get all this data at your fingertips in real-time, and you don’t have to do a thing once you set it up the first time.

All you have to do is set up a web analytics dashboard with Cyfe. You can use it to create a neatly organized visual dashboard of everything we’ve covered:

I recommend setting up your dashboard to display the following:

• Search rankings
• Customer lifetime value
• Traffic
• Leads
• Conversion rate
• Revenue

Each of these can be tracked with of Cyfe’s pre-built widgets. It definitely makes life easier, and I find it’s worth every penny.

Whichever method you choose, you now know how to measure content marketing ROI.

Beyond Direct Sales: The Murkier Parts of Content Measurement

Now you understand how to see the dollars your content efforts have brought in. However, as I explained in the first section, content can do much more for you than simply bring in customers.

The biggest benefit of content, in my opinion, comes from SEO. Content is one of the top two search ranking factors, according to Google’s own Andrey Lipattsev.

The other? Backlinks.

External links from other sites to your site are one of the biggest influences on ranking higher in search results. And who doesn’t want that?

Content helps with both of these. Obviously, it gives you high-quality content, which Google wants…

Image Source

But content goes even farther than SEO. It can also serve to increase your customer lifetime value, onboard new customers, and improve your brand awareness. Let me explain:

Customers don’t buy from you until they trust you. So why do we trust businesses?

• Someone referred us (which is why it’s a good idea to think about involving influencers)
• Trust signals, such as HTTPS, security badges, professional site design, etc. (including the design of your content)
• Transparency, such as revealing failures or true motives

These are just a few of the many website credibility factors. And content helps with all of them.

You can use your blog as an excuse to interview or survey high-level influencers, giving you a strong referral. You can make it look amazing (check out KlientBoost for an example of sexy, trustworthy blog design), and reveal failures you experienced in your business or tactics you used to grow.

You can even use it to land guest posts on other sites, and build a reputation online for quality. These are all ways content marketing provides a return beyond dollars and cents.

If you’re not using content, you should really consider starting.

Conclusion

If you’re a digital marketer or run your own business, there’s a good chance you’re spending a lot of time or money producing amazing content.

If you don’t know which pieces of your business are working and which aren’t, you won’t be able to scale up without hitting a ton of roadblocks.

Understanding how to measure content marketing ROI is fundamental to your businesses success. It’s the difference between becoming a leader in your industry or just a follower.

In this post, we’ve examined the most practical and simple ways to determine the return on your content. We’ve detailed the fundamentals, like Google Analytics and goal tracking, as well as some advanced shortcuts, like the Cyfe dashboard and integrating your content with HubSpot or SalesForce.

Come back to this piece as often as you need to, and I promise you’ll start to understand the numbers your content efforts are bringing.

Will you start measuring your content marketing KPIs? Make your commitment known by leaving a comment below!

Through my experience as a sales manager, I often wondered if there is a need for a shake up on how sales teams are structured and what benefits are we reaping from the current roles populating the event publishing companies which include sponsorship sales, exhibition sales, guesting/VIP sales and delegate sales. The popularity of webinars for some companies has given rise to digital sales roles too.

I think it is time for a shake up and take this old traditional structure out and usher in a new structure with new roles. The problem with the traditional structure is the whole sales department is talking to the same audience and selling them 3 different packages or in some cases 4. For example, a company can participate as a sponsor, exhibitor or delegate. If we go one step further they can also get involved online and just have a digital presence. Would it not be ideal for one awesome sales person to sell all the options available to the client? This would save time on having to market separately three/four different event packages to generate leads for individual sales departments. While I was working as a sales manager there was always constant feuds between exhibition, sponsorship and delegate sales with regards to who spoke to the client first and which package they should take. Instead of serving in the interest of the client and what they are trying to achieve at the event everyone in the sales department starts to push their own agenda to make sure they hit their targets and stop working in the interest of the event and the client.

Sponsorship and Exhibition managers are usually out in the field doing face to face to selling so do not spend as much time selling over the phone as delegate sales roles. This inevitably means delegate sales have further reached in terms of the number of potential attendees they are getting through to. This means they speak many potential attendees who may want to participate as a sponsor, exhibitor or speaker. Instead of allowing such leads to slip through the net by pushing the wrong offering we should train the delegate sales team to set up scheduled appointments on behalf of their Sponsorship/Exhibition manager.

Another problem is once the delegate sales team have sold their packages or offering they pass payment processing to their administrative or accounting department. However, many unpaid places slip through the net as this is not necessarily a priority or the main function for these departments. In the weeks leading up to an event instead of the sales team canvassing for more sales, there are unwillingly succumb into a credit control role chasing for unpaid invoices. Potential leads in the meantime and last-minute opportunities are slipping through the net. What’s the solution here? Well, we now have very sophisticated CRM software on the market which allows us to take immediate payment from attendees if they are paying via credit card. This inevitably cuts down on the hours and time spent chasing for payment from delegates and missing out on those last-minute registrations.

As I mentioned there are several different roles in the traditional sales department selling different packages for the same event which creates many problems internal and external. With this in mind, I have come up with a new structure for the sales department with hybrid roles (fig 2.). This may involve setting up a new commission structure but who cares? Wouldn’t you rather your sales department work in cohesion, effectively and churn out bigger numbers.

Our goals are the same as they’ve always been: attract customers’ attention, stick in their memories, and provide a great service (or product) they keep coming back to.

That’s never going to change. So what’s the difference? Consumer choice. Gone are the days when we could spray-and-pray radio ads and advertorials in high-circulation outlets. Consumers are absolutely glutted with options. There’s more out there than anyone person could ever experience and it’s just as difficult – if not more so – to stand out in the all-too-familiar “crowded marketplace” as it ever was, fancy tools or not.

1. Turn off your phone and call a meeting

Meetings aren’t anybody’s favourite pastime. But you’re going be glad you arranged this one because you’re going to get your entire team together to figure out the most important step in implementing any marketing plan for a startup: “what do we want to achieve?”

Your business' success depends on every person within it. And, you’ll probably find that not only are you (mostly) on the same page, but their ideas on how to get from A to B can be dramatically different from yours – and maybe even more effective, provided everyone’s realistic about the gains to be expected and how they can be achieved. Fresh perspectives and different ethos can all make major contributions.

Argue it out. Get passionate. Pass the mic around the room, involve everyone, and freestyle yourself a chartbuster. Not only will you get valuable input, you’ll also be able to choose only the best from a broad diversity of ideas you might not have heard otherwise.

2. Budgeting: numbers aren't everything

I’ve grown companies from the ground up, over and over, and the way I do so today is vastly different than it used to be. Over the years I’ve learned that, as marketers and entrepreneurs, we can easily get so obsessed with “numbers”,  that we lose track of what suits our audience. Our philosophy. Even our products.

Be hypercritical of every pound you invest in marketing initiatives. Don’t spend a cent you’re not absolutely confident in. Sure, there’s always a chance and every campaign’s a gamble on some level. But make sure you’re being realistic. Is that the right channel for your PPC campaign? Is boosting that Facebook post actually going to yield any sales? Target All The Things.

This is where data comes into play. It’s one thing to get super-creative in promotions (do this), but your marketing team needs to love data from tracking to analysis as much as they love artistry. Data should be one of the key drivers in determining how much to spend on marketing strategies – make sure your team knows how to wield it effectively.

One of the best marketing investments you'll ever make is a person or team who knows what they're doing - how to run a campaign, how to collect data and analyze, and how to optimize current and future initiatives based on what they've learned. Don't be afraid to let them push boundaries or use their imagination.

Keep sight of the whole. Always have a clear vision and remember: a campaign that nets more with a higher CPA isn’t necessarily better than a lower-cost initiative. Because hey – startup cash doesn’t just fall from the sky. Use it wisely.

3. Build a perfect lead/sales-gen platform

Whether it’s a full-blown website, a branded mobile app, or even just a social media presence, always look back to your lead-generation platform when trying to boost visibility and sales. It’s got to tick every box, especially online.

Users expect a certain level of performance and flow from both apps and sites (or any other digital platform), and if they don’t find it with yours, it’s easy for them to look elsewhere. A one-second delay in page loading or users being unable to find the Next Step immediately can have a dramatic effect on conversion rates. And solid copywriting? Cleverly-crafted copy can improve the ROI of any marketing investment you make.

UX, design, and copywriting look simple on the surface – like a painting viewed from afar. But get up close enough to see the brush strokes and you quickly realize things get a lot more complicated pretty quickly.

The bottom line here is, “optimize” is more than a digital buzzword – tiny changes in design and user experience/interface measurably affect sales. “Perfect” might be too strong a word, but it’s what you should be striving for. Always. Even if something doesn’t seem broken, looks for ways to improve it anyway – listen to your customers and keep an eye on your industry because your market, driven by consumers’ expectations, will constantly evolve.

Know your customer

Understanding who you’re actually selling to is one of the cornerstones of marketing. That’s why you hear the word “targeting” (or its variations) so frequently: targeting helps you choose the correct look, tone, and channel to showcase your product effectively.

This part’s more science than art. It’s fairly easy to layout a basic ‘customer profile’. You know who they are, generally speaking. But remember the consumer choice overload we talked about? Somewhere out there, some people are going to find a platform that more closely matches exactly what they’re looking for.

And that’s okay – you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But what you can do is focus on learning everything you can about your best people. Then you can tune all your marketing messaging – content, channels, everything – to match what they want and exceed what they expect.

Know your customer's journey

Now that you know who they are, you can get a pretty good idea of how they find you. Some channels will always outperform others, and certain customer habits are both predictable and predictably emergent.

For example, if you’re running a campaign for a B2C product, the best time to advertise probably isn’t during business hours – your customers are working. They’ll miss it. Vice versa, too: your B2B customers may see your ads because they’re working.

The same is true of the time of year: odds are surfboard sales slump in winter. Holiday decorations and Halloween costumes don’t move much in July. It’s more efficient to allocate your marketing spend to campaigns that take advantage of high-sales times of year.

Those are simple examples, and they come with a slight caveat: no matter what, don’t drop off the map entirely. Maintain a constant presence; just know when to invest and when to pull back.

Over time you’ll start to see patterns in your customers’ device usage – tailor your efforts to the devices they use most frequently for better results. That said, cross-platform marketing (AKA “people based marketing) means you can make sure you’re in front of the customer when they’re ready to buy, which isn’t always right away. Know your customer lifecycle and take advantage of it.

Use data

One word: DATA. Measure everything. Record it all. Track your best and worst-performing initiatives, the actions your prospects and customers take, and how and when they take them. Analyse and refine non-stop.

Data should fuel every marketing decision you make.

Some useful tools to measure performance across platforms:

• Google Analytics
• Google Alerts
• TweetDeck
• Hootsuite
• Facebook Insights
• MaximizerCRM
• MailChimp (and other email marketing platforms)

4. Scale down sometimes

Even national-level businesses don’t always advertise on that big a scale. Geo-focused marketing helps them trim the fat off their campaigns for near-immediate ROI improvements.

As companies grow, so too do their marketing budgets. Almost inevitable. But taking a good look at where your revenue’s best generated – the places bringing home the most bacon – means you can focus specifically on those locations for better, more reliable returns.

It’s like this: why put up a set of expensive billboards on the freeway (passive) when you can advertise directly to potential customers who are walking by your restaurant at lunch hour (active)? Wouldn’t you sell more tickets to this weekend’s rock festival if you advertised in train stations and hotels, where inbound tourists are already wondering what to do?

It’s a big, crowded world out there – trying to capture it all is a good way to blow your budget. Instead, focus on those small, hyper-targeted locations and moments to cost-effectively win your customers one at a time.

5. Don't be scared

When something works a little, it’s easy to get comfy. To settle. But why not do something that works a lot? Why be satisfied generating 3 leads a day when, with a few small tweaks or a big step sideways, you could turn that into 30?

The market – your customer – will never stop evolving. What works a little today might not work at all tomorrow. Don’t get too stuck in your ways; you’ll fall behind competitors. Continuously shape yourself to match the market. Stay fun. Stay interesting. And do not be afraid to take risks! For now, those 3 leads will still be there tomorrow… and you just might get 27 more.

Startup marketing in a nutshell

Showcasing your brand consistently and in ways appropriate for the channels you utilize (for example, people don’t want to see advertising in social media – that’s for genuine engagement and conversation) is crucial. To find out what those channels are, and what platforms your customers use to access them, you’re going to need data.

This can all be distilled down to a few simple sentences:

The more data you’re able to collect, the better-targeted your efforts will become. The better-targeted your efforts become, the more efficiently you’ll be able to invest in them. And the more efficiently you allocate your marketing spend, the higher and more reliable ROI you can expect to enjoy.

Thanks to Ian Naylor for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Ian Naylor is the CEO & Founder of AppInstitute. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

I was hooked on “The Bold Type” as soon as I saw a trailer, and now that the first season is out, I’m obsessed. I love shows with strong female leads and this one completely blew me away. Front and center are three young women with big dreams and all the willpower to make them happen, even when things look bleak. The best part about this new series though, is the CEO. Unlike so many other plots where the CEO of a big magazine is cold and cruel (sorry, Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada), Jacqueline Carlyle of Scarlet Magazine takes a big role in helping to build up her employees and see them succeed, instead of making their work lives miserable. It’s refreshing to see empowering relationships between leaders and employees on the big screen, and it’s one of the reasons this is my new favorite show.

While I was watching, I started noticing some great public relations tips mixed in with the struggles Jane, Kat and Sutton face while they’re chasing after their dreams, and I couldn’t wait to share them with you! So get comfy and read on to find out how the brave ladies of Scarlet Magazine can help your public relations efforts. But FYI, if you haven’t seen the show yet, there are spoilers ahead.

Be Bold with Your Business’ Public Relations

1. Don’t be afraid to lay your cards on the table. In The Bold Type, Jacqueline knows how great of a writer Jane can be if she gets out of her own way. She pushes Jane to lay all her cards on the table and be completely honest with both her readers and herself.

Creating public relations content for your business can be just as scary as writing articles about your own life experiences. After all, being open and honest with internet users you’ve never met can make you feel very vulnerable! But the good news is no one knows or embodies your brand better than you do. Write for that vision and don’t be afraid to show your readers who you are!

2. But at the same time, know when to post and when to stop. That’s an important lesson Kat had to learn while Adena was detained in an airport in her home country. Kat was furious that she was being held and wanted to use her authority as the head of social media for Scarlet to help free her. The other executives at Scarlet, including Jacqueline, knew doing this would cause more harm than good and convinced Kat to hold off. While it was difficult for Kat to not send out a #FreeAdena tweet, she kept Scarlet out of the situation. Jacqueline approached her after Adena was released, telling Kat that she made the right choice to not say anything, but that wouldn’t always be the right choice.

This same rationality is needed when writing content for your brand. It’s easy to get carried away with personal opinions, but certain topics should never touch your business (we generally recommend avoiding divisive topics like politics and religion). Keep all your business’ content, from blog posts to social media updates, free from heated topics and opinions. Anything you publicly post reflects on your brand; keep your content about your company and save the personal stuff for your private life.

3. Empower your employees. When I sat down to watch the first episode of The Bold Type, I was honestly expecting Jacqueline to be another Miranda Priestly. Stereotypically in films and T.V. shows, CEOs of successful fashion magazines and the like have that role of ‘mean boss.’ I was very happy to learn I was utterly wrong about that. The more I watch this show, the more I realize how much it’s about empowering women to chase after their ambitions and turn their dreams into reality.

Whether you’re just starting a company or you’ve been growing for years, this is a lesson you should always keep in mind. Your employees are a big part of why your business is as successful as it is, so make sure you’re letting your team know how much you appreciate their work. Company culture starts at the top; the more you empower your staff, the better they’ll turn around and serve your clients.

In the show, Jacqueline acts as a mentor to her employees. She’s firm in her decisions and she always makes sure everything that happens in in Scarlet’s best interest, but she also takes the time to nurture her people and make sure they’re getting out of work as much as they’re putting in. When was the last time you spoke to your employees about how they feel in their jobs? Act as a mentor for them. Help them grow in their own skill and confidence just as they’ve helped your business grow. As Sr. Dir. Of Publicity, Emily Sidley, wrote about the Parks and Recreation finale, just as you’d help a journalist with whom you were working, help your employees be their absolute best.

4. Be fearless. Sutton tends to play close to home when it comes to her life, and a prime example of this is her chasing a job she doesn’t really want because it provides more financial security. That is one approach, but without taking any risks, you rob yourself of the chance to see where your dreams can take you. Sutton really wants to work in fashion, not advertising sales, and while it takes her some time to admit it, once she does it’s like she lifts chains off of herself. You can see the relief she feels to finally be honest about what she really wants.

When you’re starting your brand, you need to be just as fearless. If J.K. Rowling gave up, we wouldn’t know anything about Hogwarts or the wizarding world. If our CEO Erika Taylor Montgomery let fear hold her back, Three Girls Media would never have been founded. Be honest about what you want your company and your brand to be, and then do everything in your power to make it happen.

5. Know when to chase success. I love Kat. She knows when to chase down a good thing. In the first episode, Adena, a very talented Muslim photographer rescinds her decision to let Scarlet run her photo spread. Kat, being the fearless person she is, finds Adena and convinces her that letting Scarlet run her story would be the best thing for her career (and she was right, the story gained tons of attention on social media).

You need to know when it’s time to chase after your own success. At the end of the day, you are the only person who is able to determine the prosperity of your business. When an opportunity comes up that you know will help advance your brand, be like Kat and don’t let it get away.

6. Be confident! This is an important aspect of The Bold Type. It’s so fun to see Jane come out of her shell to confront her ex, Sutton finally gain the confidence to admit she wants to pursue a career in fashion and Kat refusing to take no for an answer when she knows Adena’s photo spread is the right move for Scarlet. These ladies don’t back down from a challenge, and neither should you!

Whatever you do, do it with confidence. If you’re constantly unsure of yourself, not only will your readers and potential clients sense this and be less likely to work with your company, but you’ll miss so many opportunities to grow your brand. It’s okay to try something different. Not only will you help push your brand forward, but the confidence you gain from going outside your comfort zone will encourage you to continue searching for new ways to build up your business.

7. Work hard. Jane, Kat and Sutton put in years of internship and assistant work in order to achieve their dreams. They used every opportunity they had as a stepping stone to help get them where they wanted to be, and they used their networking connections to continue learning and improving in their field.

You can’t wait for your brand to become successful by itself! Every chance you get, work on your business’ public relations. Create content to reach your audience so they are inspired to work with your business; look for opportunities to learn something new. I know it can be frustrating when you’re just starting out, but the fact remains that you can’t skip ahead to the part where you’re already successful, and you shouldn’t want to! The experiences you have and the skills you learn along the way will serve to make you better at what you do, so look for every possible opportunity you can to learn and grow!

I love the great public relations tips The Bold Type has to offer, and I can’t wait to see what others I can find as the season progresses. If you have some free time and a Hulu account, I highly recommend you get to know these bold ladies a little more. And if you find any other public relations tips in the show, let me know in the comments!

As CMO of a technology company, I get a lot of emails from salespeople. A lot.

In the first week of July, I received 45 emails from salespeople; in week two, 48; in week three, a bumper 61; and in week four, 54. That’s an average of 52 emails per week -- or 10 per business day.

Salespeople must navigate through all this noise to get my attention.

I used to be a salesperson myself, so I understand the challenge they face and the fact that they are doing their job. Perhaps for that reason, I decided it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the emails that successfully provoked a response -- as well as those that failed.

The distinction is staggeringly simple.

The Emails That Worked

Let’s kick off with three emails that got my attention and tickled my fancy enough to read, reply, and give the salesperson the meeting they were after.

1) The Researcher

James had my attention from the first paragraph which repeated back verbatim what I have in my LinkedIn bio. It’s a pretty simple idea but effective in immediately proving to me that this isn’t just another automated email -- it’s one written personally for me.

James then explains what his company can help us with (our content journeys), proves he’s researched the tools we use, and requests a meeting.

2) The Name-Dropper

Just like James, Brian cuts right to the chase and quickly demonstrates this email is personal to me -- not a clear copy-and-paste job. The old saying “flattery will get you nowhere” might be true in some cases (see many a failed date in my youth), but in the context of a sales email it’s a great way of proving that you’ve done your research.

Flattery aside, Brian compelled me to act by name dropping competitors in our space currently using his company’s technology to do their lead scoring. I’d not be doing my job at this point if I didn’t at least take a look to see if there’s something our competition is doing that we could be leveraging. And so I did.

 3)  The Creative

Video messages (a.k.a. video voicemails) are still rare enough to stand out in the inbox, which is exactly what Benny and his personalized thumbnail image did.

The email is short, clean and simple -- referencing the tech we use, the value his company can add (more leads), and of course emphasizing the importance to watch the video.

Importantly, the video itself was personalized -- revealing some interesting stats about our YouTube channel -- and short enough to drive action.

The Emails That Didn’t Work

Now for the emails that didn’t get me to bite.

1) The Essay Writer

This email is too darn long. During a busy work day I’d be half tempted to delete an email like this from my wife (only joking darling!) Of the sales emails I receive, excessive length is probably the most common mistake.

It’s also clearly either copied-and-pasted or automated -- so not unique in any way to me -- but even if it was the most delightful personal email of all time, it’s highly likely it would already be in the trash can after I’ve dismissed it on the assumption it was simply too long to be personalized.

2) The Self-Server

There’s a few things I don’t like about this email. First, it’s too apologetic. From the subject line to the meme, the tone is one of desperation. That’s far from the best way to start any business relationship.

I’m also not a fan of the “choose one of these options” approach as it’s very much for the benefit of the sender. A sales email should always benefit the recipient (and more than just “less emails from me!”)

3) The Spell-Checker

Now, I’ll admit that this one is tad harsh. Our company name is regularly misspelt with that evil extra ‘s’ in the middle of “ SaleCycle,” but I use this example to illustrate the importance of checking your facts, spelling, and grammar before sending an email.

A sure-fire way to start the relationship on the wrong footing is spelling the prospect’s name wrong (or getting it wrong completely -- it happens!), stating an incorrect fact, or using clumsy grammar.

Personalize Don’t Paste

I promised at the beginning the truth was “staggeringly simple,” and I think it is.

The major difference between the folks who got a response from me and those who didn’t? They took the time to make their email personal.

The problem about focusing too much on your value propositions, smart one-liners, elevator pitches, and so on -- they are all about you.

The second you think about the recipient, it gets decidedly simpler.

There are several golden rules that will help you get a response from me -- and I believe would work equally well on like-minded people:

• Show You Researched Them: Compliment what they did right on their blog, website, or with their brand.
• Provide Value: Share a statistic, article, or relevant example.
• Keep It Short: Long emails look like they’ve been copied-and-pasted.
• Name-Drop Their Competitors: It gives them an obligation to at least take a look.
• Find a Personal Connection: Whether that’s a sports team, music, movies, food -- you get the idea.
• Get Creative: If all else fails, try video, social media, even hand-written letters!

Feel free to drop me a note at chris.sheen@salecycle.com if you want to try out your approach on me.

(I’m going to regret this aren’t I …)

Email marketing is probably the most used and most valuable marketing channel to engage and nurture potential buyers. Email allows you to share marketing messages that are specifically targeted at your key personas at each stage of the buying journey. Email marketing can be personalized, and delivered at just the right time. Marketing automation programs have made it easier than ever to send, track and report on the performance of your email campaigns. But many companies are still getting email marketing very, very wrong.

Many struggle to get emails opened and or delivered. Some marketers get marked as SPAM or worst of all — get blacklisted by the email cops. Don’t be scared. Here are a few tips to keep your email marketing program SPAM-free.

Don’t write SPAMMY emails – Does your subject line or the content of your email scream SPAM? Is your email copy tackier than a Vegas wedding? Do you frequently abuse the word “free”? Use a tool like mail-tester.com to see how SPAMMY you are.

Email sending domain setup – Your emails should be coming from your domain, not some random one your email provider is using. If you are using HubSpot you can check out their How-To here, or if you need an expert to get your system fully set up, give us a call.

Remove hard bounce emails – Keeping your database clean is important for both marketing and sales. The last thing sales wants is for marketing to provide a list of “qualified leads” where 10% or more are bad contacts. Marketing, don’t be that guy– sales is counting on you.

Don’t get caught in a SPAM Trap – There are two types of SPAM Traps: Pristine and Recyled.

Pristine Traps are email addresses that are shared in locations that would be scrubbed –but then sold as part of a purchased list. This is why we always tell our clients not to buy lists — they’re probably filled with a few SPAM trap emails.

Recycled traps are the really tricky. They can trip you up even when you’re following Inbound best practices. Recycled traps are abandoned emails that are taken over by the inbox provider specifically to act as a SPAM trap. Remember how we told you to remove hard bounces from your database? Well, that one that you didn’t remove, could magically start receiving emails again, and it could be a SPAM trap.

Sending too few emails – List decay occurs at about 22.5% per year. So if you send out one email a year you can count on about 22.5% of your contacts to be bad. If you send more emails consistently you can stay ahead of list decay. You should also find out if a key prospect on your list has changed their email address before you lose them.

Email marketing should be one of the foundations to any inbound marketing strategy. Making sure you do it right will help you see better results and keep you out of trouble. If you use HubSpot and need an expert to take a look at how you’re doing, connect with us. Or, if you’re looking to integrate or improve your email marketing as part of your inbound marketing and sales reach out as well. Heck- you can even send us an email.

“What gets measured gets managed” is a longstanding business aphorism. But today’s sales technologies enable companies to measure almost anything, which leads many managers to try to measure everything. As a consequence, managers don’t have a clear sense of what is really driving sales in their business, while salespeople, who are inundated with dozens of metrics, get lost in the day-to-day noise. The result is poor management of what matters.

The challenge, of course, is to decide on the right metrics. Consider the results of a survey of key performance indicators (KPIs) being used by more than 800 sales teams across industries. Wins are the most common metric used across sales roles and industries. On average, firms measure closed deals and rep production against quota monthly, which isn’t surprising. Selling is a performance art, and “making the number” should be the goal of any sales organization, but a closed deal is an outcome and a lagging indicator; it can’t be used by the salesperson or sales manager to improve future outcomes.

This is why leading indicators such as demos, web registrations, calls, or C-suite-level meetings are often more instructive. Instead of reviewing historical results, which are beyond a rep’s control, they offer real-time feedback on whether salespeople are spending their time and efforts in the best way. Leading indicators are within a rep’s control. If salespeople are behind on a key indicator, for example, they and their managers can change behavior to increase the probability of success.

Deconstruct Your Sales Funnel

In order to improve sales outcomes and clarify the relevant sales KPIs in your business, you need to deconstruct your sales funnel.

Here’s a typical flow of activities:

Prospecting: cold calls, email, phone, LinkedIn, etc.

Qualifying: initial conversations aimed at separating the merely interested from the actual prospects and determining who is a qualified opportunity

Advancing opportunities: discussions with qualified opportunities to communicate the value of your product to the right contacts

Closing: final steps in negotiating and winning the business

Post-sale: service, order fulfillment, possible customization, and onboarding activities to ensure the client is successful

Every company is different, but every business has a sales conversion funnel. Some funnels are relatively short and simple, while others are long and complex. Knowing what type of funnel applies in your business is essential to clarifying key metrics and performance management practices, including sales incentives.

Consider one SaaS company that sells a menu display and advertising platform to restaurants, which is a big but fragmented market. The challenge for reps is that, because restaurants all have different budgeting processes, they must be there at the right time to close that sale. Once a sale is closed, the firm incurs low marginal costs in setting up and maintaining a customer on its platform. In this situation, it makes sense to “feed the funnel” and provide reps with incentives, through proper metrics, to make frequent and repeated calls.

By contrast, consider another SaaS firm that sells a subscription software product that provides big productivity and environmental benefits if the customer is willing to alter some traditional workflow processes and use the software at sufficient scale. This is a more protracted buying and selling process, where ongoing customer education and onboarding is crucial. Awareness and initial enthusiasm from a prospect on the capacity to adopt new software can be deceptive and expensive for this firm. Here, simply “feeding the funnel” is a mistake: Lead generation is less important than pursuing the right leads. Moreover, this SaaS firm’s profit margins are mainly in contract renewals and ancillary services it can provide if it gets the right scale and usage in the initial sale. Here, management must ensure that sales reps vet the top part of the funnel carefully so that they don’t spend months chasing the wrong prospects, while providing reps with the means and an incentive to manage that long selling cycle and renewal process.

The experience of Paycor, a payroll processing company, is a useful example. Like many firms, its frontline sales managers were typically former top-producing salespeople, many of whom were managing other salespeople for the first time. In making that transition, they tended to focus on what they knew best: helping to close a deal. But after closely examining the selling cycle, it became apparent that the best time to work with their reps to influence the sale was earlier in the funnel. Sales managers used the leading indicators to drive a 55% increase in relevant new-business meetings and a corresponding 50% reduction in onboarding time.

Make Performance Reviews Count

Finding the right metrics isn’t the end of the story. Selling is about behaviors, not just analyses, and making sure that salespeople align their behaviors with those metrics is an ongoing process. Performance reviews can help, if they’re done right.

Unfortunately, reviews are typically underutilized levers for influencing behavior in most organizations. Busy sales managers tend to treat them as cursory, after-the-fact discussions about quota attainment and compensation, not coaching about going-forward behaviors. The result is that, too often, “feedback” from managers is really a sermon whose message is “get better and sell more.” Like most sermons, this may work when you’re preaching to the already converted, but it’s too abstract if you’re not. Clarifying leading indicators can make a difference, because the salesperson then knows the behaviors they need to change in order to improve performance.

Many sales managers begin conversations with reps by asking well-intentioned but generalized questions like, “What’s closing this month and how can we make those deals happen faster?” In response, reps focus on the next 30 days and the required onboarding of new customers, and then neglect important activities that happen in between. This is one reason why sales output is so variable — strong sales months followed by catch-up prospecting during the lean times — in so many organizations.

After deconstructing the funnel, however, managers can use different talking points that allocate attention and resources toward those activities. For example: “Sofia, you are making lots of calls and scheduling many meetings, but you’re calling on too many small firms and your qualification criteria have you chasing many prospects that are highly unlikely to close. Let’s fix your account prioritization.”

Or: “Arjun, you are behind peers in setting meetings with VP-level prospects, and we know those contacts increase our win rate substantially. Let’s talk about the organization of your prospects and what we can do to get the right access.”

Among other things, conversations like these — especially when reflected in accessible reports and personalized scorecards — empower reps to know where they stand and where to focus. They allow sales managers to provide feedback about behaviors, not just intentions. Beyond individual coaching, moreover, relevant leading indicators can also spur more systemic means for generating proactive selling behaviors: incentives to schedule new-business meetings with the right contacts or to pitch bolt-on products that amortize onboarding time and increase renewal rates.

These steps are within a company’s internal circle of influence, not in the less controllable external market environment. But exercising that influence requires managers who know what metrics count and who can then translate data into relevant selling behaviors. Those managers are not just discussing quotas and after-the-fact outcomes; they are truly managing sales performance.

Oh, and there’s a new BTS Sheriff in town and the 23rd annual Brand Keys back-to-School survey for households indicates that according to the 8,082 parents polled, they plan to spend more this year, a combination of rising consumer confidence and consumer smarts. Six percent more, or an average of $716.

Smart, connected consumers have gotten smarter. They’re on to 21st century retail strategies Retailers taught – and consumers learned – four things that now govern purchase behavior generally, and specifically for back-to-school buying:

1. Retailers have started marketing for occasions like back-to-school earlier and earlier.
2. Prices start at very low levels, increase over time, and then drop down to lowest prices available.
3. Deals are always available if you look hard enough.
4. These days it makes sense to holiday shop very early and then as late as possible.

This year Brand Keys used a longitudinal sample with survey results gathered for the same respondents twice over the period of time from June 19th through August 11th to monitor back-to-school spending, revealing two, distinct waves of anticipated consumer purchases.

First, early consumer spending focused generally on supplies, e.g., copy paper, notebooks, writing implements, printer cartridges, ink and toner, computers, electronics, and calculators, accounting for an estimated 41% of this year’s anticipated average spend.

The second wave of later spending is anticipated to take place this month through the start of the school year, with 59% of 2017’s average anticipated spend predominantly budgeted for clothing, shoes (athletic and dress), books and study aids. And where are consumers shopping, early and later in the season? Glad you asked.

Wave 1: Early

1. Amazon.com
2. Walmart
3. Staples
4. Target
5. Apple/Best Buy

Wave 2: Later

1. Amazon.com
2. Walmart.com
3. Best Buy.com
4. Nike
5. TJ Maxx/Macys.com

While the past few years have proved this finding, this year’s BTS marketplace confirms that Amazon.com has become consumers’ default shopping platform – early or late in the season. Amazon will likely end up with 9% of the total $80 billion BTS spend this year, so a lot of money!

Average spending in all major back-to-school categories is up compared to last year, representing a 6% increase YOY, with online (99% of consumers will be using that) the consumer’s shopping platform default mode. Online is followed by closely Discount Stores (98%) and – at a distant third – Department Stores (69%). And if you think platform choice is just about pricing, think again, folks.

Pricing isn’t the only thing that consumers equate with “value.” It’s about brand differentiation and brand engagement, and retail brands that can emotionally engage consumers will be seen as surrogates for added-value, and the ones that can do that will be the brands that benefit most over the three-and-a-half months that now make up the back-to-school marketplace. These days, providing more than just low-lower-lowest prices is a fundamental lesson all back-to-school retailers need to cram for if they hope to pass courses like “Same-Store Sales” and “Accounting” with flying colors.

Like the first scene of a movie, the opening of your presentation should grab your audience’s attention, set the stage – and let them know they are in the right theater!

Unfortunately the typical sales presentation opens with a boring company overview that does nothing to distinguish you in a competitive marketplace.

Outside the Box presentation openings take into account what’s of most interest to your prospect. And it’s very rarely how long you’ve been in business or how many markets you’re in! It’s likely something much more personal and close to home, like “What do I need to do to drive customers in my door? How am I going to compete with the new guy on the block?

Here are 5 Outside the Box presentation openings:

1. Customer success story.

Whose experience is more meaningful to a prospect? Yours or that of a peer in their industry facing a similar challenge? The answer is obvious, so instead of telling your prospect how great you are, why not let a satisfied customer say it for you?

Instead of saving that powerful success story or testimonial for the end (which you may never get to if your meeting gets cut short), put it right up front for an instant boost of credibility.

2. Shock and Awe

Not a military campaign like it sounds, but attention getting nonetheless. A shock and awe opening delivers a startling statement or a fascinating fact relevant to the customer or customer’s industry. Here’s two examples:

“The average person is exposed to 5000 commercial messages per day…How will your message stand out?”

– Or-

“Contrary to popular belief, 90% of restaurants do NOT fail in the first year!…Which is why it’s important to look beyond the first month and stick with winning strategies.”

TIP: Always make sure your statement is relevant and be prepared to defend your facts or quote your source.

3. Pose an intriguing question

Successful presentations feel like a conversation, and there’s no better way to foster a conversation than to start out with a question! Instead of asking the same unimaginative questions other salespeople ask, like “Tell me about your business,” or worse, “What keeps you up at night,” think of a unique question that requires thought and imagination. For example:

“What would the ideal review say about your business?

-Or-

“What would you need to change if you landed a Fortune 500 account today?”

Not only do these questions set you apart, they get your customer thinking about where they want to be – or where they don’t want to be. And the answers provide valuable insight so you can further tailor your presentation.

4. Use Discovery

Likely you’ve learned some things about your customer before you meet – either by research or through a conversation. Reflecting back what you learned is a great customer-focused way to start your presentation. For example:

“There were two key things I took away from our initial conversation: 1) You need to reach targeted homeowners in March and April, and 2) You need to be able to respond quickly to weather-related opportunities. Is that correct?”

Relaying what you discovered accomplishes several important things: It confirms if you’re right or if anything has changed, it shows you’re listening, and it reminds them why they need to talk to you.

5. Tell a Story

A customer success story is just one type of story. Great salespeople have several types of stories ready to go. Personal stories are a powerful way to set yourself apart and connect with customers on a more emotional basis. Here’s an example:

“Carol, your recent move reminded me of when I put my house on the market. I thought I’d save some money by going with a newer real estate agent. After three failed offers, I finally went with a proven firm. He helped me price it correctly and put my house in front of more potential home-buyers. It sold in 3 weeks for $10,000 over the asking price. Like that experienced realtor, we can help you avoid costly mistakes and make sure you get in front of as many potential customers as possible.”

Replace typical boring presentation openings with an Outside the Box opening that intrigues your customer and makes them sit up and pay attention. Pick one and practice it until you feel confident. And keeping adding to your repertoire!

You block time on your calendar for a yoga class, lunch with a friend, or even a tech Shabbat. But how often do you cancel it due to what seems a more urgent work demand? Recent research from Boston University and Harvard Business School faculty shows that with the unrelenting pace and volume of work, setting and keeping boundaries has never been more challenging — or more important.

As a leader, you have an opportunity to model behavior in a meaningful way and facilitate appropriate boundary setting for your team members and your organizations’ employees. This is necessary even if setting and keeping boundaries is an area you struggle with yourself.

I understand the challenge. As an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in the 90s, work came before everything else. To the firm, I was the “ideal worker” — a phrase sociologists use to describe a problematic archetype of a fully committed employee with no personal “entanglements.” I was single with no children, and had almost unlimited capacity for all things related to work. But so did my peers, whether or not they had children, partners, or aging parents. It was just the industry and firm norm.

It wasn’t until I moved to Paris in 1997 to become Finance Manager for Disney Consumer Products Europe, Middle East, and Africa that I experienced someone setting a non-negotiable boundary for herself.

We received a request from Disney headquarters in Burbank, California, for a financial analysis. I told our controller she needed to work late that night.

“No.”

Stunned by her immediate response, I didn’t recall posing it as a question, nor did I even know that this response was an option.

She was a single parent who needed to pick up her child at daycare. She was also French; when she told me, she’d just shrugged her shoulders, seemingly not feeling any sense of conflict like her American colleagues might in the same situation.

I remember feeling both tremendous respect and envy for the boundary my colleague had set. She gave me the data I needed to complete the task, and the world didn’t fall apart when she left at 6 p.m.

Twenty years later, as an executive coach, work-life sustainability is a prominent issue that my clients grapple with, as they face the ever-higher work demands that have come with advances in technology. One client in San Francisco who works with a fast-growing tech company shared that she gets up at 4 a.m. to work. She has anxiety about the possibility of missing an email at midnight. “Is this normal?” she asked me. I responded that even if it is the norm for this company’s culture — and potentially many others — it is not acceptable universally, nor should it be.

A classic 1998 Stanford University study accurately predicted that by 2020 advances in technology will have eliminated many lower to mid-level jobs. These advances will have also significantly increased the workload of more senior managers, keeping them working around the clock.

A 2017 survey by Kronos and Future Workplace, reveals that the restructuring of work has resulted in significant burnout. Nearly half, or 46% of the human resource leaders surveyed, reported that employee burnout accounts for 20-50% of their companies’ annual employee turnover.

The irony is that HR leaders themselves are too overworked to address the vicious cycle of high burnout, low employee engagement, and low retention. Eighty-seven percent of HR leaders cited improved retention as a critical or high priority over the next five years, but 20% said they had too many competing priorities to focus on fixing the problem in 2017.

Here are six strategies to help you and your team members achieve better work-life sustainability through setting and keeping boundaries.

Communicate that the organization’s success is based on a marathon, not a sprint. While there will still be high-stakes, time-sensitive issues like beating a competitor to market with a new product, acknowledge that endurance is the goal, and speed is not the best or only metric of long-term success.  You can verbally communicate this with your team, role model it, and create organizational operating principles around it. Consistency between what you say and do is essential. In the book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout and Thrive with the New Science of Success, authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness studied elite athletes and showed that rest periods allowed these athletes to go “full throttle” when they needed to, letting them perform at their best when it counted the most. Another study from the University of York and the University of Florida, showed that more than 40% of our creative ideas come when we are taking breaks or allowing our minds to wander. Tell your team to rest when they need to, and remind them that they can’t be at their best if they’re not taking time to decompress.

Hire enough staff, and take turns taking time off. People get sick, need to care for family members, or go on vacation. Childcare falls through. You have urgent personal matters to address. If your team would be seriously incapacitated if one person was out, you have a personnel problem. Neither you nor anyone on your team should feel truly indispensable. Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School Professor, describes in Sleeping with Your Smartphone, how an experiment with one team at Boston Consulting Group, successfully took hold and was eventually expanded to 900 teams across 30 countries. Teams worked together to create a shared goal around each person having time off, with team members covering for the person who elected to spend with family, go to a movie or whatever. By allowing your team to have a breather without feeling as if things would fall apart, it reinforces trust, collaboration, and efficiency on teams and can lead to better work satisfaction and greater perceived value addition to clients. They’ll also likely feel better about themselves and their work.

Remind people that we are all human and have physical limitations.  Doing too much can result in sleep deprivation that is not only damaging to our health, but as a 2016 McKinsey study highlighted, also negatively affects the executive functions of our brain like problem solving, reasoning and organizing. This affects work performance, organizational health, and financial performance. People who work long hours are more likely to drink more and have other physical health problems, according to several studies; conversely, making time for regular exercise seems to confer a host of mental health benefits that improve on-the-job performance. Encouraging your team to set regular, reasonable hours supports a healthy lifestyle, which in turn supports better teamwork.

Redistribute work more evenly. Research by a team from Duke University, University of Georgia, and University of Colorado in 2015 found that managers underestimate how much time it takes to get something done and assign more work to those who are seen as more competent and responsible. So the only reward for doing good work is the addition of more work. High-performers reported feeling “burdened” and were unhappy about others’ over-reliance on them. Reassigning work to others on the team can help prevent burnout and turnover. It also provides much-needed learning opportunities for others on the team.

Set and keep your own boundaries. Take the opportunity to model healthier behavior. This will make a difference. Setting and keeping your own reasonable boundaries will give others permission to do so. One leader I worked with said she did her best thinking outside the office. She’d spend Monday mornings thinking at home or in a café with her email shut off. Others looked up to her for the example she set. Communicating this option for flexibility gave her team members implicit permission to do what they needed to do their best work.

Debunk your own limiting beliefs and assumptions.  You can get in your own way when it comes to setting and keeping boundaries perhaps as a result of your own limiting beliefs and assumptions. Sue, a partner at a global professional services firm, desperately wanted to carve out a life for herself outside of work. After unpacking what was really holding her back, she realized her belief was that if she did not work so intensely, she would not be successful. She conferred with other professionals she viewed as successful about how they saw their ability to set and keep boundaries and have a life outside work. She saw that their boundary-setting behaviors actually fueled their success, rather than serving as an obstacle. This helped her see the flaws in her underlying beliefs and assumptions. She re-calibrated to add in less work and more personal time.

Certainly there will be times when boundaries slip, or when it is more effective to make an exception. Negotiate the boundaries with your team as needed. Know that these boundaries will result in better overall outcomes for you and your team.

When the stakes are high and quota is on the line, your sales reps knee-jerk reaction may be to focus of the accounts that are later in the sales cycle. Their rationale is that the rest of their pipeline can be put off until an account warrants their attention. For now, they need to go for the guaranteed close.

But as a sales leader, you know that brushing the rest of the pipeline off is a mistake. Harvey Mackey put it best when he said, “You risk losing your customers when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep your customers actively involved throughout your presentation and watch your results improve.”

Reaching out to every single prospect across the pipeline can be a difficult feat without the right technology enabling consistent engagement. Modern sales leaders recognize the need for enablement platforms like SalesLoft that allow your reps to engage with all their accounts while they continue to close deals. So, let’s look at the SalesLoft features that will help your reps cover their entire pipeline and rake in more deals over time.

Automation to Save Your Rep’s Time

The thought of attending to every account from the start of the deal to close is enough to make any AE’s head spin. But you can ease your reps’ heavy workloads by leveraging authentic automation throughout the sales process.

Automation takes care of the menial processes that can dominate your reps’ days. According to Salesforce at least 40% of sales tasks could be automated with today’s technology. And by taking care of that hefty load of tasks from account information updates to synching activity logs, your reps can keep their focus on the most qualified and engaging prospects.

The key to automation is recognizing where your reps can bring the most value to prospects. Automating tasks like updating contact information, activity logging, or repetitive messages that are sent early in the sales cycle can put more time in your rep’s day. If a task within your rep’s day is not providing a prospect value, automate it.

Allow your reps to focus their time on what matters most: their prospects. Your reps should target prospects with sincere communication, rather than automated messages, when they can gain a deeper understanding of the prospect’s needs, offer more sales value, and deliver product insights. The beauty of automation is that your reps can participate in the best of both worlds; they can quickly effortless complete repetitive tasks in their day-to-day and actively engage with the prospects that warrant personalized attention.

Create Genuine Personalization at Scale

According to TOPO, 78% of sales organizations struggle to connect their business value to their prospect’s needs. With automation rules in place, your reps can focus on delivering a personalized, valuable sales experience across their entire pipeline. But when you look at your rep’s pipeline, does the number of prospects still seem too to large to personalize?

Valuable personalization does not mean that your reps have to craft every sales message from scratch. Your reps need to be able to quickly send emails that contain valuable elements to their prospects.

Have your reps make full use of the personalization available within SalesLoft. Reps can quickly mix and match personalization tactics with the help of dynamic tags and Snippets. With Snippets, reps have easily accessible tidbits of content that contain commonly used phrases, links to resources, or add valuable insights into prospect’s challenges. By incorporating these small personal touches your reps can efficiently send perfectly catered messages that turn emails from just a notification in their prospect’s inbox into a valuable asset.

When your reps are able to balance their entire pipeline thorough automation and personalization at scale, their overall pipeline efficiency will flourish. By combining these two aspects throughout your rep’s sale cycle, just like Harvey Mackey said, you can watch your results improve.

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

The post Want Better Pipeline Coverage? Start Doing These Two Things appeared first on SalesLoft.

When solidifying your goals for lead generation, it can be tempting to focus on the quantity of incoming prospects. Which is not surprising, given it a rather straightforward and easily accessed metric. However, it is at least as, if not more, important to focus on lead quality— the value, potential, and fit of the leads for your company. High-quality lead generation remains the top challenge for 61% of B2B marketers even if their basic strategy for bringing in leads is in place.

So what are the causes behind a lack of high-quality leads? Let’s examine some of the most common issues with generating high quality sales leads and some remedies to improve results.

Ambiguous or Overly Narrow Buyer’s Personas

As you may know, buyer personas are fictional characters created to represent the needs, pain points, and desires of several main categories of a company’s real-life customers. A well-researched persona can be the core of a marketing campaign; it should be constructed with the use of both statistical observations and insights gained from personal interaction with past clients, through surveys, case studies, etc.

Buyer personas can be used to generate quality leads in a variety of ways, as they essentially provide guidance to your marketing team on how to tailor your entire campaign: everything from content creation and revision to social media coverage to product offers. Your product is, inevitably, not going to appeal to everyone, but the utilization of personas enables a degree of customization in your campaign while maximizing reach to the main components of your lead audience. In fact, 71% of companies who exceeded revenue and lead goals in 2016 reported having buyer personas!

When fleshing out a persona, it’s important to strike a balance between detail and applicability. An overly specific persona will leave you short-sighted and generate a shortage of leads in both quantity and quality. On the other hand, an overly ambiguous persona will be ineffective. It starts with asking the right questions.

Take time to think about genuinely significant criteria to keep in mind when creating a persona, like their job role, company type, personal background (but not TOO personal!), but most importantly their challenges and goals. Additionally, these personas need to have a degree of flexibility because your client base will shift over time— this is also why good data is crucial to remain up-to-date. HubSpot has a great article outlining the process.

An Outdated Lead Scoring Model

A lead scoring model allows you to rank leads by potential for engagement, purchase size and timeframe, fit for your company, etc. on a points system. This model is highly beneficial for any company looking to organize their lead generation strategy; an Eloqua study determined that deal close rates increased by 30 percent for B2B companies making use of lead scoring.

The criteria used to create the model are in your hands, though obviously there are some advisable options out there, such as determining target market and how points will be distributed. When developing a lead scoring model, make sure to account for behavioral data throughout all phases of the buyer’s journey as well as initial interest that a prospect displays at the top of the funnel.

As mentioned previously, social media is a major resource for determining where a lead’s so-called ‘pain points’ may lie. Social data also has the benefit of providing the most up-to-date data about your leads. Demographics, industries, and client needs all need to be monitored real-time to avoid overlooking any major shifts.

Lacking a “Warming up” and/or Lead Nurturing Strategy

You wouldn’t just roll out of bed and take off on a marathon run, would you? No, you would stretch and warm your muscles first. Like a marathon, it is incredibly helpful to warm up your leads to your campaign before sending them into your sales funnel. Using channels such as your blog and social media, you can gauge prospects’ interest (or lack thereof) in specific content you are putting out in order to appeal to and attract the right leads.

Particularly with accessible and fast-shifting channels like Facebook and Twitter, you can start a literal conversation with leads by replying to comments, tracking trending topics, and reaching out directly to leads that demonstrate significant interest in your product/company. For B2B leads in particular, consider focusing on LinkedIn, as it is a network designed particularly for professionals to connect.

In regards to your lead nurturing, a drip email campaign is an integral component to nurtruing, delivering the right material to the right people at the right time through a well-segmented mailing list of leads and marketing automation technology. This is the easiest way to provide your leads with relevant information and pique their interests while avoiding overwhelming those leads who are not ready to commit seriously to your company.

You should also feed into the modern buyer’s desire to binge on content. Like Netflix, don’t just provide your prospect with one piece of content and call it a day. Think about providing an educational journey for them by linking multiple pieces of relevant content together in a lead nurturing funnel. Your funnel should take a prospect from the awareness stage to the decision stage.

No Feedback from Sales

Don’t throw away all of your marketing team’s hard work by failing to close the loop with the sales team! Communication is crucial for making strategic improvements to your campaign, particularly if the company has longer sales cycles. By reporting within a loop, marketing can send more information to sales, while sales can provide feedback and sales activity reports in return.

• Were our sales opportunities actually leads of a high quality?
• Which channels attracted the most leads?
• How and which leads were followed up on?
• Which marketing activities generated the most leads?
• Which sales activities generated the most sales?

Automation and tools such as a CRM prove very helpful in accomplishing the closing of the marketing-sales loop. With software and strategy integrated, you’ll be on your way to creating a more efficient lead generation strategy in no time.

Now that you know how to ensure that your incoming leads are high-quality, you can turn your attention to generating more! Download the free guide on the 30 greatest lead generation tips, tricks, and ideas and start balancing your quality and quantity.

Have any questions about lead generation or nurturing? Comment below and I would be happy to help.

Chart of the Day: Which optimisation techniques are marketers using to create better experiences

I was doing a customer onboarding training session with one of our Business members last week and when I was talking to the digital marketing manager and team, our conversation quickly turned to what is a good conversion rate and the best techniques to improve it. Their UX specialist referred to it as 'crow' and it made me think how many people involved in marketing know or use this term for conversion rate optimisation. Since our research shows that despite its potential power to increase leads and sales, it's not as widely used as you might expect.

In our recent managing digital marketing report, we asked about a range of techniques used to research and improve customer journey effectiveness. It was good to see that techniques such as customer persona research and customer journey mapping were widely used and AB testing, the most important technique in CRO used to identify a better performing page alongside a control was alongside them in popularity. AB is now used by 48%, which is over double what is when we first asked in our first survey 3 years ago.

However, other techniques which are an essential part of CRO, such as visitor intent surveys, usability, and path analysis were much lower. It was also interesting how little multivariate testing is used since it isn't a new technique, although it is constrained by having sufficient visitors to run a statistically valid test.

• Research source: Managing digital marketing resource (free member download)
• Sample: 583 marketers worldwide
• Recommended member resource: CRO Briefing

Want to succeed with Digital Marketing? If your answer is yes, then you need to know how Conversion Rate Optimization (commonly called CRO) works and why it is so important. Understanding how website visitors move through your website and what they do once they get there is critical. If gives you the insight you need to complete your website goal, whether it’s selling a specific product or a service. Think of a conversion as a website visitor who has now completed filling out a form on your website such as signing up for a subscription or simply completing the checkout process.

Ultimately, the purpose of increasing CRO serves to reduce the cost of business while also improving profitability at the same time. In more relatable terms, it just means trying to improve the sales efficiency and performance of your website.

With CRO there are so many variables that can affect the way you acquire and retain actionable website visitors such as design, branding, social proof, pricing process and your call to action. It can be hard to know what part of your website needs an overhaul and that’s where several factors come into play when trying to figure out your conversion rate in order to get the highest optimization experience.

In order to optimize the conversion rate of an offer or set of offers, you have to know first where to begin. Your business needs to gather quantitative data such as overall site analytics, surveying and segmenting website visitors (the people method) and tracking the conversions of each offer and call-to-action. Platforms like Hubspot provide detailed analytics of everything and enables A/B testing of each and every offer on a website. Analyzing all of this valuable information will help you to know where to focus your CRO efforts and where the majority of your visitors are coming from.

For a digital marketer, optimizing conversion paths on your website increases the number of leads for a particular volume of website visitors. Then as you invest in techniques to increase visitor volume you gain greater leverage from the investment in CRO. In other words, by increasing visitor volumes after CRO your digital marketing efforts are then multiplied.

Your quantitative information combined with real people statistics will let you know what page your visitors engaged most on and what product or page appealed most to them?

Pay close attention to what words your consumers use to describe your business or product. There are certain things that real life analytical data stats can’t clue you into and just improving your site traffic is not enough! Optimizing the words on a page including personalization for a specific visitor can significantly improve conversion rates.

Improving CRO Has Unmistakable Benefits

• Finding the right target customers for your business (not just increasing the volume of the wrong website visitors)
• A higher ROI (Return on Investment) ratio for all of your marketing efforts
• A greater ROI for your pay-per-click advertisements – less money spent for the same number of leads
• Better Expandability (turning more browsers into buyers)
• Better User Experiences-Find out what works for your website and expand on it offering users a feeling of empowerment.
• Solid Basis of Trust-Your website is an extension of your business or brand and when users feel comfortable using their credit card or other sensitive information to buy a product, it’s a big deal! Streamline your website to be professional, courteous and prompt when answering visitor’s questions.

Let’s talk about something called an “experience funnel”. An experience funnel is basically just a phrase that refers to the consumer journey through a series of steps until they are a qualified lead for sales. The journey a consumer takes when navigating a website and converting to a final sales goal. I like to think of it as a visual tool to gauge where your prospects are in their journey toward making their buying decision. Your sales funnel should be wide, capturing brand awareness near the top and then slowly narrow channeling to the bottom with the most sales and repeat customers.

This illustration shows an example of a conversion set for Inbound Marketing with three conversions in the pipeline.

If a business owner were to improve the first conversion rate by 10%, this effort would double the number of leads for sales at the end of the third conversion. In addition, by increasing the conversion rate by 10% for each of the three offers above, this would also increase the number of sales ready leads by over 8 times.

This chart shows an example calculation of the conversion rate for each conversion in the level 1 experience funnel above.

Too often, businesses fail because they try and convert the top visitor into a sale right away instead of moving the customer through a series of small conversions (called the buyer’s journey). Timing is a key factor and your real goal is just to keep them coming back and nurturing them along their search for information until they are ready to buy. The Attract phase of the buyer’s journey (the first stage in this funnel) and brand awareness are so important to overall conversions. They can’t buy from you if they don’t know your business or your product exists.

As a marketer, you have many nobs to turn in order to increase the number of leads. Many marketers just increase the Pay Per Clicks (PPC) budget, which is the old standby for getting your business website attention and generating more leads. Rising advertising costs make CRO even more critical because your business can do much better by optimizing conversions and the results can be dramatic.

Let’s face it, the competition for online advertising is stiff out there and most digital marketers compete for your customers business across the board. This is yet another reason why implementing a better CRO is so beneficial. If you want to convert a set of page visitors into actual sale, then you need to have a streamlined website that is easy to use and experience funnels that make conversion into a lead seamless.

Just about any form of digital marketing is an investment, so it’s important to keep generating an increased number of unique visitors who can convert into leads and optimize the conversion rate of each offer.

Finally, CRO improves the ability of other marketing efforts beyond just PPC. When a larger percentage of visitors click through your website to convert into a lead, all of your other marketing campaigns convert more as well. CRO is really a win-win investment for digital marketers looking to make the most out of their online businesses. Learn about CRO and more by downloading the eBook titled “30 Greatest Lead Gen Tip, Tricks & Ideas.”