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See what Lean accounting and finance can do for your company

We’ve heard the buzzword “Lean” as it pertains to an organization’s transformation into a more efficient set of operations for a while now. Often perceived as radical, it promises great results and endless opportunities for incremental improvements.

The concepts originated in Japan, led by an extraordinary transformation at Toyota Motor Corporation, with its Toyota Production System (TPS), started in the mid-to-late sixties and perfected in the seventies. The premise of TPS is continual improvement in all areas of the enterprise with the goal of increasing efficiencies and reducing waste while always maintaining respect for workers in all areas and on all organization levels.

While the Lean transformation lends itself best to manufacturing operations, its concepts apply to non-manufacturing industries as well, so if you aren’t a manufacturer, please don’t stop reading here.

The reality is that most companies in the US don’t practice Lean, at least not yet. The main reason is lack of discipline and proper direction from upper management, even though many US companies that implemented Lean report remarkable changes in all areas of the company, evidenced by improved financial statements and cash flow.

Another reason Lean transformations aren’t as popular as they should be, is that it really only works if you sustain the effort. Many of the failed attempts at Lean are attributed to not being able to maintain the Lean mindset and make it work consistently across the entire enterprise.

A popular goal sought with first Lean implementations is inventory reduction. The idea is to reduce inventory on hand and only bring in material and parts that are needed for customers’ orders or for a specific forecast, if the company makes products to stock. The result is higher inventory turns (I’ve heard of manufacturers achieving 15-20 inventory turns a year) and noticeable improvement in cash flow.

To make a Lean transformation effective, companies should also transform other areas in the organization, particularly their accounting and finance departments. Borrowing concepts from manufacturing, accounting and finance departments can also eliminate a lot of waste and focus only on value-added activities.

Each company should evaluate its own accounting and finance workflow. When activities that don’t add value are reduced or eliminated, accounting and finance personnel can focus on collecting and translating data into highly informative and useful reports that managers can really use—instead of the monthly or quarterly report packets (more like stacks of paper) that managers hardly even skim through without getting confused.

Of the many opportunities to transform accounting into a Lean organization, some companies find that doing away with vendor invoices for inventory purchases results in great savings in time and other resources. They simply rely on internal control over the purchase order process, and by using blanket POs with agreed-upon prices and release dates driven by true demand, they depend on the receiving process that automatically vouchers these receipts, which creates AP transactions that are paid according to vendor terms. The three-way match, vouchering and posting to AP of individual invoices is eliminated. Similarly, other areas in accounting can be streamlined in a Lean environment.

It’s hard to discuss Lean accounting and finance without mentioning the planning, budgeting and analysis processes, a core set of functions usually owned by finance. What is a Lean budget? Can that work even if the rest of the organization isn’t Lean? Can the process be called Lean Budgeting?

Erroneously, to the uninitiated in Lean concepts, when thinking of Lean Budgeting, the first thing that may come to mind is taking shortcuts in strategic and operational planning or perhaps reducing the number of budget iterations and their approval process. The truth, however, is that Lean Budgeting means only to reduce or eliminate wasted time and resources in the budget preparation and approval process. Of course, with reduced waste, certain pieces of the budget can be reduced while improving profitability and overall financial results.

Strategic and operational planning is the most important phase in the budget process and should never be compromised, even when transforming the company to a Lean environment. However, many existing planning and budgeting processes and their reliance on traditional technology promote much waste and complexity that can be eliminated or greatly reduced with a proper Lean implementation.

Waste in planning, budgeting and analytics processes may include:

1. Spending an inordinate number of hours developing a model that requires programming of formulas, functions and links to other worksheets or workbooks files.
2. Endless troubleshooting of budget models for errors resulting from bad or missing formulas, broken links or other issues which stem from unsuccessful changes or additions to the model.
3. Excessive time spent by finance to create modified versions of the base budget or “what-if” versions in response to requests by management.
4. Unnecessary wasted time in analytics, especially the monthly analysis of actual results against the approved budget for the period.
5. Use of a “Zero-Based Budget” except for rare occasions where required and justified.
6. Limited collaboration among budget participants using traditional, cumbersome solutions where consolidating the budget is extremely inefficient and time consuming.

If every iteration of the budget requires many hours or even days of work to recompile the budget and its derived forecasted reports and financial statements, you are not practicing Lean Budgeting!

In the next installment in this series we’ll learn how a company can achieve true Lean Budgeting while supporting manufacturing and other areas of the enterprise and providing real insight to management.

The post Do You Practice Lean Processes? How About Lean Accounting and Finance? – Part 1 appeared first on .

Once you’ve got your referral partner program running, you’ll want to collect data that will help you to optimize and grow the output from your referral partners. To do this I will outline a number of metrics that aren’t merely to measure against but actionable as well.

5 Key categories of metrics for a referral partner program:

1. The referral pipeline:
   1. # of partners
   2. # of referrals
   3. # of successful referrals
   4. revenue
2. Partner activity:
   1. % of partners that have made referrals that period
   2. % of partners that have made multiple referrals that period
   3. % of partners that have had successful referrals that period
   4. Avg # of referrals per partners
   5. Avg # of successful referrals per partner
3. Top performers:
   1. Top partners by # of referrals
   2. Top partners by # of successful referrals
   3. Top partners by revenue
4. Under performers:
   1. Lowest partners by # of referrals
   2. Lowest partners by # of successful referrals
   3. Lowest partners by revenue
5. For those running a to and through partner program – you’ll want to look at the referral pipeline by partner entity as well.

1. The referral pipeline

Understanding the flow of referrals from partners and their employees to closed won revenue is important for seeing trends. Additionally, this is your direct ROI to demonstrate the clear value of the program to executive leadership. You’ll want to have this data and manipulate it by the current time period as well as chart it over time to see trends.

You won’t take action on this data on a daily basis, but it is important to watch if something falls outside of your expectations or is under performing relative to business objectives. If so, start diving into the metrics below to diagnose possible issues.

2. Partner activity

Continuous engagement and promotion is important to keeping partners referring. Monitoring their activity levels is key to knowing when an additional nudge is needed or a full out calling campaign from channel sales to encourage repeat referrals. Keeping tabs on both percentage of partner activity as well as monitoring averages will help you to identify overall performance problems that you can address holistically.

3. Top performers

It’s great to know the overall trends for your program, but there is incredible value to identifying top performing referral partners. This is an opportunity for personalized recognition or expansion of the relationship. As with any marketing activity, it pays to focus on the best performers and give them additional resources to get even more out of them.

4. Under performers

While it is great to spend time with top performers, there are some very basic course corrections that can be made with under performers that can keep them engaged and get them successful. My favorite report is partners who have made a lot of referrals, but haven’t had any make a purchase. Chances are these partners don’t understand your target buyer or they aren’t positioning your product value correctly. A simple email and follow up calling campaign to have this discussion can go a long way to save these partners from getting frustrated and churning.

5. Referral pipeline by partner companies

If you’re running a referral partner program where you have a relationship at the corporate level to enable their sales team to make referrals to you, of course you will want to look at performance by each partner entity. Understanding how many employees they have enrolled, the activity level and success rates is key to encouraging that partner to help you internally promote. Certainly, if this is a managed relationship with SLAs, you’ll want to play close attention to their progress so you can make a call as needed to bring their attention to lackluster results or to call and recognize them for going above and beyond expectations.

What about referral partner program incentives?

There are a long list of additional metrics that we see on partner referral program dashboards. They all have a place in understanding the details of what’s working and what’s not in your program. But, if you’ve got limited time and resources (don’t we all) just focus on those five areas I mentioned above and you’ll be able to do great things!

Now many of you may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned incentives as a key metric. After all, this is a huge part of operating a referral partner program. If you are doing this manually, by all means you’ll want lots of reports and data to manage that function. Ideally, you are working with a software vendor that automates incentive calculation and fulfillment. If so, this isn’t something you need to worry about as a key metric.

Here at Kayak, we are big believers in the value of content creation and advanced CMS’s like HubSpot. We talk about them enthusiastically, and share the results we see from our own campaigns as well as the ones we deploy for our clients.

That, in turn, gets other marketers excited about them.

Business owners and marketers who come to us after reading our blogs and snapping up our downloads can’t wait to get started. We love seeing how pumped up they are to get going on inbound marketing plans, but we have to introduce them to one of the harshest truths of all first…

When you create a data-driven website, it’s never truly finished.

We can create a layout, teach the client team about the fundamentals of SEO and lead generation, and put their new site online. But, we can’t deliver a complete job for them. That’s because, even at the point that leads start coming in, the project is really just getting started.

This is something any company looking to replicate our success should understand. So, today I want to explain why it is that data-driven websites are never finished, and what that really means in the long run.

Truth #1: You Can’t Ever Finish a Data-Website

Because my firm focusses on inbound marketing and quality lead generation, our plans and campaigns are content heavy, measured and refined. They require ongoing activities and resources like time, attention, and fresh content to keep them running and refining.

At the same time, even (or especially) when you have lots of traffic coming your way, there is more to do than adding new content.

Data-driven websites are never finished.

We want to watch our analytics to see who was arriving on our website, how long they are staying, which CTAs and content they are responding to, and more importantly, how or where they’re exiting your website, while maintaining an “always helping” perspective that leads to greater trust and more solid sales.

Each of these activities and mechanisms create data points representing an opportunity to get smarter and more efficient. So, it’s easy to find yourself continually tinkering with your site to capture more traffic in the form of leads or subscribers. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

In one example, we recently noticed that one of our clients was receiving more than 4,000 unique monthly visits to three blog posts. However, they weren’t capturing many leads from that traffic. Understanding there was real interest in the topic, we investigated and saw a connection to one of the services the company offered, worked to tweak the post’s content and link/lead capture strategy to better engage and convert those visitors. If we weren’t watching the data, we would have missed that opportunity.

None of this would have come into play had the client used a traditional static website or foregone the use of advanced analytics like the type we deploy via HubSpot and Google. They would have (maybe) simply noticed good traffic but poor conversions.

Having those data insights paired with a well-defined persona compelled them into action and actually created more work for their team and ours.

The point to be made here is that data-driven websites require more work and attention than some businesses are used to, simply because marketers are more aware of challenges and opportunities revealed by the data.

Truth #2: Evolving Campaigns are Near Impossible to Plan and Quote

Until a site is up and running for a bit, we won’t have any concrete data to tell us if a client’s marketing personas or messages are 100% on target, or require a tweak. We also can’t predict how diligent a client will be at creating content, engaging prospects and colleagues on social, developing their online reputation, or working to convert the leads that come in.

So much of what we do, and a big part of the eye-popping results that attract clients in the first place, has to do with adjusting plans to seize opportunities that the data reveals.

Of course, the flip side to this is that business owners and executives are happy to keep working with us when they find a new source of sales opportunities. But in the beginning of the process, it can be tough to commit to going forward when they don’t know exactly what the campaigns are going to yield.

Is it Worth the Time and Money to Have an Evolving Website?

If you aren’t already a client, and haven’t used a data-driven model for your online marketing campaigns in the past, then you’re probably wondering about the bottom line. What you really want to know is: is it actually worth it to follow this kind of approach?

We can tell you definitively that it is, but only if you recognize that getting bigger results means more effort and patience to set it up and maintain it. If you don’t accept that from the outset, you’re likely to get frustrated and give up too soon.

The real secret here is that adding good content your website is a great way to generate activity, and start conversations. Once that happens, you start analyzing the results more closely, and are very likely to find yourself looking for ways to keep the flow of traffic coming and generate even more conversions.

You’ll start to think about new offers, informative pages to add, and ways to tweak your landing pages and emails to improve conversion ratios. That will naturally lead to more visits, more data points, and more opportunities to keep growing.

The cycle I just described is full of positives, but on a more practical side, it can take much more of your time and effort than having your developer maintain a static website. But, like all things in life or business, there is a price to success, and one victory or plateau gets you working towards the next.

Are you serious enough about improving your business to make the commitment it takes to generate leads over the internet? If so, maybe it’s time we got together to chat.

It’s Time for Just-in-Time, Situation-Specific Enablement

There’s all kinds of tools and apps promising to help your salespeople “in the moment”—across the different types of selling situations they face.

However, the marketing messaging, content assets and skills training needed to take advantage of these “situational sales enablement” technologies have not been ready, leading to many technology failures due to lack of adoption.

However, that is changing…and fast. Here’s a quick look at three trends happening right now that are making it possible to provide just-in-time, situational messaging, content assets and skills training to enable salespeople to have the right conversations at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

1. Situational Messaging Frameworks – one-size-fits-all messaging is being replaced with tested, proven frameworks for creating messages that work for different moments of truth in the customer lifecycle.
2. Situational Skills Training – stand-alone skills training over the course of days in classrooms is being replaced by short, compelling video-based skills coaching modules that are aligned to the various selling scenarios.
3. Integrated, Interactive Online Experiences – static playbooks are being replaced with interactive, mobile experiences that combine your stories and your skills in one situational messaging and coaching experience

It’s the convergence of stories (marketing messaging and content assets) with skills in a singular virtual experience for the salesperson. Imagine giving reps specific messaging and skills coaching for the exact selling situation they find themselves in — whenever and wherever they need it.

This changes the game significantly for product launches and training plans. You should no longer stand for stand-alone product messaging rollouts or isolated, skills-only training events.

That’s because your go-to-market strategies are not created equal, which means your messaging and skills need to be situational.

For example:

• Some are for highly disruptive products or services that require you to challenge the status quo and create a need for change. This requires a messaging approach and distinct selling skills designed to defeat status quo bias and introduce the necessary urgency to change. For this scenario, you need to identify the unconsidered needs your prospects haven’t considered, and then map those needs to your unique capabilities, creating a buying a vision that gets prospects to see the value of doing something different than what they’re doing today.
• Contrast this to a scenario where you are launching an upgrade to an existing product in a mature market where you are hoping to provide some differentiation that helps you take some share and protect your pricing premium. This requires a messaging approach and selling skills that de-commoditize the conversation and allow you to hold the line on discounts.
• Or maybe, you are combining several products and services into a solution or key, topical initiative, hoping to elevate your sales conversations to more senior-level buyers? This requires yet another messaging model and a separate set of skills for salespeople to provide a business case that passes muster with executive and financial decision makers. Specifically, you’ll need to be effective at adopting an executive buyer’s perspective, conducting CXO-relevant industry or company research, showing the value of a business change scenario, and demonstrating your business impact.

In any of these cases, what good is it if you launch a bunch of messaging to the field and your salespeople don’t have the pre-requisite skills to execute the story — because your skills training program is on a completely separate track and timing?

Or the other way around…what good is it if your skills training courses teach your salespeople how to engage in each of these selling scenarios, but your messaging and content assets don’t align with or reinforce those skills?

The barriers to accomplishing this convergence of stories and skills have been eliminated, and the following factors are playing a major part in that:

• Tested and proven messaging frameworks are now available for each key moment in the customer lifecycle – Why Change? Why You? Why Now? Why Pay? Why Stay? — ensuring your messaging is developed for maximum impact in each situation.
• Skills training competencies are being chunked up and virtualized in short- and long-form eLearning content that matches each of those key moments in the customer lifecycle, and they can be attached to the messaging for situationally-relevant coaching on how to deliver the story as intended, using the same science to tell the story as you used to create the story.
• All of this is being served up in an integrated, interactive format that can be accessed from anytime, anywhere by salespeople, including on their mobile devices without another piece of software or technology.

The days of stand-alone product launches, messaging rollouts or sales skills training are over, making way for just-in-time, situation-specific learning and execution.

Want more on this topic? Check out our eBook: Enabling the Just-in-Time, Situational Learner.

This article originally published in CMO.com.

The post When Marketing Stories and Sales Skills Converge appeared first on Corporate Visions.

You’ve probably heard Marcus Sheridan’s story. He is the guy whose blog, sometimes referred to as “the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools,” saved his pool company during the economic crash of 2008.

Today, Marcus is The Sales Lion and spends a lot of time behind a microphone, urging companies to do what it takes to deliver content that lives up to its potential as a sales tool.

What does it take? It takes creating a culture of content. According to Marcus, that means getting rid of the “massive silo effect” between departments – especially between sales and marketing – and getting the whole company involved in content marketing.

In this article, I summarize Marcus’s advice delivered in his Content Marketing World talk How to Tear Down Sales and Marketing Silos: The Secret to Developing a Culture of Content Across the Entire Organization.

Why now?

In the old days, companies got away with the great divide: marketers handling marketing and salespeople handling sales. Things have changed, Marcus says. Companies need to market and sell in a new way because people buy in a new way. He refers to the 2015 Forrester report that shows more than 70% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase.

“How many salespeople in your organization understand that they no longer control 70% of the sale?” Marcus asks. Buyers have changed. You have to change with them.

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Buyers have changed and you have to change with them, says @TheSalesLion. #CMWorld
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How to create a culture of content

Marcus suggests several ways to create a culture of content:

• Recognize that salespeople are part of the content process.
• Integrate your content into your sales process.
• Gather employees regularly to discuss content marketing.
• Commit to being the best teacher in the world in your niche.

Recognize that salespeople are part of the content process

Content marketing fails, Marcus says, because people outside marketing don’t think they have time to participate.

It isn’t about time. We magically find the time to do what we value. When was the last time someone in your organization, maybe in your accounting department, said, ‘You know what, y’all, if we get a chance to do a payroll today, let’s get that done, and if not, Monday afternoon is fine’? Culture is about going all in.

If you want to create a culture of content, the enterprise must have a common philosophy about prospects and customers. All must understand that content is critical. Marketers alone can’t create a culture of content. People in sales, for example, often have the mindset, “I sell; you market.” The same silo mentality goes for other in-house subject-matter experts.

This mentality “crushes businesses,” Marcus says.

Getting SMEs on board is easier said than done. Still, it must be done. Marcus recommends, for starters, that salespeople attend marketing meetings and conferences, and that marketing people attend sales meetings and conferences. In some of the most effective organizations Marcus has worked with, the sales and the marketing team essentially merge.

This makes sense; the sales team hears most of the questions, concerns, worries, fears, and issues of prospects and customers. As Marcus says:

I’m not saying that everybody has to write for your company blog. It is not our job to turn everyone into Victor Hugo. What I am saying is that everybody must participate. We never own a thing until we help create the thing.

If the term “content marketing” turns off your nonmarketing teams, avoid the term when talking with them. Speak in a language everyone understands. “If you want content marketing to work, get everybody on your teams involved,” Marcus says.

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Want #contentmarketing to work? Involve everybody on your teams, says @TheSalesLion. #CMWorld
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Integrate your content into your sales process

Marcus urges you to do something that most companies don’t do – integrate content into your selling process. When you do that, your salespeople waste less time and close more sales.

At River Pools, Marcus developed a technique he calls assignment selling. Here’s what it looked like in the pool business. When a prospect expressed interest in meeting with a salesperson, Marcus gave the prospect homework and waited for that person to read the assigned content before he set up a meeting. Typically, his homework looked like this:

• A list of over 600 customers
• A 50-page e-book about swimming pools
• Three to five significant articles from the company blog

If this seems like a lot to ask, Marcus says, that’s as it should be.

“If someone is serious about a pool and knows they are getting ready to spend 30-70K, then they likely don’t want to make a mistake on their purchase – hence the call for great content and information …

“… And what if they say they don’t have time to read the info or seem uninterested? Then I don’t go out to the home. Pure and simple.”

The idea came to Marcus early in 2013. He was looking at two groups of visitors to the River Pools website. People in both groups had filled out a form. One group didn’t buy; the other did. The difference? People who had read 30-plus pages of the website bought 80% of the time. The rest bought only 25% of the time.

The buyers educated themselves – a lot. They invested time in learning from River Pools content. As they did so, they developed trust in the company.

Helpful content proved to be “the greatest sales tool in the world,” Marcus says.

When he switched to assignment selling – giving his prospects homework before meeting with them – he no longer had to explain the same things over and over, and his closing rates shot up.

Most sales teams don’t practice assignment selling. They don’t integrate content into their process. They’re missing an opportunity. Marcus says:

If you’re not yet implementing this strategy in your sales system, please start today. Come up with homework for your interested clients, and watch the dominoes fall as they may. Take this leap of faith, and you’ll spend more time selling and less teaching.

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Helpful content is the greatest sales tool in the world, says @TheSalesLion. #CMWorld
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Gather employees regularly to discuss content marketing

Email can’t create an interdepartmental culture of content, Marcus says. Get employees together regularly, physically or virtually. Have workshops a couple of times a year. Make sure that everyone understands what you’re doing with content marketing, how you’re doing it, and why you’re doing it. Marcus explains:

This is the difference between a culture and a program. A program is a set of rules. A culture is what we learn to do naturally, like breathing. It becomes who we are. We want to share it with our friends.

To say you have a culture of content is to say that everyone who works for your company understands the value of the information you provide and participates in making that information useful.

When anyone in the world has a question related to your area of expertise, your company (with its culture of content) commits to having the answer. When people worry or wonder about something in your niche, you – and all your colleagues – want them to think of your company as the place to turn to find that answer.

Commit to being the best teacher in the world in your niche

To create a culture of content, your company must be committed to being the best teacher in the world in some area. Marcus cites Home Depot for the DIY home improvement niche: “I love their posts. This company talks to me in a way that I understand. They teach me how to be better at all things home and depot-y.”

Marcus created a culture of content at River Pools. “(We) tell a better story than others can about swimming pools and success,” he says.

This advice isn’t news to any content marketer, but it’s worth repeating: Be the best resource for something. A culture of content means that you are willing to do what it takes to be the Home Depot or the River Pools of your market.

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Be the best content resource for something, says @TheSalesLion. #CMWorld
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Conclusion

Does your company have a culture of content? The answer to that question lies in your answer to these questions:

• Are salespeople and other SMEs integrated into your content processes?
• Is your content integrated into your sales process?
• Do employees from various departments get together regularly to talk about content marketing?
• Is your company committed to being the best teacher in the world in your niche?

To learn more about knocking down silos to create a culture of content, attend Marcus Sheridan’s session at Content Marketing World Sept. 5-8 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Tear Down Silos to Create a Culture of Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Special thanks to Kaila Fleisig for helping to compile this research.

Properly hiring and managing sales development reps (or SDRs) is crucial to your bottom line. Here, we’ve compiled top resources to help you better enable your team members to succeed, plus additional information on how to effectively structure and manage your team, build out a sales tech stack and much more.

Have a favorite article or podcast we missed? Let us know in the comments.

Table of Contents

• Hiring & Managing Sales Development Reps
• Structuring Your Team: Sales or Marketing?
• Building a Must-Have Tech Stack
• Top Sales Podcasts

Hiring & Managing Sales Development Reps

Building a Career Matrix to Keep Your SDRs Happy
Sales development reps don’t often work at a company with the intention of staying on as an SDR forever. In fact, the average turnover for a sales development rep is roughly 14 months. After extensive discussion with industry influencers, SalesLoft changed the career map for its SDRs, which they think will help new hires learn more about company culture while keeping the seasoned SDRs engaged and happy.

Bridge Group 2016 Sales Development Metrics and Compensation Benchmark Report
Take a look at the annual Sales Development Metrics and Compensation Research Report, which provides valuable benchmarking data showing how metrics and compensation have changed over time for sales development teams.

7 Learnings: Building Your First, Great Sales Development (SDR) Team
While SDRs drive sales pipeline, they themselves can (and should) be your organization’s talent pipeline. There’s no better way to cut your teeth in sales or marketing than by grinding through the hard yards of prospecting. For those of you looking to build or optimize an SDR team, below are 7 learnings from creating one of these sales development engines from scratch.

Structuring Your Team: Sales or Marketing?

Why Tech SDRs Should Report Into Marketing
Gartner’s Todd Berkowitz, Research Vice President, lays out a 2015 Gartner report discussing to whom SDRs should report.

Should The SDR Function Report Into Sales or Marketing? What I Learned
Siftrock’s CEO, Adam Schoenfeld, highlights some of his thoughts on who SDRs should report to, drawing from his own professional experience.

BDR’s Should Serve as the Link Between Sales & Marketing
A shift has occurred over the past few years that has some raising their eyebrows…SDRs are reporting to MARKETING! That’s right, marketing! If you look at SDRs as a lead generation and qualification machine, this shift actually makes a lot of sense. So, whether or not you’re actually ready to bucket your SDR team wholly under marketing, you should leverage them to serve as the ever-crucial link between sales and marketing. Here’s why.

Building a Must-Have Tech Stack

A new sales technology stack is coming
A comprehensive system using the right set of tools to make sales a much more productive, quantitative effort is in order. We can no longer settle for something marginally better. Learn about the new sales tech stack now.

Building your Tech Stack: The 3 Must-Have Solutions for Startup Marketing
With all the demands facing modern startup marketing departments, sorting through 3,874 technology solutions shouldn’t be one of them. The prospect of doing that is intimidating to even the most informed marketers. So as a startup, how do you evaluate your options and determine which technologies you really need to invest in to get the most ROI?

2017 Sales Technology Stack. Selecting The Right Combination of Tools
To be successful in B2B sales you must have the courage (to get out of your comfort zone and face rejection), discipline (to do the right things and at the right time whether you feel like it or not), positive intent (where you are seeking to help your customers achieve a better state of affairs), the right ‘value narrative’ and technique for delivery (where you focus on the outcomes you help clients achieve and why it matters), and a great attitude with positive values.

Top Sales Podcasts

Best Sales Podcasts – An Ultimate List of “Must Listens”
From individual sales reps to founders, there are so many great “shows” to help you become better at your job. Take a look at this massive list with dozens of sales podcasts (ones that are still active) along with over 100 quality episodes ready to download and follow you to the gym, car, or anywhere else.

Top 11 Podcasts For Sales & Marketing Leaders
Numerous thoughtful sales and marketing innovators share their very best insights in short, easily absorbed bites that you can listen to while you’re driving to your next meeting.

The post The Ultimate Sales Development Rep Resources Guide appeared first on OpenView Labs.

"I" is a tiny, one-letter word, but it can spell big trouble in job interviews.

"People who only use the pronoun 'I' in interviews are a washout for us," Liza Landsman, president of ecommerce site Jet.com, tells Business Insider. "There are very few tech-centered organizations that don't require a high degree of collaboration."

It's natural to be prepared to talk about yourself in a job interview, but you've got to try to keep the conversation centered on what you can contribute to the team or organization you're looking to join.

It also doesn't hurt to demonstrate that you care about the people you work with, too.

"I think it's really important that everyone comes in here and they have a solid understanding that they own a piece of this building and the culture," Jet.com vice president Kristin Reilly tells Business Insider.

Apart from keeping an eye out for too many "I"s, Reilly says that hiring managers at the ecommerce site — which Walmart bought for $3 billion in 2016 — have a few more strategies for vetting whether or not someone's a team player in interviews.

Conversational red flags include:

• Shirking accountability in past roles.
• Bashing previous companies or bosses.
• Failing to take an active role in organizational cultures.

The two execs say that by steering clear of ego-driven hires, they are ensuring that the team is as strong as possible. Landsman says that, at the end of the day, she hopes to hire people who value improving and growing Jet.com as part of a team over achieving solo glory.

"We want people who come here with kind of a missionary zeal about the journey that we are on," Landsman says.

DON'T MISS: Jet.com execs say the trait they look for in job candidates is far more important than intelligence

SEE ALSO: 15 sentences your interviewer doesn't want to hear

Join the conversation about this story »

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The top-producing sales reps master discovery questions that lead to their company’s differentiated value. When reps are effective at discovering a buyer’s value drivers along with any unrealized needs, it benefits them at all stages of the sales cycle.

When reps are not good at discovery, they pay for it throughout the competitive stages of the purchase.

Being good at discovery requires being a good strategic thinker. Knowing where you want to guide the customer and what you want them to conclude or feel about your solution, is essential.

Sales reps who ask well-intentioned questions but cone them up on the spot, will probably come off sounding like their value proposition is too much like (Sameness Selling) the competition’s. Mental laziness toward the discovery phase will result in failing to effectively differentiate solution value – and that will cause buyers to lump such reps into the commodity coffin. And when this occurs, they can trapped into competing on low price.

You can be highly effective at asking discovery questions with a few guiding principles:

1. Know where you want to end up – know the conclusions the buyer must reach and the feelings they must have toward your solution if you are to win the business. B2B sales is both a cognitive and an emotion-based decision and you should be asking questions that touch on both realms.
2. Invest ten to twenty minutes before each call to develop questions. Focus on the wording and the tone. Think about how the question will come off to your prospect. Is there a better way to ask what you want to know?
3. Fit the question to the customer’s industry or business, but also tailor it to their position. In other words, don’t pose a question to a C-level or senior decision influencer that sounds like a staff person should be answering instead. For senior executives, ask questions that focus on strategic issues and business outcomes. For a lower-level decision influencer ask questions about steps, tasks, budgets and timeline.
4. Have alternative questions ready. Give some thought to your follow-up questions if the person answers one way versus another.
5. Use proven questions, but don’t sound rehearsed. Even good questions can come across robotic or survey-like. It’s best to wordsmith each question until it fits the client and sounds like you are dialoguing on a relational level.

If you want more tips on how to structure questions that lead to your differentiated value, I recommend you check out The 5 Rules of Megavalue Selling.

Raviv Turner is Co-Founder and CEO at CaliberMind. On this episode, he and I discuss the challenges B2B marketers face in understanding the lengthy buyer’s journey. It’s long, it’s complex, there are more people involved, and there is a ton of data spread across both structured and unstructured sources.

Raviv’s career path includes being an entrepreneur, a product designer, a marketing technologist, and a Former Israel Signal Intelligence Community Officer. He applied the knowledge he learned about Big Data while working as an Intelligence Officer into his work building software products.

He explains how CaliberMind uses machine learning techniques to harness data across the broad spectrum of sources, resulting in improved sales pipeline and accelerated close rates. We also discuss why he believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is overhyped and what marketers need to understand to take advantage of the power and potential of AI. This take-away alone is worth the listen!

Raviv sees AI more as augmented intelligence than artificial intelligence. He adds that it’s not going to replace marketers. Marketers can work internally with IT or with vendors to help deploy AI, but it’s not plug and play as it’s often hyped up to be. CaliberMind uses AI for lead scoring, persona and content tagging, and dynamic segmentation.

Utilizing Data to Assist Sales

CaliberMind is an Integrated Customer Database Platform that marketers use to unify customer data from marketing, sales, and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer acquisition. We now have large amounts of data, which requires that we fragment the data to make it usable. Raviv says we collect so much data that it’s hard to piece it together and manage it all without fragmentation. Another reason for data fragmentation is tool fatigue with AI and machine learning.

Their B2B customers collect various types of data starting with first party data which is about their buyers and it’s managed within CRM systems and other platforms. Second party data is gathered from sources such as Google AdWords, and third party data is rented or purchased. This data is segmented into types including firmographic and account level data, down to technographic, intent, engagement, and psychographic data.

Raviv says psychographic data (how people think) is trickier since it comes from unstructured data. 80% of behavior data is unstructured, meaning it comes from email communications, sales calls, notes in the CRM, social media engagement, etc. Combining the structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data gives a selling organization a full view of prospects.

The ‘Data Science Hierarchy of Needs’

Gartner’s Analytics Continuum includes data on what happened (descriptive), why it happened (diagnostic), and what will happen (predictive). This can all be found in the market, but the one thing you won’t find is actionable data, or what Gartner calls prescriptive data.

The ‘Data Science Hierarchy of Needs’ starts with collecting data from CRM and analytics. Below you see that it’s similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs but applies to data analysis.

6 Use Cases of CaliberMind

Raviv explains that you have to “collect the dots before you can connect the dots.” After obtaining the needed information, CaliberMind helps B2B brands with the following six objectives.

Mapping the Customer Journey

The customer journey is from lead to revenue to advocacy, and not just lead to sale. To integrate, measure, and optimize the entire lifecycle CaliberMind creates system maps post-sale thereby giving the customer a better experience.

The buyer journey is a maze with 17 touch points in the typical B2B journey. Mapping out the journey allows for journey orchestration and the ability to accelerate the deal.

Automation

Their technology allows organizations to go after a specific attribute of the target customer by applying tags across various systems. Most segmentation is based on firmographics, so it often stops at the account level.

Behavior Analysis

Raviv reminds us it’s people buying and that two accounts never look the same. Dynamic segmentation based on needs and behavior help lead to determining micro-segments.

Psychographic Analysis

By analyzing what is said, prospects can be mapped against personality traits to match the content and channel that will work best for them. The information is then pushed back to the CRM.

Operationalizing Personas

A persona is similar to a segment and Raviv says they need to be actionable. After listening to customers to operationalize personas, CaliberMind then pushes the persona score to the organization’s marketing automation software.

Content Intelligence

On average, buyers have already conducted about 60% of their research when they contact a company. Through customer journey mapping, CaliberMind can recommend a particular piece of content to guide them along their journey.

Centralized Dashboards and Insights

The Customer Data Platform provides prescriptive insights to improve the buyer experience. Through integration CaliberMind allows the sales and marketing team to continue using their current CRM and Marketing Automation software.

Raviv recommends focusing more on the data. He says everything links back to data, and the biggest struggle for customers is “garbage data.” He expects to see re-architecture of data unification to overcome tool fatigue and large amounts of data.

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The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales by Anthony Iannarino, Portfolio, 240 pages, Hardcover, August 2017, ISBN 9780735211698

The sales profession has a pretty poor reputation. Most of the traditional sales methods taught were self-oriented, focused on ways in which salespeople could manipulate others with different sales tricks and tactics, rather than on how they could help them by getting to know what they really needed. But sales has changed, in part because consumers got wise to the tricks, and in part because of consumer-protection laws that were passed to protect against them, but I think most of all because it’s better for business.

Anthony Iannarino has witnessed the change in the field. He believes we have transitioned from caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) world to a caveat venditor (let the seller beware) world. The internet has given buyers more options than ever before, while social media has given them a word of mouth bullhorn with which to damage the reputation of unscrupulous businesses. In this environment, bad sales behaviors simply don’t work as well:

 

But the negative image lingers of salespeople as being self-oriented, manipulative, and pushy—even though successful sales people are exactly the opposite.

 

The perception has stuck, and it is one that Anthony Iannarino shared when he began his professional life at his family’s temporary staffing business. Being a family business, when there wasn’t anything to do in his role as a recruiter, he “spent time calling on companies, scheduling appointments, meeting with their people, and (hopefully) winning their business.” He continued doing the same at his next job, and was so good at winning clients that his manager asked him to go into full-time outside sales. Still harboring a negative view of sales, he rejected the idea outright, going so far as to tell his boss, “I hate salespeople.” What he didn’t realize is that he was already doing it. Grudgingly accepting the offer, he began to make calls with his manager:

 

And I saw that he was never selfish, manipulative, or pushy. Instead, he was all about finding ways to help his clients get the results they needed. He was the opposite of self-oriented. He was “other oriented,” a guy who worked with his clients, not against them. Once I learned this and began to apply it, I started to love sales—and to find success as a salesperson.

 

This accidental salesperson now has a sales blog that draws over 50,000 readers each month, and wrote The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need—released last October. (Don’t worry, he offers an apology of sorts to the reader and explains why you might need this one, as well.) His sophomore effort, The Lost Art of Closing, compliments that comprehensive guide with a book for sales professionals to correct and update the very idea of what closing means. The author falls fully on the “always be closing” side of the always/never divide, but not for the commitment to buy. He argues for a progressive set of smaller “closes,” or “’advances,’ that progress toward the final close.” What Iannarino suggests is ensuring some form of commitment at the end of every interaction, an insight he gained from Neil Rackham’s 1988 book, SPIN Selling:

 

Once I read Rackham’s work, I applied the idea of gaining a commitment at the end of each interaction, and my sales results immediately improved. This practice alone was transformative, as it is the one thing that I have found that keeps deals moving forward. This insight alone has helped me generate literally hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. That from a book that cost around twety-five dollars and takes four hours to read.

 

“It isn’t the ask that makes you a bad salesperson,” Iannarino insists, “It’s the self-orientation.” When you focus on your customer's needs, you become a trusted advisor in the process, focused on delivering the results they need. You begin to understand that closing happens in stages, like closing ground on an object you see in the distance—each step gets you closer to the goal.

The Lost Art of Closing walks its reader through ten specific commitments needed throughout the sales process: 

1. The Commitment of Time
2. The Commitment to Explore
3. The Commitment to Change
4. The Commitment to Collaborate
5. The Commitment to Build Consensus
6. The Commitment to Invest
7. The Commitment to Review
8. The Commitment to Resolve Concerns
9. The Commitment to Decide
10. The Commitment to Execute

Each of these commitments helps you not only win business, but helps you help that business in a more timely and professional manner by moving the process forward and delivering a solution for them. It is all based on Iannarino’s basic philosophy that:

 

Selling isn’t something you do to someone. It is something you do for someone and with someone.

 

I have two older brothers who work in sales here at 800-CEO-READ. They spend their days fielding calls from authors, publishers, and organizations needing to move books in bulk. Because that most often requires a high level of personal attention and customization, they rarely know what the solution to a customer’s needs will be before they call. Rather, they simply listen to their needs and help them explore ways in which we can help. The same can be said of those in our customer service department, two of whom have been with the company for over two decades, and have formed trusted relationships with customers that are decades old. I would describe what they all do as consulting sooner than I would describe it as selling, but that is the role of sales today—to act as a trusted advisor from which clients can expect a consistently exceptional outcome and a lifetime of value. The Lost Art of Closing puts that approach into an actionable and living philosophy, and provides a process that makes sure the focus is always on what the customer needs, and help you find a way to assist them on that journey, adding value in the process.

Really good, humane and effective sales books don’t come around too often, so when they do you should snatch them up. The Lost Art of Closing is one of them.

The future of sales is at our doorstep — artificial intelligence.

AI is quickly becoming more powerful — and it’s starting to change the way we live in decidedly subtle, but significant, ways. If you’re a sales manager, you’ll want to embrace these changes sooner rather than later.

“Growth-focused sales organizations of every size and stage cannot afford to ignore the benefits of AI-assisted sales”

– EverString founder and CEO, J.J. Kardwell.

“It enables your team to automate prospecting by using machine learning to offload the most time-consuming tasks, and it helps your team focus on the best targets both inside and outside of your existing pipeline, so they can spend more time closing and less time searching for which prospects to pursue.”

Find Your Match

The role AI plays in our lives, while certainly expanding in terms of both consumer and business applications, is far from the dystopian, robots-roaming-the-street imagery that fiction predicts. It’s subtle, like when Siri answers our most inane questions or Netflix recommends a movie to watch.

Finding an AI partner to complement your company will exponentially benefit this transition. Still, if you’re not quite there yet, here are a few things you can do to ensure your sales team doesn’t fall behind.

4 Tips To Prepare For The Future Of Sales

1) Add Data

AI is quickly becoming the best friend data never knew it needed. It’s a union that benefits executives with a wide range of goals.

Executable data from AI and machine learning can be more effective, especially if leaders want to:

• Prioritize their existing sales pipeline
• Bring new prospects into the pipeline
• Identify opportunities to cross-sell or upsell existing customers

Once the right kind of data is collected, AI can also help make more nuanced decisions. It can help pinpoint under-managed, low-volume accounts that need an account manager or help executives find ways to anticipate and avoid customer churn.

Data is the fuel that allows machine learning and AI-based applications to grow and become truly useful. Even if leaders can’t take advantage of it, they should still be collecting and storing it.

Don’t Ignore data – Anyone doing so is falling behind. Unfortunately, many businesses are still slow to adapt — and in today’s business world, lethargy can be fatal.

Use your data correctly –  A survey of CMOs conducted by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business confirms as much. Respondents to the study gave their companies an average of 3.2 points on a five-point scale in terms of their abilities to use customer insights, while their abilities to integrate customer data across channels to improve decision-making got a 3.4 on a seven-point scale.

Your data is only as strong as the means in which it’s applied. Make sure the information gathered is going toward a reachable purpose.

Don’t Freeze up – Technological innovation continues to accelerate, but many companies just can’t keep up. And it’s not only because they’re unable to collect data. Some face a different problem: Too much data is leading to a sort of “analysis paralysis.”

“Almost every sales team faces two common growth challenges: prioritizing inbound leads and identifying relevant net-new prospects that look like their best customers”

– EverString founder and CEO, J.J. Kardwell.

“You need comprehensive, up-to-date, and accurate sales intelligence that seamlessly addresses these two challenges. It also needs to be intuitive enough that every rep can easily access the information they need for account research, meeting preparation, and customizing sales outreach.”

2) Align Processes

Siloed structures are a reality in today’s corporate culture. Maybe salespeople think they’re great at closing deals, but marketing can’t send them anything, or the marketing team thinks it’s driving plenty of leads, but the guys in sales can’t close.

“Every business wants to accelerate its growth. To do this, sales and marketing teams need easy access to the most critical insights and information on every relevant prospect. Because this information is constantly changing and massive in scale, AI plays a critical role in synthesizing the world’s data and delivering the most mission-critical insights and information directly into the hands of sales and marketing teams.”

Don’t Allow divisive thinking to pervade your business – Steer both marketing and sales toward a single overarching goal. Whether the objective is creating a better product, growing the customer base, or increasing revenue, leadership needs to ensure that both departments leverage the data into something executable for both.

3) Measure & Monitor

If an old process seems to be losing effectiveness, don’t hesitate to break it down and build it back up. Companies often fear moving away from current, tried-and-true processes built up through years of scrutiny and precision; these old-school databases or lead-management techniques used to work so well that they don’t want to ditch them just yet.

As soon as a pattern of ineffective outcomes emerges, reconsider — and rejigger — current methods. If you stick with an outdated process for too long just because it’s more convenient, you’ll continue to fall short of your goals, so be flexible.

Don’t Assume a shiny piece of new tech will solve all your problem – If your team is used to doing things a certain way, it will take time to learn a new process and implement new tools, but teaming AI with data will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications.

4) Sharpen Your Focus

Appeal to the customers most likely to use and benefit from your product or service. To do that, you need to know what customers want. A lack of empathy for the customer or end user often reveals itself in a poorly designed product or user experience. But it’s critical that sales and marketing teams develop empathy as well.

With a machine learning platform, you’ll be able to create more refined customer models and easily identify the companies or individuals who match those. These advanced analytics capabilities can lead to incredible efficiency gains and overall revenue growth.

Don’t Try to reach everyone – Instead of focusing on moving leads down the marketing funnel or closing deals, have them think about customer needs and alleviating pain points before trying to sell something.

Indeed, lots of companies now have so much data at their fingertips that it can be hard to figure out what to do with it all or how to make it relevant and useful. Let machine learning applications do the legwork when it comes to turning results into prospect needs and behavior and identifying optimization opportunities for sales and marketing.

The Final Takeaways

Business leaders, sales and marketing executives, and entrepreneurs should strive to incorporate machine learning platforms into their sales and marketing processes. They may not be able to pour tons of money into the latest data analytics software, but the good news is that a company won’t need to in order to reap the benefits.

Even if you don’t yet have a sophisticated analytics platform, be sure to:

• Get your team into the habit of using AI to learn about customers.
• Put the customer’s needs front and center.

Today’s customers want to buy into your company, not just buy from it. Show them why they should.

The post How To Prepare Your Sales Team For AI Adoption appeared first on Sales Hacker.

If you are not willing to be accountable for holding people accountable, then you will not have a culture of accountability. Your lack of accountability becomes their lack of accountability.

If you are not client-focused, your people will follow your lead. If you don’t eat, sleep, and breath clients, neither will the people you need to take care of them. Your opinion about clients will become their opinion.

If you believe that your company only exists to create shareholder value, then your people will not believe that they are doing purposeful, meaningful work that makes a difference. Your focus will sap your people of their desire to give you their very best.

If you ignore or avoid new ideas that conflict with your view of your business and your models, you will kill the initiative and resourcefulness that spurs the ideas that turn into innovation. This shutting down of ideas leads to stagnation, irrelevance, and eventually, the dust heap.

If you are pessimistic, cynical, and negative, that infection will spread so deep into your company that you will have an easier time shutting the company down and starting over than changing the culture that you created—or allowed. This is the only cancer that spreads by contact.

If you believe that external events and circumstances dictate your future, your people will believe too that their future is determined by the hands of fate. Without meaning to, you can disempower your people, and you can prevent them from being their very best.

Your people are going to, by and large, become a reflection of your leadership. Your beliefs become their beliefs, your actions theirs. You are building them in your image, and that means that it is worth stopping to take a look at what kind of people—and company—you are building.

If you want to see change, you have to go first.

The post The Leadership Playbook: Building People In Your Image appeared first on The Sales Blog.

What is social selling? It’s one of those terms you probably hear a lot but may not be able to define. At Sandler Training, we define social selling as: “Using online networks and resources to add more prospects, opportunities, and information to your sales pipeline.”

Many confuse social selling with social media marketing. They think it's about getting thousands of online followers, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers, blasting out messages, and getting people to buy based on the call-to-action in those messages. While it’s possible, it’s an aspect of social media marketing -- which isn’t very scalable if you happen to be in a company with 500 salespeople. It's unlikely that 500 individual salespeople will each be industry experts with thousands of followers. Expecting them to generate business from total strangers by leveraging the power of a compelling tweet? Not very realistic.

What is possible, however, is using social media to add people, opportunities, and information to your network. If you look around, you’ll see that’s what the most accomplished sales professionals are doing today.

Tap into the Limitless Potential of Social Selling

What I love about the three elements we include in the Sandler definition of social selling --prospects, opportunities, and information -- is they're virtually unlimited. There is always somebody else whom you can meet. There is always another selling opportunity. There is always more information that can help you qualify or progress in those sales opportunities. This definition reminds us there are endless resources that we can tap into via social media to help us sell more and sell more easily.

Your knowledge, relationships, and attention are the infinite resources that you can trade to get those other infinite opportunities back, the ones that help you sell more and sell more easily. And here’s the good news. This part is scalable. Every salesperson, no matter how skilled they are with technology or how long they’ve been in the business, has relationships, attention, and specialized knowledge they can use to secure more people to talk to, more sales opportunities, and more information. This concept is the theory behind social selling success.

To put it into practice, start giving your attention to your prospects by liking and sharing their posts. Start giving your knowledge by writing interesting and helpful posts or curating and sharing industry articles. If you want more referrals and introductions, start making them for other people and leverage your relationships and network to meet more people.

Keeping a One-to-One Focus

We believe the key to social selling success lies in recognizing that even though you can blast a message to a lot of people on social media, ultimately, you are trying to develop a one-on-one relationship with a prospect. Salespeople need to generate more one-on-one conversations that result in sales opportunities. Whether it's LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, what you’re doing is using a one-to-many medium to support a one-to-one sales approach.

Your company can build an audience, brand awareness, and lead generation funnels. That’s Marketing’s function, not yours. It’s going to take a long time to build an audience and a personal platform large enough to generate weekly opportunities, and if you’re like most salespeople, you don't have that time. Most likely, you need a sale this week. Your goal shouldn’t be to write a blog post that gets more “likes” than anyone else in your space. Your goal is simply to add prospects, opportunities, and information to your existing sales pipeline, and then leverage those to start a single conversation about a legitimate, qualified sales opportunity.

Social selling has blurred the line between marketing and sales, but as a salesperson, you need to redefine it for yourself. Are you getting paid to build an audience, or you getting paid to open and close sales opportunities?

If your answer is the latter, start thinking about how you can take leads and suspects from social media marketing and turn them into sales prospects. To help you, we created a free guide for how to write social selling emails that land you an appointment.

Businesses that exclusively focus on traffic generation and conversion may want to rethink this strategy because it diverts attention and resources from the most important individuals: the repeat customers. Unlike a new lead, repeat customers no longer require convincing to buy your products and services. Retaining them requires substantially less effort and marketing money than acquiring the first time customer.

In fact, many are happy to continue their purchasing with no input from you. However, it’s best not to take this for granted. Proactive efforts at improving their experience with your business reduce their attrition rate and may increase their numbers through word-of-mouth referrals. Of course, acquiring first time customers is also important for business growth, but retaining them and your current repeat customers allows your business to grow faster. Thus your resources should include customer retention as well as acquisition.

Three other important benefits of repeat customers are:

They Have a High Lifetime Value

Lifetime value is the net profit gained over the course of your future relationship with a customer. Repeat customers tend to spend more by making frequent purchases of products and services with a higher price point. Efforts on your part to understand their purchasing patterns allow you to make enticing offers that ensure future buying.

They Are Easy Going Customers

Because of high customer satisfaction, repeat customers make fewer complaints, are less demanding, and make fewer returns. Understanding their preferences and providing them with what they want, ensure their high satisfaction.

They Are Less Receptive to Your Competitor’s Offers

Unless they thoroughly enjoy shopping around for the best prices and deals, most people prefer to default their purchasing to proven businesses. For them, buying from a proven business is less risky. Shopping around and researching other businesses is exhausting and time-consuming. Most people have better things to do with their time and energy.

Getting to know your customers and personalizing your interactions with them isn’t easy, especially as their numbers increase. However, automated marketing and CRM software greatly facilitates and streamlines the process. It’s equally useful for acquiring new customers as well.

Almost every traditional book on sales methodologies has a section on overcoming objections. The techniques proposed often seem to be manipulative and self-serving. They often come across like an attempt to outwit the customer.

The problem lies in our choice of words. When someone “objects” to something, they are expressing disagreement, disapproval, refusal or opposition. The language is inherently confrontational. We’re applying the wrong mental model when we label our customers’ legitimate questions as objections - and we’re making it harder to deal with them.

Because, most of the time, our customer’s “objection” isn’t actually a statement of disagreement, disapproval, refusal or opposition - it’s simply an expression of an unresolved concern…

CONCERNS SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED

Let’s face it; it would be surprising if any person or organisation, facing a significant buying decision, didn’t have some concerns. In fact, if they didn’t express any concerns, we might wonder whether they were fully engaged in the process.

And it’s surely better that our prospective customer’s concerns are openly expressed rather than kept to themselves. When we think of an “objection” as something that needs to be confronted, we’re less likely to seek them out than if we think of them as natural concerns that need to be addressed.

So encouraging our customers to articulate their concerns is a helpful strategy. It helps us to understand more about their decision making process, and the stage they may have reached in their buying journey.

SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE

More importantly, it opens up a broader conversation. When we talk in terms of objections, we tend to narrow our thinking to dealing with their negative or ambivalent feelings about our company, our solution or our offer. But those are just a fraction of the factors that could derail a project.

Their concerns could include how they might achieve consensus with their colleagues on the decision team, how they can be confident that the project they are championing will deliver the expected results, or how they can persuade their organisation to fund their project ahead of other competing investments.

They might be concerned about the impact of the decision on their staff or colleagues, or on their own reputation as a competent manager and a safe pair of hands. They might be concerned about whether they actually need to change anything, and whether they might be better off sticking with the status quo.

IT’S NOT THE OBVIOUS OBJECTIONS THAT KILL OUR CHANCES

Here’s the problem: if we continue to embrace a narrowly-focused, objection-handling mindset, the chances are that we will never uncover many of these concerns, or be given the opportunity to help our prospective customer to resolve them.

You see, most of the time, it’s not the objections that we get told about that kill us: it’s the concerns that we fail to address that prevent us from winning what might otherwise have been a mutually successful and profitable project.

LEARNING FROM CONCERNS

As well as helping us deal more effectively with an active sales opportunity in its current phase and form, proactively uncovering and resolving concerns can also help us to learn how to run more effective sales campaigns.

If we can anticipate, uncover and address commonly-expressed concerns earlier in the sales process, we can resolve them before they unnecessarily delay an opportunity in the its later stages. If we can pre-emptively raise and address common concerns before the customer recognises or articulates them we can reinforce our position as a truly trusted advisor.

And by thinking of our role as resolving concerns rather than handling objections, we end up adopting an entirely more productive, non-confrontational and collaborative mindset in our relationship with our existing and prospective customers.

So - think back to the last sales training course you put your sales people through. Review your current sales enablement materials. Do they talk about handling objections or about uncovering and resolving concerns? If it’s still mostly about handling objections, you may be sending your sales people out armed with entirely the wrong mental model.

And that's something you should certainly be concerned about...

You might also enjoy:

• Transforming the future by reflecting on the past
• 4 things you need to know about B2B buying decisions
• Identifying your Ideal Customers - the essential guide
• Moving the Middle: bridging the gap between your best sales people and the rest

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, enabling them to systematically establish their distinctive business value in every customer interaction.

Open rates. Click throughs. Unsubscribes. Bounce rates. These metrics are all important for email marketers to track in order to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. But if we take a step back and think about what matters most when it comes to evaluating email marketing success, what metrics best demonstrate an effective effort in driving longstanding, loyal customers?

Long-term studies have shown that populations targeted with more personalized emails are much healthier when it comes to loyalty and engagement. This is why it’s important to serve customers a balanced email content diet – providing them with variety that’s aligned to their individual tastes and preferences.

So, what can email marketers start to look at now to go beyond clicks to drive long-term lift? Here are a few metrics that really matter:

Email Reuse Rates

One big mistake email marketers make is discarding emails after one use. When you consider the time and effort put into creating each piece of content, it is wasteful to take the one-and-done approach. It is also shortsighted. Just because an email is unopened when it’s sent doesn’t mean it’s not of interest. There are other factors in play that could influence a consumer’s interest at the time that they receive it. Retailers should look at emails that generate high click-through rates and resend them to another portion of their customer base a few days later to see what further interest can be generated.

In addition, retailers should maintain a content library to extend the lifespan of all of this valuable content. Not only does this help retailers increase click-throughs and generate maximum value from every piece of content they have, but they can also examine the data each piece generates to determine the ideal products and categories to send to each customer, as well as the perfect time to send it.

Engagement Rates

We know every consumer is unique, so we shouldn’t expect the same reaction to each piece of content. To get insights into what is working and what’s not, retailers should test emails on a small group of customers and adjust accordingly based on their engagement rates. This will help email marketers be more successful and will make recipients more satisfied with the emails they receive from you.

Customer Cadence

Since each consumer has a different appetite for content that evolves over time, retailers need to regularly match the frequency and timing of emails to each customer’s changing tastes. By pinpointing the perfect email cadence for every customer, retailers can ensure that their high-value customers stay engaged and their content is not overlooked or ignored. They can do this by using data from customer interactions to optimize their email targeting.

The Moral of This Story

While many email marketers prioritize content based on merchandising goals – such as selling more sweaters or promoting the newest trend – they should instead be focused on what customers are interested in. Through this approach, they can create a balanced diet of content for each customer, who will continue to crave more from you over time – resulting in the long-term lift all retailers are hungry for.

You walk into the coffee shop right near your office – the one you’ve been coming to for years. As you duck and weave through the crowds and wind your way to the register, you place your order, and then grab a cup of the free new caramel cotton candy carrot latte positioned on the counter as you wait. You take a few sips, and are really just starting to enjoy yourself, when you discover that the cup is leaking. The staff are all busy, there are no more cups, so you toss it, all while making a mental note that you sort of liked that beverage, and to try it again.

A week later, you walk by the new coffee shop a few more steps from your office, and decide to go in. By the door, the owner hands you a cup of free coffee very similar to the one you had last week, and chats with you for a while. He learns about your likes, dislikes, needs, wants and your job. Your cup starts to leak again, but the owner notices quickly, and hands you another. Inspired by the experience, you become a new regular.

Across the consumer and B2B spaces, free trials are still a major way of introducing products to the market. And when you think about it, the basic principles of ensuring that customers buy after they try aren’t all that dissimilar between the two spheres. Ensuring conversion success relies on knowing your customer, leveraging that knowledge for personalized outreach, fixing issues that arise, and overall, solving your customer’s need or problem to fuel continued engagement with your product.

So when it comes to your free trials, which of those coffee shops are you? Do you really know your users, and can you follow them on their journeys so that you can meet their needs exactly when they have them? As hot (yes, it’s a pun) as your product is, it simply doesn’t matter if you can’t get your users engaged enough to eventually spend money on it.

So why aren’t your free trials generating qualified leads? Here is some advice on best practices to increase trial conversions.

Limit Trial Time

For whatever reason, 30 days has become the industry standard when it comes to free trials. But running a trial too long can actually contribute to customer churn.

First, in our space, moving fast is of course vital to survival. When users try your product and encounter issues within the first day or two for which they find no quick resolution, a message from you some 30 days later with questions about use and offers to purchase will go ignored. You’ve already used up far too much of their valuable time, without solving their problem.

There’s no perfect number, and trial times can differ by product. Different users with different machines, architectures, operating systems and comfort levels with the product may need more or less time. But the key to increasing conversions is to be able to identify issues with the trial in more or less real-time, to work on solutions before users gets so frustrated that they walk away altogether.

For instance, perhaps users are encountering an issue with the settings on a configuration wizard that prevent them from fully utilizing the product’s functionality, and abandoning your product before ever launching it. By monitoring session run-time and correlating that information with data on machine, memory capacity, region, version, edition, operating system and much more, you can pinpoint problems like this and speed resolution.

In turn, by looking at trends in runtime sessions, we can get a sense of how many times a user needs to launch the product to become familiar and comfortable with functionality, and target follow-ups for the exact moment when the user will be most likely to covert – or when he or she is most likely to fall out of the pipeline.

Personalize Messaging

How many times have you discovered – too long after you’ve carefully crafted and sent marketing collateral – that the functionality users really like in your product isn’t what you had assumed? And as a result, finely tuned marketing campaigns just aren’t resonating with potential users. Perhaps PC users move through a workflow in a different manner than Mac users. Perhaps users in Germany aren’t utilizing a piece of functionality that is very popular in the U.K.

The best offers take into account actual use cases, and provide relevant content to these audiences that makes them realize you understand their problem and can help solve it. By slicing and dicing usage data by factors like geography, operating system and more, you can tailor offers to each audience to dramatically increase conversion rates.

Offer Content that Adds Value

Personalization does not simply mean sending the email from and to an actual person’s name, or even just identifying unique problems by geography or role. Offers that catch attention add value.

Data-driven marketers know their audiences, and know exactly what else they may need to make a buying decision. Augmenting offer strategies with rich media – how-to videos on workflows that you see are popular within the customer base, or stories that highlight interesting, innovative functionality that customers are missing, or customer case studies that demonstrate ROI – will help grab the bit of attention that may make the difference between clicking the link to buy or clicking to delete the email.

All of this rests on a sound usage analytics’ strategy – with anonymized data to help you find trends, outliers and identify and fix problems in your free trial strategy. As such, you’ll really get to know each and every customer to solve their problems and create long-term relationships with your brand.

The post Best Practices for Increasing Trial Conversions appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Ever walked up to a stranger at a party, a networking event, or just a new acquaintance and wanted to make sure they left the conversation with a positive impression? 

Robin Dreeke, a Naval Academy graduate, former Marine, former head of a federal behavioral analysis program, a current FBI agent, and coauthor of "The Code of Trust" shared three strategies with Business Insider to connect with anyone, anywhere. Following is a transcript of the video.

Three ways to build connections with people is by asking questions, active listening, and decoding nonverbal behavior. It's really pretty simple because when you ask questions, the other person's brain's automatically engaging. It's the best thing you do.

Again, when you're asking questions, again, nonjudgmentally or in a challenging way, but from a seeking to understand way, you're demonstrating their value and you're demonstrating an affiliation, and their brain is really rich and rewarded for it.

Did you ever hear the expression, "Hey, you want to plant seeds for someone to think about tomorrow?"

You don't do that by telling someone what to do, or telling them your thoughts and opinions. You do that by asking them questions because their brain will engage those things and they can't stop. So, that's the first one.

Active listening — that is really simple for me because, by just demonstrating that you're listening by following up  on the statements and information they're giving you during an encounter.

Get rid of the things that you think you had to say in any kind of script, and pay attention to what they're saying and follow up with even deeper questions about understanding who they are and their thoughts and opinions.

And finally is the nonverbals. And what we're in nonverbal behavior to demonstrate that we actually do have affiliation and liking going on, is we're looking for the smiling, maybe a little head tilt, exposing a carotid artery, trusting the world not to rip out my jugular. Palms up, ventral displays, eyebrow elevation, all these things are saying and demonstrating we have liking, we have affiliation. As opposed to the eyebrow compression, lip compression. This is saying you're not doing something right, and you need to adjust what you're doing in order to make that connection.

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“I ignore the quota,” Theresa the salesperson said. “No one loses their job here if we don’t make the numbers, which are totally unrealistic anyway.” 

Steve piped up, “We don’t worry about the quota; it’s a yearly number and no one tracks it.” 

Amad said, “Yeah, they give us quotas, but the sales managers don’t have the same numbers, and the systems engineers aren’t on the same system; so no one gets punished but us.” 

To top it off, a really anxious saleswoman by the name of Sylvia said, “Our company president sets the quotas every year; the sales manager doesn’t have much to say about it. No one pays attention.”

And so on, and so on. This occurred in a single gap analysis meeting with salespeople at a high-tech company that was not making its numbers. When the revenue isn’t hitting forecast, there is more to it than training the reps (few need it), competitive offers (there are always competitors), or product failures (seldom valid). To understand the revenue failure issue, as a consultant I had to start with the people closest to the issue and then spread out to policies, procedures, tool use, and marketing lead generation.

Quotas can be by dollar, by product, and by sales activity; often by all three. Quotas have several functions:

• Insurance to make the top number for the company,
• A performance measurement for salespeople—a bar that must be reached so management can fire the poor performers,
• A motivation to create super achievers to make up for those who fall short,
• A way to ensure the timely flow of revenue to support the rest of the employees.

In my years of sales management and sales consulting I have found the following four reasons for sales failure in many companies.

Today, I am sharing the four common issues for Quota Failure:

1. Companies do not have monthly, quarterly and yearly quotas.

If you do not have individual monthly, quarterly and yearly sales quotas you are not running a sales organization, you are running a lottery. Set monthly and quarterly achievement quotas and watch sales increase within three months; within six months you will be surprised at the change in achievement. All good salespeople keep track of their achievements and need to know how they are being measured. If you aren’t doing this now, you can expect some resignations; those who don’t like being held accountable (usually those not making quota) will quit. When you think about it, this won’t be a loss but a win.

Why it Matters:

“If you do not have individual monthly, quarterly and yearly sales quotas you are not running a sales organization you are running a lottery.”

James Obermayer

2. Quota achievement isn’t reported monthly.

If a salesperson doesn't know where they stand on quota achievement for the month, how will they know if they are ahead or behind?  Too many companies are slow to report or only do it quarterly.  I think the issue lies with the accounting department, which dislikes doing this work.  Report their performance achievements monthly, if not more often.

3. Quotas are unrealistic.

Is the sales incentive bar set too high? If you have set sales quotas too high (when fewer than 70% make quota year to year), you have to tell the quota-setting executive that quotas are set too high and are not motivating; they are performance killers. Setting stretch quotas (10-15% higher than what you really need) is a prudent tactic, but 30-50% stretch goals each year are unrealistic and demoralizing.

Why it Matters

“Remember, a pipeline is managed by fearful, insecure salespeople reporting to optimistic sales managers, and both deal with selfish prospects who lie.”

James Obermayer

4. The Canary in the Coal Mine: Do you have an honest sales pipeline you can count on?

Your sales forecast (AKA sales pipeline) is the first indicator of failing sales and therefore quota failures; it is a very reliable indicator of the future. When sales falter you need the most accurate forecast, not salespeople covering their backsides because prospects have:

1. Stopped returning calls
2. Postponed the deal far into the future
3. Suddenly run into budget issues
4. Misled or lied to the salesperson because they don’t know how to say the situation has changed

The pipeline is the first indication of failure (the canary is dead on the bottom of the cage), and this starts happening a month or two ahead of severe drops in sales. Remember, a pipeline is managed by fearful, insecure salespeople reporting to optimistic sales managers, and both deal with selfish prospects who lie. The first indications of a gasping canary is when deals are pushed, new deals are not put on the forecast for closing in 30-60 days, and salespeople, during sales meetings, talk long and loud about what prospects say without commitments. In other words, if I talk loud and long enough that is a good enough excuse for failure.

To counteract this, get the pipeline and the people who control it, the salespeople, to be  painfully truthful and you will solve many issues. You must insist on the truth from salespeople, not overly optimistic estimates. Create policies for retaining only serious buyers on the pipeline.  Don’t embarrass or harass salespeople about their pipeline; help them build it.

Of course, these aren’t the only issues with quotas and quota achievement, but address these four issues and you’ll fix the majority of quota failures.

These are four of 56 reasons sales could be failing as outlined in a white paper written by James Obermayer. Go here for How to Tell if Your Pipeline is Failing You: A CEO’s Guide.

We are now in the age of the self-educated buyer. Two-thirds of buyers complete their decision-making before they contact a sales rep. They take in content in their own way, on their own time. To deal with this new reality, you must have an effective on-demand content strategy that puts your...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Chart of the Day: Finance, Manufacturing and Travel Industries reach the email inbox 9 out of 10 times

For email marketers, the prospect of your emails not reaching the inbox has been a consistent worry. Email services for consumers (Gmail, Outlook etc) are always trying to do the best for their users and have protection in place so spammy looking emails don't clog up their inboxes. This level of protection means that 1 in 5 emails don't reach the intended recipient.

In a recent report by Return Path the email delivery experts on average, 85% of emails from all industries globally ever reach the recipient's email inbox.

Banking & finance, distribution & manufacturing, and travel marketers are achieving the best inbox placement rate with 90% or more emails hitting the inbox

On the flip side, automotive, education/nonprofit/government, and social & dating industries are having a harder time reaching their audience with inbox placement rates of less than 78%.

Inbox placement rate by industry

• Source: Return Path - 2017 Deliverability Benchmark Report
• Sample: Sample of more than 2 billion promotional email messages sent to consumers around the world between July 2016 and June 2017
• Recommended Resource: Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Buyers Guide

The cash conversion cycle is a key metric for startups, but one that often isn’t talked about until a business hires a CFO. Once a business established product market fit, the cash conversion cycle is a key metric of a company’s cash efficiency - how quickly a company can convert a dollar of investment into a dollar of cash flow.

To calculate the cash conversion cycle for a software company, the formula is

`CCC = Sales cycle + Accounts Receivable Latency - Accounts Payable Latency

Sales cycle is the number of days from first engaging a customer to when the customer signs a contract. Accounts receivable latency is the amount of time from the contract being signed to the customer paying for the service. Accounts payable is the number of days from when the business receives its bills and when it pays them. That’s all a bit amorphous so let’s compare two hypothetical situations.

Case	Sales Cycle	AR	AP	CCC
Short Cycle	45	30	30	45
Long Cycle	270	90	30	330

In the case of the Short Cycle, the CCC is 45 days compared to 330 for the Long Cycle. Why is this so important to a business? For the same reasons payback periods are critical. The faster an invested dollar is recouped, the sooner the business can invest it again in lead generation, sales development and account executives.

In the Short Cycle, the business can buy $1 worth of leads every 45 days. In the Long Cycle, the business must wait nearly one year before investing that dollar. Either the Long Cycle company must raise much more capital, and be diluted further, or it will grow more slowly.

Of the three parts of the cash conversion cycle, only one component is determined by the go to market organization: the sales cycle. The other two parts, accounts payable and accounts receivable, are the responsibilities of the finance teams.

By collecting payments from customers promptly, the finance team improves the CCC of the business. More cash to invest in growth sooner. And by negotiating for better payment terms, a longer time to pay bills, the finance team keeps more dollars in the company’s accounts to invest. For example, if the Short Cycle startup can negotiate 90 day payment terms and their CCC is 45 days, they could theoretically invest a dollar twice in growth before paying it to a supplier.

The paragraph above illustrates why CCC is a metric most startups begin to measure after hiring a CFO. The finance team is a critical part of managing CCC. But the sooner the business can understand, measure and tune its CCC, the more sooner the business can reinvest dollars to grow faster.

Only 37% of B2B marketers have a documented B2B content marketing strategy!

Ouch. Maybe that’s you. Do you see why it’s important to have a documented strategy, but just don’t know where to begin? Or perhaps you doubt that it can work for your company.

So why should you have a documented strategy?

Research shows that businesses with a documented strategy get 7.8 times more website traffic than those who don’t. By not having a documented strategy, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity for traffic growth!

While a blog or infographic may seem like an insignificant piece of the puzzle, every piece of content is crucial to your business. A content strategy helps to guide your content creation efforts with tactical precision. So what principles should steer you through your content creation and strategy?

We’ve gathered 12 of the most helpful tips that will help you to stay on track and build your content strategy to its full potential.

A content strategy helps to guide your content creation efforts with tactical precision

12 Expert Tips to Improve Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

1. Be Helpful

The role of content marketing is to serve your audience. Suffice it to say, a blanket “buy our product” approach is not helpful. Even if you truly believe that your product or service is a God-send solution such an turn-off most people.

Instead, create content that inherently makes your audience’s job easier. While it may feel counterintuitive to create content without self-promotion, doing so will support your brand. It will instil trust and loyalty. If you can win over prospects with helpful content, chances are they will come to you when it’s time to purchase.

Create content that inherently makes your reader’s job easier.

2. Start Small

When beginning your content marketing, there’s no reason to be everywhere all at once. Begin with one channel, perhaps your website. Create a large collection of content, and then focus your efforts on directing traffic back to that content.

Spend time grooming your website. Make it user-friendly — easy to navigate and find your content — and visually appealing so that visitors want to stay. Remember to think how your content will appear on mobile devices, since many readers view content on-the-go. Use social media and paid media to nurture interest in your content, and lead people back to your website.

3. Make Sure Your Core Content is Buttoned Up

You may have a mountain of owned content for your audience to devour — but if you don’t have your core content locked down, your job is only half done. Core content, or static content, is the content that doesn’t get old. This includes

• About Us page
• Product description page
• Vision statement
• Why Choose Us page

Content like this needs to be well-written and thoroughly checked before you release other content. If your content does its job, prospective buyers are going to do in-depth research on your website before they make a decision. Spend the time to vet this core content in order to tip the scales in your favor.

4. Create Content That Speaks to Multiple Buyers

Different from B2C buyers, who make purchase decisions as individuals, B2B buyers often make purchase decisions as a group. The person who reads your content or talks with your sales team may be just one link in the chain of people making the final decision.

How does this change your content marketing approach? You need to create content that speaks to every member of a company’s core decision-making team. For instance, if part of that team is a CFO, you’ll need to create content that speaks to his or her financial concerns.

Discuss buyer behavior with your sales team. Learn who is often involved in the purchase decisions of your buyers. Then create content that specifically speaks to those individuals.

5. Spread Your Content Across All Stages of the Funnel

When beginning the journey of content marketing, many err by focusing on the bottom of the funnel. After all, this is the content that wields direct power over purchase decisions. But if your sole goal is bottom-of-the-funnel content, then your funnel has holes that are leaking potential leads.

Combat this common mistake by creating content for every stage of the buyer’s journey. Make it your goal to educate your audience. This goes back to item number one on our list: be helpful.

Audit your current content mix to see what stages of the buyer’s journey are not well-addressed by your content. Then focus your energy on balancing these areas until your funnel is all “patched up” and fucnctions normally again.

6. Make Gated Content Easily Accessible

Have you ever clicked on a CTA to get content, and then come face to face with a question form that is reminiscent of a loan agreement? Maybe you were even scared away from that piece of content by this bad experience. If this describes your forms, then you need to seriously rethink your gated content strategy.

Whittle down your form to the absolutely necessary information you need to assess a lead. In other words, make your form accessible to your audience. Otherwise, you’ll lose more people in the process.

7. Gate Strategically

Gated content is a great lead generation tool. But there’s a danger in going overboard on your gated content. For many readers, too much gated content can be a major turnoff. Instead, gate your content strategically and sparingly.

Maintain a hearty portion of ungated content. And make sure that the content you gate is worthy of the information that you’re asking for in return. There’s nothing more frustrating than forking over your precious information for content that you could have found somewhere else with no strings attached.

In order to use this tool effectively, save it for the middle and bottom of your funnel. Otherwise you could be wasting your time on fish that don’t bite or leads that don’t go anywhere. Instead target your gated content towards those who are ready to make a purchase decision. They deserve your time and energy.

8. Make Thought Leadership a Content Goal

Thought leadership sets you apart as an expert in your industry — it makes you the go-to authority that inspires confidence in your field. This translates to confidence in your brand and products. This is most helpful for C-suite executives, but should also be a goal for lower-level members of your company.

Set yourself up as a thought leader through your content. Create content that fills a need in your industry. Write about solutions to common problems or unique insights on current events that affect the industry.

Use such tools as Google Trends and Buzzsumo to see what topics are trending in your industry. These tools will help you to stay on top of industry news, conversations, and problems. Then you can be the first to produce content that speaks specifically to these issues.

9. Seek Quality Over Quantity

In order to offer up the helpful content that we discussed earlier, you need to pay attention to the quality of your content. In fact, one piece of top-quality content is worth more than 10 pieces of low-quality, mediocre content. Who wants to create content that’s meh?

Audiences have the tendency to read between the lines — if the quality of content goes downhill, it reflects on the brand who produced it. Use tools like Grammarly and Hemingway to help you create error-free content. Create a style guide that will keep your entire content creation team on the same page, in order to create harmoniously high-quality content.

10. Tap Into Influencer Marketing

As we all know, audiences are fed up with traditional advertising, and have become distrustful of brands promoting their own products. So how do you gain your audience’s trust and loyalty despite this?

Influencer marketing can help with these and other problems. Influencers are those who already have a large and loyal audience — many of whom may be the ones you want to target. By working with influencers on content creation and PR campaigns, you can amplify the reach of your brand with a familiar voice that people on the other end will listen to.

Search for influencers within your industry who have high engagement levels with your target audience. You can do this with such tools as BuzzSumo and Traackr. These tools show you specific data on all influencers, such as how many followers they have and their content’s engagement levels. Tools like Klout and Kred give influencers specific scores on their influence.

11. Include a Mix of Content Formats

Every member of your target audience has a content preference. Some are more visual, and will search specifically for content such as infographics, videos, and slideshares. For the more studious reader who perhaps has more time to peruse written content, create blogs, eBooks, and white papers to satisfy their desire for extensive content.

Audiences are more visual than ever before. In one survey, 37% of marketers said that visual content was the most important form of content for their business (second only to blogging, with 38%). Make sure that every piece of content you publish has some sort of visual component — even a feature image that speaks to the topic discussed.

A free visual content creation tool like Canva can help you to create stunning images and infographics to capture and retain your audience’s attention.

12. Lead Your Reader on a Journey

Every piece of content should lead somewhere. What is the next logical step for your reader on his or her way to becoming a loyal buyer? Utilize calls to action that gently lead a customer to the next desired step. Perhaps this step is to subscribe to your newsletter or blog updates, download an Ebook, or schedule an appointment to talk with a sales member.

It helps to create a visual plan of attack for your content. This makes it easy to see the logical progression of your content, and plan its direction. Then create attractive and persuasive calls to action that will gently pull your readers to it.

Key Points to Remember….

• Create content that helps your target audience do its job better, without self-promotion
• Aim for thought leadership content that sets your brand apart as a leading expert in the industry
• Use influencer marketing to bypass the growing thicket of brand distrust, and build your brand awareness through someone your audience already trusts
• Create a wide array of content formats, with an emphasis on visuals throughout your content.

Your B2B content marketing strategy is a powerful tool to boost your reaching your business goals. We hope these tips help you to take full advantage of your content strategy and attain the killer results you desire.

Finding the right sales incentives is critical to building a more effective sales organization. But regardless of the incentive system you have in place, there are things management can do to injure its effectiveness.

Let’s review three of the worst sales incentive policies I’ve seen. They are:

1. Capping incentives
2. Treating all salespeople the same
3. Not measuring and adjusting over time

Capping Incentives

The idea behind capping incentives is short-sighted, and goes something like this. “What if Salesperson X gets all these sales, that will mean we have to pay him all this cash. Let’s put a maximum on the amount we have to pay so we can save on the cost of this program.”

It doesn’t take much time to recognize the flaw inherent in this solution to a problem we should all be so lucky to have. If Salesperson X gets all those sales, those sales equal revenue for the company. So long as the incentive structure is built in such a way that the company profits from the sales after the incentive, there’s no reason to cap it. All capping it does is tells Salesperson X and the rest of your sales team not to work so hard.

Treating All Salespeople the Same

No two employees are the same. And we should not expect them to respond to incentives in the same way. Nowhere is that more true than in sales.

Your high performers might need different incentives than your more average salespeople. New hires might require more support and therefore a different set of expectations than more experienced staffers. People selling different products or to different client types might see starkly different performance.

Your incentive structure should be flexible enough to allow for these kinds of differences. The key is clarity and fairness, not rigidity.

Not Measuring and Adjusting Over Time

Putting an effective incentive plan in place for your sales organization is a time to “Set It and Forget It”. Just like most other marketing practices, it is important to continually optimize the incentive structure over time. Test until you find the one that leads to the maximum benefit for the company and then monitor it for staleness or slippage over time. You may need to inject a little excitement every once in a while if you have a sales team that gets used to the status quo.

Custom trade show booths are perfect for exhibitors looking for a one-of-a-kind exhibit solution to reflect their brand’s personality on the show floor. In this post, we cover several important areas of trade show booth design to help you create a high-impact exhibit tailored to meet your trade show marketing needs.

Your Goals Inform Your Trade Show Booth Design

Your trade show booth is a tool that supports your trade show marketing goals, so making sure your goals are properly outlined is a key step in designing your trade show booth.

Common Trade Show Goals Include:

• Generating leads
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate Sales
• Attract Visitors
• Promote products and services

Make sure you clearly communicate your trade show goals to your exhibit design partner so they can create an exhibit around your objectives that will help you reach your objectives.

Your Exhibit Budget

Trade show booths are a major expense, accounting for 10% of the average trade show budget. This does not include the exhibit space itself, which can typically amount to 30% of your overall budget. Below are two essential tips to help you control the costs associated with designing your exhibit.

Prioritize Booth Elements That Help Achieve Goals:

During the consultation phase of the trade show booth design process, prioritize which design features are most important for you to achieve your goals. Cross off features that are more expensive and less essential to your overall exhibiting objectives to keep costs down.

Prorate Booth Cost Over Estimated Lifespans

To determine the overall lifetime cost and potential return on investment of your exhibit, estimate how many years and at how many shows you per year it will be used. The average lifespan of trade show display hardware is five years. For graphics, the average lifetime is one year.

Trade Show Booth Design Considerations

Before you head into your first meeting with your exhibit partner, research design components that are best suited for your goals.

Search online for custom trade show booth designs for inspiration and make a list of the key components you want to include in your booth.

Common design elements include:

• Hanging structures
• Towers
• Backwalls
• Counters
• Meeting spaces
• Media kiosks
• Product shelving and displays
• Storage spaces (counters, closet, etc.)

Trade Show Graphics

 

Graphics are arguably the most important element of a trade show booth design. High-impact graphics are the key differentiator between capturing the attention of attendees and drawing a high volume of booth traffic versus having your booth relegated to being just another exhibit on the crowded show floor.

Check out our post on trade show graphics to learn more about the options and considerations around designing goal and brand-focus graphics.

Flooring

Flooring is one of the most important pieces of a great trade show booth design and often gets overlooked. Trade show flooring can create an inviting appearance for your booth and it can also provide comfort for your staff and visitors while standing for extended periods of time.

In-Booth Media

Incorporating multimedia as visual or auditory elements can enhance the overall experience for attendees visiting your booth. From the visuals attendees see to the music they hear, multimedia plays a major role in setting the atmosphere and communicating messages that help exhibitors achieve their goals.

Multimedia can be used to support product demonstrations and contests and enhance booth graphics via monitors, touch-screens, video walls and augmented reality.

Decide early what types of technology you wish to incorporate into your booth so they can be a considered in the trade show booth design process from the beginning.

Finding the Right Exhibit Partner

Selecting the right exhibit partner is crucial to designing a successful trade show exhibit. Below we outline the keys to selecting an exhibit partner that can meet your company’s exhibiting needs.

Research Exhibit Partners Early

The process of finding the right exhibit partner can take time, and it can take months design and build on an exhibit. Begin your exhibit partner search early so as to find the right fit while leaving enough time to design and build your trade show exhibit.

Know Your Needs

When speaking with a potential exhibit partner, be upfront with your needs, budget and deadline. Research each potential partner’s capabilities to ensure that the companies you are considering can meet your desired budget, timeframe and trade show booth design requirements.

Look for Experience

Experience is everything when it comes to selecting the right exhibit partner. Exhibit partners with a long and successful history have experienced teams of exhibit designers and builders who work as a cohesive unit, minimizing miscommunication and leading to an overall easier design and building process.

Check References

Ask for and follow up with references from each potential exhibit partner. Contacting references allows you to learn more about the experiences others have had with the services you require, how closely an exhibit partner can follow budget, direction, how they resolve issues and the level of customer service they provide.

The Trade Show Booth Design Process

 

There are four core steps in the exhibit design and creation process, including:

1. Needs Assessment

Complete a needs assessment form. The needs assessment form is a list of questions your exhibit partner uses to better understand your creative vision. This information will help guide your exhibit partner regarding what materials and design techniques to use when designing and building your exhibit.

2. Review and Refine Initial Concepts

The exhibit designer will provide you with rough sketches and concepts of an exhibit design. Once you agree to a design, the exhibit designer will then create line drawings and 3D renderings of your exhibit to give you a better understanding of how your exhibit will look once completed.

3. Establish Exhibit Details and Framework

The exhibit designer will then turn over the design to exhibit detailers who use CAD software to outline the building blocks of your exhibit’s framework. The exhibit detailer provides project managers and exhibit builders with complete specification of parts, materials, finishes, and construction methods to work from. Then graphic specification are finalized and converted into templates for graphic designers.

4. Exhibit Preview and Approval

After your exhibit is built, you will have the opportunity to preview the booth at your exhibit partner’s facility. During the preview you can ask your exhibit partner to make tweaks and adjustments to your booth if needed.

Once you sign off on your exhibit, your exhibit partner will pack up and the exhibit to your event.

Create a Killer Trade Show Booth Design

Creating a killer trade show booth design requires careful planning and skillful execution. If you want more exhibit design tips and ideas for your next exhibit, download Nimlok’s Exhibit Design E-book. Learn how to complete an exhibit design needs assessment, design your trade show graphics and more with this free comprehensive guide.

 

One of the reasons so many sales forecasts end up wildly off base at the end of a quarter is because the interactions between salespeople and buyers are so complex and so dynamic as to make them nonlinear. There are more people engaged in the process and more variables being introduced in large, complex, strategic deals that come with a good deal of risk. The evidence that we use to determine whether to forecast a deal is no longer up to the task.

Set aside the fact that salespeople often use end of month or quarter end dates as placeholders instead of asking the client what date it would make sense to go live with a new solution. Also set aside that many of what are called “opportunities” in the pipeline are really still leads. Also set aside the fact that many prospective clients have not really committed but are simply engaged in conversations at the early stages of exploring.

None of this is to suggest that you should not have a forecast, or that you should accept the nonlinearity of the sales process without trying to create certainty and predictability in sales. But there are some factors that should now be given more weight.

The sales process is really a series of commitments that we make with the client to engage them in the process of change. The making and keeping of these commitments provide an indication as to the progress the salesperson and their prospective client has made towards deciding to change and executing that change.

When commitments have been made but not kept repeatedly over time, it is an indication that the organization the salesperson is working with will continue to struggle to keep commitments, and later to execute. The fact that the people in the organization are struggling to keep their commitments does not necessarily mean they won’t buy, but it does mean without further evidence that they are committed to a certain timeline, it will be difficult to include them in a forecast. No matter how well you try to control the process.

Other organizations have a greater willingness and capacity to make change inside their own organization when they are aligned with their goals, and when their communication allows for the tricky and sticky conversations around change, there’s a greater likelihood that the people inside the company keep the commitments they make, and things tend to stay on track.

The willingness to make and keep the commitments that make up the process of change and that result in a better future state is one factor you have to consider when assessing whether or not to forecast a deal in your pipeline. Kept commitments over time indicate that they are more likely to be kept in the future. Unkept conversations over time increase the likelihood more will be missed. This is a generalization, and all generalizations are lies, even when they prove useful.

The increasingly nonlinear nature of sales is going to require a deeper dive into the progress made around all the commitments necessary to make change. In order to understand where your opportunity lies, and how likely it is to close on or before the date it is being forecast, you’re going to have to consult the record of commitments made and kept.

The post Nonlinearity and Your Forecast appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Sales training is a time consuming process. In the beginning, it might feel like you’re over-communicating or micro-managing your new team. However, sales people are on the front lines of your business and act as the representatives of your brand. Your sales rep training process should reflect this, and that means you can’t afford to compromise on the content or delivery of your onboarding.

The average ramp-up time for sales reps is between six and nine months. With all of this time invested in sales training and onboarding, how do you maximize the return?

In this post, we help you create a comprehensive training and onboarding manual for your sales team. At the end, you'll find examples of sales training manuals to help your reps ramp quickly.

When you're creating a new-hire training plan, remember a few things:

• Keep your training plan personalized because each representative is different.
• Authenticity is the key to building trust. You don’t have to be the stereotypical "loud" salesperson to earn clients.

Featured Resource: Sales Training Manual

Download for Free

Sales Manual Examples

Sales manuals are a great way to automate your sales agents’ orientation program.

A sales manual is a guide that contains the background information of your company, the goals you want to achieve, and the selling process. A good sales manual also describes your target client, how to talk to them, the do’s and don'ts of your selling process, etc.

Every sales training manual is different based on what the company is selling as well as the goals and objectives.

For more clarification, here are some sales manual examples that you can use as a guide to write yours.

1. HubSpot Sales Training Manual [PDF]

HubSpot has a very elaborate onboarding process for its sales agents. The entire process takes 90 days.

In the first 30 days, sales agents are introduced to the company's internal organizations, selling systems, solutions, customers, and everything else about the services they offer.

For the next 30 days, the sales agent gets what I'd describe as a "trial process." They start their sales journey applying the concepts, principles, and lessons that they've learned. This is when an agent gets their style through experimentation.

After 60 days, the sales agents are ready to start working officially. At this point, the sales manager sets key performance indicators (KPIs) for the agent and provides them with everything they need to achieve them. On the 90th day, the agent can monitor their progress and see what they can change for better results.

For more details on the 30/60/90 method, download the HubSpot Free Sales Training Manual.

2. Jibu Sales Training and Development Guide [PDF]

Jibu is a drinking water company with over 154 Franchises across 7 African countries. They've sold over 333 million liters in just 8 years, so they're clearly doing something right.

Jibu has an extensive sales agent training guide like any other successful organizations. Their sales manual template is divided into two sections.

The first part contains the background information of the company. This includes:

• What sets them apart from their competitors
• Who their customers are and why they love Jibu
• Their production technology
• How they settled to their price range

This part allows the sales agents to connect with the company and understand how things run across the organization.

The second part of the sales agent guide has the selling process. Some of the things that the sales agent learns in this part include:

• The difference between marketing and sales
• The different types of Jibu customers
• How to engage with customers
• What to avoid in sales

This part is crucial in ensuring that all the sales agents understand the company's expectations on how they should carry themselves.

Check out the Jibu Sales Training and Development Guide PDF to see all the details.

3. Badger Sales Training Manual [PDF]

This guide is ideal for a newbie in the sales department. Badge Sales Training Manual provides a comprehensive guide on all the basics of sales training. It defines sales, gives you the benefits of sales training, and teaches you how to go about it.

In this guide, you'll learn hacks like how to cut the sales training program time by 50%. This will ensure your sales agents are effective and you don't spend months in the training session without getting results. You will also learn how to automate certain tasks and the best tools to use.

The Badger sales manual also teaches you all types of sales marketing methods to ensure you choose the one aligned with your products or services. Check out the Badger Sales Training PDF to learn all the basics in sales.

4. Trojan Labor Sales Training Manual [PDF]

Trojan is a subsidiary of Hire Quest Direct that has been in the industry since 2002. They help companies looking for workers in any field – most of the workers are temporary, which is very economical for many companies.

Trojan has an intensive sales manual training guide that teaches their sales agents everything they need to know to sell their staffing services.

Their sales manual shares email and call templates their agents can use in all possible scenarios, which makes work easier for the new recruits. The manual also teaches the agents the importance of not over-glamorizing their services to manage the customers' expectations. It also guides an agent on what to do once a customer makes an order and the correct follow-up messages.

Stages of an Onboarding Process

1. Pre-week training
2. Day-One
3. Email and Administrative Preparation

Stage 1: Pre-Week Training

If you want them to come confident and prepared to maximize their first day, consider pre-week training. This gives your sales representatives more information on their roles and what they’ll learn during training.

New sales hires at HubSpot experience “a day in the life” of a HubSpot sales representative before their official first day. From technical setup to call observation and activity shadowing, new representatives get an up-close look at the end goal of their training period.

Stage 2: Day One

About 72% of employees say one-on-one time with their direct manager is the most important part of the onboarding process. It’s crucial that your new hires’ first day sets the right tone for their career in your company. To make sure they feel like they’re being formally introduced to their role, provide them with a direct manager on the first day at work, so they don’t feel that they are being led astray.

Stage 3: Email and Administrative Preparation

To combat the isolating feeling that can come with being new hire, make sure the email account of your new representative is accessible prior to the first day of work. This allows you to send the new hire HR information ahead of time, as well as an agenda for day one. That way, even if your day is packed, they will know where to go and who to meet.

Stage 4: Orientation

Using the first day to orient your company’s new hires broadens the strokes of the company. Take care of HR documentation, set them up with a computer, and introduce them to the company on a high level.

At HubSpot, these are just a few of the things their new hires experience on their first day. They also have lunch with a veteran HubSpotter to learn more about the company and. In addition, new hires also get a chance to ask questions from a senior sf, or someone who’s been around for a while.

You'll also want to introduce them to their 30-60-90 day plan that outlines expectations as they ramp up. Let’s dive into what this plan might look like.

Stage 5: First 30 Days

The first month (30 days) of your representative circles around learning: your company, your customers, your solutions, your internal organization and processes, and their role within it all. Getting them acquainted with these things may include:

Stage 6: Product or Service Training

What will your rep be selling? Whether it’s pool supplies or software, it’s important to train them on how to administer, use, and see the value of your product or service.

HubSpot’s new hires go through extensive product and Inbound Marketing training. They learn how to use HubSpot’s CRM, Marketing, and Sales tools. The hands-on training has them building landing pages, setting up contacts, and presenting “final projects” at the end of their training cycle. The project serves as a benchmark for new hires. Reps get to show off their understanding of HubSpot tools, and managers can gauge new hire progress.

Stage 7: Gaining Understanding of the Market

A successful sale often comes down to BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. While determining budget and handling general price objections can be pretty straightforward for an experienced representative, the other three components require familiarity (and perhaps intimacy) with both the buyer and the market:

• Authority - To establish authority with the prospect, the representative must understand your position in the market: your strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of your competitors.
• Need - Representative must also develop competency in mapping those strengths and weaknesses to prospect pain points to qualify for (and prove) fit.
• Timing - Gauging the prospect's timing, knowing customer and sales lifecycles, and developing a nurturing and follow-up process that works with those life cycles are crucial for getting the timing just right.

All of these take experience and training.

Stage 8: First 60 Days

Once the sales representative completes their "information gathering" period, it's time to give them hands-on experience to improve their comfort level and get them into process development and routine.

Job Shadowing

An effective way to get a representative’s feet wet is by pairing them with one of your seasoned team members so they can gain insight in live time. Have the new employee listen to calls, ask questions about workflow, and get a sense of the team’s strategy.

Prospecting and Introductions

The representative should also be given a chance to introduce themselves to points of contact for accounts they’re inheriting and/or do some initial prospecting and outreach to begin filling their pipeline.

Performance Reviews

Be sure to meet with the representatives to provide feedback, encourage good habits, and reinforce performance milestones and goals.

Stage 9: First 90 Days

After 60 days, the representative should be comfortable and autonomous enough to apply their training and start making an impact as their pipeline opens up. Managers should ensure that new reps have everything they need to:

• Establish a schedule that's aggressive but works for them
• Meet with prospects and develop relationships
• Navigate the process, hit KPIs, and crush goals

Stage 10: Post-Training

Once you’re sure your representatives are ready to hit the ground, here are some of the last things you need to do.

Set clear expectations & goals.

Set 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals. Calculate ramp rate based on the average number of months it takes a new salesperson to hit 100% (or close to) of quota. To make this more accurate, segment an average ramp period by experience — for example, it might take the typical veteran salesperson four months to ramp, while a freshly-minted college grad requires nine months.

Establish a new-hire mentor.

A Microsoft study found that employees who are paired with a mentor or “buddy” are more productive in 97% of the cases.

Assign every new salesperson a mentor who’s been in their position for a longer period. Mentees can bounce questions, comments, and new hire growing pains of their mentors. Mentorship provides new hires with perspective, guidance, and advice from someone outside their management team.

At HubSpot, every new hire is paired with a mentor. Beyond the first few weeks, mentors can offer career advice, make important networking connections, and save salespeople from burnout. Pair new hires with mentors, and you’ll set them up for a longer, happier career with your company.

1. Train them on how to use your CRM.

Teach your reps how to use your CRM, and include hands-on, project-based training (like how to enter new contacts, set reminders, and log communication). When appropriate, have them take a CRM certification exam. Most CRMs offer them, and it’s a great way to ensure that new reps understand how to use the tt software.

You can find HubSpot’s free certification courses here.

2. Conduct call reviews.

Sign up new hires for call reviews — and lots of ‘em. It’s good for them to listen to reviews from your top reps and a few from reps who haven’t been part of the team for so long. This allows new hires to learn from a variety of experience levels and gives them access to different types of critique.

3. Provide a sales process overview.

Cover the main stages of the sales process and conversion rate benchmarks (on average, 10% of emails convert to connect calls, 20% of connect calls convert to discover calls, etc.) This tells your new representatives where to prioritize efforts and what kind of numbers they’ll be held to.

4. Train reps on how your company handles prospecting.

How does your company prospect? Share common channels, number of touchpoints, and best practices. Outline how much research representatives should conduct and which details they should look for.

5. Walk the reps through your buyer personas.

In this section of training, describe your ideal customer. If you’re a B2B company, teach your salespeople what a best-fit company looks like and which contacts they should be trying to make at that company. If you’re B2C, describe the types of consumers reps should be targeting. You should also lay out the foundation for how your organization assesses and communicates with decision-makers.

6. Provide a competitive analysis.

Provide an overview of your main competitors then share a competitive analysis that highlights exactly what makes you different. Be honest about where your product/service falls short of the competition and where it outperforms the rest of the market.

7. Have strong reps provide demo training.

Incorporate good and bad examples into demo training and have everyone participate in role-play. Conduct reviews of new hire demos, connect calls, and close conversations. Include common objections that arise during your sales process and let new hires respond to those objections before supplying them with ready-made scripts.

A good rule of thumb is to provide positive feedback first, then move to areas for improvement. Foster this rule in your sales organization to create a team that embraces constructive criticism instead of being afraid or resentful of it.

8. Hold technical training.

Learning to use team or company technology (i.e., phones, video platforms, etc.) can be a tough and undocumented process. Train new hires on how to use your technological resources, and have them showcase their skills during a demo with you. When they can troubleshoot basic issues — like asking prospects to mute their microphones if an echo arises during a presentation — they’re one step closer to being ready for a live call.

9. Practice negotiating and common object handling.

Even experienced representatives need to know how a company approaches the negotiation phase. What are your parameters for discounts and sales? What kind of judgment calls can your representatives make in terms of discounts? And, what is the etiquette for discussing these topics with prospects?

10. Offer onboarding training when applicable.

Will your representatives be in charge of onboarding new clients? Share best practices and responsibilities that accompany this role. If there’s a hand-off to a renewal manager or customer experience representative, make sure both parties understand what that process is as well.

11. Encourage necessary certifications.

At the end of their sales training, hold a certification exam. Have your reps role-play an exploratory call, demo, negotiation, and closing call. This allows you to gauge whether a rep is ready to start representing your company in front of prospective clients.

By the end of training, HubSpot representatives are both certified inbound sales and inbound marketing certified. They’re also certified in giving HubSpot Demos. Certain passing scores must be met and managers are notified if further training is necessary.

12. Create vertical-, role- or territory-specific training.

Make sure each new hire receives relevant supplementary training for role-specific duties. If you’re onboarding a BDR, provide further training on how to qualify prospects by asking the right questions. And, train your reps on specific verticals or territories they’ll be targeting (i.e., when prospecting in the pacific northwest, phone calls convert at a higher rate than emails).

13. Offer leadership/management training.

Everyone should move through basic sales training to understand the goals, values, and customers that your sales organization prioritizes. If you’re bringing in a manager or executive, further training may be required to set them up for success.

Make Your Sales Training Worthwhile

Ramp up for salespeople is tough. But if you do it right, you’ll see a huge ROI on the time and efforts you invest in new hires early on. Don’t skimp here, and you’ll enjoy the benefits of talent retention, high morale, and high-quality sales strategy.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Tesla, Elon Musk’s automotive start-up, is having a very good year. In September, the company expects to begin shipping its all-electric Model 3 to non-employee customers, who have already logged 500,000 pre-orders. After reporting earnings earlier this month, its stock jumped, rocketing the 14-year-old startup’s valuation to over $53 billion, ahead of every other U.S. car manufacturer and all but three worldwide. This despite the fact that the company lost nearly two billion dollars in the past two years alone.

There’s little argument that Tesla is a wildly innovative company.  But is its automotive business a disruptor, poised to transform the entire transportation sector?  That’s the question that has dogged the company from the beginning, inspiring heated debate among Wall Street analysts, fanatical customers, and tech-related online communities.  Musk himself is ambivalent about the term. “I’m much more inclined to say, ‘How can we make things better?’” he said recently.

The answer matters. The company is currently almost $10 billion in debt, and on Monday last week Tesla announced plans to borrow an additional $1.5 billion to escape what Musk calls the “manufacturing hell” the company is now experiencing in its transition from small batch car making to mass production. Investors and lenders are betting on the company’s long-term potential to dominate a future that may feature autonomous vehicles, sustainable energy consumption, and the ability to upgrade easily as both hardware and software evolve. If that potential isn’t realized, the money will quickly dry up.

Tesla clearly doesn’t qualify under the traditional definition of a disruptive innovation. In the model described by Clayton Christensen, a new entrant offers substitute products using technology that is cheaper but initially inferior to products offered by mature incumbents. Then the disruptor improves its performance over time, eventually catching the industry either unaware or unable to adapt.

In our continuing work on Big Bang Disruption, we have noted several alternative paths to industry transformation. These include offering a more expensive product whose superiority shifts consumer buying patterns, a “blue ocean” alternative that redefines consumer expectations to create new market space, and a long period of growing revenue but shrinking profits that lead to industry collapse and reincarnation based on a new value proposition.

Finally, there is Big Bang Disruption itself, where rapid evolution of new technologies leads to the introduction of substitute products that are both better and cheaper right from the beginning, triggering a sudden abandonment of consumers away from incumbents to the new entrants who best utilize the capabilities and changing economics of the disruptive tech.

But no matter which definition you use, it’s hard to see Tesla fitting it.

For one thing, it’s not clear what disruptive technology the company is offering. Electric cars have been around for a long time (Tesla has been selling them for almost a decade), but the technology is still neither better nor cheaper than internal combustion. According to Tesla’s own data, battery density doesn’t exhibit the kind of growth that has driven exponential improvements in digital technology. Battery performance may not reach parity with fossil fuels for another 50 years.

Ditto for autonomous vehicles, and for Tesla’s promise of fully-automated manufacturing based on improvements in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other disruptors. Tesla may find a disruptive solution using some or all of these technologies, but they haven’t yet.

In the meantime, of course, there’s no guarantee that Tesla will be the winner in any automotive technology arms race.  Most major car companies are now investing heavily in the same technologies, and in some cases may be using the same component suppliers as Tesla. Tesla famously open-sourced all its patents in 2014, reducing any advantage the company may otherwise have claimed for proprietary inventions.

For now, what the company has is a powerful brand that stands for luxury and sustainability at the same time. But it’s not hard to see any number of existing premium brands—think BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, Lexus—stepping in to claim the same mantle.

Still, Tesla boosters compare the company to Apple, and on the surface the similarities are compelling. Both companies were led by visionaries, both offer high-end versions of commodity products, and both enjoy fierce loyalty from customers.

But the competitively-priced Model 3 is not the iPhone, which in 2007 radically reinvented cell phones, personal digital assistants, digital cameras, and several other disparate products in one remarkable leap. (At the time, one of the premium mobile devices was a Blackberry.) And Apple, unlike Tesla, had the capacity to make millions of the new devices right from the start, along with strong distribution, retail, and repair channels.

Tesla is also not comparable to Netflix, another frequently-cited example of a disruptive innovator. Netflix disrupted the video rental market at least twice—first with its DVD mailing service and then, in 2007, with its streaming Internet-based service, which clearly met the better and cheaper criteria for a true Big Bang Disruption. Consumers jumped en masse, destroying Blockbuster and other retail rental chains in just a few years. Tesla’s current battery technologies are not both better and cheaper than existing internal combustion. Even if they were, it would not be realistic to expect customers to replace vehicle hardware as quickly as they change their media-consumption habits.

The better analog for Tesla may be the Sony Librie and other early electronic book readers, introduced at great expense and fanfare between 1998 and 2006.  None of them succeeded. Then Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007, at last igniting transformation of the sluggish book business.

Amazon’s disruptive insight was that component technologies had finally matured, including displays, storage, lightweight batteries, and cellular networks that could be used to upload and download new content. Amazon also leveraged its growing strength in the publishing supply chain as well as a reputation for superior customer service to create and dominate the e-book business, dispatching prior and future competitors.

As these examples suggest, successful disruption often requires a robust manufacturing, distribution, and service platform that can be repurposed to help scramble the incumbent industry supply chain in short order, as well as a steady supply of revenue from more mature products to fund continued experimentation.

For now, Tesla has none of these. Worse, the company is subject to considerable uncertainty over substantial government subsidies, which in some markets have had a profound influence on the willingness of consumers to pay Tesla’s premium price. In Hong Kong and Denmark, for example, announcements that the subsidy would be withdrawn collapsed Tesla sales by 90% or more, leading Danish officials to extend the rebate period.

Assuming the company can overcome its “manufacturing hell,” Tesla may well deliver all the 500,000 pre-ordered Model 3s by the end of 2018. But as Apple learned from the muted success of the iWatch, early enthusiasm for a new product may not suggest a long tail of future sales. After announcing the Model 3 in 2016, Tesla signed up the first 300,000 customers in just two weeks, most in less than a week. But as with smart watches, the increasingly frictionless spread of product preferences among consumers may mean that nearly all likely customers showed up at once, at product launch.

For the cash-strapped Tesla, waning sales may cut short any hopes of securing a sustainable leadership position in a reinvented transportation industry. Elon Musk may succeed in starting a disruptive revolution, only to fade from the field just as incumbents or other new entrants waiting nearby storm the palace.

 

Note: an earlier version of this piece discussed the Kindle’s ability to connect to WI-FI networks; the more relevant attribute is its ability to connect to cellular networks. The piece has been updated.

For some founders, aligning sales and marketing is an uphill battle

The challenge is often fraught with politics and pointing fingers. In the ideal world, your inside sales team and inbound marketing team should operate like a well-oiled machine. Communication between the two sides should be consistent, and the objectives that each group is striving to achieve should be obvious and in sync. Unfortunately, in most organizations that’s simply not the case.

In fact, according to Rinnovation, 65 percent of sales reps say they can't find content to send to prospects, representing the most common complaint cited by sales teams.

That’s insanity!

How does it get this bad?

Well, it gets to this point when the company allows it to happen. If you’re a startup founder or senior executive and your marketing and sales departments aren’t on the same page, it’s on you to readjust and get the team back on track. As much as people like to say marketing is from Mars and sales is from Saturn, the reality is this: They’re both key parts of your universe.

And if they’re not unified in working toward the same goals, then you’re probably leaving money on the table every single month. In this blog post, we’re going to arm you with the insights and strategies you need to ensure that your inside sales team and inbound marketing team are aligned.

Want to build a high-performing sales organization? Check out our Ultimate Sales Resource Bundle (free download).

Start by aligning sales & marketing definitions

In both sales and marketing, there are plenty of acronyms to be thrown around. (If you’re not a fan of acronyms, then you’re going to really hate the world of marketing and sales.) While it’s easy to poke fun at all the acronyms, there’s no question that the definitions of some industry buzzwords differ depending on whom you’re speaking with. As an organization, it’s important that your teams are aligned on definitions and understand what they’re trying to do when it comes to the sales funnel.

At the foundation of inbound marketing and inside sales is the acquisition of leads. The challenge is that the sales team and the marketing team often disagree on what exactly is considered a lead. As such, it’s important to ensure that both marketing and sales know how the company defines a lead and what a quality lead looks like. Both teams need to know how leads are inserted into marketing automation programs, when they transfer into a CRM, who is responsible for that process and what differentiates a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) from a sales-qualified lead (SQL).

An MQL is a prospect that the marketing team has acquired through their content marketing efforts, someone they feel confident is a potential buyer. In most cases, the MQL has indicated that they are in the market for a product like yours by their actions or by explicitly stating it when they filled out a form. On the flipside, an SQL is an MQL who’s been handed over to the inside sales team and has given further indication that they’re almost ready to buy. It could be an agreement to jump on a phone call. It could be listening to a sales call. It could be actively visiting a product page on your website.

Regardless of what your definitions look like, the most important factor is that your inside sales team and inbound marketing team both know and understand the definitions. Once you’ve aligned these, it becomes 10 times easier to ensure that your teams are aiming for the same target.

Establish goals that marketing & sales both influence

In the article “How the Rift between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps,” Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson write:

In a recent Corporate Executive Board survey, sales executives’ top term for their marketing colleagues included “paper pushers,” “academic,” and perhaps worst of all, “irrelevant.” On the other hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as “simple minded,” “cowboys,” and flat out “incompetent.” Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative.

Gulp.

This disconnect is deeply rooted in one thing: goal misalignment.

As I've said at the 2016 Growth Conference: Sales and marketing need to get their shit together!

Brands need to ensure that their inbound marketing team and inside sales team view one another as team members and understand the role that both sides play in each other's success. Once definitions are set, the sales and marketing teams need to get aligned when it comes to organizational goals. Setting sales goals and marketing goals that align is so key.

Unfortunately, many marketers have spent years being told by their managers that the metrics that matter most are things like page views, impressions, click-thru rate, time spent on site and traffic. Yet, as any startup founder will tell you, unless you’re in the media space, those things usually don’t pay the bills—which is why marketers need to care about revenue just as much as sales does.

In simple terms, if marketing is given a sales target that’s the same as the sales team’s, they’re more likely to ensure that the content they create drives high quality leads. This sense of responsibility will keep the inbound team from investing in fluff pieces to raise traffic numbers and instead increase day-to-day discussions with sales to better understand what kind of content is going to help nurture leads, acquire leads and close prospects.

Build a strategy that both sides embrace

Once the goal is established within your startup, the best inbound marketing and sales teams should start planning as a unit rather than in silos. The folks at Marketo put together this great example of what happens to a buying funnel when sales and marketing are both in the room:

As you can see in the chart, the marketing team is no longer solely focused on getting the company on a prospect's radar. Instead, they’re also tasked with helping sales by creating content that assists in moving the lead from the evaluation stage to the purchase stage.

This type of integration forces marketing to get to know their audience better and forces sales to rely on marketing more so than in the past. This reliance on marketing will be better for both teams while also making the customer journey a more seamless process.  

Leverage technology that offers transparency

Once the definitions, goals and strategy are in place for aligning marketing and sales, it’s time to ensure that the leaders of both departments know what’s happening in the company. There are plenty of solutions that can help you create dashboards for showing you what’s happening on the inbound side of things. The majority of the marketing automation software available today lets you see and manage your leads directly from the dashboard. Typically, the dashboard shows you insights like how engaged a lead is with email marketing efforts, which pages they visit on the site and what resources they’ve downloaded in the form of ebooks, infographics and reports.

But more important than dashboards is that your sales people and your marketers ARE COMMUNICATING. It doesn't matter what tools they use, and how they communicate—what matters is that they do so frequently, know what's happening, and are working towards the same goals.

For inside sales teams, it’s all about embracing an inside sales software that lets you see what’s happening on your team. Services like Close.io offer sales leaders deep transparency by tracking everything from call records and notes to SMS efforts and follow-ups. All these data points allow sales leaders to ensure that their teams are being productive with their time and effective with their communications efforts.

Wrapping things up

You might be thinking, Who has time for all this?

Well, I’ll tell you this: Ensuring that your inside sales team and inbound marketing team are aligned will save you more money in the long run than what it will cost you to leave things as they are. Sure, it might take some time, but think of the resources you’ll save from going down the drain and the leads you’ll be better equipped to close.

And more important, making this effort now will have a lasting impact on your corporate culture and bottom line.

Interested in learning more about how technology can help sales and marketing get on the same page? Check out our Startup Sales Bundle and leverage the 9 email templates, 3 checklists, 7 sales books and more to ensure that your sales team is moving in the right direction with the right leads. Get your bundle today:

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• Google Flights lets you find great deals on flights in seconds.
• The site also has several features that can save you even more money, if you know how to use them.
• Flight tracking sends you alerts when prices increase or drop, the "Discover" tool helps you book your dream vacation for less, and the "Price graph" lets you find the best time to book your flight.

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While it's always a good idea to book flights in advance, sites like Google Flights have made it possible for you to travel on a budget, even at a moment's notice.

One of the most powerful price comparison tools available right now, Google Flights can show you all your travel options in literal seconds. It's lightning fast, both on web and mobile, and you can find flights in a dozen different ways.

To help you save more money on your next trip, INSIDER rounded up the 9 best Google Flights tricks that you need to know about. Here's how to start booking cheaper flights:

1. Get alerts on your phone before prices go up.

Google analyzes historical price trends and uses predictive algorithms to determine whether you should book a flight now or wait until the price drops. If you use Google Flights on your phone, keep an eye out for notifications that warn you about likely fare increases.

Currently, these alerts are only available for certain routes, and you can't control when they appear on your phone, but they're still a useful way to figure out when you should book your flights.

2. Or get alerts sent to your email whenever prices change.

Instead of waiting for price alerts on your phone, you can turn on price tracking to monitor flights around-the-clock. You'll get an email when prices increase or drop dramatically. There are two ways you can do this.

First, you can track the prices of all flights to your desired destination. Just enter your city or airport of origin, your destination, and your travel dates. Then, find the box under "Choose an outbound flight" that says "Track prices," and tap the toggle to start receiving price alerts in your email.

Second, you can track the prices of specific itineraries, like flights with set departure and return dates. Just enter your travel details, and choose a specific flight. Then, instead of booking the flight right away, tap "Track price."

When you check your tracked flights and destinations, you'll also see a graph that shows you how the price of a flight has changed over time. If you frequently travel on the same route, you can use this graph to gauge when your flight is usually at its cheapest and anticipate future price dips.

3. If you have time to spare, play around with your travel dates to find the best deal possible.

One of Google Flight's most useful features is the ability to compare prices using the site's calendar or "Flexible dates" features. If you have a destination in mind and want to save the most money possible, click one of the travel date boxes, and tap "Calendar" or "Flexible dates."

The "Calendar" feature shows you how the price of a particular itinerary is likely to change over time. The "Flexible dates" feature shows you the cheapest itineraries you can book, sorted by departure and return dates.

4. Find out how much you can save by flying to or from a different airport.

If you live near several airports, you may be able to get a better deal by flying in or out of one that's slightly farther away. While you can compare prices between airports using Google Flight's "Multi-city" search, there's a much quicker way to do this.

Just enter your preferred cities or airports, and then click on either your origin or destination. On the drop-down menu, click "Nearby airports," and you'll see a list of the cheapest flights available at airports near you.

5. See how much it would cost to fly to almost any city in the world.

If you don't have a set destination in mind, you can find some pretty incredible deals using Google Flight's "Explore map." Perfect for adventurous travelers, this is a great way to book spontaneous trips to new cities.

Just click on any city in the world, and you'll see the cheapest flights available for that trip on the left side of the screen. You can also use the filters at the top of the screen to narrow down your search.

6. Find and book your dream vacation for less.

On Google Flight's homepage, you can use the "Discover" tool to find an affordable vacation based on your specific interests. All you have to do is play around with the three filters provided: dates, places, and interests. Feel free to be as general or as specific as you want in your search.

Once you find the perfect trip, click on the colored icon, and a box will pop up that shows you the cheapest flights and hotel rooms available.

7. Find out if you should book your ticket now or wait for a better price.

Google Flight's "Price graph" feature shows you how prices are likely to change over time. It's an easy way to spot significant price drops if you're still not sure whether to book a flight now or later.

8. Keep an eye out for money-saving changes to your itinerary.

When you're searching for flights, don't ignore Google's "Date tip," which will appear at the top of the screen. The tip, highlighted in green, shows you how much money you'd save if you changed one or more of your travel dates.

9. If you don't have time to browse through flights, check out Google's top pick.

When you book a trip last minute, you often have to choose between two bad options: cheap flights that are less-than-ideal (like red-eyes, for example), or overpriced flights that aren't worth their price.

In this situation, Google's top pick, which is usually highlighted in green at the top of the "Best flights" box, is probably your best bet. According to Google, these picks are the best trade-off between price and convenience, out of all available flights for your trip.

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