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6 Email Marketing Myths You Can Ignore written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Email marketing has been around for a long time, and consequently, people have developed a lot of opinions about what works and what doesn’t. However, as the digital marketing landscape has changed, some things about email marketing that used to be true are no longer so. And there are some things that have always been myths, but still persist today.

Here, let’s debunk the six biggest email marketing myths out there.

1. Email Marketing is Dead

As more digital channels have emerged through which you can reach clients, there have been whispers going around that email marketing is dead.

In reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Marketers still see a great deal of value in email marketing, and are still investing heavily in this tactic. According to surveys from HubSpot, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content. On the B2C side of things, 59% of consumers report that information in an email has influenced their purchasing decisions. And everyone is on email. Ninety-nine percent of consumers check their email every single day (and most report doing so multiple times a day).

2. Frequent Emails Feel Spammy

Some marketers are hesitant to send regular emails at the risk of annoying their mailing list. And it’s true, for most consumers, their inboxes are crowded places. A survey from Marketing Charts found that the average person receives 416 marketing emails each month.

But just because others are sending emails doesn’t mean you shouldn’t send any (or only send one once in a blue moon). The key to avoiding that spammy feel is ensuring that your content is always valuable. If you send emails that add value, provide information, and are actually helpful to your audience, you’re a lot more likely to see strong open rates and a reduction unsubscribes.

If you’re looking for tips on creating engaging content, check out this post.

3. Unsubscribes Are a Bad Thing

No one enjoys rejection, and an unsubscribe can certainly sting. But the reality is that unsubscribes are not necessarily a bad thing. A clean email list is key to staying on ISPs’ good sides, and that’s what will keep your emails from being barred from inboxes.

You can do things on your end to clean your list—like scanning for typos and giving people an option to re-opt-in if they’ve been unresponsive to your recent email marketing efforts—but unsubscribes are a way for you to get your customers to do some of the heavy lifting for you. An unsubscribe is someone saying they’re no longer interested in your content, and that could be for any number of reasons.

If you see a large number of unsubscribes all at the same time, that might be indicative of a problem with your content, but if you see people leave your list from time to time, that’s simply making space for a higher open rate overall and a better relationship with ISPs.

4. There is a Magic Day and Time to Send Emails

Some marketers swear by sending emails at a very specific time. If it’s not Tuesday at 10am, they won’t send an email!

There has been a lot of research over the years, with marketers trying to find that magic time where open rates will be high and conversions will abound. But these studies have been less than definitive, and so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to timing emails.

It’s certainly true that some audiences will engage with emails at a higher rate at certain times of day, but that will vary from business to business, so trying to stick with some antiquated idea about the one day and time you can send an email won’t serve you.

Instead, do some experimenting, send emails at several days and times throughout the week and see which ones get the highest engagement. Then aim for that time again, and see if you can repeat your results. Be willing to mix things up, and don’t be afraid to send emails out more than once a week (see point 2 above).

5. Long Subject Lines Spell Trouble

For a long time, marketers were told to shy away from subject lines that were too long to be fully displayed in someone’s inbox. That sounds on the surface like a sensible piece of advice, but it turns out that a recent study from Marketing Sherpa busted this long-held belief.

While email subject lines that fall into that “sweet spot” of 41-50 characters performed well, it’s actually longer subject lines with 61-70 characters that did the best. So don’t stress about fitting all of your email subject lines into those narrow parameters. Instead, work to create a subject that is attention-grabbing and really tells readers what they can expect to find inside the email.

6. Avoid Repeat Messages

Super Office reports that the average open rate for emails in 2018 was just shy of 25%. That means that three out of four people on your list are not seeing any given email. Some people won’t read a given email because the subject line doesn’t interest them, but others will miss it for completely innocuous reasons. They may have been busy that day or accidentally deleted the message.

Whatever the case may be, for your most important content, it’s okay to send the same email copy twice in order to get the highest engagement. This isn’t a tactic you should take with every email message, but it can actually be valuable when used sparingly.

There are a few caveats here. First, don’t send the same email on the same day. Instead, wait several days before you resend it. You should also switch up the subject line, so that those who wrote the email off the first time because of its subject line might open it this time, and so that those who opened it the first time around aren’t put off by getting the exact same email twice.

Traffic is down all over. It’s not just you. No one is reading your blog, and no one is reading anyone’s blog. The reason is that so many people wasted readers’ time. Too much junk. Too many marketers trying to capture everyone’s attention and failing. And far too many vague stories without real value.

No One is Reading Your Blog

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write. It means you should write better. It means you should be more specific. It means you have to tell stories to a very specific group of people you hope to serve. That’s what’s next. Well, one of many details of what’s next.

What Not to Do

Should you shut your blog down? Not if you don’t have any other ways to earn the attention of others. Should you move your writing efforts to someone else’s website like Medium or LinkedIn or Facebook? Not exactly. Sure, share an article there sometimes, but don’t give up your home base.

How To Get People to Read Your Blog

First: don’t. Get them to read a specific article, something you’ve invested time in, and something you feel will deliver some value. But then what else?

• Design each post like an important article. That doesn’t mean write extra long posts. It means to think of it as if the post will stand alone, will be accessed by someone who won’t actually ever land on your website, and who is plucking through this post as if it’s standalone.
• Make every post extra-readable. From the design of your site to the layout of your post, be super crisp. Use larger fonts. Use bullets and subheadings and graphics to break up large banks of text.
• Be brief and concise. As best as possible, get right to the point. People want their information and they want to get out.
• Write to SOLVE a specific need. This post tries to help with “how to get people to read my blog” types of challenges. Make every post a specific solution.
• Give people actionable information. You can write about ideas all day, but without something to do, people will stop reading.

What Else Can You Do?

People will read if you give them something of value. I’ve found that you can give away a lot of your best ideas in a blog post and it won’t break the bank. People will still hire you. They still need what you know. What else can you do?

Video. Record videos. Upload them to YouTube, and post the embed of that video on your blog.

Podcasts. Record a podcast show and post the embed of that audio on your blog.

Profiles. Write about the people you serve. About them, not about how great you are for working with them.

And so on.

Don’t quit. Just get better. And if ever your company wants to get better at reaching people and driving more value, get in touch.

The post No One Is Reading Your Blog appeared first on Chris Brogan Media.

• When you consider that over 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn as a way to find new talent, it makes sense that optimizing your profile should be the first thing you do when planning a change.
• Experts recommended using a professional profile photo that shows recruiters your best self and focusing on job-specific keywords throughout your profile.
• To make a great first impression, include key achievements in your opening paragraph.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Over 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn as a way to find new talent. When looking to vet potential candidates, they want to see a LinkedIn profile that stands out amongst the other 600 plus million people who regularly sign on to their account.

So if you're looking to make a job or career change, optimizing your profile is a key first step. To that end, we talked to four experts about how you can optimize your LinkedIn page to get potential recruiters to notice you.

Use a professional profile picture

According to LinkedIn statistics, having a profile photo results in 21 times more profile views than not having one. "People are hiring people, and you need to be able to forge a personal connection online with the recruiter or hiring manager," said Kyle Turk, hiring manager and VP of marketing at Keynote Search, an executive search and recruitment company. Portraits allow recruiters and company executives to relate to you and put a face to your brand as an employee.

Plus, Turk pointed out that profile pictures can be used to add personality and color to make your profile stand out and visually appealing. But before you click and upload your favorite shot, make sure you choose a professional photo that ensures that you look like an approachable leader.

"If you are a senior executive, you shouldn't have an image where you are not smiling, arms crossed or look overly serious," Turk said. "Culture plays an enormous factor when companies are considering new executives, so presenting an approachable and positive personality will go a long way," he explained.

Spend time on your 'about' section and profile headline

When adding to your LinkedIn page, it can be easy to skip over the top of your profile, which includes the headline — the space right under your picture — and the 'about' section. But because these spaces are the first introduction that people might have of you when they discover you on LinkedIn, it's crucial to maximize them. Not only that, these two areas play a significant role in the keyword search results that a recruiter might see when they're searching for candidates, according to Brie Reynolds, a senior career coach at FlexJobs.

For the headline in particular, Reynolds said they see a lot of clients in their career coaching program who put their current job title and company name, but you can be more creative than that. "Put in several titles that best encapsulate what you do and what you'd like to do, or a job title and the industry you'd like to work in," she said. "It's a quick way to show anyone who interacts with you on LinkedIn what you have to offer."

If you're an executive-level job seeker, Reynolds said that a headline that describes your strongest attributes as a high-level professional can work nicely — for example, "Transformational Operations and Logistics Leader" or "Change Manager and Senior Portfolio Director for National Nonprofits." This allows you to make a clear value proposition to a potential hiring manager.

The 'about' section could include the size of the organizations, the teams you have led, the industries you want to work in, or the leadership philosophy you espouse, like inspirational/blue sky or player/coach.

Read more: The Silicon Valley headhunter whose company has placed execs at Lyft and Spotify reveals the precise formula he uses when placing tech professionals

Optimize your keywords

When headhunters get a new mandate to find candidates for a role, Turk said they typically have a desired persona and skill set they are actively searching for. "Most searches begin with keywords on LinkedIn to find candidates that match that profile," he said. So, to increase your chances of being found, make sure you're adding keywords that are relevant to your skills on your profile.  

Whether it's in your summary or experience section, Turk said you should always optimize your profile to include these keywords. For example, if you are a senior marketing executive (CMO or VP), Turk said you would want to include these keywords in your profile: marketing strategy, marketing leadership, marketing operations, budget management, brand development, marketing analytics, marketing technology, data-driven decision maker.

"The idea is very similar to when people search on Google, they use keywords to find the most relevant page that matches what they're looking for," he added.

Build on your experience

One of the most common things Turk said he's noticed on LinkedIn platforms is that a lot of people don't build out their experience with details. "Do not simply list your company with no other information — it provides very little detail to the recruiter to know if you are a fit for the role," he explained.

To remedy this, Turk suggested adding a sentence about what the company you work or worked for does to bring some context to your industry experience. Then, add another sentence or two about your role and responsibilities, but remember, when you are completing this section that it is not a resume, it is more of a teaser to qualify you for further consideration. "Provide additional information as to the scope of your role and achievements that will qualify you for the roles you are seeking," he said.

Finally, your experience section is also an excellent place to input keywords to be found by executive recruiters or add media, such as videos of you talking or presenting to showcase your work and make your profile more appealing (videos, blogs, awards, etc.). 

Ask for recommendations

Recommendations, or real-time testimonials, provide references for your work, skill set, and your personal qualities.

"Things like hard-working, positive attitude, genuine, leadership style and more may not shine through the other sections of your profile," Turk said.

To provide more context to who you are and how you work, he said to have others do the talking for you by asking for recommendations from your managers, co-workers, or other professionals in your area of expertise.

Read more: One email I wrote brought in 100% of my clients after I started my business — here's the template

Stand out in your opening paragraph

In addition to placing select keywords throughout your LinkedIn page, another way to stand out, said Bill Humphreys, senior marketing manager and a specialist in niche tech recruitment for MRL Consulting Group, is to include key achievements in your opening paragraph.

"For example, if you work in sales, this could be described as overachieving targets or projects you have completed," he said. It's the first thing recruiters or hiring managers see when they land on your profile, so make it count!

Be specific with your word choice

Your LinkedIn account is not the time or place to draft a novel full of vague sentences that leave a recruiter scratching their head. In other words: be specific.

"It's tempting to put overly vague statements on LinkedIn (e.g., I am a healthcare disruptor) while employers are looking for specific, tangible skills (e.g., I analyze healthcare pricing data to achieve better profit margins at hospitals)," said Catherine Shea, assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.

Sometimes by casting too wide a net, Shea said you are overlooked for someone who is more specific in their statements. Make the recruiters job easier by being more specific when describing your professional experience.

Reverse-engineer LinkedIn

Spending time on your own profile will help you get noticed by recruiters, but if you want to be even more proactive, consider searching other users' accounts. Shea said executive job seekers can do this by reverse-engineering LinkedIn.

"Find the person who has (or is hiring) for your dream job and work backward from their network to your network," she said. This might be six degrees of separation, but Shea said it would help you figure out how you are connected.

"Cold emails are rarely successful, but if you're able to get an introduction via a friend of a friend of a friend, chances of success are higher that you will get a response and traction in your request," she added.

SEE ALSO: This cold email from a Twitter employee to the head of HR got the sender her dream job. Here's exactly why the message stood out among a sea of requests.

Join the conversation about this story »

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In this article, we’ll guide you through the various customer experience metrics and how best to measure and optimise your customer experience.

customer experience metrics

We now live in a world where customers have an infinite supply of products and services to choose from, and it’s getting harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Customers have become less responsive to the endless conveyor belt of product releases, and the countless ads and marketing campaigns pinged to their screens daily.

People now care more about relationships and experiences with brands and CEOs are starting to take notice, according to “Closing the Customer Experience Gap,” by HBR nearly three-quarters of business leaders (73%) said that delivering a relevant and reliable customer experience is critical to their company’s overall business performance today.

Think back to a time where you went to a restaurant based on a giant ad? Most likely very few times. How many times, in contrast, have you followed the recommendation of a friend or a positive review in a magazine or newspaper? Unbiased references by friends, experts and families carry tremendous power.

The most innovative companies understand that success is closely correlated with creating an end-to-end customer experience that delights customers. Happy customers have the potential to be the strongest troops in your marketing team. Satisfied customers promote your brand and can be a huge asset as their recommendations hold significant influence over potential buyers. They also buy more, stick around and cost less to serve, helping improve the bottom line in ultra-competitive markets.

When setting out to improve your customer experience, you cannot afford to drive blind when carrying out initiatives to enhance your customer experience. You need to make sure you track and measure metrics accurately so you can understand your performance in delivering outstanding experiences for your customers.

As the great management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying,

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

So it’s crucial you measure what matters.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the various customer experience metrics and how best to measure your customer experience.

Why measuring customer experience metrics matter

Focusing on metrics that are imperfect or not meaningful can have a severe negative impact on your business. Optimising for the wrong metrics and not having in-depth knowledge of your customers will lead to erroneous decisions that hurt your business.

Usually, the root cause of poor customer experience measurement is when companies use metrics defined along functional lines that only tell you part of the story. Creating misalignment between what is being measured and what is driving the underlying economics and customer experience. Choosing the wrong metric can also generate misalignment between the underlying moral purpose of the person doing the work and what is being measured. Both of these can create serious problems for your organisation.

For example, measuring the success of a support rep based on the total number of calls they respond to per day does not align their work to making the customer happy. A support agent will be conscious of their manager assessing individual performance based on the number of requests completed per day. It is within their self-interest to keep calls short and sidestep challenging customer problems. Forcing behaviour such as offloading hard to solve problems to a different team, or avert solving a problem because it will be too timely or complicated to fix. A situation where all the actors from the employee, customer and organisation lose out.

The customer loses out by receiving a miserable experience, annoyed they turn into a detractor sharing their experiences with friends, family and acquaintances taking their business elsewhere. The company now loses out on all the economic benefits of happy customers, and employee morale dips as they fail to delight customers and knowingly deliver a rubbish experience.

An overview of customer experience metrics

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

First developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, it’s now used by millions of businesses to measure and track how they’re perceived customers. Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the loyalty of customers to a company. NPS scores are measured with a single question survey and reported with a number from 0-100, a higher rating is desirable.

The survey question gauges customer loyalty by asking a straightforward question, “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend X product/service to a friend?” Respondents answer with either 0-10 or “not at all likely” to “extremely likely.” Brands can come up with an aggregate score by removing the neutral responses, and subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters.

You can measure almost anything using an NPS score – so as well as understanding the overall NPS for your organisation, you can track scores for everything from individual products, stores, web pages or even staff members.

NPS is an excellent way of understanding the overall customer perception of your brand. You should measure NPS regularly so you can continuously learn and track customer loyalty over time.

For more information on NPS read our guide to Net Promoter Score here.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Where NPS measures a customer’s overall perception of a brand, customer satisfaction (CSAT) measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific product, service, or interaction with a brand.

CSAT targets a ‘here and now’ reaction to a specific interaction, product or event, but it is limited when it comes to measuring a customer’s ongoing relationship with a company.

CSAT is measured by one or more variation of this question that usually appears at the end of a customer feedback survey:

“How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?’

Respondents use the following 1 to 5 scale:

• Very unsatisfied
• Unsatisfied
• Neutral
• Satisfied
• Very satisfied

The results can be averaged out to give a Composite Customer Satisfaction Score, although CSAT scores are more usually expressed as a percentage scale: 100% being total customer satisfaction, 0% total customer dissatisfaction.

Brands can gauge customer satisfaction overall by presenting surveys at various customer interaction episodes, asking customers to rate their experience or a specific product. From there, brands have an opportunity to identify problem areas and link them to a particular phase in the customer journey.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures a customer’s ease of an experience with a company. It’s typically measured by sending customers an automated post-interaction survey asking them to rate a specific statement on a defined scale by asking the question “on a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’, how easy was it to interact with [company name].” The statement will depend on the interaction they just completed.

Companies can then analyze the potential points of friction in the journey. For example, low CES scores might reveal that a website’s checkout process is too complicated. Or that their experience submitting a support ticket was confusing.

By acting on this insight and removing obstacles for the customer, companies can reduce customer service costs and attrition rates (and by extension, loyalty) by making things more convenient for the customer.

Other metrics to measure

Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn describes the rate at which a customer abandons a brand, unsubscribes, or stops visiting a website. You can calculate churn by dividing the total number of customers lost by the total number of active customers over a specific timeframe. For subscription-based companies, churn is easier to measure than it is with an online store where all items are purchased on a one-off basis. It’s essential for e-commerce brands to define what churn means within the context of their company.

Retention Rate

Customer retention rate refers to the percentage of customers that the company retains over a specific period. Retention is, in essence, the opposite of churn, meaning gathering feedback from customers who stick with you can reveal what you’re doing well.

First Response Time

First response time is the average amount of time that it takes for customers to receive an initial response to a support issue. Generally, this is measured by customer support team, it’s calculated by taking the average response rate time between a customer opening a support ticket and when a rep acknowledges their request.

Average Handling Time

Average handling time is the amount of time to resolve a support issue from start to finish. This includes every interaction from calls to emails and chat, plus time spent waiting between interactions. The “ideal” handling time varies by organization and complexity of the issue, but it’s good to get a sense of how long people are waiting, on average, for a fix. Remember, this could be a root cause for churn.

Understand the why behind the score with customer feedback

How can you turn survey results into action?

Customer feedback holds all the answers. Countless businesses fail to extract actionable insights from their unstructured data.

Customer Feedback

When trying to deliver a customer experience that your competitors can’t match, focusing on quantitative metrics alone is a huge opportunity missed for customer experience practitioners.

Collecting quantitative data is essential to benchmark customer experience performance over time but acting on quantitative metrics is ill-advised without understanding the why behind the score.

Your customer experience data needs to be actionable enough to change engineering and product roadmaps across an organisation. You should be able to understand whether a potential change in product strategy will meet the needs of a specific customer segment.

To get to the why behind the score you need to capture open-ended feedback from customers to evaluate why your NPS or CSAT is going up or going down. Customer feedback is a great way to build a continuous improvement feedback loop that encourages employee learnings and behavioural change throughout an organisation to make it more customer centric.

Today, touchpoints—and data sources—have multiplied exponentially to include mobile apps, call centers, kiosks, all kinds of social media, and pretty much anytime anyone ever interacts with a screen. It’s possible to capture customer feedback across multiple sections of the customer journey targeting different customer segments on different channels.

Customer experiences once involved was limited number of not easily tracked touchpoints, including magazine and television ads, store visits, purchases at cash registers, and communications received by mail, such as bills or claims responses.

Surveys with additional questions or adding space for verbatim responses at the end of an NPS, CSAT, or CES survey can be sent to customers. Feedback can also be found in unsolicited forms like social media mentions, App Store reviews, or long-form reviews on sites like TrustPilot, Yelp, or G2 Crowd.

Ask customers what they think, in their own words, and make it easy for them to share. The quality of insights gathered is dependant on the quality of data captured. It’s essential to ask the right questions at the right time to correct customers. The better the questions you ask, the more meaningful and richer insight data to analyse.

However, collecting data to ensure insights that can drive actions is a topic that deserves its own attention and something you can find out more about on our blog page.

Customer Experience Analytics

Which handful of actions will generate the most impact on the customer’s experience? If you had the answer to that question, you’d have a serious competitive advantage in your industry.

Customer experience improvement initiatives can comprise of multiple uncoordinated plans that emerge with good intent from different parts of an organisation. The problem is that there is little clarity which action will offer the most value for customers.

Optimising customer experiences means understanding all the possible combinations of sequential interactions that a customer can take and identifying opportunities for improvement.

To identify opportunities for improvement, you need to understand how your customer’s think and feel. Imagine if you had insight into the mind of the customer? You could quickly enhance your marketing messaging, product roadmap and support experiences.

However, the challenge of breaking down the mountain of feedback across multiple data sources can make even the most hardened executive shudder with fear. Companies today have numerous systems, databases and tools siloed across different functions all geared towards collecting feedback. Teams are sitting on colossal data sources failing to take advantage of the opportunity it presents.

Analysing these large data sets and providing insights and recommendations has, for a long time, has been a headache for customer experience practitioners. The quick and easy solution to this problem is integrating disparate data sources into one platform.

Okay, this is all well and good, but you may be wondering how do I get over the line?

Integrate data silos into one platform

What may appear as a monumental task is quite simple, and it’s a problem we can take care of for you. With our platform powered by the latest in Machine Learning, you can integrate all your feedback channels and analyse your data at scale.

We can identify topic and sentiment in each piece of customer feedback with the same level of detail as you and I reading this text right now. Breaking down that information into clear insights, so you understand the key drivers behind your customer experience metrics. Ensuring you have actionable insights to shape decision making and build experiences that delight.

For instance, from our recent analysis of the UK retail banking sector (link here), we can identify significant detraction causes include poor app security and unintuitive UI. On the upside, the variables that turn customers into promoters include helpful support and ease of use on the app. We can then dive deeper into topics such as app security and identify sub-topics such as login, auto log-out and verification/identification.

Must-win battles in the banking industry, thus often involve creating a seamless UI and improving customer pain points such as app security and contact centre accessibility. Identifying topics that matter most to customers can help improve aspects of the customer experience that you wouldn’t have had visibility of without the help of text analytics. The more data we have, the more granular insights we extract. It’s important to remember the system is only as powerful as the quality of input.

Combined with other sources of customer data, you can perform effective customer segmentation. Segmentation adds a lot of context to customer data so you can better understand how different customer groups feel about some very prominent parts of the customer journey.

You may have different competitors challenging you for different customer segments in different markets. If you could segment how different customer groups such as 16-25 think and feel you can begin to build personalised customer experiences and delight customers.

Monitor customer experience metrics in real time using dashboards

Customer experience teams need to share detailed reports on metrics both at a journey-level and at an overall level.

Create custom dashboards for different teams so they can keep track all of the feedback relating to their area of responsibility – by product, by marketing, by customer care team or agent etc. View an example dashboard here.

Custom dashboards can help multiple teams operate more collaboratively. A dashboard will be able to explain to the rest of the business the relative impact of solving a problem or making a change to the customer experience in a way that is understandable to multiple stakeholders. Set up alerts, so the right team member is notified when there is a change in the data that require recognition.

When bringing new sales reps into an organization, one of the most valuable investments of time you can make as a sales leader is to ensure those new hires are set up for success. That starts with understanding what success looks like. How many deals do your fully-ramped AEs need to close each month in order to hit quota? How much pipeline do they need to carry? How many meetings should they be having each week? You need to have a clear set of expectations for your fully-ramped reps in order to determine what goals should be set for new hires as they ramp.

Set Ramping Goals

If you know what success for a tenured rep looks like, you can work backwards to determine when leading indicators need to be reached. For example, if you expect a new AE to reach full productivity four months from their start date, and you have a 60-day average sales cycle time, then that AE will be best set up for success if they are carrying a full pipeline within two months of their start date. That will ensure they have the length of a full sales cycle to close that pipeline and attain their full quota. When you think about building that pipeline, if you know that it takes, on average, two weeks for an initial meeting to convert to an opportunity with a pipeline amount, then those same new AEs should be carrying a full load of meetings within six weeks of their start date.

This same logic can be applied to new SDRs. Call and email goals should be hit as soon as they complete their training, while conversion rates on those activities should increase as they ramp. If you know, on average, how many activities it takes to create an opportunity for your tenured SDRs, then you can set expectations around their activity levels starting from the first week they are working while giving them time to increase the effectiveness of those activities over the duration of their ramp. If you expect them to hit a sales accepted lead or sales qualified opportunity goal in their second month, then you should likely also have a clear path for them to hit fully-ramped meeting creation targets during their third week.

Communicate Goals & Track Progress

The reason to take this kind of approach to setting clear ramp goals, by week in many cases, and by month even in those organizations with long enterprise sales cycles, is that you’ll be able to clearly explain to your new reps why they’re being asked to hit certain milestones as they ramp and how hitting those milestones will set them up for success in consistently attaining quota.

Tracking progress against ramping metrics in weekly 1:1s will also help to surface any issues quickly so that they can be addressed immediately. New hires will have the opportunity to receive coaching throughout their ramp in a manner that will make them successful over the long term.

Iterate through Sales Maturity

If you don’t have the metrics to do this readily at hand – maybe because in an early stage company, the founder has been doing all of the initial selling – you can still use the information that’s available to you to set some initial guideposts and see how well those stack up to reality as you start to have cohorts of reps to test them against.

You may find that, in an early stage company without a dedicated sales enablement function, your initial expectations of ramp were too aggressive given the level of training you’re able to provide, and you need to adjust your plan to account for early hires taking longer to ramp. However, that time to productivity should shrink as you become more practiced as an organization at integrating and teaching your new members.

For organizations who have already ramped multiple reps, you may be able to set up a more sophisticated ramp plan that uses the data you have on how individuals in a given role have previously ramped. How long did it take prior classes of mid-market AEs to build pipeline? How long did it take your last ten enterprise SDR hires to set your target number of meetings per week consistently? Being able to compare a new hire to the average of their peers in an apples-to-apples way that adjusts for tenure can provide another data point in understanding what a successful ramp looks like in your organization.

The post Using Metrics to Onboard and Ramp Salespeople appeared first on OpenView.

You don’t just think about prospecting. Prospecting is something you do, and you do it daily. Watch this video to learn the 10 rules:

 

 

1.The number of deals you have to close directly reflects the amount of time you spend prospecting. The prospects you close with next month and next quarter are the people you prospect with right now.

2. Don’t start what you can’t finish. A single phone call will never be enough. You have to be prepared to reach back out to the prospect numerous times over a period of days, weeks, or even months before you have a meaningful conversation.

3. Focus on the outcome that you provide rather than on what you sell. You do what you do because you can help others. The benefits that you offer and the outcomes that you deliver are what matter most.

4. Always have a dedicated time to prospect each day and each week. If you think that you will just get to prospecting once you have everything else done, you’re wrong. There will always be demands on your time. You must schedule prospecting in your calendar just like you schedule any other appointment or meeting. It needs to be part of your routine. Prospecting is no different than showering; it’s best done daily.

5. Prospecting is about interrupting people. They will never know how much you can help them until you first reach out. Accept the fact that you are an interruption; the only way that you wouldn’t be is if they were already your customer.

6. When you hear the prospect say, “just send me some information,” realize that they are simply saying that to get rid of you. It’s a phrase to easily end the conversation. New salespeople get excited when they hear a prospect ask for more information. Don’t fall for this request before first asking them questions to uncover more of their needs.

7. Prospecting is not networking. There’s nothing wrong with networking, but it is not prospecting. Networking is about creating relationships over time and these can turn into prospecting situations, but always view networking as having a long-tail that takes time.

8. Using lines such as “just checking in”or “how’s your day going?” are a waste. It’s your job to bring new value each time you reach out to them. When the other person hears these kinds of phrases/questions, it can show them that you don’t know what to ask for and you don’t have anything new to say. Simply put, it indicates that you are wasting the prospect’s time.

9. Never think that you can rely on a single form of communication. Always use every communication method available. The person who thinks they can rely solely on email, LinkedIn or anything else as their sole method of prospecting is downright lazy. You can take this to the bank: lazy prospectors quickly turn into broke prospectors.

10. Don’t expect your calls or emails to be returned. You can’t send one message and think that your work is done. There’s a reason why companies such as Coca-Cola spend so much on advertising- because they know they need to. Certainly, your name and your company isn’t as well-known as Coca-Cola, so if they feel like they need numerous messages to create sales, you do too.

So, there’s the 10 rules you need to follow in prospecting. Spend 10 minutes thinking through each item on this list. What do you need to change? What do you need to do more of? Prospecting is the start of sales: when we prospect well, we will close well. Learn more in my video, 10 Rules of Prospecting: https://youtu.be/REv0dB3n_6g

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

What can you really achieve with a solid email marketing strategy? What is a realistic email goal for your business? This article walks you through four real-world examples of businesses that set goals and used email to achieve them. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

• Tim Cook gave advice to Stanford graduates over the weekend based on his experience stepping into Steve Jobs' shoes as Apple CEO after his death.
• "Your mentors may leave you prepared, but they can't leave you ready," he told the audience.
• Cook also used his Stanford commencement address to call out Silicon Valley for its shortcomings, to the tune of Facebook, Theranos, and YouTube. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple CEO Tim Cook drew from his experience of taking over the tech giant after the death of Steve Jobs to give some life advice to new graduates during his commencement speech at Stanford University on Sunday. 

After waxing on the dark horizon of Silicon Valley and Stanford's role in it, Cook devoted the end of his speech to the ephemerality of time, the concept of readiness and how it's often actually not possible, and the generational expectations and legacies. 

"Things feel like they have taken a sharp turn," Cook said about the tech in the inextricable worlds of Stanford and surrounding Silicon Valley. 

The crux of Cook's speech was a recognition of what the rest of the world has seen in recent years: the popping of Silicon's Valley's shiny bubble of innovation — of neat "code, optimism and idealism" — and its descent into mess, moral ambiguity, and much-needed accountability. As examples, he gestured toward the shortcomings of Facebook ("privacy violation"), YouTube (a "blind eye turned to hate speech") and Theranos ("the false promise of miracles in exchange for a single drop of your blood").

"This place still believes that the human capacity to solve problems is boundless. But so, it seems, is our potential to create them," Cook said.

Cook imparted his final pieces of wisdom to new graduates in the context of his taking over Apple as chief executive and a changing Silicon Valley:

"Your mentors may leave you prepared, but they can't leave you ready."

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the Stanford commencement speech and told the audience, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

Cook referenced the famous quote in his own speech, drawing upon his personal experience of being passed the CEO torch at Apple as Jobs went on medical leave and later died. Jobs could leave him prepared, Cook said, but never truly ready to take over the company.

"When Steve got sick, I had hardwired my thinking to the belief that he would get better," Cook said, "And when he was gone, truly gone, I learned the real, visceral difference between preparation and readiness."

Cook recounted this time as "the loneliest I've ever felt in my life," but said that, "When the dust settled, all I knew was that I was going to have to be the best version of myself that I could be." 

"Don't try to emulate the people who came before you to the exclusion of everything else."

Cook's advice for those looking to be their best self is to put on blinders to outside expectations. 

"If you got out of bed every morning and set your watch by what other people expect or demand, it'd drive you crazy," Cook said. 

He cautioned against "contorting into a shape that doesn't fit" yourself, which wastes time and fools no one. 

"When your time comes, and it will, you'll never be ready. But you're not supposed to be."

And when graduates find they are not ready, Cook suggested seeking out "hope in the unexpected," "courage in the challenge," and "vision on the solitary road." He warned against getting distracted, and he denounced folks who fail to take responsibility, but demand credit.

"You can't take it with you. You're going to have to pass it on."

Cook concluded by urging graduates to "Be different. Leave something worthy." Like Jobs passing Apple onto Cook, a worthy endeavor will become part of graduates' legacies.

You can watch Cook's full speech in the video below.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why it's so hard to switch from Apple to Android

Letters to the editor should be sent to sunletters@vancouversun.com. The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@postmedia.com. Read More

You may have heard the expression, “Take a walk in your customer’s shoes.” The idea is that you put yourself in the customer’s position and see the situation through their eyes. This is good advice for those who have customer-facing responsibilities.

You may have heard other versions of this expression. One of the more humorous versions is, “Walk a mile in your customer’s shoes, and once you’re a mile away, you can say anything you want about the customer and they can’t hear you.”

I said it was humorous. I didn’t say it was right.

Recently, I was speaking at a convention in Philadelphia, where I heard another version of the phrase. This one’s a good one. “Before you walk in the customer’s shoes, take off your own shoes.”

What this means is that even though we try to see the experience through the customer’s eyes, we sometimes don’t – or can’t – because we know too much from being on the inside of the company. It’s hard to separate ourselves from what we think the customer perceives versus what the customer actually experiences.

Years ago I came up with a short poem: Think like the buyer, not like the supplier. That’s it. It’s just one line. I would have used the word customer instead of buyer, but I couldn’t come up with a good rhyme. The point of the poem is similar to the idea of walking in the customer’s shoes. We need to get inside the heads and hearts of our customers and step away from our company roles before we can truly understand what the customer is thinking about us.

However you say it, there’s only one way to do it. You can’t talk about it in a conference room with your colleagues. You must become the customer. Depending on your type of business, there are different ways to do so. Call your company from the outside and experience what it’s really like to go through the phone tree or be put on hold. Make a call to the sales department or go visit a store as a customer. Experience all you can from the customer’s perspective.

We want our customers to have a great experience. The only person who can really judge your success is the customer. The customer is the judge and jury on that one.

Do your perceptions of the customer’s experience align with the customer’s reality? Take a walk in your customer’s shoes – after taking yours off – and find out.

Sales objections are tough. But with the right approach, you can get ahead of them before they ever happen. In this video, I’ll show you exactly how to overcome the 7 most common sales objections out there. Check it out!

The post 7 Most Common Sales Objections (And How To Overcome Them) appeared first on Sales Speaker Marc Wayshak.

Given the inevitable complications and unique considerations involved in any complex sales environment, it’s hard to imagine that we could ever execute a completely “perfect” sale.

Unlike a typical manufacturing environment, which seeks to produce highly replicable solutions with standardised raw materials, rigidly defined process stages and accurately measurable quality inspection criteria, many aspects of a complex sale are unfortunately either unknowable or uncontrollable.

This is particularly true if we are selling to a new customer for the first time, or if our customer is making an unfamiliar purchase. The complexities are further amplified if there are multiple stakeholders involved in the decision-making process (as there almost inevitably are).

But if perfection is unattainable, what can we do to systematically improve outcomes? The answer lies in a simple concept: we must systematically identify and eliminate the avoidable sources of error that bedevil any complex sales environment…

Atul Gawande, in his best-selling “The Checklist Manifesto” (if you haven’t read it, you must) described the two major sources of failure: errors of ignorance and errors of ineptitude.

Errors of ignorance

In a complex sales environment, errors of ignorance stem from having a less-than-complete understanding of the key facts relating to the situations we find ourselves involved in. Some of these facts will, for all practical purposes, be unknowable. Despite all our efforts, we will inevitably remain ignorant of certain things. We cannot achieve perfect knowledge.

But errors of ignorance frequently include things we could have known but didn’t. They include questions that we should have asked – but didn’t, and research that we should have undertaken but didn’t. These are errors of choice, and in any complex environment there are many potential errors of ignorance.

Maybe we didn’t prepare carefully enough. Maybe we simply weren’t curious enough. Maybe we didn’t listen attentively enough. Maybe we didn’t follow up on something that was said or done and so missed a critical fact or implication or to recognise a potential line of investigation.

These errors of ignorance are avoidable. They are things we look back on and wish we had known. We can help to eliminate them by having a structured approach to discovery – by knowing what we need to know, by recognising what we currently don’t know, and by systematically filling in the gaps in our knowledge.

Many errors of ignorance turn out to be errors of assumption. We think or hope we know something, but we have failed to verify it. And if (as is so often the case) those comfortable, untested false assumptions turn out to have a fundamental bearing on our chances of success, we only have ourselves to blame.

Errors of ineptitude

On the other hand, errors of ineptitude stem from a failure to apply knowledge that did exist somewhere in the system and could have been applied to the situation in question. These errors of ineptitude can happen at both a personal and at an organisational level.

At a personal level, they can happen because we failed to recognise the importance of something we had learned and did not act upon the information. Maybe we failed to make the connection between what we might have regarded as isolated data points, and so managed to miss the big picture.

Or maybe we failed to follow a best practice that we had been trained on, or to complete a task that we can retrospectively recognise as being more important than it seemed to be at the time. Maybe we were simply in too much of a hurry to stop and think about our priorities.

At an organisational level, avoidable errors of ineptitude often happen because someone else within the system learned something or had a valuable experience that their colleagues could have benefited from, but the organisation failed to share the information with everyone who needed to know.

Or maybe the organisation simply didn’t recognise the value of establishing best practices and making it easier for sales people to follow them than to ignore them – simply leaving sales people to work things out for themselves without the benefit of the accumulated learning of their colleagues.

These isolated “islands of information” are incredibly dysfunctional, and yet they exist to one degree or another in almost every sales organisation. Here are just a few examples – it would be surprising if you were unable to recognise many more:

• The failure of sales and marketing to agree on the common characteristics of an “ideal customer”
• The failure to induct new sales hires in the hard-won lessons learned of their more experienced colleagues, leaving them to repeat the same mistakes
• The failure to establish common standards for the information sales people are expected to gather during the all-important discovery phase
• The failure to establish common best practices for what experience has told us that successful sales people need to know and do at each stage of the pipeline
• The failure to pool experience from the field with regard to commonly-asked, tough-to-answer customer questions and how best to respond to them
• The failure to ensure that everyone involved in an active opportunity has the chance to collectively review the situation, strategy and tactics on a regular basis

Eliminating errors of ignorance and ineptitude

So how can we systematically eliminate avoidable errors of ignorance and ineptitude? We can start by assessing our wins and losses and identifying the common patterns of success and failure.

When we won, why did we win? What were the customer’s circumstances? What did we know and do? What were the things that caused the opportunity to advance? What were the potential obstacles, and how did we deal with them? Looking back, what were the key “moments of truth” that helped us to secure the sale?

And when we lost, why did we lose? Were there any aspects of the customer’s circumstances that could in retrospect have been seen as warning signs? What did we fail to know or do? What were the things that caused the opportunity to stall? What were the obstacles that we failed to deal with? What could we have done better? If we were bound to lose, how could we have qualified the opportunity out earlier?

In every organisation, there will be a number of common best practices – as well as things that we must learn to avoid. We can and must distil these lessons into a series of simple guidelines and checklists that – if followed – will increase every sales person’s chances of success.

We need to share that information in an easily accessible form – preferably embedded into the CRM system we expect our sales people to use. We need to position the guidelines as best practices that if applied will inevitably make our sales people more successful, rather than as a series of tasks our sales people are forced to follow.

We need to appeal to each sales person’s best interests rather than position our system as a series of tasks our organisation requires them to complete. Nothing we do should serve to in any way to suppress any sales person’s creativity or sense of curiosity.

We need to position this sales effectiveness programme as something that reflects the winning habits of their top-performing colleagues and ensure that the guidance is continually updated to incorporate the latest learning from the field. If we do this, it becomes something our sales people own rather than something our company imposes on them.

If you haven’t yet implemented this sort of initiative, I strongly suggest that you do. Both industry research and personal experience suggests that organisations that implement these sorts of dynamic processes significantly outperform their competitors.

One of the challenges of being a creative professional is that you aren't always sure what people will buy. It often feels like a game of Roulette, in which you have to create a lot of work, hoping someone will buy something. But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if you could sell something before you ever created it?

Why does anyone buy anything? Because the cost of not having it is greater than the cost of acquiring it. This is true for almost everything but especially for sales and marketing. If you want to thrive as a creative professional, you need to understand what it takes for someone to buy from you. Otherwise, you just might starve.

For a long time, creating infographics has been all the rage. Launching a new product? Create an infographic about it. Want to get press coverage? Create an infographic. Trying to get inbound links? Create an infographic. It’s like that analogy: When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Marketers are churning out infographics left and right to capture people’s attention in our increasingly visual and busy world. And there are lots of free resources out there to help you create infographics, such as Venngage or Canva— all you need to do is plug in some data and voila, an infographic … right?

Not quite. With this hammer/nail mentality, it’s easy to spend time creating something that’s not quite up to snuff. If you’re mainly concerned with just having an infographic, you could end up with something that gets lost in the sauce — not something people will be excited to read and share.

To make sure you’re putting your best infographic foot forward, read on. We’ll highlight the top mistakes people tend to make with their infographics and give you tips for steering clear of them yourself — because if you’re going to go for the nail, you might as well know how to use the hammer properly.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the worst types of mistakes we’ve seen (and even committed ourselves) in infographics.

1) The Title’s Wordy

This is probably my biggest pet peeve of them all (which is why it’s first on the list). Unlike design, crafting great titles should be in any content creator’s wheelhouse. It’s something all content creators do, whether they create infographics or not. In a world where everyone has very limited attention for content, a great title could be the difference between your infographic being successful … or not.

So if your title is wordy or unappealing, spruce it up. Keep it short, punchy, and compelling, yet descriptive of what’s inside. Need help? Check out this blog post for tips on writing great titles.

2) There’s No Compelling Narrative

Infographics shouldn’t just be a jumble of stats and facts with icons and graphs next to them. Like any other piece of content you create, it should tell some sort of story. Even if all you have are 10 stats for your infographic meat, there should be some flow between them that speaks to a larger trend.

Having a compelling narrative means that your infographic should have a beginning, middle, and end — just like a blog post. The beginning is usually a sentence or two of introduction. The middle is the meat of the story — it has a few themes with supporting details for each. The end wraps it all up for the reader and usually includes the sources for the infographic. People should be able to skim the infographic and walk away with a clear message.

Want an example of a great infographic with a narrative? Check this one out.

If you’re struggling to develop a narrative in your infographic, put together an outline first. Remove and reorganize the bullet points until it makes sense, then translate your outline to the infographic format. If you’re using an infographic template, the translation should be fairly easy — you can just plug the bullet points for each section into the template and then customize the graphics to support the bullet points.

3) The Data’s Outdated

Each industry is different — some move much faster than others. So if you’re building an infographic with data from several years ago, chances are it’s outdated or maybe even wrong. If you want your infographic to get shared and bring long-term, evergreen traffic to your website, you want to keep the data as current as possible.

Each industry moves at its own pace, so what “dated” means changes depending on the industry you’re in. That being said, if you’re creating content for that industry, you should have an idea of what’s in vogue now and what isn’t. If you’re unsure, do some Googling to see if there are more current data on it.

4) The Text Is Tiny

One of the hardest things about designing infographics is you have to make them easy-to-read at any size. Even if they’re only a few hundred pixels wide, people should be able to read and scan the infographic without enlarging it.

So treat your infographic like you would a PowerPoint presentation — keep your font sizes large enough that anyone can read the text on your infographic on any device they choose. People will be accessing your infographic on many different screen sizes, and your infographic should be readable on all of them.

5) No One Knows It’s Yours

After you spend all that time outlining, writing, editing, designing, and optimizing your infographic, you want to get the credit your company deserves. When people share your infographic on a social network of choice, you want people to know your company created it, even if the sharer didn’t mention you.

The easiest way to prevent that is to include your company logo or URL in the infographic. It doesn’t prevent people from incorrectly sharing/attributing the infographic, but it will help ensure people know your company created it — which could bring them one tiny bit closer to visiting your website, converting on a form, and becoming a customer. (Every little bit counts!)

6) It Only Lives on Your Website

Though you want people to recognize you created the infographic, you don’t want to discourage people from sharing it with their network. Chances are, your infographic is meant to get you exposure … so you’ve got to get people to share your content if you want to accomplish that goal.

So make sure you have the infographic primed to be shared. Add an easy embed code and add tweet/pin buttons next to the infographic. If you’re promoting the infographic in a blog post, add some “tweetable takeaways” in the comments, complete with “Click to Tweet” links. Basically, any way you can remind people in a non-spammy way to share the infographic — do it.

Also, make sure you’re distributing the infographic to the right networks. If you have a SlideShare account, for example, upload your infographic there. Since not a lot of people use SlideShare for infographics, you’ll have a better chance of getting noticed — and you’ll improve your chances even more if you avoid the rest of these mistakes, too.

Today’s sales teams are under increasing pressure. Buyers are more educated than ever and are evolving with technology. Social media has given people the opportunity to communicate transparently about products and services—and the people who sell them.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

• Mary Meeker just put out her Internet Trends report for 2019. The annual report has been called "Silicon Valley's Bible" because of how influential it is.
• One portion of the slides looks at trends in healthcare, namely that the field is becoming more digital.
• But broadly, the portrait Meeker paints of the US healthcare system also looks a lot like one she drew half a decade ago: an expensive, wasteful system with lots of room for improvement. 
• That slow-changing nature of healthcare should put tech companies and others aiming to disrupt the industry on alert, because it could make their jobs harder.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report is out, and it paints a hopeful picture of a more digital, less wasteful healthcare industry.

The slide deck has been called "Silicon Valley's Bible" because of its highly influential nature, but you might want to take its healthcare predictions lightly.

In this year's iteration, Meeker highlighted promising technological trends in healthcare, like the use of virtual doctors in telemedicine. 

But if you take a dive into the archives of Meeker's reports, which date back to 1995, it's also clear that little has changed about the US healthcare system in many years.

That should put tech companies and others seeking to upend the healthcare system on alert. Healthcare is slow to change, making the task ahead for those looking to enter or disrupt it much more difficult. 

Read: Mary Meeker's tech state of the union: Everything happening on the internet in 2019

The shift from healthcare to health-tech

Tech is making inroads into the US health system, from outside tech companies to new startups and established healthcare firms. 

Meeker's latest report makes a compelling case about that. She cites data about increasing consumer use of digital health tools and numbers from companies like genetic-sequencing firm Illumina, doctor-search platform Zocdoc, and drug-delivery startup Nurx.

Read more: The CEO of $111 million birth control startup Nurx told us how she's charting a new path forward after a scorching New York Times exposé

But prior reports have also had a similarly hopeful take on US healthcare. Back in 2014, for instance, Meeker predicted an "inflection point" for US healthcare, thanks to reforms in the Affordable Care Act aimed at moving health providers like hospitals to electronic health record systems.

Read more: Pharma giants Novartis and J&J are putting their might behind 2 new technologies that could transform how we treat cancer and obesity

There was a similar prediction around 2013, when reporter Steven Brill's groundbreaking article "Why Medical Bills are Killing Us" came out on the cover of Time. In a slide that year pointing to the cover story, Meeker wrote, "right story, great reporting...perhaps, right time." 

As a highly-regulated industry where peoples' lives are at stake, healthcare is known for changing slowly — as it should, many experts argue.

Yet at a broad level, the way Meeker described the US health system hasn't changed all that much in half a decade.

Take a look: 

In 2014, Meeker's Internet Trends report described a costly, wasteful healthcare system.

Five years later, Meeker's 2019 report still describes an expensive, inefficient system.

Meeker's 2014 report pointed out "reasons for optimism" about the healthcare system due to digitization.

Meeker's 2019 Internet Trends Report highlighted the same theme. It points to a trend of digitization in healthcare, which she said consumers were driving.

In a digitally driven world, the human element can get lost. Nothing can replace face-to-face rapport, which is why events can do wonders for your sales--certain types of events more than others, depending on your brand and positioning. These three types of events can boost your sales. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Have you heard the phrase, “Never in the history of calming down, has anyone ever actually calmed down, by being told to calm down”?

In a hot job market, where B.C. has Canada's lowest unemployment rate, opening a branch office in Nelson is a key experiment in Vancouver-headquartered Traction on Demand's recruiting strategy. Read More

One of the challenges with believing that Level 1 Value (the value in your product itself) is enough to create a preference to change providers, is that it leads to behaviors like sending a quote. Even if you sell a pure commodity, unless your strategy is to win by always having the lowest price, a quote isn’t likely to compel your dream client to change—and why should they when you have created no compelling reason to do so? You are better off with a consultative sales approach.

Let’s be clear about the difference between a transactional sale and a transactional approach to selling. In the case of a transactional deal, the client is making a decision they make frequently enough to know what they need, and one with little risk to them or their business. A transactional approach to selling, even when one sells a commodity, is to believe that there is no greater value you can create for your client. It’s an approach that absolves you of the responsibility for creating greater value for your client—mostly to your detriment.

Turning a Transactional Sale into Consultative

Imagine a salesperson sells the same computers as their competitors. The client sends a request for a quote to all of their suppliers, seeking the lowest price. All of the suppliers respond with quotes that are only separated by a few pennies. On what criteria should the client decide which supplier they select to fulfill their order when the only difference is the price? This time one competitor wins, the next time another lowers their price to acquire the orders, and so begins the great race to the bottom.

Imagine instead that one salesperson reads the request for quote and calls the client to share an insight and idea. This rep calls to share with the client that the item they want to order is fine, but there is a better option available to them without their having to invest much more than they would spend on what they requested. This is the application of caring enough to call, and it is the application of business acumen and situational knowledge, two factors that change a transactional approach to selling to something more consultative. While it’s possible—and in some cases, likely—a person in purchasing may send another request for a quote, but there are cases where they will also give the order to the person who takes the more consultative approach.

Using a Consultative Approach to Move Up

The decision to be consultative around commoditized sales isn’t a new idea. Salespeople and sales organizations have been effectively doing so for decades by moving up to higher levels within their prospect’s organizations and creating more significant and more meaningful opportunities to develop contracts in which they receive all of the transactions. The starting point is creating greater value, value worth eliminating the need to send out a request for quote for every single transaction.

The ideas and insights you have that would reduce your transactional client’s overall costs are best employed with stakeholders higher up in the organization, the business owner’s who invest—and who are often willing trade a higher price for lower costs, something only possible when there is value above the product itself.

Level 2 Value is experience, meaning you are easy to do business with and have excellent service and support, all of which may lower costs even when your price is higher. Level 3 Value is execution, which means producing a better, more consistent result, one that is better than your competition, also something that justifies the delta between your price and your competitor’s. Level 4 Value is strategic outcomes, which means advise on how to create better results that are tied to directly to your dream client’s strategic initiatives and goals, something that differentiates you from the most crowded of fields.

Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch

For more on understanding the Levels of Value and competitive displacements, pick up my book, Eat Their Lunch: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales.

The post Transactional Sales Require a Consultative Sales Approach appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Rani Molla / Vox:
Mary Meeker releases her 333-page Internet Trends 2019 report showing growing e-commerce, expanded US ad spending, rising number of gamers, 51% of world online  —  Here are all the slides, plus analysis.  —  It's the holiday season for data nerds: That is, Mary Meeker is delivering …

The current thinking on sales is that your client is either unaware of the need to change or already motivated to change, something we might have described as either dissatisfied or satisfied. Naturally, salespeople prefer their dream clients be good and discontented, as it reduces the difficulty of making a sale.

A lot of sales strategies developed over the last decade have started with the premise is that your dream client is not likely to be dissatisfied and requires help in understanding their world and the better results available to them. Rather than view the state as binary, it’s better thought of as a continuum. For our purposes here, I am going to use four points along a path from content to dissatisfied.

Oblivious

These prospects are wholly unaware that they should be dissatisfied and are not the least bit concerned about their results or their future. They aren’t aware of the forces that should be causing them to change, and because they are unconcerned, they hold the most dangerous position possible: business as usual.

It takes time and effort to help bring the awareness to prospects who are oblivious, and they don’t often greet your attempts to wake them with anything that resembles gratitude. Sometimes you will be greeted with contempt for shining a light on areas of their business they’d prefer not to look at, as doing so would require them to change.

Your business acumen and situational knowledge have to increase both awareness and concern to create an opportunity to explore change.

Aware, Not Concerned

I once had a client that was aware that what they were doing was wrong, and no matter how much I shared with them about how awful their future was going to be unless they changed, I couldn’t compel them to do what they needed to do to help themselves until it was too late. After three years of making the case and sharing the changes they needed to make, the bottom fell out of their business—despite my persistence.

Some of your prospects will know their world is changing without being concerned enough to take action. In some cases, they don’t believe anything can harm their business and that what impacts others will not damage their results. Others will avoid concern because of politics, lack of will to make a change or lack of knowledge around making that change. A few will prefer to hand the future challenges over to their successor, riding out their time.

Here your insights, ideas, and business acumen must be deployed in increasing concern to create an opportunity.

Aware, Concerned

A good portion of your prospects and dream clients are going to be highly engaged in their business and both aware of the changes that should be causing them to change and concerned about what it means for their business. These prospects are already awake and turned on, and because this is true, the goal of sharing insights and ideas needs to shift from creating awareness and concern to proving you have the subject matter expertise to help them explore change and determine how they should change (for more on Exploring Change, see The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales).

No more pushy sales tactics. The Lost Art of Closing shows you how to proactively lead your customer and close your sales.

One might assume that your dream clients at this stage are easier to win because they are already aware and concerned. I would that were true, but it is not. It’s more difficult for your dream clients to make change in their organization, and because complex sales require some level of consensus, it takes more time and effort. If you are working on a competitive displacement (i.e., stealing a customer from your competitor), it’s even more difficult.

Here you have to explore change, compel action, and build consensus.

Motivated to Change

Occasionally, the stars align in your favor and you come across a prospective client who is aware they need to change and highly motivated to do so. In the modern age of sales, we do so little prospecting that we rarely find these opportunities, especially when one suffers from the belief that they can rely on inbound and that their competitors have their dream clients locked down forever, something that, given a long enough timeline and persistence, is always proven to be false.

Even when the stars align, you still have to do the difficult work of selling—and creating a preference to work with you, your company, and your solution. Your insights and ideas need to position you as the right partner to help your dream client move from their current state to a better future state.

It can be tempting to try to approach these prospects by making the case that you are the right partner, but you are better proving that you are the right partner by helping them design and envision that future, providing a roadmap of how to achieve that better future, and helping them make the internal sale.

If you want to motivate your dream client to take action, it is helpful to match your approach to what they need from you to do so.

The post How To Motivate Your Dream Client to Take Action appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Congratulations on making your quota for this quarter! It’s the 4th consecutive quarter you’ve made your number and you are feeling good. Instead of only seeing yourself as a salesperson, you’re now seeing yourself as a sales leader. You’ve arrived, but hold on… have you arrived? It’s easy to consider yourself a sales leader when you’re making your numbers, but are you really a sales leader? Below are 12 questions you need to ask yourself to determine if you’re a sales leader or merely a salesperson:

1. Do your employees exhibit a level of confidence in you that makes them share confidential information?

2. Do customers ask you questions that go beyond what you sell, because they value your input and see you has having keen insights?

3. When problems arise, do you take ownership of the account or do you pass the blame?

4. Would customers and others you work with say that you demonstrate integrity in everything you do?

5. How often do you educate your customer and help them see things that they would not have seen otherwise?

6. Are you actively building relationships with multiple people at every account / customer you work with?

7. Within your company, is your view sought out and seen as valuable?

8. Do you take an active role in mentoring and helping other salespeople both inside and outside of your company?

9. Do you own your sales quotas and business plans? Do you see them as merely a starting point of what you’ll achieve?

10. How much time do you spend developing your own skillset to become an even better sales leader?

11. Do you own your day and have clear goals for what you intend to accomplish, or do you allow others to control it?

12. Do you have a clear set of multi-year goals to help you grow both professionally and personally?

How did you do answering those questions? Which ones do you feel like you need to work on to develop a better answer? Most likely, you need to develop a plan, or at least, that’s what sales leaders do. A sales leader is never content, because they are always on mission to improve themselves and those around them.

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

In today’s environment, your prospective and existing customers typically have multiple choices to meet their needs. Therefore, business success often boils down to effective market segmentation, identification, and sizing.

Segmentation is a process designed to cluster prospective and current customers into different groups so that each group comprises individuals that share a similar level of interest in the same or comparable set of needs. Segmentation matters if you want to

1. Tailor your offer (product, channel, touch point, price, and communication) more precisely to different groups based on their needs
2. Understand the economic value and economic potential of each group.

Using demographics such as company size, location or industry are common approaches many companies use to tackle segmentation. Segmentation is one of the most basic responsibilities of Marketing. It is Marketing’s job to match a distinct value proposition with a unique segment.

Two fundamental steps are required before you can decide which market segments to pursue.

Segmentation Takes Knowing the Lay of the Land

The key step to using segmentation to win is to start with a “lay of the land.” The best way to understand the lay of the land is to answer these 10 key questions.

These first five address identifying the market size and potential for your product or service:

1. What are the biggest and most important unmet needs customers are experiencing in the market? This can be determined by conducting formal primary research and digging into data from your social media feeds.
2. How big is each of these needs? How many customers does each one involve and how much revenue would solving these generate?
3. What problems do these unmet needs reveal? Are they problems that can be solved by something already in the market, or will it take something new?
4. Which if any of our current products/services might best meet these needs? If not, do we have what it takes in terms of capabilities and market window to develop a new offer? Will our offer be disruptive to the current solutions?
5. What other companies could we anticipate being able to service these needs?

These next five questions will help you decide which segments are worthy of pursuit:

6. Which customer segments offer the highest revenue and profit potential? Do we have existing customers in any of these segments?
7. How accessible are these segments?
8. If we could access these segments, how would we position our products or services in order to reach target segments?
9. How would we validate our opportunity and increase our traction? In which of the segments would this be the easiest to achieve?
10. Which segments provide the best marketing opportunity AND return on investment?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can begin to evaluate the opportunity and accessibility dimensions of the segments. This evaluation will enable you to select and prioritize the customers that will accelerate your revenue generation efforts.

By Kira Jerome, Marketing Intern at Heinz Marketing

There is a generational shift happening within buying committees. Millennials are taking the reigns as decision makers, influencers and project managers. Sure, we all saw it coming eventually—every generation grows up and moves into bigger roles with more influence and responsibility. The question is, are B2B sellers making the necessary changes in their approach in order to find success when it comes to engaging a millennial stakeholder or buying committee?

The following points will provide a bit of guidance and insight as companies consider their approach to marketing, selling, and engaging millennial buyers as this generational shift continues.

Some important things to know about millennials…

They do a large amount of individual research before getting in contact with a salesperson. With so many unbiased tools and research options at their fingertips, talking to a company representative before using these tools seems like putting the cart before the horse. As illustrated by Forbes, the top 4 ways millennials gather information includes product demos, 3rd party user reviews, free trials, and then the vendor or product’s website (in that order).

Millennials trust and prefer having their own experience with the product with unbiased reviews before diving into the self-promoting product content from the company’s website or speaking to a salesperson.

That being said, companies should view their online content (including both the website and social media content) as the first “salesperson” or “representative” that a millennial buyer will interact with and gain insight from.

Younger members of this demographic prefer to engage with social media as a form of information as it highlights short pieces of information and focuses on visuals (HBR).

Millennials are more likely to look for solutions to personal problems, or to problems they have been assigned to find a solution for rather than team issues (b2b.snapapp).

Think about what might be troubling a millennial buyer on a personal level based on their title and firm. This brings us to the importance of buyer personas. Organizations should create targeted personas of millennial buyers that include “basic demographic details, behavior, goals, pain points, and buying patterns” (Newberry). Tune in to the engagement channels and communication methods that are most likely to resonate with and influence this demographic, such as social media and live chat options, as this age group finds phone calls interruptive and annoying (Almquist).

Trust is key. When these millennial buyers do reach out to a sales rep, they are usually wanting to “…confirm product limitations and negotiate pricing” (Barcena).

If your sales team is approached by a millennial stakeholder, they are likely already far along in the buying cycle and are looking for specific information. Handling questions or issues honestly and directly makes a big difference in landing a deal with a millennial prospect.

At the end of the day, as this generation continues to move up the corporate ladder, a company will be doing itself a disservice if it doesn’t consider millennial buyers and influencers as part of the buying committee.  To find success in engaging this group, content must be authentic, nonintrusive, and available on a variety of platforms.

I hope these tips give some insight into the minds of the B2B millennial consumer. For more information check out the in-depth research by SnapApp and Heinz Marketing here.

The post B2B Selling to a Millennial Stakeholder appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

• Silicon Valley may be the world's largest tech hub, but it's not the only one.
• From Tel Aviv to Stockholm, several global cities have come to be shaped by booming tech industries.
• Many of these startup scenes are attracting young workers and creating a new wave of wealth.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Move over, Silicon Valley — cities across the globe are vying for a spot as the world's leading tech hub. Several have even been called "the next Silicon Valley" or dubbed the Silicon Valley of their country or region.

Major cities like London and New York have witnessed growing tech sectors, while others, like Sydney, are undergoing government plans to become their own Silicon Valley. While it seems that many big cities these days are turning into tech hubs, only a few are truly being defined by their tech industries.

Read more: Disappointing photos show what living in San Francisco on a tech salary really looks like

Many of these flourishing tech hubs are not only attracting young workers but also ushering in a new wave of wealth, resulting in changes like luxury property booms and old neighborhoods undergoing revitalization periods.

From Tel Aviv to Berlin, take a look at six global cities that have been likened to Silicon Valley.

SEE ALSO: Israel's luxury real estate market is booming, and it's driven in part by Jews buying 'insurance homes' to flee political strife in Europe and South America

DON'T MISS: 13 mind-blowing facts that show just how expensive San Francisco really is

Tel Aviv, Israel, a growing tech hub, has seen a boom in luxury real estate.

Called "the next Silicon Valley" and referred to as "Startup Nation," Israel has undergone a high-tech revolution, Daniel Knobil of Home Search Israel previously told Business Insider: "Israel has become one of the world leaders in bio technology, cyber technology, artificial intelligence, online games, and high-tech agriculture."

It's home to more startups per capita than any other country and attracts more venture capital per person, Business Insider previously reported. Evi Angelakis, founder of New York-based Golden Key Realty Group, told Mansion Global that Israel is second in the world behind Silicon Valley when it comes to tech hubs. 

At the center of this hub is Tel Aviv. Multinational tech companies like Google, Oracle, and Facebook have research centers in or near the city, which also serves as a home for a plethora of successful local tech companies. Google recently bought GPS navigation app Waze — local to Tel Aviv — for $1 billion, and Amazon opened an office in Tel Aviv in October.

As a result of this tech boom, "there have been extremely successful Israeli companies making extremely successful wealthy Israelis," Knobil said. "The country has gone through a real revolution, which has fueled a demand for luxury houses and apartments."

This is especially true of Tel Aviv, where real estate is the most expensive.

Berlin, Germany, has a thriving tech scene thanks to its bounty of affordable property.

There's been a surge in technology companies based in Berlin, Sam Shead previously reported for Business Insider. As James Cook wrote, Berlin is "home to a mixture of hackers, privacy experts, scientists, and video companies that are making waves in the tech scene."

Tech giants like Apple and Facebook have offices in the city, which is also home to local success stories like music streaming service SoundCloud and to-do list App Wunderlist. Google opened its "Campus Berlin" tech hub in 2017 because Berlin's startup scene grew so rapidly over the last five years, setting it on track to become one of Europe's leading ecosystems.

A number of UK tech startups relocated to the relatively cheap city following Brexit, which could inhibit their ability to access the European market and make it difficult for them to hire, The Financial Times reported.

From 2015 to 2017, Berlin witnessed a 9% increase in startups, higher than any European city, reported Nicholas Borsotto Machado Monteiro for Entrepreneur, citing Creditsafe. The city accounted for 70% of total investments in German startups in 2017, and it was named a banner year for startups by Ernst & Young.

While tech booms usually lead to increased real-estate prices, Berlin had so much affordable property available that companies and their employees were able to easily snap up spaces, Monteiro reported. With such affordability, the city has been able to easily attract global talent.

Shenzhen, China, is the country's main tech hub.

Matt Rivers of CNN called Shenzhen "China's Silicon Valley."

With more than 14,000 high-tech firms, 3,000 of which were established in 2018, Shenzhen's tech industry accounts for nearly 40% of the city's GDP, according to Mansion Global. There are five tech giants fueling Shenzhen's tech hub, and two of them — Tencent Holdings and Huawei Technologies — collectively employ 234,000 people.

The city is part of the Chinese government's Greater Bay Area initiative, a project to develop technology and innovation growth in the country to rival California's Silicon Valley, reported BBC.

The tech scene is contributing to a rise in wealth among some of its residents, according to Wealth-X's 2019 Billionaire Census report. "Shenzhen is a big part of the reason that China has been minting new billionaires at a rate of one per week," Carrie Law, CEO of Juwai.com, a real-estate portal for Chinese buyers, told Mansion Global. 

The city's urbanization is driving a boom in luxury property developments while also changing what luxury looks like — smaller properties focusing on amenities and convenience are being favored over villas and townhouses. Shenzhen is now one of the top five cities in the world with the most expensive housing, reported Alice Woodhouse of The Financial Times. 

Lisbon, Portugal, has an emerging startup scene thanks to accelerator funding and plenty of coworking spaces.

Lisbon's startup scene emerged five to 10 years ago — today, it's set to become a leading tech hub in Europe, according to Mansion Global.

In 2016, the Portuguese government created a national network of tech hubs and startups in Lisbon thanks to the StartUP Voucher initiative, which offers a yearlong fellowship to 400-plus entrepreneurs, reported Heather Farmbrough for Forbes. They also set up a $225 million venture capital fund to increase foreign investment in startups.

From 2014 to 2016, 700 companies in the high-tech industry were established in Lisbon. Lisbon has 32 tech scale-ups — companies that have raised just under $1 million (USD), which make up nearly half of the companies in the city, according to a Startup Europe report.

A former army food factory will be reconstructed into a huge startup campus, Hub Creativo Beato, and Google recently announced plans to launch an innovation center just outside the city (date unknown), according to Mansion Global.

Tech workers are revitalizing Lisbon's rundown buildings in up-and-coming areas, transforming them into hubs and coworking spaces, as well as affordable places to live.

Bengaluru, India, has evolved from cheap labor to booming startups.

In its 2019 Wealth Report, estate agency Knight Frank referred to Bengaluru as "India's answer to Silicon Valley," thanks to the city's variety of tech sectors across artificial intelligence, food tech, fintech, and robotics. More than 400 multinational tech companies, like Microsoft and Samsung, have offices there. It's also home to local companies like Infosys and Wipro. 

"The tech scene and entrepreneurial spirit in Bengaluru are booming," Niketh Sabbineni, a local tech entrepreneur, told Rachel Hall of The Guardian. India's IT industry began here 25 years ago — in 2017, it was named the world's most dynamic city by the World Economic Forum, Hall wrote.

In the beginning, the tech scene included foreign companies looking to cut costs, which gave the city a reputation for cheap labor, according to Hall. Now, it's evolved to take on more of a startup feel.

The city's GDP is expected to grow by nearly 60% in the next five years and the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals is expected to grow by 40% in the same time period, according to the Knight Frank report, citing Oxford Economics data.

Stockholm, Sweden, is home to plenty of coders and unicorns, leading the tech industry in Scandinavia.

Dennis Mitzner of Tech Crunch called Sweden the "tech superstar of the north." Stockholm — where coders comprise 18% of the workforce — is creating a second Silicon Valley in Scandinavia, reported Ben Schiller for Fast Company.

It produces the highest number of unicorns per capita of any global city outside of Silicon Valley, reported Forbes, and it was ranked the second-most prolific tech hub in the world by VC firm Atomico.

Stockholm's tech scene emerged in 2009 — in just five years, investment in the city's technology industry tripled to roughly $377 million, reported Max Benwell for The Independent. Home to more than 22,000 companies, the city has birthed successful global companies such as music-streaming service Spotify and gaming company King. 

The booming tech industry has benefited from the Swedish government's investment in high-speed internet, and its daycare system, which enables flexibility for entrepreneurial families, according to Benwell.

Stockholm "now has its own personal identity, in the same way San Francisco has Silicon Valley," he wrote.

Sales leaders are constantly focused on attaining revenue goals, which naturally shifts the bulk of their attention to top performers. After all, they’re the breadwinners who consistently achieve quota and drive revenue. The general perception is that keeping top performers successful will increase everyone else’s performance as they try to keep up.

This is flawed thinking. Core performers, or “B reps,” are a company’s most valuable asset. How is that possible? Get familiar with the 20-60-20 theory. This approach of grouping sellers finds that 20% of a sales team are top performers, 20% are struggling, and the other 60% are somewhere in the middle.

Research done by the Sales Executive Council found that a 5% increase from the middle 60% of performers yielded 80% more revenue than a 5% increase from just the top 10%. If sales leaders want to increase quota attainment and optimize pipeline generation, they have to start by improving the effectiveness of their core sellers.

What is Sales Effectiveness?

So, what is sales effectiveness?

Sales effectiveness describes the process of finding the right sales tasks to produce the best possible sales output and outcomes. For different organizations, this could mean improved profit, revenue, sales of a new product, or something else entirely — it all depends on how company strategy defines success.

Regardless of how a sales organization chooses to define effectiveness, it can only be obtained by scaling the success of core sellers, and not just the top performers. By focusing on the majority of their sales force and not only the top 20%, sales leaders receive a much higher return for their efforts.

Enablement Tools Help Scale Quota Attainment

How do sales leaders take this process and increase effectiveness at scale? Though it’s great to recognize and reward top-performing sellers, it’s more important to improve the overall effectiveness of an entire sales force. One way to accelerate this change is by investing in technology such as a sales enablement platform that provides analytics into the sales activities that are most effective.

When sales leaders have visibility into the activities that are driving progress, they can discuss which activities should be made into best practices with stakeholders and team members. Utilizing a sales enablement platform that integrates with a sales rep’s everyday workflow uncovers these best practices for everything from sales onboarding to buyer email templates.

With buy-in from sales reps, enablement teams and sales leaders can then replicate high performing behavior across the entire sales force. Once these activities are clearly defined for sales reps and reinforced through practice and technology, it’s easier for them to understand and execute — ultimately helping reps guide buyers more effectively through each stage of the sales funnel.

Core performers are on the cusp of becoming consistently successful sellers, but they need help from enablement and sales leaders to identify and execute on repeatable best practices. This doesn’t happen without an enablement tool to provide visibility into effective activities.

One of the challenges with believing that Level 1 Value (the value in your product itself) is enough to create a preference to change providers, is that it leads to behaviors like sending a quote. Even if you sell a pure commodity, unless your strategy is to win by always having the lowest price, a quote isn’t likely to compel your dream client to change—and why should they when you have created no compelling reason to do so? You are better off with a consultative sales approach.

Let’s be clear about the difference between a transactional sale and a transactional approach to selling. In the case of a transactional deal, the client is making a decision they make frequently enough to know what they need, and one with little risk to them or their business. A transactional approach to selling, even when one sells a commodity, is to believe that there is no greater value you can create for your client. It’s an approach that absolves you of the responsibility for creating greater value for your client—mostly to your detriment.

Turning a Transactional Sale into Consultative

Imagine a salesperson sells the same computers as their competitors. The client sends a request for a quote to all of their suppliers, seeking the lowest price. All of the suppliers respond with quotes that are only separated by a few pennies. On what criteria should the client decide which supplier they select to fulfill their order when the only difference is the price? This time one competitor wins, the next time another lowers their price to acquire the orders, and so begins the great race to the bottom.

Imagine instead that one salesperson reads the request for quote and calls the client to share an insight and idea. This rep calls to share with the client that the item they want to order is fine, but there is a better option available to them without their having to invest much more than they would spend on what they requested. This is the application of caring enough to call, and it is the application of business acumen and situational knowledge, two factors that change a transactional approach to selling to something more consultative. While it’s possible—and in some cases, likely—a person in purchasing may send another request for a quote, but there are cases where they will also give the order to the person who takes the more consultative approach.

Using a Consultative Approach to Move Up

The decision to be consultative around commoditized sales isn’t a new idea. Salespeople and sales organizations have been effectively doing so for decades by moving up to higher levels within their prospect’s organizations and creating more significant and more meaningful opportunities to develop contracts in which they receive all of the transactions. The starting point is creating greater value, value worth eliminating the need to send out a request for quote for every single transaction.

The ideas and insights you have that would reduce your transactional client’s overall costs are best employed with stakeholders higher up in the organization, the business owner’s who invest—and who are often willing trade a higher price for lower costs, something only possible when there is value above the product itself.

Level 2 Value is experience, meaning you are easy to do business with and have excellent service and support, all of which may lower costs even when your price is higher. Level 3 Value is execution, which means producing a better, more consistent result, one that is better than your competition, also something that justifies the delta between your price and your competitor’s. Level 4 Value is strategic outcomes, which means advise on how to create better results that are tied to directly to your dream client’s strategic initiatives and goals, something that differentiates you from the most crowded of fields.

For more on understanding the Levels of Value and competitive displacements, pick up my book, Eat Their Lunch: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales.

The post Transactional Sales Require a Consultative Sales Approach appeared first on The Sales Blog.