Rnordman

Of course, we need to go deeper to figure out why Ultimate and Workday outperform. Is it just that HCM is a great space? Probably not. Infor sells HCM too and it isn’t looking good for them.

The post Sales Pipeline Benchmarks to Supercharge your Competitive Edge appeared first on Sales Hacker.

If you want to know how you lose important relationships, including critical client relationships, here are some of the reasons.

• A Lack of Integrity: There is nothing faster or more effective at damaging relationships than a lack of integrity. Being dishonest will cost you relationships, which is why honesty is the best policy. You need to walk your talk.
• Ingratitude: Taking people for granted and being ungrateful will cause you to lose relationships. When you no longer appreciate people, those relationships are at risk.
• Complacency: Relationships require an investment of time and energy. When you quit feeding relationships, those relationships quit feeding you. Like everything important in life, you need to go first.
• Assuming Bad Intentions: Some people believe in their heart of hearts that everyone is out to hurt them. They question their motives, believing that they must always protect themselves, and thus, never make themselves vulnerable enough to have a real relationship.
• Being Self-Oriented: The very word relationship connotes two people both caring about the other. When you care more about getting what you need or extracting value from the relationship, that self-orientation makes it impossibly difficult for a real relationship to exist.
• Making People Feel Small: The biggest people you will ever meet work very hard to make other people bigger, and they put forth the effort to make people feel important. When you have to be the biggest person in the room, you work against the outcome of making others feel important, and you hurt relationships.
• Attacking People Personally: Big people focus on the issues. Small people focus on the person. You can very easily underestimate the damage you do when you attack someone personally. Personal attacks are designed to hurt the other person, and even though you may apologize, the damage may not be that easily repaired.
• Lack of Trust: For some reason, those who are not trustworthy tend not to trust others. You don’t have to make any accusation for someone to recognize a lack of trust. That lack of trust is an indication as to how you feel about another person, and when it is felt, relationships suffer.
• Lack of Caring: This is a binary choice. You care. Or you do not care. When you don’t care, you have no relationship. Caring is what trust is built on, and that makes caring the prerequisite for all relationships.

The post The Keys to Damaging Relationships appeared first on The Sales Blog.

HypnoArt / Pixabay

A CRM is an agent’s bestfriend as much as girls have diamonds for theirs. And the numbers prove this fact quite well: A 29% increase in a company’s sales revenue is made possible by the implementation of a CRM; agents are fully mobilized and organizations will experience a 26.4% increase in agent activity due to the inclusion of social media and mobile network channels; and lastly, 65% is the total average of agents who have been consistently reaching their quota upon the adoption of a CRM. Besides knowing how to choose the right CRM for you, it also is important to note the benefits it can contribute to your company. Here is a rundown of ten of the best things a CRM can do for you:

1. Improving Your Customer Service

The possibility of having “improving your customer service” in every single number of this list is not at all remote. It is just the core benefit that every sales CRM imparts to organizations, and needless to say, the best one too. We hear how these pieces of technology positively affect businesses all too often, but how does it really do just that and so what if it does? In the customer-centric sales industry where the “customer is always right,” agents put a premium on making sure that each transaction gets the job done. Whether it is an order being placed or an issue being resolved, every interaction made with a client should be time well-spent for the client as much as it is for the agent. A company equipped with assistive tools such as a CRM assures their customers quality customer service by requiring minimal idle time for each transaction.

2. Automation Of Daily Sales Operations

Every client has their reason why they need a certain product, as well having the same number of reasons why they don’t. Unfortunately, most of the time, it’s the latter that outweighs the former in the decision making process. And the challenge of getting a “Yes” from the client is what every agent works to overcome every day. But let’s not forget that we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg here, and that a couple more tasks battle with it for an agent’s attention. So where does a CRM come in? One comes in to save an agent from those times they wish they could clone themselves into a battalion to accommodate every single client. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the automation of miniscule tasks such as: sending of forms to fill out, sending reports to managers, and the addressing of legal issues; are easily dealt with to allow agents to focus on getting that “Yes.”

3. Better Data For Improved Reporting

Being human means agents are not immune from mistakes, especially with the number of tasks they need to get done within a day. Being a warehouse of almost every bit of company and customer information, CRMs easily automatically whip out machine-generated numbers and files that are essential in giving managers an overview of daily, weekly, monthly, and even annual performances of agents in their interactions with clients. Because of this capability, sales CRM systems make certain sales tasks, like the processing of data, free from human error to ensure that each report sent to the manager will most certainly be valid points of references for sales and marketing strategies.

4. Higher Revenues From Customers

Having a big customer volume doesn’t necessarily translate to big financial revenues, yes. But it is most certainly a catalyst for it, and CRMs are very much attuned to providing your organization with high numbers in that department. CRMs ensure that businesses enjoy high customer revenue statistics through the optimization of strategic marketing campaigns in various customer channels. These helpful tools are smart pieces of technology in that they tap into uncharted demographics in perpetuating product promotions too.

5. Improving Communications Within The Organization

As much as the main focus of communications is the relationship between agent and client, it also is important to note that interaction between the disparate parties of an organization is as important too. A Sales CRM tool is key to ensuring this business aspect by making sure that the channels between departments are open to each other. Having this fluidity in the flow of information also allows agents to improve their responses by collaborating with agents from teams like Marketing, Accounting, or IT; in the process making sure that each client’s query is answered with the appropriate solutions.

6. Optimize Cross-Selling Abilities

Cross-selling is one way to make your customers feel that you value the client-agent relationship they have formed with you. Being equipped with the necessary client details through CRMs will give agents the sufficient data they need to make sure that a client’s issue is solved. The practice of cross-selling, a process by which an agent offers products that will hopefully supplement the client’s needs, has been a key factor in the effectiveness of CRMs, and needless to say, the effectiveness of agents as well.

7. Ensure Your Agents’ Satisfaction

Keeping the customers happy is important, but so is maintaining your agents’ satisfaction. As the sales CRM software provides a comprehensive warehouse of vital company and client data, this allows agents to be fully involved in the process. An agent who understand what he or she is doing, and how to course through every situation will never work a day in his or life. Having a full grasp of how things work just makes working seem like a walk in the park, thus, ensuring that each agent has a smile on their faces.

8. Cost-efficient Solution

Upon the installment of a CRM, the hardest part is gaining the pace in which the software runs on. Agents will always have to keep up with CRMs and not the other way around. But this little sacrifice will soon be worth going through once the effects of your CRM starts manifesting themselves. The CRM takes the place of positions like client-service reps by making sure that it aids sales agents in performing tasks that a human employee would do.

9. Streamlines Marketing And Sales Functions

In terms of marketing, CRM for sales create fortified communication channels like websites for example. This cloud-based channel helps businesses reach a broader audience, and even tap into those markets they never thought about pursuing. In the case of sales, CRMs aid in the fast progression of closing deals by decreasing turnaround time. Also, CRMs promote the unification of both sales and marketing teams to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.

10. Provides Additional Administrative Support

Banal tasks may make the experienced agent grow irritant. After all, what is x number of years for them to still be responsible for administrative functions. This is where CRMs come in, these tools make sure that each agent is kept focus on major tasks such as closing deals, rather than sending emails, reports, or surveys on customer satisfaction.

Discounting can be a touchy subject. Sales people often claim that discounts are required to make the sale. Pricing is philosophically opposed to discounts as they undermine profitability and signal lack of pricing power. Marketing worries about how discounts will impact value perception but at the same time desire the increased attention that a well-managed discount campaign can generate. Ouch. How do you manage all of these different imperatives?

In a recent survey by pricing recruiter Chris Herbert, 'sales rush to discount' ranked second as the biggest frustration facing pricing (number one was 'lack of data or bad data'). Patrick Campbell from Pricing Intelligently has recently published an excellent analysis of the cost of discounts and the long-term negative impact they can have on customer lifetime value. See 'A comprehensive data guide to why you shouldn't discount.'

Patrick identifies three characteristics of customers receiving discounts:

• Lower willingness to pay - customers demanding and receiving discounts showed a lower willingness to pay over time (suggesting they perceived the value of the offer to be lower)
• Higher churn rates - customers with discounts often have less loyalty and are more willing to switch out one solution for a cheaper solution when one comes along; they drive the race to the bottom
• Lower lifetime customer value - a direct result of lower prices and higher churn

Given all this, why do SaaS companies discount at all?

One reason is that it is a fact of life in enterprise sales. Whenever procurement gets involved, there is intense pressure to discount. Put yourself in the procurement role for a moment. Your job is to get the best deal for your company and make sure there are alternate sources of supply. The cardinal sin in procurement is that your competitor gets a better deal than you do and one of the best defensive plays requires a discount. Many procurement professionals regard it as professional malpractice not to get a discount. We will share more on how to manage procurement and emerging best practices for procurement in B2B SaaS in future posts. For now, people designing B2B SaaS pricing have to remember to take into account the needs of procurement and build this into pricing and pricing strategy.

There are two other reasons to discount in B2B SaaS: as a strategic investment and to reflect the actual differentiated value for the customer.

Discounts as a strategic investment

Sales often justify discounts as a form of investment. "We need to make a strategic investment in this customer." "This discount will get us a lighthouse account in this sector." 

Investments are a good thing. Like all investments, we expect a return. So when we are treating a discount as an investment, we need to be able to say how, when and how much of a return we will get. These critical questions are often skipped in the pressure of closing a sale and giving a discount. In most cases a discount for a specific customer is not an investment, it is an attempt to close a sale that the sales rep is afraid of losing or that is stagnating in the pipeline.  If this is the case, let's acknowledge it, and not pretend we are making an investment. We are giving away profit margin, and quite often profit, to win a sale.

There are ways to structure a deal as an investment. The discount can be time bound. One can discount professional services instead of the subscription (the subscription will continue for years, one hopes, and the discounted professional services can be an investment in the configuration and integrations needed to lock the customer in). One can make some explicit assumptions about the other customers that this company will bring in, once established as a lighthouse account. These are all legitimate reasons to discount, but the assumptions need to be stated, tested and tracked (Would you make other investments and then not track them to see if it made a return?)

Investments in winning a segment are generally easier to defend, as long as they are part of a larger plan. The plan can include additional functionality tailored to the segment, marketing messages, and marketing campaigns, and a pricing structure tuned to that segment. In this case, discounting is part of a larger plan. One that will be tracked and measured and the ROI calculated.

Discounting (and Premiums) that Reflect Differentiated Value

I know of one company that has built explicit Economic Value Models (using the EVE methodology) for all of its offers. This company is in the specialty chemical industry and created additives for well-understood chemical processes. It knows the amount of differentiated value it provides relative to the alternatives and has set prices based on the amount of that value it needs to capture for itself. Now for any specific customer, it is possible that the value will be different, lower even, because of the way the customer has configured their plant. In these cases, when there is real evidence that the differentiated value will be lower, it is willing to give a value-based discount. The same company will also modify its formulations for a customer and charge a value-based premium.

Most of us are not that sophisticated and operate in spaces where this level of specificity is impossible (or too expensive to justify). But the principle is the same. If a segment gets value in a different way from the general market then it may warrant its own offer and the price should be adjusted, discounted if necessary, to reflect that value.

This can work well in negotiations with procurement. One sometimes gets a procurement officer who tells you "That functionality does nothing for us, it has no value and we don't want to pay for it." When this happens, call the bluff, and offer to provide the service without the functionality. In my experience, procurement generally backs off, and when they don't, you have reinforced your overall value message.

Ideally, you are designing your offer to make it easy to switch functionality on and off (design for value-based configuration). This gives your sales people the tools they need to negotiate with procurement and your product marketing people the ability to configure offers for specific segments.

Discounting is part of the B2B SaaS world and you are not going to avoid it, especially once you are dealing with buyers who have procurement departments. 'Don't discount' is not practical advice. Instead, you need to manage your discounting.

1. When treating discounts as an investment, make sure you know how and when you will get a return on that investment.
2. When the discount is meant to reflect the actual differentiated value of the offer, create a version of the offer designed and priced for the segment.
3. When dealing with procurement, provide a discount but stand your ground on the value of your offer and be willing to call procurement's bluff when they claim that some part of your offer has no value.

StartupStockPhotos / Pixabay

What do the world’s best SDR teams do? What actions should they take to penetrate high-value target accounts? Here’s what we’ve learned in the trenches, working with customers, and talking with other industry experts.

They run the whole play

The best sales development teams are the ones that run the whole account-based play. A play is a series of steps that orchestrates interactions across departments and channels to achieve a business purpose for one or more buying centers at target accounts.

This idea of a play is a crucial concept in Marketing Orchestration. It’s the recipe for the overall account penetration program, and it should be designed up front, then improved over time. Rather than ad-hoc outbound plays, an account play enables organizations to build a systematic program of activities aimed at turning a target account into a real opportunity.

“We find that senior executives are 2.5 times more responsive to quality multi-touch campaigns than are junior executives.”
-Dan McDade, President & CEO, PointClear

They work side by side with marketing

Anyone who knows a thing or two about account-based strategies knows that silos don’t work. We’re even seeing more and more sales development teams moving under marketing.

Sales development must work with key members of the marketing team to execute ABM. For example, when field marketing is running a VIP event, they’ll rely on sales development to help run plays to the right list. After the event, sales development will help follow up with hot prospects in a timely manner with the right messaging. Another example is when early stage opportunities get stuck, they help run deal nurturing plays to get the ball rolling again.

There are countless ways that sales development can work together, but the important thing is that they do work together.

When silos are down and everyone is on the same page, you can create real engagement to land high-value accounts and expand existing relationships. You can scale your ABM by leveraging the benefits of automation where it counts, while maintaining the human element with personalization where it really matters.

They leave very little to chance

Instead of letting individual reps decide who to call, they develop target account lists and map the buying teams inside them. Similarly, the best sales development teams design the specific interactions that the reps will have, while leaving plenty of space for targeting and personalization.

“The idea is to design a surge of activity across all account stakeholders – and parlay that into richer engagement.”
-Tom Scearce TOPO

Gone are the days of one-touch, one-off email prospecting. Sales development is a strategic initiative and part of a larger plan to land and expand target accounts.

They work the whole account

Winning big deals today means working the entire account.

According to CEB research, the average buying team today includes 6.8 people. With increasing risk aversion, technology complexity and compliance concerns, few experts see this shrinking any time soon.

As every sales pro knows, the bigger the team, the less likely they are to end up buying. After all, it only takes one veto to kill a sale (or one person on holiday to stop a deal in its tracks). This risk is far higher if you’re tied to a lead-centric approach, talking to single individuals in isolation.

They harness the power of relevance

Perhaps nothing is an important to the success or failure of an account-based strategy than your ability to be relevant to your target contacts. Why?

• Relevance separates enlightened sales development from spam.
• Relevance earns email opens and more importantly, responses.
• Relevance gets buyers to lean forward instead of drawing back.

Your entire program is designed to deliver relevant messages to the right people at the right time. And relevance can only come from insight: a real understanding of the buyer’s challenges, opportunities and pain points.

If you cut corners here, you risk damaging your relationships with the most important people at your most important accounts. It’s just too easy for them to hit the spam button and block you from ever reaching them again. To deserve the attention of target accounts, the best sales development teams earn it.

What does your sales development team do to earn the attention (and business) of your target accounts?

PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay

Sales is an area where many companies still offer performance-based incentives – both monetary and non-monetary.

Why? It works. Multiple studies tell us that the right incentives motivate a higher performance than no incentive at all.

With sales, it is very easy to measure performance. Either you get the sale or you don’t. You know how much the sale is worth. And you can see if the value a salesperson is bringing in changes over time.

So setting incentives makes sense, if they improve performance. The company wins, the salesperson wins. Everyone is happy.

So how do you find the right incentive?

The truth is there is no one-size-fits-all incentive model. Each organization, each industry, and indeed, each salesperson is unique. What works for one won’t always work for another.

The key, as with anything else, is to test different models to find the one that works the best. Here are some possible incentive structures to get you started:

Make It a Competition

If you have a sales team that is all on equal footing, adding a competitive atmosphere can be an effective way to create incentives. Reward your highest performers relative to the rest of the group with monthly or quarterly prizes or bonuses.

• Pros: incentivizes above average performance, gamification can make for a spirited atmosphere
• Cons: may lead to distrust among salespeople, no incentive for mid-level performers who are not on top, poorer performances may hold a grudge, too much competition can be unhealthy

Flat Fee Commission

With a flat fee commission, each sale will lead to a financial reward. No matter how many sales a salesperson gets, they will get a financial award for each one. So the more they sell, the more they make.

• Pros: clear and fair incentive, no competition among salespeople, incentivizes more sales
• Cons: does not take value of sales into account, no incentive for personal growth, no limit to potential cost

Percent Based Commission

This is the same as a flat fee commission, but it solves for the problem of differing sale values. If each sale is worth a different amount of money to the company, there is no reason why the commission should be flat. A percent of each sale takes the size of the sale into account.

• Pros: clear and fair incentive, incentivizes higher revenue, no competition among salespeople
• Cons: no limit to potential cost, might sacrifice lower value sales to chase the higher commission

Tiered Commission

Whether flat fee or percent-based, a tiered commission structure incentivizes growth. Assign salespeople a monthly quota (or quotas) they must hit. Every sale above and beyond those quotas carries higher commission potential. They are still getting rewarded for every sale, but the higher their sales get, the more those sales are worth.

• Pros: incentivizes growth, no competition among salespeople
• Cons: no limit to potential cost

Mix and Match

The four models above are just a start to the possible sales incentive programs that companies can use. It’s possible to combine them, and alter them to meet your needs. For example, you might have a commission structure with a competition built in, so that everyone gets paid but the top performers get paid the most. Or you might have different incentives for each individual, based on whatever motivates them.

There are three keys to creating a sales incentive program that works:

1. Make it clear and easy to understand
2. Make sure it incentivizes the right behavior
3. Make it flexible enough that you can tweak it over time to find the right balance between revenue and cost

• Tensions escalate between USA and North Korea after threats to US overseas territory of Guam.
• Any conflict would cause major economic problems both in Korea and more widely across the globe.
• Global supply chains could be severely impacted.
• US debt levels could spike as a result of any conflict.

Tensions between the USA and North Korea escalated further on Tuesday evening when President Donald Trump promised "fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before"in response to recent threats from North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Un.

Hours later, North Korea responded by saying it is seriously considering a missile strike on the Pacific island of Guam, home to a US military base.

A physical engagement between the two nations still looks highly unlikely, but it is something that serious analysts and academics have started to talk about.

Clearly, the biggest and most important impact of any conflict between the US and North Korea — either nuclear or conventional — would be a catastrophic loss of life and huge human suffering.

However, in a note circulated to clients staff at research house Capital Economics have assessed the potential economic impact that any conflict might have on the world's economic prosperity.

Writing on Wednesday Gareth Leather and Krystal Tan note that in previous major conflicts since World War Two, countries affected have seen significant drops in economic output.

"The experience of past military conflicts shows how big an impact wars can have on the economy. The war in Syria has led to a 60% fall in the country’s GDP," the pair write.

"The most devastating military conflict since World War Two, however, has been the Korean War (1950-53), which led to 1.2m South Korean deaths, and saw the value of its GDP fall by over 80%."

The chart below illustrates the drop in GDP of numerous economies affected by conflicts in the post Second World War era:

Understandably, the Korean peninsula — which would be the likely arena for any conflict — would bear the brunt of any economic shock, Capital Economics' analysts suggest, with South Korea's economy the worst hit. That impact would inevitably spread to the wider global economy, which given that South Korea accounts for 2% of global GDP, could cause significant disruption.

Supply chains globally would be impacted, with Capital Economics using the major floods that hit Thailand in 2011 as a comparison with any potential damage in South Korea "because of the huge disruption and damage they caused to the country’s manufacturing industry. The impact on the economy was considerable. GDP in the final quarter of 2011 fell by 4% y/y, led by a 16% contraction in manufacturing output."

However, the "impact of a war in Korea would be much bigger. South Korea exports three times as many intermediate products as Thailand," Capital Economics' writers argue.

"In particular, South Korea is the biggest producer of liquid crystal displays in the world (40% of the global total) and the second biggest of semiconductors (17% market share). It is also a key automotive manufacturer and home to the world’s three biggest shipbuilders.

"If South Korean production was badly damaged by a war there would be shortages across the world. The disruption would last for some time – it takes around two years to build a semi-conductor factory from scratch."

Here's the chart showing South Korea's share of global exports:

Any conflict would also have a major impact on the United States economy, given the cost of waging a war on foreign soil.

"At its peak in 1952, the US government was spending the equivalent of 4.2% of its GDP fighting the Korean War. The total cost of the second Gulf War (2003) and its aftermath has been estimated at US$1trn (5% of one year’s US GDP)," Leather and Tan write.

"A prolonged war in Korea would significantly push up US federal debt, which at 75% of GDP is already uncomfortably high."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are waging a war of words over the future of AI

geralt / Pixabay

Throughout my childhood, I grew up with a familiar and constant mantra ingrained in my daily thoughts: always be prepared. This has manifested itself in various ways throughout my life, including my career in sales. At a young age, I realized that how you say something is certainly important. But I also found that what you say – word choice – is clearly just as critical. As I began my role as a Sales Development Representative at memoryBlue, I wanted to capitalize on a medium that allowed my ongoing commitment to strong word choice and messaging to come across in its purest form: email.

Words Matter, Choose Them Wisely

In this post, I’d like to cover some of the variables that go in to what constitutes an effective sales email (i.e. subject lines, open rates, ROI, personalization, and technology). Many of these variables are best examined by taking a statistical approach. Some statistics are not as specific as we would like them to be, but they can be just as, if not more, insightful from a broader perspective.

Before we dive into details, let’s get some understanding of the environment we’re working in today as sales pros. According to PEW Research (conducted in 2015), the median number of smartphone owners in developed economies is hovering around 70% for adults. That number is probably closer to 80% at this stage, which serves to highlight a thought that should be central to most sales pros and marketers: most emails are now opened on mobile devices. This means that each word must count in terms of value, as well as how much space it takes up on a 4 to 7-inch screen.

Percent of adults who report using a smartphone – Pew Research

This is data you must give serious weight to when considering the length of your emails. According to a study done by Boomerang, covered in an article by Hubspot, the optimal email body length rests between 50 and 120 words. This means you must be concise across the board. There is no room to expand and expound on a topic – grab the reader’s attention, offer some value and close with a call to action. That’s literally all you have time for and all that your emails should try to accomplish.

So just how do you grab attention in the modern business world? Let’s answer that question with a question…

What’s your favorite subject?

Subject lines are critical and they serve as the great gatekeeper in cyberspace. You’re not getting “in” unless you find a way to make this step a bullseye. Subject lines are so imperative, in fact, that Apple incorporated them as an option for text messages in one of their iOS updates a few years back. They are the first words a prospect sees in an email, and can be the make or break factor determining whether a reader opens your message or simply deletes it all without ever seeing the meat of things. And digging below the surface a little bit, the devil is truly in the details when it comes to the subject.

According to Adestra, personalized subject lines have open rates nearly 23% higher than non-personalized subject lines. This means name usage right in the subject line, among other things, can have a huge pay off.

According to Convince & Convert, 33% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. Right out of the gate, one out of three recipients have a wall that you will not get over unless you take time to craft a subject line that catches their eye. This statistic brings us to the first (and arguably the most crucial) step of crafting a good subject line: the amount of text. In additional research by Adestra, subject lines with 30 or fewer characters have above average open rates. Along those lines, according to Contact Monkey, subjects with three or more words are opened 15% less than those with just one or two words.

Stop and think about that for a second. Can you exercise that sort of brevity when you craft your next subject line? Statistics say you should!

These are statistics I came across early in my time in sales, and I quickly decided to build around them. I now take care to not use more than two or three words on my first couple prospect touches via email, and I always opt for the shortest subject lines I can possibly muster. This means I never “spill too much candy” from a sales point of view, and it requires minimal effort from the recipient to engage. It seems like a silly aspect to pay mind to, but once you realize that every aspect counts in an email, it’s a quick fix.

Words to Live By

After cracking the code on the amount of words to use, your actual word choice has every bit as much impact. As we have established, emails need to be as concise as possible. Consequently, it’s imperative to make the few words used in your subject lines count. ContactMonkey research indicates that each of the top five performing subject lines included “Re:” in them. This allows the recipient to presume that a dialogue has already taken place, which will motivate them to open the message. I will always incorporate an “Re:” subject line email into my cadence (usually on the second prospect touch) to maximize ability to get a return off the email. But fair warning: take caution with this approach. If the sales prospect hasn’t engaged in any conversation with you, there’s a risk that you’ll be offending them with the presumption of familiarity here.

On the flip side, messages containing “Fw:” in the subject line are opened 17% less according to Convince & Convert. This may be due to the idea that, if something is simply being forwarded, it is not as immediate or important, and it is something being broadly circulated.

According to Sidekick, a few words included in a subject line that boost open rates are:

• “Tomorrow” (10%)
• “Free” (10%)
• “New” (4%)

Conversely, words that dropped open rates include:

• “Quick” (17%)
• “Meeting” (7%)
• “You” (5%)

We can debate the reasons for these statistics, but it is good practice to follow the numbers and make sure you are choosing each word with a strategy in mind if you want to improve email effectiveness. Once you have perfected a select number of subject lines that grab attention, the spotlight turns to focus on the content of your email.

Carrying a message

While effective subject lines can be crafted and honed relatively quickly, the body of the email has much more depth and nuance needed during its construction. Statistically speaking, the strongest argument to be made when crafting the actual email is to focus on personalization.

Source: Aberdeen B2B social media marketing study; Image Credit: AfterOffers.com

Understanding what makes an actual email tick in terms of successes and failures is hard to prove statistically, but one aspect that consistently stands out is personalization. Crafting your emails to specifically address each prospect you are reaching out to can immensely improve your click-through rates, response rates, and conversion rates. According to Aberdeen, personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.

Despite these widely available facts, an astonishingly low 39% of senders build personalized messages in email. According to a survey by CMO, over 90% of professionals agreed that personalization was important, very important, or extremely important for a message to resonate. The data argues that personalization is held in high esteem by both senders and receivers, yet not nearly as many people follow through with it. The common sales pro or marketer still opts to continue blasting out “one size fits all” mass emails.

How do I get noticed?

While social media has become embedded and institutionalized throughout western society, and companies clamor to make their presence known in the space, email still trumps the new platforms. According to McKinsey, email is 40% more effective than Twitter and Facebook. Despite the fact that email is still king, you must treat it delicately. Pay vital attention to your send frequency and avoid wearing out your recipients’ patience.

According to the Database Marketing Institute (DMA), open rates are highest when two emails per month are sent to a target. Another important aspect to consider: mobile devices have blown desktops out of the water on the consumption side. Open rates clear 50% on mobile devices according to Campaign Monitor (and in the same study, most of the phones that they are opened on are iPhones). On the other side, over half a billion Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices according to TechCrunch. In short, email is incredibly valuable – but acknowledging how it’s consumed is a critical step for every sales pro. These facts affect every aspect of email construction.

If you’re still on the digital fence…

While many sales pros realize there are benefits to using email, some may still be skeptical of the pay off when investing a good bit of time and effort into the exercise is mandatory. Obsessing over the crucial details such as word counts, subject lines, send frequency, timing, personalization and more can seem daunting. Is it truly worth it?

In two words: you bet!

Source: Aberdeen B2B social media marketing study; Image Credit: AfterOffers.com

According to DMA, the ROI on email is a whopping 3,800%. That is an astonishingly high number, and makes it a clear choice for your sales tool belt. According to the same study, 77% of the ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. Better yet, as time goes on, ROI is continually increasing for email. From 2013 to 2014, email ROI increased threefold according to DMA. As mobile email access has improved and become commonplace, those numbers are only going up. With statistics like this, any argument presented as a reason to not use email becomes tough to swallow.

Win the War

The art of professional sales is often a war of attrition. Many believe it is purely a numbers game, and in many ways, it can be. Hopefully this statistical approach to sales email will help push you to utilize this powerful tool, or at least have a better understanding as to why many pros already do. Following the status quo is mediocre – go above and beyond! Blaze your own trail by not only incorporating email into your sales campaigns, but by crafting your email messages and cadence with precision. You won’t regret it.

How Can You Harness Facebook’s Tremendous Advertising Power? With over two billion monthly users, Facebook can give you access to thousands or even millions of members who may be interested in your products or services. The tricky part is figuring …..

The post 5 Rookie Facebook Ad Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on Smart Insights.

Open-ended questions are far more effective than closed-ended questions in getting a buyer to open up and share more information with you.

In a previous CONNECT2Sell Blog post, we illustrated how closed-ended questions can hurt your ability to understand buyer needs and limit your sales conversations. Let's dig into how you can improve the questions you ask buyers by making them open-ended.

Everyone is drawn to a good story. Why? We love to imagine ourselves as the protagonist, overcoming the odds and winning. Stories are inspiring. Stories help us understand how the world works. Ultimately, stories give us clues about how to solve our own problems in the real world.

And stories are attractive because they’re concrete. They’re visual, easily pictured in the mind’s eye. We all would much rather learn through a story than through a lecture.

Prospects Learn Through Stories Too

But the power of stories goes much deeper. Psychologists believe that stories have served humans in their quest for survival since the earliest of times — our species has used storytelling to warn and learn of dangers in the world around us. Storytelling is a part of our primal psyche.

In 2010, neuroscientists at Princeton University discovered the ability of stories to “sync” the brains of storytellers and their listeners. The fMRI imaging revealed that when one person told a story to another, both individuals’ brains displayed nearly identical activity across most areas. This phenomenon was repeated with each of the pairs in the study.

Is it any wonder than stories sell better than a list of facts?

Illuminating Insight Makes Stories Produce Buying Behavior

Many marketers and salespeople have realized that storytelling plays an important part in gaining new customers, so they’re using case studies and customer stories in their marketing and sales conversations.

But not just any story has the ability to motivate a prospect to buy now, and buy from your company rather than a competitor. There are two traps that marketers and salespeople fall into when telling customer stories: not understanding the danger of the status quo, and not truly differentiating their product/service’s value.

To result in a purchase, a story has to illuminate the cost of the status quo and the benefits of change as well as demonstrate that the prospects’ pain cannot be truly solved with any solution other than yours. Let’s look at each of these requirements and how to use them to boost the effectiveness of your case studies.

1. Reveal the Cost of the Status Quo

Different studies show that 60-70% of enterprise sales opportunities end with the prospect not making a decision. The status quo is your biggest competition for two main reasons:

• Time Scarcity: Today’s companies are operating “lean and mean” — there’s more work and fewer people to get the work done. Prospects are stressed about everything that they need to accomplish in the time that they have available, and it’s easy to put off buying decisions that take up additional time.
• Loss Aversion: We are all wired to avoid loss. We fear making buying decisions because it involves risk: a potential for loss.

If your customer stories are going to result in a purchase by the listener, they have to clearly communicate why the status quo is so terrible. Your case studies need to bring prospects to the realization that the risk of keeping the status quo is worse than the risk of taking the action necessary to purchase your product or service.

Let’s Get Practical: You can accomplish this by really digging into the pain and suffering that the protagonist (your client) was dealing with before they began working with you. Describe this pain in detail — not only the amount of money being lost, time being wasted, and other numerical stats, but also the emotional consequences that the key players were dealing with.

2. Differentiate Your Value

By now we all know that 60% of the buyer’s purchase decision is complete before they connect with a salesperson. But what does this mean? Buyers are researching on their own, forming their thinking based on information gleaned online, without additional input. They come to the sales conversation with opinions already in place.

Because most companies don’t do a good job differentiating their value on their website and other online communication channels, prospects believe that most providers are pretty similar. They come to the sales conversation thinking of your product or service as a commodity.

Your case studies (actually, all of your materials, but especially case studies) need to reframe the situation so that prospects understand two things:

1. Why they need your particular solution
2. Why they’re not going to find it elsewhere

Let’s Get Practical: If you don’t already have a clear picture of how your solution is truly different from the alternatives available, ask yourself this question: What aspect of the prospect’s problem is my company better equipped to solve than my competitors? There’s some element of the problem that you can fix better than anyone else. Once you know what that element is, uncover all the pain points associated with it. Peel back all the layers of those pain points and dig into all the ways that the prospect feels that pain and the consequences of it. Next, get very clear on exactly why and how you are better equipped than your competitors to solve those particular pain points. Your case studies should make your prospects realize that those pain points are the most important ones (by clearly communicating the pain and the consequences) and show how you can solve them better than anyone else.

Make Your Case Studies Powerful

Stories connect, and stories are memorable. But when you incorporate these two insights into your customer stories, they become even more powerful. Powerful enough to move prospects to take action and sign contracts.

You are facing an unwanted reality: sales for your company are just not where they should be.

Nearly all sales managers have found themselves in this position at one point or another − it is almost like a rite of passage before you really get the hang of managing sales.

However, the key to getting your sales back on track is to determine the root cause of your sales slump.

Is it your sales team?

Is it the market?

Is it a lack of understanding of the market? 

Is it your managing style?

There are a number of factors that could be contributing to the decline in your company’s sales.

However, there are 4 common factors that you’ll find across companies in the United States.

Thus, today we are going to let you in on the secrets of those factors that could be draining your company, and you, of sales.

The Top 4 Factors Driving Your Sales Team to Failure

1. Your Sales Team Lacks Prospecting Skills

The key to successful sales is the ability to successfully prospect new customers.

Unfortunately, according to a 2017 Hubspot survey, “prospecting is the most difficult part of the sales process for salespeople.”

And it is clear why: consumers are just not buying like they used to.

With the growing popularity of shopping via social media and smartphones, as well as the use of the internet to research products on their own, consumers are relying less on salespeople.

How does your sales team navigate these issues?

The Solution

Your sales team can get around these consumer hurdles by going beyond being just a salesperson − your team needs to focus on becoming a trusted advisor.

Thinking outside of the box and being proactive are the means of survival in the sales world today.

Sitting and waiting for leads to fall into their laps will bring nothing but failure for your salespeople, and your company’s sales.

Your sales team needs to always have goals to work toward. When they achieve the goals, set new, higher ones.

The need to keep improving and doing better should never leave your sales team.

2. Your Sales Team Lacks Drive

Drive is the core of a successful sales team. Without true Drive, your salespeople will likely not be able to succeed long-term.

So chances are good that if your salespeople are struggling, they lack Drive.

However, finding salespeople with Drive can be a tricky thing.

Why is that?

Because Drive is something that cannot be taught. Drive is something a person has or does not have. Furthermore, Drive can be easily faked in an interview.

So how do you determine if a sales rep has Drive?

The Solution 

The only way to know if your sales rep has Drive is to give them a sales skill assessment.

The results of this assessment will tell you if your salespeople have the 3 critical traits that make up Drive:

• Need for Achievement
• Competitiveness
• Optimism

The best time to give a sales assessment is before the in-person interview, so you only interview those with the highest potential for success in sales, saving you time and money.

Oftentimes, sales managers will look at experience as a more desirable trait than Drive, but sometimes this is the wrong route to take.

Experience can be taught, but Drive cannot.

3. Your Sales Reps Are Wasting Precious Time

Though technological advances have made some parts of sales much easier (think CRM and other programs that are more efficient at keeping track of sales information), many sales reps are finding that they waste a great deal of time on activities that are not selling.

According to the same Hubspot study, 57% of sales reps spend up to an hour each day on data entry.

Think of all the potential sales lost as a result of this.

Your best seller could be prospecting new clients and bringing in some great numbers, but instead they are entering data.

The Solution

Find members of your team that are better suited for things such as data entry.

Which employees should you have focus their efforts on data and follow-up? 

Those employees with lower Drive.

Though they lack Drive to be great salespeople, those with low Drive can still be great assets to your company.

In order to allow the high-Drive salespeople (known as hunters) to spend more time selling, low-Drive salespeople (known as farmers) can serve as support staff – doing things such as entering data and following up with customers.

Customer support for issues and building relationships for future and repeat sales is just as important as the initial prospecting and sales done by high-Drive salespeople, so the low-Drive salespeople are just as key to your company.

Setting your sales team up like this allows your employees to work side-by-side to maximize their potential, and play to their different strengths.

4. Your Salespeople Don’t Fully Understand the Product/Service Or Your Competitors

This seems fairly simple, but you would be surprised at how many sales reps do not really understand what they are trying to sell.

That is a wild thought, right?

If you are wondering how they can expect to be successful in sales without a complete understanding of the product or service, we have an answer: they cannot.

Without the knowledge, they will never find success.

Knowing your company’s product or service is absolutely integral to selling.

The ability to answer (almost) any question, and talk about the product or service to consumers is what is going to take your sales team’s prospects and turn them into customers.

Also, a great way to seal the deal with prospects is to let them know what you offer that your competitors do not.

Knowledge about the industry as a whole and what your competitors are offering is a major factor of successful sales.

So how do you ensure that your sales team understands not only the product or service they are selling, but your company’s competitors as well?

The Solution

The way for you to ensure that your sales team has all the information and resources they need to feel confident about selling your company’s product or service is to provide them with proper training.

Help them feel truly connected with the company and its product or service, and you will find your sales reps connecting to more prospects.

The post 4 Eye-Opening Reasons Your Sales Team Is Failing appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

A career in sales is not for the faint of heart. From long hours to aggressive targets, salespeople are especially vulnerable to burnout.

Good salespeople are worth holding onto — even when they hit a rough patch. Although feelings of burnout in sales are common, they can be alleviated, and can also provide valuable learning opportunities to help sales managers create healthier work environments.

Here, I spoke with Sunny Sandhu, Director of Sales Development at Guru, to discuss his tips for spotting burnout in salespeople, and how leaders can address the root causes of it.

Table of Contents

Sales Burnout

Causes of Burnout for Sales Reps

Signs of Sales Rep Burnout

How to Help Reps Recover from Burnout

Sales Burnout

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and sometimes physical state of distress that is caused by prolonged or repeated exposure to stressors. 

Burnout has become a mainstream business topic in recent years. But despite being newsworthy, it isn't new. 

"Burnout is actually biological in nature. This problem has persisted across multiple generations, whether we knew it or not. People used to talk around the dinner table about their work problems, and about how they didn't feel motivated. The culture was different. Now, we have a magnifying glass to shine a light on this problem," explains Sandhu.

The good news? Although burnout still persists in the workplace, it looks the same as years prior. This means it's easier for sales leaders to spot burnout on their team. The key is knowing what signs to look for.

Causes of Burnout for Sales Reps

Here are some common causes of burnout for sales reps.

1. They lack support from management.

Unfortunately, sales reps can easily begin to experience burnout when they feel like they're lacking support from management

To alleviate this, start by initiating open and candid conversations with your reps, says Sandhu. But to pull this off, there needs to be a level of trust between reps and their management.

"If they trust you, they're going to tell you exactly how they're feeling. If not, they're going to hide the truth because they think your reaction is going to be negative," he told me.

For many managers, the most pressing question is, "How can we fix this?" But Sandhu argues that a better question is, "Why is this happening in the first place?" He gives a scenario of a surface-level manager who, in conversation with a burned out salesperson, tries to improve their selling tactics instead of getting to the heart of the issue.

A more productive approach is similar to that of a sales call. "While the ultimate goal is to secure a deal, you first need to understand their problem — and what's causing it — before you can solve it," Sandhu explains.

2. The sales culture is toxic.

A healthy culture can bring out the best in your salespeople. For leaders, this means fostering a culture of support, not fear.

"Reps need confidence and optimism to do their job, but fear detracts from that. If they hop on a call and don't have a great conversation, their fear of hitting quota intensifies. Then they hop on another call, and it happens again. It creates this downward spiral," Sandhu told me.

Another key driver in toxic work cultures is a lack of transparency, especially around decision-making. This occurs when a company consistently makes decisions that directly impact employees without warning or input.

For sales leaders, the solution is upleveling your communication skills. Sandhu explains: "It's super important to over-communicate, especially in a virtual world. Proactively share any of the changes that are coming down. This shows that you care about keeping them in the loop."

At Guru, Sandhu also likes to invite reps into the decision-making process. "Ask for feedback and incorporate their perspectives into the decisions that are being made. Your reps aren't just generating or closing deals, they're also contributing to the buildout of something bigger than themselves."

3. They don’t have the right tools or resources.

In sales, every minute counts, so increasing efficiency is key to your salespeople feeling like they have the tools necessary to do their jobs or streamline those non-selling tasks.

"It's really about making sure that those non-selling activities don't take time away from being able to sell. The longer your reps spend trying to find resources, the more frustration that builds because they're not spending time doing what they love," Sandhu told me.

By decreasing administrative strain on your sales team, you’ll remove a major cause of burnout and boost productivity. In fact, companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months, according to Gartner Research.

Start by polling your salespeople to see if your CRM or sales enablement software is still making the grade. Then ask if there are other administrative pain points that are not being met. Based on these answers, you’ll be able to gauge what your next move should be. This could be hiring more salespeople to hit a certain revenue threshold or investing in tools that will make your team more efficient and effective.

4. They aren't recognized for good work.

For most salespeople, the primary measure of success is monthly or quarterly quota attainment. However, if your salespeople don’t have smaller goals to hit within that timeframe, it can be easy for them to feel burned out. 

Sandhu echoes this sentiment, telling me, "Make your reps feel like every outcome they deliver is the biggest win, the most important thing in the world. All of those micro moments play into how a rep feels when they come to work, how meaningful their work is, and how it contributes to greater company goals."

Competitions can also be effective for team-bonding. Sandhu encourages sales leaders to "Make room for banter and non-work-related conversations. Reward them for hitting goals. This could range from lunch to a virtual experience. This sends a message that you see your team as more than a number, because we're so much more than that."

Here are a few metrics that can promote a little friendly competition between reps and give your sales team some motivation:

• Opportunities created
• Opportunities by stage
• Meetings scheduled
• Meetings held
• Demos
• Emails sent
• Quote requests
• Milestone interactions

It's equally important to have the right tools in place to measure KPIs throughout the sales process. Most CRMs come equipped with dashboard functionality. Build or customize canned reports to highlight the metrics you want your team to meet, and place them on a dashboard that everyone can see.

5. They lack clear expectations.

How can your reps succeed if they can't find the goal post to score? This is why every salesperson needs clear expectations and goals.

This is especially important for remote sales teams. After all, remote teams are more vulnerable to communication breakdowns, and may struggle to find resources or information.

As you set expectations for reps, remember to keep them realistic. While it's okay to set challenging goals, demanding too much can lead to reps feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and burned out. 

6. They don’t have mentors.

Sales can be an emotionally draining job, so it’s important for each person on your team to have a mentor. Your salespeople need someone to vent to, seek advice from, and share things with that they might not feel comfortable talking to their supervisor.

Mentorship is also important for professional development. Call didn’t go well? A mentor can listen to the tape and offer objective advice. Rep feeling like they can’t maintain the necessary pace? A mentor can coach them on how to become more efficient with their time, or how to appropriately frame this challenge to their boss.

Check in with your salespeople routinely to make sure they’re regularly connecting with their mentors. If they’ve lost touch or haven’t replaced a dormant mentor, it may be a sign they’re feeling too overwhelmed or unmotivated to manage that relationship. Use this opportunity to talk to them about burnout and build a path forward together.

Signs of Sales Rep Burnout

Now that we've covered the common causes of burnout, let's explore some signs that might suggest your reps are experiencing it.

1. Their numbers are slipping.

In sales, we have a wealth of data at our fingertips, making it easy to spot when someone is trailing behind. So if you suspect a rep is close to burnout, start by checking their numbers.

"We want to look at past and current performance to see if there's any dips in activity. Are they sending fewer emails, fewer calls, less meetings, or less LinkedIn messages than they normally would send in any given week or month?" advises Sandhu.

With this information, determine whether this is a trend or an irregularity. If it’s a trend, you may have an employee who can’t perform at the level you require. If there's an irregularity in this salesperson’s historical performance data, it's time to open a conversation.

2. They lack motivation or focus.

If you notice a salesperson’s lunches getting a little longer or their energy dipping in meetings, you might be facing employee burnout.

Chances are, they’ve reached a point of feeling like they can’t push anymore. From here, you can choose how to move forward with this salesperson. 

• Encourage them to take a few days off to recharge without the expectation of answering email or phone, or maybe even offering some quota relief. Salespeople are almost always plugged in, available to answer prospect emails or phone calls immediately. That can easily lead to burnout. Allow them to really unplug, refresh, and reset.
• Put together a performance plan that outlines how your salesperson will get back on track. This might include weekly check-ins, smaller benchmarks, or adjusted numbers. Whatever your performance plan looks like, make sure your rep knows that you’re invested in getting them back to their place as a high performer.
• Be willing to discuss parting ways. Give your salesperson some time to think it over. Often, that can be the jolt they need to reinvigorate their enthusiasm for the job. If it’s not, it might be best for both of you to part ways and explore new options.

3. They’re increasingly negative.

This can be a tough one to spot. After all, a mainstay of the sales pit is the regular trading of war stories or venting about frustrating calls. But when a salesperson becomes a source of prolonged negativity, it can be a sign of burnout that needs to be mitigated before it spreads.

A workplace survey can be a great way to mine for anonymous feedback that everyone feels comfortable sharing. Make sure you ask about goals, workplace culture, and overall job contentment. You may be surprised how many others on your team are also feeling negative, without openly sharing.

Take their feedback and make changes or address problems openly. This is a time for each side to step up, take responsibility, and move on in a positive way. The outcome should be a better, healthier work environment.

4. They’re unwilling to change.

If something works, salespeople like to stick with it — for good reason. While there’s no point in reinventing the wheel if a process is working, it’s also important for your sales team to be dynamic, changing with customer and industry trends. Evolution on your team is also a great way to fight burnout.

But if you have a salesperson who refuses to use a new tool that promises to save the team time, or who balks at a new strategy for Sales and Marketing to work more closely together, this could be a sign of burnout.

When a salesperson is wrestling with burnout, even the smallest change to their current processes can seem overwhelming. Proceed with the following steps:

1. Make the change a requirement. They need to know that the new tool or process is not optional.
2. Offer training. Ensure that your salespeople (especially those who are change averse) receive proper training on how to implement your new tool or process.
3. Monitor adoption. Have benchmarks your team needs to hit during the implementation of your new tool or process, and hold everyone accountable.
4. Reward changes in behavior. Change is never easy, especially in sales. Make sure you’re acknowledging and rewarding positive steps towards acceptance of new tools or processes that your team makes.

5. They’ve stopped caring about professional development.

Professional development is something that’s often overlooked for salespeople. Sales is such a fast-paced career, it can be easy for salespeople to zone out any information that’s not immediately helping them close a deal.

If your reps are so focused on making their number that they’ve stopped learning new sales technology or techniques or honing their core selling skills, they may be burned out or fast approaching it.

To combat burnout, make sure you’re sharing interesting or inspiring articles with your team. Start a Slack channel where you’re all contributing one article a week that offers a fresh spin on a tried-and-true tactic, or builds industry knowledge. Encourage them to follow sales influencers on social media. Maybe even offer some of your salespeople the opportunity to attend a conference that piques their interest.

By investing in your team’s long-term success and happiness, you’ll keep their minds active, engaged, and productive — all of which help combat burnout.

How to Help Reps Recover from Burnout

Want to help your reps navigate through feelings of burnout? We asked the HubSpot sales team for advice — check out their tips below.

Want to start with a quick video? Give this a quick watch for additional ways to support your sales team as a leader: 

Now, listen to how the HubSpot sales team proactively guards against burnout in their teams, and build out your own strategy.

1. Create structure for new team members.

According to Cierra Steiner, a new HubSpot Growth Specialist team member, structured check-ins with her manager have helped ease her transition and minimize overwhelm.

"I just started in January, and starting a new sales role can be overwhelming. My manager has really helped calm my nerves by reassuring me that we will just take one day at a time. He’ll say, ‘Tomorrow you're going to focus on X — that's it. Don't worry about the week, the month, the year. Just worry about doing X tomorrow.’

I work remotely and he also regularly checks in on me to make sure I'm getting my questions answered and not getting too stressed. It's been an amazing experience so far!"

2. Encourage open conversations about burnout.

For HubSpot Channel Account Manager Dylan Wickliffe, creating safe spaces for teams to discuss burnout is key to creating a healthy work environment.

"Let it be okay to talk about burnout. Even the best sales reps wake up some days and just simply aren’t feeling it that day.

Encourage breaks. Encourage mental health days. Don’t make reps afraid to admit they're burned out, and let them alleviate it in their own way. Then help them crush it and succeed when they get back to it."

3. Lead by example.

Your team will model your behavior as a leader — good and bad. If you practice habits that lead to burnout, your team will not feel comfortable taking the steps needed to take care of themselves when burnout is on the horizon.

HubSpot Channel Account Manager Jordan Benjamin says, "Make it ok to take time off. Work with your team to understand why they do the job and not define who they are solely by stack rank."

Burnout is a natural part of any job or career path. As a manager, it’s part of your job to be on notice when burnout is a threat to your team and the overall growth of your company. Be proactive about it using a few of these tips, and you’ll enjoy a healthy work environment, happy salespeople, and steadily increasing revenue.

Buyers aren’t what they once were. Remember the days of buying a car before the internet? You would go to the dealership, gather information from the sales person in the form of a brochure, go home to study the brochure to understand the different models and features, and then return to the dealership a week later ready to purchase the vehicle. But in today’s information-rich, digital environment, buyers have all the information they need to make an informed decision, making the salesperson’s role less educational and more transactional.

So where does that put today’s marketer? Well, we are now the stewards of the buyer’s journey. We are responsible for walking each prospective customer through their own personalized and relevant content journey, making sure that they get all their questions answered on the road to making a purchase. Now, more than ever, we need to understand our buyers down to their behaviors, core demographics, wants, and needs. That’s where lead nurturing comes in.

Lead nurturing is the process of building effective relationships with potential customers throughout the buying journey. Now before we dive into lead nurturing best practices and tips, let’s set the record straight that there is a difference between drip marketing and lead nurturing. A drip marketing program sends (drips) communications at a specific cadence set by the marketer, but it does not consider who that lead is, what their behaviors are, or what segmentations they might meet. Lead nurturing is adaptive, segmented, based on activities (or inactivities), and is extremely personalized for each lead. Think of it like a conversation. Drip marketing is like a monologue whereas lead nurturing is having a 1-1 conversation.

So how do you create hyper-relevant email marketing conversations through lead nurturing? What are the important ground-rules for building a nurture program that scales? Here are 5 tips for making your lead nurturing emails stand out in the inbox.

Tip #1: Write Subject Lines That Beg to be Opened

Since the subject line is the first thing a recipient sees, it would be silly not to discuss techniques that work. After all, your email doesn’t matter if no one opens it! Not every subject line needs to be a literary achievement, but there is power in a subject line that is magnetic. At Marketo, we use The Four U’s of Subject Lines, a very helpful acronym that we picked up from Copyblogger to help determine if our subject lines are ready:

• Useful: Is the promised message valuable to the reader?
• Ultra-specific: Does the reader know what’s being promised?
• Unique: Is the promised message compelling and remarkable?
• Urgent: Does the reader feel they need to read it now?

To take it one step further, here are 5 subject line techniques that really work:

• Educate: 7 Things Marketers Can Learn from Sales
• Ask a question: Did you miss this?
• Announce a sale, new product, or an exclusive look: First Peek: Our latest Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing
• Offer a solution to a problem: Pay Down Your Loan
• Jump on a popular topic: The State of Email Marketing: What’s Working Now?

Tip #2: Choose the Right Sender

Lead nurturing is all about trust. You want buyers to trust communications from you or else they won’t always be willing to open them. In addition to the subject line, one way to create and reinforce trust is with the sender name—or the From Name. If you think about it, would you open an email from someone you didn’t know? The From Name can make all the difference and can influence opens, clicks, and even spam complaints.

There are a few options that you can experiment with, and examples of each:

• Company or Brand Name: Apple, GrubHub, Banana Republic, etc.
• Product or Service: “Mileage Plus” by United Airlines is used as a From Name.
• Personal Name: A specific employee at your company. This could be your head of marketing or the sales account executive that owns the account.
• Campaign-based: We sometimes sends nurturing emails from “Team Marketo” or “Marketo Events” so buyers know exactly what to expect before opening.

Tip #3: Build a Strong Email Body

Okay, so you’ve got a subscriber to open your email. Now what? Like any landing page, you want your email to be compelling, clear, actionable, and answer the what’s in it for me? question. To check if your email delivers this experience, run it by the 30-second summary rule. Can you get through the email in 30 seconds and know the value it provides? This test will help make sure that your call-to-action is clear and the value proposition is obvious.

Now that you have the subscriber’s attention on the email body, there are a few more things to consider:

• Keep your email width to 600px max. Any wider and you’ll likely have rendering issues across some email clients.
• Remember that rich media like Flash, JavaScript, and video won’t work in an HTML email.
• Focus on what will and won’t appear above the fold on a subscriber’s screen, whether that’s on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
• Consider experimenting with the style of emails—sometimes heavy text works better than a beautiful visual.
• Always provide a plain-text version of your email for subscribers who don’t like or accept HTML versions. This will also help your deliverability.
• Use bullet proof buttons, which are buttons that look like images but are actually just HTML and CSS code. If your main call-to-action is a jpeg button, it will not be displayed until the email is opened and images are downloaded. HTML buttons render before images are downloaded, which changes email open and click experience. When Marketo tested bulletproof buttons, we saw a 20% lift in click-to-open rates.
• Always use alt tags. These let users who have images blocked know what they are missing. They can help boost both open rates and click rates, so don’t miss out.
• Reduce distractions. Emails are like landing pages in that they have one goal in mind: conversion. The best landing pages are clean, simple, and use visual cues to guide the prospect to complete a form. Use this same logic when building your emails. Give your call-to-action room to breathe and you’ll see better results.

Tip #4: It’s (Past) Time to Go Mobile

I know it probably feels like we’re beating a dead horse here, but over 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device. If your emails aren’t mobile friendly, you’re missing out on engagement. If you don’t believe me, think about the last time you clicked on a poorly formatted email on your phone. Could you think of one? Me either.

According to The Radicati Group’s Mobile Statistics Report, “by the end of 2018, worldwide mobile email users are expected to total over 2.2 billion…by this time, we expect 80% of email users will access email via a mobile device.” As you develop a successful lead nurturing program, be sure that you build this capability into your emails as it will only become more important over time.

There are a few different ways to build a mobile-friendly email:

• Scalable Design: Good for beginners and teams with limited resources—it’s a design that works across desktop and mobile and doesn’t require code to adjust image and text sizes.
• Fluid Design: This design works best with text-heavy layouts that flow. It requires some CSS knowledge because of width limitations, but it still works for teams with limited resources.
• Responsive Design: This design includes everything from the two styles above and then adds CSS media queries, allowing you to design for specific screen sizes. It offers the most control but requires the most resources.

Tip #5: Don’t Forget Segmentation

Segmenting your audience, the act of dividing your leads into definable and actionable parts, is essential to your marketing success—particularly with lead nurturing. The more you segment, the more relevant your lead nurture programs will be. If you are not relevant, your audience simply won’t pay attention. Segmentation means higher engagement. An executive requires a different piece of content than someone in an intern role. What resonates with one audience won’t resonate with another.

Additionally, as it pertains to email, studies have consistently shown that segmented email sends yield higher results. In a Marketo Benchmark Email Marketing Study, we found segmentation to be the highest ROI tactic used by email marketers. In fact, according to our proprietary Engagement Score (which tracks how engaging an email is in Marketo), 23% of how engaging an email is can be explained by segmentation. Smaller, more segmented sends in your lead nurturing yield better results.

I hope this has helped frame the necessary steps to building out a strong foundation for email lead nurturing. For more resources on developing a strong lead nurturing strategy, be sure to download our Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing! And as always, comments or other ideas are encouraged below.

The post 5 Ways to Make Your Lead Nurturing Emails Stand Out appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Operations has long been a forgotten persona. But not anymore. Without ops, data doesn’t see daylight, leads aren’t routed, accounts aren’t scored, CRM and marketing automation databases decay. There are more than 60,000 open operations positions and it’s time we start shinning a light on the importance of these roles.

To give you greater insight into just how important and underserved the ops role is – across sales, marketing and general business – LinkedIn and InsightSquared teamed up to bring you the ‘Ops Leviathan” – an infographic that compares the basic characteristics of sales, marketing and business operations roles based on original research supplied by the LinkedIn team. Check out the infographic below!

The post The State of Sales, Marketing & Business Operations [Infographic] appeared first on OpenView Labs.

HypnoArt / Pixabay

It seems everywhere I turn, there is a huge urgency around “helping” our sales people sell more. Clearly, the data on sales performance is startling, though not new. The percent of sales people meeting or exceeding their plans is declining. The percent of organizations not making their plans is staggering.

Everyone is recognizing the changing customer. First they are becoming impossible to reach (perhaps an intended or unintended consequence of the deluge of prospecting emails/calls). Second, more buying decisions end in “no decision made,” so they struggle to buy. Our sales people need help in more effectively engaging these struggling customers.

Sales people are struggling under the weight of ever expanding product/solution portfolios. They are struggling to compete in a world of global competitors and new business models disrupting entire industries.

It seems everyone in the organization recognizes the challenges our sale teams have in achieving their goals. The new mantra seems to be, “We need to do more to help our sales people succeed!”

Thousands of technology driven tools/apps are coming to the market, with hundreds of new ones being launched every month.

Marketing has gotten the message and is aligning themselves with sales–sharing many of the metrics/goals. They are on a mission to help sales and our customers, overwhelming us with content on the web, seminars, webinars, downloadable content, new marketing programs, blogs, thought leadership, influencer programs, account based marketing, MQLs, SALs, XYZs.

Sales enablement is on a parallel path, looking at training, tools, systems, programs, content.

We’ve a new vocabulary to describe how we are leveraging technology to help our sales people. No conference is complete without every speaker talking about the value and virtues of their sales and marketing stacks. Recently, I heard one proud executive talking about their stack of 19 applications/programs to help sales people! Sometimes, it seems like locker room boasts of “mine is bigger than yours.”

We’re adding new functions to the sales organization to help our sales people–often offloading them of prospecting responsibility to SDRs, or we have overlays/specialists to help deal with product complexity.

Increasingly we recognize we and our sales people can’t go it alone, so we recruit partners to help and collaborate in solving the customer problems.

The sheer volume and velocity of the things we are doing to “help” our sales people is mind numbing.

The recipients of all this help—our sales people are reeling. I imagine at some point there will be a sales person breaking down in the middle of the office, shrieking, “Stop The Insanity!!!”

Too many of the sales people I meet today are simply exhausted and overwhelmed. They are well intentioned, they want to do better, they want to perform, but they are becoming so distracted by the help we are offering–also well intentioned–they don’t have time to spend with the customer selling.

The results are tragic. We do audits/assessments of organizations. We are seeing time available for selling plummet. In large, successful organizations, we typically measure it at 9-22%! We see voluntary attrition skyrocketing, often in the 30’s-40% range, in one very large organization it was 72% in the first year of being hired!

In virtually everything we see, while we are doing more to “help” our sales people, we aren’t seeing the results we expect. And much of this is the result of our well intentioned efforts to do more.

Perhaps we need to rethink our approaches. Rather than continuing to pile more and more stuff onto our sales people–training, tools, programs, support, content, systems…… Perhaps we should first focus on simplification, on eliminating and stopping some things.

I know it’s terribly unfashionable, but the simple concept of business process re-engineering is something I seldom hear sales management, sales enablement and others talk about. Perhaps it’s implicit in what many are doing, but maybe we need to make it front and center for all our sales performance improvement efforts.

Before we do more for our sales people, the question we need to be asking ourselves is, “What should we be stopping, how do we simplify?”

Complexity will be the single biggest issue (if it isn’t already) impacting the performance of our sales teams in the coming years. Front line sales people are at the nexus of the complexity our customers face and the complexity of their own organizations; the complexity of our expanding product/solutions offerings; the complexity of our expanding partner ecosystems; and the complexity of getting things done within our own organizations.

No other part of the organization faces the overlapping and often opposing areas.

Perhaps the best way to help our sales people is to stop trying to be so helpful by giving them more.

When Vancouver-based architect Michael Green stops to reflect, he acknowledges that his practice of designing big buildings built from engineered mass-timber materials has come a long way in a short period of time as the trend in sustainable construction gains momentum.

“It is definitely wood’s moment,” Green said. ” …  But it’s still in its infancy, but what we’ve seen is on a different level. We’ve seen major global design firms who said they had no interest in working in mass wood now working in wood.”

Green literally wrote the book on modern timber construction, The Case for Tall Wood Buildings, a case study on using materials such as cross-laminated timber panels and engineered glulam wood beams to build skyscrapers as tall as 30 storeys, published in 2012.

He designed the Wood Innovation Design Centre in Prince George, the provincial government’s six-storey showpiece to sell the world on using B.C. lumber to construct expansive buildings, which opened in 2014.

There was a wildly popular TED Talk in 2013 that has been viewed more than one million times.

His firm put together a theoretical plan to build a timber structure the same proportions as New York’s Empire State Building (aptly termed the Empire State of Wood).

Among the projects Green’s firm, MGA (Michael Green Architecture), has been involved with include the T3 building in Minneapolis, Minn., which for a time was the largest wood building in the U.S., a new forest-sciences complex for Oregon State University in Corvallis and a collaboration in Paris that proposes a virtual forest of 20 residential skyscrapers made of wood.

“I think he’s been very influential,” said Lynn Embury-Williams, executive director of Wood WORKS! B.C., a not-for-profit that promotes the use of wood in construction and design. “He’s always put together all of the pieces. He never talked just about how would it be to build with wood. He linked it to the very solid environmental benefits — carbon sequestration, using natural materials.”

With The Case for Tall Wood Buildings, Embury-Williams said Green opened a lot of eyes.

“At the same time, Eric Karsh at Equilibrium Consulting (one of Green’s key collaborators on the book) was also working on projects and promoting mass timber,” she said. “Just the notion this could even happen was pretty amazing.”

And on a recent Tuesday Green sat down to talk with Postmedia News about how his adventurous, outdoorsy youth climbing mountains and kayaking around the world turned him into one of the participants at the centre of the global conversation about how to build more sustainably with wood.

Fisher, the architect’s black Lab, greets you first, rolling over for a belly rub outside the MGA boardroom, before you meet a casually dressed Green himself. He walks in wearing a navy T-shirt and khaki shorts looking ready to head for a walk on the beach near the Kitsilano home he and significant-other Sahra Samnani recently finished renovating, instead of the lunch with a lawyer that is his next appointment. He has the lanky build and ruddy complexion of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors.

“I think that adventurous side, mountaineering and kayaking, and my family’s history of living in the Arctic, and so forth, all combined on my professional side in being a little bit willing to not follow the status quo,” Green said.

He was born in Winnipeg, but only because there was no hospital in Baker Lake, Nunavut, where his family was living and where he spent the first five years of his life. The Greens later settled in Ottawa, where Green went to high school, and nurtured artistic talents that led him to choose architecture as a career, a path that took him to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., as his entry point.

It wasn’t an easy fit for him, and he “didn’t feel like a good architect” for a long time, though he worked in a top firm under Cesar Pelli, one of architecture’s star skyscraper designers.

“I did not connect with it at all,” Green said, until he started being able to link the values he was developing by immersing himself deeply in nature on mountaineering in places such as the Himalayas and South America. He found his love for the outdoors in the wilds of the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as a youth, which he carried on his journeys, experiencing other cultures and observing how other people lived and found happiness, even in sub-standard housing.

And he discovered some of his attraction to wood as a building material by helping his grandfather construct cabins on his summer property in northern Michigan, then in his own wood shop where, during his 20s, he found more satisfaction making furniture than he did in architecture.

“I think that led me to an intersection that natural materials have to be the answer,” Green said. “And that requires great responsibility, not just to understanding how materials are used in building, but understanding a lot about where (the timber) comes from and how you make sure forest practices are responsible practices.”

He was able to marry the two in his practice when he moved to Vancouver 21 years ago (attracted by the proximity to mountains and the wilderness) and is now part of a growing coterie of experts in the forefront of mass timber.

Green has written a second book, Tall Wood Buildings, Design, Construction and Performance, with co-author Jim Taggart, that chronicles some of the prominent projects built in the timber vernacular. He has also started an online education effort, Design Build Research (DBR), which Green hopes will aid his firm in spreading the mass-timber mantra to countries such as China, India and Brazil.

“If we do it wrong, it could cause real risk,” Green said, both environmentally in poor forest practices and in safety through poorly designed buildings.

In Vancouver, the city is seeing new mass-timber buildings — the 18-storey Brock Commons student residence and the Virtuoso market-residential building at the University of B.C., and Terrace House, a 19-storey condo development downtown. Green views those as positive steps, but still “baby steps” for a place with a wealth of the natural resources and talent available to do a lot more.

“We can’t talk about being a green city unless we can complete the story by building green buildings,” Green said.

“We’re trying to solve a whole number of big issues in our community, more housing, affordable housing, sustainable housing, and meet climate objectives. Those are things you can do with this, and yet it’s not happening,” Green said.

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According to a survey conducted by Headstream, almost 79% of adults think that brands telling stories is a positive thing, but only 64% believe that brands are doing it well. The survey also found that a great story will influence 15% of an audience to make a purchase immediately and 55% to make a purchase eventually.

As well as capturing attention and driving social shares, there is now a huge body of evidence that suggests that when brands tell stories it can have a huge impact in influencing the way people come to regard them. Research from Brainjuicer has also suggested that brand films that connect emotionally can also influence the purchasing decisions of your customer base.

Telling stories that promote your company, service offering or product is a subtle art thought. It’s all too easy to burst the bubble and bring the viewer crashing back to reality if they think they’re being sold something. What’s needed is to approach your brand film as you would approach any traditional story and that means understanding how narrative is structured.

In this short guide for Serious Startups I want to break down this narrative structure and look at how businesses can learn from the ancient art of telling stories.

Quest

Every compelling story has a central goal and, typically determined by the protagonist, it must be relatable, believable or intriguing (or all three). A quest is preceded by a status quo and is therefore a driving force to return to the status quo or create a new status quo.

Quests for tangible end goals in brand film need to be compelling and prompt an emotional connection through an empathetic response to the protagonist. Your quest could be something as tangible as blowing up the Death Star in Star Wars or killing the shark in Jaws.

In this typically honest piece of content marketing from Dove (see above), even though the story is told through interview clips with the women and experimenters, it is made clear from the outset that the quest is to make the women involved feel more confident with their appearance. As with so much of Dove’s marketing, the brand plays second fiddle to the wider social message.

Four things to consider:

• What does your protagonist want to achieve and why?
• Is your goal clear and compelling enough that your audience will become emotionally involved?
• Is your protagonist being proactive in their quest or are events seemingly out of their control?

Conflict

Incorporating an element of conflict or suspense will help to ensure your protagonist’s quest is not progressing too smoothly, and will keep your audience intrigued and interested.

It’s rare in brand marketing that you will create a conflict as extreme and diametrically opposed as Harry Potter’s stand-off with Voldemort. Conflict can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, such as the series of the short comedic vignettes that prevent Scrat from every getting his acorn in the Ice Age films.

A popular brand film equivalent to this could be the adorable Buster the Boxer ad (see above) from master storytellers John Lewis, in which our loveable canine protagonist is prevented from getting on the new trampoline by a mere pane of glass.

Three things to consider:

• What is standing in the way of your protagonist?
• Is your story suspenseful enough, or are events progressing too seamlessly to be believable?
• Is your antagonist performing their role convincingly?

The Stakes

To maintain that all important emotional connection, you need your audience to get behind your protagonist and root for him or her, every step of the way. The stakes have to be established in other words.

When working to create the ‘Lost Scarf’ TV commerical with Nationwide (see above), we knew we had to build a strong emotional connection for the audience to really care about some guy who’d just lost his scarf on a bus. It’s why the first half of the film establishes the emotional importance that scarf has to the protagonist. Without establishing this first, the climax would not have been anywhere near as powerful.

Two things to consider:

• Why is your protagonist’s goal significant and what implications does it have on the world around them?
• If their goal is not reached, what happens and why?

The Climax

As your protagonist moves closer towards their goal, your narrative should escalate, play on tensions introduced by your antagonist, and create action as the conflict is overcome. The viewer’s emotional connection must pay off here as the story arc comes to its conclusion.

In Polish company Allegro’s masterstroke of narrative brand marketing, our protagonist’s quest to learn English is made clear from the outset (with hilarious effect), but it is only at the end do we see how perfectly this has been used to set up the almost unexpected emotional suckerpunch that lies at the heart of this film’s message.

Two things to consider:

• How is your story going to escalate, whilst remaining believable and relatable?
• Does your narrative come to a clear conclusion?

Emotional Resolution

As well delivering a satisfying climax to your narrative, you must consider whether the narrative has delivered an emotionally satisfying resolution. In Finding Dory, as Dory finds her parents before the end of the film, her quest is complete, but the emotional resolution doesn’t occur until she frees Marlin and Nemo, returning to the reef with her friends and her newly found parents.

In brand marketing, emotional resolution is as much about subtext and careful inclusion of the brand and it’s values as it is about narrative arc. You must not only establish empathy with your protagonist and their quest, but you must also associate this in some way with your brand.

In Turkish Airline’s fantastic commercial (see above), no subtitles are needed to explain how our protagonist’s dreams are realised when a plane lands in their seemingly quiet little patch of desert. This is the climax of the story but the emotional resolution is only delivered when the captain salutes our wide eyed and awe-struck heroes.

Three things to consider:

• What is your emotional resolution?
• What is your story really about and has it’s values been expressed without being too subtle or too obvious?
• How do the values you’ve expressed line up with your brand?

Your Role

As well as telling the story, you must consider how your brand fits in with the message you are conveying. If your narrative heavily features your product, you should take care not to fall into the trap of ensuring your product is the hero, instead placing your brand as a key facilitator in your protagonist’s quest and ultimately its resolution.

Alternatively, your presence could be through the reflection of one of your central brand values. Although their products do not feature directly, the Dove advertisement works well to communicate the brand’s commitment to celebrating everyone’s natural beauty.

Two things to consider:

• Is the story relevant to your brand and does it feel authentic?
• Does your presence feel natural or are you forcing a connection?

Creating a convincing story that helps establish your brand and what you do isn’t easy but it’s important to remember to tell the story first and sell your brand second. You shouldn’t try to characterise your brand too literally. Instead, ensure your message is clear and easy to follow, and focus on creating value and prompting an emotional response from your audience.

Article by Ernan Roman Featured on CMO.com

• "It's not just what we buy from you; it is the total experience that determines whether we buy from you again ... or go to the many other choices in your category."
• "If you want to keep me as a customer, I expect what you market to me to reflect my individual interests and preferences."

• It cut its losses and outsourced ventures that were outside of its core expertise: According to Simon Cotterrell of analytics firm Interbrand, what has made Lego successful comes from knowing what it is good at. "That's a very brave thing to do, and it's where a lot of companies go wrong," he said. "They don't understand that sometimes it's better to let go than to hang on."
• The company found new ways to listen to its customers: Anne Flemmert Jensen, senior director of Lego's Global Insights group, noted, "My team spends all our time travelling around the world, talking to kids and their families, and participating in their daily lives." The company also rolled out Lego Life, a social network for kids.

One of the biggest advantages of companies with successful sales enablement strategies is their ability to maintain focus. From content mapping through launch and optimization, they’re clear on why they invested, where they’re going, who is involved, and the steps required to reach their goals. Today we’ll share a framework for how they do it, courtesy of the Highspot services team.

Platform Value Drivers

Revenue: your sales reps live by it, your marketers are scored against it, and your C-suite monitors it daily. Illustrated below is a depiction of the ways sales enablement contributes to this all-important metric.

One of the reasons we like this value pyramid is that it applies equally to sales and marketing teams. For example, at the foundational level, the ability for sales teams to quickly access the content they need is a reflection of how easy it is for marketing to make all of their company’s best-performing content available on a single platform. At the next-highest level, platform usage is directly related to the positive experiences and success of other users from both marketing and sales. At the top, customer engagement is a clear-cut indicator of whether or not platform features are capable of driving the revenue – and value – anticipated from any sales enablement investment. Finally, all activities lead to increased revenue, the ultimate KPI for sales and marketing.

Putting the Model to Work: Three Key Steps

As recently highlighted in SiriusDecisions’s State of Sales Enablement 2017, 74% of surveyed organizations plan to increase their sales enablement investment in the next year, with many up-leveling the responsibilities of their Sales Enablement teams. In addition and as shared in Highspot’s State of Sales Enablement 2017, more than 75% of respondents from companies using sales enablement tools reported higher year-over-year sales, the majority within an environment of increasingly complex sales processes.

These and other data points are signs that the attention devoted to sales enablement is on the rise. They also encourage deep understanding of the value pyramid and its applicability to specific opportunities. Here are a few suggestions on how to achieve similar results at your company.

1. Focus on your foundation

From the technology industry to financial services, manufacturing, medical devices, consumer products, and others, the nearest-term objective of sales enablement buyers is getting their content under control. As outlined in our Best Practices series, this requires a combination of team alignment, modern and quickly scalable technology, and a vision for how your sales enablement platform will be managed over the long haul.

During this phase, your emphasis should be on activities that establish and maintain platform commitment. This means bringing aboard your full roster of publishers from sales and marketing, and ensuring their approach to sales enablement is data-driven. At Highspot, we help customers accomplish this by sharing content performance scorecards and related insights on where content is performing and where it’s missing the mark. Scorecards help solidify content management strategies and increase the probability of success farther up the pyramid.

2. Monitor your usage

In sales enablement as elsewhere, platform value is directly related to usage levels. The more sales and marketing teams are publishing, customizing, sharing, and analyzing content on their sales enablement platform, the higher the likelihood they’ll recognize the full benefits of their investment. For example, AI-driven features such as search, recommendations, engagement, and revenue attribution yield deeper insights and more accurate results with greater usage.

Key contributors to high usage include: platform integrations, user experiences, and the range of scenarios in which your sales enablement platform delivers flawless results. Another way we help customers optimize usage is by setting up a solution health dashboard. The dashboard, in conjunction with the previously mentioned content scorecard, provides sales enablement leaders with the intelligence they need to continue ascending the value pyramid.

3. Optimize for Customer Engagement

It has been widely referenced that approximately two-thirds of content goes unused and therefore generates zero ROI. Optimizing for customer engagement centers on identifying your highest-performing content, organizing and prioritizing it, and leveraging what you’ve learned to deliver more of the same. In summary, if the content you’ve worked so hard to manage and the platform on which you’ve generated usage isn’t driving engagement, then you’re falling short of your goal.

This is where having a culture and tools to support AI-driven optimization is critically important. It’s also where content analytics reports uplevel visibility into content that is (and isn’t) driving engagement, as well as who is (and is not) doing their part to elevate top-line performance.

Front-and-Center, Start-to-Finish

By focusing on how every content strategy decision contributes to revenue growth, forward-thinking businesses are using sales enablement to generate more effective customer conversations. They’re keeping the goals of modern sales enablement where they need to be and pursuing revenue growth with intelligence and tenacity. In short, they’re turning their focus into a force. And so can you.

There’s abundant evidence to show that when sales people rush the all-important discovery stage of a complex B2B sale they store up a bunch of problems for the latter stages of the sales cycle - and often find that that the deal ends up stalling or (to continue the motoring metaphor) that they spin off the road long before reaching the finish line of a successful sale.

It's clear that the old adage “more haste, less speed” applies just as strongly to selling as it does to many other aspects of our lives. When we look at what experienced, effective sales people do differently to their less productive peers, we see that they tend to move more deliberately and slowly during the early stages of the sale, and invest more time in deeply understanding the dynamics of the deal.

This has been borne out by a series of analytic assessments of sales performance: all other things being equal, a deliberate and thoughtful approach to discovery allows effective sales people to identify and eliminate poorly qualified opportunities early in the process, and to create the foundation for swifter progress through the remaining stages of well-qualified deals.

By focusing their time on better-qualified opportunities, shortening the overall sales cycle and increasing their win rates, top performers create the capacity to win far more business than their less-disciplined peers. It’s perhaps no wonder that the research that underpinned “The Challenger Sale” found that high-performers in complex sales environments delivered nearly three times the revenue of their middle-of-the road colleagues - a far higher differential than in simple transactional sales.

So what can we learn from their example, and how can we coach the “willing middle” of our sales organisations to follow the lead of the top performers?

IT PAYS TO SLOW DOWN + STICK WITH THE PROBLEM

An effective discovery process involves far more than simply uncovering a need that we believe that we can solve, and then hitting the accelerator hard and racing ahead to propose our solution. It requires that we stick with the problem far longer than may at first seem natural. It requires that we deeply explore the implications of the issue, and identify who else is or might be affected.

It also requires that we discover what - if anything - they have already done to try to deal with the problem, and what the results of those initiatives have been. Perhaps most important of all, it requires that we hold our nerve, keep our foot off the fast pedal, and do not advance beyond this discovery stage until and unless our prospective customer has acknowledged a compelling reason to act.

Uncovering a need we can satisfy is irrelevant unless the prospect has a compelling reason to act - and the problem with needs is that we (and our customers) always have many more needs and wants than we ever have the capacity to satisfy or fulfil. So, even if they start off with the intention of addressing them, our prospects end up parking most of their needs for a later date.

IS THE NEED INTERESTING, IMPORTANT OR CRITICAL?

That’s why it’s so important - during this all-important early discovery phase - that we establish whether the need the customer has just acknowledged to us turns out to be merely interesting, clearly important or obviously critical.

Interesting issues can get a sales discussion started, but unless the problem is particularly easy or cheap to fix, it will fall by the wayside sooner or later. If we recognise that the customer’s acknowledged need is no more than interesting, we have to do our best to elevate its importance, or conclude that we are probably better off qualifying out.

Important needs can get a serious evaluation started, but they always run the risk that the project will be usurped by something that is seen to be even more urgent. If we cannot help or persuade our prospect to elevate the importance to critical, we must at least try and associate the project and our solution with a bigger issue that has been declared to be a strategic initiative for the organisation.

Solutions to critical needs are almost guaranteed to get approved - but that doesn't mean they are plain sailing even if we believe we have a superior solution. Because of their strategic nature, any potential vendors are likely to come under significant scrutiny, so we had better prove our credentials to the decision-making group.

IS OUR PRIME CONTACT A CHANGE AGENT?

There are of course a number of other factors that need to be explored during the discovery process, but there is one that particularly stands out: is our current prime contact someone who has the qualities of a proven change agent, capable of championing the cause of the project and persuading their colleagues of the need for change (also known in some quarters as a mobiliser®)?

If not - if the person we have initially engaged with is a relatively junior functionary acting on someone else’s behalf - it is unlikely that they will have the necessary insights about the business to enable us to properly qualify the opportunity. At this early stage, before we get permanently locked in to a low-level contact, we need to find constructive reasons why it’s in the interest of all concerned that we engage with the owner of the underling business problem.

If we fail to establish this early, we will find ourselves at a continuing disadvantage throughout the remainder of an often-protracted and usually unsuccessful sales cycle. Negotiating access to power early is another of the characteristics that separate top performers from the rest, and the foundations are best laid during the discovery process.

A QUESTION OF SELF-RESPECT

What this really boils down to, in my experience, is that top sales performers always have too much respect for their own time to waste it pursuing opportunities that they are never likely to win, whilst their less confident sales colleagues tend to cling on to any and every opportunity like a shipwrecked sailor holding on for dear life to a sodden piece of wood in the hope it might rescue them.

Invest in discovery, treat the sales accelerator pedal with caution in the early stages, and respect the value of your own time: whilst it may not be the complete answer, I think that this represents some key elements of the sales success formula.

The next time you conduct a sales pipeline review, I suggest that you focus as much attention on how your sales people are opening their opportunities as you do on when they expect to be closing them. There’s no doubt, in my experience, that if you help them become better openers, they will inevitably become more effective closers…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

How to Use Webinars for Every Stage of the Customer Journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Simply put, webinars (online meetings) are a convenient form of content that gives you the ability to create “one to many” engagements. One of the things I love most about them is that you can use webinars for every stage of the customer journey by altering the intent of the content as the buyer’s questions, goals and needs change. In fact, you must consider this approach to get the most from this medium.

Think of webinars as a form of content, because that’s what they are.

To see what I mean, take a look at the sections below to see what webinars can do for your prospects and customers throughout each phase of the journey. I’ve also sprinkled in ways that we at Duct Tape Marketing use them to give you some food for thought on how you might be able to apply these ideas to your business.

Create awareness

When it comes to spreading awareness around a business, many marketers resort to blogging, social media, emails, PPC, and so on. While I am all for these methods of building awareness and use them myself, I’m always perplexed as to why more business don’t add webinars to that list. They are an excellent way to promote useful content and teach timely topics.

Duct Tape Marketing Example: Every month we host what we call a System Webinar that covers topics that I believe are relevant to marketers at that time. Anybody is invited to these calls, and it’s a great way for me to share my knowledge on a topic while at the same time give a good impression and introduction of my business. Past topics have included:

• Pay Per Click Advertising Basics
• Create a Referal Machine That Works Everyday
• Tips and Tools for Greater Productivity

Build trust

I’m all for testing out various formats on webinars to see what works best for you and your audience, but if there is one thing I’m against on this type of platform, it’s selling. Don’t sell, give. Repeat that sentence over and over again so that it sticks with you.

Use your webinars to help your audience solve a problem they’re having. This helps to establish trust and credibility, which are two attributes that are key if you want somebody to eventually buy from you.

Convert

A percentage of people who attend your awareness-based webinars will want to know how they can act on that useful content, so you need to be prepared for this question and create a webinar that outlines how you might be able to help them.

A conversion-based webinar can even be used to deliver a proposal to a prospect.

Duct Tape Marketing Example – Whenever a person expresses interest in the network, we recommend the next step is to attend our Benefit Discovery Session that takes place twice per month. In this webinar, I showcase the many benefits of partnering with the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network and explain why many consultants believe it is the best business decision they’ve ever made.

Additionally, we conduct Total Online Presence Audits where we provide a detailed report that shows a business the highest priority issues for optimizing their online presence. This report is presented in a webinar format.

Train

Once you have clients, you can continue ongoing engagements through webinars, covering anything from onboarding to new feature rollouts and demonstrations.

Duct Tape Marketing Example – Within the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network, there is a plethora of tools, templates, and processes to get consultants up and running to make more money fast. Along with the benefits mentioned above, we also have Breakthrough Training Series calls bi-weekly for consultants, that address hot topics and best practices to further their marketing knowledge and expertise.

We also use webinars to train new consultants on our systems and processes which have proven to work very well thus far.

Report results

If you’re in marketing, you know how important it is to follow metrics and report the results from your efforts. Webinars are a great way to deliver this information, whether it be to a client or an internal team.

Duct Tape Marketing Example – We present mid-month reports to our clients, and it’s almost always through a webinar. The people we present to appreciate this efficient and interactive method.

Referrals

Once you have educational content, you can start to offer it to strategic partners, which can eventually lead to guest appearances on their webinars or webinar collaborations between the two of you. This helps to increase your referrals and eventually lead to more business.

Duct Tape Marketing Example – I’ve developed relationships with numerous people within the industry that have helped me build up my client base and expand my referrals. For example, through relationships I’ve established, I’m doing webinars for BuzzSumo, SCORE, American Marketing Association, and Copyblogger this quarter alone. This helps to expand my exposure, reach new audiences, and increase my referral network.

Helpful tips

Best practices for conducting a webinar

There are numerous ways you can run a webinar, but below are a few best practices I would follow regardless of the format:

• Narrow in on a topic that the webinar will focus on and stick to it.
• Don’t read off the slides – you can reference the points on the screen, but be sure to elaborate and expand on them to add value.
• Practice, practice, practice – Until you’re a master webinar host, and even after you become one, it’s important that you practice so that you have a good handle on your talking points as well as your timeline (this is especially important for webinars that have a strict cut off time).
• Promote the webinar – no matter how great the content you’re presenting is, none of it will matter if nobody sees it.
• Make an engaging slide deck – you need to keep people focused on your presentation, and this starts with the visuals.
• Test your technology – I always log on a few minutes before the webinar start time to ensure everything is running smoothly from a technical perspective (this includes checking to make sure your computer is fully charged).

Tools

To implement these webinars effectively, you need to make sure you’re using the right tools. We use the following for various types of webinars, and I highly recommend you check each of them out to see what will work best for you.

• Zoom
• GoToWebinar
• Loom

Those are the most effective use cases for how I use webinars throughout each phase of the customer journey. If you’re using them for additional purposes, I’d love to hear what they are!

Welcome to "The Pipeline" — a new weekly column from HubSpot, featuring actionable advice and insight from real sales leaders.

Salespeople frequently undermine their chance of winning sales when they allow value leaks — instances where your email, proposal, word choice, presentation, or body language diminishes the perceived value of your solution — to creep into their sales processes.

Value leaks undermine a buyer’s confidence in your solution, reducing your likelihood of closing — and even if you do win, you’ll have a harder time charging full price. Buyers will request concessions to address their concerns about perceived shortcomings. In worst-case scenarios, you can lose the sale completely if the buyer’s concerns reach a level that you can’t overcome.

Value leaks are easy to spring, but if you remain mindful of where and how they can pop up, you can ensure that you‘re not undermining your chances of closing throughout your sales process. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the “why” behind value leaks, get a better sense of when they might occur, and review how to avoid them.

Why do value leaks occur?

Value leaks are often the byproduct of previous losses. When a salesperson has battle scars from deals that went south, they tend to lose confidence in their solution and exhibit evasive behavior — exposing themselves to potential value leaks.

For instance, let‘s say a salesperson is selling a product that isn’t backed by 24/7 support — and once upon a time, that factor held up a deal or two. In turn, those unfortunate experiences have the rep rattled. So when they're presenting to a prospect, they hastily speed through the support slide in their presentation deck.

Prospects can pick up on lapses in confidence like that, and those moments — those quick gaps in assurance, authority, and assertiveness — allow value leaks to come to the surface.

Let's take a look at some examples of value leaks during various stages of the sales cycle.

1. You reference price or "low costs" in your outreach email.

An outreach email sets the tone for your entire sales process. You need to project confidence and authority, right off the bat. You can‘t come out of the gate hobbling — so don’t lead by referring to your price or “low costs”.

A prospect will only buy your offering if they perceive it as being better than the one they currently use. They‘re interested in the most valuable solution — and there’s a major distinction between valuable and cheap.

In most cases, you don't want, “Look how much of a bargain this is!” to be the basis of your entire value proposition, and you don't want to attract buyers only shopping around for the cheapest price.

Send an outreach email that sets your sales process in motion with the ideal outcomes, personalized perks, and benefits that come with your solution at the forefront — and avoid springing a value leak right as things get off the ground.

2. You leave voicemails that project a defeated attitude.

Leaving a voicemail with a defeated attitude and an “aw shucks” tone is one of the quickest ways to expose a value leak and undermine your chances of closing. If you sound like you are making calls to fill your day, your buyer will sense that lack of value immediately.

Know what you‘re going to say — and be intentional with your voice, tone, and vocal pacing when you leave voicemails. Don’t trail off. Don't rush through common phrases. Avoid too many “uhs” and “ums”, and don't speak too quietly.

The way you speak is one of the easiest ways for a prospect to gauge your authority, understanding of the deal at hand, and level of confidence in your solution — so be mindful of how you come across via voicemail.

3. You're too nervous or eager when following up.

Silence from a prospect tends to erode a salesperson‘s confidence. It often gives them the impression that they can’t win the sale — and the anxiety that comes with that can send them into desperation mode.

If you find yourself in this situation, don't be quick to chase down your buyer — doing so can weaken your negotiating position, and a pushy “just checking in” email can hurt your margins. Remain composed when you get here. Stay confident in your solution and your ability to convey its benefits, and avoid springing a detrimental value leak.

4. You're too cagey or apologetic on connect calls.

Don‘t apologize for interrupting a prospect’s day, and don’t assume they're too busy to speak with you. Putting the buyer on a pedestal and making their time more valuable than yours harms your perceived value.

The same principle holds true for phrases that place the buyer on a different level than you or your company, like “We would do anything to work with a brand like yours.” A statement like that is essentially an admission that you've never worked with a business like theirs.

“I know you're busy,” is also problematic. Remember, if you‘re on a connect call, it means that the prospect wasn’t too busy to pick up the phone — and bear in mind that you're busy as well. Your time is equally as valuable as theirs because you have valuable information and insight that will ultimately benefit them.

5. You have poor nonverbal communication when meeting.

Body and language and posture are two of the main sources of potential value leaks when getting face-time in with prospects — whether that be virtually or in-person. Poor nonverbal communication can easily erode a buyer's faith in you and, in turn, your solution.

Little things like slouching or avoiding eye contact rarely go unnoticed if you do them too much. And if you constantly fall back on bad habits like those, you‘re going to project a lack of confidence — and that’s the quickest way to undermine your sales process.

6. You're too passive when setting meetings with prospects.

A successful deal generally requires some give-and-take throughout the sales process. It's not a matter of making unlimited concessions to your prospect and kissing the ground they walk on until you close.

By no means should you make a point of being rude to or confrontational with your prospects, but you can‘t automatically give them all the leverage by sucking up too much. So when you’re setting a meeting, be willing to be assertive.

For instance, don‘t over-thank them for accepting a meeting or ’“making time to meet”. Again, that kind of “aw shucks” mentality undermines your position and — like so many other mistakes covered on this list — projects a lack of confidence.

You also don‘t want to accept changes to the terms of a meeting without mild pushback. And if a key stakeholder doesn’t attend as promised, you should note your disappointment and establish that you invested time and money to travel to the meeting — and the executive’s attendance was a key part of the reason you made the effort.

7. You're too passive during meetings with prospects.

Your assertiveness shouldn't be specific to scheduling the meeting — you need to bring that willingness to push back on prospects a bit to the meeting itself.

For instance, you should never respond to a request for pricing in the first five minutes of a meeting. Your solution deserves a full discussion of the value it provides, and jumping right to price diminishes your ability to convey that and undercuts the content you came to present.

You also don‘t want to quiver at the mention of the competition. If you seem uncomfortable when your prospects mention the other options they’ve reviewed, you give those companies an immediate bump while shortchanging your solution. You can‘t project confidence if you’re showing fear of your competitors.

8. You get rattled when managing skeptics.

A skeptic raising a question is, at once, a challenge and an excellent opportunity. Unfortunately, many sellers don‘t see it that way. They get defensive and feel like they’re being treated unfairly.

Ceding too much power to a naysayer and acting disgruntled when they pose a tough question demonstrates a lack of confidence in your solution and undermines your ability to win the sale. Skeptics often have great internal credibility in their organization, and their tough questions earn them respect because they scrutinize vendors and their solutions.

If you crumble under pressure when a skeptic challenges you, other attendees in the meeting will be thinking, “If your product is so good, why wouldn't you challenge the skeptic?” So when you‘re put in this situation, don’t cave. Engage the skeptic, and show the rest of the room that you don't fear their input.

You have to give your champions material and a platform to combat the skeptic's objections. When you leave the room, the stakeholders on your side will only fight for your solution if you were willing to fight for the sale.

We have all been in a meeting where the skeptic sits to the side with their arms crossed, sending a very clear message that they're not “buying what you are selling.” They want to let everyone in the room know they are not on board with the proposal.

But if you don't try to engage the skeptic, you let them win by default — and you wind up doing more harm than good. Fearing the skeptic in the room and ceding too much power to them gives the buyers a valid reason for concern.

9. You get nervous or defensive when handling objections.

How you handle objections shows a lot about your ability to maintain the perceived value of your solution. Just like tough questions from a buyer, an objection gives you a great chance to put their fears to rest. Body language, speaking pace, and eye contact send the right message: “I hear your concern but I believe we can win your business and make you satisfied.”

Don’t fear the tough question. Many sellers misunderstand the nature of a tough question and their fumbling response or defensive reaction shows the buyers your company has gaps in your ability to satisfy their requirements.

A tough question proves your buyer is trying to build a case to support your proposal, and they need this information to position your solution with their bosses and financial buyers. A tough question isn’t an obstacle to the close — it’s a strong buying sign.

10. You drop the ball during sales presentations.

Obvious as this might sound, composure is key when conducting sales presentations. That means you need to know your stuff and have confidence in your slides — even if your position isn't perfect.

For instance, let‘s say you’re selling to a hospital, but your customer logo slide doesn't have any hospitals on it. You dread that slide and get hung up on whether the prospects will grill you about not working with any hospitals.

You imagine them asking, How can you expect us to be the first hospital to sign up with your company?” And when you finally reach that slide, you race through the talking points — hoping that they won't ask you about healthcare references.

If you do that, you'll create an unnecessary value leak. Instead, understand that the slide might raise some issues. Remain calm when presenting it, and brace for objections. Again, tough questions are opportunities just as much as they are challenges.

Don't lose composure over perceived flaws in your presentation — understand the strengths of and potential gaps in your value proposition, and be prepared to address both.

11. You undermine your value in your proposals.

Don‘t sell yourself short with your proposals. I keep saying it, but I’ll say it again — you need to project confidence. If the language in your proposal is cagey, passive, or awkward, you're going to undermine your ability to do that.

For instance, I once reviewed a proposal for Virtual CRO that included the following text as part of the pricing proposal:

“(This part is optional and many clients elect not to use this part of the solution.)”

That statement suggests, "You shouldn’t buy that — and even if you do want it, you should not pay full rate.”

12. You make unnecessarily drastic and tactless concessions when negotiating.

Never pre-negotiate. Steer clear of statements like, “We always throw that in,” or “If we wait until the end of the quarter, management will give you our best price.”

Buyers have a responsibility to negotiate, and you have a responsibility to protect the margins and avoid discounts. Additionally, you don’t want to acknowledge that there is another layer of your company that controls pricing. You make yourself irrelevant to the sales process if you are not going to control the negotiated price.

Additionally, don’t provide a discount for a multi-year commitment. The relative purchasing power of a dollar decreases every year, which should allow you to raise prices. However, in an effort to lock up clients, many sales teams will discount the second and third years of a contract.

Standard software contracts with perpetual licensing include the provision to raise the support price by 5% each year, and all procurement departments know this fact — but many sales teams still feel the need to provide discounts on the SaaS licensing costs.

Pay attention to your fears about selling, and acknowledge how your fear can lead to a value leak in your sales process. Buyers respond well to confidence. Sellers need to project confidence in themselves and their products at every stage of the sales cycle.

qimono / Pixabay

A friend who coaches a girls soccer team recently shared, that after a tough loss, one of her 13-year-old players said, “Well, you know coach, you either win or you learn.” Yeah! We really are coming to appreciate the value of failure and experiments that don’t go exactly as expected.

But it’s not just mistakes that have value; there’s tremendous instructive power in successes as well. In fact, what distinguishes today’s most effective leaders is that they learn from everything and everyone they encounter. They demonstrate learning agility.

Why learn agility now?

No one will argue that today’s business climate is more dynamic and changeable than ever before. Many have written about the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world within which we must operate. As a result, businesses must become increasingly agile. This demands flexible, highly responsive strategies as well as leaders who are:

• Expansive, possibility-oriented thinkers, able to recognize patterns, connect dots, and see changing conditions before others do;
• Collaborative, inclusive, and curious;
• Able to act quickly, set new direction, make smart but fast decisions, and engage in focused experimentation; and
• Equally comfortable improvising as necessary and also translating those improvised moves that worked into codified strategies, systems, processes and tools that help the organization continue to evolve.

Given this expanded job description, it’s no longer viable for leaders to rely exclusively upon today’s knowledge, skills, approaches, and strategies. In the words of author Marshall Goldsmith, “What got you here won’t get you there.” The ability to learn, develop and grow is today’s only sustainable competitive advantage. Hence the importance of learning agility.

Learning agility defined

While definitions abound, two in particular paint a vivid picture of what learning agility is and why it’s important.

According to Bersin & Associates, learning agility is a:

“Competency or capability which describes a person’s speed to learn. In most businesses, this skill is considered one of the most important factors in great leadership.”

Korn/Ferry International builds upon this description, defining learning ability as the:

“Ability and willingness to learn from experience, and then apply that learning to perform successfully under new situations.”

And since both definitions include a focus on competencies, capabilities, and ability, the good news for anyone interested in improving performance and organizational impact is that learning agility can be learned!

Any dog can learn new tricks

Enhancing learning agility need not be a complicated undertaking. It requires no organizational mandate, initiative, or training. It comes down to a few key practices that leaders at any level can experiment with and implement informally on their own. Want to be a more agile learner? Try the following:

• Anticipate learning potential in every opportunity. Nearly every encounter, job or assignment contains the possibility for learning if approached with intentionality. Taking even a moment to pause and consider what you might learn from a situation reinforces your intention and enhances your receptivity to new insights that might present themselves.
• Invite and appreciate feedback. It can frequently take years of hard-knock experience to come to an awareness that others knew from the start. One of the quickest ways to learn—about ourselves or anything else—is from others. But this only works when there’s a genuine appetite and appreciation for feedback from others.
• Assume new responsibilities, take risks and stretch yourself. Different experiences and tough assignments provide the most fertile ground for testing ideas, approaches, and yourself. Whether you succeed or not, you’ll have more fodder for learning and development when undertaking something novel rather than doing the same old thing.
• Mine experiences for insights. Each experience offers a wealth of information—if we take the time to reflect on it. But, too frequently, we don’t.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning.”
— T.S. Eliot in “The Dry Salvages”

It’s easy to “miss the meaning” when you’re in the proverbial hamster wheel of activity. That’s why building greater learning agility can be as simple as pausing routinely throughout the day to ask:

• What did I learn from that?
• Where else can I use this information/skill?

So, whether you win or lose, succeed or fail, learning can still be the prize for leaders who possess learning agility.

Consultative selling is a method for narrowing the remove between the seller and buyer. By closing this gap, the relationship transcends a “give and take” dynamic to become more of a shared effort to resolve a complex business problem. Reaching this point means embracing these guiding principles.

Exude Conviction, Confidence & Curiosity

Developing skills and behaviors that demonstrate your commitment to the relationship and attentiveness to the details coming from the customer. Bring a strong point of view balanced with a genuine interest in them and what they are trying to achieve.

Connect to the Emotional Side of Buying

In one word, sellers must empathize. Doing so means not simply acknowledging the customer’s challenges but seeking to feel what they feel and understand what they think. Friend/Foe Bias is another form of cognitive bias that tells us we are naturally wired to assess each other’s intentions and to quickly decide if someone is a friend or foe (threat). Seller behaviors must not be manipulative or appear self-serving to avoid triggering a threat response and eroding trust.

Foster Openness

Get the customer talking. You cannot move the sale forward without both sides contributing to the conversation. Some buyers are reluctant to offer information which is why effective sellers first give so they can eventually get. Customers will resist opening up if they: are bored, feel interrogated, are asked uneducated questions, believe you are focused on yourself, believe you are pushy and add no value, believe you haven’t earned the right to ask something bold. Great consultative sellers today are exceptionally skilled at fostering openness through exceptional questioning.

Illuminate Customer Thinking

Remember that insightful questions are just as effective at getting a customer to think different as sharing ideas or insights. Knowing when to give and take requires high skill execution and a laser focus on the customer response throughout.

Give Space for Customer Thoughtfulness

Let the customer develop their thoughts. The dialogue should be as productive to them as it is to you. Rather than craft your next sentence, take the opportunity to understand the meaning behind their words.

Connect the Critical Dots

Build persuasiveness by coaching the solution in the client’s needs. This approach enables them to visualize the practical application of the product and how it might look in the real world. Limit solutions to a concise, manageable list of only the most relevant in order of priority. Avoid “data deluge.”

Maintain Seller & Buyer Alignment

Keep the customer in the game. If skepticism or obscurity is left unrecognized, it will grow unchecked until finally killing the sale.

Technology, competition and multiple stakeholders have all changed the buyer’s behavior. The sellers pushing the sale across the line are those who recognize these changes and adapt accordingly. These agile sellers are playing the game at a higher level.

However, sellers can only expect to benefit from gains once they see changes in their behavior. Doing so means revisiting what it means to be customer focused. Striving for authenticity, leading with a plan, engendering buyer participation, creating momentum and driving insights with questions are all part of the plan.

At Richardson, we’ve seen how effective these practices are when implemented correctly. More importantly, the sales organizations we coach have seen the effectiveness of a consultative approach in winning the sale.

To learn more about how to elevate your consultative selling approach to be competitive in the modern sales environment join us for a complimentary webinar, Adjusting Your Consultative Selling Approach to Engage The Modern Buyer, on August 8 at 3:00 PM EST, or download the White Paper: Elevate Your Consultative Selling Approach to Compete Today.

The post Guiding Principles of Consultative Selling appeared first on Richardson Sales Training & Enablement Blog.

jarmoluk / Pixabay

While most business owners and upper management think they understand their target audience, you don’t want to invest money into inbound marketing to find out that you targeted the wrong group of people or that you missed out on a more lucrative group of potential customers.

So how can you be sure that your inbound marketing plan is set up to attract the right people? Use market research to inform your decisions!

First we’ll review the two main types of market research and then we’ll discuss how market research can help you perfect your inbound marketing plan.

Types of Market Research

1. Quantitative Market Research

Quantitative market research discovers the objective measurements behind customer decisions through surveys and questionnaires. Through analyzing this numerical data, researchers are hoping to capture an unbiased result that they can apply to a larger population.

Some common examples of quantitative data include:

• What proportion of customers find a product useful, attractive, a good investment, and so on.
• What proportion of customers use the internet to conduct research or make a purchase.
• What proportion of customers would respond to a promotion or incentive (e.g. reduced price, enhanced product, longer warranty period, etc.).
• What proportion of customers are aware of a business’s full roster of products and services.

2. Qualitative Market Research

If quantitative research is finding out “what” people prefer, qualitative research is discovering “why”. Qualitative research goes deeper into understanding the emotion and motivation behind customer behavior. This approach can be useful for revealing how customers feel about a brand, why they like particular marketing messages and more.

Qualitative market research can be done through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and online bulletin boards. Some common examples of quantitative data include:

• Why customers choose product A over product B
• Why customers navigate a website in a certain way
• How customers feel about changes in a product

Benefits of Market Research for Inbound Marketing

Now that you know the two main types of market research, let’s discuss how they can benefit your inbound marketing strategy:

1. Build A Better Buyer Persona

First and foremost, your marketing should be crafted to reach the right audience and the right ideal customer type (aka buyer persona). Therefore, by utilizing market research to build out an accurate buyer persona profile before beginning your marketing efforts, you can be sure that you’re marketing to the right person.

Once developed, a buyer persona profile influences everything from marketing content, to sales funnel development, product development and so on. With robust and realistic buyer personas, businesses have a map, direction, and destination so that their marketing efforts can succeed. Without developed buyer personas, businesses could be missing out on connecting with profitable customers, and failing to fully exploit the full revenue potential and lifetime value of existing customers.

Here are some key characteristics of your buyer persona that market research can help you get right:

• Demographic-related data (age, gender, etc.).
• Industry-related data (sector, size, etc.)
• Job-related data (role, responsibility, authority, etc.)
• Personal-related data (interests, hobbies, etc.)
• Research-related data (how they get information, what publications and blogs do they read, etc.)
• Goal-related data (what are their aspirations, what problem do they need to solve)
• Objection-related data (what are their key obstacles to solving their problem)
• Budget-related data (how much money do they have to spend to solve their problem)
• Decision-related data (what is their authority, are they a decision-maker or an influencer, etc.)
  

2. Evaluate New Attract & Convert Opportunities

With inbound marketing, you’re looking to attract your buyer persona and convert them into a lead which will hopefully turn into a customer! Through market research, you can evaluate potential new audiences to attract and uncover fresh conversion points to turn visitors into leads.

As I’m sure you know, potential new audiences aren’t always easy to identify. When you own a business, it’s easy to get tunnel vision to where you see your products and services applied in a select number of ways. With market research, you are able to research whether your current audience is happy with your offerings and whether there are more lucrative audiences you hadn’t thought of. For this type of research, I typically recommend hiring a third-party firm so you can be sure the results are unbiased. All too often in-house market research can lead to confirmation bias, where your team finds results because they wanted to find a particular outcome.

Next, with new conversion opportunities, you can find where and when potential customers are interacting with your business to try to convert them before they’re ready to purchase. Through the buyer’s journey of awareness, consideration and decision, there are many questions that your business can answer for its buyer personas!

• Awareness Stage – In the awareness stage, providing educational content on common problems and symptoms is key! From research reports to expert content, you can help potential customers discover that they’re not alone in their situation. Plus your expertise can help describe why they’re experiencing a problem and offer several solutions!
• Consideration Stage – Once a person has decided on the exact problem they’re experiencing, they’ll most likely be looking for a solution (if they haven’t found one through your awareness stage content offers). Whether it’s a product they need or a method to solve the problem, internet research almost always comes in handy to see what other people chose as a solution and to understand all the problem’s complexities before deciding on a solution.
• Decision Stage – Now having defined their problem and solution, your buyer persona is probably going to start looking for vendor and product comparisons, case studies, free trials, etc. By offering these to potential customers, they get educational information while learning about your business plus they might even trade their contact information (like a Name and Email Address) to download these content offers.

3. Can Help Determine Focus SEO Keywords for Content

When your buyer persona is online looking to buy your product or service, what do they look for? Whether they’re in the awareness, consideration or decision stage of the buyer’s journey, you want to be sure that they can find you. This is when using qualitative and quantitative methods really comes in handy, because you can uncover the right SEO keywords to use in your content.

Using market research, you can find out the specific terms your audience is using to search for your business and you can also find out what questions they are asking in the buyer’s journey. By creating content and optimizing your pages based around these terms, you’ll have better success drawing people into your website and better awareness of what questions your website needs to answer for them.

For example, if you are selling business signs, you may find through market research that people are searching for “window clings” when they are trying to find window graphics. Therefore, you can optimize your website for the term that a person would be searching for or write blog content around it!

Next Steps

If you’re an inbound marketing agency looking to capitalize on market research for your clients, it’s truly a win-win! With data-backed strategies, you can ensure that your campaigns are targeting the right people at the right time with the right messaging. Not only does this create more success for you as an agency, but it creates more success for your clients.

I’m willing to wager that at least one of Facebook’s 5 million (and counting) advertisers is your direct competitor. Even if Joe’s HVAC or Asics or exceptionallypungentcatnip.org don’t know what the hell they’re doing, they’re siphoning your share of voice.

What exactly does that mean?

If you’re not advertising on Facebook yet, prospects (Newsflash: Facebook has 2 billion users) are already growing familiar with your competitors’ brands. This doesn’t bode well for the bodies circling the top of your sales funnel, but it’s especially concerning when we consider folks with wallets already in hand.

Fortunately, usurping your competitors across the trifecta of Facebook, its hype-saturated Messenger application, and Instagram, is a cinch: if you know what you’re doing.

In the event your gorgeous creative and irresistible CTA’s aren’t already floating around THE social network, do yourself a favor: open another tab and sear our how to advertise on Facebook infographic onto your brain. It’ll give you a fundamental understanding of what makes Facebook ads valuable to your business (and more importantly, how to get them off the ground).

All set? Perfect. Competitive advertising on Facebook is the next frontier.

Let’s kick those training wheels to the curb and dig into the 5 ways you can use Facebook ads to take down your competitors.

#1. Leverage Interest Targeting to Sway Competitors’ Biggest Fans

In AdWords, competitor campaigns are like checkers; in Facebook, they’re closer to 3D chess.

Competitor campaigns in AdWords are easy to establish but in most cases, they aren’t particularly effective. This is because the underpinning mechanics of Google’s auction make it difficult (and pricey) for an advertiser to rank for keywords for which they have low Quality Scores.

The components of Quality Score (distilled: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience) are such that it’s difficult to do competitive advertising effectively because, guess what: you aren’t your competitors. That truth is reflected in your ad copy and your landing pages; you can’t leverage trademarked terms belonging to other companies, so you’re forced to talk around them, lest you risk the wrath of Google’s ban hammer. That means you’re doomed to lower CTR and Quality Scores for competitor brand terms.

In the event you have unreal brand recognition or your CTAs are so compelling that, historically, your ads receive a disproportionate number of clicks, you might end up with an “Average” expected CTR for competitors’ branded keywords; of course, if that’s the position you’re in, you probably don’t need to be running competitor campaigns in AdWords, as you’ve got what the kids call “dominant market share.” Congrats.

Switching gears, while Facebook doesn’t explicitly allow you to target fans of your competitors’ pages, you can target prospects based on their “interests.” Facebook defines interests based on the things someone explicitly likes and closely related subject matter. This means that if your competitors or their customers are active on Facebook, you can use stated brand affiliation or fandom to create brand recognition and, eventually, sales.

Let’s say you’re a craft brewer looking to put your product in the hands of folks who appreciate a nice hefeweizen in the summer months but haven’t yet strayed from the six packs on the shelf at their local Shell station. At the Ad Set level, under “Detailed Targeting,” search for the names of some well-known craft breweries…

Searching for smaller, more localized competition might not yield adequate audience sizes. You should also be aware that Facebook may surface different audience estimates based on factors like capitalization and use of domain vs. brand name. My point is this: you’re going to have to play around a bit to get your competitor interest targeting just right.

Since the businesses in the audience we’ve started building above are all well-established, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a large pool of interested Facebook users to target…

If you’ve got a taproom, you might want to layer geographic targeting atop your competitor-centric interest targeting in order to drive physical traffic; in the event you’re simply looking to generate interest in your brand, try using one of Facebook’s creative ad formats to teach, awe, and inspire prospective consumers. Next time they’re in the package store, they’ll skip right over the Boston Lager in search of your briny Gose.

#2. Beat Your Competition to the Punch with Lookalike Audiences

Net-new prospects come in all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes they’re ready to convert RIGHT NOW – in search, this is conveyed through a high-intent query like “buy men’s running shoes size 13”.

But in most cases, it takes a bit of lead nurturing (more on that in a minute). Through Lookalikes, Facebook allows you to skip over some of that nurture process before your competitors even know a prospect exists. With the help of the infinitely useful Facebook Pixel, lookalike audiences allow you to take two pieces of information—a source audience and a location—and create a brand-new audience of prospects whose demographic and psychographic makeup mirror that of your source audience.

If your source audience is a list of recent website converters, often the resultant lookalike audience will contain prospects who are close to making a purchase in your vertical (or, at the very least, interested in learning more about what you do); all you need to do is convince these qualified prospects that what you’re peddlin’ is better than the alternatives.

This means that getting your products and services in front of these people before your competitors do provides your business with a distinct advantage. Let’s review how you can create your own lookalike audiences in Facebook.

After navigating to the “Audience” tab and selecting “Create Audience,” you’re given the option to create a lookalike audience or a custom audience. In the event you’ve never dabbled in audience creation, you’re going to want to select the latter; this will function as the source audience (mentioned above) for your very first lookalike!

Custom audiences can be created using:

• Customer file (email addresses you upload)
• Website traffic (provided the Pixel is on your website)
• App activity (I’d wager this will be of little use to you: pretend it doesn’t exist)
• Engagement (explicit action taken on either Facebook or Instagram)

To maximize the value of the lookalike audience(s) you’re going to create, I’d suggest sticking to source audiences created using either a customer file or site traffic from high-value pages only. A high-value page is one that indicates conversion or, at the very least, intent to do so imminently; for most advertisers, this means thank you pages and shopping cart confirmation pages.

Once you’ve got your source audience ready to rock, select it from the “Source” dropdown in the “Create a Lookalike Audience” menu and enter your desired location in the [drumroll] “Location” field. Facebook will immediately generate an estimated audience size for your lookalike using the following format…

Your new lookalike consists of the 1% of the total Facebook-having population in your chosen location that most closely resembles your source audience. Combined with interest, behavioral, and demographic targeting, you can whittle your lookalike down to the perfect set of prospects. From there, it’s all about creative, baby!

If you’re a more advanced advertiser, you can subdivide your lookalike based on ranges of similarity to your source audience by clicking on the phrase “Show Advanced Options.” Doing so will provide you with a few more audience-creation options, like so:

Think of the leftmost range in the image above as an identical twin and the broader, larger subset to the right as a second cousin who grew up two streets over. Both have proximity to your source audience that a random Facebook user selected from a hat likely would not. Just make sure to remember that the larger you make your lookalike audience, the less its members will have in common with your source audience.

In the example above, that 2% to 5% audience is made up of more than 6 million people; while your 1% audience will probably respond well to high-value offerings like product demos, the broader subset of the population should be served a top of funnel offering and remarketed to after the fact.

In either scenario, you’re advertising to audiences consisting of folks who bear some resemblance to your most valuable audiences, giving you a distinct advantage over your competitors.

#3. Build a Bona Fide Facebook Ads Funnel

When it comes to Pay Per Click advertising—regardless of channel—you need a funnel.

Hitting a prospect who just made a tertiary, informational query with an opportunity to BUY NOW or enter a free trial isn’t going to do anything except waste your advertising budget. That’s not true: it’ll also annoy the hell out of some poor soul simply looking for an answer.

Through the near infinite, varying degrees of targeting mentioned above (plus a slew of others I won’t touch on today), Facebook allows you to create a full marketing funnel. Armed with this conversion-enabling tool, even if your competitors are competent enough to target the right audiences, your superior, hyper-relevant ads and offerings will garner more conversions than you can shake a stick at.

Let’s say you’re an advertiser selling a piece of software and operating with the following constraints:

• An audience of 200,000 “prospects” with varying degrees of qualification
• A monthly Facebook advertising budget of $5,500
• An average close rate of 70% (killer product you’ve got over there!)

If you were to divide your advertising strategy into three distinct sections, it might look something like this:

Your topmost offering—in this instance, a free trial—is being served to prospects who are totally new to your funnel; while your trial is killer and convinces a fair number of prospects to eventually demo your software with a sales rep, most people who see your free trial ads on Facebook either gloss right over them or click and bounce.

In the business we call this a Facebook ad fail.

Using the custom audience you’ve created to target anyone who begins a free trial, you’re able to pitch prospects an opportunity to chat with a sales rep; in the model outlined above, 50% of these prospects say yes to a demo. Assuming a 70% close rate after completing a product demo, you’d wind up with 35 net-new deals. Not too shabby, right?

Don’t answer yet. Just watch.

Now, what if instead of serving a Facebook ad for a free trial of your software to an audience of 200,000 people, you show these prospects a high-performing piece of content that provides actionable advice in exchange for their email address. Notice how the volume of leads at the top of the funnel shifts dramatically from the first model (100 to 500); even though a content download is inherently less valuable to you than a free trial, it’s more valuable to the prospect at this stage in their buying process.

From there, using the custom audience tactic, you can serve that group of 500 prospects—each of whom is now familiar with the value your brand can provide for free—with an opportunity to learn more about your software by downloading a case study.

Finally, with the help of yet another custom audience and amazing Facebook ad creative that references one of the positive outcomes highlighted in the case study your prospects just read, it’s time to offer the opportunity to schedule a product demo.

At this point, the volume of leads at every stage of the funnel is considerably higher than we saw in the first example. Assuming an average sale price of $2,600, the measured, funneled approach that considers the readiness of a prospect to act and serves an appropriate ad/offer has the capacity to gross an additional $54,000.

While I’ve used a software company to illustrate the effectiveness of a Facebook sales funnel, you can apply this exact same, consumer-centric model to any industry and have success.

#4. Offer Unrivaled Customer Service Through Facebook Messenger

David Marcus, the man in charge of Messenger at Facebook, recently told Business Insider that “Conversations between users and companies inside Messenger have a 30% better return on investment than retargeting ads on the web.”

Think about that for a second. Retargeting is the practice of advertising to prospects already familiar with your brand, folks who have taken some previously defined action, and Messenger provides substantially better ROI.

All together now… “Daaaaamn.”

Facebook Messenger ads give you the opportunity to provide an engaging customer experience without having to, well, engage. Thanks, AI! But how do Messenger ads work? They’re actually pretty simple.

When a prospect clicks on your ad in their News Feed, it incites a “conversation” with your business no matter what kind of device they’re browsing on.

You can use Messenger ads to…

Promote a New Offer

or

Provide a Discount

All you need to do is upload a warm greeting message and piece of clickable creative and you can begin engaging with prospects in a way that would otherwise be impossible without them picking up the phone or physically walking through your front door.

Facebook’s Messenger Ads have a ton of potential in terms of both customer service and sales, and they’re only in their infancy. By incorporating them into your Facebook advertising strategy now, you’ll appear more engaging to your prospects, imbuing your brand with a level of personalization and intimacy that your competitors can’t come close to.

#5. Explore Instagram’s Virtually Untapped B2B Market

Consumer brands slay on Instagram, and that makes a ton of sense.

It’s an outlet that caters to creative thinking with a suite of ad types that complement everything from product catalogues to high-engagement, brand-centric stories. It’s no wonder, then, that most B2B operations have a genuine aversion to the platform. And that’s a good thing for you.

Instead of trying to compare Instagram to search, look at it as Facebook’s version of the Display Network; use it to pull interested prospects into the top of your funnel with engaging creative, then speak to their intent to purchase later in the funnel with more targeted Facebook ads.

Are Instagram ads ever going to represent a consistent, direct path to conversion for your business? Probably not. But they will provide you with an additional, underutilized channel through which you can reach net-new prospects. If your competitors aren’t doing it (yet), you need to be.

Combined with the targeting options and funnel concept outlined in this post, you’ll be your vertical’s top dog in no time!