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Arguably, the call-to-action is the catalyst for moving users through the funnel with your online content.

If you’ve read anything online, you’ve likely encountered a basic call-to-action encouraging you to take the next step and “Download now,” “Gain Access,” or “Contact Us.”

You want more conversions (leads, subscribers, downloads, etc.), right?

A good call-to-action — also known in marketing circles as the “CTA” — isn’t the only variable you need for better conversions, but it will certainly make your efforts a lot more effective.

Here’s how to write a CTA with power, poise, and polish.

Call-To-Action Power

The most important thing to remember with your call-to-action is this: the reader is already on your site, they’re already engaging with your content, right now, you have all of the power.

But you can easily lose power if you don’t entice your reader to take the next step. Answering “what’s in it for me” — also known as the hook — is the best way to do that.

We also call this the Give to Get. This is where you’re offering something in exchange for a users email address (because “Hey buddy! Give your email address so I can email you every 5 minutes!” just doesn’t work).

You can offer:

• A free consultation
• A free trial of your product
• Discounts
• E-books, email courses, or white papers

The key is to start building trust by giving exceptional value.

A powerful call-to-action will hit three points:

1. It will provide clarity on your content
2. Powerful CTAs give your reader direction on what to do next
3. Your click-throughs on your CTAs will help you measure success of your site/content/offers

Adding Poise & Polish To Your CTA

There are three places to perfect adding poise and polish to your call-to-action:

1. Your copy
2. The design of your call-to-action
3. CTA position (or placement)

Copy

For a subscriber or buyer to convert or click through on your call-to-action, they need to recognize that what you’re offering fills a need.

Don’t forget to communicate that by answering the all important question …

“What’s in it for me?”

Michael Aagaard, Unbounce’s Senior Conversion Optimizer, used this helpful image to move past boring CTA content and be more direct.

Unbounce is a tool you can use to create custom landing pages and test your CTAs, by the way!

Design

A design is often in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to your CTA you’ll want to ensure your design stands out.

A few simple tips for good design:

• Match your current branding and style
• Use plenty of whitespace
• Consider color — especially with your CTA button
• Don’t ask for too much information (shorter forms do better)

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Look at BidSketch’s call-to-action. It’s got plenty of whitespace, uses the color red to highlight the finer points, is extremely clear and concise, and only asks for your email.

And the client testimonial? The cherry on top!

Positioning

Positioning or placement is considering where your CTA will show up on your website.

There are lots of places:

• On your homepage
• At the bottom of every blog post
• As a pop-up

The #1 piece of advice I have regarding your CTA is to ensure it’s placed above the fold (a Google study clarified that by saying your CTA should be right above the fold).

What’s some of the best advice you have for writing the perfect call-to-action? Let us know in the comments section below!

Productivity isn’t a measurement of the quantity of work done. That isn’t productivity. It’s efficiency at best, and busyness at worst. Productivity is measured by the value and quality of the outcome you produce. If you want to be more productive now, this is how:

Do What Is Most Important:

You undoubtedly have hundreds of tasks you could be completing. Some of them are important; many of them may be urgent. Most of them are not important enough that you have to do something about them right now, and even less are so urgent that they can’t wait 90 minutes for your attention.

Being productive means doing what is most important. This means that being productive requires you to make a values-based decision: “What is the most important outcome I need to generate?” By moving from tasks to a higher value, most of what shows up on your to-do list can put in perspective. If you forgot to buy dog food, you can still feed your dog. If you didn’t write the client proposal for the client whose business could change your results and those of your company, you have made a mistake.

Do One Thing to Completion:

Productivity will elude you if you can’t give yourself over to some task for longer periods of time. You have to give what is most important your time and your focused attention.

Most of the most important and meaningful work you need to do will not be completed in a single day or a single 90-minute block of work. But if you don’t string together a number of 90-minute blocks to knock out big chunks of your major projects, you will take longer to complete that work, and the work will not be your very best.

Three 90-minute blocks a day can transform your results and your productive output. Taking the time to do one thing to completion allows you to be productive—even if the rest of the day is consumed with work that requires you to be responsive to the needs of others.

Make Time to Make Decisions:

There is one other thing you have to do to be productive. You have to make choices about the work you are going to do and when you are going to do it. This isn’t about time management. These decisions are value-based decisions, and they take more time and area greater cognitive load. This is because you are making trade-offs.

You have to decide that “this” is more important than “that.” You are not only deciding what gets done, you are also deciding what doesn’t get done. You are not only choosing when something gets done, you are also choosing when something else doesn’t get done. It takes time and thoughtful preparation to be able to be productive in a world that increasingly interrupts you.

Not everything can be the most important thing you have to do, and not everything you can do should be done at all, let alone right now.

The post How To Be More Productive Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Wait. Don’t open your email inbox. Don’t go straight into reactive mode, searching for something to do, and making your choice on what you feel like doing. Instead, do what’s most important.

1. Educate Yourself: On your way to work, listen to an audio book, listen to a podcast, or read a book, magazine, or journal article that will help you grow and develop both personally and professionally.
2. Prospect: There is nothing more important than prospecting. Spend the first hour dialing the phone, calling your dream clients to ask them for an appointment. No matter what happens the rest of the day, you will already have done more prospecting than most.
3. Nurture: Call, email, or find some other way to nurture the contacts inside your dream client’s company. Share something of value, something that will help them understand something about themselves and their business and compel them to change. You need to be known as a value creator.
4. Move Late Cycle Deals: You know that big deal you are working on that’s in the closing stages of your sales process? Do whatever work is necessary to move that deal forward. If you haven’t gained the commitment you need, do that.
5. Move Earlier Deals: The deals that are in the middle of your process need attention too. Do whatever needs to be done to move those deals forward. (See what we have done here. We have done the most future-oriented work first by prospecting and nurturing dream clients. Then we moved on to the work around deals that are live and need attention now).
6. Check Your Email and Respond to Voice Mail: You can’t ignore this work. Most of what is in your inbox doesn’t require your attention, but three or four emails require you do something now. Take care of what needs to be done, and leave the rest of the emails for the time you block to process email.
7. Follow Up with Existing Clients: You sold your clients some outcome they couldn’t achieve without you. Follow up with them to make sure that they are generating the results you promised them.
8. Send Thank You Cards: When was the last time you sent your clients a thank you card? Gratitude is the biggest of big deals. When was the last time you did something nice to say thank you to the operations people who execute what you sell? Do something to appreciate the people who trust you with their business, and the people you trust to serve your clients.

The post Top Eight Activities for Salespeople on Monday Morning appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Feeling unmotivated this summer? Like you just don’t have the stamina or the focus to get anything done?

It’s all in your head.

No, really. Your brain plays tricks on you, and sometimes it tries to trick you into being unproductive. But as I tell people all the time, in my role as an executive coach, there are ways you can beat your brain at its own game—actually tricking it into being more efficient in the workplace.

Let me offer a few practical suggestions.

Telling Your Brain to Get More Accomplished

Play the part of the observer. Have you ever asked yourself what’s stopping you from getting things done—what’s truly standing in your way? There is a lot of value in playing the role of an outside observer, stepping back and assessing what motivates your lack of motivation.

Break down your big projects into sprints. A sprint is when you focus solely on one small part of the puzzle—completing one specific, measurable goal as quickly as you can. Breaking big projects into sprints can be a helpful way to get through them without becoming overwhelmed.

Race against yourself. Set a timer for 30 minutes, and try to get as much done as you can in that span of time. Compete with yourself; make it your most productive half-hour ever. Promise yourself 15 minutes of break time if you can get something significant done.

Make a not to do list. In addition to listing the items you need to complete today, also make a list of the things that can wait—the things you don’t even need to think about just now. This can be liberating, and allow you to feel better about tackling your more pressing tasks.

Outthink Your Own Brain

Your mind can sometimes be your own worst enemy—but there are ways to stay one step ahead of it. I hope you’ll find some of these simple strategies to be impactful!

Most salespeople are convinced asking for a budget doesn’t work. That’s not surprising, since the vast majority of prospects will say, “I don’t have a budget for this,” when pressed. If you’ve heard this answer before, you’re far from alone -- and there’s a relatively simple fix. The truth is, you haven’t yet learned how to ask for a budget in the right way. In fact, there’s one approach that will work nearly every time, helping you dominate the competition in sales.

To learn the best way to respond to the next prospect who claims, “I don’t have a budget,” read on.

1) Establish the cost of their challenges.

Before you determine their budget, you first need to establish the value of your solution -- and that begins with learning the cost of your prospects’ challenges. After digging into your prospects’ deepest frustrations, ask, “How much would you say these challenges are costing your organization?” Once they answer, move forward and ask for a budget.

For more on this strategy, check out this video:

2) Roll with the punches.

After you’ve defined the cost of the problems you’ll solve, you may still face some reluctance from a prospect who doesn’t want to provide a budget. If that’s the case, stay calm and roll with the punches. Try explaining, “The reason I ask is because I want to avoid wasting your time with a back-and-forth after giving you a proposal.”

3) Don’t give up.

Just because a prospect doesn’t offer a budget the first time you ask doesn’t mean it’s time to give up. Return to the cost of the challenges, then try again. For example, you might ask, “To solve the issue of X -- which is costing you $110,000 every month -- what could you see yourself investing in this project?” If you’ve built a strong connection with prospects, they won’t mind being asked again. If they still don’t have an answer for you, it’s time to pull out the range.

4) When all else fails, give a range.

You don’t want to start with this strategy, but if you keep hitting a wall with a prospect, try presenting a range. Say, “George, in order to accomplish what we discussed, I can tell you we’re going to be somewhere between $100,000 and $400,000. Where in that range could you see yourself investing in a solution?”

You’ll notice this is a very wide range -- even without providing real insight into the cost of your offering, a range like this will elicit a specific number from a prospect almost every time.

5) Don’t back down.

You can’t serve customers well without knowing how much they can afford. It’s also your right as a salesperson to be on the same financial page as your prospect before giving a presentation or putting together a proposal. Keep that in mind, and don’t leave until you have a budget. This will save you pain down the road and set you up for a strong close.

For more powerful sales advice, check out this free report on the three closing questions you must ask.

Many companies begin an internet of things (IoT) journey with great expectations, only to end up with disappointing business results. Gartner recently estimated that through 2018 “80% of IoT implementations will squander transformational opportunities” and fail to monetize IoT data. And a new survey by Cisco found that one-third of all completed IoT projects were not considered a success. In my experience with dozens of organizations implementing IoT solutions, those that achieved their expected ROI changed their traditional business approaches in one or more of the following ways:

They Developed a Partner Ecosystem

The essence of IoT is interconnectivity. Interconnectivity is about more than the connections between devices — it is about the connections between customers, partners, and suppliers.

Accordingly, IoT is driving a shift in business structures from a one-company-does-it-all model to a let’s-work-together approach. This means that companies must leave behind traditional models of proprietary systems, rigid processes, and reliance on a few longtime partners and move toward models that embrace open and flexible structures in which partners can solve business problems together. This collaborative approach is no longer optional: No single company, deploying only its own products or services, can capture IoT’s value by itself, and certainly not with the speed required in today’s digital market.

Insight Center

Companies deploying IoT successfully in industrial sectors such as manufacturing, oil and gas, mining, and transportation are seeking multiple agile partners with open IP architectures to co-create solutions. This approach lets organizations aggregate best-of-breed technologies to develop cost-effective solutions that advance their goals.

For instance, Goldcorp, the global mining company, recently partnered with Accenture to help knit together an ecosystem of large and small IoT suppliers to co-develop a connected mine in Cerro Negro, Nicaragua. With data analytics provided by Microsoft Azure and an informational infrastructure developed collaboratively by Industrial Scientific and Cisco, operators now have a dashboard to remotely monitor the people, equipment, and air quality in the mine in real time.

In another example, the employee safety solution deployed by Marathon Petroleum with its integration partner keeps track of workers’ locations and automatically broadcasts safety alerts by combining data from Wi-Fi, wearable gas detectors, motion sensors, wireless networks, and real-time location systems – all sourced from different suppliers.

Once a company understands that it is a node in an interconnected network, its business strategy must change externally and internally. As Goldcorp and Accenture, and Marathon Petroleum and its integration partner have shown, change can work if it is built on interconnectivity.

They Update Their Talent Management Strategies

Yes, IoT requires new technical skills, ranging from data science and systems architecture to cybersecurity. Equally important, however, is the need for technology experts who possess both the business and the people skills to collaborate across groups inside and outside the enterprise’s four walls.

The reason? IoT solutions tend to span information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and core business functions. These groups must work together. Thus leading IoT adopters are increasingly bringing these functions together at an organizational level, creating new roles and hierarchies. Last year, BP-Akers, the Norwegian petroleum company, created a new executive position, SVP and chief improvement officer, to spearhead the alignment of its digital and IoT functions. In addition, several manufacturers have recently created a new frontline role, IT manufacturing engineer, with dotted-line reporting to both OT and IT.

Campofrio Food Group, a multinational meat processor, decided to transform its technology, culture, and business processes at its 17-year-old flagship factory in Burgos, Spain. When the Burgos factory burned to the ground two years ago, Campofrio rebuilt it as a connected factory. It blended IT and OT, upgrading the factory with IoT technologies that automate production while providing real-time data on materials, equipment, and, most important, workers. The company encouraged employees to change their one-job-for-life mentality and reinvent themselves, helping them acquire new skills and collaborate on all levels, including participating in decision making.

“We transformed from an old-fashioned hierarchy where everyone had a siloed job to a more interactive culture where everyone is urged to step up and help shape the direction of the business,” Javier Alvarez, CIO of Campofrio, recently told me. “In exchange for retaining jobs in a new, state-of-the-art facility, we asked our employees to take advantage of training and refresh and stretch their talents. Within five years, we want to spread the core components of this technology and talent model to all our production facilities in Europe.”

There are several strategies that can be used to develop IoT talent. First, train your employees in critical IoT skills — not just technology and processes but collaboration, too. Second, implement a culture of innovation across all grades, functions, and regions. Many companies, such as Cisco, regularly challenge employees to form teams to work together on solutions about which they’re most passionate. Empower them, incentivize them, and encourage them to think and act like interdependent entrepreneurs at a startup.

Attracting the next generation of IoT talent will take more than money — it’s just as important to nurture a team-based culture of diversity and openness in which every voice is valued. This not only appeals to younger workers but also aligns with IoT’s network character. Putting up booths at university recruiting events and hosting job fairs will not be enough. Try sponsoring joint projects with universities through which students can experience your company firsthand. Or, like IBM and Cisco, partner with educational institutions to co-develop curricula and offer online IoT courses. Then go beyond that. Boeing, Northrup Grumman, and many other manufacturers run summer internship programs for high schoolers to entice them to return during and after college. The New Manufacturing Alliance, funded by member companies, helps fill the skills gap through educational partnerships with schools, offering scholarships and grants to students at technical schools. Milwaukee companies Rockwell Automation and ManpowerGroup recently announced a partnership to train 1,000 military veterans for advanced manufacturing. Amazon openly shares its Career Choice program with other companies, which trains entry-level workers, mostly in warehouses, for higher-paying careers.

Siemens, the German industrial giant, needed experts in mechatronics, a blend of mechanical and electronics engineering, in its North Carolina facility in the United States. Instead of going the traditional hiring route, Siemens established a four-year apprenticeship program with a local community college that offered both on-the-job training and a degree in mechatronics. This approach worked exceptionally well, providing Siemens with the talent it needed and prompting the company to expand the program to other schools and locations.

They Focus on the Business Challenge, Not the Technology

IoT technology is very cool. But chasing the cool factor can lead to compromised ROI. One U.S. city installed a state-of-the-art inflow and infiltration system in its manholes — a very cool solution that worked as designed. But the city didn’t realize the promised benefits. Why? The new below-ground system wasn’t integrated with existing processes above ground. Street sweepers continued to operate as they always had, clogging the inflow holes with leaves and dirt. Not so cool. But if IoT partners focus on the business challenge, they will capture new levels of ROI.

A few years ago, Harley-Davidson, the iconic American motorcycle company, had a big problem: Global competition was increasing and its core market was aging. The company needed to respond to changing customer desires more quickly, while also becoming more efficient operationally.

So, at one factory, Harley-Davidson assembled people from both IT and operations, created a unified team, integrated multiple systems into a single enterprise network, consolidated islands of data, and created a fully IoT-enabled plant. This allowed the company to shrink a fixed 21-day production schedule for new orders down to just six hours, reduce operating costs by $200 million, improve production efficiency, and reduce downtime. Plus, build-to-order cycle times sped up by a factor of 25, allowing the company to respond to customer desires far more quickly and efficiently.

Ultimately, this is the promise of IoT as the foundation for digital transformation: supercharging business to better serve customers and stakeholders. But to fully realize IoT’s potential, companies need to approach it as a multifaceted journey, making changes to their business models and strategies — or risk ending their trip before it really begins.

You’ve done it. You put all the time and energy into designing and manufacturing a new product for your ecommerce store, and you’re finally ready to add it to your website and start selling it to customers. The question is, where do you start? Getting initial traction on a new product isn’t always easy—it doesn’t always happen naturally or quickly. So what can you do to increase the likelihood of your success? How can get customers and other people in your target audience excited about it? How do you build trust and drive actual sales?

It’s not easy, but it is possible. It just takes time, money, and the willingness to test a variety of tactics aimed at getting your new products in front of the right people.

Here are 13 product awareness tactics worth trying the next time you’re ready to launch a new product on your ecommerce store.

1. Send an Email to Your VIP Customers

Before launching any new product, the first thing you should do is send an email out to your most loyal and active customers. These are your raving fans—the people who come back to you over and over again to buy your products. The purpose of this email is to get your brand advocates (the people who are most likely to trust you and buy from you) to order your new product before anyone else.

To drive sales using this tactic, write an email that makes this select group of people feel special. Help them understand that the first batch of inventory for this new product is extremely limited and that you need their help testing it out before you can release it to everyone else publicly on your website. You could also offer a big discount or promotional code in the email as an additional incentive to get this group of people to buy.

2. Plan a Photoshoot Day

Successful product launches today are all about the visuals. You can’t expect to drive sales on any new products unless your prospective customers can get a crystal clear idea of what it is that you’re selling—what it looks like, what it might feel like, how it functions, etc. To succeed, you need to have great visuals. Well before you launch your product, spend an entire day capturing and editing visual content about your products.

To cover all your bases, you should think about the types of photos, videos, gifs, and interactive media you’ll need for your marketing efforts. Think about all the visuals you want to include on your product page, but also think about the types of imagery you want to have when you’re ready to talk about your new product on social media, in advertising, and in email campaigns.

Need help creating great visuals? Check out this helpful product photography guide from BigCommerce.

3. Leverage Influencers

As the ecommerce space becomes a lot more competitive, more and more online retailers are hiring and working with influencers who can help them tap into new audiences. To sell products online today, you can’t just have a functional ecommerce store—to succeed, you also need to be able and willing to build community around your products. You also have to be willing to participate.

By working with influencers, you can gain immediate credibility and trust in communities that you might not have much influence in yet. This can be extremely useful if you’re launching a new product and don’t yet have raving fans or loyal brand advocates who can help ensure a successful launch.

To see this tactic in action, check out what Beardbrand is doing on their blog. They regularly feature videos of bearded influencers using their products and educating others on how to grow, manage, and style a beard.

4. Tell the Origin Story

Storytelling is another big part of what makes ecommerce brands successful today. Again, online consumers today don’t just want to buy products—they want to be part of a community and an experience. Storytelling is an easy way to connect with customers on a more human level, and it’s a great way to differentiate from competitors.

To build awareness around your new product, take the time to develop the origin story of your new product. Help people understand why you decided to design and make this new product, what it means to you, who it can serve, etc. Help people get as excited as you are about your new product by showing them how much thought you’ve put into it.

Need help crafting a great story? Check out our guide here.

5. Run a Contest

You can also build a lot of buzz around your new product by launching a contest or a giveaway for your followers to participate in. Tools like Gleam and Rafflecopter make it incredibly easy to build and launch viral contests and giveaways that can be embedded into your own website.

To make your product launch successful, consider creating a contest where you give away a certain number of your new products for free to a few lucky winners. Have contestants provide you with their contact information (email address and phone number) so that you can add everyone to your email list. Anyone who enters your contest to win a free product should be considered incredibly qualified leads—i.e. they are probably very likely to buy from you if you spend a little more time marketing to them.

6. Collaborate with Partners

Another great way to drum up more awareness and conversation about your new products is to collaborate with other partners who align with your products and business. It’s another easy way to tap into other audiences that you might not have had access to on your own.

There are a number of ways you can collaborate with partners when it comes to product launches. You could host a virtual launch party together and invite both of your audiences (more on that later, you could send co-branded email marketing campaigns out to both of your lists, you could create bundled collaboration product packages that are sold on both ecommerce stores, the list goes on and on.

The key to your success is all about finding the right partner. Find a company that sells products that compliment your own, sells to audiences that are identical to your own, or ones that support the same cause, mission, or movement as you.

7. Throw a Virtual Launch Party

Another way ecommerce retailers are connecting to more people and differentiating from audiences is by hosting virtual launch parties using tools like Facebook Live. As social media sites become noisier and more competitive, brands and retailers are using video, and live video specifically, as a way to stand out.

To raise awareness about your new product, promote a virtual launch party to be thrown at your headquarters. Invite local customers, vendors, partners, community members, and your team members—designers, engineers, customer service reps, etc. Have your team introduce and talk about your new product, and make it fun! Ask audience members both in person and on the Facebook Live to chime in with questions. Offer exclusive promo codes to attendees and run an exclusive giveaway during your Facebook Live launch party.

Want to see a real-world example of this? Check out this recent product launch party thrown by YETI.

8. Offer a Pre-Order Discount

I mentioned this briefly in the first tactic, but it’s worth mentioning again: if you want to drive immediate sales and excitement about your new or soon-to-be released products, consider offering a pre-order discount or promo code to your entire list of past customers and leads. Let everyone know that the pre-order discount is limited-time only in order to drive urgency. You can also limit the inventory quantity in an effort to drive more interest and immediate action from your list.

9. Create a Bundled Product Offer

If you’re worried that your customers might be hesitant about a new product that you’re launching, consider bundling it with one of your most popular products. Reduce the cost of one of your most purchased items if customers agree to bulk order it with your newest product. It’s a great tactic for building trust and getting your new product into the hands of people who already love your other products and company.

Promote your bundled product offer in Facebook ads, in email campaigns, and throughout your website. This is another place where you can drive urgency by limiting the time people have to order, or limiting the amount of bundled packages available to purchase.

10. Promote Educational Content

To boost awareness about your newest products, spend time creating content that helps customers understand how to use your product to solve the problems or pain points they have. Don’t create promotional blog posts and expect them to drive sales for you—instead, become a value provider and a brand that’s willing to freely educate customers on various topics that they’ll be interested in. It’s another way to become more involved and active in the community that you’re ultimately trying to serve.

Need help creating a content marketing strategy for your ecommerce business? Take a look at this article from our blog.

11. Get Photos and Feedback from Customers

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to convince new customers to buy from you. As soon as you launch a new product in your store, your main priority should be to get it into the hands of people who can and will share their feedback with you. You want to be able to show other visitors as soon as possible the social proof and unbiased opinions from others that they need in order to make a decision about your product. That means as soon as you launch and get a few orders in the mail, you need to spend time reaching out to happy customers to get photos and testimonials about your new product, and you need to share that feedback with your social media followers and on your product pages.

12. Create a Movement

Another great way to build brand awareness and awareness for your products is by creating or supporting a movement that you know your customers care about. For example, Chaco, YETI, and S’well are all brands that promote living an exciting and adventure-filled life. They build and sell products to support that lifestyle, and the celebrate people and stories that they know their target audience can and will relate to.

To create and support the right movement, you have to know your customers, and you have to take the time to develop your own brand story. You have to ask yourself: why am I selling these products to these people? Why does it matter and what am I trying to help them achieve? Once you know the answers to those questions, you can start to shape a movement that people can get behind (such as adventure, serenity, peacefulness, happiness, health, etc).

13. Get Help from Designers & Developers

Finally, if you want to successfully launch a new product, you have to get help from the professionals. In ecommerce, design and function matter more than anything. It has to be easy for customers to access and use your website from any device, your product pages need to look good, and people need to be able to differentiate your brand from other brands selling similar products. Take the time and spend the money to work with great designers and developers who know how to “brand” products and create amazing shopping experiences for people online.

Over to You

What other product launch or product awareness strategies have worked for you recently? Tell me in the comments below.

When former Ford CEO Jacques Nasser took over the company, he was so determined to be a change agent that he sunk over a billion dollars into an endeavor that ultimately failed.

His goal? To “put the Internet on wheels” by enabling drivers to use Internet portals. He set out to achieve this at all costs, adding voice-activated navigation, LCD videos and other high-tech features into ordinary vehicles. He joined expensive ventures with Yahoo and other tech companies. This led to skyrocketing costs that rose far above what the average consumer was willing to pay. Soon, Ford had the lowest per-car profits among the Big Three, according to the Harbour Report.

Nasser’s obsession with innovation came at the expense of efficiency. All leaders must make tradeoffs between conflicting priorities at times. Here’s a closer look at the three most common clashes and how to overcome them.

Agile Leadership

Agile leadership, or flexible leadership, describes the balanced approach leaders must take to choose between conflicting priorities. The Flexible Leadership Model outlines three main areas competing for a leader’s attention: people, processes and innovation. Focusing too heavily on one of these areas can have negative consequences for another, but at times, it’s necessary. The best leaders understand which area deserves the highest priority at any given time and are able to maintain a balance between all three.

Clashes Between Processes and Innovation

As we saw in Ford’s case, focusing too heavily on innovation can keep organizations from maintaining efficient and cost-effective processes. Here are three other instances when leaders often have to strike a balance between these two priorities:

• When a major change requires significant investment, reducing efficiency and reliability for a period of time
• When developing and launching a new product increases costs.
• When too much emphasis on efficiency and cost reduction make a company less willing to invest in new technologies

Leaders must consider the organization’s strategic objectives to decide which area should take precedence at any given time. Processes are most important when price is the most important competitive advantage, but it may take a backseat to innovation when new products and services are constantly being introduced, making it more important to differentiate yours.

Clashes Between Processes and People

Having safe and efficient ways of working is good for everyone, but there are times when your process negatively impacts your people (or vice versa.) Here are a few examples:

High levels of compensation increase employee satisfaction, but they also increase costs
• Increased rules and standard operating procedures improve reliability but can undermine employee satisfaction
• Downsizing and outsourcing reduce costs but can hurt morale

The best leaders are able to strike a balance between behaviors that support efficiency and reliability (such as attention to detail and managing accountability) and behaviors that support people (such as consulting and team-building.)

Clashes Between Innovation and People

Innovation is important for a company’s future success, but just as too much focus on trying new things can eat away at profits, it can also put added stress on people.

Here are a few examples:

• When the cost of new technology takes away from compensation and bonuses.
• When managing change leaves less time for employee development
• When attempts to keep employees happy impedes progress

Jacques Nasser is hardly the only CEO who has fallen short in his attempts to prioritize one area over another. For instance, other CEOs have focused too much on process improvements, prioritizing low prices above all else and doing significant harm to employee retention or innovation. Agile leaders understand how to juggle often conflicting priorities, ensuring all three areas are thriving even if one may take greater precedence for a period of time.

Fortunately, agile leadership is a skill that can be developed. To learn more about how to improve leadership agility through the behaviors, systems and structures within your organization, read a preview of my book, Flexible Leadership: Creating Value By Balancing Multiple Challenges and Choices.

“So you are ready to start an inbound marketing campaign. Great! All you need to do is follow 3 simple steps, and you will see tons of new business automagically! ” Well, not so fast. While there are tons of videos and pieces of content professing to have the secret to fast growth, the truth is real growth takes time and a lot of hard work.

In this episode of the “Hack My Growth,” I break down what it looks like to start an inbound campaign and how unrealistic expectations can lead to quitting before you ever reap the benefits. So let’s dive into the truth together, shall we?

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s going on everybody? Welcome to Hack My Growth. Today we’re going to be talking about inbound marketing, and the concept as a whole. Since 2013 inbound marketing has really seen a rise and it encompasses a number of different digital market tactics like SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing. The goal behind inbound marketing which is also referred to as cool marketing is to influence people to build that relationship so that they start to take an interest in your brand, followed by actions like downloading a white paper or interacting with your business, saying “Hey, I want to learn more.” So, instead of jumping in front of somebody and interrupting them with an advertisement, inbound marketing is all about driving them back to your brand. It kind of follows this funnel that we have over here on the white board. Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight.

Today we’re going to be talking about some of the common misconceptions when it comes to inbound marketing. A lot of times I’m speaking with business owners that want to get started building their brand online. They’ve had a website, and they’ve done some search engine optimization, but they really haven’t gained any traction, and they want to see results. Many of them need to see results immediately, and they think, “If I get behind this inbound thing, I do some SEO and some content marketing, wham, I’m going to have tons of visits and tons of interactions.” Because we see all those videos, “How to Rank Overnight for a Billion Visitors.” You watch these videos, and you see people getting these magical results really quickly, and you assume that’s just the way it should be for everybody.

But the reality is, that’s not how it works. Growth takes times. Real growth, with the people you want to interact with and actually attract to your site, takes time. The first phase of inbound is Attract. In this Attract phase of inbound, we’re doing things like SEO, optimizing our site for search. We’re doing content marketing. We’re also doing social; we’re doing some email. There’s a number of other ways that you can reach out. You can even use traditional marketing methods to attract people to your business. This is all pulling people into this funnel. After you’re driving the traffic and you’re driving the right people to your site, which takes time in and of itself, then you need to work on converting them. This is where you have offers, forms, types of things that people would actually want to engage with. Not just putting up a piece of content that you hope somebody wants, but actually learning about your buyers. The reason this process takes a lot longer if you do it right is because you have to do the research to understand the person.

Behind every single one of these metrics is a person who wants to do business with you, or could potentially want to do business with you. But, unless you actually meet their needs, they’re never gonna go through this process. The end goal of inbound marketing is to delight. The reason we want to delight our customers is that then they become referrals. We all know (I don’t care what stream, or what channel of marketing you do) a personal referral is still the best form of marketing. It creates the most engagement for any brand. If you can get your users in your customer base to be pumped about who you are, they’re going to send more people into the top of your funnel who are ready to buy than any other marketing tactics. These will actually funnel people in. But, as you notice, the funnel gets smaller as it goes down. It’s because people fall off. Maybe somebody just wants to read your content, but they really don’t want to buy your product. You’re just adding content value to their lives.

Maybe somebody kind of gets to this middle stage and realizes, “Hey, this really isn’t for me. I think I’m going to head this direction.” So, the funnel gets narrower as it hits bottom. If you can start to really engage your customer base, it actually makes the top even bigger because now you’re filling it with more people, but the best part is you’re filling it with people who actually want to do business with you. Growth takes time. When you start doing this stuff a lot of people expect to see this giant spike in traffic, and sometimes you do see that. Sometimes you start getting a social presence, and it just takes off. But, most of the time, you start to see this slow and steady growth. In Google analytics, it actually looks more like this. That’s because you have days and weeks, but what you want to see is this trend line upward. About that first year or so you’re really going to see traffic grow minimally.

Maybe you see a big spike, but it’s really going to start to plateau. What happens is, about the six-month mark, people start to quit. They start to give in, and they start to say, “You know what? This is too hard; this content marketing thing’s too hard, this building links is too hard, I quit.” If you do that what happens is you end up plateauing, and often times trailing back downward. Now, all of that effort you put in for that entire six months, or a year, actually goes to waste because you got frustrated and you didn’t have enough of the guts to push through the pain of growth. What happens is, if you continue to put in the effort, it actually starts to grow exponentially over time and compounds on itself, and that’s where you see growth start to skyrocket. But, honestly, it doesn’t usually happen until midway through that second-year mark, depending on your industry.

Now, this is a very broad example. What it shows is that if you continue to invest, and you continue to put effort into the process, you will reap what you sow. If you stop doing the work, traffic trends go in the exact opposite direction, and everything’s just going to tank, and you go back down to where you were, and you’ll be frustrated because you haven’t seen growth. When I started going full funnel inbound marketing for my business, it took me 12 months to really see that needle start to move. I was getting leads, there were things I was doing to generate business, but I really wasn’t seeing the full return on investment for inbound. I was blogging three times a week; I was active on social media, I also had to fill client services. I had a lot of stuff going on, and I had every excuse to say, “This is too hard, I’m not going to do it.”

But, what I see now, there are pieces of content I wrote one year ago, two years ago, evergreen pieces of content that are still relevant today, are now once again delivering more targeted people to the top of my funnel. When it comes to inbound marketing quick fixes aren’t the answer, not as a long term strategy, and growth is a long term gain. So, when you’re starting your strategy set yourself up for success by having the right expectations, and don’t expect yourself just to see results because you’re blogging now. Do the work, be consistent, and in time you’ll see the results and the benefit of that work. Hope you guys learned something from this episode. Until next time, happy marketing.

Episode 73 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why customer relationships with a business are more valuable than those with its products.

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Relationships have a fundamental purpose. They make us better; otherwise, there is no reason for the relationship.

In business, the debate is whether the customer has a relationship with the products or the business or both. And if it does, which should come first?

If your customer relationships are with your products, then the relationship is only as good as the products.

The problem with that scenario is that if something fails to work as expected, the relationship is at risk of failing too.

It takes work to build business relationships, so it makes sense to use every means possible to avoid those breakups.

Flip Your Marketing from Products to Relationships

In his bestselling book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, former international hostage negotiator for the FBI, Chris Voss, identifies two conditions that people need to be comfortable in negotiating situations:

#1. Feeling safe
#2. Having a sense of being in control

These conditions are personal and emotional, and that means they are people, not product-based.

Traditional advertising creates product awareness, and it does that well. But you have to go further to get and keep buyers engaged with your business so they can feel safe and in control.

You have to shift your focus to create familiarity with buyers by showing them the big picture, that is, how your company goes about helping its customers.

Give them something that helps them see, feel, and understand their relationship with your business in advance. And that something is your branded process that addresses the known customer concerns, which may include:

• Project scope
• Budget and payment terms
• Schedules and timelines
• Communications and changes
• Warranties and remedies

To name a few.

Fortunately, the interactive nature of digital marketing makes it possible to address these concerns pretty easily. A short “explainer” video on the home page of your website that introduces your company is a good start.

Then, you can create more videos, podcasts, or blog posts that address every conceivable concern, with the idea of removing risk so that buyers feel comfortable moving forward with your business.

Your Business Process is The Relationship

It should encapsulate the 5, 10, or 30 years of your company’s accumulated business experience, especially the relatable stories that make its capabilities real.

To convert prospective buyers into customers requires trust in your business, in your products and services, and the people on the front lines and behind the scenes that make it all happen.

That’s a lot to accomplish when you have the limited attention of a potential customer because trust is something that has to be experienced first-hand. A referral or testimonial is helpful, but not enough.

For some companies, a “try before you buy” offer is a risk-free way of acquiring that first-hand experience. Although, one problem is that trial is a product based-solution, so it falls short in the relationship department.

Also, that could involve significant costs for a landscaping business.

The alternative is to design, brand, and market a process that can serve as a “stand-in” for the experience.

Think of your process as an interactive map that gives buyers the opportunity to experience the most meaningful aspects of your business.

What are those essential elements or touch points that make your business unique? I’m sure several come to mind, but I’ll suggest you can find others where your competitors tend to drop the ball.

If you would like to know more specifics on how to build and brand your business process, check out the links in the show notes below.

Good luck.

Contracts are a necessary part of buying and selling goods, especially in the B2B sales world. Gartner estimates that 60-80% of B2B deals are managed by contracts. It’s surprising then how many companies leave the contract process up to chance or a sales rep’s discretion.

According to IACCM, ineffective contract management can cost businesses up to 9.2 percent of annual revenue.

9.2 percent! That’s a staggering figure, and a frustrating one when you realize that number can be decreased with a few simple changes to your contract process. These changes don’t require a massive investment in new quoting tools or technologies. You can execute them with the tools you already have at your disposal, like SalesLoft.

Be Persistent

While getting to the contract stage of a deal can be exciting, you’d do well to heed the words of Han Solo and “don’t get cocky.” Deals can still fall apart at this stage if not given the appropriate amount of attention and care.

Create consistent intervals for following up on a contract so you can gauge status and answer any questions that may have arisen. SalesLoft allows you to automate this process by creating a cadence specifically for this stage of the buying cycle.

It’s also important to monitor what messages and intervals work best during this stage. Your analytics should give you a good idea of how much follow-up is too much and which messages inspire the most progress from your buyers.

Have Contracts and Resources Accessible

The most unforgivable mistake you can make in the contract stage is for you to be an impediment to a deal. You need to remove all the friction you can from this stage of the buying cycle. While you can’t influence your buyers organization or approval process, you have complete control over your side of the deal and you should do everything you can to make it as efficient as possible.

A no brainer for speeding up this process is to make sure you have everything you need to send, edit, and approve contracts ready to go. You should have contracts in an accessible place, and know how to edit and send them quickly.

You should also make any resources you may need accessible too. The contract phase usually involves some last minute questions or resource requests as your buyer works their way through final approvals. A feature like team snippets can have all of this contract-related content organized and just a click away, right when you need it.

Be Exceptionally Responsive

Finally, it should go without saying that the contract stage of a deal should be the period of time where you’re most responsive to your buyer. Failing to respond to an email or phone call for just a few hours could derail their approval process or in competitive deals, hand the deal off to a competitor.

Make full use of the technology available to you to make sure you know the second a prospect needs you. Make sure your email tool has best-in-class reply tracking and can send you desktop alerts when your buyer responds. It’s also helpful to have a sales dialer that can forward calls to your cell phone or desktop depending on where you are in your day.

All of these are small process tweaks to the contract stage of your sales cycle, but they can have a big impact on your efficiency and effectiveness. Who wouldn’t want to get that 9.2 percent of their revenue back?!

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Download your copy of the free report today and start turning every discovery call into a highly qualified opportunity.

The post Your Contract Process is Losing You Money. Here’s How You Fix It. appeared first on SalesLoft.

Unique visitors. Page views. Time-On Site. Bounce rates. There is a growing number of metrics that publishers and brands utilize to determine the success of their campaigns. While those numbers are crucial to success, they are only available if readers and customers actually make the decision to click-through on a headline to engage with the content they have discovered.

A Simple Trick For Better Headline Engagement

Immediately engage with your customer by creating a sense of personal buy-in. Certain trigger words can change the entire tone of the article on a personal level.

Example Of A Standard Headline: This Digital Marketer Unlocked A Simple Secret To Increasing Engagement By 300%

An Improved Headline: A Digital Marketer Unlocked A Simple Secret To Increasing Engagement By 300%

A single word change can make all the difference when attempting to earn buy-in from readers. The word “This” places the emphasis on a single instance of one “digital marketer.”

However, changing the word to “A” gives the sense that a similar incident could benefit anyone who is a digital marketer.

Audience Referencing And Why It Works

When you reference your audience in a headline they immediately feel like you are talking directly to them. In our original example “This” referred to a single person. When we changed “This” to “A” we targeted all digital marketers.

There are certainly more forceful examples of audience referencing. Trigger words such as “Your” and terms such as “You won’t believe” target a broad audience by speaking directly to their own sense of self.

The Headline For This Article

Our Headline: This Simple Trick Will Get Your Customers To Engage With Your Content

Sorry to get a little bit meta on you, but our title was built on the principle of audience referencing. In fact, we used it twice.

“Your Customers” refers directly to your need to attract readers, email signups, buyers, etc.

“Your Content” references your desire to build content that will engage.

Audience referencing comes in a lot of forms. If you target athletes who are attempting to improve their game, you might talk about how “professional golfers can teach you a lot about eliminating your slice.” The term “golfers” in itself, references anyone who plays golf.

Renowned copywriter Mel Martin was famous for his audience referencing, he would write headlines such as: “For golfers who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their game — and can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong”

He didn’t use a direct “You,” “Your” or another similar statement, but blanketed his headlines with terms that would target a very specific demographic, in this case, golfers.

One of the main reasons articles are shared is because readers want to provide thought leadership that adds value for their followers. If your articles have titles that add value and they provide audience referencing, your likelihood of success is vastly improved.

The larger and more established an organization becomes, the more complex the demand creation function. This is true for many things, but for B2B marketers, the effect is especially compounded.

As businesses grow, sales pipeline requirements do as well – and more rapidly than the total available market. This means that we marketers must continuously develop and refine new engagement strategies, channels, content, nurturing tactics, analytical and optimization efforts, etc. as our businesses scale. In other words, our marketing successes lead to greater challenges.

Such new demand marketing challenges obligate us to adopt new marketing tech for efficiency, append data for greater insights that enable us to focus efforts, and test numerous new channels, content and engagement tactics to attract the accounts and personas we may have missed in the past.

To ensure sales pipeline maintains an upward trajectory, our marketing infrastructures become barely navigable webs of data, tools and processes that we can’t holistically measure or optimize.

That’s when our previous successes hit a wall.

Demand Gen Issues Becoming More Common and Troublesome

Though many organizations can keep a good eye on what’s working and what’s not, such growth pains often incrementally hinder key aspects of our demand generation programs and infrastructure (as well as those of marketing operations and sales).

Running demand programs is like playing a game of chess in which the rules change regularly. You have numerous specialized pieces and plays, all of which are interconnected. If anything is overlooked, it affects the entire team’s performance. It’s critical to be aware of growing demand gen problems and how to prevent, eliminate or mitigate each of them.

1. Trouble generating full ROI from events

B2B marketing organizations spend more on events than on any other demand marketing or tech investment (18% of budget according to Forrester). This puts much onus on demand marketers to attribute a great deal of pipeline opportunities to these events. Yet, most leads generated at events – conferences, trade shows, field events and webinars – are time-intensive to process and have limited professional or firmographic intelligence, diminishing their value. In other words, not only are events an sizable financial investment, in order for them to work, marketing teams must also invest a great deal of time and resources as well.

To ensure event investments translate to pipeline opportunities and revenue growth, B2B marketers must find ways to quickly:

• Process and route leads to the right nurture track our sales follow-up channel to capitalize on prospect interests and increase likelihood of conversion
• Enhance event-generated leads with the prospect data intelligence marketing and sales need for follow-up

Having a plan in place well before the event is key here. Do your homework on previous events. Find out how leads will be formatted, what they’ll contain, when you’ll receive them – and then develop a plan for filtering leads (e.g., deduplication), appending additional data to the contacts, reformatting per database requirements, and routing to proper follow-up channels.

The slower these processes occur, the less likely you are to convert contacts to opportunities, diminishing event ROI – which then leads to reduced event budget in the future, further diminishing pipeline and so on. If you wish to automate these efforts, there marketing tech to help here as well.

2. Inability To execute ABM strategies

Account-based marketing (ABM) is more than a program or an account wish list. It’s a holistic B2B strategy that’s enabled by technology, data and integrated marketing and sales efforts. With so much focus on which accounts to target, the ABM efforts of many B2B marketers are falling short on identifying and engaging the right decision-makers within target accounts.

To ensure ABM strategies lead to substantial pipeline and revenue growth, B2B marketers must:

• Centralize dynamic target-account list data pulled from numerous sources
• Create a sophisticated content marketing plan to target and engage target-account decision-makers using branded content
• Ensure decision-maker lead data is accurate and actionable
• Match new contacts to accounts
• Measure and optimize ABM program performance holistically, across numerous systems, from marketing automation to CRM to predictive

Executing these elements and more is no easy task. ABM technologies can help, but ensuring you have all the right steps in place is even more critical than investing in any supporting technologies. Martech won’t fix a bad strategy or misaligned set of processes.

3. Neglecting lead/prospect data Health

This one isn’t a new problem, but its importance is growing, especially as regulations over acquiring and using personal information are expanding (see #5 below). Over 30% of the lead data generated by B2B marketers is invalid, contains unacceptable values or is incomplete. This doesn’t even include duplicate leads.

As Matt Heinz put it, “Dirty data is the silent killer of marketing campaigns. It makes you look bad, depresses the impact of great content and offers, and can put your brand, reputation and domain at risk (or worse).”

There are several ways to mitigate the effects of bad lead data:

• Manually govern, scrub, format leads gathered from lead providers (very time- and resource-consuming)
• Invest in third-party services to clean out your database after bad lead data has been injected (which only reduces some of the consequences of bad data)
• Invest in tech that automatically filters out poor lead data before it enters your system (the optimal solution)

3. Letting Program Complexity Turn Into Inefficiency Turn Into Stagnation

Inefficiency is the creeping death of many a B2B marketing team. Spending hours conversing with individual lead providers in one-off fashion, manually building campaigns, keeping an eye on lead pacing, scrubbing, reformatting, appending and uploading lead files to marketing automation, gathering performance data in excel to build reports, and optimizing campaigns one piece of content, channel and lead partner at a time – these are all basic top-of-funnel B2B marketing processes that weigh down performance and prevent you from focusing on strategic efforts that bring real gains to sales pipeline.

Automating as many of these basic tasks as possible with martech is the quick win. But if you can’t do that, your best bet is to templatize tasks so you can “copy and paste” efforts to gain agility and efficiency.

5. Being Liable For Breaking Emerging Data Privacy Regulations

This is the new one – and it’s big. Marketing organizations are being held to a higher standard of data privacy compliance than ever before. Nearly all countries have laws protecting personal data privacy, and all companies capturing and sharing this information must comply – at the risk of crippling fines.

At the same time, marketers are being asked to collect increasing amounts of detailed, actionable data with which to engage and convert prospective customers. A global business’ success today rests on its marketing team’s ability to walk this tightrope with diligence and speed. A plan to ensure personal data compliance within each region to implement a demand gen program is crucial. Further, you must ensure that each vendor you work with is also maintaining the same level of compliance.

Nearly all the marketers I meet seem, in some way, obsessed with personas. A persona is a convenient little tool that describes some set of attributes of a hypothetical―and supposedly typical―customer that are intended to allow everyone in the company to understand this customer and what they want.

If you’ve spent time talking with me about personas, you know exactly how I feel about them: I hate them.

No, I don’t hate the idea that there should be an understanding of the customer, and everyone should be able to see what it is. That’s necessary for getting teams aligned and driving market growth (see my discussion on this in my previous post).

I hate the idea because most of the marketers I meet use them as crutches―and not very useful crutches at that. I hate that most marketers try so hard to be specific and complete in their description of “Finance Francine” that their list of things “Francine” cares about are either redundant or useless in creating messaging that will convince the hypothetical “Francine” to spend non-hypothetical money.

Have you ever seen a list like this?

“CEO Chuck” cares about:

• Increasing revenue.
• Increasing profit margin.
• Meeting set revenue and profit goals.
• Not losing revenue.
• Not losing profit margins.
• Increasing net income.

OK, I’m going a little overboard, but you’ve seen that list. The problem you see with it is that it’s redundant. I see that and something far more dangerous to your marketing:

The list is meaningless.

If the person working on personas in your organization makes lists like this one, you probably don’t ever look at them for anything you do. If you do look at them, I’d ask you whether they help you target content, create advertising, or email campaigns or even inform sales scripts.

A good test for whether you have a useful persona is whether your average sales rep can use the language in the persona document to describe how you help your customer and the prospects on the other side of that table (or other end of that call) respond with “Yes!! That’s exactly what I need!” How often does that happen to you?

So, what do we do about this? How do we get a useful understanding of the people to whom we are selling (and yes, if you’re selling to businesses, you’re still selling to people)?

Focus on the person.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but then again, it isn’t. They say understanding other people and building relationships is hard. When you are selling any kind of offering, you are building a relationship with another person (or people), and it’s exactly as easy and hard as with anyone.

What’s the key to getting this right?

In an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of knowing how you and your offering make a difference in the lives of your customers. There are three steps to making this an integral part of your marketing:

1. Understanding your customer’ needs and aspirations―most importantly, the ones they don’t articulate.
2. Understanding what needs and aspirations you can enable.
3. Understanding how you help your customer meet those needs and achieve those aspirations.

Revisiting “CEO Chuck,” here’s how this might work:

Chuck runs a small software company. Chuck is trying to solve the disconnects within his organization. He knows that if product, sales, and marketing could stop arguing and get on the same page, it would be easier and smoother to generate leads and grow the sales pipeline. His demand generation leader says the biggest obstacle to getting prospects into the pipeline is knowing how to effectively find the right kind of person to whom to deliver messages. His investors are breathing down his neck about meeting sales targets and showing some eye-popping PR stories. His engineers are bugging him about prioritizing new features and bug fixes, and claim they can’t understand what they should be doing first―it all seems important.

Now let’s say you are selling some kind of marketing product to Chuck. You could tell Chuck your offering increases revenue, and you’d think that would be important enough for him to buy it. But let’s say your offering could help get the pipeline process unified between sales and marketing, and make sure they both have at least common numbers, account information and the like. You could then offer Chuck a solution to at least part of the sales and marketing friction problem, making his pipeline move more smoothly to help grow revenue.

Some marketers will see that as a more specific and, therefore, smaller offer. It’s not. It helps solve the problem your prototypical customer thinks they have. It makes sure you can deliver something they think is valuable to them and that makes a difference in their lives. And if you do it successfully, I am pretty sure they will tell their friends and colleagues you made a whole set of challenges go away.

This illustration is an over-simplification for the purposes of keeping this post readable. But the point of doing this exercise―and doing it well―is you get to understand your customer as a person, not as a hypothetical persona or profile.

And when you stop making claims to a persona and start making promises to people, you can start delivering real value and changing their lives.

Looking for some quick sales tips to boost your performance and keep you on top of your game? Look no further. The data-driven, expert-approved sales tips and tricks below will help you both improve your existing approach and experiment with new techniques.

Whether you want to develop stronger presentation skills, identify new prospecting strategies, hone your closing chops, or all of the above, these sales tips will set you up for success.

Table of Contents

• Prospecting Sales Tips
• Email Sales Tips
• Calling Sales Tips
• Conversation Sales Tips
• Presentation Sales Tips
• Closing Sales Tips
• General Sales Tips

Prospecting Sales Tips

1. Monitor industry events that may trigger new demand, such as major hiring shifts, an executive leader change, or new industry legislation.

2. Before you reach out to a prospect, identify the specific problems they’re likely to be dealing with.

What we like: Researching your prospects is key to making a pitch that hits home. Your pitch should be tailored to each buyer’s pain points. The more you can personalize, the better your odds of success.

3. Narrow your audience: “When you focus your energy on targeting a narrower audience, your message can be more customized,” says digital strategist and entrepreneur Trish Saemann.

4. Schedule time for prospecting every day — even on the last day of the month or quarter.

What we like: This shows your dedication and perseverance, both to your team and to yourself.

5. In addition to traditional channels such as email, phone, events, and referrals, use social media to research new prospects. Of salespeople, 55% do, helping them build rapport and keep the top of their pipeline as full as possible.

Email Sales Tips

6. To get more engagement with your emails, keep your writing accessible and easy to understand.

Pro tip: Avoid unnecessary jargon or long blocks of text. You can discuss every aspect of what your product does during a demo or call. Your email is just a brief touch point.

7. Limit your email subject lines to seven words max — otherwise, they may be cut off when viewed on phones.

8. You may be tempted to use “Re:” in a subject line to increase open rates, but prospects are likely to promptly delete these messages after opening them.

9. If you’re trying to reengage a prospect who’s gone quiet, don’t guilt-trip them.

10. Emails that start with “just checking in” or “just following up” aren’t nearly as effective as those that include a reason for reaching out and a clear call-to-action.

11. Consider using videos to grab your prospect's attention and stand out in a crowded inbox.

What we like: Video is now the preferred method of media consumption, so take advantage of it and meet your prospects where they’re at. You may not be able to embed a video directly in an email, but you can create a gif with a play symbol that links to the full video.

12. To avoid the annoying back-and-forth of finding a time to meet, include a link to schedule a meeting directly on your calendar.

13. Send a follow-up email as soon as you get off the phone to ensure things don’t slip through the cracks.

14. Use spell-check or an editing tool like Grammarly to avoid embarrassing typos in your copy.

15. Keep track of your templates’ open and response rates. Then, drop your low-performing messages — and double down on the high-performing ones.

16. Think twice about using funky formatting or special fonts. They may seem fun, but more often than not, they’ll just make you look unprofessional.

17. Never send an email without including at least two personalized elements — and no, [prospect name] and [company name] don’t count.

What we like: Although email templates can help save you time, keeping things personalized allows you to make more meaningful contact with each prospect.

18. Write concisely. Rambling on and on can make you sound insecure, whereas clear, focused communication sends the message that you believe in yourself and the value of what you have to offer.

19. Emojis can be a great way to convey a more human, conversational tone — but don’t overuse them.

Calling Sales Tips

20. On a first discovery call, it’s important to balance sticking to your own agenda with addressing the pricing and product questions that prospects are likely to be most interested in.

21. Your prospects want to talk to a person, not a robot — so you can use a sales script as a starting point, but be prepared to go off-script as needed.

22. Try to get to the bottom of what your prospects want and what they may be thinking but not telling you.

Pro Tip: Databox CEO and Former HubSpot Sales Vice President Peter Caputa recommends bringing a “healthy skepticism and a willingness to ask incisive questions” into every sales conversation. He adds, “This is necessary to break down prospects’ walls and uncover the truth.”

23. Treat everyone with respect: Just because someone isn’t a final decision-maker or senior executive doesn’t mean you should dismiss them or their authority.

24. “To ensure you’re truly engaged in every conversation, pretend each call you have is the first with that customer,” advises sales strategist Babette Ten Haken.

25. Research shows that people tend to be more honest in the mornings, so if you’re struggling to pin down a flakey prospect, try scheduling an early-morning call.

26. If you also work with your prospect’s competitors, don’t advertise that in your pitch — after all, your prospect wants to be better than their competition, not exactly the same.

27. Never bad-mouth your competitors to a prospect — and if your competitors do something well, say so openly. This sends the message that you’re both honest and confident about your own value.

Pro tip: Keep a close eye on your competition and note what their strong points are. You can then tailor your approach to emulate their best practices.

28. Pay attention. According to a recent survey of 1,000+ global sales pros, being attentive and engaged is the number one most effective strategy for building rapport with prospects.

29. Never lie. “As a salesperson,” sales expert Jim Keenan explains, “truth is your greatest asset, because it builds trust.”

30. If a prospect criticizes you, don’t get angry or defensive — that’ll only make them dig in their heels, while humility and grace are more likely to get them to come around.

31. To maintain a friendly and helpful attitude, try picturing yourself sitting on the same side of the table as your prospect.

Best for: Keeping the prospect’s good in mind, especially if they’re difficult for you to work with.

32. Defer to your prospect’s communication preferences: If they clearly prefer email over phone calls (or vice versa), then go with it.

33. When motivation flags or you find yourself reluctant to get on (yet another) call, remind yourself of your financial, career, or personal goals.

34. Trading leads with another salesperson can be a great way to get out of a sales slump: You’ll feel less pressure to perform, and it could be a fun change of pace (as long as you agree in advance who’ll work the deal long-term if the prospect ends up moving forward).

35. Be persistent and don’t give up on a prospect just because you don’t get an immediate response.

Pro Tip: B2B call center expert Jeff Kalter argues, “A baseball team won’t win the game if they only try to hit the ball once. The same is true for you. If you only call leads once, you’re highly unlikely to make the sale.”

Conversation Sales Tips

36. Sales trainer and co-author of Your Successful Sales Career Len Foley speaks to the power of genuine curiosity, reminding salespeople to “get fascinated with your prospect.”

37. Maintain a 2:1 ratio of info to feedback: For every two pieces of information you give your prospect, ask a question confirming you’re on the right track.

What we like: This tip ensures you’re engaged in a conversation, not just sales pitching. By asking questions you can also put your active listening skills to use.

38. Show, don’t tell: “The moment [you’re] tempted to tell the buyer what ‘he needs to do’... offer a story about a peer of the buyer [instead],” suggests Mike Bosworth, author of Solution Selling and What Great Salespeople Do.

39. An easy-to-follow success story is dramatically more effective than a long or meandering one — so when it comes to storytelling, keep it short and sweet.

40. When offering a counterpoint, using the word “and” instead of “but” can help you sound like you’re agreeing with your prospect, taking them off the defensive and making them more amenable to your position.

41. Don’t rush to fill silences. These quiet moments give prospects a chance to process information and make a sales pitch feel more conversational.

42. To boost your prospect’s subconscious sense of connection with you, identify the specific words they use and use those same words in your own speech.

43. Flattery works. Complimenting a prospect on a recent company achievement or personal success can go a long way to cementing your relationship.

Pro tip: Don’t overdo it. People can tell when you’re just buttering them up, so be sincere and specific in your praise.

44. Enthusiasm can be a positive, but too much can backfire. Avoid an excessively boisterous tone, and limit your use of words like “awesome,” “fantastic,” and “amazing.”

45. A recent report identified “good listening skills” as the most important skill for sales leaders — so make sure you’re taking the time to listen when engaging with prospects.

46. To show you’re listening, paraphrase what your prospect says back to them with a phrase like, “What I hear you saying is…”

47. Harvard professor and former HubSpot CRO Mark Roberge speaks to the importance of establishing urgency: “In my experience,” he reflects, a “sense of urgency is best addressed right after the goal-setting phase of the discovery conversation. Once goals are established, explore why it’s critical for the prospect to address the pain now.”

Presentation Sales Tips

48. If you’re feeling tired or checked out, listening to an energizing song before you make calls can help you get your head in the game and come across as more upbeat and engaged.

49. Only present solutions that are relevant to the prospect (even if that means leaving a really popular feature out of your presentation).

What we like: By focusing only on the relevant solutions, you show your prospect that you understand them and want to help meet their needs. This demonstrates that you have their best interest in mind.

50. Your prospects don’t care about your product’s bells and whistles — instead, highlight how these features translate into real value for the buyer.

51. Don’t be afraid to ditch your presentation agenda if the prospect wants to focus on a different topic. This is all about putting the customer first, which is the heart of inbound marketing.

52. If you’re using a presentation deck, don’t let it become a distraction, notes SinglePlatform CEO and co-founder Wiley Cerilli: “Successful salespeople are trained to capture and manage customers’ attention. You don’t want to give authority away to the deck that’s behind you.”

53. Less is more: The longer your presentation lasts, the less impact you’re likely to have.

Pro Tip: Practice your presentation ahead of time so you know your message, are confident in what you’re saying, and can present it without rambling or being repetitive.

54. Writing down a prospect’s objections in real time shows that you’re really paying attention (plus, it’ll help you address their concerns more effectively).

55. Rather than trying to force a prospect through your funnel, adapt to their buying process.

56. Come up with a target next step to come out of the presentation (a follow-up meeting, a product trial, purchase terms) — along with several alternatives in case it’s rejected.

57. Don’t overpromise. It may win you the deal today, but it won’t be worth the unhappy customers you’ll face tomorrow.

Best for: Creating a flywheel, which relies on bringing in long-term, happy customers.

58. When demoing your product, focus on the key features relevant to your prospect, rather than whizzing around a complex interface or diving into every detail.

Closing Sales Tips

59. Don’t procrastinate: More than one in five sales professionals say the biggest reason prospects back out of deals is because the sales process takes too long.

60. To either get a “yes” or surface a prospect’s remaining objections, ask them, “If we offered you the product at this price, would there be any reason you wouldn’t do business with our company?”

Best for: Making sure your prospect has no more lingering doubts or reservations.

61. Avoid manipulative closing techniques, as most prospects today are sophisticated enough to recognize them and walk away.

62. Freemium and free trial offers can be a great way to get to yes, with 90% of salespeople who use these options reporting that they are “moderately to extremely effective at turning prospects into paying customers.”

What we like: This option allows your prospects to actually experience the value your product has to offer. Allow the product to speak for itself.

63. Go into negotiations with a few non-monetary concessions to offer, so you can negotiate on terms other than price.

General Sales Tips

64. To boost your momentum and confidence when you’re in a sales slump, set yourself a few small, achievable goals.

65. Define a personal “sales mission statement” and use it to foster a more deliberate decision-making process.

66. Don’t sell something you don’t believe in.

Pro tip: “If you believe that all you have is your transaction, you’ll never get there,” writes Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone. But if you truly believe in what you’re selling, you’ll “know that you’re inviting people into what is absolutely a beautiful (and long-term) relationship.”

67. Address complaints promptly and directly. Ignoring them or being roundabout will only turn prospects away.

68. Your sales manager can be an incredible resource, but you need to ask the right questions to grow as a sales rep.

Pro tip: Don’t avoid the hard questions, like “Why do you think we lost this deal?”

69. “Attend call reviews,” says Michael Pici, director of sales at HubSpot. “If you‘re not running or attending call reviews, you’re missing a huge opportunity to improve your sales performance.”

70. Never stop learning: Keep your knowledge of the product up-to-date, role play challenging conversations, and read industry news regularly.

Best for: Staying engaged in your career and upping your sales game.

71. Research shows the top salespeople are resilient, empathetic, and ambitious, so focus on honing those traits in yourself.

72. Forget “Always Be Closing” — your mantra should be “Always Be Helping.”

73. Always go the extra mile: Even if it’s the last day of the month, even if you’ve already hit your quota, keep calling, emailing, and scheduling meetings.

74. To stay on track when you’re feeling demotivated, set yourself clear goals — and stick to them.

Pro Tip: Ask a colleague to help you hold you accountable to your goals, and you can do the same for them.

75. Protect your time: You only have so many selling hours in the day, so avoid distractions and use your work hours wisely.

76. Productivity is important — but you can’t be productive if you’re burnt out. So don’t forget to prioritize work-life balance!

77. Seek out team members who will motivate you to improve and encourage you to keep going when you're feeling down.

What we like: This is where the “team” aspect of your sales team comes into play. Make sure you’re supporting one another so that everyone succeeds.

78. Learn from the best: Take the top-performing salespeople at your company out for lunch and ask for their advice.

79. A great manager, coach, or mentor can make a world of difference — so invest in cultivating these relationships.

80. Sales pro Jeff Kalter emphasizes the importance of adaptability: “Because every buyer is different, you can’t set your sales cadence in stone. Instead, monitor prospects’ interests and how they interact with your brand. Downloading a white paper, for instance, is entirely different than a contact request.”

81. Embrace new technology: For example, more than two in three salespeople say that AI and automation tools are changing how they plan to sell.

Best for: Freeing up sales reps to make more human connections with prospects.

Getting Started

When it comes to sales, everyone has their own style. These tips aren’t one-size fits all. Start experimenting to see what works best for you. Or even better, team up with a teammate and tackle these tips together.

Once upon a time, there was a straightforward solution to “monetizing” your website when you got tired of trying to make AdSense work: Write an ebook! Having something of your own to offer, even a simple $7 ebook, virtually always beats trying to monetize your traffic with advertising. And that’s still true. (In fact, sales
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The post Making a Living Writing Ebooks: Here’s How It Works Today appeared first on Copyblogger.

Facebook Messenger ads are a great way to help close more sales. We’re seeing success using them for our B2B and B2C clients. In this article I’m going to share a real use case and show you how to set up your own Messenger ad in 3 easy steps.

The beauty of having a messenger ad running for your business is that it acts like a sales assistant, quietly waiting for your prospect to ask a question.

Just because someone visited your website and didn’t immediately fill out a contact form or make a purchase doesn’t mean that they’re not interested. Many people leave because they didn’t get their question answered. Also, people may be too early in the research phase so they’re not willing to give out their email address or phone number just yet.

This is where Facebook Messenger ads step in. Your prospects can ask questions and get real time answers from your sales team without ever having to give up their information. It’s a nice way to ease someone into a sales conversation.

So what is a Facebook Messenger ad anyway?

It is an ad that allows your prospects to directly message you or your sales team with questions they may have prior to actually engaging in your sales process. It is an easy way for people to get some personalized human answers to their questions without exposing themselves to an icky sales pitch. They don’t have to give up their phone number or email address. Currently there are two different kinds of Facebook Messenger ads, sponsored messages and destination ads. I’m covering Destination ads in this article.

For this example I’m showing how to use messenger ads to assist in the sales process. There are many other ways to use messenger ads and I will cover them in future articles.

Why use Facebook Messenger ads?

• Currently there are over 1.2 billion people on Facebook Messenger
• People are more likely to message via Facebook rather than your website’s messaging app
• People have come to expect immediate answers to their questions
• People don’t need to give up their phone number or email to engage with your sales team
• It’s a baby step into your sales process
• Not many people are using them currently
• The cost can be very low compared to other ad types

When should you use a Facebook Messenger ad?

Because I’m talking specifically about Messenger destination ads, I advise using these to retarget people that are near the bottom of your sales funnel. Or they are in the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey. In plain speak, you want to target people that are showing a strong interest in your product or service. This gives them an opportunity to ask and get answers to their specific questions.

Many times just getting a simple question answered will move someone into being ready to buy.

When our clients use this strategy we see many short exchanges that then turn into people handing over their phone number to the salesperson so they can get on a call with them and close the deal.

Who should use this?

We are currently using it for the following types of sales:

• B2B Services
• SaaS
• B2C High-Ticket Items
• Info Products

Generally, if you’re not selling an impulse item, and some interaction with a knowledgeable salesperson would help the sale, then it is worth trying. We always recommend test, test, and test.

How to set up Facebook Messenger ads in 3 easy steps

Step 1: Identify Likely Customers

List the action(s) people take on your website that indicates they have a strong interest in your product or service. Usually we can determine who is more likely to be interested in your product or service by what actions they have taken on your site. So our first step is to identify some of those actions that potential customers are likely to take.

• Visited a specific page on your website
  • Pricing page
  • Demo page
  • Downloaded content
  • Case study page
  • Registration page
  • Checkout page
• Watched a video about your product or service
• Placed items in your shopping cart but did not check out

Identify the one or more actions from above that are appropriate for the product or service you’re selling. We’ll use these actions to build your target audience in our next step.

Step 2: Build Your Audience in Facebook

Use the action or actions you identified in Step 1 to build a custom audience in Facebook.

Note: You will need to have the Facebook pixel installed on your website.

Let’s use my company, OverGo Studio as an example:

In Step 1 we identified that people visiting our Packages & Pricing page are likely to have a strong interest in our inbound marketing services.

Next: Log into your Facebook Ads Manager

1. Select Audiences

2. Create Audience (select Custom Audience)

3. Select Website Traffic

4. Enter the web page URL you identified in Step 1

5. Enter the number of days you want to target these viewers. If you have a small amount of traffic you may have to lengthen the number of days to 30 or longer.

6. Give the audience a descriptive name

7. Click Create Audience

Step 3: Create Your Ad

Now we’re going to build the actual ad people will see in their Facebook news feeds. There are many different types of ads we can design at this stage. For this example we are going to keep it very simple. The goal of this particular ad is to get those that showed an interest in our service to engage with us and ask any questions they may have.

Success TIP: Always start by designing your ad copy and image before getting into Facebook Ads Manager.

• Make sure your ad copy aligns with the audience you’re targeting and their actions.
• Avoid stock photos if you can. It is better to use a custom image.
• If you’re targeting video viewers use a screen capture from your video.
• If page viewers keep your branding consistent with your website.
• The goal is to make your ad familiar and friendly.

Now that you have all your ad assets let’s log into FB Ad Manager and build your messenger ad.

Click Create New Campaign

1. Select Traffic as your marketing objective

2. Give your campaign a name and click Continue

3. Under Audience go to Custom Audience and select the audience you created earlier.

4. Set your budget. I recommend using daily budget. Currently the minimum is $5/day. This is usually enough for this type of Messenger Remarketing Campaign.

5. Upload your ad image or video. You can also pick one from your existing library.

6. IMPORTANT – Under Links – Destination select Messenger

7. Place your headline here. Make sure it reads well on mobile, as most viewers will be on mobile devices.

8. Enter you main body text (this appears above your image or video)

That’s It, you’re Finished.

Click Review Order to check everything, then Place Order.

Notice that our ad copy is very short and to the point. This is a very bottom of the funnel type of Facebook Messenger ad. We are only calling out the very few people that might have had a question about our services. This type of ad will have a very low engagement rate. That is okay because the few people responding are likely to be what we call sales qualified leads.

So what happens next?

When someone clicks this ad, it will open their Messenger app. When they send a message you can engage with them in real time. You or your sales team can monitor Facebook Messenger for this. During off hours you can use an autoresponder or a bot to assist. Once someone responds they will be on your messenger list. You can then automate messages to them just like you would do with email automation and drip campaigns.

In future articles, I will cover how to use Messenger ads to generate top of the funnel leads for your business.

A good mentor can be a great thing to have, but a hard thing to find. Now LinkedIn is attempting to pair those looking for advice from a mentor with professionals willing to share it through a new mentoring feature. It started rolling out in a few select locations this week, with plans for it to go nationwide soon.

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There has never been a better time to start and manage a small business. With unlimited access to utility services, tools, and applications, it is needless to say that you can save a lot of your time and efforts in managing a small or medium sized business. In just a few simple clicks, you can now find solutions to some of the mammoth problems that you encounter while operating your enterprise on the internet. Today, anyone with a laptop and internet connection can start a business of their own and hence faced are challenges such as accessing and organizing such gigantic amount of information in terms of knowledge of the resources and infrastructures involved.

I clearly remember that during the initial stages of my business, I struggled a lot with keeping up with all the details. Be it any kind of business, there comes a time when you run out of storage space on your computer. After much brainstorming, I decided to take my business to the Cloud! That was the day and I have never looked back. Not only does it help me with keeping a track of anything and everything that’s going on; rather it also keeps me on track with the repositories and inventories during all times.

One thing that I have discovered is that taking the right steps in the right direction will certainly bring about positive changes in your business sooner or later. Switching to cloud-based storage has been a lifesaver for me at the time when my system crashed unannounced! This is exactly where these time and money savings hacks will come to your use!

Now that we have understood the importance of being a step ahead of unavoidable constraints such as time and money, let us take a quick glance at 5 Simple Ways to Save Time and Money for Small Businesses.

5 Simple Ways to Save Time and Money for Small Businesses

· Productivity Applications

The use of productivity applications is highly recommended in case you are focusing on making the most of your time and money. The best part about some of these productivity applications is that they are available for absolutely free of cost; hence optimizing your cost-benefit ratio as well. I use Any.do (to keep all your schedules on track), IFTTT (where a series of prebuilt applets take care of the A-Z of my professional and personal lives), TuTuapp (for using some paid applications for free on my device in a secure way), and last but not the least Trello (a customizable digital bulletin board for keeping track of lists, chores, assignments, etc.) are some of the best productivity- enhancing applications that I have been using.

· Online Tools

Fact: Money doesn’t grow on trees!

Also fact: Time stops for no one!

Thankfully, there are several online tools which do justice to these sentences! With online banking picking up much pace these days, how wonderful it will be to have a place where you can input all your money-related metrics, which you can also access during all points of time from anywhere and everywhere. Mint (the online budgeting tool that has started a revolution by linking all accounts and keeping all money-related matters under one roof!), Filevid (a very useful online video downloader which saves a lot of your time and efforts), Buffer (a social-media management tool for linking all social media accounts with business so that all posts and promotions scheduled get posted simultaneously across multiple platforms), and Bloomforth (an inexpensive cloud-based, inventory management tool which is great for scheduling and keeping tracks of all processes and accountabilities) are some of the online utility tools that you can use!

· A Photocopier in your Phone!

If your business includes lots of documents to be scanned and signed, then it is best to get any of the numerous scanner applications for your smartphone. The best thing about these scanner applications is that they don’t just click a picture of your document; rather they also find the edges, remove shadows, and apply several other correction features to ensure that you have got the most appropriate copy of the document in hand! Scanner Pro is one such tool which is coupled with time and money saving features, such as cloud syncing, folder creation, and password protection.

· Create and maintain your OWN website

Surveys show that it takes somewhere between $200-400 per year to manage your business on the internet. Believe it or not, a humongous amount of money goes into website creation and maintenance when you take help from professional web designers. These people will do utmost justice to the money you pay, however, there are ways you can minimize this cost by taking matters in your hand! Yes, with just a few simple content management hacks in your kitty, you can build a website on your own. There are hundreds of CMS (Content Management Systems) available on the internet which provides you with the back end administration panel for creating new pages and linking all of your website together. This way you can save both time and money without any dependency!

· Go PAPERLESS!

EVERY department of your business will benefit from going completely paperless. It is a lot easier to store, retrieve, access, process, and interpret information digitally as compared to maintaining files and registers. By going paperless, you also save on ink, paper, printer, and other manual filing systems. It is environmentally acknowledged and also ensures data and information security. Not only does it benefit you; rather it also enables your customers to keep track of and recall bills receipts, and memos during all times.

Conclusion

These small hacks and tricks help us in making great profits in the long run. If you are also looking for ways to optimize the use of money and time with respect to your small or medium sized business, give these simple hacks a try!

A few years back my mom said, I thought I taught you that bragging is not nice! I looked at your LinkedIn thing, and you're tooting your horn all over the place.

Well, there definitely is a fine line between being real and authentic on your LinkedIn profile and appearing boastful or pretentious. However, it's extremely important to clearly show people why you are expert at what you do and share valuable information with your network.

As a guy who looks at probably a hundred profiles each week, I can definitively tell you that most people are not displaying and sharing enough information, and this puts them at a distinct disadvantage when someone is comparing them to others in the same or similar position.

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Best ways to use LinkedIn to display and share your expertise

If you need to beef up your profile and boost your presence on LinkedIn, here are seven simple ways to accomplish that without getting scolded by your mom.

1.  Recommendations. It does take time to secure recommendations, but it will be worth the effort, because nothing is better than someone else saying you're the best. It will differentiate you from others when people are comparing you to your competitors, and you'll undoubtedly receive lots of positive comments about the quality of your recommendations—which should lead to new business.

2.  Skills and related endorsements. Even though this feature has caused a lot of confusion (and rightly so), it still has great value. You can display what you're expert at, and, if done correctly, it will help you get to the top of the list when people are looking for your products, services, and expertise.

3.  Adding media (available in the Summary, Experience and Education sections of your profile). These are great places to display or link to documents (Word, Excel and pdf), video, Power Point presentations, blog entries, and photos that allow the readers to see for themselves the depth of your expertise.

4. Separate job experience entry for industry leadership position. If you hold or have held an office or position in an industry related association or organization, highlight that fact by adding an additional current or past job experience entry to your profile. Share specific details about your responsibilities. Also, if you're a speaker at your association's events or a contributor to their newsletter or blog, share that as well.

5.  Accomplishments profile sections. Don't be bashful about adding these special profile sections and including details related to each entry. Remember—you're the only one who is going to tell your story. Also, if you don't list any accomplishments on your profile, people may assume you don't have any accomplishments!

6.  Individual status updates. Because everyone in your network will not receive or read every status update you post, share your best resources regularly. This also gives people who are new to your network an opportunity to see your best stuff.

7.  Publish an article. This is the newest way to share your thought leadership. It's like having your own blog, and your network is notified whenever you post an article. And because it stays on your profile, people will see your expertise on display whenever they visit your profile.

Don't let your competitors get an advantage over you on LinkedIn. Be real and authentic as you proudly display who you are and what you have to offer—and hopefully your mom will say, That's my awesome kid!

The post Do You Look Like an Expert on LinkedIn or Just a Bragger? appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

Social media influences almost every facet of our lives. We use Twitter and Facebook to learn about the news. We chat with friends via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. We send silly messages to each other through Snapchat and save our favorite things on Pinterest. We broadcast ourselves live with Periscope and document our lives with Instagram.

Social media is deeply embedded in our online shopping as well.

5 years ago, it was enough for a business to simply be on social media. To have a presence. To occasionally post pictures of products as well as updates on sales. Today, things are completely different. Social media is absolutely revolutionizing eCommerce world. Businesses who don’t effectively engage in social media will find themselves left out in the cold while their competitors blow past them.

As Catalin Zorzini says:

For Web businesses, effective social marketing represents real value. Social networks offer new ways to reach first-time customers, engage and reward existing customers, and showcase the best your brand has to offer. Your social network profiles and the content you share are as important as a business’ storefront signage and displays in the 1950s.

Why? Social networks are evolving from merely places to find and distribute content; they’re becoming commerce portals. Businesses that integrate social media into their marketing strategy – from customer acquisition, to sales, to re-engagement campaigns – will benefit.

But what changes matter the most? What changes are having the biggest impact on the eCommerce world?

Here are 5 to think about.

#1 – Live Video

Live video is everywhere these days. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter have all doubled down on live video, believing it to be the future of social media. Live video is engaging, it’s visual, and it allows users to engage with each other in a real-time manner. It allows for interaction and face-to-face conversations. Above all, live video keeps users on social media platforms longer, which is why everyone is pushing it so hard.

As Matthew Ingram notes:

Facebook’s engineers have been busy tweaking the algorithm to push videos—especially news-worthy or popular ones—higher in the news feed. And all that tweaking has had the desired effect: Facebook now gets more than 8 billion video views a day. A view is defined as anything longer than three seconds, but that is still a massive amount of video being watched on the service (Snapchat is also close to this number).

As you might imagine, live video is also revolutionizing the eCommerce world in a number of ways.

Brands are relying on live video to show off products in new, unique ways. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts took viewers inside their “test kitchen” with live video to show how they create their donuts. Tough Mudder has taken viewers up close and personal with brand evangelists to show what’s required to run their events.

Live product demonstrations and Q&A’s are also becoming increasingly popular. They let brands and companies show off their new products and answer questions about them in real-time. This is a huge advantage compared to simply displaying pictures on a website or video ads.

Finally, brands are using influencers on live video to promote their products. For example, beauty companies may send products to influencers to test out and promote via live video. This gives an authentic feel to the promotions that isn’t available with standard video ads.

Video is on fire right now, and it’s only going to keep getting bigger.

#2 – Hyper-Targeted Advertising

It’s no secret that social media companies collect a lot of data, and that they let advertisers use that data. The granularity and specificity of that data means that, more and more, eCommerce companies are able to hyper-target audiences.

As the Washington Post notes:

Facebook keeps ads “useful and relevant” in four distinct ways. It tracks your on-site activity, such as the pages you like and the ads you click, and your device and location settings, such as the brand of phone you use and your type of Internet connection. Most users recognize these things impact ad targeting: Facebook has repeatedly said as much.

This article goes on to state that Facebook collects an astonishing 98 different points of data on each user!

The implications for business are astronomical. In the past, an outdoor gear manufacturer could generally advertise to audiences by taking out an ad in Field & Stream magazine. Now, thanks to the data available to them, they can specifically target men ages 22-50 who like the National Rifle Association, prefer Budweiser, have expressed an interest in camping, and also like to read Field & Stream.

As you can imagine, this type of specificity opens up new worlds for eCommerce companies. They no longer need to spray large amounts of money into ads, hoping they manage to hit the right audience. Now they can know they they’re on target and that their ads will resonate with the audience.

Additionally, companies can see exactly how well their ads are performing – how many clicks they’re getting, how many people have seen the ad, etc.

The advances in social media advertising are allowing companies to be much more specific in their ad spends and measure the results much more effectively.

#3 – Constant Brand Monitoring

Thanks to the search and alert functions provided by social media analytics platforms like Mention and SproutSocial, companies can now constantly monitor for mentions of their brand and engage with customers.

For example, if a customer is upset with a company and mentions them on Twitter, that company can instantly reach out and offer help. They can offer discounts to customers who are having problems and thank customers for their support.

As SproutSocial says:

With a dedicated support handle, you don’t have to worry about questions from followers getting lost in a series of brand mentions. Plus it’s easier to stay on message and maintain a consistent tone across the channel. Switching from promotional to conversational to support can be tricky to maintain, especially during busier times.

If a customer is happy with a company, the company can share that positive review on social media and invite others to leave reviews. Or if a customer leaves a negative review, the company can personally reach out and seek to fix the issue.

If a news story breaks about an eCommerce product, the brand can get out ahead of the story and shoot down false rumors or spread good news.

eCommerce companies that aren’t constantly monitoring their brands are likely to fall behind those that do. After all, everything moves ten times faster in the social media world than in real life.

#4 – The Advent of Chatbots

Artificial chatbots are also playing an increasingly important role for eCommerce companies. For example, if a customer visits a company’s Facebook page, an automatic chatbot can engage in Facebook Messenger, offering discounts, the ability to solve problems, and even personalized recommendation.

Paul Chaney writes about how the company Spring is using a Facebook Messenger bot:

A good example is mobile-first e-commerce retailer Spring, which launched Spring Bot, a personal shopping concierge powered by Messenger and Zopim live chat, reported the fashion blog Fashionista.

To start the clothes-buying process, the bot asks the customer what he/she is looking for and then presents options from which to select, including clothing, shoes, or accessories. Customers can see thumbnails with links to the products that they can purchase using their mobile device.

As more people take to messenger services rather than the social media platforms themselves, chatbots are going to become even more important. And with well over a billion people using Facebook’s standalone messenger app, it’s not surprising that Facebook is giving companies resources to develop chatbots. They know that Messenger bots are going to be big.

Additionally, chatbots are becoming more important as younger consumers steer away from older communication methods such as email and depend on instant communication methods, such as Facebook messenger and WhatsApp.

We should expect to see bots becoming more present in messenger apps in the future as companies realize their power.

#5 – In-App Purchase Options

In the past, if you saw an item on Instagram and wanted to purchase it, you had to exit the app, open your browser, find the site, and then make the purchase. That method is quickly fading away as social media platforms integrate buy buttons.

Now, it’s possible for eCommerce retailers to incorporate buy buttons directly into their advertisements within social media platforms. This reduces buyer “friction” and makes impulse buying much easier. If a person sees what they like, they can simply click the buy button and immediately purchase it.

Additionally, marketing platforms like Soldsie are letting companies instantly add items to a shopping company (assuming the customer agrees) when they make a comment under an Instagram or Facebook photo. This means that if a customer sees a t-shirt he likes, he can immediately start the purchase with something as simple as a comment. This makes it incredibly easy for customers to purchase in the moment.

Conclusion

With the incredible societal shifts caused by the internet in general and social media in particular, it’s no surprise that eCommerce is being caught up in the wave. Social media is offering new and exciting opportunities for online business, and we should only expect these to increase.

With platforms constantly evolving and finding new ways to personalize shopping, social media will play an even bigger role in shopping in the future. Depending on your ability to avoid impulse buys, it’s either a fantastic or terrible time to be alive.

It turns out "dress for success" is much more than just a catchy motto.

Recent studies have indicated that there is some value in dressing for the job you want, as noted by the Wall Street Journal last year.

Studies have shown that wearing nice clothes in the office can affect the way people perceive you, how confident you're feeling, and even how you're able to think abstractly.

In a study completed at Yale in 2014 that used 128 men between the ages of 18 and 32, researchers had participants partake in mock negotiations of buying and selling.

Those dressed poorly (in sweatpants and plastic sandals) averaged a theoretical profit of $680,000, while the group dressed in suits amassed an average profit of $2.1 million. The group dressed neutrally averaged a $1.58 million profit.

According to a co-author of the study, this shows that the poorly dressed participants would often defer to the suited ones, and these suited participants could sense this heightened respect, backing down less than they might have otherwise.

In another study, participants who dressed up were more likely to engage in abstract, big-picture thinking like a CEO, while those less well-dressed concerned themselves with minor details.

"People who wear that kind of clothing feel more powerful," Michael L. Slepian, co-author of the study and an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia Business School, told the WSJ. "When you feel more powerful, you don’t have to focus on the details."

How does this advice fit into your everyday style? In today's casual office dress code, dressing up can have an even bigger effect.

But make sure to follow the "plus or minus one" rule for company dress. For example, if most people in the office wear button-up shirts, you might want to put on a blazer. If most people wear blazers, you might want to wear a suit. And so on.

SEE ALSO: 17 things every guy needs in his closet for summer

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 7 outdated fashion rules that men can now ignore

As sales people, we need to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes.

Organizationally, we need to understand their business, markets, industry, key strategies/drivers, key challenges, how things get done within the company, and more.

Individually, we need to understand what makes them tick, what they worry about, what their personal goals/ambitions are, how they are measured, how they spend their days, and more.

The better we are at connecting with them–where they are, the more effective we will be in identifying how our products and solutions might help them achieve their goals.

We want to be able to mirror their experience, sharing ideas and engaging them in relevant conversations about them and their organizations. The more we understand and can be empathetic, the more effective we will be in engaging them in meaningful ways.

But how do we do this? How do we do this fast?

Yes, experience helps. When I ran an organization that sold engineering and manufacturing systems, I used to hire people who had actually been design or manufacturing engineers but could sell. Their experience, having “been there/done that.” enabled them to engage their counterparts–our customers with greater credibility.

But we can’t afford to take the time to gain the insights of having been in those roles. As a young person, roughly 30 years ago, I was expected to call on “C” level executives, engaging them in conversations about how to improve their businesses–yet I had never had the experiences they had, or been in the roles they had been in (I don’t think being president of my college class counted as a “C” level job). How do we fast track our learning process? How do we compress years of experiences into much shorter periods of time?

Some thoughts—but the most critical requirements are incessant curiosity and a drive for constant learning:

1. Learn the industry! Subscribe to blogs, newsletters, magazines that your customers subscribe to. Ask them what they read, who they pay attention to, who they think are the “thought leaders” in their industries. If you can, attend some of their trade shows. Learn the structure of the industry, key participants, key issues, key threats. Learn their “language,” and how they measure themselves. For example, in semiconductors/electronic components, you won’t understand much until you understand Book/Bill. In retail, consumer products you need to understand inventory turns and profit per cubic foot (for stores). In telecom you have to understand what ARPU is, and in SaaS companies the same concept is ACV or ARR–but if you use ACV in telecom, you won’t connect. If you deal with aeronautical engineers, you will talk about aerodynamics, but the same concept in automotive body design is expressed by flow lines. But if you talk about flow lines to an aeronautical engineer, they will think you don’t understand them, you don’t care about what they care about. If you can’t talk your customer’s language and know how they measure success, you won’t connect with your customers.
2. Learn the companies you are working with, particularly if you are doing anything that’s account based. What are their goals, strategies, priorities? How are they perceived in the markets, how do their customers perceive them, how do their competitors perceive them? How are they organized and structured? How do they work and get things done? What’s their culture? What are their KPIs? What’s their performance? Are they leaders, laggards?
3. Talk to your customers’ customers. Find out why they buy your customers’ products, what they look for, what separates one supplier from another, how they create value with the customers. Understanding what drives your customers’ customers enables you to engage and create much better value with your customers.
4. It’s hard to understand things from your customer’s point of view if you’ve never been in the role. How can you understand the way “C” level people think/act if you’ve never been one? It’s actually much easier than you might think. Find every opportunity you can to meet these people with no agenda other then getting to know them, learn how they think, learn how they spend their days, learn what drives them in their roles. A great way to do this is look within your own company. Never met a CPO? Go meet the CPO in your own company. Spend time asking him about the role, how she prioritizes her time, how she is measured, how she establishes goals. Ask her questions, like, “What do you expect of a sales person who’s trying to reach you and arrange a meeting? Who do you respond to? What do you see great sales people doing when they meet with you?” Do the same thing for every key persona you are expected to call on. It’s in the self interest of the people holding those roles in your organization to spend time helping you understand those people better.
5. Go to some of your current customers, those you already have relationships with. Ask them, “Why did you buy from me? What was it that I/we did in the sales process that resonated with you?” They may be tempted to say you had the right solution at the right price, but probe them. Talk about their buying process and their perception of how you engaged them. What did they like, what didn’t they like? What have they seen others do that resonated with them? Go beyond the sales process talk about them and their role. What are their goals and ambitions? How do they spend their days? How is their performance measured? While it’s unfashionable, what keeps them awake at night? Understand them in their “role” in the company, as well as personally–as human beings.
6. Where you can, “hang out where your customers hang out.” When I sold to banks/brokerages in NYC, they hung out at place like Harry’s at Hanover Square. I’d go there, meet them, listen, learn, build relationships. The lessons I learned there, enabled me to engage my customers much more effectively. Today, many of your customers are “hanging out” in discussion groups or other online venues. Listen to the discussions, learn, ask questions.
7. If you are in sales enablement, help your sales people do these things at scale. Provide them playbooks, content, training, and tools to help them understand the industries, companies, and people. Try to get the stories and communicate them in a meaningful way. Something as simple as a “lunch and learn” with your own CFO helps your sales people better understand what drives CFOs. Give sales people the chance to ask the 10,000 questions they always wanted to ask CFOs but were afraid to ask. Make a video of the session and keep it available for people to review. Add interviews with key customers. Focus less on why they bought your products, but on who they are, what drives them, what they are trying to achieve.

This process never stops. Top performers have an insatiable curiosity about their customers–the markets/industries, the enterprises, the individuals.

One of the interesting by products of doing this is the perception of your customers. Learning about them, what drives them, how they work, how they get things done shows that you care. That’s often the most important thing to customers, just knowing that you care about them and their success.

Sometimes you think you’ve done all you can to increase engagement in your emails, but it’s just not working. And you may ask yourself, “What more can I do?” Changing how you write your emails can be the key to increasing engagement. Using more effective and persuasive words, you can push your subscribers to take action. The good news is you don’t have to be a copywriter to encourage more action in your emails. Chances are the most effective words to use in emails are words that you use everyday. [bctt tweet=”Chances are the most effective words to use in emails are words that you use everyday.”] There are 8 simple, yet effective words you can use to increase engagement in your next email. You can use these words strategically to inspire your subscribers to take action or develop good feelings about you and your brand. Read on to learn about these 8 words and how to use them in your emails.

1. Now

The word “now” is one of the most effective words to use in email, because it invokes action and urgency. It asks subscribers to do something right away, rather than putting it off until later. “Now” is a good word to use in your subject line to increase open rates. Or, include it in your call-to-action (CTA) button to increase click-through rates. However, when using this word in your emails, you want to make sure that subscribers understand what action they need to take. The next step should be clear since you’re asking them to do something immediately. You can achieve this by making your email focused on one specific outcome with one CTA, a top trend in B2B emails in 2017. Rifle Paper Co. utilizes the word “now” by incorporating it in the CTA button and focusing the email on one outcome: shopping for planners.

2. You/your

You can also make your emails more compelling by using the words “you” or “your” instead of speaking in the third person. “You” and “your” are effective because they give your message a personal feel. This viewpoint can make your subscriber feel like you’re speaking to them exclusively, rather than a group of people. We use second person in our emails, blog posts and ad copy. (It’s even in this blog post’s title!) This email from Sky Sports incorporates “you” and “your” to get subscribers excited for their own summer of sport. The email does a really great job of letting subscribers visualize the impact in their own lives.

3. Thanks

Thanking your subscribers is more important than you think. Not only does it add a human quality to your email, but it also builds brand loyalty. When subscribers know you appreciate them, they are more likely to have positive feelings toward you and your brand. Then, when they are ready to make a purchase, they may not remember why they like you, but they know you made them feel good at some point in the relationship. Not sure how to thank subscribers through email? Here’s an idea: send an email celebrating the anniversary of when they subscribed to your list. You can take this opportunity to thank them while also reminding them of their long-term loyalty. And there’s an easy way to do this with email automation! Just add your anniversary email to your follow-up series for 365 days after the first message. Here’s a great example of how Harry’s said thank you in an anniversary email.

4. New

The word “new” is a great word to give subscribers that extra push to download your content or buy your product. To subscribers, “new” can signify that the content offered in the email is fresh, and they have the opportunity to get it before others. It may also guarantee that the content was created with the most recent information. For example, if you are offering a download of a new industry report, subscribers want to know that the information found inside is up-to-date. “New” works especially well for sales emails when you are introducing a recent product that has just been released because it invokes excitement! Who doesn’t love something brand new and shiny?

5. Easy

Using the word “easy” in an email emphasizes to subscribers that what you’re asking is not difficult. Also, if you’re speaking to a beginner audience, it can alleviate worries about not being able to complete the task. For example, let’s imagine that you are a personal trainer and your audience doesn’t know how to get started with weightlifting. To make them feel more confident, you can assure them that your services or content make it easy to get started and begin seeing results. Check out this example email from Uber, which informs new customers that using the app is easy:

6. And

Try this in your next content offer email: phrase the offer in a way that makes subscribers think they’re getting a great deal by using “and.” Even when you have nothing else to give (or time to create more content), restructure the way you promote it to make it sound like a great deal! For example, we offer a guide called “What to Write in Your Emails” and when we promote this guide we often call it the “What to Write guide and 45+ email content templates.” The templates are a part of the guide, but by using “and,” we phrase it in a way that adds more value to the guide. Applying this principle, we sent out an email offering free content when subscribers signed up for an AWeber account. The email bundled two pieces of content using “and” to maximize the value of our offer:

7. Free

“Free” is one of the most persuasive words in the English language, and for good reason. Because who doesn’t love free stuff? It can get subscribers to take action, because there is no risk involved. It can also signal that the subscriber is saving money. For example, online retailers use this effectively when they offer free shipping on purchases.

8. [Insert name here]

Personalization is key in your emails. Not only does it help you connect with subscribers, but it also catches attention in the inbox and in the email itself. Consumer behavior research shows that when we hear our own name, it signals that important information will be directed at us. After all, it’s the first word we learn to read and write – even dogs and cats recognize their own name being called. Adding a subscriber’s name to an email can earn more engagement and trust from the subscriber reading the message. The email below from Simple uses the subscriber’s name in the headline to immediately catch his attention.

Notice any trends?

If you can’t fit these words into your emails in a logical way, use the principles behind these words to brainstorm your own! Here’s some guidelines to help you apply these principles to your own emails:

• Keep it short – The longest word of these eight is only six characters long (besides the subscriber’s first name). Use short words in your emails because they’re easier for your audience to read quickly.
• Make it easy to understand – All of these words are simple, one or two syllable words that are commonly used by anyone who speaks the English language. Avoid complex words and make it easy for your audience to understand your email.
• Be specific – When you use these words, there is no ambiguity about what they mean. Being simple and specific ensures that the message gets through to your subscribers – especially since you only have a few seconds to get their attention and make an impact.

Using these effective words in your next email

If you’re stuck on how to effectively use these words in your emails or you just don’t have time to write your emails, try the What to Write guide. It includes 45+ email content templates, already loaded with the most effective words to use in your messaging.

Many businesses begin with single-channel distribution. That sole channel could be a brick-and-mortar store or an e-commerce website. In either case, all sales flow through one outlet.

The advantage of a single-channel distribution management system is simplicity. There’s only one channel to manage, one channel to stock, and one channel to market to customers. As a business expands, however, the single-channel model can limit growth.

For example, a local coffee roaster may exhaust the supply of potential customers in a single market. By adding an e-commerce website with nearly unlimited reach, it could make its beans available to every coffee drinker in every city.

While that potential growth may be exciting, it can also be challenging. How will a local company compete with existing national retailers? How can it maintain the appropriate supply of beans to keep customers—near and far—happy?

Identifying and solving these issues can help ensure that a multi-channel distribution management system reaches its full potential.

The Definition of a Multi-Channel Distribution Management System

When distributing a product, each “channel” is an additional avenue to reach customers. Thus, multi-channel distribution management is a strategy to provide customers with multiple ways to purchase the same product.

A multi-channel distribution management system is the set of business processes that enable profitable, sustainable development of multiple distribution channels.

Many multi-channel distribution systems benefit from the support of technology. However, the “system” includes more than just software that supports the execution of a multi-channel strategy. It also includes strategic business planning to help shape the creation and improvement of that execution.

Why Some Businesses Opt for Multi-Channel Distribution

Given the potential challenges of managing a multi-channel distribution strategy, why do some businesses choose this more complex route? The simple answer is growth. However, while the long-term goal is the growth of sales, the near-term outcome may be the growth of a customer base or purchasing options.

These are common reasons why businesses shift to a multi-channel strategy:

In-store sales have peaked. Even for a popular brick-and-mortar location, there are limits to revenue. A store is open for a certain number of hours per day, can handle a certain number of customers, and can stock only a certain quantity of goods. These limitations hamper growth-focused businesses from expansion.

Customers want more purchasing options. The popularity of a brick-and-mortar store may also work against it. For example, a butcher shop may frustrate customers with long lines after the workday or over weekends. Providing a second channel like home delivery could give those same customers another, more convenient channel to get a steak or leg of lamb. This effort to create a seamless purchasing experience across all channels is known as omnichannel management.

Businesses want to reach new customers. This desire often provides the biggest opportunity for growth. The need to seek out new customers is what can turn a local brand into a regional or national one. Many fast-food franchises began as local brands before expanding their customer reach through the sale of individually-owned-and-operated stores throughout the country.

While each of these needs may inspire the development of a multi-channel strategy, all focus on increasing sales and revenue. A neighborhood shop may have no desire to expand its presence beyond the local community. But for companies with ambitious long-term goals, the decision to adopt a multi-channel strategy is usually a question of “when” not “if.”

Potential Challenges

Are there drawbacks to executing a multi-channel strategy? Certainly, there are potential challenges to the multi-channel management of a large, complex operation. If not handled properly, poor management can undermine certain channels or even the overarching business.

For example, channels may begin to compete with one another. An online store may prove so convenient for customers that foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar counterparts begins to dwindle. Professional sports teams also face this challenge. Many fans prefer the television viewing experience to attending a game in person. As a result, teams must work to improve the in-person experience to continue to fill billion-dollar arenas.

When consumers have multiple purchasing channels, maintaining a cohesive pricing structure presents another challenge. If an online sale is more profitable than one at a local store, should the prices for each channel reflect that difference? Local breweries sometimes charge more for a beer at the brewery—despite lower distribution costs—to protect their relationships with retailers, who sell most of their product. This decision may confuse or frustrate consumers who expect to save money by buying directly from the source.

How to Market a Multi-Channel Distribution System

To develop a successful multi-channel system, businesses must achieve multi-channel integration of elements beyond production and distribution. The marketing component is critical to identify the most valuable channels and build relationships with partners that play a role in product distribution.

Identify the right partners. Some businesses have multi-tiered distribution networks. A protein bar manufacturer may sell its product to a distributor, who then sells it to a grocery store chain. To maintain a successful multi-channel distribution program, each partner must benefit from the relationship. This requires businesses to detail the benefits to each partner clearly through a tailored marketing strategy.

Identify the right type of partnership. To develop a tailored marketing strategy, businesses need to consider the most valuable benefit they can provide to their multi-channel partners. This may be marketing materials that reinforce the value of the partnership, or informational content that helps a partner convince their partner to continue to support the product’s distribution. Some partner marketing materials even include training for end-of-line sales staff to help them inform potential customers.

Measure results effectively. The measurement of results can support multi-channel marketing in two ways. For one, it can help a business understand which channel partners are most valuable to the enterprise. That knowledge, in turn, can help allocate marketing resources to continue to build on the most lucrative partnerships.

Good measurement can also help a business show its partners how valuable the partnership is for both parties. For instance, if a business can tie a national television campaign to an increase in sales at a partner store, it helps demonstrate the value of its marketing efforts to the partner.

Multi-Channel Distribution Technology

Integrating the production, distribution, and marketing components of a multi-channel strategy is complex. While the right high-level strategy is necessary for success, so too is access to supporting technology to help manage it. Here’s why technology to integrate these components may well be critical:

Production. The accurate measurement of sales data can help ensure production aligns with sales potential. A marketing campaign that generates interest beyond a business’s capacity to fulfill that interest may cause consumer frustration and waste resources.

Distribution. To coordinate distribution, companies need to consider the entirety of the supply chain management. This may include delivery to centralized warehouses and storage prior to final distribution. Not surprisingly, the supply-chain management needs to align with production and marketing management. This coordination ensures goods can get to consumers when they want them and that production doesn’t outstrip demand.

Marketing. The coordination of marketing efforts often relies on a customer relationship management (CRM) system. A CRM can help a marketing team better understand which products consumers purchase and which marketing efforts are most successful. Robust CRM data can help predict potential production needs or the ideal location of products prior to the start of a new campaign.

Reaching the Full Potential of Multi-Channel Distribution

A multi-channel distribution management system is often a necessary step for continued business growth. That potential for growth is alluring but not without challenges. Multi-channel managers continue to report that reducing the costs of order fulfillment and improving overall distribution efficiency are at the top of their to-do lists.

These issues are not likely to disappear anytime soon. For most companies, multi-channel distribution management is an ongoing process to build efficiencies that make it easier for consumers to find, purchase, and receive their product.

The coordination of that effort involves information sharing across many business segments, including production, distribution, and marketing. As technology continues to evolve, managers can make better use of business data that helps all channels work together more effectively. Increased coordination, in turn, yields the sought-after benefit of a multi-channel strategy: increased sales.

The world is full of unique and interesting individuals. As a sales professional, it’s your job to master communication with each person you come into contact with, be it a straightforward CEO or a talkative and inquisitive VP of Sales. And you know better than most how difficult it can be to adjust to different personalities on the fly.

Luckily, there are common traits among buyers that can make adjusting your communication per individual much easier. Thanks to our partners at Crystal and their DISC profile analysis, we segmented these commonalities into specific personalities. This infographic explores seven personality types sellers deal with regularly, and tips to seal the deal with each.

Let’s take a look:

Want to learn more about engaging these seven different personalities?

The post 7 Buyer Personalities and How to Sell to Them [Infographic] appeared first on SalesLoft.

No matter how prepared you think you are for your presentation, objections can – and will – come up. Perhaps you missed something in your discovery, the prospect’s circumstances have changed, or new people are involved. While it’s impossible to prepare for every potential objection, the overwhelming majority of objections you will get during your presentation will fall into one of 5 common categories.

Preparing for these 5 common objections in your presentation can keep you from being blind-sided and increase your success rate.

5 Common Objections in your presentation

1. Price

This common objection comes in a variety of forms: “You’re too expensive,” “We don’t have room in the budget,” or “Your competitor is cheaper.” Regardless of the packaging, this objection appears on the surface to be all about price. And if you’re competing on price, you have made yourself a commodity.

The anecdote to competing on price is establishing value, however before you leap to respond, you need to dig a little further. Is it really about price? If so, what is your prospect basing his expectations on? Is he comparing apples to apples or apples to aardvarks? Does he have dated or inaccurate information? Get to the real root of the price objection in order to address it effectively.

2. Need

While the need for your product or service should be part of your qualification process, prospects may surprise you in your presentation with statements like, “I’m not sure we’d really use this” or “I guess it would be nice to have, but I can’t really justify it.” These are signs that you haven’t successfully connected your product or service to your prospect’s needs yet.

A needs-based objection requires you to take a step back and reconfirm your discovery findings with your prospect. If their needs have changed, you’d be wise to devote the remainder of your time to having a discovery session so you can uncover their current status and needs. Once you’ve identified a true need, either adjust your presentation on the fly (if time allows) or reschedule.

3. Status quo

Complacent prospects are frustrating. Their reasons for clinging to the status quo usually fall into one of 3 areas: 1) They can’t (or won’t) see how much better their current circumstances could be with your product or service. 2) They do see the potential, but simply don’t care enough (in which case, you are probably talking to the wrong person) Or 3) they are afraid of change.

Status quo buyers need to have a powerful reason to change. You must clearly define − and stress — the consequences of no change versus the positive impact of change.

Prospects who are afraid of change need reassurance that the risk is low and rewards great. People only walk through their fear if they are convinced that the rewards more than outweigh the risks. Fear is an emotional response however, and logic can only go so far. To effectively address fear you need to be able to provide social proof or shift their perspective. Click here for tips on how to sell against the Status Quo.

4. Feature or functionality

Many times prospects get hung up on the notion that they need a specific feature or capability — one that you don’t offer. Unless you know this feature is critical to their success (in which case, why are you there?) don’t get into a head to head battle about why your prospect doesn’t really need it. Dig deeper to uncover what your prospect thinks this feature will accomplish for him. Make a list of all must-have features with your prospect. If you can establish that the objection isn’t a deal breaker, you can often move past this potential sticking point and on to building a case around the features you do provide.

5. Timing

“This just isn’t the right time for us,” or “maybe next year” are disappointing things to hear any time during a sale, but particularly during your sales presentation. Timing is often a stall, which means you need to narrow down what the real objection is. Did they see value in your proposal? Are there concerns about price or implementation?

The best way to deal with a timing stall is to pre-empt it in discovery. When does the prospect need to have a solution in place? Is there a new regulation, a product sunset, or an internal deadline that your prospect needs to meet? If you’ve found this out and still get this objection during your presentation, stop and reconfirm that the prospect’s deadline still exists. If it does, explore what other solutions they have in mind and what happens if they miss this deadline.

You can’t prepare for every possible objection. Review your discovery notes to make sure you have a full list of potential objections. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and ask yourself what your concerns might be. If you do a little homework and have a strategy around handling these 5 common objections in your presentation (plus any unique to your industry or product) you will improve your chances of a successful outcome dramatically.

The key point to know about storytelling: a story isn’t the best way to leave a message for consumers to remember you. It’s the only way to do that.

In today’s world of content shock, with people drowning in a sea of marketing messages, how do you make them want to listen to you? Not listen – want to listen.

Forget the data, make a personal connection instead.

Tell them a story.

Source: One Spot

Why does it work?

People retain 70% of information through stories, but only 10% from data and statistics. That’s because we use only the language part of our brains to decode data, while a story activates brain areas responsible for experiences, too. In other words, when people read a sales story, they feel as if it truly happens. It gives an emotional response and makes them emphasize as well as remember your brand.

Psychology Today makes it clear:

• When evaluating brands, consumers use emotions (personal feelings) rather than information (attributes, features, and facts).
• Emotional response has far greater influence on our intent to buy a product than does content.
• Positive emotions have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments.

Long story short: storytelling is a must for creating emotional connections with your audience.

That’s all well and good but…

How many marketing blogs that reflect the fundamentals of great storytelling do you know? And how many marketing blogs actually talk about implementing storytelling elements to your digital copy?

The art of writing captivating brand stories is a challenge. It’s because storytellers understand the critical elements of fiction writing, whereas few marketers have these skills.

Let’s cut to the chase:

What do you know about wooden personas of storytelling?

Pinocchios of storytelling

They are fiction characters brands create to tell stories. Pinocchios are abstract, and their role is to substitute real people where needed.

Henneke Duistermaat does love using Pinocchios in her articles:

Source: Enchanting Marketing

Howard and Helen are wooden personas of storytelling here. Hannah and Heather live in the blog, too. So do Hans, Harvey, and Hunter. By the way, have you noticed all of them have names started with H? That’s not a mere coincidence. Share your guesses in the comments!

Why are they wooden?

Pinocchios aren’t real. Their role is simple: to help narrators fold information into the candy wrappers of a story. Rumor has it that people don’t trust wooden personas, which does harm to your marketing goals. What resuscitates Pinocchios is their infusion into honest and transparent details about your brand.

But even the most wooden persona is better than no persona at all. Bad though it is, Pinocchio helps to write a sales story. A top class would be creating a character that enables your consumers to emotionally connect and want to follow its acts.

But how to use Pinocchios to make people care?

A hero’s journey and anthropomorphism

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

― Paulo Coelho

So how many stories exist in brand storytelling?

Here’s the kicker: the critical elements of fiction writing are must-have here, as well.

You can’t simply write a story step-by-step. If believe you can, oh dear… Houston, we have a problem!

To get people hooked on your story, it should follow the principles of drama, with elements such as background, set-up, narrative arc, catastasis, and resolution. Otherwise it collapses.

It’s a classic storytelling technique known as monomyth (or, a hero’s journey), the old-as-Adam text structure that we find in folk tales, fiction books, and most Hollywood blockbusters from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings.

Declared by Joseph Campbell, a hero’s journey is a successful formula for profitable stories. Brands use it too, paraphrasing rather than plagiarizing one and the same plot: a hero (your target customer) has to leave home for a difficult journey, moves into unknown places, overcomes trials, and comes back home with a reward or wisdom.

Does this ring any bells?

The basic formula of monomyth is easier and faster to master than learning 1,462 plots by Wallace, 36 dramatic situations by Polti, seven plots by Booker, four types of stories by Borges (above-mentioned by Coelho), or even two plots by Aristotle (comedy and tragedy). Brands use this technique to bring their message alive for the audience, and it’s enough to achieve their marketing objectives.

Some struggle to stand out, applying anthropomorphism to their storytelling. In conjunction with monomyth, it works wonderfully!

It gave us MailChimp’s Freddie:

And Trello‘s Taco:

And now, for the most interesting part:

At least seven alternative ways to use monomyth in brand storytelling exist which, if used with all crucial elements in mind, allows your sales copy to stand out. And it leads your target audience to care and buy.

7 ways to use storytelling in sales copies

Let’s play a little:

Imagine two protagonists – Steve and Nick – and several supporting characters. Nick is a businessman: he sells pink elephants. Steve is a businessman, too: he has developed a system to assist entrepreneurs with sales. The benefits of this system are what we should disclose in a story.

Here’s how to deliver a sales story that captures the hearts and heads of our audience using seven storytelling techniques, other than the classic hero’s journey.

1) False start

Here you start telling a seemingly predictable story but then disrupt it suddenly and begin over again.

It’s a powerful technique to capture the audience into paying closer attention to your message.

Game of Thrones started as a solid but predictable story about Eddard Stark’s life and adventures. All plotlines led to him, and the audience got ready to watch Ned’s long way toward epic wins. And when a sword cut his head in the first season? An overwhelmed “wtf?” could be heard in 197 languages. The world went “wow,” and didn’t believe it!

Today, millions are addictive to the series.

How to use it in brand storytelling?

This technique is appropriate for telling about failures, lessons learned from that experience, and innovative ways you used to solve business problems.

Here’s the example of a false start story with our Nick as a protagonist:

2) In media res (in the middle)

Start telling a story with its catastasis (the dramatic middle). This trick allows to grab the audience and keep them craving resolution. People feel something interesting happens, and they need to be attentive to understand what it is.

As a narrator, you should be careful: don’t show all the aces at once. Let readers go deeper into the story and they won’t leave you until the end.

Nick’s “in media res” story could be as follows:

3) Nest (Frame)

Interlace several narratives into one story with your core message in the center. This lets you explain the concept by analogy and give steps on your way to the conclusion.

An example of one such stories is One Thousand and One Nights. Shahryār’s castle is a frame (nest) with Scheherazade’s tales interlacing into it.

Another “nest” is the film 12 Angry Men. Inside a frame of deliberation are personal stories of twelve men, determining their choice as part of the central concept.

How to use this technique for marketing goals? Let’s try:

4) Chamomile

Tell several stories divorced from each other, linked to one central concept. Doesn’t it remind you of a chamomile flower with many petals around one stem?

This storytelling technique works at conferences, where several speakers tell their stories united by one core topic. Use “chamomile” in your sales copy to build evidence around a single message, and demonstrate its importance and weight to the audience.

It’s also great for creating emotional impressions around your idea, or demonstrating how several scenarios relate back to it.

That’s how this storytelling technique works for Steve’s brand:

5) Sparklines

Contrast two stories here – “what is” and “what could be.” This allows a narrator to draw attention to business problems, and fuels a desire for change.

“Sparkline” is a favorite technique of advertisers because it’s visual and highly emotional. It motivates the audience to support you and inspires them to action.

Let’s use the example of two businessmen – Nick and Dan. Dan uses Steve’s system, and Nick… does not.

6) Unhappy end

This one looks like a monomyth without a happy ending, but still ends in hope. It’s a way of mapping drama to your story: a hero meets challenges, risks and fails, but his struggle isn’t in vain. The hero gains knowledge and wisdom crucial for his victory “behind the scenes.”

Use this technique to tell how your brand overcame challenges on its way to a satisfying conclusion.

7) Junction

This storytelling technique is similar to nest, but here you don’t frame the story with additional ones – you tell several equally important stories leading readers to a single conclusion.

Marketers use this trick to talk about partnerships, show how great minds come together, or demonstrate how their business development occurred.

The best example of this technique is the story of web developers Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Herre’s what it would look for our wooden persona Steve:

Don’t write, tell…

So here you have seven different ways to tell one story, and it’s up to you to decide which one works best for your brand. To create irresistible content series and surround consumers with brand experiences, give them multiple ways to enjoy your hero’s journey.

A story is a language your audience speaks.

Whatever storytelling technique you choose, it works when used wisely. Remember that the core of every story is its subject matter and benefit. Find the drama, reach out to emotions, engage your audience, and you’ll move closer to achieving your brand marketing goals.

What storytelling technique do you use, if any? Do you consider wooden personas for creating a sales copy? Which variant of a hero’s journey, from above-mentioned, could work for the story of your brand?

While entrepreneurs now have more opportunities to start their own business ventures due to the internet, the main rule of wealth-building still remains the same: Let your money work for you by unlocking multiple streams of passive income.

In the digital world, this can be achieved in multiple ways.

You can build a blog that generates ad revenue, self-publish eBooks on marketplaces like Kindle, or create affiliate websites that passively earn commissions.

Out of all your options, building a full-fledged e-commerce store will quite possibly be the ones to give you the heebie-jeebies. After you research your market and acquire the funding, you need to be prepared for all the heavy lifting that ensues — from online marketing to inventory management.

Is it challenging?

Absolutely.

Is it easy to pull off?

Of course, not.

Is it rewarding, though?

You betcha!

If you’re looking to start your own ecommerce business but you’re hesitant to jump the bandwagon due to whatever limitations you find yourself in, then allow me to share with you five unbelievable ecommerce success stories that will inspire you to pull the trigger.

If you’re ready to be inspired, then read on.

1. Robert Nava – National Parks Depot

One of the biggest advantages of online entrepreneurship is it doesn’t matter who you are or what you did in the past.

All that matters is what you do after you made the decision to enter your chosen industry.

From age 11 to 27, Robert Nava spent most of his time in correctional facilities.

He was convicted for various crimes and had severe problems with illegal drug use.

As an ex-felon, Nava admits that there’s this inner, burning desire for acknowledgment which drove him to pursue multiple business ventures after being released from the California State Prison in 2007.

After numerous failures, he finally achieved success with National Parks Depot — now a major online store that sells outdoor gear.

For Nava, success came just at the right moment.

While his family struggled to make ends meet, he tried his hand at online selling through a modest Facebook page.

Nava built his social presence by selling custom shirts and posting photos of national parks all over the world.

Eventually, he tried drop shipping to access products he didn’t already have.

Since Nava didn’t have a sizeable enough Facebook followers, he ventured into Facebook ads.

However, because his finances were at rock bottom (in fact, he couldn’t even pay his rent), he decided to start with a small budget.

He invested $60 for the paid ad and waited to see how much he’d get in return, or if it’d even bring him profit at all.

To his surprise, his $60 ad budget made him $1000 on sales just on the first day.

He then doubled his budget on the second day which also resulted on his sales almost doubling as well.

Just by rinsing and repeating the strategy, his business skyrocketed in a month.

2. Morgen Newman & Casey Elsass – MixedMade

When online entrepreneurs get stuck in the product research phase, the 3-step game plan that they often use to help them get out of the rut is this:

Step 1: Recognize their audiences’ problems.

Step 2: Look for existing solutions.

Step 3: Create a product that’s far better than their competitors.

Entrepreneurs Morgen Newman and Casey Elsass proved that sometimes, you don’t need to dig too deep for a product idea that sells.

Just by infusing raw honey with chili flakes, then branding the product as MixedMade, they managed to generate $170,000in sales within 10 months.

After their initial success, they continued to expand their product line by exploring different, unique flavor combinations.

Today, Newman and Elsass’ company is now known as Bushwick Kitchen.

A huge part of MixedMade’s success is their extensive press coverage which directly resulted in a 2,200% growth in sales.

This was all thanks to Casey’s effort in relentlessly pursuing every press target they had in their sights.

While their situation may come off as an entrepreneur’s dream for a lot of people, they didn’t achieve the level of success that they attained without any challenges.

For one thing, PayPal froze MixedMade’s account at one point as a fraud-prevention measure due to the sudden increase in their sales volume.

They also faced shortage issues from their bottle and chili suppliers.

Despite the immense pressure, the pair remained unfazed and focused on solving one problem at a time.

As an e-commerce brand, there are several things you can do to prepare your online store from similar situations. Diversifying your payment options is an easy example. Using credit card processing services like North American Bancard will allow you to accept payments via Visa, Discover, MasterCard, Amex, and even Paypal.

When you have several means to receive and process payments, you’ll have multiple safety nets in place in the event that one payment option becomes problematic.

This means that your ecommerce operation can continue unhampered.

Having more than one supplier of a key product component is also a great way to prepare for sudden spikes, which is what Newman and Elsass did after experiencing bottle shortages.

3. Andy Dunn – Bonobos

Now that you know the dangers of unplanned growth — it’s time to emphasize the value of growing slowly, steadily, and surely.

Andy Dunn learned this the hard way with his apparel online store called Bonobos.

In his desire for faster growth, the company offered up to 60% off and blasted newsletters to their leads.

It was a good effort, but their website couldn’t accommodate the increased traffic. This led to droves of consumer complaints that forced them to temporarily take down the site until the issues were fixed.

The moral of the story is simple: Don’t bite off way more than you can chew.

Before you run marketing campaigns that will skyrocket your website’s traffic, make sure your website can handle the increased volume, and that you have the capacity to convert your web visitors into sales — not just by ensuring that your supplies last, but also by upgrading your web hosting solution.

Fortunately, most modern web hosting companies like Bluehost and HostGator make plan upgrades easy.

Major ecommerce platforms like Shopify also offer CDN hosting capabilities to their partners.

4. Jake Nickell – Threadless

As a new-age entrepreneur, you need to have an adaptive mindset when it comes to new technology. This is the brand-building secret of Jake Nickell — founder of Threadless.

In an interview, Nickell reveals that he is the 1,500th user ever to register on Twitter. He also claims that Threadless is one of the first brands to reach hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

It all started when Nickell, along with partner Jacob DeHart, launched t-shirt design contests on a website called Dreamless.org.

The duo encouraged other users to share their designs through the site, printed the best ones, and then sold the shirts for profits.

Their process was so simple and replicable, Nickell and DeHart launched an official Threadless website right after the first batch of t-shirts was printed.

After independent artists submit their t-shirt designs, the crowd decides which one gets printed and sold through the site. The original designer then earns a commission for each sale.

In other words, Threadless is not your average e-commerce store.

It’s also a community-driven website that bridges the gap between artists and consumers. Still, online entrepreneurs can learn a number of things from their success.

If you want to get ahead of the competition, then you need to be vigilant about the new trends and technologies. Optimizing your online store for mobile devices, for example, is a great way to leverage the current dominance of smartphones, convertible laptops, and tablets.

You should also give your audience a voice and let them help you in shaping the identity of your brand. Threadless embraces this as a component of their core platform. Other ecommerce companies can do the same by staying open to customer reviews and feedback.

5. Michael Dubin – Dollar Shave Club

Sometimes, it’s not about what the product does — it’s about the convenience.

Dollar Shave Club, founded by Michael Dubin, embraces the fact that shaving isn’t supposed to be complicated, and so should shaving products.

Dollar Shave Club built their brand by offering a one-dollar subscription service where customers receive high-quality razors monthly. However, they have since repriced their services to $5 with a few inclusions, from shaving butters to body cleansers.

Sure, $1 or $5 for your shaving needs is indeed a great value, but it’s not the reason why Dollar Shave Club is such a huge success.

It’s all thanks to Michael Dubin himself and his creative and humorous promotional video.

Let’s face it, most niches today are too saturated to be profitable for aspiring entrepreneurs. Without a unique identity to distinguish your brand from the competition, it will be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to get your target market’s attention.

The moment Dubin found a voice that works for Dollar Shave Club, they integrated it into every element of their site.

In 2016, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for a whopping $1 billion while retaining Michael Dubin as its CEO.

Conclusion

For those who are still pursuing success in the ecommerce space, it’s always helpful to draw inspiration from those who already made it big.

After all, the more success stories they come across, the more motivated they become at turning their dreams into reality.

Is there an ecommerce success story that you’d like to share? If you answered with a “yes,” then please add them in the comments section below. Cheers!

Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative is part and parcel of President Xi Jinping’s strategy to solidify China’s emergence as a great economic and military power, a leading expert on Asian economies said Wednesday.

In May, 2017, China’s President Xi Jinping has pledged $124 billion (£96bn) for the scheme, known as the Belt and Road initiative.

China will funnel an additional RMB 100 billion ($14.5 billion) into the Silk Road Fund, while the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank will set up new lending schemes of 250 billion ($36.2 billion) and RMB 130 billion ($18.8 billion), respectively, for Belt and Road projects. In addition, China will provide RMB 60 billion ($8.7 billion) for humanitarian efforts focused on food, housing, health care, and poverty alleviation. A second Belt and Road Forum will be hosted in 2019.

The current high profile projects are the building of Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway, China-Laos railway, Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, and Hungary-Serbia railway, and upgraded Gwadar and Piraeus ports in cooperation with relevant countries. More than 270 cooperation projects or agreements have been signed during the May 2017 summit.

Nadege Rolland, of the National Bureau of Asian Research said Xi’s vision and strategy “is not a new thing” in Chinese history or to the West, but it is more tightly integrated to meet the challenges of a digital world, to shore up its economy from the severe downturn of 2008-2009 and expand its markets into new territories, especially Europe.

The goal is to have China as “the uncontested leading presence in the region,” an idea for a strategy that defines “region” as extending far beyond its borders. The Chinese also would be “using that [new] wealth to attract more foreigners [to invest with them] and expand power and influence” globally.

Rolland said Europe, including the European Union, is interested in what China has to offer, particularly through its “Digital Silk Road” moves, and appears to be willing to work with Beijing on developing joint standards in cyber use and control.

As for Russia, “China believes cooperation is very good because they have common interests,” particularly in Central Asia economically and Beijing is “not stepping into [Moscow’s] sphere of influence” when it comes to large security issues.

India “is the only country [on China’s borders] refusing to endorse Belt and Road” and its development and infrastructure bank. India, long suspicious of Beijing’s support of its bitter rival Pakistan and concerned over its building of ports in a number of nations on the Indian Ocean, “is starting to work … with Japan” on infrastructure projects outside its borders.