Rnordman

SEO can be painful… Very painful.

In 2013, I started executing SEO for a website called LifeCoachSpotter.com. The goal? To generate leads for life coaches who want more paying clients.

Just publish a ton of blog posts and we’re all set, right? “Build it and they will come.”

Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

We launched the site with 50 well-written blog posts, which was no small feat…but the result?

Zero traffic.

How to Achieve Zero Impact SEO Results

The complexity, depth, and multi-disciplinary nature of SEO makes it seemingly impossible to succeed. Google’s algorithm is a mysterious and well-guarded blackbox. Confusion ensues.

When I was working on SEO for Life Coach Spotter, I read and followed everything Rand Fishkin and other SEO gurus advised.

Props to Rand, I love him to death and his advice is top-notch.

However, 90% of the SEO tactics and tips I’d learned just didn’t move the needle.

I experienced the pain of non-stop hustle with nothing to show for it first-hand. I received garbage advice like:

• use keywords in your image alt text
• watch the ratio of follow to nofollow backlinks
• be mindful of the ratio of text to HTML
• optimize your image file names

These factors have zero impact on SEO. Ignore them at all costs if you care about growth.

When you’re focusing on growth and hacking your way to success, you ain’t got time for things that don’t work.

But when you’re clueless ‒ you’ll test out anything and quickly start to learn everything that doesn’t work; a process of elimination.

I tested out dozens of strategies.

Beautiful ideas like broken link-building, guest posting, and far worse tactics like link-building on forums and blog comments.

These well-known, don’t-move-the-needle tactics are your worst possible SEO investment. Stay far away from them.

So what actually moves the needle on your SEO?

From 0 to 20,000 Organic Search Visitors/Month

I knew I was onto something when I saw a 381% increase in overall organic traffic over a 5 month period. This came much later, in 2016, after I had already spent the first 3 years executing everything else that didn’t move the needle.

During this 5-month time period ‒ of a 4x increase in organic search traffic ‒ I tested over 8 ideas, but I ultimately attribute these results to only 2 things:

1. well-optimized comprehensive content guides
2. link-earning campaigns like this infographic (which is always predicated on outreach)

Here’s a snapshot of what that content creation campaign looks like:

73,647 Words of Optimized, Targeted SEO Content

But wait, it gets better.

Right after that, I tested out a new .edu link-building strategy. It’s called “The Scholarship Strategy” and it has been lovingly documented here.

The results?

Another 538% Increase in Organic Traffic in Just Two Months

That’s a 538% increase after the 381% increase.

In May of 2016, the site’s organic search traffic was 2,147 for the month.

By March of 2017, it was 20,273 for the month.

An 844% increase in organic search traffic.

A substantial breakthrough from the previous 3 years.

Ah-ha!

Real, battle-tested proof of what actually drives results for SEO.

Do you want to know what it is?

1. Referring Domains
2. Content
3. Optimization

If you want to drive substantial results for SEO for your site, don’t take any of these lightly. Let’s dive deeply into each one.

Your 3-Step Game Plan to Blow Up Your SEO

1. Referring Domains: Get Quality and Quantity

While everyone and their grandmother is talking about backlinks, you and I should be talking about referring domains.

What’s a referring domain?

A referring domain is a website that links to your website.

It allows Google to group your friend’s website that is linking to you 20 times as only one referring domain vs 20 backlinks.

Google is smart.

It’s much harder to get 20 referring domains to your website than it is to get 20 backlinks all from one website to your website.

So Google’s ranking algorithm weights this accordingly.

In fact, as of today, Google weights referring domains so heavily, that from all of my experiments, I believe without a shadow of a doubt that referring domains is the most heavily weighted ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

“The holy grail of SEO.”

There are at least 4 important aspects to referring domains. They are:

1. the quantity of them
2. domain authority
3. trust flow
4. relevance

I know from my experience that the Trust Flow of referring domains is an important metric. My .edu link-building strategy did little in terms of relevant or quantity of referring domains (it was only a dozen or so .edu backlinks). The Trust Flow of universities, however, is nothing to sneeze at!

2. Content: No More Blog Posts!

Every content marketer has a different name for the same exact thing:

• The Skyscraper Technique
• 10x Content
• Write Epic Sh*t
• Cornerstone Content

Each of these SEO content philosophies is the same basic idea, just rebirthed with a new name.

Write phenomenal content that meets the following criteria, and you have a much higher chance of ranking that page:

• long (3,000-12,000 words long)
• very well-written and high-quality
• useful, helpful, and answers common questions
• authoritative
• actionable
• unique
• engaging

Fun to talk about. Hard to do. Ask any content marketer.

In short, you want to write a comprehensive content guide that crushes all of the other competing 500-word or 1,000-word blog posts out there on the topic.

Longer content is positively correlated with higher rankings.

The Number of Blog Posts Published Via WordPress Every Month

Every month on WordPress, 80 million blog posts are getting published.

Do you really want to compete with that?

Let me be the first to tell you: Blog posting for SEO stinks! And here’s why:

1. Blog posts are relatively short.
2. Blog posts are dated. (Ugh!)
3. Blog posts might only target 1-4 keywords.
4. Blog posts can cover the same exact topic multiple times.
5. Blog posts dilute your internal backlinking efforts.
6. Blog posts dilute your link-building efforts from external sites.
7. Blog posts have to constantly be written.
8. Blog posts have less dwell time since they’re shorter.
9. Blog posts are less authoritative.
10. Everyone else is doing them.

Nuff said.

I think I’ve made my case here.

On the other hand, the comprehensive content guide:

1. is long
2. is evergreen
3. can be optimized for dozens of related keywords
4. is heavily focused on one topic
5. allows you to focus your internal linking efforts
6. allows you to focus your external link-building
7. needs to be written only once
8. has longer dwell time which increases conversions and brand awareness
9. is naturally authoritative
10. has a much higher barrier to entry; gives you a competitive advantage

You only have so much budget and time to produce your onsite content. So focus your resources properly for the highest ROI.

Go big or go home.

3. Optimization: Dozens of Keywords in One Article

Your keywords need to be grouped by topic, and then prioritized and organized.

Once your keywords are grouped by topic, you need to plan out your content outline based on the subtopics within that keyword group.

Headers should be high-volume keywords. Synonyms and keyword variations should be used naturally and normally throughout the text. Keyword phrases should be given careful attention, as the same phrase can pop up a handful of times in different keywords.

Be natural. Stay cool.

Don’t start keyword stuffing.

Use that keyword a minimum of one time and if it happens to arise more naturally, let it.

That’s it. Let Google figure out the rest. (Afterall, Google is way smarter than you and I). Long-tail phrases should arise normally in your body text.

The point is, Google still heavily depends upon you using those keywords and phrases to consider that page very relevant and rank-worthy for that query. So you have to optimize with the actual keywords in there. If you don’t, you risk not having that page rank for your coveted keywords.

So you have to optimize with the actual keywords in there. If you don’t, you risk not having that page rank for your coveted keywords.

If you don’t, you risk not having that page rank for your coveted keywords.

The 4 most important places to optimize your comprehensive content guide (or any piece of content):

• title tag
• url slug
• header tags
• body text

I don’t know why the old school SEOs are still obsessed with H1 tags. If it’s any header tag (H2, H3, H4) or in the body text, Google gives it more than enough consideration.

How to 10x Your SEO Right Now

So now you know the only 3 high-impact ranking factors in Google’s algorithm that you need to crush. Let me repeat them for you again:

1. Referring Domains
2. Content
3. Optimization

Now what?

Let’s go through each of the nitty gritty tactics we need to implement.

Part 1: Keyword Research for Optimization and Content

The juiciest part of keyword research that 90% of businesses miss is this:

You need to group your keywords together by topic.

That’s it. You need to group all of those variations of your keywords based on the related theme that runs through them all. Here’s a concrete example:

You need to group all of those variations of your keywords based on the related theme that runs through them all. Here’s a concrete example:

Here’s a concrete example:

• toddler bath toys
• kids bath toys
• best bath toys
• bath toys for babies
• how to clean bath toys
• bath toys for 1 year old
• bath toys for 3-year-olds
• best bath toys for toddlers
• cool bath toys
• bath tub toys

Do you see what everybody is missing with their “keyword research”?

It’s not about the actual research, it’s about how we organize and implement our findings.

We have a dozen variations of [bath] + [toys].

All of these queries are ultimately looking for very similar or related information about bath toys.

To be honest, the full list I have for this keyword group is 150 keywords long!

Imagine your piece of power-content that is optimized and addressing all of the variations, phrases, and user intent just around bath toys.

Imagine if you wrote that piece of content but forgot to mention a simple word like “toddler”, “1-year-old”, or “cool bath toys”.

Your thoroughness pays off in spades.

To find all of your keywords and then group them is not a straightforward process, though I have systematized it.

The first step is simply collecting all of the keywords around all of your topics from as many different sources as you can find.

Here’s my top 10 list of sources for collecting keywords:

1. Import previous keyword research.
2. Import keywords from Google Analytics/Webmaster Tools.
3. “Get Ideas” from Google Keyword Planner from landing page.
4. Check and import the keywords that your site is already ranking for
5. Check and import keywords that 3-6 competitors are already ranking for.
6. “Get Ideas” from competitors’ landing pages in Google Keyword Planner.
7. Check competitors’ meta keywords.
8. Manually brainstorm a list of ideas and use Google Keyword Planner to “Get Ideas”.
9. Get keyword suggestions from Ahrefs, SEMrush, and more.
10. Any other sources available.

Once you’ve collected keywords from all of these sources, you should have over 2,000 keywords. Next, you need to filter them, remove duplicates, and remove negative keywords.

From here, we have to group them.

I’ve been hacking together tools like this beautiful Word Frequency Counter to see which words and phrases are the most recurring.

Once we’ve found 20-60 recurring words, phrases, or themes we need to label each keyword as having that word stem or not.

To this end, I’m using another hackerific method in Google Sheets with this formula: =IF(RegExMatch(A1,”keyword”),”YES”,”NO”). If the keyword contains that word stem, then it will get labeled appropriately in another column of our spreadsheet with a “YES” or a “NO”. Lovely.

If the keyword contains that word stem, then it will get labeled appropriately in another column of our spreadsheet with a “YES” or a “NO”. Lovely.

Next, sort and organize the keywords by the words they contain and start breaking them apart into groups.

Now that you’ve grouped your keywords together, the next thing we need to do is plan content around these keywords.

In a nutshell, you want to create an outline for your comprehensive content guide based around the highest volume keywords within that group, as well as phrases. You want to include these higher volume keywords in many of the bullet points of your outline (which will become your H1, H2, and H3 tags). For example, the keyword “best bath toys” will become “The Best Bath Toys for Your Child” or “The Best Bath Toys For a Fun Bath”. You want to use your keywords naturally.

For example, the keyword “best bath toys” will become “The Best Bath Toys for Your Child” or “The Best Bath Toys For a Fun Bath”. You want to use your keywords naturally.

You want to use your keywords naturally.

Once your content is planned, go ahead and start writing. We’re aiming for a colossal piece of content like the one the magnificent Dmitry Dragilev (who I met at the Growth Marketing Conference) has documented here. I think that 3,000-12,000 words usually does the job pretty nicely.

I think that 3,000-12,000 words usually does the job pretty nicely.

And the beautiful thing is, our content is already optimized! We already optimized it when we created the outline. Now that you’ve finished writing it, go back and drop in any keywords where appropriate. For example, if you used the word “bath toys” at one point, you might want to work that into the keyword “cool bath toys” or “bath toys for a 1-year-old”. Good. Now our long-tail keywords are getting incorporated too.

Now that you’ve finished writing it, go back and drop in any keywords where appropriate. For example, if you used the word “bath toys” at one point, you might want to work that into the keyword “cool bath toys” or “bath toys for a 1-year-old”. Good. Now our long-tail keywords are getting incorporated too.

For example, if you used the word “bath toys” at one point, you might want to work that into the keyword “cool bath toys” or “bath toys for a 1-year-old”. Good. Now our long-tail keywords are getting incorporated too.

Good. Now our long-tail keywords are getting incorporated too.

Part 2: Link-Earning

Now that your on-page SEO is ship shape, let’s go ahead and start getting those all-powerful backlinks (I mean… referring domains) to your website.

This is where most people get stuck.

Look, when it comes to link-earning, you can choose from over a dozen different strategies to pursue. 80% of the strategies out there won’t get you high-impact results.

Let’s just focus on the high-impact strategies that drive real results and forget the rest. Cool?

Link-Earning Campaign Criteria

For link-earning to be effective, it has to meet a few criteria.

First, we want our backlinks to come from websites that are authoritative, trustworthy, high-quality, and relevant (if possible).

Second, we want our links to be earned “editorial links”. If you can just go onto another site and put the links in there yourself, you really don’t have a competitive advantage, do you? Any link that is truly earned means that you rightfully deserve the link because another writer, editor, or webmaster has put it there because your content is worthy of it.

These links have a higher barrier to entry, so it will keep your competitors away.

Third, we want to put our content in front of the right targeted influencers or authorities who are likely to link to it.

There’s no point in mass emailing 100 people if only 10 would truly be interested in it. We execute targeted outreach to put the right content in front of the right people.

Create real value and share it directly with the right people and you’ll be earning backlinks.

There are no shortcuts.

Strategy #1: Original Research

This approach is my favorite and I learned it second-hand from an agency called Fractl. All we’re essentially doing is executing original research and then presenting the data and telling the news media about it.

Why’s it so powerful?

When you are the source of the research, you are the source for citation, and how do people cite sources on the web?

With a backlink!

You want to be the citation and be the reference because that naturally earns you backlinks. To see what I mean, take a look at this case study or any of Fractl’s other case studies to get a real feel for this.

In essence, you’re going to

1. perform original research (a survey, internal company data, or curate existing data)
2. present your findings (interactive data visualization, charts, infographics)
3. pitch it to the media (digital PR and outreach)

Strategy #2: Interactive Data Visualization

While infographics have gotten worn out over the years, interactive data visualizations are super-engaging and a powerful opportunity for link-earning today.

Here are some lovely examples to take a look at:

• Here is Today
• Is It Better to Rent Or Buy?
• World’s Biggest Data Breaches & Hacks
• NBA Top Draft Picks vs Top Performers

While admittedly, making an interactive data visualization is far from easy, it gives you a highly competitive barrier to entry. Since a significant amount of resources (investment, time, focus) go into making one, it means your competitors are likely to shy away from doing it, allowing you stand out from the crowd.

Take a look at the Out of Sight, Out of Mind campaign, which documents the number of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan in a very visually captivating way.

What kind of results did they get?

1,220 referring domains!

When was the last time your backlinking campaign got you that?

Remember, to execute this effectively you must do outreach!

Strategy #3: An Industry Report

A state of the industry report or white paper not only makes you the source for citations (ie. backlinks), but also naturally positions you as the authority within your industry ‒ a lovely side benefit of your link-earning campaign.

Here’s just one example for you to mull over. This industry report from Social Media Examiner is 50 pages long!

Eke! Sounds like quite a bit of work, doesn’t it? Nobody ever said results-driven SEO was easy.

All I’m suggesting is that if you want to move the needle, you have to invest the resources.

Just take a look at their results:

Imagine what this will do for your website’s SEO.

Strategy #4: A Tool

When you make a free, online tool that is useful and valuable to people, we all naturally want to link to it because it’s valuable and useful.

Just like in the previous examples, this is not overnight link-building magic.

More like a ton of Gary Vee-style hustle and hard work.

If you consider the SEO value of creating such a valuable asset, it’s priceless.

Here’s an example for you to play with from SmartAsset. While “mortgage calculator” is a highly competitive search term and dominated by big corporations, this free little online tool from SmartAsset earned them 483 referring domains!

You’re not going to see this kind of ROI with those old and stale tactics like broken link-building.

Think again.

Moving the Needle On Your SEO

Just like any other marketing channel ‒ whether it’s video marketing, Facebook Ads, or something else ‒ SEO takes a large investment of resources in order to get breakthrough results.

Where and how you choose to focus your investment resources determines your ultimate ROI.

The real scary/crazy thing about SEO is that it’s so long-term, you can’t run tests quickly.

It can take anywhere from 1 to 6 months to get the results from your experiment.

In other marketing channels, you can test out paid traffic today and see the results right now.

With SEO, we have to follow a long and treacherous process that includes:

• research
• content creation
• outreach
• link-earning
• getting your backlinks crawled by Google
• having those backlinks factored into rankings in the SERPs
• tracking and reviewing the ranking positions and traffic

Despite all of this, the return on investment for SEO is absurdly high for your business.

Afterall, recurring monthly traffic drives recurring monthly revenue (or recurring monthly revenue growth).

Moreover, when your prospective customers are inbound, targeted, and have already learned about your product or service from your website ‒ your business will have found its golden goose.

With high rewards comes quite a hustle and grind to get on Google’s radar and get your business’s website to the bottom of page 1.

After all, you have to deserve to be there. You better start crackin’ on your SEO today so that 6 months from now you’ll have something to show for it!

If you think it’s hard to sell, you might want to spare a thought for your potential customers: depending on which research you look at, the majority (around 2-in-3) of their buying decision processes end with them deciding to do nothing at all, and sticking with the status quo.

There is, of course, a connection between our challenges as sales people and our prospective customers’ challenges in reaching a consensus about whether they really need to change and, if so, what they need to change to and which solution represents their best available option.

If you’re determined to do a better job of assessing and influencing your prospect’s intentions, here are 4 key things you need to know about how buying decisions are actually made…

1: Status Quo Bias

According to research into buying behaviours by the Nobel-prize winning behavioural economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman and referred to in a range of publications including the “Three Value Conversations”, if your customers lack a compelling reason to change, they are likely to decide to stick with the status quo.

This is closely connected with a concept that I introduced in an earlier article: the pyramid of pain. Whilst interesting needs may to set off an investigation, and whilst important needs are likely to trigger a detailed investigation, only truly critical needs are guaranteed to force an organisation into action.

The implication for sales: if, as I do, you see sales as fundamentally an exercise in change management, then we must carefully assess whether our customer’s current pains are so significant that they outweigh the risks that are always associated with any new initiative.

If they are not currently significant enough to drive action, then we need to see whether we can amplify the pain by introducing previously unconsidered implications that make action inevitable. Our goal must be to get the prospect to the point where they believe that the pain of same significantly outweighs the pain of change.

2: Loss Aversion

On a closely related topic, Kahneman also discovered through a series of cleverly designed experiments that people (and by extension the organisations they work for) are twice as strongly motivated by the drive to avoid a loss as they are by the opportunity to achieve a gain.

In other words, the fear of failure is much more powerful in these circumstances than the hope of success. This finding, in particular, challenges conventional sales behaviours that typically seem focused on promoting a positive vision of the future rather than helping the customer to see the risks in where they are today.

The implication for sales: we’ve got to get used to spending much more time deeply diagnosing and exploring our customer’s current situation and developing the consequences and risks of inaction before we give in to the temptation to promote our solution and the benefits it could bring to the customer.

If we can then connect the negative consequences of sticking with the status quo with the positive benefits of adopting our solution, and if we help them to build the case for change, we will find ourselves in a much better situation than we would if we give in to the “itch to pitch” at the first possible opportunity.

3: More decision-makers = fewer decisions

Many observers have acknowledged the growing trend towards consensus-led buying strategies that inevitably involve many more stakeholders. The authors of “The Challenger Customer” now estimate that there are, on average, 6.8 actively involved members of the decision team in a typical complex B2B purchase.

More worryingly from the sales person’s perspective, their research has also shown that the probability of a successful outcome to the buying process drops from around 80% when a single decision maker is involved to around 30% when there are six or more members of the decision team.

The implication for sales: If fewer than 1-in-3 typical complex buying decision processes result in a clear decision to buy anything, then we clearly need to do a better job of helping to facilitate the customer’s buying decision process and playing our part in identifying and eliminating the many obstacles that could lie in the way.

It is foolishly dangerous to assume that our customers know how to buy, and it is critically important that we work through and with a pro-active change agent (the authors of the Challenger Customer use the term Mobiliser®) on the customer’s side who is capable of steering the internal buying process to a successful conclusion.

4: No differentiation = safest choice

“Me-too” marketing and “thought leadership” materials that are nothing of the sort aren’t helping the cause, either: if prospects cannot differentiate between their solution options in a meaningful way, they will default to the safest choice - which, if it isn’t “do nothing”, is likely to be either the lowest cost offer or most recognisable brand.

If we are neither the lowest cost option nor the most established brand in the space (and, let’s face it, most times we won’t be either), then we had better make sure that we are seen to be clearly and positively differentiated from all the other options available to the customer.

Traditional “value added strategies” usually turn out to be counter-productive. Having additional features or capabilities that the customer does not recognise they really need will only open the suspicion that we must be over-charging and spark a request that we discount the irrelevant features and give them a keener price.

The implications for sales: we have to move the discussion away from the obvious needs that everyone else is addressing and shift the conversation towards previously unrecognised and yet inherently critical implications that are uniquely well-addressed by our distinctive capabilities. Or we had better brace ourselves for a price negotiation that can only end in a race to the bottom.

Understanding Buying Behaviour

It ought to be clear that the more we understand how our customers buy and what drives their buying behaviour, the more effective we will be as sales people. If you’re interested in exploring the implications in greater detail, I recommend the two excellent books that I referred to above: “The Challenger Customer” and the “Three Value Conversations”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Getting better results from outbound sales is what we have been about since we started as a company. We are always looking for new ways to optimize our campaigns and help our customers achieve awesome results, so it should come as no surprise that we have been looking for better information about when is the best time to send email campaigns.

Of course, it isn’t just us. Salespeople and marketers have been trying to nail the best time to send emails with limited success (Tuesdays are the best!). While well intentioned, these efforts haven’t been able to get specific enough to have a great effect. It is simply because no one has ever tried to connect reliable data on email delivery with demographic data about the recipients of the email. After all, different groups have different habits. Would you expect a startup founder to be receptive to emails at the same time as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company?

We have been able to leverage our data to find the best time to send email campaigns

In this post:

• Why a message can be twice as likely to convert purely depending on when you send it

• 5 reasons why optimizing your email’s send time will help your emails convert

• What you should do to find the best time to send email campaigns

Growbots is in a unique position. On the one hand, we provide our customers with a dataset of highly targeted leads. This data includes information like the job title of your prospect along with the size, age, location, and vertical of the company targeted. The other half of our product is a cold email automation tool which our customers use to automatically send out their cold email campaigns at times they specify.

Using AI, we are then able to identify which of the responses they get are successful. There have been over 1,000,000 cold email campaigns sent using our platform which makes for a ton of data covering the best times to contact different segments. Of course, all of this data is difficult to make actionable on its own.

For that reason, our data science team built a machine learning model to determine the best time to send emails to a particular segment. Using this tool, it is really easy to input the segment you want to target and see what time you are most likely to get a response. Why does this make a difference?

Let’s look at the example of a CEO of a small technology company in San Francisco. If you send your campaign to this segment on Tuesday at 7:15 AM, you will only get a 3.7 percent conversion rate on average. That makes sense as your prospect will probably be cleaning out all of their emails from the night before and yours will get lost in the shuffle. But if you just wait a few hours until 11:45 AM on Tuesday, you’ll get a 6.8% conversion rate on average.

A message can be twice as likely to convert purely depending on when you send it.

Doubling your conversion rate has serious knock-on effects and can effectively double the revenue you generate from your outbound pipeline, all because of timing.

So see for yourself when the best time to send emails is. Simply put your prospect’s demographic information into the tool. The information you get could be the key to getting more positive responses from your emails.

To show you the impact your prospect’s demographics can have on the best time to send them an email campaign, we have looked at a couple of examples to see how optimizing sending time can be helpful. From that we came up with 6 reasons doing this will help you convert more emails.

5 reasons why finding the best time to send email campaigns will help your emails convert

While the one example I gave above can illustrate our point, it is still an anecdote. A more thorough study would provide better information about how optimizing email send times would be useful. To do this, we did two different studies to see how changing a variable can affect the best time to convert an email.

Our Method

For both of these studies we used these baseline criteria:

A small (<200 employees) company founded after 2010

To make sure the results weren’t localized to a specific area, industry or profession, we looked at the popular searches on our platform. From this we developed a list of 6 time zones (US West Coast, US East Coast, UK, Continental Europe, India, and Japan/Korea), three verticals (technology, corporate services, transportation), and job titles (CEO, VP Marketing, Head of HR) which we got conversion data for.

For each of these combinations, we first looked at what happened if you took that baseline company and changed the age of the company. We then took the baseline and saw what happened when you changed the size of the company.

What we wanted to see is how much the information in our email sending time optimizer could help you convert. In other words, how much of a difference picking the right time would make over picking randomly (the average for the week). From these studies, we found these 6 insights:

1. You can almost double your conversion rate, just by optimizing your send time.

Let’s say you are starting out with cold email and are just getting by with a 2.5% conversion rate. On average we found that when we looked at companies of all different ages there was an average 2.8% bump from sending your messages at the right time. And when we looked at companies of all sizes, we saw an average bump of 2.4%. What that means is that you could bump your 2.5% conversion rate to around 5%, just by optimizing send time.

And of course, that is the average. Certain buy personas see a much bigger swing. Take the 5.8% bump you see here:

By sending your message at 9 AM on a Thursday, you boost your conversion rate by 70% over the average. This has a big impact of your outbound pipeline. Since conversion comes at the beginning of your pipeline, it doubling it can effectively double the revenues you get.

2. The size of your prospect’s company has a big impact on conversion

The way your prospects treat your message is often down to the way their company works and smaller companies work differently than larger companies. This can be in how they innovate or the experience of what it’s like to work there. So it will come as no surprise that the size of a company can affect the way people work, meaning that it can also determine when they respond to emails.

Let’s take our baseline example:

And make it a medium sized company:

Two things jump out. The first is that you generally see lower conversion from a larger company but the more important difference is that your message has the best chance of converting three days later. In fact, if you optimized you campaign for a small company and then used that same sending time for a medium company, you would only have a 3.1% chance of converting only .4% better than average.

On the flip side, if you optimize for the medium sized company, you do a bit better but lose 1% off your conversion rate.

3. Almost nobody has their best day on Monday or Tuesday but you should still send emails on those days

As you can see from this chart of the study we did based on company age, none of the prospects we studied would be best contacted on Monday. Tuesday was only slightly better with only slightly over 3% of the days.

So does that mean you should never send an email out on Monday or Tuesday? Of course not. When you are presented with this prospect you certainly should:

The point is that there is no such thing as the best day or the worst day to send out cold emails. There is only the day which is perfect for your prospect.

4. Small changes to the size of a company can mean a 9-hour difference between the time of day you should send your email campaign

Even if you optimize the day that you send your email, people are creatures of habit and do things at the same time every day, right? Not really. This is true in a lot of cases we found but we also found this prospect:

For this first prospect, it is best to contact them at 9:45 am but if you just make the company medium sized you get this:

The best time to email this second prospect is 9 hours later in the day. The point here is that there are no criteria to small to optimize since one little change can make a big difference.

5. The benefit you see from optimizing the time you send your email changes depending on your target

It is important to be realistic about the benefits you can get for optimization. They tend to change based on targeting so we found that we got the biggest benefit targeting the Japanese market (3.2% on average) when studying the age of the prospect’s company while it was continental Europe that got the biggest bump (2.6% on average) when we studied size.

You can see that optimizing for different criteria will get you a different average bump to your conversion rate.

The point is that you will get different results depending on who you are targeting. That said, it’s always important to optimize the time of your emails as there is almost always a benefit.

What to do now

We would be the first to admit that these findings are outliers of a couple rather limited studies so how can they provide value for you? The point of these is not to explain trends that you should take as gospel when timing your emails. Instead, we want to emphasize that every situation can be different.

This used to pose a problem in the past. After all, the best data out there wasn’t segmented, severely reducing its actionability. Now, you can find the best time to send an email based on your target persona. It is an incredibly easy and free way to get more positive responses to your email campaigns.

• Two business professors studied the valuations of 116 unicorns, finding that many overstated their value.
• When they adjusted valuations for special protections provided to VC investors, nearly half of unicorns lost their coveted $1 billion status.

Tech "unicorns," once a rarity, have become commonplace.

Some 200 now exist around the world — with more than half coming from the US — earning an aggregate valuation of $600 billion, according to a recent study by two business professors from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Sauder School of Business and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). 

Why has it become so easy for startups to achieve a billion-dollar valuation? Many of them are using creative financing maneuvers to conjure imaginary valuation figures that don't hold up to scrutiny, according to the UBC/GSB study, which examined 116 unicorns.

It turns out, when you adjust the valuations to account for guarantees provided to preferred shareholders that dilute the value of common shares, nearly half of unicorns lose their coveted $1 billion status.

Will Gornall, an assistant finance professor at UBC and lead author on the study, recently explained in an interview on the school's website (emphasis added):

"We found that the average highly-valued venture capital-backed company reported a valuation 49% above its fair value. But, when the valuation was recalculated using the financial model developed by [co-author Ilya Strebulaev] and I — which derives a fair valuation of each class of shares of VC-backed companies by taking into account the intricacies of contractual cash flow terms – almost half of these companies lost their unicorn status, with 11% being overvalued by more than 100 per cent."

Here's how it works: In later funding rounds, startups will negotiate a higher share price, but as part of the bargain they guarantee their investors certain protections — such as earning a minimum return on their money or guaranteeing they'll be paid out in full before all other shareholders. 

"Specifically, we found that 53 per cent of unicorns gave their most recent investors either a return guarantee in IPO (14%), the ability to block IPOs that did not return most of their investment (20%), seniority over all other investors (31%), or other important terms," Gornall said. 

Even though this sort of thing has become normal, valuations haven't caught up to the fact that providing additional protections to senior shareholders lessens the value of common shareholders. Treating the shares equally can significantly inflate the overall value of the company. 

A prime example Gornall cites in the paper is the IPO of Square, the payment tech company that took a beating when it went public in 2015 at a valuation of $2.9 billion — far below the $6 billion valuation it achieved in its Series E funding round a year earlier. 

But the Series E backers came out OK. As part of the terms of their investment, they were guaranteed $18.56 per share in an IPO, so when the IPO share price came in at $9 instead, they were compensated with extra shares until they were made whole. Common shareholders received no such extra compensation, making their shares less valuable. 

If Square's last private valuation had reflected the difference in value between the share classes, the company would have been worth $2.2 billion rather than $6 billion — an overvaluation of 171%, according to the study.

So why bother orchestrating an inflated valuation? Beyond ego, a sky-high valuation can come in handy when a startup — especially one that's hit a plateau — is still trying to generate buzz, attract talent, and market its products.

But for regular company employees, many of whom are frequently paid in part with stock, these financing maneuvers make their compensation packages a lot less valuable. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: TOP STRATEGIST: Bitcoin will soar to over $20,000 by cannibalizing gold

Long emails are bad enough when they come from grandma. When they come from a stranger, they’re practically unforgivable.

One of the fastest ways to annoy potential buyers and lose business is to send them lengthy emails that say too much, quote too often, and broadcast your lack of respect for the recipient’s busy schedule.

Our work lives are filled with ways to do sales and marketing: messaging tools, news feeds, social networks, and on-the-go conference calls. That means even a moderately long email whose sales pitch is muddled can be a hindrance to doing business with others. No one wants to decipher your five-paragraph opus when they can find relevant benefits in a two-line message from someone else.

With that in mind, here are a few of the most common reasons long emails happen, and how to create better client relationships by avoiding them.

1. You’re cramming features and benefits.

Sure, you’re excited about your business and want to show off everything it offers. But your potential customers just want to know what will add value to their business and solve their problems. Anything else adds unnecessary length.

To avoid doing that, turn features into benefits and stick to one item per email. If your email is getting too long, read back through it and count up the features and benefits. Edit out anything that isn’t tied to the main idea of your email.

2. You’re giving it all away at once.

One of the tricks to writing good cold emails is knowing how to spark intrigue and curiosity in potential buyers. Maybe you can “double {!Company}’s presence on social media to get more people excited about the brand and build a rock-solid reputation in the process.” But if you say all that in one breath, what will you put in the next seven emails of your eight-touch email campaign?

If your potential customer doesn’t respond to that first email—and that’s possible, no matter how good the message is—you have nothing left to entice them with.

3. You’re too pleasant.

Emails from strangers that open with pleasantries are like houses with oversized foyers—the extra space adds nothing and would have been put to better use in another area, like the kitchen. Similarly, don’t clog up the opening of your email when you could be using your precious word count elsewhere, like the body text or call to action. If you really don’t want to waste someone’s time, don’t open the email by telling them as much.

Instead, lead with data that underscores a pain point or ask an unexpected question.

4. Your quotes suck.

Quotes from experts or celebrity endorsers can be powerful social proof in sales emails. Choose wisely, though. A carefully selected but powerful one-liner quote can be strong social proof. But a block quote is just a wall of text that puts off readers and makes you look lazy.

As you reread your email before sending, ask questions like: Does the quote illustrate a particular benefit? Does it offer clear social proof that could persuade the reader? If the answer is “no,” cut it immediately.

Of course, if you want to avoid all of these, there’s an easy fix: check your ego. Too often, long-winded emails happen because the sender is in love with their own words or refuses to believe their messages could ever need edits. But part of doing good sales is knowing when to leave yourself out of the conversation, and nowhere is that truer than in emails. Set the ego aside when you sit down to write—your response rates and potential customers will thank you.

The partner landscape has been going through momentous changes due to the onset of the cloud and consequently the change in target buyer. Therefore, it has become a necessity to diversify partner relationships in order to meet growth objectives. One way companies are doing this is by establishing partner referral programs to:

• Qualify resellers as referral partners to prove productivity and fit
• Generate leads from ISVs and other individual who would never be resellers
• Get value from resellers who can’t transform to SaaS delivery models but can still be leveraged as referral partners
• Diversify partners and increase revenue generation through referrals

Based off referral partner data from actual companies’ partner referral programs during the course of a year, benchmarks were formed on:

• The average referral activity of partners
• The kind of leads coming in directly from referral partners
• How partner referrals are converting
• The impact of sales involvement on the success of partner referrals
• How rewards figure into the success of partner referrals

What is the average referral activity a company can expect from partners?

Kathy Contreras, Research Director for Channel Strategies at SiriusDecisions commented, “Partner referral programs can be used in any industry and offer a way to motivate and reward partners for identifying and registering new leads. This type of partnership [referral partners] provides the opportunity to align with organizations that have strong relationships with a supplier’s target buyers, but are not interested in or qualified to resell the supplier’s offerings (e.g. suppliers that provide collaborative solutions, systems integrators, consultants, influencers, etc).”

In the recent study done by Amplifinity based on partner referrals made on the Amplifinity platform during the course of a year, it was determined that on average 69% of referral partners are actively referring throughout the year. The average program contained 863 partners making referrals out of the average 1,250 enrolled in the partner referral program.

The remaining 31% of referral partners enrolled were not actively referring.

How high-quality are the leads that come from referral partners?

Partner referral leads are one of the highest quality partner leads. What makes partner referral leads so high-quality are their one-to-one interactions. But not all partner referral methods necessarily enable that type of interaction. Therefore, it is interesting to compare the most used partner referral methods to their success in driving deals.

Most Popular Partner Referral Methods

As the chart illustrates, a lead form is by far the most popular way for partners to refer. This is logical since partners have a higher comfort level with lead forms as a result of it being a common business practice for partners. When looking at how lead forms converted for partners it is no surprise that it came in as the second most successful in terms of generating deals with a 37% conversion rate from partner referral lead to deal.

But if lead forms have the second highest conversion rate what is the highest?

Surprisingly, print cards have a conversion rate of partner referral lead to deal of 67%. However, this must be taken with a grain of salt since print cards were used less than 1% of the time by referral partners. This is another method that emphasizes the value of that one-to-one referral from partners.

Social media comes in as a far second in terms of popularity, with the data showing that not one partner referral coming from social media converted to a deal. This brings to the forefront the assertion that it is the one-to-one interaction that makes partner referrals such high-quality referral. While social media referrals can be done one-to-one it is more often used as a general blast.

“The data supports the concept that channel marketers already know – personalization improves conversion.” Says Trisha Winter, CMO of Amplifinity. “The same goes for referrals. Social media, which is typically used as a one-to-many referral method was the second most used, but had no success. Partner referral programs need to enable one-to-one referrals with methods like print cards, lead forms and verbal; which had high success rates.”

What impacts partner referral programs’ conversion rates?

The average success of deals coming from partner referral on the Amplifinity platform is 31%. On its own this conversion rate is remarkable, but when compared against the overall industry average created by Salesforce’s Implisit of 0.48% it almost becomes unbelievable.

However, this drastic increase in partner deal conversion didn’t surprise Winter, “It didn’t shock me that the success rate of leads created from partner referrals run on Amplifinity was so much higher than partner lead industry standards. When companies have the ability to enable partners with target buyer information while automating referral tracking, communications and incentive fulfillment it’s easy to see how referral volume and quality would sky rocket.”

Another factor that impacts the conversion rate is the fact that many partners will only bring a referral forward when a prospect has already become interested in the product or service. Attribution can additionally happen at the opportunity stage, which inherently inflates the success rate.

How does enabling sales involvement change the partner referral conversion rate?

While a 31% conversion rate is amazing by any standards, the Amplifinity report showed that enabling sales involvement in the partner referral program drove up the conversion rate even more. On average, a referral program that enabled sales to actively recruit partners to the program, generate referrals from partners, qualify referrals through partners, and receive a facilitated introduction from partners more increased the conversion rate to 41%.

What type of compensation is being offered to referral partners?

Compensation is very important when it comes to any partner program. Within the compensation structure lies the motivation for partners to make referrals. So what type of compensation is used most to motivate partners?

• • 60% of programs offer checks
  • 20% of partner referral programs offer gift cards
  • 20% of programs offer bank transfer

The most common compensation amount paid out to referral partners was between $101 – $1,000 with 76% of partner referral programs paying between those amounts. This large variance can be due to the percentage of revenue a partner referral program pays out and the cost of the product or service the partner is referring.

Download the full report to see more data on business partner referral programs including:

• Most offered referral methods
• Most successful referral methods
• How the top 1% and top 10% of referral partners perform
• Average referral pipeline
• And much more

The answer to this question is a lot more complicated than it looks. There are many factors that impact the percent of leads that should be closed by sales.

This blog will take you through five factors that impact lead close rate and a calculation you can use to determine the minimum close rates your product or solution requires.

The five main factors in lead close rate are:      

1. Market definition
2. Lead definition
3. Lead cost
4. Process for following up on leads
5. Lead nurturing

Market definition: We once did work for a company that had two different views of the market. Sales was focused on $1 million opportunities in big companies. Marketing focused on $10,000 deals in small-to-medium sized companies. The fact that one competitor with a book value of $10 billion sold “point solutions” that ranged from $10,000 to $50,000 strongly indicated that the market was open to smaller point solutions and not elephant-hunter deals.

I am still friends with the then SVP of Sales of this client and I still kid him that he had more sales executives on his team than there were seven-figure deals in the market he was targeting. After blowing through $1 million in sales and marketing expense our client was sold at an auction—ultimately to the competitor with the huge valuation.

Over and over we find that clients and prospects want to do aspirational prospecting (prospecting into larger deals than historically have been targeted and won) or prospect too broadly.

This is why account-based marketing processes are so important.

The first principal in #ABM is to focus the organization on a single, tightly defined market. To the extent everyone in the organization is focused on the same targets, the close rate will be greater than if the organization has a diffused focus.

Lead definition: A client in marketing told us that they had delivered 9,000 leads to sales the previous year. The SVP of Sales said they received ZERO leads from marketing the previous year. He asked us to examine the gap.

As it turned out, marketing bought leads from a content aggregator for $23.15 per so-called lead. The qualified lead rate was .8%. No way sales executives were going to go through 100 unfiltered, unqualified suspects to find less than one qualified lead. Unfortunately, this is all too common. Marketing has a lead quantity and lead cost goal without regard to the effectiveness of the effort (i.e. were the leads qualified and did they close).

Lead cost: To complete the story referenced above, the 9,000 suspects were acquired (for a total cost of $208,350, at $23.15 each) and ignored by sales. The close rate—ZERO PERCENT.

When we went back to marketing to share our results, they said: “Those are too important a source of leads for us but we can’t afford to have you pre-qualify them—so we just send them directly to sales.” Far as I know they still are sending “raw” leads, and they are still being ignored.

Process for following up on leads: The prospect experience can be compromised on the front-end (by pushy appointment setters, by inexperienced junior telemarketers reading from a script or by generic messages shell-shocking them from a spam cannon). It can also be compromised on the back-end (by light, ineffective follow-up, or no follow-up at all).

This blog explains what a lead is and how to follow-up. Establishing the right prospect experience substantially increases close rates. There is a lot of talk today about the customer’s experience … but don’t forget the importance of your prospect’s experience.

Lead nurturing: This blog shows you how to triple the return on any marketing and sales investment. Effective nurturing of leads increases the number of prospects worked and increases the close rate by three times. Note the graphic below that shows the perception of sales as to the life of a lead vs. the reality: Sales often believes that a lead will close early in the cycle or not at all. In truth, leads can close throughout a lead lifetime, and, with proper nurturing, do.

The Formula for Calculating Break-Even Close Rates:

	Example 1	Example 2	Example 3
Deal Size	$25,000	$100,000	$500,000
Margin	80%	65%	50%
Gross Margin/Deal	$20,000	$65,000	$250,000
Completed Companies per Week	50	40	30
Lead Rate	7%	5%	3%
Number of Leads per Week	3.5	2	.9
Cost per Lead (based on $61.50/hour and 40-hour week)	$703	$1,230	$2,733
Break-Even Close Rate (1 / (Margin per Deal / Cost per Lead))	3.5%	1.9%	1.1%
Close Rate Required for 10x ROMI*	35%	19%	11%

*ROMI = Return on marketing investment

Analysts attempt to provide formulas for companies to follow regarding close rates for average companies (20%) vs. close rates for best-in-class companies (around 30%). In my opinion, this approach is too simplistic, and doesn’t account for variety of variables such as deal size, margins and lead rate.

Based on 30 years’ experience doing what we do here at PointClear, a lead generation, qualification and nurturing firm, the close rate for each product or solution at each company will be very different depending on the five factors herein—and the quality of the sales executives and sales management and internal communication.

Formula Takeaways

On one hand, many executives will feel that Example 1 would be risky to invest in because a 35% close rate is aggressive.

On the other extreme, many would also be surprised that the break-even close rate on Example 3 is so low.

But in fact, Example 3 is a brighter scenario than first meets the eye. Assuming you have annual maintenance, are selling a SaaS solution and/or consumables are part of your selling proposition (i.e. there is a recurring revenue involved) you might even be willing to invest with even less than an 11% close rate. 

So now you see why, when someone asks me about close rates, I start with “it depends.”

• Then we talk about scenarios.
• Then we talk about risks.
• Then we talk about the metrics necessary to ensure success.
• Finally, we talk about how important it is for senior executives to understand close rates and to stay involved in the factors and formulas outlined in this blog.

I value your input. Please provide it on the blog or send me an email to dan.mcdade@pointclear.com

 

Getting a consistent pipeline of new leads flowing into your business is a great feeling – but it’s not enough. These leads need to be nurtured and moved through the funnel, or else you’ll end up losing them altogether, and all of the effort your team put in to bringing them in will go to waste.

Are you making some of these common mistakes that cause B2B companies to lose vital leads?

Mistake #1 – Waiting too long to make contact

If you are seeing a number of inbound leads fall out of your pipeline, it might be because you’re delaying initial contact. After someone fills out a form on your website, it is imperative that you reach out quickly – ideally within an hour.

Mistake #2 – Failing to score leads

Not all leads are created equal. Some will be more valuable to you than others, because they align with your buyer persona, they have behaved in a way that indicates that they are closer to making a purchase, or they exhibit professional information that would be a good fit for your company.

Not scoring leads means your sales team will waste valuable time on leads that were never going to progress in the first place, and they may not spend enough time on the leads that are most promising.

Mistake #3 – Failing to segment leads

While lead scoring is essential in determining which leads are most valuable, lead segmentation will provide information about each lead’s characteristics. There are six traditional segments, from Marketing Qualified Leads to Opportunities in Demonstration Phase to Opportunity Won, that B2B and enterprise companies use, although your own may differ.

Without segmentation, you won’t know which actions are best to take with what lead. Have they had a demo already? How did they respond? Are you in negotiations with them? Or have they slipped back down the funnel and require more follow up?

Mistake #4 – Not communicating internally

Your marketing and sales teams should be fully aligned if you want to plug those pesky leaks in your lead funnel. If they are not communicating properly, it will be difficult for your sales team to know which MQLs are most valuable and score them appropriately. It also makes it harder for your marketing team to target the right leads, since they won’t have a clear understanding of the type of leads your team is looking for. This can cause leads to become stale and fall out of the pipeline, simply because they weren’t actually valuable in the first place.

Mistake #5 – Not following up

Lastly, if you’re not following up appropriately with leads that have expressed some interest in your product or service – either through inbound or outbound activities – you’re going to lose out. We’ve written before about the importance of following up, but it bears repeating and integrating into your sales team’s daily habits.

Content intelligence (CI) is the shiny new toy of content marketing. Like many new technologies, some users may try to adopt content intelligence technology before they fully understand it, and fail to fully realize its benefits. Content intelligence software is expanding in variety and function, so it’s important to understand the pain points content intelligence addresses.

This post offers a brief overview of what content intelligence is. It addresses some of the pain points content intelligence solves, and outlines the first step to prepare for the advent of this exciting technology.

First, let’s define content intelligence.

What Is Content Intelligence?

Content intelligence draws upon artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, but it is neither of those things. Content intelligence is the systems and software that transforms data into actionable insights for content strategy and tactics. Content intelligence gives you the full context of an individual piece of content—and the body of content it sits within, to make better decisions about anything pertaining to the content in question.

Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner defines content intelligence as “technology that helps content understand itself—what it’s about, how it speaks, how effective it is at accomplishing certain goals, what emotions it calls to mind, etc.”

What Pain Points Does Content Intelligence Address?

Every marketer alive today proclaims how “data-driven” they are. But if you look at how content is utilized, it’s still mostly based on intuition and guesswork. Only eight percent of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community), and only 55 percent of bloggers regularly check analytics (Orbit Media).

Here are five common content marketing pain points that content intelligence addresses.

1. You’re Not Sure What to Share or How to Distribute

When it comes to content marketing, creating a killer piece of content is only half the battle. In addition to creating engaging content, your audience needs to be exposed to it. This means building a successful distribution strategy around your content beyond just a cursory social share or email blast.

Currently, there are many channels where most decisions about how to utilize content largely come down to intuition. These include social media, websites, advertisements, and so on. Content intelligence can add significant value to this process by utilizing consumer models and characterizing content from previous interactions to suggest what to share next. It can make those decisions informed, and even automate some of those decisions in a scalable manner.

Think about how hard it is to know what to promote, when to promote, and where to promote it. Over four million blog posts are published on the internet every day, while 50 percent of content created gets eight shares or less according to BuzzSumo. Content intelligence will enable highly personalized, cross-channel promotion that humans are just not wired to do.

2. Your Audience Segments Aren’t Getting the Right Content

When trying to find a show to watch on Netflix or songs to listen to on Spotify, you’re served personalized media based on your viewing history and personal taste. Yet on a company’s web page, you’re usually presented with the same stories everyone sees.

With content intelligence, expect instead to see stories based on your previous browsing history, your position in an organization’s hierarchy, your title, what you’ve consumed in the past, what other people in your organization have consumed in the past, and even which content—or certain pieces of content, shared in succession—has the highest conversion rate at the stage you’re currently at in the consumption cycle.

Those are just a few factors content intelligence can weigh when calculating which content to display to a given consumer. But there are literally hundreds of possible factors that can be fed into an algorithm to find the right weight for all those inputs, so you know exactly what context something has and what the right piece of content is.

This could be hugely impactful in making your content work harder for you. According to Infosys, 74 percent of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized, and Rapt Media says 63 percent of consumers said they’d think more positively of a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting, or relevant. Content intelligence will utilize your existing content inventory to make it as effective as possible.

3. You Don’t Know Which Content to Update

Content marketers can use their inventory more effectively if they know when to refresh evergreen articles or update other content to help it perform better. Say a particular article or blog post performed really well, but it hasn’t been refreshed in a year. Wouldn’t it be nice to receive a prompt for this article to be refreshed and shared? Beyond that, content intelligence could recommend changing a headline or adding more images if it recognizes your existing content could work more efficiently for you.

There’s a constant stream of things a content marketer can do to be a lot more effective that don’t take up much time, but it’s hard to figure out what they are. Content intelligence can surface that information in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-act-on way, so you can login every day (or week), get some really useful feedback or advice, make those changes, and see specific growth in certain areas.

Content intelligence will allow you to do this throughout funnel stages, your website, a sales person on the phone, or emailing with a prospect. Any time you have a touch point with a customer, you can show targeted information that’s highly valuable to them.

4. You Don’t Know What to Write About

Writer’s block has been giving content creators ulcers since before content marketing existed. Content creation is another area content intelligence can optimize.

Content intelligence can make recommendations about what to create based on what performs well, or what your competitors are doing, and the recommendations can vary based on your goals. You could say, “We have a goal of a certain number of leads or page views generated for this quarter,” and you could receive recommendations to help you achieve that. The recommendations will necessarily differ based on the goal.

While machines can mainly only create data-driven content for now, that’s evolving quickly. IBM partnered with a movie studio and created a video trailer using AI, which took over the creative process. Coca-Cola has used AI to generate TV ads, selecting the music and creating scenes.

5. Your Content Isn’t Working

Tennessee-based marketing strategist, speaker, and author Mark Schaefer coined the term “content shock” in 2014. It describes the phenomenon of an ever-increasing arms race to produce more, and more compelling, content. This content is seldom personalized, and consumers’ attention spans are resolutely finite. These two things together ultimately overwhelm people with content options, making content marketing less effective for most companies.

Content intelligence is a significant competitive advantage for organizations wanting to overcome content shock. Content intelligence offers insights that help you produce better, more engaging content. It also offers more intelligent means of distribution to get content to the right audience where it’s most compelling. Content intelligence enables you to present the right content to the right person, every time.

For example, if you’re a B2B marketer and have just downloaded an ebook, often you’ll be presented with that same ebook as a call-to-action if you revisit the site two days later. If that company has created enough great content, however, content intelligence allows them to truly tailor their brand experience to an individual level. You don’t feel there are too many products on Amazon because you only see the stuff that matters to you, based on your behavior. If content is the same way—if you only see what’s relevant to you all the time—it doesn’t matter to you how many millions of ebooks are out there.

---

If you want to overcome content shock, content intelligence provides a competitive advantage.
Click To Tweet

---

How to Prepare for Content Intelligence

Content intelligence relies primarily on data computation to work. This means the insights it provides are only as good as the amount and quality of the data you have. To leverage this technology for competitive advantage requires as long a history as possible of well-structured, well-maintained, trustworthy data. The first step to ensuring you have good data is to conduct a comprehensive content audit (which should be performed once a year, regardless) and implement an organized tagging and categorization system for all your content.

Content intelligence can solve a wide range of content marketing problems. These include alleviating time constraints, resource shortages, strategy uncertainty, stresses around data computation, and content recommendations.

For a more in-depth look at  content intelligence check out Content Intelligence: The New Frontier of Content Marketing Technology.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from Jay Baer at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

It’s no secret that sending personalized emails is the best way to ensure the right content gets delivered to the people who want it most. It’s also no secret that the best way to do so is by sending targeted emails with contextual content to specific subscriber segments. Targeted emails can drive up to 77 percent of your overall email ROI, which makes them an essential component to any successful email marketing strategy. Many are already using tags to trigger targeted automated campaigns. With the latest feature updates, you'll be able to segment and send targeted broadcast newsletters based on tags as well. (Not using tags and automation yet? Learn more about our features!) Let’s dive deeper into what this means for you, your email strategy and your business.

Use tags to do more with email

With tags, you can apply specific tags (or labels) to each of your subscribers (based on things like whether they are a customer or prospect, where they signed up, interests, geographic location, etc.,) in order to send targeted broadcasts and trigger campaigns. Now, you can create automatically updating subscriber segments based on those tags, which opens the doors for more opportunities to send targeted emails. By sending emails to various subscriber segments, you deliver hyper-relevant content to those who are most interested in it – which makes it even easier for your audience to understand the value of your emails and your business. So if you want to do things like send content only to subscribers based on information they filled out on your sign up form or an existing tag they may have, it’s possible! It works like this: When building a sign up form, create and add a tag to ensure it's applied to subscribers who opt-in to your list. You can also build your form and apply tags to subscribers based on information they select in a custom field. To send specific subscribers an email, create a new segment in Manage Subscribers based on the tag. Create your broadcast email and send to your new subscriber segment! Not using AWeber's forms? Many of our trusted integration partners, like Unbounce, OptinMonster, and Interact now support tags. You can also apply tags when importing subscribers, or manually from your Manage Subscribers page.

Send a contextual broadcast email

Here's a specific scenario in which you might use tags: Let’s say you’re a food blogger who’s planning a webinar on the vegan diet. Add a sign up form to collect email addresses from registrants. (In addition to creating tags in AWeber forms, you can also apply tags using one of our trusted integrations, or when importing subscribers.) As you create your sign up form, make sure everyone who signs up to your list receives the tag “vegan-webinar.” By tagging subscribers this way, you’ll know exactly who joined your list as a result of the webinar. Since you know these subscribers are also interested in vegan content, you can send targeted broadcast emails with information like vegan recipes, ebooks and other resources after the webinar. Simply search for subscribers with the tag "vegan-webinar" in Manage Subscribers, create a new segment and send. Related Post: 16 Ways to Segment Your Subscribers and Boost Email Engagement

Trigger a contextual campaign

After the webinar is over, you can then trigger an automated campaign to tagged subscribers with more content. Share an invite to download another bonus incentive, such as a vegan meal plan or promo code to purchase a recipe book. Add as many emails to your campaign as you need to maintain regular communication. Your subscribers will remain engaged with content they're interested in, and you can nurture them to become a loyal customer!

The groundwork for more advanced automation

As the team here at AWeber HQ continues providing customers with the tools they need to send smarter emails, better connect with subscribers and save more time, these changes are only the beginning. In fact, they open the door for other automations like engagement-based tagging. We have a lot in store for you in the coming months!

Do more with targeted emails

Check out our Subscriber Management Resource Hub for how-to articles and segmentation inspiration. Or, reach out to our AWesome customer solutions team if you need a helping hand! Not an AWeber customer? Sign up today for your free 30-day trial!

The post New Features: Segment with Tags and Send Broadcast Newsletters to Tagged Segments appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Early in my career, the majority of my business contacts came from my immediate circle. They were people who wrote about the things I wrote about. Thought about the world the way I did. Did the kind of work I did and even spent the majority of their time at the same events I went to

Booooooooooring.

Don’t get me wrong—I love what I do. But since then, I’ve made it my goal to master the idea of networking with people outside my industry. And I urge any professional working in inside sales to do the same.

(Note: Want to take your inside sales career to the next level? Download our ultimate sales resource bundle free.)

When you start to build relationships with individuals outside your industry bubble, interesting things start to happen. In today’s blog post, I’ll show you the advantages of connecting with people outside your industry and arm you with tactics you can use in your day-to-day life to establish these relationships, nurture them and make them count.

To start, here are a few reasons why you should be networking outside your industry:

New perspectives offer new ideas

When you’re constantly surrounded by sales professionals, it’s easy to fall victim to confirmation bias. The ideas that have allowed you to succeed in your profession are very similar to the ideas that have allowed your colleagues to succeed. As a result, it’s likely that you share similar philosophies on how to find success in your job and in your industry.

On the other hand, when you connect with people from other professions and industries, you gain new insights that can help you solve problems by looking at them from a perspective you hadn’t previously considered.

More referrals from new connections

One of the best parts of building a network outside your industry is that the people you’re not already close friends with offer great opportunity. What I mean is that these individuals offer you an opportunity connect with folks you wouldn’t be associated with through your existing network.

This thinking is built on a sociology concept called the theory of interpersonal ties. In a study titled "The Strength of Weak Ties," Mark Granovetter of Johns Hopkins University writes that interpersonal ties can be simply classified as strong, weak or absent. He studied 282 white-collar professionals who received their jobs from a referral in order to gauge the strength of their relationship with the person who made the referral. 16.7 percent said they saw the contact twice a week, 55.6 percent said more than once a year but less than twice a week, and 27.8 percent said once per year or less.  In other words, most of these professionals benefited not from close connections, but from weak ties that opened up new opportunities.

Cornell University's David Easley and Jon Kleinberg talk about this concept a bit deeper in their book “Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World,” where they explain why staying in circles made up of people just like you can be a disadvantage: "The closely-knit groups that you belong to, though they are filled with people eager to help, are also filled with people who know roughly the same things that you do."

Add value through your own network

Growing a network outside your industry opens avenues to learn about new opportunities. In some cases, these opportunities might not have a direct impact on your business but could help you make a valuable connection for a client, partner or colleague, allowing you to add more value to your network and your new connection.

Potential to be a future customer

And while it might seem pretty obvious, one of the biggest reasons to network outside your usual events and conferences is to find new customers. People from other industries who need a service or product like yours may not be linked into the same circles as you and your typical customer. Understanding this reality can put you into a position to gain a competitive advantage by networking outside the box.

At this point, I’m sure you’re sold on the idea of networking with people outside your industry. But how do you find them? How do you connect with people who don’t attend sales conferences or industry events? Here are a few simple ways to kickstart and nurture relationships with people from other industries:

Schedule time to research events

People from other industries aren’t just going to fall into your inbox and CRM. You’re going to have to be a bit more intentional about connecting with these folks, which means spending time and getting outside your comfort zone. In particular, one of the best ways to connect with people has been and always will be meeting in person. There’s just something about meeting someone in the flesh that offers a deeper connection than what you get with video, phone and email.

That’s why I recommend scheduling time to research events happening in industries that are interesting to you. Visit a site like Eventbrite and search for keywords that would be used in the industry you’re looking to target. Be sure to sort the results by the type of event that best suits your budget and comfort level—there are options ranging from meet-ups to conferences. Then start a running list of events that would make sense for you to attend.

Host fun gatherings with interesting people

Over the last few years, there has been a surge of entrepreneurs and executives creating their own unique events to grow their network. As an example, Sol Orwell, the co-founder of Examine.com, recently hosted an event where he raised money for charity by inviting 140 people to taste and vote on a variety of cookies made by 27 professional chefs. People loved it.

After the Cookie Off (awesome name, right?) proved to be a successful event for helping out a charity and facilitating new connections, Orwell decided to do it again with what he called the Sausage Showdown. One attendee described it as “the most relaxing networking I have ever experienced.”

Another great example of someone running these types of events is Dan Martell and his Founder Dinners. Unlike Orwell’s Cookie Off and Sausage Showdown, the Founder Dinners happen more frequently, are smaller in size and don’t have a price tag to attend. Here’s a short video that Martell put together showcasing what the Founder Dinners are all about:

Think about creating your own mini-events and inviting interesting people who work outside your industry. It can be as complex as a Cookie Off or as simple as a dinner at a local watering hole where everyone picks up their own bill and enjoys good times and good food.

Become active in their online communities

Establishing relationships in person are great—I agree 100 percent. But sometimes, it’s more efficient to spend time building these relationships from your keyboard (at least to start). One great way to identify and build relationships with people from other industries is to go into the online communities where they spend time and strike up conversations. Be transparent about why you want to connect with them (you’re interested in the space) and don’t go into these communities—or any relationships—with the expectation of seeing immediate returns.

Comment on blog posts in their space

It’s likely that in any industry you can think of, there’s someone writing about it semi-regularly on a blog. In most cases, there are tons of people writing about a specific topic. If you find a blogger who isn’t a mini-celebrity, reach out to them after reading a few of their posts with your thoughts and feedback. This simple gesture is a great way to get on their radar and make them familiar with your name.

Over the next couple of weeks, comment on their posts, share them on social with a tag and reach out to them if you’re ever in town. Use their blog as a starting point to establish a relationship and use your interest in their industry to act as a starting point for a relationship.

Wrapping things up

So there you have it: a handful of ideas that should help you understand the value of networking outside of your industry along with insights that will help you do it.

If I could give two pieces of advice it would be this:

1. Don’t look for immediate return
2. Don’t go into these engagements with the sole purpose of making more money

If you’re walking into your relationships with business as a focus, it’s likely that you will come up short. The focus should simply be on adding value to the lives of those you meet and having some great experiences with them. If a relationship turns into a business opportunity, that’s a great thing—in fact, it’s likely that this will be the outcome if you go into it with the right intent.

But that’s the key. You need to go in with the right intent. Otherwise, people will see right through it and show you the door before you even take your shoes off.

So what's next? Grab a free copy of our ultimate sales resource bundle that'll help you take action right now, to create bigger results, faster.

And check out this episode of The Startup Chat podcast where Steli and Hiten discuss the value of seeking diversity in all areas of your life: Why You Should Invest in Diversity in Your Startup (and Life)

Sales experts preach the value of “asking for the sale.” Don’t assume that your customer will buy when the time is right. Make the time now.

The same rule applies to demand generation creative and to email copywriting in particular. Effective email campaigns are nothing without a compelling call to action and copy that drives action at every opportunity.

For a stark reminder of what an email looks like when you don’t drive action adequately, see the campaign below from Verint, a New-York based analytics company. The email reads like a brand manifesto, a commentary on current trends, a description of a new ebook … everything that is, except the one thing it’s presumably designed to do: drive response.

Not one word of this email, until the very last button (Download Ebook), invites the reader to take action. Most of the copy is either a tired recitation of product messaging, or a bland commentary on market trends. Let’s highlight the mistakes to avoid:

* the headline (Intelligent Customer Experience) and subhead (Every Customer …) are branding statements. They do nothing to sell the offer, nothing to communicate the value of that offer, nothing to drive action.

* The entire first paragraph (“Businesses around the world …”) is a classic and unfortunate example of copy intended to “set up” the offer by describing the trend, problem or opportunity that makes that offer relevant. (I wrote about the perils of “set up paragraphs” at length in this earlier post.) Here, however, it’s just a lengthy recitation of fact. Why do I need to know all this? Why would I read further? Even the second paragraph (“While the move to digital …”) is more of the same marketing-babble.

* When the writer eventually gets to the actual offer (Paragraph 3), the copy is simply a description, almost as if it were an abstract for a user conference. The ebook sounds interesting, but there’s nothing here that’s telling the reader to request it. Simply changing this paragraph to begin: “Download the new Verint ebook …” would probably do wonders for click-through rates, assuming the reader hasn’t already abandoned ship.

Remember: when it comes to driving email engagement, a call to action should appear both early and often. In other words: ask for the sale. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

For more tips on email copywriting, check out our infographic (no registration required): “29 Tips to Improve B2B Email Campaign Performance.”

The House Energy and Commerce committee Thursday advanced legislation on a 54-0 vote that would begin the process of changing regulations to allow cars and trucks that operate without human drivers. Similar legislation is being developed in the Senate with rare bipartisan support, an effort supported by automakers such as Ford Motor Co. and Tesla Inc. as well as technology firms Alphabet Inc., Lyft Inc. and others that are developing the vehicles.

Labor unions are urging a slowdown as lawmakers fast track legislation to allow self-driving vehicles on the road, a potential boon to some union jobs and an existential threat to others.

Larry Willis, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Division, a coalition of 32 unions, said Congress is progressing too quickly without understanding the full effects of autonomous vehicles, which “are likely to cause massive job dislocation and impact worker safety.”

One study, by the progressive research group Center for Global Policy Solutions, estimated that a rapid transition to automated vehicles could result in more than 4 million lost jobs in the U.S., with taxi, bus, and truck drivers among the hardest-hit.

* McKinsey estimates that the economic gains of driverless vehicles in the trucking industry could be range from $100-500 billion per year by 2025 (McKinsey 2013). The bulk of these savings would come from the elimination of the wages of the truck drivers. According to the American Trucking Association (2015), the industry employs over 3 million truck drivers, and the automation of driving poses a huge threat to the livelihood of these truck drivers. There is currently a shortage of about 25,000 truck drivers because of the long hours and time away from home (American Trucking Association 2015). Self-driving trucks would simply increase the capacity of logistics companies, allowing for more shipments. The role of employment in trucking would become more technical, and there would be a smaller number of self-driving truck monitors.

Savings in trucking and logistics and increased capacity would be a constant discount for retail and other businesses dealing with the movement of goods.

* Although self driving cars and trucks will cause losses in some industries, the overall impact on the U.S. economy should be positive, as Morgan Stanley estimates an overall potential value of $1.3 trillion annually, or 8% of the entire U.S. GDP (Lewis 2014) just from commuter productivity and savings in collision costs.
* Driver productivity will also rise as a result of the added time that can be used for other tasks, like working during one’s trip to the office. Diamandis (2014) estimates that self-driving cars could save over 2.7 billion unproductive hours in work commutes, generating an annual savings of $447.1 billion per year in the U.S. alone (assuming 90% self driving car penetration). This time savings estimate, combined with $488 billion from collision costs amounts to total savings of $1.1 trillion in the U.S., or 8% of the U.S. GDP, and as much as $5.6 trillion worldwide.
* there are 152 million employed people in the USA. An 8% increase in the economy should result in an offsetting increase in employment in other parts of the economy
* Software constitutes approximately 10% of vehicle value. While influencing many automotive functions, the software-hardware interfaces are largely independent of each other. In automated vehicles, software components will become coordinated into a central, universal operating system, to control the powertrain, infotainment, and autonomous features, and may eventually represent 40% of the car value (Jonas et al. 2014). Jonas et al. (2014) expect that larger auto manufacturers, larger suppliers, and leading technology companies (like Google, Apple, and Microsoft) will be responsible for such production.
* The public transportation and taxi industries account for $66 billion and $20 billion in annual revenue, respectively (IBISWorld 2015, IBISWorld 2016). Ride sharing apps have already caused a 6.7 percent annual decrease in taxi service between 2011 and 2016 (IBISWorld 2016) and decreases as large as 30 percent in Los Angeles and 65 percent in San Francisco (Nelson 2016, Kerr 2014).With the addition of self-driving cars to ride sharing services, a 50 percent decrease in taxi revenues would cause a shift in $10 billion in revenue toward ride sharing. Ride sharing and CAVs are not as direct of a substitute for public transportation, and public transportation is less expensive compared to private driving services like taxis, so the shift would likely not be as pronounced. A 25 percent shift in public transportation revenues, however, still represents $16.5 billion in decreased public transportation revenue.
* There are approximately 105 million for-pay parking spaces in the U.S. and approximately 720 million spaces including the non-paid commercial spaces, a home space, and a work space for each vehicle (Chester 2010). At an average land value of $6,300 per parking space, the total land value of parking spaces is $4.5 trillion (VTPI 2017). If the amount of parking decreases by just 1% each year, $45 billion in property value will be freed annually. Parking will become more efficient and demand will decrease with the advent of self driving cars, opening up land for other uses. The commercial real estate industry generates $931 billion in annual revenue (IBISWorld 2016), so the $45billion in land could provide opportunity for a 5% increase in land development revenue.
* Self-driving cars will cause a 22 percent increase in highway capacity at 50 percent market penetration, 50 percent capacity increase at 80 percent market penetration, and 80 percent increase at 100 percent market capacity.
* Easier travel means greater demand for travel, however. Fully automated vehicles will enable children, elderly, and disabled people greater access to meaningful destinations and activities at all times of day.

“If anyone needs to be at the table for a discussion on self-driving technology, it’s the package car driver, the long-haul truck driver and the taxi driver,” James P. Hoffa, general president of the 1.4-million member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents those drivers, said in a statement.

Labor unions successfully lobbied for the House to include a 10,000-pound weight limit in the legislation. That means automated semi-trucks and other commercial vehicles without drivers can’t be deployed the way passenger vehicles would be under the bill.

The bill passed last week by the house committee allows autonomous vehicle testers to significantly ramp up testing of cars that don’t comply with safety regulations, from 2,500 to 100,000. It would grant the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sweeping powers to create new safety standards for self-driving cars and would prohibit state legislatures from passing their own laws that oversee the design and operation of autonomous cars.

Journalists are great storytellers. We have to understand storytelling just to get into the business, and once we’re hired, we get plenty of practice. While working as a TV reporter, I was tasked to cover a few short stories (VO’s and VOSOT’s for those in the industry) and one long-form story (or reporting package) every single day on the job. That means, in just my short four-and-a-half years on the air, I created more than 1,170 long-form news stories alone. And that’s a short-lived journalism career compared to some of the long-timers!

So who’s your best resource for creating powerful stories that connect? A journalist. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. Well, no one’s perfect, but journalists are pretty damn good at storytelling. While practical experience is often the most effective way to fine-tune your storytelling skills, you can start out strong with these four secrets that I learned as a journalist to create content that connects.

1. Find your story by asking the right questions

The first hurdle in effective storytelling is getting started. What story are you going to tell and how are you going to tell it? In my time reporting, I was frequently asked: “How do you pick what stories you’ll be covering?” In TV news, journalists are expected to bring new story ideas to the team every day to be discussed in an editorial meeting, where the producers work in collaboration with the rest of news team to determine your story assignment for the day.

During my first couple of weeks on the job, I dreaded these meetings like a blind date. I’d come to the table with my story ideas thinking I’d thought them through, only to be grilled with questions from my superiors. My first news director would ask me after every pitch, “why do I care?” I blanked on this one a couple of times, and felt embarrassed that I was wasn’t even sure I could answer that question. It didn’t take long to realize that the answer to this crucial question sets the stage for even greater questions to follow – the ones to ask during your interviews on the topic.

“Great questions make great reporting,” – Diane Sawyer

But before we get into those hard-hitting questions, let’s start with the basics. It seems obvious to ask the who, what, where, when, and why – but these can get overlooked if you focus too narrowly on the end result of your story. Heck, I’ve worked with reporters who’ve hit the jackpot on a story but failed to get the subject’s name. Make sure you get all your ducks in a row so that you have the necessary foundation to build an even greater story.

If you’re unsure about something, don’t just smile in agreement. Ask for more information right then and there. This will avoid an awkward phone call, plus save you from a headache when you’re piecing things together later. After all, a puzzle with one small piece missing is still considered incomplete.

Now, for the big puzzle pieces – the deep questions. It’s wise to do a little homework before you head out on your quest to find the root of a story. Similar to making a grocery list, it’s never a bad idea to have some questions jotted down, just in case. But, while it’s wise to have some questions on reserve, the key to getting to the root of the story is to pay attention. Allow your subject’s responses to influence your follow-up questions. In order to ask the right question, you must listen to the answer that came before it.

2. Listen with an open mind

While a little homework prior to an interview demonstrates thoughtful preparation, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to have pre-determined questions teed-up before your interview subject has completed their thought. Just as with any conversation, it’s off-putting when someone responds with a prepared question that indicates they weren’t really paying attention to you. Not only does this negatively impact your relationship with the subject and their ability to trust you, it interrupts pivotal points that can lead to major breakthroughs in your story.

On almost an everyday basis as a reporter, I would go into a story thinking it will turn out one way, then find myself calling my producer to let them know we’ve got a new angle. You need to be okay with your story shifting direction. In fact, don’t even think of it as derailment. If you truly listen, you’ll be guided to even greater questions.

“I never learned anything when I was talking.” – Katie Couric.

Anyone can go into an interview with a dozen questions prepared, but a true storyteller finds the most impactful pieces to the puzzle right there in the interview chair or out in the field. You learn the importance of putting the community first by listening to what they value. That’s the bread and butter to truly connecting with your audience.

3. The most impactful stories have emotion

By lending an ear and allowing room for honesty and vulnerability, your audience is more likely to connect to your story emotionally. Think of the most memorable story you’ve heard. What was it about? How did it make you feel? When I say emotional, I don’t mean it has to be dramatic, either. Emotion can take on many shapes ­­– humor, excitement, pain, joy – you name it.

One of the biggest ways to achieve emotional storytelling is to connect your story to a specific person or group of people. If every story simply stated the facts, most of us wouldn’t listen or remember any of it.

4. Always follow-up

So you’ve published your story, you’ve connected with your audience, and you have them emotionally invested, now what? You’ve worked so hard to ramp up engagement, it would be a missed opportunity to stop here. There are likely extra details, new facts, later developments, reactions or new issues that have been raised since the original story. Journalists know all too well the importance of following-up on a story and the impact this can have on its followers.

As a reporter, I continually checked-in with the community on the stories I had covered, whether it be through social media monitoring, or even picking up the phone. Had I not followed up on my stories for updates, who would bring those stories to the assignment meetings I talked about earlier? Whenever you’re telling a powerful story that connects, it’s important not to completely turn your back on it. Even if it’s story about your business. If you want to keep your audience, or even customers happy, you’ve got to make sure they don’t feel forgotten.

If your audience cares about a newly passed law, follow up your original story with another on how real companies are dealing with the changes. If you know that time and resources are a huge barrier to getting things done, continue to create stories and content that help them solve those problems. If it’s a problem today, chances are it will still be a problem in three months.

Why Should You Care?

So I’ve given you the inside scoop on powerful storytelling, but how can this help your business? Let’s face it, whether you’re a small business or a major corporation, exposure is crucial for survival. You want people to get the word out about your business. The challenge is that people have become more selective than ever. We’re now programmed to tune-out in-your-face, salesy content. But what people are doing more of, is engaging with powerful content. They’re sharing things they like, things that interest them – and truly powerful storytelling is interesting! Even if you’re in an industry that (on the surface) doesn’t seem so glamorous, there’s always a story that is interesting to your audience.

Whether it’s a story that’s used for marketing or a story for the press, keep these journalism secrets in your back pocket: Take the time to get the facts, ask the right questions, listen and discover your story’s emotional roots, and consider every story a revolving door filled with new perspectives, possibilities and future opportunities.

Account Based Marketing is inevitable. If you’re a B2B marketer, you’re going to implement an ABM approach eventually. There are simply too many technologies and marketing trends converging that make ABM inescapable, as Russell Glass and Shail Khiyara make it clear in this post.

Customer Centricity
Because the Internet has made product information widely available, the customer is in control of the buying process, and this unavoidable fact has made the customer experience a tremendous advantage, Glass and Khiyara argued. ABM enables marketing and sales teams to work together to deliver a winning CX.

The Proliferation of Data
The rise of data has made it possible to target marketing messages precisely to specific audiences — that is individual companies or accounts — which has made ABM so accessible that 71 percent of B2B marketers have run an ABM program.

Content Must Be Relevant
Buyers are bombarded by content in today’s hyper-connected world, and weeding out irrelevant content has become an imperative. An ABM approach is built around the idea that a company makes itself helpful by delivering specific, relevant, timely and useful content to particular companies.

Sales and Marketing Alignment
The capability to use data and content to deliver relevant marketing messages has made increased sales and marketing alignment a long awaited reality. LinkedIn research shows that 70 percent of salespeople and marketers agree that sales-marketing alignment results in an improved customer experience.

ABM is coming – here’s what you can do right now to prepare

Here are nine steps the sophisticated marketers can take to ensure their foray into ABM is a winner:

Step 1: Position ABM as a Strategic Initiative

ABM is about driving growth through high-visibility accounts. With so much riding on your ABM efforts, it’s critical that the management team recognizes the strategic importance of this program and puts the necessary resources behind it. To get these resources, marketers must work closely with sales to lay the groundwork for success by documenting target accounts, goals, and tactics, and by agreeing on how to measure the impact of your combined efforts.

Step 2: Staff Up for Success

The most successful ABM marketers act as CMOs on the specific accounts they are targeting. The skills necessary to execute this kind of ABM are an entrepreneurial spirit, an understanding of selling to multi-departmental buying teams, storytelling, and strong project management skills.

Step 3: Agree on Goals with Sales

For an ABM approach to see success, it’s imperative that sales and marketing work together. Among the goals these departments should be aligned on:

• Identifying a higher number of influential individuals within each account
• Promoting higher customer loyalty
• Closing a higher percentage of major deals
• Growing revenues within existing accounts

Step 4: Identify Target Accounts

Sales and Marketing must collaborate to identify the most promising accounts to target. The teams should examine internal and external data to determine, for example, what company characteristics are the most predictive of sales success and are shared by the most loyal and profitable accounts.

Step 5: Research Everyone on the Buying Committee

The goal of ABM is to land or expand an account, but don’t forget that you’re selling to a set of people within each account. And getting a grasp on each person’s role and responsibilities is critical to effectively engaging them. Using LinkedIn, you can discover vital information about people in a select account, such as their recent activities, likes, and experiences.

Step 6: Develop Compelling, Engaging Content for Each Influential Department

With ABM, marketers must ensure that their messages and content reach both far and wide within a single account. LinkedIn research shows, depending on the industry, that 3.1 to 4.6 additional groups beyond the main purchaser inside a company in influence the purchase process. Ideally, you must create content that speaks to the CFO, but also content that addresses the concerns of, for instance, engineering and human resources, which may wield buying influence.

Step 7: Equip Your Sales Team to Engage Accounts

In aligning with the sales team, marketers must ensure that salespeople have the insight and content they need to be useful to their target accounts. Marketers should provide an account overview and personas on each member of the buying committee, up-to-date interactions between the account and your company, and relevant content and guidance on when and how to use it.

Step 8: Put ABM into Action

In an ABM program, marketing typically is responsible for serving content, generating Marketing Qualified Accounts, and keeping sales posted on account interactions. To put these ABM responsibilities into action, marketers should determine the most fitting technologies to use, which can include analytics tools, marketing automation software, customer relationship management systems, and social media.

Step 9: Test and Measure Impact

To calculate the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns, A/B testing is indispensable. Although it may seem counterintuitive, it can be better to start with a big account list rather than a small one. If you start small, it’s harder to run A/B tests and fine-tune your focus. But if you start with a large list of target accounts and apply ABM best practices, you can measure the impact of your campaigns and then segment that larger list for maximum impact.

To learn more about ABM’s inevitability and how to take advantage of it in your organization, register today for the webinar, “Why Account-Based Marketing Is Inevitable: How to Take Advantage of the Trends That Make ABM a Successful Strategy for B2B Marketers.”

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Inc. here.

An upscale Italian eatery recently tried an experiment. It offered its buffet for $4 to some and $8 to others. Same food, same amounts, only some people were paying twice as much. How do you think that affected those diners’ perception of the food?

Of course, the people paying $8 rated their meal more highly. Similarly, when researchers poured a $90 bottle of wine into a glass and told drinkers the actual price, they loved it. When they told them the same wine was $10 a bottle, they didn’t enjoy it as much.

Common sense dictates that it shouldn’t work this way. But we all know that what we pay has a great deal of influence over how we perceive a product or service. Despite this time-tested truth though, too many startups persist in pricing their products or services too low. Lacking a solid customer base and data, bootstrapped startups are understandably more concerned about getting a product out the door than figuring out pricing. But, they can wind up limiting profits or positioning their products and services as “value” when they could be better off positioning as “premium”.

How premium pricing can pay off

In any business there will be a range of opinions about pricing. Unfortunately, that’s often all there is. In general, companies don’t think about pricing in a sophisticated manner while pricing can have a huge effect on your business prospects, including how consumers perceive your brand, growth, and profitability. The reason non-Ivies like Duke and Notre Dame charge roughly the same tuition as Harvard or Yale, for instance, is because they want to be seen on the same tier. The decision is about marketing, not economics.

My best example of a well-considered pricing strategy is Apple. While Apple’s status as a luxury brand is debatable, its products are priced on the high end. When a new Apple product hits the market, Apple ensures that it has a solid price point. This pricing strategy is based on the idea that Apple products offer something unique and proprietary (its hardware and software design and App Store ecosystem) that competitors can’t copy.

AI-based digital personal assistant provider x.ai has taken a similar approach. Its “anti-lean” pricing strategy, which starts at zero for a low-function version but runs to $39 (professional) and $59 (business), is based on extensive research but also a belief that the company is offering something valuable. In its analysis, x.ai claims that an exec making $90,000 a year would save $700 a month outsourcing meetings instead of scheduling them herself. Seen in that light, this anti-lean pricing is a bargain.

These examples show that pricing should be rooted in confidence. It’s a way of saying “We think we’re offering something special here that justifies the money. If you don’t agree, we’re fine with that.”

The questions to ask about pricing

Getting to that level of assurance means first asking questions like, “What is the value of my product or service to my customers?” and “How is it different?”

Often, startups skip this step. In an analysis we ran last year, we found that half of seed stage SaaS companies consider pricing either right before launching their product or as the product is getting ready to be launched. More than 40% of such companies have never tested or piloted their pricing and a similar amount have never conducted market research to understand how much buyers would be willing to pay.

Lacking confidence behind their decision, most companies low-ball their initial pricing. Some 54% of seed-stage companies charge less than $5,000 a year for the average customer. More established companies tend to charge more.

Lower pricing offers less risk but also less upside. Companies that leave pricing for last often get caught up in a culture of pricing products and services low or putting out a free product rather than thinking about pricing in a way that makes more business sense. It’s time that startups took a more thoughtful approach.

The post Solving the Startup Pricing Dilemma: Why Too Many Companies Sell Themselves Short appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Pretend that you’re an experienced buyer who has met with hundreds of business-to-business salespeople. What percentage of them would you say are excellent, good, average, or poor?

According to a new study of more than 230 buyers, 12% of salespeople are excellent, 23% good, 38% average, and 27% poor.

The bad news is that the underperforming salespeople lack the self-awareness to know that buyers don’t value them, nor do they understand why. They don’t take the time to figure out why they lost a deal or longtime client. They either don’t know why they weren’t selected or they reflexively blame it on factors out of their control.

Interviews with buyers illustrate seven important lessons about the mistakes salespeople make and why they lose business.

1. They are not trusted or respected. Customers can think of a salesperson as someone who is trying to sell something, a supplier with whom they do business, a strategic partner who is important to their business, or a trusted adviser whose advice is followed. Obviously, a trusted adviser enjoys significant advantages over the competing salespeople. However, just 18% of the salespeople buyers met over the past year would be classified as trusted advisers whom they respect.

2. They can’t converse effectively with the senior executives. While salespeople frequently meet with lower-level and midlevel personnel at a client company, the rare conversations they have with C-level decision makers directly determine whether they win or lose the deal. Therefore, it is critical for salespeople to understand how C-level executives think and to communicate with them in the language they use. Unfortunately, buyers report that fewer than one out of three salespeople can hold an effective conversation with senior executives.

3. They can’t clearly explain how their solution helps the buyer’s business. Buyers amass information that helps them justify their strategic decisions. In other words, a product’s strategic value comprises the reasons and arguments that buyers provide to senior management and others in the company about why they should purchase a product. Different strategic values include increasing revenues, decreasing costs, gaining a competitive advantage, and standardizing operations in order to reduce risk. However, buyers say only 54% of salespeople they meet with can clearly explain how their solution impacts the buyer’s business.

4. They are too self-centered. Study participants were asked to choose the primary reason they don’t like meeting with salespeople. Their answers reveal that they feel pressured by self-centered salespeople. Forty-four percent believed salespeople are only serving their own agenda, while 25% indicated salespeople only care about making the sale. Twenty-three percent were uncomfortable because it is difficult to say no to them, and 8% said salespeople are not the type of person they typically associate with. The lesson is clear. Instead of focusing solely on revenue, salespeople should concentrate more on helping buyers accomplish their goals.

5. They use the wrong closing strategy. Study participants were presented with different closing techniques in order to understand how they would respond. Overall, hard close techniques such as “This is the last time we’ll be able to extend this offer and we need an answer now” were rated least effective. A hard close creates a binary “yes or no” response from the buyer and is associated with a “take it or leave it” mentality. Soft close techniques such as “If you spend another $100,000, you will receive an additional 10% off the entire order” were rated most effective. A soft close is based on a suggestion that leads buyers to believe they are acting of their own free will, when in fact they have been directed to follow an action.

6. They don’t alleviate the risk of buying their solution. Business-to-business buyers are fixated on risk mitigation because past interactions with salespeople have conditioned them to be skeptical. Therefore, they make vendors respond to immense requests for proposals, complete laborious evaluation spreadsheets, and document each product feature to prove it exists. Still, one of the primary reasons a purchase isn’t made after a lengthy evaluation is because the salesperson hasn’t alleviated the risk of buying.

Tolerance for risk fluctuates by function and by industry. Not surprisingly, IT and accounting have less risk tolerance than marketing; dynamic, creative fields such as fashion and media have more risk tolerance than government or health care. Salespeople should understand these dynamics as they seek to assuage buyers’ concerns about risk.

7. They can’t establish a personal connection with the buyer. There is an equilibrium point where the buyer respects the salesperson’s conviction and is not offended by their persistence, which enables the relationship to develop. Buyers cited five key reasons why there isn’t “chemistry” or a personal connection with a particular salesperson:

• The salesperson was too pushy.
• There was a difference in communication styles.
• The salesperson’s personality was much different from mine.
• The salesperson was too eager to befriend me.
• There was a difference in age.

Most salespeople are very comfortable selling to certain types of people. However, they’re far less likely to establish rapport with someone who is wired far differently than themselves. Since they’re not exactly sure how to behave, they act in a way the buyer considers too pushy, or they overcompensate by being overly friendly.

It’s not surprising that 81% of buyers indicated they would rather talk with someone who shares their same mannerisms. As a result, buyers will choose the salesperson who develops rapport over those who don’t. Ultimately, a salesperson wants to become a communication chameleon. Just as the chameleon changes colors to match its surroundings, the salesperson’s goal is speak the buyer’s language (industry, technical, and job function) in order to change a skeptic into a believer.

Competing in the world of selling today means understanding the changing world of your buyers and adjusting your sales approach accordingly. The biggest change for sellers is that the game has gotten harder, and sellers need to execute at a higher level than ever before to compete. Committing to this level of change is the difference between college sports and pro. The players are bigger. The game is faster. The conditions are more challenging.

Recent Changes in the Buying Process

• Unprecedented access to information: Today’s buyers are more informed and more prepared. They perform extensive research and many are deciding on solutions before engaging a salesperson or having a conversation. As a result, buyers show up with an arsenal of knowledge as well as preconceived idea of what they believe they need. They are also able to complete more phases of the buying cycle on their own. Research from Forrester forecasts that “1 million B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service eCommerce by the year 2020.” This isn’t the end of the sales profession but rather a wake-up call to all sellers that the customer is looking for more.
• Availability of options: Related to the overabundance of information, buyers today are bombarded with opinions and options. There can be a multitude of ways to solve a particular issue and navigating the best path can be a challenge. Further complicating the challenge is the potential to misdiagnose a need and pursue the wrong solution.
• Increased skepticism: Economic instability, geopolitical concerns, corporate scandals, and public relations blunders have created mistrust and greater skepticism among buyers. Combine that with the proliferation of corporate jargon and aggressive marketing tactics and you can see why buyers might be skeptical of anyone looking to gain a meeting with them.
• Increased number of stakeholders: Matrixed, global organizations, the desire for collaboration and buy-in, and increased risk aversion have driven buyers to bring more stakeholders into the buying process. Additionally, buying groups may change by opportunity and/or line of business and involve players with new roles.
• Navigating complexity, ambiguity: Ironically, as access to information has proliferated, the level of ambiguity in the business environment has increased. This uncertainty makes it hard to determine what long-term strategies and short-term tactics will be most effective in reaching business goals and even whether those goals are still relevant. High levels of ambiguity create a tendency to preserve the status quo, although this is rarely an effective means of increasing revenue, saving on cost, or proactively managing risk.
• Decreasing loyalty: The last decade has seen a divergence between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It used to be that when a salesperson checked with a customer and the customer said they were satisfied, this meant they would pick them over their competitors. Now, a customer may say that they are satisfied or even very satisfied and still switch to a competitor. Long-term customer loyalty is eroding.

While these factors seemingly raise the buyer to an unreachable height sellers must remember they offer their own critical skills. Buyers still seek trust, authenticity and clarity to help them synthesize value from their resources. Sellers can differentiate themselves by delivering on these needs. However, the seller’s challenges are significant amid tremendous pressure. In the end, success stems from the seller’s reaction to that pressure.

Elevating Your Consultative Selling Approach

The confluence of these challenges has created ambiguity for sellers trying to distill the customer’s primary challenges. Technology, skepticism, risk-averseness and increasing stakeholders challenge the connection between the customer and seller. As a result, the sales cycle has elongated, or in some cases stopped. According to Sirius Decisions, 60% of sales opportunities end in no decision. This inertia stems from the seller’s challenge of navigating misconceptions originating from the buyer’s research. This problem is compounded by limited access to buyers amid attenuated schedules. These factors have narrowed the squeeze in the hour glass. And average sellers who could sit idly in the middle of the pack are now pushed down to the bottom while highly skilled, agile sellers are able to stay on top. These are the people that are upping their game, adding new skills, and ensuring they consistently execute with a focus on the buyer. So how does these top sellers show up?

1. Avoid Seller-Centric Behaviors

Nearly all sellers believe that they’re customer focused when, in fact, few truly are. McKinsey research found that B2B companies averaged less than 50 percent on a customer-experience index rating. Sellers facing the pressure of a more challenging world, may often dig in the heels and resort to seller-centric behaviors to try to strong-arm customers or gloss over core issues. But these behaviors only deepen mistrust. Sellers need to understand the person in the other chair. Doing so means forming an accurate diagnosis of their problem. This insight builds credibility thereby fostering trust. These steps are critical in earning the right to ask the incisive questions that bring about a dialogue.

In an increasingly digital world, this connection offers real value. A customer-focused approach must flow through your thinking, actions, and words. By getting to the core of their challenges, you’ll be better prepared to position a solution that drives real value for them.

2. Shift to a Mindset of Authenticity

Sellers must give before they get. Define your presence as one of shared commitment to the business challenges. Research from McKinsey underscores the value of this approach. After changing from transactional selling to consultative selling one company credited the move with “$500 million in new bookings and a 40% improvement in productivity.” The difference comes from deeper customer relationship. However, this depth cannot develop without authenticity.

This practice arises from the ability to accurately diagnose the buyer’s business challenges, stated needs, and unknown needs. From this point the seller can show the buyer how to effectively leverage the specific pieces of data necessary to reach a resolution. This “data distillation” is becoming increasingly important in a world awash in analytics. Data only serves the buyer when it’s relevant to their concerns. When positioning a point of view, insight, or solution, it had better be routed in that customer’s specific, priority problems or else you risk sounding inauthentic and irrelevant.

3. Lead the Conversation With A Plan

Show the customer that you value their time by offering a direct approach that starts the conversation with a clear direction. This opening will also give you an early indication of the buyer’s expectations. If your intended path is divergent from their goals for the conversation, you can adjust accordingly. A well-articulated plan sets a tone of credibility. Therefore, it’s important to prepare your remarks so that you can get to the point fast and embrace their sense of expediency.

Remember, the shortest distance for the buyer to travel is to simply stay put. A 2017 survey from Richardson revealed that 26% of sellers believe “combating the status quo” is the biggest challenge their buyers face when making a purchasing decision. Help reach the high “activation energy” of a sale by building your plan around a central goal of addressing opportunity costs. Even a “no decision” carries a cost.

Appeal to the buyer’s sense of practicality by focusing your solution through their lens. Some stakeholders look for technical capabilities while others need to see financial or strategic benefits. Consider all sides.

4. Build to Decisive Momentum

Guide the customer through the dialogue by eliciting feedback. Get a sense of how well they understand your solutions and ideas. This periodic checking helps move the buyer to the next step. As a seller, you aren’t simply asking for the sale once, at the end of the process. Instead, you’re asking for the buyer’s commitment incrementally throughout the journey. This practice builds decisive momentum where your alignment with the buyer makes each successive decision is easier than the last. Show the buyer your own decisiveness by coming to the conversation with a point of view.

5. Leverage Insights Gained Through Questioning

Ask smarter questions. In doing so, you’ll educate the customer by helping connect the dots with a line that traces to your solution. This process can be difficult because it forces both sides to acknowledge the stature of the business challenges. However, getting a full survey of the land avoids the false positivity that can catch both parties by surprise. Meanwhile, openness illuminates the specifics that will give you an edge over the competition.

Be prepared for buyers who are willing to answer only a few questions. Today, everybody is under pressure to do more in less time. Therefore, come ready with the best possible questions that get to the core issues fast. Questioning also affords the opportunity to float ideas. Inviting the buyer to think differently about solutions can be made less threatening when the concepts are presented as questions. Ask the buyer how they feel about your ideas. Understanding the right questions begins with a consultative approach.

6. Understand the Neuroscience Behind How Buyers Buy – Or Don’t

Buyers are human beings. And, human beings have three fundamental needs for well-being that affect how they perceive what is happening, what they listen to, and how they ultimately make decisions. The Social Determination Theory tells us that humans need Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. Strong questioning skills help sellers respect these needs by:

1. Staying emotionally connected with the customer, which feeds relatedness;
2. Avoiding coming across as manipulative, which protects the customer’s sense of autonomy;
3. Creating a safe environment to discuss challenging or sensitive issues, which protects the customer’s sense of competency.

7. Work Off Facts, Not Assumptions

Anchoring is a form of cognitive bias that describes the common, human tendency to rely too heavily on one piece of information. Sellers are especially prone to anchoring to their own assumptions when pursuing an opportunity rather than working diligently to seek out the facts through the customer dialogue. Anchors can cause sellers to miss or dismiss potentially valuable information that could help them move the sale forward and position a more compelling and valuable solution. To counteract anchoring, the best consultative salespeople mindfully engage in active listening to “tune into” new or conflicting information, as well as pursue the customer’s thinking, rather than move away from it. They aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions because they know the facts and truth for the customer will produce the most compelling value proposition.

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

The post 7 Ways to Elevate Your Consultative Selling Approach to Compete Today appeared first on Richardson Sales Training & Enablement Blog.

What does it take to implement content marketing effectively in a larger organization?

It’s not an easy question to answer broadly because a) every team has its own dynamics; b) every organization has constraints and limitations, and c) every vertical market has its own unique characteristics.

Even so, there is a growing body of research that points to several underlying factors present in successful content marketing, including following:

• Commitment
• Consistency
• Documented strategy
• The time and resources to produce quality

Those themes are certainly accurate, but these gloss over important nuances in mid-to-large organizations that are in essence implied tasks.

1) Active participation from marketing leadership

Surveys show the most successful content marketing organizations allocate the proper staff including internal and external resources. In less successful programs, content marketing is treated as an additional duty or a part-time job.

That makes sense: any business initiative that stands a chance of success requires resources, but it’s my observation that the survey data misses an important point: marketing leadership.

Content marketing isn’t something that the CMO can simply delegate to a team to go figure out – the way many did with social media. Or if a team is tasked with figuring it out, delegate that task knowing it’s a likely path to a long list of recurring meetings, slide presentations, and indecision.

Effective content marketing requires active participation from digitally proficient leaders empowered to make a decision. A little personal experience in trying to build an audience will go a long way.

It is better to draft a simple one-page plan – and start executing – than it is to have one that lands with a heavy thud and never gets off the ground.

2) The content marketing plan must be executable

Research also demonstrates that the most successful programs have a documented plan or strategy. Again, my experience tells me there’s an important subtly to this wisdom: the plan has to be executable.

This sounds simple enough, but any marketer that’s earned stripes in larger marketing shops knows, that teams can spend many cycles creating an impressive – and often very long plan – that folds under its own weight. Typically, you’ll find this in marketing shops where the person or people writing the plan are not the same as those responsible for executing the plan.

Yes, there should be a strategic vision, goals and objectives. It’s true that editorially driven content should favor education over hype. Of course, the program should be tightly integrated with other aspects of marketing – across owned, shared, earned and paid media. Content marketing should absolutely be measured, over time, for the value, it delivers to the organization.

However, if all of these aspects are so heavily weighted that they inhibit a streamlined process for efficiently researching, producing, approving and publishing content, the initiative is likely to falter before it even gets underway.

It is better to draft a simple one-page plan – and start executing – than it is to have one that lands with a heavy thud and never gets off the ground. A one-page plan can be improved and those improvements will be infinitely better over time.

3) Resolve and tenacity

Consistency absolutely matters in content marketing. Here again, research shows that those organizations capable of producing content consistently on an owned media platform over time are more likely to report success with content marketing.

However, I find the “over time” aspects of consistency get unwittingly glossed over in reports on these studies. There’s an implied characteristic here and that is perseverance. Content marketing requires time – six months at a minimum.

Why?

Few are the buyers willing to part with six or seven figures on enterprise technology because a vendor wrote a blog post. There’s a lot of competition out there – and your competition and your customers both get a vote. It’s not just what you do with content, but how well it performs comparatively. It will take some trial and error to figure out the niche, tone and angles that work best for your company.

All of this requires resolve and tenacity – the ability to keep coming back relentlessly despite knowing you might have some real winners, but you’re also going to have some real flops. Many times, what you think will win actually flops, and what you think will flop sometimes wins.

Perseverance is probably the hardest part of content marketing. This is because many businesses today are driven by short-term metrics reported, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

And that constraint brings us right back to leadership and the ability of marketing leaders to simultaneously staff, plan and execute marketing campaigns for short term and programs, like content marketing, for the long term.

Note: A version of this post was originally published on Sword and the Script under the title What Does It Take to Implement Content Marketing Effectively in B2B?

Photo credit: Pixabay (CC0 1.0)

Among the biggest frustrations of being in business–and there are plenty–is spending time, money, and resources on sales lead generation without getting conversions. If you don’t convert leads into the pipeline, or turn them into customers, your revenue will suffer.

You can’t just give up on lead generation–that would be financial suicide. The better solution is to carefully examine your lead generation techniques and compare them to reasons why sales leads don’t convert. Here are some common reasons why leads do not enter the sales pipeline or convert to customers.

• You’ve aimed at the wrong audience: A marketer who says his potential audience of customers is “everybody” is doomed to failure. Carefully assess the features and benefits of your offerings and determine who is the ideal potential customer. For example, a group of potential sales leads consisting of “business owners who need inside sales assistance” identifies a real audience, with a real need, that is small enough to serve effectively.
• Too many leads and not enough quality: It may seem like madness to say you can have too many leads. However, if you have a thousand leads and only 10 of them are actually interested in your products and services, you’ll waste your time and money on trying to convert the uninterested majority into the pipeline or into customers. Pre-qualify leads as thoroughly as possible to ensure they have a genuine interest in, or need for, what you have to offer.
• Marketing and sales are at odds with each other: There are lots of stories about the disconnect between marketing and sales, but the truth is that conflict between these two vital departments can hurt your lead conversion. Marketing may hand off leads to the sales department before the lead is ready. The sales team may have unrealistic expectations of the marketing department. Get these two segments of your company working in harmony and your conversion rates will dramatically increase.
• Follow-up was slow or ineffective: Lead nurturing through follow-up contacts and other techniques is vital to moving leads into and through the sales funnel. If someone contacts you, they are interested in what you have to offer. Failure to follow up quickly can cause that lead to believe you’re not interested in their purchase. Get back to people within 24 hours at the least, and sooner if possible.
• Your website is a mess: A hard-to-navigate website will cause visitors to give up in frustration long before they have the chance to be converted. You no doubt have a lot of information you want to convey, but a clean, streamlined site will ultimately convert better than one that’s cluttered with too much text or too many pictures. Make sure visitors can easily find the information they’re likely to want and include a search function to make moving through your site even easier.
• There is no clear call to action: Always include a call to action that makes it clear what your sales leads need to do next. If site visitors don’t know how to get in touch, or are confused about how to express interest in your offerings or make a purchase, they’ll give up and go to a competitor who makes it clear. Make calls to action explicit and provide easy ways to contact you.

Converting leads to prospects, and prospects to customers, is the lifeblood of any business.

​You’ve heard it all before, Customer Success is about retaining customers, which is at least as important as acquiring new ones. Yet, adding new logos to your book of business is always a priority for growth. This is especially true with early stage companies as they grow the little brand recognition and credibility they have.

When making the case for Customer Success, make sure you understand what Customer Success can actually bring to the Sales team and how it will power not only retention and expansion but also acquisition.

Offload Your Sales Team

Without Customer Success, a lot of the Sales staff’s time is dedicated to account management.

Companies without a Customer Success organization can go two ways: maintain Account Managers as points of contact post-sale, or delegate the relationship to Support. The former stems from a desire to build relationships, and the latter from the idea that interactions only happen when a problem is identified and needs to be fixed. In the first case, the company already has an understanding of customer-centricity but weighs down on the Sales team’s time and resources by tasking them with activities that aren’t related to acquisition. A Customer Success organization takes over these responsibilities and gives Sales more time to develop new territories.

Allow New Sales to Grow Your Book of Business

The main objective of Customer Success is to reduce the company’s churn rate. By reducing your churn rate, you’re actually allowing the Sales team to add their acquisitions to the company’s portfolio, as opposed to continuously filling the MRR hole caused by churn. The weight of new logos is greater when they build one on top of the other, as opposed to replacing each other.

Hire Acquisition Champions

By tasking them with deployment – and, ultimately, adoption – your company is expecting its Account Managers to work on totally different skillsets from one day to the other. Between Sales and Customer Success, hunting and farming each require different skills. By differentiating the two functions, companies are able to hire sales champions who have all the skills required to move deals through the funnel and close them.

Move Leads Through the Funnel More Efficiently

Customer Success provides your entire company with increased visibility into your customer base. Through their efforts to gather knowledge and understanding around how your customers use your product, they are identifying opportunities for case studies, interviews, and testimonials. By working with Marketing, Customer Success has the unique ability to deliver sales enablement material that will have a real impact on your sales funnel.

Close Deals With The Help of Your Customer Advocates

The CS team is responsible for making customers successful, which, upon completion, provides you with a pool of customer advocates who would be happy to take reference calls with new prospects. There’s nothing as convincing as the word of a peer, which can be leveraged by Sales with the help of CSMs.

Use Customer Success as a Key Differentiator Against Your Competitors

The truth is, if your competitors haven’t boarded the Customer Success train yet – they will. In the meantime, you can beat them to it and use Customer Success Management as a differentiator when talking to prospects. If they’ve boarded it before you, they’ll use the same technique to convince leads to pick them over you. Finally, if Customer Success is already common in your industry, make sure your Customer Success organization shines throughout the sales process. Prospects like to know the product they’re buying comes with a human touch (Software-as-a-SERVICE).

Create Expansion Opportunities

Every new day comes with its load of expansion capital. Every opportunity the customer has to use a new product feature should be used to add value and drive adoption. By dedicating a department to ensuring that this happens, you’re investing in nurturing new “prospects” for future sales cycles. Customer Success secures renewals, but it also paves the way for upsells and cross-sells.

Lately, there’s been a big push for adding humor and personality into B2B marketing. I’m all for it—not only does it play into my natural strengths, it means that B2B marketers can bring more creativity and fun into their day-to-day.

It may be hard to cast off the idea that we on the B2B side have to be buttoned-down, professional, and above all, inoffensively bland. But if our content is going to stand out in the crowd, we’ve got to get in touch with our funny bones.

With that in mind, here are 20 brand-new jokes that only a B2B marketer could love. As I said in my last funny post, there’s nothing like a good joke: And these are, believe me, nothing like a good joke.

20 B2B Marketing Jokes

Q: Why did the B2B marketing band play unplugged?
A: They refused to pay for amplification.

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Our new eBook!
Our new eBook, who?
Please fill out the following 17 fields for a free download of this punchline.

Q: How does a B2B marketer make her boat go?
A: She uses the sail’s force.

You need to know if your target audience prefers “Don’t Stop Believing” or “Wheel in the Sky.” It’s vital to understand your buyer’s Journey.

Q: Why did the B2B marketer give his pet owl a lollipop?
A: He wanted to make the hoots sweet.

Q: What’s a B2B marketer’s favorite zoo animal?
A: The inbound lynx.

I’m trying to get people to join me in a group of cool kids who still write in notebooks. It’s small so far, but I’m optimizing my paper clique strategy.

Q: Why did the CMO put a fence around her jewelry box?
A: She insists on gating all her assets.

Q: Why did the B2B marketer get fired as a film director?
A: Weak calls to action.

You should always hire a bad B2B marketer to make your butter – they have a high churn rate.

I just started a company to build awareness for volleyball, tennis, and fishing. It’s a small operation, but I have a high net promoter score.

Q: Why does the B2B marketing band only have backup vocals?
A: They’re having trouble getting qualified leads.

B2B marketers are so cautious, they wouldn’t kill a fly without a thorough swat analysis.

Q: How many account-based marketers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Just one, but Sales will take the credit for it.

I wrote an SEO-driven blog about pancakes. It’s at the top of the Maple SERP.

Q: Why are B2B holiday gifts boring to look at?
A: They only use white paper.

I started a whisper campaign for my last B2B client. It had high relevance, but low volume.

Q: Why did the priest get an MBA in B2B marketing?
A: To boost his conversion rate.

Q: How do you market your B2B solution to a cat food company?
A: Develop your purrrrr-sonas.

Why do we call it sales enablement and not BANT-Aid?

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Long-tail keywords!
Long-tail keywords who?
Knock-knock jokes, best knock-knock jokes, funniest clean knock-knock jokes, knock-knock jokes about marketing, jokes for kids, knock-knock jokes for kids, funniest kids’ knock-knock jokes about marketing.

All Jokes Aside…

Content is more likely to compel action if it can engage the reader on an emotional level. That level of buy-in can be tricky for B2B content, but humor can be a valuable tool for making a human connection, regardless of how dry your subject matter may be.

I hope these jokes inspire you to add personality to your content—and please don’t hesitate to share some jokes of your own in the comments.

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2017. | 20 Jokes Only a B2B Marketer Will Get | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post 20 Jokes Only a B2B Marketer Will Get appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

As marketing and sales technologies improve, new marketing strategies surface which turn traditional tactics on their ear. One amazing example of this is account based marketing (ABM). Unlike the traditional marketing funnel, with a large, anonymous top of funnel, ABM is like an inverted funnel – instead of inefficiently spending to generate thousands of leads to find a small number of desirable opportunities – ABM targets known, pre-qualified accounts with high quality, personalized marketing campaigns.

ABM wasn’t really possible 10 years ago, but in a post-social, highly connected digital world it’s now possible to target only the companies and buying personas who are most likely to be successful with your product or service. Doing so requires a new set of steps which we will outline here.

Step 1 – Build your list

ABM is effective when you’re targeting a few hundred rather than a few thousand accounts. Define your audience of accounts and identify the right buying personas and influencers to target with campaigns. List building can be done a variety of ways, including purchasing lists of emails from list vendors, or 3rd party data providers (example: ZoomInfo.com http://www.zoominfo.com). This works well if target companies are in North America, but for global companies, this can be more challenging. Linkedin is a great resource, and there are a variety of resources available to develop your targeted lead list. Once you have your target companies and individuals, you can use tools like Hunter.io (http://hunter.io) to collect contact information like email addresses.

Tip: Target competitor customers or specific verticals to narrow your prospect list.

Step 2 – Segmenting the Journey

Target content should have multiple purposes. Each engagement should help promote the brand and qualify the lead. Doing this requires a well-defined journey based on buying stages. A prospect who engages with content about the “basics of topic A” or “is topic A right for you” is at a fundamentally different stage than someone who is researching “getting started with Topic” and “best practices for Topic A”. Most buying cycles have 3-4 distinct stages – discovery (when someone is starting to learn about a product/service), Interest (when someone has decided to dig deeper), Intent (demonstrating purchase intent), and Purchase/Conversion. ABM cycles require investment in discovery stage content to help the prospect identify and quantify pain points or see the opportunity for ROI in a particular product/service. Once the journey stages are well-defined, content should be designed to help move buyers from stage-to-stage and clarify interest level. Typically you want sales to start engaging at the interest or intent stage, depending on your buyer persona.

Tip: Personalize the messaging and content as much as possible. Take full advantage of the knowledge you have of the target accounts to optimize content.

Step 3 – Omnichannel

There is no one channel to rule them all, so plan for how to use content across a variety of channels. The goal should be to bring awareness to your product and brand, and then appear to be EVERYWHERE the prospect turns. It’s important to coordinate between email, landing pages, and blog articles not only for content, but to cookie and track each visitor. Once a prospect has a cookie and is engaged, retargeting is fantastic. Keep in mind that unlike traditional display ads, retargeting ads are highly targeted and less expensive because of the narrow, well-defined audience target – rather than. Social sites like Facebook, Google and Linkedin enable specific CRM/audience targeting – which is not for creating look-alike audiences, but rather explicit targeting. Remember to evolve the message as the buyer progresses through the funnel, so the messaging is relevant to the buying stage if possible.

Don’t forget, the phone is still a viable channel. As soon as a buyer is qualified, they should move from the marketing funnel to the sales funnel to get them on the phone. The marketing campaigns don’t stop! Retargeting ads are also great for keeping a brand top of mind to support the sales team. Even if the prospect starts a free trial, ABM isn’t over.

Tip: Live chat does a great job of capturing early stage prospects and accelerating them through the funnel. Use well-trained resources to effectively leverage this channel.

Marketing and sales alignment is increasingly important for high performing organizations. Not only does ABM facilitate sales and marketing alignment better than traditional methodologies, but it often delivers shorter time in funnel because it’s highly targeted and personalized. There are ABM specific platforms, but most CRM marketing platforms can be configured to support ABM.

You allow your marketing team to gain the interest of potential customers before they begin the buyer's journey with you. This is generally a good process, but sometimes the numbers fall, and you have to keep your pipeline full.

So, how do you create net new opportunities if your inbound leads are running dry? You warm call.

When inbound leads are insufficient, you may need to engage in warm calling to generate net new opportunities. In this post, we'll define what it is, what makes it different, and give you actionable tips to power up your sales prospecting. And in you're in a pinch, jump to the information you're looking for.

• What is warm calling?
• Cold Calling vs. Warm Calling
• Hot Calling vs. Warm Calling
• Effective Warm Calling Tips

It’s okay to reach out to good-fit prospects who haven’t converted on your website yet. You just have to do it correctly. The key to warm calling is to be efficient, effective, and add value in the first 15 seconds. That’s right — only 15 seconds.

Now this isn't the only type of call you can make to prospects, but it may be the type of call you choose over alternatives.

What makes warm calls different?

Cold Calling vs. Warm Calling

The main difference between cold calling and warm calling is the level of familiarity and engagement with the prospect. Cold calling involves reaching out to completely unknown individuals who have had no prior interaction with the company, while warm calling involves contacting leads who have shown some level of interest or engagement, such as filling out a form or attending an event.

Warm calling typically has a higher conversion rate as there is an existing foundation for the conversation, making establishing rapport and building a relationship easier.

Hot Calling vs. Warm Calling

In contrast to warm calling — whether your prospect has converted on the website or your call is the first touch point — hot calling is when you know the prospect is ready to buy. They've submitted a form or emailed you and said, "I've been doing some research, and I know your solution is right for me." 

Because they're eager and on the cusp of a decision, there's little need to "warm them up," it changes the focus of the conversation from relationship-building (though that's still important too!) into evaluating budget, need, and timing so you can close the sale. 

In essence, give the people what they want, and don't beat around the bush. 

Effective Warm Calling Tips

You won't always have the luxury of hot leads ready to talk to you and purchase. However, the following tips will help you enter into a conversation as you gauge level of interest:

1. Identify good fit companies.

The best prospects are the ones that look like your best customers. They’ll have similar pain, which means they’ll be easier to sell to and have higher retention rates. Study your buyer personas and learn to recognize your ideal buyer quickly. Review your customer base and identify key similarities between your most successful clients so you have a finely honed sense of what to look for.

One caveat: Don’t just focus on the whales. While it’s important to identify your largest target accounts as early in the year as possible, whales don’t come around often. Concentrate on understanding your business’ bread and butter — the type of customer that buys again and again.

2. Research the company.

Preparation is essential in warm calling — after all, you can’t deliver value if you don’t know what your prospect cares about. I use LinkedIn to read a bit about the company and collect specific information.

At a minimum, you should know how many years the company’s been in business, the number of employees, their location, and their value proposition. This may sound obvious, but knowing these basics is important. It helps you determine the type of problems this business is likely to face and tailor your introduction. A 10-person company’s business pain is very different from a 500-person company’s pain.

3. Research the company’s executives.

I always do research to find out if I know any of my prospective companies’ senior executives or am connected to people who do. I want to find any information I can that’ll make it easier to connect — for example, whether he’s a Midwestern football fanatic or she’s a San Diegan surfer.

I dig for educational background, I examine their LinkedIn photos for clues to their personality, and I try to determine the most critical problems an executive in this role would have.

4. Perfect your opening.

Calling an executive is theater. You have 15 seconds to capture their attention and demonstrate value.

My call opening is: “Hi Chuck, this is Dan from HubSpot.” Then I’ll pause and wait for them to respond.

It’s important to sound powerful and in control. The prospect may not have any idea who you are or what your company provides. It’s crucial to sound assertive — prospects are more likely to respond to someone who’s confident and authoritative than a clearly nervous rep.

5. Be human.

A sales rep’s secret weapons are voice tone and a sense of humor. Your voice tone can put people at ease or on edge, and an ability to make people laugh will go farther in making them trust you than any sales pitch.

Prospects are extremely busy, so be as pleasant as possible and show that you understand the demands of their positions. Smile when you’re warm calling (they’ll be able to hear it!), especially if it’s early in the morning.

6. Prepare your talking points ahead of time.

Referencing a piece of specific, non-generic information and asking a great question establishes a level of trust and opens the door for a professional conversation.

The key is to get as detailed as possible on a topic with which the executive is familiar. For example, here’s a talking point I could use:

“I saw that you posted a blog article last week on cybersecurity at your company with a really intriguing title. I read it twice, and the paragraph about X strategy was really interesting. I thought I’d pick up the phone to talk with you to see if it was successful.”

Do you think she’s ever had a call like this? This hyper-tailored opening changes the game. It compliments the prospect, engages her right away, and leads to follow-up questions about why the company chose this strategy, whether it succeeded or failed, what they plan to do next, and how you can help.

7. Ask open-ended questions.

Even though you know the prospect is a good fit, you still need to assess their interest and need. By asking open-ended questions instead of yes/no questions, you're prompting the prospect to better engage with the conversation. This gives you an insight into understanding what matters to them so you can better help.

8. Listen for triggering events or pain. 

As you guide the conversation with open-ended questions, you should be digging for their pain points, the things that keep them awake at night. These are the things that your product/service may be able to solve for, and if you can prove this in their words, you're more likely to win them over.

9. Keep the call under five minutes.

Even though you may find that your product is a great fit, a warm call is still an interruption. Use your best judgment if the conversation is flowing well, but be respectful of your prospect’s time. After five minutes, ask, “Do you have a few more minutes, or should I email you information?”

Your first call is just an opening, so don’t worry about cramming in as much information as possible. Find out which other stakeholders should be included on the email, then let your prospect know that you’ll be their point of contact for solving their business pain.

10. Leave a voicemail.

There's a good chance your prospect won't pick up. When that happens, you might be tempted to immediately end the call and move on to the next one. Don't do that. Voicemails can be a valuable touch point even if they don't prompt a call-back.

Why? Because you're getting an opportunity to add value and build your credibility.

Here are a few ways to leave a voicemail that'll accomplish those goals:

• Offer one quick tip and say you're happy to share more if your prospect is interested.
• Foreshadow a helpful strategy, resource, or expert you're going to share with them via email (see the next tip).

11. Follow up with an email.

Following up with an email enhances your visibility. If you actually spoke to the buyer, they're probably going to open your message now that your name is familiar to them. If they didn't answer but listened to your voicemail, they'll recognize your name as well. And if they didn't do either, at least you'll increase the odds of connecting with them by trying another channel.

In your email, thank them for their time and provide additional ideas for solving their biggest business pain. I recommend personalizing your message with a short video — it's easy to record one on your webcam using Soapbox, a free tool from Wistia.

12. Call again.

I recommend calling four times in 12 days. This cadence doesn't cross the line into "harassment" territory, but it does give you a pretty good shot of connecting with your prospect if they have any interest in talking to you.

Don't forget to vary the times at which you call. Maybe the buyer is always slammed in the morning or goes into focus mode every day starting at 3 p.m. Trying them at different points in the day helps you catch them when they're most receptive.

Personally, I like to make calls in the morning before the craziness of a workday hits an executive’s desk — from 7:30 a.m. to 8:20 a.m. local time. If you call earlier, you’re more likely to catch them at their desks. About 25% of the time, the executive picks up.

13. Define a tangible next step.

Every communication you have with a prospect should be designed to drive the sales process forward or determine if you should disqualify them. Include one clear ask in your follow up email so your prospect knows what’s coming next. Even if the response is negative, you’ve laid the foundation for a future relationship.

14. Have a colleague call you.

There's no better way to know what works and what falls flat than having those strategies used on you. With that in mind, ask another salesperson on your team to call you. Pretend you're a typical prospect.

Take notes on the words and questions they use, your reactions, and how effective their CTA is. Incorporate those takeaways into your own approach. And do the opposite, as well: Call them and then ask for their feedback. Practice makes perfect.

Master the Warm Call

Cold calling doesn’t work like it used to, but that doesn’t mean any unsolicited phone call is ineffective. Instead, take the time to carefully research good fit prospects before offering them specific, targeted value, and reap the benefits of warm calling.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In healthcare, extraordinary technology and innovative strategies exist side-by-side with last century’s tools, systems, and out-of-date status quo. This old world/new world dichotomy makes healthcare operations difficult and confusing. And it’s the same with healthcare marketing.

The promise and payoff of modern marketing often seems out of reach to healthcare marketers. It’s easy to buy software, but it’s difficult to transform. How do you navigate the regulatory waters? How do you overcome your legacy systems and processes? How do you convey value propositions that are deeper than ROI? How do you maintain relationships throughout years-long healthcare buying cycles? How do you implement and scale an integrated program?

I lead an organization and team that works with healthcare marketers to help them transform to become essential to their organization’s revenue program. My team and I work closely with payers, providers, healthcare IT, wellness platforms, fitness, medical device manufacturers, and clinical service providers as their partner to grow awareness, engagement, sales pipeline, and revenue. And one thing is clear: every healthcare marketing team feels overwhelmed to some degree. 

Recent research from SiriusDecisions confirms that healthcare marketers are struggling with these key issues:

• Legacy marketing roles are being stretched by new business models
• The effect of working in silos within highly matrixed, complex organizations
• The need to dramatically up their game in order to be relevant and strategic partners within their organizations

Healthcare marketing needs to transform. It’s that simple. And successful transformation begins by making an accurate, dispassionate diagnosis.

That’s where a diagnostic tool comes in. While there may be other diagnostic assessments that you can find or use to help identify the areas of your business that need to transform, for the purposes of this blog, I will cover the assessment I’m most familiar with—my team’s—The Revenue Transformation Assessment for Healthcare Marketers.

Implement a Diagnostic Tool

As you look to implement a diagnostic tool there are a variety of attributes you’ll want to look for. Look for one that was designed to help you honestly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your healthcare marketing function. Your assessment should also give practical next step recommendations for how you can take your program to the next level. These recommendations can help you understand, in detail, not only where you’re at, but also where you’re going – and help you get there.

Different people in different roles and levels might also have contrasting views on where your organization is. This assessment, when taken by a variety of people on your team—your manager, your teammates, your employees—can help you consolidate the disparate views across your marketing organization, and can be truly revealing. When taken by a large group of people, the insights your assessment provides should give you a wider perspective on where your marketing organization is in its marketing journey (our does!).

The 12 Capabilities of a High-Functioning Marketing Team

Ideally, any diagnostic tool you implement will give you a well-rounded perspective of your marketing and marketing team. Our assessment, for example, addresses all twelve capabilities that any high-functioning marketing team needs:

1. Brand and Value Proposition

What do you stand for? What makes you unique in your space? Your brand and value proposition help define your organization and stick out from your competitors in a crowded market.

2. Goals and Metrics

What business objectives are your marketing programs driving toward? Knowing what success looks like, and how to measure it will determine what path you take to get there.

3. Target Audience Definition 

Do you know the profile of your best customers at the segment, account, and persona levels? Do you know their customer journeys? Understanding what makes your best customers the best will help you reach out to and find more customers like them.

4. Messaging and Content

Is your messaging and content engaging and converting? You can churn out content all day, but it won’t be engaging if the messaging isn’t compelling, personalized, and relevant in your target audience’s eyes.

5. Marketing Program Strategy 

Connecting the dots that support your end-to-end revenue process of your marketing in a strategic way makes for a better oiled, more efficient revenue machine than random acts of sporadic marketing.

6. Lead Management 

Capturing, tracking, scoring, monitoring, reacting to and progressing leads and accounts are important steps to making sure each lead gets taken care of by the right stakeholders at the right time.

7. Marketing and Sales Technology 

The number of sales and marketing tech solutions is mind boggling. Implementing and integrating your marketing and sales technology (like marketing automation, CRM, website, analytics, testing, interactive content, predictive, adtech, and ABM technology—just to name a few!) can seem like a lot of work, but it’s imperative to driving demonstrable ROI.

8. Data

Stale and incomplete data can run an otherwise efficient, smooth marketing program right off its tracks. Even just getting started on cleaning up your data—making it current, non-duplicative, and integrated—can make a huge difference.

9. Media and Channels

Engaging your target audience in the right channel at the right cost—across paid, earned, and owned can be the difference in your lead generation and nurturing programs sinking or swimming.

10. Stakeholder Alignment

Collaboration between your revenue stakeholders is key—how effectively your product, brand, demand, sales, and customer success teams are aligned is a fundamental part of driving revenue at any organization.

11. Reporting and Analytics

Are you measuring activity or impact? If your budget went up 20% where would you invest it and why? If your budget went down 20% where would you reduce it and why? Regularly reporting on your programs and how they’re performing allows you to optimize and improve—tying your results to revenue impact makes your reporting even more powerful.

12. People

Having the right people with the right knowledge on your team can make a world of difference in achieving your revenue goals.  Making sure you manage the many resources, skills, capabilities, and experience needed to fully deliver on your marketing programs can be a challenge—having the right agency partners to fill any gaps can help.

Are you healthcare marketer that’s seen marketing transform in your organization? Or, does it need to? I’d love to hear more about your experiences and how you’re thinking about transformation in the comments below. Looking for a diagnostic tool to help you start to transform your revenue? Here’s the one I talked about in this blog.

The post Healthcare Marketers: It’s Time to Transform appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

A Match Made in Heaven, Gone Wrong?

Sales and marketing are a match made in heaven… or at least they should be. And as with any good match, it’s important to celebrate together. By celebrating success, recognizing performance, and making all of the data and updates clear, transparent and real-time, you can build a powerhouse of revenue.

As with any other industry or organization, you are only as good as your leadership. Managers set targets and motivate behavior to accomplish tasks. It sounds simple and straightforward but often proves to be anything but that.

To make matters worse, there’s often a disconnection between sales and marketing, resulting in broken communications, blame, and frustration. This is particularly troubling considering that so much sales time is wasted on unproductive leads while simultaneously the sales reps tend to leave almost 70% of marketing materials unused.

However, the benefits of aligned sales and marketing are clear. In a study by the Aberdeen Group, it was found that companies with strong marketing and sales alignment achieved 20% annual revenue growth.

So, how can you bridge this gap, bring sales and marketing together, and celebrate together in the process?

First, Create Unity Between Sales and Marketing

The best way to create unity is through a shared understanding of each person’s individual impact on the overall goal. Nobody wants to be that one team player who isn’t putting out… but often, it’s hard to figure out who’s trying hard and who’s not, so everyone just settles at mid-effort.

Instead, managers need to understand exactly what activities drive sales. Then, they need to create KPIs around these activities for both sales and marketing.

Once KPIs are established, there needs to be a way to track progress on goals. And of course, there needs to be recognition, communication and rewards at the end to incentivize performance and get the teams celebrating together. Here’s how:

• Set Clear KPIs

First, people need clearly defined objectives to complete. If you’re going to ask someone to work hard, they need to know what to do, how to do it, and what importance it plays in the overall mission. Make these things clear.

These objectives or KPIs should be based upon whatever drives the most growth and success for the company. Don’t just base your metrics on whatever seems to be trendy or popular in other organizations.

KPIs should also be kept relatively simple and attainable.

Examples of KPIs include number of calls, revenue targets, demo requests, MQLs, SQLs, and so on. Each department will have their own. And if you have hired decent managers, then they’ll already know where to focus the effort in order to drive performance.

By setting these KPIs you allow your employees to know what is expected of them, while also giving them flexibility in how it gets done.

TIP: Nobody likes micromanagement, so try to allow each person to problem solve either individually or with coaching.

• Measure Performance

There is no purpose in setting goals if you do not set indicators of success. There is no winning team anywhere that sets goals but then fails to measure their progress towards those goals.

Once the objectives are clear, you need to show progress in real-time. The days of posting reports or updates once-a-day or sending spreadsheets via email to update teams on performance are long over. People need to know how they are performing on their targets now.

Why is this so important? For one, it makes coaching much easier. Coaching should always be based on metrics rather than gut feeling. And the more closely you can tie behaviors to outcomes, the more likely you are to end up with a successful coaching strategy.

In addition, using real-time data builds awareness and transparency on key goals. This awareness can be used to keep forward momentum going, rather than allowing it to slip away.

Colleagues’ performance and celebrating together enhances teamwork and inspires people.

It’s important to provide regular feedback on performance, even with modern software systems. While people may be able to see and understand their progress on goals, a manager still plays a vital role in influencing execution and refining the process.

• Celebrate Achievements

A major problem with work is that for some reason, people act like you’re not supposed to celebrate achievements. We have this idea that work should be dry and boring… but does it have to be that way?

Celebrating the accomplishment of goals is a key step in building connections between co-workers. As they say, “the company that plays together, stays together”.

If you’re not celebrating the good times, you’ll likely struggle to make it through the bad times without high churn.

In order to celebrate achievements, there’s the old way… and the new way. Generally speaking, the old way involves sales bells, white boards, and the occasional power point to spice things up.

However, the problem is that it’s hard to create real-time celebrations or to connect separated offices to share in the fun together because of all the back-end work involved.

The new way of celebrating achievements involves SaaS solutions, commonly known as engagement software or gamification, which pull data directly from your CRM, dialer, or other connected systems and create instant celebrations on web, TV, and mobile devices. The major benefit is that you can leverage the data to create automatic celebrations and to connect all of your offices around the globe.

Celebrations are real, genuine, and focus on the things that matter. Sales, offers, demo requests, inbound leads, and other such activities are great examples of things worth celebrating, especially when a specific KPI is reached (100 demo requests this month, for example).

By celebrating the achievement of key goals together, you will create cohesion between sales and marketing, giving them a cyclical incentive to work together and have fun while doing it.

Next, Create Peer-to-Peer Recognition

Now that you have created unity between your sales and marketing teams, leverage that unity by getting them to celebrate each other’s achievements, thus building true cohesion, teamwork, and alignment.

According to American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his “Hierarchy of Needs”, recognition is a critical component of human social interaction and is required to create a workplace where employees feel valued and appreciated. It’s more than just a “nice to have”, it’s a “must have”. Recognition creates a sense of importance, and thus ownership.

Recognition is also a low cost, high impact way to boost engagement, motivation, and company culture. In the Gallup article cited here, most employees state that their most meaningful recognition comes from managers or the CEO. However, a large percent also cited peers or customers as their most memorable source of recognition.

Increasingly, companies are finding that a bottom-up approach of peer-to-peer recognition may actually be more effective than pushing praise from the top down. In fact, peer-to-peer is 35.7% more likely to have a positive impact on financial results than manager-only recognition.

Additionally, a recent research by the Harvard Business Review links loneliness and depression to lack of social support at work. Specifically, social connectedness in the workplace can greatly improve self-esteem, respect, and happiness amongst co-workers.

According to a recent UK study, companionship and recognition are even more important than a high salary.

Peer-to-peer recognition is critical because it creates a horizontal engagement and motivation structure, rather than top-down. Motivating employees is a critical part of any manager’s job. And it’s much easier with buy-in and support from the ground level, as a result of a strategy that effectively empowers goal setting and celebrations.

Finally, Keep the Momentum Going

A major part of where most initiatives fail is that they eventually lose steam and die out. Generally, this results from everyone being so busy with so much to do that even the best plans sometimes fall by the wayside. Yet, due to the benefits of SaaS and advances in technology, it’s now easy to keep the motivational fires burning.

A major concern, of course, is that by automating recognition and celebrations, they will lose their value. For the most part, this is true. If gamification and engagement software systems become nothing more than a digital “pat on the back”, they are essentially useless and will actually demotivate over time.

However, the goal of engagement software and gamification systems should not be to “replace” current forms of recognition. But rather to “enhance” them.

Technology can help provide real-time updates and highlight events worth celebrating. But it is still the employees and management who need to push this forward by making it meaningful.

Example

For example: Let’s say someone makes a new sale in your company and it registers within an engagement software system. Then, one of the following two things happen:

• The TV plays some music, user unlocks a new badge, and everyone goes back about their day.
• Same as above, but co-workers actually get up, congratulate the employee, give him a high-five, and share a quick laugh.

Which of the above do you think will result in better company culture, better relations between the departments and an overall happier workplace?

Gamification and engagement software systems in and of themselves are silly if people do not meet halfway and leverage the benefits to create better outcomes. This is no different than any other technology or SaaS solution. You get out of the process what you put into it and the systems themselves will never replace the human factor. The role of management will always be to set clearly defined goals and then motivate their teams to accomplish them. The role of employees will likewise always be to achieve the targets set for them. To form the foundation of the company’s culture. How we achieve this will continue to shape and evolve over time as new technologies and ways of doing things emerge. But building a workplace that respects, supports, and celebrates each other has never been more important than it is today.

So, what is “The Best Way to Celebrate Lead Generation and Sales”? Quite simply it’s by leveraging the power of data-driven engagement and recognition systems in order to build a workforce that shares vision, purpose, and unity towards common goals that propel the company forward.

Managing time as an account executive can feel like a high-pressure juggling act in front of a live audience. Day in, and day out you need to log mandatory tasks, send emails, make phone calls, and more, all while engaging with your prospects and closing deals. The only way to keep this act running smoothly is to maintain a high level of sales efficiency.

Even if you are a scheduling master, it’s still easy to get bogged down by your pipeline. You need the right tools in your sales stack to make efficiency possible. Using a sales engagement platform like SalesLoft takes AE efficiency to the next level by simplifying the more repetitive tasks from your to-do list so they take less of your time. SalesLoft allows you to automate the more repeatable tasks in your day and gives you easy access to the information you need. These types of streamlining features take the stress out of menial tasks and let you focus on what’s really important; building strong customer relationships

To shed even more light on how SalesLoft can efficiently execute Account Executive’s tasks and put more time in your day, we’ve invited Stephen Gladney, Account Executive here at SalesLoft, to this edition of Sales Tips.

Transcript

Hi, Stephen Gladney here. I want to talk to you today about how SalesLoft can help you save time and do more with less. As an Account Executive there are a million tasks you must do every day to stay on top of your pipeline. And as that pipeline grows you can begin to get buried under a giant to do list, or even worse, have some leads fall through the cracks. To avoid this situation I use SalesLoft to automate repetitive tasks and streamline actions that might take up a lot of my day. The first area that SalesLoft helps me as an AE, is in Team Snippets. Many of your potential customers are going to be facing similar problems. So you might find yourself being repetitive with certain content or copy. So for example, using the same case study over and over again, or answering the same question over and over again. This is where Snippets comes very much in handy for AE’s. Tracking down this information, and having to copy and paste it every single time, is extremely tedious and can take up a lot of time. With Team Snippets I can have it right there, and not just for me, but for my other colleagues as well. We now have a comprehensive library of commonly used content, just a click away, or a few key strokes away. On the topic of eliminating repetition, automation rules are a game changer. Recent studies have shown, that all the repetitive salesforce tasks being done each day, an AE can spend up to two thirds of their day on non selling activity. We’ve all been there before, logging tasks instead of actually selling. Automation rules let you take actions on common events or situations automatically. So for example, when a manager assigns me a new lead inside Salesforce I can have SalesLoft automatically import that prospect into my cadence. Or when I find my own prospect,say on LinkedIn for example, I can have SalesLoft automatically create that lead or contact for me in Salesforce. With these rules in place you can spend more time selling and less time on series management. I know how annoying it can be when tech doesn’t work the way that it should. From connectivity issues to unsaved data, it can be both frustrating and hinder your deal. That’s why SalesLoft identifies and fixes sync errors for you automatically. Thanks for watching. Hope this was helpful. Feel free to drop a question or comment below.

 

---

Want to learn more about effective sales strategy? Download your free copy of our Account Based Sales Development ebook and start landing larger clients, earning more revenue, and enjoying more sales success.

The post These SalesLoft Features Will Save You Hours Each Week appeared first on SalesLoft.