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“Why aren’t people responding to my emails?”

During my time as a SalesLoft Implementation Success Manager, this was one of the most commonly asked questions I received. And it was always a tough answer to crack.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a magical email template that guarantees responses. Many different factors play into whether an email is even read to begin with — the right time, the right person, and so on. TOPO reported that only 24 percent of buyers are actually opening sales emails. How can you tip the scale and get people to respond?

Nowadays prospects seek a seller who legitimately cares about them and their company’s needs. So you want to craft your emails so they are centered around your prospect.

As always, start by researching your prospect so you can add just the right kind of personalization to your email. Tools like our latest ebook simplify the research process with specific buyer personality descriptions and email suggestions for each.

After your prospect knowledge is sufficient, compose the email that will personally resonate with your prospect and motivate them to reply. The best email for your prospect doesn’t have to start from square one. You can still work within your own email templates! Here are three components you can easily adjust for greater email success.

Limit Your Email’s Length

We live in a world where entire campaigns and news stories are delivered in 140 characters or less. Most people have little time or patience for more information than that.

But some sales reps still feel compelled to send a virtual mini-novel to their prospects. Are the replies pouring in from an email jam packed with company information? Probably not.

There is power in brevity. So, to increase the likelihood of your email being read and give yourself the best chance at a response, keep your emails short.

How short are we talking? Boomerang app found that emails with word counts between 50–125 words have an average reply rate of 50 percent. For those who don’t automatically think in word counts, that comes out to a couple of two-three sentence paragraphs. You still have the wiggle room to provide a solid amount of information, but the length of the email is a lot less likely to overwhelm your prospect with wordiness.

Use Distinct Dialect

We’ve previously discussed the importance of matching your tone of voice to your buyer as a way of building rapport. On phone calls you can simply adjust your tone to the person you’re talking to. Portraying tone and building rapport in your email is a bit more challenging — no matter how well you use italics or caps lock to try and change your pitch.

The key to building solid email rapport is buyer-centric personalization. You need to send an email that conveys your tone, and also reflects a deep understanding with the buyer.

To craft this perfectly tuned email, integrations like Crystal should be your best friend. Crystal puts together a personality profile for the person you are reaching out to. Even better, they provide suggestions for how to engage with the person via email; things like “include emoji,” “be concise,” or “add data and analytics.” Just the right personal touches urge the prospect into replying.

Provide Valuable Content

There is one question you should ask before hitting send. Why is your email worth your prospect’s time? If your email delivers value that is relevant to your prospect, then it should be well worth their time. And the best way to give that sort of value is through the prospect-specific content.

According to TOPO there are three types of content every sales rep needs in their repertoire for higher engagement with potential customers;

• Core Content — Your standard company information like a customizable intro deck or customer road map. Sending this content along with your introductory emails and after any discovery calls or demos gives prospects a take-away item of necessary company information.
• Key Question Content — Content that delves specifically into the aspects that prospects may have more probing questions about. Offer integration docs, feature explanations, blog posts, or case studies to provide the exact value your prospect needs to continue the sales process.
• Roadblock Content — This is the content you keep in your back pocket at all times. If the prospect has a roadblocker, like interest in a competitor, you can send documentation to smooth that point over. For example, send a competitive comparison guide.

Once you are familiar with your prospect from previous conversations or your own research, deliver the content that best fits their needs. Not only are you sending them a solid email with a great resource, you also show your ability to provide for them once they become a customer.

Sure, it would be ideal to send the exact same template to every prospect, but blasting out generic emails detracts from human connection prospect’s crave. So when composing your next email put the prospect first, keep your message short, and deliver the most possible value.

It’s time to start winning deals and influencing prospects with a firm understanding of personality-based selling. Download the free ebook today!

The post 3 Tips for Better Email Reply Rates appeared first on SalesLoft.

Every business undergoes this type of problem, it’s a normal and simple problem. But it always ends ruining what we work for. What is this problem? (Silent Pause for ten seconds) Yup, that’s right, if you’re thinking that the problem is “How to keep a business going” then you’re right. It’s that simple, and one of the answers is “Invest your time in Lead Generation”

Lead generation services might help you’re business going, by finding a prospect that is interested in your business and finding future business partners, surely your business will continue until the end of time or until your company becomes broke or has a scandalous incident.

Have you ever heard the phrase “You are out of business if you don’t have a prospect” by Zig Ziglar? Well, what Zig Ziglar said is true. How can your business go without a prospect in sight, or that you’ve given up in finding a prospect?

I know it’s not easy to find a qualified prospect for your business, but you might want to consider the fact that not everything is easy. You don’t think that conquering a country back then was easy right? It takes a lot of planning before anyone charge in. You might work for it about a week or so, but it is worth the work. Because you’ll find the best and qualified prospect that has taken interest in your business.

I’ll give you a little advice in conquering your problems if you are still having doubts in Lead Generation.

Remember that everyone is just like you – You are you, but what you think might be the same as others. Your personality might be different but the way you doubt, is always the same as others. You might wonder why, and they too will wonder why. Everyone is doubtful when they don’t trust the person.

You are the tactician of your business, you must never forget that. Because once you do, you’ll be the one in strings. Like a puppet being controlled by a puppeteer.

For the first time, Cornell University researchers are using imaging capabilities at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) to explore how copper affects plant fertility. The work could provide key insights into how plants can be bred for better performance in marginal soils.

Source: Unsplash

Geofencing marketing is a tactic that leverages the user’s location data to inform marketing decisions. We previously described what geolocation is and how the different types of targeting can be used in your marketing. This time, we’ll go over five core use cases for geolocation marketing to reveal how practical this technique can be.

Messaging campaigns powered by geolocation data are frequently used by retailers to drive foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores, but this isn’t the only use case. In fact, there are several uses for geolocation marketing campaigns that don’t even require a brick-and-mortar presence at all.

No matter your app vertical, there are likely one or two geolocation use cases that will work for you. Find yours below.

1. Target Users When They’re Near a Competitor

Driving traffic to your store isn’t the only goal of a marketing campaign. In some cases, it’s a win to simply drive traffic away from competitors.

Retail apps without a brick-and-mortar location can establish geofences around competitors’ physical stores. By offering promotions and discounts when users are about to shop at a competitor, you’ll keep your app top of mind even without a physical presence.

Even if the message doesn’t immediately lead to conversions, it might cause shoppers to hold off on buying the item until they’ve done some more research — giving you another chance to win the purchase.

2. Tailor Recommendations to the User’s Geolocation

Location-based recommendations aren’t new, but mobile GPS tech enables far more precision than IP address blocks. Instead of a restaurant app suggesting popular food in the city, it can suggest popular food within one mile. Geolocation enables more relevant recommendations and search results than ever before.

Search results and passive recommendations aren’t the only ways a restaurant app can leverage geolocation. With geofencing, you can trigger push notifications to proactively suggest venues when users enter a new neighborhood. The immediacy of these suggestions will likely drive better results than more generalized city-wide recommendations.

3. Optimize the In-Person Experience With Beacons

We regularly say that mobile marketers should optimize their apps with analytics and A/B testing, but it’s a lot harder to optimize in-person experiences like brick-and-mortar stores. Normally, there’s no good way to collect data on the shopping experience, so businesses are left with only big picture metrics like conversions.

With beacons, this story is changing. Beacons are small, physical devices that track nearby phones via Bluetooth. The technology is picking up in popularity: according to Business Insider, half of the top 100 retailers in the US tested beacons in 2014, and we can expect to see 4.5 million active beacons by the end of 2018.

By placing physical beacons around the store, you’ll be able to track customers’ precise locations. This helps store owners understand patterns in foot traffic, which items catch shoppers’ eyes, which aisles are most overlooked, and more. These granular metrics enable deep optimizations that could affect conversions down the line.

If your app doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar store associated with it, you can still use beacons at events. If you plan on hosting conferences, pop-up shops, or local meetups, remember to gather data with beacons to optimize future events.

Source: Wikipedia

4. Inform Product Suggestions With Location History

Geofence-triggered push notifications help conversions in the immediate future, but what does this mean for long-term campaigns? Location data is, in fact, one of the many types of user data that can inform future marketing campaigns. If location plays a key role in your app, you can collect location history the same way you might track app usage history. Then, if you spot any trends, you’ll be able to adjust your marketing accordingly.

Think of a public transit app that lists up-to-date bus arrival times. By default, the app might show the closest transit routes to the user’s current location. But over time, this app could add even more value by learning which routes the user frequents. If a particular route is part of someone’s daily commute, the app could eventually default to that specific route instead of showing all nearby schedules.

5. Prompt For Surveys on Geofence Exit

Geofencing is a two-way street. Events and messages can be triggered when a user exits a geofence, not just when they enter. This presents the perfect opportunity to survey users and collect valuable post-purchase information.

Generally, customers aren’t inclined to fill out surveys (no matter how short) without a tangible reward. Since these customers are already using your mobile app, you can offer a discount on their next purchase in exchange for filling out the survey.

Something like, “We’ll give you 10% off your next purchase if you fill out this three-question survey” could do the trick.

This tactic is especially powerful when triggered upon exiting a geofence because the in-store experience is still fresh in the user’s mind. You’re more likely to receive honest feedback.

Getting Started With Geofencing Marketing

Source: Freepik

There’s a lot of tech behind the scenes in the world of geolocation marketing. Luckily, marketing platforms like Leanplum abstract the technical challenges away, leaving marketers free to craft location-based campaigns without occupying engineering resources. If you’re now getting started, keep these five use cases in mind as you build your first geofencing marketing campaign.

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Leanplum is the mobile marketing platform built for engagement. We help brands like Lyft, Tinder, Grab, TED, and Zynga orchestrate multi-channel campaigns — from messaging to the in-app experience — all from a single, integrated platform. Schedule your personalized demo here.

There is no silver bullet to increase sales. However, an integrated marketing and PR strategy can be one key to unlocking sales. Below are four tips for boosting lead generation and accelerating sales through PR and media relations.

1. Strategic media placements can help not only with general awareness for your company, product or service, but also with lead generation. Coverage in the precise publications that your target audiences read and with finely tuned messages about your value proposition, customers’ successes and differentiators can drive traffic back to your site and generate leads for your sales team to nurture.
2. What happens to people who read your coverage and are interested in your product or services? Where do they go next? Most likely, it’s to your website to learn more. Make sure you make it easy for referrals to become leads – not only by making sure you have the right content on your site to help prospects along the funnel, but also by making sure you have a way to capture leads. This means, at some point, you need a way to get their information. While a generic “contact us” form might work, it’s less effective than gating premium content that people are willing to trade their email address to access. And once you have that information, you can nurture prospects and move them closer to a sale.
3. Press coverage, along with mentions in industry analyst reports and product reviews, can offer third-party validation for your product and service, which can go a long way in nurturing your prospects and hopefully converting them. But first, you need to arm your sales team with this tool – make sure they know what collateral is available for them to reference with prospects. And make sure your press mentions are visible on your site for all visitors – whether prospects, media or otherwise.
4. Measure your activities and their results with tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Marketo, Bizible and many more. These tools can help you uncover valuable insights into which media placement is driving the most traffic to the site, which placements are generating leads, what site pages are capturing visitors’ attention and more. When you have this data, not only can you report back to your CEO how PR impacted sales, but you can act on these insights to continue your success.

On its 20 year journey to becoming the world's largest online retailer, Amazon has focused almost purely on consumers. 

But in 2015, Jeff Bezos's Seattle-headquartered tech giant decided that it needed to do a better job of tapping into the online business-to-business (B2B) market, which is worth £96 billion in the UK alone, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

It launched a new free-to-use business supplies marketplace called Amazon Business in the US and went on to launch the platform in Germany in December 2016, and the UK this April. 

Amazon Business is off to a promising start, according to Bill Burkland, head of Amazon Business in the UK.

"The US acquired over 400,000 businesses and a billion dollars in revenue for Amazon Business in its first year of business," he said during an interview at the company's London office, adding that there were 45,000 sellers on Amazon Business in the US by the end of the first year. 

"You can think about Amazon Business being for business customers what Amazon.co.uk is for consumers," Burkland continued. "It's a marketplace where business customers can come and be confident that no matter that they're looking for to operate their business, there's a high probability they'll be able to find it on Amazon."

Amazon wants companies to go to Amazon Business to buy everything from new computers and A4 paper to toilet cleaner and power tools. There are currently over 100 million products listed on the marketplace, which can also be accessed by people outside the US, the UK, and Germany.

"A customer in any EU country can go onto .co.uk, Amazon Business, and buy. Export is a big part of our business that is attractive for the seller community as well," said Burkland.

How Amazon Business is different from Amazon.co.uk

Amazon Business differs from Amazon's consumer website in a number of areas. It offers VAT-free pricing and includes features that are specifically targeted at businesses such as a reporting and analytics suite that helps companies to track and limit spending. The entire Amazon.co.uk product catalogue is available, but there are some extra products too.

Burkland said one county council in the UK recently signed up to Amazon Business to buy books, as you might expect, but it ended up buying everything from wheelbarrows to glitter.

Unlike Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Business offers one day free shipping to customers when they spend over £30. Amazon Prime members who set up a business account can also take advantage of free shipping on Amazon Business.

The Amazon Business platform — yet to get any dedicated integration with Alexa, Amazon's personal assistant — has proved popular with small and medium sized businesses from the get go but Amazon is keen to get larger enterprises with thousands of staff making big, bulk buys on the too as they're the real revenue drivers.

On the size of the overall business market, Burkland said: "It's a big market segment. So we have a long way to go. It's one where we think business customers will find value. And it's one that we're investing in heavily." Burkland and his spokesperson said they were unable to provide any numbers that would illustrate how much Amazon is investing in Amazon Business.

Interestingly, Burkland said it doesn't matter to Amazon whether businesses do their shopping through Amazon.co.uk or Amazon Business."We're agnostic. We want to build a marketplace based upon customer feedback reflects what customers want. If they choose to use that, great. If they choose to use Amazon consumer, that's fine."

Amazon Business could become the next AWS

Amazon has several large businesses beyond its well-known ecommerce platform. It has a video streaming platform, a music streaming platform, a grocery delivery service, and an audiobook service. 

Burkland compared Amazon Business to Amazon's enormous cloud company, Amazon Web Services, which hit over $12 billion (£9 billion) in revenue in 2016. "I think that in many ways Amazon Business is kind of following in those footsteps," he said. 

In order to become the next AWS, Amazon Business will need as many sellers as it can. In the UK, Amazon Business has successfully enticed stationary retailer Ryman onto the platform.

Burkland was unable to provide any figures for how Amazon Business is doing in the UK because it's "still early days." He said he expects to release some official numbers later this year and revealed that the company is planning to sponsor some events to help promote the brand. Amazon Business is also being marketed through email display ads but there's no "Tube advertising or TV/radio yet."

All of the engineering efforts for Amazon Business take place outside the UK but Amazon has hired dedicated sales, marketing, procurement and alliance teams for Amazon Business locally. 

"Amazon Business is part of the 5,000 job commitment that Amazon has made to new jobs or new hires in the UK this year," said Burkland. 

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When a large prospect shows interest in your startup, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon. But there’s one thing you should consider before exploring a future in enterprise sales.

Let’s say you plan to sell your product directly to consumers, but an enterprise prospect asks you to build on top of SAP, so they can use your software internally. What should you do?

Many founders, especially those with limited enterprise sales experience, might say, “Let’s try a pilot and see if companies who use SAP also have a need for our product.”

Here’s the problem:

You don’t know very much about the market. Is the prospect really worth abandoning your plans to sell to end-consumers or SMBs? Is SAP the best platform for your product? It’s hard to know the answers without first collecting data.

While it’s important to compare your options before committing to enterprise sales, it’s difficult for most startups to test the waters with a series of rapid-fire experiments. Why? Because experiments like this—even the quick ones—take at least 12–18 months.

Want to develop your own sales strategy? Get your FREE sales strategy template today!

If you want to pursue enterprise sales, you need to be all in

Can you commit yourselves to enterprise sales—and only enterprise sales—for the next two years? This isn’t a market to dabble in. You can’t test enterprise and direct consumer sales concurrently, unless you have a big team with tons of experience.

Think about all the steps you'll take to determine whether this is the right course of action for your startup:

• Transition the prospect’s initial interest into a demo and/or paid pilot
• Convince the prospect to purchase your product (and sign a long-term contract)
• Implement your product
• Generate recurring value for the customer
• Conduct a case study—prove that what you’re selling solves an enterprise-level problem

Then you have to replicate this process over and over again to justify the switch to SAP-focused development. What works for one company might not work for others.

We’re talking about a massive task list and overall timeframe. It’ll be two years before you know whether enterprise sales is right for you. Can you risk that much time just to collect data? By the time you get your answer, it could be too late to pivot or put those insights into practice.

Enterprise sales is a big risk, but it can definitely pay off

Take Box, for example. They set out to make a product for end-consumers, but once that path closed, they committed themselves to enterprise. Their CEO, Aaron, read enterprise books, met with enterprise CEOs and executives, and soaked in all the enterprise knowledge he could to prepare himself for the transition. They’re doing really well, but they had to go all-in. They had to commit. It wasn’t an experiment. They didn’t dip their toes in the water.

Do your own 360-degree research

If an enterprise prospect wants you to build your product on top of SAP, don’t just take them at their word. Instead…

Talk to SAP employees

Tell them what you’re building and ask them whether they think your product is a good fit for their customers and platform.

Talk to SAP consultants

They’ll have a lot to tell you about implementation and customization. Ask for their advice, feedback, and pain points.

Talk to startups who have built products on top of SAP

Meet with successful and unsuccessful companies. Learn from their experiences and mistakes. What do they wish they’d known beforehand? What were some unexpected costs? Where’s a good place to start?

Talk to competitors

See what kind of response you get when you discuss your product. Show them what you’re trying to do and explore better opportunities for market-fit. Learn how they sell their own solutions.

Are you ready to make the commitment?

If you’re not sure, take the time to do more research. Don’t experiment just because a prospect showed a little bit of interest. Don’t commit just because one or two enterprise executives liked your presentation.

Ten years ago, at my first startup, we transitioned to enterprise because companies like Google, Intuit, and Oracle showed some interest. We gained early traction and I thought, “Man, this enterprise shit isn’t hard. What’s everybody talking about?” But it turned out to be very difficult. By the time we found out enterprise wasn’t right for us—15 months later—it was way too late.

We made a bunch of rookie mistakes following a path we didn’t understand. In the end, we wasted an incredible amount of money, energy, and time, which is the most critical resource any startup has.

If you’re ready for enterprise sales, there’s only one thing to do

Go all in. Dedicate the next 12–18 months to enterprise success. Commit fully to research, testing, and implementation on a large scale. After all, there’s no such thing as a quick experiment in enterprise sales. 

Develop your own successful sales strategy, even if you've never created one before. Click below for a free template!

If the credo of social selling is to add value, to volunteer your help, and to wait for others to talk about what you do, I wonder if social selling was actually wasting a lot of people’s time – when they should be out selling. And what’s wrong with talking about what we do?

You may or may not be familiar with the term ‘Knowledge Retention.’ However, you – and your team – have likely experienced frustration caused by its absence:

• Time and energy wasted as each new employee struggles to understand their role and responsibilities.
• Lost productivity and overall disruption to the business as those new hires slowly get up to speed.
• Mistakes caused by a lack of information, practice, feedback, or experience.
• Deliverables and deadlines missed due to employee absence and turnover.

These are just a few examples of what happens when institutional knowledge isn’t captured and managed in an intentional, proactive way. They may seem like small issues that can be overcome in the moment, but at scale they create significant negative business impact. The real issue is the lack of an information roadmap, and building one is an intentional step that pays off in more ways than one.

The difference between storing information and retaining knowledge

In its simplest form, knowledge retention involves capturing organizational information so that it can be used later. This enables employees to efficiently build on the experience and expertise of each other through access to organizational information, strategies, and best practices. This is a key competitive advantage, and it differentiates leading companies from their competitors, helping them keep promises while adding value to their customers.

Many people regularly backup their devices to minimize the risk of losing their personal data and information. Knowledge retention provides a similar level of security to companies by capturing and protecting their employees’ knowledge, because while employees may not ‘crash,’ they can definitely leave. And they do. According to a study by the Future Workplace, 91% of millennials expect to be in jobs for less than 3 years. And in a strong economy, the job market tends to favor talented employees. Every time an employee transitions, their organization risks losing their valuable knowledge. The companies that excel at employee retention are at an immediate advantage.

Over time, employees learn to navigate their work environments. But, unlike backing up a phone or computer, employee knowledge isn’t all centralized or discrete, making it harder to backup. And while making that information accessible – through a repository like SharePoint or Dropbox – is a great start, it isn’t retaining knowledge. The knowledge that connects all of this information and uses it for decision-making is what keeps a company running. Knowledge retention focuses on preserving this information roadmap.

Companies need to be proactive to protect knowledge

In theory, knowledge management should be integrated into the daily operations of every organization, proactively protecting what employees know long before they leave. It should create and foster an environment of knowledge-sharing, from detailed, role-specific onboarding to reward structures, job rotations, mentoring programs, and company procedures. Building an employee training plan out of shared knowledge is infinitely easier when an organization takes a proactive approach.

The reality, however, is that most businesses take a more reactive approach to knowledge capture, typically triggered after an employee announces they’ll be leaving or transitioning. At this point – without proper succession planning – the company has an uphill battle. They are trying to pull information out of an employee who has checked out. There is limited time, and few guides or resources in place to help the manager or interim backfill identify what needs to be retained. The result? That knowledge, which was accrued over years of tenure, is lost and business is disrupted.

Recognizing the true value of employee knowledge is the first step. The cost to back up employee knowledge is far less than the time, money, and relationships wasted trying to recreate it. And while it may require more initial effort, the key to knowledge retention is preparation.

The post How to Capture, Manage and Use Institutional Knowledge to Boost Your Productivity appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The tech "bubble" — if there ever was one — appears to have peaked sometime in late 2015/early 2016 and venture capital funding for tech startups has gone into a global decline, according to new data from KPMG.

The good news is that the decline is slow and undramatic. We are not seeing the sudden crash that characterised the dotcom bust in 2000. For those who feared that VC funding of tech companies had become worryingly frothy, this will be reassuring. Having arrived at the top, tech appears to have stepped back from the ledge.

Nonetheless, it still means there is less money and fewer deals going on. And the deals that are getting done are generally larger — money for smaller deals is drying up.

Here's a snapshot of what the peak looked like, and where we are today.

• Q1 2015, total number of VC funding deals globally: 5,250.
• Q2 2017, total number of VC funding deals globally: 2,985 (down about 43% from the peak).
• Q2 2016, total VC funding in dollars globally: over $45 billion.
• Q2 2017, total VC funding in dollars globally: $40 billion (down 11% from the peak).

KMPG put together a series of useful charts on the data. This is the total universe of funding, showing a clear pullback over the last two years:

Global funding

KPMG said in its report:

"Worldwide VC deal count slid again by just over 7% between Q1 and Q2'17. However, thanks to a surge of mega-rounds, the quarter-over-quarter increase in total venture capital invested was a staggering 55.3%. This included the largest venture round ever, raised by Beijing-based ridesharing platform Didi Chuxing, at $5.5 billion. Analyzing year-over-year figures, even the massive $40 billion invested in Q2'17 was down by 14.2% relative to the $46.7 billion invested in Q2 2016, while deal volume fell by 24% across the same timeframe."

The US

The largest market, the US, saw moderate softening. Total funding in Q2 2017 remained near the peak but the number of deals declined by about 27%:

Europe

The pullback was more pronounced in Europe.

The total number of European deals more than halved from the peak, and the total value of deals declined by about 48%:

In Europe, KPMG said, there was "a fifth straight quarterly decline in deals volume, however, total VC investment in Europe remained strong as a result of a number of mega-deals. Three $100 million+ deals together accounted for $1 billion in European VC funding, including $502 million to London-based Improbable, $397 million to Berlin-based Auto1 Group, and $100 million to London-based GammaDelta Therapeutics."

The UK

The UK looked like a version of the wider trend. Deals declined by more than half, and the total value went down by about 22%:

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Change management can be a test for any organization. Several studies by Towers Watson show that just 25% of change management initiatives are successful over the long term. I wouldn’t be surprised if the statistics are worse in my industry, financial services, where so many companies are large, global, regulated, and structurally complex.

So four years ago, when I was CEO of GE Capital Retail Finance and tapped to lead a mega change initiative — splitting off our unit into a new, publicly traded company, Synchrony Financial — I’ll admit I viewed it as a huge challenge. Major organizational changes, covering everything from recruiting and branding to regulatory approvals and marketing, happened in rapid succession, with a hard deadline of 12 months to get it all done for the IPO — and 18 months from the IPO until our full separation from GE.

While every CEO is forced to work through organizational change, many will tell you that of all their duties, change management scares them the most, because nearly every aspect of a company and its leadership is tested. Change management certainly tested us. We went from being part of a company with over 300,000 employees, at GE, to being a company of 10,000, at Synchrony Financial, seemingly overnight. We hired roughly 1,000 new employees in approximately 15 months to build our operations, human resources, compliance, and technology teams. (We have hired more than 5,000 new employees since beginning the effort in late 2013.) During this time, we had to cut the cord from the distinct, 100-year-old culture at GE and create something that was uniquely our own.

This is what I learned:

Ask, listen, and be transparent with employees. When the separation plans were announced, I knew our employees would be anxious. I just didn’t know in what ways.

What I did know was that I, and our leadership team, needed to solicit feedback — a lot of it. The first thing we did was engage in ongoing listening sessions. We sat down with small groups of employees across functions and talked about everything — including leadership, operations, compensation, benefits, and staffing. We also talked about how we would run the business and serve our clients while we set out to separate. We couldn’t hit the pause button while we figured out what to do.

We asked about employees’ hopes and concerns. We held monthly town hall meetings where we could discuss these issues in large groups, and we created an anonymous “Ask Margaret” question box that gave every employee a direct line to me. Very quickly, common concerns bubbled up. We found that while people understood our vision, they worried about their careers and what would happen to their long-term health and investment programs. I was initially surprised at how direct and personal some of these questions were, yet they made so much sense in terms of the massive change we were introducing: Would paychecks be delivered on the same day they had been previously? Would employees have the same number of vacation days? Would our health insurance programs include their doctors and hospitals? People wanted detailed answers — and they wanted them fast. And when we were too slow, they were not afraid to tell us.

When we spotted these issues, we did our best to fix them, whether it meant hiring new people, changing policies, or reorganizing. As we did this, we went on a roadshow, with the senior leadership team holding face-to-face meetings with employees around the globe. We have more than 1,000 employees co-located at a number of different partner sites, so we needed to make sure each employee heard the same message directly from us, not only through email. And we didn’t say it just once. We continually explained what we were doing and why we were doing it so that there was no room for misunderstanding or rumors. We aimed for constant transparency, even before everything was final.

Create (or revise) a defined mission and values. As my leadership team and I fielded questions about our company’s purpose, I knew the answers couldn’t come just from the top. Often I received this question from our employees: “How can we preserve our GE heritage while embracing our new future as a stand-alone company?” To get to the answer, I asked them the same questions I had asked our senior leaders.

We talked about their emotions: What inspired them to come to work each day? What words evoked the passion they felt about the organization? What values drove them? What made them proud? In all, we engaged more than 500 employees from around the world for feedback on our culture through focus groups, interviews, workshops and anonymous ideation sessions.

We quickly realized that the key to building our own distinct culture was to capture the ambition that already existed — and the opportunity that attracted people to the company in the first place. We transformed those feelings into a simple sentence: “We pioneer the future of financing, improving the success of every business we serve and the quality of each life we touch.” This ended up being the “true north” our employees rallied around.

Be open to creating new work policies and benefits. “What makes sense across a 300,000-person conglomerate like GE won’t necessarily make sense for a 10,000-person organization.” This comment came up in one of our feedback sessions, and it stuck with me. Once we knew what we stood for, we had to turn those words into actions. We also had to analyze the needs of different groups — not just at headquarters but at every location and every level. We moved away from the one-size-fits-all model.

One big lesson I learned was not to assume that you know what people value. A CEO is far removed from the day-to-day concerns of most workers. A program or benefit may sound good, but if it isn’t improving employees’ lives, then we need to find something else that will. During our feedback discussions, for example, many associates brought up their desire for more flexibility. Individuals trying to manage children’s school events, dentist appointments, or home services, for example, needed more control over work schedules. What did we do? We created a policy that allows them to take time off in one-hour increments (versus the minimum of four hours required in our previous company). It was a highly valued change.

As we further studied the employee feedback, as well as the composition of our workforce that was very different from GE’s, we made many changes. We developed a four-year transition plan to move from a defined benefit pension to an enhanced 401(k) plan; we changed our philosophy and approach to bonus plans; and we even changed compensation levels and job titles to be better aligned with our industry. We were completely transparent about all of these changes and took employee feedback into account as much as we could.

One idea we retained from GE was to celebrate diversity. At the same time, we needed to do it in our own way. We kept diversity networks that represent women, African American, Asian, Hispanic, LGBT, veteran, and disability groups. We also added a diversity symposium that brings members of these groups together annually to share their unique perspectives — perspectives that can lead to great ideas and help us better serve our diverse customer base.

Find ways to have fun. As we made strides on the separation plan, one of my senior leaders asked: “With everyone working so hard, how do we find time to celebrate?” I believe celebrating success is critical, but it’s important to make it personal and authentic. This is one area where consistency is not necessarily a virtue. You need to allow each leader to create their own idea of fun, as long as it ladders up to a larger theme. There’s always a danger in trying to overengineer culture.

During a time of transition, it’s easy to focus on the work. Yet this is exactly when focusing on people is more critical than ever. At a time when we could have taken a pause on all training, diversity, and culture initiatives, we doubled down on them. This has paid off dramatically.

Rapid change doesn’t have to be a recipe for confusion. You can bring employee engagement and productivity to new levels when organizations and leadership are transparent, take everyone’s opinions seriously, and offer an authentic shared vision. At Synchrony, we had to evolve quickly and rip off the Band-Aid when we spotted issues. The build ended up looking much different than I or anyone else expected.

Of course, the journey isn’t over. We separated, went public, and created a name and a brand. While we now have a unique Synchrony culture, it doesn’t end there. There simply is no finish line for culture. But I’m thrilled with where we landed, and even more so with where we’re headed.

By Kathy Menis, SVP of marketing

Coca-Cola has done it. So has a big-name advertising agency. Hershey’s, too.

All introduced a role that should put every CMO on notice: chief growth officer. In Coca-Cola’s case, the company even scrapped its original CMO role after a key executive’s retirement.

Coca-Cola’s move isn’t that surprising: Brands always have focused on growth. But the trend also highlights how much advertising’s digital transformation is upending the traditional CMO role. To succeed in today’s competitive landscape, CMOs need to do more than drive creativity, brand positioning, and awareness. They must be part data scientist, part customer engagement leader, and part growth driver.

This increased pressure is palpable. According to recent Accenture research, 50% of CEOs see CMOs as the primary drivers of disruptive growth within their company, and 37% would have no problem firing their CMO over missed growth targets.

The emphasis on growth has led to conflicting priorities for CMOs and prompted many to emphasize customer acquisition above all else. But retaining customers should be just as important. Customer acquisition is costlier than retention and loyal customers often drive more lifetime value than one-and-done or fickle consumers.

Customers won’t give brands their loyalty if their experiences are purely transactional. They want to feel that a brand intimately understands them and their preferences, which marketers — and CMOs in particular — only can achieve by giving them a connected experience across all touchpoints and channels. This means marketers must recalibrate the balance between acquisition and retention, and make understanding customer identity a central part of their long-term growth plan, investment, and vision for the future.

A contradiction for CMOs

Customer acquisition continues to get the most resource investment and prioritization. According to a recent CMO Club and Signal survey, just 44% of CMOs called increasing customer loyalty and retention their primary marketing objective, compared to 74% who said the same thing about acquisition. Also, 77% of CMOs spend less than half their budgets on retention initiatives, with a third allocating only 10% to 30% of budgets to keep customers happy. 

Marketers know that a happy customer is an engaged customer. The majority say achieving a “single view of the customer” is essential for delivering relevant experiences. At the same time, most are either unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with their current retention rates and customer lifetime value. 

The contradiction is clear: CMOs heavily invest in acquisition, but wonder why they can’t keep customers — even though this is a secondary priority. In a way, you can’t blame them. Technological and organizational silos have made it really difficult to achieve the “single view” necessary to keep customers loyal and happy. There’s also a herd mentality that causes marketers to keep investing dollars in walled gardens where you surrender data ownership, accept technology disintegration as a tradeoff for working with multiple vendors, and compromise real-time customer interactions for latency — wash, rinse, and repeat.

How CMOs must evolve

For a brand to grow, it actually must know its customers, and that only can happen if it makes customer identity a strategic priority. Brands must own their ID graph (a database that houses all known identifiers that correlate with individual customers) and adopt technology that syncs and captures online and offline behavioral data and historical data, allowing them to reach customers in real time with relevant messaging whether their interaction is on the web, mobile, in-store, or with a call center.

Establishing this connective thread will boost loyalty and retention. Some brands are already using identity resolution technology — which unifies all of a brand’s offline and online data assets on one platform — to develop a long-term customer identity strategy and like-minded products. Gap, for example, generates personalized product recommendations based on a customer’s previous online apparel shopping and browsing behavior. Turner, meanwhile, has created the “Turner Data Cloud” to connect disparate customer data and create custom audience segments across the myriad brands under its umbrella. This data consolidation also has empowered the media giant’s sales organization to begin selling across its portfolio and has driven the efforts of Turner’s new CMO council, which meets monthly to review the entire organization’s priorities across every channel.

Focusing on current customers hasn’t come at the expense of growth at these companies. It’s time for all companies to embrace metrics that measure growth in customer retention and lifetime value since both have a significant impact on elevating profitability and revenue. CMOs can lead the charge to make their companies more customer-centric — and they don’t necessarily need a Chief Growth Officer title to do it. CMOs can drive growth within their organizations by investing in an identity resolution strategy that increases customer engagement, delivering connected and personalized interactions, while minimizing the negative experiences that fuel churn.

CMOs don’t have to sacrifice customer retention for the sake of acquisition. To succeed and secure their place within their organizations, they must do both.

Find out how a customer identity solution can break down the data silos in your organization to fuel customer loyalty and retention.

 

This post is sponsored by Signal. | Content written and provided by Signal.

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If Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein were B2B marketers today, what do you think they’d spend most of their energy and effort on? Let’s take a look at a few quotes to get a hint:

“Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my axe.”
–Abraham Lincoln.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
–Albert Einstein

These two are among the countless quotes that stress the importance of focusing on the right things to set yourself up for success. It’s often counterintuitive and very hard to maintain the discipline and spend more time sharpening the axe than cutting down the tree, or asking the right question than finding the answer.

If Lincoln and Einstein were B2B marketers today, I’d argue they would focus heavily on finding the right accounts to target in the first place.

With Demand Generation, it is not uncommon to be heavily focused on the WHAT – many teams start with offers or content assets as a starting place. Account Based Marketing is different, you must start with the WHO – the starting place is defining your target accounts. This is the most important decision you will make with ABM. The idea is simple – you need to focus 100% of your efforts on the right targets.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

The target account selection process is often more effective if teams use data – not just opinions! There are 4 types of data that you need to select target accounts:

• Firmographics: What company characteristics best predict a successful sales process?
• Technographics: What technologies do they currently use or are they looking to invest in?
• Intent Data: Is the company showing signs that they’re in the market for solutions like yours?
• Engagement Data: How engaged is this account with your company right now?

There’s another equally important activity that you can do with your team. It doesn’t involve spending tens of thousand on new technology or an analyst firm.

Enter the Won Sales Analysis.

We’ve all heard of the lost sales analysis where you look at reasons you lost a deal. It’s time to explore the Won Sales Analysis and reverse engineer your best existing customers to find more of them.

I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from the book, SHiFT by Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto. There are five stages of a Won Sales Analysis: identify, find, close, improve, and classified.

Before we dive into how to do this, it’s important to note that you need the right people involved. Target account selection isn’t just a job for marketing – you must get buy-in and sign-off from your Sales and Customer Success counterparts. One person or department alone will not be able to answer these questions. It takes the collective wisdom of your entire customer-facing team to effectively conduct the Won Sales Analysis.

Go through specific stages of the customer journey and uncover to uncover key pieces of information.

1) Identify – Establish the events, triggers, and pain points that led to the purchasing decision. The chances are people at your target account already had a pain and were aware of some available option. You want to look for an exact point in time that motivated them to act. When you can hone in on this brief window of opportunity, you can start to uncover valuable information and identifying the moment your target customer actively sought a solution. What was the compelling event?

Learn how to recognize this by asking questions like:

• What created the sense of urgency that compelled you to proactively keep a solution for this challenge
• Why is your current solution no longer viable or meeting expectations?
• What are your current expectations?

2) Find – When and how did they find you?

Getting to highly motivated decision-makers before your competition is key. Ask about the sequence of events that happened before the trigger event that pushed the prospect into dissatisfaction with the status quo. A key operative word here is sequence. Unlike simple consumer purchases, this often is not a single event but rather many events over time.

Ask questions like:

• What purchases made this problem become more of a priority?
• What changes in the market has impacted the propensity to buy?
• What internal changes signal a change in priorities?

3) Close – What made them choose you?

Determine the buyers expectations for a solution as well as their expectations for you and your product or service. Find out how your target account justified the purchase to their team.

Ask questions such as:

• What made you inquire about our solution?
• What is the biggest benefit you see from choosing us over our competitors?
• What are the results you’re expecting with our solution?

4) Improve – How can you make it easier to do business with you? Lower the hurdle for our prospects by getting in front of them faster when a trigger event occurs. Let your customers teach you something about your business.

You know A) the condition and B) why someone would buy from you. Now, let’s look at going from A to B quicker.

Make it easier for them to buy, and ask these questions:

• What can we do to make it easier for prospects looking for solutions like ours to buy?
• How can we make it easier for prospects to understand the value and benefit of our solution?
• How can we add more value sooner in the relationship?

5) Classify – What are the top characteristics of accounts highly likely to buy from you?

Identify the different types of accounts you’ve closed so you can predict future deals with more accuracy.

Find out:

• Customer data, such as the size of the business, title, and background of the decision-maker, type of business, etc.
• Source of the deal
• Size of the sale
• Length of the sales cycle
• Etc.

By completing a Won Sales Analysis, you’ll get more insight into events and triggers that bring you the best customers. You’ll understand what value you bring to customers (thus why they buy), and how you can close more deals.

Remember, the WHO step is the foundation of your ABM program. Don’t skimp on this. Get your team involved and spend some time to complete this before creating and executing your orchestrated ABM plays.

This Steve W. Martin Sales Research Originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review. This is the first of a series B2B Buyer Persona Research articles.  Follow Steve W. Martin to receive future research articles.

 

 

Put yourself in the position of the experienced evaluator who has met with hundreds of salespeople. What percentage of salespeople would you say are excellent, good, average or poor? I recently conducted an extensive research project of B2B Buyers to understand how they perceive the salespeople they meet. Overall, study participants rated 12% excellent, 23% good, 38% average, and 27% poor as shown below.

Think about those figures for a moment. What are the implications of nearly two-thirds of B2B salespeople being considered as average or poor? This situation creates an aversion to risk because evaluators have been conditioned to be skeptical and not to trust salespeople in general. Therefore, they’ll make every vendor respond to immense RFPs and complete laborious spreadsheets—each product feature and operation has to be fully documented to prove it exists. They’ll require meticulous hands-on evaluations of each product and painstakingly documented findings. The goal is risk mitigation and reducing the uncertainty associated with selecting a vendor and making the purchase.

They won’t buy until they are completely satisfied, and when they meet with salespeople, they become proctors who are cross-examiners as opposed to collaborators. For example, a purchasing manager will punish vendors who violate the selection process. This obviously creates a challenge because the salesperson’s goal is to implement a strategy that changes the selection process to his or her benefit.

When you look at ratings of salespeople from the perspective of departmental buyers, a pattern emerges. Evaluators who are part of IT, engineering, and accounting are more critical of the salespeople than those from lesser scientific or process-oriented departments such as marketing. Since these analytical buyers have advanced degrees in the sciences (computers, finance, engineering, etc.) they are more likely to be skeptical and consequently more demanding of salespeople. This should not be a surprise since they’ve had years of systematic education followed by a business career that was heavily focused on scientific methods and data analysis.

 

Another interesting pattern occurs when tolerance for risk is analyzed by department. There seems to be a correlation between the ratings of salespeople and tolerance for risk. Specifically, the higher negative rating of salespeople is inversely related to the department’s tolerance for risk. For example, IT personnel rated 37% of all salespeople as poor and their risk tolerance average was the low at 5.0. Conversely, marketing rated 18% of salespeople as poor and their tolerance for risk rating was much higher at 7.1. It can be inferred from these metrics that these two departments will interact with salespeople and analyze vendors in different ways with varying levels of due diligence. The figure below shows how buyers’ poor perception of salespeople is inversely related to their appetite for risk.

 

The tolerance for risk also varies greatly by industry as well. Dynamic, creative, trend-oriented industries such as fashion, entertainment, and real estate have the highest risk tolerance averages. More conservative, static, and process-oriented industries such as government, consulting, and healthcare have the lowest risk tolerance averages. Again, this validates that different industry types interact with salespeople and analyze vendors in different ways with varying levels of due diligence.

 

Evaluators will go to great lengths to reduce the risk of buying. They might list their needs in documents that are hundreds of pages in length. They might hire consultants to verify that they are making the right decisions. And they’ll conduct lengthy evaluations to test prospective products, talk to existing users of the products, and complete pilot testing to ensure the products work as advertised—all in an effort to eliminate their fears, reduce their uncertainties, and eliminate risk. The B2B buyer is fixated on risk mitigation.

 

The Sales Persona Research is sponsored by DiscoverOrg, the leading global marketing and sales intelligence tool used by over 2,400 of the world’s fastest growing companies to accelerate growth. DiscoverOrg’s team of over 250 researchers refreshes every data point at minimum every 60 days – ensuring customers reach the right buyers with the right message at the right time. For more info, please visit www.discoverorg.com.

 

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To grow a business these days, one needs to understand why traditional sales and marketing strategies are failing and how to develop a sales marketing strategy that works.

What is Sales Marketing?

A well-crafted combination of sales and marketing is necessary for successful business growth. Sales entail the direct one-on-one interactions, those interpersonal connections that directly add revenue to the bank accounts. Telephone calls, networking, and meetings are all part of the direct sales process.

Marketing, on the other hand, involves all those actions that a business takes to reach and recruit prospects. Examples include direct mail campaigns, advertising, public relations, and television or radio commercials.

Direct sales marketing embodies all of these strategies. The number of ‘touches’ a prospect requires to convert into a sale varies, though research suggests anywhere between three and twelve touch points. More important than quantity, then, is following and maximizing each contact so that the time, cost, and effort put into each sale decreases.

What Isn’t Working?

Some of the most tried-and-true methods of marketing still work. People still love video advertising, for instance. In fact, video accounts for 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco Visual Networking. However, many other marketing strategies are falling flat. To be sure, Sirius Decisions reports the average sales cycle has increased by 22 percent over the past five years since more decision-makers are being involved in the buying process.

• According to the 2016 DMA Response Rate Report, direct mail is expected to experience a 19% decline over the next 12 months;
• A mere 13% of people who read print publications report ever looking at the ads;
• 44% of direct mail is never opened;
• 70% to 80% of online users don’t look at online ads, preferring to focus only on organic search results;
• 86% of people ignore television commercials.

Effective Sales Marketing Ideas

As buyers become increasingly over-saturated with advertising gimmicks, it becomes even more important for business owners and marketers to devise innovative ways to target potential customers. It is the role of a business owner, then, to ensure that information is delivered to prospective customers at the right time, in the right format, and on the right platforms. This is where an inbound marketing strategy becomes crucial.

Research

There’s no need to spend copious amounts of time drudging up case studies. Instead, ‘research’ refers to time spent understanding the company and its goals, understanding the industry, and understanding the customers. This is where business owners focus on attracting customers rather than seeking leads and customers.

1. Clarify what the business is and ask:

• What does it mean to ‘grow the business?’
• How will someone know if they’re successful?
• What are the long and short-term goals?
• What is the sales process?

2. Check out the industry

Whether a person has been in the industry for two, ten, or twenty years, chances are pretty high that the industry will keep on changing. As innovations come up or new expectations are established, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. This is where industry research comes in.

• How do other businesses fare against meeting (or exceeding) the goals?
• What marketing strategies are other businesses in that industry doing to attract clients or customers?
• What current events and news is impacting that industry?
• Is there a business to business marketplace a business owner can access?
• Are there any leaders that a business owner can speak to within the industry?

3. Figure out your customer base

Speak to the people on the ground—those who directly communicate with customers—to better understand the customer base. These are the people who can provide the most insight into what customers want. When talking to them, here are some worthwhile questions to ask:

• Which marketing tactics are most effective?
• Are customers complaining about any current strategies, such as too many emails or obnoxious ads?
• What are the customer demographics?
• What questions are the sales teams answering most?
• What pain point/s does the product or service help alleviate?

Create Effective Content

No longer is it sufficient to leave a website dormant while expecting customers to magically discover its presence. Instead, business owners should update its content consistently. Over 70 percent of marketers say relevant content is the most effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactic, while companies that blog 16 times or more per month enjoy four times more leads than those who publish blog content less than five times a month.

The most effective content is that which focuses on helping customers reach their goals and/or solve their problems. While content on the Internet often grows stale within weeks after publication, it’s best to make sure content is as evergreen as possible so that it can retain its value for years to come.

Recognizing the importance of having an efficient, skilled copywriter either on staff or freelance is imperative. Doing so can increase the company’s revenue substantially, double its customer retention rate, and create brand recognition.

Pay attention to SEO

In the world of marketing, SEO is the latest buzzphrase—and with good reason. SEO consists of all the factors that influence search engine ranking. It is like turning on a spotlight so that customers know where to find a business. After discovering what a company’s customers are looking for (see above), it’s important to weave those keywords onto every page of the website.

To optimize a website for SEO, Entrepreneur magazine suggests that business owners:

• Create a priority list of targeted search terms that pertain to the customer base and market segment;
• Review pertinent industry sources and competitive lists to determine what keywords should be used;
• If users frequently misspell a word, include that in the webpages as well;
• Track the site’s rankings every 30 to 45 days to ensure the keywords remain effective;
• Determine goals ahead of time and make sure they are measurable so that it’s possible to note the return on investment regularly;
• Create page titles;
• Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing;
• Place strategic words and phrases throughout the content on every page;
• Continually test and measure the business’s success using objective tools to do so.

Develop Podcasts

People love to receive something for nothing. In the world of marketing, the most valuable asset is knowledge. Offer this to customers through an effective use of Podcasts. Podcast listening increased by 23 percent between 2015 and 2016.

Become social media savvy

The effectiveness of social media marketing is contentious. While some people say it’s a complete waste of time, the numbers suggest otherwise. After all, the breadth of audience participation is unparalleled.

• 72 percent of adult Internet users utilize Facebook;
• During the past two years, content consumption on Facebook has increased by 57 percent;
• Instagram has 500 million active monthly users;
• LinkedIn has 450 million members, with a reported 25 percent active on a monthly basis;
• Thirty percent of U.S. millennial internet users use Snapchat regularly.

Stay in contact

Depending on the product or service offered, it may be that the company is on the customer’s mind daily, such as the case with a food product, or only occasionally, as is the case with expensive beauty treatments. Regardless, it’s critical to be in the customer’s thoughts as soon as they are ready to buy. The way to do that is to maintain constant and consistent communication.

1. Collect the customer’s information at every opportunity;
2. Craft email or text campaigns to stay in contact with prospects and previous customers;
3. Be sure the business is listed in local directories and search engines.

Effective marketing means more than relying on direct mail advertising or television commercials. It has evolved into a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory process. Keep up with industry trends, as well as the new technology available to assist marketing efforts using these suggestions.

Does your company use sales intelligence? If it does, you probably reference the reports within your CRM on a regular basis to check up on metrics like quota attainment, call outcomes, stage duration and much more. And while insight into these types of metrics and activities makes a huge difference in sales performance, there are probably times when you wish you could get more out of your data.

Why are these things happening and what are the specific steps that you and your team can take to improve your results? Getting the answers to these types of questions usually requires additional digging and analysis, even with technology like predictive analytics.

But with the rise of the next generation of artificial sales intelligence – prescriptive insights – sales teams are now able to quickly receive actionable, data-driven recommendations as to the exact levers that should be pulled to drive growth. Here are three scenarios where prescriptive insights have the power to save your sales performance.

You’re not sure how to maximize your reps’ strengths.

As a sales manager, you know that for every rep who consistently books meetings and quickly closes deals is one who, try as he might, just can’t seem to drive conversion at one pipeline stage or another. But while your top performers obviously have great strength in key areas, you may be surprised to find that your underperformers actually excel at undervalued, underutilized or unexplored aspects of your sales funnel.

Rather than wasting time on trial and error and making reps jump through hoops, relying on prescriptive insights can quickly point out ways to help your underperforming reps join the head of the pack by utilizing their strengths. For example, perhaps Rep A has been struggling to close media and publishing companies – your bread and butter. But when it comes to telecommunications businesses – a largely untapped vertical for your company – she has a 90% close rate. Let her lead the expansion into that segment!

You don’t know which leads are driving the most value.

You probably have a general idea of the types of companies your business sells to and has the most success closing – i.e. small businesses, sales folks, financial companies, etc. But when marketing hands your team a list of a thousand leads, or you’re staring a full day of sourcing in the face, do you have a crystal clear picture of the types of prospects you should be prioritizing?

Prescriptive insights show you not only the types of customers that exhibit the highest close rate, but the qualities of those actually generating the most value for your business – which are two very different things. For example, you may have a high volume of leads from a particular industry, but are struggling to close them. Or, maybe you are closing a lot of deals in a specific region, but are not able to generate a significant amount of revenue from them. Finally, perhaps the deal value from leads with a certain contact title is high, but you are lacking leads from this segment.

Each of these scenarios requires a very different course of action, and prescriptive insights can tell you which to take. This is accomplished by using a simple yet powerful equation called lead yield, which you can learn all about in this blog post.

You’re falling short of your sales forecast this quarter.

We’ve all been there – you’re halfway through the quarter and the likelihood of your team hitting its forecast seems to shrink every day. But of all the levers that impact your sales performance – switching reps, changing up your process, reaching out to new leads, etc. – how do you know which to pull?

Figuring this out can take weeks of time-intensive analysis or grueling trial and error. Or, you can look to prescriptive insights to highlight the specific areas where your team is falling short, and even point out some creative ways for you to make up any deficiencies. For instance, “If each rep on your team can increase her average contract value by $5k, you will end the quarter at $35k over plan.” Or, “Reduce your team’s time-to-first-action from an average of 33 minutes to 17 minutes to generate $150k more this quarter.”

The Science of Sales

Thanks to the development of scientific sales solutions, these types of prescriptive insights are now readily available to any company with the quantity and quality of sales data needed to conduct statistically accurate analyses.

You've trained your salespeople on the actions required to move prospects from beginning to end stages of the buyer's journey — but how do you know if it's actually working? What factors should you be taking into account? And how can you improve it if it's not functioning as well as you'd like?

The concept that underlies all those points is known as sales effectiveness. Here, we'll go over what that means, how to measure it and provide steps you can take to improve your sales process. And if you're short on time, use these links to jump to the information you need.

• Sales Effectiveness Definition
• Sales Effectiveness Metrics
• How to Measure Sales Effectiveness
• How to Improve Sales Effectiveness
• Sales Effectiveness Tools

How sales effectiveness is measured can vary by company or organization depending on which sales metrics are the most important to them.

Sales Effectiveness Metrics

Some ways to measure sales effectiveness of your team include:

• Individual Quota Attainment: A metric used to gauge whether or not a sales representative has met their sales target. Typically sales quota attainment is calculated monthly, quarterly, or annually.
• Average Annual On-target Earnings: The total compensation a sales rep can expect to receive if their performance matches the expectations of their role.
• The Sales Cycle Length: The average time a salesperson needs to convert a prospect into a paying customer.
• Average Deal Size: The average monetary value of successful deals a business makes with its customers.

With our software, you can measure your effectiveness using HubSpot Sales Reports & Performance Management for total visibility into your sales metrics.

Request a Demo Today

Once you understand which metrics you should be on the lookout for, it's time to evaluate and measure your team's effectiveness at each stage of the buying process.

How to Measure Sales Effectiveness

1. Observe your sales pipeline.

This involves understanding how your leads move through your buyer's journey and where they get stuck. By tracking metrics such as conversion rates, time in each stage of the sales process, and win/loss ratios, you can identify any bottlenecks in your sales process and take steps to address them.

2. Look at your engagement and activity.

In addition to pipeline metrics, tracking activity metrics is essential to understand how your sales team engages with potential customers. You can track metrics such as calls, emails, and scheduled meetings. By monitoring these metrics, you can identify which activities are most effective at moving leads through the sales funnel and coach your sales team accordingly.

3. Carefully study your win and loss rates.

As you move closer to closing deals, tracking sales progress to measure your team's effectiveness at closing deals is essential. This includes tracking average deal size, sales cycle length, and win/loss rates, as we mentioned before. By analyzing these metrics, you can identify areas where your sales team may need additional training or support to improve their ability to close deals.

4. Evaluate how your sales reps influence or upsell customers after the initial purchase.

Finally, it's important to measure the impact of your sales efforts on your customers. This can look like tracking customer satisfaction, retention rates, and referrals. By understanding how your sales efforts impact your customers, you can adjust your sales process to meet their needs better and persuade them to repurchase your product or service later.

These should be your starting points for tracking your sales effectiveness. But if you already have a process in place — but not the results you want — then you can take steps to improve your process.

How to Improve Sales Effectiveness

Invest considerable time, energy, and resources into training.

Training is the most fundamental, straightforward base to cover when you're trying to get there. Make sure your reps have a thorough understanding of your sales process, preferred sales methodology, and your product or service.

If you feel your training isn't extensive or rigorous enough, consider enrolling your team in an externally coordinated sales training program.

And while some of these programs might be pricey, they can still be extremely valuable in helping your reps refine their sales skills and improve their sales effectiveness.

Refine your opportunity management infrastructure.

Opportunity management gauges sales effectiveness by tracking and managing sales opportunities. It helps prioritize interactions with potential customers based on their business potential and stage of the relationship.

Refining opportunity management infrastructure also exposes flaws in sales processes for continuous improvement. Sales effectiveness can be improved by establishing a pipeline, encouraging research, tracking contacts, and having a holistic view of the sales pipeline. This allows reps to be set up for success and improve sales effectiveness.

Leverage a sound sales process.

Salespeople require a sound framework for guidance to be practical. Reps need to understand how to guide opportunities from prospecting to closing if they're going to be effective — as the sales process's effectiveness influences the reps' success.

Making the sales process as solid and efficient as possible is vital. Take time to analyze the process if it's inadequate, pin down the problematic steps, and provide a more thorough perspective to reps. Define specific actions and exit criteria for each step, measure changes, and stay aware of any issues moving forward.

Those are all viable avenues to improve your sales effectiveness. But if you're looking for ways to simplify and automate your sales effectiveness, consider leveraging digital tools.

1. Sales Hub

• Pricing: Professional Plan; $450/month, Enterprise Plan; $1,200/month

Get Started with Sales Hub

Sales Hub features tools to improve sales effectiveness at every sales pipeline stage. Elements like email tracking, templates, and call recording allow your reps to convert leads into opportunities more efficiently.

From there, tools like its appointment scheduler, automation capabilities, and live chat help support your reps' efforts by keeping opportunities engaged. And pipeline management features offer your salespeople consummate visibility into their opportunities' progress.

It's an excellent option for any business interested in a multifaceted tool to reduce friction in its sales process and improve sales effectiveness.

2. Clari

• Pricing: Contact for Quote

Image Source

Clari aligns your revenue team with efficient operational cadences for forecasting, pipeline reviews, renewals, and expansion. These allow for predictable revenue and insight that can improve sales effectiveness.

The program is an excellent resource for sound pipeline management. It gives you complete visibility into which transactions make up your inventory, what coverage each segment and territory has, and how much more you need to make the number in current and future quarters. These can help you identify risks and make better-informed decisions in your sales operations.

3. Pipedrive

• Pricing: Essential Plan; $14.90/month, Advanced Plan; $24.90/month, Professional Plan; $49.90/month, Enterprise Plan; $99/month

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Pipedrive offers a decidedly sales-oriented CRM platform — tailored toward enabling hard sales with data and automation. The platform includes tools to retrieve web data about your contacts from online sources like LinkedIn. The platform can give you insight into the viability of pursuing the leads you gather.

The kind of intelligence and direction Pipedrive provides can set your reps up for success and boost your sales effectiveness. By giving them a leg up and a predictive edge in their engagements with prospects, Pipedrive ensures that your salespeople can consistently keep their sales efforts running smoothly and effectively.

4. Gong

• Pricing: Contact for Quote

Image Source

Gong is a conversational intelligence platform that can provide sales reps and managers with real-time, actionable, AI-powered feedback on their calls. Those capabilities offer sales managers a bank of information to browse, benchmark, assess, and better understand their reps' calls — allowing for meaningful insight to smooth over hitches in your sales process and offer reps more targeted, helpful feedback about their efforts.

Gong can improve your organization's sales effectiveness by keeping your sales efforts sensible and streamlined, exposing any weak points managers have to address with individual reps and their teams.

Improve Your Brand's Sales Effectiveness

Keeping tabs on the effectiveness of your sales process is critical to helping you gauge the health of your sales organization and ultimately learning how to sell better. If you want to get the most out of your sales operations, it serves you to understand sales effectiveness, how to measure it, how to improve it, and the best resources for optimizing it.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in January 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

 

Amazon’s Alexa just got a new job. In addition to her other 15,000 skills like playing music and telling knock-knock jokes, she can now also answer economic questions for clients of the Swiss global financial services company, UBS Group AG.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a new partnership between UBS Wealth Management and Amazon allows some of UBS’s European wealth-management clients to ask Alexa certain financial and economic questions. Alexa will then answer their queries with the information provided by UBS’s chief investment office without even having to pick up the phone or visit a website. And this is likely just Alexa’s first step into offering business services. Soon she will probably be booking appointments, analyzing markets, maybe even buying and selling stocks. While the financial services industry has already begun the shift from active management to passive management, artificial intelligence will move the market even further, to management by smart machines, as in the case of Blackrock, which is rolling computer-driven algorithms and models into more traditional actively-managed funds.

Insight Center

But the financial services industry is just the beginning. Over the next few years, artificial intelligence may exponentially change the way we all gather information, make decisions, and connect with stakeholders. Hopefully this will be for the better and we will all benefit from timely, comprehensive, and bias-free insights (given research that human beings are prone to a variety of cognitive biases). It will be particularly interesting to see how artificial intelligence affects the decisions of corporate leaders — men and women who make the many decisions that affect our everyday lives as customers, employees, partners, and investors.

Already, leaders are starting to use artificial intelligence to automate mundane tasks such as calendar maintenance and making phone calls. But AI can also help support more complex decisions in key areas such as human resources, budgeting, marketing, capital allocation and even corporate strategy — long the bastion of bespoke consulting firms such as McKinsey, Bain, and BCG, and the major marketing agencies.

The shift to AI solutions will be a tough pill to swallow for the corporate consulting industry. According to recent research, the U.S. market for corporate advice alone is nearly $60 billion.  Almost all that advice is high cost and human-based.

One might argue that corporate clients prefer speaking to their strategy consultants to get high priced, custom-tailored advice that is based on small teams doing expensive and time-consuming work. And we agree that consultants provide insightful advice and guidance. However, a great deal of what is paid for with consulting services is data analysis and presentation. Consultants gather, clean, process, and interpret data from disparate parts of organizations. They are very good at this, but AI is even better. For example, the processing power of four smart consultants with excel spreadsheets is miniscule in comparison to a single smart computer using AI running for an hour, based on continuous, non-stop machine learning.

In today’s big data world, AI and machine learning applications already analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and produce insights in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of consultants in the financial markets. Moreover, machine learning algorithms are capable of building computer models that make sense of complex phenomena by detecting patterns and inferring rules from data — a process that is very difficult for even the largest and smartest consulting teams. Perhaps sooner than we think, CEOs could be asking, “Alexa, what is my product line profitability?” or “Which customers should I target, and how?” rather than calling on elite consultants.

Another area in which leaders will soon be relying on AI is in managing their human capital. Despite the best efforts of many, mentorship, promotion, and compensation decisions are undeniably political. Study after study has shown that deep biases affect how groups like women and minorities are managed. For example, women in business are described in less positive terms than men  and receive less helpful feedback. Minorities are less likely to be hired and are more likely to face bias from their managers. These inaccuracies and imbalances in the system only hurt organizations as leaders are less able to nurture the talent of their entire workforce and to appropriately recognize and reward performance. Artificial intelligence can help bring impartiality to these difficult decisions. For example, AI could determine if one group of employees is assessed, managed, or compensated differently.  Just imagine: “Alexa, does my organization have a gender pay gap?” (Of course, AI can only be as unbiased as the data provided to the system.)

In addition, AI is already helping in the customer engagement and marketing arena. It’s clear and well documented by the AI patent activities of the big five platforms — Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft — that they are using it to market and sell goods and services to us. But they are not alone. Recently, HBR documented how Harley-Davidson was using AI to determine what was working and what wasn’t working across various marketing channels. They used this new skill to make resource allocation decisions to different marketing choices, thereby “eliminating guesswork.”  It is only a matter of time until they and others ask, “Alexa, where should I spend my marketing budget?’’ to avoid the age-old adage, “I know that half my marketing budget is effective, my only question is — which half?”

AI can also bring value to the budgeting and yearly capital allocation process. Even though markets change dramatically every year, products become obsolete and technology advances, and most businesses allocate their capital the same way year after year. Whether that’s due to inertia, unconscious bias, or error, some business units rake in investments while others starve.  Even when the management team has committed to a new digital initiative, it usually ends up with the scraps after the declining cash cows are “fed.” Artificial intelligence can help break through this budgeting black hole by tracking the return on investments by business unit, or by measuring how much is allocated to growing versus declining product lines. Business leaders may soon be asking, “Alexa, what percentage of my budget is allocated differently from last year?” and more complex questions.

Although many strategic leaders tout their keen intuition, hard work, and years of industry experience, much of this intuition is simply a deeper understanding of data that was historically difficult to gather and expensive to process. Not any longer. Artificial intelligence is rapidly closing this gap, and will soon be able to help human beings push past our processing capabilities and biases. These developments will change many jobs, for example, those of consultants, lawyers, and accountants, whose roles will evolve from analysis to judgement. Arguably, tomorrow’s elite consultants already sit on your wrist (Siri), on your kitchen counter (Alexa), or in your living room (Google Home).

The bottom line: corporate leaders, knowingly or not, are on the cusp of a major disruption in their sources of advice and information. “Quant Consultants” and “Robo Advisers” will offer faster, better, and more profound insights at a fraction of the cost and time of today’s consulting firms and other specialized workers. It is likely only a matter of time until all leaders and management teams can ask Alexa things like, “Who is the biggest risk to me in our key market?”, “How should we allocate our capital to compete with Amazon?” or “How should I restructure my board?”

So you’ve invested your time, energy and money in generating more site traffic. You have even managed to convert some of that traffic into leads. The question now is, how do you get them to purchase your product or service? In this video, we explore what motivates people towards purchasing and what you can do to help increase your sales numbers.

There are both emotional and logical reasons behind each purchase someone makes. These are in constant conflict with their dominate reasons to avoid buying. As 21st-century business people, we must understand this internal battle and use what we know to help our buyers make smarter decisions.

We must learn how to ask the right questions to move our leads through the buying process without disrupting their internal balance. If we push too far, they may end up regretting the purchase and attached negative feeling towards our brand. Watch the video to learn more!

 

Video Transcript

Hey, what’s up everybody, and welcome to Hack My Growth. I’m Ryan Shelley, and today we’re going to be talking more along the lines of sales. How do we convert our internet leads, or inbound leads, into sales? This is one of the hardest questions to answer, and a lot of times really frustrates website owners and marketers because they’re getting a lot of people coming to their site, but they’re not actually getting them to take that step towards conversion, and then another step towards a sale.

So we’re going to talk about the psychology behind why people buy, or why people run. As you can see behind me, we’ve got this whiteboard, and on it we’ve got a fulcrum, and there’s a decision here. People make decisions from an emotional standpoint, way more so than they do from a logical standpoint. Sure, there is logic that plays in, there are certain things that we want to buy for logical reasons, but most of our impulses towards buying really come from a place of emotion.

What happens is, we have a lot of pain, or we have a need. So over here, we’re going to have this giant boulder, right? Inside of this boulder, we’ve got needs, and we’ve also got pain. Now, when we have a need or pain, it kind of pushes down on this part of our brain that starts to say, “Okay, something needs to change because I don’t like this pain. I don’t like feeling what I feel right now, so I’ve got to make a decision.”

There are two different ways that we make decisions: we buy them impulsively to try to fix that need, but that can also have an adverse reaction. So we have a need and we have a pain, but there can also be pain attached to actually buying something. It could be regret. We also feel buyer’s regret, right? Where we bought something, and you go, “Aww, I shouldn’t have bought that.” Or, “That costs too much money, and now I’m in the hole, and what are they going to do about it,” right? So we’ve got to find a balance between meeting a need and having somebody feel regret. Now, a lot of times when we talk sales, people get this image we talk about all the time, right, of a used car salesman pushing, pushing, pushing towards the sale. What ultimately happens when you do that is you amplify regret, so people actually hate the fact that they bought something from you.

Now, in internet marketing and online marketing, sometimes we do this through e-mail. We just blast, and blast, and blast, and blast, to the point where people feel like, “Ugh, I don’t want to deal with it anymore.” Then they start pushing away. And the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change, so they make a decision not to go with you.

What we have to do, skillfully and tactfully, is actually learn how to press in on this part, on the needs, and on the pain, to uncover the real reason that they need to make a change in order for them to make an emotional decision that’s also founded in logic. What that does is that makes the regret go away, because now they’ve made a decision that met a need, but they made it in a way that makes more sense, and they don’t actually regret the decision because they’ve come to a clear realization of what they really need.

And we do that through asking questions. Now, these aren’t questions like, what color do you want? What size are you wearing? These are questions like, what’s the pain? What’s the source of the pain? Why are you feeling that pain? What is the specific need that you’re having, and what is it doing to your life right now?

So recently, I can give you a very, very good example. Recently, I had to purchase a new computer. I was working on the computer one Monday morning, and I dropped a cup of coffee into the keyboard of my Mac, and I was very, very frustrated, as you can understand why. I started to think, “Oh crap, I’m going to have to buy a new computer.” Immediately, I had a lot of pain, but I also started to feel some regret or frustration because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend all that money on a new computer. So what I did instead of just going out and buying a new computer, I started to work on the one I had and try to fix it. You know, I flipped it over, cleaned it out, tried to get all the coffee out of it. Over the next couple of days, the computer slowly died.

The good thing is, I spent that time emotionally preparing myself for the fact that I may have to buy a new computer, but I also started to do some research. I actually called up (the company) and said, “Hey, last time I did a custom machine. I’m not sure that I need it this time. Can you help explain this and walk me through the process?” Now, what the Apple sales rep did really, really well was asking me questions. What do you do with your computer on a day-to-day basis? Well, I’m shooting videos. We’re writing blog posts, we’re editing images, we’re doing a lot of creative work. We’re also doing a lot of data analysis. So what he was able to do was have me uncover my real needs here, figure out what they really were, and what my pain point was currently, because the computer I currently own had some issues with it, but I still needed speed.

So what this did is it started to prepare me and lay this foundation based off logic. He just walked me through some questions. What’s the model that you have now? How fast do you need your computer to be? What are some things that you do on a day-to-day basis? What do you like to do for fun on your computer? Do you like to game, or do you like to … And for me, it’s more nerd out and spend time in video editing or Excel spreadsheets. He was able to walk me through the buying process with these very poignant questions. Now, I didn’t buy that day, but what happened was a couple of days later, when my computer finally went pfff, I walked in and I bought the model that he recommended for me, and I felt good about it. The reason I felt good about it is because he asked the right questions and helped uncover the real needs behind needing a good, high-quality machine.

Now, if he would’ve said, “Oh, you need to get the best custom machine, and here’s why it’s better. It’s just better, just trust me, you need to get it. It may be a little bit more money, but it’ll be better.” I’m going to start to really question what his motives are. I’m going to question, “Why are you pushing me so hard on your product when you really haven’t understood what my needs were?” And a lot of times, we do that, but we don’t really realize that we’re doing it. We come to our leads and we say, “Buy now! Click here! Let’s go!” We’re not thinking about their emotions on the other side and what they may be feeling, and maybe the regret that they might be feeling if they’re making a decision. Now, that’s the fastest way to lose a customer base, where you get people to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, but you don’t actually meet their real needs and their real pain points. Now they have regret from buying our product.

So what’s happened is they made an emotional association between our business and regret.

If we start asking questions and uncover their pain points, not only would it help the sales numbers, we’re actually going to help market to them better because we’re going to understand their needs. We’re actually going to help develop better products that actually meet their requirements. So it’s really important that we base everything we do around asking questions, and asking the right questions that are actually going to expose the needs and the pains. And I know I said actually quite a bit there, but that’s a really important word because a lot of times, we come up with questions that we think they want, not questions that they really want.

This is where buyer persona research and actually spending time, physical time, whether it be on the phone or on a video call with customers, or prospective clients, helps you to understand what their needs and passions are. When you do this, it will lead to increased sales, because you won’t be pushing people towards a sale that they regret, but you’ll be exposing the pain that they have and helping them really explore what they need, and finding the right solution for them. Hope this was helpful, and until next week, happy marketing.

The fingerpointing is underway in earnest after a leaked report warned B.C. motorists will get hit with auto insurance rate hikes of almost 30 per cent in the next two years if the government doesn’t massively overhaul ICBC’s basic insurance system.

The 203-page report by Ernst & Young says drastic measures are needed that could include capping payouts for pain and suffering for minor injuries, re-introducing photo radar, changing red-light cameras so they also catch speeders, boosting police efforts to catch distracted and impaired drivers, and making high-risk drivers pay more for insurance.

The report was commissioned by ICBC’s board earlier this year while the Liberal government was in power, but was not made public.

The new NDP government, sworn in Tuesday, inherits the ICBC mess.

“The report is a damning indictment of the B.C. Liberals management of ICBC over the last 16 years,” Attorney General David Eby, whose portfolio includes ICBC, said in a statement on Friday. “They’ve left a real mess for us to fix.”

For their part, the Liberals say they had taken steps to improve the situation at ICBC and they warned the NDP against bringing back photo radar or adopting a no-fault insurance scheme.

“Both of these are failed ideas that the NDP has tried to force on British Columbians in the past,” the Liberal Opposition said in a news release on Saturday.

“The NDP government needs to be upfront with British Columbians: are they planning to adopt a no-fault insurance scheme and are they planning to bring back photo radar – yes or no?” said Andrew Wilkinson, Liberal MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena in a statement.

He criticised Premier John Horgan for not making public his written instructions to his cabinet ministers, including any instructions about ICBC.

“Photo radar was implemented in B.C. in 1996 by the NDP and scrapped by the B.C. Liberals after it turned into a lucrative revenue generation tool that only undermined public confidence in law enforcement,” the statement said.

The Ernst & Young report paints a bleak picture of finances at the Insurance Corp. of B.C., saying the Crown auto insurer, which has a monopoly on basic coverage, is facing unsustainable financial pressures and requires immediate intervention by the provincial government.

“B.C.’s auto insurance system is facing unprecedented challenges,” it said.

The report was commissioned by ICBC’s board earlier this year, but was not made public. A copy was leaked to Postmedia News.

While ICBC premiums are among the highest in Canada, the report said, “they are not high enough to cover the true cost of paying claims.”

“More accidents are occurring on B.C.’s roads, and the number and average settlement of claims are increasing. Only recent government intervention has protected B.C. drivers from the currently required 15 per cent to 20 per cent price increases. This rate protection has eroded ICBC’s financial situation to a point where it is not sustainable.

“The average driver in B.C. may need to pay almost $2,000 in annual total premiums for auto insurance by 2019, an increase of 30 per cent over today’s rates,” the report said, adding that assumes that current trends persist, that ICBC is expected to cover its costs from its premiums and that significant reforms are not made.

The review of ICBC was requested by the previous Liberal government, which was under fire for years of repeated rate hikes and the Crown agency’s deteriorating finances. ICBC was forced to admit to regulators in November it might have to hike basic rates by 42 per cent, compounded over five years, but insisted that was a worst-case scenario.

ICBC board chair Joy MacPhail, a former NDP cabinet minister appointed to the job on Thursday, was handed a copy of the report on Friday, the corporation said.

The report’s proposed measures stop short of a full “no-fault insurance” system, which curtails a person’s right to sue, and which an NDP government tried unsuccessfully to pursue in the 1990s.

In recent years, ICBC had been boxed into a corner by the Liberals. There were politically motivated rate caps at the same time as the number of claims and injury costs soared and earnings from the optional side of its insurance business, which have been used to keep basic rates artificially low, dwindled.

The Liberals used cash from ICBC’s profitable optional insurance business to hold rate hikes last year to 4.9 per cent when 15 per cent was required. But that emptied the corporation’s reserves to dangerous levels.

Subsidizing basic rates with dwindling optional coverage cash is “not a sustainable solution,” warns the Ernst & Young report. ICBC’s once-profitable optional insurance business actually suffered a loss of $311 million in the most recent fiscal year of 2016/17, the report reveals, though ICBC has yet to release its official financial figures for that year.

The gap between basic premium revenues and rising claims costs is $560 million and the shortfall will hit $1.1 billion by 2019 if nothing is changed, said the report.

“There is no indication that the underlying issues will correct themselves,” read the report. Instead, the “significant structural problem” in ICBC requires comprehensive change.

B.C. is the last province in Canada with a purely litigation-based insurance model, where drivers not at fault in a crash sue the at-fault driver for economic loss and suffering. The review suggested B.C. could follow the models of New Brunswick, Alberta and parts of Australia by capping payouts for pain and suffering on minor injuries from $4,00o to $9,000, while at the same time increasing accident wage and medical benefits.

It’s also possible to let drivers buy an optional “top-up” coverage that would, in effect, give the drivers back the right to sue to replace any reduced claim money they could have got through the courts.

Minor claims have soared in cost by 365 per cent since 2000 and are eating up 60 per cent of all total injury payouts, says the report. The size of cash settlements for minor injuries is also rising, as is the number of accidents on the road and the cost to fix technology inside modern vehicles.

ICBC also doesn’t properly price insurance for higher-risk drivers with poor records, and its plans to slap surcharges on luxury vehicle coverage should be expanded to generate more revenue, said the report.

The report also recommended the return of photo radar (now called automated speed cameras), which the B.C. government stopped using in 2001 after complaints it was a cash grab. International research says it could cut fatal and serious collisions by more than a third, the Ernst & Young report said.

“The goal of automated enforcement is to significantly increase the perceived chances of being caught, creating a change in behaviour that will translate into a crash reduction at high-risk locations,” it read.

ICBC could also dramatically increase the number of red light cameras (it currently has 140 at high-risk intersections) and reconfigure them to allow photographing speeding vehicles at all intersections, even during green lights. That could cut the severity of accidents by 45 per cent.

The report recommended doubling the average number of random roadside breath tests for impaired driving and significantly boosting penalties (a six-month driving ban for drivers with blood alcohol levels of 0.07 to 0.10 was given as an example).

The province could also add more police to traffic units to focus exclusively on impaired and distracted driving and catch potentially tens of thousands of additional distracted drivers, mostly smartphone users, said the report.

The report concludes by saying implementing these measures, and others, could bring ICBC’s rate hikes down to the level of inflation, roughly two per cent a year, but that requires immediate and major work by the government.

— with files from Postmedia

rshaw@postmedia.com

twitter.com/robshaw_vansun

Let’s start out on the beach. Picture some relaxing waves, imagine a layer of sand is stuck to your forearm, and settle deep into your metaphorical beach chair. You reach into your oversized beach bag and pull out a book — what’s the genre? If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s probably not an in-depth guide on optimizing your content strategy.

There’s a reason the bookstore features a table of summer beach reads. Consumers choose their content based on what they need in that specific moment. Behind every purchase is a distinct need; therefore, each piece of content should have a purpose. Content should assist the consumer’s search for the solution, whether they’re just discovering a problem or standing ready with cash in hand.

So, the key to effective content is telling potential customers what they want to hear, right when they need to hear it. But it’s not as simple as it sounds, namely because your prospective customers are all at varying points in their individual journey. To create content that will effectively guide someone toward purchase with your brand, you first have to really get to know your targeted consumer.

This is where it becomes critically important to know what your buyers typically think, feel and behave in each part of the sales funnel. Mapping a customer journey provides insights that allow you to craft a more effective content marketing strategy.

But before we jump into customer journey mapping, let’s quickly define the customer journey.

Quick refresh: What is the customer journey?

Each time a person encounters a brand for the first time, a series of interactions, evaluations and decisions kick into motion. Think of all the ways someone might interact with a brand: reading a 2-star review on Yelp, chatting with a representative over the phone, or receiving an emailed receipt for a purchase. There are hundreds of touchpoints for any given brand, all creating unique experiences for potential and existing customers.

The customer journey is the aggregate collection of those experiences and interactions with a brand.

Planning content with the customer journey in mind

In order to plan and distribute content that aligns with your customer’s journey, you need to visualize what that journey looks like from start to finish.

Customer journey maps are a tool for illustrating the customers’ experiences at each touchpoint they encounter and tracing potential paths toward purchase. Because not everyone follows the traditional flow, mapping out the process allows you to better trace the path of a customer who could potentially enter the market at any stage.

There are a number of templates that you can use to map out the journey, as well as a wide variety of visualizations. But to get started, we’ll explore some high-level steps to outline the mapping process.

1. Start out with your personas

If you’ve taken the time to detail personas that represent your existing and potential customer base, it’s time to put all that effort to good use! Explore their expected behaviors, buying triggers and pain points.

Ask yourself, what motivates them to even consider your brand? What experiences push them toward making a purchase? What potential frustrations prevent them finding a solution or satisfaction?

2. Describe your customer’s end-goal

When it comes to interacting with your brand, what are your customers trying to achieve? Once you determine what your customer wants, think about how that desire aligns with your own business goals. While the customer should be the focus of this exercise, it’s important not to lose sight of why their needs matter to your business in the first place.

3. What individual actions are they taking that work toward those goals?

This is where you start to delve into the details of the customer journey. Write out the series of tasks the customer must undertake to achieve the goal you described above.

By breaking the process down into individual actions, it will become easier to recognize what information the customer would find helpful at each step of the journey.

4. Think about the channels

Consider the channels where your customer is operating in order to perform those tasks. Knowing whether your customer is interacting with your brand in-store, online, by phone, or through print materials helps dictate the best form for your content.

As you start to move toward planning and distributing content, don’t forget that it’s more likely customers are using all of these channels at some point, even simultaneously.

You can delve deeper and define the most common online channels that they visit by researching where they are likely to spend their online time. You can also use audience research to place your content in the line of sight at the right time.

5. Start defining well-suited content

Here’s the moment we’ve been building toward. Think about what content, both traditional and digital, would serve your persona best when completing the tasks needed for their goal. Use any device usage or technographic profiling you have at your disposal and ensure that you’re creating content that meets their needs.

Mapping content to stages of the customer life cycle

Equipped with knowledge about customer goals and behaviors, you can use the customer life cycle to organize this journey by placing these experiences within the three broad stages of the sales funnel: awareness, consideration and decision.

Awareness

Think of the top of the funnel as the exploration stage. Customers have a lot of questions as they discover and define their needs. This is where the customer realizes that your brand is a potential match for providing a solution.

Content types:

• Blogs
• Infographics
• E-books
• How-to or informational videos
• Informational webinars
• Whitepapers
• Research reports
• Editorial pieces

When developing content for the awareness stage, keep in mind that a customer in this stage of your sales funnel is also likely at the same point of their customer journey with many other brands. That’s why is so important the content makes a strong impression for your brand while ultimately helping the customer toward their goal.

Consideration

When it comes to the middle of the funnel, customers get serious about their search for answers. This means they’re researching your brand, comparing it to others, and weighing the importance of certain attributes to aid their eventual decision.

Content types:

• Product webinars
• Case studies
• FAQ
• Product samples

Decision

As customers enter what is traditionally considered the bottom of the funnel, customers use the evaluative criteria they’ve established to decide on the solution.

Content examples:

• Free trial
• Live demo
• Estimate
• Phone or in-person consultation

Pro tip: Although this three-stage funnel is handy for organizing the many touchpoints your brand offers, don’t think of the customer journey as a linear process. The majority of a customer’s journey is digital, which empowers the customer to choose when, where and how they want to interact with a brand.

Much of the work we do at Ibbaka is centered around value-based pricing. In one of my previous posts, I reviewed one of the key inputs of pricing strategy—market segmentation. Now, I would like to explore another critical business process—value-based selling. How can we enable our sales people to practice value-based selling? The key is to have a way to rapidly categorize our prospects and existing customers so that we can focus our communication tactics and keep the focus on value.

To be good at value-based selling, we really must begin by understanding how our prospects and customers see our offering in terms of value and their willingness to pay. We have found this 2 by 2 matrix a useful way to categorize prospects. Looking at our prospects' understanding of our value on one axis and their available budget on the other provides guidance.

When trying to optimize the monetization of our offer, we want to identify prospects in the upper right. These are Good Prospects because they understand the value of our offer, have the budget and can justify a higher willingness to pay. Sales efforts should focus on prospects that appear in this category. Marketing and pre-sales should shift other prospects to this space.

Potentially Good Prospects are those who have budget, have the willingness to pay, but do not understand our value. As sales and marketing professionals, we need to understand and show how these types of prospects can derive greater value from our offering. Ask yourself, how can we communicate differentiated value to prospects who have budget but do not have a clear understanding of how we contribute value to their business and how we differ from the alternatives?

The upper left quadrant represents prospects to Nurture. These are prospects which recognize the value we offer but have limited budget. Because of their limited budget, they will have limitations around the willingness to pay. How do we communicate value if the prospect has a low budget? For these prospects, we have to be disciplined and help them to recognize our differentiated value. We have to nurture their willingness to pay.

The lower left quadrant represents our prospects who we continue to Educate and Make Aware. While we will not focus as much attention on these prospects, we will continue to soft touch these prospects. It will be a long road to convert these prospects to buyers because they do not understand the value we provide and they also do not have the budget to afford our offering.  

Let’s now examine our proposed categorization for our current customers. Here is another 2 by 2 matrix. This time, we will be look at getting value on one axis and pricing perception/pricing level on the other.

Again, we want our customers to be in the upper right quadrant. Our customers here are Happy because they are getting value. Also, they are paying fair price for this value that they receive.

Customers in the lower right quadrant are At Risk. They do not feel they are getting value. These customers are paying a fair price, our customer success team needs to find ways to increase value for these customers and to help them to recognize the value they are getting.

The upper left quadrant represents customers who are getting value but are underpriced. We need to Upsell based on value and get a higher monetization. This category of customers represents those customers with whom we are leaving money on the table. Our customer success and sales teams need a playbook to help these customers to convert to a higher tier of pricing. The way we do this is by communicating differentiated value supported by the right pricing structure. A lot of handholding and communication is needed to do this successfully.

The bottom left quadrant represents customers who are not getting value and they are not paying fair price for our offering. Continue to reinforce and Build Awareness. It will take time and effort to move these customers to the upper right position. We will need to find a way to increase value while shifting these customers to a higher price point. 

Sales and customer support need to know which quadrant each prospect and customer lies in and have a plan to move them to the upper right or to coach them out. This should be built into CRM and customer support tools.

Effective, rapid and actionable categorization of prospects and existing customers will enable business development teams to better focus efforts and come up with better ways to communicate value to optimize the monetization of offerings. The goal is to align customer success with our own success.

As marketers, we spend countless hours on understanding our buyers and their journey toward making a purchase. Along their way, we meticulously identify the actions they take, the questions they ask, and the content they read. To assess your overall Marketing Strategy,

When there is a revenue shortfall, the finger pointing starts, and the chief finger pointers are often marketing and sales.

Consider this hypothetical dialog:

Marketing―“We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing leads for you. But you don’t convert them into customers.”
Sales―“Your leads are no good.”
Marketing―“How would you know? You never follow up on them.”
Sales―“It’s not worth the effort.”

Revenue Growth Levers

You’ve got five revenue growth levers to grow the business. Marketing controls two and Sales controls three.

There may be plenty of blame to go around, but the first question is “What is sales doing with the leads it does consider qualified?”

Improving the revenue growth sales levers may be a lot more cost effective than asking marketing to spend more money developing leads. This is particularly true if Sales isn’t handling leads well, anyway.

Put another way, the ROI on fixing the sales process could be much higher than the ROI on increased lead flow.

The Revenue Model

Below is an example of a hypothetical company with $12.5 million in revenue generated from marketing developed leads for a specific program. The revenue is directly attributable to the lead development effort.

Marketing created 100,000 potential leads and 5,000 qualified leads over the course of a year. Sales closed 250 or 5% of the Marketing Qualified Leads.

The Levers’ Impact

Let’s say the company wanted to increase the revenue from this program by 20% or $2.5 million.

The company could do this without investing another nickel in lead development. A 6% to 8% improvement in the three sales levers could generate the 20% revenue increase.

Let’s look at this another way. Sales has 2,500 leads that it considers qualified. Yet it’s closing only 10% of those (250). Can’t blame Marketing for that!

If Sales closed 12% of those leads, that would generate the 20% revenue increase.

How to Pull the Revenue Growth Levers

So, what would it take to improve the three sales levers?

1. Sales Strategy―A well thought out (and clearly communicated) sales strategy enables the sales team to pursue that target market with a compelling message. This means selling the right things to the right people.
   Impact―Sales Cycle, Close Rate, Sales Price
2. Opportunity Analysis―This goes well beyond the target company’s “firm-o-graphics” such as industry and company size. The analysis creates a score based on the prospect’s need and the likelihood of closing a deal.
   Impact―Sales Cycle + Close rate
3. Buyer’s Journey―This requires understanding the buying process and educating the buyer through the journey with appropriate content and information.
   Impact―Sales Cycle + Close Rate
4. Follow up―Consider these statistics from a forbes.com article by Ken Krogue of insidesales.com.

• The typical sales rep makes only 1.3 attempts to reach a lead.
• Only 27% of leads are actually contacted (sales rep speaks to the lead).
• 35% to 64% of leads never get called at all.
• 87% of leads are abandoned.

Effective follow up is essential. The company needs proper sales procedures and tools such as a CRM.
Impact―Close Rate

5. Selling Value―Sales reps can’t sell products. They must sell value. A prospect must see a ROI for the purchase.
   Impact―Close Rate + Sales price

Getting Started on the Revenue Growth Programs

What’s necessary to implement these five programs? Mostly, it’s training and coaching.

That investment is a lot smaller than the cost of advertising, trade shows, direct mail, and other marketing programs.

Don’t turn on the lead development spigot until Sales can handle leads effectively. Otherwise, you’re flushing money down the toilet.

If you’re in a love-hate relationship with your blog, you’re not alone. A full 60% of B2B marketers say their biggest challenge is producing engaging content. Over half struggle to measure content effectiveness, and 57% are having a hard time producing content consistently.

Why Should You Have a B2B Blog?

As challenging as effective blogging may be, it’s also incredibly rewarding. B2B marketers that use blog content get 67% more leads than those who don’t. And marketers that invest into blogging are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI. Blogging is so effective, that 45% of marketers say blogging is the #1 most important piece of their content strategy.

Here are some reasons why blogging is such an effective part of your B2B content marketing tactics.

Blogs are versatile

You can include just about anything in your blog – any kind of topic, any kind of content, any kind of voice and tone – you name it. Embed a video, infographic, or audio clip.

This versatility makes blogs incredibly popular with your target audience, because they can consume visual content quickly, or skim through a helpful article that equips them to accomplish more.

Blogs can feed your email nurturing (newsletter and RSS feed)

If you’ve got an email list (you DO, don’t you?), your blog content is an incredible way to stay top-of-mind with your leads. Your subscribers are already getting updated when you publish new articles, but you can take your blog to the next level by sending a monthly newsletter to your entire email list.

Your audience is busy, and they’re not going to check your blog every day for the latest article that’ll solve their greatest problems. But when your thought leadership is delivered straight to their inbox, you’ll captured their attention and continually stay top-of-mind.

And you don’t pay a dime for it, either.

Blogs have legs on social media

Your blog content can really take off when you promote it on your social media channels. Social media can get your content in front of eyeballs that would otherwise never come across your blog – and draw them back to your site.

They boost your SEO and increase traffic to your website

Want to get seen on search engines? There’s nothing better than blogging to improve your SEO and draw organic traffic to your site. On average, B2B websites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages. That means you’ve got a 434% greater chance of being found on Google if you’re investing into blogging. Not bad!

How to Build a Blog that Converts Every Time

Okay, so blogging can be a big-time tool in your content conversion toolkit. But like any tool, you need to know how to use it properly to get the results you’re looking for. Here are seven basic best practices that’ll get you greater success with your business blog.

1) Pick a persona

A lot of business blogs bottom out because their content doesn’t hit home with the right people. Your blog content should be highly focused on your ideal customers’ pains, motivations, and questions.

If you aren’t using buyer personas for your content, start now! Personas keep you focused on your target audience by providing a very clear representation of your ideal customer. Don’t know how to create a persona? Check out our article that walks you through it.

“The Whole Brain Group updated our logo and website to support our day-to-day business. We particularly valued identifying our customer persona so that we could design everything with them in mind. We have received numerous compliments on the logo from consulting engineers and mechanical contractors.” – Norm Hall, R.L. Deppmann

2) Pick a pain point

Once you know who you’re writing to, you need to decide what pain you’ll address. People who read blogs are in pain, or they’re avoiding pain. They’re looking for a solution to a problem, or a better way to do their work. Your blog content should provide the answer they’ve been searching for.

If you “get” your persona and their pain, you’ll score a major win here, because you’ll be providing exactly the kind of content your audience is looking for. And that boosts your thought leadership and trustworthiness.

Each blog article should address one specific pain point. Keep it laser-focused for greater impact and effectiveness. If you try to address too many issues at once, your message becomes watered-down and muddled.

3) Identify and include relevant keywords

Keywords help your content get found – but the right keywords help you get found by the right people. If your target audience doesn’t use industry-standard terminology in their searches, you’d better not use industry terms as your keywords either. Otherwise, you’re just speaking to your industry, not your customers.

Getting the right keywords and using them properly can be overwhelming, especially if you’re not an SEO geek. But if you focus on the basics of keywords, you’ll see good results.

4) Write the blog

Pick a blog type and length, and assign someone to write it. Some examples of blog types:

• How-tos
• Listicles
• Curated content
• Pro/con comparisons
• Top 10 articles
• Quizzes

You can also embed videos or infographics, which often boost the ROI on your content.

Speaking of boosting ROI, long-form content (1200+ words) has tremendous value in several ways:

• Increased shares on social media
• Stronger thought leadership
• More conversions
• Higher ranking in search results
• Increased time on site
• Greater perceived value

Who should write your post? You’ll need someone who writes well, understands blogging best practices, and has the capacity to craft an effective post that converts. For many businesses, that person is hard to find – at least, on a consistent basis.

Outsourcing may be a smart option – professional marketers know how to expertly create content that presents you as an industry thought leader to drive more revenue.

5) Optimize for SEO and lead generation

When you’re writing your article, optimize it for SEO and readability. Be sure to follow these guidelines:

• Keep paragraphs short
• Use headings and subheadings to break up long chunks of content
• Include images – and use keywords in your alt tags
• Optimize headings, titles, and URLs for search
• Add a keyword-rich meta description
• Titles should be compelling, but also specific rather than vague
• Include links to authoritative sites, and to other posts on your site
• Include a call to action at the end of your post – and within your post as well

6) Distribute and promote

Many companies believe that if you build it, they will come. With content marketing, there is no field of dreams, so you’ll need to be purposeful about sharing your content and promoting it. And doing it where your ideal customers are already going.

We mentioned social media earlier. Think about which platforms your audience is spending time on – LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook? Pinterest? – and share your blog content on those channels.

Also consider syndicating your articles with services that can get your content in front of a wider audience. Medium and Business 2 Community are a couple examples of popular syndication sites for B2B companies.

Share key articles with industry influencers – especially if you mention them by name. Send them a quick email letting them know they might be interested in what you have to say, and ask them to share it with their network.

7) Measure your effectiveness

Always be measuring the effectiveness of your blogging, and make adjustments as needed. Check your most effective and least effective posts each quarter, and make tweaks to optimize them for better performance. Then check back the next quarter and see how they’re doing.

Business blogging is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase awareness of your company in the digital landscape – especially if you’re consistent in following these seven best practices. Blogs boost thought leadership to drive more revenue, and they’re incredibly powerful content conversion tools.

An entire cottage industry of LinkedIn software hacks, browser extensions and other add-ons are making it easier than ever to generate leads on the world’s largest social media platform for professionals.

An entire cottage industry of LinkedIn software hacks, browser extensions and other add-ons are making it easier than ever to generate leads on the world’s largest social media platform for professionals.

Now, I’ve been bullish on LinkedIn for quite some time due to the ease of locating and engaging your ideal, B2B-related sales leads and clients using the platform.

Apparently I’m not alone. I’ve noticed several software developers jumping into the fray, offering Internet browser add-ons, software hacks and automation methods all built around LinkedIn.

All of it is aimed at helping LinkedIn users like you and me find our ideal prospects more quickly, automate the LinkedIn lead generation process and even send prospects LinkedIn invites from right inside our personal email accounts.

What follows is a look three of the best “LinkedIn hacks” I’ve come across recently.

Email Tool – Rapportive

Rapportive is a great (and free!) add-on for Gmail users. It takes just a few seconds to install via Google’s Chrome browser and works with Mozilla’s Firefox as well.

Rapportive taps into your Gmail inbox and immediately pulls up any related LinkedIn profiles, Twitter handles, Skype accounts, websites or other online entities tied to a person’s email address.

In addition, Rapportive enables you to send someone a personalized LinkedIn invite without leaving your Gmail inbox. If you’re using LinkedIn as a lead generation and content marketing platform (and you should be!), Rapportive is a great way to effectively and efficiently build your network from right inside Gmail.

(FYI, you can also do a similar type of integration using LinkedIn and your Yahoo! email account.)

Lead Generation Tool – LinkedIn Advanced Search

The fastest, easiest and most efficient way to use LinkedIn for lead generation is by hacking into LinkedIn’s powerful internal search engine.

With more than 500 million members in 200 countries, and with 2 new members joining every second, LinkedIn has stored a virtual treasure trove of online data for you to hack into.

The key to finding buried treasure inside LinkedIn search is using a combination of boolean searches and LinkedIn’s built-in search filters to narrow the list from 500 million prospects down to your exact or ideal audience.

Here’s how it works.

For example, if you want to sell your product or service to CEOs, in the search bar you’ll type: “CEO”.

Next, you’ll use LinkedIn’s advanced filters to refine your search.

First up, you can filter your “CEO” search results by “People,” then by 2nd Level Connections – meaning you want to find new prospects to connect to and engage with.

In this example, my search for “CEO” yields more than 104,000 new prospects I can immediately start connecting to and engaging with!

Now, say you want to target professionals with the job title CEO, and you specifically want to target CEOs in the healthcare industry, ideally in Chicago and New York.

Using LinkedIn’s additional search filters, you can do exactly that, giving yourself a ready-made list of healthcare industry CEOs in Chicago and New York!

Once you do a general search, the key is to use the Advanced Search filters/features that you’ll see popping up on the right-hand side of the screen with your search results. Filter your prospects by location, job title and so on, and that way you’re able to instantly create some context for a personalized conversation!

Automation Tool – LinMailPro

The secret to success on LinkedIn is utilize the site’s treasure trove of user data to conduct personalized, one-on-one marketing with your ideal prospects.

Even better, you can use third party tools like LinMailPro to automate the entire process!

LinMailPro is a third party, paid add-on for Google Chrome users that you can purchase and utilize in conjunction with your LinkedIn account.

Serving as a virtual assistant, LinMailPro allows you to personalize and automate your LinkedIn invitations and messages, saving you countless hours of copying, pasting and typing your LinkedIn invites and messages over and over.

Now, the idea here is to both personalize and automate your process, meaning you still send a personalized invitation to a prospect based on where he or she lives, her job title, industry type and so on.

LinMailPro will insert the person’s first and/or last name for you, along with a personalized note that you can use for each invitation or message.

Now, if you simply try and spam people with generic invites or tone-deaf advertising messages on LinkedIn, you’ll get terrible results, turn off prospects and likely get flagged as a spammer on the platform.

When used in that fashion, an automation tool like LinMailPro only helps you fail faster, so be smart about how you use it!

Also note, LinMailPro works only with the Google Chrome browser, and you must purchase it through the Google Chrome web store.

Final Thoughts

I have no doubt that there are more LinkedIn add-ons, software hacks and automation tools coming soon.

The reason is simple – LinkedIn isn’t going anywhere!

If anything, it’s gaining momentum and has massive expansion plans in areas including video, images, online courses and more.

So if you haven’t already, you need to be getting active on LinkedIn. If you’re not sure how or where to being, you can start with my free LinkedIn training.

Let’s get you going!

Who buys your product?

(Besides your friends, and your mom, that is.)

Understanding who you’re selling to is crucial in today’s personalized marketing environment. The more you know about your customers, the more you can tailor their experience to retain engagement, and develop greater prospects.

There are a host of decisions ecommerce owners have to make…from choosing a brand angle to which ecommerce platforms are the best for their growing business–it’s a lot to decide. But, figuring out who you are selling to is likely one of the most important decisions you will make.

According to information taken from Teradata, only around 41% of all marketing executives are currently using customer engagement data to help them inform their marketing strategies. However, the more you learn about your customers, and the more you use data to develop awesome buyer personas, the more you could benefit.

For example:

• Using buyer personas in an email marketing campaign resulted in a 2-times higher click through rate according to MLT Creative.
• Buyers are 48% more likely to consider companies that personalize their brand experience
• A study conducted by Relevance found that 15% of respondents found their buyer personas to be seriously effective. At the same time, only 15% of their respondents used in-depth research to inform their data. Coincidence?

Here, we’re going to introduce the basics on buyer personas, and what you need to do to start creating one that works for your ecommerce business. Remember, having a comprehensive understanding of your customers is crucial to meeting your business goals. Regardless of whether you’re hoping to optimize or build the customer experience, create better content, or develop more sales, it all starts with understanding your audience.

Who are your Customers, Anyway?

Customers today just aren’t as loyal and trusting of businesses as they were a few years ago. With the internet available for everyone to use, it’s much easier to be skeptical of different products, and consequently, do your research about a brand before you ever consider doing business with them. On top of that, social media has given people the power to rethink and share their purchasing choices.

Today’s customers are more unique, diverse, and challenging as the digital market has worked to amplify niche segments of different industries. In other words, if you want to get ahead of the competition, then you’ll need to know who your customers are.

Learning about the type of people you’re interacting with, from their psychological behaviors to their demographics, is crucial to creating an experience that relates directly to them. That’s where buyer profiles come in. Simply put, they help you to design an image of your ideal customer, so you’re not just trying to appeal to a crowd, but you’re focusing on offering a message to a specific type of person.

For instance:

• A single male in his early twenties living in Los Angeles might be more interested in hearing about the party scene, fast cars, and fitness tips, than entrepreneurial tips and investment opportunities.
• A couple in their thirties without any children might be looking for ways to improve their home or build on their lifestyle hobbies.
• A married mother-of-three might be searching for a brand that understands her challenges raising children, and trying to work on a budget.

The more you understand your customers, the more you can make steps to connect with them on their level. This creates a stronger relationship between brands and buyers.

Creating Buyer Personas that Really Work

One of the biggest problems that ecommerce companies face when it comes to developing buyer personas, or marketing personas, if you’d prefer, is that they struggle to know how much information they need to include. Personas help you in everything from marketing, to sales, to choosing your next selection of products and services. They assist in internalizing the type of customer you want to attract and relating your customers to real human beings.

In other words, identifying your ideal buyer as “someone who likes shoes”, isn’t enough. The strongest buyer personas are almost always based on a combination of market insights and research, such as the metrics you gather from checking out your Google analytics, and the data you can obtain from your sales and marketing teams. Small businesses might have one or two personas, whereas larger enterprises might have dozens.

To start off with, when you’re defining your buyer personas, you’ll need to go broad. For instance, if you’re a company that sells photo-editing software, you’ll be able to spot two different types of buyers almost instantly:

1. Casual buyers who are purchasing the product to use for fun.
2. Business buyers who are purchasing the product for their entire company, or using it as a solution for their entrepreneurial efforts.

Once you have those broad groups in mind, you’ll be able to break them down further. For instance, that first group might be more likely to include younger people, between the ages of 17 and 35, who are interested in technology and photography. On the other hand, the second group might include young entrepreneurs, small business owners, and professional groups that are interested in offering higher-quality images to their clients.

Once you have a broad idea of who you’re selling to, you can start to break down each buyer persona, and look at the nitty-gritty details.

Examining the Details of Each Persona

So, how do you start really drilling deeper into each of your customer personas? There’s plenty of information out there, you just need to know how to use it. By assessing the metrics on your google analytics reports, speaking to your marketing experts, and even engaging in surveys and interviews with your existing customers, you can begin to develop a deeper understanding of each user in your network.

Surveying existing customers is one of the best ways to get a pure view of your current market. After all, who better to tell you what your customers are like, than your actual customers? Just remember, that while you’re gathering information, you’re going to need to check out some of the following essential elements:

• Location: Where do they live
• Age: Age range (in general)
• Gender
• Interests (What do they like)
• Education level
• Job title: What do they do
• Income level
• Language: What language do they speak?
• Buying motivation: What are their pain points, why do they buy from you?
• Buying concerns: What prevents this customer from buying from you

Learning as much as you can about what your buyer does, and doesn’t want will help you to tailor your marketing and sales nurturing methods to their needs. In other words, if your persona is for “Steve”, a guy in his forties who works for a tech company and is trying to manage on a low-income, you probably shouldn’t email him with deals on enterprise-grade wholesale software.

How Can You Get this Information?

We touched above on the idea of using interviews to collect information about your ecommerce buyer personas, but let’s look at gathering data a little more. Buyer personas are often developed through interviews, surveys, and research into your target audience. This will include looking at a range of customers, prospects, and people who might align with your target audience. To get the information you need to develop your personas:

• Examine your contacts database for trends about how certain customers and leads consume or find your content.
• Use form fields on your website that can capture important information about your customers, such as where they’re located or what their job title is.
• Speak to your sales team and ask them for feedback on the type of customers they’re interacting with most often.
• Interview your prospects and customers, either online or in person to determine what they like, and dislike about your product or service.

Using Personas in your Marketing

Now that you’ve figured out what buyer personas are, and how you can start developing them, you might be wondering how you can use these strategies in your marketing techniques.

The answer is pretty simple. At a basic level, your personas will allow you to create messaging and content that appeals to your target audience on a deeper, and more customized level. It also means that you can target your marketing efforts for different audience segments.

When combined with the various stages of your purchasing cycle, strong buyer personas can help you to map every stage of your marketing process, from how you package and advertise your product, to where you sell it, to how you follow up with customers after a purchase. In other words, it can help you to define the perfect customer experience for your particular brand.

As time goes by, you’ll find that your personas will change and evolve, particularly as you continue to discover new information about your customers and what drives them. As you grow as a business, you’ll be able to keep going back and tweaking your image of your ideal customer to create a more targeted communication strategy for your audience. This will mean increased engagement, better ROI, and a generally happier customer base.

Many young professionals who have worked for a couple years in corporate have debated whether to quit their jobs to complete an MBA. Some of them are looking for a career change, others are looking to move up in their profession. However, does the traditional career step of a two-year MBA program still make sense? The top schools including Harvard, Stanford and MIT, with their prestigious programs, will of course tell you it’s the only viable option for in depth training. I’m a serial entrepreneur who has worked in eight different countries and judged many startup competitions. Based on my own experience as well as taking a deeper look at the supposed benefits of an MBA, I present a consideration in this piece on how a startup can add far more learning and value to your career and life, hands down.

MBA Homework: Founding a Startup?

Let’s look at what the traditional MBA programs are now offering. First, more and more MBA programs are shifting to an entrepreneurship-focused curriculum and actually have their students found a startup as coursework. Huh? Why bother taking time out of the workforce or two years of evening work when you can join a startup whose mission you appreciate, and learn on the job?

#1: Startup Vs. MBA Costs – What Are the Benefits Vs. The Risks?

Next, a two-year MBA program can be highly cost intensive. In addition to the $100,000 to $150,000 of tuition, you still have to take care of your housing and living expenses while earning zero income. Of course, the same cash concerns apply to building a startup. Most founders seed their ideas with their own savings at the beginning while sleeping on couches and living off ramen. However, they often raise money from family and friends, crowdfunding or even investors. That means if their startup does well, then they will have more capital to take it to the next level. If your MBA program startup turns out to be successful, you’ll be dealing with the sunk cost of tuition, IP licensing from the university, and the social pressure of not dropping out of school.

#2: Theory Vs. Practice – The Difference that Facing Risk Can Make

The difference between theory and practice is huge in entrepreneurship. There is no better way to learn how to create your own business than to actually do it. In a startup you learn through necessity, failing fast and iterating your ideas based on feedback from the market or customer. The prospect of running out of cash and having to solve a problem forces you to learn quickly, memorize more and explore new models and approaches, many of them never mentioned in books or taught in school settings. Instead of enjoying the semester and preparing for the final exams a couple weeks early, you are faced with the “final exam” every single day. At a university you have a safe and isolated environment, but the startup environment will not just teach you how to operate under pressure, but also how to deal with adversity and true failure.

#3: MBA & Startups: Power of Building a Network

Finally, many people pursue an MBA for the network they build, which will help them later in their career. MBA programs do indeed provide a great place to meet talented classmates, but why wouldn’t you meet such people while doing a startup? When building your own business you will interact with a large number of people — from customers to partners, and investors — who will be a valuable addition to your network. The breadth of people you meet will be far broader than classmates in an MBA program, and they will provide realistic and often brutally honest advice untainted by the common bonds forged in a classroom experience. They will not come from the same background nor the same industry, which will force you to put yourself into their shoes in order to sell them on your idea.

Conclusion

I am not trying to bash an MBA degree. A university’s reputation can be highly beneficial in future job applications, and the resources that are available to MBA students including mentorship can reduce mistakes once out of school. However, as it becomes increasingly easier to found a startup due to the improving entrepreneurship ecosystem, the benefits of building a business in the real world have now surpassed the isolated training offered by the traditional MBA program.

To be realistic, let’s assume you take your jar of tuition money, invest in your own idea, learn everything needed from accounting to marketing to sales and legal topics in order to make your startup successful, master all challenges that you come across but still fail at the end. You still end up with an incredible journey that will bring you so much more real world learning. As a badge of honor on your resume, it means that you took the risk and had the guts to do what most people will always be too afraid to do. And that experience and confidence will get you farther in your career than any classroom learning.

This article originally appeared on Han Jin’s blog and was reprinted with permission.

• TV ratings continue to slide, yet advertisers keep pumping money into TV.
• It's becoming apparent that YouTube and Facebook's recent public mishaps might have cost them a chance at grabbing TV ad budgets.

There's never a good time to have a big, public screwup. But in the advertising market, the timing of Facebook and YouTube's recent mishaps (centered around shoddy measurement and ads ending up in the wrong places) appears disastrous.

Just look at the latest TV ratings numbers released earlier this week by Pivotal Research's Brian Wieser.

"Total day and prime time viewing of traditional TV programming among adults 18-49 fell by double digits again, while internet-connected-device-based viewing – most of which is not ad-supported – rose yet again by around 50% year-over-year. "

And national TV commercial impressions – i.e. the number of ads that got delivered to adults between the ages or 18 and 49 - slid 9.1% this June compare to last June, Pivotal reported.

In other words, old fashioned TV down, Netflix up.

Indeed, the story for traditional live commercial television has not been good of late. Have you seen the ratings lately for "Battle of the Network Stars" or "The Gong Show"? No seriously, those are real network TV shows in 2017. You missed those while watching "Game of Thrones" or streaming "Glow" on your phone. Don't worry, coming this fall is a show about a magician who helps the FBI.

Meanwhile, look at what's just happened with the TV upfronts, the annual compressed sales smorgasbord during which major TV networks try to sell off 75% of their ad space for the year. They were supposed to be down. But surprisingly, the market was up. Ad sales volume this year is supposed to climb by 3 or 4%, reported The Hollywood Reporter.

Huh?

It seems like TV advertisers are facing the reality of having no place else to go. YouTube, which had been making major inroads with ad buyers as a legitimate TV alternative in recent years, has been rocked by scandal. Advertisers ads were spotted next to hate videos. And even though some advertisers have come back, several have not, reported The Wall Street Journal.

"The inability of companies of that magnitude to guarantee brand safety was truly the straw that broke the camel's back," NBCUniversal ad sales chairman Linda Yaccarino told The Hollywood Reporter.

Then of course, there's Facebook, which since late last year has acknowledged a string of ad measurement mistakes that undermined ad buyers confidence in the platform. And those mistakes came at a time when many advertisers were already questioning how strong ad engagement was on Facebook, particularly with video that people can so easily flip past in their newsfeeds.

That's probably a big reason why Facebook is trying to get long form video content off the ground as quickly as possible (though of course, people have watch these shows before advertisers will get excited).

Big traditional marketers want to find an alternative to traditional live TV viewing – which is still huge, but eroding fast. They've got plenty of reasons to be skeptical about digital ads overall, which is why the giant platforms like Facebook and YouTube should theoretically win.

But right now, those outlets are struggling to prove they can provide a big, reliable, brand safe, curated environment for marketers. That's at a time when serious money is seemingly up for grabs.

Those conditions would seemingly provide a great opportunity for Snapchat, with its Discover environment. But Snapchat is still so new to many marketers, and it has plenty of its own ad challenges.

So for the time being, TV networks keep cashing big checks.

Join the conversation about this story »

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If you’re keeping up with the latest B2B trends, you’ve probably heard or read the term “Account Based” recently. Many B2B organizations deal with a smaller lead pool and longer sales cycle, which means you’ve probably had to adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. And, that’s where account-based marketing and sales come in.

Beyond buzzwords, making anything ‘account-based’ is a process and not something that happens overnight. To make the process easier for you, I’ve put together a breakdown of how being ‘account-based’ works specifically for sales, and then five tips on how to manage your account-based sales (ABS) team.

Your ABS Team

Establishing the right inputs to guarantee successful outputs starts with assembling the right team. B2B sales requires a comprehensive, multi-channel approach to nurturing leads at different levels. To be successful, you’ll want to assemble a focused team to manage your different channels and campaigns.

#1: VP of Sales

Your VP of Sales is responsible for managing your account-based campaigns. They focus on ensuring the attainment of goals and quotas and should be a talented and motivational people manager.

Your VP of Sales can also serve as the “heavyweight” in your big-client meetings as well as a brand evangelist. This means keeping an active social media presence and building your brand’s awareness as an industry thought leader. While this role does not have to be reserved for the VP, it is a role you will want on or accessible to the marketing team. The core value of this role is in building awareness, securing partnerships, and expanding overall brand authority. If you think for a minute, you can probably think of an example of a company that has benefited from having a vocal, consistent, thought leader and advocate at the VP level (Moz comes to mind for me).

#2: Account Sales Executive

Your Account Sales Executive will be the primary “salesperson” of your ABS team. This team member will be responsible for holding meetings with prospective accounts and managing (or collaborating with) the Business Development (or Sales Development) reps as they find and prospect new accounts.

Your Account Sales Executive will be able to ideally close deals from the meetings that SDRs generate by following the process I’ll document later in this post.

#3: Business Development

BDRs or SDRs (Business Development Reps/Sales Development Reps) will handle most of your outreach cadences as well as manage your VA (virtual assistant) if you have one. These individuals are the true yeomen of your account-based system. They’ll test different email sequences, create new voicemail scripts, and crank out many of the hands-on aspects of account-based sales with emails and follow ups, etc. Your BDR will dive into the details to schedule meetings and demos for your Account Executive to close deals.

While many teams run marketing and sales as separate departments, it doesn’t mean they should be disconnected strategically. I believe they need to work together seamlessly to be effective.

#4: Virtual Assistant Data Scientists

Now you’re going to need a lot of data, and you probably have plenty, but the hard work is in making sense of your data and extracting insight that will help you craft emails and outreach interactions that are valuable to users. Unfortunately, the three primary members of your ABS team are all tied up. This is where the VA (virtual assistant) Data Scientist comes in (or marketing/sales operations for many teams).

This employee is critical for a scalable ABS system. While your BDR’s and Account Executives crank away at their work, your VA is prospecting new accounts to target. Not only that, your VA should be prospecting contact information for at least three of the decision makers in each of your target accounts.

This way, instead of paying for lead lists, you can go after the exact contact at the exact company you are targeting.

#5: Account-Based Content Marketer

Sure content marketing may sit on the marketing team, but I did already address that it’s critical to have a partnership. An account-based content marketer creates and promotes content for your end buyer that addresses their questions and pain points and arms your sellers with something valuable to start or continue a conversation.

For example, imagine you are an SEO software company, and you want to raise awareness amongst companies that recently got funded.

With this in mind, your account-based content marketer will create a content strategy to address your target audience and could craft an asset called: “The Average Organic Visitors of Series C Funded Firms: Winners and Losers.”

Not coincidentally, this piece would support the efforts of your BDR/SDRs as they communicate directly to your target accounts and schedule meetings to discuss how your software can help them overcome their competitors.

5 Tips for Account-Based Success

Now that I’ve walked through the roles you need at a foundational level to successfully execute an account-based program. Here are five tips to help get you to the next level.

Tip #1: Weekly 30 min. Monday Morning Meeting

One of the keys to success with an account-based program is how quickly you can learn (and iterate) from failed tests. To decrease your time to success, we recommend a weekly meeting of your ABS and ABM stakeholders every Monday morning. In this meeting discuss the previous week’s performance, but also dive into the goals for the coming week.

In my organization, one of our greatest successes came from changing our team dynamic to include organized weekly sprints, which created accountability by setting quotas for not only sales but also marketing and advertising.

Tip #2: Data Is Critical

The importance of the right data can not be overstated. If you are targeting the wrong accounts, ABS will fail. If you do not have current emails or phone numbers, the process can fail. If you are targeting the wrong persona with the wrong message, your account-based program will fail.

Thus, having clear firmographics and psychographics is of the utmost importance. Here’s an example of what you should be looking at when you name a target account:

• Industry: B2B SaaS
• Titles: VP of Marketing, Marketing Manager, Demand Generation
• Software: Marketo
• Trigger Events: Funding
• Data Sources: Angel.co

Tip #3: Work From The Middle Up

As you are developing your program, don’t go after the big fish right away. It seems obvious, but I don’t want you to miss this—there’s a lot of learning and testing that goes into each team’s journey learning and executing a successful account-based strategy. Make sure you give yourself and your team time to learn with a pilot program.

Also, you don’t want to start at the very bottom of your target accounts as they might not be the ideal fit. My recommendation—start in the middle. Target the mid-market of your target audience and then once you have your campaigns perfected go after the top and bottom.

Tip #4: Don’t Run Your Campaigns Shorter Than The Buying Cycle

A big mistake we made and many others make is that they run their account-based team’s program on cycles that are too short. For us, the average contract is up every 6-12 months. In other words, almost every marketing contract is up for grabs once a year.

If you know that, then why would you only target an account over a 30 day period? You now have a 1 in 12 chance that the timing will be right. Thus, it’s critical you know your industry and increase a number of touches over time with your accounts and don’t have your team sprinting in the wrong direction.

Tip #5: Help, Don’t Sell

When managing your team be careful to not set quotas that improperly encourage your team to hard sell over help. Remember, the #1 thing that influences a deal is timing…and you can’t control that, so just let it go. Instead, focus your team on helping your target accounts at every touch point and allow the demand for you to build until eventually, the timing is right.

Whether you are a seasoned account-based leader or just getting your feet wet, with the right team and careful execution increasing returns from your efforts are right around the corner. Who do you think is critical to account-based sales? How have you structured your team?